Review: Plane

Plane (spoilers)
Cert: 15 / 107 mins / Dir. Jean-François Richet / Trailer

What a world. In other times, a film of Plane's calibre would have been shuffled directly to video; in 2023 it's used to prop up ailing cinema schedules. Yes, The Butler is back! Everyone's favourite Caledonian commando returns as Brodie Torrance™, the white, middle-aged, single-dad, widowed-husband, troubled-past, diamond in the rough airline pilot who routinely turns up late to his own flights looking like he's slept in a skip and somehow not getting breathalised on every single step of the gangplank. A man who's spent so much time at high altitude, his oxygen-starved brain can't remember what accent it's supposed to be sending to his mouth.

For the avoidance of doubt, Brodie is Scottish™, a fact which gets mentioned in the script approximately every fifteen minutes as a sort of disclaimer to international audiences who won't be able to understand three out of every four words he says. Sadly, the territory where Gerard will achieve the lowest level of actual verbal decoding, is Scotland...

STORMY

But to the film. Brodie departs Singapore one dark and stormy night bound for the good old US of A, his small passenger manifest being bumped up by an accompanied felon who's being extradited after capture abroad. Flying through the maelstrom, the craft is struck by lightning causing a power-outage, meaning the captain is forced to make a crash landing on the first landmass which comes to sight. The plane touches down roughly, with two on-board fatalities. What's worse though, is that upon debarking the crew work out that this island is under the control of separatist militia, and the inhabitants of the plane won't be rescued by these people, but more likely taken hostage and/or just murdered. So it's up to Dark Horse Brodie Torrance to put his RAF-past into good use, and put his trust in the most dangerous man on the plane to help them all out...

So it's worth remembering that while The Nasty Militia come to be the film's antagonists through luck rather than judgement, all of this is caused by a lightning strike as Gerard flies through a storm. Yes for clarity, the real bad-guy in this movie is weather. Although given the carbon-footprint of launching a 155-seater McDonnell Douglas MD-80*¹ just to carry 14 passengers, it certainly feels like mother nature's ire is justified.

JACK

A po-faced survival thriller custom designed for all the dad-heroes in the audience, the problem with Plane is that is just isn't very good. Butler seems to be playing a dialled-down version of his usual action-hero hoping for gravitas, but comes off as chronically tired instead. The script doesn't have his usual level of quippery, and charisma isn't making up the shortfall. And sure, maybe Gerard's not quite right for the part, but after Willis, Gibson, Neeson and Statham, who else is answering the phone in 2022?

Mike Colter strives as Louis Gaspare, the handcuffed antihero on sudden day-release, but the film only uses him for action sequences and does absolutely nothing to actually explore let alone redeem him. Everyone else is set-dressing, there are no characters in this movie. Most of the faces here are barely even archetypes. Once the separatist militia villains arrive, this turns into exactly the sort of mildly xenophobic action thriller we've all been expecting since the titles. Maybe not to Besson-levels, but even Captain Phillips bothered to find out what it was the pirates actually wanted.

There is some interesting camerawork in the film's combat scenes, to the point where you can tell this was all director Jean-François Richet was really interested in capturing. Although to be fair, that's a charge which can be levelled at a large percentage of the target audience, as well. Truth be told, at a nuts-and-bolts level the film is about as well assembled as you could hope for this sort of thing. The problem here isn't the execution but the product itself, the first screenplay seemingly written by ChatGPT*².

SNOWMAN

Apart from anything else, the plane's only in the air for 19 minutes. By that logic they might as well have called the movie 'Shirt', at least Gerard waits the full half hour before ditching that. In a just universe, that craft would have come down on the island from H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon, then we could spend the rest of the film watching every character wish they'd smashed into the sea instead.

Despite the occasional feint in the direction of a plot twist the film is reassuringly linear, and no matter how wide-eyed and earnest Gerry gets with his mugging to camera, Plane is bland, disposable and frankly boring. Of course it could be worse. We should probably think ourselves lucky that Mark Wahlberg wasn't flying it...

Asda. End of aisle cardboard pop-up.
Gifts for Father's Day.
£2.

