Category: Action film

Black Panther (2018)

Chadwick Boseman is the legendary Black Panther in Marvel’s solid comic book outing

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Chadwick Boseman (T’Challa/Black Panther), Michael B. Jordan (N’Jadaka/Erik Kilmonger Stevens), Lupita Nyong’o (Nakia), Danai Gurira (Okoye), Martin Freeman (Everett K Ross), Daniel Kaluuya (W’Kabi), Letitia Wright (Shuri), Winston Duke (M’Baku), Angela Bassett (Ramonda), Forest Whitaker (Zuri), Andy Serkis (Ulysses Klaue), John Kani (T’Chaka)

Marvel’s comic book world is now so stuffed with characters, worlds and dimensions that it is remarkable how many of its heroes are white and male. Black Panther does something completely different, giving us a set of African heroes and placing the common framework of a Marvel film within a very proud, and distinct, African heritage. So you can pretty much guarantee you ain’t seen a comic book film quite like this one.

After the death of his father (in Captain America: Civil War), T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) becomes king of the secretive nation of Wakanda. Camouflaging itself as a poor and unadvanced nation in order to avoid interaction with the rest of the world, Wakanda has in fact for centuries been mining a remarkable metal, vibranium, that has helped the nation become hugely technologically advanced. Its king also bears the responsibility of being the “Black Panther”, ingesting a vibranium-infused herb to gain superhuman speed and strength. However, others have their eye on the throne, not least Erik “Kilmonger” Stevens (Michael B Jordan), who wants to turn Wakanda into a force that could protect the black people of the world from their historical oppressors and avenge centuries of slavery.

Black Panther never fails to be entertaining. The film is shot with a genuinely vibrant excitement, and I love the way it proudly embraces a comic book twist on African tribal heritage. In fact the film’s depiction of an African nation which is secretly the most powerful and advanced nation in the world is really quite an impressive political statement.

Ryan Coogler directs the film with flashy brilliance and comes up with a few ways of presenting what are (essentially) action sequences we’ve seen many times before in unique new ways. The stand-out is an early action scene in a Korean bar, filmed to appear as an immersive single take around a large set, the camera dipping and zooming from character to character. Coogler also brings a fair amount of visual wit to the fights while not losing the emotional and character depth the story is aiming for.

The film also has some fine performances, with Boseman dripping dignity, nobility and decency as T’Challa. Regular Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan gives a great contrast as bitter LA slums kid turned misguided would-be dictator Kilmonger. Danai Gurira stands out as proud general Okoye, torn between duty and personal loyalties. Hell even Forest Whitaker – clearly loving every moment of this OTT Marvel world – gets some weight and dignity out of his typical grandstanding style.

It’s another mark for the film that the world of Wakanda is so effectively gender neutral. Kings of Wakanda have a Praetorian Guard of female warriors, most of the leading voices on its council are women, and its technical genius is T’Challa’s sister Shuri (played by Letitia Wright in a charming, star-making performance). Sure it doesn’t feel like the role of Black Panther himself is up for grabs for anyone lacking a penis, but this is a world where women are equal, if not leading, partners in the action.

The film also addresses issues of post-colonial struggle, not least attitudes towards slavery and oppression handed out to Africa over centuries. Kilmonger’s fiendish plot is, in many ways, actually quite sympathetic – he wants to use Wakanda’s resources to protect those of African descent across the world. Jordan gets some good moments from his speeches laced with anger at the historical treatment of Afro-Caribbeans and, to be honest, it’s hard not to see his point. So hard in fact that the film has to drop hints that Kilmonger is a potential tyrant to stop him from seeing too reasonable. 

This is where the film’s plot starts to get slightly hazy. The character arc of T’Challa himself is pretty unclear. Traditionally in these films, the character must embrace his destiny. Problem is, a lot of this arc was covered in Captain America: Civil War. The writers are unable to give him a truly compelling replacement arc here. T’Challa drops a few references early on to not feeling ready – but basically swiftly embraces it. He never outlines a real alternative agenda to Kilmonger – there are characters in the film who argue “Wakanda doesn’t get involved in the world”, but he isn’t one of them, so there is no journey towards engagement with the outside world (on far more humanitarian terms than Kilmonger advocates). 

Frankly, Okoye is given a better character arc than T’Challa, beginning by advocating “we must serve the throne and respect our traditions even if we doubt them”, and learning later to follow her own conscience. T’Challa, in contrast, is no discernibly different at the end of the film to how he was at the beginning. 

T’Challa’s journey is basically getting something, losing it and then getting it back. Strip away Boseman’s performance and the character is basically pretty dull. He partly suffers, as does the rest of the film, from an overstuffed cast spreading the focus of the film far too thinly and leading to character arcs and interconnections feeling rushed. Kilmonger’s connection with T’Challa is forced – they only know each other for at best two days! – and there is a superfluity of villains. There’s not only decoy antagonist Klaue (and his gang) hanging about for a good chunk of the film, but also Daniel Kaluuya’s ill-defined best friend turned opponent, W’Kabi. Combining Kilmonger and W’Kabi would have helped no end, allowing two different, divergent agendas to develop and cause a relationship rift between two friends (Kaluuya is instead totally wasted in a nothing part, whose allegiances change depending on the demands of the plot). 

The good guys fare no better: Lupita Nyong’o is completely wasted as a love interest who feels stuffed into the movie because, y’know, these films gotta have one. She does nothing in the film that could not be easily done by another character, and nearly all of T’Challa’s emotional scenes – and personal motivation – are tied into his sister rather than this are-they-aren’t-they-a-couple. 

It’s all part of the traditionalism that underlies the film. Its structure is familiar and, like many Marvel origin films, the villain is a dark reflection of the hero with similar skills. The final battle is traditional and a little dull (and feels very similar to Avengers: Infinity War). The film avoids showing T’Challa torn between isolation and intervention – he in fact advocates both in the first 15 minutes – and doesn’t really make much of the prospect of a hero changing his mind or developing his views to embrace a wider world.

But it stands out because it is different. And it deserves no end of praise for making such a film so full of love and respect for its heritage. It walks a very difficult line between enjoying the bright exotic colours while not making the film patronising or overly “other-worldly”. How many other Hollywood films have, at best, two white characters (well played in both cases by Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis)? How many others would dare have the villain make a defiant, sizzling and emotionally inspirational speech about racial oppression and the hypocrisy of the West (though the film goes easy on America, with the speech taking place at the hilarious “Museum of Great Britain”. Where is this place – please get my tickets!).

