Aladdin (2019)

The Low-Down: For the past decade, Disney has been mining its treasure trove of animated classics for live-action remake fodder. Thus far, the results have been charming enough, though none of them has made a definitive case for or against telling the same story in a different medium. Aladdin has the rather dubious distinction of tilting the debate in favour of leaving well enough alone. Notwithstanding a few welcome sparks of colour and reinvention, this remake will struggle to convince anyone that it needed to exist. In fact, it provides concrete proof that – however good, however photo-real modern special effects have become – there are some things that just work better when animated.

The Story: You know the drill – Aladdin (Mena Massoud) is a street rat with a heart of gold, picking pockets to stay alive in the bustling markets of Agrabah. He’s recruited by Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) – nefarious, ambitious vizier to the Sultan (Navid Negahban) – to steal a magic lamp from the Cave of Wonders. Aladdin’s life takes a turn for the weird and wonderful when he rubs said lamp, freeing an all-powerful Genie (Will Smith) who grants him three wishes. With the Genie’s help, Aladdin makes his bid for the heart of Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott). But romance falls by the wayside when Jafar sets his evil plans into motion.

The Good: There are some welcome efforts to update elements of Aladdin’s story to better reflect the world in which we live today. In the 1992 original, it was always frustrating that a princess with the intelligence and independent spirit of Jasmine had to find a husband to rule Agrabah. This remake doesn’t derail the romance, but it does make time to return Jasmine her agency – making clear that she’s the one in the relationship with all the (political) power. It’s a shame that Speechless, the new song she’s been given to explore her inner turmoil, feels so out-of-place in both the film and the score. The tune is disposable, presumably fished out of composer Alan Menken’s bottom drawer, with pop anthem lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul that are frustratingly generic. But hey – effort appreciated.

The Not-So-Good: Unfortunately, the rest of Aladdin never quite lives up to the spectacular  heights of the original film. It’s decently made, for the most part, and the action sequences are gratifying to watch. In live action, Aladdin is something of a parkour practitioner, the camera chasing after him on his gravity-defying sprints through the streets of Agrabah. But the magic is curiously gone, bled out of scenes that should crackle with joy and emotion, like Prince Ali and A Whole New World. Apart from a couple of goofy moments that feel charmingly improvised, you won’t be able to spot director Guy Ritchie’s chaotic comic streak in the film at all. Almost all of its best bits – specifically the friendship between Aladdin and the Genie – are lifted, beat for beat, from its predecessor.

I (Don’t Want To) Dream Of Genie: Robin Williams’ Genie is one of Disney’s towering achievements – his every motion, facial expression and quicksilver transformation like lighting captured in a bottle, literally and figuratively. It’s truly one of the most sublime marriages of actor and animation ever: Robin Williams is the Genie, and the Genie is Robin Williams. It’s actually unfair to expect anyone to fill Williams’ enormous shoes, even someone like Smith, who has bucketloads of natural charisma of his own. Here, he’s not only hamstrung by having to give a performance already perfected by someone else – he’s saddled with unfortunate character design (that gigantic, puffed-up torso) and occasionally ropey CGI. As a result, Smith’s Genie becomes the stuff of nightmares. It should come as no surprise that Smith is most effective in the scenes when he isn’t big and blue. The opposite can be said of Jafar, who was made all the more sinister by his distinctively arch appearance in the animated film – something Kenzari can’t possibly hope to approximate as a real human person. At least the film’s animal companions (Abu, Rajah and Iago) are wonderfully rendered, which gives one hope for Disney’s next live-action remake, The Lion King.

Recommended? Not particularly. Aladdin tries, quite hard, but doesn’t make a convincing argument for its own existence – and occasionally threatens to ruin your childhood.

Night At The Museum: Secret Of The Tomb (2014)

No one would blame you for expecting the worst from Night At The Museum: Secret Of The Tomb. The first film was fun but hardly groundbreaking, and the second a rather forgettable retread. This final entry in the franchise could simply be cashing in before it cashes out: raking in some money at the box office from a holiday season crowd desperate for family-friendly, feel-good fare. What’s so unexpected is that there’s actually a zany spark of life to Secret Of The Tomb, one which makes the film a joy to watch – even if its plot is decidedly undercooked.

