Category: Action film

High Noon (1952)

Gary Cooper stands alone in High Noon

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Cast: Gary Cooper (Marshal Will Kane), Grace Kelly (Amy Fowler Kane), Thomas Mitchell (Mayor Jonas Henderson), Lloyd Bridges (Deputy Marshal Harvey Pell), Katy Jurado (Helen Ramirez), Otto Kruger (Judge Percy Mettrick), Lon Chaney Jny (Marshal Martin Howe), Eve McVeagh (Mildred Fuller), Harry Morgan (Sam Fuller), Morgan Farley (Minister Mahin), Ian MacDonald (Frank Miller), Lee Van Cleef (Jack Colby)

It’s 10:35 am on the day of the wedding of retiring Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) to Quaker Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly). It should be the happiest day of his life – but events are interrupted by news that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), a killer Kane put away, has been released and will arrive on the midday train with his gang to kill Kane. Kane’s first instinct – and the town’s – is for Kane to flee the town: but Kane doesn’t want to spend his life looking over his shoulder, and besides his friends and colleagues in the town will stand with him right? He decides to make his stand – to the outrage of his pacifist wife – only to find one-by-one the citizens of the town excuse themselves from helping Kane. After all, who wants to die?

Playing out like a Western 24, Kane has got a little under 90 minutes to put together a posse to give himself a fighting chance against these hardened killers. Zinnemann’s film is full of carefully placed shots of clocks that hammer home the ominous approach of Kane’s seemingly inevitable death. In a brilliant use of contrasts, Kane walks with growing desperation in virtually every shot through the increasingly abandoned town, mixed with clever cut-backs to the Miller gang waiting patiently at the train station (with deep focus shots of the train lines stretching on forever) for Miller to arrive and kick off the killing. Using a wonderful combination of low-angles, tracking shots and one superb crane shot that pulls out and away to show Kane stranded alone in the abandoned town, Zinnemann’s film stresses Kane’s isolation, anxiety and growing desperation.

Because Kane is scared. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s past-his-best and over-the-hill, a long-serving hero on his last day in the job, outmatched by his opponent. Why on earth wouldn’t he be desperate for help? John Wayne and Howard Hawks hated the film, loathed its perceived anti-American-spirit and, most of all, couldn’t stand the idea of a Western hero being scared and desperate for help. They even made a twist on the film, Rio Bravo, where Wayne played a marshal turning down any and all help in order to do what a man needs to do alone. For them that was a Western hero, and this self-doubting, anxious pussy Kane – the man even cries at one point! – was an abomination.

Cooper seemed to be no-one’s choice for the film – Heston, Brando, Fonda, Douglas, Clift and Lancaster all turned it down – but scooped the Oscar as Kane. Then 51, his obvious age and vulnerability – at one point Lloyd Bridges almost beats the crap out of him – make him feel even more at risk from this threat. In a performance devoid of vanity – other than perhaps Kane landing the radiant (and thirty years younger) Grace Kelly as his wife – Cooper is sweaty, nervous, twitchy and a mix of All-American duty and genuine nerves, resentment and terror at what feels almost certain to be his end. Kane knows why he must do it, but to Wayne’s disgust, he still doesn’t like it.

Carl Foreman, the screenwriter, was to be pulled before the House of Un-American Activities for his communist sympathies. And the entire film is pretty clearly a commentary on the McCarthyite era, specifically the abandonment of those pulled before the house by those who seemed to be their friends. Like the blacklisted Hollywood writers and actors, Kane opens the film with admirers and friends all of whom eulogise his greatness and decency: and all of them turn their back on him as the chips go crumbling down.

Most of the film is given over to Kane desperately going from ally to ally, only to find that he is offered only platitudes, excuses and outright cowardice. His deputy demands a recommendation for Kane’s job, and chucks in his star when Kane refuses. Old friends hide in their houses and refuse to come out when Kane comes calling. Lon Chaney Jnr’s retired marshal pleads illness. The judge rides straight out of town and suggests Kane does the same. At a town meeting in the church, the voices calling to help Kane are few and far between, and Mayor Thomas Mitchell praises Kane to the skies, before concluding the town would be better off if he could ride away and not come back. The one man who volunteers backs down when he finds out no one else has volunteered, and the only person eager to fight is a 14 year old boy. 

So much for loyalty and the American way. When the chips are down, words mean nothing and it’s the actions that show the man. Customers in the saloon talk about how life wasn’t that bad when the Millers ruled the town (to show how wrong this is, literally their first action when riding into town is to steal something from a milliners). Others moan that all this law enforcement from Kane has actually made business a bit worse for the town. Why do the hard thing, why make the stand, when it’s so much easier to just look down, keep quiet and let the just suffer while your life ticks on.

Cooper’s Kane is masterfully low-key, subtle, using only the slightest gestures to show deep-rooted, only barely hidden resentment and bitterness, covering fear. What he’s doing he’d give anything not to do, but he sees no choice. There is no other Western where the hero writes a will, and quietly weeps with his head on his hands on his desk. There is no other Western where the hero spends so long trying to make a manly task easier to do. There is no other Western where the self-serving cowardice and hypocrisy of the townsfolk are more blatant. No wonder Cooper – in the final insult for Wayne – drops his tin star in the dirt at the film’s end, as the townsfolk rush out to congratulate him on winning the duel. This is a film that looks at America as it really is – and many people didn’t like that one little bit.

Zinnemann’s direction is spot on, a perfect blend of tension build and technical mastery, mixed with superb dialogue from Carl Foreman. Not a word or shot is wasted, and every single character and event is carefully sketched in, established and build up with no effort at all. Cooper is superb, Grace Kelly just as good in a thankless role as the humourless Quaker wife who struggles with her life-long principles against her love for her husband. Beautifully filmed, with a wonderful score with Dimitri Tiomkin, High Noon is a classic for a reason, a masterpiece of slow-build and enlightened social commentary.

