The La Manchan Candidate

I first started writing about films on the internet back in 2001, and at the end of that first year announced the list of films I was particularly looking forward to – one of them was Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Well, it has taken somewhat longer than anticipated, but I am finally in a position to write about this movie. I must express my gratitude to Terry Gilliam for finally finishing it and getting it into cinemas, even with the disgracefully limited UK release it has eventually received – I could have ended up looking quite silly otherwise.

The travails of Gilliam’s Don Quixote have become legendary, helped by the release of Lost in La Mancha in 2002 – intended as a making-of film to go on the DVD, it ended up as the chronicle of a collapsing film shoot, as an already-chaotic production was sent into a terminal spin by scheduling problems, terrible weather, injured stars, and much more. It would have been enough to win The Man Who Killed Don Quixote a spot in the book The Greatest Movies Never Made – but, as I have previously noted, ‘never’ is a bold choice of words, and just as a few of these projects have finally crept out into the world, so Gilliam has finally finished this movie.

You can’t accuse The Man Who Killed Don Quixote of a lack of self-awareness, as the opening credits ruefully acknowledge the long and troubled history of the production (‘and now, after 25 years in the making, and unmaking’). This kind of playfulness continues on into the movie itself, where we encounter Toby (Adam Driver), a pretentious director surrounded by obsequious hangers-on, engaged in what looks like a troubled and chaotic production of a film of Don Quixote on location in Spain. Things are not going well, with abrasive crew-members, endless hold-ups, and a distinct lack of inspiration. The situation is not helped when Toby’s boss (Stellan Skarsgard) leaves his trophy wife (Olga Kurylenko) in his care: she turns out to be much taken with Toby, and the director finds his amorous instincts over-riding his better judgement.

It all takes an odd turn, however, when a chance encounter with a gypsy selling various wares reunites Toby with a copy of the student film that made his name, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He realises he made the movie in the same area, a decade or so earlier, using local people in the key roles – an old shoemaker, Javier (Jonathan Pryce) as Quixote, and a bar-owner’s teenage daughter, Angelica (Joana Ribeiro), as Dulcinea. But a brief visit to the locations of the movie reveal that it has had a less positive effect on the other participants: Angelica became fixated on becoming a famous film star, which led to her being sucked into a netherworld of crime and degradation, while Javier became convinced he really was Don Quixote and abandoned his old life entirely.

Various misunderstandings from Toby’s chaotic life lead to him being arrested by the police, but he is less than entirely delighted when the old man appears on horseback and ‘rescues’ him. The self-styled Quixote addresses Toby as Sancho Panza and declares that great deeds and adventures await the pair of them…

Don Quixote defeated Orson Welles long before Terry Gilliam ever attempted to film it, and entire films have been made recounting the tortuous progress of Gilliam’s version to the screen: two of the director’s choices to play Quixote died while the film was trapped in development hell, while other cast members have shifted roles in the meantime (Jonathan Pryce was originally supposed to be playing an entirely different part). Perhaps most significantly of all, the script of the movie has been significantly rewritten since Lost in La Mancha came out: I was expecting there to be an explicitly fantastical, time-travel element to this movie, but it has been removed.

In its place is something more subtle and unexpected, and rather more in keeping with Cervantes: the novel was published in two parts, many years apart, and the second volume opens with Quixote and Sancho rather nonplussed by the fame they have acquired as notable literary figures (not to mention outraged by an unauthorised sequel penned by other hands). The Man Who Killed Don Quixote manages a degree of the same kind of witty self-referentiality – nearly all the characters in it are aware of the book, and intent upon acting various bits of it out for different reasons. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, it is also a remarkably faithful adaptation of a novel which doesn’t easily lend itself to other media.

You could argue this is a double-edged sword, for Don Quixote is a sprawling, episodic, picaresque, apparently undisciplined book, and Gilliam’s film is arguably many of these things too. The first act in particular feels slow and rambling, the story unsure of which way to go. But once Toby and Quixote set off on their peculiar exploits, it lifts enormously, and it slowly becomes clear that in addition to being an adaptation of Cervantes, this is also an engaging and affecting comedy-drama about Toby’s own personal redemption and discovery of his own inner knight-errant.

