fire and forget

Warren Beatty 1990

Dick Tracy is perfect — on paper. The concept is brilliant, the design is immaculate, the casting and acting are spot-on, the script sparkles with zingers. So why doesn’t it work?

It’s the structure of the film. The story is kicked off by mobster Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino)’s murder of rival mobster and club owner Lips Manlis (Paul Sorvino). At the same time, his goons kill a cop, but that’s quickly forgotten: Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty) only asks Caprice about Manlis.

The problem is, we just don’t care about Lips Manlis. He’s a grotesque character and a gangster. Caprice’s henchmen blitz rival gangsters and we don’t care — that’s what (celluloid) gangsters do. And frankly, we don’t get that emotionally invested if they kill (celluloid) policemen either, because that’s also just what they do. In terms of storytelling, cops and robbers pays their money and takes their chances.

In order for a murder to act as a catalyst to a police procedural like this, it needs to be more than a murder. It needs to be a crime more heinous than a gangster killing another gangster. It needs to be a gangster crossing the line.

Big Boy Caprice is a great character, but there’s no sense of danger about him because his goons do all his dirty work, including offing Manlis. Contrast this with DeNiro’s fleshy, pampered Al Capone in The Untouchables — who suddenly, explosively kills several men with a baseball bat. Caprice should have got his hands dirty, by killing someone who wasn’t meant to die in such a squalid fashion: someone who didn’t choose to be there.

If Lips Manlis was the last straight club owner in town, that would have worked, as his murder would have been a tragedy. If the cop was days from retirement — he was pretty old — then that would have been (a cliché, but also) a tragedy. In order for us to really buy Tracy’s crusading zeal we need to feel Caprice isn’t just doing what gangsters do: he’s also preying on Joe and Josey Everyday.

Which we never see, apart from the opening radio news bulletins about shoeshine vendors getting leaned on. Even then, the good citizens are attacked for resisting the gangsters, so it’s almost like the citizens don’t need Tracy’s protection. And we should be shown, not told. When we do later see glimpses of the protection rackets in action, it’s during this colourful musical montage, devoid of any actual sense of threat:

Speaking of which, there are three musical montages, which is at least one too many. The first act of the film is Tracy’s repeated failure to nail Caprice, with the first plot point being the bugging of the club (not Manlis’ murder). This allows Tracy to smash Caprice’s operation , but where a kick-ass action sequence should be we get a musical montage. The campy punching-six-guys-at-a-time stuff is great, but we could have done with more fights like the brutal-yet-hilarious lean-to set-to with Steve the Tramp.

On the musical note, Madonna isn’t as bad as you might remember. As vampy nightclub chanteuse Breathless Mahoney, she is a bit blank-faced (no pun intended) but with those dresses, that lipstick and those killer lines she’s great value (Tracy: “No grief for Lips?” Breathless: “I’m wearing black underwear”). Beatty’s steadfast yet frequently-flummoxed Tracy is just the right side of self-righteousness, while the Kid (Charlie Korsmo) and Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) are spiky and sparky enough to sidestep winsome child and whiny damsel cliché.

It’s interesting that Beatty originally wanted Bob Fosse to direct, while Martin Scorcese was also a possibility. Either may have given the film a little extra zip. Ultimately Dick Tracy suffers from comparison to Batman (the success of which probably helped Tracy get made). Despite appearing a year later, Tracy feels like an ’80s film, where Batman feels like a 90s film (even if it has dated badly and is inferior, IMO, to Batman Returns).

Miracle at St Anna is Spike Lee’s take on World War Two. Spike directing Nazis? I can’t see it. Hell, I’m intrigued.

A Crowning Moment of Awesome is defined by TVTropes as a “moment when a fictional character does something for which they will be remembered forever, winning for them the eternal loyalty of fans.” It’s a punch the air moment, and here are some of my favourite CMOAs:

“Popcorn!”
Grosse Point Blank

Out of ammo, existentially-torn hitman Martin Blank (John Cusack) is cornered in the kitchen of his girlfriend’s father’s house. On the other side of the kitchen unit, proselytizing rival hitman Grocer (Dan Ackroyd) offers to sell him a pistol. Blank, who earlier killed a man with a pen to the neck, agrees, but as Grocer beetles out to shoot him, Blank manhandles a television off the counter. Which he then deposits on Grocer’s head with his rival’s own catchphrase.

Dredd stabs his own hand
Judge Dredd: Raptaur

There’s a fair case for Dredd’s CMOA being the moment supernatural Dark Judge Fear, who kills by showing people their greatest fear, discovers that Dredd fears nothing and is invited to “Gaze into the fist of Dredd!” But I wasn’t around for that, and my earliest defining memory of how hard Dredd is comes from the lushly-painted Aliens rip-off Raptaur by Alan Grant and Dean Ormston. Dangling from a pole, half-dead, Dredd stops himself from falling by sticking his boot knife into his own hand before passing out. Nails hard, that is.

“I was out of bullets…”
Die Hard 4.0/Live Free or Die Hard

Cornered in a traffic tunnel, an injured and pissed-off John McClane (Bruce Willis) climbs back into his damaged car and heads at full speed towards the helicopter in which Euro-mercenaries are waiting for him. At the last second, he bails out, and the car is launched through the air… Hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) is gobsmacked: “You just killed a helicopter with a car!”

