Uncivil War

Here we are again for another episode of ‘Which McDonagh are we talking about anyway?’, even less forgivable than usual given that it’s only a couple of months since the other one – John Michael McDonagh – had a film out and we last went through all this rigmarole. Okay: so this week it’s Martin McDonagh and his new movie The Banshees of Inisherin, which (spoiler alert, perhaps) has already been getting rave reviews from proper film critics whose opinions are actually worth money.

This is a very congruent movie for the McDonagh canon, as I believe we touched on last time. If you lay a hand on one of the brothers’ films at random you are likely to strike one featuring either Brendan Gleeson (The Guard, Calvary) or Colin Farrell (Seven Psychopaths) – or possibly both (In Bruges), most likely a black comedy-drama (most of the foregoing), very possibly set in or around Ireland (The Guard and Calvary again). The other McDonagh film of this year was quite notable for not really scoring points in any of those categories; this one restores the averages by being more or less a clean sweep.

Colin Farrell plays Pádraic Súilleabháin, a middle-aged farmer on the small island of Inisherin off the coast of Ireland, which his better-read sister (Kerry Condon) accurately summarises as being full of bitterness and idiots. The setting is the 1920s and the Irish civil war is rumbling away off in the far background of the story. The film starts ordinarily enough as Pádraic calls for his friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) on the way to the pub; Colm ignores him. When questioned Colm rather brusquely explains that he doesn’t want to be friends with Pádraic any more; Colm is feeling intimations of mortality and would much rather spend his time playing and composing music than having aimless and rather dull conversations with a man whose main distinguishing feature is the fact he thinks a donkey is an appropriate house pet.

Pádraic is understandably a bit wounded by this treatment from a man he called a friend, even if most people on the island seem to agree that he is a bit of a dullard and only spared the title of island idiot by the presence of a youth named Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who is an absolute dimwit. He insists that Colm be friends with him again, but Colm refuses – slowly it becomes clear to the audience, if not Pádraic himself, that Colm has his own profound issues to deal with, of which his apparent cruelty towards his former friend are only the outward sign. Eventually Colm is forced to issue an ultimatum: if Pádraic doesn’t stop bothering him, he will be forced to take very severe action in order to prove he is serious about wanting to be left alone…

As noted, The Banshees of Inisherin has been enjoying excellent reviews, with lots of positive words about how very funny it consistently is. I can’t argue with that: it’s a very amusing and enjoyable film, up to a point – McDonagh has a tremendous ear for the rhythms of Irish language and many of the scenes have a beautifully-judged structure where two or three characters consistently repeat each other, words and phrases bouncing around between them. It’s worth saying that the cinematography is also excellent, and the Irish landscape looks absolutely gorgeous. It almost goes without saying that the film is also extremely well-acted; the early buzz is that both Farrell and Gleeson may end up getting Oscar nominated (which I suspect may just mean that neither of them has any real chance of actually winning a gong).

However: a lovely pastoral Irish farce this is not. This is a film rooted deeply in despair and death and pain, even if it isn’t immediately apparent. Someone threatens to do something absurdly horrible and grotesque and it sounds like a joke, and in a sane world it would be a joke – but in this film they turn out to be in deadly earnest. By rejecting Pádraic’s friendship, Colm has impugned Pádraic’s idea of himself as a nice, sociable fellow, which he takes as a profound insult. Their relationship is consumed by a viciously bitter feud, with neither side prepared to call it quits.

Did I mention that Irish politics forms part of the backdrop to this movie? On the other hand, it almost seems too heavy-handed of McDonagh, for all that the pointless, apparently unresolvable conflict in the movie, one which lurches from one gratuitously horrible act to another in defiance of sanity or logic, certainly seems to have some parallels with the historical situation in Ulster. Both men start out with well-defined, quite reasonable positions – Colm wants more time for his musical endeavours, Pádraic simply wants to be acknowledged as a decent and agreeable human being – and by the end of the film it seems like their feud will rob both men of the very thing they are fighting for. It is profoundly bleak and sad, for all of the black comedy.

Parts of the film are so dark it almost becomes difficult to watch, but the craftsmanship of McDonagh and the cast keep the film engrossing, and while it may be bizarre and extreme, it also resonates in the way it addresses some fundamental questions – does the creation of great art excuse treating other people badly? Is the urge to want to leave something behind as a legacy always a selfish one? There’s a sense in which both men start out as understandable, sympathetic individuals, and the process by which they slowly transform, almost imperceptibly, into irrational zealots for their own causes is also beautifully done.

The Banshees of Inisherin is not quite the film it initially looks to be, but it has all the intelligence, wit, and craft of the best of Martin McDonagh’s past work. Quite apart from the issues it raises and the strength of the performances, it is quite simply a very beautiful thing to look at – most of the time at least. For a gentle comedy to slide as smoothly and satisfyingly into something almost akin to a horror movie is quite unusual, for it to be achieved so gracefully is exceptional.

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Sympathy for Mister Vengeance

It sometimes feels like people have been talking about ‘the return of cinema’ virtually since the moment that cinema sort-of went away, nearly two years ago. One film after another has been touted as the harbinger for the return of business as usual at the box office – first Tenet, then Black Widow (along with a few others at the start of last summer), James Bond, and finally the most recent Spider-Man. You would have thought the massive take of No Way Home would have put an end to this kind of chatter, but no: apparently the fact Covid restrictions were still in place when it came out means that $1.6 billion-and-counting somehow doesn’t qualify as ‘business as usual’ – and so the baton has been passed on again, this time to Matt Reeves’ The Batman. (We have discussed in the past the rather cute phenomenon where the addition of a definite article apparently elevates a film about someone dressing up as a bat to punch crooks to the status of Serious Drama With Gravitas.)

You know me, I’m never ever cynical, but someone who was might offer the thought that most of the people declaring The Batman to be the First True Post-Pandemic Hit are those with a vested interest in seeing it be a hit of any kind. Certainly this is a big, expensive, rather unwieldy movie, which I’m slightly surprised to see getting a release this early in the year – presumably Warners are wary about putting it up against the Dr Strange sequel, which is likely to dominate the early-summer landscape, although this would be a surprising sign of a lack of confidence given it is, after all, a Batman film.

But, you might ask, what’s another Batman film in a release schedule which already includes outings for Morbius the Living Vampire, Dr Strange, the Flash, Thor, Aquaman, Black Adam and many more? A reasonable question, and a Batman film is, self-evidently, a superhero movie on some level. But I’d argue there’s also a sense in which Batman transcends the superhero genre. People have been making films about Batman for longer than any other costumed hero; the 1989 Tim Burton film practically invented the modern superhero movie template.