*¹ Seriously, I fucking love plane-geeks just like I fucking love train-geeks. If Star Wars didn't take up all my brain-shelves I'd totally be in one of those clubs. Magnificent work you beautiful people. ^{[ BACK ]}


*² Spoilers, highlight-to-read: And fair fucking play, I did not have the film turning into Flight Of The Phoenix on my bingo card. Rather than killing the all bad guys (because he's only killed several), Gerry decides he'd better repair his own plane and fly the rescued passengers all out of there. Because sure, he's ex-RAF so that means he's a fucking one-man ground crew. And sure, he could have performed this (apparently) five minute task at the start of Act II well before the militia showed up, when he had the time, the space and significantly fewer bullet holes in him, but let's not split hairs, eh? [/End]
Mind you, while I'm on: I'm assuming none of their mobiles work once they're on the main island after the crash? Because if that's mentioned in the script it's well buried among the screeching and complaining, and not a single character keeps forlornly jabbing at their Samsung that we see. And yet there, in the film's closing moments, is Gerry sitting on the back steps of the plane on the blower to his girl. How? This scene only takes place fifty miles away from the rest of the movie, there's either coverage in the Phillipines or there's not. Apart from anything else, all those militia bods are totally the type to be with 3 Mobile... [/End]
^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Angel Has Fallen

Angel Has Fallen
Cert: 15 / 121 mins / Dir. Ric Roman Waugh / Trailer



It’s always darkest before the dawn, and you know you’re in the heart of the school Summer holidays when your local cinema can only free themselves from swathes of brightly coloured animated features by screening a straight-to-DVD sequel they've picked up from the £3 shelf in Sainsbury’s.

Yes, the law of diminishing returns has brought us to Angel Has Fallen, the third entry in what its star is apparently calling A Franchise*¹. Gerard Butler, a feature-length Wellman advert with the focus less on vitamin supplements and more on protein shakes laced with shots of testosterone, plays Mike Angel Banning, all-round Man™ and personal bodyguard to Morgan Freeman’s President Character*². When Gerry is framed after a botched assassination attempt, it’s up to him to escape from the custody of the security services and uncover the dark heart of the web of corruption and y’know what? You know exactly how this works by now, I don’t have to explain it. It's that film.

SHORT

Now I’m trying to keep this review on the short side and lord knows I have a huge laundry list of complaints on why this is not a great movie. But you can tell that from the title, the poster and the cast. I still went anyway, so I'm to blame for my experience in there. Oh look the first sequence has Danny Huston in it as Gerry's boss, I wonder if he’ll turn out to be Actually A Baddie on account of not having played a genuinely sympathetic character since *checks notes* ...1995? Let’s wait and see.

So while it’s Butler’s turn here to live out every Top Gear fan’s daydream of being the Man™ surrounded by a cast that exist solely to either fear or revere him, this could just as easily be a vehicle for Wahlberg. Or for Damon. Or for Neeson. The result would be exactly the same. And far be it from me to big up the career of Dominic Cooper, but his capable, gruff, yet emotionally scarred super-security-operative was dealing with suspiciously acrobatic killer drones two bloody years ago, mate. And it wasn't good then, either. In a failed bid to redress the chromosome imbalance of the movie, Piper Perabo has been airdropped in to be Tearful Wife On Phone™ (Radha Mitchell having finally had enough after doing this twice), appearing every fifteen minutes or so to act as a visual reminder than Gerry is a) straight and b) a family man. Wahlberg would approve, if nothing else.

WATTS

Between Huston, Freeman and Butler, there’s so much phoning-in of performances*³ here that British Telecom have an exec-producer credit. The whole thing is almost spectacularly formulaic, which might not be so bad if two thirds of that cast hadn’t already pulled the exact same shit twice already with the same character names*⁴. But Angel Has Fallen commits that most egregious of all cinematic crimes: it’s relentlessly boring. Although I was quite surprised how linear a conspiracy thriller can get away with being these days. If there’s a man, woman or child who isn’t instinctively able to map out the film's plot structure and resolution after about four minutes then the audience for This Type Of Thing is truly secured.

We go through the motions (scowling, grunting, final mano-a-mano faceoff fight on a rooftop which is clearly an indoor soundstage) until Gerry wins. Obvs. There's a sort of mid-credits scene that appears a minute into the credits, so sure is the editor that people will not otherwise be hanging around to see it. The sizeable audience with whom I shared an auditorium still continued leaving during that. They'd seen 'directed by', that was the end, that was the deal and they were damn-well sticking to it. A patron adjacent to me sat and ate an entire full-size tube of Pringles throughout this movie, a level of heart-disease-baiting that I feel is entirely in keeping for a genre which the BBFC are rumoured to be designating a new rating of 'G – Suitable for Gammon’.

Even with its so-far patchy selection, the cinema of 2019 is a well-stocked bar boasting real ale, craft beer, fine wines, cocktails and slammers.

Angel Has Fallen is like looking at all that and asking for a pint of Carling...

Equalizer 2, Jason Bourne, Mile 22.



