2023 - July
Angel Heart (1987) 4/4
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) 4/4
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 4/4
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) 4/4
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) 4/4
The Omen (1976) 3.5/4
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) 3.5/4
In the Line of Fire (1993) 3.5/4
Mission: Impossible (1996) 3.5/4
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) 3.5/4
Jack Reacher (2012) 3.5/4
The Fugitive (1993) 3/4
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) 3/4
The Empty Man (2020) 3/4
The Blackening (2022) 3/4
The House of the Seven Gables (1940) 3/4
Final Destination 5 (2011) 3/4
Mission: Impossible II (2000) 3/4
Anything for Her (2008) 3/4
The Omen (2006) 3/4
Final Destination 2 (2003) 3/4
Final Destination (2000) 3/4
Holocaust 2000 (1977) 3/4
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) 3/4
Final Destination 3 (2006) 3/4
The Way of the Gun (2000) 2.5/4
Damien: Omen II (1978) 2.5/4
Mission: Impossible III (2006) 2.5/4
A Perfect Murder (1998) 2/4
The Resurrected (1991) 2/4
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) 2/4
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) 2/4
Wrongfully Accused (1998) 2/4
The Life of David Gale (2003) 2/4
The Final Conflict (1981) 2/4
The Final Destination (2009) 2/4
Accident (2009) 1.5/4
The Proposition (1998) 1.5/4
Omen IV: The Awakening (1991) 1.5/4
Truth or Dare (2018) 1/4
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) 4/4
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 4/4
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) 4/4
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) 4/4
The Omen (1976) 3.5/4
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) 3.5/4
In the Line of Fire (1993) 3.5/4
Mission: Impossible (1996) 3.5/4
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) 3.5/4
Jack Reacher (2012) 3.5/4
The Fugitive (1993) 3/4
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) 3/4
The Empty Man (2020) 3/4
The Blackening (2022) 3/4
The House of the Seven Gables (1940) 3/4
Final Destination 5 (2011) 3/4
Mission: Impossible II (2000) 3/4
Anything for Her (2008) 3/4
The Omen (2006) 3/4
Final Destination 2 (2003) 3/4
Final Destination (2000) 3/4
Holocaust 2000 (1977) 3/4
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) 3/4
Final Destination 3 (2006) 3/4
The Way of the Gun (2000) 2.5/4
Damien: Omen II (1978) 2.5/4
Mission: Impossible III (2006) 2.5/4
A Perfect Murder (1998) 2/4
The Resurrected (1991) 2/4
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) 2/4
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) 2/4
Wrongfully Accused (1998) 2/4
The Life of David Gale (2003) 2/4
The Final Conflict (1981) 2/4
The Final Destination (2009) 2/4
Accident (2009) 1.5/4
The Proposition (1998) 1.5/4
Omen IV: The Awakening (1991) 1.5/4
Truth or Dare (2018) 1/4
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- DirectorSoi CheangStarsLouis KooRichie JenStanley Sui-Fan FungA troubled assassin, who works by orchestrating "accidents", suspects that an accident that happens to his team is not an accident at all.01-07-2023
Bear with me as I recount a chain of events leading up to the death of a middle-aged businessman. First, a woman gets a flat tire on a busy road causing a traffic jam. Second, the businessman, on his way to work, turns back and takes an alternative route which takes him down a tight alley. Third, a banner hung between two buildings which line the alley comes loose and falls on the businessman's car. Fourth, the businessman comes out of the car and tugs on the banner to get it off his windscreen. Fifth, by pulling on the banner, the businessman breaks a window and a giant shard falls on his head killing him.
No, this is not a scene from a "Final Destination" movie even though it certainly qualifies. In that series, such Rube Goldbergian accidents were orchestrated by Death itself but in Soi Cheang's Hong Kong thriller "Accident", they're engineered by a secretive group of assassins.
OK, let's look back on the chain of events. The car breakdown is obviously engineered. The driver is one of the assassins, an operative known only by her rather unimaginative codename Woman (Michelle Ye). The banner was cut down by another operative Uncle (Shui-Fan Fung) all under the watchful eye of The Brain (Louis Koo), the leader and mastermind of the group. After the job is finished, Fatty (Suet Lam) meets up with the employer and collects the hefty paycheck.
As we've come to expect from Hong Kong films, there are some stunning visuals in "Accident" which find a kind of poetic beauty in horrific violence. The best sequence in the movie sees the group plan out and execute a complicated hit on an elderly shopkeeper. The sequence, beautifully shot by Yuen-Man Fung, takes place in rainfall so thick that it resembles a theatre curtain. Like a Mamet thriller, "Accident" establishes an intentional artificiality which lends it a surreal, noirish atmosphere most evident in this superb sequence.
It is during this job that one of the operatives is killed in a freak accident. A bus ploughs into a crowd of people killing Fatty and almost killing The Brain. But what is a man who orchestrates accidents for a living meant to make of such an event? Can The Brain really believe that the bus crashed on accident or is there another group using his own methods against him?
From here on in, "Accident" turns into an increasingly unbelievable psychological thriller, sort of like a Hong Kong take on "The Conversation". The Brain begins seeing connections which plainly aren't there, suspecting strangers of plotting against him, and even turning on his own team. He grows more and more paranoid until we, the audience, can't even be sure of what is real and what is not.
The premise is terrific but the execution suffers. Kam-Yuen Szeto and Lik-Kei Tang's screenplay is seriously lacking in intrigue and plausibility. We never buy into the idea that The Brain is really being targeted and since there aren't any other characters in the film besides the team and an insurance investigator tailing them (Richie Ren) there's not much mystery here either.
The first third of the film, focusing on the team's meticulous planning and preparation of a hit, is captivating and unusual but once the actual plot kicks in director Soi Cheang loses his sure footing. The Brain's descent into paranoia is as sluggish and listless as it is unengaging. It's hard to care for a character you know nothing about, whose identity is a mystery, and whose personality is guarded and distant.
Despite some excellent visuals and an inspired, entertaining first half, "Accident" descends into a naval-gazing bore. Maybe if the film took the time to flesh out the characters I would have found myself interested in their fates but the thin screenplay and the glacial pacing with which the film unfolds its predictable plot left me past caring.
1.5/4 - DirectorPhil RosenStarsSidney TolerMantan MorelandFrances ChanCharlie searches for a murderer amidst numerous ghosts conjured up by a strange variety of spiritualists and occultists.01-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorPhil RosenStarsSidney TolerMantan MorelandEdwin LukeEccentric scientist Harper lives in a spooky mansion with all the trimmings: hidden lab, secret panels, inscrutable butler, and greedy relatives with unusual talents. When Harper seems to be murdered, Charlie Chan (with the uninvited help of No. 4 son) tries to answer such questions as Where's the body? How can a dead man walk? And how can a secret murder be done in full view of detectives and witnesses?03-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorJoe MayStarsGeorge SandersMargaret LindsayVincent PriceBased on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, this classic film follows a family feud between two brothers and an ancient curse that haunts them.03-07-2023
Melodrama is a difficult genre to plul off. It requires a headfirst plunge into unrestrained emotion without a hint of self-awareness or satire. It must be played quite seriously with reckless abandon but without the pretension of being taken seriously. The emotions of the story weigh considerably on its characters' lives but the story itself must be as light as a feather and as easily digestible as a biscuit for the audience. It is a constant tightrope walk on the very edge of theatricality which must be walked with daring and care not to tip over into self-parody.
The cinematic melodrama is almost a lost art. They seemed to work best in the era when movies themselves were grand, theatrical, and not meant to be taken as realistic portrayals of everyday life. When actors projected their larger-than-life performances with voices that echoed like a lion's roar in an empty ballroom. Only the artificial and stylish sets of those movies could hope to contain such grandiose acting.
"The House of the Seven Gables", based very loosely on Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel of the same name, is no masterpiece but it is a superb example of one such torrid melodrama that actually works. It puts forth its story made up of all the elements that are required of a gothic soap opera with such seriousness and earnestness that it's impossible not to be taken at the flood of its overwrought romanticism.
The plot is made up of an old creaky house, a decades-old vendetta, an ancient family curse, and a love which endures all obstacles through the years. It stars George Sanders and Vincent Price as a pair of brothers feuding over an old family house and Margaret Lindsay as the woman caught between them. She loves Price but when he is framed for murder by his greedy brother, she is left alone to weather the lonely years waiting for his release.
More than 20 years later, Price is released and hatches a devious plot to make his brother, now an influential and much-despised judge, confess how he lied to get him jailed. Also present are Nan Grey and Dick Foran as representatives of a younger generation falling in love in the same house with the hope that they won't repeat the errors of their ancestors.
As I said, "The House of the Seven Gables" is no masterpiece - it's too workmanlike for that and its adaptation is an awfully muddled attempt at translating an intricate novel into a straightforward movie. Still, I greatly admire its simplicity. Directed by Joe May, not a great stylist by any means, it presents its story and its emotions with forceful clarity. Just look at the beautifully simple scene in which Price returns to the old house. We see his return from the perspective of Lindsay who hides in her room as she eagerly listens to his careful footsteps. They never actually meet each other in this scene but the love between them is conveyed more powerfully than had they physically embraced.
The film also has a great deal of atmosphere, especially in its first act which hints ominously at an old family curse. Joe May made his name in Hollywood directing old Universal horror films and the experience shines through in what is undoubtedly the film's best part.
The cast is made up of familiar, beloved names. Vincent Price, before he became known as a sinister, haunted bad guy, was a terrific romantic lead capable of great warmth and vulnerability. George Sanders brings his usual blustering, loud, theatrical stylings making the judge a truly despicable character. Still, the film's finest performance comes from Margaret Lindsay whose transformation in the time skip is absolutely impeccable. To see her go from this energetic, charismatic, youthful presence to the iron-willed, cold, monosyllabic person her character becomes is astounding. It is one of the finest performances I've seen from an actress in one of these melodramas and should be remembered more than it is.
"The House of the Seven Gables" has its flaws but I find it a spellbinding, engrossing picture. It is a soap-opera of the 1940s but feels more like a 19th-century play being performed just for us by the finest touring company of the day. It has all the charm and the overwrought emotions we've come to expect from the genre and for its connoisseurs I think that's more than enough.
3/4 - DirectorPhil RosenStarsSidney TolerMantan MorelandBen CarterCharlie discovers a scheme for the theft of government radar plans while investigating several murders.03-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorPhil KarlsonStarsSidney TolerMantan MorelandBenson FongSomeone is attempting to steal radium stored in a bank. Death by cobra venom connects a number of murders. Charlie investigates.03-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorPhil RosenStarsSidney TolerFortunio BonanovaBenson FongChan is faced with suspects in a stolen atomic bomb formula case, that are being killed with bullets that are not fired from a gun.04-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorPhil KarlsonStarsSidney TolerMantan MorelandBen CarterA public defender enlists Charlie to exonerate one of his clients, an ex-con falsely accused of bank robbery and murder, scheduled for execution in nine days.04-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorDan O'BannonStarsJohn TerryJane SibbettChris SarandonCharles Dexter Ward's wife enlists the help of a private detective to find out what her husband is up to in a remote cabin owned by his family for centuries.10-07-2023
It started like a routine case for private eye John March (John Terry): a wayward husband leaves his nagging spouse for a simpler life in the country. Unfortunately for John March, the husband is Charles Dexter Ward (Chris Sarandon).
Yes, Dan O'Bannon's second and last film as a director, "The Resurrected", is an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", even though it doesn't exactly wear its provenance on its sleeve. The first half of the film feels a lot more like a 90s erotic neo-noir with its sleazy private-eye protagonist, sexy client with an outlandish story, and some truly dreadful interior design choices. The horror elements are drip-fed slowly as John March looks further into Mr Ward's sudden change in disposition: why is he being delivered mysterious long caserts; why does his house smell of rotting corpses; why is he followed wherever he goes by a sinister one-eyed servant and a mysterious bearded man?
I admire the choice made by O'Bannon and writer Brent V. Friedman to slowly uncover the horrors of Charles Dexter Ward, but the twists in the tale are so obvious that the wait for them to be revealed to us becomes frustrating. When Lovecraft wrote his novel, the story was original and unusual, nowadays its secrets are so commonplace in horror fiction that this adaptation's choice to play them straight makes it seem tired and cliched.
This first half of "The Resurrected" is a rough sit. It is tedious and unusually awkward often betraying its low-budget and troubled production history in the most unfortunate of ways. For example, a lot is made of the relationship between John March and Mrs Ward (Jane Sibbett). The entire first half of the film seems to be building up some kind of a relationship between them only for the film to completely forget she exists in its climax. Their relationship is the most obvious of several victims of the film's recutting at the hands of the producers.
Not that their relationship is a highpoint of the film anyway. Jane Sibbett gives a stilted performance lacking in charisma. Most of the time she looks uncomfortable and her close-ups could be used as the before pictures for a constipation medicine ad. John Terry, a solid character actor, is badly miscast in the part of John March, a supposedly noirish, sleazy private eye who comes across more like an IRA auditor than a latter-day Sam Spade.
The film picks up steam considerably, however, with an atmospheric and extremely well-executed sequence in which our leads break into Ward's country house and discover untold horrors in the basement. Todd Masters' visual effects are superb, supremely disgusting, and smartly filmed in moody, concealing darkness.
Another reason why the second half of "The Resurrected" starts to work very well is Chris Sarandon who gives a spirited, commanding performance as the mysterious villain of the piece. His climactic showdown with John Terry is another highpoint of the film.
And yet, the creaky first half is difficult to overcome and even with some inspired set-pieces, "The Resurrected" never quite managed to grab my attention. With its dull leads, slow pace, and a serious lack of directorial stylishness, it far too often resembles a cheap cable movie rather than the creepy cosmic horror it is trying to be. Perhaps if it had had the sense of humour of "Re-Animator" or Dan O'Bannon's wonderful "Return of the Living Dead", it would have been a more entertaining and original film.
2/4 - DirectorRichard DonnerStarsGregory PeckLee RemickHarvey StephensMysterious deaths surround an American ambassador. Could the child that he is raising actually be the Antichrist? The Devil's own son?11-07-2023
"The Omen" is now rightly remembered as one of the finest horror movies of all time because it treats its premise and the horrifying implications made by it absolutely seriously. It never winks at the audience, there is no camp, no inside jokes, no little knowing aside glances. It elegantly eschews being lurid, shocking for shock value's sake, or unnecessarily gory. It tells its frankly preposterous story with solemnity and as much realism as possible and in doing so manages to convince and engage us at least for the duration of its 110-minute runtime.
The weakest element of the film is easily David Seltzer's screenplay which takes vast leaps of logic in order to make its plot work. Thinking back on it, I can conjure up dozens of unanswered questions mainly revolving around the idea that the almighty Satan would for some reason lay the entire future of his Earthly kingdom in the hands of an obviously evil ragtag group of shysters, cheats, and creeps. Of course, if we're being generous we could interpret all of their mistakes and betrayals of the cause as parts of Satan's plan. Still, even if do that a lot more questions pop up as a result such as why does Satan not just kill all of these characters plotting to eliminate his precious offspring? He certainly can do it but conveniently he waits just long enough for the exposition scenes to end.
It is, however, to the greatest credit of the film itself that we largely don't think about these plot holes while we're watching it. The movie's saving grace is that this screenplay, which could have easily been yet another cheap and hoaky "The Exorcist" rip-off, was directed by Richard Donner.
Donner, a hugely underrated director who always brings a slick, polished, and understatedly stylish direction to his films, made a series of superb decisions which lend "The Omen" far more credence and gravitas than it rightfully should have.
First and most obviously, there's the film's excellent casting handled brilliantly by legendary casting director Maude Spector. It was a stroke of genius to cast Gregory Peck in the lead role as the US ambassador to the UK who learns that his lovely little son is actually the child of the Devil. It is easy to say that just seeing Peck, a respected movie star, in such a role lends it gravitas. Doing that, however, would be a disservice to Peck whose performance here is excellent and far more than just a casting gimmick. He approaches the role of Robert Thorn just as seriously as he did the role of Atticus Finch delivering a measured, commanding, intelligent performance. You grow to like Robert, this capable, reasonable, down-to-Earth politician whose entire life and conception of the world go topsy-turvy in the span of several days.
It is also a stroke of genius to surround Peck with a cast comprised of first-class British actors using their impeccable technique to fill out poorly sketched-out characters. Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's favourite actress, is absolutely terrifying as Mrs Baylock, the demonic nanny. Her psychotically frenzied eyes and icy demeanour fit chillingly with the description one character gives of her saying that she is "an apostate of Hell".
Also perfectly cast is Patrick Troughton as a fallen priest with his manic bug-eyed stare, small and wiry stature, and grotesque, unshaven face. Last but certainly not least is David Warner, utterly convincing as the bohemian journalist Jennings who approaches the hunt for Satan with the same cynical detachment he might report a sex scandal with. Also in the film are such recognisable and respected character actors as Leo McKern, Robert Rietty, Anthony Nicholls, and Penny Downie who help round out a truly astounding cast list.
Secondly, there are the perfectly chosen locations in and around London. Just like Friedkin before him, Donner chooses to shoot his horror film in real, unaltered places which lend it a kind of authenticity you just can't replicate in a studio. Seeing this extraordinary yarn unfold in such mundane locations makes them all the more terrifying.
Finally, there's Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score which ushered in the seemingly undying trend of using powerful Gregorian chants in horror movies. Of course, the best-remembered cue in the film is the sinister main title - the whispering, plotting choir slavishly praising their master. However, there's so much more in Goldsmith's frankly brilliant soundtrack to give you goosebumps. The 1970s were the pinnacle of his career, a decade in which he explored atonal melodies and experimental soundscapes. Compare, for instance, the screeching, creepy piece that accompanies the fight between Mrs Baylock and Thorn to his work on "The Brotherhood of the Bell", an unfairly forgotten TV horror film from around the same time.
The story of "The Omen" is absolutely preposterous but the film that was made of it is eery, serious, and absolutely terrifying. Not only do Donner and his collaborators give the film a real sense of authority and gravitas, but they also fill it with memorable set pieces such as the exhilarating scene in which a priest is chased by a storm towards a looming church and, my personal favourite, the genuinely creepy moment in which Mrs Baylock shows up in Mrs Thorn's (Lee Remick) hospital room, her eyes blazing with her fanatical devotion to Satan.
There is a book to be written on how a thin screenplay for an "Exorcist" rip-off was turned into a horror classic. Suffice it to say that 47 years later, "The Omen" still bustles with the same energy and elicits the same chills as it did back in 1976. It has stood the test of time in the way that films made by talented, serious and committed people usually do. Even though its prophecies of the arrival of the spawn of Satan didn't come true it did herald the arrival of Richard Donner, a director who would leave an indelible mark on cinema history with a series of polished, entertaining films that transcend their often trite scripts.
3.5/4 - DirectorDon TaylorMike HodgesStarsWilliam HoldenLee GrantJonathan Scott-TaylorDamien the Antichrist, now about to turn thirteen years old, finally learns of his destiny under the guidance of an unholy disciple of Satan. Meanwhile dark forces begin to eliminate all those who suspect the child's true identity.11-07-2023
Jerry Goldsmith was a genius. Plain and simple. After his Oscar-winning score for "The Omen", it would be fair to assume he would never come close to replicating the ingenuity, the originality, and the effectiveness of that film's main theme "Ave Satani" and yet he did it again just two years later in "Damien: Omen II".
This new theme which plays over a dynamic opening montage of Carl Bugehangen (Leo McKern) driving around Israel is a very different beast from the original as befitting the state of Satan's plan. While in "The Omen", the Devil's desire to plant his offspring on Earth was in its secretive infancy, now in the sequel the plan is well and truly underway.
Thus, the theme is no longer quietly menacing and sinister. Now, the chanting chorus is loud, frenzied, fanatical. They are hailing the dawn of a new age they now know for sure is coming. Their chanting is accompanied by bombastic t trumpets spitting out notes like bullets being fired out of a bell. A symphonic orchestra underscores the theme with a string accompaniment which has the intensity and the drive of a bullet train. The effect is ominous indeed! Evil has now grown, established itself, and is powering ahead with its plan to conquer the world. Only a genius composer can encapsulate the entire premise of a movie in a single 3-minute cue.
The rest of the movie is unfortunately not quite as good even though it is certainly a slick and entertaining horror film. Its first mistake is to abandon the enticing twist its predecessor ended on. Indeed, at the beginning of "Damien", we don't find the titular spawn of Satan traipsing through the halls of the White House but rather living with his uncle Richard Thorn (William Holden). Unlike his brother, Richard is not a terribly clever man failing to spot the fact that everyone who comes close to Damien seems to die in tragic and bizarre accidents.
