Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)

The Low-Down: There’s a lot riding on the slim, young shoulders of everyone’s friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. Far From Home is the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) since the recent double-whammy of Avengers movies changed the status quo forever. Where does the most successful superhero franchise in the world go after this? Can non-legacy superheroes – like Spider-Man, Black Panther, Captain Marvel etc – carry on where Iron Man left off? Is the MCU running out of steam? It’s a big burden for a relatively smaller film in the franchise to carry. But Far From Home does so very well by zeroing in on what has successfully fuelled the MCU thus far: prizing character development above all to tell a story that’s as emotional as it is entertaining.

The Story: Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is trying to find his bearings in an unsettled world. He, along with half his school-mates, has suddenly reappeared on Earth – unaged and not at all dead – five years after the Snap. His mentor, Tony Stark, haunts him in the form of video tributes and street art. There’s something strange going on between Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), Tony’s Head of Security. Amidst the uncertainty, all Peter wants is to get back to normal: to enjoy his school trip to Europe, and to let MJ (Zendaya) know how he really feels about her. But world-saving duties wait for no young man. Suddenly, Peter is roped in by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to do battle alongside Quentin Beck a.k.a. Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), taking down rogue Elementals that have already ravaged one world and are hellbent on destroying another.

The Good: At its best, Far From Home impressively blends the awkward comedy of a coming-of-age romantic drama with country-hopping superhero action thrills. It’s a delight to watch Peter use his superhuman skills as Spider-Man to navigate his way through hormonal messes of his own making – often in the same scene. This is as intriguing a narrative direction as the MCU has ever taken: using a lighter, more humorous lens to examine the aftermath of Endgame’s darker, considerably more mature themes. At the same time, Far From Home finds a rather ingenious way to quietly become one of the MCU’s most political films. (More on this later.) It’s worth noting, too, that, in a franchise filled with sublime casting coups, Holland continues to prove himself to be one of its very best. He dances nimbly through Peter’s high-school misadventures, while still tapping into the heartbroken, traumatised core of his character.

The Not-So-Good: With the action focused so squarely on Peter, his friends – especially his love interest – invariably suffer. Jacob Batalon is as goofily charming as ever as Ned, Peter’s best friend, but he might as well have the words ‘comic relief’ tattooed across his forehead. Zendaya’s sparky, sarcastic MJ – while still an interesting twist on a classic character – comes dangerously close to being a damsel in distress. And, while Jon Watts’ direction is more zippy and confident than it was on Homecoming, he doesn’t always land or weave narrative beats together very effectively. As a result, the film occasionally sags when it should soar.

One of Life’s Great Mysterios: What is Gyllenhaal – indie movie darling and theatre thespian – doing in an MCU movie? It might seem like one of life’s great mysteries… but all will soon come clear once you realise just what drew him to the part of Quentin Beck. Fans of the comics will know that there’s far more to the character than what we saw in the trailers, but nothing will prepare them for how brilliantly he’s been reinvented for the MCU. Essentially, this is a gift of a role for the prodigiously gifted Gyllenhaal – allowing him to play every shade of hero (including a few notes of uncanny similarity to Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark), while also indulging his more whimsical, theatrical side. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how Gyllenhaal must have been drawn to the grim relevance of Quentin’s storyline to the world in which we live today. Just as Black Panther examined race and Captain Marvel explored toxic masculinity, Far From Home asks audiences to think about the concepts of truth and reality – at a time when both are very much under threat.

Fan Fare: Marvel has trained us all well – never leave the theatre before the credits stop rolling, for fear of missing a funny moment or a narrative nugget that hints at future films and storylines. This reaches a new level of necessity with Far From Home. Each mindblowing scene – one midway through and one at the very end of the credits – is vital to knowing (or, at least, guessing) where the MCU is going next. Also, watch out for one of Tony Stark’s beloved A.I. acronyms: it will apply, in a subversively clever way, to more than one character in the film, drawing laughs in one instance, and eliciting a deep sense of foreboding in another.

Recommended? Absolutely. There might be a few growing pains here and there, but Marvel has hit another home run – grappling effectively and emotionally with its immediate past, while raising the storytelling stakes for the future.

Captain Marvel (2019)

The Low-Down: It’s been a long, slightly ludicrous time in coming, but Marvel Studios’ first female-led superhero movie is finally blasting into cinemas. Unfortunately, Captain Marvel is trailing plenty of controversy in its wake, largely generated by the same toxic, sexist segments of ‘fandom’ who have been venting their rage online about ‘their’ franchises being taken over by women. (See: Ghostbusters, Star Wars etc.) It’s quite wonderful, then, that Captain Marvel is (literally and figuratively) the most powerful response to these haters yet – not only is it a ton of fun, this film is unapologetically, explicitly feminist in a way that’s never before been presented on screen in such a mainstream blockbuster.

The Story: We first meet Vers (Brie Larson) as a promising new cadet in Starforce, an elite military unit dedicated to protecting the Kree homeworld of Hala from the threat of Skrull invasion. For what she lacks in memories of her own life and story, she more than makes up for in wit, courage and pure power – an energy that her commander, Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), constantly counsels her to keep in check. When a Starforce mission goes wrong and she winds up on Earth, she starts putting together the puzzle pieces of her past as former Air Force fighter pilot Carol Danvers – and begins to reclaim what she has lost.

The Good: All told, Captain Marvel is an absolute blast to watch. Like its titular heroine, the film is fun, fearless and thoroughly feminist: celebrating Carol herself, as well as the women in her orbit who (she will soon discover) helped make her who she really is. The film’s genre-hopping – stacking psychological thriller on top of buddy comedy and spicing it all up with some space opera – doesn’t always work when taken as a whole. But each element of the film is delightful, especially when Carol meets and impresses Nick Fury (a CGI-de-aged Samuel L. Jackson, dialling the goofy charm up to 11) and they embark on a road trip that takes them all the way to the stars. It’s worth pointing out, too, that the film quite ingeniously deepens the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)’s mythology, both backwards and forwards in time, while giving us the miracle that is Goose, a cat Flerken who will steal your heart and also strike fear into your soul – the way all the best cats Flerkens do.

