Godzilla (2014)

Godzilla the only character this film is truly interested in.

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Ford Brody), Ken Watanabe (Dr Ishiro Serizawa), Bryan Cranston (Joe Brody), Elisabeth Olsen (Elle Brody), Juliette Binoche (Sandra Brody), Sally Hawkins (Dr Vivienne Graham), David Strathairn (Admiral William Stenz)

There is a lot of affection out there for Godzilla. I’ve never quite felt it myself, so I guess I was the wrong person to watch this film. This is a film celebrating the legend of a series of films from Japan about a guy in a rubber suit hitting other guys in rubber suits in a set designed to look like a miniature city. Gareth Edwards’ has directed an affectionate homage that at times flirts with being a more interesting film but never really commits to it.

In 1999, Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is forced to watch his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) die in front of him in a mysterious accident at the nuclear plant in Japan they work at. Fifteen years later, his now grown-up estranged son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a bomb disposal expert, is called to Japan after Joe trespasses into the exclusion zone. There Ford and Joe discover there is no fall-out at the accident site – and that the accident was actually linked to a series of mighty beasts from prehistoric times who feed off radiation. The beasts are being investigated and monitored by a global organisation called Monarch – and they are starting to stir. Soon cities are at risk and our only chance of survival may be from alpha-predator Godzilla bashing the other monster out of existence.

Godzilla starts with a brilliant human interest story – a husband forced to sacrifice his wife to save hundreds of thousands of others. But around the halfway mark it loses all interest in its human characters, who become mere spectators to the mighty monsters hitting each other. By the final act, your interest in the action will depend on how much you can invest in a huge CGI monster hitting another huge CGI monster. With nary a character in sight, I’m not sure how much I could. 

Gareth Edwards does a good job directing the film. It’s intelligently and imaginatively framed and Edwards shows some wonderful restraint in showing Godzilla himself, gently avoiding showing too much too soon (the monster doesn’t appear full in camera for well over an hour into the film). In fact, Edwards has a lot more interest in showing the perspective of ordinary people watching the rampage, running or simply standing in awe starring upwards at these mighty beasts. It immediately hammers home the scale and awe of these creatures. Edwards often films from the perspective of those on the ground, with the camera craning upwards seeing the colossal beasts.

It’s a shame that the film doesn’t lavish as much attention on the cardboard cut-out characters who are running around beneath the beasts. A fine company of actors are assembled, most of whom are relegated for much of the first half of the film to spouting exposition and the second half of the film to staring upwards in awe. Remember when Edwards made his breakthrough film Monsters? This film, sure, had monsters in it but it was a human interest story about two very different people thrown together after cataclysmic events. Edwards’ film worked because it was above all about people and their problems. Hollywood came calling.

And Hollywood of course missed the point. Edwards is a director who I think has some truly interesting work in him. Watch the scene as Cranston is forced to slam the safety doors on Binoche. This is a scene crammed with more drama, emotional investment and tragedy than the whole of the rest of the runtimes of Godzilla and Edwards’ Rogue One. Both of those films are well-made but derivative bits of geek chic, pandering towards the crowds by giving them parts of what they think they want, homage-stuffed retreads of other films that focus on bashes and toys rather than on people and characters. Edwards is becoming a purveyor of B-movie thrills, well made, but basically empty. 

That’s your Godzilla movie here. Well-made but rubbish. Full of spectacle wonderfully filmed, but fundamentally empty. A film that is careful about what it shows you and when, but is basically lacking any real soul.

Our Kind of Traitor (2016)

Stellan Skarsgård is the Russian traitor whose secrets pose a danger for the British elite in Our Kind of Traitor

Director: Susanna White

Cast: Ewan McGregor (Perry MacKendrick), Stellan Skarsgård (Dima), Damian Lewis (Hector), Naomie Harris (Gail MacKendrick), Jeremy Northam (Aubrey Longrigg), Khalid Abdalla (Luke), Velibor Topic (Emilio Del Oro), Alicia von Rittberg (Natasha), Mark Gatiss (Billy Matlock), Mark Stanley (Ollie)

John Le Carré’s works often revolve around a dark, cynical view of government agencies as corrupt, indolent and focused on petty or personal concerns rather than doing what’s best for the country and its people. Is it any wonder that there has been such a burst of interest in adaptations on film and television of his work? 