The second problem is indeed with Richard who is a character without any agency or impetus. While the previous film was a mystery in which the unfortunate Robert Thorn slowly uncovered his son's horrifying true nature, "Damien" is really just a series of spectacular death scenes connected with a flimsy plot in which a group of Satanists plot to ensure that Damien inherits his uncle's multi-million dollar company.
Now, since we know the truth behind the creepy kid and since no other character is actively trying to find out what is going on there is no real structure to "Damien". Stanley Mann's screenplay does introduce a series of interesting potential subplots only to drop them immediately every single time.
One interesting possibility that the script raises is that Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor) himself does not know who he is and yet he spends the entire film looking sinister and even using clearly supernatural powers to deal with anyone who crosses him. Halfway through, there is a baffling scene in which Damien reads a Bible, realizes he is the son of the Devil, and has a nervous breakdown only to then be perfectly fine for the rest of the film never once acknowledging that anything has changed.
Another intriguing subplot is that Damien is surreptitiously surrounded by members of a Satanist cult. The film introduces a number of these cultists who are played by good actors but fails to ever flesh them out into interesting characters. OK, the original Omen had the same problem but there at least these cultists were memorable creations, creepy and grotesque, whereas here they're only vaguely sinister and instantly forgettable.
And yet, I did find myself enjoying "Damien: Omen II". It is certainly no horror classic nor does it ever live up to the promise of the original's enticing finale. Still, it does deliver a series of fun, well-executed, and occasionally witty (in a macabre way) set pieces which include a man getting trapped under the ice, another chap getting crushed between train cars, and a man being cut in half by a lift wire. My favourite is right at the beginning, however, and shows us the fate of old man Bugehagen and his friend played well by an underused Ian Hendry.
I love the Jerry Goldsmith score and I really liked Bill Butler's sleek, stylish photography. I even enjoyed some of the supporting performances including a chilling turn from Lance Henriksen. "Damien: Omen II" would have certainly benefitted from a stronger plot or really any plot at all and the spectacular set pieces would have resonated even more strongly if we actually cared about the characters at their centre. Still, it is an entertaining, sometimes clever, often goofy horror film that I would be amiss not to recommend.
2.5/4 - DirectorGraham BakerStarsSam NeillRossano BrazziDon GordonThe now adult Antichrist plots to eliminate his future divine opponent while a cabal of monks plot to stop him.12-07-2023
I am still smarting that the producers of "The Omen" sequels never properly followed up on the cliffhanger that the original film left us on. The idea of Damien Thorn, the son of Satan, as an adopted member of the first family - a sort of a latter-day Kennedy, is so enticing, scary, and satirical that it alone would have made "The Omen" franchise worth watching.
Instead, the third instalment "The Final Conflict" gives us an adult Damien (Sam Neill) who is the president of his late stepfather's company. Somehow, the idea of the Son of Satan as an industrialist is less intriguing and original to me.
Sam Neill makes for a rather boring Antichrist in what is his Hollywood debut. Alright, the previous two actors who played Damien were no Linda Blair either but their respective films only ever required them to look menacing in their bowl cuts. Here, Damien is meant to be a seductive, charismatic leader who rallies the support of hundreds of Satanists worldwide and even manages to spin the head of a beautiful BBC reporter who can't help but fall in love with him even though she knows his true nature (Lisa Harrow). Neill, unfortunately, is awfully wooden in the part. His idea of playing sinister is to stare seedily into the camera. He lacks the required charm or the menace.
Much like "Damien: Omen II", this third instalment also lacks a strong plot revolving around a series of loosely connected incidents which are somehow meant to signal the end of the world. In the hands of director Graham Baker, the whole film has a saggy, disjointed feel as it meanders from one plotline to the next growing increasingly goofier as the runtime slogs on.
First, there's a group of Italian monks who have acquired the mystical Meddigo daggers which can kill the Antichrist. They set out to assassinate Damien in a series of badly planned attempts which predictably end in gory disasters. One of them tries to kill Damien in a TV studio by jumping onto him from the rafters only to get tangled up in a cable and fall to his own fiery death. Another one tries to corner him during a fox hunt only to get mauled to death by a pack of cuddly-looking beagles.
The second plot, resembling something out of Giulio Paradisi's insane "The Visitor", sees a comet appearing in the sky signalling (somehow) the second coming. In order to prevent the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, Damien orders his minions to go out and kill all male babies born on that day. This leads to a truly unpleasant montage of Satanists offing babies through some goofy Rube Goldberg machinations. I wonder, however, why Damien needs minions to do his evil bidding since he and his father are clearly capable of causing supernatural accidents as we saw in both of the previous films. Furthermore, why do Damien's minions go through all this trouble of making the babies' deaths look like accidents? None of it matters, however, since the second coming never... well, comes and this plotline is forgotten along the way.
There's more bizarre goofiness going on in "The Final Conflict" to the point where I wondered if I was watching an Italian rip-off instead of the genuine end of "The Omen" trilogy. But no, the film was written by Andrew Birkin, a talented screenwriter wrestling with too much baggage of the past, and not Andrea Birkinetti.
The biggest problem with "The Final Conflict", however, is that it is a terribly underwhelming climax to the trilogy. The death scenes which were so memorable in the first two films are now weak and shoddily executed, the Antichrist resembles more a proto-Gordon Gekko instead of the second coming of the Devil, and his eventual demise is so anticlimactic that it is almost self-parodic. The Biblical quotes that show up at the end only add to the overall campiness of this disappointing finale.
I don't want to come over all negative on "The Final Conflict" but the film is a letdown especially since its technical credits are quite strong. I love Phil Meheux and Robert Paynter's photography so bold and colourful. Unlike the previous two films which traded in stark realism, "The Final Conflict" has a more painterly look which gives it an epic scope the screenplay lacks.
Also superb is Jerry Goldsmith's gorgeous soundtrack which rounds out what must be the best trio of scores any horror franchise has ever had. The music is now operatic and grand and strangely beautiful like a Lacrimosa for the World giving the whole film an eerily elegiac feel.
And yet, "The Final Conflict" does not work mainly because it has two giant black holes at its centre. Sam Neill is a weak villain and Andrew Birkin's screenplay is unfocused and illogical leading to a sluggish, disappointing movie that has none of the wit or the menace of its predecessors.
2/4 - DirectorAlberto De MartinoStarsKirk DouglasSimon WardAgostina BelliRobert's in charge of constructing a nuclear power plant in the Middle East. Will it be instrumental in prophecies of antichrist's apocalypse?12-07-2023
Who would have thought that the best "Omen" follow-up would be an Italian rip-off called "Holocaust 2000"? And yet here it is, a film so bold in its ideas and cleverly mixing the doom and gloom of the nuclear age with the religious horror of its predecessor that it completely outshines the entertaining but thin official sequels.
It stars Kirk Douglas as Robert Caine, the enthusiastic industrialist with the dream of building a nuclear power plant in the Middle East. He barrels ahead pushing his plan along with nothing but his easygoing Hollywood charm despite increasing resistance from protest groups and the local government. But nothing stops Mr Caine when he has his mind on something and before the credits roll he is pushing the button to level an ancient holy cave on whose site he plans to build his steel mammoth where he will try to tame the power of the sun.
Now, anyone who's ever seen a horror film knows it's a bad idea to build even a hut on the site of an ancient cave on the entrance of which is carved the name of Jesus but then Robert Caine doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would watch "Poltergeist".
Kirk Douglas does for "Holocaust 2000" what Gregory Peck did for "The Omen". Admirably, he doesn't phone in his performance nor does he treat the often ludicrous dialogue he has to deliver with any kind of irony or depreciation. He delivers an energetic, wholly credible performance as a man whose relentless drive and ambition slowly turn into outright paranoia.
"The Omen" only hints at the possibility that Gregory Peck is actually insane and merely imagining that his son is the Antichrist. Intriguingly, "Holocaust 2000" leans into the idea wholeheartedly.
After a series of bizarre accidents and mysterious prophecies delivered by the nuclear power plant's supercomputer, Caine becomes convinced that his unborn child is actually the son of the Devil. He conspires with a priest (Romolo Valli) to kill the baby in the mother's womb as his attempts and behaviour become more and more desperate.
The degeneration of Caine's sanity coincides with the rise of his older son Angel (Simon Ward) who slowly takes over his father's place in the corporation. Simon Ward is terrific as the dutiful son behind whose loving smile there is a certain sinister slyness.
The big twist behind "Holocaust 2000" is glaringly obvious right from the beginning but the film is so full of clever ideas and striking set pieces that I was willing to overlook this and similar other faults.
Director Alberto De Martino and his production designer Uberto Bertacca create a truly hellish environment out of clean, metal walls, glass structures, and giant, overbearing computers. The nuclear power plant control room is an especially good set resembling an ancient altar.
DP Erico Menczer does a terrific job as well in creating the disturbing dreams which plague Robert Caine. They don't quite reach the intensity of the dream sequence from the similar "The Visitor" but they make a whole lot more sense.
"Holocaust 2000" has its fair share of flaws, most of which it shares with other Italian productions of the time. There are plenty of shoddy sequences involving obvious model shots and bad back projections. The screenplay is as muddled as only an Italian film can be and some of the acting is distinctly wood-flavoured (especially Agostina Belli's as Robert Caine's mindless girlfriend).
And yet, I found the film truly engrossing in ways that none of "The Omen" sequels are. The idea of the Antichrist in control of a nuclear power plant is absolutely brilliant and far more potent than what Damien Thorn wound up doing in "The Final Conflict". Furthermore, the way the film toys with the notion that Robert Caine might be off his rocker is genuinely suspenseful.
Unlike most Italian rip-offs, "Holocaust 2000" takes the premise of "The Omen" and expands it into fascinating and original ways. If only the official sequels had its imagination and boldness!
3/4 - DirectorJohn MooreStarsLiev SchreiberJulia StilesSeamus Davey-FitzpatrickAn American official realizes that his young son may literally be the Devil incarnate.12-07-2023
The remake of Richard Donner's "The Omen" is a fascinating film to analyze. Directed by John Moore and released on June 6th, 2006, it used an almost word-for-word identical screenplay as the original and even restaged certain scenes shot-for-shot. What this means is that the changes that were made can be easily identified and contrasted to the corresponding scenes in the original to see the difference they make.
Indeed, the biggest difference between the two films is John Moore's directorial approach to the material which can best be described as maximalistic. Whereas Richard Donner opted for low-key subtlety and a sinister, grounded sense of realism, Moore shoots the film like a grandiose, operatic music video opting always for in-your-face shocks and stylish visuals.
This difference is most noticeable when it comes to the production design. In my review of the 1976 film, I remarked how effective the use of mundane, unobtrusive locations is. The 2006 film does no such thing. Compare, for instance, the church where Father Brennan meets his grisly fate. In the original film, it was a small though atmospheric place. A regular church the kind of which you'll encounter by the dozen as you walk through London. The church where Moore shoots his version of the scene, however, is a huge Gothic cathedral akin to Count Dracula's castle which looms heavily over the city. It is a foreboding, terrifying structure the kind you'll never find in London.
Similarly, Father Brennan's tawdry small flat from the original is now a chiaroscuro-lit chamber beneath the underground which rattles as trains pass over it. Jennings' photo studio which was a cramped closet in the original is now a cage in a huge, purposely underlit hangar. The Thorns, meanwhile, now seem to live in a palace which would probably dwarf the Buckingham one.
This MTV grandiosity has carried over onto the camerawork as well which is shaky, reactive, and full of crash zooms. Marco Beltrami's score is booming and not terribly original and every single set piece has been dialled up to eleven.
Annoyingly, Moore doesn't resist the temptation to include a series of unnecessary dream sequences and cheap jump scares. He doesn't have Donner's restraint to slowly build the horror but rather wants to jump into it headfirst right from the off.
The fact that this deliberate stylization doesn't overwhelm the story is a credit both to John Moore's skilful direction and David Seltzer's screenplay which actually comes across as a tighter, more sensible piece of work here than it did in the original. The few updates that were made by Dan McDermott are good. I particularly like that they've given Mrs Thorn (Julia Stiles) a more proactive role. She is a smarter character with more agency here than she was back in 1976 and figures out that there's something wrong with Damien well before her husband does.
The casting is pretty good as well. David Thewlis and Pete Postlethwaite are as good choices as possible to fill the shoes of David Warner and Patrick Troughton respectively. Liev Schreiber doesn't quite have Gregory Peck's authoritative presence but makes for a more muscular, youthful Robert Thorn. Especially good is Mia Farrow who gives one of her career-best performances as Mrs Baylock, the Satanic nanny. Her take on the character is vastly different from Billie Whitelaw's. She masks her villainy behind a veneer of warm quirkiness and niceness which arguably makes her all the creepier.
The one cast member I didn't particularly like is Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick as Damien. He is just too cute with his puffy cheeks and big ears. He tries to be frowny and scary but I kept wanting to boop his tiny little nose. I think the problem is that John Moore tries way too hard to make him look intimidating whereas Richard Donner allowed Damien to be a regular kid and let the events that transpire around him make him scary.
In my review of the 1976 original, I remarked that Richard Donner's direction and the work of his excellent collaborators elevate what could have been a lurid and silly horror film into an absolute classic. John Moore's remake, however, merely does what the script asks of it.
Nevertheless, to my surprise, I did rather enjoy "The Omen". It's nowhere near as effective or as memorable as the original but as its own film, it is a stylish, slick, and awfully entertaining little romp.
Of course, it suffers from the remake curse which is the perfectly valid question of why would you watch it instead of the original. Well, there's no particularly good reason but if you know and love the material as much as I do you'll enjoy this version in the same way you'd enjoy a new production of an old play. It's fun to see different actors and a different director take on the same material. I had a ball seeing Pete Postlethwaite (one of my favourite British actors) do the ominous poem, I loved Mia Farrow's new take on Mrs Baylock, and David Thewlis' decapitation scene was a real crowd-pleaser.
This film, then, is no masterpiece and I'd certainly rather watch the original but if we had to get a remake of "The Omen" (and we all know we did), this is as good a remake as we possibly could have hoped for.
3/4 - DirectorJorge MontesiDominique Othenin-GirardStarsFaye GrantMichael WoodsMichael LernerTwo attorneys adopt a mysterious orphan girl as their daughter, unaware she is the new Antichrist, next in line to Damien Thorn.12-07-2023
"The Omen" franchise has a spotty history with television which includes a failed 1995 in-name-only pilot and a short-lived A&E TV show called simply "Damien". Even more obscure is the 1991 TV movie "Omen IV: The Awakening" which tried to continue the original movie series on the Fox Network. It got utterly savaged by the critics of the day and still remains the only "Omen" sequel without any vehement defenders.
Watching it for the first time, I was surprised by how disjointed and uneven it is resembling more a compilation of 5 or 6 episodes of an unaired TV show than a single, coherent movie. The plot is indeed highly episodic in nature and revolves around the hijinks and exploits of Delia York (Asia Vieira), the adopted daughter of a politician (Michael Woods) and his lawyer wife (Faye Grant). Unbeknownst to them (but immediately obvious to the audience), Delia is the latest incarnation of the Antichrist possessed of the power to cause heart attacks in those who oppose her and a true passion for mischief.
The best episodes of "Omen IV: The Awakening" are the ones which play the typical Omen tropes for comic effect. There is a surprisingly good 20-minute segment of the film in which the Yorks get a new nanny - the delightfully quirky Jo (Ann Hearn) - who is the first to realize Delia's true nature and who tries to stop her. Scored throughout with almost cartoonish cues by Jonathan Sheffer, this segment of the film plays out like a horror farce. Especially inventive is the scene in which Jo takes Delia to a carnival where all the psychics suddenly begin to sense her evil presence.
The worst episodes of "Omen IV: The Awakening" are the ones in which it tries to be a serious horror movie. Every so often, the film shifts its attention to Mrs York's attempts to get to the bottom of her daughter's weird behaviour. Brian Taggart's script then becomes a series of exposition dump dialogue scenes which go on and on into tedium. Faye Grant gives a terrible, confused performance which makes her character come across more like a hysterical housewife than a woman on the trail of the truth.
But "Omen IV: The Awakening" is a schizophrenic collage so if you're not enjoying one scene - just hold on - there's every chance that the next scene will be something completely different! That's how serious-minded info-dumps are followed by absolutely insane scenes of a sleazy private eye (Michael Lerner) tracking down a fallen nun across the country until he eventually finds her in a cult devoted to snake worship! Add to that the fact that he is apparently being haunted by a choir of homeless people who chant Jerry Goldsmith's theme from the first film and you've got yourself some delightfully bizarre sequences.
The film is credited to two directors - Jorge Montesi and Dominique Othernin-Girard - and indeed it feels like several distinct films with their own storylines, tones, and genres which were mushed together. "Omen IV: The Awakening" moves at a furious pace, never allowing any subplot to truly develop or any suspense to build. Scenes often end before you've even processed what you've just seen and characters very rarely refer to anything that happened before.
It's this manic disjointedness that makes "Omen IV: The Awakening" quite a fun ride. You truly never know what's around the corner. It could be a boring exposition scene or a shoddily executed death scene or a curiously imaginative sequence full of wit and tension or an insane musical sequence featuring a choir of homeless people! As confusing as the film is it's certainly never boring or predictable.
On a purely technical side, however, this is a TV movie through and through. I would never be reviewing it if it weren't a part of "The Omen" franchise and had it not been shown theatrically overseas. The direction from both of the helmers is pedestrian at best and Martin Fuhrer's photography has that flat sheen that is unmistakably 90s TV.
I did, however, enjoy Asia Vieira's performance as the girl Antichrist. I like that she has a very distinctive characterization which is quite different from Damien Thorne. Her evil is peppered with a mischievous wit and she approaches her bidding with the disposition of a prankster. The sequence with the nanny, which truly is the highlight of the film, is less like "The Omen" and more like a Satanic version of "Home Alone".
I won't call myself a defender of "Omen IV: The Awakening". It's certainly far, far from a good movie even when graded on the TV curve. It is, however, not nearly as bad as people would have you believe. I like that it tries to be tonally different from the "Omen" films. I appreciated its more overtly comedic stylings and I very much enjoyed Asia Vieira's take on a familiar character.
The biggest joy, however, comes from the simple pleasure of not having any clue where this film is going or what it's going to do next. Every 10 or so minutes, it becomes a whole different ballgame ranging from broad comedy to attempts at serious, grave horror. Characters are introduced and then dumped regularly and seemingly important plot points disappear with them. I'm sure that this film could easily be re-edited into a number of 20-minute episodes and perhaps that was the intention of the filmmakers.
1.5/4 - DirectorSteven SpielbergStarsHarrison FordKaren AllenPaul FreemanIn 1936, archaeologist and adventurer Indiana Jones is hired by the U.S. government to find the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis can obtain its awesome powers.14-07-2023
What is there left to say about "Raiders of the Lost Ark" except to parrot everyone's opinion about it being pretty much a perfect adventure film? From the exciting prologue in the jungle to the atmospheric finale which makes me all the sadder that Steven Spielberg hasn't made a horror movie in almost 50 years, this first Indiana Jones movie is a thrill ride which is just as fun as if you were along for the adventure but significantly less dangerous.
So what makes a great adventure film? Well, a great hero for one and, honestly, it's hard to think of a more perfect adventurer than Indiana Jones, the roguish archaeologist deliberately created as an homage to heroes of yore such as Doc Savage. On top of that, there is no more perfect casting choice for Indiana Jones than Harrison Ford, the rare Hollywood star with the steeliness of Charlton Heston and the witty charm of Cary Grant.
Equally as important is a great sidekick and Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) is about as great as they get. It is a shame that Karen Allen never became a staple of the Indiana Jones franchise because her tough, wisecracking, two-fisted dame is the perfect foil for Indy. I love how she never lets up on him, never lets him get away with an easy joke.
To me, however, the most essential tenet of the adventure genre is a great villain! In "Raiders of the Lost Ark", we get two iconic baddies. One is Rene Belloq (Paul Freeman), fascinatingly created as a kind of other side of the coin to Indy. He's just as charming and just as clever but he doesn't have Indiana Jones' infallible scruples. To him archaeology is just a business and the treasures go to the highest bidder. Freeman is great as the anti-Indy, so suave and sly and every encounter between the two of them brims with humour and tension.
The other iconic villain is the monosyllabic Toht (Ronald Lacey). Not much is known about this evil Gestapo torturer but I think that the fact that he wears a black leather coat in the desert is information enough. Toht doesn't get as much screen time as you may remember but I love his brief appearances in the backgrounds of shots manically laughing at other people's misfortunes. There's something deliciously evil about him which reminds me of the best comic book villains.