“It’s way past time you learned– what it means– to be a man”
The Dark Knight Returns

Man of steel-turned-government stooge Clark Kent is ordered by the US government to bring in Batman, whose return to vigilantism is attracting the wrong kind of attention. Batman softens up his former friend with hunter missiles, a shot from the Batmobile, kryptonite arrows, a sonic gun and a blast of electricity direct from the city grid. In an armoured suit, he delivers a stunning punch. For a glorious moment, Frank Miller shows us Superman beaten.

“Not even in the face of armageddon. Never compromise.”
Watchmen

Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world, has ended war by the simple expedient of murdering millions in New York. As other costumed adventurers stand by, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ implacable and psychopathic vigilante Rorschach shows his resolve, simply turning his back and walking out into the Antarctic snow, determined to expose the horrific crime. It’s his defining moment, and his last: when Doc Manhattan follows to kill him, Rorschach removes his mask, tears streaking down his face, showing emotion for the first time as he exhorts Manhattan to “do it!”

“Not enough gun.”
Preacher: War in the Sun

The Saint of Killers, a vengeful gunslinger now deputised as the angel of death, meets Jesse Custer in Death Valley. There he faces a US Army tank squadron, ordered to fire on the lone gunman by the evil Herr Starr. A grinning tanker admits “he’s always wanted to try this”, but as the smoke clears the Saint is not only still standing, he’s shooting it out with the tanks. Realising his miscalculation, Starr calls in a favour from the White House and the Saint is hit by a nuclear bloody missile. The mushroom cloud spreads over Death Valley, but in the white-hot epicentre the Saint shows why he’s clearly Garth Enis and Steve Dillon’s favourite character — and mine — as he simply spits and keeps a-walking. Now that’s awesome.

*spoilers*

It’s been a terribly-kept secret that Frank Darabont, the man behind the excellent Shawshank Redemption and half-decent Green Mile, wrote a draft of the film that became Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The film’s long gestation period was attributed to getting the script right, and it’s popularly bemoaned that Steven Spielberg let George Lucas throw out Darabont’s work. Which is weird when you consider that Lucas, who is unquestionably a conceptual genius with a gift for awesome ideas, simply cannot write.

But are we being fair? I tracked down Darabont’s draft (via torrent, good luck finding it though) to compare it with the finished film.

Some elements are the same: the opening set-piece in the warehouse, complete with magnetism nonsense, truck chase and rocket sled; the interrogation and subsequent commie-bashing; the business with the skull being hypnotic. To my surprise, the alien sequence is also there, and is actually toned down in the final film. Perhaps too much; it’s not clear what’s happening to Spalko in the film, where the draft script gives everybody a clear-cut comeuppance.

Unforgivably, Indy doesn’t even leave the States until page 44 — that’s three quarters of an hour into the film. He’s held up by some spy-type stuff that just doesn’t play quite right in an Indy film. Darabont ups the commie subplot by having Indy falsely accused of murder, which again tastes wrong to me: I think it’s a bit of a lazy device to have your hero explicitly “on the run”, and the finished film does well to tone this aspect down. One of the things I liked about the film was the way it played the insidiousness of the red scare against Indy, showing how illogical, arbitrary and unsubstantiated that kind of whispered smear campaign rally was.

Plenty is different: Indy is no longer scared of snakes. And there’s no Mutt. I have to admit I quite liked Mutt, in that he was quite resourceful — it’s him who busts them out of the Russian camp, and I like the last haircombing before being shot. Surprisingly, Darabont wrote the Tarzan bit: here, Indy pursues the feral Oxley on a series of vines.

The red ants sequence is there, but the chase doesn’t include the fencing. There’s a couple of nice lines here that are very Indy:

CRUNCH! The truck lands in a tree, slamming to a stop in the branches. The engine dies. Marion gives Indy a withering look.

MARION
Only you could park us in a tree.

INDY
Only you could drive me out of mine.

Indy starts cranking the key, but the engine’s flooded.

HAMA
I think they want us to surrender.

MARION
Don’t worry. We’ll blow up before that happens.

Suddenly, the ENGINE ROARS TO LIFE…

INDY
German engineering.

There’s no Spalko, which leaves us with a hole where the main villain should be. Instead there’s a selection of baddies, who dip in and out, so the sense of peril isn’t consistent.  Ray Winstone’s mockney sidekick Mac, with the ludicrously see-sawing loyalties, is swapped for a more straightforward Russian baddie, called Yuri. In South America we meet dictator Escalante, turncoat archaeologist von Grauen, hapless American diplomat Osgood Turner, and mercenary Porfi. Darabont also gives us the very cool ‘Thin Man’, who is an “extremely thin and sinister individual dressed all in black”.

The Thin Man shuld have had an expanded part. Darabont tells us “He looks like Death in a homburg hat. Make no mistake — there’s enormous power coiled in his wraith-like frame. His rat-thin face displays an old, livid scar that runs forehead to chin, bisecting a milky dead eye“. Sounds a bit like Toht, right? I imagined him having as being some kind of exotic killer with a dastardly foreign accent, if he speaks at all. But strangely, this sinister individual turns out to be just a American gangster, saying things like “C’mon, pally. Let’s not drag this out.” After a fight sequence in Indy’s museum the Thin Man becomes positively verbose, exclaiming: “Pull me up, I tell ya I’ll spill everything! I’ll rat out the Russkies! I’ll clear ya, I swear I will! Just pull me up! For the love’a Mike, pull me up! ” Just doesn’t sit right. Anyway he’s dead by page 39.

Unfortunately, they all feel like secondary villains: Yuri, Porfi and the Thin Man are clearly henchman, von Grauen is one-dimensional and Turner isn’t really a villain at all. Meanwhile Escalante feels disconnected from the story. The characters pass through his world, so he takes an interest, but he isn’t engaged with the action.