Our Kind of Traitor is straight out of the Le Carré wheelhouse. On a holiday to save their marriage (after his infidelity), Perry (Ewan McGregor) and Gail (Naomi Harris) bump into charismatic Russian gangster Dima (Stellan Skarsgård). Perry and he strike up a surprising friendship – and before he knows it Perry is agreeing to carry information from Dima to the British intelligence services. This attracts the attention of MI6 officer Hector (Damian Lewis) who sees this as an opportunity to expose the corrupt links between Russian criminals and high-level British bankers and politicians. Dima, however, will only hand over the goods if he is promised asylum for his family – something the British authorities, aware of the mess his revelations could cause, are not happy to allow…

Susanna White, veteran of some excellent television series of the last few years, puts together a confidently mounted and generally well-paced drama, with many of the expected Le Carré twists and turns. If she leans a little too heavily on the murk – the green and blue filters on the camera get a big workout here – it does at least mean that we get a real sense of the twilight world the characters operate in, meaning flashes of wide open space and bright daylight carry real impact. She also really understands how violence is often more shocking when we see the reaction of witnesses rather than the deed itself – all the most violent and tragic events in the film are seen at least partly from the perspective of the reactions of those witnessing them. The sense of danger on the edges of every action, stays with us while watching this unjust nightmare unravel.

It also works really well with one of the core themes of the movie: our ability to feel empathy for other people and how it affects our choices. Dima is driven towards defection because of his distaste for the increasing violence of the next generation of Russian criminals, and their lack of discrimination about who they harm. He’s all but adopted the orphaned children of a previous victim of violence, and his motivation at all points is to insure his family’s safety. Hector, our case officer, is motivated overwhelmingly by a sense of tragic, impotent fury about his rival ensuring Hector’s son is serving a long sentence in prison for drug smuggling.

And Perry is pulled into all this because he has a strong protective streak – something that eventually saves his marriage. Perry frequently throws himself forward to protect the weak, with no regard for his safety, from his unending efforts to protect Dima’s family to throwing himself in fury at a mobster roughing up a young woman. His intense empathy and protective streak motor all his actions and run through the whole movie.

It’s a shame then that his actual character isn’t quite interesting enough to hold the story together. Nothing wrong with McGregor’s performance, the character itself is rather sketchily written. Aside from his protectiveness we don’t get much of a sense of him and – naturally enough – he’s often a passenger or witness to events around him. Similarly, Naomie Harris does her best with a character that barely exists.

Instead the plaudits (and meaty parts) go to Skarsgård and Lewis. Skarsgård dominates the film with an exuberant, larger than life character who never feels like a caricature and reveals increasing depths of humanity and vulnerability beneath the surface. Lewis matches him just as well, at first seeming like a buttoned-up George Smiley type, but with his own tragic background motivating a long-term career man to slowly build his own conscience.

Our Kind of Traitor handles many of these personal themes very well, but it doesn’t quite manage to tie them into something that really feels special. Instead this feels a bit more like a Le Carré-by- numbers. We get the shady secret services, government greed, good people trapped in the middle – even some of the characters, from the foul-mouthed spook played by Mark Gatiss to Jeremy Northam’s jet black Aubrey, seem like they could have appeared in any number of his novels. 

There is a film here that is wanting to be made about the invasion of the UK by dirty Russian money – but it never quite comes out as this Dante-esque, Miltonian spiral. Instead the film too often settles for more functional thrills, a more traditional or middle-brow approach that works very well while you watch it, but doesn’t go the extra mile to turn this into something you will really remember.

The Blind Side (2009)

Sandra Bullock sets her own rules, campaigning for a better life for a young black man in The Blind Side

Director: John Lee Hancock

Cast: Sandra Bullock (Leigh Anne Tuohy), Tim McGraw (Sean Tuohy), Quinton Aaron (Michael Oher Tuohy), Jae Head (SJ Tuohy), Lily Collins (Collins Tuohy), Ray McKinnon (Coach Cotton), Kathy Bates (Miss Sue), Kim Dickens (Mrs Boswell)

Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for this sweet but unchallenging film, the sort of thing you could have expected to see on TV in the 1990s as a “movie of the week”. She plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, a determined and driven woman who adopts and mentors Michael Oher (Quinton Aaaron), a gentle giant of a teenager who has grown up in foster care and who struggles with shyness. Michael has been accepted by his school for his potential skill, but the school can’t cater for his requirements for a less traditional teaching model (he struggles with reading and confidence). All that changes as Leigh Anne pushes for Michael to get the support he needs and encourages him to excel as a footballer.

This is the sort of naked crowd pleaser that will leave a smile on your face – and probably escape your mind after a few days. It’s devoid of challenge and ticks every single box you would expect this kind of rags-to-riches story to cover – the initial struggle, the growth in confidence, the setback, the rebound, the happy ending. It’s all there – and packaged very well by Hancock (heck the film won a surprise nomination for Best Picture).

