Roarke Adrift

It’s a crowded market when it comes to the low-to-mid-budget horror movie – the very nature of the form means that it can be hard to cut through and get attention. What you really need, in the likely absence of star names, is either to be part of an established franchise, or a really good gimmick. But there’s only so many films they can crowbar into the Conjuring or Paranormal Activity settings, which may be why we are increasingly seeing the rise of the peculiar (to my mind, anyway) ‘…but done as a horror movie’ subgenre.

I suppose if you wanted to be pernickety you could argue this dates back all the way to the 1940s with I Walked With A Zombie, which is Jane Eyre, but done as a horror movie. It’s all become a bit more impudent and grisly in recent years, however: one film that stood out for me was Brightburn, which is basically the origin of Superman, but done as a horror movie. There was also the horror take on (of all things) the Banana Splits, also in 2019. Currently getting more buzz than you would have thought possible for what sounds like a deeply questionable work is the forthcoming Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, in which the loveable old bear is reimagined as a homicidal maniac and basically sounds like a fantastic argument for revisiting the law when it comes to copyright and public domain. (I doubt it will prove quite as traumatising as the Peter Rabbit movie, of course, and that wasn’t even meant to be a horror film.)

I didn’t have quite as extreme a reaction when my fellow Cthulhuites and I went along to see Underwater, not that long before the first lockdown, and were treated to the trailer for the film version of Fantasy Island, directed by Jeff Wadlow. My first reaction was ‘doing Fantasy Island as a horror movie? That’s a really, really weird idea.’ I am old enough to remember the original Fantasy Island TV show from the late 70s and early 80s – I barely remember any of the actual plots, but I do recall the iconography of the thing – Ricardo Montalban swanking around in a white suit crying ‘Smiles, everyone, smiles!’, and Herve Villechaise as his sidekick shouting ‘De plane! De plane!’

For the uninitiated: it was basically an anthology show which came out of an unsuccessful pitch meeting at the network ABC. Apparently the exhausted producers had half a dozen ideas rejected by executives, leading one of them to jokingly suggest they do a show about an island where people could live out their sexual fantasies, which of course the network really liked. (Nowadays it would probably be a reality show.) The premise was essentially just that: an island where visitors could live out their fantasies, through unexplained but possibly otherworldly means. (Various episodes suggested that Roarke might be God; Montalban’s own theory was that he was a disgraced angel.) I think it’s fair to say it was about as gritty and challenging as The Love Boat, although apparently the version from the 1990s with Malcolm McDowell was a bit sparkier. (I understand that, post the movie, yet another incarnation of the show is now running, though whether the success of the movie had any part in making that happen I have no idea.)

So, anyway, this is a horror version of that show. Roarke is played by Michael Pena and the premise seems to be the same – visitors arrive on Fantasy Island to leave out their dreams. As we have already seen a young woman being kidnapped by masked men, however, it’s clear that this place has a darker side to it. Initially it seems very much like a conventional update of the TV show – a hard-working businesswoman (Maggie Q) wants the chance to revisit a bad relationship decision, a cop wants the opportunity to be a soldier for a while, two brothers just want to live like millionaires for the weekend. But the final guest (Lucy Hale) has a different kind of fantasy – horribly bullied and persecuted at school, she wants revenge on the person responsible. Her fantasy consists of her going into an underground vault where the bully (who we saw at the start) is tied to a chair. Various options for punishment are available to her. Is this really what she wanted?

Gradually it turns out that most of the other fantasies are not going fantastically well, either, and it seems like a succession of cautionary tales with the subtext ‘be careful what you wish for’ are in progress. Some of the guests also get momentary glimpses of a horribly burned figure closing in on them, and it becomes clear that there is something else going on here…

At this point I sat up and started paying more attention to a movie which was proving to be a bit less dumb than I had expected it to be. It turns out that all the guests, rather than simply winning a free trip to the island, have been deliberately selected to go there. To say more would be to enter the territory of spoilers, I fear, but there is perhaps a sense in which the shade of J. B. Priestley briefly lingers over Fantasy Island (before no doubt leaving very rapidly).

It’s certainly an interesting take on the material – very up-front about the powers of the island and Roarke’s position as its overseer, both of which get a lot more exposition than ever happened on TV. ‘Interesting’ can only take you so far, of course, and the main problem with Fantasy Island is one you might have predicted: tonally it’s a bit all over the place, switching from frat-boy comedy to mainstream drama to dark fantasy to something not unlike torture-porn horror almost at random. It’s very curious to watch, and actually quite intriguing as the story begins to develop, but it’s never that funny, or emotionally involving, or honestly even scary. It’s also the case that, for the film’s twist to work, at least one of the characters has to spend the first half of the film acting in a way that doesn’t actually make sense given what we later learn about them. Probably this is a major flaw in the script, but the film is so hectic it’s not the sort of thing you find yourself minded to dwell upon much.

Occasionally you see a trailer for a movie and your gut reaction turns out to be exactly on the money: Fantasy Island is really, really weird. It’s almost certainly not an unqualified good kind of weird, though on the other hand I don’t think the film is so awful it deserves some of the opprobium heaped upon it (multiple nominations at that year’s Golden Raspberries) – I can only imagine that people thought ‘Fantasy Island as a horror movie? Terrible idea = terrible movie.’ It’s certainly a strange idea, and film itself is odd and not really very satisfactory. But it has a certain originality and ambition to it.

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Red Vs Blue Movie

The other day I was a little surprised to discover I still had a checklist in my head of all those movies which the onset of lockdown back in March 2020 stopped me from seeing in a timely manner. Possibly the outstanding item on said list is a movie called Military Wives, which may sound like a niche magazine but is actually one of those uplifting true-life comedy dramas which almost invariably make me feel like opening a vein whenever I watch one. I got as far as watching the first half hour of that at the cinema before the building’s electrics blew and we were all sent home with the promise of a free ticket to a future showing. Five days later the cinemas all closed, and I’ve never heard anything about this movie since (I wasn’t actually enjoying it much so I’m not that bothered about seeing the rest of it).

Perhaps even more unlucky was Craig Zobel’s The Hunt, which had already suffered one delay to its release and came out just in time to play for less than a week. But at least The Hunt has resurfaced on one of the big streamers, where it doesn’t seem to have made a particular impression. Perhaps that’s because this is a movie which was the product of a very particular moment in American culture, which has now to some degree passed, or possibly it’s simply because it’s a rather odd film.