Larry (Ben Stiller), the night watchman at one of New York’s finest museums, has been privy to its biggest secret for years. Every night, the enchanted Egyptian tablet of Akhmenrah (Rami Malek) glows and all the museum exhibits – from President Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams) through to pint-sized cowboy Jed (Owen Wilson) and Roman gladiator Octavius (Steve Coogan) – come to life. But disaster strikes when the tablet begins to rust and the magic starts to fail. Desperate to keep his friends alive, Larry travels with a motley crew to London, hoping that Akhmenrah’s parents – currently on exhibit in the British Museum – can help make things right again.

Anyone watching Secret Of The Tomb for its plot (um, why?!) will be disappointed. The story is predictable and rather silly, draped as it is around a big, mysterious and ultimately anti-climactic family secret regarding the magical tablet. There’s a clumsy attempt to shoehorn some emotional growth and depth into Larry’s relationship with Nicky (Skyler Gisondo), his now college-age son who’s keen to take a year off to be a DJ in Ibiza. It’s hard to shake the feeling, too, that the script was cobbled together to give everyone in its hefty ensemble cast something to do – Jed and Octavius’ misadventures in the British Museum, in particular, are fitfully amusing but largely inconsequential.

And yet, there’s such a lot of joy and heart to the proceedings that it’s easy to give into the film’s blithely silly moments – of which there are, thankfully, many. Chief among its delights is the addition of Sir Lancelot (Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey fame, showing off a surprisingly keen sense of comic timing) to the mix: the pompous, seriously pretty knight struts through the film with an outsized sense of purpose, and provides most of its belly laughs. We even get a wonderfully-imagined chase sequence set in the loopy twists and turns of an Escher painting, a biblical reference better than most of Exodus: Gods And Kings, and a star cameo so funny that it’s easily worth the price of admission.

The cast isn’t really called upon to do their best work, but they give it their all anyway. Stiller’s trademark brand of deadpan haplessness continues to amuse, as he literally pulls double-duty in playing both Larry and Laaa, his new Neanderthal doppelganger. Dick Van Dyke makes a brief but very welcome return to the franchise, as do Bill Cobbs and the late Mickey Rooney (in his last screen appearance).

But the emotional heft of the film is really provided by Williams, who plays Teddy with such charm and warmth that you might find yourself tearing up at the most unexpected moments in the film. Each time Larry is forced to confront the possibility that his buddy Teddy might be frozen in wax forever, so too will the audience be reminded that they must savour the talent and energy of one of Hollywood’s finest comedians in one of his final movie roles.

Franchises like Night At The Museum are simply not intended to set the cinematic world alight with their brilliance and intelligence. But it’s nice to see that, at the end of this particular franchise’s run, its creators still harbour quite a bit of love for the oddball characters who – quite literally – come to life onscreen. Indeed, the resolutely family-friendly Secret Of The Tomb is at its best when Larry fights to save this surrogate family he’s found with a little bit of luck and magic.

Basically: Hardly groundbreaking, but a charming and, at times, bittersweet final chapter for the franchise.

The Face Of Love (2014)

When does deep, abiding love tip over into unhealthy, tragic obsession? The answer, apparently, is all the time, in oddly affecting romantic drama The Face Of Love. Buoyed by a strong cast, this tale of a woman falling for her dead husband’s doppelganger manages to gloss over some of its more troubling implications for quite a while. But, ultimately, writer-director Arie Posin fails to disguise the fact that an interesting premise does not a great film make. 

Nikki (Annette Bening) is devastated by the sudden death of her beloved husband Garret (Ed Harris). Without him, she drifts through a haze of loss and grief, unable to walk through her house or visit the museum without being reminded of him. After five years as a widow, she meets, quite by chance, Tom (also played by Harris), a man who’s the spitting image of her deceased husband. She tracks him down at a liberal arts college where he teaches, and the two strike up a romance: one that never quite manages to free itself from the troubling spectre of Nikki’s still-burning love for Garret.

Posin reportedly sat down to co-write his script after his mother gave him an idea for the story: she had spotted someone in the crowd who looked eerily like her dearly departed husband. There’s certainly a host of interesting ideas revolving around this premise. When does love turn into obsession? When does it keep the ones left alive from moving on? To what lengths can love drive a person? Indeed, The Face Of Love occasionally hits upon moments of quite startling insight, particularly when Nikki walks through her beautiful, empty house like someone already dead.