The Not-So-Good: The first act of Captain Marvel is its weakest – it’s almost as if the film, like its title character, hasn’t quite figured out what it is or wants to be. That can make for a mildly puzzling first viewing experience, compounded by a script that makes no allowances for those who can’t keep up with the murkier politics of Kree-Skrull warfare. Due to the deliberately fractured narrative structure (mirroring Carol’s identity crisis), even Marvel aficionados, who can readily tell their Krees from their Skrulls and Marvell from Marvel, might find it challenging to follow the plot at first.

O Captain, Our Captain! Kudos are due to Larson for making all the disparate elements of the film and her character work. For one thing, she makes kicking inter-galactic butt look easy and effortless. But it’s in finding Carol’s heart and soul that Larson truly shines – a particularly impressive feat since she’s essentially playing a character who barely knows who she really is. Somehow, somewhere, in the midst of Carol’s snarky comebacks and fierce smackdowns, Larson promises us a real human being – one we’re excited to get to know better as the MCU continues to grow.

Nevertheless, She Persisted: One of Captain Marvel’s purest delights is its unabashedly feminist heart. In the film’s most emotionally affecting sequence, we see Carol getting up – over and over again, through the ages, over decades, all her life – when she’s told (particularly by the men around her) to stay down, to smile, to please others, to live a life that is nothing like the one she deserves to make for herself. It’s an electrifying moment that will resonate with women and girls everywhere, whose lived experiences are of a world that has them constantly questioning their worth and value. Carol’s true triumph isn’t against hordes of shape-shifting aliens or an imminent inter-galactic attack – it’s against the insidious horrors of toxic masculinity and gaslighting. What makes it all work doubly well is that the film also proudly celebrates the women in Carol’s orbit, from Annette Bening’s brilliant maverick scientist, Dr. Wendy Lawson; to Lashana Lynch’s fiercely competent fighter pilot/single mom, Maria Rambeau.

Fan Fare: Marvel fans, of both the film and comic-book variety, will find themselves very well-served by Captain Marvel. MCU devotees will be rewarded with origin stories for fan-favourite characters – not just Nick Fury, but also Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), both of whom are decades away from their destinies with S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers. The script is canny enough to use and subvert fan expectations gleaned from decades of comic lore – testing our sympathies most notably in the form of charismatic Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn). And be warned: this might well be the first movie ever that has you tearing up even before the opening credits, with Marvel having re-designed its production logo in honour of the late, great Stan Lee and the words he wrote that changed the world.

Recommended? Yes! Captain Marvel pulls off the rather incredible feat of being properly entertaining and enlightening. A film that will reward multiple viewings, it’s an essential addition to the canon of superhero movies.

 

Incredibles 2 (2018)

A sequel to The Incredibles has a lot to live up to. Pixar’s fresh, funny look at an ordinary family with extraordinary powers became an instant classic when it was released in 2004 – for very good reason. Writer-director Brad Bird struck a sublime balance between domestic drama and tongue-in-cheek satire – celebrating and sending up superheroes in equal measure. So, 14 years on, is Incredibles 2 worth the wait? Fortunately… yes. It doesn’t quite redefine or revitalise the genre, the way its predecessor did, but it’s still brilliantly funny, thoughtful and a pure joy to watch.

The film picks up exactly where The Incredibles left off – revealing that, as in often the case in real life, the happy ending was neither entirely ‘happy’ nor an ‘ending’. When we meet the superpowered Parrs again, they’re trying to figure out how to fight crime – not just as a team, but as a family. It’s more complicated and frustrating than any of them expects, especially when a botched mission yields catastrophic results… and a ban on superheroes.

This turn of events allows Bird to capitalise on the one element of Incredibles 2 that remains unique even in these superhero-obsessed times: the fact that the Parrs are a proper family, bound together by blood, love, duty and responsibility. That dynamic – anchored by the profoundly relatable tensions between husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister – was what made the first film such a delight to begin with.

Incredibles 2 builds on this with even greater warmth, sensitivity and insight, touching on themes as expansive as feminism, empowerment and screen addiction along the way. When she’s called upon to front a pro-superhero publicity campaign, we watch Helen/Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) struggle with the demands of being a working mom. Left to take care of the children, Bob/Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) is forced to come to terms with his own roles and responsibilities as a father. And the kids are experiencing growing pains of their own: Violet (Sarah Vowell) freaks out over a forgotten first date; Dash (Huck Milner) does battle with his homework; and baby Jack-Jack tests out his burgeoning powers on an unfortunate nemesis.

Speaking of Jack-Jack – the youngest member of the Parr family steals the entire film – and will run away with your heart too. It’s no spoiler to say that he starts randomly unleashing one superpower after another: his abilities manifested in Pixar’s 2005 short film, Jack-Jack Attack, and are on full display in every trailer for Incredibles 2. But it’s impossible to adequately express just how delightful Jack-Jack is in this film – even as he shoots laser beams from his eyes, spontaneously combusts (“It means fire, Robert!”) and morphs into a rampaging mini-demon. His kinetic showdown with a hapless raccoon is one of the film’s best scenes: at once howlingly funny and gorgeously animated.

Jack-Jack is the easy standout, but similar care has been invested into exploring the potential and implications of his family’s powers. In particular, there’s a thrill of imaginative fluidity that runs throughout every one of Elastigirl’s scenes, given freer rein by 14 years of technological improvements. Her ability to stretch herself thin – a canny metaphor for the myriad demands of motherhood – allows her to slip through cracks, soar through the air and stop a runaway train in visually arresting ways.

In fact, it all looks so spectacular that you’ll find yourself gaining a renewed appreciation for the pure magic of animated movies. We’re living at a time when CGI and special effects can pull off just about anything on screen. And yet, Incredibles 2 proves with its every frame and action sequence that there are some ideas that just won’t work as well in live action. (That’s a lesson Disney might want to take to heart, by the way.) Edna Mode – genius fashion designer and undying fan favourite – proves it whenever she slices through a scene, radiating a cutting charisma as huge as she is tiny.

