Tag: USA

Atlas

  By

★★★
“Ripley from the block…”

This was watched, effectively as the B-feature before Furiosa, with expectations along appropriate lines, given that basis. And as such, this is fine. It’s glossy, shiny and well-crafted technically, albeit making little or no emotional impact. This is partly because, in the early going, it feels suspiciously like someone said, “Hey Siri! Rewrite the script for Aliens, replacing xenomorphs with bad AIs, and Sigourney Weaver with J-Lo.” She plays Atlas Shepherd, an AI expert, decades after a revolt of the robots killed millions before it was contained, with leader Harlan (Liu) vanished from Earth. Now he’s been tracked to a distant planet, and a military mission sent to capture Harlan. Atlas reluctantly goes along with the soldiers as an “advisor”.

Fortunately, on arrival, the story heads in its own direction. The force is ambushed and forced down, with Atlas and her AI-enabled mech, Smith (voiced by Cohan) as apparently the only survivor. She opts to forge on with reaching Harlan’s base, a choice which brings her into conflict with Smith, who insists on putting his pilot’s safety first. Complicating matters is the need for Atlas to allow a neural link from Smith into her mind, in order to complete the mission successfully. This is something which she is very loathe to allow. There’s more than paranoia here, with pretty good reasons for her reluctance, connected to Atlas’s past and how it was responsible for the previous AI rebellion. 

Topical for this to come out the week Google’s AI search results suggest using glue to stop cheese sliding off your pizza. Yet, despite the initial scenario, it ends up being rather – some might say, suspiciously – pro AI. Not quite, “I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.” But definitely suggesting, even haters are going to have to bite the bullet and accept them into their lives. I will say, Smith ends up a likeable character, with an awareness of things like sarcasm, which make him approach human. Some might say, more so than Atlas, and certainly more than one of the other mechs, who insists on informing people of her preferred pronouns. I rolled my eyes hard at that.

Between this and The Mother, Lopez seems to be aiming to carve out a career as a Netflix action heroine. In both cases, the films work better on the action front than the dramatic (Lopez as a boffin is always a stretch). This has some nice examples of mechanized set pieces, as the Atlas/Smith partnership makes its way across a hostile planet towards their goal. It’s refreshingly free of any romance, being unexpectedly close to hard SF. Admittedly, this isn’t a film I’m probably ever going to revisit. But it provided a decent two hours of mindless entertainment, and let’s face it, that’s largely why we still have a Netflix subscription. If J-Lo wants to keep making this kind of thing, I’m happy to keep watching them. Just so long as she doesn’t start singing. 

Dir: Brad Peyton 
Star: Jennifer Lopez, Gregory James Cohan, Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown

The Marsh King’s Daughter

  By

★★½
“Always protect your family.”

This begins with the young Helena, living deep in the woods with her mother and father, Jacob (Mendelsohn). He’s teaching her the ways of the forest, including hunting and the need to be ruthless, with the top priority expressed in the tagline above. However, things aren’t quite what they seem: it feels like it could be a century ago, yet the tranquil illusion is shattered when a lost stranger on an ATV rides up. Mom makes a break for freedom with Helena, for it seems this is actually a kidnapping which has gone on for a long time. Fast forward twenty years: Jacob is in prison, mom killed herself and Helena (Ridley) is working a dead-end job, but married to Stephen (Hedlund), and with a daughter, Marigold.

Then Jacob escapes custody while being transferred, and all hell breaks loose. For Helena has changed her identity, in an effort to disconnect from her past. Stephen is entirely unaware of his wife’s history, until the authorities show up on their doorstep. Helena is naturally concerned that her father is going to make contact, or worse. Inevitably, that’s exactly what happens, and she is going to have to dredge up those long-abandoned skills in order to live up to the standards ingrained in her, when she was living in the woods. It will also require her to return to her childhood haunt, for a confrontation with Jacob which has been several decades in the making.

I suspect the main problem is that we know where it’s going to go, almost from the moment we are told Jacob has broken out of jail. The film, however, insists on dallying around, having Helena’s paranoia ramp up in a middle act that loses all momentum, creeping around at night and hearing the flute-like music which her father used to play. Does this indicate he is near, or simply that the stress is triggering some kind of psychotic episode? To be honest, we don’t particularly care. I kinda lost much sympathy for her, after realizing she had hidden everything from Stephen. You’d think the fact she has more tats than a Maori chieftain might clue you in to something of a checkered past, but that’s apparently just me.