It opens with the audience being made privy to a chat exchange between a group of liberal friends, complaining about the latest outrages committed by (we are invited to assume) Donald Trump. (As we have noted, the film was due to come out in early 2020.) The friends console themselves by discussing an upcoming social occasion, when they will gather at the mansion home of one of them and then hunt and kill a dozen or so ‘deplorables’ – this being a rather loaded expression, derived from a disparaging comment about Republican voters made by Hillary Clinton.

A sequence set on the flight to the hunting grounds then follows, which mainly seems to be here for shock value and to pad out the film to a decent ninety-minute length: the first class passengers gang up to kill someone from cattle class who recovers from the sedative they’ve been given unexpectedly early. And from here we’re off into the hunt itself.

A dozen people wake up on the edge of woodland, close to a large wooden crate; they are all gagged. Inside the crate they find weapons of various kinds, before coming under fire from a hide nearby – several of them are gorily killed before the survivors flee into the woods, contending with booby traps (spike pits, land mines) along the way.

That’s basically all you need to know about the premise of the movie; there isn’t a great deal more to be said about it, to be honest, without getting into the realm of spoilers. There’s a weird diversion where it looks like a replica of rural Arkansas has been constructed in Bosnia to confuse the quarry in the hunt, but this once again feels a bit like diversionary filler – there’s a distinct smell around this film of it being a case of a strong premise that they really had trouble blowing up to feature length.

The idea of people hunting people isn’t an especially new one, after all – readers with serious psychiatric issues may recall that, after The Hunt had its theatrical run cancelled, I consoled myself by watching The Most Dangerous Game, another movie with a similar premise from the early 1930s. It crops up in various genre TV episodes as well – see The Snare, an episode of the Hulk TV show from the seventies. But one also gets the sense that this was conceived as a piece of satire as much as a thriller or a horror movie (it’s certainly gory enough to qualify as the latter).

Exactly which genre The Hunt falls into is a somewhat contentious issue, which has even earned its own Wikipedia footnote. I originally heard it advertised as a horror movie (not surprisingly, given it was produced by Blumhouse, the makers of the Paranormal Activity, Purge and Insidious franchises, as well as the (rather good) recent Halloween films). However, if you slap together any combination of the words horror, action, thriller, satire, and comedy, it is practically certain that someone will have described the film this way.

And the odd thing is that they all do describe the film: there’s more than enough gore for it to qualify as a horror, parts of it are very funny, and there’s at least one really well-staged action sequence. The problem is that, rather than blending all of these things into a single, coherent whole, The Hunt has a rather frenetic quality, hopping from sequence to sequence and topic to topic as if it’s afraid that if it lingers on any of them the audience will realise it’s actually a fairly insubstantial film. The irony is that if anything’s likely to create this impression it’s the fact the movie can’t keep still.

Wrong-footing the audience is often a good idea, and the film does have a go at this, being deliberately misleading about what exactly’s going on. It also attempts to do the old Psycho routine of introducing a character as, ostensibly, the lead, and then spectacularly killing them off relatively early in the film. This can work quite well – but The Hunt does the idea to death, repeatedly seeming to establish a protagonist only for them to meet a grisly fate a few minutes later. It gets a little bit wearisome, to be honest.

The scattershot approach of the film does occasionally pay off: there are some very funny moments, most of them satirical – the liberal elitists responsible for the carnage often pause in planning their mass slaughter to pick each other up for things like cultural appropriation and inappropriately gendered language. These scenes are so knowingly absurd that only an idiot could genuinely find The Hunt to be a provocative and dangerous incitement to division – it’s an exaggerated parody of the splits already existing in modern America.

Needless to say, Donald Trump weighed in and suggested an upcoming film was intended to ‘inflame and cause chaos’ (possibly that very stable genius was concerned about demarcation issues). To be honest, The Hunt is very small potatoes on that particular score, but the central idea – liberals hunting conservatives – was always going to be a bit controversial. The script does attempt to subvert audience expectations, by turning out to have as its main target the tendency of some people to believe anything they read on the internet, and the inflexible and nuance-free nature of so much modern political discourse. But this turns up rather late in the day, and feels like a bit of an afterthought.

Nevertheless, I did rather enjoy it: there are solid performances from what’s largely an ensemble cast (Hilary Swank, Wayne Duvall, Ethan Suplee, Betty Gilpin, Emma Roberts and Justin Hartley all get their moments of prominence) and the piece does have pace, energy, and a degree of wit about it. I’m not sure it hangs together as a coherent political thesis but there are certainly some very nice moments along the way.

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Dipsticks and Diptera

Death, entropy, and the speed of light: everything else is relative. I am aware this is a fairly philosophical note on which to open another entry on a theoretically amusing film review blog, but so it goes. I actually suspect it would amuse and satisfy the French hyphenate Quentin Dupieux (described by one critic as a ‘writer/director/composer/editor/cinematographer/auteur/weirdo’) to learn that one of his films sent my into a metaphysical spin quite so early on; he seems like that kind of person.

Dupieux, you may or may not recall, has previously shared with the world a couple of – for want of a better expression, and better expressions really are wanting in this case – horror pastiches: Rubber, the tale of a sentient telekinetic tyre on the rampage in the south-west USA, and Deerskin, in which a man possibly in the grip of a midlife crisis falls under the sway of a megalomaniac jacket. His 2020 film Mandibles is, by comparison, a much milder and gentler affair; it’s actually much more mainstream. Needless to say, if you compare it with virtually any other two films from the last few years, this is not the case: the film is still roaringly bonkers, it’s just that the tone of the thing is much more accessible.

Gregoire Ludig plays Manu, a dimwitted small-time crook for whom things are not going very successfully – as the film opens he is sleeping on the beach. It is a rather lovely beach in the south of France, to be sure, but even so. Nevertheless, things show signs of looking up a little bit when a more successful acquaintance offers him a job – couriering a box from one place to another, no questions asked (a bit like a cross between Frank Martin from The Transporter and Frank Gallagher from Shameless).

Manu takes the job and soon runs into his old friend Jean-Gab (David Marsais), who is equally morally-flexible and not appreciably brighter. However, things take an exceedingly odd turn when the car Manu steals to carry out his mission in turns out to have something in the boot (putting the goods in the boot is a stipulation of the job). This is not luggage, or junk, or a kidnapped daughter of a Chinese crime-boss, or anything else you might expect to find in the boot of a car in the south of France: it is a giant fly, which has somehow got itself wedged in there. When I say ‘giant’, I do not mean ‘unusually big for a fly’; I mean it is the size of a large dog. (The fly still turns out to be unfeasibly cute, somehow.)

Now you or I would probably run a mile or call someone properly equipped to deal with an insect of improbable size, but Manu and Jean-Gab display the genius of the somewhat thick by instantly recognising this as a money-spinning opportunity in a very effective disguise. They hit upon the plan of training the giant fly to steal things for them. This involves abandoning the job they have taken on and holing up somewhere; needless to say this does not go entirely to plan.