Another hugely important element of the adventure film is the McGuffin - the object of the search which draws all of these disparate characters together. The Ark of the Covenant is an inspired choice. Even though it is not as famous nor as iconic as the Holy Grail (which will famously come up later in the franchise), the Ark is an object enshrouded in myth and mystery, exactly the kind of mystical artefact the Nazis might be looking for. After all, it is said to contain the law of all laws - the ten commandments - imagine those in Hitler's hands.
As directed by Steven Spielberg, all of these elements combine into a perfect adventure, dynamic and continually entertaining. One thing that is not talked about enough, in my opinion, is just how perfectly paced "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is. After a rousing 10-minute prologue and only three or four scenes of exposition, we're off on our adventure. Indeed, Spielberg never lingers on a scene or a situation for longer than is absolutely necessary. The action scenes are fast and cleanly shot while the dialogue scenes are brief and to the point. The film moves with a lean brevity which even the Indiana Jones franchise will struggle to repeat in future endeavours.
Finally, I have to mention John Williams' iconic score without which the Indiana Jones franchise is unimaginable. What I admire about his work on "Raiders" in particular, however, is the restraint he shows about using the famous theme. We hear snippets of it here and there throughout the film but the full version only kicks in at the appropriate, climactic moment.
If I had any niggles about the film (and they are minor) they would be with Lawrence Kasdan's plotting. For one, it is a little disappointing to realize that pretty much the entirety of the film takes place in a single location. Even though there is a great variety of sets in "Raiders", for some reason, I always remember this adventure as being more globe-trotting than it really is.
The second, larger problem, is that our leads really don't have all that much of an impact on this story. It has become a meme over the years that Indiana Jones accomplishes nothing in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" but in this case, the meme is absolutely accurate. In the greater scheme of things, he is a supporting character in his own movie. He keeps getting himself into trouble, getting captured and then escaping but is really only a minor nuisance to the villains who execute their plan almost to perfection. Even the climax comes about through the ultimate deus-ex-machina plot resolution without Indiana Jones' help and his life is only saved through a lucky happenstance.
Furthermore, for all of her toughness, the character of Marion is sadly underused and is not given nearly as much agency as she deserves. After a memorable introduction, her role in the plot is that of a plaything for Indy and Belloq to quibble over and drag around Egypt of their own will. I wish she had a more active role in the plot and a larger impact on the overall story.
Still, these are fairly minor complaints to have about a movie that is just so much fun! "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is a delightful, fast-paced, relentlessly dynamic adventure film that redefined the genre forever and to this day remains a perfect example of how to do an homage without it becoming glib, insular, or front-loaded.
4/4 - DirectorSteven SpielbergStarsHarrison FordKate CapshawKe Huy QuanIn 1935, Indiana Jones is tasked by Indian villagers with reclaiming a rock stolen from them by a secret cult beneath the catacombs of an ancient palace.14-07-2023
True to my contrarian nature, the opening sequence of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" is probably my favourite of all the Indiana Jones opening sequences. It's lavish, dynamic, and funny and manages to be a perfectly executed action sequence while also incorporating elements of farce and an homage to 1930s musical numbers. Starting with a terrific performance of Anything Goes from Kate Capshaw and capped with a brilliant one-liner delivered with wit and precision by Roy Chiao it is an absolute thrill and a delight.
This brilliant sequence is not an outlier in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", a film full of dazzling and exciting set-pieces. Take, for example, the superb minecart chase sequence which rivals the memorable truck chase from "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Another great set-piece, though comical rather than action, is the dinner scene in which all kinds of grotesque meals are served before a queasy Willie (Kate Capshaw). I'm also very fond of the sequence in which Indiana and his two sidekicks escape a falling plane in a dingy even though that's not a popular opinion. Still, it seems to me that applying logic to a movie homaging old Republic serials is a fool's errand.
No, the set pieces are not lacking in this, second, Indiana Jones film. What is more problematic, however, is the story which is meant to be connecting them. Written by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, it doesn't have the glorious simplicity of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" but lacks the intricate plotting of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade". What we're left with, instead, is one hell of an underwritten screenplay.
Consider, if you will, the film's villains and contrast them with the villains from "Raiders of the Lost Ark". We get the suave and sinister Prime Minister (Roshan Seth) who is very reminiscent of the suave and sinister Rene Belloq from the first film. And yet, the Prime Minister only appears in two scenes before his climactic fight with Indy. His character beyond being suave and sinister is absolutely non-existent. Whereas Belloq was cleverly positioned as Indy's exact opposite and equal, the Prime Minister is a cypher. His motivation is barely sketched out and even after seeing the film many times over the years, I'm still not sure what his plot was all about.
The other villain is much more memorable but no more fleshed out. He is the High Priest, played menacingly by Amrish Puri. Much like Toth from "Raiders", he is a rather monosyllabic character whose threat is imposed with the imminent danger of violence rather than supreme intelligence. Toth, however, was given a whole host of idiosyncrasies and bizarre little tics to make up for his lack of dialogue. The High Priest gets no such development and remains a striking visual rather than a well-drawn character.
A character who gets a lot of criticism from Indiana Jones fans is Willie, Indy's unwilling sidekick who would much rather still be singing in her lavish Shanghai nightclub than traipsing around the jungle avoiding critters and giant vampire bats. Again, like the good contrarian I am, I have to say I quite like Willie. As someone who is not all that fond of adventuring and the great outdoors, I very much feel her pain. Ably played by Kate Capshaw, a charismatic and witty actress who is not afraid to take the character into cartoon-land, she is a great comical foil for the stony-faced Indiana Jones.
Still, she is no Marion and it is a great mystery to me why this film had to be a prequel and why they didn't bite and kick and fight to get Karen Allen back. As funny as I think Kate Capshaw is, she doesn't really have any chemistry with Harrison Ford and I think it's a mistake to turn her into a romantic interest for Indiana. For one, it feels like he's cheating on Marion, and secondly, it comes so far out of left field that it just never feels right. Willie is a great comic relief character but she's no good as the romantic lead.
There's another great sidekick in this film in the form of Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) who is my second favourite character in the whole franchise right behind Henry Jones, Sr. Ke Huy Quan was a great child actor, full of charisma and energy, and his chemistry with Harrison Ford is superb. I would have happily watched many more adventures starring the two of them.
"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" is frequently cited as the weakest of the original trilogy which, without a doubt, it is. It's full of great sequences and I'm very fond of our heroic trio but Huyck and Katz just never pull it all together into a coherent, convincing plot.
I do admire the conscious choice to make a very different picture from "Raiders". "Temple of Doom" is more of a haunted house ride full of jump scares, skeletons, and creepy crawlies. Steven Spielberg once again proves himself an exquisite horror director by crafting some genuinely creepy moments. My favourite is the atmospheric arrival in the impoverished Indian village, beautifully and smokily shot by Douglas Slocombe.
I'm less enthusiastic, however, about some truly disturbing scenes in "Temple of Doom" which do hamper my enjoyment of the film's second half. We see kids dying of starvation being whipped and thrown around and praying to die. Now, I'm no Puritan nor am I easily shocked, but I found myself getting uncomfortable watching all of these horrors which is not quite the feeling I hope to get during my Indiana Jones marathon. It feels a bit too much, like if we got to see Toth torturing Jews in "Raiders of the Lost Ark".
"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" has many admirable qualities and truly stupefying set-pieces but its thin screenplay doesn't manage to tie them all into a dazzling movie. The villains aren't as interesting, the McGuffin isn't as compelling, the adventure is a little too rooted in a single location for my taste, and the third act goes on for a bit too long with a number of highly elaborate fight scenes and chases upon chases.
There is one thing, however, that is better here than it was in "Raiders" and that's the score. John Williams has managed to top himself with a soundtrack featuring more variety than before blending adventure, comedy, and horror cues with a deft and ease which is sometimes lacking in the actual movie.
3/4 - DirectorSteven SpielbergStarsHarrison FordSean ConneryAlison DoodyIn 1938, after his father goes missing while pursuing the Holy Grail, Indiana Jones finds himself up against the Nazis again to stop them from obtaining its powers.14-07-2023
The second instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise was a brave attempt to do something completely different but "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" is a welcome return to the format. As if to celebrate and acknowledge that we're back on familiar territory, the film opens with a witty, self-aware prologue showing us how the young Indiana Jones (River Phoenix) got his hat, whip, chin scar, and a fear of snakes.
From there on Jeffrey Boam's screenplay sticks ardently to the "Raiders" format bringing back the old villains - the Nazis - and the old team of protagonists to beat them to the McGuffin. Back on the chase are Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), his absent-minded boss Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott), and his wily sidekick Sallah (John Rhys-Davies). Joining the team is the finest addition to the franchise, Indiana's surly dad Professor Henry Jones (Sean Connery), the only person who can authoritatively stare down our stoney-faced hero.
Boam and Spielberg then take the "Raiders" formula and upgrade every single element. I complained in my review of the near-perfect first film that it all took place in a single country. Well, complain no more critic, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" merrily bounces from America to Venice to Austria to Berlin to Hatay. Brilliantly, every location has its own flavour - its own soundscape, its own look, its own atmosphere.
Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe does a magnificent job of capturing the very essence of every country so that it feels like you're along for the ride. Furthermore, John Williams graces us with the best Indiana Jones score here, so rich in local colour and full of variety.
Whereas "Raiders" was primarily an action film, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" adds an enticing element of mystery to the proceeding. The whole film is structured like a scavenger hunt in which Indy and his dad have to find a tablet which will take them to a map which will take them to a city... you get the idea.
Also upgraded are the action scenes which are now even bolder, even more imaginative, and even more spectacular. Indy gets to fight on every surface available from the ground to the air and the water. There's even a brilliantly choreographed fight on top of a train which rivals Buster Keaton. Notice also how Spielberg and Boam never forget to include little jokes and character beats in every single fight scene. I marvelled at how well-edited these scenes are by Michael Kahn, how he never loses pace or focus when he stops to allow the characters to deliver a pithy one-liner.
In sharp contrast to the previous film, the supporting cast is littered with memorable, colourful characters. The principal villains are wonderfully vile including the always suave and sinister Julian Glover and Michael Byrne who makes a most unusual heavy - so animalistic and brutal while also managing to remain so elegant and precise.
There are also some wonderful comic turns most notably from Alexei Sayle who gets only a single scene as the greedy local Sultan but oh, what a brilliant scene it is!
Indeed, every single scene in this film is perfectly crafted like a short film with its own three-act structure. If you don't believe me - go ahead and pluck any of them out of context and you'll get a masterclass of setup, development, and even a twist to boot. Personally, I'd nominate the blimp scene ("He had no ticket!").
Of course, the real heart of the film is the relationship between father and son - Indy and Henry. It helps, doubtlessly, when they're played by such forces of charisma as Harrison Ford and Sean Connery but the writing of these characters is so vivid, emotional, and witty. Jeffrey Boam gives them such clever dialogue which is always sharp without being glib, truthful without being sentimental.
This is a superbly entertaining movie, crafted with the care and perfection you could (and should) teach in film schools. It works as a beguiling standalone adventure and as a conclusion of a trilogy especially if you view Elsa as the ultimate subversion of the Indiana Jones' girlfriend trope.
If "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is a perfect adventure film then "Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade" is THE perfect adventure film. For my money, this is "Citizen Kane" of the genre. I certainly cannot find it a fault because Spielberg and his team manage to make even Alison Doody's stiff performance work to the film's advantage. I don't think perfection in art is attainable but Spielberg and his team have come damn near it with this, a rare sequel that is better than the original.
4/4 - DirectorSteven SpielbergStarsHarrison FordCate BlanchettShia LaBeoufIndiana Jones becomes entangled in a Soviet plot to uncover the secret behind mysterious artifacts known as the Crystal Skulls.15-07-2023
The most (in)famous scene, without a doubt, from "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is the one in which Indy (Harrison Ford) finds himself trapped in a fake American town populated by mannequins about to be blown up by a nuclear test. Stuck between a rock and an A-bomb, he shuts himself into a led-lined fridge and is blown clear across the desert by the nuclear blast. The fridge doors open, Indy steps out, dusts himself off and gives the mushroom cloud one of those withering Harrison Ford looks.
Now, I don't think this particular scene is among the most problematic in this failed attempt to revive one of the most iconic 80s franchises. However, it is idiomatic of the kind of approach Steven Spielberg and writer David Koepp take to the material which ultimately sinks the whole project.
I think the idea of a fake idyllic American town is brilliant for one. The scene in which Indy explores the uncanny, empty place is "Twilight Zone"-ish in the best possible way. Furthermore, the franchise has made a habit of placing Indiana Jones in impossible, life-threatening situations only for him to find a brilliant way out of them. The thing is, in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", he keeps finding himself in impossible, life-threatening situations and then never finds clever ways to get out of them. He just survives.
The film is, thus, a cartoon. People get punched, shot at, fall off great heights, and blown up by nuclear bombs and only ever get a slight nosebleed and maybe, maybe a cut lip. In one scene, Indy and his mates fall off three separate waterfalls one after another and his hat stays on!
The great thing about the action scenes from the first three films is that even when they were funny there was always a real threat to them. Indiana Jones was never the strongest guy in the room. In fact, quite often he was the least prepared guy in the country and yet he would always manage to claw his way out of crazy situations through luck, cunning, and a little help from his friends. In this film, however, I kept expecting him to bounce off the ground when falling from a great height and come out of bomb explosions with soot on his face.
This cartoonishness extends itself to other aspects of the film as well. Karen Allen returns to the franchise as the tough, brilliant Marion Ravenwood. She is understandably pissed at Indy for dumping her some twenty years ago while pregnant and never coming back. Well, she's pissed at him for about five minutes and then completely forgives him. For the rest of the film, they banter and wisecrack at each other like it's 1981 again.
Worse than the fridge explosion are scenes that come later in the film such as the truly ridiculous scene in which Indy's young sidekick Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) commands a pack of monkeys to attack a Russian convoy and somehow manages to overcome the said convoy by swinging on lianas like Tarzan.
The frustrating thing is that a lot of these scenes are decently conceived and with a slightly more serious approach (Republic serial goofiness rather than Saturday morning cartoon goofiness) could have worked. There's a potentially terrific action scene in which Mutt swordfights the main Russian baddie Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) while balancing on the sides of two speeding jeeps. The scene is utterly ruined, however, by Marion (Mutt's mother) who commentates the fight as if she's watching her son fight in a friendly competition. She displays no concern for her son, she's not worried that he'll die, so why should we be?
No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get engrossed in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". There is no menace, no suspense, and no threat to our characters' well-being. What there is, however, is a singularly uninteresting plot - overly convoluted and utterly uninvolving lacking the glorious simplicity of "Raiders" or the clever mystery of "Crusade". Set in anonymous jungles, fictional temples, and CGI-laden locations, the film lacks the authenticity of its predecessors and their (however picturebook) historical intrigue.
It's a shame that this film falls apart as quickly as it does because it teases us with some rather neat possibilities. Cate Blanchett makes for a terrific baddie with her sinister Russian accent and severe bowl cut. She has the stylishness and the mysteriousness of Toth. It's also great to see Karen Allen back as well as some welcome newcomers to the franchise including the venerable British greats Ray Winstone and John Hurt.
Sadly, John Hurt is utterly wasted in a role that requires him to play the fool for the entirety of the runtime while Ray Winstone's character is so obviously sleazy and corrupt that his very presence makes Indiana Jones look like an idiot.
Harrison Ford is on form but a lot of what he should be doing is instead relegated to Mutt who is played in a rather dull way by Shia LaBeouf. Admittedly, I am no great LaBeouf fan but his performance here is distinctly lacking in charisma and any chemistry with Ford. The best Indiana Jones sidekicks are the ones who are his equals, who can stand up to him and give him hell. Mutt is not up to the task and instead spends the whole film being Indy's whipping boy.
"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is the perfect example of what happens when filmmakers return to a franchise far too late after they've long moved on as artists and forgotten what the original was all about.
I can't remember if at the time there was much clamouring for the return of Indiana Jones. There probably was. In that case, the wish for his return was made on a monkey's paw. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" feels like a pale impersonation of "Crusade" rather than a bold, new take on the series. It has more in common with "Allan Quatermain and the City of Gold" (in plot and in style) than the inventive, spirited, original films that it is trying to emulate.
2/4 - DirectorJames MangoldStarsHarrison FordPhoebe Waller-BridgeAntonio BanderasArchaeologist Indiana Jones races against time to retrieve a legendary artifact that can change the course of history.16-07-2023
By the end of the first third of "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny", I was sitting back happily in my seat, giddy like a schoolgirl, delighted at what I was seeing. I had been treated to a trademark Indiana Jones action prologue which although hampered by some questionable de-ageing effects and a tad on the long side proved an exciting and surprisingly witty opening. Atmospherically set on a train speeding through a dark and stormy night, it saw Indy (Harrison Ford) and his sidekick Basil "Oh, how we wish Denholm Elliott was still alive" Shaw (Toby Jones) battling some Nazis like it was 1981.
Fast-forwarding to 1969, we were treated to some enticing talk about Archimedes' time travelling machine by Basil's globetrotting antique-dealing daughter Helena (Pheobe Waller-Bridge). Hot on her trail, also seeking the titular dial is Dr Schmidt (Mads Mikkelsen), a former Nazi turned NASA scientist, who plans to use it to restore the Third Reich to its former glory.
I was so excited for the adventure that perhaps I was destined to be disappointed because the rest of "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is a dutiful, nuts-and-bolts nostalgia trip which provides thrills and a decent amount of entertainment but very rarely rises above what is absolutely necessary.
I found this film's second act a real drag. It tries to emulate "Raiders'" non-stop action and barrage of set-pieces but instead feels repetitive and bloated. It's one chase scene after the next all of which repeat the same familiar beats and end on the same anticlimax. The dial Indy is seeking is always in another castle.
James Mangold's direction is technically sound but the action scenes are altogether too frantic and cookie-cutter. Noticeably lacking are those little moments of humour or character building that made the action scenes in "Raiders" and "Crusade" so dazzling. Having only just left the theatre I'll be damned if I can remember a single stunt, a single moment, or even a single shot. It all blurs together into a muddle of shaking cameras and stuntmen with CGI'd faces.
What makes it all the more frustrating is that the third act is absolutely brilliant! Oh, how I wish the film wasn't a chase after the dial but rather a race through time using the dial's power rather than just waxing poetic about them. Imagine the brilliance of an Indiana Jones film in which Indy gets to visit all the time periods he's learned about, see the antiques he saved when they were new, and fight some time-travelling Nazis in important moments throughout history. When we finally get a taste of that exciting possibility it's two hours into the film and even though the climax is brilliant, fun, and rousing, it feels like we've been fed too little too late.
So, where does that leave us? Well, "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is definitely better than "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". OK, that's damning it with faint praise. While it is nowhere near as original or as well-made as the original trilogy, I do think the film has a lot of strong points.
I absolutely loved Mads Mikkelsen's evil Nazi. I love that he's now a NASA scientist, protected by the CIA. I love his sinister, grotesque performance which reminded me at times of Ronald Lacey's Toth. He is the best villain the series has had since the aforementioned little Gestapo torturer.
I also loved the criminally underused Toby Jones who is a much better replacement for Marcus Brody than Jim Broadbent was. Similarly underused are Thomas Kretschmann and Antonio Banderas whose appearances in the film boil down to cameos.
Speaking of cameos, I thought John Rhys-Davies was done justice by the filmmakers. Sallah is back for a few funny, well-written scenes. Karen Allen, however, was robbed. Her smart, tough, ebullient presence would have done this film a whole lot of good. Why she was relegated to a single-scene cameo is beyond me.
Onto the main cast where I definitely have some reservations. Harrison Ford still has the charm, charisma, and wit to play Indiana Jones. This is his best and most vivacious performance in decades even though he is obviously far, far too old to be convincing as an action hero. There are moments in this film where I laughed seeing the 78-year-old Ford supposedly leaping from one car to the next and engaging in fist-to-fist combat with people a third of his age.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whom I usually love both as an actor and as a writer, is a terrific foil for Ford and they have some great dialogue scenes together which brim with energy and caustic wit. I must confess, however, I didn't much like her character. I don't think it was a good idea to write Helena as basically a female version of Belloq from "Raiders". She's a thief, a graverobber, and a mercenary - essentially, the kind of person Indy would normally be fighting against. I just never bought her character arc or the fact that Indy sticks with her even after she double-crosses him multiple times.