When you add in the various TV series and spin-off movies – and DC and Warners’ willingness to exploit this particular property with absurd thoroughness has deservedly been the subject of satire, even in their own projects – you reach a situation which is almost unique. Your average person in the street with minimal knowledge of the lore of even one of the big-name Marvel characters will still likely know the name of Batman’s butler, be able to identify many of his regular opponents, and not need to have things like the Batmobile and the Batcave explained to them. In short, Batman and his world have acquired an almost folkloric status as something complete and resonant in and of themselves; they have become archetypal, something which even extends to comparatively minor characters like the crime boss Falcone (played by Tom Wilkinson in Christopher Nolan’s first Batman movie and John Turturro in the new one).

The great advantage this gives to film-makers is that they have a lot more creative latitude to work with – they don’t have to bother introducing all these characters every time, and because there have been so many different iterations already, they don’t have to worry about creating some kind of mythical ‘definitive’ version of the comics character. The Batman mythos is uniquely open to being adapted to suit the creative vision of anyone working within it.

So what is Matt Reeves’ take on the material? He establishes quite quickly that Batman has only been doing his thing for a couple of years, as you’d expect given the casting of the youthful-looking Robert Pattinson in the role. (Given he routinely goes around introducing himself by growling ‘I am vengeance’, it’s not surprising several characters start calling him Mr Vengeance instead of Batman.) There’s a nice sequence demonstrating that Batman really is intent on a reign of terror against Gotham City’s criminal element, then we’re off into the plot proper: in the middle of an election campaign, Gotham’s mayor is gruesomely murdered by someone who enjoys leaving fiendishly tricky puzzles at the crime scene; Batman and his ally Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) follow the trail, but find themselves uncovering a conspiracy hinting at festering corruption at the heart of the city’s establishment. But what does the killer really want – and what’s a good name for a villain obsessed with riddles, anyway…?

Reeves’ version of Gotham City inclines a bit more towards Nolan’s than Burton’s; it’s certainly light years away from anything in the Joel Schumacher films. The vibe is very much one of Watchmen meeting Seven – the main point of distinction, really, between this and the Nolan trilogy is the pervasive sense of stygian gloom and incipient horror that’s constantly in the air.

This is certainly the bleakest and most nihilistic movie ever to engage in high-profile cross-promotion with a Japanese subcompact crossover SUV and a brand of cream-filled sandwich cookie (you can imagine Matt Reeves groaning and sinking his face into his hands when he heard about this). In many ways the film takes rather an easy and obvious option in this department, presenting Gotham (and by extension the world) as a relentlessly horrible, nightmarish place, where society is riddled with corruption from top to bottom, and Batman himself is engaged on a futile (and perhaps counterproductive) crusade driven more by an urge to violence than any higher motive. There is occasionally the odd grace note of hope, of course.

To work in this kind of setting, the Batman characters are all dialled down to their most naturalistic settings, in the process losing most of the gaudy whimsicality which is surely what made them so memorable – a fat-suited Colin Farrell is unrecognisable as the Penguin, which has a certain symmetry to it as this version of the character is virtually unrecognisable as the top-hatted and umbrella-wielding villain most people will be familiar with. Something similar goes on with Zoe Kravitz’s love-interest burglar, who is a Woman With Cats, but not permitted to be anything more outlandish. Paul Dano is effective enough as the Riddler, but also essentially unrecognisable – he’s a combination of splenetic InCel and online conspiracy-monger.

Despite all this, the film often bears a surprising resemblance to previous Batman movies – if we’re serious about our thesis that Batman films are their own separate subgenre, then these moments of repetition would be the conventions of the form. The suggestion that Batman has more in common with the villain than he would perhaps be comfortable with gets articulated again, although quite subtly for most of the movie; more prosaically, the unveiling of the new Batmobile is held back until the second act, acting as the prelude to a big action sequence. In the end Gotham City itself – or at least a big chunk of it – faces an existential threat.

It’s a polished, well-mounted and effective movie, that tells a complex tale well, with some strong performances – but I can’t help feeling that the very archetypal quality that enables it to function also keeps it from really being distinctive. The Nolan movies worked so well in part because they were so startlingly different from what had come before them – this film feels more like Batman-as-usual, albeit done to a high standard, and with lashings of extra gloom and oppressiveness. (Michael Giacchino’s score is effective, but his Batman theme is about one modulation away from turning into Darth Vader’s, which I’m sure wasn’t the intention.)

Nevertheless, this is towards the top of the pile of recent DC Comics movies – which means that, the modern world being as it is, two sequels and various TV spin-offs are already in the works. Clearly Warner Brothers are convinced that you can never have too much Batman. I’m not so sure – but a visit to Gotham City now and then has its own special pleasures, many of which The Batman successfully provides.

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Bereaved and Aggrieved

Olinka and I settled into our seats, opened a bag of chocolate eggs, and prepared to enjoy the trailers. ‘And, of course, the good thing is,’ I said, ‘that these should all be trailers for thrillers.’

‘Aren’t they always?’ said Olinka, crunching an egg.

Yes, as regular readers will be aware, Olinka’s fondness for going to the cinema is considerable, as is her nigh-on miraculous ability to watch a movie and yet not actually be aware of what genre it is. This is the woman who thought Kray twin biopic Legend was a black comedy, and that properly spooky horror movie Ghost Stories was a thriller. (She also thought that going to watch Hereditary was actually a good idea, but it would be unchivalrous to dwell on that too much.) When I suggest we go and see a film, Olinka’s first question is nearly always ‘is it a thriller?’ And the pleasant thing is that I can always answer ‘yes’, safe in the knowledge that, as far she’s concerned, it probably will be.

This time we got the previews for The Favourite, Glass, Robin Hood, and The Girl in the Lucrative Franchise, only the last of which I would honestly describe as a proper thriller, but there you go, you can never be sure these days. I think I’ve observed in the past that films that don’t fit easily into genre categories tend to have more diverse trailers running in front of them, and the fact is that the film we had gone to see is a curious mixture of genre movie and very serious drama: I speak of Widows, directed by Steve McQueen (no, the other one). It was the thriller element that I expected Olinka to enjoy, but this is also a female-led movie and I felt sure she’d appreciate that bit, too.

The film is set in present-day Chicago. Viola Davis plays Veronica Rawlins, a former teacher married to Harry (Liam Neeson), who is a professional criminal (this might seem like a rather unlikely relationship for all sorts of reasons, but the actors and script are good enough to sell it to the viewer). However, no sooner has the movie got underway than we are plunged into the midst of Harry’s latest enterprise, which is going horribly awry. The robbery at least is quite successful, but then the crew are pursued by the police, there is a hail of bullets, an explosion, and a fireball. Veronica and the wives of the other robbers are now, well, widows.

