Quite Noisy on the Norfolk Front

We talk quite glibly about ‘the war movie’ as a distinct genre, and I suppose there is some truth to that – there are enough commonalities of subject matter, setting, and theme for these films to comprise a recognisable canon of sorts, after all. And yet war films are as diverse a bunch as any other, often depending on exactly which war they concern and the accepted narrative concerning it. War movies made during actual wars are usually propaganda, plain and simple; ones made in the decade or two after a war become testimonials, usually concerned with retellings of notable deeds. After enough time has elapsed they just become backdrops for rousing adventures and/or examinations of more universal themes.

John Sturges’ film adaptation of the Jack Higgins novel The Eagle Has Landed came out in 1976, thirty years after the Second World War concluded, at a point when the myth of the war and its iconography was perhaps beginning to displace memories of the reality in terms of how it was perceived. Certainly the film itself is hardly painstaking in its attempts at historical accuracy.

 

(I have to say, respect is due to an impressively imaginative poster, which features all sorts of elements – exploding churches, strafing Messerschmitts, and so on – which do not prominently feature, or indeed feature at all, in the actual movie. Not sure they’ve got Jenny Agutter’s face quite right, though.)

Things get underway in – one surmises – late 1943 or early 1944, with the result of the war no longer in doubt, only the final score. Inspired by the rescue of Mussolini from captivity in Italy, Hitler (played by the late Peter Miles in scenes which didn’t make it into the final cut) orders the kidnapping of Winston Churchill from Britain: no-one but Himmler (Donald Pleasance) takes this notion seriously, but the head of German military intelligence is obliged to carry out a feasibility study for political reasons anyway.

The job is assigned to a Colonel Radl (Robert Duvall), who – rather to his astonishment –  discovers that there is an outside chance that the trick can be turned: Churchill is due to be spending a weekend at a secluded country house close to the east coast of England. To carry out the mission, Radl recruits IRA man and mercenary Liam Devlin (Donald Sutherland) and decorated, but now disgraced Fallschirmjager officer Kurt Steiner (Michael Caine) and his men. Soon enough Operation Eagle is underway, with first Devlin and then Steiner and the others inserted into the UK in disguise. But even the best laid plans can go awry, especially given Devlin’s penchant for romantic entanglements and the presence in the area of a force of US Rangers…

The Eagle Has Landed is very much an all-star all-action mid-seventies ITC Entertainment kind of production, and it is perhaps illuminating to compare it to the 1943 movie Went the Day Well?, directed by Cavalcanti. Both deal with the same idea, of a British village being seized by enemy paratroopers as part of a wider plot, but the treatment is quite different, as is the context of the films (of course). Went the Day Well? is a propaganda movie, and an occasionally brutal one, with precious few shades of grey as the heroic villagers (including a gun-toting Thora Hird) rise up and do battle with the vicious German interlopers. At the time the threat of invasion was still a recent memory, and the war still being prosecuted, but in 1976 things were very different.

We tend to remember the Second World War as one of the ‘good’ wars, justified by the fact it was essentially a heroic battle against the darkest of evils, but there’s little sense of that watching Sturges’ movie – this is a war movie oddly bereft of bad guys. All the German characters are rather sympathetic, Himmler excepted, and the movie is at pains to establish Steiner as a decent man revolted by the Nazi doctrine of racial superiority. The structure of the movie means we get to know these people rather better than any of the British or American characters who are ostensibly the heroes who foil Radl and Steiner’s plan – the US Ranger commander played by Larry Hagman is a vain, pompous fool, his subordinate (Treat Williams) something of a cipher.

The result is that the action sequences towards the end of the film, in which the German-held village is assaulted by American soldiers, feel like a curiously empty spectacle. They’re very well staged and directed, and do stir the blood a bit, but you always know what’s going to happen, and you don’t feel particularly invested in watching the inevitable Allied victory – you will almost certainly be hoping that Michael Caine survives, and may even be hoping that (in defiance of historical fact) he succeeds in his mission.

The question is whether this moral vacuum at the heart of the movie is a deliberate choice, reflecting the fact that there can be heroes and villains on both sides in a war, or just the result of a director not quite getting to grips with the material. Certainly Caine thought it was the latter, complaining that Sturges had no involvement with the editing of the film once shooting was complete, choosing to go fishing instead. He lamented the fact that what could have been a more substantial thriller ended up as a somewhat cartoonish action adventure.

I can see what he’s getting at, because – as someone else has pointed out – Pleasance’s impersonation of Himmler is the most credible thing in the movie by quite some distance. Caine is still good, as are many of the other supporting players, some of them better known as British TV faces – Jean Marsh is in there, also Roy Marsden and Denis Lill – but possibly a bit too prominent is Sutherland. Sutherland goes all-out for the central casting Oirishman from County Leprechaun approach, and it does make you roll your eyes a bit, as does the improbable romance between him and a young local girl (Jenny Agutter).