Adam Driver wouldn’t necessarily have been my first choice for this particular role, but he carries it off well: this is a proper leading role, which he does full justice to. While I would deeply love the chance to peep into the parallel quantum realms where this film was made five or ten years ago and John Hurt or Michael Palin played Quixote, I honestly can’t imagine either of them doing a better job in the role than Jonathan Pryce does here – Pryce is enjoying one of those periods of late bloom that actors sometimes have, and this is one of his best performances.

Of course, Pryce and Gilliam have worked together a number of times in the past, and I first became aware of the actor following his lead performance in Brazil. His presence here isn’t the only thing that recalls some of the classic Gilliam movies of the past: there is the way in which the present day and the medieval collide with each other (mostly figuratively, here), and also the film’s focus on the conflict between imagination and dreams on the one hand, and dreary old reality on the other. You’re never in doubt as to which side the director is on; you could probably argue that Terry Gilliam’s whole career has been building up to doing a film of Don Quixote.

I’m not sure this is quite as consistent or as impressive as some of Gilliam’s other feats of cinematic legerdemain, but neither is it far from the standard of his best films, and there are moments which are as accomplished as anything he’s done in the past. It feels like a minor miracle that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has been finished at all; the fact it is as good as it is simply adds to the sense that it is something we should be grateful for. (It’s just a shame that – true to form – the film is still entangled in legal difficulties affecting its release and distribution, which is presumably why it has barely appeared in British cinemas.) A heart-warming achievement for Terry Gilliam, anyway, and a treat for those of us who’ve loved his films for years.

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The Bean Identity

It is with an appropriate sense of dutiful resignation that I find myself turning my attention to David Kerr’s Johnny English Strikes Again, a third outing for Rowan Atkinson’s incompetent secret agent character. I think it is safe to say that there was no particular public clamour for another Johnny English film, and that the main reason for the appearance of this one is that the Atkinson family finances could be in need of a top-up: Atkinson himself seems to be semi-retired these days, his only substantial appearance since the last Johnny English (seven years ago) being as Maigret on the telly.

The movie gets underway with a cyber-attack on British intelligence, compromising the identity of every agent currently operating in the field – and so, to track down the guilty party, the British Prime Minister (Emma Thompson) is forced to reactivate some retired agents, amongst them Johnny English (Atkinson), who has left the service and become a school teacher specialising in knockabout espionage gags (he is clearly beloved by his cute young charges; the presence of all the kids is really the first sign that this film is pitching to a juvenile audience in every sense of the word).

Well, after an odd little scene where the mere presence of Michael Gambon, Charles Dance and James Fox briefly lifts proceedings (sadly, these are merely uncredited cameos), English is sent out into the field with his trusty sidekick Bough (Ben Miller). They go to the south of France where they end up infiltrating a chic restaurant by pretending to be French waiters (cue silly voices); they encounter the mysterious yet glamorous Ophelia Bulletova (Olga Kurylenko), who seems to be working for the mastermind behind the plans; there are various pratfalls and other very obvious gags in the style of Mr Bean.

Meanwhile, the string of cyber-attacks on the UK continues, driving the PM even further up the wall. She resorts to retaining American tech tycoon Jason Volta (Jake Lacy) in order to try and shore up the country’s defences. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, well, as you can probably tell, my Anglo-Iranian Affairs Consultant and I ended up going to see this film mainly because dinner-and-a-movie is just something we occasionally do, and – having been to the cinema six times in the previous week or so – there wasn’t much else on that I hadn’t already seen. And, you know, I told myself, it’s Rowan Atkinson, it’s very difficult for him to slip below a certain level of funniness, so it’s not like the film can be a total waste of time. Indeed, a colleague had taken a seven-year-old to see it and reported that she had in fact spent some of the film laughing.

I must be becoming even more of a withered old excrescence, because while I did laugh a few times during Johnny English Strikes Again, I don’t think it was in quite the way that the makers were hoping. There are, truth be told, some inspired moments of physical comedy from Atkinson, not to mention some quite good silly voices. But so much of the film is so painfully obvious and – as mentioned – laboriously telegraphed that while I was laughing, it wasn’t because the jokes were funny – it was at the idea that professional comedy film-makers thought that this kind of material was up to scratch.

