Review: Puss In Boots - The Last Wish

Puss In Boots: The Last Wish
Cert: PG / 102 mins / Dir. Joel Crawford & Januel Mercado / Trailer

It feels somewhat disingenuous to call Puss In Boots: The Last Wish an unasked-for sequel, not least because the world's biggest unasked for sequel is currently still in cinemas and is by all accounts making ridiculous sums of money. Nevertheless, arriving eleven years after its direct predecessor, courtesy of two directors, two story writers and two separate screen writers, the feeling of a cinematic fifth-wheel remains...

The film follows Puss (voice once again by Antonio Banderas), as he recklessly finds himself on his ninth-and-final cats' life. Having heard the legend of a lost shooting star which crashed to earth and will bestow any wish upon the discoverer, our hero sets out on a quest to find it and be granted a reset of his feline power-ups. Along the way he is joined by jaded mercenary and former-partner Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault), and the brightly optimistic chihuahua Perrito (Harvey Guillén). The journey won't be easy however, as the trio are being tracked by evil business-magnate and collector of fabled antiquities Big Jack Horner (John Mulaney), as well as cockney crime-family Goldilocks and the Three Bears (Florence Pugh, Ray Winstone, Olivia Colman and Samson Kayo). To make matters worse, Puss himself is being stalked by the literal lupine personification of the grim reaper (Wagner Moura), intent on claiming the cat's final life for himself.

CENTRAL

Taking the good points into account first, the central narrative has a stripped-down simplicity which, while it never feels dumbed-down, will be ideal for the younger members of the audience to follow and enjoy. This is a straightforward treasure-based adventure, and the use of the map as a central plot-point (physically changing the terrain depending on who holds it) is a nice anchor point for the story to keep things firmly on-track. Banderas is enjoying himself immensely in the title role, Hayek is solid (although the mostly-subdued nature of her character means the actress' vocal performance is frequently drowned out, tonally), and Guillén plays 'annoying yappy comedy dog' in precisely the way you'd imagine. The supporting voice-cast are all having great fun, and mostly merge with their animated counterparts very well.

At 102 minutes including the credits this isn't overly-long, but nor does it feel padded out. The film is a PG rather than the expected U because of the wolf's characterisation, and a string of bleeped-out profanities from Perrito are played to maximum comic effect; but apparently Olivia Coleman saying that the cat-lady's house smells of piss is just a bonus. Fair. Everything here moves at a bright, brisk pace, and the story markers are set out clearly, with frenetic action sequences and careful exposition scenes carefully placed so as not to run into one another. It's just that...

GRANADA

...well, as a standalone action feature this is way more of a mess than Dreamworks should ever have put their name on. In addition to the scattering of writers and directors, the central characters have full CGI model-rendering complete with the associated fur texturing you'd expect to see. But many of the players further down the ladder seem to be working on reduced-polycount models, giving them an overly angular appearance reminiscent of 1990s animation. The surface-texturing is photorealistic in some places (the main characters, again), given a watercolour effect in others, and even just flat-shaded in a few. The movement and film style is standard for the most part, then drops into anime effects and editing for the fight scenes, but still with the full CGI models. The film is a headache for anyone looking for a coherent experience.

On top of all this, the script takes repeated pot-shots at Disney, using its fairy-tale-world setting to include IP-baiting references to Jiminy Cricket, Pinnochio himself, and the bag/umbrella motifs from Mary Poppins. This might be charming or even cheeky from an independent studio, but given Dreamworks' standing as firmly second-tier to the House Of Mouse it feels more than a little bitter. By the time you consider the dearth of cat-jokes that a movie like Puss In Boots seems custom-built to deliver (and did, last time), you begin to wonder if all of this happened because an executive found an old contract behind a radiator which tied Banderas to one more project.

Despite my moaning, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish isn't bad. But given Dreamworks' past glories, it's pretty far from great. The Last Film would have been a more reassuring title...