In the end The Eagle Has Landed seems to have become one of those largely innocuous all-star movies which regularly pops up on TV on Bank Holiday weekends, usually with its gorier moments (Hagman’s death, for instance) snipped out. Which is fair enough: it is an example of the war movie reduced to the status of simple entertainment – it doesn’t have the simplistic morality of the worst kind of war film, nor the complex ambiguities of many of the best. It just doesn’t seem inclined to deal with wider moral issues at all, focusing on its straightforward action-adventure story to the exclusion of all else. And there’s not much actually wrong with that, I suppose: but with the kind of talent involved in this movie, you could be forgiven for hoping for something slightly more substantial.

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The Shallow End

Wood floats, death gets you in the end, the total entropy of a closed system can never decrease, and if a movie makes nearly $800 million off a $60 million budget, it’s a rock-solid certainty that there’s going to be a sequel to it. So it proves, with the arrival of Deadpool 2, directed by David Leitch this time around. Why would you sack Tim Miller, the director of the first one (which, as I believe I mentioned, turned a tidy profit)? Well, creative differences, not to put too fine a point on it: especially when those differences were with Ryan Reynolds, who in addition to playing the title role, on this occasion also co-produces and co-writes the movie. Now, Reynolds is another one of those amiable screen presences whom I seldom have a problem with, but it is possible to turn a movie into too much of a star vehicle, and the question is whether that’s happened with this film. (There’s also the question of whether we need yet another Marvel-originated superhero extravaganza featuring a stony-faced Josh Brolin on the rampage, given it’s only about three weeks since the last one demolished all sorts of records, but first things first.)

Various things happen at the start of Deadpool 2 which would probably constitute spoilers if I went into details about them, but let’s just say they leave disfigured mercenary and general super-powered pain in the neck Deadpool (Reynolds) in a bad place, wondering what his role in the world is. Needless to say his old pal Colossus, a nine-foot-tall Russian made of organic steel, has an idea about this: Deadpool should join the X-Men and do his bit to put his powers to responsible use.

Of course, because Deadpool is a violent sociopath who won’t shut up, this plan does not really work out, and Wilson finds himself packed off to mutant prison with a troubled young man who has flamey-zapping powers (I still maintain the single stroke of genius at the heart of the X-Men franchise – or is it just a convenient plot device? – is the fact that ‘mutant genes’ mean you can give just about anyone any conceivable ability without having to justify or rationalise it in any way) and looks up to Deadpool in a way he finds difficult to deal with. There’s also the problem that with his regenerative powers suppressed by the technology of the prison, he’s quite rapidly going to die of terminal cancer. Bummer!

However, things get even worse with the appearance on the scene of Cable (Brolin), a time-travelling cyborg warrior (the comics version of this character is a mutant, but that’s not really made clear here). Cable is here to avert dark events which will afflict the future world from which he hails, which puts Deadpool’s young associate squarely in his sights. Can Deadpool find it in him to become a heroic protector, even if only for a little while?

Well, much like the first one, this is essentially another entry in the X-Men franchise, taking place off in its own peculiar little corner of that universe, with a fairly standard superhero movie storyline made distinctive by a strong element of self-aware comedy. Or, to put it another way, while some parts of this film are genuinely accomplished effects-driven action sequences – there’s a clash between two classic characters that would not be out of place in one of the main sequence X-movies – much of the film is crass, puerile, potentially offensive, and absurd.

This is not necessarily a problem, of course, but the problem is that it is very much like the first one. Encountering a movie doing this kind of knowing and irreverent joke was a genuine novelty when the first Deadpool came out, but the essence of comedy is surprise and the unexpected, and doing the same kind of thing all over again is inevitably going to be a little problematic. Some of the best jokes were even in the trailer – they’re funny the first time you see them, but in the actual movie you’re not surprised by them, you’re waiting for them, so they inevitably have less impact. And you can also really predict the kind of jokes they’re going to do – going in, I was thinking ‘Hmmm, they’re bound to do something at the expense of Logan,’ and so it proves, in practically the very first moments of the film. Elsewhere they do repeat gags from the first film, to notably less effect, and at times the movie does seem to be scrabbling around for ideas – if this is supposed to be a semi-spoof of superheroes, why is the credits sequence a Bond parody?

That’s not to say Deadpool 2 is bereft of laughs – it isn’t, with some of the more comedy-sketch-like scenes proving very funny indeed. Quite wisely, several of the best jokes are held back for the credits sequence. I have to say, though, that for anyone connected with Marvel to be doing jokes at the expense of DC’s frankly wobbly film series just feels like bullying at the moment, even if the jokes are often pretty good ones.

Of course, Deadpool 2 has the same problem as the first one, which is that once you start to get all knowing and self-referential and ironic, it kind of sets the tone for your whole movie – and so it proves here. There are various elements of Deadpool 2‘s plot which deal with grief, and loss, and other ostensibly serious emotions, but they really, really struggle to give these things any real heft or traction, simply because Ryan Reynolds is always winking at the camera and undercutting the whole thing by making jokes about how the budget is so much bigger this time around. Guys, if you’re not going to take this movie seriously – and not taking it seriously is kind of the point of the Deadpool character –  then you can’t really expect the audience to, either.