It’s fair to say, however, that not everything about Incredibles 2 feels quite as effortless as it did for its predecessor. This time around, Bird’s screenplay isn’t as light and nimble in its examination of superheroes and the people who help and hinder them. The characters of Winston (Bob Odenkirk) and Evelyn Deaver (Catherine Keener) are more grounded, for example, but also less interesting than the likes of supervillain Syndrome and super-sidekick Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson). The biting meta commentary of the first film is sorely missed. Some of the characters aren’t given much space to grow, either – Dash moves the fastest of them all, but feels like he doesn’t really go anywhere.

14 years on, you’d be perfectly justified to ask if there’s any point to Incredibles 2. After all, we now live in a cinematic era in which the superhero genre has established itself firmly in Hollywood. We’re intensely familiar with tales of ordinary people living and grappling with extraordinary powers. In the decade and a half(ish) that has passed since, Pixar has also released a bunch of sequels to films that didn’t require or deserve them (*cough*Cars*cough*). It’s enough to make you doubt if the Parrs have anything left to say – and if it would be said well. Thankfully, the wit and wonder of Incredibles 2 proves that good things do indeed come to those who wait – and that we’d be happy to wait for even more.

Basically: Brilliant in both execution and enjoyment, Incredibles 2 is worth the wait.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

There’s no denying that Marvel Studios is – by most industry standards – almost ridiculously brave. Its president, Kevin Feige, has given the green light to any number of projects, decisions and personnel that would make most studio executives faint from horror. He resurrected Robert Downey Jr.’s career (it’s hard to remember, sometimes, that recovering alcoholic Downey was down and almost completely out when he became Iron Man), and trusted out-of-left-field directors like Jon Favreau, Joss Whedon and Kenneth Branagh to helm his studio’s riskiest and most expensive projects. And here comes Captain America: The Winter Soldier – one of the bravest decisions of them all, if not an entirely successful one.

After fending off the Chitauri invasion of New York, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) again tries to settle down to life in a country – and century – he no longer knows. The young man with the old-school values starts working for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in S.H.I.E.L.D., an agency meant to protect ordinary people from external threats, but finds himself asking a lot of worrying questions about the way things are being done. “You’re holding a gun to everyone on Earth,” he frets manfully at Fury, “and calling it protection.”

When it becomes clear that the methods and machines of S.H.I.E.L.D. have been badly compromised, Steve teams up with the two people he’s decided he can trust – results-oriented Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) a.k.a. Black Widow and war vet Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) a.k.a. The Falcon – to get to the bottom of a nefarious conspiracy that threatens to destroy Earth as he has come to know it. Oh, and he’s also being chased by another genetically-engineered super-soldier: the titular Winter Soldier, who might possess a secret or two of his own.

There’s an enormous amount to love about Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It is, truthfully, the boldest entry in Marvel’s canon yet, and not simply because it dares to bring superheroes into the gritty, twisty world of spy thrillers. That, by the way, is a great touch, particularly in a really quite spectacular car chase through the streets of Washington D.C., one that culminates in a literally heart-stopping encounter in Steve’s shadow-lit apartment.

What the film really dares to do is shake up the mythos of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe to date. Across several films now, Nick Fury has emerged as the sardonic but unquestionable defender of what’s good in the world. It’s somehow fitting that the most red-blue-and-white of superheroes should be the one who uncovers all the shades of grey. It’s a storyline that upsets the comfortable narrative of S.H.I.E.L.D. and its enforcers to date – including Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, making a welcome return to the franchise – but also disrupts the way ahead (including, intriguingly enough, for Marvel’s companion television series, Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.).

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo – best known for their work on cult TV sitcom Community – demonstrate a great flair for character development. This is a talky and occasionally silly picture, its plot getting more outlandish as it unravels, but the Russos make up for the occasional deficits in logic with a lot of heart and depth. Steve’s attempts to battle his survivor guilt allow him to connect with both Natasha and Sam, and there are some quietly effective moments when it becomes evident how much Natasha has come to care for Fury. Steve also gets the chance to re-connect with a couple of familiar faces from his long-buried past, which allows him to come somewhat painfully to terms with his strange, new-found life.

The film fares less well in terms of its unwieldy script, which marshals its unlikely elements together quite effectively but is – at the end of the day – formulaic and a tough sell. The big conspiracy lying at the broken heart of S.H.I.E.L.D. manages to be both predictable and ridiculous. It’s a narrative twist that feels a few decades too old, like Captain Rogers himself: a relic of a certain type of Cold War thriller on which this film is clearly modelled (think All The President’s Men), rather than an idea that better captures the nebulous shifts of the world’s current political climate.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier also frequently begs the question – more so than Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World did – ‘Where the heck are the rest of the Avengers?’ It beggars belief that only Steve and Natasha are reacting to the events of this film, which are catastrophic and earth-shaking enough to suggest that their old team-mates should really have popped in at some point. Surely Tony Stark would have something to say about the use of his doomsday technology in any scenario, much less this one!

The cast goes a long way towards making up for the hokier parts of the script. On paper, Steve is a rather one-note good guy, fighting for old-fashioned ideals in an unrecognisably debauched world. But Evans gives him heart and creates a huge amount of sympathy for the shield-wielding Captain America, particularly in a surprisingly emotional last-act confrontation with the Winter Soldier. This film also gives both Johansson and Jackson more to do than in any other Marvel movie to date, and they’re both so electrifying that you’ll continue to wonder why they haven’t yet received their own flagship movies.

The decision to cast Robert Redford – still hopelessly debonair at 77 years of age – as Alexander Pierce, Fury’s commanding officer and confidant, is a canny one. It’s a nice callback to the 1970s thrillers that made Redford’s name and no doubt inspired the grit and feel of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Redford delights in the role, and helps make it appear more complex than it really is.

When it comes down to it, Captain America: The Winter Soldier can leave a little something to be desired when taken on its own merits. Frequently, its grand ambitions outstrip the logic and power of its script. As an extension of what has become the world’s biggest franchise of blockbuster films, however, it’s an unmitigated success. It’s brainy, dark, and boldly rips apart the entire underlying narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In that sense, at least, there’s no doubt that this is one of the finest blockbusters you’ll see this year.

Basically: A fine, bold entry in the Marvel canon, if not an entirely successful one.