As usual, the film operates in the same kind of narrative space as the Bond series. This may be because the original film was actually co-written by Purvis and Wade, long-time workhorses of the Bond franchise, and this time around the movie has managed to snag a genuine Bond alumnus in the shape of Olga Kurylenko (I am terribly shallow, but I do enjoy watching Kurylenko, even in films as dubious as this one) – quite what someone like her, who I would describe as a proper film star, is doing third-billed after TV’s Ben Miller, I’m not sure. It’d really be stretching a point to call this a Bond parody, though – the producers seem to have decided that the core audience for these movies is quite young children, which would explain a lot in terms of how silly and predictable most of this one is. Well, actually, it shouldn’t – even quite young children deserve better than this stuff.

One of the particularly frustrating things about it is that it refuses to engage (even in passing) with the real world. The closest it comes is when Thompson, who is clearly itching to do an eviscerating impression of Theresa May, lets rip about how awful and stressful her job is. Given the movie is largely predicated on the notion of how rubbish English people are at virtually everything, it pointedly refuses to engage on the main political issues of our time, even obliquely. When it does very occasionally seem to be slightly topically relevant, this is a) almost certainly by accident and b) almost uncannily misjudged – the plot revolves around a team-up between British intelligence and their Russian counterparts, for instance. The rest of the time it simply withdraws into a bland world of slapstick nonsense.

And I can’t help thinking that there’s a rather suspect reactionary whiff coming off this film, too, which leads me to suspect it may be intended as fodder for elderly Daily Mail-reading grandparents to take their hyperactive grandchildren to see. The issue of Britain’s place in the world may not be addressed, but there’s a definite sense of the film being suspicious of the modern world – the bad guy turns out to be an Elon Musk-esque tech boffin, there’s kind of a motif about doing things ‘old school’, and various jokes about Health and Safety regulations.

So, if you are an elderly, somewhat right-wing grandparent looking for something undemanding to shut up the brood of your brood, then Johnny English Strikes Again could very well be the film for you. For virtually anyone else, though, this is just too lazy and obvious and bland to pass muster. However, there are signs that the makers of this film are taking inspiration from Peter Sellers’ Pink Panther series, which only really concluded with Sellers’ passing. Atkinson is 63 and looks to be in good shape, so there may yet be future offerings from Johnny English in the future. But look on the bright side, there might be an environmental catastrophe and the collapse of civilisation first.

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Persistence of Memory

All right, as you probably know, I try to avoid proper spoilers hereabouts – if I can, anyway. Every now and then, however, a film comes along which it is very difficult to talk about in any detail without risking giving the game away about its story. This is particularly the case with movies which help themselves to story ideas and concepts from other (usually low-budget) films willy-nilly, presumably in the belief that no-one will notice the steal – or nobody who matters, anyway. Joe Kosinski’s Oblivion is one such movie.

Oblivion (the meaning of the title remains somewhat obscure in the context of the film) is not a sequel or a remake of a big-name property, nor is it a superhero or TV show adaptation. This may explain why it has slipped out ahead of the pack of big summer genre movies (summer movie season now starts in late April, apparently, which is frankly absurd), even though it stars a performer of the magnitude of Tom Cruise.

Cruise has shown an interest in science-fictional undertakings on and off for over a decade now (insert Scientology joke here if you wish) and this is his latest excursion into the genre. He plays Jack Harper, a repairman and one of the very last people on Earth. A catastrophic war with invading aliens has left virtually the entire planet a desolate ruin, and the task of Cruise and his partner Andrea Riseborough is to maintain the security drones protecting a network of power rigs generating energy for a colony of survivors on Titan.