A much more interesting character, to me, was Shaunette Renee Wilson's CIA agent who starts to become disillusioned with her agency after she realizes the extent of Dr Schmidt's villainy. She is a sadly underused character who is unceremoniously dispatched from the plot far, far too early and would have made a more interesting and more convincing sidekick for Indy than the duplicitous Helena.
Overall, "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is a workmanlike action picture, entertaining enough for the general audience and full of nostalgic throwbacks for the older fans. However, that wow factor of the originals is definitely missing and it's pervaded by a distinct taste of having been designed by a committee. I enjoyed it while it lasted but ultimately I don't think I'll be revisiting it along with the original trilogy when the inevitable rewatch comes along.
3/4 - DirectorBrian De PalmaStarsTom CruiseJon VoightEmmanuelle BéartAn American agent, under false suspicion of disloyalty, must discover and expose the real spy without the help of his organization.17-07-2023
The opening credits of the "Mission: Impossible" TV show were so exciting that they set a very high bar for the rest of the episode. In fact, my test of the quality of a "Mission: Impossible" episode is whether there is a single sequence or even a single moment that is nearly as adrenaline-pumping as the opening credits. There usually wasn't.
In 1996, 30 years after the original series began, someone finally realized that the high-stakes heists that formed the show's central premise would work much better on the big screen and an iconic modern franchise was born.
The prologue of the first "Mission: Impossible" film tries very hard to sell us on the idea that it'll be a team effort rather than a Tom Cruise vehicle. The team is led by Jon Voight, as mellifluous as ever, and includes such movie stars as Emmanuelle Beart, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emilio Estevez, and... Ingeborga Dapkunaite. Well, you can probably guess which one of them will die.
Of course, the answer is all of them and right at the beginning leaving Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, the sixth man on the team, on the run from the CIA who believe he is the mole who sold his comrades out.
The plot is complete garbage. A tedious retread of familiar spy cliches revolving around a list of all active CIA spies - a stupid thing for an organization that prides itself on its secrecy to have. Predictably, there are some sinister operatives looking to buy the list and a mole in the CIA offering to sell it. The casting of Vanessa Redgrave as the shady buyer is a stroke of genius but the identity of the mole is disappointingly obvious right from the get-go.
Then again, "Mission: Impossible" was never about the plot. There's a moment in this film where I realized that despite its thin story, it had me firmly in its grip. Ethan has assembled a new team including Ving Rhames' hackerman Luther and the duplicitous Krieger played beautifully by a snarling Jean Reno. They plan to infiltrate the CIA itself and steal the list in order to smoke out the real mole. Shocked by the audacity of Ethan's plan, Luther confronts him saying it can't be done. Ethan looks at him, smiles, and says "We're going to do it" at which point that brilliant Lalo Schifrin theme kicks in and I realized I was teetering on the edge of my seat.
The heist scenes are what makes these "Mission: Impossible" movies and the first film is no exception. The best and most iconic being, of course, the one in which Tom Cruise lowers himself into a highly-guarded computer room by dangling from the ceiling.
Director Brian de Palma gives this film his trademark sheen of style and polish but he also imbues it with an infectious simplicity. Before every heist sequence, we get a detailed but visually exciting briefing on how the plan is supposed to go, what all the dangers are, and how Ethan plans to subvert them. Then we watch the plan meticulously unfold and wait on tenterhooks for things to go wrong. No matter how many times the formula is repeated, by god it always works!
I liked "Mission: Impossible" as much for what it isn't. I love that it avoids tedious gunfights, chases, and fisticuffs. It doesn't try to evoke excitement through usual means instead continually relying on smarts, stylish visuals, and imagination to provide high-octane action sequences. It doesn't forget it's a spy thriller and not an action extravaganza.
The aforementioned scene in which Ethan and his team break into the CIA is much more suspenseful and tense because they are avoiding combat. They want to go in and out unseen and that's much more challenging both for the characters and for the filmmakers.
David Koepp and Robert Towne's screenplay is thin and highly predictable but it is considerably lifted by Brian de Palma's inspired direction and some truly astounding heist sequences that hold up even in the face of the film's much more actionized and cutting-edge sequels.
So, how about that test of mine? Are there any sequences or moments that are more exciting than the opening credits? Yes, absolutely! The CIA heist, for one, and the brilliant climactic scene involving a helicopter tailing a train, for two. The film is full of excitement and imagination and is still every bit as fun as it was back in 1996.
3.5/4 - DirectorTim StoryStarsGrace ByersJermaine FowlerMelvin GreggSeven friends go away for the weekend and end up trapped in a cabin with a killer who has a vendetta. Will their street smarts and knowledge of horror movies help them stay alive? Probably not.18-07-2023
"The Blackening" is based on a very funny sketch from a few years ago in which a group of friends find themselves chased by a killer who can't decide which one of them to kill first - you see they're ALL black. It's a clever premise for a 4-minute short indeed but historically, sketches have made for poor movies. There's just not enough material there to support a feature narrative.
To my surprise, however, "The Blackening" works mainly thanks to a sharp, smart, and bitingly funny screenplay by Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins and a first-rate ensemble cast whose chemistry and charisma shine even in some of the film's duller moments.
The story remains roughly the same - a group of college friends find themselves being chased around a cabin in the woods by a deranged crossbow-wielding psycho. The one added twist is the titular board game with a racist stereotype Sambo head in its centre. The killer forces the characters to play the board game - a black history trivial pursuit - in order to decide who lives and who dies. The questions include "How many seasons of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" was Dark Aunt Vivian in before she was replaced by the Light-Skinned Aunt Vivian" and "Name five black actors who appeared in "Friends".
Just recently, we've seen an influx of wannabe satirical takes on slasher films. "Bodies Bodies Bodies" was the most recent to try and fail to be this generation's "Scream". It was undone by unlikeable characters and an obvious twist. Out of all of these recent films (including the appalling reboots of "Halloween" and "Scream" itself), "The Blackening" is by far the one which comes the closest to the coveted prize.
Unlike "Bodies Bodies Bodies", Oliver and Perkins' script is populated by witty, smart, fleshed-out characters. The filmmakers are sympathetic to them and so are we. They are not merely stereotypes to be made fun of. The actors playing them are absolutely superb, especially Melvin Gregg who steals every scene he's in. Consequently, the film bristles with a kind of youthful, manic energy that is absolutely infectious.
The film has a sharp satirical edge which is aimed at the historically remorseless treatment of black people in horror movies. The great thing about "The Blackening", however, is that it makes its points while never forgetting to be entertaining and riotously funny. Oliver and Perkins don't stop the jokes to hammer home some weighty political agenda. In fact, the film is never weighted down by the points it's trying to make. Instead, it foregrounds the issues it is raising by cleverly placing them at the very heart of the story.
The weakest aspect of the film is its slasher trappings particularly because the filmmakers seem too in love with their characters to actually allow anything bad to happen to them. The first half of "The Blackening" is outstanding - full of clever, memorable dialogue and great character development - but as the film leans further into the slasher genre it seems to run out of steam.
The second half of the film, most of which is comprised of our heroes running away from the killer, is repetitious and lacking in genuine suspense. Tim Story's direction is not the problem. He manages to infuse the film with a great deal of spooky atmosphere, perfectly balancing the tone between comedy and horror (a rare feat indeed!). No, the issue is that at some point we realize that no one is going to get seriously hurt and the threat evaporates from the movie. That's a big problem for a slasher - a genre which arguably revolves entirely around kills and bloodshed.
The mystery is also awfully weak. I guessed the killer's identity before he even showed up and it's never a good idea to end the film with a lengthy exposition scene in which the killer has to explain his convoluted motivation to the audience.
But when the film is in its element of satire, I doubt you'll find a funnier slasher this year. The great thing about "Scream", and the reason I think it has remained so beloved, is that it works equally as both a viciously biting satire and a genuinely thrilling slasher. "The Blackening" doesn't quite reach that level.
Instead, I would argue that it could be this generation's "Scary Movie", an irreverent spoof which takes down the genre by turning its own tropes against itself. The one big difference, however, is that "The Blackening" is an infinitely smarter and more human movie. Its likeable, smart, funny characters are its strongest suit and just the interplay between them is worth the price of admission. If they ever make "The Blackening 2", and I sure hope they do, I just wish they'd put them in a better thought-out mystery and put them up against an actually threatening villain.
3/4 - DirectorJohn WooStarsTom CruiseDougray ScottThandiwe NewtonIMF agent Ethan Hunt is sent to Sydney to find and destroy a genetically modified disease called "Chimera".18-07-2023
What I loved about the original "Mission: Impossible" show and the subsequent Brian de Palma film was how they didn't rely on outrageous action scenes, gunplay, or chase scenes to build suspense and tension. They focused instead on their characters' inventiveness, ability to get out of tight spots without the use of violence, to think their way out of situations which other action heroes would shoot their way out of.
"Mission: Impossible II" throws all of that into the wind. It gleefully discards any pretence of intelligence and goes for balls-to-the-wall action. Gone is Brian de Palma and his penchant for Hitchcockcian thrillers. The director now is John Woo, easily my favourite Hong Kong director, and a man who is not known for subtlety. There is a whole two-minute sequence in "Mission: Impossible II" in which nothing happens except that a woman walks down a dock in slow-motion as her scarf twirls in the wind and her hair dances around her face obscuring a seductive smile. Yeah, this is a very different kind of movie.
John Woo's aesthetic makes a seismic change to the series even though Robert Towne's script could have easily been turned into a more low-key spy thriller. His main point of reference is Hitchcock's "Notorious" in which secret agent Cary Grant sends his lover Ingrid Bergman to infiltrate the lair of her former lover Claude Rains in order to find out where he is keeping the uranium he's stolen.
In "Mission: Impossible II", secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) sends his lover and a professional thief Nyah Hall (Thandiwe Newton) to infiltrate the lair of her former lover and secret agent gone rogue Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) in order to find out where he is keeping a deadly virus he's stolen.
The best performance in the film bar none comes from Thandiwe Newton who is a much more enticing, proactive, and intelligent love interest for Ethan Hunt than Emanuelle Beart was in the first film. She brings a certain sharpness and a sense of humour to the film which in turn gives her a whole lot more agency than women usually get in balls-to-the-wall action films.
The plot is just as ridiculous as the one in the previous film and just as forgettable. Who cares where the deadly virus is or what Ambrose is planning to do with it? We're here for the action scenes and by god John Woo delivers. Bringing all of his usual stylistic obsessions such as slow-motion, flips and kicks, gunplay that looks more like dancing, and doves, he crafts a rare action movie that is genuinely beautiful to look at. It has a grace and an artfulness to it that's rare in such a gritty, violent genre.
What is sadly missing are the heist scenes that made the first film and the original series such a joy to watch. Ethan Hunt's inventiveness remains untested for the duration of this film which is a shame as I'd love to see John Woo's take on the iconic CIA infiltration sequence from the first film.
Also missing is any semblance of reality. Take, for instance, the famous "Mission: Impossible" masks which were used sparingly and smartly in the first film. Here, however, it seems that every few scenes one of the characters will whip off a mask to reveal another character underneath. Those masks must be magical because they also seem to alter the wearer's height, gestures, and acting prowess. Ethan Hunt is particularly fond of these masks as he seems to take a few with him wherever he goes. You never know when the plot will require you to become someone else.
There's a lot more to criticise about "Mission: Impossible II" but at some point, you have to wonder what the point would be. This is such an unapologetically over-the-top action film, intentionally goofy and stylized that realism and common sense would be a burden to it. Once I discarded any desire for it to make sense, I found it a whole lot of fun. I especially loved all of the John Wooisms on display like the hilarious and gorgeous montage in which Ethan and Nyah make eyes at each other as flamenco dancers mingle between them in extreme slow-motion as Hans Zimmer's franchise-best soundtrack strums away in the background. That's poetic cinema!
3/4 - DirectorTerry O. MorseStarsSidney TolerMantan MorelandVictor Sen YungCharlie investigates murders connected with insurance fraud. This one is set in San Francisco's Chinatown.19-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorJ.J. AbramsStarsTom CruiseMichelle MonaghanVing RhamesIMF agent Ethan Hunt comes into conflict with a dangerous and sadistic arms dealer who threatens his life and his fiancée in response.19-07-2023
It's interesting to note that the first two films in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise were directed by two of the most unique, stylish, and recognisable action directors possibly in the history of American cinema. Brian de Palma directed the first film giving it an old-school, Hitchcockian touch seamlessly blended with his own trademark touches. The second film was directed by the legendary Hong Kong action movie auteur John Woo who took the series onto a whole new track with his over-the-top, hyper-stylized visual, liberal overuse of slow-motion, and dance-like gunplay.
The third film in the franchise, however, was directed by J.J. Abrams who even at a huge stretch is nowhere near being in the same directorial league as de Palma and Woo. He's a decade-defining producer and creative force behind such megafranchises as "Lost", the revamped "Star Trek" films, and the "Star Wars" sequel trilogy, but as a director, he has an undistinguished workmanlike approach.
"Mission: Impossible III" was his directorial debut and without a strong cinematic stylist behind the camera it resembles a high-budget, high-octane TV pilot. It has that glossy sheen that 2000s action movies had which gives it that distinct taste of a corporate product. It's a perfectly serviceable action film full of explosions, shootouts, and stunts but it lacks the personality that made the previous two films stand out from the crowd. It doesn't have Brian de Palma's slickness, John Woo's grandeur, or even Tom Cruise's particular brand of ambitious insanity.
It is the last "Mission: Impossible" film not to have a subtitle but if it had it should have been "Mission: Impossible III - This Time It's Personal". The film begins with the bad guy, a sleazy sadistic arms dealer Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), holding a gun to the head of Ethan Hunt's wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan). He will count to ten, he says, before he blows her brains out unless Ethan (Tom Cruise), tied up in the chair across from her, tells him where the rabbit's foot is.
What is the rabbit's foot? We never find out but from what I can gather it's some kind of a doomsday device or something... They might as well have just come out with it and called it McGuffin.
Before Davian's count is out, we flashback a few days before and the plot begins in earnest when Ethan is pulled from his own engagement party and ordered to go and rescue an agent who's been captured by Davian. His wife, as it turns out, still lives in blissful ignorance thinking her hot husband-to-be works for the Department of Transportation and that his boring life consists of studying traffic patterns and attending suddenly convened two-day conferences every now and then.
The introduction of Ethan's private life might have seemed like a good idea to the writing team of Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Abrams but character development is not what we go to see these films for. Like James Bond or Indiana Jones, I find that Ethan Hunt is more compelling and plain more fun when he's a mystery. A secret agent with a secret life who rides into town on a cool motorcycle, kills the bad guys, beds the hot girl, and rides out into the sunset never to be seen again... until the sequel that is.
It doesn't help that Michelle Monaghan's Julia is written like a complete chump and that she shares so few scenes and almost no chemistry with Tom Cruise that she too becomes nothing more than a kind of a McGuffin.
What we do go to see these movies for are the spectacular, suspenseful heist sequences and "Mission: Impossible III" contains two big ones. The first is an extended and beautifully orchestrated sequence in which Ethan and his team have to break into the Vatican. The other is shorter but arguably more memorable and sees Ethan swinging between two Shanghai skyscrapers.
These two sequences are superb, unfortunately, what happens between them is far less interesting. The plot is more coherent in this film than it was in the previous two but there are also far more chases, shootouts, and mindless violence than before. This is not what "Mission: Impossible" movies should be all about. They are about using brains rather than brawn, subtly infiltrating rather than shooting your way in, deploying subterfuge rather than heat-seeking missiles.
Without John Woo's stylish direction to make them appear balletic and graceful, these action sequences are a proper bore. J.J. Abrams overuses shaky cam and edits them so aggressively that they appear sliced rather than cut together. I had trouble following what was going on and even more trouble getting myself interested in what was going on.
The two great sequences in "Mission: Impossible III" are among the franchise's finest but they only comprise about 30 minutes of this two-hour movie. The rest of it is comprised of inane action fodder, severely underwritten romance scenes (which were also done far, far better in John Woo's film), and a fairly predictable spy plot which fails to generate much intrigue.
I suppose in the grand scheme of things, "Mission: Impossible III" is a perfectly serviceable actioner but as a follow-up to a Brian de Palma thriller and a John Woo action extravaganza, it is a woeful disappointment even though Philip Seymour Hoffman's Davian is the best villain the franchise has had so far.
2.5/4 - DirectorChristopher McQuarrieStarsTom CruiseRosamund PikeRichard JenkinsA homicide investigator digs deeper into a case involving a trained military sniper responsible for a mass shooting.19-07-2023
I must confess that I've never read any of Lee Child's novels but I did absolutely love the "Reacher" TV show starring Alan Ritchson. I say that because the most frequent criticism of the 2012 "Jack Reacher" film is that Tom Cruise is nothing like the Reacher of the novels. I can't really say but he is not a million miles away from Ritchson's portrayal and he certainly gives one hell of a convincing performance.
But the film had me gripped before Cruise's Reacher ever showed up. It opens with a chilling sequence in which we watch as a sniper perched on top of a building picks off civilians milling about miles away. Director Christopher McQuarrie shoots the sequence largely through the sniper's viewfinder forcing us in essence to experience his own cold-blooded thrill.
The film then moves onto an equally compelling montage showing a different cold-blooded professional process - the investigation. Detective Emerson (David Oyelowo) and his team inspect the crime scene, collect the shells and fibers, and most crucially find a fingerprint in an unexpected place - a coin inside a parking meter. Within 18 hours they have a suspect in custody. "Must be some kind of a record," says the district attorney (Richard Jenkins) as he presses the suspect, a former army sniper (Joseph Sikora), to confess. But the suspect holds steady and only says one sentence: "Get Jack Reacher".
Who is this mystery man? Well, another in a series of cypher action heroes played by Tom Cruise in recent years. He is a former military policeman who is now living off the grid. He has no driver's licence, no credit cards, no permanent residence. He is untraceable and the only way to get in touch with him is if he gets in touch with you.
Despite what the ardent Lee Child fans may tell you Tom Cruise is terrific in the part. Sure, he may not be as tall as the Reacher in the novel but frankly, I don't give a damn. His performance imparts so much more about the character than his physical attributes. Look, for instance, at the cool, professional, collected way he walks around the crime scene. Look at the way he sizes up his enemies before they even approach him. Look at the way he communicates - with curt, to-the-point sentences which leave no room for interpretation.
Reacher is a fascinating character and one of the best performances Tom Cruise has given in his life.
At 130 minutes, "Jack Reacher" is leisurely but it fills its runtime with intriguing, fleshed-out characters. It spends time with them giving them distinct personalities and histories. One of the film's best sequences is a montage which takes us back to the day of the murders only showing the crime from the perspective of the victims. It spends time on each of them making them more than anonymous cannon fodder. Getting us to understand the personal tragedy behind the thriller plot.
It also takes a lot of care to properly and clearly tell its complex story. "Jack Reacher" is a real mystery, not just a cheap actioner posing as one. The plot, based on Lee Child's "One Shot", is solid if not all that original. I predicted most of its twists but I had a good time tagging along for the ride.
Don't get me wrong, the film has some terrific action scenes in it as well and I just love the way Christopher McQuarrie shoots them. He lets the choreography breathe without drowning it in shaky cam and quick cuts. He doesn't overwhelm the scenes with loud, pumping music. Instead, most of the action scenes unfold in concentrated silence creating a palpable sense of tension and unease.
One particularly good fight scene is actually comedic in nature. In it, Reacher lets two of the goons essentially beat each other up as they try to beat him up in a tiny bathroom. The scene is very funny but works only because McQuarrie catches each and every beat of it. Every moment of confusion on the goons' faces, every wry smile from Reacher, every punch.
Speaking of punches, I am fascinated by how visceral they are in this film. Not only do we see every punch connect, but we also hear a thudding, bone-crunching sound effect which made me physically wince every single time. I never usually commend action scenes since I am not a huge fan of them but in "Jack Reacher" they are so well executed and so viscerally effective that I feel compelled to mention them.
"Jack Reacher" has its fair share of problems: it is all things considered a tad too long, the plot doesn't wrap up as neatly as it thinks it does, and I wish the colourful villains got more screentime than Reacher's rather bland lawyer sidekick Helen (Rosamund Pike). Still, it is an above-average action film because the stuff between the fight scenes is just as interesting, just as exciting, and given just as much care as the excellent fight scenes themselves.
After such an impressive showing, I am not surprised Tom Cruise asked Christopher McQuarrie to come and direct his flagship franchise - "Mission: Impossible".