Robocop (2014)

With the recent flood of remakes, prequels and sequels, it would seem that Hollywood has really lost the plot – lacking original new ideas, studio executives are diving into their back catalogues and dusting off perfectly good films and rebooting them for a new generation of audiences. Generally, the results haven’t been great. In that context, it’s hard to fault a generation of fans for worrying over José Padilha’s reboot of Robocop. Fans have fretted at the titular cyborg cop’s brand-new, all-black suit and aired doubts about whether the remake can capture the darkly satirical spirit of Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film.

As it turns out, the question is whether it should do so. In a handful of moments, Padilha’s Robocop displays the same tongue-in-cheek audacity that elevated Verhoeven’s film from trashy action flick to socially conscious satire. But it’s also an entirely different beast of a film that has its own considerably more sombre agenda. Steering largely clear of the humour that suffuses the 1987 film, Padilha instead homes in on the very human, heartbreaking dilemma posed by a protagonist who wakes up one day as a mix of man and machine.

Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) – loving husband, supportive father, upstanding cop – lives in an America that still resists the idea of unfeeling robots patrolling the streets. OmniCorp, led by the Machiavellian Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton), is keen to bring its machines back to home ground. When Alex is critically injured after a disastrous crime bust, he becomes the prime candidate for OmniCorp’s decision to address ground concerns by fusing man with metal. When he wakes up, Alex finds himself in a shiny, metallic new body, crafted by Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman).

What follows is a bitter tug-of-war for Alex’s soul, as he goes from wounded hero to test subject. On the one side are his wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) and son David (John Paul Ruttan); on the other, Sellars, Norton and all-purpose henchman Rick Mattox (Jackie Earle Haley). The film wants us and Alex – trapped in between and, more often than not, sedated into submission – to ask important questions about humanity, family and love.

In the cinema, it actually works well enough. The pounding action beats come fast and furious, although some are too murkily captured. You’ll also find yourself identifying with Alex when he wakes up and his armour is removed, so that he can see just how much (or, to be more accurate, just how little) of his body actually remains. It’s a scene that’s almost sickening in execution and implication: as Alex breathes in and out, his lungs pumping pink and horrible in the mirror, it’s easy to ache for the man who’s been lost inside a tangle of machinery and corporate greed. Kinnaman is particularly effective in this moment, his horror and heartbreak worn weary on his face.

But poke away at Padilha’s plot and it turns out that, in retrospect, there are more than a few chinks in its armour. Quite a few interesting ideas fall disappointingly by the wayside as the film cranks into higher gear, such as the morality of the man within the machine. Padilha actually sets Murphy up as a pretty reckless, hotheaded and vengeful guy, which begs the question whether he has any more right to make life-and-death decisions than an emotionless drone. As the film’s core message – an excoriation of American big business and politics – is revealed, so do these notions of character and complexity get buried beneath increasingly tense face-offs between Sellars and Norton.

It’s frustrating, too, that an element deliberately played up in this incarnation of Robocop – Alex’s family – turns out to be so disappointing in the end. As a character, Clara is a colourless washout: she seems to exist only to complicate the plot, signing Alex up for surgery at first and creating problems later when her newly robotised husband is kept away from the family. For a film that seems so concerned with exploring Alex’s inner dilemma, it’s a problem when the family he’s fighting for has to struggle to feel real.

To its credit, Padilha’s Robocop comes determinedly to life when he plays up the darker side of American politics and big business. His supporting cast in this regard is absolutely first-rate: Keaton oozes through the film, his clean-cut American charm scraping away to reveal the greed lurking within him. In a way, this is just as much Oldman’s film as it is Kinnaman’s: Dennett Norton’s crisis of conscience poses the same questions of a different character – what is it like to be human? When is your soul too effectively sold to the highest bidder? Oldman – who could just as easily have played Keaton’s part – is the soul of the movie, tied up in knots as he slowly realises what he has done to Alex.

In fact, the film’s greatest moment is also among its very last. Samuel L. Jackson, who plays the incredibly pro-Omnicorp reporter Pat Novak, bookends this incarnation of America as he pushes hard – too hard – for robots to patrol America’s streets. The way Jackson’s scenes are shot are almost gaspingly hard-hitting, packed with a delicious satirical punch that otherwise comes across as too heavy-handed and gloomy during much of the overly serious film.

When heading into the cinema, fans of Verhoeven’s Robocop might want to adjust their expectations. Strictly speaking, Padilha’s version isn’t a reboot so much as it is a re-imagination. Taking the same basic premise and characters, Padilha has wrought a darker, more heavy-handed castigation of American big business, one that stands quite well on its own as a morality tale. But the film does also let its protagonist down somewhat, by promising more depth but not quite managing to deliver.

Basically: Less a remake and more a re-invention; good in some parts, heavy-handed in others.

Turbo (2013)

Animated movies go where other movies cannot. It’s the final resort for the unfettered imagination – a way of realising stories, characters and universes when live action, for reasons of budget or logic, simply can’t cut it. Turbo is very much a movie that couldn’t exist outside of the medium. More than most films – even animated ones – it asks the audience to take a trip into the surreal: a quirky universe in which a snail can not only dream of speed, but actually have his wish come true. It’s a bold, quirky effort, but ultimately one that strains even the seemingly boundless limits of credibility afforded to animated films.

Theo (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) is a garden snail who’s obsessed with speed. He spends his nights watching his hero Guy Gagné (Bill Hader) race his way to victory on the Indy 500 circuit. Biology and his sensible older brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) are determined to keep Theo grounded – until a freak accident blesses him with supersonic speed. With the help and friendship of Tito (Michael Pena), a huge-hearted dreamer who wants bigger things than helping out at his brother Angelo’s (Luis Guzman) Mexican restaurant, Theo goes Turbo on his way to achieving a dream that defies pretty much every law of nature there is.

For the most part, Turbo coasts by on its easy, silly charm, due largely to its cast of strong supporting characters. Tito is a whirlwind of ideals and energy, and provides great comic relief and emotional support for his gastropod buddy. The crew of racing snails who serve initially as Turbo’s rivals and later his friends are all fun in their own ways – particularly reckless ringleader Whiplash, who’s voiced by Samuel L. Jackson with characteristic panache. The character of Chet is a particular triumph: his constant fretting over his younger brother is genuinely touching, even as he suffers from a case of mistaken identity that provides the film with its best running gag.