The rigs are threatened by shadowy creatures nicknamed Scavs, with whom Cruise has various run-ins when not waxing lyrical about the good old days, being troubled by enigmatic dreams of a pre-war Earth featuring a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko), or hanging about the remains of famous buildings – the Big Book of Sci Fi Cliches axiom that the more iconic a building is, the more disaster-resistant it will prove is fully in force. But then a Scav signal appears to trigger the re-entry of an ancient spacecraft, and despite being warned off by his own mission control, Cruise discovers within the hibernating form of the woman from his dreams – and she appears to recognise him…

If you are partial to SF movies, and have yourself been in stasis for the last four years, then you will probably quite like Oblivion. It looks impressive, the performances of the four leads (Morgan Freeman turns up to give proceedings some gravitas, but the nature of the plot precludes me from saying in what circumstances) are all at least solid, and for a while it seems to be riffing on ideas and images from SF movies of the early 70s with skill and insight.

That said, it’s not nearly as subtle or clever as it needs to be – a clodhopping early reference to Cruise having had his memory wiped signposts very early on that the audience is being set up for a major plot twist, and so it proves. The twist in question is effective enough, and, to be fair, it’s followed by a few more which are also decent. Oblivion is not short on cleverness – the problem is that it does have a serious shortfall of new ideas, genuine thrills, and soul, and some of the plot does strain credibility just a bit (the ending in particular is an outrageous attempt at having cake and eating it).

I actually feel a bit guilty about not liking Oblivion more than I do, because for all of this there are some genuinely great things about this film – the production design is great, the soundtrack is interesting, and Andrea Riseborough blasts everyone else off the screen, as usual. The problem is that I liked this film even more the first time I saw it, when it starred Sam Rockwell and was called Moon.

I don’t think I’m overstating things if I describe Oblivion as a gargantuanly-budgeted remake of Moon which has had various action sequences, an alien invasion, and a love story grafted onto it without a great deal of elegance. The premise, atmosphere, and even a couple of specific scenes all seem uncannily familiar. If you haven’t seen Moon, then this probably doesn’t illuminate you much – but at least I haven’t spoiled Duncan Jones’ exceedingly fine film for you. If you have, then you now have a very good idea of the direction in which Oblivion ends up going (sorry).

For me the similarities were so numerous and so glaring that they really got in the way of my enjoyment of Kosinski’s film (which, for the record, purports to be an adaptation of an unpublished graphic novel – hmmm). Others may well have a different experience, which is fair enough – there are good things going on here. But I still think that if you don’t like SF, you’re not going to warm to Oblivion simply due to the film’s premise, and if you do, its derivativeness and arguable lack of real substance isn’t going to endear it to you, either. Judging it on its own terms, this is quite possibly a better film than I’m giving it credit for – but to do so seems to me to require wilfully ignoring just what a blatant knock-off it is.

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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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Roman in the Gloaming

Neil Marshall’s must-have list prior to making Centurion:

• 1 copy of the Annals of Tacitus (for research purposes)
• 1 DVD of Lord of the Rings (ditto)
• 1 DVD of The Warriors (ditto again)
• four dozen assorted javelins, swords, axes, spears, and other sharp implements
• various assorted trained horses and wolves
• twenty Roman legionary costumes
• six jars face paint (blue)
• two dozen severed heads, hands, legs, etc (rubber)
• 500 gallons of blood (fake)
• Olga Kurylenko’s phone number

Hmmm. By 2010 the scorecard for Neil Marshall’s directorial career stood as follows – Dog Soldiers: small-cast, small-budget horror – modest popular and critical success. The Descent: small-cast, not-quite-so-small-budget horror – significant popular and critical success. Doomsday: big-cast, big-budget SF horror – bit of a cock-up. So it’s fair to say Centurion was a movie with a lot riding on it in terms of the director’s reputation and future prospects. It may therefore be telling that Marshall chose to make a film which didn’t go mad splicing different genres together, was stuffed with the cream of British acting talent, and – perhaps most crucially – only cost about two thirds of what the previous movie did (our old friends at the UK Film Council were involved in the financing, too).