Still, Jacob looms over the entire film even when he is not physically present, since he has, understandably, been living rent-free in his daughter’s head. There is a seasoning of Stockholm syndrome here, in the way the father has impressed his personality on his daughter. Yet none of it is particularly engaging. We’re left just waiting for the face-off which we know is inevitable, where Helena has to decide how far she is willing to go, in order to protect Marigold. Is that further than Jacob is prepared to go, for what he believes is the best interests of his daughter? I feel the answer to that question should be more interesting than this bland exercise in wilderness abuse ends up becoming.

Dir: Neil Burger
Star: Daisy Ridley, Ben Mendelsohn, Gil Birmingham, Garrett Hedlund

Hard Knox

  By

★★½
“Opportunity Knox.”

I was intrigued by this, mostly due to the presence of Penn, an Australian champion in karate who appeared (albeit, in minor roles) in a number of Hong Kong action movies of the nineties. Her blonde hair made her stand out, as one of the few gwailo women to be seen in the genre. This TV movie, intended as a pilot for a series appears to have been her swing at stardom in the West. After it fell agonizingly short, she seems to have given up on acting entirely. She now appears to be the CEO of Signal 8 Security, a private security company back in Hong Kong – the celebrity clients listed on the company’s website appear to include Jackie Chan, ironically enough.

This is, in some ways, art imitating life, as here she plays Niki Knox, who… runs a private security company. On her wedding day to Jackson (Chong), her father Darrell (Lee Majors) is put in a coma by the villainous Delicious Malicious (Kessell) – yes, that’s apparently her name – who is seeking a trio of gemstones which Darrell has been guarding. As a sideline, Malicious runs a PPV website that streams her blowing up buildings and other acts of mayhem. But the gems are the main thing, and Niki has to stop them from falling into the wrong hands, otherwise… bad things will happen.  She has to manage that with the help of former cop Steve Hardman (Calabro), who is now her employee, and despite the betrayal of someone very close to her.

Just as Cynthia Rothrock’s American movies are not a patch on her Hong Kong ones, so Penn’s action here is a pale imitation of her work in things such as In the Line of Duty V. I don’t know why I expected any more from a TV movie though, especially one making a lackadaisical effort to pass the city of Sydney off as a generic American metropolis (an endeavour largely undone by Penn’s noticeable Aussie accent). It still might have managed to work if it had stuck to a simpler scenario, just pitting Knox against Malicious, the latter chewing scenery to entertaining effect. It’s definitely a case where the sidekick outshines the main villain.

Instead, there are too many supporting characters who serve little purpose, and Calabro in particular sucks the life out of any scene he’s in. There’s no chemistry with Penn at all, and I’d much rather have simply seen this sister doin’ it for herself. As noted, I’m not sure there’s much of a stretch in Penn’s role here, yet she’s reasonably engaging. I might have talked myself into watching the show, albeit only if Steve Hardman suffered a quick and painful death in an early episode. That will remain hypothetical. For while the pilot did get a positive reaction in the United States, it appears that sales in the rest of the world were so weak, the production company was unable to proceed to series, and the project was scrapped. I’d be hard-pushed to call it a great loss.

Dir: Peter Bloomfield
Star: Kim Penn, Thomas Calabro, Simone Kessell, Jason Chong

The whole film is on YouTube, as below

Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls

  By

½
“Amateur hour and a quarter.”

Incompetent on every level, this proves there’s a section of cult fandom which would praise a dog turd to the heavens, if told it had a “feminist” message. The title is probably – scratch that, certainly – the best thing about this, suggesting a throwback to the JD films of the fifties, filtered through the lens of Russ Meyer. “Suggesting” is the keyword here, since the reality is more like the finger-paintings of a developmentally challenged three-year-old. I guess the title is actually inspired by Blood Orgy of the She Devils, a film made in 1973 by Ted V. Mikels, one of the most inept directors ever to pick up a camera. This movie is poor enough Mikels would likely require his film’s name be taken off it.

