Allied Cert: 15 / 124 mins / Dir. Robert Zemeckis / Trailer
Ah, that awkward feeling when you realise you're watching Marion Cotillard being outstanding in a film which is only quite good. If anything, it reflects quite badly on director Robert Zemeckis that an actress who was probably pregnant for a lot of her scenes was the one required to do all the heavy lifting. But I'm getting ahead of myself…
Morocco, 1942. Canadian allied-forces spy Max Vatan is airdropped outside of Casablanca*1 and instructed to meet fellow operative Marianne Beausejour. Posing as a married couple, they are to carry out an assassination of a high-ranking Nazi official. After completing their mission (that's in the trailer, it's not a spoiler), they relocate to London and marry while Max continues working for the Ministry of Defence. But when his superiors have reason to believe that Marianne is a German spy filtering information back to the Fatherland, Max has to ask himself how deep her cover really is, and if he even knows the real Marianne at all…
An odd recipe this, putting Mr Pitt of 'no fixed genre' with thespic heavyweight Cotillard, written by Steven Knight (of Eastern Promises' parish) and directed by Robert 'Back To The Future' Zemeckis. And that list of primary ingredients is as uneven as the film which comes out of the cinematic oven after two hours.
Ultimately, Allied doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, be it a tense espionage thriller or angst-ridden romantic drama. As a result the film ends up convincing as neither, although it is quite a lot of fun in the meanwhile. The action set-pieces are nicely executed, as is the overall sense of creeping tension. Pitt seems to struggle when he's required to show emotion (although I can't tell how much of that is his perma-spy character not wanting to show his true colours), whereas Cotillard more than makes up for it with a performance which is far too subtle for a film like this. While each scene moves the story in the right direction, the film is baggy at just over two hours, often feeling like it's stalling the audience. Elsewhere there's some neat cinematography in the Casablanca section of the film (even if much of it screams 'soundstage'), and the damp, muted colour-palette of London complements it perfectly. We've also got long-time Zemeckis cohort Alan Silvestri on scoring duties, routinely playing his game of 'hide the BTTF opening-line' where everyone can hear it. Bless him.
The other awkward feeling comes in the film's closing moments, when a quiet, reflective coda suggests that the audience have been watching something emotionally engaging rather than just quite entertaining. For all the ducking, shooting, whispering and shouting though, the relationship at the centre of the film just didn't convince me. And that is supposed to be the point of the film.
I want to score Allied more highly, because it is enjoyable. But I know for a fact that in about a week, I won't remember a thing about it…
Well, it wants to be Inglourious Basterds with a heart, but it ends up more like Mr & Mrs Smith with a grimace.
As much fun as it is, there's nothing inherently cinematic about it, unfortunately.
Judging by the last few minutes?
Apparently not.
It's not.
I won't.
There is.
First firearm-related casualty of the movie.
Textbook stuff.
Level 2: This film stars messrs Brad Pitt and August Diehl, both of whom rocked up in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, a movie which featured a voice-over from Sam Windu Jackson.
I mean seriously, who casts Pitt and Diehl in a WWII thriller together again? Mind you, Daniel Betts is in this, and he starred with Pitt in Fury, another WWII drama. Thinking about it, the problem could just be Brad Pitt…
*1 Bear in mind, the film Casablanca wasn't released until 1942. This film is set in 1942. At the time it came out, it was another run-of-the-mill, quick-turnaround drama; well-received an'all, but it didn't gain its iconic status until years later. I only mention it because that line in the trailer where Marianne's like "You'll go on the roof. In Casablanca, that's where men go…" is a trope she wheels out every three minutes or so. Like there's something really special about this Nazi-occupied city that all the others in mainland Europe haven't got. "In Casablanca, we don't drive slowly" / "In Casablanca, men don't kiss their wives with their top shirt-buttons undone" / "In Casablanca, we start with the cutlery from the outside but we use the steak-knife to butter the bread". I genuinely expected Max to stop and yell "Oh, are we in Casablanca? I WISH YOU'D SAID SOMETHING EARLIER, I'VE DRESSED FOR CROYDON!"…
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.
Oh, Guy. You do know, don't you Guy, that they're still making East-End gangster movies? That 'Krays' one comes out in less than a month. That looks good, Guy. Why weren't you involved in that, Guy? I love your work when you do those movies. What are you doing, Guy? What is this?
And so, the inimitable Mr Ritchie takes directorial (and co-penmanship) duties over the relaunching of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the 1960s TV spy-show. Normally in this paragraph I'd summarise the film's premise in one or two sentences, but I'm not actually sure what it's about. Yeah, I've just watched it. Something involving inconsistent accents, a nuclear weapon and women wearing ridiculous sunglasses, but then aren't they all? Even Mission: Impossible (playing in the screen next door, aptly) has managed to leave most of that behind, although that's not a period-piece, to be fair.