Bumblebee (2018)

A heart warming double bill in surprising “genuinely good Transformers film” Bumblebee

Director: Travis Knight

Cast: Hailee Steinfeld (Charlie Watson), John Cena (Colonel Jack Burns), Jorge Lendeborg Jnr (“Memo” Gutierrez), John Ortiz (Dr Powell), Jason Drucker (Otis Watson), Pamela Adlon (Sally Watson), Stephen Schneider (Ron), Glynn Turman (General Whalen), Len Cariou (Hank), Dylan O’Brien (Bumblebee), Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Angela Bassett (Shatter), Justin Theroux (Dropkick)

Michael Bay started making Transformers films in 2007. These massive, action-packed, technological marvels are testament to the skill of special effects gurus to create live-action versions of these transforming robots – and a testament to the lack of soul in Michael Bay as the films became increasingly empty, sprawling, noisy, pornographic (not in that sense!), tasteless, sexist efforts that leave a bad taste in the mouth. Bumblebee is a soft-reboot of the franchise – and the very first time it feels like this is a Transformers film that those growing up with the cartoons could recognise, and that you would be happy to show to kids.

In 1987, Cybertron has fallen and the Autobots have scattered across the galaxy. Young Bumblebee (voiced by Dylan O’Brien) is sent to Earth, where he loses his voice, his memory and nearly his life combating a Decepticon. Taking refuge as a beat up Volkswagen Beetle, Bumblebee is found by Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld) a young car mechanic enthusiast mourning the sudden death of his father and struggling with her mother (Sally Watson) starting to move on with a new boyfriend Ron (Stephen Schneider). While Charlie and Bumblebee bond, more Decepticons – on the hunt for Bumblebee who they hope can lead them to Optimus Prime – arrive on Earth and join forces with anti-Transformer agency Sector 7, represented by Colonel Jack Burns (John Cena), to track Bumblebee down.

Travis Knight came to the film from directing several successful animation films – and his understanding of the nuances of inflection and character that you need in order to bond with animated characters. He also brings back an innocence, a dignity and a sense of honour to the franchise. Where the Autobots in past films had increasingly become brash blowhards or brutal warriors (not least Optimus Prime who seemed to become more psychotic as the series went on) this film made them again the noble defenders of the weak that they were in the comics and cartoons. It’s not an exaggeration to say if the fans were waiting for a film that got closer to the spirit of the original, they had been waiting for this one.

Knight’s mastery of animation makes Bumblebee a true character, an endearing, bumbling (sorry), accident-prone, scared little kid who is also a tender, caring and understanding friend. With Bumblebee mute for most of the film, the character communicates solely through his body language – and his hugely expressive eyes – and Knight has redesigned the character to have a larger, more open face that immediately makes him a warmer character. Knight also has a brilliant line in visual comedy, with Bumblebee hilariously trashing a house at one point in a stumbling display of silent comedy that works extremely well. 

It also helps that Knight has such a strong, marvellous performance from Hailee Steinfeld as Bumblebee’s carer and protector. Seeing Steinfeld in this film is a real reminder of what brash, very male, figures Shia LaBeouf and Mark Wahlberg cut in the past few films, where women were even objects of tasteless ogling or rebellious kids to be protected by men. All that is thrown out of the window here (thank goodness), with this being the first film in the series written by a woman, Christina Hodson. Steinfeld is allowed to develop a character who is not a Tomboy, a hot scientist or a teenage girl stereotype, but someone who feels very real and hugely charming. Steinfeld brilliantly creates a bond with Bumblebee – no mean feat for a creature that is not there – and the film hinges perfectly on her growing emergence from the shell of trauma and loss at the death of her father, through finding a new purpose with Bumblebee. It’s a great performance anchoring a film full of special effects.

Knight’s film can still handle all the action you want – but unlike with Bay, where spectacle and violence is always considered way more important than story and character, his action scenes are shot with a simpleness and clarity that put character at the forefront. In fact character is what every scene is about, not the shattering punching and tastelessly sadistic, pornographic violence of robotic dismemberment that Bay’s film’s degenerated into. This is a film which feels inspired by the vibe of ET, about two damaged souls who come together to protect each other and find themselves. It’s a film that is about friendship and affection, and Knight’s action scenes carry a sense of these qualities, this desire to protect people, into them.

With the film’s light comic touch – not least from John Cena who is on good form as a Colonel with a grudge against all Transformers (“They literally call themselves Decepticons. That doesn’t set off any red flags?”) and Jorge Lendeborg Jnr, very endearing as Charlie’s would-be love interest – it feels like a film genuinely made by people who loved the original and loved it’s innocent, good-vs-bad themes. Knight also returns the design of the characters back far closer to the look of the 1980s – the opening on Cybertron, with all the characters appearing as souped up versions of their 1980s cartoon form is virtually a love letter to anyone who grew up watching these characters. Knight not only gets the visuals right, with a warmth and depth of character none of the rest of the films have had, he also understands the bravery and heroism of the Autobots in a way Bay never did – Knight’s Optimus Prime is a million miles from the prisoner-executing loonie Bay created.

Bumblebee for sure is no Citizen Kane (although it has lashings of Spielberg in it, not least ET). But it’s on a different planet to the rest of the series, and a film with tonnes in it to enjoy. With its careful balancing of themes from loss to survivor guilt it also has more to it than meets the eye.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

Roger Moore takes aim in this most low-key of his adventures – and one of his best

Director: John Glen

Cast: Roger Moore (James Bond), Carole Bouquet (Melina Havelock), Topol (Milos Columbo), Julian Glover (Aristotle Kristatos), Lynn-Holly Johnson (Bibi Dahl), Michael Gothard (Emile Leopold Locque), Cassandra Harris (Lisl van Schlaf), John Wyman (Erich Kriegler), Desmond Llewelyn (Q), Jill Bennett (Jacoba Brink), James Villiers (Bill Tanner), Geoffrey Keen (Minister of Defence), Walter Gotell (General Gogol), Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny), Jack Hedley (Sir Timothy Havelock)

Where could Bond go after he went to space in Moonraker? Another planet? The future? The producers of Bond decided they couldn’t top that – probably wisely – so for Bond’s next outing they went back to low-key basics. For Your Eyes Only Bond would find himself in an old-school Cold-war game of cross and counter-cross, scrambling for the Russians for ownership of what looks like a cross between a typewriter and child’s cash till toy. 

That toy is the ATAC (though it might as well be called MCGUFFIN) a ministry of defence system used to co-ordinate nuclear subs or some such. When the ship it’s on sinks somewhere off the coast of Greece, MI6 and the KGB swing into gear to be the first claim it from the Ocean depths. So Bond is off to Greece to investigate, not knowing who to trust: should it be MI6 contact and shipping magnet Kristatos (Julian Glover) or playboy smuggler and former resistance man Columbo (Topol)? And how will he deal with Melina Havelock (Carole Bouquet), the long-haired, half-Greek archer intent on revenge on whoever ordered her parents killed while they (without her knowledge) searched for the ATAC? Either way it will involve chases, deadly winter sports, flirtatious teenage ice skaters and a death defying climb up to a monastery at the top of a mountain.