The closest thing to a main villain is Baron Peter Belasco, but he doesn’t come into the story until an hour in. Compare this with Belloq or Walter Donovan, who actually kicks off the plot in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I would have like to see some foreshadowing, perhaps Indy professing a professional distaste for Belasco’s celebrity archaeology in the museum sequences.

Overpopulation is still an issue. Colourful secondary characters are essential, but in the film we had Oxley, Marion, Mutt, Mac and Indy travelling together, which was too many. The draft script is even worse: by the end of the film we find Indy and Marion tied up and sharing a tender moment — except there’s six other characters tied up with them, plus Oxley and three tuppeny villains wandering around.

Marion comes into the film earlier, and has way more to do, including a campily old-fashioned dogfight sequence. She’s also married the other archaeologist, Belasco, who serves a similar role to Belloq (”You and I are very much alike… It would take only a nudge to make you like me”), mirroring Indy:

PETER
Can you honestly say you haven’t felt its hypnotic power? Can you truly say you wouldn’t give everything to know what ancient secrets lie within?

INDY
Would you?

PETER
Indiana, we are men of science. We would gladly clasp hands and jump into hell if that were the price of knowledge. Tell me I’m wrong.

Indy can’t bring himself to deny it. He glances uncomfortably at Marion, who gives him a wry look.

MARION
I knew you two would hit it off.

Later, Marion gets the great line:

MARION
This isn’t like leaving the cap off the toothpaste, Peter! You’re a goddamn Russian spy!

Oxley’s role is also fuller, and way more macabre. He serves as a dark reminder of the dangers of actually finding what they seek, rather than just gibbering comedy relief.

There’s a fair bit of nerdy harking back to previous films. After losing his job, Indy gets drunk, wanders into the museum, and decides to reclaim the antiquities he recovered. This leads to a reprise of the idol/bag of sand moment from Raiders of the Lost Ark. We learn Willie Scott is now married to a Hollywood director… The script ends with Sallah and Henry Jones at Marion and Indy’s wedding, with the potential nerdgasm of Sean Connery drunkenly crooning Fly Me to the Moon.

It is definitely sillier than I expected. As well as the wing-walking plane sequence and vine-swinging, Indy gets eaten by a giant snake. Swallowed whole and completely eaten. Needless to say, his fear is well and truly back after that experience.

So is Darabont’s script better than the final film? Obviously, we’ll never know how much is Darabont, or Lucas or Spielberg or David Koepp. The draft certainly has more momentum once Indy leaves the States, but it takes too long to do so. Unlike the final film, there’s less exposition and more action. Secondary characters get more to do, but it’s overpopulated and lacks a primary villain. Just makes me wonder why it took so long to produce something so average.

Neil Marshall 2008

A British tale of Hadrian’s wall, mounted with automatic machine guns to massacre blood-puking plague zombies, crossed by a pneumatic one-eyed babecop to find a barking mad Malcolm Macdowell in a post-apocalyptic Scotland full of mutant punks. Sight and Sound must have loved it.

What surprised me was the sheer scale of thievery involved. Doomsday kicks off by nicking the frenzied mob of 28 Days Later, body swerves into the boat assault from The Usual Suspects, date-rapes the concept of Escape From New York (via The Thick of It: the George Romero version) before carving the nuts off the APC scenes from Aliens, hangs the torture scene from Lethal Weapon from a meathook, then devours the charred flesh of a kind of bovver-booted Cirque du Soleil. Then things get really weird, with crazy-eyed cheque-casher Malcolm MacDowell popping up as a mad scientist/Sheriff of Nottingham pantomime dame. Then it’s pedal-to-the-metal for a ludicrous jaunt down Mad Max 2’s wreckage-strewn motorway before a final look at Alistair Campbell’s version of Downfall – followed by an ending nicked from The Dark Knight Returns.

Sounds fun, right? It kind of is, although it lacks the killer final punch of really gobsmacking moments or laugh-out-loud one-liners. Rhona Mitra’s copper carries the show as Lara Croft & Snake Plissken’s little girl taking on a series of mohicanned cannibal Frank Begbies to a soundtrack of ’80s bombast. A surprisingly committed cast, including Bob Hoskins and Alexander Siddig, seem to have convinced themselves they’re doing Chekov, which gives the unbridled bloodletting and profligate head-lopping a certain grand guignol crunchy grandeur. And yet, almost unbelievably, it could have done with being more bonkers.

So I signed up for a free 30 day trial with Lovefilm and none of my disks showed up, so I forgot I’d done it until I noticed £15.99 going out of my account. I asked for my money back and they said no, but then offered me 4 months free to make up for it! I don’t have to pay again until October! Now that is some excellent customer service. Good work, Lovefilm.

Update: Lovefilm has also given me one free rental of my choice to apologise. Nice one.

Steven Spielberg 2008

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: terrible title, film not so bad. It’s no Raiders of the Lost Ark or Last Crusade; it’s not even Temple of Doom — at least that had memorable set-pieces. There’s none of the rollicking thrills of Raiders despite the bustling CGI sequences, none of the creepiness of Temple despite a host of mysterious aliens, nimble jungle-dwellers and flesh-eating ants, and none of the mystery and chase elements of Crusade. Instead we get a plethora of talky exposition and no sense of peril or revelation. There’s a deft sense of period and some nice details to fill in Indy’s intervening years, but the film generally coasts on the charm of its cast: Harrison Ford’s Indy is always fun to spend time with, and all Shia LaBoeuf can do is charming. But none of them have any decent lines to work with: Cate Blanchett’s husky Soviet dominatrix is particularly badly served, and I’d also have loved to see more of her psychic warrior skills. Plus, after the opening sequences, the set pieces lack invention: none of the scenes stay with you past the closing credits, except the opening fridge/atomic bomb interface.