This would be stressful enough in the normal way of things, but it gets worse: it turned out that in the fateful job-gone-wrong, Harry and the others stole two million dollars from another criminal, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Manning has decided to go legit, or at least become a better class of criminal, by going into politics, and is currently locked in a bad-tempered electoral race with establishment candidate Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell). Manning needs the money back in order to fund his campaign, and is not about to let the fact it all got incinerated incline him to let Veronica off the hook. She has a month to raise the cash or it will go very much the worse for her.

However, Veronica finds herself the recipient of a rather unusual bequest from her late husband: a notebook containing the plans for his next heist, which would have netted him five million dollars. Rather than just selling the plans to Manning, Veronica decides that on this occasion, sisters are going to do it for themselves, and recruits two of her fellow widows (Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki) to help her execute the job…

This is, I would argue, the other Steve McQueen’s most accessible film to date, and looks every inch the slick Hollywood thriller. Nevertheless, this started life as a six-part drama on British TV thirty-five years ago: just goes to show that sometimes these things spend a while coming to fruition, I suppose (I’m sure I heard somewhere that Ann Mitchell, star of the TV version, has a walk-on part at one point in the movie, but I didn’t spot her).

Original writer Lynda La Plante gets a credit but you could be forgiven for assuming this had been written for the American screen by McQueen and collaborator Gillian Flynn (yup, the one from Gone Girl). La Plante’s plot survives essentially intact, but the idiom is wholly American, as are the social issues McQueen chooses to explore in the course of the film.

Given that McQueen’s last film was essentially 134 minutes of factually-inspired historical misery, you may not be totally surprised to learn that his version of Widows does not shy away from the darker side of life. Quite the opposite: this is a film set in a thoroughly, horribly corrupt and nihilistic world where virtually everyone seems to have given up hope and abandoned any principles they ever held. It is all about getting ahead and staying there: at one point, the mother of one of the widows basically encourages her daughter to become a call girl, as this is apparently a fairly agreeable way of earning a living. Racism, political corruption, and police brutality all feature in the plot to some degree or other.

That said, this is still a very absorbing film, helped by the fact it has a smart, intelligent script and an excellent cast – quite apart from the people I’ve already mentioned, it has Robert Duvall as Farrell’s repugnant father and Daniel Kaluuya as Manning’s brother, both of whom are very good (Kaluuya is kind of playing the unpredictable-psycho-killer-brother stock character, but manages to find some new things to do with it). And it’s not even as if it’s totally bereft of lighter moments – at one point the widows realise they’re going to need an extra pair of hands to complete the robbery, and (in the absence of anyone else remotely qualified), end up recruiting Rodriguez’s babysitter (Cynthia Erivo) to complete the team.

On the other hand, it does almost feel as if the film itself gets rather absorbed in the world of its story, rather than the heist narrative. There are a lot of characters, and the plot is inclined to sprawl somewhat (even so, not all of the widows are developed as individuals to anything like the same extent, with Michelle Rodriguez being notably less well served than Elizabeth Debicki).

I was slightly surprised when Olinka, a couple of hours in, emitted a great sigh and asked (of no-one in particular) ‘Is this film ever going to end?’ – but in retrospect I can kind of see where she was coming from. If there is a flaw in Widows, it is that this is a film with an awful lot of middle, most of which seems to have been taken as an advance on the end: the actual climactic heist does eventually materialise, but it feels like a bit of an afterthought – curiously under-developed and not really as tightly written or directed as you would expect. It is as if the more dramatic, social-commentary elements of the movie have staged a sort of coup against the heist plotline which it started with.

I am slightly saddened to have to report that, despite it still more-or-less functioning as a thriller, Olinka was less than fulsome in her praise for Widows as we left the cinema. Personally, I enjoyed the performances and the script enough for the issues with the central plotline not to be a particular issue for me. This is the kind of grown-up, quality movie which usually does very well with both critics and audiences – I’m virtually certain it will be more of a popular success than the other Steve McQueen’s last film; the question is whether it can achieve the same kind of critical triumph as well. Whatever the answer proves to be, this is a solid, intelligent movie.

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Mushroom Stew

Overheard in a cinema in the Earth Year 1994, prior to a revival of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver:

‘Did you see that Clint Eastwood film on telly the other night?’

‘Oh yeah – he goes into that girls’ school and has them all wrapped right round his little finger, right up until the moment when they [spoiler redacted]. Top movie.’

Overheard in a cinema in the Earth Year 2017, after a screening of Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled:

‘So, what did you think?’

‘Well, I thought he was perhaps suited a bit more to the part than Clint Eastwood was…’

‘Well, Clint Eastwood’s not a very good actor, is he?’

(I had to absent myself from the vicinity of the conversation at this point, lest an eruption occur.)

Perhaps I should make clear that the people I was earwigging in 1994 were both youngish men, while my companions for the new version of The Beguiled were somewhat older ladies. Does this tell us anything about the differences between the 1971 version of the movie, directed by Don Siegel, and the remake? Well, perhaps.

Like the original, Sofia Coppola’s movie is set during the latter stages of the American Civil War, in and around a finishing school for girls in Virginia. Due to the turmoil of the conflict, only a tiny group of pupils remain, along with a couple of staff members – headmistress Martha (Nicole Kidman) and teacher Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst).

One day, one of the girls is out picking mushrooms in the woods near the school when she comes across John McBurney (Colin Farrell), a wounded enemy soldier. She helps him back to the grand old house in which the establishment is located, at which point the question becomes one of what they should do with him. Obviously, the sensible thing to do would be to call in the authorities of their own side straight away, but somehow it doesn’t seem quite so simple – McBurney would probably die on the way to a prison camp, so the charitable thing is surely to keep him around until he feels better, isn’t it?

There is, not to put too fine a point on it, a little unrelieved tension in the air, as the presence of McBurney has an alarming effect on a group of women and girls who have apparently been living without masculine company for far too long. McBurney’s own natural charm and manipulative nature don’t help matters much. The women are soon all under his spell, and he seems to be on to a very good thing at the school. But has he underestimated the strength of the emotions his arrival has unleashed?