It’s powered above all by a forceful, larger-than-life performance by Bullock, the sort of “personality” part that the actor has always excelled at (there is no doubt she’s a hugely engaging performer and always has been). Bullock grips the film by the horns and rips through the expected scenes. She’s a glamourous rich woman who isn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with the local gangsters! She’s wealthy but she’s still in touch with her roots! She’s beautiful but she wears the trousers in the household! It’s everything you would probably expect, and Bullock can more or less play it standing on her head. She brings all her expert comic timing and exuberance to bear and mixes it with an emotional concern and empathy rarely called for in the romcoms that have made up much of her career. In a weak year (Carey Mulligan in An Education was her only plausible rival for the little gold man) she took the prize.

It’s probably the only thing that The Blind Side will be remembered for, however much most people will enjoy it when watching it. Its story of good triumphant and a disadvantaged young man getting the chance to come to peace with himself and turn his life around, are bound to put a smile on most faces. There are lots of funny lines, and Leigh Anne is such a powerhouse she makes a chalk-and-cheese partnership with anyone she shares a scene with. But it’s basically not got a lot more to it than just showing you a rags-to-riches tale, with a few slight notes of racial tension thrown in (and then barely even explored in any depth). A more interesting film might have taken more note of the differences between the Tuohy’s background and the poverty of Michael’s childhood neighbourhood and the fate of the rest of the people who grew up (none of whom had his advantages). But this is more interested in presenting an unlikely, balsy, champion of the underdog promote his life.

I suppose you could say that this film tells the story of the troubled background and eventual success of a young black man and not only filters all this through the experience of a family of wealthy white people, but also suggests that the chances of a black man achieving this without the support of a white family was practically impossible. But, then this isn’t a film with a political agenda. It’s just trying to tell a charming, uplifting story. Take it on those terms and it’s enjoyable. Try to delve into it any deeper and it will puff up and disappear in a burst of feelgood warmth. But the only reason it will be remembered – the only reason why it even remotely stands out – is as the film Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for.

Now You See Me (2013)

A gang of magicians get up to all sorts of antics in light and empty caper Now You See Me

Director: Louis Leterrier

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg (J Daniel Atlas), Woody Harrelson (Merritt McKinney), Isla Fisher (Henley Reeves), Dave Franco (Jack Wilder), Mark Ruffalo (Agent Dylan Rhodes), Mélanie Laurent (Agent Alma Dray), Morgan Freeman (Thaddeus Bradley), Michael Caine (Arthur Tressler), Michael Kelly (Agent Fuller), Common (Agent Evans)

Sometimes the simplest tricks are the best. Remember David Blaine? All his huge illusions and stunts weren’t worth thruppence compared to the simple awe of watching him perform card tricks in front of stunned regular folks in the streets. This film is pretty much the same, a dazzlingly shot con-trick of a film that wants to reveal a stream of tricks that it was holding up its sleeves over its runtime, each twist being less and less impactful. The most magic thing in this is the sleight of hand card trick Jesse Eisenberg performs at the start of the film – after that it’s like watching your soul drain away over two hours under an onslaught of wham-bam twists.

Anyway, J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) are a ragtag bunch of professional magicians, hypnotists, stunt performers and conmen who are recruited by a shadowy magical organisation known only as The Eye for reasons unknown. One year later they are performing huge stadium gigs, with the support of millionaire insurance man Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), as The Four Horseman. During their first show they magic millions of Euros out of a bank in Paris while performing in Las Vegas – a stunt that attracts the attention of the FBI and Interpol who send agents Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Alma Dray (Mélanie Laurent) to investigate. Meanwhile, the Horsemen are on the run from the law, and still working towards ends unknown, while dodging magic debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman). But is anything as it seems?

The answer of course is no. But then what do you expect from a film that proudly announces (frequently) “the closer you look, the less you will see”. It’s a pretty good message for the film – but not in a good way – as Now You See Me is as insubstantial as air, a puff of showmanship so pleased with its twists and tricks that it completely fails to have a heart. By the time we get to the end of the film and realise almost everything we saw over its runtime wasn’t real you’ll feel disconnected rather than engaged.

In fact, as a heist/con movie, this isn’t that good. The formula depends on you thinking you’ve got it worked out and then BOOM you realise you didn’t. It also by and large depends on charming, playful leads (think Newman and Redford in The Sting) and on a sort of consistent logic where you get the satisfaction of pieces you didn’t even notice falling into place as vital clues. Now You See Me does none of this.

In fact, it’s so pleased to tell you that it pulled the wool over your eyes that it rushes several of its reveals with an indecent haste. It largely fails to sprinkle clues throughout the film and basically plays unfair with the whole audience. There are things you can never hope to work out as they are based on not being shown vital clues early on. Characters and the film carefully never reveal any hints of true allegiances or motivations until the last possible minute.