The film’s big innovation is bringing in Brolin as Cable, another very popular comics character with a quite bafflingly complex back-story. Here he is basically just a slightly more sympathetic version of the Terminator, which doesn’t give Brolin a great deal to work with (the actor has said he found the experience less satisfying than playing Thanos in Infinity War, which doesn’t surprise me). As is the way of things these days, Brolin is under contract to reprise the part in forthcoming movies in this franchise, and it will be interesting to see if he gets more to do then (quite how all this will mesh with Marvel’s masterplan to consolidate their assets and fold the X-Men characters into the Marvel Studios films remains to be seen: a Thanos Vs Cable movie would really give Brolin a chance to shine).

I don’t know, I quite like the X-Men movies even though the formula is starting to show its age a bit. The Deadpool films are a really odd mix of material with wildly different tones and styles, some of which works much, much better than others. This second one already seems to flailing about in search of ways of staying original and funny – it succeeds, but by no means consistently. Much like its protagonist, Deadpool 2 is fun and engaging on a certain level, but it’s also a kind of a scrappy mess. But as long as these films keep making money…

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This Town Ain’t Big Enough…

A quarter of a century ago my then girlfriend and I decided to go and spend our Saturday night watching Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard, mainly because it seemed like the kind of thing couples were doing at the time. This was certainly the case at the Odeon in Hull, as the first time we turned up the screening had sold out before we arrived, and we ended up going to see Lord Attenborough’s Chaplin instead (which, truth be told, may well be a better movie, if less mechanically romantic). However, we were young and bloody-minded, and neither of us had yet figured out that the whole traditional relationship thing was possibly not for us, so we went back the following weekend and saw the Saturday matinee.

There’s a bit half-way through The Bodyguard where Costner takes Houston out for the night and, in an unusually interesting move for a Kevin Costner character, takes her to see a black-and-white Japanese movie from 1961, the title of which is not given on-screen. Hence it was that I was the only person in the theatre laughing at the meta-gag of characters in a movie called The Bodyguard going to see another (much better) movie also called The Bodyguard – or, in the original Japanese, Yojimbo.

Yeah, I may have been going to see Whitney Houston movies in my late teens, but my fate was probably already sealed by that point, for I had spent much of my middle teens watching movies like Yojimbo, directed by (of course) Akira Kurosawa. Or perhaps this is less of a surprise than I am insinuating, for it’s not as though we’re discussing some art-house obscurity – in terms of general fame and influence, this is surely one of the most significant Japanese movies of all time, with only Seven Samurai and the original Godzilla ahead of it.

Yojimbo stars that most celebrated of Japanese actors, Toshiro Mifune, in an iconic role as a nameless, drifting samurai swordsman. As the film opens he is wandering aimlessly through the desolate Japanese countryside in the middle of the 19th century (it’s a little startling to consider the film was set only a century or so in the past when it was released). However, he comes upon a small town paralysed by a power struggle between two rival gangs. Partly motivated by some vague moral instinct, and partly (it seems) to amuse himself, the swordsman decides to ‘save’ the town by orchestrating the destruction of both gangs and their leaders. The local innkeeper (Eijiro Tono), the closest thing he has to a confidante in town, immediately concludes he is a madman only intent on causing chaos and destruction.

In any case, his plan hits a number of snags, firstly when the local government inspector pays a visit (causing the gangsters to arrange a hasty truce so as not to attract the attention of the authorities), and later when the temporary cessation in hostilities looks like becoming a more long-term pause. Most serious of all is the appearance of the brother of one of the gangsters, Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai, who may perhaps have wanted a word with whoever did his picture on the poster), who has been spending some time on the other side of the Pacific and returned with a classic souvenir of American culture: a handgun…

(Rather appropriately, given there are some allusions in the subtitles to Unosuke apparently meaning rabbit in Japanese, there is a danger of going down a bit of a rabbit hole here about just when Yojimbo is set and exactly what kind of heat the gangster is packing. People who know more about such things than me (not a small group, by the way) have pronounced that the weapon in question is a Smith & Wesson Model 2: however, this only went into production in 1876, ten years after the Meiji restoration. Wikipedia suggests an 1860 setting, based on the introductory captions of the first American dub of the film; the implication certainly seems to be that it takes place in the last years of the Shogunate. The gun is totemic, anyway. (I believe this is what is known as a digression.))

Some people who are really refined in their tastes complain that Kurosawa’s fame as a director is mainly due to his willingness to make films in, for want of a better word, an occidental idiom (I am avoiding the word ‘western’ as it is likely to confuse the issue), and that he is not as properly Japanese a film-maker as, say, Yasujiro Ozu (whose films were not released internationally as they were ‘too Japanese’). Maybe they have a point – for many people, Yojimbo is most recognisable as the source material of A Fistful of Dollars, the Sergio Leone movie which launched the spaghetti western craze and the career of Clint Eastwood (it also spawned a not terribly good 1996 Bruce Willis movie, Last Man Standing). However, what’s considerably less well-known is that Kurosawa admitted the plot of the movie is drawn from a story by Dashiell Hammett, so the American flavour is baked into Yojimbo. The presence of Nakadai’s character is surely an acknowledgement of this – this isn’t just a movie which inspired westerns, on some level it was conceived of as a western.