But the film also gets too caught up in its own premise. The relationship between Nikki and Tom unfolds in a realistic but also deeply creepy way: she frequently refers to him as Garret, and clearly slips into the delusion that her husband is alive far more frequently than she reminds herself that she’s with an entirely different man with his own identity and feelings. That’s not the bad part; in fact, it’s quite intriguing and tragic in its unsettling fashion.

What works less well is the way in which it all ends. The inevitable confrontation between Nikki and Tom is much delayed – she hides a family photograph with Garret, and for some reason he googles Nikki but never thinks to google Garret – and, when it finally takes place, is deeply anti-climactic and a bit silly. Instead of dealing with the very real ramifications of Nikki’s actions (she takes Tom to the scene of Garret’s demise to “make new memories!”), the film chooses to skip a year ahead, picking up the story in a ham-fisted way that gives no one any real emotional closure – not Tom, not Nikki, and certainly not the audience.

What joy there is to be had in this film comes from its astounding and very committed cast. Bening expresses more hope and despair in her face and eyes than the script sometimes allows her; she’s the reason Nikki comes off as sympathetic and heartbroken rather than crazed and callous. Harris’ part is pretty thankless, but he imbues Tom with a sad hopefulness: the way he proclaims that his heart soars because of the way Nikki looks at him will likely break yours. (Robin Williams, by the way, pops up as a neighbour who’s long held a torch for Nikki, but isn’t given very much to do.)

In some moments, The Face Of Love makes a very strong case for its existence. Within Nikki’s heartbreak, one can find shades of dangerous obsession and tragic delusion. Bening alone maps Nikki’s desolation in a wonderfully sensitive way. But, because of the deeply strange manner in which the film chooses to resolve Nikki’s relationship with Tom, it all rings too hollow in the end. This is not, as it turns out, The Face Of Love, but more The Farce of it.

Basically: Intriguing, with moments of shattering insight, but ultimately disappointing.

The Butler (2013)

There’s an inescapably episodic feel to The Butler, the much-lauded political drama (very) loosely inspired by the true story of Eugene Allen. Allen was a fixture in the White House: a butler who stayed, served and outlasted the administrations of eight American presidents over 34 years. Small wonder that the film flits restlessly from president to president, the passage of time marked less by character development than star cameos. There’s some great acting on display in The Butler, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the script simply isn’t strong enough to do justice to its intriguing premise and fascinating story.

Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) led a hardscrabble life as a child – growing up on a cotton plantation, he bore witness to the wanton cruelty of his family’s white employer, before he was promoted to ‘house nigger’: a job that taught him how to be completely invisible in a room filled with his betters. For him, great triumph and success is marked by his employment as a butler in the White House. From Dwight D. Eisenhower (Robin Williams) through to Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman), Cecil serves quietly and unobtrusively so as to make a better life for his wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and sons – dutiful youngest boy Charlie (Elijah Kelley) and rebellious, freedom-fighting Louis (a fiery David Oyelowo).

Much of the film is concerned with the hugely charged issue of race in America, with Cecil doubling up as the personification of the country’s greatest sin. From slave to indentured servitude, Cecil serves at the pleasure of white men: none more white than the ones who rule the White House (a more apt and literal name for a building there has never been). The elevation in his social status, as pointed out by his increasingly radical son Louis, is just another form of enslavement: the kind in which he willingly participates, the kind that denigrates him in a different, far subtler way than actual slavery.

It’s a tricky, complex issue to address, one that’s loaded with so much history, politics and emotion that it’s hard to decide just how to respond to Lee Daniels’ very earnest film. The Butler raises enormously important issues: there is so much legally-sanctioned, utterly reprehensible oppression woven into the backdrop of this particular civil rights revolution that any film which dares to so baldly lay out the story of one family’s struggle to deal with it all should be welcomed with open arms. Certainly, The Butler checks those boxes as it tells Cecil’s life story: one which effectively encompasses the evolution of political, social and cultural norms towards the treatment of blacks in America. He has, quite literally, seen it all: from slavery to emancipation, from cotton plantations to Lyndon B. Johnson’s (Liev Schreiber) Great Society.