Set in Britain in 117AD, this is the story of gladiator’s son turned Roman centurion Quintus Dias (homme du jour Michael Fassbender), serving on the hazardous northern frontier of the Empire. The story is… hmm, there’s quite a lot of business in this film before we get to the actual story, most of it insanely macho and violent, so I suppose it counts as establishing the tone for the rest of the movie. Basically, Quintus gets captured by the local Pict tribe, escapes, and meets up with a Roman legion commanded by Dominic West, who’s been sent by the Governor to kill the Pict king. West is being assisted by Olga Kurylenko, who’s playing a native huntress (Kurylenko’s character is mute, partly as a character point, but also – I suspect – to avoid awkward questions about her Russian accent). However things do not go to plan when the legion is lured into a trap and massacred, with the general being captured. Left in command of a tiny group of survivors, Quintus is faced with a stark choice – should he lead the men towards safety – something far from assured, with the Picts still hunting them – or attempt to rescue the general from the clutches of the barbaric Celts?

Well, no prizes for guessing which he plumps for. My expert and informed reading of this film – well, the credits, anyway – leads to me to infer that this is, in fact, a homage to The Warriors, a 1979 movie about gang warfare in New York City, which was in turn based on a story from Xenophon (whatever props Centurion earns for crediting its inspirations are instantly lost when it spells Xenophon’s name wrong). However, the obvious plot similarities – small band of brothers have to battle their way home from deep within enemy territory – are sort of obscured by the fact that in many superficial ways Centurion much more closely resembles The Eagle from 2011.

The parallels with The Eagle are almost – ha, ha, you’ll like this one – eyrie. Not only do the films share a very similar setting and tone, but they’re based on the same historical event – the apparent annihilation of the Ninth Legion somewhere in Scotland in the early second century. You could even view The Eagle as an unofficial sequel to this film, as they don’t substantially contradict each other. Even beyond this, the structure and style of the films are very similar – although Centurion is a bit less soggy and authentic, for good or ill.

However, where The Eagle is thoughtful and does its best to be atmospheric, Centurion is a much more straightforward action movie. There’s a bit near the beginning which seems to be implicitly comparing the Roman presence in Britain with the present-day British presence in Afghanistan, but the film doesn’t pursue this in any meaningful way. Instead we get lots of Lord of the Rings-inflected helicopter shots of figures in a rugged landscape, and the odd bit pinched from elsewhere (believe it or not, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a notable donor).

But mostly what you get is violence. Lots and lots of it. On the strength of this film I get the impression that Neil Marshall can’t walk past a throat without slitting it or sticking an axe in it (note to libel lawyers reading this: I mean in a creative context). I thought Doomsday had some heavy violence in it, but this is possibly even stronger stuff. In the opening ten minutes you get a gory massacre, someone’s arm being skewered to a table with a knife, a bar brawl, and a prisoner being carved up by his captors. And it doesn’t really let up for most of the rest of the film – there’s a battle scene at one point which feels like it consists of dozens of quick shots of people being impaled on spears, shot in the eye with burning arrows, having their heads smashed with axes, chopped to bits by swords, etc, etc. I had thought that exposure to the collected works of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, the Hammer guys, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had left me almost completely desensitized to this sort of thing – but no, there were a few bits in this film which made me go ‘Ooh,’ and grimace.

Now I’m not saying this in itself makes Centurion a bad film. But at the end I came away with the impression that there’s not much else to it except the violence: the story is so basic – dare I say it, perfunctory – that nothing else really lingers in the memory. This is a real shame as there is some top acting talent in this film. Fassbender is, of course, probably too classy an act to really be in this kind of film, but does his best regardless. Also appearing are the likes of David Morrissey, Liam Cunningham, Noel Clarke and Riz Ahmed, but those that make an impression do so by sheer force of charisma rather than as a result of the parts they have to play. Imogen Poots pops up as the love interest, and is as charming as usual, but once again she gets little to work with and the story demands she appears too late to really make an impact.

Centurion seems to have been an attempt at a serious historical action movie with an appropriately dour tone – indeed, at one point it looks as if the ending to this movie is going to be as dark as that of The Descent. It looks good and the actors are talented, but the problem is that the script can’t find anything really interesting for anyone to do for long stretches at a time, and the relentless gore makes this look like much more of an exploitation movie than is probably the case. I missed the SF and fantasy elements of Marshall’s other movies, too: isn’t there room in the world for a Roman soldiers vs. zombies film?