Of course, it is many other things as well: it starts off as a very black comedy, and perhaps also a wry comment on some of Kurosawa’s earlier movies. Mifune’s character is not a noble, heroic figure from the same mould as Kambei (of Seven Samurai), but a scruffy cynic who initially seems to be interfering in the affairs of the town for rather dubious motives (he vaguely comments that it would be good to get rid of the gangsters, but also notes that it’s his job to be paid for killing). It’s only the fact that he seems to have some kind of integrity, and of course the fact that he is played by Mifune, who is always ferociously cool, that marks him out as in any way better than the venal, morally bankrupt people running the town. Only Unosuke seems in any way similar to him; this is why the gunslinger is really the swordsman’s main antagonist in this movie.

However, as the story progresses it seems that the swordsman becomes aware that this is not just game: innocent people are caught up in the struggle between the gangsters. And it is here that Mifune, perhaps inevitably, reveals that there is a well-hidden core of decency to his character. He professes to hate pathetic people, but it is his decision to help a young family that almost causes his downfall, and his inability to abandon an ally which provokes the climactic battle of the film. And even here he unexpectedly reveals the capacity for mercy, sparing the life of a young man with romantic delusions he briefly encountered at the start of the film. There is no honour or glory in death, the film suggests, there is just death, and it hurts. Even when all is said and done, the swordsman’s mask slips back into place – ‘Now we’ll have some peace and quiet around here,’ he observes, deadpan, at the end of the film, having just single-handedly slaughtered most of the town’s remaining population.

Performance-wise, this is Mifune’s film from start to finish, and he effortlessly dominates it (with Kurosawa’s connivance, naturally). Even the great Takashi Shimura does not make much of an impression as a lovelorn sake brewer in league with one of the gangs – only Nakadai comes close to challenging Mifune, which is surely as it should be. Most of the time Mifune is only competing for attention against Kurosawa’s typically energetic camerawork and editing, and Masaru Sato’s striking, angular score. The music is kind of jaunty and chaotic, as befits a film about a off-kilter, chaotic world.

You can see why Yojimbo was such a big hit that it led to a sequel and numerous remakes, official and otherwise. On one level it is a superbly made piece of entertainment, with moments of comedy, pathos, and action, with a very satisfying structure to the story. But there are also glimpses of more serious issues here, commentary on the state of the world and the people in it. If it seems to be just as cynical as its anti-hero about the characters – well, just as he reveals an unexpected soft streak, so the film treats its characters as flawed human beings, not one-dimensional cartoons. I imagine this is one of those movies that will be around for as long as our culture endures.

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Crofts Unoriginal

I decided a couple of years ago to stop watching new movie trailers over the internet, as a general rule – this was partly because they so often spoil pretty much the entire movie, but also because I think it’s surely much better to see them on the big screen, where at least some of the gosh-wow factor survives. That says, it does seem to be the case that TV and internet advertising has to some extent supplanted the old-fashioned ‘coming attractions’ style trailer – there are quite a few pretty big movies coming up over the next few weeks – the Pacific Rim sequel, Ready Player One, Rampage – and for a long while it looked like I wasn’t going to see a trailer for any of them. They all turned up in a bunch, in front of another big movie which I never saw a trailer for at all.

The movie in question is the new version of Tomb Raider, directed by Roar Uthaug, which apparently really is his name. (We are in for a bit of a mini-festival of people with unusual nomenclature, for the film was co-written by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and co-stars someone called Walton Goggins.) Yes, they’ve done another movie based on Tomb Raider, and spent about $100 million on it. I must confess to being even more befuddled than usual by this, for to my mind the only things that scream ‘late 1990s’ more than the whole Lara Croft/Tomb Raider thing are Spice Girls records and Jim Carrey trying to be a serious actor. But apparently there is still an audience for these things (Tomb Raider movies, I mean).

This time around Lara Croft is played by Alicia Vikander, thus continuing the time-honoured tradition of talented and not-uncomely young actresses being rewarded for their skill and success in serious movies by landing a leading role in a comic-book or computer game franchise (cf. Halle Berry in Catwoman, Charlize Theron in Aeon Flux, Jennifer Lawrence in X-Men, Scarlett Johansson and Elisabeth Olsen in the Marvel movies (soon to be joined by Brie Larson), and so on). On this occasion Lara is less of a one-woman argument for the violent overthrow of the aristocracy, for as the film starts she is an impoverished victim of London’s gig economy, despite there being a massive inheritance lined up for her.