The trouble is that The Butler handles it all in a frustratingly ham-fisted way. It’s both too complex and too shallow, trying to fold in eighty years’ worth of history into 132 minutes. It touches on a wealth of issues and ideas, but in so fleeting a way that only those well-schooled in the politics of the era will be able to keep up. Cecil’s own brief interactions with each of the Presidents feel heavily scripted, clumsy and obvious and yet adding up to very little: it’s as if screenwriter Danny Strong wanted to over-emphasise and underplay the influence this butler had on American politics at the exact same time. As a result, the film plods along, hammering some emotional points home while failing to flesh out some of the more layered, complex notions it raises.

What does work very well in the film is its cast. Whitaker is superb as the self-effacing Cecil, a man who would rather disappear into the woodwork than be noticed standing up for himself. His anger at his son – and perhaps his own inability to protest against the world in which he must live – is beautifully played. Winfrey, too, is excellent as Gloria, a wife kept on the sidelines by a man who himself exists only in the periphery of his workplace. The list of actors playing presidents is impressive, the make-up all the more so: the last person you might imagine in the role of Reagan is Rickman, but he looks the part to an uncanny degree.

Perhaps the way to properly illustrate what’s good and bad about The Butler is to suggest that the film would be better off as a television series. There is so much that’s important about its story that it feels like a waste for it all to be shoved willy-nilly into the framework of a feature film. In The Butler, Cecil’s chats with his employers feel contrived and inconsequential; it’s easy to imagine that, on a television series, they might play out like the well-earned grace notes they really deserve to be.

Basically: A troubled drama dealing with far too many complex issues in a running time that allows for little subtlety. Reads as maudlin when it could be devastating. Great acting though.

The Big Wedding (2013)

On the strength – or to be more accurate, the weakness – of The Big Wedding, it’s clear that Hollywood no longer deserves actors of the calibre of Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon. Heck, it doesn’t even deserve actors like Katherine Heigl, Amanda Seyfried and Topher Grace. Billed as an uproarious ensemble comedy about a family wedding going very badly wrong, this is predictable, painful and hardly funny at all.

The titular wedding is that of Alejandro (Ben Barnes) and his lovely bride Missy (Seyfried), to which the entire extended family is invited. This means Alejandro’s adoptive brother Jared (Grace) and sister Lyla (Heigl), his divorced dad Don (De Niro) and mom Ellie (Keaton), and his dad’s girlfriend of ten years Bebe (Sarandon). But it also includes Alejandro’s biological mother Madonna (Patricia Rae), whose conservative Catholic beliefs threaten to turn the entire weekend upside down. To avoid upsetting Madonna, Alejandro convinces Don and Ellie to play at still being married – at least until after the wedding.

It’s a thin and rather contrived premise, but better rom-coms have succeeded with worse plotlines. The problem with The Big Wedding is that its screenplay – by director Justin Zackham – is terrible. Riddled with sexual innuendoes (a character named ‘Muffin’ played by Broadway veteran Christine Ebersole) and ‘jokes’ that aren’t particularly funny (De Niro getting repeatedly punched in the face), the script lurches from scene to scene with little regard for emotional engagement or character development.

Pretty much all of the characters in the film are poorly-written caricatures, to the point that even its inexplicably accomplished cast can’t salvage them. Don, for instance, comes across as a perpetually randy, offensive brute of a man, and it’s hard to understand why former best friends Ellie and Bebe have both fallen for him. Actually, it’s hard to like any of the characters – which is no surprise since their director doesn’t seem to like them very much either.

In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that Hollywood no longer has any idea what to do with distinguished actors from the seventies who aren’t Meryl Streep. These days, they all seem to be biding their time in mediocre but inoffensive comedies, waiting for another chance to prove why they’re legends of the silver screen. Unfortunately for everyone involved with The Big Wedding, this manages to be so grievously mediocre that it actually becomes offensive in its own way. Even fans of the rom-com genre, whose standards have already been revised downwards for movies of this sort, won’t find much in the way of romance or comedy here.

Basically: Don’t bother RSVP-ing for this one.

August Rush (2007)

The trailer for August Rush, as I recall it, was lush and whimsical, filled with sweeping music and arty shots of a dreamy Freddie Highmore – staring into the distance at a future where his character’s genius musical talent would reunite him with his lost parents. It came across as a modern-day fairy tale, and certainly seemed promising enough. Reviews were mostly charitable, so I decided to brave the film for myself – sigh, big mistake.