For Your Eyes Only is one of those quiet gems of Bond movies that, because it is about something quite small scale and quiet compared to the films it precedes often gets overlooked. It’s certainly the point where Moore should have stopped making the films – when your turning down the advances of someone because she’s too young (as he does ice skater Bibi) you know it’s time to go – and to be honest Moore was flagging already here, clearly too old for the action and certainly far too old for Carole Bouquet, who looks like she could have him for breakfast (she struggles to muster much sexual interest in him). But it doesn’t really matter because this is an old-school bit of spy cool, mixed with some decent but grounded fights and chases and shot with a loving eye for Switzerland and Greece (with plenty of clichéd visuals and sound cues thrown in from both as you would expect).

The producers wanted to shy away from the gadget filled antics of the previous films. As if to make the point, Bond’s car is destroyed almost immediately, forcing him to make a getaway at one point in a bashed up Citroen 2CV. The long sequence in the film where Bond is chased around a ski resort – which takes in cross-country skiing, a ski jump, a toboggan and several other winter sports is remarkable for nary a gadget in sight, with Bond relying on his wits and native skill with skis. Even when ascending the mountain at the film’s end, he uses nothing more than standard climbing equipment, putting his trust in ropes and hooks. It’s possibly the least tech heavy Bond film since Doctor No. There isn’t even a novelty watch and no humorous Q briefing on the gadgets. The only visit to Q’s lab is to use a cumbersome facial recognition system, that hilariously uses computer disks the size of stone slabs loaded into something that today resembles a dishwasher.

Other than that Bond is on his own, and it’s fairly neat to see him go about an investigation and follow a trail – even if Bond is, as usual, a hopeless undercover agent who largely relies on waiting to see who tries to kill him first. The villains, as always oblige, spending most of the film attempting to off Bond for all sorts of confused ill-defined reasons. Perhaps it has something to do with our main villain – the rather low-key Julian Glover, playing possibly the least colourful Bond villain ever, a guy who just wants to sell the ATAC for some cold hard cash – using so many cut outs for his operations, speechless goons (including an early appearance from Charles Dance) and East German skiing champions who seem motivated to kill Bond purely for larks and the evilz.

The first half of the film though is huge fun, watching Bond blunder around the ski resort dodging hits, fighting people, punching out butch hockey players and the like that it hardly matters that most of the plot is pretty inconsequential. When Bond finally stops mucking around in Switzerland and heads to Greece the ATAC is found in about 5 minutes flat (Havelock helpfully left a map with the downed boat coloured in on it, making his daughter’s ability to translate his cryptic notes pretty much useless), while the villain immediately takes this chance to comprehensively unmask himself.

After a further elaborately sadistic attempt to off Bond involving dragging him across coral in shark infested waters (sharks are always such deadly threats in Bond films), Bond unites with Topol to storm the castle in an actually pretty gripping and vertigo inducing climb sequence, another triumph of John Glen’s mastery of the action sequence. It’s a nice touch as well to introduce the “guest star” of the film not as the antagonist but as a protagonist ally, a neat twist that must have come as quite a shock back in the day. Topol plays his role with realish, cracking nuts, gags and heads with equal glee.

The film also heads into some dark places. For all his charm, gallantry and debonair wit, Moore does his meanest thing in years here when he kicks a heavy’s teetering car off a cliff. But that’s a fair repayment for the brutal running over of his mid-film squeeze (played by Pierce Brosnan’s real life late wife Cassandra Harris) earlier on by the same heavy. The early murder of the Havelock’s is surprisingly graphic (and also gives a great reaction shot for Carole Bouquet as she turns and looks back as the plane carrying her parent’s murderers jets away, her eyes screaming “I shall have my revenge!”) and Carole Bouquet’s Melina is determined figure, who does more than her fair share of the action.

Of course the film can’t endorse too much her need for revenge. “That’s not the way” Bond, like a disapproval uncle, rather prissily tells her several times. Which is a bit rich coming from a man who opens the film by dropping his wife’s murderer down a factory chimney shaft. That opening sequence by the way is a joy, a neat call back to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (whenever Bond went serious, it referenced Bond’s status as a widower) as well as a the dispatching of a it-could-be-anyone bald, scared, cackling villain with a white cat who makes an ill-advised attempt to kill Bond with a remote controlled helicopter (the film is so anti-Gadgets, only the baddies seem to use them and they don’t even work for them). It’s a neat “fuck you” to Kevin McCloy, at that time in a feud with the producers over the rights to Bond who had refused to allow them to use Blofield or Spectre again in the films. Keen to show they didn’t need Blofield, the producers introduced him in all but name to ignominiously kill him off, his final pathetic words a hilariously meaningless offer to buy Bond a “delicatessen in stainless steel” if only Bond would let him go.

FYEO is a crackingly old-fashioned Bond film that, despite being more grounded, has some great action sequences and a host of actors having a good time. Carole Bouquet is one of Moore’s best Bond girls and Moore himself certainly should have stopped here, this film throwing together one of his best mixes of light comedy, moral uprightedness, playfulness mixed with a dash of cruelty. John Glen did such a good job assembling this one he directed the next four films. It’s not got the smash-and-grab of The Spy Who Loved Me, but it’s an excellent action adventure.

Body of Lies (2008)

Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio fail to master the Middle East in Ridley Scott’s spy thriller Body of Lies

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Roger Ferris), Russell Crowe (Ed Hoffman), Mark Strong (Hani Salaam), Golshifteh Farahani (Aisha), Oscar Isaac (Bassam), Ali Suliman (Omar Sadiki), Alon Abutbul (Al-Saleem), Vince Colosimo (Skip), Simon McBurney (Garland), Lubna Azabal (Cala)

Ridley Scott is a bit of a curate’s egg as a director. You can always expect a film with a certain visual flair, as well as a story that attempts to tackle big themes and engaging topics. However, it doesn’t always produce an end result that really grips or feels like something that particularly stands out from the crowd. That’s what you end up with Body of Lies, a film that constantly feels like it is on the cusp of saying something important or interesting about the relationship between East and West, but constantly falls back on the sort of spy movie tropes it initially feels like it wants to debunk.