Now you may be thinking ‘Oh, no, not another film about two small-time crooks in the south of France trying to train a giant fly to nick stuff for them,’ and I understand why this might be the case. However, things take another unexpected turn when they run into Cecile (India Hair), a well-off woman who lives locally, who (completely erroneously) recognises Manu as Fred, her old boyfriend from school. She immediately invites the pair of them to stay at her house along with her and her friends. One of her friends is Agnes (Adele Exarchopoulos), who – due to brain damage received in a skiing accident – is normally incapable of speaking at any volume lower than a shout. With this lot all in the same villa together, what are the chances of something outrageous happening?

Very high, obviously. It’s all just as weird as it sounds – the tone is set by the complete lack of surprise the leading duo exhibit on seeing a fly the size of a bulldog – but the insect itself is somewhat less central to proceedings than you might expect: it’s a device to propel the plot along more than anything else. The uselessness of Jean-Gab and Manu are the source of much of the comedy (the actors are, I am given to understand, a successful comedy duo in France); the eccentricity of the various characters they run into only provide more opportunities for comic weirdness.

In the end, the meat of this film is basically a farce about a mistaken identity and two idiots trying to hide a giant fly from their hosts via increasingly unlikely means. All of the Dupieux movies that I’ve seen have been funny to some extent or other; this is much more straightforward as a comedy than them, and probably funnier as a result. It revels in just piling on the absurdities far beyond the point of credibility. There’s an extremely game, high-volume performance from Adele Exarchopoulos, whom I’d only previously seen in quite earnest dramas – it’s probably a bit iffy to do jokes about people with long-term cerebral injuries, but the character is handled relatively sympathetically and the actress, at least, does not appear to be attempting a caricature.

You might reasonably wonder what the hell all of this is in aid of – Rubber, after all, was to some extent about the deconstruction of genre conventions, while Deerskin concerned itself with the peculiar intricacies of the middle-aged male psyche. So what’s Mandibles about? Well, I’m not sure it’s actually about anything beyond assembling the most ridiculous plot it can manage – although I suppose it does have something to say about the value of friendship, for the bond between the two leads is palpable and endearing (thoughtless and amoral people though they are). It may also have something to say on the topic of inviting long-lost friends to stay as house-guests, especially when you haven’t actually seen them for decades. Whatever it’s about, if indeed it’s about anything at all, Mandibles is a good-looking and enjoyable film, though undoubtedly a very silly one.

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The Art of the Wish

It’s always a lovely moment when the first big superhero movie of the summer comes along. Of course, 2020 being a hideous brute of a year, it only really qualifies as such if you live in the southern hemisphere, but this sort of thing shouldn’t surprise us any more.

Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 was one of the films still being advertised the day before the first lockdown was announced back in March, theoretically as ‘Coming Soon’. With Warner Brothers having announced simultaneous cinema and streaming releases for all their films next year, I suppose we should be grateful for the chance to see it on the big screen at all – and I feel obliged to point out that while the DC movie franchise tends to get some flak, at least they haven’t battened down the hatches like Marvel or the makers of the Bond franchise. I just hope people respond appropriately and (where safe to do so) take the chance to see a proper, accessible blockbuster at the cinema.

If we’re going to be quibblesome about these things, this movie has a bit of a fridge title, as the lead character is never actually referred to as Wonder Woman and the 1984 setting barely informs the plot – it’s just there to enable a bit of shallow nostalgia and easy jokes about legwarmers and bad fashion, as well as providing a bit of cognitive distance for the film’s more satirical elements to function in (we shall return to this in due course).

The film opens with a rather stirring and well-mounted scene depicting one of she-who-will-never-be-referred-to-as-Wonder-Woman-on-screen’s youthful adventures, during which Hans Zimmer’s score keeps promising to erupt into the full, thrillingly berserk Wonder Woman theme. (But it doesn’t, for a good long while.) As noted, it’s a nice little vignette, which sort of relates tangentially to the resolution of the plot – but I sort of suspect it’s just there because Robin Wright and Connie Nielson were still under contract and they couldn’t think of another way to get them in the movie.

Anyway, the story moves on to the mid-1980s, where Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is working as a cultural anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institute, as well as doing a little discreet day-saving when duty calls (well, as discreet as one can manage when leaping around in red and blue armour lashing a glowing golden rope at people). One of the robberies she foils is that of a mysterious and ancient stone of obscure provenance, allegedly with the power to grant wishes.

Well, something like that can’t possibly be real, so Diana indulges herself in just a little wish. Her new colleague Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), who hero-worships her, has a go at wishing too. But it turns out the person the stone is intended for is ambitious would-be tycoon Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal). Lord seems harmless enough, until Diana finds herself reunited with the spirit of her dead boyfriend Steve (Chris Pine) – rather than actually coming back from the dead, he just possesses the body of some poor schmo, a fact which everyone concerned with the film handwaves away just a bit too easily. Diana’s wish has come true – so what about everyone else’s…?

Saying that Wonder Woman 1984 easily qualifies as one of the year’s top two big summer movies doesn’t really mean a great deal, and probably qualifies as too faint praise – it may not seem as fresh and exciting as the 2017 movie, and none of its moments land quite as impressively as the big ones from first time around, but it’s still an efficient and sharply-made movie, with a reasonably coherent plot and some well-written characters.

That said, I’m not sure it really needs to be two and a half hours long (there’s a fair deal of faffing about, mostly concerned with flying around – sometimes in the Invisible Plane, which presumably the Comic-con crowd really wanted to see, or not), and it also falls into the trap of giving the villains all the most interesting things to do: Wonder Woman herself mainly just wanders around in pursuit of exposition. Gal Gadot inhabits the role charismatically, but she’s mostly stuck sharing the screen with Chris Pine, who as usual is – to paraphrase Stephen King – an agreeable-looking absence of hiatus. And while the film hits all the usual notes concerning empowerment and the toxic nature of sexual harassment, its feminist credentials struck me as a little wobbly: the plot is to some extent set in motion by the fact that the biggest personal issue Wonder Woman has to address is feeling a bit sad that she doesn’t have a boyfriend. The same is really true of Barbara Minerva – this is a big, meaty role, which Wiig really does good work with, but on the other hand the character’s major issue is being a bit of a klutz who feels jealous of glamorous women who can walk in heels. I’m not sure this is what Hannah Arendt meant when she spoke about the banality of evil.

