Movie Review - Clash of the Titans

Genre: Fantasy Action
Director: Louis Leterrier
Starring: Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Mads Mikkelson, Alexa Davalos
Running Time: 118 minutes (plus trailers)

“Release the Kraken!!!”

With a budget of US$120 million dollars, one would’ve hoped that the people behind Clash of the Titans would’ve had a little money to spend on a script. If you have the cash to depict an enormous CGI Kraken rising from the ocean, to pay the salaries of Hollywood superstars like Liam Neeson and Sam Worthington, and to convert the entire film into 3D in post-production, surely you could have found ten grand or so to give to someone to focus on the plot. Or the characters motivations. Or the dialogue. Wishful thinking apparently – Louis Leterrier’s remake of the 1981 film Clash of the Titans is a woefully written, muddily paced film who’s greatest ambition seems to be to check all the minimum requirements of an action adventure film, likewise delivering only the bare minimum in entertainment and excitement, as well as the odd miss-placed chuckle and some very sketchy information about Greek mythology.

The film begins with a brief chronicling of “history”, in which the Gods of Mount Olympus defeat their creators – the Titans – with the help of an enormous beast of Hades’ creation: The Kraken. However, in a shocking turn, Hades (Ralph Fiennes) is betrayed by his brother Zeus (Liam Neeson) and tricked into taking dominion over the underworld, where he spends his time letting his hair grow out and plotting revenge. In the interim, Zeus creates human beings, seemingly for the sole purpose of raping them – the result of one such union is the birth of demigod Perseus. Perseus is raised by Spyros (Pete Postelthwaite), a fisherman, and grows up without any knowledge of his birthright. But just as you begin to think that Sam Worthington could not possibly look more out of place on a rickety old fishing boat, Hades shows up again and massacres his entire adopted family, leaving Perseus to swear his revenge against the Gods who wronged him.

The biggest issue Clash of the Titans seems to face is a total lack of respect for itself. The story moves from plot point to plot point with no real enthusiasm, as Perseus and his company of poorly developed rag-tag soldiers trek across plains, deserts, forests and mountains (all inexplicably within half a day’s Scorpion ride of each other) in order to reach their next uninteresting destination. The dialogue in the film is atrociously written – generally it’s the sort of stuff that seems badass in trailers, but just sounds ridiculous when actually spoken in the context of a conversation - and it is all delivered with minimal effort by unenthusiastic cast-members. This is Sam Worthington’s third major film roll following Terminator: Salvation and Avatar, and of the three he definitely gives his weakest performance here. There is no denying that the man has a strong screen presence, but his thick Australian accent (which he has apparently just given up trying to hide) makes the suspension of disbelief all the more difficult; truly, he is totally out of place in this role.

This movie also proves that casting A-list talent doesn’t do you a bit of good is the lines they’re delivering are rubbish; although Liam Neeson does manage to muster some gusto for his big declaration that the Kraken be released, and although King of the Underworld seems like the part that Ralph Fiennes was born to play, the two of them both end up giving some of the weakest performances of their respective careers, a tragedy that is compounded by the fact that they both look completely ridiculous in their costumes and hair pieces. This is another area where the film falls flat - almost all of the mythological creatures in this film, from Charon to Medusa to Hades himself, are incredibly poorly designed, coming across as pitifully funny instead of even remotely threatening.

However my biggest gripe with Clash of the Titans is the decision made to convert the movie into 3D in post-production, presumably to capitalize on the financial success of Avatar. Whilst this may seem like a good idea in theory, we see in Clash of the Titans the difference between a movie conceived and shot in 3D by a groundbreaking director, and a film hastily converted into 3D at the last minute as a cash grab. I payed an extra six dollars for a ticket, inflation that would be an absolute rip-off even if the technology had improved the film. But instead this movie looks awful in 3D, the motion blur making the hypothetically decent action indecipherable. Until directors are using this technology with respect, in a way that enhances their films, I plan on boycotting any and all 3D films that aren’t animated, or directed by James Cameron.

