Review: A Haunting In Venice

A Haunting In Venice
Cert: 12A / 103 mins / Dir. Kenneth Branagh / Trailer

There are few images which evoke a perfect combination of civilisation and tranquility like the waterways of Venice, so it's not altogether inapt that we drop in on that city in a post-war setting as the celebrated detective Hercule Poirot is trying his best to adapt to a life of gentle retirement.

As for the haunting? Well, he's trying, that is, against the wishes of a subconscious still struggling to deal with psychoses from the world war before the recent one, followed by a civvy-street occupation that's involved being perpetually surrounded by All Of The Killing. It's no surprise that our hero's sense of reason is on the verge of collapsing. When Poirot attends a Halloween party in a palazzo reputed to be home to dozens of vengeful spirits, it makes for an uneasy evening. And when a visiting medium is murdered following an after-hours seance, well - that makes for a typical one...

STRING

And so to the third in this (frankly) troubled string of Kenneth Branagh's interpretations of Agatha Christie's Belgian sleuth. I won't waste space here listing their particular failings, only to say that I approached this film with slightly more dread than was probably intended by 20th Century Studios. I don't necessarily consider myself as a Christie Purist™, but I also don't enjoy watching demonstrably inferior versions of the stories I love.

So I was more surprised than anyone when I found myself rather enjoying A Haunting In Venice. The story is a (very) loose retooling of 1969's Hallowe'en Party, but uses this more as a broad inspiration rather than source-text. And because of that distance between the novel and the screenplay, this has far more of an identity than the previous entries. There are far fewer 'small' inconsistencies to get caught up in when you're watching events unfold essentially for the first time.

EVERYTHING

Hildur Guðnadóttir's score, Haris Zambarloukos' cinematography and overall production design are firmly on the film's side, all managing to make an isolated, decaying multi-storey mansion still feel atmospherically sumptuous. And speaking of atmos, the sound editing appears to have been taking lessons from the school of Blumhouse for its deathly silences and subsequent jump-scares. That said, in terms of actual chills this is still more effective than most of the straight-up horror flicks of recent times.

Performances of the comparatively (and thankfully) pared-down ensemble cast are solid all round, even if they feel a little televisual in their melodramatic angst. Although with the very best will in the world Branagh's central turn is the weakest aspect of the whole thing (it's like he's hoping the audience will just accept him as Poirot through repeated exposure, rather than any persuasive craft on his part). We're three movies in and the man still sounds like he's auditioning for 'Allo 'Allo.

And if that's not enough to raise a smirk, there are enough high ceilings and falling chandeliers here to suggest that the palazzo isn't actually haunted, it's just got the Trotter family running about in the attic...

ONCE

Ken's Poirot movies have always worked best for audiences who are able to 'un-remember' previous versions of the story that's being told. A Haunting In Venice is no exception, and wisely assists the viewer by largely being its own - very respectable - thing. If this series is to continue (and it will, whether we like it or not), the way forward will be writing wholly original stories using familiar characters. Absolutely no shame in that, and far more scope for creativity.

Apart from anything else, you really have to admire the chutzpah of budgeting for a Venice location shoot and basing your PR around that, then having 95% of the movie take place indoors, at night, while it's raining too hard to see the scenery in the occasional cutaway exteriors.

Ken got his holiday, I see...

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: Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer
(Spoilers)
Cert: 15 / 180 mins / Dir. Christopher Nolan / Trailer

Oppenheimer is a three hour, period-set film about nascent nuclear weaponry from a provenly competent storyteller which somehow features neither a young Emmet Brown sitting in a physics lesson nor Indiana Jones in a fridge.

Christopher Nolan is a fucking coward*¹.

*¹ Okay, I'll keep this as brief as I can. The note about Doctors Brown and Jones is obviously a joke. The score is not. I did not enjoy Oppenheimer. Then again, I genuinely believe that it's a film not created for enjoyment in any traditional sense, quite a demanding piece to watch and unsatisfying by narrative necessity. We should certainly expect no less a challenge from Christopher Nolan though, just as we wouldn't want him to be anything other than himself as a filmmaker. I suppose.