What keeps Turbo from going into hyper-drive is the niggling sense that something about the film’s premise just isn’t quite right. Turbo’s graduation from tomato garden to race track is, quite frankly, nonsensical. Of course, animated movies have created magic out of nonsense before. But, for some reason, it’s tough to buy this particular story, especially when the moral it peddles (‘you can achieve your wildest dreams if incredibly good fortune turns you into a freak of nature and the entire universe bends to your will’) is considerably murkier than usual. That makes Turbo an awkward hero to root for, especially since his need for speed seems to be pretty much his sole defining trait.

Forgive the film its odd plot, and Turbo is a largely inoffensive, enjoyable experience. Viewers young and old alike will be entertained by the glimpses afforded into the world of a working snail, and there are some visual bursts of imagination (as Theo imagines himself into Gagné’s world via a television screen) that are a joy to witness. Dig a little deeper in Theo’s tomato patch, however, and you might find yourself coming up empty.

Basically: A muddled attempt to look beyond the shell and the slime to find the snail within.

Django Unchained (2012)

Nobody makes movies quite like Quentin Tarantino. Many have tried in the twenty years since he first exploded onto the cinematic landscape with Reservoir Dogs, but juggling myriad genres, snappy dialogue and kinetic violence isn’t half as easy as he makes it look. In fact, he’s missed the mark himself, with the languid and overly chatty Death Proof. With Django Unchained, however, he’s delivered an instant classic: a dazzling, brutally intelligent post-modern Western that’s every bit as challenging and issue-driven as it is stylish and entertaining.

The Django of the title (Jamie Foxx) is a black man sold into slavery – a man who’s never known true freedom and is sorely missing his feisty wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). One fateful day, he is freed by the cheerfully eccentric, liberal bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), who needs Django’s help to identify his next target. Soon, the two men strike up a comfortable working relationship that extends to friendship – and Schultz sets out to help Django rescue Broomhilda from dastardly slave owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Tarantino pulls no punches with the politics in Django Unchained: the sheer unmitigated horror of slavery, America’s great sin and shame, plays out across the screen in moments both horrifying and heartbreaking. It’s devastating to see the extent to which white men casually and callously dehumanise Django, Broomhilda and all the other souls who share their skin colour. This is history, daringly revisited, and a potent reminder of how easily men can lose their humanity in a quest for power, control, and – most tragically of all – entertainment.

The mandingo fights on Candie’s plantation – which pit slaves against each other in a battle to the death – are incredibly difficult to watch, and while some might question their historical authenticity, they nevertheless bring to mind everything from gladiatoral combat to modern-day cage matches. Perhaps the notion of people dying or suffering grievous bodily harm for the sake of entertainment was indeed exaggerated for Tarantino’s movie, but it’s hard also to deny that it could well be the logical extension of the demeaning lack of concern for the lives and rights of slaves at the time.

That’s not to say Django Unchained is a boring, stuffy history lesson – far from it. Tarantino brings his characteristic flair and kinetic energy to proceedings. The film fairly explodes with combustible scenes of action and violence, blood swirling through the sky like paint on a canvas, as Django and Schultz make their way ever closer to Candieland. There is a climactic shoot-out near the end of the film that’s as spectacular and gory as anything you’ll see in a cinema this year.

Meeting the larger-than-life characters – and relishing the zippy dialogue they reel off – is perhaps one of the most enjoyable elements of a Tarantino movie, and, with the help of a truly outstanding cast, he’s created a clutch of absolutely fascinating personalities for Django Unchained. Only Waltz could switch so effortlessly from playing Jew-hunting Nazi scum Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds to Landa’s polar opposite. He lends Schultz, the gentlemanly murderer with an enormous vocabulary, a rakish charm that makes it possible to believe that this character can take lives for money as easily as he treats a black man as his equal.

The denizens of Candieland are every bit as memorable. DiCaprio embraces full-out villainy as master of the house Calvin Candie, and somehow manages to makes Candie’s cruel volatility puzzlingly charismatic. It’s a downright shame that he’s been passed over at many an award ceremony for his performance – just as his co-star Samuel L. Jackson has been for the equally difficult, possibly even more hateful part of Stephen, Candie’s unwaveringly loyal senior house slave. This really is Jackson as you’ve never seen him before, aged and stooped and utterly despicable: a man whose response to subjugation is not just to obey, but to worship, his master.

Ironically, it’s the stoic Django who resolutely labours in the foreground while everyone around him springs straight off the screen and steals the movie from under his feet. Foxx is fine in the part, but so remarkably restrained in relation to his co-stars that it’s easy to forget the film is actually about him and his hero’s quest to recover the love of his life.

Just as Tarantino does a tiny disservice to Django by surrounding him with so many more fascinating characters, he doesn’t manage to completely sustain the narrative momentum of the film through to the end. The showdown between Schultz and Candie is so fantastically shocking that it leaves a vacuum in its wake, and the movie takes a while to pick up its pace again.

But that’s really just a minor quibble for such a major entry in the Tarantino canon. For people who weren’t charmed by his attempt to re-write the history of the Holocaust in Inglourious Basterds or the relentlessly talky Death Proof, rest assured that Django Unchained is a brilliant return to form. It’s a heady mix of ideas, humour, violence and style, smart and silly and serious all at once – and proof that, after twenty years, Tarantino remains one of the movie industry’s most daring and inventive story-tellers.

Basically: Don’t chain this one up – it’s one of the finest films of the year, and certainly ranks amongst Tarantino’s very best.

Written for F*** Magazine

1408 (2007)

Horror movies aren’t usually my cup of tea – in fact, I tend to avoid them rather like I would the plague. But how often do you get a horror movie that stars the indie-est of big (or at least, thisclose to A-list) stars, John Cusack? Not to mention (what amounts to) a cameo performance from Samuel L Jackson? Clearly, I couldn’t, and decided to brave this latest adaptation of one of Stephen King’s short stories, especially since critical reception appears to have been mostly favourable. Fortunately for me, the reason I watched the movie – Cusack – is reliably good, as expected. Unfortunately, even he isn’t quite good enough to lift this movie out of its myriad plot problems and sheer miserable predictability.

