Review: Unwelcome

Unwelcome
Cert: 15 / 104 mins / Dir. Jon Wright / Trailer

Directed by Jon Wright, Unwelcome is the story of a young expecting couple in central London - Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) and Jamie (Douglas Booth) - who inherit a house from Doug's elderly aunt in rural Ireland. Upon arriving in the idyllic village, the pair are cautioned by neighbour Maeve (Naimh Cusack) that certain superstitious traditions have to be upheld. More pressingly though, repairs to their semi-dilapidated home are being carried out by local ne'er-do-wells The Whelan Family (Jamie-Lee O'Donnell, Chris Walley, Kristian Nairn and none other than Colm Meaney - the Poundland Brendan Gleeson). The incompatibility between city attitudes and countryside manners soon grinds everything to a halt as Maya and John begin to find out who their enemies really are...

BALANCE

Some movies struggle to balance all their ideas, feeling like they've been written by a committee. Others suffer because only one person was at the typewriter, unable to fully develop ideas or bounce them around to greater effect. Unwelcome is firmly in the second camp and, frankly, Uneven. The film teases its semi-demonic Powrie (or red caps / little-people) well enough throughout, but the backstory and methodology is too vaguely defined to really sell their malevolence to the viewer. There's plenty to enjoy for seasoned fans of mid-budget horror, but for everyone else the film will be markedly less satisfying.

It's perfectly cast, albeit for slightly undemanding roles (I certainly wish I could have seen the version of the film that Hannah John-Kamen seems to be acting in; it looks much better), and initially appears to be beautifully filmed with crisp, rich, warm tones from cinematographer Hamish Doyne-Ditmas. But then this look continues. And increases. Now I'm as guilty as the next reviewer of complaining about stylised desaturation these days, but this is too just colourful for the atmosphere it's trying to conjure. Even the night-scenes are lit up like an operating theatre...

Despite clearly sitting within a set budget it's not that the film feels cheaply made, but cheaply written. Penned for the screen by Mark Stay (from a story by him and the film's director), this begins in heavy-handed full-throttle and pretty much continues in this vein as even the 'friendly' people in the village seem inherently weird. But this isn't some London-phobic tale of outsiders being shunned by locals, we're just hanging out with a couple who can't catch a break. There's also a rich seam of dark comedy waiting to be mined out in the countryside, but for the most part the gags are DOA because of how needlessly harrowing the rest of the movie is.

CROSS

The main problem is that once our heroes arrive in Ireland, the intense colour saturation lends the film a dream-like air, as in a video game or a badly shot soundstage pretending to be an exterior location. In this environment, it's impossible to introduce a credible threat since a sense of reality doesn't exist to be disrupted. Therefore, the only way to generate sympathy for Maya and Jamie is for the film to relentlessly punish them for misdemeanours they really haven't committed. Director Jon Wright clearly despises his characters, but would like you to stroke your chin at their misfortune instead.

Unwelcome never slows down enough to properly build tension. The Whelan family are certainly very unpleasant, but never become real characters to be properly frightening. And the only person in the entire town who seems to know anything about the Powrie is Maeve, who fails to really give enough detail about why they're to be feared/respected. Jamie's Aunt may have entered into some bargain with the little people, but it doesn't follow suit that Maya has to continue it, particularly since they don't seem to be intimidating the rest of village (not in an organised way, at least).

KRISTOFFERSON

On a social-level, the film deals with its very specific themes very acutely, but there's little beyond that. Horror works best as metaphor; this is just a modern retooling of the Hammer-era folk chiller (by way of Dog Soldiers, then by way of Labyrinth) using mawkish audience manipulation rather than actual storycraft. If anything, it's disappointingly literal.

When the film finally lets rip with its bloodsoaked finale, the story has spent so long gleefully abusing its protagonists that all of the inbuilt ridiculous humour instantly evaporates, but the focused urge for crimson revenge isn't quite there either as the bad guys are split over two hastily sketched - but entirely separate - groups.

I can envision Unwelcome playing really well to a packed film-festival crowd who are into the corniness and care slightly less about pacing, but in a quarter-full multiplex screening this sort of fell on its arse a bit. The lack of atmosphere in the room is not the film-makers' fault of course, but that does affect a viewer's perception of what they're watching. A civilian audience isn't going to wryly guffaw at a heavily pregnant woman being terrorised for over an hour and a half.

