Reviews

I'm reviewing the US version which was re-cut for release here. Unfortunately I have no idea what they did to the movie.

The Germans have a great word called 'verschlimmbessern', which means making something not very good worse, by attempting to make it better.

Maybe that's what they did, given that a couple of Brit viewers really liked the movie.

The one nod to the Yanks I noticed was that at some point Micky Mannock (Frank Harper) says to his cousin/partner in crime that he can now go and "join his uptown friends." Uptown? All the years I lived in London I never came across an 'uptown.' Looks like I missed out on something really worth going to.

As for the movie itself: a vanity project for Frank Harper who co-wrote, directed and starred in it. That's a hard thing to pull off without coming over like a complete prat, and I can only think of Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin pulling this off successfully. And Frank Harper isn't a good enough writer or director to match them.

The plot is beyond tired and I couldn't care less for any of the lead characters who have no redeeming features whatsoever, and I wouldn't have minded all of them being killed off in the most boringly predictive final shootout.

Charles Dance is the only one who comes out of this reasonably well as the gangster with all his fingers in the pot, and understanding how the business really works.

My nomination for most likable character is for the unseen taxi driver who drives the kids and wife off to safety.

It is sad when an excellent cast is wasted in something quite as preposterous as this.

Imagine a late Victorian London where a near teenage young lady styles herself a 'Financial Consultant', and sinks a retired school teacher's entire retirement savings in a shipping line that goes bankrupt after its ship -- apparently the only one -- mysteriously disappears at sea on a calm day.

The plucky financial consultant resolves to retrieve the retirement funds, and begins investigating in a culturally thoroughly modern, multicultural London, as if maybe the screen writer and casting director had failed to notice the Victorian settings and worked a modern script, while everybody else did their best to recreate Victorian London without paying attention to the incongruities and anachronisms of the script.

Throw in mediums, psychic visions, mysterious foreigners, dastardly businessmen, surprisingly unintimidating goons, secret weddings, and love affairs that are so complicated that even the cast seems quite unable to work out who is involved with whom until the very end.

Fans of Philip Pullman's 'Sally Lockhart' books may not mind any of it, but this movie will leave the uninitiated puzzled as to their success.

Cop chases convict carrying an alien lifeform in 2009 Boston.

Boring, formulaic and predictable low budget sci-fi; the script makes very little sense and even fails in its own internal logic. A complete failure on every level other than cinematography.

Glum London backdrops and washed-out color match British secret agent Charles Dobbs' (James Mason) despair at the infidelity of his nymphomaniac wife, and the possible murder of a likable and idealistic Foreign Office civil servant.

Slightly dated yet still exciting cold war spy thriller combines the talents of James Mason, Sidney Lumet, and a fine supporting cast, though John LeCarre might wonder what happened to the novel the movie is based on.

There isn't a hint of 'Swinging London'; the relationships and a gay subtext, played out on several levels, are handled maturely and without an invitation to snicker.