Why should this be? Well, daddy Richard Croft (Dominic West) disappeared years ago, but Lara refuses to believe he is dead and won’t sign the paperwork saying as such. (Kristen Scott Thomas and Derek Jacobi turn up for this scene, just to give the film a bit of much-needed heft, and are presumably nicely rewarded for the use of 5% of their talent.) She refuses to take over the family corporation, declaring ‘I’m not that kind of Croft.’ One wonders what kind of Croft she thinks she is – a tennis player? A sitcom writer-producer? I can’t think of many others.

Then Lara finds a clue that puts her on her father’s trail: apparently he was last spotted headed for the ‘Devil’s Sea’ and a lost island, rumoured to be the location of a semi-mythical Japanese queen with allegedly supernatural death-dealing powers. Yup, there’s a tomb just crying out to be raided, if she can only get to it…

There’s a moment about halfway through the new Tomb Raider where Lara Croft, who up to this point has basically been a fairly normal (albeit unusually tanned and ripped) cycle courier on a slightly odd backpacking trip, finds herself obliged to kill a man with her bare hands (in self-defence, naturally). It’s actually quite rare for a movie to show an iconic character killing for the first time (the only other instance I can think of off the top of my head is at the very start of the 2006 Casino Royale), and to its great credit Tomb Raider doesn’t simply skate past this. Alicia Vikander’s performance in particular keeps it grounded and very real: we do get a sense that this young woman has crossed a boundary she will never be able to return from.

Then again, that’s kind of emblematic of the whole film, which seems to have ‘keep it real’ as its mission statement, and about which the single best thing is Vikander’s performance. She is playing a real human being, barely recognisable as the cartoony robotic mannequin from the two Angelina Jolie movies. Of course, time has moved on and this is reflected in the film – Lara Croft slings a very Hunger Games-ish bow rather than the usual big guns (though there is the inevitable reference to her iconic dual-wielding tendencies at one point), and Vikander is somewhat more modestly dressed – at least to the point where you don’t get a strong sense of what it feels like to be Michael Fassbender, anyway.

I have to say I was rather dubious about the rumoured attempts to reimagine Lara Croft ahead of the new movie and turn her into a more rounded individual, even if this did mean making her a less rounded individual in other ways (ka boom tish). Wouldn’t this just be missing the point of the character, roughly akin to turning James Bond into a teetotal single parent? Well, of course, it’s not quite like that, for it’s not as though we’re talking about an especially deep or complex character who’s intended to represent anything in particular, beyond the player of a particular computer game. As a computer game sprite she’s only marginally a character in the traditional sense anyway. The new movie hardly breaks ground by making her a feisty, independent, courageous young woman, but I would suggest that coming up with a coherent personality at all is some kind of achievement.

It’s certainly the most notable thing about the film, which is otherwise a very undistinguished action-adventure runaround with a slightly coy approach to just what genre it belongs to. Parts of the plot are just so silly and implausible you simply sigh and roll your eyes, while other sequences which are intended to thrill are just so hackneyed they’re dull – yes, there are more booby-traps with spikes, and oh, look, here’s another collapsing corridor to be run down, and – yes, right on cue – here comes another death-defying leap. The bad guys, led by Goggins, are very dull and anonymous, and most of Lara’s allies feel straight out of central casting. (On the other hand, turning up to deploy his monumental scene-stealing skills is Nick Frost, whom it is always good to see.) The conclusion of the movie is unnecessarily cluttered by some blatant angling to set up a sequel.

Tomb Raider is, if nothing else, a big improvement over the two Angelina Jolie movies: although the benchmark they set was so subterraneanly low that this hardly means anything at all. It passes the time and is never actively bad, but at the same time it brings nothing really new to the screen and its principal point of interest is Alicia Vikander’s excellent performance. This film will justify its existence if it helps her with her career trajectory and means she ends up playing more rewarding parts in better movies. On its own terms, however, it basically poses the question of why anyone other than hardcore gamers should still care about Lara Croft, and despite the best efforts of Vikander and everyone else, it fails to come up with a convincing answer.

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Corpses and Confusion

There were, of course, many things about the pre-financial crisis world that any sensible person might look back on with a sense of regret and nostalgia. For myself, one of these is Borders, a chain of bookshops which operated on an epic scale – just a bit too epic, as it turned out. These days the Borders which I most often frequented have turned into branches of Tescos or pet supply shops; I suppose I should just be grateful that Waterstones survived the cull.

Adding just a little piquancy to all this fond remembrance (don’t worry, we will get to something of substance fairly soon) is the fact that, during the last months of Borders’ existence, I found myself somewhat financially embarrassed and was entirely unable to take full advantage of the bounty on offer. The only thing I remember buying was a book which, on later reflection, I found myself almost wishing I hadn’t: Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (based, obviously, on the famous novel by Jane Austen, who is rather cheekily credited as co-writer).

I will spare you yet further ramblings about my somewhat turbulent relationship with different incarnations of Pride and Prejudice, and merely note that Grahame-Smith’s parody is another manifestation of the Great Zombie Boom of recent years. The book itelf was successful enough to spawn various follow-ups, with titles like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina, while Grahame-Smith put his obvious talent for a snappy title to work and went on to write Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, filmed by Timur Bekmambetov a few years ago.