Oh well. Centurion is probably a better and more coherent film than Doomsday, but at the same time not quite as interesting. No word yet as to what Marshall’s next project is going to be, but the list of ‘planned films’ in his Wikipedia entry suggests he will not be going too far out of his comfort zone (suppliers of Kensington Gore up and down the land rejoice). The jury is still surely out as to whether The Descent was the one really great film Neil Marshall had in him: I hope not.

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Franchise Affairs

From the Hootoo archive. Originally published January 8th 2009:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to yet another unlikely reappearance by the film review column that just won’t take a hint. Ye Constant Editor can breathe easy, however, as I’m only back in the realm of English-language cinemas for a couple of weeks—being away from the big screen is just about the only part of my current lifestyle I don’t enjoy, but it’s a real pain. Apart from a couple of months in the summer when I was back in the UK, I’ve only been to the pictures three times all year, and even then I had to limit myself to films which looked like having fairly straightforward plots. So, in Italian I watched Alien Vs Predator 2, which while being on its own merits acceptable, still marks the debasement of two quality franchises to something like the level of Planet Terror, and Iron Man, which seemed pretty spiffy even if I lost all the sparkling dialogue and the dubbing was lousy. More recently we trundled off to the kino in Bishkek to see Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace, which I’m certain at some point involved a DVD player being hooked up to a video projector. Suffice to say my (beginner level, according to my teacher) Russian was not quite up to the task of following the story and I came out completely baffled, though I was relieved to hear friends and family in the UK had similar experiences.

Having watched the film again in English I have to say I don’t quite think it deserves the bad press it’s been getting from some quarters. It is, as if you need telling, the 22nd film in the mighty James Bond franchise and the second since the Daniel Craig-fronted reboot of the series. Fleming fans may be disappointed to hear that this doesn’t follow the plot of the original story very faithfully (Bond goes to cocktail party and hears about someone’s unhappy marriage). For the first time since the very early seventies, Quantum of Solace follows on from the previous instalment as lovable sociopath Bond commences his campaign against the shadowy organisation who killed his lover and, more importantly, gave his knackers a right good whacking in 2006’s Casino Royale. After a couple of frenetic chases around Italy he winds up in the Caribbean on the trail of dodgy entrepreneur Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, who seems to be some sort of French Steve Buscemi clone). Greene is up to no good in South America, and Bond’s operations are inevitably hampered by both the connivance of his American associates and the all-pervading nature of the network Greene himself represents…

On one level it’s easy to see why this film’s got a bit of a lukewarm response from some sections of the audience. Most people, myself included, enjoy the slightly larger than life elements of most of the Bond films, and so for this film to feature not a single goon in an orange boiler-suit, hollowed-out volcano base, or satellite death ray, and in fact revolve around an attempt to take over a country most people can’t find on the map is arguably a bit of a risk. Well, you could argue the same was true of Casino Royale, and I take the point; but that had the advantage of novelty value and generated considerable excitement simply because this was James Bond done in a totally new way. This isn’t an origin story and I think people were expecting more of a traditional Bond movie, which this seems very uncomfortable being. For example, Bond is given a female sidekick with an utterly ridiculous name, but it’s never actually said in full on screen, and Bond’s incidental rumpo feels a bit crowbarred in (so to speak) as well.

As it is, the Bond this really resembles is 1989’s License to Kill, hardly the most glittering of antecedents (and I’m saying that as a fan of Timothy Dalton’s take on the character), but in its fascination with high tech telecommunications, brutal fights in seedy hotel rooms, and depiction of governments and intelligence agencies being fundamentally compromised, it really much more closely resembles the last couple of Bourne movies. Now, once again, I’m a massive admirer of that particular franchise (and that guy who, er, wrote a rather lukewarm review of The Bourne Identity back in 2002 wasn’t me, okay, it was an impostor), but a Bond movie is a different kind of animal: as long as Bond is a government agent it’s impossible for this series to be as critical of modern western policies and methods without fatally undermining their hero. I’m not sure people go to these movies looking for the same thing, anyway— Bond movies should be a bit more fun, you should want to be James Bond in a way you’d never want to be Jason Bourne.