In the Middle East, Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a dedicated CIA operative, with an intricate knowledge of the cultures and issues of the region. He constantly finds himself frustrated and undermined by his boss Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe), based in Langley, who is constantly willing to sacrifice long-term gains for short-term political pay-offs. Assigned to Jordan, Ferris begins an investigation into a terrorist cell, working closely with head of Jordanian security Hani Salaam (Mark Strong) – but Hoffman’s intercessions increasingly cause tension.

Scott’s film is stylish and well assembled, with a great sense of pace and place. The contrasts between DiCaprio on the ground (in the dirt, facing dangers and tackling everything from terrorists to rabid dogs) and Crowe back in the States (rarely if ever seen without a hands-free phone set dangling from his ear, viewing everything at a distance with no understanding of the intricacies) is well drawn. The sense of complete cultural misunderstanding and lack of connection between East and West is established early, and attempts to cross it generally lead to disaster. The patience and expertise of the Jordanian security forces is contrasted constantly with the more slap-dash, hasty efforts of the CIA to meet the same goals. It’s all set for something quite interesting.

But then the film somehow doesn’t quite come together. Its episodic structure increasingly stretches out as action moves back and forth from Jordan to Langley and back again. A particularly wild scheme by Ferris (which, to the viewer not the film, suggests he is as incompetent and reckless as Hoffman) turns the film towards the sort of kidnap/torture/nick-of-time-rescue plotline that wouldn’t look out of place in 24 or James Bond. Basically, the plot turns on the film transitioning from something with a genuine political statement to make into the sort of disposal rent-a-spy-thriller that you forget pretty quickly. 

DiCaprio gets a lot of “big” moments to juggle with, as well as a rather forced romance with a Jordanian nurse (something that he and Golshifteh Farahani play very well, but seems to have wandered in from an even more conventional film) but the film works hard to paint him as the “hero” who knows better than his superiors, despite the film chronicling a string of mistakes. Crowe enjoys himself as self-important windbag behind a computer, as uncaring as the institutions he represents.

The real star of the show however is Mark Strong, excellent as the suave head of Jordanian intelligence, seemingly the only character who has any understanding about what is going on. With a cool sharpness, slightly playful politeness and a slight chill of threat, Strong is the film’s most interesting character. There is a striking point made here that the most effective person in the film is a Jordanian spy chief with a mixed reputation – but the film largely shirks the possibility of really using this to demonstrate how out-of-their-depth the CIA agents are, as if worried that flagging up their manifest incompetence at every turn would sell badly Stateside.

It’s part of the film’s general lack of soul behind the skill of its construction. I know Scott is deeply interested in these themes of East vs West and the culture clashes that develop from it, but it just doesn’t come out here at all. There was a film to be made here about how the war on terror has thrown the CIA and the West into a setting they don’t understand, playing by rules they haven’t been briefed on. But all too often the film instead settles for telling us the same-old-same-old, padding out its runtime with spy story clichés and thriller plotting. Scott himself even uses visual tricks – surveillance drone shots and 24 style action – which suggest that somewhere along the line his heart wasn’t really in it. Body of Lies could have been a really interesting thriller about the world today. Instead it’s just another spy thriller about the war on terror.

The Time Machine (2002)

Guy Pearce wastes his time in The Time Machine

Director: Simon Wells (Gore Verbinski)

Cast: Guy Pearce (Dr Alexander Hartdegen), Samantha Mumba (Mara), Orlando Jones (Vox 114), Mark Addy (David Philby), Jeremy Irons (Über-Morlock), Sienna Guillory (Emma), Phyllida Law (Mrs Watchit)

Every so often during this hysterical travesty of poor film-making, it’s worth remembering that it was was directed by HG Wells great-Grandson. If that’s not a reason for HG Wells to invent a time machine and travel into the future, in order to give his descendant a slap, I don’t know what is.

Anyway, with a plot vaguely reminiscent of some elements of the original novel, but just as inspired by a strange mixture of Hollywood blockbusters and Colin-Baker-era Doctor Who, The Time Machine stars Guy Pearce as Dr Alexander Hartdegen. In New York in 1899, Hartdegen is exactly the sort of naïve, floppy haired, genius eccentric so beloved of Hollywood movies, fascinated by time. When his fiancée Emma (Sienna Guillory) is killed in a mugging gone-wrong, obsession to prevent this leads him to invent a time machine – but he finds himself unable to prevent Emma’s death. Travelling forward into the future to find out why he eventually finds himself 800,000 years in the future where the Earth is occupied by the peace-loving Eloi and their brutal hunters, the subterranean Morlocks.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this film, but let’s try. It’s very poorly written. The dialogue clunks to the ground in a way reminiscent of the lumps of the moon that fall to the Earth in the future Hartdegen sees. There is scarcely any logic in the events we see, from the mechanisms of time travel to computers lasting hundreds of thousands of years with no identifiable power source. Characters tend to do things because the plot needs them to do it, rather than for any actual logical reason. Character development occurs with a randomness: Hartdegen starts the film as a buck toothed, shaggy haired “eccentric” and ends it as a ripped, action-hero haired heartthrob. No idea how that progression is meant to work, but you certainly won’t find the answer in the script.

It’s also poorly directed. Wells, working for the first (and only) time with live action actors has no idea at all about how to set a film’s tone or pace. The tone veers wildly from lowbrow comedy to highblown tension from tragedy to farce. Scenes that are meant to pluck the heartstrings will bring out tears of laughter. The actual comic bits will only bring out groans. Action scenes late in the film are shot with a ham-fisted bluntness that reduces them to laughable, cheesy crapness. Bright lights and wide angles frequently make a film that cost over $100 million to make, look like one that cost a tenth of that. I will cut Simon Wells some slack, as he had to stand down from the production, meaning it’s final moments were put together by Hollywood Hack Gore Verbinski, who probably just wanted to be out of there as soon as possible.

Also the whole design is so stupid. It’s a sort of steam-punk cool, but with no logic applied. The time machine never moves from its fixed geographical point, so it’s just as well no one tried to build a house on it or that the moon collapse didn’t drop a pile of moon rock on top of it. The time machine itself is a wonky contraption, full of spinning metal things and odd surfaces but of course Hartgeden doesn’t even consider installing a seat belt or any head protection. The Morlock design is equally bad, bright lighting making them look more like the bastard spawn of the Orcs from Lord of the Rings and Oscar the Grouch from Seasame Street.