That it slightly dodges and fudges the implication of these themes in its plotting and the conception of its hero – who is basically a dull character played by a charismatic actor – doesn’t reduce its pleasure at doing something different. I’m not sure it will stand up to repeated viewings – look past the setting and it does little new – but it’s a worthy entrance in a crowded universe.

Collateral (2004)

Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx take a long taxi ride in Michael Mann’s thriller Collateral

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Tom Cruise (Vincent), Jamie Foxx (Max Durocher), Jada Pinkett Smith (Annie Farrell), Mark Ruffalo (Detective Ray Fanning), Peter Berg (Detective Richard Weidner), Bruce McGill (Frank Pedrosa), Irma P. Hall (Ida Durocher), Barry Shabaka Henley (Daniel Baker), Javier Bardem (Felix Reyes-Torrena)

Tom Cruise enjoys throwing us film-goers curveballs every now and again. In Collateral he pops up as a sociopathic hitman, grey of hair and suit (like a buzzcut, rampaging John Major) leaving bodies strewn about the place. It’s great to see him in Michael Mann’s lean, very enjoyable action thriller, looking as sleek and soulless as the rest of LA.

Cruise’s Vincent is a hitman in LA to knock off a list of targets. But how will he get from hit to hit? Why by hiring a taxi driver for a night: risk-averse dreamer Max (Jamie Foxx) who has been working “temporarily” as a taxi driver while he builds plans for his dream limo business for a mere 12 years. Max is thrilled to have a big spender in his car – until something goes wrong on hit #1 and a body lands on his cab. Max no has no choice but to assist Vincent – although Vincent ends up becoming more attached to Max than he might ever have imagined.

Mann shot his film on a high-definition video and it gives a very unique look at LA, really capturing the hazy yellows and cool blues of the city and giving everything in the picture a slightly grainier, starker look. But that would count for nothing if the story of the film wasn’t pretty good, and Collateral is a very effective action thriller, which doesn’t reimagine the genre but offers more than enough freshness to enliven the familiar elements it’s made up from. 

Its main assets (along with Mann’s cool, detached and pin-point sharp direction) are the performances of its two leads. Cruise is just about bang-on as a professional hitman, devoid of empathy, who finds surprising possibilities of friendship open in front of him. He’s a fascinating character, like someone who has spent so long studying people that he can just about replicate human reactions, without understanding the humanity behind them. Cruise’s obsessive preparation for his roles also help makes him flawlessly convincing as this lethal ubermensh.

Foxx however is just as good as a basically decent, friendly, low-key guy who is kidding himself that he is not drifting through life. It’s Max’s story we follow throughout the film – and it’s his sense of personal morality, his strict belief in right and wrong, that gives the film its dramatic force. Foxx also avoids undermining or laughing at Max, who is basically a man so buttoned up and cautious that (without a major push) he’ll clearly die of old age in that cab. 

These two characters thrown together have a curious chemistry – a sort of riff on the casual bonds that can develop between driver and passenger as they talk about their lives, views and interests. It’s not a friendship – certainly not in Max’s case – but it’s a strange sort of bond nevertheless. Vincent, you feel, hasn’t talked to many people like this – and while he’s still willing to threaten Max or put him at great risk, he still develops a strange protectiveness about him. It’s this quirky and different relationship that powers the film and finally makes it unique. This odd couple don’t overcome boundaries to become bosom friends, but they also don’t come together as fierce rivals. Instead they sort of work out a co-existence in that cab.

It’s the most interesting thing about a film that otherwise – to be honest – deals a pretty familiar deck with confidence. Sometimes the film plays its cards so well you overlook them – the first time I watched it, I was semi-surprised at the reveal of the final victim, but really it should be pretty obvious to anyone who has seen a movie before. The plot is full of moments like this that are played with a freshness – or with a cunning – that stops them from feeling familiar.

But that’s really what it is. The journey around LA from hit-to-hit is a familiar sounding idea. The encounters between Vincent and the targets are pretty familiar – the exception being a fascinating, and hard to read, encounter with Barry Shabaka Henley’s jazz player turned informant, which sizzles with tension – and the action scenes, while well staged, are the sort of shoot-outs we’ve seen before. Mann shoots them with a vibrant excitement, but it’s mostly B-movie stuff presented freshly.

What it comes down to is that relationship between those two characters, and the skill of director and actor in drawing out subtleties in performance. (Don’t listen by the way to the director’s commentary, which ruthlessly strips these subtleties away as Mann bangs on about heavy-handed, predictable backstories which thankfully don’t make it into the movie, but make it sound dumber than it is). Cruise and Foxx are both fantastic, Mann’s direction of this sort of icy-cold, impersonal, dangerous city is impeccable and the film itself doesn’t fail to entertain.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

Guy Pearce and Jim Caviezel as friends turned foes in The Count of Monte Cristo

Director: Kevin Reynolds

Cast: Jim Caviezel (Edmond Dantès), Guy Pearce (Fernand Mondego), Dagmara Dominczyk (Mercedès Mondego), Luis Guzmán (Jacopo), Richard Harris (Abbè Faria), James Frain (JF Villefort), Michael Wincott (Armand Dorleac), Henry Cavill (Albert Mondego), Albie Woodington (Danglers), JB Blanc (Luigi Vampa), Alex Norton (Napoleon Bonaparte), Patrick Godfrey (Morrell), Freddie Jones (Colonel Villefort), Helen McCrory (Valentina Villefort)

Alexander Dumas’ novels are beasts. The Count of Monte Cristo is a real mountain of a book, a sprawling story of adventure and revenge. Kevin Reynolds’ film had a near impossible task to turn this into a film – most have gone down the route of adapting the book into a TV series – but triumphantly succeeds by locating in it a very clear, very filmic narrative.

In 1815, Edmond Dantès (Jim Caviezel) and Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce) are young men serving on a merchant ship, who wash up on Elba where Napoleon (Alex Norton) is in exile. Tricked into taking a letter for Napoleon back to France, Dantès is betrayed by Mondego, who desires Dantès’ fiancée Mercedès (Dagmara Dominczyk) and resents his own envy for the far poorer Dantès. The corrupt magistrate Villefort (James Frain) colludes to protect his own family’s secrets, and Dantès is locked up in the dreaded Chateau d’If for 15 years, during which time he meets fellow prisoner Abbè Faria (Richard Harris) who teaches him politics, mathematics, philosophy and sword-fighting. Faria shares with Dantès the secret of the vast treasure he hid on the island of Monte Cristo – treasure Dantès dreams of using for his revenge.