This is a weird little first-draft of a movie. As a trashy, cautionary-horror flick it's absolutely fine, but there's the unscratched-itch that Unwelcome could have used its runtime for something much smarter and more meaningful...

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: Ant-Man And The Wasp

Ant-Man and The Wasp (first-pass / 2D / spoiler-free)
Cert: 12A / 118 mins / Dir. Peyton Reed / Trailer



Good things come to those who wait, and viewers in the UK have been standing by for the arrival of Marvel Studios' Ant-Man And The Wasp for almost a month. The twentieth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe landed in the US on 6th July, but the UK release was postponed until 2nd August, reportedly because some people were playing football or somesuch.

But cometh the hour, cometh the ant, and Peyton Reed's anticipated sequel is finally here. The story picks up around two years after the events of Captain America: Civil War, but before those of the recent Avengers movie. Having struck a plea-deal with the FBI for Ant-Man's part in breaking the Sokovia Accords, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is nearing the end of a 24-month house-arrest, while Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and her father Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) have spent the time on the run, legally complicit in Lang's crime by virtue of owning the equipment he used to shrink and enlarge himself.

The Pyms haven't been idle in their time though, and are nearing completion on a machine to explore the Quantum Realm, certain now that they can rescue Hank's wife (and Hope's mother), Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), who's been lost in there for 30 years. For this, they need to bring Lang out of his enforced retirement. But the product of their secretive work is in high demand, and black market tech dealer Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) has gotten wind of what they're building, as has a mysterious entity known only as the Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who is equally keen to acquire the finish product. The race for the Quantum Tunnel is on, but do any of its participants realise exactly what they're hoping to unleash..?

The good news - Marvel have succeeded once again, demonstrating why they're the market leaders in superhero movies which are entertaining, heartfelt and funny. Director Reed keeps the plates spinning with a focused skill, smoothing out the often-competing plot strands. As hectic as the five-author screenplay becomes, everything pulls in the same direction, blending action and humour in the way we've come to expect, all set against the backdrop of the larger continuity.

Paul Rudd is on solid form as our flippantly laid-back hero, still trying to balance a slightly dysfunctional family life with his membership of the Avengers. Evangeline Lilly gets to shine more properly this time around, stepping into the Wasp costume revealed at the end of the first instalment. Bringing both brains and brawn to the partnership, Hope van Dyne threatens to overshadow her counterpart on several occasions with a performance which is bigger than the script Lilly is working from.

Elsewhere, Michael Douglas holds the fort once more as the irascible Dr. Hank Pym, matched only by an unusually brittle turn from Laurence Fishburne as his ex research colleague, Bill Foster. Light slapstick and bickering duties are carried again by Michael Peña, T.I. and David Dastmalchian, while Judy Greer, Bobby Cannavale and Abby Ryder Fortson return to flesh out Lang's home-life.

But the show is very nearly stolen by Hannah John-Kamen's Ghost. A fantastic emotive and physical performance coupled with a character who's in a satisfyingly grey area make this antagonist arguably the most interesting aspect of the entire film.

Because while Ant-Man And The Wasp is a great ride and undoubtedly Marvel™, there's something missing.

A huge part of that is the wow-factor. Whereas the 2015's Ant-Man had the element of pleasant surprise on its side, this sequel is weighed down with expectation, much like Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2. But rather than build upon the universe of the first entry, Reed's film feels more like an extension. Rudd's trademark deadpan exasperation has been more or less usurped by Chris Pratt's Star Lord at this stage, leaving the former's quips feeling a little flat. And although the gags are fast and frequent here, the script pales next to the gleeful boisterousness of Thor: Ragnarok. It's almost as if the rest of the MCU has overtaken this casual outsider.

The next issue is one of Ant-Man And The Wasp's scale (no pun intended). While the whole MCU project has been on a generally upward trajectory since its birth in 2008, how do you top the dramatic weight of Avengers: Infinity War? Well in this case, you don't. Edgar Wright's original foundations for Ant-Man were separate from Thanos' quest to get his hands on the magical mitt, so even after Wright's departure, the 2015 feature had a 'detached' quality. Of course the in-universe link is stronger this time around, with half of the setup coming from Civil War, but the West-coast location and lack of cross-over characters from other titles give the story the feeling of a spin-off, rather than a numbered chapter within the main narrative. This isn't necessarily a bad thing of course. After all, Disney's other studio, Lucasfilm, played a similar card by succeeding (also chronologically preceding) the divisive heft of The Last Jedi with the breezy swagger of Solo, a sort of palate cleanser for the continuity.