Playing with non-linear storytelling once again, Oppenheimer is framed as two separate interviews with associated sets of intertwining and converging flashbacks, each spanning the same twenty-or-so years from different points of view, where the guy we're supposed to be rooting for is demonstrated as being a dysfunctional, womanising moral-vacuum who's figured out how to most efficiently carry out genocide before the nazis and complains non-stop about this before, during and after the fact. Leaving a spray of failed personal and professional relationships in his wake, we see Oppo systematically piss off just about everybody in his life and then act surprised when they take against him...

Of course, this wouldn't be a Christopher Nolan movie without mumbled, unintelligible dialogue from the most important characters, battling here against Ludwig Göransson's piercing, intrusive score in a sound-mix that was finalised while somebody was hoovering. All of this has the pacing and delivery of high-drama, but with the implication of a storyline rather than the exposition of one. I know Nolan doesn't like to spoon-feed his audience, but Oppenheimer doesn't even have cutlery on the table.

You see, despite the device itself having a supporting role on the film's poster, this movie is not actually about Da Bomb. This is just as well, because shortly into the first act Nolan realises he can't narratively simplify for the audience either quantum physics nor the workings of an atom bomb, so quickly stops trying. What the movie actually is, is three clinical hours of dislikeable characters doing unpleasant but necessary admin and then everyone being unable to cope with the fall-out (literal, as well as metaphorical) of that, interspersed with the micro-management of international and domestic U.S. politics of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. So I was hardly expecting Terminator 2, but this is lots (lots) of middle-aged white guys in suits sitting around withholding information and showing they really can't be trusted (I go to the cinema to get away from that), leaving the cinema audience with quite frankly nobody to root for. Other than the demonstrable sociopath the film is named after. I suppose.

In terms of moral debate, Oppenheimer occupies the same shelf as Eye In The Sky and Red Joan, where hand-wringing and thousand-yard stares nudge aside the brutal practicalities of Not Losing A War. I never thought I'd watch a movie where Matt Damon plays the most rounded and sympathetic character, but here we are.

While the two timeline strands are clearly delineated by the use of colour, the content in each rarely seems complementary or interactive enough to warrant the effort. Like several of the director's recent pieces, the presentation seems needlessly fiddly yet is perhaps the only thing saving a story which would otherwise be grindingly linear. But without a solid grounding in the U.S. politics surrounding the Second World War, it all comes out as a mess anyway. It certainly feels like there's a price of entry here that's separate from the one printed on the ticket...

Biggest bugbear: We know that test-bomb's not going to destroy the world, lads; we're all here in 2023 watching the film and we'd probably have heard about that before now.

Second biggest bugbear: So what are these clandestine, closed-room hearings for, exactly? What are the nefarious powers in faceless American government trying to do to Mr Oppenheimer, who single-handedly won all of that very specific part of the late-war for them? Are the Suits trying to have him silenced? Discredited? Ruined? Killed, even? No, they're trying to remove his security-clearance. They want his badge back, that's all. They don't want the guy swanning around the lab like he owns the place ten years after he built them a super-bomb and has done nothing since but wear out the buttons on the highly-subsidised coffee machine. Just have a bit of dignity and retire, Oppo. Jeez...

Oh and bonus points to Kenneth Branagh, failing to control an accent in a built-up screenplay. Again. Proof positive that our celebrated auteur director was either distracted on-set, or deaf.

In short (and I'll bet you wish you hadn't clicked into this footnote now), Chris Nolan has not made a genuinely great film since Inception. There, I said 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: Belfast

Belfast
Cert: 12A / 98 mins / Dir. Kenneth Branagh / Trailer

A quasi-memoir from writer-director Kenneth Branagh, Belfast centres around 9yr old Buddy (Jude Hill), a young resident of the eponymous city at the start of the troubles in the summer of 1969*¹. Living with his family, Jude has to juggle the domestic strains of urban prepubescence with a rising tide of political violence on the streets, as communities are literally torn apart in an escalating series of clashes.