Cusack plays Mike Enslin, a writer (aren’t they all, in King’s fiction?) who has eschewed his earlier literary ambitions to pen schlocky books for the tourist’s market about creepy, haunted houses, castles and whatnot. In his defense, Mike has a modicum of professional integrity, so actually checks into the various purportedly haunted hotel rooms he intends to review, always with a cigarette in hand should the end of the world indeed be nigh and he needs one last smoke. One day, when flipping disinterestedly through his mail, Mike comes across a postcard telling him to avoid Room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel – and, of course, he’s hellbent on testing his wits against the room, despite warnings from insistent hotel manager Gerald Olin (Jackson) that this is one “evil fucking room” and no one has managed to last an hour in it without killing themselves or dying in some truly horrific way. Undaunted, Mike enters the room and soon begins to realise just what Olin was trying to warn him about, even as he’s forced to relive aspects and incidents from his past he’d rather never think about again.

Now, having intentionally avoided them for much of my life, I have a rather meagre understanding of horror films and what works and what doesn’t. To 1408‘s credit, I’ll say that it had a couple of good, genuinely creepy scenes under its belt. (My horror afficionado friends assure me that this is so, and I am not merely easily freaked out.) In fact, our introduction to Room 1408 starts out promisingly: Jackson doesn’t have much to do in this film, but he does what he’s contracted to with the usual aplomb – in his smooth, efficient way, brow furrowed as only he can, his Olin paints a nasty picture of what’s lying beyond the door to 1408 for both Mike and the audience as he lays out in full-blown detail all the deaths that have taken place in that room, including the natural ones deemed not exciting enough for press publication. Director Mikael Hafstrom gets some shivery moments out of Olin refusing to accompany Mike down the corridor to 1408. It’s just as weird and more than a little spine-tingling when Mike enters the room and first starts to experience random events like chocolates appearing on his pillow and the clock radio cheerfully playing The Carpenters’ (’til now) wedding standard, We’ve Only Just Begun – and it hits an early, quite awesome climax when he realises just how trapped he really is when he tries desperately to get the attention of someone living directly across the street from the hotel.

Unfortunately, everything goes a little pear-shaped when the scares move from the unexpected and creepy into the realm of CGI and dire predictability. It’s difficult to take the film and its creepy-crawlies all that seriously when, a lot of the time, the special effects honestly look like something that were produced for a straight-to-DVD horror flick not worthy of a teenybopper star’s valiant efforts, much less Cusack’s. (Ghosts? Pshaw – I was more scared when a window came crashing down on Mike’s hand for no reason. Who needs CGI for that!) As the room continues its battle to the death with an increasingly loopy, beleaguered Mike, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only member of the audience who found the initial, quite artfully sustained suspense flagging halfway through the film. It’s really asking rather a lot of the audience to continue suspending its disbelief when what happens to Mike becomes ever more ludicrous, at points forcing him to dangle off a ledge outside the room or facing some kind of creepy monster when he takes a tour through the hotel’s air ducts in a bid to escape his room.

Now, that’s not to say that parts of the movie weren’t genuinely intriguing – much of this having to do with the psychological aspects of Mike’s torture in the room, and Cusack’s tour de force performance. It’s impossible to separate these two elements, as I suspect it’s really Cusack’s sheer skill and screen presence that makes Mike’s descent into hell, as he recalls a happier life with his wife Lily (Mary McCormack) and daughter Katie (Jasmine Jessica Anthony), believable. A lesser actor in the role would have shown 1408 up for what it actually is: a movie with a barely serviceable plot, soundtracked with dodgy horror-movie music that’s subtle as a sledgehammer, and which should have been relegated to some early-afternoon graveyard TV slot. But Cusack, as he breaks in every way possible, is riveting: whether he’s shouting and tearing and screaming at inanimate beer cans, holding ashes in the place of his daughter, or yelling to Lily not to look for him when his attempt to get her help is derailed by a doppelganger begging her to come up to 1408. There’s no doubt the movie is Cusack’s, and he owns it from the moment he shows up onscreen: it’s a one-man play, and if you’re there as a fan, you’d at least have weathered the film’s 95-minute running time for something.

But Cusack can’t act his way out of a fundamentally bad plot, and a disappointing double-ending that isn’t a double-ending at all. Blame it, perhaps, on the fact that we’re part of the Sixth Sense generation, and always hope for some kind of twist to come that will blow the entire enterprise apart and render it far smarter and more intriguing in retrospect. This, of course, just never materialises with 1408. Too bad – it had a cast that far outstripped its capabilities and ambitions.

[edited to add: the guardian of the Carpenters’ music archive must be on crack, loaning out We’ve Only Just Begun to two summer movies this year i.e., 1408 and The Simpsons Movie. How will I ever take it seriously again?!]

Black Snake Moan (2007)

It’s difficult to sum up a movie like Black Snake Moan: after leaving the cinema, you’d probably find yourself hard-pressed to shake the feeling that writer-director Craig Brewer had tried his darnedest to make a movie as hilariously, freakishly outlandish – and therefore memorable – as possible. And whatever his motivations, it’s tough to deny that he succeeded. His quirky cast of characters, after all, includes raging nymphomaniac Rae (Christina Ricci), heartsore produce farmer Lazarus (Samuel L Jackson) and perpetually anxious enlistee Ronnie (Justin Timberlake). It’s not long after Ronnie leaves Rae for the army that she falls into a seemingly neverending spiral of depravity and casual sex, until she’s left for dead before Lazarus’ home, beaten to a pulp by Ronnie’s purported best buddy Gill (Michael Raymond-James). The plot is fairly predictable, but serviceable given what eccentric, engaging people Brewer has concocted: the recently-dumped Lazarus must, in keeping with his completely unsubtle name, rise to live again, to rediscover his purpose in life after being dumped by his wife for his brother. This meaning he finds through rehabilitating Rae, which, for bondage fans among you, is equivalent to his chaining her to his radiator and essentially preventing her from stepping out of his house. When Ronnie returns suddenly and finds Rae gone, can he force himself to again overlook her promiscuous reputation and trust that the love she still has for him can continue to keep him sane?