While it didn’t hold my attention every second, I will at least say that Clash of the Titans is rarely boring. Thanks to simplistic, cliché and extremely repetitive dialogue, it’s always clear what the characters want to achieve, and there are a few moments of swordplay here and there that aren’t hampered by the 3D. Now I should point out that the movie is playing on both 3D and regular screens, and if for some bizarre reason you do want to see it, definitely go with the later. But at the end of the day, be they in three dimensions or two, it just didn’t matter to me what happened to anyone in this film. Sam Worthington could have died halfway through; Argos could have been utterly destroyed by the Kraken and I just wouldn’t have cared.



Clash of the Titans is in theatres now

Movie Review - The Lovely Bones

Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Director: Peter Jackson
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Rose McIver, Michael Imperioli
Running Time: 135 minutes (plus trailers)

"My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name, Susie. I was fourteen years old when I was murdered"

I have many complaints I wish to make about The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s directorial follow up to King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But if I could only make one it would be about the lead character, fourteen year old Susie Salmon. Played fairly well by child actress Saoirse Ronan, who was previously nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in Atonement, Susie was never the less a protagonist whose journey I did not care about at all. It didn’t help that the entire film is cloyingly narrated by her, that she comes across as your typical whiny fourteen year old girl movie character, or that any time she is onscreen she is accompanied by the irritating tinkling of a piano. It also doesn’t help that she spends most of the movie dead.

For those of you who don’t know, The Lovely Bones is about a young girl, Susie, who on 6th of December 1973, is murdered. Now you know this going into the movie; and even if you didn’t, she tells you what happens in the voiceover anyway. Now I wouldn’t quite say that I disliked Susie enough to actually be looking forward to her inevitable death, but I was looking forward to the point in the film when her wise-for-her-age voice would stop ringing in my ears. Unfortunately, as the films taglines tells us The Lovely Bones is “the story of a life and everything that came after” and so even after Susie is rubbed out twenty minutes in, she continues to be a presence in the film, distracting from what could have potentially been a very interesting story. Instead what we got was a movie that was over long, overly sentimental and despite its attempts to be deep, contained more unrealistic CGI than it did intelligence or human emotion.

In the wake of Susie’s death her middle class family attempts to deal with the grief of her passing, whilst her killer, a shut in neighbour who gives all middle aged men living alone who spend their days playing with dollhouses a bad name, disposes of her remains and begins to plot his next crime. Meanwhile Susie finds herself exploring some kind of a purgatorial paradise, a strange computer generated wonderland between heaven and earth. It was these scenes, the scenes that featured the films quote unquote main character that really ruined the movie for me. As Susie wanders through a forest that changes seasons in an instant, or dances through a field of wheat that turns to water, I found myself wondering what the point of these scenes were and when we were going to get back to the real world to the characters who were still actually alive.

Jackson does do a competent job behind the camera; the cinematography is strong, the visuals in the “heaven” sequences are generally interesting (although often let down by the overutilization of poor special effects) and the acting from the entire cast is good to great. Most notably Stanley Tucci is very creepy as George Harvey, the sinister killer. But the character development in The Lovely Bones is another thing that leaves something to be desired. Even though Tucci does a good job, the script has him spending most of his time peering out windows or brutishly shutting his curtains…in fact all of his mannerisms seem to scream “child molester”. Hell, would you trust someone with that moustache? Then at the end of the film we get an incredibly frustrating and rather silly resolution to his story that struck me as a desperate (not to mention rushed) attempt to try and tie Susie’s world with the real one.

The most disappointing thing, I feel, is that many elements of the film; the families anguish and the killers machinations, could have been interesting. But Jackson insists on these long, poorly rendered CGI fantasy sequences that add absolutely nothing to the ongoing story, and in fact, giving that the film goes for over two hours, serve as nothing but totally unnecessary padding. Susie doesn’t learn anything in this twilight zone; all she does is mope and impart preachy life lessons onto an audience who (speaking for myself at least) just wanted her to move on. Literally. If you edited out all the scenes featuring Susie after her death and just focused on her grief stricken father’s obsessive quest for justice and her killer’s attempts to get away with his crimes, you would have a film of a more appropriate length that I would probably recommend. Instead we got The Lovely Bones.