Considerably more interesting is the main villain, whom Pedro Pascal likewise does some very good work with. To briefly venture down the rabbit hole, in the comics Maxwell Lord is a second- or third-string villain or supporting character (he also turns up as a substitute Lex Luthor in the Supergirl TV series), sometimes with mind-control powers. Jenkins and her fellow writers do something rather more provocative with him: here, he is a failed businessman, minor TV personality and con man, much given to shouting things like ‘I am not a loser!’ The power he acquires from the wishing-stone isn’t explained especially clearly, but suffice to say it permits him to erect vast (and politically provocative) walls in the twinkling of an eye, and steal the power of the presidency of the United States – one set-piece has Wonder Woman attempting to apprehend him within the corridors of the White House itself. (Playing, by implication, Ronald Reagan is an actor named Stuart Milligan – who ten years ago was playing Richard Nixon in another over-the-top fantasy: there’s a pub fact you can have for free.)

Jenkins has said, apparently with a straight face, that the Lord character as depicted here is not based on any real-life businessmen with dubious tax affairs and TV careers who may have found themselves in the White House. (And if you believe that, she would probably like to sell you a bridge in New York.) To be fair, the film probably does just enough in the way of camouflaging its subtext to keep the cute-red-baseball-cap brigade from getting all huffy and boycotting the movie (the eighties setting obviously helps a lot with this), but it’s still hard to see the film’s subtext as being anything other than a both-barrels takedown of you-know-who.

It’s interesting and rather enjoyable to see a blockbuster with such an unashamedly partisan edge to it, even if that edge is heavily disguised. Of course, events mean that the film is coming out after a certain election, rather than in the run-up to it, so thankfully real-world events have already been resolved without Wonder Woman having to get involved. Still – and this applies to the whole movie, which is a very engaging piece of entertainment – better late than never.

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Perforated Ulster

It’s something of a remarkable week, as for the first time since March they have released two new movies which interested me enough to make the effort to see them (well, all right: a friend suggested seeing this second one, I’m not entirely sure I would have bothered otherwise). Both of them were partly financed by Ingenious Media – I’m not sure whether this was a coincidence or not – and, confirming my suspicion, both of them were preceded by virtually an identical set of trailers: Kenneth Branagh dusting off his moustache and Belgian accent, Colin Firth weepy, Blumhouse’s Craft remake and peculiar mash-up of Freaky Friday and Halloween, etc, etc. I forgot to mention – perhaps my subconscious was heroically trying to shield me – another movie on the way out, which looks like being a vehicle for Melissa McCarthy to do her usual schtick. I don’t have a problem with this per se, but it also seems to prominently feature James Corden as the voice of a super-computer. Friends, if we all get out of this year intact, one of the things I will take away from it is the sudden realisation that I don’t need to brutalise myself by going to see movies with James Corden in them, and I’m damned if I’ll watch another.

Not that I’m swearing off dodgy movies entirely, of course, or I probably wouldn’t have gone to see Barnaby Thompson’s Pixie. This is Thompson’s first movie as sole director, but as a producer he has a track record going all the way back to Wayne’s World, nearly thirty years ago. Since then he has had a hand in a bewildering variety of films, including Spice World, The Importance of Being Earnest, Fisherman’s Friends and a version of Lassie – of the few of these that I’ve seen, none particularly impressed me, if we’re honest, and some of them were honestly really poor. However, I knew none of that when actually going to see the new movie (which is probably just as well).

Pixie is set in Northern Ireland and mostly concerns the doings of the title character (played by Olivia Cooke) and the various men (young and old) who wind up in her orbit. One of these is her stepfather Dermot (Colm Meaney), who is the local gangster kingpin. The fact that this is going to be a knockabout crime thriller aspiring towards black comedy is established when two young men kill some drug dealers dressed as Catholic priests (despite the fact that two of them are supposedly Afghan) and steal a huge quantity of drugs from them.

After some rather convoluted plotting has unfurled itself, the drugs end up in the possession of two entirely different young men, Frank (Ben Hardy) and Harland (Daryl McCormack), who are not the sharpest or most self-aware tools in the shed. Luckily, they are acquaintances of Pixie, who blackmails them into cutting her in on the drug deal they are hoping to set up: her share will finance her going to art school in America, apparently.

However, the original owner of the drugs, one Father Hector McGrath (Alec Baldwin, giving a textbook demonstration of a phoned-in performance from an imported American star), would like them back, and in addition Dermot has also sent one of his people in pursuit of the trio, not realising one of them is his own stepdaughter…

Well, when the lights came up at the end of Pixie and we were sitting there watching the closing credits, I turned to my companion, feeling compelled to share my gut reaction. ‘People have got to get over wanting to be Quentin Tarantino sooner or later.’ My friend is perhaps a little too young to have lived through that era where every aspiring film-maker and their dog was trying to do a knock-off of Pulp Fiction – things like Two Days in the Valley, The 51st State and Killing Zoe – so it took him a moment so see what I meant, but the odd thing about Pixie is that it does feel very much like a script from the mid-to-late nineties that it’s taken them twenty years to find the financing for.

If this were actually the case, I might even suggest they could have usefully spent the intervening time polishing the thing up, because while films about laid-back Irish chancers out for a bit of craic are all very well, they still need to have reasonably sharp and cohesive screenplays. This one has one of the most fumbled opening acts I can remember seeing, with what feels like a lot of needless faffing about – or at least poor exposition – and characters being introduced in the wrong order. It does all settle down eventually, but it’s still a needless demand on the audience’s goodwill.

Even then, the film constantly feels like it’s on the verge of unravelling completely, with jokes not really connecting, significant bits of storytelling just not there and inconsistent characterisation being used to keep the plot going: Pixie herself is a cool, smart, plans-ten-steps-ahead kind of girl, except when it’s necessary that she isn’t. After meandering about amiably for over an hour, the film suddenly seems to realise it needs to have some kind of climax, and so one is rapidly contrived: though just what the principal characters’ plan is never quite becomes clear – the director seems much more interested in a slo-mo shot of a screaming nun firing a pump-action shotgun.

As I say, it is kind of amiable, and it does have some very able actors in it like Colm Meaney and Dylan Moran (who gets a very funny cameo). Front and centre all the way through, though, is Olivia Cooke, whose career I have followed, not without interest, since she appeared in the Nu-Hammer movie The Quiet Ones in 2014. She does her usual fine job, but this is not one of the better films on her CV. ‘What do men see in irritating free spirits?’ wondered Julia Roberts’ character in Larry Crowne; well, it’s clearly still a live question, as the film is named after Cooke’s character for a reason, and we are all clearly supposed to fall in love with her. She’s an odd mixture of butt-kicking feminist and Holly Golightly – streetwise, ambitious and determined, but also caring and not without her vulnerable side (with the faintest suggestion of a slightly kinky sexual availability too). I have to say the character didn’t really seem plausible to me, despite Cooke’s best efforts – and even if she had been, I would probably have found it difficult to warm to someone whose repertoire includes dealing in drugs, swindling her so-called friends and the odd cold-blooded murder.