Highmore plays the orphaned Evan, a boy who has always heard the music in life, in everything around him. He believes beyond the shadow of any doubt that this music he hears in leaves and bells and traffic actually ties him to his parents, who will one day return for him – if they can hear the music he can make. So he runs away from the orphanage one day to New York to hunt for his parents – who, unbeknownst to him, met and fell in love over the course of one day several years ago, and never saw each other again. Cellist Lyla (Keri Russell) and rock singer Louis (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) are living separate lives, the former firmly believing her son to be dead, the latter unaware he has a son at all. Evan falls in with a street gang of children led by Wizard (Robin Williams), a rough man who takes huge cuts of his young charges’ busking harvests – and soon embarks on a career in music as the renamed August Rush. Will he be able to reunite with his parents, and escape from Wizard’s stiflingly loving environs?

A more accomplished version of this movie would probably have at least taken a stab at injecting a little unpredictability into the proceedings. Instead, August goes into full-blown fantasy mode – the story is soaked in cliché and unravels in ways so by-the-numbers that it’s a chore to sit through another scene of Highmore delighting a host of adults as he demonstrates unprecedented musical talent, or of either of his parents staring achingly into the distance, pondering about something missing from their lives that they can’t quite identify. Yes, it’s that kind of movie, knitted through with missed opportunities, Fate (capital F), Destiny and all that other jazz. It’s difficult not to feel impatient as the movie wears on, for it to prove that there’s something more to its trite script and poorly developed characters as the trailer would have you believe. The film doesn’t even boast that undercurrent of magic that might have lent some credibility to its ludicrous plot – ‘escapee orphan with rock-star or world-famous cellist parents becomes the toast of New York through sheer stunning skill!!’.

The performances here barely lift the film out of its rut. Highmore can’t seem to move beyond starry-eyed dreaminess, which gets wearing after a while. Russell is one-note, even though her character technically has the most emotional stuff to play around with, and Rhys-Meyers as brooding as ever – but neither of them gets much out of their roles as written on the page. Williams is the standout and, if anything, the sole reason to see the film. He is electric as Wizard, who stands in a desert of continually shifting moral sands – he is kind to his wards, and also domineering, demanding of but inspired by them in equal measure. Williams plays this with the kind of carefree spark, with a slightly darker edge, that has been missing in his recent performances.

Altogether, a disappointment of a film – lacking the magic and whimsy that might have made its plot palatable, August becomes a poor, predictable excuse for a fairy tale that is far more difficult to swallow than it should be. Fairy tales should go down like a spoonful of sugar – this one feels more like candy-coated cod liver oil.

Night At The Museum (2006)

Tailored specifically for the festive-minded Christmas crowd, Night At The Museum is the equivalent of movie cotton candy – an airy, cheery confection so feather-light that your feelings and memories about it dissolve within minutes… leaving nothing but a slightly sickly aftertaste, if at all. If it’s the kind of movie you’re in the mood for, then you’ll have a great time at the cinema. Thankfully, Museum is a genuinely funny, rather amusing example of its genre. But if you’re looking for artier fare, steer clear of this painstakingly engineered blockbuster; there’s nothing here for you.

Ben Stiller plays professional layabout Larry Daley – a man who’s spent much of his life coming up with quirky inventions that have all categorically failed to catch on anywhere. A disappointment to his ex-wife Erica (Kim Raver) and little boy Nick (Jake Cherry), Larry finally decides to get a steady job as a night watchman at the Museum of Natural History. After he’s shown the ropes by the outgoing trio of security guards, led by Cecil (Dick Van Dyke) and flanked by the scrappy Gus (Mickey Rooney) and slightly odd Reginald (Bill Cobbs), Larry settles himself in for what he thinks is a dead easy job. Unfortunately, the night shift is when everything in the museum, well, literally takes on a life of its own – including statues of Theodore Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Attila the Hun (Patrick Gallagher) and native Indian tracker Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), and packs of figurines from miniature tableaux of the Wild West and the Roman Empire, led by hotshot cowboy Jed (Owen Wilson) and Roman-era gladiator Octavius (Steve Coogan). Larry spends a couple of frustrating nights trying to settle into his new job… but has he sufficiently figured out the ropes when he’s suddenly pressed into service to save the museum and all its inhabitants?