Daniel Craig gives another good performance as Bond, given the material he has to work with, although his ultra-deadpan delivery of most of his one-liners means they tend to fall a bit flat. This may be partly due to Forster’s direction, which really isn’t anything particularly special. The plot is okay and does actually make sense, as long as you pay it due attention. Olga Kurylenko is rather good as Bond’s sidekick (hardly a Bond girl as such, given that they don’t, y’know, thingy) and giving an especially charismatic turn some way down the cast list is Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter. Wright manages to make Leiter more than simply just Bond’s American gofer, and it’s a shame he doesn’t get more to do. Hopefully he won’t get fed to sharks again for a good long while.

In my review of Casino Royale I talked about how it had dynamited away all the baggage and formulae which had encrusted the Bond character over the years to reveal something fresh and interesting. I still stand by that, but to me this film, with the Bond theme reduced to an occasional motif, iconic gun-barrel sequence bumped to the closing credits, no gadgets, no Q, no Moneypenny, seemed very uncertain of what to replace all these things with. As a thriller, Quantum of Solace is okay, although a bit low-key and occasionally unsure of itself. As a Bond movie, it’s sorely lacking in the magic and swagger of the franchise at its best. Thinking caps on at Eon, perhaps.

Well, anyway, only being back in the UK for less than a fortnight it was obvious I would have to be highly selective in my choice of viewing matter. Clearly, only the most sophisticated and enriching films could be considered as worthy of my time. But then I forgot about all of that and went to see Transporter 3, directed by Olivier Megaton (which is surely a made-up name, but still quite cool). Anyone remembering the glory days of this column will recall that I enjoyed the original Transporter much too much on its release nearly six years ago. Original sort-of director Louis Leterrier has gone to (fairly) greater things ( well, he directed the last Hulk movie, anyway), while ludicrous star Jason Statham (and I say that with all affection) has really let it define his career. Is the magic still there the third time around?

Mmm. Baldy motorised mercenary Frank Martin (my man J, like you need telling) appears to be trying to ease himself out of his chosen career, seemingly so he can spend more time fishing with his best mate, dodgy cop Tarconi (Francois Berleand). However, trouble strikes when his chosen protégé louses up on a job, and the dischuffed client (Robert Knepper) insists on Frank taking over the assignment. This involves driving a couple of big bags from Marseilles to Odessa in the company of extraordinarily freckly babe Valentina (Natalya Rudakova), both of them having been fitted with exploding jewellery. In the meantime other stuff is going on involving a cargo ship filled with cartoon toxic waste and a Ukrainian government minister (Jeroen Krabbe) getting blackmailed by nasty Big Business. I would say not to worry and that it all makes sense in the end, but it’s really so obvious from that start what’s happening that I won’t bother.

People don’t go to a Transporter movie for the plot, anyway (at least I don’t); they go for ridiculous stunts and chases, Jason Statham administering a good kicking to identikit goons, and more likely than not the leading lady administering a good kicking to the English language. Happily, all these things are fully in place for the new instalment. I’ve written in the past about how the trajectory of a successful franchise tends to go from originality to tradition, and then from tradition to formula (and normally to box office extinction). There was nothing terribly original about the first movie which may be why this series seems to be fending off creative hardening of the arteries passably well. Frank is still particular about his wardrobe, possibly because he often ends up taking his clothes off in the middle of a fight, and is permanently grumpy, but this is the essence of the character. The gay subtext to Transporter 2 (which I personally missed, probably because of what Jason got up to off-screen with Qi Shu in the first one) is gone this time around, but there’s the usual range of vehicular-based mayhem and the set-piece fight where Frank takes on about six people simultaneously.

I was personally sort of pleased that Megaton hasn’t broken the conventions of the franchise (or indeed the recent films of the Luc Besson canon, which of course this belongs to) by encouraging the actors to, er, act. The developing romance between Frank and Valentina is performed with all the passion and allure of a liaison between Stephen Hawking and an I-speak-your-weight machine. There’s a mind-boggling scene where they get to know each other by Frank asking her what her favourite meal is, in quite astounding detail. She seems happy to oblige (it’s actually a wonder she stays so thin as most of her dialogue revolves around food) and the effect is not so much romantic as reminiscent of an episode of Masterchef with a particularly surly host.