Then again, none of the film really feels like it has any connection to the real world, even the real world we were expecting at the start of the year. It’s not the worst film of its genre that I’ve ever seen, but it has nothing like the genuine warmth and texture and really good jokes of a film like The Guard (another black comedy thriller set on the island of Ireland). Olivia Cooke, possibly not for the first time, passes the movie star test by being very watchable in a not very good movie, but this is still really a waste of potential in most ways that count.

 

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Honestly, Liam…

A few weeks in, and something of the shape of the revised cinema ecology is becoming clear: in the near-total absence of major releases, mid- and low-budget movies are having something of a moment in the sun, so things aren’t as bad as they could have been, always assuming you like modest genre movies and slightly quirkier films. On the other hand, the reduced number of films out there means that the trailers have become somewhat more heterogenous than has traditionally been the case: a year ago, if I’d seen three trailers for horror movies, one for a quality weepy, and one for a big-budget literary mystery, all in front of the same film, I would have been left scratching my head.

As it turns out, none of these were in the same genre as the film I’d turned up to see, for it seems that not even the biggest global crisis in half a century can impact on the metronomic regularity with which the world is treated to Liam Neeson-starring thrillers. Honest Thief has been produced, written and directed by one Mark Williams, a curiously obscure (or possibly reclusive) individual whose most surprising credit, to me at least, is as a producer on the hospital soap opera Casualty. From a car park in Bristol to the set of a bus pass badass movie in only fifteen years: career trajectories can be funny old things sometimes.

Generic movie, generic poster…

The movie doesn’t hang about and gets under way with pleasing economy, as it is very quickly established that Liam Neeson is playing a feller called Tom, who is a (naturally) highly proficient ex-marine explosives expert who has turned his hand to bank robbery with considerable success. The slickness and professionalism of his activities has led the media to dub him ‘the In-and-Out Bandit’; normally I would indulge in some low humour about this rather dubious nickname, but the film appeared to anticipate this and has a running gag with Neeson grumbling about the dodgy handle he’s been saddled with.

Next up we have Neeson enjoying a cute-meet with self-storage facility manager Annie, played by Kate Walsh: cue a quick ‘One Year Later’ caption and the happy couple are considering buying a house together (viewing properties is very easy for them, as Neeson just breaks in and has a look around without needing to check with the estate agent). However, being the decent, upstanding crook that he is, Neeson’s conscience just won’t let him settle down and enjoy his new life until he’s squared things with the authorities.

So he rings up senior FBI agent Robert Patrick (you know, off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single occasion where Robert Patrick doesn’t play either a cop, a fake cop or an FBI agent, other than Die Hard 2) and tries to make a deal: he’s prepared to give all the money back and say he’s sorry, on condition he only goes to prison for a little while and can still be visited by his lady friend (as he calls her, rather quaintly).  Patrick assumes he’s a crank and palms the job off onto junior agents played by Jai Courtney and Anthony Ramos, who are quite startled when Neeson turns out to be on the level and reveals to them where he has hidden all the money.

However, here things take a bit of a turn, as Courtney decides he quite likes the idea of keeping the cash and splitting it with Ramos, and talks his partner into going along with this plan. But what’s to be done about Neeson in this scenario? Well, one thing leads to another and sure enough Neeson soon finds himself the target of a full-scale manhunt by the authorities, wanted for a murder the corrupt agents have framed him for…

This almost inevitably leads to the moment where a very cross Neeson gets on the phone to his persecutors and essentially growls ‘I’m coming for you!’ It’s almost a convention of the Liam Neeson action movie that this happens, and it features prominently in the trailer. This may have been a mistake, as – let’s face it – the reputation of the Liam Neeson-starring action movie is not exactly stellar; as noted, these things seem to roll off a production line, with mostly only cosmetic differences between one and the next.

Honest Thief, however, is a slight cut above. This is still the kind of movie where one character can wrestle another out of a second-floor window and they both walk away with only minor cuts and bruising, or the duo can repeatedly empty their guns at each other from a distance of about twelve feet and only inflict a minor flesh wound, but it’s neatly plotted for the most part, with much more of an emphasis on characterisation than violence.

All right, there is a bit of an issue which the film has to negotiate in order to function – why does a moral, upstanding man of integrity like Liam Neeson rob banks in the first place? And why is he so determined to give the money back all of a sudden? Well, they kind of fudge the first point: it’s a combination of doing it for the fun of it, and a vague sense of moral outrage produced by corruption in big business (or something). As far as giving the money back – well, there’s a lot of waffle about Neeson not wanting to have to keep secrets from Walsh, and so on, but basically it’s because the film is predicated on his being determined to do so.

Once you accept these premises, the film is an entertaining and satisfying thriller, with enough quirky touches to lift it up a notch or two. Neeson’s basically playing the same character as always, but he does it pretty well, and there’s a very good performance by Jai Courtney, who initially seems like just a bit of a loose cannon before slowly being revealed to be a borderline psychopath.

Let’s keep things in perspective: while this is a superior Liam Neeson action movie, it’s still a Liam Neeson action movie, not really a film of substance, depth, or scope (there are only about seven speaking parts in the whole thing). However, in a world where more substantial movies have temporarily disappeared, it’s a reasonably safe bet for an undemanding couple of hours of entertainment.

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Nursing an Obsession

Once more unto the strange demi-monde which constitutes a trip to the cinema these days. The multiplex appears to be doing its best to battle on, showing whatever new films are being released, big-screen favourites (I suspect attendance for the inexplicably popular diversity barn-dance The Greatest Showman may be hit by the fact it gets its UK terrestrial TV premiere this week), and even the odd special event (they’re opening one evening especially to show a new documentary about Gretel Thunderbird). But the signs that something is not quite right are unmissable – normally you hardly ever get out-of-genre trailers ahead of a new film, but there was a real mixed bag this time, including the trailer for Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth’s new weepie twice (once was enough to do the job).

Anyway, this week’s Medal of Valour goes to the makers and releasers of Rose Glass’ Saint Maud – although, if we’re going to be strict about this, the film actually came out a couple of weeks ago, before the local cinemas went back into siege conditions. This is, one suspects, quite a low-budget movie (not that it comes across that way), and so the exposure of the backers should be limited: with a possible American release still to come, one hopes they do okay with it.