Presented in high-contrast monochrome (with the exception of a largely needless present day fraction of a framing device which looks like it's gone through Instagram*²), Belfast is a fine-looking film, initially at least. While cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos captures some striking and moody imagery, it soon becomes apparent that the black-and-white filter is doing all the heavy lifting in assuring the audience that this took place In The Past. Because as meticulous as the wardrobe and set-dressing departments have been, the look of the film feels slightly exaggerated in its period detail, like an overdone cosplay or episode of Life On Mars. Not helping this is the music. Van Morrison's incidental work is fine, but there are needle-drops in every second scene, like Kenneth's got his eye on three soundtrack albums before the film even hits Netflix. A bizarre Commitments-lite moment in the third act blurs the lines of age-distorted reality.

BLUNT

What's more of a problem however, is the director not quite knowing what type of film he wants to make. Belfast is an uneven mix of a bittersweet, slightly mawkish childhood tale of crumbling innocence in the days before coming of age, and a socially-charged drama where there are no right answers but plenty of wrong choices. To be blunt, Branagh's not quite the filmmaker to bridge the two, and the end result is depressing without being especially gritty; heartfelt without being particularly uplifting. While he doesn't hold back on getting up-close to the era's atrocities, the 12A certificate can't quite do justice (if that's the word) to the outrage and panic the audience feel in watching the scenes of violence. They're done well but feel like they're from another film altogether, and presented as as a recurring irritant rather than a rising tide.

In terms of performance, the central figure is of course Jude Hill. While he certainly shows a lot of promise, the young actor is not yet strong enough to pull together the whole film, and although Jamie Dornan and Caitríona Balfe put in great turns as his parents, they seem to do this around Jude rather than with him. He does get a handful of great scenes with Ciarán Hinds as his grandfather though, and you suspect this is where the real heart of the film lies (certainly the wisdom), but there isn't enough of the interplay to make it a defining feature. Judi Dench is also in the film*³.

Too fluffy to be a real hand-wringing awards-nudger*⁵, not quirky enough to go full Yellow Poster™, Belfast is an odd and unsatisfyingly unsatisfying experience. The film's clearly been made with a lot of love, but that's not enough. The message gets lost in the confusion.

Unless that is the message..?

*¹ This film could have been a Bryan Adams jukebox musical instead, I'll leave you to think about that. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² And I say this as someone who's a fan of Instagram, but still. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ Look I love Dench as much as anybody, the very definition of A National Treasure™, but her scenes seem to have been filmed during pre-production when Judi was still trying to decide if her accent should be Belfast, Byker or Bombay*⁴... ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Yes I know it's Mumbai now, but the film's set in 1969 and it was Bombay then. Plus alliteration, y'know? ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁵ Although I'm sure it'll pick something up. It'll probably land Best Flick at the BAFTAs now, if only to make my review look even more redundant. That's precisely the kind of thing they do over there... ^{[ 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: Murder On The Orient Express

Murder On The Orient Express
Cert: 12A / 114 mins / Dir. Kenneth Branagh / Trailer



Okay first off, if you haven't seen any version of Murder On The Orient Express before, Kenneth Branagh's new presentation will be ideal for you. Seriously. The performances, sets, costumes, lighting, sound-design and soundtrack are all exquisite, and the photography will tick the boxes for all those whose first reaction to a sunset is to fire up Instagram. While the production certainly never strays far from the precedent set by previous outings, lensmaster Haris Zambarloukos's approach is inherently cinematic.

The rest of us, however, spend the best part of two hours asking why another retelling of Agatha Christie's most famous story is necessary; a question which the film fails to convincingly answer.