If you watch this movie as a child, you would very likely be transported by the flights of fancy that form the bedrock of Museum. Stiller wasn’t kidding when he said that he wanted to make a family-friendly comedy that he could finally take his kids to see, because this movie is perfect for the average little tike. Who wouldn’t want to see a T-Rex made entirely of bones whip itself into life and thunder through the corridors of a museum, playing fetch with his own rib? What about a wisecracking Easter Island head (voiced by Brad Garrett), a bunch of grunting Neanderthals trying to make fire or a weeping Attila the Hun being put in touch with his feminine side? It’s all the kind of thing you’d have been transfixed by as a kid – and, to the credit of screenwriters Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, they pepper their script with enough zingers and in-jokes that adults don’t feel as if they’ve wasted their money accompanying their kids to the cinema. They do also make an effort to ground Larry’s motives in something resembling reality, taking some pains to establish his concerns when he sees his son wanting to be a pencil-pusher like stepdad Don (Paul Rudd).

That being said, there really isn’t anything fantastically new about Museum – it’s quirky, cute and thoroughly amusing, especially when Teddy Roosevelt dishes out his noble platitudes, or when Larry tussles with a monkey to regain possession of his keys to the African nature exhibit in the museum. (Very lowbrow comedy there, I must admit.) But it’s not what one would call vital or important cinema – far from it. The film-makers are aiming, as already indicated, squarely for the pockets with this movie, and I imagine the attendant merchandise is already winging its way off the shelves in toy stores everywhere. Dollar signs rarely translate into artistic merit, and what we have here is a workmanlike, enjoyable family picture that won’t kill you to watch it, but which is unlikely to become part of the yearly Christmas tradition in every household either.

The one thing about this movie that adults really can appreciate, which children are unlikely to notice, is that its cast gathers together a host of some of the greatest comedic talents to have ever lived. I’m not just talking about Frat-Packers Stiller and Wilson, or even Ricky Gervais (who delivers a delightfully acerbic cameo as uptight museum director Mr McPhee). And no, I’m not even talking about Williams, who is great as Teddy Roosevelt – at once oddly presidential, at other times touchingly human for recognising with such clarity just what he is… a wax figure. The real treats to watch here are the triumverate of old comic talents. I profess to having always had something of a girlish crush on Van Dyke, and it’s just a thrill to finally be able to see him get some mileage out of that absolutely spot-on comic timing of his again. Whether he’s flashing his trademark twinkling grin at the flummoxed Larry, or tap-dancing briefly with his mop in the credits, watching Van Dyke on screen is a pleasure. And it’s just as much fun seeing Rooney hurl abuse at the hapless Stiller, or have Cobbs play a doddering, sentimental old fool.

All in all, a fun, happy movie that’s not too taxing on the grey matter – a great way to pass the time with little kids, and what else could you ask for amidst the bustle of Christmas, when all you really need is some time to put up your feet and relax a little?

Happy Feet (2006)

I really really wanted to like this movie. I mean, what’s not to love? Gorgeously animated emperor penguins singing their hearts out? A voice cast featuring Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Robin Williams and Elijah Wood? And did I mention the really gorgeously animated penguins? Because, unfortunately, that’s about all Happy Feet has to offer its adult audience. Oh sure, there are some laughs, mostly provided by Williams’ trifecta of characters – particularly wannabe Latino lover penguin Ramon and fake penguin messiah Lovelace – and to its credit, the story did try to move beyond its basic sugary ‘outcast finding his own niche to fit in’ plot. Unfortunately, the attempt to move the story out of its immediate set-up as a family picture not only doesn’t improve the movie, it only highlights the fact that much of HF is trite, predictable and not particularly engaging.