Morfydd Clark plays Maud, a young woman working as a nurse in a grim-looking seaside town in England. Before the film even gets going we are treated to a rather ominous tableau involving a corpse, somewhere vaguely medical, and a cockroach, and of course the question is whether this is backstory or a promise of things to come. It is some time before we find out. In the meantime, Maud (who is clearly very devout and much given to prayer) starts her new posting as a palliative carer for a former dancer named Amanda (Jennifer Ehle). Amanda is very ill – ‘you’ll be seeing her soon, I think,’ Maud says to God – and perhaps finding it hard to come to terms with her condition. She is cynical and jaded.

This is not, you would think, a recipe for happy relations with a committed Christian like Maud, but Amanda seems to be fascinated by Maud’s faith and even begins to show signs of having a bit of a spiritual awakening herself. However, as all this is going on, we are learning more about Maud herself: she is prone to strange, rapturous seizures, for one thing. And also, more ominously, it becomes clear that Maud is not her real name, and there is an incident in her past which led to her leaving a job at the hospital.

But all this seems to be behind her now, as she seems to be building such a good relationship with Amanda. Until, that is, her attempts to lead Amanda into a more virtuous way of living, controlling who she sees and what she does, cross the accepted patient-carer boundaries, with eventually regrettable consequences for both of them…

Jennifer Ehle, as you might expect, is very good as Amanda, but this is one of those films which stands or falls by the quality of the lead performance – and it must be said that Morfydd Clark is quite extraordinary here. This is the kind of acting that wins awards when it doesn’t appear in a horror movie, as Clark creates a wholly rounded, completely convincing, deeply alarming characterisation in the course of the movie. You get a complete sense of this person’s personality and how it has been shaped by events in the course of what’s quite a short film (less than an hour and a half); even from the start, when Maud might just seem to be another mousy, slightly prim and repressed young woman, there is a sense that there is something just slightly off about her. She is just a bit too intense and repressed. Naturally, we get to see other sides of her character as her resolution wavers in the course of the film: which just reminded me of something I was once told – it’s all very well letting yourself go once in a while, as long as you can get yourself back again.

But events have left Maud isolated and lonely, with only her faith for consolation and purpose. I can imagine that this is the kind of film that faith groups are likely to complain about, as it isn’t the most flattering depiction of religious belief – in fact, as the film goes on it gives, I imagine, a pretty good impression of what it’s like to be trapped in the mind of someone in the process of going completely insane. It’s an outstanding character study, but throughout the film you’re seeing the world through the eyes of someone profoundly disturbed, and this is quite as uncomfortable as it sounds.

This is a film which is strong on atmosphere – brooding and oppressive, as you might have guessed – with lots of rumbling cello on the soundtrack (Adam Janota Bzowski did the music). It’s such a long, slow burn that for a while I wondered if this was going to turn out  be another of those post-horror movies we’ve been having recently. In the en d I would say not: the scares and the blood eventually arrive, to shocking effect. The film deploys its small number of digital effects cannily, to produce a genuinely otherworldly effect when they appear. There’s one particular shot at the end of the film which is so unexpected as to be almost breathtaking, almost leading the viewer to reconsider all they’ve seen – but the volta to this, when it comes, hits like a hammer.

Saint Maud isn’t a popcorn horror movie by any stretch of the imagination, but something much darker and more intense, and I can imagine some people will wonder how I can find this kind of film actually enjoyable – it’s the kind of film you emerge from shaken and rattled and glad to get back into the light. The answer is simple that’s it’s supremely well-made, especially considering this is Rose Glass’ first film as writer and director, and there’s always pleasure to be gained from craft and artistry. It’s the most impressive debut I can remember seeing in a long time, and one that makes her someone to watch out for (at least if cinema survives the current crisis). This is one hell of a movie.

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History Repeating

I don’t often get feelings of deja vu at the cinema, but I did the other day: there was an odd sense of detachment from reality, and not in a good way, rather akin to the atmosphere at the showing of Bloodshot (the last film I saw in March before lockdown kicked in). Not to put too fine a point on it, the various short films with messages like WELCOME BACK! and LET THE LIGHT OF CINEMA SHINE AGAIN! felt a bit disingenous given that Cineworld and Picturehouse are – as previously discussed here – closing their doors again as of Friday, and the local Odeon is going down to weekend openings only.

Given that the postponement of No Time to Die is at least partly responsible for this, it’s rather ironic that this was pretty much the only film for adults being trailed on the trip in question – trailers are intended to provoke a range of emotions, but I doubt irritation is quite what Eon had in mind (the same run of trailers also included one for Peter Rabbit 2, so my negative psychic energy gauge was pretty much topped up to the brim by the time the actual film arrived).

In the circumstances I suppose one should feel grateful to anyone who’s taken a chance on releasing a mainstream movie at all, as they’re in the minority – both the Odeon and the Phoenix in Oxford have been showing Akira every night this week, just to fill their screens, but much as I admire Katsushiro Otomo’s epochal cyberpunk vision, I doubt there’s the audience there to justify this. In line for a medal along with the makers of Tenet, The New Mutants, and a handful of others are the people behind Bill & Ted Face The Music, a film which has apparently been ten years in the making (now that’s just plain bad luck).

Was there a burning appetite  for a third instalment in this particular series? I’m not sure, but post the John Wick movies, Keanu Reeves is apparently ‘hot’ again, which I suppose amounts to the same thing. Dean Parisot directs this time around. The movie opens with the revelation that, nearly thirty years on, Bill and Ted have yet to write the song which unites the world and paves the way for utopia, with the result that reality itself is starting to unravel: figures such as Babe Ruth, George Washington and Jesus are popping out of existence and reappearing in the wrong places. This struck me as quite a hefty piece of exposition to casually dump on the audience as part of an opening montage, but the film is nothing if not breezy and fast-moving.

Anyway, we find Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Reeves) reduced to playing at a family wedding (a complicated dynastic history means that in the course of the ceremony the groom becomes his own stepfather-in-law, or something). They go on to unveil their latest effort at musical immortality, a prog-rock horror concerning the meaning of meaning which involves Winter throat-singing and Reeves playing the theremin, the trumpet and the bagpipes in quick succession (and, frankly, if the idea of this doesn’t at least make you chuckle, this probably isn’t the movie for you).

Pretty much their only supporters are their daughters, Billie (Samara Weaving) and Theadora (Bridgette Lundy-Paine): their wives (who, the film takes pains to remind us, are former princesses from medieval England) are doing their best to be supportive, but finding this hard, and Ted’s father still refuses to believe any of their stories about travelling in time or visiting the afterlife. Ted has even begun to entertain thoughts of packing the music in, monumental destiny or not.