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: The Hitman's Bodyguard

The Hitman's Bodyguard
Cert: 15 / 118 mins / Dir. Patrick Hughes / Trailer



It seems like we've waited most of the year for a break in the downpour of superhero tentpole-movies. So, before the autumnal clouds gather for Thor and the Justice League, Lionsgate have taken the opportunity to get the unmasked Deadpool and Nick Fury sent to Coventry*¹ for a road-trip in The Hitman's Bodyguard, the kind of movie which would usually land in March or October, were it not for the names on the poster...

Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) is a down-at-heel close-protection bodyguard, tasked to safeguard professional assassin Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) on his journey to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to testify against despotic war criminal Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary Oldman). The underhand and frighteningly-connected Dukhovich has strike-teams out to silence the sole witness before he can arrive, but Bryce and Kincaid have their own intertwined history, and the road-trip will be anything but straightforward for this odd-couple! [ Do you see? One of them is an expert at killing people, whilst the other specialises in keeping them alive. It is this central disparity which creates unavoidable friction between the lead characters, and from whence the thrills and indeed humour will arise. Salma Hayek also stars as Kincaid's wife Sonia who swears a lot and who is in prison, and can therefore have her segments produced entirely separately. ]

At least I imagine that's how the pitch went. What we actually get here is a lighthearted generic action movie interspersed with scenes of Reynolds and Jackson's semi-improvised bickering in a car. Which is fine. The Hitman's Bodyguard feels for all the world like a Gerard Butler schedule-filler*² that struck gold when the casting director was able to call in a couple of favours. The screenplay is efficient enough, if largely unimaginative, and leaves you with the impression that the 'comedy' aspect was tacked on in the third-draft once the lead performers had been confirmed. Reynolds and Jackson are great of course, but there's little here that they haven't done elsewhere, and to greater effect. Despite the best work of writer Tom O'Connor*³ and multiple narrative-assisting flashbacks, the audience never forgets that they're watching the actors, not the characters.

Likewise, Gary Oldman is basically fine as an Eastern-European warlord who mostly sits in a courtroom arrogantly protesting that he has no charge to answer, although he's not doing anything that a hundred other character actors could have brought in at less than half the price. Salma Hayek, as noted above, swears for comic effect at regular intervals. And she's good at it, but y'know. It seems like director Patrick ('Expendables 3') Hughes doesn't really know what he wants to do with his players so he's just letting them autopilot*⁴, and handing the day's footage to the editors. To be fair, that strategy could have backfired far worse than it did here.

The film's action set-pieces are on-par for the genre with some fantastic stunt-work, but using a hyper-shaky cam that's designed to disguise the lack of movement in a frame, and the kind of CGI explosions which make you realise how much of the budget went on the casting.

Overall, it feels like everyone had an absolute blast making this movie, which is rarely the sign of a focused piece of work. This is no exception.

The Hitman's Bodyguard is eminently forgettable and more than a little uneven, although it's distracting fun for the duration of the run-time at least. But when it comes to the standout actioner of the Summer-season with an A-list cast, gleefully stylish violence and a jukebox soundtrack, that crown belongs to the Atomic Blonde...

If you liked what Ryan Reynolds was doing in Deadpool*⁵, what Sam Jackson was doing in Die Hard With A Vengeance and what the story was doing in From Paris With Love or Olympus Has Fallen, you'll get a lot out of The Hitman's Bodyguard.



Not while Charlize Theron's kicking arses in the screen next door..



Not as much as director Patrick Hughes would perhaps like to think, but just enough to warrant the budget being funnelled directly into the casting department, yes..



With the best will in the world, of course not*⁶.



Nope.



There is, indeed.



Level 1: Mace Windu's in this. Come on, keep up…





*¹ Literally, not metaphorically. That's something you don't see every week at the flicks. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² With the added bonus of not starring Gerard Butler. Now there's a selling-point for a movie. You can have that one for free, guys... ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ Not that one. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Not the requirements of the directorial role of course, but I suppose this was never going to be 'an auteur's movie'. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁵ Also if you like Deadpool's thing of taking an iconic 80s ballad and framing it in an ironic way against a background of carnage. This film does that. Twice. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁶ Oh, and while I'm on, despite what the film says there's no Dover-to-Amsterdam ferry. It's geographically unfeasible; the Amsterdam ferries leave from Newcastle. The ferries from Dover sail to Calais or Dunkirk, where you'd drive up through France to Holland. And sure, those of you who haven't seen the film may be wondering 'well how do you know that's what they don't do?' which would be a fair question except that 'Amsterdam' is on the ferry in huge letters. Okay, this isn't as whopping a transgression as the last Transformers film, but I didn't want to go the whole review not mentioning 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: Sausage Party