In a bid add a fresh lick of paint to an old carriage, this iteration borrows rather heavy-handedly from other icons of intrigue. The style of the opening sequence, which sees Hercule Poirot wrapping up his previous case, is a clear nod to the James Bond / Indiana Jones in medias res approach, while our hero's on-the-spot deductions in the first act owe more to Baker Street's most famous resident than even Agatha herself would care to admit. There's the feeling with these inserts that the Belgian sleuth is perhaps being pushed toward a more active cinematic presence, and a couple of sequences later in the film shore up this suspicion, despite feeling uncomfortably out of place themselves.

Speaking of incongruities, I'm happy to report than Mr Branagh's moustache and accent combination-set are thankfully nowhere as... awkward as they were in the reveal-trailer*¹. Both take some time to get used to, but at least they're not too problematic. Branagh is a fine actor of course, and an even better director. But he's slightly lacklustre as Poirot, somehow.

Back at the coalface however, Orient Express itself is the very essence of character-driven storytelling, an approach which is borderline impossible when this many familiar faces are in the room. Harking back to the golden age of ensemble-dramas, the all-star cast is impressive but frankly too big. It's relatively easy to hide one guest star in a movie like this, but here you'll never forget that you're watching Johnny Depp*² and Kenneth Branagh and Michelle Pfeiffer and Judi Dench and Derek Jacobi and Willem Dafoe and Josh Gad and Daisy Ridley. Despite the tried and tested structure of the oft-adapted tale, the film sags in the middle and never quite regains its pace, even with a thoroughly sincere denouement.

But all-in-all, Branagh's Murder on The orient Express is a perfectly acceptable re-telling of the story. If a largely unnecessary one. I certainly can't resent the creative team for trying to put their own stamp on a classic, but this will always be Dame Agatha's, first and foremost…

If we get nothing else from this, we can be at least take comfort from new audiences being introduced to Poirot's (Christie's) serene wisdom:

"Every day we meet people the world could do without, yet we do not kill them. We must be better than the beasts..."

Oh, and this loses a point for the Death On The Nile setup-line in the final moments. It's cheap, it's cack-handed and it's canonically illiterate*³.



Other screen versions of this same story, I shouldn't wonder, or Agatha Christie adaptations in general.



Well, it's a testament to the enduring legacy of Christie that a Wednesday evening screening in the second week of its run was over two thirds full (and with a story which, once you know 'whodunnit', you tend not to forget). The film's also scheduled to run next week, too, so it's clearly pulling in the punters across the board. Smashing work, folks.



Well, ish. The film achieves enough to justify its existence (as a one-off entry, at any rate), but in the grand scheme of things, perhaps the interpretative net should have been thrown wider?.



With a cast of this pedigree? Of course not.



Nope.



There isn't.



Level 1: Rey's in this, also there's a 'stepping in poo in a sun-bleached environment' joke three minutes into the film which I'm taking to be a clear homage to The Phantom Menace.





*¹ Upon viewing the first trailer in the cinema (I'd avoided it at home), it appeared that Poirot's 'new' moustache and windswept hair made him look like he'd been sleeping in a doorway, while the snippets of the accent we heard made it seem like that doorway was somewhere in Gateshead. Mrs Blackout was appalled to the point where she (an ardent fan of Agatha Christie) didn't come to see the film.
^{[ BACK ]}

*² Although with one recent exception, can we ever? ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ It's no spoiler to say that in the closing scene of the film, Poirot meets a representative form the British Consulate who informs him that there's been a murder in Egypt ("and only on the Nile!") . The reason Death On The Nile works from a plot-mechanics perspective is that all the characters are established and introduced to Poirot before the murder takes place - while Poirot is also on the boat - so the murderer has to be present in his company and known to him. If the Karnak is going to shore up to let the detective onboard then there's nothing stopping the murderer escaping, before or during his arrival. There's also no reason for the British Consulate to be involved at that point, unless 20th Century Fox are planning to completely retool the story from the ground-up. It's that sort of haphazard reinvention which threatens to derail The Orient Express on more than one occasion...
^{[ 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: Dunkirk