If it isn’t clear from how quickly my synopsis slipped from quirky to sentimental, BSM, for all its outer trappings of howlingly desperate nymphomaniacs chained to radiators but nevertheless screwing the brains out of virile young men who should cluelessly happen by, is an old-fashioned story about redemption and love. Yes, love. In the end, Brewer’s story is really about the age-old themes of dealing with loss (Lazarus gritting his teeth as he bulldozes over his wife’s rose garden), loving someone despite not quite being able to trust them (Ronnie’s impassioned adoration of the hopelessly unfaithful Rae), and becoming a better person (Rae coming to terms with her demons, Lazarus with his, and both embarking on loves and lives both old and new). Maybe that’s what Brewer is going for: in a world defined by the fantastic and surreal, there are still some home truths about people, human nature and the power of a good redemptive story or two that never fail to grab the hearts of an audience eager to find some hints of themselves even while escaping into the vicarious safety of the movie world.

With his quirky perspective on people and genuine appreciation for blues music, Brewer adds a couple of genuinely nice touches to BSM – one of which, of course, is the churning, heartfelt music that forms the soundtrack of these characters’ lives. Aching songs of lovelorn poetry, as gritty as they are ethereal, punctuate the movie – frequently sung by Jackson himself, and helping to ground BSM in an emotional reality that transcends the movie’s occasionally ludicrous characters. The strange bond that has coalesced between Rae and Lazarus is nowhere more clear than when he strums his electric guitar and howls lyrics of pain and loss into a crashing lightning storm, and she wraps herself around his leg and begs him to keep singing, to keep the demons away. As the scratchy black-and-white documentary footage that opens the film informs us, we’re looking at the characters through the lenses of the blues: music for the love-battered heart that, for some reason, just keeps on pumping through the pain and the suffering and all that other terrible, terrible jazz.

This is nicely balanced out by Brewer’s willingness to indulge in some bizarre comedy, making the most of Rae’s sexual predilections to inject some humour, some fizz of life, into the otherwise rather gloomy proceedings. The moment when Rae wakes fully to discover herself chained to the radiator of what she can only assume is some pervert’s house – priceless. As she struggles mightily to free herself, running full tilt out the front door, Brewer has no problem indulging in what would generally be an editing no-no: a slow-mo cut of her being yanked, cartoon-like, backwards by the chain keeping her tethered to the radiator. Other moments you would never expect to find funny are also played, rather delicately and skilfully, for laughs: for instance, when the painfully young Tehronne (David Banner) is almost brutally dragged into Rae’s arms after she has tried to resist the urges that make her what she is.

Not to say that Brewer manages to pull this off entirely successfully. His reliance on homespun truths, hidden beneath a veneer of eccentricities, ultimately weakens his story – notably when he tries to explain why Rae is a nymphomaniac. Thematically, I suppose, it’s important to know what trauma she might have suffered in her childhood to turn her into a nymphomaniac who seems only able to salve her troubled soul when engaging in sexual intercourse with someone (almost anyone). But, as Rae rails against her mother in the local supermarket, the movie slips into a sombre, far too realistic key after that, losing some of the quirky spark with which Brewer so happily doused his creations through much of the movie.

Brewer’s two leads are excellent: Jackson eschews his typical, stylish-as-all-get-out characters to play an ordinary guy with a bit of a beer gut and a broken heart that needs to be healed – even if that means tending to the wounds and soul of another human being who’s none too grateful for his efforts, at least initially. Whether Lazarus is growling out bluesy notes of pain and longing, or dumping Rae into an icy bath to break her fever, Jackson plays him with an innate dignity and equanimity that keeps the character interesting rather than hollow. Ricci, too, wrings everything she can out of Rae. She’s given to histrionics and more than a little over-acting, but she manages to make Rae almost winsomely broken, an object of sympathy rather than – as would be the case in more conventional movies – one of derision and, possibly, revulsion. Timberlake is fairly convincing as Ronnie, showing some dramatic chops which, if honed, could speak of a promising career in future as something other than just a pop singer. S Epatha Merkerson has a nice cameo as the lady who warms to Lazarus and represents, for him, another opportunity at rebirth.

For a film that ostensibly appears to be like nothing you’ve seen before, boasting characters of a particularly kooky, possibly offputting bent, BSM surprises by being a movie more about essential truths than pure and simple titillation. It’s a bizarre setting with strange characters, sure, but one grounded thoroughly in very real emotions – and is as a result a refreshingly original way of looking at stories that have been told a million times before.

Snakes On A Plane (2006)

Probably the most interesting thing about Snakes On A Plane isn’t its actual storyline (what storyline? it’s all in the title!), or whether it’s really any good or not. No, what’s really fascinating about this movie is all the internet hoopla that sprang up alongside the production, turning it into a cult phenom on the web long before the movie was even in the can. Who hasn’t been regaled with stories of Snakes fanfic, songs and blogs, T-shirts and merchandise and Youtube spoofs? Even the mainstream movie magazines have gotten in on it, reporting on the tidal wave of geeky fanboy love that has embraced this movie and turned it into one of the talking points of the summer. Not that the movie’s ludicrous, happily cheesy, thoroughly self-aware title wasn’t capable of doing that all by itself. My god – who would have the sheer audacity to name a movie after its entire plot? And therein lies the bonkers genius of the entire Snakes concept – from the outset, it warns you about a couple of things: you’d best be prepared to watch a movie about a ton of snakes on a plane, for one. For another, in the vein of cheesy Hollywood B-movies, you know from the title that you’re not getting anything even remotely approaching art. The movie knows its limitations, and with the help of internet geek boys the world over, turned it into a selling point.