Being a hate-filled fanatically misogynistic crypto-fascist (apparently), I am constantly surprised by the fact that I frequently admire and enjoy films directed by and starring women, but there you go. I did not catch Sofia Coppola’s last couple of films, but I did see Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, and had a pretty good time watching them both (even if my review of the latter does contain the suggestion ‘would have been much improved by the addition of a story and some decent dialogue’). The Beguiled is likewise not a film which anyone is likely to decry as an offence against cinema, but at the same time I can’t see it becoming as big a critical darling as some of this director’s films.

I mean, the actual carpentry of the story holds together pretty well, though it would possibly have been better if we’d got more of a sense of what life in the school was like prior to McBurney’s arrival. Creating atmosphere is one of Coppola’s strengths as a director and she duly creates a strong sense of unspoken tension between the various women as they slowly begin to compete for McBurney’s favours. The performances are universally strong, although everyone seems to be operating very much within their comfort zone as a performer. I’m sure I’ve seen Nicole Kidman do that mannered southern lady schtick before, and the same is true of Kirsten Dunst’s repressed schoolteacher. Elle Fanning perhaps does something slightly new as a somewhat out-of-control young girl. On the whole this is the kind of film you would expect it to be – atmospheric, fairly intense, and not especially light on its feet.

Then again, perhaps I’m biased, for I have seen the original Don Siegel movie on which the new one is based (although admittedly not recently). The 1971 Beguiled always seemed to me to be very much framed and marketed as a Western, although that may just be down to the presence of Eastwood and Siegel. The new movie is much more open about its identity as a drama (perhaps even a melodrama) in the Southern Gothic tradition, though perhaps this is also the result of the story being seen from a more openly feminine perspective.

Even so, this is hardly a radical new interpretation of the story – all the key plot beats survive very much intact (at one point someone is sent to fetch a book on anatomy and a saw), but I suppose the characters are drawn a little differently – McBurney is less of a sexual predator, perhaps, and the incestuous elements of the original story have been removed. The movie has also drawn flak for, would you believe it, a lack of diversity, because the character of a slave who featured in the Siegel version has likewise gone. (In her defence, Coppola has said that she felt that it would not do justice to the importance of the issue of slavery to just touch on it in passing, as would most likely have been the case had she included a single minor character in this way. Sounds reasonable to me, but, hey, I’m apparently not the best person to judge this kind of issue.)

I would imagine you are more likely to enjoy watching the new version of The Beguiled if you are not familiar with the one starring Eastwood, simply because the plot will contain a few surprises for you. This is a well-mounted, well-played, capably-directed movie, but it doesn’t really add that much to an original which was a memorably unsettling and quietly powerful psycho-drama in its own right. A moderately engaging piece of entertainment, I think: not much more than that.

 

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Fabulous Pests and How to Annoy Them

I hate to break it to you, but we are currently approximately 16% of the way through the 21st century. All resources must be exploited. All revenue streams must be maximised. The chances of anything still popular and therefore financially viable being allowed to remain a fond memory are, to be perfectly honest, zero. So it should come as no surprise that it has been decreed that the vastly lucrative entity that was the Harry Potter film series has lain fallow long enough, and that a series of prequel movies has duly started to appear. (It took about fifteen years for the original Star Wars trilogy to get prequelated; ten years for The Lord of the Rings; with Harry Potter the delay is down to five. At this rate the prequels will soon start coming out in double bills with the films they are based on.) First out of the blocks to hoover your money is Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, directed by David ‘Safe Pair of Hands’ Yates.

(What, too much? You may have a point, especially considering I was rather positive about Yates’ Tarzan movie, which only came out a few months ago: he must have knocked this one out in a couple of weekends. Well, anyway: you must forgive me, it’s my age. Come on, it’s not as if JK Rowling actually needs the money or anything.)

All righty then: the story opens with the arrival in New York, New York of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne). He is a traveller who appears to be British, has floppy hair, is terribly eccentric yet clearly meant to be hugely endearing, wears a bow tie, and has a battered old box which is bigger on the inside than the outside (hey, I’m just saying). Newt is, of course, a wizard, for we are in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (TM), although we are also in 1926 on this occasion.

Inside Newt’s magic box are his collection of magic animals, a.k.a. weird little chunks of CGI, which he frequently fishes out and bonds with; so often, in fact, that you begin to fear for Redmayne’s sanity after all that acting to empty air and golf-balls on sticks. His visit to the States runs into trouble when he accidentally mixes up his case with that of aspiring baker and non-magician Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) and several of the little buggers inevitably escape. This draws the attention of magical cop Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and her kooky sister (Alison Sudol).

The magical authorities of the States are not best pleased as it seems that some kind of supernatural menace is already on the loose in the Empire City, preying on normal people and wizards alike, with top wizard-cop Colin Farrell on the case. Can Newt and his friends recapture all his lumps of CGI and solve the mystery of what’s really going on?

The ardour of the Harry Potter fanbase is still such that a film like Fantastic Beasts is effectively critic-proof; and sure enough this one has made over $270 million in about a week of release. Anyway, it would be remiss of me to say that it is an actual waste of time, money, and talent, for clearly a lot of thought, imagination and skill has gone into creating the world and story of the film.

Even so, one can’t help but notice that this first made-directly-for-the-screen tale has ditched the British setting for something more familiar to that big audience in the USA (i.e, a setting in the USA). It hasn’t become totally Americanised, but something very odd still seems to have happened: this is a film with a main character who resembles an American person’s idea of what the British are like, set in a place which is a British person’s idea of what America is like. Then again, it’s JK Rowling, so you don’t turn up expecting reality, and the two things do kind of balance each other out.

That said, I’m rather less impressed with Rowling the screenwriter than I was with Rowling the novelist: the story is reasonably well-structured, and properly cinematic in scope, but the plotting is considerably less impressive, the tendency towards sentimentality seems rather stronger, and as usual the thing is in dire need of a good no-nonsense editor.

Possibly the most serious problem, which may become more obvious as this series goes on – apparently four (four?!?) more prequels are in the works – is that very sense of self-indulgence, of the film being its own raison d’etre. I still think much of the success of the Harry Potter books was down to their comforting familiarity to parents rather than children: there’s a touch of Agatha Christie to that fiendishly clever plotting, and also of Enid Blyton in the Three Have A Wizard Time vibe which is so often in evidence. Underneath all the intricate world-building they are on some level pastiches of different kinds of story.