At the middle of it all you have the sort of bizarre cast that could only have been assembled by some sort committee asking first “who’s cool?” and second “who needs money?”. Cool is surely the only reason Samantha Mumba (yes that Samantha Mumba) ended up in this film, as a sexy Elio lady who might just make Hartgeden forget all about that fiancée he’s spent four years obsessing about. At the other end, in one of his finest performance of cash-grabbing ham, we have Jeremy Irons. I have to admire his pluck, going through a laborious (Oscar-nominated!) make-up job (albino with a brain growing down his back), but the sort of sub-Scar speechifying the Über-Morlock delivers at the film’s climax (not to mention a bizarrely wonky final fight scene) is the work of a man already mentally spending the money on restoring his new castle in Ireland.

At the centre, Guy Pearce. I think at this time Pearce was going through some sort of career crisis. He’s handsome enough to play rugged, leading-man, action heroes like the type Hartgeden becomes. But in his heart, he’s more at home playing weirdos, outsiders and oddball (witness the happiness with which he embraces the buck-toothed oddness of early Hartgeden). So God knows what he made of this, but you can sort of tell he thinks the whole thing is crap, but doesn’t know what to do other than play it with a straight-jawed commitment (he’d soon learn, as Irons has, to meet crap with ham). Copper-bottomed crap at that, the sort of crap that would normally have you running for the hills. So Pearce sort of gets his head down and just gets through it and clearly hopes to still have a career when he comes out the other side. Which I suppose is more than Samantha Mumba managed.

Events sort of happen at this film, which seems to have some sort of confused message about moving on (“Your fiancée is dead? Man up and get over it!”) and wants us to live a life of individualism even while Hartgeden sets about giving the poor Eloi the sort of post-Victorian education that eventually led to their ancestors cracking the moon in half and wrecking the world. It’s the sort of film that ends things (literally) with a bang, Hartgeden creating some sort of time bomb out of his time machine and then running super-fast away (fortunately much faster than the allegedly super-fast Morlocks. Also the shockwave decides to stop once it’s killed all the Morlocks meaning Hartgeden is only guilty of mass genocide rather than wiping out the world). 

It’s all so far away from HG Wells cautionary tale of scientific progress gone awry that you wonder if his grandson even read his book. Did HG envision one day that a film would be made where a Morlock does a head turn double take, like some sort of Seasame Street reject, a few seconds before he blows up? That Jeremy Irons would pale up to play a character who might as well be called Gruber-Morlock? That Sienna Guillory would be saved from a mugger only to be hilariously killed off camera by a horse? That the future would be the singer of Gotta Tell Ya repopulating the planet with a bored Australian actor? If HG did make that time machine, we better tell him 2002 is a year to miss.

“Where would you go?” The poster asks. “To another film” replied the cinema audience.

The Wolverine (2013)

Hugh Jackman brings out the claws once more for The Wolverine

Director: James Mangold

Cast: Hugh Jackman (Logan/Wolverine), Hiroyuki Sanada (Shingen Yashida), Tak Okamoto (Mariko Yashida), Rila Fukushima (Yukio), Famke Janssen (Jean Grey), Will Yun Lee (Kenuichio Harada), Svetlana Khodchenkova (Dr Green/Viper), Haruhiko Yamanouchi (Ichiro Yashida), Brian Tee (Noburo Mori), Ken Yamamura (Young Ichiro Yashida)

Before James Mangold and Hugh Jackman teamed up for their triumphant 2017 Wolverine capper Logan, they first made The Wolverine. Adapting one of the most popular comic books to feature the clawed superhero, The Wolverine is set in Japan where Logan’s Ronin-like personality comes into contact with a culture he has more than a little sympathy for. 

Opening with the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, Logan saves the life of young soldier Ichiro Yashida. Over 60 years later, the ageing Ichiro (Hauhiko Yamanouchi), now a tech billionaire, asks Logan to see him before he dies. He offers Logan the chance to give up his regenerative powers and live a “normal” life. Logan is unsure – but when Yashida dies, he suddenly finds his power gone and that he is embroiled in an inheritance war between Ichiro’s son Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada) and granddaughter Mariko (Tak Okamoto), with uncertain aid/opposition from Yashida retainers Yukio (Rila Fukushima) and Harada (Will Yun Lee).

The Wolverine wants to be a dark character study, an attempt to drill down into the psyche of its hero. It doesn’t really succeed in doing this. Following on directly from the little-loved X-Men: The Last Stand, the present day section of the film opens with Logan still consumed with guilt over his euthanasia of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), haunted by dreams of her. Living rough – and of course with the beard of tragedy looming large – the film aims to use the Japanese setting to bring Logan into a greater understanding of himself. In other words to accept the two halves of his personality: Logan and Wolverine. It’s no surprise to say this is what happens, but it fails to really get a sense of the clash between the two halves, or a sense of internal struggle of Logan wanting to reject the Wolverine personae.

Put simply, the film doesn’t manage to give us an idea of the internal war in Logan. He talks of wanting to leave violence behind him, but the sort of existential torment this requires would get in the way too much of the sort of claw-slashing action the fans are handing over their ticket money to see. On top of this, the sort of Samurai-inspired, still semi-feudal Japanese setting (with established families and loyal retainers) doesn’t really end up relating too much to the action. The sort of “masterless samurai” story the film is trying to tell requires a sense of deep honour and duty – themes which are there but don’t really come together into something really coherent. 

Basically, Japanese culture is, by and large, pretty irrelevant to the actual setting. Samurai culture is trivialised down to something that lacks any real thematic depth – the only thing that really matters is Logan learning a Japanese sword is a two-handed weapon – and the clash between Western greed and old-fashioned values of duty, honour and service is barely more than inferred. Effectively, for all the locations, the film could basically have been set anywhere at all, the entire cast replaced with Russians or Ghanaians or French and barely a word of the script would have needed to change.

Alongside this, the action, when we see it, has been watered down to the safest, PG-rated level you can imagine. There is barely any blood seen on the screen. Characters are hacked and slashed but all of it with smooth cleanliness. Action scenes switch between being shot far too closely, and with too much of an admiring air for choreography, or with a super-shiny gloss of special effects. There is a pretty good sequence on top of a bullet train, with Logan and his opponents tumbling and buffeted in the wind, but even this feels a little over produced. By the time the film hits its final battle, it’s hard not to be a little bit bored as Logan takes on a massive special effect, in a battle where the stakes are not altogether clear.