3.5/4 - DirectorTerry O. MorseStarsSidney TolerGloria WarrenVictor Sen YungA treasury agent on the trail of counterfeit money confides to fellow ocean liner passenger Charlie Chan that there have been two attempts on his life.20-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorEdward ZwickStarsTom CruiseCobie SmuldersAldis HodgeJack Reacher must uncover the truth behind a major government conspiracy in order to clear his name while on the run as a fugitive from the law.20-07-2023
Without Christopher McQuarrie at the helm, "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" lacks the personality and the stylishness of the original. The first film was a smart, tense, intelligent thriller in line with Lee Child's novels which also happened to have some of the most striking, realistic, and suspenseful fight scenes I've seen in years. The sequel feels through and through like a corporate product - a ginric cash-in on a potentially lucrative IP. It's a paint-by-numbers actioner with wall-to-wall fight scenes, chases, and explosions none of which are in the least bit memorable or imaginative. Shot in that annoying shaky cam, chop-chop style, "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" really should have taken the advice in its title and left the original standing tall and alone.
Tom Cruise once again stars in the role of the former military policeman turned lone wolf drifter wandering from one town to the next looking for injustice to set right. He is terrific in the part as he was before giving the stony-faced Reacher an understated soulfulness and a concentrated intensity. He is utterly convincing in the part.
The plot takes him back to his old army days as he becomes entangled with Major Turner (Cobie Smolders), his replacement in the military police. She is arrested and wrongfully accused of espionage and after a bit of snooping so is Reacher. Together they go on the run in order to clear their names and stop me when you've heard this one before...
The plot taken from Child's same-named novel is utterly conventional and frequently disregarded in the screenplay written by committee and credited to Richard Wenk, Marshall Herskovitz, and Edward Zwick. It twists and turns but keeps running into inane fight scenes and chases which lead nowhere. By the time the final twist landed, I couldn't remember where we had started from.
Also in the film is Sam (Danika Yarosh), a rebellious teenager who may or may not be Reacher's daughter. Her addition to the picture is a cynical attempt at examining Reacher's emotional side. Well, the first film had already done that in a subtler, smarter, more effective manner. Without needing to resort to these kinds of cheap and dull melodramatics.
The fight scenes are just as unremarkable and frankly boring as the plot. Zwick opts to shoot them in that shaky cam way that makes everything going on unintelligible. I couldn't make out most of the fight choreography which is a shame since the little I did see seemed fun.
As you may have gathered, I'm not a huge fan of "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back". It's exactly the kind of movie that I was glad the first film wasn't. Still, I do have to say that some of it does have that quaint charm of cheap 90s action flicks and perhaps had I rented this film on VHS way back in the day I might have enjoyed it more.
I also liked Cobie Smulders as the tough Major Turner. I liked how she consistently gave Reacher hell and didn't stand for his macho wisecracks. I like how she challenged him and was his equal both in the action scenes and the dialogue scenes. She is a far better character than the one Rosamund Pike played in the first film.
But the rest of "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" is predictable, muddled, and dull, dull, dull. I was gripped by the premise of Reacher going back to the army but as the film went on I began to realize that it was more interested in shooting guns and breaking bones than telling a compelling story. Sadly, it ends up doing neither in an exciting way.
2/4 - DirectorChristopher McQuarrieStarsRyan PhillippeBenicio Del ToroJuliette LewisTwo criminal drifters without sympathy get more than they bargained for after kidnapping and holding for ransom the surrogate mother carrying a baby for a powerful, shady man.20-07-2023
We're introduced to our two anti-heroes as they pick a fight with a goofy-looking punk in front of a crowded nightclub. They manage to break his girlfriend's nose before they're utterly ripped apart by the crowd gathered in front. This is the kind of guys they are. Stupid in the worst way. The way that makes them immune to fear and common sense. The way that makes them almost competent as criminals. The operative word, of course, is almost.
They are known only by their aliases. Mr Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Mr Longbaugh (Benicio Del Toro). In the waiting room of the sperm bank where they deposit their specimens, they hatch a plan to kidnap a heavily pregnant surrogate of a very rich man.
The kidnapping itself goes surprisingly smoothly if only because the girl, Robin (Juliette Lewis), wants to be kidnapped. She has developed feelings for the child she's carrying and doesn't want to hand it over.
From here on in, the film turns into a criminal mosaic made up of all kinds of characters with ulterior motives and no morals. It turns out that the rich man is a known criminal (Scott Wilson) who sends out two murderous goons (Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt) after our hapless kidnappers. But the goons are no fools and they hatch a plan to steal the money for themselves. Also after the kidnappers is the more reasonable if no less deadly Joe Sarno (James Caan), the rich man's fixer, who has the ulterior motive to beat all ulterior motives but since it's not revealed until the end I won't spoil it here. To top it all off, the rich man's spoiled trophy wife (Kristin Lehman) is having an affair with one of the goons while the doctor monitoring the pregnancy (Dylan Kussman) is in love with the surrogate. Oh, and he's also the rich man's son from a previous marriage. Confused yet? Good.
The insanely complex plotting should come as no surprise seeing how "The Way of the Gun" is the directorial debut of Christopher McQuarrie, best known for writing "The Usual Suspects" and taking over the "Mission: Impossible" franchise. It is also one of the most 1990s indie movies I've ever seen to the point where I suspect that at least some of it was intended as self-parody.
The dialogue, for one, is hilariously overwritten. There are movie references galore, cryptic talk about "what happened in Baltimore", and pseudo-philosophical musings like "the only thing you can guess about a broken down old man is that he is a survivor". All of this is delivered in a deadpan manner by a series of quirky, cartoonish characters. The obvious influence here is Quentin Tarantino but it's hard not to notice that the plot is "Fargo" by way of "Bottle Shock" and the atmosphere is Sam Peckinpah by way of Michael Mann.
Christopher McQuarrie is a writer who always manages to find interesting characters and situations even in the most cliched of plots. "The Way of the Gun" is chock full of them. Especially interesting to me was the rich man's household so full of duplicity, greed, and barely hidden hatred. The idea of a baby being brought into this environment is horrific so we can feel for Robin at least a little.
The least interesting people for me were the two kidnappers. They are certainly the least well-drawn of the ensemble and feel the most like movie characters. They seem to have no backstory and no definite personalities. They speak only in cyphers and wisecracks. Phillippe and Del Toro seem to be playing the mood of the picture rather than human beings. There is no dimension to them beyond the function they have to perform in the plot.
The best performance by far comes from James Caan as the weathered old professional. Right from the moment he walks into the picture, he knows how it's all going to end.
McQuarrie has written a lot of good material here but he never acquires a tight enough grip on it. There are too many characters, too many situations, too many double-crosses, and altogether too much plot for an inexperienced director to handle. Indeed, the whole picture falls apart in the disappointing third act which abandons all pretence of intelligence and plotting to degenerate into a second-rate shootout. After watching these characters plot and scheme for 90 minutes it's a real letdown to never see their plans play out.
I enjoyed "The Way of the Gun" on a scene-to-scene basis but McQuarrie never pulls them all together into a coherent whole. The pacing is wildly uneven and languorous, the tone constantly flip-flops between farce and melodrama, and ultimately I have no idea what this whole film was actually about besides style.
Beneath all the layers of jigsaw plotting, movie references, over-stylization, and forced quirkiness, is a really good thriller about some interesting people caught in a situation so complicated they themselves can't comprehend it. McQuarrie the writer has set it all up but McQuarrie the director hasn't quite got the confidence and the competence to bring it out to the surface.
2.5/4 - DirectorHoward BrethertonStarsSidney TolerMantan MorelandVictor Sen YungWhen a troupe of showgirls with their impresario and press agent vacation at a Malibu Beach resort, two of them are garroted. Charlie takes on the case assisted by Number Two Son Jimmy and faithful chauffeur Birmingham Brown.21-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorWilliam BeaudineStarsRoland WintersWarren DouglasMantan MorelandSoon after a Chinese princess comes to the US to buy planes for her people, she is murdered by a poison dart fired by an air rifle.21-07-2023
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https://www.imdb.com/list/ls539978222/ - DirectorWolfgang PetersenStarsClint EastwoodJohn MalkovichRene RussoSecret Service agent Frank Horrigan couldn't save Kennedy, but he's determined not to let a clever assassin take out this president.22-07-2023
I miss films like "In the Line of Fire". Solid thrillers for people who love solid thrillers. Films that have no major marketing hook, no giant stunt to feature in the trailers, and that don't aim to be the most expensive, highest-grossing, most explosive movie ever made. It's the kind of movie that had its last big resurgence in the 1990s and the kind of movie that Clint Eastwood excelled at making before he decided he wanted to be an important filmmaker.
"In the Line of Fire" is one of his finest films perhaps exactly because he didn't direct it. Instead, it's helmed by Wolfgang Petersen whose direction is taut, suspenseful, and exciting. He gives Jeff Maguire's occasionally ludicrous screenplay the kind of urgent energy that just sweeps you along and stops you from thinking too hard about the plot.
Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent who 30 years ago failed to save JFK and is still paying for his mistake. In one of his best performances, Eastwood is utterly convincing as the man who spends his days replaying those events in his head trying to come up with all the different ways it should have played out and all the different ways he can blame himself for failing to protect the president. There's a terrific montage in the first third of the film where the camera slowly dollies into Eastwood's haunted, haggard face as the Zapruder film plays, but his performance is so good that I wonder if maybe the filmmakers didn't even need to lay on the assassination footage. I think we would have known what he was thinking about anyway.
The plot begins when a tip-off from a landlady leads Horrigan and his partner Al (Dylan McDermott) to the apartment of a mysterious master of disguise (John Malkovich) whose walls are lined with pictures from that faithful Dallas morning. Soon enough, Horrigan is getting phone calls from the man who claims he is planning to kill the president.
The relationship between Malkovich and Eastwood in this film is really its most fascinating part. Both are cool operatives, professional and ruthless in the line of fire. More importantly, both of them are planning to give up their lives for the president's - Eastwood to save him, Malkovich to kill him. Weirdly, Malkovich sees a kind of kindred spirit in Eastwood's secret service agent and the way Maguire develops their relationship through a series of fantastically written and performed telephone calls is truly surprising.
The actual plot grows more and more ridiculous as it progresses. Malkovich offs people left and right and no one seems to notice. Furthermore, even after he's killed four people, including one secret service agent, the White House Chief of Staff (Fred Dalton Thompson) still refuses to cancel the president's campaign tour. At a certain point, "his ratings are down" is not a good enough excuse.
Furthermore, Malkovich is able to move around freely among Secret Service agents even though all of them have his photograph in their pockets. He's supposed to be a master of disguise yet each of his disguises looks exactly like John Malkovich!
The most ridiculous part of the film is the tacked-on love affair between the 63-year-old Horrigan and his 24-years younger colleague Lilly Raines (Rene Russo). Eastwood and Russo trade some clever barbs at each other but I can't help but feel that the relationship between them would have been much more convincing as some kind of a mentorship. They're clearly badly matched lovers and the chemistry between them is not romantic in the least.
But "In the Line of Fire" is much better as a whole than a sum of its parts. It's a delightfully efficient thriller which consistently delivers thrills. It works mainly, I think, because we genuinely are not sure if Horrigan has it in him to save the President. Like Eastwood's gunslinger in "Unforgiven", Horrigan is a broken-down old man, sickly and far from his peak efficiency while Malkovich is deadly, sinister, and truly smart. He is a superb thriller villain, one who poses a real threat to the protagonist not only in a physical sense but also intellectually.
Petersen gives the film a pulsating pace but smartly takes his time in unveiling the villain. It takes a long while before we even see Malkovich's eyes and even longer before we begin to learn anything about his backstory which makes him all the scarier.
"In the Line of Fire" is no masterpiece but it is a first-rate thriller from a time when the genre was content with telling good stories about interesting people in unusual situations. A terrific supporting cast and a rousing score from Ennio Morricone only add to what is already a fun, suspenseful movie.
3.5/4 - DirectorLesli Linka GlatterStarsKenneth BranaghMadeleine StoweWilliam HurtLonging to have a baby, a sterile 1930s Bostonian hires a man to impregnate his wife.22-07-2023
Arthur (William Hurt) is a very rich man who cannot have children. He is married to the ravishingly beautiful Eleanor (Madeleine Stowe) who oh so wants children. In order to resolve what was an impossible problem in the 1930s, he makes the titular proposal to the young, clumsy but ambitious businessman Roger (Neil Patrick Harris) - he is to act as Arthur's surrogate, impregnate his wife, and keep the secret in exchange for a whole lot of money. As Arthur's faithful lawyer Hannibal (Robert Loggia) puts it, he's to get a lot of money to make love with a beautiful woman and walk away.
This sounds like a terrific premise for a Billy Wilder comedy Jack Lemmon might have starred in. Indeed, the scenes in which the sexually inexperienced Roger fumbles his way into Eleanor's bed embarrassed by his erection did get more than a few guffaws out of me. Unfortunately, the screenplay by Rick Ramage doesn't seem to realise it is howlingly hilarious. As directed by Lesli Linka Glatter it descends into such pained, overwrought, po-faced melodrama that even the smallest violin in the world wouldn't be pathetic enough to provide a soundtrack to it.
The plot gets heated up when Roger's decision to claim the child as his own coincides with the arrival of a new priest to the parish. The young and virile Father Michael (Kenneth Branagh) is, in fact, the secret son of Arthur's older and much-hated brother and if you thought it'll all end on that you've not seen enough episodes of "All My Children". Of course, Eleanor falls for the hot priest and of course, she loses her baby and of course, there's murder and mayhem and heated passions thrown into the mix.
Now melodrama is touchy business. When played right it can be a lot of fun or it can even end up being quite profound. If "The Proposition" wanted to be fun, this material needed a director like Franco Zeffirelli or even Kenneth Branagh himself. Someone willing to take it way over the top, indulge in its wildest emotions, make it as visually sumptuous as it is narratively preposterous. If, on the other hand, it wanted to be serious and deep, it needed someone of Krzysztof Zanussi's calibre. Someone who could eke out the emotional honesty and character development out of this frankly ridiculous story.
Lesli Linka Glatter, a prolific and terrific TV director, achieves neither. She seems to take the script at face value, as she might a script for an episode of a TV show she was guesting on. She doesn't add any special flavour or style to the piece. In fact, the whole film is vastly tonally inconsistent which is evident from the aforementioned scene with Roger and Eleanor. The proceedings in the bedroom are farcical and played for laughs but every so often we cut to Arthur moping around in the garden, getting wet in the rain, looking like someone... well whose wife is having sex with another man. Just the very fact that these sombre, melodramatic close-ups are inserted in the middle of such a goofy scene makes them unintentionally hilarious.
The whole film is quite funny, to be honest, mostly when it isn't trying to be. The only word fit enough to describe Rick Ramage's screenplay is insane. It plays out like the ravings of a lunatic. Every scene seems to introduce some new twist or new angle which makes the story even more preposterous. Coincidences drive the plot such as the one when Eleanor just happens to visit Michael when he just happens to be burying some poor unknown sod in the pauper's graveyard. He then just happens to ask her to attend the funeral which she just happens to do. The casket is, for some utterly inexplicable reason, open and she glances at the man's face only to recognise... Well, I won't spoil it but the shock is enough to make her faint and fall into the open grave at which point I laughed until tears welled up in my eyes. Not quite the kind of tears "The Proposition" hoped to incur though.
I suppose "The Proposition" will have its charms for the audience who might enjoy an odd episode of "All My Children". I must confess I enjoyed some of it myself if for all the wrong reasons. It's certainly never boring and the performances are good even though never quite as good as you'd expect from the actors involved. But there is a reason why "All My Children" was 60 minutes long. There's only so much insanity a man can take in one sitting and "The Proposition" hit that quota by the end of its first act.
There is no hope that any of it can be taken seriously, especially when you learn that Blythe Danner supposedly raised William Hurt or when you realize that the whole film is narrated by Father Michael to Hannibal who was actually present for most of the story and would have already known quite a few of the things Father Michael tells him. Still, if taken in the right way (as a so insane it's good kind of movie), I think this can be quite entertaining.
1.5/4 - DirectorJeff WadlowStarsLucy HaleTyler PoseyViolett BeaneA harmless game of Truth or Dare among friends turns deadly when someone - or something - begins to punish those who tell a lie or refuse the dare.22-07-2023
From the "making mundane party games scary" school of horror filmmaking comes "Truth or Dare", the unholy bastard child of "Wish Upon" and "It Follows" that made Blumhouse more than 90 million dollars. I, on the other hand, wouldn't want to see it again even on a dare. Not because it's a bad film, even though it is, but because it's a pretty bland, unsatisfying, and wholly unremarkable watch which will evaporate from your mind before the credits roll. It's a mishmash of familiar cliches poorly recycled from far better bad movies.
The premise is clever, I'll grant them that. I like the idea of making a horror film around a game of truth or dare. A better, smarter filmmaker could have made a wickedly entertaining movie around it motivating the characters to up the stakes of the game not through some cockamamie ancient curse but through actual character-building and interpersonal relationships.
The plot is a blatant rip-off of "It Follows" and revolves around a group of teenagers who are shanghaied into playing truth or dare by a mysterious and desperate character. It turns out, much like in the far superior "It Follows", that he has cursed them deliberately because the only way for him to live is to find more players.
From there on in, the film settles into a repetitive formula of a few scenes of the teenagers trying to investigate the origins of the curse being followed by a "truth or dare" sequence in which those who refuse to either reveal a dark secret or do an outrageous dare die in brutal ways.
The problem with this film is threefold. The first is that we don't care at all what happens to these characters. There are seven players in this game and not a single one of them is a remotely likeable or fleshed-out character. This problem should in no way reflect on the surprisingly solid cast who do their best with the film's superficial, dumb writing. No, the problem is entirely down to the screenplay which only treats the protagonists like cannon fodder.
Secondly, the investigation into the curse is lifted wholesale from similar films like "The Bye Bye Man" and offers no twists on the familiar cliches. It's trite, fairly boring, and entirely unsurprising setting up a predictable and poorly executed climax.
Thirdly and most fatally, the actual truth-or-dare scenes are not at all scary. In fact, the whole film lacks any kind of a creepy atmosphere or outright scares. Even the ubiquitous jump scare quota is shockingly low. The dares are not all that outrageous (they're on the level of a hack YouTube prankster), the truths would only be impactful if we actually cared about the characters saying them (which we're not), and the repercussions are so quick, unimaginative, and bloodless that they leave no impact on us. Maybe this film should have stolen more liberally from "Final Destination" or, for that matter, "Wish Upon" which at least had the decency to be outrageous when it couldn't be scary.
The film was directed by Jeff Wadlow who had previously directed "Cry Wolf", another horror film which tried to turn a party game scary and failed. His direction is best described as shoddy. The entire film has a cheap look of a quickie to it. Scenes are haphazardly blocked, the mise-en-scene seems improvised, and every shot is flat and overlit. Most tellingly, there is a number of shots in which two characters are talking to each other and the actors behind them clearly have no idea what to do while they're waiting for their turn to speak. So they walk about aimlessly, flail their arms, and shoot significant looks at each other as if they're wandering where their careers are going after this mess.
I've certainly seen many worse horror films than "Truth or Dare" but that shouldn't reflect on my overall score in any way. This is one of those dull, safe, predictable horror films which are relatively amiable and enjoyable as background noise while you're doing something else. That way at least you won't notice that entire scenes are missing, key events happen off-screen, and none of the characters have any kind of a personality. If, however, you happen to look at the screen too long you'll become haunted by the curse of common sense which will force you to turn the film off and watch something actually good.
1/4 - DirectorBrad BirdStarsTom CruiseJeremy RennerSimon PeggThe IMF is shut down when it's implicated in the bombing of the Kremlin, causing Ethan Hunt and his new team to go rogue to clear their organization's name.23-07-2023
At one point in "Ghost Protocol", the fourth "Mission: Impossible" movie, the Kremlin blows up. Yes, the whole thing! The entire magnificent, enormous, imposing building is obliterated by a somewhat wonky-looking CGI explosion. That kind of hokum is something only a truly entertaining movie can pull off. If you're not having fun, such grandstanding is a real turn-off. Thankfully, "Ghost Protocol" is maybe the most out-and-out fun of all the "Mission: Impossible" movies so far and that's really saying something.