Still, there is that pesky matter of the impending implosion of the universe to consider, and the duo find themselves summoned to the future to explain their lack of progress on the world-unifying-song-writing front. The song must be written, toot sweet, or an alternative prophecy will be entertained – one where the universe is saved not by Bill and Ted’s music, but their deaths…

What ensues is pretty much of a piece with the two original movies (which I must confess to not having watched in absolutely ages): it’s either deceptively clever or deceptively silly, depending on where you stand, but all put across with great energy and commitment by the players. Reeves and Winter spend most of the film travelling into the future trying to steal a copy of the song from themselves, which basically produces a series of sketches where they appear in increasingly preposterous prosthetic make-up. The script is surprisingly generous in the amount of time it gives to the daughters, who essentially reprise the plots of the first two movies as they assemble the greatest band in history to back their fathers up – this includes bass-player Death (William Sadler), despite an awkward split (musical differences) needing to be resolved.

All of this is telegraphing a climactic twist which is obvious virtually from the start, as we are now living in a cultural climate where it seems deeply problematic to suggest that two white dudes can actually achieve anything positive and noteworthy. But so it goes, and Bill & Ted Face The Music is mostly very engaging stuff, hard to dislike, and often very funny. There is something undeniably touching about seeing Reeves and Winter back together, and there’s no sense of Reeves leveraging his superstar status (which is not really surprising, given the plethora of stories about what a lovely human being he is) – this is the same double-act from thirty years ago.

In the end you can’t help feeling a bit sorry for a film which is so laid-back and cheerful making its debut in such awkward times: in any previous year, the upbeat final message about bringing people together through music would be an unexceptional one, but at the moment the world feels deeply and (in some ways) necessarily divided on all kinds of levels. A lot of classic science fiction films of all kinds share an essential kind of naivety – it’s perhaps one of the charms of the genre – so you can’t really criticise Bill & Ted Face the Music on these grounds. One could wish the film’s optimism were a bit less at odds with reality right now, though.

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Takoyaki Mon Amour

Lots of positive press in the media this week about Sir David Attenborough’s latest film, which – obviously – is the perfect way of starting a review of something completely different. Well, mostly different. (The wildlife documentary genre has diversified a bit in recent years.) One of the most vivid TV memories of my youth was watching Attenborough’s Life on Earth in 1979, the show which really began his ascension to the position of global icon which he now occupies. This was not inevitable, however: the American networks which helped to fund that first series were a bit uneasy about the fact it was fronted by a then-obscure British TV executive and suggested that, for the US transmission, Attenborough’s on-screen appearances be cut back to an absolute minimum and his inimitable voice-over be replaced by those of someone more familiar to the good people of Boise, Idaho – Robert Redford, maybe? Attenborough checked the contract and refused. Nevertheless, the influence of the US backers on the blockbuster series persists, and has – if you ask me – become rather more pernicious.

The first few big Attenborough series had all the big images and breathtaking photography you would expect – but coupled to this you actually learned something, about ecology, animal behaviour, deep time and how evolution functions. The world being as it is, you won’t hear much talk about evolution in the new, blockbuster shows. Lots of beautiful images, stirring music, and powerful narratives about animal lives – but actual science? Not so much of that. The emotional response has supplanted the intellectual.

It’s a trend fully on display in Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s documentary My Octopus Teacher, available on that big old market-leader streaming site. Now, you might just possibly be drawn in to watching this film by the thought that it is about some wealthy eccentric who hires another person to teach his collection of cephalopods something. (Is this the time or place to get into that knotty ‘what is the correct plural for octopus?’ question? Apparently, it’s octopuses, but I’m not expecting it to come up that much.) There’s actually some potential there – another good title gone to waste. Or it could be about someone who is educated by an octopus, which likewise invites the potential viewer to engage in some productive speculation.

(Foster is the one at the bottom.)

Well, it turns out to be the latter, sort of, but I do suspect most people will conclude the title of the film is a bit of a chiz. It concerns the activities of one Craig Foster (apparently some sort of documentary film-maker, m’lud, and also the producer of this film), who seems like an intelligent and intense fellow, though perhaps not a man one would wish to be trapped in a lift with. The story as the film tells it – and the only voice you will hear throughout the film is Foster’s – is that Foster was having some kind of existential crisis, many years ago, when he decided to start swimming every day in a kelp forest off the coast of South Africa. It was during his daily briny sojourn that he first made the acquaintance of, um, a little octopus. (At the time of writing this film’s Wikipedia page lists the cast as ‘Craig Foster’ and ‘Little Octopus’.)

Foster says he was gripped by a sudden idea: what if he spent time every day swimming with Little Octopus and really got to know her and the kelp forest? Which is what he obviously did, as it’s the subject of the film. The documentary goes on to recount the growing bond between Foster and Little Octopus, their increasing fascination with each other, Foster’s grief and trauma when Little Octopus is partially-eaten by a pyjama shark (not as cute as it sounds), his joy at her recovery, and his gradual acceptance that the two of them are just not destined to be together. (I think there’s scope here for a companion piece – maybe The Man with the Octopus Teacher’s Wife – in which Mrs Foster’s feelings about her husband’s activities are made clear.) 

At least, that’s what we’re told. Recently, though, the issue of just how extensively the narrative of this sort of documentary film has been massaged has become a live one, and it seems to me that there’s something fishy about this octopus. The whole thing is framed as Foster looking back on his time with Little Octopus and her impact on his life – and vice versa, I suppose – and yet it is accompanied by suspiciously high-quality footage of the events he’s talking about. Was he filming it all at the time? If so, who’s doing all the second-unit stuff showing him swimming around? Are we actually seeing reconstructions of what happened, using a different octopus? If so, does the octopus know it’s just participating in a reconstruction? It seems unlikely.

Frankly, it all comes across as a bit one-sided, too, and would be greatly improved by some input from Little Octopus herself, giving her side of the story. ‘I was just overwhelmed by my feelings for her,’ confesses Foster at one point. Was this a reciprocal situation, or was he just the latest in a long line of men to have their heads turned by a much younger and impressively flexible female? Sadly the technology is not there yet for Little Octopus to make a proper contribution concerning how she felt about this whole situation.

(One of the odder things I’ve been involved in recently was a protracted and slightly combative discussion over the philosophical issues involved in translating communications between human beings and intelligent cephalopods – we weren’t even talking about that film in which Amy Adams teaches alien squid to speak English rather badly – particularly when it comes to proper nouns. But it has been that sort of year overall, I suppose.)