The thing about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is that it’s a funny title which tells you exactly what to expect, but is it actually something you can drag out for the length of a whole novel? It’s a funny concept, but you need a bit more if you’re making anything longer than a comedy sketch.

All very relevant, one would suspect, to the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, written and directed by Burr Steers, and produced by Natalie Portman, who was clearly at one point really desperate to play Elizabeth Bennet, no matter what the context. This is another of those films that never made it to the local cinemas in Oxford, and I was quite glad to catch up with it, even if my expectations were, shall we say, moderate at best.

Steers has a conscientious go at setting the scene in a manner which is vaguely coherent: the expansion of the British Empire in the 18th century brings all kinds of foreign exotica to England’s green and pleasant lands, most notably the zombie virus, which proceeds to sweep the nation. London is fortified (a touch of steampunk here), and sensible folk of the upper classes invest in combat training so they may defend themselves against the undead hordes.

It is against this backdrop that much of the same plot as in the traditional Pride and Prejudice unfolds: the Bennets are a well-bred but slightly impecunious family, and Mrs Bennet (Sally Phillips) is determined to find good and wealthy husbands for her five daughters. Top of the list are Jane (Bella Heathcote) and Elizabeth (Lily James). The arrival at the neighbouring estate of the dashing and wealthy Mr Bingley (Douglas Booth) is surely a good sign, but his stern friend Mr Darcy (Sam Riley) seems to disapprove entirely of the Bennets. Meanwhile, Elizabeth finds her head turned somewhat by Wickham (Jack Huston), a young soldier who appears to have been badly wronged by Darcy. Can the Bennet girls find romance and happiness? Could it be that Elizabeth has badly misjudged Darcy?

And, of course, there are also zombies rampaging about the countryside, although as this film is only a 15 certificate in the UK, the actual blood-soaked horror is inevitably a bit low-key. One of the big differences between the Grahame-Smith novel and the movie is that the latter moves much further away from the original Austen story, inserting much more of an action-adventure climax involving the Four Horsemen of the Zombie Apocalypse, not to mention the Zombie Antichrist.

I can kind of see why they’ve done this, as its identity as an action-horror zombie movie is clearly very important to this film – note the poster, on which the word ‘Zombies’ is considerably larger than the others. But it does inevitably take the movie further away from Jane Austen, which – given the whole point of the thing is that it’s an Austen-based mash-up – is surely a mistake. Perhaps it’s just an indication that this film has a fundamental problem, trying to bring together things which just don’t fit in the same story.

Well, maybe, maybe not. My problem with the book was that Grahame-Smith seemed to have chickened out of just putting zombies into Pride and Prejudice – which is, as noted, a funny idea – and had started trying to be actively funny, with creaky jokes like ‘Mr Bingley was famous for the size of his balls’, and the inclusion of the whole martial arts element, which isn’t rooted in the works of either Jane Austen or George A Romero.

Perhaps the problem is that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is quite funny as an idea, but once you start actually writing the story and genuinely attempt to stay true to both elements, it turns into something else. You could make it work, probably, but it wouldn’t be the comedy that the title suggests.

Certainly, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sort of hangs together as a zombopocalypse movie with a period setting – and in its own way it’s not much tonally weirder than Maggie, for instance – and in some ways it’s the Austen-specific bits of the plot that feel intrusive. It’s as any kind of comedy that it falls down, being fatally short on wit and self-awareness. Mostly, it takes itself painfully seriously, and the actually funny bits are the ones that feel like they’ve wandered in from a different film – Matt Smith (one of many actors who’ve managed to swing the ‘and’ position in the credits on this film) goes into comedy overdrive as Mr Collins and blasts everyone else off the screen, while a crucial scene between Elizabeth and Darcy juxtaposes authentically Austenesque dialogue with the pair of them engaging in hand-to-hand combat: suddenly the film comes to life, even though it feels like much more of a spoof as it does so. (The moment where a hot-under-the-collar Darcy dives into a lake, an emendation of the story first added by the BBC in 1995, makes an appearance, apparently because it’s expected to nowadays. It’s handled completely straight even though it’s surely ripe for spoofing.)

But these are only a handful of moments in what is quite a long film which never quite figures out its own identity – does it want to be a proper costume drama, a rom-com, an action horror movie, or what? Is it actually supposed to be funny? And if so, on what level? Is it trying to be clever, or knowingly dumb? It’s genuinely difficult to tell, not least because the answers seem to change throughout the course of the film.

As I have often noted in the past, you can do a lot with zombies (as recent films have shown). But you can’t do everything with them, or at least not all in the same movie. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes a talented and attractive cast and doesn’t give them the material they deserve, apparently never quite knowing what to do with them. It may be the film-makers never settled on the type of film they wanted to make. It may be that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is only funny as a title, not an actual story. I’m not actually sure. But I’m sure that this is a movie which doesn’t really work.