In fact it’s one of those films where most of the characters are, for large chunks of time, really pretending to be someone else. This can work, but it doesn’t here as most of the Horsemen are basically rather unlikeable arrogant arseholes. The four actors mostly coast through basic set-ups, and you’ll be pleased when they fade into the background in the second half of the move (all four of them are basically decoy protagonists, and the film shelves them when it can no longer think of a way of hiding their true motivations in plain sight any more). The real lead is actually Mark Ruffalo’s FBI agent, and Ruffalo is a charming, likeable, schleppy presence that you can root for, even if the plot takes us on a character journey with him that makes no real sense (the clue for this is the film’s references to a magician who buried a card in a tree years earlier for one trick). 

It’s flashy in its film making, and Leterrier has a workmanlike touch with making things look cooland putting the camera in interesting places. He has no real idea of character or pacing – the film is frequently quick, quick, slow – and he creates a film here that has nowhere near the brains it thinks it has. It’s all flash and no substance. Look too closely and you’ll see nothing there.

Amores Perros (2000)

Dogs, love and car crashes in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s debut feature Amores Perros

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Cast: Emilio Echevarría (El Chivo), Gael García Bernal (Octavio), Goya Toledo (Valeria), Álvaro Guerrero (Daniel), Vanessa Bauche (Susana), Jorge Salinas (Luis), Adriana Barraza (Octavio’s mother), Marco Pérez (Ramiro)

What links playboy kid Octavio (Gael García Bernal), model Valeria (Goya Toledo) whose career is so high it can only go downhill, and El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría) a hitman who lives like a scruffy hobo? Love of course! Well that and a near-fatal car accident that has life-changing effects for all three of them. And dogs too. They all love dogs. Iñárritu’s debut film plays like a mixture of Altman and Tarantino, throwing together three small-scale stories into something that feels electric and fast, but also strangely empty, as if it is skirting the surface of its characters without really delving into them.

Its interesting re-watching this film now, after Iñárritu has become a double Oscar winner and one of the world’s leading directors. The mastery of technique is all there in Amores Perros. Iñárritu’s style with the camera is fluid, intense and engrossing, and he uses a wide combination of fast-cut editing tricks, stylish camera work and handheld cameras that immerses the audience in the seedy underworld of Mexico City. As part of a wave of Latin American films made at the time, Amores Perros perhaps comes second only to City of God as an example of how to bring the danger and reality of the streets to the screen. Shot with a drained out style that makes everything feel even more grim, dirty and depressing than it probably is, Amores Perros is as sharp a dog bite of cinema as you could expect. 

Within this brilliant evocation of urban cinema work, Iñárritu crafts a series of three morality tales so universal in their structure and themes that they could just as easily been pulled from Chaucer or Boccaccio. It works as well, these three short films linked by common themes, cleverly structured narratively so that we learn more about each story as the other two unfold. Iñárritu structures the pivot of the story being the car crash that opens the film. The causes leading up to it are covered in the first story, with the events of the second story hinging on its effect on model Valeria in the other car, and the third spinning out the change of lifestyle it helps push on hitman El Chivo. Each story starts at different places in relation to others and each expands and deepens the overall picture we get of Mexico.

And it’s a place with its own underworld economy, powered by everything from murder and robbery to dog fighting. Octavio is a low-rent criminal (as is his brother) who ends up sucked into pitching his vicious Rottweiler into dog fighting. El Chivo lives in filth and dirt and takes commissions from corrupt cops to knock off targets. Both these stories hinge on inequality and desperation: Octavio and his family are working-class and have remarkably little. El Chivo is literally a tramp, a man who has turned his back on his old affluent life in disgust. The people they deal with are hoodlums and criminals and the few middle-class people who intrude into their lives do so with contempt. It’s all particularly obvious when, in the middle chapter, we head into the world of model Valeria and her lover, magazine editor Daniel – although even they are struggling to make ends meet.

It’s this middle story that actually makes for a fascinating centre point in the story. Valeria is crippled in the car accident, bed-ridden and disabled in the very week that Daniel has finally left his wife and children to be with her. Daniel (well played with a growing frustration and disappointment by Álvaro Guerrero) increasingly finds it hard to keep his patience with the disappointed and increasingly despairing Valeria (affecting work by Goya Toledo). This story of romantic, illicit love turned far too quickly into a burdensome marriage filled with dependencies has a universal tragedy to it. Their problems hinge around the disappearance of Valeria’s beloved dog, which may or may not be trapped under the damaged floorboards of the flat, a despair that becomes an obsession for Valeria and a constant burden for Daniel.