The plot, such as it is, concerns four girls, who set about taking revenge for one of their number when she’s sorta-kinda-not-actually raped. Though any concepts of justice are fairly loose, since they were already gleefully committing crimes, including murder. Meanwhile, the least convincing detective in film history, Inspector Morton (Silverstein) narrates, offering a moral context with lines like, “When the maternal and creative forces of women become corrupted by the brutality of the every day world, a force of incredible violence is unleashed.” The women are similarly implausible as disaffected schoolgirls, with the gang’s leader, Sarah (Gingold), a Jew who has a shrine to Hitler in her bedroom, and goes to Catholic school. I’m very confused.

No, wait: not confused, just staggeringly bored. For Lucas doesn’t have the barest idea of film-making, such as basic framing. So we get violence that is completely unconvincing, utterly unsexy nudity, and what I can only presume are comedic moments landing like lead balloons. It’s all accompanied by Z-grade surf punk and other flatulent noises, likely provided by the director’s equally talentless mates. There’s one moment where self-awareness is almost achieved. The women go to a drive-in, hunting their last victim. An even worse film is playing, and the narrator – who no longer seems to be Morton, for unclear reasons – declares, “The movie dragged on. And on. And on.” So close to getting it.

Legend has it the director, unable to get her work distributed, committed suicide, only for her brother to take up the movie in her honour. Except she never existed, Michael Lucas making his sister up, in the belief it’d improve the odds of his film being taken seriously. That’s the level of artistic honesty we are dealing with here, and if there weren’t already a myriad of reasons to hate this, I want no part of it. I did sit through to the finish, mostly out of a stoic refusal to let myself be beaten by this piece of pretentious garbage. Trust me, when I say this isn’t even “so bad it’s good,” it’s closer to being so bad it’s unwatchable. Near the end, someone is sodomized with an electric drill. I can’t think of a more appropriate metaphor for the viewing experience.

Dir: “Meredith Lucas” (Michael A. Lucas)
Star: Phillip Silverstein, Robin Gingold, Simoone Margolis, Melissa Lawrence

Til Death Do Us Part

  By

★★
“Bored til death, more like…”

Great poster. Solid trailer. In the light of those, unfortunately, the film can only be described as a significant disappointment. While it’s good, and occasionally very good when in motion, damn, there is a LOT of flapping of lips going on here. It’s clear that writers Chad Law and Shane Dax Taylor, as well as director Woodward, are in love with their dialogue. This is unfortunate, since it’s nowhere near as amusing, informative or entertaining as they think. There’s probably a decent twenty minutes in this, mostly when the lead character – nameless, known only as “Bride”, a conceit shamelessly stolen from Kill Bill – is kicking butt. Since the film runs a hundred and eleven minutes, that is a problem.

Indeed, nobody here gets a “proper” name. The Bride (Burn) decides at the last minute she is not going to go through with marriage to her fiance (Blain), and runs off to her family cabin. Her husband-to-be doesn’t take that lightly, and sends seven groomsmen, under the best man (Gigandet), to bring her back. not with polite discussion to convince her to return. For it turns out everyone involved is part of a shadowy organization of assassins called “The University”. You don’t get to leave, so the Bride has to defend herself from the consequences of her decision, still in her wedding dress. Which as Chris pointed out, is odd, considering it’s her family’s property. No clothing better suited to combat?

Confusing matters considerably further is a flashback (I guess) to happier times on a beach somewhere, whose purpose escapes me, except for providing a nice vacation for Jason Patric. What these lengthy scenes certainly do, is sap the film of any momentum as survival horror. Then again, the film does plenty of that itself, with endless scenes of the characters talking and talking and talking and… you get the idea. It’s a pity, because the violence, when it shows up, is done with some energy. Burn seems to be doing quite a lot of her own stunts, to good effect, and there’s nice use of improvised weaponry. The chainsaw shown on the poster is not just there for show either, providing perhaps the film’s most memorable moment.

Not that there’s exactly a lot of competition, admittedly. I found myself frequently thinking of ways this could have been improved. “Being roughly thirty minutes shorter” would be a good start. Alternatively, could potentially have been fun if the seven bridesmaids had also been assassins, fighting for the Bride. Why is it just the groomsmen? There, it feels like a sure-fire case of diminishing returns, with most of them more annoying than anything else. This is especially true of Gigandet whose character is perpetually droning on about the speech he has to give. Pancho Moler as T-Bone is perhaps the only one to make an impression. It’s all a garbled mess, which seems poorly constructed, and only occasionally delivering on the wildness of its premise. 

