Review: Clone Wars

It's fun, certainly, but is quite a bit further down the path of made for kids than even Return of the Jedi went.

There are moments where your expectations are decidedly jarred. The first being that, as this is distributed by Warner Bros; and not 20th Century Fox it doesn't have the Fox Fanfare opening it and, somehow, that's just weird. That piece of music, iconic in its' own right, has always been apart of the opening of a Star Wars film. Speaking of music Clone Wars doesn't even have John Williams' theme, but a variation on it. This is tinny, thin and lacks the majesty indicating this cartoon's real place in the world which is a TV movie. Much of the incidental music is a sort of cross between world music and mild rock which is fine of itself but, again, just isn't Star Wars.

Whilst we're on the beginning, there's no opening crawl, either. Instead it's a voice-over done in that cheesy American style which the old serials might well have had. Here, though, it just seems to be pandering to an audience who don't want to take the time to read.

Much of the advance rumour mill suggested that this movie would be a bridge into the new series which is to be set, apparently, between episodes 3 & 4. The rumours were wrong as this is set between Episodes 2 & 3 where it should have had a great chance for fleshing out Anakin's story and how he dealt with the aftermath of his mother's death and his response to it, certainly his first steps on the dark path to becoming a Sith. What did they make of this opportunity? "I don't want to talk about my past." says Anakin to his new padawan. Talk about a waste.

Actually, let's talk about waste. Padme barely appears, preventing any development of her relationship with Anakin, the politics (barring some drivel about the Hutts controlling space trade routes in the Outer Regions) are all-but ignored so there's no advancement of the overall situation and Obi-Wan & Anakin are kept apart so there's no sense of growing conflict between them. So the Star Wars Saga goes even further down the road of shallow spectacle. It's really little more than an excuse for one battle after another.

The good news is that it does that well. The battles are well-staged, the animation sumptuous and the voice acting excellent throughout. Indeed, Anakin works better than Hayden Christensen ever managed it. The animation department have gone for a style which often leaves visible 'brush strokes' on backgrounds or 'tool marks' on computer models making the art look more organic and less clinical than is too often the case with computer-generated imagery. That hyper-realism which seems to make things less real is subverted and works incredibly well. Using computers also allows the camera right into the middle of the action on occasion giving a soldier's-eye view of the proceedings.

As always, it's the story that lets it all down a bit.

Anakin fights Dooku again, but there's no real tension to it as you know it can't be resolved until Revenge of the Sith. If you haven't kept up with the comics or novelisations you may be confused by the heroes' familiarity with Asajj Ventress, the apprentice of Count Dooku as she's not explained at all. So much for "Always two there are; master and apprentice." Since Dooku is the Sith apprentice what's Sidious doing letting him have his own? Toe-curling cuteness is provided by the new padawan, clearly meant to be about 13 and fitted with the biggest baby-blue eyes you've seen outside of Jap-anime and a baby Hutt. Yep, you read right; a cute Hutt.

The whole thing with the Hutts is the most aggravating thing about the whole premise. Sadly, the franchise is going the Star Trek (and more recently Doctor Who) route of constantly shoehorning previous characters in where they're not needed. It began with Boba Fett into Ep 4's special edition which had the effect of reducing him from one of the galaxy's most feared bounty hunters into a standard minion followed by stuffing Chewbacca into Revenge of the Sith just because fans wanted to see him back.

Please stop listening to bloody focus groups.

Here it has resulted in giving the Hutts, and Jabba in particular, far too much power in the grand scheme. The Hutts are crime lords, not galactic potentates. Surely it wouldn't have been too hard to come up with the head of some galactic fiefdom with real value or strategic importance than stretching to having the Republic and the Jedi prepared to deal with Jabba? Don't get me started on Jabba's gay cousin from New Orleans, either. Other than pointing out that it meant requiring Padme to have an almost inside knowledge of the Hutt's family structure and where to find this cousin (Uncle? I really was past caring).

In short a movie which is to Star Wars what those digital roller coasters are to thrill rides; fine but not as good, as memorable or as much fun as the real thing.