Part of the problem is that we don’t know what it’s about; with no Ark or Grail, the El Dorado city of gold aspect could have been played up rather than the little green men side. At least the CGI is relatively restrained, while every punch gloriously sounds like a gunshot, whipcrack and hammer blow in one. Like I said, not terrible.

I’m not sure when I realised that I’d been won over by Die Hard 4.0. Was it the point when I punched the air because a car had just crashed into a helicopter, or the point when a car crashed into a lift shaft, or the point when a truck crashed into a fighter plane? To be honest, ol’ smilin’ John McClane had me at hello, or at least the point ten or so minutes in when he said hello to some bad guys by throwing a fire extinguisher at them and then shooting the fire extinguisher so that the fire extinguisher blew up and it blew them up as well.

If the above has you grinning like a sex-starved orang-utan in a co-ed monkey house, then Die Hard 4.0 is for you. If not, get the hell out of my blog, you big girl’s bedwetter.

Steven Soderbergh 2007

The problem with these big cast franchises is the Star Trek problem of finding everybody something to do. The focus isn’t as firmly on Clooney this time as he isn’t the originator of the plan, so the others have a bit of breathing space. Matt Damon comes off best; a leading man elsewhere, he has so far been the junior member of Ocean’s crew, but 13 is his coming of age. With a big fake nose.

Carl Reiner essays a far more successful English accent than Don Cheadle’s weirdly-accented Basher, who spends most of his time fiddling with a large drill but is compensated with a flamboyant scene pretending to be a stunt motorcyclist. Bernie Mac, however, only gets one decent line for a film’s worth of hanging around. Shaobo Qin displays a bit more attitude and there’s plenty of life in the running gag that he doesn’t speak English. Eddie Jemison is saddled with being the least cool of the gang, although nothing is ever what it seems.

Scott Caan and Casey Affleck are the best served outside of the leading troika, with a whole subplot involving their infiltration of a dice factory and their involvement in industrial relations proving a comic highlight.

At the heart of it all is Elliott Gould’s Reuben, whose heart attack provides the catalyst for the job. He doesn’t do much but drift around in his pyjamas, but you feel for him anyway.

Reuben has been laid low after Al Pacino’s casino boss screwed him over in a business deal. Affronted, Ocean’s crew decide to take him for everything he’s got. For once, it’s not about winning everything, as making sure the other guy loses everything. What this adds up to is a series of complex cons to make sure that the casino’s grand opening breaks the bank.

This means several additions to the cast, including a criminally underused Eddie Izzard and a typical hard-luck turn from David Paymer.

The marquee names are poorly treated, however. Pacino’s Willy Bank is more clown fish than shark. Despite all the Godfather references, his meeting with Andy Garcia is disappointingly limp. We only know he’s tough because he’s Al Pacino, rather than from anything in the script.

Worse is Ellen Barkin, whose supposedly icy enforcer Sponder comes across like Cameron Diaz’s halfwit aunt. Olga Sosnovska’s Debbie is much more interesting. Her role should have been expanded to take over Sponder’s, giving a slinky frisson to the Ocean/Rusty/Linus troika and perhaps tempting Ocean and Rusty from the straight and narrow with their respective partners (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Julia Roberts, neither of whom show up here).

Julian Sands is also criminally limp in a role that David Thewlis, say, would have seized by the scruff of the neck (were all the decent British actors too busy with Potter…?)

More knockabout than previous entries, 13 virtually invites you to disengage your brain and just feel the comedy, as the dialogue and story is frequently impenetrable until the second viewing. Fortunately it is pretty funny, and pretty charming, but despite the complexity of the various scams the whole thing still tends to flabby - just like the leads.

Martin Scorsese 2006

Boooooooorrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnggggggg.

Alejandro Jodorowsky (1970)

While it is thoroughgoing bonkers, don’t be put off by the film’s mental reputation. There is a logic to the narrative, albeit an elliptical, right-angled unlogic. In many ways, it follows the conventions of the Western, but filtered through the unconscious of a child, or a madman.

El Topo, a black-clad gunslinger, crosses the desert with his young son and avenges the massacre of a town by some giggling, scuzzy bandits led by a powdered Colonel. He leaves his son with monks and returns to the desert with a woman who will only love him if he is the best gunfighter. So he takes on four master gurus of the gun to prove himself. Shot and left for dead, he is revered as a god by a group of deformed exiles trapped in a cave. Upon waking from his coma, years later, El Topo decides to dig a tunnel so the cave-dwelling freaks can be free. To finance this effort he and his dwarf lover entertain the corrupt citizens of a nearby town. Predictably disaster and death are never far away, in an apocalyptic climax that would have had even Peckinpah scratching his head.

Many Western conventions and tropes are present, but often skewed, exaggerated and rendered abstract. The central figure is a black-clad Man With No Name. Outlaws are filthy, lascivious and bestial. Authority figures are corrupt: The Colonel is vain and megalomanical, and the town Marshals are obese sadists (and homosexual predators). The townsfolk are incestuous, slavedealing degenerates.

What’s worse is the townsfolk commit the ultimate sin of hypocrisy. The women of the town call themselves the “Decency League” but appear in the mise -en-scene of the bordello, enslaving, molesting and then sentencing black servants to death. The menfolk live in fear of the women but conceal an orgiastic speakeasy. The local preacher leads the crowds in games of Russian Roulette, which is to him a show rather than a religious service.