Fantastic Beasts, on the other hand, is just a fantasy with a couple of right-on subtexts of brick-through-your-window subtlety, coupled to a lot more world-building. Some of this is interestingly unexpected: the magical community in the USA, despite having a female president (told you it was a fantasy), is by no means depicted entirely flatteringly – they are autocratic and alarmingly fond of the death penalty. But much of the rest of it may not be that interesting to you if you’re not already a pretty heavy-duty Harry Potter fan, and many of the references to characters and so on from the previous films and books may likewise go over your head if you’re not one of the faithful. Due to my abnormally retentive mind, I think I got most of the references, but even so I thought much of the climax was rather underwhelming – there didn’t seem to me to be a lot at stake, at least nothing I’d been made to care about. Some concluding revelations in particular are most likely to simply baffle people who maybe saw all the earlier films once each when they came out, and can’t remember all the labyrinthine backstory of every major character.

Still, it looks suitably lavish and there are some nice performances: Redmayne is a bit too mannered for my tastes, but Fogler gives a charming performance, Farrell gives proceedings some heft, and they appear to have finally run out of new ways to smother Ron Perlman in latex rubber: he appears here via mo-capping, as a goblin who seems to be in desperate need of a chiropractor. None of it is actively bad, although Sudol’s performance possibly comes close in terms of sheer capacity to annoy, and I have no doubt the expectant masses will lap it up like butterbeer.

Fantastic Beasts is, though, primarily a film which has been made to service an existing fanbase, and just how much you enjoy it will probably depend on how much of a true believer you are. I was never really one of the faithful, certainly as far the movies go, and so I found this film to be a reasonable diversion, perhaps rather overlong and a bit schmaltzy, but generally inoffensive overall. It will be interesting to see how well this film does over the whole length of its release, and whether subsequent instalments will direct themselves quite so exclusively at the core audience. And if it sounds to you that I’m treating this film more as an exercise in branding and marketing than an actual piece of storytelling – well, I commend you on your perspicacity. But it is 2016, after all.

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One for the Pot

Every now and then a movie comes along which really makes you pause and scratch your head, not necessarily because it’s bad, but because it’s just so utterly unlike anything else on release. The same goes double when a movie of this kind manages to snag what looks very much like an A-list cast. Are they trying to show their credentials as serious artists? Is it perhaps some kind of situationist statement? Or does the director just have a fistful of incriminating photographs?

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster is exactly this kind of film. Apparently set in what looks very much like the real world, Colin Farrell plays David, a middle-aged architect whose wife has left him. Under the rules of the odd society which is in charge, he is required to check into a special hotel for single people, where he is given 45 days to find a partner and fall in love with them. Should he fail to do so, he will be turned into an animal of his choice: quite naturally, he wants to be turned into a lobster. (David is accompanied by a dog, who it transpires is his brother, following an unsuccessful previous stay at the hotel.)

David soon settles in and adapts to the kindly-yet-terrifying regime of the hotel manager (Olivia Colman), making friends with some of the other singles there (including John C Reilly and Ben Whishaw – this may not be the biggest hit Whishaw appears in this month). As well as being indoctrinated in all the various advantages that being in couple brings, on a regular basis all the inmates of the hotel are bussed down to the local woods, where they hunt and tranquilise ‘Loners’, people who have opted to defy the conventions of society.

However, life at the hotel does not really work out for David, and he eventually becomes a Loner himself, managing to win the confidence of their leader (Lea Seydoux – this may not be the biggest hit Seydoux appears in this month). Ironically, of course, no sooner has he won his place in this most antisocial of societies than he finds romance blossoming between himself and one of the others (Rachel Weisz – this may not be the biggest hit a member of her household appears in this month). Will true love conquer all?

Well, the question presupposes that the words ‘true love’ actually mean something. I suspect the makers of The Lobster wouldn’t necessarily agree with this, for this film has one of the dourest, most cynical views of relationships I can remember seeing. There is hardly a hint of genuine affection between any of the couples at the hotel – their relationships are not romantic but simply transactional, a necessity which is more-or-less forced upon them. No-one questions the necessity for being part of a couple, it’s just accepted as an essential part of living.

The Lobster is widely being dubbed a comedy in reviews and promotional material, and it may be that this doesn’t sound to you like particularly fertile ground for big laughs. I would tend to agree, and in fact I suspect the whole ‘comedy’ label has come from the fact that it isn’t obviously anything else, and the central idea of people being turned into animals is quite a silly one. On the whole the film defies the concept of genre, or at least refuses to be bound by it – there are some blackly comic moments, all of them utterly deadpan (Farrell trying to take his trousers off with one hand cuffed behind his back, for instance), but also a fair amount of graphic material, and sections bordering on the horrific (this isn’t a film for animal lovers, either).

I can only presume that the big-name cast are doing this just to show that they are artists as well as stars. All of the performances are, well, game, with Farrell and Weisz in particular coming out with dialogue of the most affectless inanity with utter conviction (this is yet another of the film’s stylistic quirks). If they never quite manage to sell you on the idea that this film is set in a coherent other-world, well, that’s because it’s just too weird an idea to work in those terms.

It’s not as if the metaphor underpinning The Lobster is exactly difficult to decipher, either: the film is an ironic comment on the importance society places on being part of a couple (and anyone who tells you this doesn’t make a difference has clearly never had to contend with the dreaded single supplement on a package holiday). This extends to an implicit criticism of the lengths that people will go to in order to establish or maintain a connection with someone, although once again this is grotesquely exaggerated in the film.

Fair enough, there’s material for a film there, but The Lobster seems to run out of new ways of discussing it quite quickly. You get a strong sense of where the film is coming from quite quickly, but by the second half it’s starting to feel like they’ve run out of ideas and are just indulging themselves in arbitrary weirdness to pad out the film.

This is certainly an original movie, well-made, and with some serious talent involved – and it does contain some funny moments and interesting ideas. But in the end, it does feel a little bit self-indulgent, and it’s often not the easiest of films to watch. Nice to see something quite so weird getting a relatively big release, but I suspect that has more to do with the cast list than anything else.

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In bed with The Mouse

If you were of a sour, baleful, Daily Mail-ish disposition, you might well find something very disagreeable in the current trend towards films which are essentially historical accounts not of the lives of great people, nor of the details of significant events, but simply of the making of other films. And I suppose you might have a point – at the very least it smacks of creative conservatism, if not an outright dearth of ideas. Already this year we have had Hitchcock, which was essentially behind-the-scenes on Psycho, while making a solid pitch for the quality-Christmas-non-Elf-fixated box office is John Lee Hancock’s Saving Mr. Banks, which is deeply concerned with the genesis of the movie version of Mary Poppins.