 

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I Wanna Know What Semtex Is

Current holder of the ‘Well, That’s Really Not At All What I Expected’ award is The Foreigner, one of those rather anonymously-titled genre movies you often find turning up direct-to-DVD or on streaming sites. My understanding is that this movie did get a theatrical release in some countries last year, which is doubtless due to the fact it has some proper stars in it – Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan – and is directed by the very capable Martin Campbell, who is arguably the director with the most consistently impressive track record in the Bond franchise. So you’re expecting a thriller, with these guys involved, but what exactly? Well, it’s clearly going to be some kind of buddy movie, isn’t it, with Chan and Brosnan possibly as superannuated spies brought unwillingly out of retirement together – Brosnan perhaps as someone a bit pompous, who’s gone respectable, and resents having to work with Chan, who comes across as a well-meaning oaf until it’s time to kick some heads in. Inevitably the two of them bond (no pun intended) through some crazy exploits, before a feel-good ending that leaves the door open for a sequel…

Amazing. Every word of what I just wrote is wrong (to coin a phrase). This is such a wholly different kettle of fish that it’s barely recognisable as a kettle of fish at all. Jackie Chan plays Quan, a single father who owns a Chinese restaurant in London (he and his family emigrated to the UK back in the 80s). His teenage daughter is his pride and joy, and so it is an appalling trauma when she is killed in a terrorist bombing just five minutes into the movie.

The bombing is claimed by the Authentic IRA, a rogue faction of the united Ireland movement, and pressure is immediately brought to bear on the political wing of the organisation to give up the men responsible for the atrocity. First in line for the squeeze is Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Liam Hennessy (Brosnan), who was a senior IRA man before – apparently – eschewing the way of violence. Everyone, including the media, assumes that Hennessy must know who planted the bomb, which brings him to Quan’s attention.

Everyone is a bit surprised when a fairly elderly Chinese dude turns up at Hennessy’s office in Belfast demanding to be told the names of the men responsible for murdering his daughter, but Quan is not to be dissuaded by veiled threats or fobbed off by the usual platitudes. However, their surprise turns to actual amazement when Quan sneaks off to the office toilets and fabricates a bomb out of lemonade and cigarettes, rather like a more violent MacGyver. He is clearly an aging restauranteur with a bit of a past, and he’s not going to take no for an answer…

So, yes, this is absolutely not a comedy film. Instead it is another of those Bus Pass Badass movies, this time starring everyone’s favourite Hong Kong-born knot of scar tissue in an entirely serious role. Well, I say ‘entirely serious’, but the film does require you to accept that Quan – who it turns out had some kind of special forces background during the Vietnam War – has kept up with his training over the last forty years. It’s a fairly big ask, but not an unreasonable one, as seeing Chan do his stuff is partly why you’re watching the movie in the first place. The film is, shall we say, carefully constructed so that Chan does not have to participate in a great many complex dialogue scenes in English, but his performance as a man who has basically had his emotions ripped away by an inconceivable tragedy is entirely believeable.

Also operating very much against type is Pierce Brosnan. Now, it may be that one of the reasons why this film didn’t get a theatrical UK release is that it ventures into some slightly ticklish areas – I don’t just mean the fact that this is essentially a fairly lightweight thriller which features multiple bombs going off in public areas, either (I’m never very comfortable when terrorist atrocities are treated as the stuff of genre entertainment, but maybe that’s just me). Brosnan’s choice of beard, glasses, and accent makes it pretty clear that his character is intended to be a kind of roman a clef version of the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, and one suspects that lawyers had an interesting time ensuring this movie was not actionable – there are numerous mentions of the IRA throughout, but references to Sinn Fein itself are much less frequent and oblique.

Once you get your head around all this, though, Brosnan also gives a perfectly good performance in a somewhat tricky role – Chan is obviously the good guy in this movie, but Brosnan is playing a much more ambiguous figure, whose exact role in the plot is not immediately clear. The two of them have very little screen time together, though, which is a bit of a shame.

In fact, this rather feels like two quite different films which have been spliced together – there’s a morally ambiguous political thriller about Ulster politics and the connections between politicians and the men of violence, starring Brosnan, and then there’s a much more straightforward action movie with Chan in the lead role. I have to say I would have appreciated perhaps a little more of the latter, for the action sequences are where The Foreigner really comes to life – the film is puttering along engagingly enough in its opening section, then a bunch of IRA heavies turn up to Quan’s B&B to run him out of town, and suddenly we’re into a proper Jackie Chan action sequence with people flying out of windows and tumbling down flights of stairs. It’s a little more restrained and has a harder edge to it than you might expect, but it’s still exhilarating stuff.