But these are the special pleasures of the Transporter franchise, which you’ll either appreciate or you won’t. It’s not quite as breezily mad or as beautiful to look at as the first two movies, but it does the business where it counts. I’m well aware that some people will complain about the many enormous holes in the plot or the utter silliness of much of the climax, or indeed the dreadful acting of virtually the entire cast. I don’t care. I really enjoyed it.

If you’d told me a few years ago that I would be reviewing a remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, starring Keanu Reeves and John Cleese, then probably your next utterance would have been ‘Please stop screaming’. However, so it has come to pass, with Scott Derrickson’s new version currently showing at a cinema near you. (Unless you live in Kyrgyzstan, of course.) I approached this one with the gravest misgivings, as is inevitable when it’s one of your favourite films they’re updating. I reviewed the original movie back when the A-numbers only had six digits, at the dawn of time (or at least the dawn of 24LAS), something I’d completely forgotten about until I sat down to write this!

However, let’s concern ourselves with the new version, which initially sticks reasonably close to the original movie’s plot. An extraterrestrial object is heading for Earth at immense speed, but rather than being the planet-busting meteor everyone is anticipating, it turns out to be a sort of giant luminous marble (cos if you put flying saucers in movies these days you get laughed at) which touches down in Central Park. Before the waiting scientists and military, the marble disgorges a small slimy alien and a giant shiny robot. This being America (I’m sorry, it’s such a lazy joke) the small slimy alien is promptly shot. The boffins are somewhat surprised to discover that under the slime is actually Keanu Reeves (starting to show his age a bit). Reeves plays Klaatu, an emissary from a federation of local alien civilisations who are a bit concerned with the situation on planet Earth. Naturally the Americans want to know exactly what their plans are and turn Klaatu over to the CIA for proper interrogation. However, he is sprung with the help of principled astrobiologist Helen (Jennifer Connolly) and sets out to determine the fate of mankind…

You will note I said ‘initially’ at the start of the synopsis, and sure enough after a bit the plot deviates enormously from that of the original movie. It’s not exactly faithful to begin with, but the early additions and changes (sticking in a prologue set in 1928, making Helen a scientist rather than a secretary, giving Klaatu psychic powers), are all understandable in that they attempt to explain things that a modern audience might find a little bit difficult to credit (although a sequence where Klaatu contacts a fellow alien who’s been living incognito on Earth for decades seems a little irrelevant). Later on the creators just seem to be following the internal logic and demands of their own story, which is entirely reasonable, and they still manage to fit in a couple of iconic moments from the original: Klaatu’s meeting with Professor Barnhart (John Cleese playing it straight) and a visit to Arlington with Helen’s son (Jaden Smith, who’s not too bad in a fairly tricky part). However, the actual bit with The Earth Standing Still is entirely reconceived, as is Gort’s role in the proceedings, and for some reason they decided not to include ‘Klaatu barada nikto!’ this time.

As you might expect, this means the alien-as-Christ subtext which was at the heart of the original film has been completely removed and there isn’t really much to replace it beyond some fairly indistinctive waffling about saving the environment and how people are really horrible but also rather lovely too. However, it doesn’t take itself completely seriously, and rather surprisingly this is mostly due to a light-footed performance by Keanu Reeves, who’s able to put his usual— er— semi-detached style of acting to good effect here. He’s startlingly good and has clearly let Michael Rennie’s original performance as Klaatu inform his own. Even more surprising is the way that, whenever he’s off-screen, the IQ of the movie seems to drop about 30 points, with much more feted performers like Connolly and Kathy Bates all at sea with some painfully obvious expository dialogue.

So while this new version isn’t perfect, it’s not far from being as good as I could realistically have hoped for, and it certainly isn’t the travesty I was almost expecting. The special effects are perfectly competent, low-key enough not to jar, though I would’ve liked to see more of Gort in his original incarnation, and this is a polished and professional movie. I’m not entirely sure what you’ll make of it if you haven’t seen the original, but I suspect it’ll pass the time engagingly enough. Not a classic, but not a disaster either.

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