By contrast, El Topo, a stone killer, is an honest man. He avenges the massacre of a village with no personal motive for gain. Later he takes up the cause of the freakish exiles as a shot at personal redemption for his duplicity in killing the gunfighting masters.

Peckinpah would have approved of the portrayal of women: hypocritical grotesques or beautiful, seductive betrayers.

The characterisation of the guru-like gunslingers of the desert gives the film a spiritual angle that sets it apart from the nihilism of the spaghetti Westerns El Topo closely resembles, giving it the feel of an Asian fairy tale. There’s a messianic subtext as well: the Colonel asks El Topo “Who are you to judge me?” and gets the reply “I am God.” He shows the power to bring forth water from the desert, a power he bestows on the woman after ravishing her.

After defeating the masters, El Topo cries out “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? “, only for the women to inflict stigmata upon him in a gunfight. But later, when he is revered as a god, he denies it. “I am just a man” he says. A man near impervious to bullets, but yet a man.

It’s no surprise that Jodorowsky went into comics later. The desert setting, oblique dialogue and grotesque characters lend the film an otherworldly, post-apocalyptic aesthetic. El Topo himself is a visual treat, whip thin in black leather and hawk-like eyes.

There’s a delight in visual detail like a bandit wearing three ever-smaller sombreros, or the graphic design simplicity of the eye symbol on the church, or El Topo’s incongruous umbrella. The character of the Double Man is pure visual audacity: a man with no arms carries a man with no legs on his back, creating a whole man.

The Mole: A tale of a man becoming a god of the gun. No surprise he loses his humanity and must earn it once again. No surprise it ends in fire and flame.

Tobey Maguire
Kirsten Dunst
James Franco

It’s very brisk, innit? Plot point/plot point/plot point/fight scene/plot point etc. The acting is delivered in a broad, almost old-fashioned kind of way, that, along with the slapstick/slapdash attempts at comedy remind you that this is, in fact, a kid’s movie. The musical interludes (I know! WTF?!) and effects sequences are so disconnected from the actual human acting bits that they feel imported from a whole other film. Quite a weird film.

There’s too many contrivances and coincidences. The Venom symbiote comes from space: so a meteor just plops down near where Peter (Maguire) and MJ (Dunst) happen to be. The plot calls for MJ to become disillusioned with Peter: so they just happen to bump into Gwen Stacey (Bryce Dallas Howard) at a restaurant. The plot calls for Peter to realise what he has become under the influence of the symbiote: he and Gwen just happen to turn up at the bar where MJ now works.

Worst of all, when the plot calls for Topher Grace’s Eddie Brock (a man with a number of legitimate dramatic reasons to follow Spider-Man around) to bond with the symbiote, we are asked to believe he has suddenly found religion, and has chosen, of all the churches in New York, the same one as Peter Parker.

The characters are subservient to the plot structure, and the plot subservient to the effects. It should be completely the other way around.

The special effects aren’t even that captivating (with the notable exception of the stunning realisation of the Sandman). The big action set-pieces are weightless and cartoony, like video-game interludes. The change between ‘real’ acting and CGI fight is so marked, it’s like the grain change in old sitcoms when the characters step outside the soundstage.

Worse, the effects wranglers mistake dizzyingly fast movement across incomprehensibly large spaces for spectacle, so it’s hard to see what’s going on, and harder to care.

A fight in the subway tunnels - when at one point Spider-Man grinds Sandman’s head to powder against the side of an onrushing subway train - is the only point where the excitement and drama of two people in conflict is enhanced by the effects, rather than the scrap acting as a showcase for the digital trickery of cartoon characters bouncing about a cartoon storyboard city.

Even an effects-light stand-up fistfight between Parker and Franco’s vengeful Osborn feels overedited and overcooked, and would have benefited from a Bourne-style stripping down.

And why, exactly, is James Cromwell even here? As with Jon Favreau and Joe Pantoliano’s thankless appearances in Daredevil, maybe Cromwell has one patrician eye on the future franchise paychecks.

James Franco’s performance is ten times as seductive as Maguire’s, and spending half the film grinning like a head-injured four-year-old is a waste of his slow-burning charisma. Having the whey-faced gimlet-eyed Kirsten Dunst within fifty miles of him is a waste of my time and yours.

Thomas Hayden Church is wicked, though. The Sandman effects are consistently gobsmacking, combining with his new granite physique to create a memorable character through the synergy of acting and effects.

Meanwhile Topher Grace’s camping-it-up works well but Venom’s rubberiness doesn’t, while Maguire’s doughy Peter Parker seems like a completely different entity to the loose-limbed Spider-Man.

But forget the kid’s stuff. The big question is, as ever: does it work as an allegory for Iraq (another one!)? Of course it does (doesn’t everything?). Six years after the Twin Towers fell off-screen and were digitally erased from in the first Spider-Man film, the threequel is all about the danger of revenge as a long-term motivation.

The black suit represents vengeance. Vengeance feels good; but it transforms the wearer into an unrecognisable monster. And anyway, the act being avenged wasn’t as simple as we thought. Vengeance is simple: black and no white. Real life is in colour.

It’s no coincidence that Spider-Man’s triumphant return to the good - in red and blue - sees him swoop past an enormous US flag, while the closing voiceover talks about personal choice. Hurray!

So, not exactly great, but with yawnsome effects comes pleasing weirdness.

Thomas Turgoose
Stephen Graham
Jo Hartley

Best film of the year. Yeah, I said it.