Dir: Timothy Woodward Jr.
Star: Natalie Burn, Cam Gigandet, Ser’Darius Blain, Orlando Jones

Jack Squad 2: The Next Generation

  By

★½
“Do you know what the definition of insanity is?”

This is a question posed by the bad guy (Fears) towards the end of this, and of course, he provides the usual explanation in response: “It’s doing the same thing, expecting different results.” After watching this, I would choose to adjust it slightly. A valid definition of insanity is making the same movie, and expecting different results. Because it is, more or less, what Rankins has done here: it’s a remake of his own movie from fourteen years ago, Jack Squad. Now, there’s something to be said for that. I mean, Cecil B. DeMille did The Ten Commandants twice, while directors from Hitchcock to Michael Haneke have remade their own films. 

The difference is, they were kinda busy. For instance, Hitchcock directed twenty-five features between his two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Since the original Jack Squad in 2009, Rankins has made just one feature: Angry Kelly in 2014. Did he not manage to come up with more than one original idea in a decade and a half? And that count is presuming Angry Kelly is not about a man who is annoyed because he was drugged and robbed by a trio of women. I’ve not seen it, I can’t say. Here, we get a little variation at the start, where the original Jack Squad get hunted down, and a bit at the end, where there’s dissension in the ranks over hidden money.

In the middle though? It’s a blatant re-make. Three young women decide to make money by drugging and robbing men. This goes wrong, when one of the targets is a courier for a violent drug boss, carrying a large sum of cash. They make the ill-advised decision to hold onto the money, a choice which brings them into the crosshairs of its real owner. If anything, we have even less going on this time. It’s a good half-hour before the new trio, of Cassie (Green), Nikki (Alexander) and Cam (Lynn) put their scheme into action. I guess there is at least some altruism, the goal – at least initially, before the designer shopping kicks in – being to cover the medical bills run up by one of the trio’s mother.

The overwhelming sense of deja vu here is what knocks the overall rating here down below the original. I mean, the three characters feel almost like bad photocopies of their predecessors. There’s one who has qualms about the whole concept, while another refuses to give it up at any cost. It’s likely a little more technically competent, though at basically two hours long, is still painfully over-long. There’s a weird subplot where one of the women has a mentally challenged brother, who wants to be a baseball pitcher. This does eventually show relevance, though the way it does, might have you wishing they hadn’t bothered. If we don’t get Jack Squad 3 until 2037, I am completely fine with that. 

Dir: Simuel Denell Rankins 
Star: DeShon Green, Samiah Alexander, Tinesha Lynn, Gregory J. Fears

Abigail (2024)

  By

★★★
“And Then There Were None – with vampires”

SPOILER WARNING FOR THIS REVIEW: ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE TRAILER!

Trailers can do a lot of damage to a movie’s impact, and is definitely the case here. If the trailer hasn’t outright told us the idiot gangsters had kidnapped a little vampire girl, the first third could have been very suspenseful. To elaborate: we witness the kidnap of an innocent little girl; normally our sympathies would immediately be with the victim, worrying about her well-being. We explore the setting and characters are more or less established. Then a gruesome murder happens and the gangsters wonder, “Who’s killing our people? Why? The girl’s father is big in the (criminal) underworld and has a mysterious henchman named Valdez. What’s his story? Is it all a reckoning for past misdeeds?”

This potential homage to Bryan Singer’s semi-classic The Usual Suspects falls flat, as anyone who saw the trailer (and posters) already knows it’s the little girl who is pulling the strings and will murder the gang of misfits. It’s a total fail by the marketing department responsible, though you understand a wish to signal to horror fans it’s something for them. I guess it will pay a dividend in the end – though will keep people away who are not horror fans and might have gone, expecting a crime thriller. In any case, the big surprise is ruined and you can’t help wonder if that was the best way to go.