But first things first, I didn't actively dislike this. I just couldn't like it, either. I feel it's important to lay that out now, because I'm about to do nothing but complain about it *ahem*…
What an almighty fucking mess this film is. A very stylish mess, like a Christmas-season aftershave commercial with extended bouts of gunfire, but a mess all the same. A plot which has been copy/pasted from page one of the spy-movie-screenwriter's-handbook, yet is still utterly incoherent, somehow; a distracting soundtrack which is all over the place stylistically and too loud in the mix; choppy editing and excessive split-screening; subtitles for the stretches of German/Russian/Italian dialogue which appear in a massive, yellow, block-serif typeface which is borderline unreadable for the amount of text (and time) displayed; and a leading man whose cartoonishly repetitively oscillating register makes all of his dialogue irrelevant*1.
Credit where it's due, Henry Cavill succeeds in one notable area; he manages to make Armie Hammer not be the worst thing in a film. Much of the script's dry humour falls upon Henners to deliver, and it's a ball which he drops repeatedly*2. The problem is that with Ritchie's much-maligned Sherlock Holmes movies, Robert Downey Jr was able to carry things along in his own style. TMFU has no such crutch. That said, Ritchie scores in one similar way with his latest rejuvenated franchise, in that the film will infuriate fans of the original series whilst baffling everyone else.
And was the inclusion of 'a still-practicing Nazi war-criminal who shows his victims photo-albums of his 'work' prior to torturing them slowly to death' written in to the film before or after the decision to go for a 12A certificate? For obvious reasons things don't get too gruesome, but it's still there and it's completely out of kilter with the rest of the film. Even if I found the electric-chair finale to be one of the best-delivered gags.
But y'know what? The Man From U.N.C.L.E. looks very pretty and if you're not fussy about being spoon-fed a non-plot then you'll probably get something out of it.
And yeah, that's me not-hating a movie...
Oh, it probably is, but only because it'll be better on a big screen than a small one.
Netflix/telly.
I have no fucking idea.
I don't think so; your mileage will vary.
Not really.
(already disagreed with Mrs Blackout over this one, even though she conceded many of my reasons for it being a mess)
Not that I heard, although anything that isn't Cavill's/Hammer's/Vikander's voice or the seizure-inducing soundtrack is largely white-noise, anyway.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. stars Alicia Vikander, who appeared in Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley from The Phantom Menace,
Son Of A Gun wih Ewan McGregor from TPM, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, and Ex Machina with Domnhall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac from The Force Awakens.
She's connected.
What I'm asking is, why hasn't Alicia Vikander been cast in a Star Wars movie yet? Everything about her just yells Naberrie/Skywalker/Organa…
*1 Seriously, listen to Cavill in the trailer. His line about "and what came after me was barely human…"; he delivers every single fucking line in 'that' exaggerated voice. It's like he's almost singing his dialogue, except none of the lyrics make any sense and you only realise that when you have no idea what the fuck's meant to be going on because he's been the one chosen to deliver the pre-finale plot summary (no, seriously), and two minutes later you realise that it actually doesn't matter because look, here's a speedboat chase and an explosion.
*2 Either Cavill can't deliver the humour, or Ritchie can't direct him to do it. It could well be both, although I have a friend-of-a-friend who went to school with Cavill on Jersey, and attests to the fact that the man has absolutely no sense of humour. This ties in with what I saw in the movie.
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.
Picture the scene. A slightly drab office interior in Hollywood, California. A battered table seats a room of weary junior film execs, tasked with reinvigorating a classic franchise for today's demanding audience. Today, 'horror' is on the agenda, and one cocksure young upstart has just the answer: "Okay you guys, what's scarier than a clown-doll?" … "Uh, I dunno Johnny, what?" … "Ha! A whole goddamn BOX of clown-dolls!"… "KER-CHING! Then they can come to goddamn LIFE with the poltergeists moving them!" Yes, welcome to #FridayAfternoonScreenwritingClub, where cliche is the currency and only the laziest survive. You'll be finished the script and in the pub by 3:30.
Because the world was crying out for a remake of Poltergeist which does absolutely nothing new with either the story or the genre.
Now in all fairness, in terms of your classic Haunted House Horror™, Poltergeist is only ever as 'bad' as the original, but it's never as good. The intervening years have not been kind to the format. The real problem with a flat-out 'remake' is that you also port over all the things (from a writing point-of-view) which make the film feel dated because they've been flogged to death in the years between the original outing and the new one. Although lets not be too precious about the 1982 flick; it was great for its time, but it hasn't aged particularly well and it spawned two unnecessary sequels and a TV series.