But truth be told, the stakes never feel particularly high in Ant-Man And The Wasp. Walton Goggins' bad guy is certainly painted as an unpleasant character, but carries little sense of actual danger (indeed, his presence seems to be a setup for a long-running joke about truth serum). Considering the title specifically names two characters, Evangeline Lilly's Wasp is still effectively a sidekick here, and the story revolves more firmly around what Ant-Man is up to. Equally, with Brie Larson's Captain Marvel on the horizon, you might think that a female character like Hannah John-Kamen's Ghost would play a more central role in the proceedings, especially given her close ties to the protagonists. Instead, she's criminally underused, a cog which could exist solely to make the machine appear more complex.

And all of this might be more forgivable if it wasn't for the frequent bursts of exposition wrapped in shoddily explained pseudo-science; Marvel is usually above this methodology. Obviously the viewer needs to accept the convoluted concept of items being able to shrink and enlarge at the touch of a button if they're to go with the flow. But they'll also need to believe that a vehicle can be reduced from full-size to that of a child's toy, yet still somehow maintain the same speed on the road after the transformation. As if the physics of wheel-RPM doesn't count in the MCU. And when pedantic things like that are sticking in your humble correspondent's mind during the movie, it's probably not doing all it could be to engage an audience on other levels.

The last four paragraphs aside, the incredible shrinking adventure of Ant-Man And The Wasp is an enormous amount of fun. Perhaps not the Fantastic Voyage it could have been, but it's nice to see that Marvel aren't Downsizing just yet.

Good things come to those who wait. Although great ones seem more arbitrary…

The business-end (not spoilers, but highlight-to-read anyway):

• Is there a Wilhelm Scream? Not that I heard.
• Is there a Stan Lee cameo? There is, yes.
• Is there a mid-credits scene? Of course there is.
• Is there a post-credits scene? There is. More on this in my second-pass review.

Well, Ant-Man.



Yes, obviously.



Yes, obviously.



It's not.



I shouldn't imagine so.



Not that I heard.



Level 1: That un-named First Order Officer from The Force Awakens is in this.







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: Ready Player One

Ready Player One (3D)
Cert: 12A / 140 mins / Dir. Steven Spielberg / Trailer



Ah, the evenings are getting lighter and Steven Spielberg returns as only he can, with a sci-fi adaptation that will completely reinforce audiences' existing opinions on Ernie Cline's source-novel. People who loved reading Ready Player One will get a lot out of this cinematic rendering, while those who were 'less enthusiastic' will see their list of gripes brought to three-dimensional life. Anyone who hasn't read the book will see both the pros and cons which others have discussed, and probably develop a headache around twenty minutes in which lasts until they go to bed. Feel free to guess at this point the category into which your humble correspondent falls...

So our digital hero's journey begins in 2045 and follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), aka Parzival in the virtual reality/internet hybrid known as The Oasis. Wade spends his free time hunting for Easter eggs throughout the virtual realm in the hope of winning the grand prize - ownership of the system and half a trillion dollars. Teaming up with fellow adventurer Samantha/Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), the pair form a team to liberate The Oasis from the hands of Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn)'s megacorporation IOI, who want to take final control of the game and its participants.

First things first, I didn't dislike this. I feel that's worth pointing out because of everything I'm about to say. Ready Player One certainly can't be faulted for its ambition. The execution however, is another matter. In a very real sense, this is a CGI-animated piece with live-action segments, and the visual effects work and sound design is outstanding all round. That said, it'd be even better if the whole thing would slow down long enough to get a proper look at anything. Even with its rare quiet moments, there's barely a static camera throughout the entire movie.

And it's this frenetic pace which bleeds over into a hastily presented plot setup, as we race from one set-piece to the next, with unintroduced characters reciting industrial amounts of exposition (all the more notable, in a film which basically makes no sense*¹). With a runtime of over two hours, Ready Player One is like being waterboarded with Sunny Delight while Peter Kay repeatedly bellows "d'you remember the 80s?"*² over a blaring synth-rock jukebox soundtrack…

Because the centrepiece of the buzz and attraction around Cline's work, for better or worse, is its array of pop-culture references. While the film is clearly delighted with the Warner Bros, Ambin, Capcom and 20th Century Fox properties its been able to secure the rights to, others are notable by their absence. Marvel's superheroes can be name-checked, but we only see DC's. This could well be for the same mouse-related reason that the definitive movie about nostalgia and iconic pop culture doesn't have any Disney characters in its arsenal, and while the script mentions "padawan" and "Millennium Falcon", visual Star Wars references are buried deep within the noise*³.