But then that’s the problem of this film, a sort of overly-complex Diet Coke of a film. The film has no fewer than three potential villains, none of whom end up being particularly interesting. It heads towards a final resolution that doesn’t feel like it helps us – or Logan – learn anything new about themselves. “I am the Wolverine” Logan growls at one point – but this claiming of his identity never really feels that earned. It’s a statement, a suggestion of depth, rather than depth itself.

This is hard on the film, and really there is nothing that wrong with it. It’s perfectly entertaining and passes the time. But it leaves the viewer with nothing after it finishes. It happens and then it is not happening and to be honest you won’t really notice the difference. It lands fairly in the middle of the franchise, a bland but not offensive effort that had the potential to be something greater but ends up firmly safe and middle-brow, avoiding diving too far down into its lead character’s psyche or showing us real action. Jackman is still good, much of the cast are fine, and Mangold is a solid director – but it never sets alight. Perhaps the sense of missed opportunity here is what ended up powering a much darker, grittier and engrossing film in Logan?

John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum (2019)

Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry and some very, very mean dogs in John Wick Chapter 3

Director: Chad Stahelski

Cast: Keanu Reeves (John Wick), Ian McShane (Winston), Mark Dacascos (Zero), Laurence Fishbourne (The Bowery King), Asia Kate Dillon (The Adjucator), Halle Berry (Sofia), Lance Reddick (Charon), Anjelica Huston (The Director), Saïd Taghmaoui (The Elder), Jerome Flynn (Berrada)

Early on in the film, John Wick (Keanu Reeves in a role he might have been born to play) builds a gun from scratch components of other weapons to fire some outsized ammunition, throws an axe across a room to take out an assassin, and then effectively reloads a horse, using its rear leg kicks to dispatch two more luckless assassins. It’s a dizzying 20 minutes or so of pure balls-to-the-wall action fun full of invention and black humour. The film never gets near repeating it, despite much trying.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum doesn’t have much in the way of plot. Instead it’s effectively a two-hour series of fight sequences. What plot there is pops up around the edges of all this imaginative blood-letting. That plot doesn’t really make much sense, and can basically be summarised as John has been declared excommunicado by “The High Table”, the shady organisation that runs the criminal underworld, meaning he is a target for every assassin in the world, and he is trying to reverse that decision. That’s kind of it, and any other subplots are basically slightly confusing or narratively empty detours from that central idea.

If you cut out all the fight sequences from the film, it wouldn’t run a lot longer than 15 minutes. There isn’t really any interest in the talking stuff or the characters, which seems to be fine for the likes of Laurence Fishbourne, who is wheeled out for three scenes of badass scenery chewing, but does mean that motivations and reasons for why anyone is doing anything at all remain completely unclear. There is a key subplot involving Ian McShane’s management of the Continental, the criminal “neutral zone” hotel in the centre of New York, that involves so many changes of allegiance and intentions that it winds up making no real sense.

But then people ain’t going to this for a character study. They are there for the fights. And, as I say, these are really inventive and entertaining. The first 20 minutes – with John haring through New York, trying to stay one step ahead of a blizzard of killers – is brilliant. It’s designed to be watched with large groups of people in the same mood, encouraging you to laugh, wince and shout out with the people around you. You can’t fault the work that has gone into the filming of this or the commitment of the actors or the genius of the choreographers. All of this is pretty faultless. And, no matter what extended fight you watch, you know you will see something different in every single one.

The problem is, the vast number of fights begins to pummel the audience into submission as well. Seeing Keanu Reeves involved in a series of three-in-a-row mixed martial arts sequences, each lasting well over 5-10 minutes, you start to let the whole thing drift over you. Put bluntly, after the initial explosion of action, the film hits a level it tries to sustain for almost an hour. And it’s too much. You just can’t keep that same level of engagement. I actually nearly dropped off at one point, which is not a good sign. How much action can one film take? 

There needs to be a balance. And without any real investment in what we are seeing, John Wick 3 is another of those films designed for YouTube. I can imagine watching most of these fights as little five-minute videos on the Internet in the future. Actually broken down like this I will probably enjoy it a lot more. But as a single film, there is nothing there to link it together.

The first film had a simple, but very pure, storyline that we could all relate to. A man loses his beloved wife, who on her deathbed gifts him a dog to care for. Said dog is then killed in a senseless break-in by some arrogant criminals. John Wick’s revenge is against those who thoughtlessly took from him the last piece of the only woman he loved. Everyone can relate to that – and it grounded everything we saw and immediately put us on John’s side. This film however is a confused motivation-less mess. If the series originally presented us with a John unwillingly dragged back into this world, since then (and here) he seems like a character with no inner life. 

The film attempts vaguely to add one, suggesting that John must make a choice between being a killer or the better man. Problem is choosing to be the better man isn’t really a platform for fights. So we lose what the film really needs, which is John struggling between his good and bad demons. Instead his motivations are a confused mess and the film spends more time showing us the brutal groin attacks of Halle Berry’s dogs (those things fight with no honour let me tell you) than giving us a lead character with a coherent personality.

It makes John Wick 3 not a lot more than a YouTube compilation, and giving Ian McShane some Latin to drop to explain the film’s title, or trying to change a character in Act 4 into a personal rival for John, doesn’t suddenly give it depth or interest. It’s fun in small chunks, but this is way too long and seems to have lost at least half of what made the first film such a guilty pleasure.

Public Enemies (2009)

Johnny Depp rides into action as John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s underwhelming Public Enemies

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Johnny Depp (John Dillinger), Christian Bale (FBI Special Agent Melvin Purvis), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Billy Crudup (J Edgar Hoover), Stephen Dorff (Homar van Meter), Stephen Lang (Agent Charles Winstead), Stephen Graham (Baby Face Nelson), Jason Clarke (Red Hamilton), David Wenham (Harry Pierpont), Spencer Garrett (Tommy Carroll), Christian Stolte (Charles Makley), Giovanni Ribisi (Alvin Karpis), Bill Camp (Frank Nitti), Branka Katic (Anna Sage)

Michael Mann has an affinity for crime films. With Heat as one of his calling cards, Public Enemies is his attempt to do the same in the classic prohibition and bank robbery era of the 1920s. The guys going head-to-head this time?  John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), coolest robber there is, an icon of the criminal classes, and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) rigid and committed FBI agent. Public Enemies however fails to match Heat, falling part way between history lesson and action thriller. Covering the last few years of Dillinger’s life, and the rise of the FBI, it’s a cold, strangely uninvolving film mixed with a few stand out action scenes where tommy guns go blazing.