Now, I'm not saying it's a perfect film. The screenplay by Josh Apellbaum and Andre Nemec is such a collection of handwaves and bare-minimum set-ups that my mouth was agape at the sheer boldness of it all. Never have I been more intently aware that all the stunts and set pieces were planned out before an inkling of the plot was made up. The way "Ghost Protocol" functions is that there's a brief and usually off-hand dialogue scene in which one of the team goes "Well, we have to get the McGuffin from the Deadly Locked Room", and then another member of the team replies "But the Deadly Locked Room is Deadbolted by the Security Thing", and then the third member of the team goes, "Well, there's a way to get past the Security Thing and it's by doing the Incredibly Dangerous Stunt", at which point Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) goes off and does the incredibly dangerous stunt.
The whole movie and everyone in it is at the service of the set pieces. Their sole part in the film is to either hinder or help Ethan at achieving incredible World Record breaking feats. The saving grace is, of course, that the set pieces are so much fun and so perfectly executed that you gleefully forget that everything around them is hollow and kinda dumb. With Tom Cruise's infectious energy and enthusiasm and director Brad Bird's pitch-perfect balancing between the sublime and the ridiculous, "Ghost Protocol" is always moving at just the right speed that you never have the time to stop and think about its plot. Indeed, the most difficult scene to believe in the whole film is the one in which Ethan Hunt supposedly isn't eager to climb the Burj Khalifa. Yeah, right!
The story, such as it is, begins when Ethan Hunt and his team are accused of blowing up the Kremlin. Now hunted by the Russians, they have to find out the true perpetrator who, also by the way, happens to have the Russian nuclear launch codes. Happy days!
The team this time unfortunately does not contain Ving Rhames's sardonic computer hacker Luther and the film is poorer for it. His role, however, is successfully filled by Simon Pegg as Benji, probably the best comic relief I've seen in a very long time. Pegg is terrific in the part because he doesn't overplay it. Benji's goofy and wisecracking but he's no fool and Pegg smartly avoids playing all of the moments for laughs. Also in the team is the always welcome Jeremy Renner as the mysterious intelligence man Brandt and Paula Patton as Jane whose character is about as bland and forgettable as her name.
After the dull and actionized "Mission: Impossible III", "Ghost Protocol" is a real return to form for the series. OK, admittedly it is still a tad too shooty-shooty, runny-runny for my taste, but the bulk of the set pieces revolve around deception rather than confrontation. There's a great line in the film which really perfectly sums up the whole point of the series and why "Mission: Impossible" stands out from all the other action franchises. It comes right after Ethan Hunt has explained his latest outrageous scheme to the worried Brandt. He replies: "The Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world and you want to alter its infrastructure with the hopes of convincing two people that they've had a meeting which actually really never happened?"
The most talked about scene in "Ghost Protocol" is the one in which Tom Cruise scales the Burj Khalifa. In fact, the entire sequence set in Dubai is superb from that edge-of-your-seat stunt right to the dazzling chase through a sandstorm. In between, however, is the part of the film which really impressed me. It revolves around the aforementioned meeting and plays out exactly like an old "Mission: Impossible" episode just with a higher budget and better pacing. It's a superb sequence which relies on intelligence and wile rather than shootouts and fisticuffs and is the most fun I've had in any of these movies so far.
"Ghost Protocol" is the best "Mission: Impossible" movie so far because it manages to be more entertaining and more spectacular than the ones that came before. Still, I do have to say that I miss Brian de Palma's approach to the series just a bit because that first film still had a foot in the door of reality and because that is the only "Mission: Impossible" movie in which Ethan Hunt isn't the human embodiment of Jesus Christ Superhero. Still, with its stellar cast, great set pieces, and Brad Bird's pacy direction "Ghost Protocol" is a whole barrel of fun. Just ignore the talky bits in between the good stuff. They don't really matter.
3.5/4 - DirectorJames WongStarsDevon SawaAli LarterKerr SmithAfter getting a premonition about a plane crash on his school trip, Alex, a student saves a few of his classmates. However, their situation gets complicated when death starts chasing them.23-07-2023
"Final Destination" does not get enough credit for being one of the most playful and definitely the most entertaining film of the 2000s slasher craze. It takes the familiar dead teenagers formula, expects you to know it inside out, and then proceeds to subvert all of your expectations. Perhaps it's because it does so with less panache and less obviously than "Scream" or because it's just so cheesy and fun, but "Final Destination" is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Wes Craven's slasher classic. I think it should be.
Everyone knows that a good dead teenagers film slowly builds up to the kills. So, for its first trick, "Final Destination" will kill all of its main characters in the first act. Well, temporarily at least. The premise of the "Final Destination" franchise, if you have been living under a rock, is always the same. A person gets a premonition of an imminent disaster which will claim the lives of a number of people. After a spectacular sequence showing us that disaster, the film then goes back in time to the moment when our lead had the premonition. They then save the lives of the people who would have died in the disaster. But, you can't cheat death and the appointment these people had with it must still be kept.
If you think the premise sounds like an episode of "The X Files", that's because it originally was. This first film is based on a spec script submitted by Jeffrey Reddick and subsequently expanded into a feature-length screenplay by James Wong and Glen Morgan.
The second twist on the dead teenagers formula that "Final Destination" introduces is the way in which this appointment is kept. The premise of the franchise is not as brand-new as some may think. In fact, something quite similar was done in the 1984 horror film "Sole Survivor". However, in that film, the titular sole survivor was hunted down by the ghosts of those who died in the plane crash. In "Final Destination", quite brilliantly, however, the killer is non-corporeal. There is no zombified representation of death, no masked manic, no slasher wearing a yellow raincoat. Instead, death comes to claim its debtors in the form of accidents. A puddle of water on a bathroom floor that someone might slip on. A leaky gas burner that might ignite a fire.
These death scenes have now become a staple of the franchise but interestingly the deaths in this first "Final Destination" movie are a whole lot less grandiose and over-the-top than they will become. Director James Wong plays most of them surprisingly realistically giving the death scenes a palpable tension of oncoming doom rather than the gleeful goofiness that the later sequels would go for instead. Unfortunately, this also means that the deaths in this instalment are probably the least memorable except for the one reserved for Amanda Detmer's Terry which is without a doubt my favourite scene from any horror movie.
The first "Final Destination" movie is, on the whole, a lot more low-key than the sequels. It begins with a wonderfully tense sequence in which Alex (Devon Sawa) has a premonition that the plane he and his high-school classmates are on will explode. It's a noticeably low-budget plane crash but James Wong turns this limitation to his advantage. Rather than wowing us with exterior shots of engines exploding or debris crashing on the ground, he traps us along with the doomed passengers on the quickly disintegrating plane. It's a superbly creepy and unsettling sequence which also makes this movie the worst in-flight entertainment ever made.
After his premonition is over, Alex tries to convince his 40 classmates to get off the plane but he manages to save only six and his teacher named Val Lewton (Kristen Cloke). One of the biggest flaws this "Final Destination" film has are its annoying and unlikeable characters. Instead of being grateful to Alex for quite literally saving their lives, they shun him and treat him like he's the cause of the plane crash. Especially egregious is Carter (Kerr Smith), a braindead meathead, who is written with all the nuance and depth that's usually accorded to high-school bullies in teenage sex comedies.
But don't worry, soon enough they begin dying off one by one. Cleverly though, the film does not settle into its formula. Alex is a good example of a proactive protagonist who catches onto what's happening and sets about trying to find the solution. After a few more deaths, they do stumble upon one which doesn't really make sense but, hey, who cares as long as we're having fun!
The third act of "Final Destination" gets rather overwrought with our heroes running away from a series of oncoming accidents. Live wires, tree roots, and a swimming pool with a hole in it come after them like Jason Vorhees and it all sort of descends into ludicrous chaos.
Indeed, despite its inventiveness, "Final Destination" is far from a great horror film and I think that that's why it's not as frequently remembered as "Scream" when it comes to genre-bending horror movies. Its characters are annoying and unlikeable, the death scenes are tamer than they should be, and the whole thing has a kind of hammy creakiness that makes you feel like you should be watching this on a worn-out VHS tape.
And yet, it has a strange kind of staying power thanks largely to James Wong's atmospheric direction. It is also the most unapologetically fun horror film of all the post-"Scream" slashers maybe precisely because it doesn't flaunt its cleverness with film references and self-parody. It takes itself seriously and manages, at least for 90 minutes, to get us to take it seriously as well.
3/4 - DirectorDavid R. EllisStarsA.J. CookAli LarterTony ToddDeath is stalking Kimberly Corman and multiple survivors of a deadly highway accident.24-07-2023
"Final Destination 2" is that rarest of beasts - a horror sequel that's actually better than the original. OK, the margins of difference are admittedly minimal but even getting close to recapturing the magic in a sequel is a minor miracle let alone bettering it.
The premise is the same right down to the smallest beats but "Final Destination 2" executes it with more precision, confidence, and gruesome fun than the first film did while also adding some intriguing (if not altogether logical) twists along the way.
Once again, the film opens with a spectacular sequence in which our protagonist, this time college student Kimberly (A.J. Cook), has a premonition of an accident about to occur. This time 'round the accident is a highway pileup caused by some loose timber falling from a truck and oh my what a sequence it is! With a number of gruesome, terrifying deaths, VFX that still hold up, and a larger sense of grandeur and scale, the car pile-up in this film far outshines the plane crash which opened the first one. In fact, it might just be one of the most spectacular sequences ever captured in a horror film.
From there the film settles into the standard "Final Destination" routine. Kimberely saves a few people who then begin to die off in a series of bizarre accidents. They should have died in that car pile-up and Death is out to even the score. "Final Destination 2", however, significantly ups the ante. For one, the death scenes are far more outlandish and memorable. From the falling glass pane to the airbag to the face which is my personal favourite, here we have some of the best ones in the whole franchise. Writers J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress clearly had a lot of fun planning them out and director David R. Ellis shoots these grotesque demises with macabre glee.
Also improved is the way our protagonists decide to deal with the unusual predicament they find themselves in. For one, the cast of annoying teenagers from the first film has been replaced by a more diverse and fleshed-out cast all of whom have their own way of coping with the idea of their own unavoidable demise. I also quite like the solutions they find and how they end up becoming a ragtag group of survivalists. I wish the film focused more on these solutions and their struggles to stay alive.
What the film can't escape, however, is a cheesiness which haunts the franchise like Death haunts those who escape it. Somehow, despite its spectacular sequences and a healthy sense of humour, "Final Destination 2" still feels like something I should be watching on a dusty old VHS tape or Joe Bob Briggs' "Monstervision". I think the problem may lie in the portentous dialogue which tries to sound profound and philosophical but which no actor in the world could quite sell. That is except for the wonderful Tony Todd whose brief but memorable cameo is the only scene which fully nails the delicate balance between cheesiness and seriousness.
"Final Destination 2" is a rare sequel which successfully builds on its predecessor. It develops the lore, improves on the mistakes, and repeats what made the original work with more gusto and confidence. It doesn't have the freshness of the original or its playful inventiveness, but it does the job more efficiently and entertainingly.
3/4 - DirectorFred CavayéStarsVincent LindonDiane KrugerLancelot RochWith no legal means left to him, a high school teacher devises a daring plan to rescue his wrongfully imprisoned wife from jail.24-07-2023
A good thriller puts us in the shoes of the protagonist. Who among us hasn't watched one of those actioners and, just for a moment, imagined themselves as Ethan Hunt or Harry Callahan or John Rambo? Who hasn't wondered if they would do as well in a tight spot?
Clever thrillers, however, make the protagonist into one of us - an ordinary bloke caught in an extraordinary situation. Those kinds of thrillers are my favourites. The kinds that don't feature hero cops or secret agents or super-trained assassins but accountants or realtors or shopkeepers. For one, they offer a much wider range of suspenseful situations. How will someone who's never shot a gun in their life handle themselves in a fight scene? The stakes are immediately higher. Secondly and most importantly, however, they allow us to fully identify ourselves with the protagonist so that when the inevitable happy ending comes we can feel like the action hero for a change. Seeing one of these regular joes beat the bad guys and get the girl makes us think, just for that precious little second, that maybe we would do as well as Rambo in a tight spot. When, at the end of Fred Cavaye's "Anything for Her", the lead cop turns to his colleague and asks in disbelief "You say this guy was a teacher?", I felt a greater rush of adrenaline than I do when Ethan Hunt saves the world from a nuke. I know I could do as well in a tight spot as Vincent Lindon!
The film is pure fantasy, of course. There's no way I or Vincent Lindon could pull off the heist he does in real life but the measure of a good thriller is whether it convinces the audience that he could. "Anything for Her" did convince me and it gripped me right from the start.
The film begins with a montage of a fairy tale marriage between Julien (Vincent Lindon), the aforementioned teacher, and Lisa (Diane Kruger), the mother of his beloved son Oscar (Lancelot Roch). The three live in one of those swanky, modern apartments you only see in movies and Architectural Digest. They laugh all the time and begin making out as soon as there's no one around to see them.
A single shot warns of the trouble to come, however. A close-up of a small blood stain on Lisa's jacket. She tries to wash it out but before she can there's a knock on the door. It's the police there to arrest her for the murder of her boss whom she openly detested. Did she do it? The film doesn't really bother itself with that question. She might have or she might not have. What is more important is that Julien is absolutely certain she didn't do it and will do anything to prove it.
Fast forward to three years and a few trials later and all his resources have been drained. He now lives in one of those poor apartments you wish you could own and is being turned away by every lawyer in the country. "You must accept that she's going to stay in prison," tells him one. But Julien's not the kind of guy to just accept something. Inspired by a prison escapee's book, he hatches a daring plan to break his wife out. But can he pull it off?
The trick in "Anything for Her" is that director Fred Cavaye and writer Guillaume Lemans focus more on the mechanics of a prison break than the realities of it. The big question is how can a teacher, a regular guy in every way, break a woman out of prison? So, the film follows his attempts at obtaining false passports, planning the getaway, and executing the escape.
Cavaye is smart enough to focus his film so intently on Julien's attempts that we never get the chance to look at the plot from an objective point of view. Thinking about it now, after the film has ended, it all seems quite dumb and movie-like but while I was watching the film, I was completely invested.
A lot of the credit must also go to Vincent Lindon and Diane Kruger who do a brilliant job in underwritten parts. The scenes between them in the tiny, dilapidated prison visit room were a highlight for me. They create such a convincing loving bond that you never doubt he would indeed do anything for her.
The double-edged sword of the film's intent focus is that it never bothers to develop the characters. The film is threadbare to the maximum and only ever fleshes out its plot. We never learn very much about Lisa or even Julien for that matter. We only get tantalizing glimpses into their emotional struggles and only fairy-tale-like flashbacks of their married life. It occurred to me at one point that I would be just as interested in seeing the three years that transpired before "Anything for Her" begins as I am in the prison break plot. Especially with actors this good.
"Anything for Her" came out relatively soon after the brilliant "Tell No One" which was a thriller that focused on its characters, their emotions, and their personal journeys through an extraordinary situation. "Anything for Her", on the other hand, focuses only on plot mechanics dropping only occasional hints at its characters' inner lives.
But that's OK. Even though I would have loved to know more about Julien and Lisa and even Oscar I can't in all honesty say that I didn't enjoy what I was given. Fred Cavaye has orchestrated a terrific thriller here, suspenseful and exciting and fun in the way I talked about before. It works because we can identify fully with Julien, his quest, and his methods. In the end, I felt like I could have pulled off what Vincent Lindon pulls off within the logic of this film and I left as a happy customer.
3/4 - DirectorJames WongStarsMary Elizabeth WinsteadRyan MerrimanKris LemcheWendy Christensen and a group of teens who escaped a fatal roller-coaster crash face a bloody date with Death.24-07-2023
They say that you're much more likely to die in your car than riding a rollercoaster. "Final Destination" is the only franchise in which you can do both!
"Final Destination 3" is the slickest, most competently produced film in the franchise hitting that sweet spot between the awkwardness of the film-to-digital transition of the early 2000s and the 3D craze of the late 2000s.
Director James Wong delivers a handsome-looking film, stylish and atmospheric and with a much more pronounced sense of humour than either of its predecessors. Of all the films in the "Final Destination" franchise, this one comes the closest to being an out-and-out horror comedy. Wong was, of course, the director of the original film. Also returning is his co-writer Glen Morgan - the two guys you'd think would definitely know how to make a "Final Destination" film.
The film is also significantly bolstered by a terrific performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead - easily the best in the franchise - who takes this material far more seriously than the people who wrote it. She puts so much honest emotion and vulnerability into her performance that she is probably the first and only "Final Destination" protagonist I ever genuinely grew to like.
Her character is named Wendy and she is the one having the premonition. This time round, the opening accident happens on a malfunctioning rollercoaster - an interesting idea which ultimately results in an underwhelming prologue. It has neither the gruesome variety of deaths that the plane crash in the first film had nor the spectacular grandiosity of the pile-up from the second film. Despite the flashy editing, the only thing that happens is that the rollercoaster breaks down and most people fall out.
"Final Destination 3" is a sleek and entertaining movie but it is somewhat undone by a shocking lack of ambition. Unlike its two predecessors, it contents itself with merely repeating the premise over and over again without adding any new twists to it. The film is repetitive to the point of tedium. Pretty much every sequence plays out the same way. Wendy and her pal Kevin (Ryan Merriman) show up to try and convince another survivor of the deadly rollercoaster that their life is in danger. That person boasts about how they're invincible and will never die only to then suddenly and shockingly... well, die.
The death scenes themselves are gruesomely memorable but they lack any tension. Besides the fantastic and unexpectedly funny tanning bed death scene, each one plays out in exactly the same fashion. They're all sudden, shocking, and loud lacking the meticulous preparation and growing suspense that made the previous films' death scenes so deliciously entertaining.
The other characters besides Mary Elizabeth Winstead's are mostly fine if utterly underdeveloped. The only egregiously annoying character is Sam Easton's Frankie who must be the most obnoxious horror movie character of the 2000s and would most definitely be on the sex offenders register if he didn't die thankfully early in the film.
What baffles me, however, is that despite all of their fellow survivors (and friends) dying off one by one, they all seem to go about their business, unaffected in any way. Unlike the survivors of "Fatal Destination 2" who banded together to try and survive, these people refuse to believe anything is going on even after four or five deaths. Perhaps this was one done so that the death sequences could be rearranged at the free will of the editor.
The only addition "Final Destination 3" makes to the lore of the franchise is taken directly from "The Omen". Wendy finds out that the photos she took just before the rollercoaster accident contain clues as to how her friends will die. The film doesn't really go anywhere special with this idea. We get to see the relevant person's photo before their death scene but the clues are so general and plentiful that they might as well not even be there.
Don't get me wrong, "Final Destination 3" is still a fun, solid product. It has a knockout performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead and a terrific sense of humour which director James Wong injects into every facet of the production. The problem is that it's so happy to follow the formula that it is almost instantly forgettable.
3/4 - DirectorDavid R. EllisStarsNick ZanoKrista AllenAndrew FiscellaA horrifying premonition saves a young man and his friends from death during a racetrack accident but terrible fates await them nonetheless.25-07-2023
The "Final Destination" franchise is probably the most consistent in all of horror. It is made up of four good films and one dud. Unfortunately, this is that one dud.
"The Final Destination" is one of those 3D abominations that aimed for spectacle but somehow ended up looking cheap and haphazardly assembled. I suppose that on some level it still delivers thrills by following the formula faithfully and unimaginatively but coming on the trail of three geniunely good horror films and with one yet to come, there's no good reason not to skip it.
This fourth instalment in the franchise makes the common mistake of assuming that bigger means better. Sure, there's a whole lot more carnage and destruction here. We get several giant CGI explosions, a woman gets sucked into an escalator, a man's intestines get sucked into a pool filter, but it all really amounts to nothing because none of it is in the least bit believable.
The best kills in the "Final Destination" franchise are the ones which are the most plausible. When we see someone get hit by a truck while crossing the road or get their eye burned out by a laser, it plays into our innate paranoias and anxieties. The deaths in "The Final Destination", however, are so outlandish and impossible that they don't even qualify for the term "freak accident". There is no possibility of any of them happening without the intervention of a supernatural force.
Further ruining the illusion is the over-reliance on CGI. The whole appeal of this franchise is its bizarre and inventive deaths. We want to see the Rube Goldbergian mechanisms which lead to the accidents in action. Unfortunately, "The Final Destination" misinterprets the appeal and gives us a scene in which dozens of people perish anonymously in a giant fireball which is more the provenance of action movies than horror films. It doesn't help, I suppose, that the CGI is desperately wonky and unconvincing especially when compared to the excellent effects in the spectacular opening sequence of "Final Destination 2".
What is most surprising is that this film was made by the same team as "Final Destination 2". Director David R. Ellis and writer Eric Bress reteamed here and completely failed to recapture the magic of the previous films with this dull, uninvolving, po-faced sequel which is disappointingly lacking in imagination or humour.