You've got to feel for poor old Sam Rockwell, now cast into 'dad' roles and mumbling his way through the film with an embarrassed contrition akin to a teenager who's been recognised going into a church by two classmates, and who's hoping they'll pretend they didn't see him when Monday comes. We saw you, Sam. We all fucking saw you. Luckily the pressure's taken off Rockwell in the third act when Jared Harris arrives to shoulder the enormous burden of eccentric cliché and further devalue his already patchy CV. Worse yet, Jared seems to have borrowed Colin Farrell's accent to do it with. God help us all.
And the audibly sensitive will be saddened to learn that Poltergeist is another horror flick with the volume set to 'far too high'. AGAIN. Serious questions for those of you in the know: Is the audio-level locked automatically on digital films these days, or do the projection-staff*1 get a note giving them the recommended volume? If it's the first one, is there an override? If it's the second, does anyone know of any cinemas who actively discard such 'advice' and use their common sense when it comes to not wrecking the hearing of their audience? And the 3D: yeah, whatever mate.
Oh, and how the fuck can screenwriter David Linsday-Abaire justify gimmicking-in some GPS trackers and an iPad controlled drone for the film's finale, when the lost spirits of the damned have spent the entire film beforehand disrupting every electrical item they float past??
Like its stablemates, Carrie and A Nightmare On Elm Street, Poltergeist is so close to the original film as to render it artistically pointless. Worst of all, the film is barely even 'creepy', let alone scary. As horror movies go, there's no greater failure.
Fuck it, I've seen worse.
But what kind of justification is that for a film as half-arsed as this?
No.
A better option still would just be to imagine the mixture of vague disappointment and boredom you'll inevitably feel by watching this.
Get out of my house.
…what, to make you actually miss Craig T Nelson?
I will, yes.
There isn't, no.
Poor ol' Sam Rockwell appeared in 2005's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, as did Warwick 'Wicket' Davis.
*1 I know they can't really be called 'projectionists' any more, but I also know it's not the same job as the folks who serve you the popcorn.
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.
The Boxtrolls (3D)
Cert: PG / 97 mins / Dir. Graham Annable & Anthony Stacchi
It's almost (almost) as if animated films in the twenty first century have become too clean, too polished. And not just visually, either. It's almost (almost) as if all character foibles (and in the case of 'villains', entire defining traits) need to be ironed out, sanitised or fixed by the closing credits (sequels notwithstanding). Even with this in mind as I was watching, The Boxtrolls seemed to feature a layer of delightful sweat, which wouldn't quite let me love it, however much I admired what was in front of me. Although it was only published in book-form in 2005, the story has a true Dahl-esque feel to it, where even the characters you're rooting for are charmingly flawed.
The story of a young boy raised underground by non-human scavenger creatures and his subsequent re-acquaintance with the surface-world, The Boxtrolls carries themes of family, identity and societal unrest that would probably be handled far more cloyingly by one of the major animation studios. That said, I don't think the film has the immediacy of Laika's previous feature, Paranorman, and the aforementioned 'dirty' look and feel may well put off casual audiences and critics alike (although it's going to be a done deal for existing fans of the book).
The animation itself (including the 3D) is absolutely stunning; hand-crafted stop-motion with a fluidity I've never seen before, and the film has a voice-cast to match it perfectly (Ben Kingsley is a particular highlight as cheese-obsessed super villain, Archibald Snatcher). Rolling in at a very respectable 97 minutes (where many computer-animated features are shorter*1), you have to admire the craft, even if nothing else takes your fancy (hang around during the credits for the tiniest glimpse into the scale of making the film). I even thought that the central character's racing helmet may have been a nod to Anakin Skywalker's podracing gear, but a) that may be a generic design, and b) I would think that, wouldn't I?
I was left with the impression that there were areas which could have used further development (the young Eggs playing music with the boxtrolls is seen in a montage at the start of the film then not used again), but the film certainly packs its runtime to maximum effect.
For the younger members of the audience, there'll be as much to disturb them in The Boxtrolls as there will to entertain, which thinking about my favourite books as a child feels about right. Like being trapped in a charming yet macabre dream, The Boxtrolls has a lot to offer. It's just hidden under a layer of grime…
Pretty much.
Kinda, although there are surprisingly few 'jokes' in there.
Almost certainly.
Whatever takes your fancy; the story will work on any size screen, but the animation is beautiful on a big screen.
Maybe a touch, but not enough for you to worry your pretty little head over.
I will, but there's no burning need at the moment.
Didn't catch one.
Have you seen any other films this year which make an almost direct homage to Fist Of Fun'sRod Hull character?
Because I've seen one, now.
*1 I'm not saying that computer animation is "easier", by any means, but the physical frame-by-frame effort in a 97 minute stop-motion picture has to be commended when a behemoth like Disney are prepared to put out an 84 minute CGI feature as their Summer standard-bearer.
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.