Sausage Party
Cert: 15 / 89 mins / Dir. Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon / Trailer



Hot on the tail of some less-than-stellar publicity comes Sausage Party, the all-animated comedy from the minds behind Bad Neighbours and This Is The End. And yeah, they're films I didn't particularly love. Luckily, it's also from the minds behind Superbad; a movie chiselled into my all-time top ten. I may moan about some of the crap they churn out, but I do have a lot of time for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. And who doesn't want to see a film with a swearing frankfurter, right?

Life in the supermarket is pretty rosy for the groceries. Every day is spent gleefully hoping they're chosen by the gods and taken into The Beyond, to be looked after forever more. But when a returned jar of Honey Mustard tells Frank (the frankfurter, Rogen) and Brenda (a bun, voiced by Kristen Wiig) of the awful fate that awaits them beyond the automatic doors, the fabric of their belief-system is torn apart as they have to fight to escape, to survive and to convince the other groceries to work together for an uncertain freedom rather than accept an assured doom…

Yes, it's that heavy-handed. It's funny, but not at all delicate. The film has three levels of gag in its arsenal. 1) Food-puns and dick-jokes, often combined, 2) Broad racial/cultural generalisations based on the origin of any particular food, and c) Socio-political and socio-religious satire. This is all well and good in itself and executed with the subtlety (and accompanying foul-language) you'd expect. But the screenplay has already reached the third rung of its ladder by the end of the first act, meaning everything which follows is just rehashing the same points, but more loudly each time.

Tonally, the film is a little like a 22-minute South Park episode that got out of hand. The animation's great, the voice-work is mostly seamless in tandem with that, and the film holds the audience's attention throughout. While this will be a great film to watch with some friends after getting in from the pub, there's not enough there to warrant re-watching in the future. Superbad has a surprisingly soft-centre, but this is hard-candy all the way through.

Sausage Party is consistently funny, but it's nowhere near as clever or insightful as it repeatedly thinks it is; just the effortless master of the single-entendre…

South Park: The Movie is its closest spiritual cinematic relative.



Only to marvel at the high-res texturing.
There's nothing else that won't work equally well at home.



Oh, probably.



Nope.



Nope.



You bet your ass, there is.



Level 1: Bill 'BB-8' Hader's on voice-duty here.





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: Tale of Tales

Tale of Tales (aka Il Racconto Dei Racconti)
Cert: 15 / 134 mins / Dir. Matteo Garrone / Trailer



When Salma Hayek eating the red, boiled heart of a sea-monster with her bare hands isn't the weirdest thing in a film, you're in for some fun. Matteo Garrone brings us a loosely interwoven trio of medieval Italian folk tales set in the three neighbouring kingdoms. In one, Toby Jones falls in love with a flea the size of a small cow and uses similar judgement to choose a suitor for his daughter, meanwhile John C. Reilly slays the above-mentioned serpent so that his barren wife can conceive a child (again, what could go wrong?), as the randy-royal Vincent Cassel fails to keep it in his pants, inadvertently seducing one of the village-crones and leaving her emotionally-stunted sister in a precarious state-of-mind…

While Tale of Tales probably isn't a film to wander into blindly, the best approach will be to take in as little baggage as possible and just let yourself be told a story (or three). Even my brain spent the first twenty minutes or so shouting down the small voice pointing out "how would that happen?" before finally slipping into gear. And it's worth noting that the stories on offer here aren't quirkily-gothic fairy tales, nor are they the judicially-harsh morality lessons you'd expect of the format. They're just weird. Pro-level weird. Making Tim Burton's kookiness look like Coronation Street, weird. You might laugh, you might squirm (spoiler: you'll do both), but you won't be able to look away*¹. I should also point out that despite my usage of the Italian title at the top of this post, the film is English-language. I know not everyone's a fan of subtitles, so if that was potentially putting you off then it won't be a problem here.