If you are Gerard Butler's mum.



Well, one only hopes that when this film hits DVD after the requisite 17-week period, the packaging designers are going to pre-print the 'Gifts For Father's Day' flash directly onto the cover-art, to save supermarkets a bit of time over the next fifteen years.



It is not.



That's likely.



Inexplicably, no.

Like someone in the sound-editing department has gone "No Terry, we're better than that…"



Level 1: That dancer from Dryden Vos's barge-party is in this.





*¹ Gerry. Mate. There’s a Subway on my nearest high street where they regularly put notices in the window to say they’ve run out of the base ingredient, bread, and that they’ll be closed before 6pm due to staffing shortages. That Subway is part of a franchise, too. Do you see where I’m going with this? ^{[ BACK ]}

*² I’m sure the words “President Trumball” seemed perfectly benign when this series began in 2013. I mean why wouldn’t they? But the writers are in a hole now, aware that any time Freeman’s character is referred to by name there’ll be an involuntary twitch from the audience at the point of ”President Trum-“. Bad luck lads, what can you do? I mean you certainly can't kill him off, otherwise your leading hero is shit at his own and only job. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ Although it’s worth noting that while Freeman literally phoned in most of his turn for the second movie, this time he opts for being in a coma for most of the run-time. In that respect, his was the sole character I began to identify with. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Look, we know you’re not trying, Gerry, and you certainly know. But can you at least act as if you’re interested? Sorry, daft question... ^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Den Of Thieves

Den of Thieves
Cert: 15 / 140 mins / Dir. Christian Gudegast / Trailer



Oh, Gerard. Still growling his way through action movies. Still hoping this is just a phase as the his craggy features become ever-more pronounced. Still picking up the Embittered, Alcoholic, Rule-Breaking Cop™ roles that Neeson is too busy for, most likely because they both share a similar level of accent-control. Anyhow, some casting-call listed that aforementioned part along with the character name "Big Nick O'Brien" and his agent evidently thought it was tailor-made for Paisley's finest. And so it came to be.

Big Gerard stars as Big Nick, a police detective in charge of a specialist counter bank robbery squad in downtown Los Angeles (the bank robbery capital of the world, according to the helpful overlay cards we get in the opening moments). When the boys in dress-down body armour get wind of an imminent job on the Federal Reserve*¹, it's scowling all round as we follow the cops and criminals alike through a maze of meticulous planning and frantic gunfire. Nick is constructed entirely from tattoo-ink, cigarettes, scotch, coffee, donuts, Pepto-Bismol*², a weakness for hookers and a maverick disdain for The Suits™. Textbook stuff, to put it diplomatically.

And amazingly, it's not awful.
Although it's pretty far from great.

It also appears that all of Hollywood's script editors are currently on strike. Den of Thieves should be a clock-punching 95 minute romp of shakycam car chases and punch-ups. Instead, director Christian Gudegast self-indulgently ambles along for 140 of them, seeming to believe the movie has something profoundly unique or meaningful to reveal to the audience and the genre itself. Long brooding scenes of Nick's incidental domestic strife try to shore-up a character who hasn't been built in the first place.

In one over-long interrogation scene, Nick explains to a kidnapped suspect "you're not the bad guys - we are". Probably just as well he cleared that up, since other than himself, getaway driver Donnie (O'Shea Jackson Jr) and chief-crim Ray Merrimen*³ (Pablo Schreiber), the members of each 'crew' are underwritten and interchangeable. For the last hour, even the film itself has no idea who it's actually rooting for. But the end result is the same: a £3 Father's Day DVD assembled from offcuts of every heist movie made in the last 40 years.

Packaged like absolute filler and delivered like it too, Den Of Thieves is fine, if unremarkable. The core idea is solid enough, but the movie lacks character.
As well as characters.

Watch Dog Day Afternoon, Hell Or High Water, Sicario and Logan Lucky.
I mean instead, not as-well-as. They're all far better.

Fuck it, even Triple 9 manages to keep the same shit under two hours..



Nope.



Stream it, tops.



Nope.



Nope.



Nope.



Level 1: This film features Uncredited Stormtrooper from The Last Jedi. And you may well snort at that, but if it was on my CV, that's how I'd be introducing myself at dinner parties.