The Lovely Bones is now playing in theatres in Australia; it will open in the US on January 15th

Movie Review - Surrogates

Genre: Science Fiction, Action Thriller
Director: Jonathan Mostow
Starring: Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, Ving Rhames, James Cromwell
Running Time: 89 minutes (plus trailers)

“Our world has become a safer place”

In the not too distant future, the way we live our lives has been changed forever due to the advent of “surrogates” – robotic versions of ourselves that we can control from the comfort of our own home, sending them out into the world without any fear of injury, disease or death. But when two users, one of them the son of the inventor of surrogacy, are killed via signals from their own surrogates, it appears as though the technology may not be as safe as it seemed. Enter FBI Agent Tom Greer (Bruce Willis), an experienced but disillusioned detective who has begun to despise the fakeness of the world around him. Despite an interesting premise, Surrogates is a film that takes the easiest and most obvious route every single time. With shades of Gataca, The Matrix, Minority Report and I, Robot, Surrogates is a thought provoking film that is trapped within the most standard of sci-fi/action movies, and its failure to explore the ideas it so tantalizingly put forward left me feeling unsatisfied, bored and a little insulted.

The movie could have been really good. There are individual moments that were so promising; the ideas of anonymity, of changing oneself, of this artificial perfection are all so relevant in this internet age, but the movie never really goes further than the initial “oh look, the hot female robot was actually being controlled by a big fat dude”. I really wanted to explore the universe the film set up; I wanted to know more about surrogates, about what you could and could not do. I wanted a District 9 style look into this world; instead, I got the bare minimum that was required to push along what was, quite frankly, a very predictable murder mystery. I had so many questions - the movie tells us that 99% of the world now uses surrogates – does this include the billions of starving people in Africa? Is famine a thing of the past? I guess we’ll never know.

I’d like to present just a few examples of the utter lack of creativity in this film. Most obvious is the completely unnecessary fact that Bruce Willis’s character had a son who died. And we know this, from the moment he enters a child’s room in his home that is perfectly made up, and stares wistfully at a carefully placed baseball glove. There’s absolutely no reason for this subplot, except to give Willis the chance to whisper gruffly “I lost a son too” when a murder victims father yells “how can you possibly understand?” Yeah, we’ve never seen that before. Or what about the clever introduction a third of the way into the movie of the over-weight tech guy who can take control of any surrogate in the city; I wonder if he’s going to re-appear? Even the little things were uninspired – some characters abuse electricity, an addiction they refer to as “jacking”. Jacking? Creative stuff, really. I'm not sure if this indicates the screenwriters are stupid, or if they just think the audience is. Probably both.

There is some good in the movie. The ending, although a) predictable and b) given away in the trailer, was still my favourite part of the entire film – it was the only time it seemed to be trying for something other than stock standard storytelling. I also thought that Bruce Willis did a good job of playing Bruce Willis, a role he seems to have perfected over the years. Finally, the relationship between Willis’s character and his surrogate obsessed wife was somewhat interesting, and her job as a futuristic beautician seemed appropriate. But even this story arc could have been handled so much better. And on the other side of the coin we have the character of The Prophet, one of the stupidest, poorly developed characters you will ever see – I felt embarrassed for Ving Rhames any time he was on screen.

Director Jonathan Mostow previously made Terminator 3, a much hated film that I will, to a certain extent, defend. It obviously not up there with the first two, but at least it had some good action, and a few moments where it seemed to be trying. Surrogates doesn’t even have this working for it – the action is bland (and every second of it was featured in the trailer), the score tells you exactly how to feel at every given moment, and the film-making is shot reverse shot the entire way through. Surrogates had the potential to be a good maybe great sci-fi film, but everyone involved seems motivated only by the paycheck. From the dead son to the casting of James Cromwell, there is not an original thought to be found in Surrogates past the initial concept. And this, more than anything, is the reason to skip it.