The film is utterly enthralling, in an often jaw-dropping sort of way (the borderline code-breaking winces, gasps and guffaws of the couple next to me served as a fair barometer of the mood in the room). And given how outlandish the content is, the cast's performance is amazing; never even approaching the grotesque pantomime it would become in the hands of many other directors. Garrone has his actors on a tight leash, but it still doesn't restrict their abilities. Similarly, Alexandre Desplat's score and Peter Suschitzky's cinematography are quietly overwhelming, complementing Garrone's work perfectly.

In fact, my only slight gripes are that while the stories are presented in a staggered format (rather than a linear portmanteau series), the balancing often feels a little uneven. The natural breaks in each tale, where you'd switch to the next chapter of another, seem erratic and sometimes just too far apart. And one of the three also seems to run out of steam rather than have an actual ending, but as I said, these aren't your run-of-the-mill fairy tales.

A thing of often terrifying beauty, Tale of Tales will leave you stunned through the meticulously rendered end-credits as your brain tries to process what it's just witnessed. There's far more than what's on the surface, but it'll get more intense the deeper you go…

There's a bit of Jabberwocky in there as well as A Field In England.



If you can, yes. Just to be amused by the reactions of your fellow patrons (and that's a mutual experience, I assure you).



It does.



It could well be.



Not at all.



There isn't.



Level 2: This film's got Vincent Cassel in it, and he was in that Black Swan with Natalie 'Padmé' Portman.



That's a very strong 6, but frankly I was too freaked out for it to be a 7 and I'll probably only watch the film again once just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating half of what happened…


*¹ Unless you're the patron who walked out after about an hour. And in a film like this one I understand that reaction, but I am amazed it took so long. The sea-monster heart is in the first fifteen minutes, after all. But because of the format, that cinematic evacuee doesn't know how any of the stories end. Imagine that. Well, I suppose they'll have to…


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.

265: Review - Puss in Boots (3D)

CAUTION: Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.



Puss in Boots 3D (2011)
21st December 2011. Location: Cinema

Normally, I wouldn't have bothered with this. I'm a civilian Shrek fan at best, and always thought Puss to be something of a one-trick pony throughout the films. As it turns out, Miss Magpie really wanted to give it a go, so while I wasn't exactly dragged to the cinema, I was going to take some convincing once the lights had dimmed.

And the result? I think I enjoyed Puss in Boots more than any of the Shrek films.

I was worried that there was going to be too much of a reliance on the 'combined fairlyland' aspect of its predecessor, where throwing in more characters from elsewhere in the genre seems to be a way of padding out the film, but I'm pleased to say that this is kept to a bare minimum (as is Puss's big-eyes schtick, which is only used twice in the entire 90 minutes). The story, while still incorporating facets such as Jack and the Beanstalk and Humpty Dumpty, really plays more as a mashup between Zorro, Desperado and the nursery standards I've mentioned. Because the whole thing zips along very rapidly, it feels longer than its hour and a half, which is already 10-15 minutes longer than many others in the genre.

But ultimately it succeeds on two fronts; 1) it looks and sounds beautiful, and 2) it's consistently funny and sweet.

The animation is absolutely gorgeous (better even that I'd expect), with sound design and voicework to match. Banderas and Hayek are on top form as usual, staying just shy of overdoing it (arguably unlike Banderas playing the same character in the Shrek films). The rest of the talent play their parts perfectly; ie you don't realise who the actors are until you read their names in the end credits (John Cleese, Russell Brand et al take note).

The only thing that struck me as odd is that it didn't have the emotional punch that animated kids' films usually have (whether they work or not). I think I was meant to be feeling a bit more emotional at the climax of the movie, but I was fairly ambivalent to that character anyway (because the character's designed to leave you unsure).

Not my favourite animated film of all time, but solidly entertaining, and great fun.



Providing you're okay with CGI cats, of course.

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.


• 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.