*¹ And I'm pleased to report that the line from the trailer in which Pablo Schreiber describes the Federal Reserve as being "like Fort Knox" has been removed in the final edit. Because as we've all known since 1995, that's a false equivalence. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Although no packaging is displayed on-screen, Pepto-Bismol is specifically namechecked in the final shooting-script. Although that's still nowhere near as cool as that time Seabrook Crisps got a product-placement deal in a Fast & Furious flick. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ 'Ray Merrimen'? Surely he should be Robin Merrimen, if anything? That said, if a movie titled 'Den of Thieves' can be made without Dennis Waterman or Hugh Dennis as the lead actor, we shouldn't expect too much from naming conventions within it.
^{[ BACK ]}


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Geostorm

Geostorm
Cert: 12A / 109 mins / Dir. Dean Devlin / Trailer



Before we get started, I saw the new trailer for The Last Jedi today, on the biggest screen in my local. So the afternoon wasn't entirely wasted. Right, then. It's a sad fact of 2017 that Gerard Butler's name on a poster usually points to the production being toward the lower-end of the Tomatometer, but that's where we are. A disaster-flick from the co-writer of two Independence Day movies and 1998's Godzilla was never going to hold any great thematic enigmata, yet this new presentation still manages to disappoint, irritate and bore. That said, it would be unfair to call Geostorm indescribably bad. Not least because I'm about to describe how bad it is...

The plot: The year is 2019 (or thereabouts?), and the Earth's network of weather-stabilising satellites is malfunctioning, causing localised Extreme Weather™, which is killing people. Since Gerard Butler is the one who designed the whole system (no really), he has to go into space to punch things until they all start working again. Meanwhile, his brother Jim Sturgess leads the mission on Earth to uncover the conspiracy behind why it's all happening. Obviously this includes President Andy Garcia Of The USA, because movies. Also, Gerard may be a reluctant-genius, borderline alcoholic insubordinate, but he's got a daughter from a previous marriage because it's important that we know he's straight. That's how I read it, anyway.

Science fact! During inclement weather, buildings and vehicles will explode fierily for no reason…

Our tale begins by having a child deliver a condescending monologue on climate-change and apolitical international cooperation*¹. That's how it begins. This narration isn't returned to until the film's final moments when at least the majority of the audience can use their empty popcorn receptacles as sick-bags. The driving force behind the narrative is that humanity (well, Gerard Butler) has constructed a planetary shield of satellites, which end up having the opposite of their intended effect. Which, if you recall, is basically the setup of Highlander II. Imagine how piss-poor your screenplay must be when it essentially rips off The Quickening. Perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps Dean Devlin has directed and co-written an unofficial prequel to one of the worst movies of all time. That would certainly fit.

The film itself quickly sketches in Butler as the put-upon everyman and Sturgess as his put-upon brother, then escalates from one contrived disaster set-piece to the next, like a story written by an 8yr old who doesn't realise this will all need wrapping up at some point. Every other line of dialogue is exposition. Either descriptive of what's happened in the past, descriptive of character motivations or descriptive of the things which are happening in the same room at that actual moment. It's as if Warner Bros have decided to save money by merging the script with the hearing-impaired Audio Description track. All that's missing from this packed barrel of bar-raising Wowshit is an appearance from Morgan Freeman as a respected academic whose role in the film is to scratch his head and not have a clue what's going on for the duration.

Dialogue highlight! I particularly enjoyed the moment when Gerard Butler has to tell his brother of the unspoken code between brothers by speaking it to his brother. #writing

As with all of these things, the point-of-jeopardy isn't the death of the central characters, but the potential extinction of all humanity itself. Although since that would necessarily include the death of the central characters, it often feels like a tempting trade-off.

On the plus-side, the effects work is pretty solid in here, as is Butler's non-region-specific US accent, amazingly. I assume he's been taking extra tuition. Or maybe he's just nowhere near the worst thing in this film. I could write a lot, lot more about Geostorm's flaws, but quite frankly it isn't worth the effort (not mine to write, nor yours to read). Every single scene in this cries out for lengthy and merciless deconstruction, and I imagine that the inevitable CinemaSins takedown will be at least as long as the movie itself.

Verdict! Every bit as lazy, reductive and pointless as the trailer suggests and then some, this is a moral, artistic, categorical waste of $120m. If Dean Devlin is really so concerned about the environment, he can do his bit by ensuring that after its theatrical run, no more copies of Geostorm are produced in any format whatsoever…

This is like someone put Lockout, San Andreas and Armageddon into a blender they found in a skip, and smeared stale piss round the rim of your glass. While you were watching.



I saw this in a cinema where an elderly couple to my immediate right kept sporadically returning to their full-volume conversation, throughout.
It was not the most annoying thing which happened in that room.



I genuinely have no idea what this sets out to achieve.



The only individual to escape this debacle with any shred of dignity is Alexandra Maria Lara, who seems to have been acting for a much better film. She's going to be fucking livid when she watches this back.