Valeria’s love for a dog becomes a substitute for the disappointing, passion-free relationship that she and Daniel find themselves locked into (Daniel even takes to calling his ex-wife to hear her voice). Dogs are more of a tool to Octavio. His vicious Rottweiler is his route to the money he needs to get his brother’s wife to elope with him. Gael Garcia Bernal plays Octavio with the edgy, simmering energy that powered so many Latin American films of the era, his face a mixture of surly resentment and romantic ambition. Octavio’s passionate flings with his sister-in-law have a youthful immaturity to them, that even she seems to recognise (his brother, while a somewhat absent husband, is clearly someone she relates to far more than the sexy Octavio). Discovering his dog’s capability for violence, he moves into the underworld of dog fighting, opening himself up to a world of trouble.

This use of dogs as a tool for greed and ambition perhaps reflects Octavio’s lack of emotional maturity and understanding of the impact of building a future with his sister-in-law, no matter how much he may wish to run away. For hitman El Chivo surprisingly, dogs are instead surrogate loves and emotional partners who have replaced the family (and indeed his regard for people in general) that he gave up long ago. Played with an expert anger masking deep sadness and self-loathing by Emilio Echevarría, El Chivo loves his dogs with all the intensity and care that is lacking from his relationship with humans. It’s this that gives El Chivo the self-regard that allows him to begin to change and rebuild his life.

Iñárritu’s primal film handles these universal themes of love and despair with intelligence and energy, even if it’s essentially three tales that play out more or less as you might expect. Because this film is essentially a collection of age-old morality tales, handsomely mounted but fundamentally predictable. What might you really learn about human nature from this film? I’m not sure. Because this is a pretty standard, even narratively safe drama, for all the minor tricks it plays with timelines. I’m not joking when I say this would not look out of place in The Canterbury Tales – and the moral issues it presents are lacking in shades of grey. Adulterers are punished, cheaters do not prosper, the “bad” are generally punished and for all that one of our characters is a hitman, he’s repeatedly shown to have more depth and hinterland than most of the rest of the characters in there.

It’s an interesting reflection on Iñárritu. He is without a doubt a major director of cinema, whose skills with the camera and editing are flawless. He creates here a film that is absolutely striking in its vibrancy and cinematic technique and its immediacy. But is it also a film that is a little too much about the mechanics of the stories rather than really invested in the stories themselves? I think it might be. Iñárritu is a master showman, but not necessarily a great storyteller and I think Amores Perros is a great example of that.

Syriana (2005)

George Clooney gets crushed by the corruption of major oil companies in Syriana

Director: Stephen Gaghan

Cast: George Clooney (Bob Barnes), Matt Damon (Bryan Woodman), Jeffrey Wright (Bennett Holiday), Christopher Plummer (Dean Whiting), Nicky Henson (Sydney Hewitt), David Clennon (Donald Farish III), Amanda Peet (Julie Woodman), Peter Gerety (Leland Janus), Chris Cooper (Jimmy Pope), Tim Blake Nelson (Danny Dalton), William Hurt (Stan Goff), Mark Strong (Mussawi), Alexander Siddig (Prince Nasir Al-Subaai), Mazhar Munir (Wasim Ahmed Khan), Nadim Sawalha (Emir Hamed Al-Subaai), Akbar Kurtha (Prince Meshal Al-Subaai)

The more I think about Syriana the more I think Stephen Gaghan was unlucky. If he had made this story today, you can be sure this would have become a ten episode series on HBO or Netflix. Instead, Gaghan made it into a film in the early 2000s. This means the bloated, over expanded plot gets crammed into two short hours at the cost of much of the emotional and political complexity it needs. Without this Syriana is an angry lecture, something that throws some interesting observations at the viewer, but basically resorts more often to shouting at them about how shit the world is. With its interlinking storylines and “serious” content it looks like intelligent filmmaking, but it’s more like a misguided opportunity.

Gaghan’s film follows four plotlines. Bob Barnes (George Clooney) is a CIA field agent, and expert on the Middle East, coming to end of his effectiveness as a field agent, struggling to get his superiors in Washington to understand the complexities of Middle Eastern oil politics. He is ordered to arrange the assassination of the eldest son of the Emir of a Persian Oil Kingdom Prince Nasir Al-Subaai (Alexander Siddig). Nasir is suspected of the States of harbouring terrorist sympathies. In fact he is a passionate reformer, desperate to modernise his country. Nasir is working with Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) a representative of an American energy company, whose son is tragically killed by an electrical fault at one of the Emir’s estates during a business trip. The Kingdom is also being courted by a newly merged US oil company Connex-Killen for exclusive drilling rights – with attorney Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) tasked to ensure that nothing stands in the way of the merger and the riches that will follow. As these three storylines of political and economic oil matters interweave, migrant oil worker Wasim (Mazhar Munir) struggles to find work in the kingdom, and is slowly wooed by extremists.