In short, I found the whole thing to be rather suspect simply on a conceptual level, but then it’s pretty clear that the film is not intended to be especially rigorous when it comes to objective fact. The nature of cephalopod cognition and the possible inner lives of octopuses is a fascinating topic, on which books have been written, but it’s one which is barely touched on here – although Foster does mention that one of the differences between Little Octopus and him is that her brain is largely distributed throughout her body – this film is only really educational in a ‘look at these wonders of nature!’ sort of way. The real focus of the thing is on Foster talking about Little Octopus in a brazenly anthropomorphic way, often accompanied by stirring violin or piano music. As previously mentioned, the whole film is intended to work on a sentimental rather than an intellectual level.

If you were to design a documentary intended to leave me cold, I think you would find it hard to do a better job than My Octopus Teacher – although I must confess to deriving a sort of pleasure from shouting at the screen, which I did on a regular basis throughout. The camerawork and images of the sea life in the kelp forest are, needless to say, very beautiful to look at – but most of the rest of it is borderline irritating. It might actually be a bit less annoying if they released an alternative version with all of Craig Foster’s pieces to camera edited out, along with his voice-over. It would be nice to look at and still emotionally fairly stirring, I expect, and the most egregiously questionable bits would be excised, so I think that might be a great improvement for everyone.

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Alas, Poor Sherrinford

Now here’s a funny thing: I’ve been reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories since I was eight. I’ve read the lot, watched nearly every TV adaptation in the last thirty-five years, seen most of the major film adaptations, even read quite a few pastiches, and – and if this isn’t a sign of the irretrievably lost, I don’t know what is – have even had a go at working out the chronology of the canon, and can explain fairly succinctly why all such attempts are doomed to inevitable failure. And yet I find myself strongly suspecting that I am not in the target audience for Netflix’s new slice of Holmesian schlock, Enola Holmes (directed by Harry Bradbeer).

What’s that then, you may be thinking, and what kind of a name is Enola, anyway? Well, fair point: ‘Let’s be blunt about this – you should not name your baby girl after the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb,’ advises one website dealing with infant nomenclature (the pushback from irate Enolas who are sick of this particular historical association dominates the comments section). Apparently the name dates back to the 1850s, at least, so it’s not totally implausible that it could have been given to the younger sister of the slightly better-known Holmes brothers, Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin).

Enola Holmes herself is played by Millie Bobby Brown, who also produced it (you know you’re getting old when the film producers start looking younger, but then again Brown is only sixteen). With the Holmes patriarch having passed away, the youthful Enola is raised by her mother (Helena Bonham Carter, cast so absolutely to type it practically sets a new record), with a somewhat eccentric home-schooling curriculum. However, this bucolic idyll is dispelled when our heroine herself turns sixteen and her mum vanishes, almost without a trace.

This occasions the turning up of Enola’s brothers for the first time in over a decade – Sherlock is making a name for himself as a detective, while Mycroft is some sort of non-specific civil servant – and she is somewhat dismayed by their response, which is basically to pack her off to a grim, Gilead-like finishing-school run by Fiona Shaw. She demurs at this and heads for London, following a trail of clues left by Mrs Holmes using her first class scrabble and ju-jitsu skills. Is a mother and child reunion on the cards? Or will another, unconnected mystery end up occupying most of the movie’s running time? (Clue: it will.) This concerns a non-threatening young toff on the lam (Louis Partridge) and the future of British society.

This is the movie that managed to get Netflix sued by the Conan Doyle estate, on the grounds that it depicts Sherlock Holmes as having emotions (this is supposedly still covered by copyright). This surprises me not because of the possibly opportunistic nature of the litigation (the Conan Doyle heirs have form in this area, having previously taken a tilt at the 2015 film Mr Holmes), but because the emphasis given to particular aspects of the great detective’s character is really the least of the film’s offences when it comes to the canon of the stories. Speculation as to the existence of a third Holmes sibling has been going on for years and has taken many forms, so the existence of the film isn’t a problem per se – but the moment the film begins to present Mycroft Holmes as a bitter, reactionary misanthrope, jealous of the greater intellectual gifts of his younger siblings, you know that whoever is responsible (the book was by Nancy Springer, adapted by Jack Thorne) either doesn’t know the Conan Doyle stories or just doesn’t care about them.

Mycroft’s basically there to represent The Man in a film which is only nominally a mystery and much more about sending the right kind of messages about self-realisation and emancipation, leavened somewhat by a very chaste YA-friendly sort-of romance for Brown. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to the Conan Doyle stories, but then neither does it seem to have much to do with the actual reality of life in Victorian London, or anything else connected to historical fact: the film is much more about now, something reflected in a jaunty and slightly frantic visual and directorial style – at times Enola Holmes seems more interested in breaking the fourth wall and talking to the viewer than in interacting with the other characters in the story. No doubt this is where the kids are at.

To be fair, Brown does have a certain winsome presence and carries the film about as well as one could reasonably expect in the circumstances. Most of the other performances are competent as well. I imagine most eyes will inevitably turn to Henry Cavill, who is after all joining a long and very distinguished list of actors to have played the most-filmed human fictional character. I do find Cavill to be an agreeable presence who can be fairly effective in the right part, but on the other hand he is best known for playing another crime-fighter of a slightly different ilk. Now, there’s no rule saying that the same person can’t play both Sherlock Holmes and Superman, but I think it’s a safe bet that they’re going to be somewhat miscast in one of those roles. Cavill is decent if a bit bland as Holmes, but this is down to the script as much as the actor: he’s there as a comforting supporting character, not as someone who drives the plot in any meaningful sense. Does that really sound like Sherlock Holmes to you? Nevertheless, this is the part Cavill has been engaged for.

The film is made to the usual standards of competency, with the English countryside nicely presented and an impressive CGI London, but then that’s really nothing special these days. There’s also some fairly nasty violence, which doesn’t feel like a particularly good fit for a film which seems to be aimed at a very young audience. I could be wrong about this, but the laboriousness with which the film bangs on at the same theme again and again suggests it doesn’t have high expectations with regard to its viewers’ mental development.

Watching Millie Bobby Brown chuck men about in the course of the plot inevitably put me in mind of the late Diana Rigg, whose performances have been one of the things keeping me sane recently. Rigg ended up as the kind of icon of female strength, intelligence and independence that I suspect the makers of this film would quite like Enola Holmes to be, and yet I don’t recall any of Rigg’s characters belabouring the audience on the topic: she just got on with being strong, intelligent and independent. This put the point across perfectly adequately and resulted, on the whole, in films and TV series which were much more entertaining and rather less wearisomely obvious than Enola Holmes usually is. This is rotten even as a piece of Sherlock-Holmes-at-one-remove, and fairly dull and obvious as a YA adventure film. It may not have been quite so ideologically correct, but in terms of simple entertainment value Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes did this sort of thing much better.

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