When Hitchcock released Psycho in 1960, no people were allowed into the cinema after the movie had started, and the audience had no idea what awaited them. You thought it was about Marion Crane stealing money and going on the run… until she got stabbed in the shower. That was a real shock. You won’t experience that here, and no-one cares for the first victim (played by the unfortunately now deceased Angus Cloud). At one time, a plot with a group of people in an enclosed space and a killer amongst them, would have made for fine suspense. The film makes no secret about taking inspiration from Agatha Christie’s 1939 thriller And Then There Were None (originally known by another, non-PC title!), and the same concept works in Alien – a fine horror/thriller in space with as much focus on characters as on suspense.

Today, it doesn’t seem to be enough. You instead end up with superficially drawn characters, about whom you just get to know enough to understand where they come from, and then you blast in with the gory action scenes. Don’t get me wrong; I liked the movie. But I would have liked it more if I had cared for the characters fate. They die here and there, they twist and they turn – and I just don’t care for them at all. The movie just has not the time to build its characters, or doesn’t want to take the time for it. Which is a pity but perhaps a sign of our frantic, “more, more, more” times. I recently saw a new BBC version of Christie’s story; while they took the time to tell it, they overloaded the plot because simple, storytelling has gone out the window in today’s film narrative.

The big problem is, the moment the main characters are established as gangsters, you don’t really feel pity for them. Why should you? They are mean spirited people – bad guys – and that is a minor flaw in the concept. Having largely sympathetic space travellers finding an alien life form is quite the opposite. We are supposed to side with them because it’s a vampire. But the necessary character building hasn’t been done, and because one twist isn’t enough the movie gives us two or three more. At the end we are supposed to root for Abigail (Weir) and last surviving gangster Joey (Barrera), fighting one of her own who turned against them. Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett are asking too much of us emotionally. Should we always side with the underdog? Why? In the end they are all monsters, therefore equally unlikable, though the movie tries to make us pity the little vampire, that big daddy doesn’t really seem to care about, until he shows up at the end.

The same directors did much better with Ready or Not, where you constantly felt for Samara Weaving’s character, thrown into the pit with an insane, blood-thirsty family. It doesn’t work well here, due to the basic premise. The leads are hardly more than sketches and even Joey doesn’t get much more than being a junkie mom who cares for her little boy. It’s not enough in the development department, folks! The actors all do good work – as far as I can tell. In Germany, you get distracted by the choice of dubbing actors: the voice actor for Cloud is hardly bearable and Kevin Durand’s German voice sounds almost like Patrick from SpongeBob Squarepants which is… distracting! Also, I feel in the German version, a lot of humour is lost, I guess something to do with line delivery. I can imagine a line like “I hate ballet!” being hilarious in English, but in the German version it has no real effect.

I don’t know any of the actors save Durand and supporting actor Esposito, but the greatness of Weir’s performance can’t be stressed enough. I did believe her helpless girl – or would if I hadn’t been spoiled before – as well as the frightening vampire. How many people can scare a bunch of grown-ups? Though, of course, it’s not new ground. We saw how effective such casting can be when Kirsten Dunst did it thirty years ago in Interview with a Vampire. The trope of the “scary, evil kid” in general reaches back until at least the 1950s. The production design is beautiful and luxurious for the old villa with bar and billiard table, a kitchen (strangely situated in the cellar?), secret tunnels in a library, a computerized control room and a pool underground for corpse disposal. Similarly great is Brian Tyler’s effective score which I would really like on CD instead of the digital release.

I was less impressed by Barrera who plays the main gangster role. She is set-up as the intelligent, tough and strong woman, but her actions constantly contradict this, e. g. she can’t imagine a kid could be evil. Why? Because she has a child of her own? Everyone knows children are natural monsters and only by time, education and life experience become “human”. Her colleagues turn out partly smarter than her there. And when she, a normal mortal, tells a vampire, “I’m going to kill you now!” you wonder how delusional she can be. There’s a big goof at the end, when she gets her mobile out to call her son and say goodbye. Weren’t all cells collected early on by Esposito’s character? If she had another, wouldn’t she have been able to call help? Why didn’t she? Perhaps I missed how she got it back – maybe in the control room when the two vampires were fighting. Someone please enlighten me? [Jim. I think when she’s in the control room unlocking the house, she sees the bag of collected phones and takes one from it. Not exactly highlighted though!]