Gaghan directs his own script and that might be his first mistake, as he is not a confident or imaginative enough director to craft something truly dramatic and engaging out of this highly researched, technical script. Instead, the script – or rather the research behind the script – drives events at every turn and leads to scenes that feel like they should be intelligent but tend to be actors reciting reams of dialogue and stats at each other. Combined with that, the film has a slightly smug preachy tone to it, desperate to let us know how shady and corrupt the world is and how trapped we are on a continual downward spiral of greed and corruption preventing us from improving and changing the world. It doesn’t always make for compelling viewing.

On top of that the complexity of the narrative is often mistaken for smartness, but often feels rather more like rushed and sudden execution of a story that doesn’t really have time to breath. Frankly the story that Gaghan wants to tell needed 8-10 hours of screen time and he doesn’t get it. Instead he throws everything and the kitchen sink into this sprawling study of oil based corruption. From Washington, to private oil firms, to intelligence agencies, to the cash rich families sitting on top of these oil geysers everyone gets a kicking as part of the same sordid mess that has led to the world being dominated by the rich and the regular guys of the middle east being left adrift and easy picking for extremists.

It feels like it should carry real weight, but it never really does because it’s hard for us to get a handle on what is going on half the time and even less harder to care once you realise the film has sacrificed character and motivation for the drive of putting together its polemical view of the world. The film is stuffed with actors, but its striking how few of the characters they play make an impression. Every part is played by a star – except of course for the inexplicable casting of jobbing 1980s Brit TV actor Nicky Henson as an arrogant oil exec, a casting so outlandishly out of place for an actor you are more likely to see in One Foot in the Grave that I kind of love the film for it – but none of the roles is really much more than a cipher.

That’s not to say there isn’t decent work. Christopher Plummer brings great heft and menace to a law firm Washington bigwig. Jeffrey Wright nailed so well playing this sort of on-the-surface meek functionary who quietly learns (albeit reluctantly) to play the game as well as the loudmouths that he has played the same role several times afterwards. Alexander Siddig owes much of his post DS9 career to his exceptional thoughtful and sympathetic performance as an Arab Prince whose forward-thinking is a disaster for the governments who want to keep using his state as an ATM. 

George Clooney won a generous Oscar (it was surely partly a compensation for not winning anything for Good Night, and Good Luck that year) but gets the meatiest role as Bob Barnes, the tired and cynical CIA agent who slowly begins to question the orders he is given and the world he has been working to build for his masters. His story contains the most actual drama, possibly why it stands out – poor George gets a rough ride here, tortured, arrested, bruised and blooded. It’s pretty straight forward stuff for an actor of his quality (Clooney plays it with a world weary outrage) but it’s also the most memorable storyline of a film straining at every moment to be important. 

It’s quite telling actually that the film’s most memorable speech is put into the mouth of Tim Blake Nelson’s oil executive (“Corruption is why we win!”) a character so lightly sketched out he barely appears other than making that speech. It’s a sign of the weakness of the film: characters serve purposes to the narrative and then disappear. These lightly sketched characters act out a lecture on world politics and economic-energy-driven corruption. Syriana needed room to breath in order to become a drama rather than a lecture. Instead it’s a decent workmanlike movie with ideas that it never manages to really express in a way that will make you care. When it tells you rich businessmen love money and powerful politicians love power you’re likely to basically say “yeah. I know. Tell me something new…”

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.

The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017)

He’s a hitman. He’s a bodyguard. Let the predictable hilarity ensue!

Director: Patrick Hughes

Cast: Ryan Reynolds (Michael Bryce), Samuel L. Jackson (Darius Kincaid), Gary Oldman (Vladislav Dukhovich), Salma Hayek (Sonia Kincaird), Elodie Yung (Amelia Roussel), Yuri Kolokolnikov (Ivan), Joaquim de Almedia (Jean Foucher), Kirsty Mitchell (Rebecca Harr), Richard E. Grant (Mr Seifert)

The buddy movie. Two mismatched people from two very different walks of life – ideally opposing ones – are thrown together to do something or, better yet, go somewhere and along the way (guess what!) they slowly put all their initial hostility behind each other and found out that, hey, perhaps they have more in common than they thought becoming mismatched pals for life. I’d love to say The Hitman’s Bodyguard does something different. But no, it doubles down on this plot. And doubles down hard.

Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) is an elite UK-based private bodyguard – but after the sudden assassination of one of his clients (and if you can’t guess who the assassin turns out to be, you’ve clearly never seen a movie) his career falls apart and he ends up guarding drug fuelled corporate executives in London (a frankly demeaning cameo for Richard E Grant). All this changes when he is brought in – of course! – by his ex-Girlfriend Amelia (Elodie Yung), an Interpol agent charged with delivering to the Hague notorious hitman Darius Kincaid (Samuel L Jackson). Turns out Kincaid has agreed to testify against Slobodan-Milosevic-style-dictator Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary Oldman, clearly using his recent Oscar to pick up a big pay cheque). But Dukhovich’s men are out to stop them, helped by turncoats in Interpol, so Bryce and Kincaid must hit the road together to get to the Hague – not helped by their obvious loathing for each other. Let the sparks fly!

