Skyscraper (3D / SPOILERS)
Cert: 12A / 102 mins / Dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber / Trailer
This is a film which features an innovative tech/real-estate project overseen by a hubristic billionaire. He gathers a group of experts (one of whom has their young family in tow) to give them the grand tour and get the insurance signed off before opening to the public. This is going well until it transpires that a disgruntled employee has sold out his boss to a rival, has hacked the security systems and ends up dead while the guests and organisers alike are trapped in the chaos, fighting for their lives as the whole thing goes to hell around them.
I thought Skyscraper would be Die Hard With A Wooden Leg, but it turned out to be Vertical Jurassic Park instead. So don't make assumptions, kids.
I won't bother summarising the plot, it's all very much in the trailer, there*1.
Yes, it's the Summer so this is Action Flick 101, and Dwayne Johnson continues his trend of accepting jobs without fully reading synopses in Rawson Marshall Thurber's concrete-shattering opus. The action may take place in Hong Kong, but his is a piece of entertainment in the most American of traditions*2.
The end result is nowhere near as awful as it could have been, but so staggeringly average that it feels like a criminal waste of its $125m budget. The film's central location, The Pearl, is apparently 220 floors of relentlessly telegraphed cliché, built on foundations of exposition, callbacks and deus ex machina. The cinematic equivalent of a dot-to-dot book, the story lurches from one set-piece to the next like a 260lb ex-SWAT agent with a prosthetic limb. Despite his considerable screen presence and innate likeability, even Dwayne Johnson can't make this interesting*3.
And because it's a 12A, none of the point-blank gunshots have exit-wounds. A trivial point I know, but I'll bring it up anyway. I thought at one point this might have been the most clockwork genre-flick I'd seen all year, then I remembered Den of Thieves.
But if you've never seen any action movies ever, this will be great.
Die Hard.
Yeah, I know everyone's saying that.
That's because it's inescapably true.
Oh, watch it in the cinema if anything, because this will lose most of its impact on the journey to your small screen. And bravely clinging on to a rapidly-dying format, you'd perhaps think that the 3D would be utilised to showcase the vertiginous heights of the drama at the world's tallest building to better effect. But no, the extra dimension is used to make things darker, blurrier and with heavy ghosting of any point of light in the background..
Stream if you must, I suppose.
It's not.
We might.
There isn't.
Level 2: Neve Campbell's in this, and she was in that Scream 3 alongside Carrie 'Leia' Fisher.
*1 Although there's at least one major dialogue exchange in the trailer which didn't make it into the final cut. God knows how many test-edits of this film are in a cupboard at Universal somewhere... [ BACK ]
*2 As well as the genre standard of having a morally-untouchable hero who's an invalided service-veteran put in a perilous situation while providing for his young white-picket-fence family (this is basically a Mark Wahlberg movie), there's probably a separate review to be written about a Hollywood's gleeful presentation of a Chinese entrepreneur saved from European gangsters by American hetero-masculinity. But I'm too tired to dig that hole, frankly… [ BACK ]
*3 And seriously though, why would that massive screen be on, with the public ooh-ing, ahh-ing and gasping through a live feed (multiple camera sources apparently) of what is clearly an ongoing police/military emergency, being left to stand around at the foot of the world's tallest building as it burns and begins to collapse? [ 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.
Free Fire (second-pass)
Cert: 15 / 91 mins / Dir. Ben Wheatley / Trailer
An odd one, this. Free Fire is a film I'd been itching to watch again since my first-pass.*1 In the interim, I'd somehow managed to forget how consistently funny it is, despite me telling people over the last few weeks that humour is one of its many strengths, and I can say hand-on-heart that there are nothing but fantastic performances all round. I fact, I can't think of a single bad thing to say about any of it.
Which is why I'm struggling to think how I haven't given the movie full-marks. Sure, I don't hand that score out often, but Free Fire is a remarkable film. It's not a sequel, reboot or franchise-entry, the 'price of admission'*2 is low and it's continually engaging with a fairly linear story. The script is eminently quotable and the run-time doesn't outstay its welcome. The film's almost unique in that I wouldn't really know what to place it next to on a shelf, other than Ben Wheatley's other films. For an out-of-the-blue movie which can appeal to multiple demographics*3, this is unprecedented Film Of The Year material. And yet I'm still only marking it 6, without knowing what could possibly make it any better. Answers on a postcard, please.