Too bad it didn’t work out too well at the box office. After a smashing opening weekend, Snakes fell ignominiously by the roadside (it’s scraped together $26.3 million at the US box office, approximately $20 million of which was garnered in its first week of release), and will now probably become that cautionary tale about movies whose overwhelming over-exposure on the internet actually failed to generate the kind of numbers true internet phenoms like The Blair Witch Project did. I’m not sure whether this is due to poor word-of-mouth (because, honestly, the concept is enough to turn most everyone with a slight aversion of reptilian creatures away), or whether the fangeeks just turned up in droves on the first weekend. But it could just be that Snakes – in the final analysis – is actually just an entertaining, mid-grade thriller that can’t quite decide whether to be a fairly serious film about snakes on a plane, or a completely whacked-out, piss-take of a flick about snakes on a plane. So it appeals neither to the highbrow among us (not that it ever would), nor to those among us who are eagerly hoping that the movie takes every cheesy, tacky B-movie convention and cliché to the extreme.

There isn’t all that much point summarising this movie’s plot. Suffice it to say that we have kickass FBI agent Nelville Flynn (the eternally cool Samuel L Jackson) busting his ass to protect Sean (Nathan Phillips), a hapless dude who witnessed the brutal murder of a district attorney by ruthless, insane crime lord Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson). En route to LA to testify, Sean and Neville and a bunch of other unknowing folks trapped abroad Pacific Flight 121 – Snakes‘ desperately mundane working title – are, to quote good ol’ Bette Davis, in for a bumpy night. The time release capsule goes off, and soon the plane is swarming with all manner of poisonous snakes, crawling out of the air vents, light fixtures, and just about everywhere. As cast fodder – sorry, I mean secondary characters – are picked off in horrific and even more horrific ways by the slimy buggers, Neville and feisty air stewardess Claire (ER‘s Julianna Margulies) must battle to keep whatever passengers are left safe. Cue double-takes, jump-shots, and moments of sheer heart-in-mouth shock as snakes leap out from the most unexpected places, wriggling into their hosts through every conceivable orifice or biting them in their most… uh… private parts.

One thing you can’t say about Snakes is that it’s boring. If you’re already in the cinema, you’ve probaby already prepared yourself for a certain level of gross-out horror courtesy of a horde of slippery-slimy snakes. And that you get aplenty – the grisly demises of passenger after passenger (in particular a couple whose macabre deaths should serve as a warning to all never to join the Mile High Club while smoking a joint!) is as disturbing as it is intriguing to watch. Snakes slither up a woman’s body, or launch themselves in the direction of someone’s eye, or simply eat a man inside out. Every kind of snake you can think of – even if you’re not a snake expert – gets a look-in, from vicious king cobras to the enormous serpentine kind that squeeze a human to death within their coils and merrily swallow the entire corpse thereafter. Shudder and a half. What’s fun about this is how director David R Ellis skilfully cranks up the tension with each successive scene. He actually makes it more than halfway believable that these snakes could cause such massive havoc on a plane, as they chew through electrical systems and apparently take out the plane’s pilots and Neville’s tough-as-nails partner John (Mark Haughton).

In a way, this is where the movie succeeds and fails in one fell swoop. Because it makes the idea of snakes terrorising a plane and holding everyone on it hostage so surprisingly plausible – at least within the world it has meticulously created – Snakes comes off as far more serious and thoughtful than it ought to be. This lends the movie – especially in its second, more chilling half when the cheesy humour that underlies the initial scenes rears its head only very occasionally – a touch of gravitas and hyper-realism that comes as rather a shock to the movie-goer’s system. Wasn’t this supposed to be a totally cheesy, irreverent film about friggin’ snakes on a friggin’ plane? I expected a fantastically wacky, deliriously illogical B-movie, and got one that was unexpectedly well-thought-through, including the myriad details it sees fit to share on the truly horrendous consequences of being bitten to death by a snake, and a lecture on illegal snake trading across the globe – not to mention how you’d apparently have to raise the threat level in the country to something approaching Def-con 4 to deal with a problem like this.

Not that I’m saying that Snakes doesn’t have its share of tongue-in-cheek, blithely irrelevant and thoroughly illogical humour. It does, usually when music mogul 3Gs (Flex Alexander) and his entourage of video-gaming homies are onscreen, or when flighty spoilt brat Mercedes (Rachel Blanchard) first appears with her sure-to-be-snake-fodder puppy in tow, and that’s when the movie sparkles. But there just isn’t enough of all this. Instead of travelling the well-trodden B-movie path you’d imagine it would take, the movie goes down the horror/last-man-standing route and tries to make you care about each of the characters – the little boys (Casey Dubois and Daniel Hogarth) travelling solo for the first time, the sassy air stewardess on her last tour of duty (Lin Shaye), the bimbotic blonde stewardess with a heart (Sunny Mabrey) etc etc. It becomes difficult to revel in Snakes‘ silliness when the characters become more human. Even ludicrous set-pieces like Flynn blasting through the windows of the plane come across as necessary, rather than random, throwaway, mindless action ‘bits’.

This does not necessarily a bad movie make, however. On the contrary – as a claustrophic thriller, Snakes actually works very well, as the passengers scramble from cabin to cabin for safety, or when the air ventilation system goes out and Flynn has to travel into the snake-infested bowels of the plane to get it working again. Although I have an issue with Ellis’ decision to have snake-eye-views of imminent attacks, the movie’s numerous scenes of people being charged/mauled/terrorised by pheromonally-charged snakes are, at their best, terrifying, chilling and hilarious at the same time. There are moments of inspired hilarity spliced with real jump-out-of-your-seat shock – things you don’t usually get in the same movie (if, given the lacklustre products of Hollywood these days, you get one or the other at all). The cast is uniformly game for anything, with Jackson a clear standout. If you weren’t already convinced that Jackson – having personified hip in Pulp Fiction and Star Wars – wasn’t one of the coolest dudes alive, his smart, punchy performance as Flynn ought to do it. Few actors alive can match Jackson’s effortlessly cool delivery of some of his more out-there lines. And however many times you’ve heard his tagline (“I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”), it’s still one of the best lines in the movie – and possibly one of the funniest in a long long time. (Though my favourite line, bar none, is when Flynn shouts in absolute exasperation: “Great. Snakes on crack.” I swear – best LOL moment right there. :D)

Laced through with some great humour, though hardly enough of it to be thoroughly satisfying, the movie is a watchable, never less than entertaining confection that’s not as feather-light as it should be, but nevertheless remains a fun, funny watch.