Plot-wise: Mumble (Wood) grows up as a horrible squawker of a singer in a tribe of penguins for whom finding their heart-songs and their soul-mates is everything – unable to capture the attention of his childhood sweetheart Gloria (Brittany Murphy) with his voice, Mumble only has his distinctly happy, itchy feet to make him feel special. An accomplished tap dancer, Mumble is ostracised by his peers and even his father Memphis (Jackman), who can never rid himself of the guilt that his accident with Mumble’s egg might have caused Mumble to be so different from everyone else. But even though his entire community, led by cratchety elder Noah (Hugo Weaving) want nothing to do with him, Mumble soon realises that the drought of fish in the region is starving his people – putting this together with stories he heard in his youth of strange aliens tagging birds, he decides to get to the bottom of the mystery that is plaguing his community. With the help of a quintet of ditzy dancing penguins, Mumble sets out for places unknown…

Now there is absolutely no faulting the animation in this piece. The sheer love and dedication that went into creating these fluffy-feathered little creatures is clear from every frame of the movie – the soft downy plume of each penguin, the majestic scenery that seems too real to be believed, the usually benign sea-lion suddenly turned into a snarling, treacherous monster of the deep. Everything about the movie’s visuals is bright, sparkly and thoroughly inspired – aesthetically, it’s an arresting sight and probably the only reason you should even contemplate watching this on a big screen. The impact simply would not be the same if you rented the movie on DVD some months down the road.

Unfortunately, gorgeous visuals do not a good movie make, and here HF flounders – stuck with a cliché-ridden plot and a main character so clearly fitting the ‘good-ol’-boy’ stereotype, the movie struggles to effectively communicate its message of acceptance and tolerance for those among us who are different. It’s a story we’ve been told a thousand times before in a thousand different ways – and here, it feels every bit as if you’ve seen it somewhere else, and done better. It’s almost as if the movie-makers came up with a checklist of all the hallmarks of one of these ‘it’s okay to be different/yourself’ movies, and dutifully ticked each one off as they went along. Guilt-ridden, clearly wrong father figure? Check. Love interest who so plainly sees the magic in the main character’s eccentricity? Check. A rousing finale in which wronged hero makes good despite all the oppression he has already suffered? Check. Actually, only kind of – in my opinion, when Mumble properly encounters mankind for the first time, the movie spirals even more out of control, stretching credulity to the point that it becomes difficult to focus on the film’s fundamentally good intentions. At heart, HF is a story preaching environmental conservation, but it comes off as strange and not particularly credible when married to the more conventional plotline about Mumble trying to dance his way into his lady’s heart.

At least the voice cast is respectable. When it comes down to it, the leading voices – Wood and Murphy – are serviceable enough. Where the movie really shines is with its cracking supporting cast. And I’m not even talking here about how Jackman recalls Elvis and Kidman channels the breathiness of Marilyn Monroe. It’s Williams’ double or triple turns at the microphone that really stand out – unlike in Aladdin, in which he made a good movie even better with a defining, larger-than-life performance, here Williams struggles to keep the movie from sinking… and amazingly enough, almost manages it – which is quite a feat considering that all he had to work with was his voice. Williams is hilarious and steals every scene he’s in, especially in his role as Ramon, which was clearly crafted to get laughs and to amuse the young’uns endlessly.

An unfortunate misfire that will nevertheless pack in the audiences because of the hopelessly adorable, wonderfully-animated penguins, I’d suggest you give HF a miss unless you’ve got a kid to bring along. I’m pretty sure kids will warm to this simple story, with its cute animals and funky dance numbers (and its comedy penguins, leave us not forget the comedy penguins). At least then you’ll know it won’t be a totally wasted trip.

The Night Listener (2006)

To its credit, The Night Listener is, for the most part, a smart, fairly well-written little movie, featuring a remarkable cast that includes Robin Williams in a non-showboating dramatic role (always welcome – given his highly erratic movie choices of late, it’s easy to forget that Williams is actually as credible a dramatic actor as he is adept at wacky, slapstick comedy). That being said, however, TNL is also never going to be remembered for being any much more than passable enough entertainment that, although intriguing in parts, is more or less forgettable for being neither abysmally bad nor astoundingly good – just frustratingly in-between.