David Mitchell
Robert Webb
Jessica Stevenson

Playing like Peep Show crossed with the closing credits of Phoenix Nights, Magicians is charming rather than hilarious, with plenty of chuckles but not much substantial going on.

This is the third film in the last year to tell the story of two magicians driven to rivalry by the death of a woman they both loved. The Prestige is David Copperfield - dazzling but empty. The Illusionist is David Blaine - po-faced and sticks around too long.

Magicians is The Great Suprendo.

It doesn’t transcend Peep Show the way Shaun of The Dead was so much more than a feature-length episode of Spaced. Where Shaun took familiar personas and developed them into new and interesting characters, Magicians sticks to the Peep Show double act dynamic too closely. Mitchell’s Harry Kane is good-hearted but awkward and uptight, while Webb’s Carl is cool but feckless. Both are, well, idiots.

Because of this familiarity with the Apple/PC geeky loser personas, we are never led to believe that the guillotining of Harry’s wife is anything more than a tragic accident, the inevitable cringeworthy punchline to any hint of success the pair may have. Things just go wrong because they’re such losers.

More interesting are the tiny moments when we get a hint that maybe it wasn’t an accident, and maybe there’s a darker undercurrent to Harry’s put-upon desperation. But these moments are never explored, which is a shame as they could have sailed Magicians into blacker comedy waters than Peep Show ever navigated.

The same is true of Peter Capaldi. He essays a similarly bristling character to Malcolm Tucker, the scabrous spin doctor he plays in The Thick Of It. So when he does spew invective ticks of foul-mouthed exasperation, they’re funny, but a bit lame compared to what we’ve heard him unleash on the small-screen.

In this regard Jessica Stevenson comes off best. An early dance scene seems to suggest that Linda will be another self-deluded ditzy frump. But dancing aside, Linda is actually the most together person here. The dance - a stockroom-gestated all-too-literal interpretation of Electric Six’s Gay Bar - seems shoehorned in for David Brent-style laughs, except it isn’t that funny. But neither was Brent’s dance either. Instead, Stevenson gets to be the voice of normality, and sexy with it.

There’s space too for small-screen where-do-I-know-them-froms Darren ‘the bloke in Smack The Pony’ Boyd, Alex ‘Holby City’ MacQueen and Steve ‘Phoenix Nights’ Edge to flesh out their grotesque characters, despite the script cheating them of that killer line.

In fact nobody gets any killer lines. Which is a problem for a comedy. The Memorable Quotes section of Magicians‘ IMDb entry is empty. I can’t think of any laugh-out-loud quotes either.

Ultimately, Magicians just can’t shake the spectre of its POV predecessor. There isn’t a moment in the film that couldn’t have been shoehorned down into a zippy half-hour episode of Peep Show. The film also doesn’t conjure a sense of place in its Jersey setting the way that, say, Funny Bones is so anchored in Blackpool, but that’s a quibble. And there isn’t enough magic!

I don’t want to say bad things about Mitchell and Webb, or Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, but Magicians, while kind of entertaining, just doesn’t pull the rabbit out of the hat.

Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West
Zach Snyder (dir)

For a trashy sword’n’sandal epic, 300 sure packs in a wealth of subtexts. It’s tub-thumping, rousing hack’n’slash stuff, but it’s probably more fun picking apart the politics than it is thrilling at the blood’n’thunder carnage-porn nonsense on screen.

300 Greek warriors, the elite of Sparta led by King Leonidas, set off to stand in the face of the all-conquering Xerxes and his vast army. This they do. There is much lopping of limbs, and also quite a bit of frankly ridiculous musclebound preening. As Leonidas, Gerard Butler chews the scenery from the depths of his Captain Haddock beard, defying giant monsters, ninja dudes, and swarming archers with equal self-absorbed swagger.

Inexplicably David Wenham as Dilios, whose voiceover frames the story (and whose spin-doctored version of the tale we are in fact watching), chooses to pitch his performance somewhere between Alistair Sim and Alfred Steptoe, and is nigh unwatcheable. Thankfully then, Lena Headey as the Spartan Queen is just breathtakingly easy to watch.

300 seems a highly fascistic vision: in Sparta, might is most definitely right. As one character states, “All men are not equal in Sparta.” Male children are pitched against each other in tooth-spitting kiddie carnage, until they return to society forged from rock, like a good Frank Miller hero should be. The Spartans are all white, smooth-chested men’s men, all the more contrasted against Xerxes and his hordes.

Perhaps this is simply another iteration of the age-old concept that society cannot function unless it separates the means to protect itself. The values of love and compassion for the fellow man and woman are inherently at odds with the capacity for violence. So the Spartans exemplify the distinct corps that protects society yet is not truly part of it, brutal and brutalised men with the capacity for violence. They’re the gunslingers who can ultimately never settle down. Sure, Leonidas has a wife, but look what happens to her, punished for his hubris when she attempts to help. As is the Captain, whose son is killed, the suggestion being that his grief is weakness. He cannot stand alongside his son as a father: they must be two warriors and no more.

The exaltation of this elite corps skews the values of society, creating in the Spartans a fascist fetish for fighting. The deformed Ephialtes is cast out by society at birth, and rejected again by Leonidas. He defects to the Persian side, and his price is, basically, a uniform. He just wants to belong.

The Persian multitude is one lumpen mass of otherness: the differently abled, of every colour, of fluid sexuality, of every stripe. The 300 are brave, principled men willing to take a stand against diversity and degeneracy (conflated here in the superhuman figure of Xerxes.)