Review: Last Legion

It's good to see that Di Laurentis films are carrying on in the same style as always: crap.

True, it's the kind of crap I like, so it's not necessarily a bad description in relation to their films.

Usually.

In this case, thought I really can't make up my mind about it. It has a good, one might even say great, cast. They mostly do a pretty good job. The fights are excellent and it looks pretty good. Yet I just couldn't settle into it.

There is one big issue I have with this film that I must get out of the way from the beginning. Racism.

It is set during the fall of the Roman Empire to the Goths and supposedly explains the origin of Excalibur (and it sort of does, but I rather preferred the idea of it being a magical weapon bestowed upon the Pendragon line by the sithe, not a really good sword made from bits of an asteroid. That's just personal preference, though). Apparently it all happened rather quickly and around a few short battles. Many of the characters are said to be either Roman or Celtic and these good and noble races are depicted with cast members of all representatives of the latter playing Celts. Apart from Scots because they play the Goths and are played as uncouth, psychopathic, barbarians. For some reason, despite actually being Scottish, many of their accents sound fake. Go figure. Kevin McKidd has perpetrated this oddity in the past. When I first heard him in Grand Theft Auto I was shocked to discover that it actually was him it sounded so fake.

Yet, I'm ambivalent about the use of Scots as the bad guys. Hey, at least it made the villains a discrete racial unit and it meant that many Scots (the usual suspects, mind you) got work out of it.

Ashiwarya Rai is good in it, but - as with almost all women playing warriors - she's just not physically believable. As always her gender is disguised, but you can tell a mile off it's a woman. Frankly, she's just too elegant, beautiful and well-groomed to be believable as a warrior. She still has a really good manicure! And where did they get than standard roman leather breastplate with mouldings in it for her breasts? For that matter, where did the boots with rubber soles come from?

Much of the digital work, again, looks shoddy. I'm beginning to think that this is an artifact of HiDef as it surely can't be every effects house making the same look intentionally. In this case there are shots so badly out of focus they made my eyes cross!


Oh, and Hadrian's wall faces the wrong way. The side with the Roman defenders on it is the Pictish side.

Review: Bourne Ultimatum

The third in the trilogy of movies reputed to be the reason the Bond series improved.

This was as truly excellent film. Matt Damon is utterly convincing as the amnesiac spy trying to get on with is life and to find out who did what to him and when. Sound a little confusing? So it is with Bourne's life. The double-dealing and paranoia rife within the agencies involved in creating and hunting him see to that. Who's on his side? Who's against him? For what is, essentially, a straightforward tale there are enough plot-twists and double-blinds to ensure that you're always engaged with the characters. Unlike the aforementioned Bond where the characters are only there to hang the action sequences on, this has characters you can actually care about and believe in. Heck, there isn't even a traditional villain. The 'bad' guys are all on the same side. The moral ambiguities of American foreign policy drive their actions and they are firmly in the 'end justifies the means' camp. Unlike in Bond where villains are bad because they're evil, these guys are evil because they want to do the right thing, but have lost sight of right & wrong. Very relevant in our tumultuous world.

But I'm making this sound like a heavy political polemic and that it most certainly is not. It is a high-octane, turbo-charged thriller. Although the characters have depth and feelings they do not block the flow of the film or slow the pace of its action. Director, Paul Greengrass, uses only the merest sketches of those more emotional scenes to show us what we need without succumbing to the temptation to become maudlin or self-indulgent. For a great example of this look for the scene where Bourne has his 'successor' at his mercy.

Allowing only the briefest pauses for breath the action is the best I have seen this year. Brutal, realistic and yet still cinematic enough to be thrilling. As a fight director myself I only wish I could work on sequences like these. Better yet, many of them take place in crowded, open, everyday locations. All of which serve to bring home the fact that spooks like these are operating amongst us, only without the fantastic skills.

The performances are uniformly excellent with no one letting the side down. All too often there will be one person who sticks out like a sore thumb due to being badly mis-cast or blatantly untalented. Happily, Greengrass & the Hubbards have assembled an excellent company down to the smallest roles.