In the end, though, this is still quite a dark film – apart from Quan, there are no significant good guys, and the British authorities are depicted as every bit as ruthless as their terrorist counterparts (we see prisoners tortured and executed). At the conclusion, there is a definite sense of closure, but not really that of a happy ending – the dead stay dead, no matter what, and no-one has come out of these events unscathed and untainted. It’s an unusual and downbeat note on which to end, but one entirely in keeping with the tone of the rest of the movie. This is a pretty decent thriller, once you get past the apparently peculiar casting choices for the two lead roles, and the two stars deserve credit for trying something different and working so hard to ensure it succeeds as much as it does.

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Last Train to Daftsville

It is with some relief that I turn to a new-ish Hollywood film which doesn’t appear to be trying to make a point about any significant topical issues, political, cultural, social, sexual, or diversity-related at all – at least not deliberately, anyway. Could this be the reason why Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Commuter has been completely overlooked by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in this year’s Oscars? Well, could be.

Or it could be that The Commuter is just another one of those slightly dubious action movies starring someone old enough to know better – in this case, Liam Neeson – which operate somewhere in the theoretical space between One Foot in the Grave and Death Wish. My personal shorthand for this sort of thing is that they are Bus Pass Badass films. Or, in the case of The Commuter, a Senior Citizen’s Railcard Badass film.

Liam Neeson even makes running to catch the train look macho.

Neeson plays Mike MacCauley, rugged ex-cop turned life insurance salesman, and all-around caring and devoted family man – which means, yes, he doesn’t have money, but what he does have is a very particular set of skills, which he has acquired over a very long career… and so on. But we’ll come to that. Neeson’s quotidian existence gets badly derailed (no pun intended) when he is laid off from the insurance company by the contemptible suit who runs the place, for no other reason than that his benefits package is too expensive.

Home he heads in a bit of a strop, wondering how he’s going to pay either of his mortgages, let alone his son’s college fees, only for the usual train ride out to the suburbs of New York to take an unexpected turn. He is approached by a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) who offers him a hundred grand if he’ll just do one little job for her – locate a particular person on the train, before it reaches the end of the line…

Of course, this deal is not quite as sweet as it sounds, for Farmiga is working for the bad guys and has wicked things in mind for her target once Neeson has run them to ground. Neeson, of course, is no eejit and quickly figures out what’s going on, but by this point his family are in the sights of the bad guys, leaving him with little choice but to play along and wait for his moment to whirl into action – inasmuch as a six-foot-four 65-year-old can do any sort of whirling, anyway.

Well, if nothing else, it is nice to see a film which just seems to be about regular guys doing regular guy things – going to work, having a beer together, playing cards, beating much younger people senseless, hurling them off moving trains, and so on. And it does initially seem like The Commuter is going to be another one of those films about mid-level middle-age rage, as Neeson finds himself screwed and discarded by the system and left with nothing. If you didn’t know better, you could almost imagine this turning into an update of Falling Down – but of course it doesn’t, and instead it ends up as another of those more-than-slightly ridiculous high concept thrillers, set in a confined space, with one man against the world. There are shades of rather good films like Speed here, but it’s also a bit like Non-Stop, which was Neeson and Collet-Serra’s last film together: these things do have a habit of getting very silly very quickly.

Of course, there’s also a sense in which these films, with their delicate little formal requirements and tropes, are virtually a raid on Hitchcock – you could easily imagine the great director, were he still with us, knocking out this sort of thing with great verve and wit two or three times a year. Jaume Collet-Serra, it’s safe to say, is not in Hitchcock’s league, but he keeps this thing moving along breezily enough, with enough invention for it to feel relatively fresh, and enough pace to distract you from realising the plot has the unshakable structural integrity of a soap bubble – or, if not distract you, at least make you not worry about it too much.

He’s helped by a script which just about ticks all the necessary boxes – there’s a delicate balance and a lot of plate-spinning involved, in that you have to keep throwing plot twists and developments at the audience so swiftly that they don’t have time to realise none of it makes sense, but still somehow ensure they have a reasonable grasp of what’s going on at any given moment in the story. Another major plus is a cast which, to be perfectly honest, is rather better than this sort of film really deserves. Elizabeth McGovern is in it, quite briefly, as is Sam Neill. Also on the train is the wonderful Florence Pugh, whom one hopes will soon be a big enough star not to have to appear in this sort of nonsense, and Shazad Latif, perhaps most famous currently for playing a Klingon warlord trapped in the body of Clem Fandango.

And, above all else, it has Liam Neeson. It is customary to bemoan the fact that Neeson’s work ethic and questionable script choices result in him turning up in quite so many Bus Pass Badass movies, but it’s not as if he doesn’t still do the odd quality picture – he gave a tremendous performance in Silence last year, after all – and they’re still going to carry on making tosh regardless. The Commuter is a better film for having Liam Neeson in it, even if he does plough his way through on autopilot.

It is, I would say, important to distinguish between those films which are utterly bonkers and those which are merely wildly implausible. The Commuter is definitely the latter and thus less of a joy than it could have been. It is a silly film. It is a trivial film. It somehow manages to be both completely far-fetched and yet also deeply predictable. It will fade from your memory within a couple of days of your watching it. But a bad film? I can’t quite bring myself to say so, even though I probably should.

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