Dunkirk
Cert: 12A / 106 mins / Dir. Christopher Nolan / Trailer



Well it's hard for me to absolutely rave over Dunkirk, not least since all I've seen for the last fortnight is pull-quotes telling me how life-altering an experience it would be, setting the bar unreasonably high. It's not. It's very good and certainly a unique film, but while he thankfully steers clear of the open-goal mawkishness of the genre, Nolan's project almost feels held back by its run-time and Certificate 12A compliance*¹. This is a beautiful looking piece of work, with Hoyte Van Hoytema's cinematography and the outstanding sound design stealing the show from the on-screen performers*² (Hans Bjnerno's aerial camerawork is particularly balletic).

The film follows three groups of people (beginning separately one week, one day and one hour before the Dunkirk evacuation) as their story threads gradually intertwine in the heat of battle. A British soldier desperately trying to leave the beach before attacking enemy aircraft kill him and his comrades, a small pleasure cruiser which sets off from Weymouth to assist in the rescue mission, and a trio of Spitfire pilots headed across the English Channel to help take out the attacking Nazi forces. Chronologically it's not a 'regular' film, and I felt a little resistance from the audience I was seated with*³, particularly since once the timelines begin to converge it briefly makes less sense, not more. Overall, while the period-detail is exquisite here*⁴, the story is more about feeling and tension, and the realising (of course) that the people who lived through those moments didn't know how it would all turn out.

But I particularly liked that a film of this scale only ever tells its stories from an individual (or small group) perspective. The grandiose morale-boosting and general flag-waving of most war epics is all but absent. If anything, the film succeeds thoroughly in presenting the misery and confusion of armed conflict. Dunkirk is to the war-movie genre what It Comes At Night is to horror; eschewing the tradition of self-contained narratives to be more of a visual tone-poem.

Unusually for Nolan's work, I'd have preferred the film to be about half an hour longer, or at least more tightly knit, to do more justice to the individual unfolding stories.

Although if we'd had that extra screen-time, I'm pretty sure it would have gone towards an extension of Sugary-Tom's Scenic Sky-Tours…

[ Spoilery-bit: highlight to read ]
Seriously though, not withstanding the question of 'could a Spitfire glide for that long after its engine has cut out?', what's Tom's game here? I'd assumed he was trying to keep the plane in one piece and land it for repair and re-use, since it had only ran out of fuel. But then he gently lands on the far end of the beach, torches it and awaits capture by Ze Germans. If he's trying to keep the machinery out of enemy hands, why not just parachute out earlier and let it crash? Plus, if he'd bailed out by the pier, Commander Branagh could have picked him up instead of an armed Nazi escort. Because there's no fucking way they're letting him live after his antics up there.



Difficult to say as I've not really seen anything like this, tonally.



For the big screen and big sound, absolutely.



I have absolutely no doubt that this is the film Christopher Nolan wanted to make, and that is a great thing.



Nope; Inception.



Nope.



Not that I heard.
Poor show.



Level 2: Not including a plethora of level-1 stunt performers, this film stars that Mark Rylance, and he's in the upcoming Ready Player One alongside Ben 'Krennic' Mendelsohn, Hannah 'First Order Officer' John-Kamen and Simon 'Plutt' Pegg.