Are there problems with the film? Yes; nothing is perfect.

The hand-held style - complete with whip-pans, shots too close to see what's happening and irritating zooms - is the chosen mode of shooting here. Yes, I find it as annoying as ever. I know it helps to pull the viewer into the action and to give a sense of immediacy, but it still drives me up the wall. It's not as bad as, say, Transformers but I really don't think it's needed. Personal tastes, here, so likely not a problem for many.

It has been a while since the last one, so the names,organisations and just who's who bandied around are a little confusing at times. Again, they fall into place as you go on and I daresay the fans will either know them by heart or have a look at the DVDs before going.

I have heard that, as with so many adaptations for screen, the script bears little resemblance to the novels. I don't know, but Robert Ludlum will not doubt be happy to hear that I intend to buy his books to find out.

Review: Transformers

I've really been looking forward to this one. Which is a bit of a surprise as I couldn't be arsed with the original series. Trite morals, unimaginative scripts and cheap animation wrapped up in a huge advertising campaign just didn't, for some obscure reason, encourage me to watch it. Odd that...

My initial reaction to the idea of a 'live-action' version of this was "Oh no! That'll be crap." took its first hit when I saw the Renault? ads. That shows how good the campaign was, I remember the ad but not the model of car. Limitead as they probably were for some French car manufacturer's sales they did convince me completely that transforming robots in a real-life setting could be done believably. Then I saw the trailers and I thought "That looks like fun!"

Of course, by this time, the nay-sayers were panicking about the director being one Michael Bay. Let's be honest, both his producing and directing credits include some total turkeys. Pearl Harbour anyone? The likes of The Rock gave me hope, though. Yes, his work is totally overblown, generally shallow, and often patronising. He uses a LOT of product-placement. Oh! Wait. That sounds like just the guy for this job, then.

So, we went along (Yes, both of us as Abby was actually off!) and, as expected had a rip-roaring old time. It is everything those nay-sayers said it would be; overblown, self-indulgent and full of product placement. It is also fun, smart and much more grown-up that I thought it would ever be allowed to be, considering that it's still pretty much just a big commercial for the toys. One of my friends had taken her kids along and they absolutely loved it, as the bruises on my thigh will attest to how much the nearest one jumped and bounced in his seat. Finally, someone jumped and laughed more than Abby!

Are there negatives? Hey! It's me!

It has the corniest voice-over opening I've heard in years which, aprt from the cheese factor, manages to contradict the later script by claiming that the Transformers originated on 'The Cube' (Ah! They're Borg, then.) and not on Cybertron as is stated later. The script's full of holes like that. I mean, DefCon Delta? What was up with good-old DefCon One? Not Sci-Fi enough? The technobabble factor is off the scale. Megan Fox, though gorgeous is about as believable as a teenager as the cast of Happy Days (too much time in the sun, m'lady) and is definitely not someone you'd accuse of wearing a training bra. And the film reference in-jokes are often almost too obscure to notice. (Amongst others I spotted Terminator, Kill Bill & The Matrix)

Worst of all for an action movie is that the action is shot in such a way as to be almost incomprehensible. It becomes not only very hard to track what's going on, but which Transformer is involved. It's almost as if Mr Bay didn't trust the CGI to look good enough to be shown clearly in the fights. Perhaps this is the reason it all just starts to get a little dull. If you're lost and can't actually root for the good guy it's hard to stay involved. Of course, about 2/3rds of the way through it seems as if Mr Bay has enough of the story and just goes all out on the action and that means it goes on for a looong time. Sadly, it begins to feel like it and, again, it's mostly because it's poorly shot. This is a great pity, because the fights are brutal. None of that namby-pamby crap from the series. These are giant, heavy, armoured and armed killing machines. Bits get broken off, people die, buildings get flattened and, best of all, Furbys get blown to bits. Not sure that's quite how Hasbro wanted their products placed, but it made me laugh.