This is actually a fairly nifty adaptation of a huge novel into something cinematic. Almost every change made to the original book ends up working extremely well – and adds an immediately understandable dramatic tension to it. I’d actually go so far as to say this might be a masterpiece of cinematic adaptation. The decision to make Dantès and Mondego childhood friends and rivals instantly adds a real frisson of betrayal to Mondego’s actions, as well as adding a very personal element to the revenge portion of the narrative. The simplification of the other “betrayers” also works extremely well, while the careful links throughout back to Dantès’ upbringing never let us forget the roots he has come from.

The script is also packed full of fun interjections. The idea of the chess piece, which Dantès and Mondego pass from one to the other, becomes laced with symbolism, while the changing of Jacopo into a sort of Brooklyn pirate works extremely well (Guizmán gets some of the best lines, but also gets to show a touching loyalty and concern for Dantès). On top of which, the pushing to the fore of the swashbuckling sword-fighting excitement sets us up for a cracking final sword fight between our two friends-turned-enemies. 

Reynolds also shoots the film extremely well with a host of interesting angles and framing devices showing how Dantès position and confidence change throughout the story. The film’s climactic sword fight is brilliantly staged and the film charges forward with a real momentum (there are of course no sword fights in the book!). 

Particularly well handled through is the sequence that is (in many ways) most faithful to the original book – Dantès’ time in the Chateau d’If. What I love in this sequence is that it’s a perfect combination of stuff from the book, Karate Kid style training, and some good old-fashioned warm character building. It’s also got two terrific performances from Michael Wincott as an almost comically dry sadistic guard and Richard Harris as the imprisoned Abbè Faria, the quintessential wise-old-mentor (the relationship between Faria and Dantès is beautifully judged).

The film perfectly balances its sense of fun and adventure with a very real-feeling story of a man who has to learn there is more to life than revenge. The plot that Dantès puts together probably isn’t the most complex piece of chicanery you are ever going to see, but it doesn’t really matter because the focus is the fun of the journey, and the thrill of someone being a few steps ahead of everyone else. 

Jim Caviezel is very good as Dantès, just the right blend of forthright moral strength and simmering resentment (few actors do stoic suffering better than Cavizel). There is a really nice questioning throughout the film of Dantès’ motives and whether revenge is really worth the candle, which adds a lovely depth to Cavizel’s performance.

But the film probably gets waltzed off by Guy Peace (who turned down the role of Dantès because he thought Mondego was more fun) who gets to campily simmer, sulk and fume at the edge of every scene. Mondego is brilliantly reinvented as a fearsomely proud, selfish, hedonistic aristocrat with a major inferiority complex, who takes everything from Dantès and still isn’t happy at the end of it. But Pearce has a whale of a time with his cruelty and resentment, and it’s a great reminder of how much he is (as an actor) in love with make-up, Mondego being scruffy, slightly pock-marked and increasingly bad of tooth.

He’s a villain you can scowl at and he’s a perfect counter-point for a hero whose emotional distance is designed to make him at times a difficult man to invest in. The film’s expansion of their personal relationship in its early section works really well, setting up the innate inequalities between them (wealth on one side, bravery and decency on the other) during the film’s cheeky and amusing opening sequence on Elba with Napoleon.

The Count of Monte Cristo is an extremely well structured, hugely entertaining adventure film. It’s very much like a 1930s swashbuckler, and every scene has some delightful moment that you’ll love. There are some very good performances in here as well, working with a very good conversion of this doorstop of a book into a film. Skilfully directed, interestingly shot, well acted – it’s a gem that’s far too overlooked.

The Long Good Friday (1980)

Bob Hoskins rules London – but for how long? – in classic Brit gangster masterpiece The Long Good Friday

Director: John Mackenzie

Cast: Bob Hoskins (Harold Shand), Helen Mirren (Victoria), Derek Thompson (Jeff), Bryan Marshall (Harris), PH Moriarty (Razors), Dave King (Parky), Eddie Constantine (Charlie), Paul Freeman (Colin), Stephen Davies (Tony), Paul Barber (Errol), Pierce Brosnan (Irishman)

The Long Good Friday nearly turned into a one-hour TV special starring a dubbed Bob Hoskins. The fact that it didn’t – and that today it can stand as one of the greatest British films ever made – is thanks to George Harrison’s Handmade Films, which bought the rights and saved the film. Thank God they did, as this is brilliant: thrilling, dangerous, intense but witty, strangely tender, satirical and smart. Fantastically made and wonderfully acted, it’s not just a great gangster film, it’s a great film.

Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is the undisputed gangland boss of London, desperate to turn legitimate. He has a plan for development of London’s dockside into a paradise of office blocks and apartments. All he needs is a big investor to support his “corporation” to make the final push. On an Easter weekend he prepares to greet an American investor from a similar “company” to his own. But as Shand prepares for this life-changing weekend, his business is hit by a wave of killings and bombings that seem targeted at shattering his organisation. What’s behind this? Who is “having a go”? And how does this link with a mysterious money shipment we witnessed at the start of the film? Shand’s going to find out – and has to do so without his investors getting cold feet.

The Long Good Friday is a well-written, brilliantly structured mystery mixed with some brutal gangland violence. Mackenzie’s film is lean and mean but laced with dry, biting humour. Everything in the film works perfectly, and it really understands the veneer of culture, class and decency that gangsters like Shand like to put over their crime dealings.

Not that Shand isn’t a decent bloke of course. Bob Hoskins is simply superb as Shand, a likeable, strangely decent guy at first, who seems to somehow shrink and twist as the film progresses and he is less and less able to control the anger he keeps bottled up. Shand clearly cares deeply for those around him, but he’s also clearly stubborn and convinced of his own superiority. Hoskins brings the part a humane gravitas, a force of nature fury that burns through the film. And when confronted with opponents he can’t understand, he still tries to use the rules of gangland to take them on.

Of course these rules are completely unsuited for his IRA opponents. Despite the advice of his pet policeman Parky, Shand is confident that he can deal with these bomb-toting fanatics. Even worse, he thinks that they are basically playing by the same rules that powered his own rise to the top of the gangster tree. Part of the tragedy of the part is seeing someone who essentially appears relatively likeable at the start of the film fall back on the violence and rage that powered his assent to the very top. Needless to say the IRA aren’t intimidated by cockney thugs, and have no intention of letting Shand get away with his attempts to strike back. 