Much is also made of the conflict between Greek reason and Persian mysticism. It’s easy to see this as a conflict between supposedly rational Western renaissance values and unreconstructed, backwards Eastern values. The Persians could be seen to represent the mystical Islamist world. Interestingly, the right-wing/Conservative vales of Sparta are tempered by a general distrust of organised religion: the Spartan religious apparatus are themselves degenerate and corrupt. It must be noted, though, that Leonidas won’t do anything to end the practise of gifting a beautiful young girl to the priests for religious, and not so religious purposes. This amounts to state-sanctioned kidnapping and drug-rape. Perhaps another contemporary analogy: the leader who keeps his attention on the external instead of sorting out the problems of his own country?

And yes, His. The strength of extreme masculinism is the basis of the Spartan society, and therefore the strength of patriarchy. Queen Gorgo is an extremely strong character, respected by all, but still marginalised from the decision-making process and relying on the patronage of weaker men to even get her voice heard in the Spartan senate.

She only needs to get her voice heard because Leonidas took his warriors off to battle the Persians without official sanction. One of the core themes of 300 is the idea of personal integrity and honour in the face of politics or expediency. The 300 start fighting because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of what the government thinks, and don’t stop fighting regardless of the fact that they will surely die.

This resonates with the situation in Iraq: a war that is justified but not technically, y’know, legal. And a war that the men in charge won’t stop, even as the clouds of arrows darken the sky over our doomed sons and daughters in another land.

The messianic ending suggests a Christian bias, but the distrust of organised religion and religious figures points to faith as a continuation of personal integrity. This fits with the themes of honour and self-sacrifice, and just plain doing what’s right because you know it to be, no matter what weaker men do or say.

And all this in an extended video game take on antiquity. The CGI fast/slow motion echoes the elaborate beat-em-up finishing move, like if you watched the film again each fight would climax with a different bloody denouement. The vulgar CGI blood spatters add to the video game feel, having completely the opposite cartoon effect to the blossoming CGI spatters of Takeshi Kitano’s samurai opus Zatoichi.

Worth seeing on the big screen, then, for the bruised palette and the spectacle of the thing, but not worth taking entirely seriously. Dine in hell, sure, but with a healthy-sized pinch of salt.

“This would be a good death…”

A common theme of Frank Miller’s work is a man’s mission to ‘die right’. 300 is an extended last stand, full of talk of dying with honour and glory. Sin City is full of flawed heroes going unwaveringly to their seemingly inevitable doom. In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman chooses the time and place of his death – to the second (although he claims his timing is a bit off, but I like to think that’s a deliberate mistake – Bruce letting Clark know that he trusts him, always trusted him to come through in the end… but also getting one up on the Kryptonian yet again. A wink, and a reminder.)

Miller’s heroes represent absolute moral justice made flesh – yet more than flesh, their rock-hard moral convictions reflected in the hyperreal, granite-like physicality of Marv, the Dark Knight, or Leonidas. Maybe this explains Miller’s attraction to Robocop, the male body rendered literally impenetrable, metallic.

For Robocop, doing the right thing is programmed into him, even overriding the programming imposed upon him by society. It’s the same with Bruce Wayne scorning the committee that bans superheroes, Leonidas killing the messenger. They’re not interested in what lesser men might do.

Doing the right thing despite the cost means that death is near-inevitable. So while conviction means death, life means compromise. Society compromises; so the uncompromising hero is a loner. We see this in 300, when Leonidas questions the Arcadians’ professions. Be a part of society, but lack agency, or be in control of one’s own destiny and conviction but be apart from society.

This is why there’s such a clear separation between the warrior class of Sparta and the others, or the chattering classes of Gotham and the Dark Knight (“Batman? I’m plain tired of hearing about him. Him and how he doesn’t let things stop him or just let things go the way us humans do”). It’s the same as the distinction between the normal folk of the American West and the gunfighter who rides into town to commit righteous violence on behalf of society, yet can never be part of that society and must always ride on into the sunset.

To attempt to be part of society is irreconcilable with the way of the warrior. Love always means trouble in Sin City. This construction of hypermasculinity precludes relationships. Relationships lead to death. And it’s not always the man that’s punished.

“The world only makes sense when you force it to…”

Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans
Danny Boyle (dir)

Sunshine treks through space with the obvious comparisons burning up against it’s own self-belief, like the conflagration against the giant shield protecting our heroes in their spaceship, Icarus II. This film is less histrionic than Event Horizon, more human than Alien, and perhaps more affecting than both.

That’s not to say it’s better than either of these films. It’s certainly subtle, and in fact starts a bit too slow, leaving the audience with enough time to wonder why exactly these seven people, out of the entire population of earth, were picked to save humanity by dropping a bomb into the dying sun.

You’d think that out of all the people in the entire world you could find a slightly more professional group, less given to wandering away from consoles at crucial points or making “We’re going to die!”-like remarks every time something goes even slightly wrong. Because setting out on a mission like this, even without the disappearance of a previous attempt, you’d have to face up to the fact that you might never return from, let’s face it, day one of training.

And while we’re at it, why are these spaceships always painted menacing grey and sterile white? This may be a film about the human effects of isolation and separation from the community (like The Beach) but why couldn’t they just paint the corridors a nice pastel pink and make sure everybody knows how to tell a joke?

And isn’t that name – Icarus – just a wee bit fatalistic?

And while we’re on the subject of willing suspension of technological disbelief, what’s the point of the onboard computer having a HAL-style personality if it means they have to play twenty questions with it just to work out anything important? Don’t they have alarms? Don’t they have a sprinkler system that actually works?