Emma Thompson plays Mrs P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins stories. The main plot of the movie is set in the early 60s, by which point she has been fending off expressions of interest in the film rights to her work for decades. Now, however, bankruptcy looms, and rather than lose her home she is obliged to depart for California, to work on a script for a film with the creative guys at Walt Disney Productions. Walt Disney himself is played by Tom Hanks. Disney is genial, avuncular, folksy and charming – Mrs Travers is prickly, particular, formal and demanding (she thinks Disney’s life’s work is vulgar and frivolous). Both of them are used to getting their own way, and so a titanic, if fairly good-mannered, clash of wills is in prospect.

Intercut with all this is another narrative concerning Mrs Travers’ own childhood in Australia five decades earlier. This focuses on her complex relationship with her father (played by Colin Farrell), an affectionate man, but also a somewhat irresponsible alcoholic. Inevitably it is this storyline which illuminates and to some extent explains the character of the adult Mrs Travers, though the manner in which this is handled is variable. Sometimes the film is quite subtle, at other points it is not – a scene with Mrs Travers objecting to Mr Banks (the father in the Poppins film) wearing a moustache is closely followed by one where we see Farrell explaining to his daughter why it is so important that he shaves.

It seems to me that there are two main approaches you can take to Saving Mr. Banks, and your choice here will largely dictate your response to the film. Either it is a touching biographical excavation of an often-overlooked literary figure, or a ghastly piece of self-regarding publicity for the Disney corporation.

Accusations that this film is basically a two-hour-plus promo for the Blu-ray of Mary Poppins, and indeed Disney enterprises in general, are not entirely without substance: the 1964 film informs the 2013 one to a considerable extent, to the point where excerpts from it are shown during the climax. Your enjoyment of most of the 1960s material will depend somewhat on your fondness for Mary Poppins – though I have to say that I’m indifferent to it at best, and still found these scenes to be enjoyable and frequently very funny indeed.

(I should say that I did emerge from this film with a heightened respect for the majesty of the Sherman brothers’ songs from Mary Poppins, which are regularly deployed throughout. The soundtrack listing even appears to promise a scene where Colin Farrell comes on and performs Chim-Chim-Cheree, which I was rather looking forward to as (potentially) this year’s Pierce-Brosnan-versus-ABBA moment, but unfortunately it never quite materialises.)

The makers of this film claim the Disney corporation made no stipulations regarding the depiction of the man who’s essentially their patron deity, which I find slightly hard to believe, and it’s still the case that while Mrs Travers comes across as often brittle, demanding, chilly, and contrary, Walt Disney is presented as unfailingly wise, kindly, decent and insightful. (Whatever one makes of the characterisations, one instinctively doubts the historical accuracy of any major Hollywood production these days as a matter of course.)

Even the most sceptical viewer would, I think, concede that this is a very polished and charming production, with considerable credit due to the writers and cast. Watching Thompson and Hanks spar is a real pleasure – Thompson gets perhaps the slightly better part, but you can see Hanks is revelling in the opportunity to play such an iconic figure when it comes to both Americana and global pop culture generally. Paul Giamatti plays Mrs Travers’ chauffeur, and Brad Whitford, Jason Schwartzman and BJ Novak play Don DaGradi and the Sherman brothers: all of them get the tone of their performances pretty much exactly right. Colin Farrell gets the big role in the Australian sequences, but I was rather impressed by Ruth Wilson as Mrs Travers’ mother.

I can’t help thinking that, based on what we’re shown here, the real Mrs Travers would have been mortified to the point of horror by the thought of her life story being repurposed as the basis for a heart-warming comedy drama, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily grounds for dismissing Saving Mr. Banks. I liked it a lot, and indeed I think it’s a film you would have to make a real effort to actively dislike – but, much as the central story of how the parent-child relationship can influence a person throughout their life is sensitively and impressively handled, one can’t shake the impression that this particular version of it is only being told due to its proximity to a much-loved, much-garlanded, out-now-on-various-formats movie classic. This is a good film, but the charge that on some level it’s basically just the Disney company patting itself on the back in public for two hours is going to be a hard one to dodge.

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Dream: Boat

It’s almost getting to the point where I feel obliged to apologise for the quantity of Woody Allen on this blog. On the other hand, the sheer length of Allen’s career as a writer and director means there’s no shortage of material: I suspect only a tiny handful of people could name every film he’s ever made, without recourse to some sort of reference material anyway. (Through a miscommunication last year I inadvertantly managed to tell a friend the local arthouse was reviving a zombie movie Allen had made in the 60s – no such beast exists, obviously – and they took it very much in their stride.)

At least on this occasion it is not a multi-stranded comedy-drama about the lives of affluent metropolitans, which at least makes it something of a novelty. No, today we are looking at Cassandra’s Dream, a film from 2007 and thus quite early in Allen’s tour grande period. This movie is really quite unlike anything else I’ve seen in his back catalogue, and really quite odd generally.

Anyway. As the film opens we meet Ian and Terry, two brothers from London (they are played by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, and if you think that casting those two as siblings makes big demands of the audience, you’re right). Ian is a fiercely ambitious entrepreneur, looking to establish himself in the hotel industry, and energetically wooing rising actress (and high-maintainance gel) Angela (Hayley Atwell). Terry is much more down to earth, working as a garage mechanic – but nursing a compulsive gambling habit that soon spins out of his ability to control it.

Needless to say, both brothers soon find themselves in desperate need of significant financial assistance, albeit for different reasons. Fortune seems to be smiling on them when their wealthy Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson) comes to visit from the USA, as they are sure the blood ties of family will be enough to guarantee his help. But it seems that these ties cut both ways, for Uncle Howard is facing serious difficulties of his own: a former business associate, also currently in London, is due to testify against him in a court case, and a lengthy jail spell could folow. Uncle Howard’s offer is very straightforward: he will help the lads out with their various problems, but only if they silence the business associate. Permanently…

That’s all very well, you may be thinking, but why is it called Cassandra’s Dream? A fair question. Cassandra’s Dream is a boat which the brothers buy at the start of the film, and which – this is so obvious as a development it barely qualifies as a spoiler – is the setting for the events of the climax. It may be that there is a deeper intended significance to the name – classically, Cassandra was afflicted with prophetic dreams of calamity, which no-one ever paid any attention to, and there is a bit of a motif in the movie of various characters having nightmares – but, as happens with depressing frequency in late-period Woody Allen movies, the subtext is so vaguely articulated as to be impossible to be sure of.

However, this would fit, as the movie is clearly intended as a sort of morality tale, concerned with issues like guilt and ambition and family allegiance. The story has a simplicity which suggest the director is going for a ‘classic’ feel, although this may also have something to do with the fact that, working in London, he’s several thousand miles out of his comfort zone.