Here is a film brave enough to not only show the IRA at its centre, but to make them as effective and ruthless as this. Not even our geezer gangsters can take them on, and the poor plods seem petrified as soon as they rear their head. Could there be a more cutting criticism of Britain’s policy in Ireland? Terrorism has hardly gone away since – you imagine Shand being equally outmatched by Al-Qaida.

As well as a gripping gangster film, The Long Good Friday is a prescient and intelligent criticism of Thatcherism. Shand is actually pretty much spot-on with his vision of London being redeveloped into a political and economic power-house, one of the major cities of Europe. Many of the locations the film uses would be unrecognisible today, as they are all sites of offices and apartments. Shand has a 1980s swagger to him, a barrow-boy made good who likes to think of himself as a visionary businessman. He’s desperate to grab for himself a bit of the new money he senses could be washing around Thatcher’s Britain. So the film makes a nice satire of the “loadsamoney” generation, as well as of the gangster world of the East End. Shand’s yacht and flat are the quintessential yuppie pads, and Shand’s motivation is raking the cash in.

British hubris actually seems to lie at the heart of the whole film. Shand’s swagger and super-confident, “Britain reborn” attitudes are all based in his firm belief that Britain has its own special destiny. Of course, as events begin to hit home, this sense of British pride (represented by Shand’s determination to reshape London into a city of glass and office complexes) begins to shrivel under the weight of events. Shand is reduced to angrily denouncing everyone from the Irish to his potential American partners to the other nations of Europe.

(In fact it’s interesting watching the film in the light of Brexit – Shand would on the surface seem to be the poster boy for a certain type of UKIPer, but he’s actually passionately excited about the opportunities the Union presents, and the centrality of London to that world. He’d almost certainly loath Farage.)

All this thematic content – and this is a hugely British film, instantly recognisable to anyone who has grown up here – gets swept up in this brilliant gangster flick. The acting is sublime. Helen Mirren is a stand-out as a woman who is a very equal partner in Shand’s business empire, just as smart and just as ruthless. Derek Thompson (him off Casualty!) is good as a slightly sleazy major-domo, as is PH Moriarty as a gangland heavy (he certainly looks the part!). Future stars like Kevin McNally, Paul Freeman, Dexter Fletcher (as a kid) and most notably Pierce Brosnan (in his first acting job as a handsome IRA hitman) fill out the cast.

Brilliantly acted, tightly directed and full of great cultural and political depth, with terrific pace, scintillating action, engrossing tension, a deceptively simple story and a great script: The Long Good Friday surely stands as a landmark British film. And it has one of the finest final sequences you’ll see, which considering it revolves solely around Hoskins sitting in a car is saying something.

Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)

Tom Cruise joins forces with his ego to take on Mission: Impossible 2

Director: John Woo

Cast: Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Thandie Newton (Nyah Nordoff-Hall), Ving Rhames (Luther Stickell), Dougray Scott (Sean Ambrose), Brendan Gleeson (John C McCloy), Anthony Hopkins (Mission Commander Swanbeck), Richard Roxburgh (Hugh Stamp), John Polson (Billy Baird), Radé Sherbedgia (Dr Nekhorvich), William Mapother (Wallis), Dominic Purcell (Ulrich)

Okay. I love this franchise. Always have. But every franchise has its misfire right? Its Phantom Menace? Ladies and gentlemen: welcome to this total turkey. Can you believe this was the biggest box office hit of 2000? Has anyone watched it since then? Did anyone like it even then?

Anyway, the plot for what it’s worth, plays like Hitchcock’s Notorious if it had been roughly humped after a drunken dinner by The Fast and the Furious. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has to recruit the bizarrely named Nyah Nordeff-Hall (Thandie Newton), a society catburgler and sort of hot Raffles. Why? Well of course her ex-boyfriend and rogue MIF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) has pinched a deadly virus and we need her to get back into his bed and trust to find out more so MIF can pinch it back before it hits the market. She’ll be ready to deceive a man though because “she’s a woman, she has all the training she needs” – or so says Anthony Hopkins’ half-asleep Mission Commander. 

Mission: Impossible 2barely has a plot though. Rarely has a film looked more like a story loosely written around some pre-determined action set-pieces. Much as I like Tom Cruise, no film looks more like a cocky vanity project than this one. The camera lingers on Cruise’s chiselled torso and general macho physicality like a lovestruck teenager. Remember when the MIF was a team organisation? Not anymore. Cruise is now a one man army, who barely needs the help of his two sidekicks (the job of one is to press keys on a computer, the other flies a helicopter. That’s it).

So the whole film is about making Cruise look good. From punching, to climbing freestyle up a cliff, to flashing the famous grin, to driving cars and bikes really fast, the whole film is blinded by his smile. Poor Thandie Newton and Dougray Scott can only watch as the Cruiser bestrides the film like a colossus, creeping about to find themselves dishonourable graves. Both performers are crushed by the weight of Cruise’s ego and the film’s front-and-centering of it. Newton can barely raise her performance above balsawood. Poor Dougray Scott not only gives an utterly bland performance, but was stuck on the set for so long by production delays he had to pull out of the first X-Men film, giving his role of Wolverine to an unknown West End actor by the name of Hugh Jackman. Ouch.

Perhaps as a reaction to the first film being seen as too confusing (it really isn’t…) the plot is almost laughably simple, verging on pointless. The film homages (rips off) other, way, way better films everywhere you look. So we get flirting-through-racing-fast-cars from GoldenEye. We get the almost the whole plot of Notorious with the woman sent to spy on her former lover by a handler who is now in love with her (the film even has an extended racecourse sequence). “I will find you” Cruise bellows at Nyah at one point like a low rent Last of the Mohicans. It doesn’t help that the film sounds like the writers spent about five minutes on the dialogue: “Damn you’re beautiful” Cruise tells Nyah. Well, be still my beating heart. This shit was penned by the writer of Chinatown for fuck’s sake.

The slight plot could probably be comfortably wrapped up in about an hour, if it wasn’t for the film’s constant (embarrassing) use of slow motion at every conceivable opportunity. I guess it’s meant to add style and depth, but it’s actually crushingly annoying and often gives us laughable moments (none more so than Cruise walking past a flaming doorway in slow motion for no reason). You just want to tell the film to get a bloody move on.