One of the first things it impossible to miss about the film is Mann’s decision to shoot the film using HD video cameras. The advantages of this is it gives much of the film an immediacy and modern look that throws the viewer into the middle of the action and makes this at times look and feel like a piece of news reel footage rather than a period piece. The camera choice allows Mann to put the camera right into the action, capturing every detail at a fast pace. The film has the look at times of a genuine documentary, and removing the richness of film also gives it the air of being caught on a phone, like some of this was some sort of found footage. Or rather, a phone that has been handled by a gifted cinematographer for perfect framing.

The downside of the choice of HD camera is that it makes the film at times look rather like a behind-the-scenes DVD documentary, with its untextured shadows and lack of lighting. Frankly at points it makes the film look bizarrely a little bit dull in places, or unusually unprofessional. Personally, I feel the benefits it gives in immediacy are cancelled out by this. But that’s just me.

Away from Mann’s shooting style – and his usual high octane skill of cutting and assembling action scenes – the film showpieces a strange lack of insight into its characters or any real developments of their hinterland. This is particularly so in the case of Purvis who never comes to life either in the film’s staging of him, or in Bale’s firm jawed, muted performance. When the final film caption throws up news of his later resignation and years later possible suicide it doesn’t make you question things you have seen in the film or feel like a logical progression: it just doesn’t tally up at all. 

The film does get some material out of how both sides play the media game. Purvis is a reluctant but fairly skilled player. His boss J Edgar Hoover (rather well played by Billy Crudup in one of the films best performances) is obsessed with spinning the nascent FBI to the media – half his scenes are bookended by press conferences – and his primary motivation is to exhibit himself to the media as the only logical choice for leading the FBI and the essentialness that it gains the powers it needs. Similarly, Dillinger and his fellow criminals delight in their media profile and do their damnedest to build up images of themselves as Robin Hoods (without the giving to the poor of course).

This is captured in Johnny Depp’s charismatic performance as Dillinger, a brooding, intense figure who would like to see himself as a sort of poet of the underworld. Dillinger talks about the banks money being their only interest and is frequently charming with an edge with regular people. He prefers bloodless robberies as they are cleaner and demonstrates a genuine sense of romantic openness with his girlfriend Billie. However, he is no angel. While he does not use violence as a first resort, he has no hesitation about using it as a second and will happily put bystanders at risk and rough up bank staff to get what he wants. He talks of escaping, but it’s clear that the game is an addiction for him and the danger is enjoyable – he takes an illicit thrill at one point of sitting in a cinema while his mugshot appears on the screen, wondering if anyone will dare spot him.

Depp’s performance is the finest thing in the film, a subtle and intelligent tightrope walk that teases depths that are perhaps not there, and suggests sympathies and agendas he perhaps does not have. While the character remains unknowable, you sense a great complexity and conflict there somewhere. He’s helped by being given a great actress like Marion Cottilard to play off, who makes Billie much more than just a gangster’s moll.

There is potential in the film, but it never really comes to life. For all the exciting shoot outs and drama, none of its characters are engaging or really interesting. The rest of the supporting cast feel like pieces to be moved around the board – many disappear with no real trace – and their fates pre-ordained by the demands of the plot. It makes for a rather flat experience, full of style, but never making you invest in it.

Beowulf (2007)

A CGI Ray Winstone faces off against monsters, temptation and fate in Beowulf

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Ray Winstone (Beowulf), Anthony Hopkins (King Hrothgar), John Malkovich (Unferth), Robin Wright (Queen Wealtheow), Angelina Jolie (Grendel’s Mother), Crispin Glover (Grendel), Brendan Gleeson (Wiglaf), Alison Lohman (Ursula)

Around the turn of the century a new style of film-making (and I guess acting) burst into the world of Hollywood. There had been special effects and there had been animation. We’d seen actors transplanted by CGI into any number of settings and locations. But motion-capture was something else. Its leading pioneer is of course Andy Serkis, and the art involved essentially placing a load of dots on people’s faces to record every inch of their movements and then feed this physical performance into a computer to create a CGI personality that unified actor and special effect. 

Zemeckis, always a pioneering film maker, was fascinated by the art and had used it on previous films – but Beowulf was his real push to create something that couldn’t have been done without motion capture. So Ray Winstone – a bulky middle aged actor – is here transformed through the computer into a slim, muscular man in his early thirties. Winstone plays Beowulf himself, and Zemeckis’ aim here was to bring to life in a way that had never been done before the ancient poem. And not only the humans would be motion captured: Grendel and his mother (played by Crispin Glover and Angelina Jolie) would also be powered by real-life human performances.

It makes a fascinating film visually to watch. Zemeckis’ camera work has the complete freedom to roam anywhere around the actors (every move they made was recorded into the computer from every angle). And he doesn’t hold back, with the camera swooping and sliding around every dimension and angle of the locations, often moving freely and swiftly with a series of engrossing tracking shots and fast moving sweeping panoramas. 

It also means that having real performances behind every creature in the film adds a real human dimension to even the most vile monsters. Crispin Glover’s physical commitment – not to mention the searing, twisted pain in his every moment – humanises Grendel in a way his simple monstrous appearance never could. The later dragon has a real feeling of humanity behind it, for all its scales and arrogant cruelty. Angelina Jolie reported she felt surprisingly uncomfortable when she saw the final realisation of her performance as Grendel’s mother – imagined here as an extremely seductive succubus, permanently naked with perfectly formed curves – but the entire thing works because of the performance behind the animation.

Some of the motion capture isn’t always of course completely successful. There is something still slightly too shiny, slightly too polished about the faces – part of the film being a slightly strange halfway gap between animation and real acting. The eyes suffer most – for all the efforts of the animators there is something still slightly dead behind, something not quite of the human face about them. It’s something that you can’t help but spot, and can’t help but be disconcerted about.

But it largely comes second to some of the imagination that exists in this version of the story. Zemeckis’ film making is often visceral and bloody – and the action sequences are as involving as he manages to make the other sequences are engaging. Not everything works: Beowulf fights Grendel in the nude, and the decision to have Beowulf’s ‘bits’ constantly obstructed by a series of fortuously placed items smacks somewhat of Monty Python and seems tonally off from the rest of the film. But by and large it works.