If you didn’t notice just from that plot description that this is as familiar and overworn a plot as a moth eaten old coat, let me confirm for you. This film does literally nothing new, original, different and interesting than a hundred films before it. In fact it’s almost a work of art to make something so completely and utterly lacking in any form of originality. The entire film plays out, almost beat for beat, as a straight knock off of Midnight Run, but lacking its charm, comic chops, absurdity and heart.

Instead The Hitman’s Bodyguard is exactly the sort of film actors take on when they have a bit of a loose end and want to pick up a healthy cheque so that they can consider popping off afterwards to do something a little more interesting. To say the actors could play these roles standing on their head is an understatement: they could play them in a coma. 

Reynolds is charming as always, but the part barely stretches him. Jackson sprays swear words around like confetti, essentially playing his public personae and looks like a man shooting a film in between trips to The Belfry for a few rounds of golf. Salma Hayek plays a sweary, sexualised “bad girl”, in a role that I think she is embracing as a lark but in fact feels demeaning as the camera leers over her body as she does bad ass things (the part also lacks any charm whatsoever). As mentioned, surely the only thing that attracted Gary Oldman to this totally bland villain role was a stonking pay cheque – and who can blame him for that.

I suppose it passes the time okay, but the film frequently mistakes vast amounts of swearing and moments of violence for actual wit. Just hearing characters drop f-bombs and shout isn’t actually in itself that funny. There is nothing actually smart about the film at any point what-so-ever. No wonder the actors coast through it effectively playing versions of their own public personaes. 

The story line is so rammed full of ludicrous events and thumping clichés that, despite the enjoyment of a few bits of pieces, you can pretty much predict everything that will happen in the movie. If you can’t spot the second the Interpol characters appear on screen which of these guys is a mole for the baddies, then you’ve clearly never seen a movie. Every single beat and every single scene that this mismatched duo go through to get from enemies to frenemies is like reading a B-movie plot creation text book. 

But then if you’ve never seen a film before this might all seem rather enjoyable. If you are thinking about watching this film, I’d urge you to watch Midnight Run. It’s like this – it’s exactly like this – but much, much better. But then I guess the stars of this film will say the same. Even as they limber up to make a sequel: but then they’ve got bills to pay.

American Hustle (2013)

Glamour and confidence tricks in David O. Russell’s flashy American Hustle

Director: David O. Russell

Cast: Christian Bale (Irving Rosenfeld), Amy Adams (Sydney Prosser), Bradley Cooper (Richie DiMaso), Jennifer Lawrence (Rosalyn Rosenfeld), Jeremy Renner (Mayor Carmine Polito), Louis CK (Stoddard Thorsen), Jack Huston (Pete Musane), Michael Peña (Paco Hernandez/Sheik), Elisabeth Röhm (Dolly Polito), Shea Whigham (Carl Elway), Alessandro Nivola (Anthony Amada), Robert De Niro (Victor Tellegio)

In 2013, American Hustle was nominated for ten Oscars and won none of them. Somehow, being invited to the big party but not receiving any prizes was strangely fitting for a film about small time grifters forced into a big game way beyond their control. Russell’s film is like a celebration of his strengths and weaknesses as a director: it’s stuffed with some very good (if rather mannered) performances, offers lots of dynamic film making, but is still basically a rather cold and arch film that’s hard to really invest in – rather like a con game in itself.

In 1978, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) is a small-time grafter, running scams with his partner and lover Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who uses the identity of a young English aristocrat “Lady Edith Greenslly”. Rosenfeld longs to leave his unstable, selfish wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) for Sydney, but fears he will lose all his access to his adopted son. Rosenfeld and Prosser’s career of clever investment frauds is brought to an end when Prosser is caught red-handed by FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper). DiMaso forces the pair into his entrapment operation, targeting New Jersey politicians with offers of bribes as part of a Fake Sheik investment. Initially it targets Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), but the operation quickly expands, as the ambitious and impulsive DiMaso constantly follows every connection and the operation expands to dangerous levels, taking in the mafia. Scared, Rosenfeld and Prosser desperately try to play both ends against the middle.

American Hustle is a decent film, which pulls together the sort of capers, turmoil and antics that you would expect from a film about a long con. It throws into the melting pot the vibes of several other films, from The Sting to Goodfellas, and asks us to admire the results. Russell encourages the actors to play it with an edgy verisimilitude that pretty much works as a metaphor for con men. Each performance is an effective display of high-wire character acting work laced with arch, studied tricks. But only rarely do you get a sense of something that’s real.