But then that is part of the John Woo style. Hard to believe this style of shooting an action film was once considered cool beyond belief. It looks so pretentiously, artily, self-importantly, thuddingly dull now. There are a huge number of action scenes here but none of them are particularly exciting, and none of them hugely memorable. There is a bit with a bike, a bit with cars, a shoot-out in a base, an infiltration of a big building. Yawn. Perhaps because Ethan Hunt feels less like a human, more like an empathy-free, ego-mad super soldier, it’s hard to care. In every other film, time is invested to make him appear human – here he’s an asshole who forces a woman to give her body for secrets, grins like a lunatic and slaughters people left, right and centre. It’s like he’s been given an arsehole upgrade from the first film (the third film would correct all this). 

The film has no humour whatsoever. It’s po-faced and serious and desperately in love with itself. I keep banging on Cruise, but I think I do blame him. Other than Hopkins, no one in the film can compete with his charisma which feels like a deliberate choice. Every single memorable thing in the film is done by him. No other character is allowed to contribute anything to the resolution of the problem. On top of that every character seems to have a Tom Cruise mask – meaning Tom also gets to play at least three other characters as well. 

John Woo shoots all this with a tedious flashiness that is completely empty. Logic is left lying battered and bruised on the sidewalk. By the time we get to the final resolution, we are desperate for Nyah (who has been used for sex, humiliated and infected with a deadly virus) to tell Cruise to get stuffed. Instead (after watching him gun down a pliant Sean Ambrose, who is never allowed to appear as a worthy adversary) they go on a sun dappled date in Sydney, with Cruise all but turning to the camera to wink. “Don’t you wish you were me?” he seems to be saying. Christ I really don’t.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

Our heroes are on the run in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Director: Guy Richie

Cast: Robert Downey Jnr (Sherlock Holmes), Jude Law (Dr John Watson), Jared Harris (Professor James Moriarty), Noomi Rapace (Madame Simza Heron), Stephen Fry (Mycroft Holmes), Kelly Reilly (Mary Morstan), Rachel McAdams (Irene Adler), Eddie Marsan (Inspector Lestrade), Paul Anderson (Sebastian Moran), Geraldine James (Mrs Hudson), Thierry Neuvic (Claude Ravache)

Sequels are tricky beasts. You need to work out what people liked about the first film and double down on it, while also expanding the story in new and exciting ways. When I first saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows in the cinema, I was very sceptical about whether this film managed that. But actually, viewing it a second time around (and almost seven years later), I enjoyed it a lot more than I remembered.

As Watson (Jude Law) prepares for his wedding to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly), Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jnr) is consumed into an investigation targeting the “Napoleon of Crime” Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris). A series of bombings across Europe is being blamed on anarchists – but is it in fact a scheme launched by Moriarty’s military-industrial complex to instigate a world war (from which he can make a profit)? Well what do you think?

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows doubles down most strongly on the relationship between Holmes and Watson. Recognising that the things from the first film everyone loved was the brotherly banter between these two, the sequel places it front and centre. While the first film felt the need to introduce a traditional love interest for Holmes, this film kills off Irene Adler in the first few minutes (despite this, poor Rachel McAdams has better material here than most of the first film). Instead the true “romantic” relationship of the film is Holmes and Watson, as they banter, bicker and make huge sacrifices to protect each other. 

It’s helped again by Downey Jnr and Law’s excellent performances and their strong chemistry. Saying this, the first half hour of the film thinks it’s funnier than it is, with its intermixing of Watson’s stag night with a series of Downey fights. There is a little too much brashness to it early on, without sufficient grounding in the warmth between the two characters. But once we hit the real action 40 minutes into the film, the balance between comedy, affection and peril is pretty effectively met.

And Ritchie directs some very fine action sequences here. There is an extraordinary sequence of a chase through the forest, which uses an exquisite mixture of hand held cameras, Steadicam, slow motion and half a dozen other tricks to deliver a series of striking and immersive shots. Yes it’s overblown and in-your-face but it works perfectly. The film is crammed with brash, powerful action scenes like this that really strike you between the eyes. 

It also still keeps in touch with the original novels in a nice way. Some of the best dialogue scenes are those between Holmes and Jared Harris’ muscular but serpentine Moriarty (Harris is very good, a far stronger villain than the first film). These scenes use dialogue from the original stories extremely effectively. Meanwhile, its build towards its version of the Reichenbach fall is actually very clever, one that twists on the movie’s “calling card” of Holmes predicting every move of a fight before it begins by having Moriarty pull the same trick (which is in itself a neat scene).

Where the film does fall short amidst all this action and explosions and jokes (some good, some bad) is that we don’t get much in the way of investigation or deduction. There is a bit of sleight-of-hand and a touch of pocket picking, but most of the “deductions” are based on highlighting with the camera or dialogue objects that might as well be labelled “Important Plot Device”. Holmes doesn’t so much as investigate here as charge head first from one combat sequence or dangerous situation to another. There isn’t a lot of patience in his method here – and not a lot of patience in the film itself. But then this film is largely based on The Final Problem, probably one of the least “detective” of the stories in the cannon.

But Game of Shadows is very good fun, has some neat action sequences, is well shot and is more or less entertaining, even if some of the comedy suggests it’s a little too pleased with itself. Sure it loses some of the smaller-scale delights of both the books and original film in its rush to make sure you are wowed. But I enjoyed it a lot more the second time round, since I’d watched the original film more recently and was tuned up into what it was trying to do.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

Josh Brolin is hero-villain Thanos in the latest chapter (and it really is a chapter) of the Marvel franchise Avengers: Infinity War

Director: Anthony & Joe Russo

Cast: Robert Downey Jnr (Tony Stark), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner), Chris Evans (Steve Rogers), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff), Josh Brolin (Thanos), Chris Pratt (Peter Quill), Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr Stephen Strange), Don Cheadle (James Rhodes), Tom Holland (Peter Parker), Chadwick Boseman (T’Challa), Paul Bettany (Vision), Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Idris Elba (Heimdall), Peter Dinklage (Eitri), Benedict Wong (Wong), Pom Klementieff (Mantis), Karen Gillan (Nebula), Dave Bautista (Deax), Zoe Saldana (Gamora), Vin Diesel (Groot), Bradley Cooper (Rocket), Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Potts), Benecio del Toro (Collector), William Hurt (Thaddeus Ross), Danai Gurira (Okota), Letita Wright (Shuri)

Well this is what it has all been building towards. Or at the very least, this is the start of what it has been building towards, since the film ends on a (slightly underwhelming as soon as you think about it) cliffhanger leadinginto the next film. You never reach the end in these movies – each one, while serving some of the story, is also a jumping-off point for the next one. Marvel’s Cinematic Universe is a triumph of long-form storytelling and juggling characters – but it’s also like a shark moving forward, promising us even more thrills and spills if we tune in next time.