It does this because the script from Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery mixes the original poem with something reminiscent of Macbeth. One of its key themes is the seduction of power and the inner guilt of heroes who know that they have feet of clay. Grendel is reimagined as the son of Hrothgar – seduced by Grendel’s mother with offers of power, he creates with her Grendel, the living embodiment of his flaws. Grendel’s mother represents the creeping temptation of greed, ambition and the “old ways” (the film plays up the Christianisation of the Vikings in the background throughout). She’s effectively all the witches rolled into one (but much hotter).

And Beowulf is ripe ground for our temptations as it’s made clear right from the start that – while clearly a great warrior – he is also a triumphalist blowhard who enjoys repeating and expanding his own myth. A story recounted about his fighting sea monsters during an epic sea swimming competition (‘It used to be just one’ comments best friend Wilfric) is a masterpiece of puffed up self-promotion on top of genuinely impressive deeds, Beowulf’s words diverging from the story we see on screen towards in the end is a neat foreshadowing of his eventual seduction by Grendel’s mother. 

Beowulf isn’t an empty boaster though. He’s a sympathetic Macbeth who feels guilt about the “sound and fury” that his life story has become. The aged Beowulf in the second half of the film is weary, tired and full of self-loathing, his great name an oppressive weight he can’t live up to or escape from. He’s a man who knows all the time he has feet of clay, but the name of a God – and that the name is so important he can’t let anything puncture it. Wilfric twice refuses to allow Beowulf to divest his conscience: the legend is so important it’s been printed as fact.

Ray Winstone handles this all pretty well – even if a lot of this requires sorrow behind the eyes, that motion capture simply can’t provide – even if the transformation of his face makes him look more like Sean Bean than a younger version of himself. Hopkins and Malkovich embrace all the cavorting and expressive body movement of motion capture like the old hams they can be. The film’s real highlight is Robin Wright who makes a great deal of Hrothgar then Beowulf’s sad wife, unhappy, quietly aware of both her husband’s flaws and perhaps the only level headed person in the Kingdom.

Beowulf has some fine technical work, but its real lasting interest is the psychological depths it tries to explore in its hero. Far from the perfect warrior, he’s someone doubtful and doubting, whose insecurities and vulnerabilities grow throughout the film and finally – like a mix of Lear and Macbeth – only becomes fully sympathetic at the very end. It makes for an interesting remix of a story nearly older than any other in our culture.

Ironclad (2011)

James Purefoy carries a big sword in nonsense medieval blood bath Ironclad

Director: Jonathan English

Cast: James Purefoy (Thomas Marshall), Brian Cox (William d’Aubigny), Derek Jacobi (Reginald de Cornhill), Kate Mara (Lady Isabel), Paul Giamatti (King John), Charles Dance (Archbishop Stephen Langton), Jason Flemyng (Becket), Jamie Foreman (Jedediah Coteral), Mackenzie Crook (Daniel Marks), Rhys Parry Jones (Wulfstan), Aneurin Barnard (Guy), Vladimir Kulich (Tiberius)

Let’s just take a moment to enjoy the fact that the most expensive film ever made entirely in Wales was directed by a guy called English. After that, you can enjoy the guilty-pleasure hack and blood nonsense of this sort of proto-Game of Thrones,which bears almost as much resemblance to British history as George RR Martin’s souped up re-tread with extra dragons.

Anyway, King John (Paul Giamatti) has signed Magna Carta – as always that document which gave the barons some say in the government is here reimagined as some sort of manifesto for a socialist revolution – but now Rome has told John that he doesn’t need to stick to it after all. So John hires (honestly) a load of Viking warriors to take out his enemies. Yes that is just as silly as it sounds. Before we know it, the barons need to take control of Rochester Castle, a stronghold which is apparently the key to the south of England. So Baron William d’Aubigny (Brian Cox) puts together a “Dirty Dozen” (well Dirty Half Dozen, it’s a British budget after all) to defend the castle, led by Templar knight Thomas Marshall (James Purefoy). Let the siege begin!

If that doesn’t give you an idea of the way the film mixes and matches parts of British history into some sort of heady brew, I don’t know what will. We got King John! We got Magna Carta! We got Templar knights! We got Vikings! All of this is frozen into a hyperviolent mixture of historical epic and “men on a mission” war film, with added limbs flying off left, right and centre. Most of it is delivered at an absurdly energised pace. At least all involved seem aware that they are making a stoopid B movie, rather than some sort of genuine historical epic.

Criticising the history of the supposed historical epic seems completely superfluous, so instead sit back and enjoy the skill with which Jonathan English apes Neil Marshall in his blood letting and imaginative slaughter. Sure, he hasn’t got Marshall’s narrative skill or his ability to carve human interest out of even the most basic cardboard characters. But he still manages to present what we see with enough sense of action and adventure. Ridiculous as it might feel that a tiny group of men holds off an entire legion of King John’s troops, you sort of go with it as the film is shot with enough sense of ragged viciousness that you don’t notice the gaps in the tiny budget (less than a single episode of Game of Thrones). 

The actors all know they are in something rather silly as well. It’s a bizarre mixture of people, from Hollywood star character actors to B-movie stalwarts to Brit TV stars to slumming classical actors. James Purefoy grounds the stuff with his usual commitment and charisma. Just as well he does as Paul Giamatti clearly rocks up in the spirit of a lark, hammily overacting to such a ludicrous degree that he sounds like John Adams on a bad acid trip. It’s a surprise they don’t turn him on the walls of Rochester Castle and let him chew through the defences. Between these two hardly anyone else gets a look in, although Brian Cox does well as the brave leader of the castle who suffers a particularly brutal death involving mutilation and imaginative use of a catapult. 

Some typically subtle restrained work from Paul Giamatti

There are some impressive set pieces and some very stirring bits of head mashing, limb slicing violence but the overall plot is completely bog standard, as if with all that investment they either didn’t have time to put a story together or felt that they needed to make something that would appeal as much as possible to the lowest common denominator in order to recoup the costs. But at least there is a nice sense of growing comradeship between this hardy gang fighting against the odds and the film gets some sense of honour and duty being causes worth dying for against tyrants. I mean, it’s not there in spades, but it’s there.

And if you like this sort of B movie hack and dash stuff you’ll probably actually rather like this. Heck I’ve seen it twice, and I found the second viewing actually rather good fun in particular, especially as I knew going into it the entire film was an absolutely absurd pile of nonsense designed to just let you watch blood spray across the screen and heads depart bodies. Roll with it – put your critical facilities on hold and forget the history – and you will rather enjoy its earnest B movie antics.