Strangely, the movie is claimed to “re-imagine” Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter from 1936. Having seen the classic movie, I can hardly see any similarities, save the main character is a female vampire, and daughter of a vampire. Her father turns up in a last minute surprise, effectively adding nothing except for re-establishing the classic Hammer vampire, of the Christopher Lee variety. Still, despite these flaws this is a good, entertaining horror movie. It’s not really suspenseful as the main characters are disposable and not developed enough to care about. And the trailer… (see previous rant!) It’s also surprisingly gory. I remember a time when such a movie would have been for 18+ audiences in Germany; this is 16+. Well, it’s not the 1980s anymore and Catholic priests aren’t sitting in German censorship board meetings anymore, so… enjoy!

Dir: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Star: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Will Catlett

Now, that trailer… Again: SPOILER WARNING!

Snatched

  By

★★½
“Everything comes to he who waits. Eventually.”

The title here seems quite deliberately a nod towards Taken, which similarly has an ex-government operative chewing up and spitting out bad guys, after they make the fatal mistake of abducting the operative’s child. In this case, it’s CIA operative Angela (Bozeman), who lost her husband Jason in murky circumstances, but subsequently put away Dmitri (Weber), the criminal mastermind responsible. Now, six years later, she can get on with living her life, bringing up son Jason Jr. (Cheatham), and hanging out with fellow agent Byron, who seems a possible husband replacement. Well, until Dmitri escapes from prison and starts killing off everyone he considers responsible for putting him behind bars.

Sooner or later – and as we’ll see, it’s not the former – that brings him into Angela’s circle, and ends up in him kidnapping Junior, with the aim of luring her into his (very well-appointed, it has to be said; I particularly liked the chandelier) lair. However, he doesn’t realize what he has done. Once this all gets going, it’s not bad. If hardly seeming an accurate portrayal of CIA practices, unless they’re utterly slipshot and incompetent, it’s kinda fun as long as you don’t ask awkward questions. Such as, where the heck does Angela get those groovy remote-controlled gun-toting little cars? Was Andy Sidaris having an estate sale? Dmitri also has a groovy bad-ass sidekick, Sophia (Camille Osborne), though her fight with Angela is disappointingly brief.

The problem is mostly the long, meandering, roundabout and largely uninteresting way in which the story gets to the amusing stuff. The first half or more is largely comprised of extremely conversational scenes of merely passing interest. In these, Angela talks to Byron about wanting to retire. Or talks to Junior about the realities of her career. Or talks to her mother, Carolyn (Hubert), about her not really a relationship with Byron. Dear lord, it’s far from the action-packed trailer, and you would certainly be forgiven if you gave up on all this soapy drama. Though I was eventually entertained by Carolyn’s ability to kick ass in a grandmotherly way, like Pam Grier on an AARP outing. At least until she encounters Sophia, anyway.

The score above is likely a composite, with two stars for the first half and three for the second, when things do reach an acceptable level of entertainment. Bozeman seems better known as a singer, but does a decent job of portraying the highly upset mother, and has a terse style of close-combat that is effective. On the plus side, it is quite gory, with a number of head-shots and other fairly graphic deaths. On the minus side, these are mostly CGI, as is apparent from the blood spray never landing on anything in the environment. You probably want to have something on hand for the sluggish early proceedings: either a good book, some snacks or an alcoholic beverage would all serve that purpose.

Dir: Chris Stokes
Star: Veronika Bozeman, Charlie Weber, Jered Cheatham, Janet Hubert

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver

  By

★★
“The law of diminishing returns.”

And that rating is from someone who, unlike most critics, really didn’t mind the first part. I’m a fan of big, bombastic science-fiction, best exemplified by The Chronicles of Riddick. [Why nobody has ever thrown $150 million at Michael Bay for that kind of thing, I don’t know. And, no, the Transformers franchise does not count. And neither does Armageddon] I want to see square-jawed heroes or heroines, going toe-to-toe with irredeemably unpleasant villains, as burning spaceships fall from the sky behind them, onto the surface of an exotic planet. While Part One of this was heavy on the world-building and character development, at least we got all that out of the way, and could look forward to a second half of non-stop action.

Couldn’t we?