It's entirely possible for a movie to depict a chaotic environment without itself devolving into chaos. Ready Player One hasn't nailed it, though. That's not to say that the action is particularly convoluted or difficult to follow - Cline's story structure itself is truly worthy of the Spielberg treatment. But the white-noise approach to the production values, coupled with dubious casting choices*⁴ threatens to make the whole thing feel like... well, like watching someone else play a game for two-and-a-bit hours. I'm genuinely sad to say that I was pulled out of the film at several points by the thought '...am I supposed to be caring what happens to these characters?'. Which is unheard of for a Steven Spielberg flick.

Ready Player One isn't nostalgia, it's a fan-service simulation of it - which is the point, after all. The metaphors about online and gaming communities were always going to feel heavy-handed in a story about online and gaming communities, but the final product also lacks that sense of eye-widening wonder which Spielberg has effectively written the book on, over the last four decades. All I got here was a sense of overload.

There's a point in the first act where Parzival stands at a mirror and asks "...does it look like I'm trying too hard?". This is a crystallisation of the whole film.

It feels like a cop-out to say Tron and The Matrix, but Tron and The Matrix...



If you watch it at all, the cinema is the place to do so, yes.



This is so visually dense that it lends itself to rewatching, and in the highest definition possible.



Okay, let's not go mad here.



Nope.



Yes. It's in the first five minutes and it's pitched down an octave or so.



Level 1: Orson Krennic, Unkar Plutt and Ansiv Garmuth are in this.





*¹ Mendelsohn's evil corporate overlord shtick feels for all the world like Agent Smith in The Matrix, if Agent Smith couldn't actually control anything in The Matrix he's meant to be in charge of so just ran around after Neo shaking his fist. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Although at one point when Parzival rips out a Saturday Night Fever sequence in a club, Art3mis responds with "woah, old school!. Even though that's only six years older than all the 1983 references the film is so in love with, which at the time of the story taking place is sixty years previously anyway. Like nostalgia began in 1980 and ended in 1995. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ That said, Parzival's belt/holster looks an awful lot like Han Solo's ANH one, but with the Thundercats sigil etched into the buckle-plate. If only the rest of the film was this subtle with its referencing. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Full disclosure, I can't warm to Tye Sheridan. I'm sure he's an accomplished actor, I just haven't yet seen him in anything where I've enjoyed the performance. In Ready Player One, the live-action Wade manages to be more unlikeable than his outlandish digital alter-ego, Parzival. Which is quite something. Simon Pegg brings his own unique brand of insincerity to the film, plus Mark Rylance is overacting. Again. These are strange days when Olivia 'mahogany' Cooke manages to be one of the best performers in a movie. ^{[ 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: Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider (3D)
Cert: 12A / 118 mins / Dir. Roar Uthaug / Trailer



Full disclosure: I haven't seen the previous movies or played any of the games, so I was watching the new Tomb Raider purely as an action/adventure flick. Adjust your response to my responses accordingly.

So, it's mid-March and this is the first 3D movie I've seen in 2018, not that I've been avoiding them, which perhaps illustrates how the stereoscopic format has fallen in the eyes of schedulers and distributors. The last two MCU movies have opened in 2D before being joined in the listings by 3D screenings the following week. It's always been an 'event movie' gimmick, but it seems to be one which is fading in demand, rightly or wrongly. Speaking of event-movies…

Tomb Raider is the latest adaptation to make the perilous journey to our screens from gaming consoles*¹, never an easy transition at the best of times. As a starring vehicle for Alicia Vikander, it's helmed by Norweigan director Roar Uthaug, and written by Evan Daugherty, Alastair Siddons and Geneva Robertson-Dworet. It is, as one would expect, the first film in a potential cinematic franchise.