*¹ Is it wrong of me to want a 15-rated version of this film? To really ramp up the carnage? I wasn't expecting Hacksaw Ridge, but there's a film that doesn't flinch from the terror of warfare. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² While the ensemble cast are on generally fine form here (even Tom 'The Mumbler' Hardy who - naturally - is given a flight-mask to talk through), I can't not say that Mark Rylance plays civilian rescuer Mr Dawson like it's the first time he's read his lines, and Barry Keoghan plays his young charge George like he hasn't been given a script. Both are far better than this and the film succeeds in spite of them, not because.
There. I said it. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ Bless them though, I've moaned about the cinema-etiquette of senior audiences in the past, but this lot were on best behaviour. Not a rustling wrapper or mid-movie conversation to be heard. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Although as I was leaving, I overheard one patron saying to her friends "the only thing was, the seats on that train in the end looked too modern!", referencing a post-evacuation scene back in Blighty. It was all I could to to keep myself from interjecting 'That's probably because you've sat on them. Train companies were still running that same stock (albeit refurbished) in and out of London until the late 1990s'. I'm not even a train geek, I just used to commute on the rattly bastards… ^{[ 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: Cinderella

Cinderella
Cert: U / 113 mins / Dir. Kenneth Branagh / Trailer



When the BBFC card vanished from the screen today and the Steamboat Willie ident appeared in its place, I actually got a little tingle. Not the one I get when I hear the Marvel Studios fanfare, obviously, but a buzz nonetheless. Disney's recent efforts (with one notable exception) have entertained me greatly and built up a reputation that's going to be difficult to sustain, surely?

Well, the in-built precursor to Cinderella is an animated spin-off/featurette, Frozen Fever, reuniting the central characters for seven minutes; enough time to set up the premise and wedge in a musical number. It's quite fun, even though it feels rushed somehow (and Princess Elsa seems to have become more powerful than any Jedi in her telekinetic ice-wielding powers). An array of miniature snowmen are introduced, sneezed into existence by the cold-ridden Elsa, and they're incredibly cute (read: marketable), although you've also got to remember that they're essentially frozen snot ;)

And with the b-movie (in the nicest sense) over, the live-action retelling of an old Disney favourite began, and my inner-cynic made himself comfortable with a glint in his eye. As events transpired, the cynic wasn't there for long, because Cinderella is really good. There. I said it. With the studio, cast and director playing to their strengths, it's outstanding at being a good old-fashioned Disney Princess Film™, and that's the important thing here. During the setup first act, the format feels occasionally anachronistic, with recent Disney entries like Frozen and Maleficent pushing the princess-story into new territory. But these film's can't achieve what they do without having the core methodology as their counterpoint, of course, and 2015's Cinderella is Disney reminding the audience that they basically invented the genre anyway (at least cinematically).

While it could certainly be said that the film doesn't push the envelope in any way, shape or form, it's only fair to note that it never feels the need to. With the story already locked and loaded, the performers have a solid sense of direction, and leading, supporting and cameo roles alike are confident and focussed. Lily James is the perfect casting for Ella, supported by Cate Blanchett, Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera as her manipulative step-family, riding the line between horrible and pitiful with ease.

Although as earnest (and innuendo-free) as the first act is, it can't escape from the fact that between the 1950 animated film and the 2015 live-action iteration, Cinderella has become more of a pantomime-favourite than a fairytale one, and the Brit-centric cast reinforces this wholesale. Although they do, for the most part, play their roles completely straight, making for a stronger film as a result. The two exceptions to this are Rob Brydon, who's been cast in the role of Rob Brydon In A Hat™, and Helena Bonham Carter, whose role as the fairy godmother requires her to wear a set of prosthetic teeth so tremendously fierce that they prevent any part of her face above them from moving, making her look like she's been using botox as a moisturiser, somehow. And Richard Madden's research for his performance as The Prince appears to have been locking himself in a room with a copy of David Essex's showreel DVD. The man's one neckerchief away from going full rogue…

Oh, and [Facetiousness - highlight to read]: I'd thought that Ella's mum's advice in the trailer had lost its meaning in the edit, but that really is what she tells her. "Have courage and be kind" is hardly 'a secret', is it? Solid guidance, yes. Good life-advice, even. But it's not a secret. In fact, if "have courage and be kind" sees you dying of consumption before your 35th birthday while your husband spends a suspicious amount of time abroad, is it really a secret worth heeding? But there's my inner-cynic rising to the surface, again. And trust me, by the second act of Cinderella, my inner-cynic was all but defeated, lying on the shore gasping for air, too weak to take the piss out of the film. [/Facetiousness]

Under Kenneth Branagh's fantastic direction which keeps things from descending into silliness, Cinderella is great at being Cinderella, and while it may not be a creative interpretation in the mould of Maleficent, it at least makes some reparation for the farce that was Into The Woods.