This time the Avengers come together (and overcome inevitable personality clashes) to defeat Thanos (a motion-captured Josh Brolin). Thanos is a lunking purple beast who believes the universe is vastly overpopulated. The solution? Why kill half the universe’s population, so the other half can lead lives of perfect contentment on the remaining resources. How? Well he needs the Infinity Stones, six all-powerful gems that, together, will give him control of time and space. He just needs to wrestle them from their various hiding places.

Avengers: Infinity War has been called less of film and more an episode in a long running TV series. I think that’s fair. This film is in no way designed for anyone new to the saga to step in – half of the expansive cast are not even fully introduced. And actually it’s a good thing: we’re almost 20 films in now into this expanded universe, and if you are one of those critics sniffing that there wasn’t any concession made to the newcomer, well tough. One of the film’s strengths is that it understanding its playing to the galleries of long-established fans. Your enjoyment of the film will only increase the more Marvel films you’ve seen.

Unfortunately this sort of “dive straight in and to hell with the consequences” approach is also the root of the film’s weaknesses. This film’s primary aim is to juggle all its characters successfully, balancing its huge number of events and locations so they remain coherent, throwing in enough set pieces along the way for whoops and cheers. What it manifestly is not for is to tell a story about character or to give us striking visual images.

It’s like a mega, mega, mega budget all-action crossover episode of something. The excitement for the viewer is, say, Iron Man and Doctor Strange butting heads or Thor and the Guardians of the Galaxy exchanging comic riffs. It’s not designed for us to learn anything new about these heroes. In fact, the character beats are pretty formulaic. A standard arc generally goes like this: brief individual introduction doing something everyday, a meeting where much plot is quickly exchanged, bickering, a huge battle and some self sacrifice. Repeat. The film does nothing fresh on this formula which Joss Whedon introduced so well in The Avengers. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The difference with The Avengers was that it felt like a real novelty, and there was a smaller number of characters to bring together (it seems almost timid now to remember the original Avengers gang was only 6-7 strong – it’s almost 20+ now). Each character had more time and we got a much better sense of how their individual personalities affected the other. Here the Russos have to try and deal with the vast number of heroes by effectively breaking them up into 3-4 silos, giving even the most prominent ones probably no more than 20 minutes of screen time.

On top of which, despite the much vaunted “all bets are off” promotion of the movie, the action still has a stakes-free weightlessness to it. Yes some characters die, and while 1-2 of these might well stick, by the end of the film the main question is how many of the deaths will be reversed, not the impact of them. In fact the final sequence (which sees several deaths) slowly carries less and less weight the more you realise these deaths are really serving as a cheeky “how will they get out of that” moment.

Which is the dark secret of Avengers: Infinity War: it’s really nothing more than a trailer for its sequel. At the end of its vast running time – after all the functionally filmed action and odd decent one liner – you realise you have watched an extended prologue for the next film. That’s the one we’ve all been building for. The events of this film, in the long run, are the long road we need to take to get there.

This is not to say the film doesn’t have moments of enjoyment. The spectacle may not be filmed with much more than a derivative traditionalism, but it can’t help but be enjoyable. There isn’t much imagination about the implications of these heroes’ powers, in the way of say X-Men 2, but it’s still impressive to watch. Thor and Captain America get some pretty cool entrances. 

But I got the impression it must have been pretty boring to act in. Most of the vast cast have very little to do except a few one-liners and then punching. The character who most emerges as a three-dimensional figure is Thanos. Josh Brolin’s interpretation of the character as a sort of misguided humanitarian, who feels to do a great right he must do a greater wrong, yearns not for control of the universe but (in a perverse way) to save it. His quest for these stones is built like some sort of Arthurian epic, involving sacrifice and struggle. It would have been easy to make Thanos a sadistic maniac, but making him someone who believes he is doing the right thing is much more interesting. Essentially he’s the main character of the film.

Of the rest those that get the most to do are those with a connection with Thanos. Zoe Saldana as his adopted daughter turned foe Gamora gets some meaty emotional material, as does Chris Pratt as her would-be boyfriend Peter Quill (Pratt is the actor who probably gets the most “actorly” material in the film by far). Paul Bettany as Vision (the robot with an infinity stone in his head) gets to centre a plot that balances self-sacrifice with his love for Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olson pretty good, even if her character oscillates between bad assery and weeping).

For the rest, it’s just their actor’s charisma that carries them through. Robert Downey Jnr gets a touching moment or two (most notably his reaction to another character’s distressed fear on facing death). Benedict Cumberbatch is great value as Strange. Chris Hemsworth gets to continue flexing his comic muscle as Thor. Others like Chris Evans are criminally wasted.

But then their time will come. Because there is another film in the pipeline – and if our heroes still feel slightly like they can survive anything up to and including getting crushed by a moon, it’s because we know that there are still movies to be made, and money for Marvel to take to the bank. And that’s probably the real nemesis of these expansive, bombastic films: the lack of danger is only going to continue while the studio doesn’t want to kill anyone major off. Hopefully that will change, but without it it’s still a film of the invulnerable hitting the inevitable.

Avengers: Infinity War is pretty good – but largely as a spectacle and because it superficially pays off what you were being hyped up to see in its action and character partnerships. But give it a year or so – and repeat viewings – and I think its stock will fall.  Because it doesn’t really do anything that unexpected, and most of its more daring movies are designed with loopholes to undo them. There are enough bright lights to entertain you (and I mostly was) but I don’t think there is much depth for you to swim in when you come back for a second dip.

Deadpool (2016)

Ryan Reynold swings into action in slightly-pleased-with-itself comicbook satire Deadpool

Director: Tim Miller

Cast: Ryan Reynolds (Wade Wilson/Deadpool), Morena Baccarin (Vanessa), Ed Skrein (Francis Freeman/Ajax), TJ Miller (Weasel), Gina Carano (Angel Dust), Brianna Hildebrand (Negasonic Teenager Warhead), Stefan Kapičić (Colossus), Leslie Uggams (Blind Al)

One day (soon?) we’ll reach critical mass with comic book films. Eventually, when every single character who’s ever appeared in a frame of a DC or Marvel comic has appeared on the screen, we’ll surely wonder if we will ever see anything new again. Some may already feel this, so perhaps that explains why Deadpool, which, for all its faults, is a comic book film doing something different, made such a big impact.

Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is a mercenary who meets and falls in love with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). Discovering he has terminal cancer, he leaves her so she does not have to watch him die, and signs up to a gruesome medical procedure designed to bring out dormant mutant genes that may cure him. It works but leaves him hideously deformed. Wanting revenge, he names himself Deadpool and hunts for a cure to his deformity – scared Vanessa would reject him without it.

What Deadpool does well is wittily flag up the familiar tropes of comic book movies. The film in fact follows each trope to the letter – but at least it has a foul-mouthed cheeky commentary. The big question you have to ask is, can a film really be that smart and different if it basically does something very traditional? If I tell you I’m going to perform a tired magic trick you’ve seen before, but I’ll do it while pointing up every single cliché of delivery, with panache, does it matter the magic trick is still as tired as I said it was at the start?

That’s what Deadpool is – the same old ideas, re-packaged in a different way, so juvenile and cheeky that for a beat or two it feels like something new, which it manifestly isn’t. It might not take itself seriously, but it also doesn’t really develop into something unique. The film opens with a neat comic riff on credits, listing not the actors but their generic character traits (“Love Interest”, “Brit Baddie”, “Comic relief” etc. etc.) – sure this is funny and smart, but doesn’t change the fact that the characters themselves are exactly that. 

Deadpool is a faux-clever film. It’s a cheeky piece of college humour: an X-Men film with swearing, sex, fourth wall breaking and gags about other films. There is a sort of witty enjoyment from Deadpool reminding us he knows he is in a movie. But most of the time, he basically behaves exactly like dozens of other lead characters in dozens of other films: he has an emotional arc of fear of rejection and embracing who he is that you’ve seen so many times before.

But the market is so saturated with films like this that the difference of presentation makes you feel for a moment you are seeing something new or clever – rather than essentially a very high budget, end-of-the-pier routine full of cheeky humour. Much of this is pretty funny by the way, but don’t kid yourself that it’s anything clever. And I don’t really think many of the gags here would stand up to repeated viewing – it’s basically just swearing and shocks. The writing is not great, its punchlines and shock beats giving the illusion of intelligent scripting.

Most of its success (in more ways than one) comes down to Ryan Reynolds. Reynolds campaigned for the film to be made for nearly a decade, and he totally nails the character. He thought up many of the best gags, and delivers the entire thing with whipper-snapper quickness and likeability. He gets the balance generally just right, and lands all the film’s big laughs. He’s very good.

But it’s an elevation of material that plays at being clever, while really just being an effective repackaging of the same-old, same-old. Remove the jokes and everything you would expect from a superhero origins story is present and correct. 

So maybe everyone was a little tired of the same old, same old from Marvel et al and wanted something different. That’s the explanation I can think of for why a pretty average film ended up so damn popular. The action when we get it is pretty good, there is some imagination behind the cameras, but it’s basically a teenager’s idea of the best film, like, ever rather than an actually very good film. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but it puts a nice shiny new tyre on it.

Hellboy (2004)

Ron Perlman fights the darkness in curio del Toro comic book flick Hellboy

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (Liz Sherman), Rupert Evans (John Thaddeus), John Hurt (Dr Trevor Bruttenholm), Karel Roden (Rasputin), Jeffrey Tambor (Tom Manning), Doug Jones (Abe Sapien), Brian Steele (Sammael), Ladislav Beran (Karl Ruprecht Kroenen), Bridget Hodson (Ilsa Haupstein), Corey Johnson (Agent Clay)

As little as 10 years ago, outside a few core characters like Batman, the X-Men or Spiderman, comic book movies were an odd curio hard to place in the mass market. Today of course, you can virtually get any character who has appeared in a cartoon strip up on the screen with a budget of millions. But back in 2004, Guillermo del Toro had to squeeze this project out on a smaller budget in order to get the studio to agree to make the film.

Hellboy has a particularly demented story. In 1945, the Nazis, working in partnership with Rasputin (Karel Roden) – yes thatRasputin, don’t even ask – attempt to open a portal to hell to, well I’m not quite sure what they want to do, but it probably involves the destruction of the world. Anyway, some humble GIs stop them and the only thing that comes through the portal is a little demon with an enormous stone fist. Raised by paranormal expert Dr Trevor Bruttenholm (John Hurt), this creature grows up into cigar-chomping secret-agent-for-the-FBI Hellboy (Ron Perlman), working on paranormal investigations. But when Rasputin returns from the dead it looks like all hell (literally) is about to break out.

Okay it should be pretty clear to you from that that Hellboy is an odd film. It’s very much from del Toro’s B-movie heart, and he invests this nonsense material with a great deal of directorial style and heart – a real “geek-boy-artist” job. Del Toro has a great deal of imagination and is able to strike a happy balance between enjoying the material and not taking it all too seriously. So he lets the film barrel along, throwing plenty of nonsense at the screen without worrying about trying to make it make real-world sense. In fact Del Toro is clearly so fond of the material that he basically shoots the whole thing like a comic book come to life. 

So the film is crammed with bright primary colours mixed with murky blacks, and Del Toro frames many key moments like comic book panels. It’s a film packed with striking images and scenes built around stuff that feels like it should teeter over into ridiculous camp all the time but never quite does. Its steam-punky styling instead manages to feel somehow both strikingly original visually and also strangely packed with integrity – like Del Toro made a very personal big-budget movie for his childhood, the sort of bizarro cult film that’s actually-quite-good and it’s going to win a huge following once people can find it for themselves (which is indeed what happened).

Del Toro’s other great principled stand was to ensure that Ron Perlman played the lead. Hellboy is a bizarre character – over six feet, red, horns, a tail – but what Perlman and Del Toro do so well is to make him some sort of Brooklynish chippy blue-collar worker with a kitchen-sink earthy wit. Perlman is clearly having a whale of a time playing this temperamental demon like some sort of longshoreman Han Solo, a brattish teenager and rebel with a world-weary cynicism. He’s crammed with contradictions (the demon who fights for good!) that Del Toro is keen to explore – and makes consistently interesting.

Because he’s such a different character, he energises a fairly traditional story and his character’s pretty standard personal-struggle-plotline (will he do the right or the wrong thing?). Perlman juggles all this really well, and gives a performance that is both dry and funny but also has moments of real heart and emotion. He even manages to sell his rather possessive love for Selma Blair’s (also pretty good) fellow orphan with pyrotechnical abilities as something heartfelt and caring, despite the fact that at one point he basically stalks her. It’s a rather wonderful performance.