Because the thing about Cassandra’s Dream is that it never really looks or feels like the 38th film from a hugely experienced, lauded and acclaimed director: it’s too much of a mixed bag for that. Allen has no ability to make his London-based characters and settings remotely authentic  – McGregor and Farrell wheel out their gor-blimey-guv’nah accents, but that’s all. And, with its settings of garages, pubs, and family kitchens, and its plot of somewhat-implausible faux-gangland hits, the result is bizarrely like the EastEnders omnibus.

Allen’s ability to attract a stellar cast remains undiminished, of course: Jim Carter turns up for a one-scene cameo, while Tamzin Outhwaite – quite a big name in British TV – essentially gets a walk-on in which her face is never clearly visible. The two stars are clearly really struggling, though, not just with their accents but with the stilted, clanging, hackneyed dialogue that comprises most of their scenes. ‘Once you cross the line, there’s no going back,’ declares McGregor at one point: this is presented as a moment of profound revelation. This is the stuff which really sorts out the men from the boys, and needless to say Tom Wilkinson is the only one who emerges looking good. (Well, Sally Hawkins is decent in what’s quite a small part as Farrell’s partner.)

However, however: while the dialogue and some of the performances are a little wobbly, the actual plot is solid enough – even if it takes its time getting where it needs to be in places. There are some genuinely tense moments and neat directorial touches along the way, and the cinematography is crisp and attractive. The impression that this isn’t your typical Woody Allen movie is added to by the presence of an orchestral score by Philip Glass – I can’t think of another that doesn’t feature either wall-to-wall jazz or classic standards. On the other hand, the Glass score, while obviously accomplished, often sounds too big and momentous for what often feels like a small-time story.

Cassandra’s Dream is not a terribly good movie, simply because virtually nothing about it rings true as a piece of drama. But Allen’s decision to craft the thing as a morality play, and as such slightly detached from reality anyway, means it is not unwatchable. The story keeps driving forward – never, it must be said, in a genuinely surprising manner – the cast are game, and it looks nice. And the very fact this is a Woody Allen film with scarcely a single one-liner in it does give it a sort of novelty value. But it’s a strange curiosity at best.

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Deep Shih Tzu

The last ten years have seen the adoption by all the big studios of something called day-and-date releasing: this is the strategy whereby a new film gets released globally on pretty much the same day. It’s supposed to help combat movie piracy, but one of the fringe benefits is that the rest of the world gets to enjoy new blockbusters on the same day they come out in America, thus putting an end to the phenomenon of people timing their holidays in order to catch a particular film as early as possible.

Day-and-date is still very much the norm for most big movies (although apparently Skyfall came out in the USA later than virtually anywhere else so as not to clash with the election), but for smaller offerings a degree of slippage in the schedule is not unknown. So it is with Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths.

Back in October I got a message from an American friend making sure I was planning to see (and then, with grim inevitability, write about) this particular film. I wasn’t, at the time; indeed I’d never heard of it. I’d heard of McDonagh, not so much for his well-received films like In Bruges but because he was the brother of the director of The Guard, my favourite film of last year. But I’m a sucker for requests and the cast list for this film looked interesting, at least. Paying only the most cursory attention to the plot synopsis, off I went, anticipating a comedy-crime-thriller. Hmmmm.

In the film, scripted by Irish writer Martin McDonagh, we meet an Irish writer called Marty (Colin Farrell), currently seemingly adrift in Los Angeles. He is struggling with his latest project, a script entitled Seven Psychopaths, mainly because he doesn’t have enough psychopaths and no ideas for what they’re going to do anyway. Real life around Marty is about to get somewhat psychopathic, anyway: a masked killer nicknamed the Jack of Diamonds is slaughtering his way through the LA mob, Marty’s strange best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) is involved not only with the lovely girlfriend (Olga Kurylenko, very briefly appearing) of a nutso gang boss (Woody Harrelson), but also in a lucrative dog-napping business with the strangely devout, or should that be devoutly strange Hans (Christopher Walken, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out there even by his standards).

Billy also wants to help Marty write the movie, and to help with the research has placed an advert inviting every psycho in California to get in touch with them and provide material for the script. Up turns Tom Waits, carrying both a live rabbit and a metaphorical torch. Meanwhile Marty is having second thoughts about the whole psychopath angle – is there no way he can do an action movie called Seven Pacifists instead?

There’s a weary old saw about how some movies review themselves – this usually meaning that the film in question is self-evidently either good or bad: you can just write about what’s up on screen without having to think too much about expressing the finer points of its quality. Seven Psychopaths also has a go at reviewing itself, but in a slightly different way.

This is because the script of the movie that Marty and Billy are writing bears an uncanny resemblence to the script of the movie they are actually appearing in – characters from the film start appearing, mixed up in the slightly awkward situation he, Billy and Hans find themselves in when Billy kidnaps the gang boss’s prized Shih Tzu. Most obviously, at one point Marty decides that their script will take a bizarre and uncharacteristic left turn – at which point his real life starts to follow exactly the same route.

It sounds cringingly knowing and clever-clever, but this element appears so subtly and unexpectedly in what starts off as a gonzo LA comedy-drama that I was quite taken in by it. It makes it hard to shake the suspicion that when someone starts criticising Marty’s writing in the film, this is really Martin McDonagh owning up to a few flaws in his own script – most obviously, Marty is criticised for writing very few, and very small parts for women, most of whom are decorative and also meet untimely ends. Does this excuse the way Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko and Linda Bright Clay are used (and sometimes abused) in this movie? Does saying ‘I know I’ve been bad’ excuse you for being bad? I’m not sure.

Anyway, this layer of cleverness, added to the talent at work throughout the movie, results in something which is a huge amount of slightly guilty fun: very violent, profane, and more than a bit absurd. This is not to say that there are not serious and even quite moving moments along the way – there’s a very tense scene in which Walken’s sick wife is cornered by Harrelson, who’s out to get him but doesn’t realise who she is. This could have come out of a serious thriller. As the film goes on, though, it drops these occasional pretences and becomes much more about Sam Rockwell, who’s off the leash as a kind of demented idiot-savant who – not inappropriately – seems to have lost track of the boundary between reality and fiction. Rockwell is very funny and gives a very big performance, but then so is Harrelson, so is Walken. Colin Farrell is stuck in the middle playing the straight man and actually does a really good job of it.

I haven’t seen a story crack itself open and start to play with its own guts in quite this way since Adaptation., and it may indeed be that Seven Psychopaths is not quite so accomplished, never quite escaping its slightly wearisome Tarantino-esque trappings. Certainly there are distinct signs of the film wanting to have its cake and eat it, particularly as the climax unfolds (‘unfolds’ is much too tidy and straightforward a word for it, of course).