Bress' script is full of unlikeable stereotypical characters the most ridiculous of which is a character known only as Racist (Justin Welborn) who parades around with a swastika tattoo, actually burns crosses in black people's front yards, and tries to lynch a main character.
The performances are also the weakest in the whole franchise but with the kind of inane dialogue they've been given, I don't really blame the actors. Like "Final Destination 3", here we have another batch of people who refuse to believe there's anything supernatural going on even after they've just been rescued from one of the most improbable deaths of all time.
The biggest problem, however, is just how tired and listless the whole thing feels. As goofy as they could get, the previous "Final Destination" films were at least consistently entertaining due to their good humour and high-octane energy. "The Final Destination", on the other hand, is a slog. A dull run-through of all the cliches and tropes that have already been done better in the previous films.
Director David R. Ellis exhibits none of the flare or macabre humour that made "Final Destination 2" so much fun. His staging of the death scenes is haphazard at best to the point where it's hard to tell what even happened in some of them. The film also lacks any kind of an atmosphere due to it being filmed in that flat 3D look which dictates that there can be no shadows or real darkness in the shot.
Due to the sound structure of the franchise's basic premise, the film does still provide a few laughs and an occasional thrill but compared to the other four films, "The Final Destination" feels more like a direct-to-video rip-off of the franchise than one of its actual instalments. Thankfully, seeing how it adds absolutely nothing to the lore and due to its severe imagination bankruptcy, it can be safely skipped.
2/4 - DirectorAlan ParkerStarsKevin SpaceyKate WinsletLaura LinneyA man against capital punishment is accused of murdering a fellow activist and is sent to death row.25-07-2023
"The Life of David Gale" was a hotly contested film when it came out which has now been mostly forgotten. At the time, it was criticised for its moral dishonesty, shallowness, and dishonourable arguments. Watching it now, 20 years later, I feel that they merely took this film too seriously. Sure, it may at first glance appear as a grave political diatribe against capital punishment but what "The Life of David Gale" actually is is nothing more than an overwrought melodrama, a cheap and preposterous soap opera more fit for a Hallmark Original slot than cinema distribution.
The script is solely credited to Charles Randolph but is actually a remake of Fritz Lang's "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt", a film which at least had the temerity to admit it was only a goofy film noir.
It follows in two timelines the life and death of David Gale (Kevin Spacey), a philosophy professor and noted opponent of the death sentence. We first meet him when he agrees to an interview with a journalist called Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet) merely four days before his execution. From behind a pane of glass, he relates the story of his life and what led him to find himself convicted of the murder of his friend and colleague Constance Harraway (Laura Linney).
The two storylines couldn't be more different in tone and approach to the material. The flashbacks are pure melodrama - a series of tragic incidents which lead the successful David Gale down a spiral of alcoholism and depression. The "present day" storyline, on the other hand, is a cheesy thriller in which our plucky crusading journalist investigates a murder down south which ruffles the feathers of a group of grotesque Southern characters straight out of Alan Parker's "Angel Heart".
It is possible, I suppose, that one of these storylines will grab your attention but I doubt that both will. I was somewhat interested in the flashbacks, mainly due to good performances from Spacey and Linney, but the thriller trappings of the present-day storyline often had me in stitches. How do you take such a serious topic as capital punishment and then graft onto it scenes in which Bitsey is menaced by a shadowy cowboy in a pickup truck or the ridiculous scene in which her car breaks down just as she's rushing to stop an execution? One storyline is Douglas Sirk, the other is poor man's Jim Thompson.
The film meanders between the two storylines until it starts to severely test our patience. What is this movie really about? There is a lengthy subplot about Gale being falsely accused of rape, a howler of a subplot in which Constance's fainting spell results in a leukaemia diagnosis, another subplot in which Bitsey's intern Zack (Gabriel Mann) tries to have it on with her but she rejects him. Subplots upon subplots upon subplots... The film goes on like this for 130 minutes without really focusing on either its increasingly silly plot or its political rhetoric.
There is a big twist at the end of "The Life of David Gale" but by the time the film reached its conclusion, I was already checked out. It simply never managed to engage me to the point of caring. David Gale is a deeply unlikeable man, a self-pitying egoist who spends his days moralising others and his nights drinking himself silly. Bitsey Bloom is no better herself seeing how she's just as rude and egoistical as the subject of her interview. When the climactic race to save David Gale's life came about I honestly didn't care whether he lived or died. The film did not make me care about him nor did it particularly convince me that the predicament he finds himself in is possible.
As far as the political grandstanding goes, I don't think this film has a serious point to make or a message to send. The set of circumstances that get David Gale in the position he finds himself in are so specific and unrepeatable that they are more a curiosity than a real danger. I doubt there's ever been anyone on death row whose story is remotely similar to David Gale's.
There is good stuff in "The Life of David Gale", this is a good cast led by a great director, but all the good elements have been done better in far more serious movies. For instance, I liked the colourful Southern characters expertly played by the likes of Leon Rippy, Jim Beaver, and Matt Craven but we saw better in "Angel Heart". I very much liked the pulsating, beating soundtrack by Alex and Jake Parker but it was extremely reminiscent of the even better Trevor Jones soundtrack to "Mississippi Burning". The story itself was told more economically and suspensefully in Fritz Lang's "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" and if you're looking for serious films on the death penalty I'd sooner suggest "Dead Man Walking" or "In Cold Blood" than this. If, on the other hand, you're just out for a thriller in which a journalist tries to prove that a man on death row is innocent look no further than Clint Eastwood's excellent "True Crime".
In other words, there's no particular reason to see "The Life of David Gale", an overwrought and kinda boring melodrama which got too much attention on its release and is now rightfully forgotten.
2/4 - DirectorSteven QualeStarsNicholas D'AgostoEmma BellArlen EscarpetaDeath returns to claim the lucky survivors of a deadly bridge collapse in this fifth frightening installment in the series.25-07-2023
I guess the makers of "Final Destination 5" didn't get the memo informing them that the fifth instalment in a horror franchise shouldn't be any good because not only is this film imaginative, funny, and a whole lot of fun, it's also without a caveat the best film in the whole franchise.
I guess it helps to have an Oscar nominee as your writer. Eric Heisserer who also wrote Denis Villeuneve's masterpiece "Arrival", has created here something that hasn't been seen in this franchise since the second film - actually likeable, sympathetic characters who go through some genuine development throughout the film. For the first time since "Final Destination 2", I actually felt bad when they died!
The film begins with the most spectacular sequence the franchise has ever seen. A superbly executed bridge collapse which claims the lives of probably hundreds of people. The sequence is carefully constructed like a short disaster flick. I just love the variety of carnage that occurs in it. Some people get impaled on carrier poles. Some people get cars dropped on their heads. One guy gets burned alive by tar in what is the most harrowing scene in any "Final Destination" movie.
Of course, as per the strictly adhered-to formula, that whole sequence was a premonition experienced by Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto), a young office drone on his way to a team-building retreat with a bus-load of his colleagues. Like in all four of the films before it, he manages to save some of them by warning them of the impending disaster only to see them hunted down by Death itself in a series of freak accidents.
The death sequences in "Final Destination 5" are phenomenal. Each is like its own short film with very distinct styles and tones. One is a wonderfully built-up suspense sequence in which we watch in horror as a gymnast performs her routine over an exposed nail. Another is a very funny slapstick comedy in which a man we know is about to die is subjected to a bone-rattling chiropractor treatment. Yet another is, of course, pure body horror! The only problem I had is that there aren't more of them.
The film is directed by Steven Quale, another newcomer to the series, who establishes a nice balance between horror and humour. His treatment of the dialogue scenes is a tad pedestrian but when the death sequences get underway he exhibits the kind of macabre inspiration which this franchise has been lacking since the second film.
My one major complaint is that this film was shot in 3D, the ultimate abomination of cinema. Kudos, however, to director of photography Brian Pearson who manages to avoid that murky, flat look that's usually associated with 3D movies. Still, I could have done without some of the more obvious 3D eye pokes. I'll never understand the attraction of having a bloody pole coming out of the screen at me.
"Final Destination 5" is this franchise's ultimate surprise. A confident, imaginative, inventive, and beautifully executed film this late in the game is rarer than the ways some of its characters die. It is the first film in the franchise since the second one which understands that for the death sequences to truly work they have to be plausible. Furthermore, there's Eric Heisserer's solid screenplay which gives us believable and more importantly likeable characters to actually root for. I especially liked the way he developed the character of Peter (Miles Fisher) who goes into a direction never seen before in this franchise.
3/4 - DirectorAlan ParkerStarsMickey RourkeRobert De NiroLisa BonetA private investigator is hired by a man who calls himself Louis Cyphre to track down a singer named Johnny Favorite. But the investigation takes an unexpected and somber turn.26-07-2023
Re-watching "Angel Heart", I was initially confused by how blatantly obvious the twist ending is. Right from the very first scene, everything from the client's name to the gloomy atmosphere to the religious imagery is poking you in the eye telling you exactly what is going on. I kept wondering how is it possible that the characters in the film aren't getting it. How are they so stupid that they don't realize who Louis Cyphre is and what he is asking of them? How could a great director like Alan Parker show his hand so early? And then, about halfway through, I had an epiphany (pun intended). I realized that "Angel Heart" is not really a mystery and that the twist ending is not supposed to come as a surprise to either us or the characters. It is a film about self-deception, about the lies we tell and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Of course, the ending is so obvious because that is the whole point and the only reason the characters in the film can't see it too is because they're willfully blinding themselves. They don't want to know.
That's why "Angel Heart" is cloaked in detective tropes. It's a film noir in which the mystery is the journey of self-realization. Parker is a director whose films are usually forceful, bursting with energy, frantically paced, and full of in-your-face visuals. "Angel Heart" is different. It's deliberate, meticulously told, almost plodding in the way its protagonist plods from one clue to the next on his way to the inevitable climax. It is a perfect recreation of a hardboiled thriller right down to the lead's wrinkled suit, sleazy demeanour, and Brooklynese accent.
Everything is noirish, that is, except the atmosphere which is pure horror right from the opening credits. As Courtney Pine's saxophone blares, the camera lingers on a darkly lit alley where cats are sniffing around an eviscerated corpse. This film has one of the most oppressive and affecting atmospheres cinema has ever seen. Michael Seresin's photography is dark and gloomy but in such a way that darkness seems luminescent like it's encroaching, growing, pressing. Trevor Jones' soundtrack mixes spooky old New Orleans jazz tunes with cues which sound like a child picking away at a piano. Even the weather is out to get our protagonist. The conditions are particularly harsh in this film as he moves from a snowy, chilly New York winter to a sweaty, dusty New Orleans summer.
Alan Parker delights in the grotesque giving the film a really disgusting taste. He lingers on puddles, dirty streets, filthy feet, and chicken guts. You can practically smell the smoke-filled bars that our sweat-soaked private eye visits. You can practically smell his slowly disintegrating shirt as well.
His name is Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) and if you think that's on the nose his client is named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro). The job is finding a crooner called Johnny Favourite who disappeared during the war owing Monsieur Cyphre a large debt.
Mickey Rourke is the perfect noir gumshoe. He nails that rumpled look like an unmade bed. His suit is two sizes too big, he walks like his pants are about to fall off, and the sweat stains which started small under his armpits at the beginning of the film threaten to engulf him whole by the end. And yet he's also charming, witty, and charismatic even though something seems to be nagging him at the back of his mind all the way through.
It is, however, De Niro who truly impresses in a small but unforgettable part. He is sly, demonic, and very, very quiet. You have to lean in to hear him and that's how he gets your attention. He never raises his voice above a whisper nor does he gesture more than absolutely necessary but he gives Cyphre a mischievous, witty demeanour like a child in on a prank. It is a magnificent performance and one of the very, very best in a once dazzling career.
Arguably, "Angel Heart" is even better if you know the twist. It is an oppressively downbeat film and it works better if you know why. Either way, the gloomy atmosphere really gets under your skin in a way that tinges the colour of your day. As I look around my room having finished watching the film, the colours of my walls seem more muted and the shadows seem to have grown. It is not a film that you can enjoy. It is certainly not a film you can just put on. It establishes a mood and sucks you right in requiring a thorough shower after the credits roll. It is a magnificent display of Alan Parker's filmmaking talents and it is a magnificently deceptive, intelligent, and deeply disturbing movie.
4/4 - DirectorDavid PriorStarsJames Badge DaleMarin IrelandSasha FrolovaOn the trail of a missing girl, an ex-cop comes across a secretive group attempting to summon a terrifying supernatural entity.26-07-2023
I can't think of many movies that begin with their own prequel. "The Empty Man" opens with a superb 22-minute prologue which could have and should have been its own short film. It revolves around a group of four friends hiking in Bhutan. One of them falls through a crevice in the snow into a long-forgotten cave where he comes face to face with a Pazuzu-like statute. When his friend climbs down into the cave to rescue him, the friend finds him staring unblinkingly at the statue whispering the words "If you touch me, you will die".
This prologue is a brilliant horror short film but not such a good opening for this film. For one, it messes with "The Empty Man's" already problematic pacing by delaying the beginning of the actual storyline by a whopping 22 minutes. Secondly, and more importantly, it sets our expectations way higher than the rest of the film can deliver. The prologue alone is chillingly effective, M.R. Jamesian, and an impressive showcase for director David Prior's ability to generate tension, suspense, and dread within familiar tropes of the genre.
The other 100 minutes of the movie are far more conventional if impressively well-executed. They take place in America, 20 years after the prologue, and follow James Lasombra (James Badge Dale), a former cop, as he searches for his neighbour's missing daughter. The girl seems to have gotten herself involved with a mysterious Scientology-like cult which worships the titular Empty Man, an entity which can be summoned by blowing into a bottle on a bridge at night.
The first half of "The Empty Man" plays out a lot like one of those Creepypasta movies of recent years. It occurred to me halfway through that David Prior might have taken this familiar and well-worn format in order to showcase his directorial abilities. A sort of "anything you can do I can do better" manoeuvre.
If that is indeed what he was doing then it sort of worked. The screenplay for "The Empty Man", based on a graphic novel by Cullen Bunn, is nothing new and indeed quite derivative of much better films like "Candyman". However, Prior's direction shines. He is especially good at creating an atmosphere of dread and growing danger and it is refreshing to see a modern horror film which doesn't rely on jump scares and grotesque imagery. "The Empty Man" repeatedly hits familiar horror beats, especially in its many set-pieces (see sauna murder scene), but it does it so skillfully, cleverly, and effectively that I didn't mind very much.
The second half of the film makes a seismic shift into cosmic horror moving away from both M.R. James and Creepypasta into H.P. Lovecraft territory. I won't spoil where the film goes mainly because I doubt I could even explain it succinctly. This is also where "The Empty Man" lost me. Prior falls into the well-known trap that many feature film debutants fall into. He crams too many ideas, too many plotlines, too many movies into one as if he's afraid he'll never get to direct another one.
This second half of "The Empty Man" is full of the kind of pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo that makes my skin crawl. As someone whose main interest lies in people, their destinies, and stories I really couldn't find much of interest in nihilistic theorizing, Eastern religions, and tulpas.
It doesn't help that the final twist is so cosmically stupid and utterly incomprehensible that it fails to tie together the many, many threads crammed into this film. This is one of those endings which are so incongruous with everything we've seen before that you spend most of the end credits going "but how come..." and "wait didn't he...".
The thing about "The Empty Man" is that it looks and sounds more intelligent than it actually is. Its charm and effectiveness lie not in its message (whatever it may be) or philosophy (if anyone got it please explain it to me) but rather in just how well it is made. This is one hell of a calling card for David Prior who strings together a series of atmospheric and genuinely creepy horror sequences. Put together, they don't make much sense but individually they are superb.
Also wonderful are James Badge Dale's committed performance and some beautiful cinematography by Anastas Michos. My favourite aspect of the film, however, must be the score by Christopher Young and Lustmord which blends the many influences, locations, and tones in the script much better than the actual film does.
"The Empty Man" is full of unexplored ideas and marred by a silly ending and uneven pacing but it is also one of the most effective and ambitious horror movies made in recent years. There are more true scares and more creepy atmosphere here than in the entirety of the "Insidious" franchise. I look forward to David Prior's future films just as much as I hope that he lets someone else do the writing, someone more economical and more judicious when it comes to cutting extraneous material.
3/4 - DirectorChristopher McQuarrieStarsTom CruiseRebecca FergusonJeremy RennerEthan and his team take on their most impossible mission yet when they have to eradicate an international rogue organization as highly skilled as they are and committed to destroying the IMF.27-07-2023
"Mission: Impossible" is the pick-and-mix of action franchises. Each instalment is such a different take on an action movie that you can inevitably find your own preferred flavour in the box. My personal preference is towards less action and more deception which is why I prefer the twisty de Palma original and the intense "Ghost Protocol" over the wall-to-wall-action "Rogue Nation" but is impossible to deny that writer/director Christopher McQuarrie has crafted a superb action movie here striking the perfect balance between high-octane action sequences and self-effacing humour.
The plot is as silly as ever. There is definitely a mould according to which they make these films. All they have to do is punch in their desired tone. We get another supervillain, psychopathic creep Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), after another McGuffin, some kind of a disc containing something he wants and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) doesn't want him to have. We also get another stupid reason why Ethan Hunt has to go on the run and become a rogue operative in order to once again save the world. You'd think that after four such previous incidents, his government would learn to trust him.
The big change here is the addition of Christopher McQuarrie, a terrific director and clever writer, who brings a wonderful, cineliterate sense of humour to the franchise. There are references aplenty here to previous great thrillers including an entire stunning sequence dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much". McQuarrie also frequently references the original series showing it more respect than any previous "Mission: Impossible" has. It's not too difficult to imagine Peter Graves finding himself in a similar predicament as Ethan Hunt in a London record shop. Let's leave it at that.
McQuarrie's sense of humour is also wonderfully self-effacing. The "Mission: Impossible" franchise was always aware of how silly it is but now that self-awareness has finally reached the levels of self-parody. Among some of the best gags in the film I'd include Alec Baldwin's hilarious speech in which he confirms Ethan Hunt's superhero status by calling him "the living manifestation of destiny" and even a joke on the usually taboo topic of Tom Cruise's short stature.
The film peppers these laughs liberally in between some truly stunning action set-pieces from an awe-inspiring motorcycle chase through Casablanca to a mad dash to stop a hitman hiding in the rafters of the Vienna Opera. Unfortunately, the film doesn't have anything as intense or suspenseful as the Burj Khalifa sequence from "Ghost Protocol" which I imagine will be the benchmark for all of these films from now on.
I'm not, by the way, talking just about the crazy jump Tom Cruise performs. I'm referring to the whole sequence in which our team do their actual jobs - using deception rather than violence to get their way. Moments of deception are painfully brief in "Rogue Nation" which delights in gunplay and fisticuffs more than intelligence. It is telling, however, that the one big moment of deception in which Ethan and his team have to kidnap the British Prime Minister was my favourite sequence in the whole film.
New additions to the cast include some great supporting turns from Simon McBurney, Tom Hollander, and the commanding as-ever Alec Baldwin. Sean Harris is the best villain the franchise has ever had - genuinely creepy and unsettling. But the best addition of all is Rebecca Ferguson's slippery double-triple-quadruple agent Ilsa Faust (a Bond-girl name if ever there was one). Her witty, charismatic, charming performance lifts every scene she's in making her the best female character the franchise has ever had (although, admittedly, besides Thandie Newton, there's not much of a competition).
Also new to the franchise is composer Joe Kraemer who's created a truly dazzling score here, so full of variety, so rich in flavour and authenticity, so exciting. It's equal parts Lalo Schifrin and Giacomo Puccini (a mix I never thought I'd hear) while avoiding the usual electrical pounding which has come to overwhelm action movie scores. Kraemer's orchestrations are impressively varied, even witty at times, perfectly accentuating the humour of McQuarrie's screenplay.
"Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation" is another slam-bang action instalment in this increasingly more reliable franchise. Christopher McQuarrie's excellent writing is especially a breath of fresh air even though I personally wish there was less shooting and more deception. Still, there's no doubt that this is a superb action film which should please even the most pedantic of fans.
3.5/4 - DirectorChristopher McQuarrieStarsTom CruiseHenry CavillVing RhamesEthan Hunt and his IMF team, along with some familiar allies, race against time after a mission gone wrong.28-07-2023
The title of "Mission: Impossible - Fallout" has multiple meanings within the plot. This sixth instalment in the long-running and consistently good franchise is a direct sequel to the previous movie "Rogue Nation". In that film, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), the living manifestation of destiny, captured the psychopathic Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). Now, he has to deal with the fallout of that action as the agents of the Syndicate, Lane's private army, are going rogue and wreaking havoc on the world.