I didn't necessarily 'get' more out of watching Free Fire again, but I enjoyed it every single bit as much. This film is future comfort-food for the cold, dark winter months.
Oh, and nice touch with Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury's Justine's Theme on the soundtrack being a musical reference to Giorgio Moroder's end-credits piece in Scarface.
I'm assuming that's deliberate since it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Best dialogue:
a)"...I like his jumper."
b) [two men, grappling on an abandoned warehouse floor]
"You smell of perfume!" "IT'S... BEARD OIL!"
c)"I just want a little sympathy, that's all." "You want sympathy, son? It's in the dictionary between shit and syphilis, now get over there..."
Best? Probably not.
Most entertaining? Quite possibly.
Nope.
Nope.
Level 1: Cornelius Evazan's in this. And he has two of those best-lines, up there.
*1 And what a difference a change-of-screen makes. The mumbled dialogue I'd noted last time was all but gone, with the general-release run of the film taking place in the more bijou Screen 3 of my local (as opposed to the advance showing, in the massive Screen 5). Whether it was the same levels bouncing around a smaller room or a different speaker-balance, it goes to show how much film/audio presentation can vary, even within the same venue. [ BACK ]
*2 By which I mean intellectually and philosophically, not financially. The literal 'price of admission' for actual cinema viewing is both high, and frustratingly consistent over varying levels of artistic quality. But that's a grumble for another post. [ BACK ]
*3 Because you don't have to be a Ben Wheatley-nerd to enjoy the film's gunplay and humour, but at the same time it's not an action-movie and there's far more under the surface anyway. [ 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.
While it's a long, long way from the heavy ordnance and monosyllabic adrenaline of the likes of The Expendables, the setup for Ben Wheatley's Free Fire is still reassuringly low-concept: an illicit gun-deal in an abandoned Boston (MA) factory between a couple of Irish buyers (Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley) and a South African seller (Sharlto Copley), brokered by a mutual contact (Brie Larson) and also attended by various henchmen on both sides. But when two of these subordinates recognise each other from an unresolved conflict, things quickly get out of hand. And when things get out of hand at a gun-deal, they're only heading one way...
As it goes, it's the second time in a week that I've watched Larson in a 70s-set flick featuring an overly-jukeboxed soundtrack. And the first of these didn't exactly leave a great taste in the mouth. Free Fire features a host of borderline-unlikeable, sketched in characters who remain barely developed for the most part, frequently mumbled and inaudible dialogue, a worryingly notable quantity of scripted 'quips' which left the audience silent though the subsequent laugh-gap, and a combination of lighting and editing that often makes it impossible to tell who's shooting at who (kind of the point of the film).
Also, I loved it.
The opposite side of the John Wick coin, the single gunfight makeing up the lion's share of the running time is the very antithesis of Hollywood Slick™. When bullets start flying, there are no trick-shots, gymnastics or one-hit kills. The shootout here is a long, drawn-out war of attrition with lucky hits and brute force doing most of the work and soundtracked (in this section where it matters*1) primarily by scuffling, breathless-complaining and fluent profanity. And that's not to say every line's a tightly engineered zinger (as I mentioned above), but it's certainly less of a sassy quote-fest and more representative of a deal between tired and angry middle-aged men, which began with poor organisation and went downhill from there.
From a writing point of view, it would have been very tempting to make at least one of the factions here the sort of loveable anti-heroes we've found in The Nice Guys. But writers Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump have kept in mind that these are people buying and selling guns, after all. The natural charisma of performers like Larson, Murphy, Smiley and Copley means they're inherently watchable without having the script cast too much judgement on them either way, and the humour veers between darkly-comic and violent-farce. Even that Armie Hammer's great fun in this, so the film's got to be doing a lot right*2.
Just what the doctor ordered after an emotionally taxing awards-season, Free Fire is a film that will bear re-watching because of the number of levels it works on. This is Ben Wheatley raising an eyebrow at the escalatingly ludicrous stream of action movies we enjoy, playing with the genre without being too acerbic at one end or getting too silly at the other. Nothing here is glamourised, but neither is it disparaged; the film takes its ridiculousness very seriously.
Because even if you examine the sandpit, you can still have a shit-ton of fun playing in it…
*1 The main drag isn't completely music-free as there is some deftly inserted John Denver to be heard. But that's a set-piece in itself, so easily clears the Jukebox Soundtrack hurdle. [ 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.