The rest of the cast are a bit more of a mixed bag. Rupert Evans is saddled with the audience surrogate role – asking the questions we can’t ask – while Karel Roden’s lipsmacking performance as Rasputin never quite engages as a villain. Stronger roles come from Jeffrey Tambor as an officious FBI director and especially from John Hurt as Hellboy’s father-figure, the kind of quintessential ageing mentor that you can imagine his wards adoring. 

The rather silly plot doesn’t really matter. The importance here is the gothic chill of Del Toro’s style, mixed with his crazy “larger-than-life” dark comic book tone. And it works really well: the film is fun and witty, and if the storyline never really feels like it earns the “end of the world” threat (and builds towards an uninvolving duking out with a giant CGI monster), there are enough enjoyments along the way to make you want to make the journey.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty are the shallow, violent romantics Bonnie and Clyde

Director: Arthur Penn

Cast: Warren Beatty (Clyde Barrow), Faye Dunaway (Bonnie Parker), Michael J Pollard (CW Moss), Gene Hackman (Buck Barrow), Estelle Parsons (Blanche Barrow), Denver Pyle (Marshal Frank Hamer), Dub Taylor (Ivan Moss), Gene Wilder (Eugene Grizzard), Evans Evans (Velma Davis)

Bonnie and Clyde can lay claim to being one of the most influential American films ever made. It came out of a seismic cultural change in America, as old style Hollywood royalty faded out and a new generation stormed the barricades to make films that felt rougher, rawer and told complex stories in shades of grey. 

Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway): drifting youngsters, not interested in accepting a conventional life. They want to go where they please and take what they please. And if some people get hurt – well they can justify that to themselves. As the poster famously said: “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people”. In a deliberately disjointed narrative, where time is unclear, the two meet, head out together, commit crimes, stay on the run and are eventually killed by law enforcement. The story is simple – it’s the telling of it that matters.

Bonnie and Clyde latches on to a counter-culture vibe that was growing in strength at the time. But what the film does so brilliantly is subvert this. It invites us to identify to with the romantic, Byronic yearnings of its heroes, who see themselves as free spirits, living a life of idealistic, unconstrained excitement. But the film also has a clear eye on the trail of violence they leave behind them, their lack of regard for this and the impact on the victims. Because make no mistake, these dreamy killers get more and more violent as they go on.

The film turns these two killers into would-be celebrities – guys who want to project a certain image of themselves to the world (down to mailing the papers photos and poems about themselves). They enjoy the notoriety and their self-proclaimed mythology. Clyde walks into banks and gleefully announces he’s with the “Barrow gang”, as if half expecting someone to ask for his autograph. Later in the film, as Clyde reads their press coverage out loud, with CW Moss like a star-struck groupie, the film never forgets the two of them were basically nobodies, who wanted to feel like somebodies.

And it lets you enjoy the romance of this. There is something fairy-tale like in the film about Clyde picking up Bonnie from outside of her home, taking her into town for flirting and robbery. The whole film continues this dreamy logic, with time jumps and scenes that don’t necessarily link up directly with each other. 

But then the violence takes over. Wow is Bonnie and Clyde a film that lets you know about the impact of bullets. Gun shots don’t just maim or wing, they rip bodies apart. The japey feeling of their bank robberies gets dispelled about half an hour into the film when Clyde shoots a bank teller in the head from point blank range (“him or me”, he later tells his brother). The gang are so incompetent, that the film is frequently punctured by shoot-outs in which no mercy is shown to anyone. 

This is of course hard for the gang to reconcile with their self-image as Robin Hoods, so they mostly forget about it. Clyde won’t steal money from ordinary people (though he’ll happily steal cars, or beat a grocery store clerk into a coma). They playfully tease and taunt a captive US Marshal – until he spits in Bonnie’s face at which point violence ensues. Only at points do the gang seem to have the slightest idea of the dangers: after kidnapping Gene Wilder’s nervy car-owner and his fiancé, a happy-go-lucky Evan Evans (both excellent), merry conversations in the car with the gang are suddenly halted when Wilder admits he’s an undertaker – Bonnie immediately demands they are thrown out and the next shot is her weeping in a field. She doesn’t seem to understand the connection, but we can.

The film is superbly put together. Warren Beatty produced the movie practically from its inception. Robert Benton and David Newman’s script was intended as a French New Wave film – evident in its looseness, its lack of old-school values, its violence, its focus on naïve dreamers who choose the easy way out – but Beatty took the script, re-crafted it with Robert Towne (billed as special advisor) and decided the film needed an American director, not a Truffaut or Godard. He brought on board Arthur Penn, and the two worked together (fought together) closely to bring this radical, edgy, jittery, electric film to the screen. 

Penn and Beatty pushed themselves to some of their best work. Beatty is terrific as the vainglorious Clyde – whose determination in crime is matched by his impotence in the sack (the film wisely doesn’t overplay Clyde’s impotence as an ironic theme, but lets the audience draw its own conclusions). He also produced the film expertly. Penn’s direction is sublime, marrying the finest elements of French New Wave cinema with old-style Westerns.

The film is restless and energetic, and intermixes moments of fun and frivolity among the gang with ominous danger and violence. The camera jitters and shakes, while throwing us into the action – the film is masterfully edited – while at other points sailing on like a neutral observer. The film has a neat satiric edge, and Penn uses banjo music masterfully to ironically contrast with much of the action we see on the screen. The characters – all of them – seem to spend so much time talking about their press coverage because they have so little to say to each other. Even the lovers only really seem to find a moment of quiet devotion shortly before their death. It give you violence as entertainment, but also tells you effectively and quietly how appalling and dangerous violence is.

The acting is similarly extraordinary. Beatty is wonderful, as is Dunaway as an impossibly young, romantic Bonnie who adapts with alarming swiftness to killing and robbing. Michael J Pollard is excellent as the slightly simple, eager young car mechanic who hero-worships the couple. Hackman and Parsons are both excellent as Barrow’s older-but-not-wiser brother, and his wife who seesaws between resentment, fear and an imperious delight in her new-found infamy.

Penn’s brilliant film deconstructs the mythology of criminals to show the emptiness underneath, their shallow self-regard and lack of insight. It does this while still managing somehow to remain affectionate towards these two murderous dreamers. Bonnie and Clyde is a sublime modern Western, a commentary on fame, a dissection of violence and a great black comedy. Shot with youthful energy and an influential lack of traditionalism, it’s a film that always feels modern and necessary.