Um. Well. About that… All I can say is, combine the two, give them to a enthusiastic editor, who can merge them into a single, coherent movie of round about two hours, and you could well be onto something. Now, I like Snyder: or, rather, I used to. 300 is great, and I will honestly defend Sucker Punch as a genuinely good movie, especially in the director’s cut. But since then? Nothing has come up to the early work. You eventually reach this, the poster child for what happens when you give someone $166 million, and let them do whatever they want creatively, without apparent significant oversight. A visually impressive, but bloated and self-indulgent mess, lacking any significant heart. 

Things follow quickly on from its predecessor, Kota (Boutella) returning to Veldt with the warriors accumulated in Part One, who will protect her settlement from the evil Admiral Noble (Skrein) and his forces. For Noble is not as dead as Kota hoped at the end of the first half, which is a nasty surprise to her. Inevitably, we get the “training the locals for battle” sequence, but we also get an extended “bringing in the harvest” sequence, and a very extended “why don’t we all sit around and reveal secrets about our dark past and what the hell is Snyder doing, can’t he hurry up and get to the fighting” sequence. My attention and interest dwindled steadily throughout the first hour and more.

Eventually – and I stress that, eventually – we get to the cool stuff, and it’s not bad. Snyder does undeniably retain an eye for spectacle, and this does deliver eye-candy for those fond of giant fireballs (hey, sue me). However, it’s all empty: sound and fury, signifying nothing, and you’re left to try and work around wonky plotting which has a few farmers taking down the galactic rulers after a couple of lessons, going little further than “Stick ’em with the pointy end.” It helps, I suppose that Noble’s craft have a tendency to explode so easily, I suspect a recall from the manufacturer’s is in order. I imagine this may end up taking Snyder’s plans for a Rebel Moon Universe with it.

Dir: Zack Snyder
Star: Sofia Boutella, Ed Skrein, Charlie Hunnam, Michiel Huisman

Calamity Jane

  By

★★★
“Calamity Plain.”

Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok are two of the most well-known names in the culture of the Wild West, though the reality of both individuals is almost impossible to separate from the myths which surround them. So it’s kinda pointless to complain about historical accuracy in films which focus on them. Better just accept them as effectively being fictional entities, which can be used for whatever purpose a filmmaker desires. Here, it’s the death of Wild Bill (Stephen Amell, best known as TV’s Arrow) in a poker game, which sets his girlfriend Jane (Rickards, also from the same series) off. She goes on the trail of Jack McCall (Allon), the scumbag responsible, who has understandably opted to depart Deadwood. 

Complicating matters is that Jane is in custody herself, having been brought to the frontier town by Sheriff Mason (Rozen), to stand trial for murder. She escapes his custody – as Chris pointed out, Mason is a bit crap at the whole law enforcement thing – and heads off after McCall and his equally scummy brother. Mason assembles a (again, rather feeble and unimpressive) posse to go after the two suspected killers. Most of the second half is an extended pursuit through some very scenic landscapes, it must be said. There are a fair number of moderate diversions before the inevitable and entirely expected confrontation between Jane and Jack, as she seeks to get vengeance, or perhaps justice, for her murdered lover.

I think I like the characters here most. Rickards gives a winning portrayal as Jane, despite an unnerving similarity to one of the members of Bananarama (perhaps that’s just me though), and the supporting cast also do a good job of inhabiting their roles. It is fairly straightforward: black hats and white hats, with not much grey in terms of morality. In this way, it feels like a throwback to an earlier time. Along similar lines, while the language is fairly ripe, with a good number of F-bombs, the violence is very restrained by comparison. I feel if a film is going to have an R-rating, the makers need to embrace that artistic freedom fully, yet outside of the cursing, this would likely merit only a PG. 

Among the supporting cast, the best is Abigail (Faia), who is entirely mad, and all the more entertaining for it. She boasts of the multiple people she’s killed, keeping a count with scars on her arms – I’d love to see a film of her back-story. She and Jane end up in a very nasty brawl, likely the action highlight of the film, with everything else being gunfights of the “Bang-bang, you’re dead” variety. While it’s all well enough assembled, there isn’t much indication of ambition or desire to tell a new story, or even an old one from an interesting direction. As a result, this only intermittently catches fire, preferring mostly to meander along safely, well within the speed limit and with its seat-belt securely fastened.

Dir: Terry Miles
Star: Emily Bett Rickards, Tim Rozon, Primo Allon, Priscilla Faia