This could, and should have been a great action film. It misses the mark, but not by much. It is thrilling in places, just not enough, and it is great fun. As with most Hollywood actioners it requires brains be checked at the door for maximum viewing pleasure.

Afterwards ask yourself these questions:

1. Why does the Spark only seem to produce Decepticons?
2. Why is there an Australian student working for the NSA? (Rachael Taylor). And just what purpose does her character actually serve?
   
3. How did they manage to get an actor to play a character with a weird name who managed to have an even weirder name that his character? (Shia Saide LaBeouf)
4. After causing untold havoc in a VERY public fashion, what makes Optimus Prime think that the Autobots will be able to "[hide] in plain sight." and which American government would allow them to?
   

Review: Die Hard 4.0

All you need to know about this sequel is whether or not it follows the template of its predecessors.
So...

• Yes; it features Bruce Willis as wisecracking Det. John McClane.
• Yes; it's stupidly, cartoonishly violent.
• Yes; it features thrilling stunts.
• Yes; there's a pantomime villain.
• Yes; there are incompetent senior officers getting in the way.
• Yes; a member of McClane's estranged family ends up involved in the action.
• Yes; it's full of plot-holes and absurdities.

In short, yes; fans will love it, the rest of us will be entertained.

In truth, the wisecrack quotient is down and those which are there aren't nearly as funny, the characters are weak cyphers to the point where you don't care what happens to any of them and - since the plot revolves around the American secret service getting its comeuppance for ignoring warnings - it's hard to not want the bad guys to win. Indeed, the Live Free or Die Hard title used in the States is dropped here, wisely, because of the jingoistic tone so sadly common over the Atlantic post 9/11.

Maggie Q is criminally underused, the bad guys are - as is becoming depressingly common in Hollywood flicks concerning terrorism - mostly French and Justin Long plays the same character he always does. If you can believe Warren P. Cheswick from Ed as a hacker extraordinaire he won't irritate the arse off you as he did me. The same goes for the depiction of all computer users as sci-fi obsessed geeks.

Check your brain at the door and enjoy the big bangs.

Clangers: Watch out for the abysmal lip-synch'ing in several scenes.

Review: Hostel 2

I've never seen the first of these films. I wasn't getting to press showings when it came out and I really wasn't interested enough in the theme to pay money to see it. However, I decided to see what all the fuss was about this time around. Having gone to the sequel I have to say that my opinions have not been changed, rather confirmed.

Now, before anyone says I had made up my mind before I went along, you may well be right, but I was prepared to be persuaded so I kept my mind open. If they had managed to make anything scary, disturbing or said anything about what might motivate someone to do the things done in this script it could have been forgiven. Despite excellent cinematography, sound design and surprisingly good acting I cannot even begin to recommend this reprehensible piece of dross.

The original, along with Saw and its sequels, have coined the new genre of torture porn and that is exactly what this is. Random people are kidnapped and sold to rich perverts to be tortured, humiliated and ultimately murdered. Unless you share the mental deviance of the idle rich who indulge their sick fantasies in these films there is no reason whatsoever to watch one. There is no tension, no drama and nothing to be gained from the experience other than a voyeuristic indulgence in watching twisted mutilation and depravity of the sort rarely indulged in by anyone outside of the Inquisition.

That porn' is becoming more mainstream is one thing and whatever your opinion on it, it is here to stay. The difference is that most of us have a healthy interest in sex and can relate in some way to watching beautiful people doing it for our entertainment. Human bodies are designed to be attractive to us. Ironically, those who suppress those desires and make sexual acts out to be depraved and dirty tend to be those who wander down the paths into sado-masochism. I do not refer here to the majority of modern SM players who indulge in a bit of spanking, bondage & nipple-clamping. For someone to develop a desire to inflict serious damage and or humiliation on a 'lover' it requires misogyny, a deep-rooted hatred of sex, one's own sexual desires and the other involved who 'makes' one feel these desires. Exactly the type fostered by the religious right. The more the Victorians publicly denied sex the more perverted they became in private. (Sweeping generalisation, I know but you get the drift.)