Seven Psychopaths is certainly satisfyingly clever and different, and – being totally wrong-footed by it to begin with – I enjoyed it immensely, for a while even wondering if the McDonagh family might be about to (figuratively) take home the (non-existent) film of the year prize for the second year in a row? I think not; while The Guard plays similar games with genre tropes to a lesser degree, it’s built around a genuine piece of characterisation with a proper supporting story. Seven Psychopaths just thrashes around demolishing itself and other Hollywood thrillers to hilarious effect – not that this is in any way not a worthwhile undertaking, nor one which is executed without skill, panache, and energy. Well worth watching.

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We Can Remake It For You Wholesale

Hello, and welcome to another installment of what’s in danger of turning into Cinema Refurbishment World. This time our beady eye settles on the big screen at the coffeeshop in Oxford city centre, where all the seats in the balcony have just been replaced. Well, to be honest I’m not struck on the new chairs – I liked the old sofas with accompanying tablettes, and in the admittedly unlikely event of someone turning up who was prepared to be physically and emotionally intimate with me I would have enjoyed sharing a super-premiere sofa with them. As with so much else in life, not to be. Hey ho.

As it was, the first film I enjoyed (by myself) in an atmosphere smelling rather like the interior of a new car was Len Wiseman’s go at Total Recall. I myself can recall my mild surprise at seeing the cover of a movie magazine with the caption ‘Classic Sci-Fi Remake Special! Total Recall! RoboCop! Starship Troopers!‘ My friends, whether or not those movies constitute classic sci-fi is a knotty question, but it certainly constitutes a ‘Paul Verhoeven Remake Special!‘ To be honest, the 1990 Total Recall is my least favourite of the Dutchman’s excursions into SF, and I was further mildly surprised to discover it was being remade at all.

And it initially appears to have departed even further from Philip K Dick’s short story. My heart always sinks a little when an SF movie kicks off with captions and graphics setting up the backstory, but at least the backstory here is engagingly preposterous. The world has been devastated by chemical weapons (oooh) and become totally uninhabitable (ahhhh) except for two regions (phew): what appears to be an extremely small section of central London (put it this way, Big Ben’s in the habitable zone but the Post Office Tower isn’t) and an unspecified chunk of Australia. Needless to say, the United Federation of Britain (no, honestly) is oppressing the Colony (don’t get your hopes up, this is as deep as the political subtext gets).

Every day hundreds of workers from the Colony get up and commute all the way to London to work in the UFB’s factories making robocops (settle down, that remake’s not due until next year). That’s a bloomin’ long commute! you may be thinking. Yes, well, but they’ve taken a few hours off the trip by drilling through the centre of the Earth and installing an elevator. (More like a theme-park ride, really, but I digress.) Yes, twice a day people travel through the core of the planet to get to work and back. Wouldn’t it just make more sense to build the robocop factory closer to where the workers live? Ah, an elementary mistake: applying reason where it has no sway.

Amongst these workers is Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell), a somewhat dissatisfied robocop welder despite the fact he is married to lovely nurse Lori (Kate Beckinsale), to whom – the movie implies in possibly its most startling moment – he is an intimately attentive husband. Feeling an odd sense of ennui Quaid trundles off to the dodgy Rekall clinic, where memories of wild fantasies can be electronically implanted. But zut alors! No sooner is he wired up than troops are flooding the place, and he finds himself shooting them up like a good ‘un. Things get even worse when his wife starts literally trying to kill him! Is this real or has the memory implant gone spectacularly tits-up?

Well, this is a big-budget remake made by a company called Original Film, but that’s about as close to irony as the movie gets. I’m tempted to say that the 1990 Schwarzenegger Recall was a big, daft, memorable movie with a big, daft, memorable star, while the 2012 Recall is a bland, good-looking, mindless movie with Colin Farrell, but this would be rather unfair to the lad, as he does the best he can with the material he is issued. The same goes for Jessica Biel as the love-interest, Beckinsale as their well-coiffured nemesis, Bill Nighy as silly-accented plot-device character, and the rest of the cast.

This would be the place to rail against the fact that Philip K Dick, one of my absolute favourite writers, has possibly the worst track record when it comes to adaptations of anyone in history – but after Screamers, Paycheck, and The Adjustment Bureau, to name but three, this surely goes without saying (and all you Blade Runner fanboys can clear off too). Dick’s complex, quirky, deeply original and endlessly imaginative stories about the vicissitudes of modern living enter the Hollywood script machine and emerge transformed into formulaic chase movies featuring odd forms of transport and things blowing up.

And so it proves here. For much of the running time watching this movie is like watching someone else playing a video game, as it goes from protracted, complicated chase to plot-installing dialogue scene, then back to another long chase or action sequence, followed by Farrell getting another plot coupon… And the characters are so thin and the actual story so underdeveloped it’s all a bit boring. Apart from the most basic rudiments of the plot, very little from previous versions is retained (although, and what this says about the target audience I’ve no idea, the triple-breasted prostitute has been retained for no reason supported by the plot). Beckinsale’s part is considerably beefed up, for no reason I can detect – but this must have been nice for her, and also her husband, the director.

The movie pays lip service to the classic Dick themes of identity and reality being up for grabs, but it’s painfully obvious that the movie’s always going to opt for the simplest, most straightforward answer, because it’s equally obvious these moments are just inserted to try and give the film some kind of intellectual heft – the story isn’t about them the way it would be if this had been, say, Christopher Nolan’s Total Recall. This movie isn’t about the nature of identity or reality. It’s about Colin Farrell being chased around by Kate Beckinsale.

The intellectual vacuum at the heart of Total Recall extends to the basic set-up. The two main locales are called the United Federation of Britain and the Colony, but they may as well have been called Ning and Nong for all the relevance this has to the script. Everyone still has an American accent. The only effect this has is on the architecture and the basic look of the thing, which is admittedly impressive – both areas look rather more like the comic-book Mega-City One than the city in the new Dredd movie. But it’s just about appearances and design and movement rather than any kind of thought-through story.

I’m aware I’ve sort of gone off on one about a film which no-one surely had high hopes for anyway, but in every department but the art direction and production design this movie is just incredibly pedestrian and uninspired, without even Verhoeven’s mad energy  and excess to distinguish it (the 1990 film was an 18: this one inhabits the absolute top end of the 12 certificate). No-one seems to have made any effort to produce anything beyond an utterly vapid and mechanical runaround. It may be that things have got to the point where audiences simply don’t deserve any better, but I refuse to believe it – and even if we don’t deserve better, I’m damned certain Philip K Dick does.

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