Gabriel Noone (Williams) is a storyteller by trade: a late-night radio DJ who tells stories gleaned from his life, he strikes up a telephone conversation with 14-year-old Pete (Rory Culkin), a young boy with a history of traumatic sexual abuse who has little more than a few months to live. A longtime fan of Gabriel’s radio show, Pete, with the help of his social worker Donna (Toni Collette), is trying to publish the novel he has written of his broken, bruised life, and is especially keen for Gabriel’s feedback. As Gabriel becomes increasingly emotionally involved with Pete and his fantastically horrific life, Gabriel’s estranged boyfriend Jess (Bobby Cannavale) sounds a note of alarm – pointing out that Gabriel spends most of his life in a fictional world more interesting than the one he actually occupies, Jess wonders if Pete really exists after all, and whether it’s all just one big hoax…

Despite a frustrating lack of overarching direction in the script, director (with part writing credit) Patrick Stettner does draw out some intriguing themes in this film. He works hard, for instance, at establishing the veracity of Gabriel’s relationship with Pete, and the former’s emotional attachment to the latter is well laid-out, as they trade barbs and signs of affection with each other (Pete calling Gabriel a “cocksmoker”, Gabriel buying Pete a copy of Playboy). When Gabriel finally decides to find out the truth for himself, his increasingly unsettling encounters with Donna are frustratingly mysterious, enough for the audience to expend quite a bit of effort in trying to decide whether Donna is merely an attention-seeking sociopath or a heartbreakingly self-sacrificing woman. Tiny, painstaking details about Pete’s life – the Playboy tucked away under his bed, how the community Donna and Pete live in rallies to her side in treating Gabriel like the enemy for daring to doubt Donna’s word – are entangled also with Donna’s clear tendency to be over-dramatic and emotional.

Unfortunately, the movie squanders a lot of the emotional capital it earns from the audience in dithering where it shouldn’t, and refusing to decide one way or the other whether it wants to be a haunting psychological study or a straight-out horror thriller. With a lack of emotional resolution on this side, and the paucity of real, heart-gripping tension on the other, TNL becomes neither a probing examination of the vagaries of the human mind, nor a straight-up spine-tingler of a movie with a psycho-bitch stalking our hero through every other heart-stoppingly dramatic scene. (Even though evidence builds up pretty strongly for one case over the other!) Trying to balance between both genres, Stettner drags out the ambiguity over Donna’s motives and sanity, to the point that it stretches both credulity and patience, and becomes a mediocre mix of the two rather than a really outstanding example of one or the other genre. The psychological conundrum raised by Stettner is intriguing – can you miss someone who never existed, someone who was the invention of another person’s fevered, mad imagination? – but only ever fleetingly addressed, because it doesn’t become clear, until the movie’s final frames, whether Donna really is a nutter. When the movie finally decides what it wants to be, it’s too late, and in fact makes matters worse – given all the prevaricating that went before, Stettner might have done better in concluding all his dithering by leaving us wondering if we would ever really know just what was happening with Donna, and whether Pete was a freakishly elaborate construct of her imagination or a real boy with a real, tragic history, rather than coming down on one side of the debate as hard as he eventually does.

Stettner’s cast is unstintingly good. Williams is restrained and world-weary as Gabriel, a man whose reality is far less palatable than a relationship with a boy whose past is more intriguing than anything Gabriel could dream up. My only beef is that Williams is so restrained that it becomes difficult to connect with his character, even as the movie meanders a little into his starved emotional life by showing us his reaction to a crowded party Jess invites him to. But he’s nicely balanced by the very fine Collette, who continues proving that she’s just about the best thing in any movie that doesn’t have a script worthy of her abilities. Investing Donna with a realism that really keeps the audience guessing about her character’s motivations (the story is a little too obvious and the red herrings hardly red or herrings at all), Collette plays Donna on the knife-edge of falling apart – making her shockingly sensible and down-to-earth in one scene (“I need to know I can trust you”), and scarily off-her-rocker creepy in the next (when Gabriel’s cool response to the sweater she tries on for him drives her just a little bit over the emotional edge). Culkin, meanwhile, continues in his brother Kieran’s footsteps, proving in his few short scenes that thespian blood does indeed flow in the Culkin veins, however much the work of eldest brother Macaulay might suggest otherwise.

It’s a shame that Stettner and his team of writers (including Armistead Maupin adapting his own inspired-by-true-events story) couldn’t gain a tighter grip on the material and marshall the script away from the slightly disconcerting, directionless drift that prevents TNL from being half as effective as it could have been. In the final analysis, the movie is an entertaining enough watch, occasionally creepy and gripping… but it also never quite manages to break out of its rather mild-mannered, distant examination of events (which are all far less ambiguous than Stettner would like them to be) to really grab the audience in the gut.