If your miniature humans are pestering you to take them to a movie over the Easter holidays and you can't palm them off with a DVD, this is the one.

If you're in the target demographic or you just like well-made films, yes.



For its audience, it'll be a buyer.



I shouldn't think so, but everyone involved can proudly wield it on their CV, yes.



Undoubtedly.



Not particularly.



Not that I heard.



Wicked stepmother Cate Blanchett starred as Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, alongside Sir Christopher 'Dooku' Lee.







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: Jack Ryan - Shadow Recruit

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
Cert: 12A / 105 mins / Dir. Kenneth Branagh




Wow. I get the impression that Chris Pine landed the role of Jack Ryan after his performance in last year's This Means War, an action/spy caper in which he gets to trade barbs and punches with Tom Hardy. It's not a bad film by any stretch, but its saving grace is the constant comedic flow between the leads. Replace that banter with mumbled CIA gibberish between Captain Kirk and Robin Hood, and you've got the new techno-thriller, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

It's more Mission Impossible than James Bond, but throughout, it lacks the fun, style or wit of either. An opening sequence truncates Jack's early career, from brilliant financial whizz studying in London, to brilliant brave soldier shooting people in Afghanistan and rescuing his comrades from a burning helicopter, to brilliant undercover spy working on Wall Street and tracking terrorists by their financial slip-ups. All of this while routinely lying about his job to his nurse/carer/fiance, Cathy, and that's her own fault really because she won't marry the secretive fibber (CIA rules, apparently. Jack said so).

So is it any good? Not particularly. It's reasonably competent at what it's doing, but that's just not particularly great. Initially crammed with computer idiot-displays which don't exist in the real world, and top-secret organisations with the crappiest security money can buy, the film doesn't take long before it resorts to good old car chases and men punching the shit out of each other. And all the while, director Kenneth Branagh doing his bit to let Hollywood know that North Korea is back off the xenophobia menu, and now it's time to start baiting the Russians again. Go on, Ken! Tell Keira how "I em bed men; listen to voice, da?"

And I'm not even sure how Keira Knightley manages to struggle in a role that demands nothing of her. I actually quite enjoy her work in the right roles, but this isn't one of them. That said, her part of The Girl One is so underwritten that anyone would struggle to perform it. Pine makes the best of a bad job (ie not enough oomph to gain any critical acclaim, but enough to get a sequel). Kevin Costner is Kevin Costner; then again, that's what he was no doubt hired for.

On a technical-grumble level, the constantly moving/sweeping/juddering camera is irritating enough, but there are several shots in the film which are slightly blurred and ghosted. It looks for all the world like the editing team have zoomed and cropped an existing shot, using a section from the middle of the frame somewhere, then upscaled it and hoped no-one would notice. I can't be the only one who did.

The Moral Of The Story: Hey, the next time you're slagging off the global finance industry, just remember: some of them are really working for government spy agencies and trying to save you! Capitalism and covert surveillance are your friends, you idiot, not The Russians!

It's not absolutely awful, but you deserve better, frankly. At least Tom Cruise did this shit with a smirk on his face.

The trailer tries harder than the film, I'll give it that.



Not really.



I suspect it actually does.



DVD. Tops.



I will, a bit.



I can't see that eventuality.



Not that I heard, although by act three, it's basically just white-noise and handheld cameras, so there could be.

Have the CIA ever actually recruited anyone fucking stupid enough to compromise their cover by leaving a cinema-ticket stub in their trouser pocket for their girlfriend to find?

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