Surrogates is in cinemas now





LAMBScore:

Movie Review - The Boat That Rocked

WARNING: The following review contains an obscene amount of nautical puns

Genre: Comedy
Director: Richard Curtis
Starring: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Tom Sturridge, Bill Nighy, Nick Frost, Kenneth Branagh, Rhys Ifans, Jack Davenport
Running Time: 129 minutes (plus trailers)

The year is 1966, and Carl (Tom Sturridge) has been sent by his mother to live with his godfather Quentin (Bill Nighy) in the hopes that the influence of a father figure will help straighten the boy out. This decision turns out to be somewhat unwise, as Quentin happens to be the captain of a pirate radio station that broadcasts rock ‘n’ roll twenty four hours a day from a boat anchored off the coast of England. The ship is host to a colourful fraternity of DJ’s – including The Count (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the ‘big and beautiful’ Dave (Nick Frost) and the simple minded Thick Kevin (Tom Brooke) – and every day twenty five million people across the United Kingdom tune in. This concept struck me as not all that interesting or funny….and the film struck me in much the same way.

The main problem with The Boat That Rocked is that is has absolutely no direction, no bearing. Carl is purportedly the main character, but the narrative frequently departs from his journey to explore short vignettes involving the other crewmembers – which wouldn’t be such a problem if they were even remotely interesting. But none of the minor characters are captivating or funny enough to make us care, and as such the film feels rudderless. The B-story that follows Minister Domandy (Kenneth Branagh) and his efforts to shut down the station has potential, but we never see it have any real effect on the rest of the characters. What’s worse is that all the jumping about make The Boat That Rocked over two hours long, which in my mind is unforgivable. A comedy should be fast paced; this film just sits there. Scratch that; it just floats there.

Thankfully, the performances are pretty strong; with the highlight unsurprisingly being Phillip Seymour Hoffman (you could say he anchors the film.) If one looks at Hoffman’s roles over the last few years – they include a maverick spy in Charlie Wilson’s War, a priest accused of sexual assault in Doubt and a recent vocal performance in Mary and Max – it becomes clear that he is one of the greatest and most versatile actors of our time. The rest of the cast ranges from good to acceptable, but like I said earlier, the characters they play are all utterly one-dimensional. Each of them has a single characteristic that is introduced within a minute of their first appearance, and that characteristic becomes their only joke. For example, the character named Thick Kevin is (wait for it) thick. Felicity, the ships cook, is a lesbian. And that’s it. That’s the only character development we get! Jack Davenport plays an uptight politician named Twat. When the characters name is a gag, it can be funny. Once. This film is weighed down by a bloated cargo of unnecessary, one joke characters that should have been tossed overboard.

At this point I feel a little bit like a killjoy. I do realise that it’s a comedy, and that as such the characters don’t necessarily need to be well rounded; they just need to be funny. And sometimes they are. But another think I noticed was that the style of comedy felt really dated. Like most people, my tastes have shifted in recent years in favour of the more R-rated comedies, whether they be the gratuitously violent works of Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) or the raunchy improvisational films of Judd Apatow and co. (40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up.) Richard Curtis has been behind some very funny films from the nineties and early naughts including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love, Actually, but their time has been and gone. The Boat That Rocked isn’t as good as any of those movies. It features some grins, and one or two laughs, but it’s not nearly worth the cost of the voyage. It’s not a Titanic disaster, but it’s certainly no…um...I can’t think of another nautically themed joke to go here. So let me just say that The Boat That Rocked, didn’t.

The Boat That Rocked is in Australian cinemas now; it will open in the US on August 28th

Movie Review - Changeling

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Director: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Jason Butler Harner, Michael Kelly

Running Time: 141 minutes (plus trailers)

Angelina Jolie stars in Changeling, a film based on the real life kidnapping of Walter Collins from his home in Los Angeles in 1928. Jolie plays Walters mother, Christine Collins, who comes up against police corruption after the LAPD, in an attempt to get some good press, claim to have found her son. However, the child is an impostor, and when Christine tries to speak out, she is placed in a mental institution. Going in, this premise struck me as rather absurd, despite the declaration in the opening credits that Changeling is ‘a true story.’ Whether it is true or not, I discovered that this premise is definitely not interesting enough to sustain a film for close to two and a half hours.