That’s part of a film that wants to have a cake and eat it as well. It’s striking in the entire story that the most sympathetic character is the initial target, Jeremy Renner’s well-meaning, passionate New Jersey politician, bamboozled into taking a bribe (money he mostly uses in the local community) because he is convinced it’s a crucial part of getting Arab investment. It’s even more striking that the most honest, subdued (and deadly) character is the Mafia kingpin Victor Tellegio, played with chilling menace by an unbilled Robert DeNiro. Nearly everyone else on the side of the entrapment operation is pretty much a selfish prick or verging on the unhinged.

But then that’s part of the point of the film, which throws two people who know what they are doing (Rosenfeld and Prosser) at the mercy of people playing with fire (Roselyn and in particular DiMaso, a permed, tightly-wound powderkeg). This is one hell of a performance from Bradley Cooper – and a sign again after Silver Linings Playbook that Russell and he have a natural understanding. Cooper is a force of nature, a bundle of terrible impulses combined with an utter lack of shame or self-control, who is quite happy to trample over everyone to get what he wants and has no regard whatsoever for the danger he puts himself and others into. Utterly unpredictable, he never sticks to a plan, veers between rage and hysterical laughter and, worst of all, is always convinced he’s right.

It’s DiMaso who spins the operation into dangerous waters with his vaulting ambition to land yet another big fish, recklessly peddling insubstantial, unprepared lies on top of each other – to the terror and horror of practised peddlar of bullshit Rosenfeld, whose whole successful schtick is based on saying “no” and having the mark do all the desperate work. DiMaso’s approach not only puts the operation at risk, it puts lives at risk – not that DiMaso cares, preoccupied as he is with his childish one-upmanship with his boss and a teenage sexual obsession with Prosser.

What chance do the (mostly) small-fish politicians and local figures have, whose lives are placed on the altar of DiMaso’s ambition? It’s no wonder that, late in the film, our conmen heroes start to feel guilt and remorse – none more so than Irving Rosenfeld. Played by Christian Bale with the sort of tricksy, Olivier-ish disguises that he so loves (in this case increased weight, a balding comb-over and a pair of tinged glasses he obsessively fiddles with), Rosenfeld is an operator happy with the level he is working at and incredibly wary of stepping up into the dangerous big leagues. Justifiably convinced of his own professionalism at fleecing money and winning trust, Rosenfeld has no problem with taking money from the selfish but every problem in the world with destroying the life of a fundamentally honest man. Bale’s performance, for all the tricks, manages to successfully build a picture of a selfish man who believes himself in his way to be honest in a way and is just trying to make his way.

That way also involves balancing between two very different women. Amy Adams does decent work as a blowsy fake-aristocrat, sporting a series of tops with neck lines that literally plunge down to her waist, although she is perhaps a little too “nice girl next door” to really convince as the love-em-to-manipulate-them Prosser. She’s not also helped by the script giving her an ill-defined arc of self-doubt linked to pretending to be someone else. Sweet as the genuine love can be her between her and Rosenfeld – and excellent as her chemistry is between Bale and Cooper – it’s the character who remains the least knowable in the film.

Also not helping is the fact that Jennifer Lawrence burns through the film as Rosalyn, the sort of electric, larger-than-life but still very real performance of arrogance, selfishness, dangerous stupidity and greed that marked her out as a major actress. Whether inadvertently putting Rosenfeld’s life at risk through blabbing details she’s half-overheard and half-understood, cleaning the kitchen while singing an aggressive rendition of Live and Let Die or nearly burning the house down because she won’t believe metal can’t go in “the science oven” (aka microwave), Lawrence is the film’s MVP.

Russell’s film showcases all these actors brilliantly, but his overall story remains a little cold and not as clever as it thinks. With a film about conmen you expect a final rugpull – and this film sort of manages one – but the story telling to take us there isn’t quite as articulate and clever as it needs to be in order to be really satisfying. Perhaps it’s the film’s ragged, hip, indie style of telling – or the air that the actors are making a lot of this stuff up as they go with edgy, semi-improvised performances – but the film never really engrosses or engages. For all that we see the inner worlds of Rosenfeld and Prosser, I can’t say I really, truly cared what happened to them. 

Instead Russell focuses on the marshalling of his resources, and cool, slick film-making. He uses expert camera work and editing, mixed with a superbly chosen soundtrack, overlaid with voiceover, sudden transitions, some narrative jumps and a vibrant sense of cool to make a story that finally feels a little too much like a style-over-substance trick – in fact a con game all of its very own, as enjoyable and entertaining as the rest of the film, but when it finishes you realise your pockets are empty.