catholiclefty

A film I had few hopes for, Max Payne lived up to those few hopes reasonably well but achieved little else bar some inadvertent amusement. This film boasts a simplistic and dumb, hole-ridden plot that is derivative of so many other films, extraneous and un-fleshed-out characters galore, and some very average performances. So a typical movie based on a video game, then.

On the plus side : the film looks good, and while many of the shots are heavily borrowed from other films in the genre, some of the lighting in particular is very nice.

On the negative side : the film is just mostly boring. There's little to care about in the plot, any suspense near the end is shot through by an unnecessary 'flash-forward' at the beginning, they set up this big bad guy for most of the film and then dispatch him with remarkably disappointing ease, the actual 'main' bad guy is a truly dumb evil overlord (he stops our 'hero' from being killed, just so he can explain the plot to him and then kill him himself - though of course he doesn't stay around to confirm his death). Characters are introduced and then go nowhere and do nothing - most notably the main 'love interest', who gets a small setup and then gets mostly ignored. A guy who does tattoos conveniently has a big book about Norse mythology on his desk when asked about it. The room with the baby in has a big sign saying 'BABY' on the door (I mean, please!). Our hero is a cop but he's never thought to look at some of the key evidence related to the death of his wife and child. There's a confusing set of agencies involved, and while inter-agency conflict is a staple of American movies, here it doesn't even make sense (or maybe it does. I didn't care less actually). The bad guys are even worse shots than ever, whereas our hero can get shot multiple times and only needs to kneel down for a long time in the sunrise to get fixed up (huh?). And he has a gun that never seems to need reloading. I could go on, but I'm getting bored...

Mark Wahlberg is better than in The Happening (my review) but obviously that's not saying much. He just looks like a deer in headlights for most of the film - even when he's shooting things or being an action hero, he doesn't seem to be getting involved in what's going on. We're probably supposed to care for his character, but he doesn't make doing so remotely easy. Mila Kunis has almost nothing to do, alarmingly for the main supposed love interest, and she doesn't do the little she has to do with any real interest. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (my review) was a decent performance from her - this however is flat and uninteresting, though most of the blame for that can be assigned to the script. Chris O'Donnell isn't bad, though he's no doubt still trying to live down Batman and Robin - which may be unfair, but still seems rather the case. Olga Kurylenko is about as interesting here as in Quantum Of Solace (my review) - ie. not very much. Beau Bridges is ok when he isn't overacting, though he seems to do that rather too often.

This just isn't very good, but on occasion it looks decent enough, which pulls it up to 4 out of 10.

(While I'm here, I'll finally do something I've meant to do for a while, and change the rating of Forgetting Sarah Marshall up to 8 out of 10. I really enjoyed this film, and it actually improves on further viewing.)

This was never going to be an enjoyable film, but while Hunger is in most respects a technically adroit film, it completely lacks both context and soul and hence, in my opinion, it doesn't work. Brutality and stark realism is acceptable for a strong purpose, but at the end of this film you're more likely to be going home thinking 'why did I watch all that misery?' as opposed to some important revelation.

There is one very good thing in this film - a very very long scene in the middle between Bobby Sands and a priest. The back-and-forth is excellent, and the skill required to do it in one shot is incredible. The problem is that the rest of the film feels like filler around this. Much of the film before this is the story of one of the warders and how he gets on with his job but doesn't really like it. Is this a clumsy attempt at balance or a clumsy way to drag the film out to feature length? I suspect the latter. There's also a very long shot where a man cleans a corridor, which goes on for literally minutes. It's almost Lynchian - but David Lynch's films are so multi-textured and varied that I allow and even appreciate the occasional indulgence, whereas here it also, again, feels like filling in time. The hunger strike itself isolates Sands and reduces what is going on to the effects on his body - and it's pretty disgusting, all the more so because there is no context applied within the film. I've no idea what we're supposed to feel at his death, but I can't say I felt much at all. Without some reference to what the protest was about or why it was important, the film is anchorless and verging on the grotesque - the prisoners almost appear petulant because their reasons aren't explored. A couple of quick quotes from Margaret Thatcher just aren't enough. Also, and while people who say these kinds of things usually tend to annoy me, it does seem problematic that the things these people did (or didn't) do to land them in prison in the first place are completely glossed over - even without delving into the highly complex rights and wrongs of the Troubles, this skirts the point and it can't really get away with it. There's too little dialogue and too many arty shots, however well-done they may be.

Michael Fassbender is to be commended, I suppose, for what he must have done to himself to play this part, and he acts well. Liam Cunningham as the other half of the amazingly long take also deserves praise.

This film failed for me - it ends up as more an art installation than a film, and in divorcing it almost entirely from any context, it makes it cold, clinical and soulless. It is shot well, and the middle scene is excellent, and on those grounds it can't really get any lower than a 4, but I'm not giving it any more than that. 4 out of 10 therefore.

The Warlords is a beautiful-looking picture that is hampered by a derivative and lazy story of three 'brothers' who help fight in a civil war in mid-19th century China. While mostly based on true events, the plot is badly paced, concentrating on early problems in the campaign. Incredibly, despite spending almost all the film looking forward to two final key battles, the first is fudged with a dodgy surrender, and even more contemptuously the second one isn't shown on screen at all! There's some murky internal politics that we're not given quite enough detail about to fully work out, so we end up not caring. And the brother-betrayal issue has been done so many times before, there's nothing really new here. Women flit in and out of the film, highly inconsequentially, so they are mainly a pointless distraction. And how on earth this film needed 8 writers - yes, count 'em, 8! - is anyone's guess.

Jet Li is decent to watch, though I'd rather see him fight with his body (The Forbidden Kingdom (my review), for example) than with swords - far more interesting. The other people in the film show wildly varying acting skills.

Looks good, but the story is boring, the battles get monotonous after a while, and the potentially most interesting battle is omitted entirely. Which isn't that good a scorecard, but I can't say I either enjoyed or hated this particularly. 4.5 out of 10.