But first, the good. The production design is excellent, and the cinematography beautiful. Angelina Jolie gives a heartwrenching performance as the grief stricken Christine Collins. John Malkovich’s performance was a little underwhelming, but the rest of the supporting cast is great, particularly Jason Butler Harner as real life serial killer Gordon Northcott and Colm Feore as Police Commissioner James E. Davis. Even the kids where great, and I am usually very critical of child actors. Moreover, Changeling explores ideas that I find absolutely fascinating. Themes of police corruption and the rights of women are hardly uncommon in period pictures, but the way in which they are developed here was really eye opening, particularly in the middle section of the film.

Where the movie failed was in keeping me engrossed. Like a lot of films based on real events, Changeling continually skips forward in time, and every time we see a new date flashed across the screen, it pulls us out of the movie. Likewise, the score was incredibly distracting. The movie also suffers enormously from structural issues. The first half hour of this film was fairly uninteresting, all though not that bad. The second act, which comes when Collins is thrown into the nut house, is terrific. But the third act takes an absolute nosedive. I won’t reveal what happens, but I will say that by the end of this film I was bored witless. Again, I can attribute this to Eastwoods desire to stay true to history, but there were so many scenes in the last fourty five minutes that could have been cut. At one point the film skips forward five years in time, which serves absolutely no purpose; the ending is ambiguous anyway, so why bother? Frankly, the serial killer subplot that is introduced halfway through would have made a far more interesting movie on its own; I found myself getting frustrated every time we cut back to Christine Collins, and it’s never a good sign when you’re no longer interested in the movies main character

As I mentioned previous, there are a lot of good aspects to Changeling. But all the cinematography in the world can’t make up for the fact that this film simply isn’t interesting enough to justify over two hours. Better editing could have made a world of difference, but sadly, Eastwood chose to be a little self indulgent, and the project suffered as a result. I really hope that one day someone makes a movie based on the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, which make up the best parts of this film. If my final rating seems harsh, it’s because I feel almost angry at how bored I was; there is a good movie within Changeling, but it is lost amongst the drek.

Changeling is in cinemas now.

Movie Review - Body of Lies

Genre: Action Thriller, Drama

Director: Ridley Scott

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Golshifteh Farahani, Vince Colosimo

Running Time: 128 minutes (plus trailers)

Body of Lies is not a good movie. If I was writing a review containing only one sentence, that is what it would be. Luckily, I can write a review that’s much longer than one sentence, so I am also able to include words such as predictable, melodramatic and dull. The basic story is as follows: The Western world is under attack from terrorist mastermind Al Salim, and the US Government, despite all their fancy technology, is unable to apprehend him. So instead, CIA agent Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) and his handler Ed Hoffman (Crowe) decide to invent their own terrorist mastermind, and use him as bait to capture Salim. The story sounds pretty good. It’s not.

The film is over two hours long, but at least thirty minutes could have been cut, especially from the dreary and irrelevant first act. Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio are both excellent actors who do mediocre jobs with the clichéd characters they play. Anyone who has ever seen an action thriller film before can predict every turn the story takes, from the unbelievable romantic sub-plot to the supposedly climatic hostage situation. But worst of all, the movie tries to be meaningful. Instead of simply resigning itself to the standard but entertaining action genre, it attempts to address weighty themes of surveillance, terrorism and America’s relationship with the Middle East, but is so heavy handed and obvious that on top of failing as an action film; it is also fails to be a credible drama. Ultimately, the ideas the film puts forward are far better explored in other movies such as The Kingdom or Enemy of the State (not to mention that one episode of South Park where Hilary Clinton has a nuclear bomb hidden…on her person.)

Around the half way point, the movie does pick up a little, but this is only because it becomes more about action and tension, and less about the message. The movie isn’t completely horrible; Ridley Scott (whose best films include Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down) does a good job of directing, and the film has enough explosions and a few tense moments to maybe…maybe make it worth renting. But I stand by what I said. Body of Lies is not a good movie.

3/10