**Spoiler alert***
Given that Manhunt 2 has just been banned by the British Board of Film Classification, which condemned its “ unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone in a game context which constantly encourages visceral killing with exceptionally little alleviation or distancing,” and “sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed and encouraged” why has this not met the same fate?

There is no redemption, no retribution upon the bad guys (with minor exceptions) and the only motivation for this film is to 'enjoy' the pain & humiliation of the characters. The only character to survive this slaughter-fest is - contrary to the usual rules of horror films where only the morally corrupt get killed - the only one with sufficient money to buy her way out, along the way killing the guy who 'bought' her. If the implication under usual horror rules is that the immoral will suffer retribution then the implication here is that only the wealthy will survive, possibly even that only they deserve to survive. Had they not made a point of killing off the sole survivor of the first film (twice - once in a dream & once for 'real') in the opening scenes then they could have avoided that accusation, but they didn't and money and power won out over determination to survive. The added implication is that the 'heroine' is not going to do anything to end the situation which saw her friends tortured to death and finishes up with her committing a 'shock' murder in the most obvious 'twist' I've seen since M. Night Shyamalan lost his originality to ego.

If society is reflected in what we allow to be seen in our entertainment media this muck makes me very worried indeed by the state of our society. In a culture where images of adults indulging in consensual, natural erotic behaviour is considered to be the very definition of a pornographic image (defined as 'likely to corrupt or deprave the viewer' rather than the more recently accepted 'designed to sexually arouse') and therefore subject to the strictest regulation, restriction and censure but this is considered to be fit for mainstream consumption what does that say about us? Nothing good, I'm afraid.

Remember, too that one of the supposedly strongest taboos remaining about porn' is depictions of sexual violence. This is about nothing else. Just because actual rape doesn't feature, don't think for one minute that sexual gratification is not what's on these characters' minds.

Review: Zodiac

Following the events surrounding the pursuit of the notorious 'Zodiac' killer in 1970s California this film concentrates as much on the lives of those involved as it does on the hunt itself.
As such this means that it is not sensationalist, voyeuristic or insensitive. Of the murders shown onscreen they are cold, brutal and very realistic. Human beings are rather tough creatures and being stabbed or shot once or twice rarely kills them as it does in most movies. This creep's victims suffer and many survive and that makes them more disturbing to watch than any gore-splattered slasher flick.

Actually, this is closer to a drama-documentary than it is to most run-of-the-mill cinema and has much in common with the likes of United 93 in look and tone. The main difference being a stellar cast giving credible, if all-too familiar performances throughout. Robert Downey jr reprises the kooky, alcoholic junkie once more and one wonders if it's his masochism or the crass insensitivity of the casting system that considers it wise to put a recovering addict in this role. A thought; are they just banking on it not mattering if he falls off the wagon again by casting him in roles where he could turn up as pissed as a fart and just be thought to be acting his ass off?

Even if the latter is the case then one wonders what Jake Gyllenhaal's excuse is for playing Peter Parker? Hell, apart from the lack of red jammies and being a cartoonist rather than a photographer there's not much light shining through the gap between these characters. Or is he auditioning to be Tobey Maguire's replacement?

Oh, and what's with the wig on Anthony Green? He's the spitting image of Kevin Costner in it and that can't be at all helpful for his career these days!

As for the film itself, it's far too long, too waffly and suffers badly from having no central protagonist. It's meant to be Jake Gyllenhall, but as he spends the initial 2/3rds of the film bumbling around in the background, it's hard to relate to him. Characters bow out of the story with hardly a mention and are not really noticed once they've gone. With no resolution, no threat and no tension the film suffers badly and, quite frankly, should have been a made-for-telly drama/documentary. Without the 'character development' it would have been 40 minutes quicker and all the better for it. It doesn't help that this is a story whose main impact outside of the US was in being used as the loose basis for the first Dirty Harry film. It, at least, had tension and pace.

This is getting rave reviews. God knows why as by the final reel you'll be begging for the Zodiac Killer to just get them all so you can get up and get some feeling back into your ass.