We open with Ms. Croft (Vikander) scraping an existence in London as an experienced archer, average boxer and exasperated cycle courier. She's flat broke, you see, that's why she's living out of a loft-arpartment in Shoreditch. In order to make ends meet, Lara has to get involved in her mysteriously-vanished father, Lord Croft's (Dominic West), business interests, by talking in-person to Derek Jacobi and Kristen Scott-Thomas while they phone in their performances from the same room.

Anyway, upon receiving an ancient, mystical Chinese puzzle box from her dad's solicitor, Lara cleverly unlocks its contents by just twisting at it for fifteen seconds, finding a key to a secret workshop on the Croft estate, where a camcorder which has lain untouched for six years still has charge left in its battery. Then it's off to Hong Kong for some Indiana Jones shit with barely-interested sidekick Lu Ren (Daniel Wu). Walton Goggins appears as Matthias Vogel, the film's obviously-creepy baddie, and nuances his performance by continuing to act that way, relentlessly.

Oh, also the world is at stake. Something about bio-weapons. The script doesn't spend too much time on that, since the characters who really want it wouldn't conceivably know about it until the film's third act, yet there they are.

So. The exterior action setpieces are choreographed, shot and directed well (which is at least partially the point here, admittedly), but as far as praise or 'finding the good' goes, that's really about it. Tomb Raider is spectacularly ordinary at best, and it's quite often not even that.

The problem, as usual, is that the collection of well-worn setpieces will work perfectly well in a game where there's interaction to the proceedings (let's not forget that Lara Croft was essentially a gender-flipped Indiana Jones to begin with). But once that's reverse-translated back onto the silver screen, all that's left is an almighty rip-off of the cinematic properties which inspired it. There's no intrigue or story driving Uthaug's movie, just the hope that Alicia Vikander sweating through a sports-vest will be enough to distract the audience from the aching void at the heart of the screenplay. Spoiler: It's not.

From the petulant, reluctant hero, to the slave-labour archaeology camp run by an evil anthropologist, to the white water rapids with a climactic waterfall, to the prising open of a cursed casket, Tomb Raider is little more than a tedious procession of adventure tropes you've seen done elsewhere, and better. The 3D is implemented well enough from a technical level, but it's pointless in a movie with this much skaky-cam and action scenes which take place in dark environments.

Then, the level of exposition here is horrendous. We get three bursts of backstory before Lara has even left London, and the third of those basically recaps the first. If the script was any more clunky it'd be written out in Lego. Although Lara is indeed presented as resourceful and tenacious, she doesn't have to try too hard to figure out the way to the Ark of the Covenant Himiko's sarcophagus, since Lord Croft has handily left a series of clue-dropping audio-diaries from previous adventures, like a cross between Rick O'Connell and Mr Kipling…

"…I found a speck on an old map that no-one else has". Three people were involved in writing this. That's actual dialogue delivered by Dominic 'The Wire' West. I was initially amazed the man could keep a straight face for his lines, but then I remembered that he recently did a pasta sauce advert for TV. That said, his mullet here is nothing short of awards-worthy, and I hope the notoriously short-memoried Academy panel keeps this in mind for next year's gongs.

For Vikander's sake, I hope the fee she negotiated is enough to compensate for the hit to her credibility as An Actual Actress. Easy money does not necessarily mean an easy life.

The movie plays out like a two-hour cutscene from a game you won't be bothered about finishing, and feels like it should be the fourth entry in a series, not the first. Just before it's re-cast for straight-to-DVD continuations and a kid-friendly animated spinoff.

Tomb Raider brings little interesting and nothing new to action-cinema, nor (I imagine) does it shed any new light upon the game series which spawned it. It's faintly ironic that the film has been rated 12A since it's natural target audience is ten years old and too wired on Haribo and Tango Ice-Blasts to analyse anything they see...*²

This film belongs firmly on the same shelf as Assassin's Creed and The Great Wall...



Hahahahahahahaha.



If you're a Tomb Raider completist, go for it.



It isn't.







There isn't.



Level 1: Jerus Jannick is in this.



I was going to give this an 'unsatisfying' 3/7, but reading back everything I've said about it, that hardly seems right...


*¹ Content-generators: Please stop penning speculative articles asking "Will this be the first good video-game movie?" every time one of these things comes along. We can safely assume it won't be, until we're miraculously proven wrong, upon which you can fill your clickbait boots retrospectively. Thanks. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² And even your kids will have seen all this before. ^{[ 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.