You know what? I will, a bit.



Not that I heard.



Level 2: Our Hero Gerald appeared in 2008's RocknRolla of course, alongside Geoff '2nd Lt. Frobb' Bell.

Incidentally, there is also a scripted reference to Rocknrolla in Geostorm, which is delivered with all the consummate artistry of a toddler at a drum-kit.





*¹ And bear in mind, I'm already on-side for this. As a Guardian-reading, science-loving, realist, I know that the first step in actually tackling demonstrable climate change is by affecting people's attitudes. And even I found this to be a load of manipulative, sanctimonious old shit, half-heartedly smeared across a two-hour montage of cities collapsing for no explicable reason. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to sit in my back garden, burning old refrigerators full of polystyrene, just out of spite… ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Gods of Egypt

Gods of Egypt
Cert: 12A / 127 mins / Dir. Alex Proyas / Trailer



Now, I've complained about the San Miguel advert in another post, I know, but it played again tonight after the trailers and immediately before the film, like some unofficial sponsor of what was to come. 'How is this going to put in a good mood for a movie I'm already half-dreading?'*¹ I thought. Then after five minutes, I saw the thematic link. Gods of Egypt stars Brendon Thwaites and Courtney Eaton as a young, naive couple, and both their mannerisms and delivery are worthy of that San Miguel advert! This was going to be a long night...

Blah, blah, ancient Egypt. Blah, blah gods walking among men. Blah, blah there's a good one and a bad one and they're going to spend two hours chasing each other and fighting through a CGI landscape while an annoying adolescent attempts to crack jokes, and also there's some lady-gods with barely constrained boobies For The Dads*². You know the drill, you've seen it before.

The film's script weaves back and forth between pompous and excruciating, while the visual effects work on a sliding-scale between 'pretty slick' and 'Power Rangers'. From a production-design standpoint, the comparisons to Stargate are inevitable (and undeserved to be fair, given the film's setting), but for those of you into tick-lists, there are some serious visual nods to Clash of the Titans, Watchmen, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Assassins Creed and even John Carter. I'm also fairly certain I saw a carved glyph of the Playboy bunny when Horus is climbing up a tower at one point; a visual gag which gets less funny the more you think about it.

It also didn't escape my attention that the film's conceit of having the 'god' characters appear as scaled-up giants next to the humans is so inconsistently executed that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (god) and Brendon Thwaites (human) miss each other's eyeline for approximately half of their shared scenes, as Brendon appears to be changing size each time he's on-screen.

Accents are a massive bugbear of mine (as regular readers will attest), but given that this story is a) translated into English from whatever ancient Egyptian dialogue would have been used and b) completely fictionalised anyway, the mix of US/UK tones throughout the cast didn't actually bother me at all. I'd have just liked Gerard Butler to pick one. A telling watermark for Butler's films will be the accent he's allowed to use for his dialogue. His better and/or more entertaining flicks feature him with his natural Paisley brogue, whereas the poorer works tend to see him struggling under the weight of Fauxmerican. However, after watching Gods of Egypt in its entirety, I'm still not sure what he was meant to be doing. He rolls a few Rs with that wry smirk of his, but I swear to god(s) he's doing a sort of Italian-Cockney half the time. I think Gerard may actually have forgotten how to be Scottish now, like one of those people who get a bang on the head and start speaking in another language without realising it...

Anyway. As utterly shite as this film is (and it is), at least Gods of Egypt didn't succeed in making me angry, if only because it doesn't seem to be taking itself seriously at all. Although that said, it's not even silly enough to be a decent kids' film.

The really weird thing is that this is all brought to us by Alex Proyas, the director of The Crow and Dark City. While neither of those movies are ageing particularly well, they're both incredibly interesting, unique pieces of work. This ancient tale, on the other hand, is timelessly incoherent.

If you were looking for the perfect movie to top off a triple-bill with I, Frankenstein and Jupiter Ascending, Gods of Egypt is for you...

Immortals.
Watch this if you enjoyed Immortals…



No.



No.



No.



Yes.



No.



Level 1: This movie stars Bruce 'Tion Medon' Spence.
And isn't it quite awful that Spence is cast as a decaying Egyptian Pharaoh Zombie, yet is instantly recognisable? Poor bloke…




*¹ It's not that I'd "pre-judged" the movie exactly, but after watching the trailer several times it was pretty fucking difficult to feel enthusiastic about the prospect of two-hours worth...

*² Or indeed for the 14yr olds this film is aimed at, to be fair.


DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.