And why do they only have one of everything (one airlock, one hydroponics bay)?

I would have liked to see more Apollo 13-style technical detail generating tension. The moment where one of the characters, encumbered by a spacesuit, falls down and can’t get up was more dramatic and emotionally charged than any of the creepy stalker stuff.

Generating dramatic tension from unconvincing technical nonsense and from the character’s own silly mistakes is a bit unsatisfying, but ignore the mostly unoriginal production design and the characters shine through (even if their core competencies don’t – these are the best and the brightest?). The crew-in-peril tropes, like ‘who’s going to snap first?’ or ‘how far will each of them go to protect the mission?’ are all present and correct, but cliché is deftly sidestepped through a subtle script and underplayed performances.

Cillian Murphy is soulful as ever, and even Chris Evans manages to bring sensitivity and nuance to what could have been a hackneyed ‘mission comes first’ gung-ho military hardhead. Hiroyuki Sanada also stands out despite not having much to work with, giving a performance of zen-like dignity as the Captain.

Things get going when the crew encounter the first Icarus mission, especially in a tense sequence involving chilling use of subliminal images. The end feels a bit rushed after the slowburn of the earlier stages, and would be more effective if the climactic fight was swapped with the what felt like the truer climax, a spectacular and wonderfully visceral spacewalk moments earlier with great music and real tension.

Oh yeah, the whole exercise may also remind you a bit of the Doctor Who episode ‘The End of the World’. But hey, we see the sun every day, and it’s still beautiful.

George Clooney / Cate Blanchett / Tobey Maguire
Stephen Soderbergh (dir)

Chinatown with uniforms.

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This is probably the greatest review I have ever read. I’m going to write like that all the time now.

That dude Neill Cumpston should be the head of film studies at all film schools ever, and lectures would consist of projecting movies onto writhing super-hot hula girls with SAS-trained rottweilers writing out your lecture notes and then flame-throwering to death any tutors that give you a bad mark.

BTFW I went to see Hot Fuzz a while ago or whenever, and it kicks arse like a copper’s size 10 to an old lady’s fucking face, and, and… cor, it’s quite hard to keep this up.

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Nicolas Cage / Eva Mendes / Sam Elliott
Mark Steven Johnson (dir)

This is the sort of film where someone in a Matrix-style long coat stands in a darkened church staring broodingly at the candles, and when challenged by the priest, replies “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I’ve sinned a lot!” and turns into a demon. Says it all really.

Ghost Rider isn’t bad, like, just not great. The big draw is the visuals, and it would be pretty hard to cock up iconography as strong as a leather-clad avenger with a flaming skull for a head. Whether riding his fearsome hell cycle up the side of a skyscraper, lassoing a helicopter with a fiery chain (!) or just standing there doing that Elvis open-fisted pointing thing, the Ghost Rider himself never looks less than dead cool. And if that image doesn’t sound like your cup of jellybeans, then, hell, Music and Lyrics is just starting in the next screen, you big girl’s blouse.

Just kidding. It’s pushing it to hang a whole feature just on how cool the lead looks, so hey, at least this film is pretty short. The Ghost Rider is the devil’s bounty hunter by night, stunt cyclist Johnny Blaze by day. In between jumping over helicopters Blaze flirts with childhood sweetheart Roxy, gets advice on stopping the devil’s son from a mysterious gravedigger, and has a couple of slightly dull paggers. And that’s about it.

It’s all quite charming, if not compelling, suffering from such a workmanlike, origin-of-a-superhero tick-box plot: guy gets superpowers, guy tests superpowers, guy reveals superpowers to sceptical girlfriend, guy has showdown with police that has everyone convinced he’s bad (except girlfriend), guy has it all explained by mentor figure, guy’s girlfriend gets kidnapped, guy has big showdown with assorted baddies over some kind of ultimate weapon, guy sets up sequel.

The Ghost Rider even takes on a purse-snatcher, for god’s sake.

That’s not to say this film is wholly without imagination: there’s plenty of nice little touches around the edges, mostly in the performances. Mendes, Cage and Elliott are all down with the silliness, and seem happy to just relax and have fun, and they’re all fun to spend time with.

An unexpectedly lean Cage is astonishingly restrained – I expected him to be bouncing off the scenery with his head on fire, trying to do the role without special effects. Instead there’s lots of little character beats like listening to The Carpenters and casually mentioning that he’s thinking of becoming a motorcycle cop.

Elliott is perfectly cast to lend proceedings a bit of gravitas, and nicely anchors the urban/Western/Texan gothic setting. Mendes is luminous but has nothing to do, except for a nice bit of comedy in a restaurant.

The villains are less successful: Peter Fonda is a casting coup but would probably be more menacing without the distracting CGI inserts (see DeNiro’s Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart), while his devilish son Blackheart, played by Wes Bentley, is just laughably lame. Blackheart’s goons, a demon for each element, each have an OK signature CGI trick and might get by in a Marilyn Manson video, but they’re absolutely rubbish in a scrap.

The fights should have involved more running each other over with lorries and less interminable scenes of two CGI demons screaming at each other. Let’s face it, the smoky, wraith-like CGI demons peddled these days lack the physicality, the menace, the downright implacable sinisterness of Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons, no matter how many times they come snarling and roaring right up close to the screen, woooohhh, scary!

So a bit more depth in the Ghost Rider/Johny Blaze character would have been good, more of a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing, but hidden depths are probably a bit too much to ask for in a film so shallow. ‘Nice flaming skull’ really says it all.

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