He also finds himself caught up in the falling out between his IMF and the CIA whose director (Angela Bassett) is growing uneasy with Hunt's roguish methods. In order to placate her, the IMF chief (Alec Baldwin) allows her to place one of her own men on Hunt's team. That man is the wonderfully named hunk August Walker (Henry Cavill), a sort of anti-Ethan Hunt who solves things with fists and guns instead of intelligence... and fists and guns and boats and helicopters and cars and motorbikes...
The goal this time is to stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb hidden somewhere in the world whose fallout alone will poison a third of the world's population. The only way for the IMF to get the bomb is to trade its plutonium core for Solomon Lane himself. The only man for the job is the man who caught him - Ethan Hunt.
In my review of "Rogue Nation", I called the "Mission: Impossible" the pick-and-mix of franchises. Every film is a different flavour of action movie. "Fallout", meanwhile, is the pick-and-mix movie of the franchise. There's something for everyone. We get foot chases, car chases, motorbike chases, and an astounding helicopter chase in IMAX in which Tom Cruise essentially uses a helicopter as an extension of his fists to beat down a bad guy. We get fistfights, gunfights, and even a rope fight. We get Paris, London, Washington, Berlin, and India. We get humour, excitement, suspense, and so many thrills that it would take longer for me to list them than for you to see the movie which you should definitely do.
Director/writer Christopher McQuarrie takes a gleefully maximalist approach to "Fallout" essentially turning it into a giant sandbox for Tom Cruise to play in. Every sequence seems to be built around one of his well-publicized hobbies. Is the "Mission: Impossible" franchise just an excuse for Tom Cruise to have fun and get paid huge bucks? Absolutely!
The only thing missing is the big heist scene which I think should be the heart and soul of the "Mission: Impossible" films. There are a lot of cool double-crosses and unexpected twists but that one big scene in which the team comes together to infiltrate a seemingly impregnable place is not in "Fallout".
Otherwise, this is pretty much the ultimate "Mission: Impossible" film. It's fun, relentlessly goofy, and directed with stunning dexterity. I love how Christopher McQuarrie never stops for exposition. He so cleverly incorporates it into the fight scenes and the chase scenes that you don't even notice you've been fed the latest plot developments.
"Fallout" has the most complex plot of any "Mission: Impossible" film and surprisingly the most coherent. This almost sounds like I'm damning it with faint praise but I enjoyed actually having some sort of a story to follow beyond the hunt for the McGuffin.
The cast is uniformly excellent, especially the returning Rebecca Ferguson and the unsettlingly creepy Sean Harris. I also enjoyed the back-and-forth between Angela Bassett and Alec Baldwin and a surprisingly menacing turn from Henry Cavill who gives a much better performance than his hunky introduction may suggest.
The one big disappointment is the replacement of the wonderful and imaginative composer Joe Kraemer whose work on "Rogue Nation" was one of the highlights of the whole franchise. Instead, we get a fairly bland score from Lorne Balfe who seems to be recycling Lalo Schifrin instead of giving the soundtrack its own unique stylings.
Never-the-less, "Fallout" is still the best "Mission: Impossible" film yet. It's relentlessly exciting, perfectly paced, full of truly astounding stunts, and even features a relatively sound plot! I was also glad that they finally tied up the loose end that "Mission: Impossible III" saddled us with in the form of Ethan Hunt's bland wife (Michelle Monaghan). Now perhaps that wild sexual tension between Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and him can actually go somewhere.
4/4 - DirectorChristopher McQuarrieStarsTom CruiseHayley AtwellVing RhamesEthan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands.29-07-2023
"Mission: Impossible" is the true marvel of film franchises. It's the rare film series that keeps getting better and better. How does it do it? After all a century of film history informs us that sequels are rarely better than the original, how come this action franchise which should by all logic be a cheap, preposterous, assembly line cash-grab is the only film franchise in history to learn from its mistakes and constantly evolve?
Besides the quality, the franchise also keeps increasing the runtimes. Despite the de Palma original only being 110 minutes long, the previous film "Fallout" was a whopping 145. "Dead Reckoning", the seventh instalment in the franchise, was so long that they had to split it into two parts. The first part is a mere 163 minutes long.
OK, I'll be the first to say that there is a bit too much exposition in "Dead Reckoning". There are at least four or five scenes too many in which characters walk into a room and explain their motivation even though they've already done so. Besides those scenes which ultimately amount to a negligible handful, director/writer Christopher McQuarrie uses every last second of the runtime to thrill and entertain.
"Fallout" was a critics' and audiences' darling for its stupefying stunts and action scenes. "Dead Reckoning" ups the ante by taking equally stupefying stunts and fights and crafting them into genuinely interesting and funny scenes which don't only entertain and dazzle us but also further the plot.
We've already seen massive car chases in the "Mission: Impossible" franchise but "Dead Reckoning" gives us one which is also an extended and truly hilarious comedic routine which begins when our heroes Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and a crafty thief known only as Grace (Hayley Atwell) wind up handcuffed to each other and escaping in a tiny yellow Fiat. I was excited but I was also crying from laughter at what is a cineliterate reference to a very funny bit from "The 39 Steps".
A climactic sequence on the Orient Express is intercut with a series of twists and double-crosses so complex and intriguing that I felt I should be keeping a scorecard. This particular sequence is the film's true dazzler starting as a low-key infiltration full of suspense and deception, morphing into a fight on top of the train which puts "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" to shame, and finally culminating in a beautifully choreographed and imaginative upside-down escape as the train slowly car-by-car sinks into an abyss.
Yes, quiet suspense scenes make a triumphant return to the franchise proving that Christopher McQuarrie can generate tension even if no one is shooting at Ethan Hunt. I love how McQuarrie has the guts to let these sequences play out at a slow, deliberate pace constantly building up suspense and adding peril, turning up the heat until the whole thing finally explodes.
I would say the approach is Hitchcockian if it weren't so obviously de Palmian. McQuarrie must have watched and liked the original film before making this one because he quotes from it liberally. He imitates de Palma's famous visual style with lots of Dutch angles and stylish camera movement.
For a fan of the original film like me, "Dead Reckoning" is a true delight. In fact, I feel like this film was made especially with me in mind. All of my favourite action movie elements make an appearance: Venice, the Orient Express, heist scenes... There's even a majestic swashbuckling sequence which made me well up with joy.
McQuarrie's screenplay co-written by Erik Jenderssen is the best in the series so far. I love how all the characters are given room to breathe, develop, and be themselves. Even the side characters such as the two CIA mooks pursuing Hunt and the big bad's heavy are given ample and colourful characterization. The two CIA agents are delightfully and wittily played by Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis and they are given actual, meaningful dialogue! Meanwhile, the big bad's heavy as played by Pom Klementieff is bound to go down in history as one of the genre's best. She barely says a word in the whole film but makes a hell of a statement through her outlandish costumes, fight style, and Klementieff's fantastic facial expressions.
The plot revolves around the quest for a key which will give the bearer access to The Entity - a rogue artificial intelligence which is this film's McGuffin. I absolutely love how McQuarrie portrays the AI as some kind of a deity with his own cult of fanatical followers led by a preachy hitman named Gabriel (Esai Morales). In one scene, Ethan and his team go to the AI's church which is actually a rave party in the Doge's Palace in Venice. Just look at the wonderful production design by Gary Freeman which makes the rave look like a cathedral.
Ethan Hunt also gets a new sidekick in the form of Grace who is a sort of 2023 take on the character played by Thandie Newton in "Mission: Impossible II". She's crafty, duplicitous, and charming and although she's definitely no Ilsa Faust (or Thandie Newton, for that matter), I think Hayley Atwell is a fun addition to the franchise.
"Dead Reckoning Part One" is the best film in the franchise by a country mile. It's not only dazzling to look at but it has a genuine plot, interesting characters, loads of humour, and so much suspense that the cinemas should offer discounts as you'll only be using the edge of your seat. I would say I was worried that the franchise cannot top this stylish, exciting, relentlessly fun movie but I know I would be wrong. After having seen "Dead Reckoning Part One", I believe miracles are possible when it comes to "Mission: Impossible".
4/4 - DirectorAndrew DavisStarsHarrison FordTommy Lee JonesSela WardDr. Richard Kimble, unjustly accused of murdering his wife, must find the real killer while being the target of a nationwide manhunt led by a seasoned U.S. Marshal.31-07-2023
The late 80s and the 90s were a great time for film adaptations of old TV shows. In a relatively short span of time, we got films like "The Untouchables", "Mission: Impossible", and "The Fugitive" which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. It's gratifying to note that time has not weathered any of these films and "The Fugitive" is just as much fun as it ever was even though it perhaps is not quite the masterpiece it was hailed as at the time.
Every episode of the original series began with a narration which said: "Dr. Richard Kimble, an innocent victim of blind justice, falsely convicted for the murder of his wife, reprieved by Fate when a train wreck freed him en route to the death house, freed him to hide in lonely desperation; to change his identity, to toil at many jobs; freed him to search for a one-armed man he saw leave the scene of the crime; freed him to run before the relentless pursuit of the police lieutenant obsessed with his capture."
The movie version, released in 1993, directed by Andrew Davis and written by Jeb Stuart and David Twohy, followed the original plot so closely that the narration still applies. It is, after all, such a classic, exceptional premise, beautiful in its simplicity and reliability with Kimble as a kind of Robinson Crusoe struggling to survive in the unfriendly wilderness of America while continually evading both the law and a series of unfortunate, often dangerous situations he'd find himself in week after week.
Harrison Ford stars as the titular Dr Richard Kimble, the most perfect casting choice possible. Ford excelled at playing these everyman heroes due to his laidback charm, undeniable on-screen charisma, and a great sense of humour brimming beneath every line, reaction and gesture. He imbues Kimble with far more personality than Stuart and Twohy's script. He is easy to sympathise with and relate to without the film having to stop and give us some tear-jerking scene with him saving a child's life or a dog.
The best part of "The Fugitive", however, is the US Marshals hunting after Kimble led by the relentless Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones). The scenes between Gerard and his team are where the movie really shines. Unexpectedly, the film develops their characters and gives them as much screen time as it does to Kimble.
Played by a group of likeable, competent character actors such as Joe Pantoliano, Daniel Roebuck, and L. Scott Caldwell there is a great camaraderie and chemistry between the marshals exhibited through their witty banter and sharp dialogue. I love how the film lets them have their private little in-jokes which it never explains. I love how each member of the team has a distinct personality and relationship with Gerard. I absolutely love how Andrew Davis gives us brief glimpses into their dynamic in scenes which most other directors would have cut out. My favourite example is the short cutaway in which, after the iconic and exciting chase at the Cheoah Dam, Gerard and his officers can't find their way out of the place.
Still, the best performance without a doubt comes from Tommy Lee Jones, a much-underrated actor who makes Gerard into an implacable and commanding figure you don't want to mess with. Ingeniously, however, he also gives him a jokey, easygoing personality which he only exhibits with his team. Apparently, a lot of Gerard's best lines were improvised by Jones himself including the best interaction in the whole picture. Dr Kimble, exhausted by the chase and desperate to prove his innocence pleads to Gerard saying he didn't kill his wife. Gerard honestly replies: "I don't care". In those three words, we get the full picture of a man who is doing his job conscientiously and with full awareness of his limitations. He has been ordered to catch Kimble, not prove him guilty or innocent.
I hadn't seen "The Fugitive" for many years even though I always had fond memories of it. Rewatching it now, I found it as entertaining and exciting as ever but I was a tad disappointed that the film is not more of an adventure. The appeal of the TV show was its many locations and situations. After a rousing first act in the North Carolina wilderness, the rest of the film gets stuck in Chicago where it falls into a bit of a rut, spinning its wheels as Kimble investigates his wife's murder.
The problem is that the mystery is not in the least bit interesting. There are very few suspects (only one of which really makes any sense), almost no clues, and the ultimate solution is so unrelated to anything we'd seen so far that it feels curiously anti-climactic. I'd much rather follow Kimble as he treks through the forests and the towns of America looking for odd jobs and evading Gerard than look at him reading papers and following-up unengaging clues.
The few chase scenes in the film are excellent, so it's a bit of a shame there aren't more of them. Especially good are the aforementioned chase through the pipes leading to the dam and the suspenseful climactic scene in the basement of a Chicago hotel. James Newton Howard's energetic score certainly helps seeing how it's one of the best action soundtracks of all time.
Speaking of chases, it does bother me that the film doesn't really give the US Marshals all that much investigating to do. They seem to bump into Kimble by pure accident whenever it's convenient for the film. I would have preferred to see them use their intelligence more and find out how they actually hunt for fugitives.
"The Fugitive" is a fun, exciting, and suspenseful film which I wish was a little more ambitious. I wonder if the film would have been better if it gave Kimble more to do. Maybe had him make friends and build relationships, do all kinds of jobs and actually struggle to survive. Once he gets to the big city, all his woes seem to be over. He never struggles for money and just dedicates himself to investigating the case which also proves disappointingly easy to solve. One wonders how come the Chicago PD couldn't crack this case when it takes a vascular surgeon mere days to follow up on the most basic of clues.
3/4 - DirectorAndrew DavisStarsMichael DouglasGwyneth PaltrowViggo MortensenA wealthy Wall Street speculator discovers that his wife has a lover. He investigates him and uses the carrot and stick to make him murder his wife. Planned to detail, it seems like a perfect murder.31-07-2023
Even though you wouldn't know it from the opening credits which only list screenwriter Patrick Smith Kelly, Andrew Davis' "A Perfect Murder" is an adaptation of Frederick Knott's "Dial M for Murder", probably the definitive stage thriller which plays out like a speed chess game between dishonest men over a clueless lady. Knott's play, most famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, is a dazzling puzzle-box of plotting second only perhaps to Antony Shaffer's "Sleuth".
At first, "A Perfect Murder" seems to be going for the same style of storytelling - the kind which generates thrills through intelligent twists and double-crosses rather than shocking swerves and violence.
The first half of the film is indeed quite engrossing as the pieces are carefully laid out on the board. Playing as the black king is Steven Taylor (Michael Douglas), a hateful and vengeful businessman who treats his wife as a trophy and everyone around him like a servant at his beck and call. This is the kind of part Douglas excels at playing and it's a delight to watch him sneer and sleaze his way through this film.
His wife is Emily Taylor (Gwyneth Paltrow) whose position as the white queen is clearly designated by her almost virginal appearance. She's played with charm and naivite by Gwyneth Paltrow. But Emily is certainly not as virginal as she appears because when we first meet her she is having passionate sex in the apartment of her bohemian painter boyfriend David Shaw (Viggo Mortensen).
At first, David appears to be her white knight but Steven has an ace up his sleeve - his first of many. He is aware of the affair and has run a background check on David who turns out to be a conman and a thief known for seducing lonely women and then squeezing them dry.
When Steven invites himself into David's apartment we expect the titular perfect murder to unfold but it doesn't. In a twist reminiscent of Shaffer's "Sleuth", he offers his rival a deal. He'll pay him 500,000 dollars to kill Emily.
Steven has concocted the plan which is too complicated to outline here. Of course, the murder goes terribly wrong and the film gets more and more complicated from there.
"A Perfect Murder" seems like the kind of movie I'd love. Its first half seems like a set-up for an intelligent, atmospheric game of oneupmanship in which Steven and David will have to outsmart each other in order to stay ahead of the police and win Emily.
Unfortunately, what transpires in the second half of "A Perfect Murder" is more akin to "Wall Street" than Frederick Knott. Whereas "Dial M for Murder" traded in suspense and mystery, "A Perfect Murder" goes for shock and surprise.
There's very little mystery in this film where everyone's motives and true natures are revealed in the opening credits. There is also very little intelligence because once Steven's original plan fails all the subsequent twists and turns grow more and more unbelievable and idiotic.
In his review, Roger Ebert cleverly noted that this is a film about negotiation more than deception and he's right. No one is really trying to play or outsmart each other. Steven, Emily, and David all realize what's going on. The suspense entirely revolves around who gets to kill whom first.
As "A Perfect Murder" unfolded, I grew less and less interested in what happens next. "Dial M for Murder" kept us gripped because we genuinely didn't know what its characters were planning, how they were going to pull it off, and where their plans would fail. All plot points that "A Perfect Murder" doesn't even try to hide.
I suppose the draw is meant to be the characters and the intrigue rather than the mystery but both are severely lacking. The characters are one-dimensional and stereotypical and the intrigue suffers because of that. A good erotic thriller also needs energy and a good deal of sexual chemistry neither of which are evident in Andrew Davis' laidback, slow-paced thriller.
What "A Perfect Murder" does offer are some very good performances especially from Douglas and the underrated David Suchet as an observant detective - a role no one is more qualified than him to play. The film also has a slick noirish atmosphere and a good old-fashioned score by James Newton Howard.
But I was simply not as invested as I should be. The story runs out of steam as soon as the murder plot goes wrong because from there on everyone's cards are on the table. Instead of building up mystery and suspense from there, Davis and Kelly spin their wheels through a story hurtling towards an inevitable and uninspired conclusion.
2/4 - DirectorPat ProftStarsLeslie NielsenRichard CrennaKelly LeBrockRyan Harrison is framed for murder and must prove himself innocent by finding a mysterious one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged man after escaping from a bus accident on the way to jail.31-07-2023
Spoof movies are impossible to properly review. There's only so much intelligent analysis you can give about a movie that's intentionally stupid and amounts to nothing more than a rapid-fire montage of gags. The only way to quantify the quality of a spoof movie is to look at the ratio of laughs it provides to the jokes it attempts. In "Wrongfully Accused", the ratio is about 40%.
"Wrongfully Accused" is nominally a spoof of "The Fugitive" whose plot it copies wholesale but it references everything from "Scooby-Doo" to "Casablanca". In one scene, Leslie Nielsen is chased by the airplane from "North by Northwest" through the "Field of Dreams".
He plays Ryan Harrison, superstar violinist, whom we meet during a particularly rowdy performance. Nothing in the film is quite as funny as this opening which sees Nielsen go from playing the violin with his teardrops to ripping it apart with his teeth Jimi Hendrix-style.
Harrison finds himself wrongfully accused of murdering Hibbing Goodhue (Michael York), a rich man whose nymphomaniac wife (Kelly LeBrock) he was schtupping while eyeing the woman painting his portrait (Melinda McGraw). The meeting between the painter and Ryan is an example of some of the film's funniest lines. "Would you sit for me," asks the painter. "Are you a dog trainer," replies Ryan.
Just like in "The Fugitive", the best character in the film is the US marshal played with just the right amount of deadpan by Richard Crenna. He walks around with unquestionable authority as he spouts nonsensical sayings and similies such as "This has more twists and turns than Chubby Checker in a blender". He issues orders such as "shoot and gut every animal in the park, their stomachs might contain a clue" and gives out random factoids. He's actually quite a funny take on the character of Samuel Gerard.
Leslie Nielsen meanwhile does his usual schtick with confidence and deft. He is one of those comedians I find funny even when they're given poor material. Ryan Harrison is not a terribly well-profiled character but this gives Nielsen's naturally charismatic personality a chance to shine through.
The problem with "Wrongfully Accused" and pretty much every spoof movie of the 1990s is that it is low on wit. It doesn't really have anything in particular to say about the movies it is spoofing. It is merely a series of occasionally absurd and frequently inane gags and sketches best viewed as short clips on YouTube.
Some of these gags are very funny (such as Ryan fighting off a thug by beating him over the head with the script for "Titanic") while others fall flat on their face. But director/writer Pat Proft has learned well from the Zucker Brothers and "Wrongfully Accused" is so loaded with jokes that even if only one in ten works you're guaranteed a laugh a minute.
In these internet days, I don't see much of a point in sitting through the entirety of "Wrongfully Accused". It has no real plot to speak of, no character development, and no intelligence. Pat Proft's direction also makes the film feel curiously flabby as a whole lacking the energy and verve of the best spoof movies.
However, if you stumble on a clip from it on YouTube or wherever, give the clip a watch. There are more than enough funny jokes, gags, lines, and even scenes in "Wrongfully Accused" to make for a litany of quality videos.
Also surprisingly good are Bill Conti's lush and dramatic score which is as straightfaced as Leslie Nielsen and Glen MacPherson's photography. If you didn't know the film was a spoof, you might be taken it by its look and sound and mistake it for a real 90s neo-noir.
2/4