The World's End is a sad way to end Edgar Wright's "Cornetto Trilogy", precious few memorable moments and a lot of repetitive action filling the time.
Six men are reunited by the nostalgia infused rantings of a drunken man-child named Gary King and set on an epic pub crawl in their old town from twenty years ago. But when they begin they find the sleepy town is the nerve-centre of a hostile takeover and they are the Earth's last hope.
Edgar Wright quickly became one of the director's I would look out for purely off the back of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World and Hot Fuzz, the latter being the second installment of his collaborative film series with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost known as the "Cornetto Trilogy". I loved Hot Fuzz, it has so much going on and excellent pacing and fun characters. This trilogy's opening act Shaun of the Dead was certainly fun as a zombie parody, but I rate it below its follow-up.
The World's End feels reminiscent of Shaun of the Dead, yet without the fun poking at a bloated genre that was experiencing a Renaissance at that particular time. I don't know what The World's End was trying to achieve, apart from literally being a Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright collab and little more.
The film feels more than a little dry of ideas as it goes on. Our reluctant characters are dragged on Simon Pegg's Cheshire Cat-grinning Gary King through multiple pubs even after they discover the town is infested with malicious alien clones. But the pub crawl must continue, despite the obvious incentive to run away. What develops is a undulating peaks-and-troughs scenario: characters reminisce about their drunken teenage years, followed by a crazed blue blood-splattered fight. Repeat until run time is complete.
Perhaps if there had been more of our characters getting increasingly drunk as their adventure continues, yes, that doesn't even really feature; they fight and run around at the end of the film as well as they did at the start.
There are some good morsels spread throughout though. The film's climax is probably the best moment in the film because of its nature of parodying science fiction films and invasion movies, feeling much more in line with the previous two installments of the Cornetto Trilogy. There's also great chemistry between the characters themselves. Simon Pegg's character is front and centre, and while critics can argue Pegg is only there because of his rise in Hollywood (he had been alongside Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible and starred in Star Trek by this point) his character is deliberately the most feeble in the story! The way the script has his friends playing off his immature, rambunctious behavior works perfectly to the film's benefit, regardless of your personal opinion of Pegg.
A lot of good stars in here too, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan (I just rewatched Filth recently and recognised him) Rosamund Pike breaks up the all-boys line up, and even Pierce Brosnen was in there. Not... sure why Brosnen was there mind you.
The World's End had the odd fun moment but sadly not enough to really hold my attention, its over-reliance on action sequences made it feel samey throughout. I really wanted to like this more, but while the earlier two films felt like great comedy parody, this was more like a straight action comedy.
Robert Carlyle directs and stars in a Glaswegian's answer to a Tarantino film!
Barney Thomson is an awkward, single and sheltered 50-something barber living in Glasgow in Scotland with an overbearing mother. His life has been uneventful and he's happy with that, but when he's involved in an accident that kills his boss and simultaneously the police are looking for a serial killer... his life is about to go off the rails.
The Legend of Barney Thomson is a love or hate situation for the wider audience, but that is common for most black comedies. I personally found it entertaining enough, but I cannot say I laughed a great deal; it has incredibly dry humour, and a little bit repetitive over the course of the movie. When I reflect on it I imagine it like a long macabre Monty Python sketch.
Robert Carlyle is very good in the lead role as Barney Thomson, who we are introduced as a man to be avoided in this barber shop: "You look like a haunted tree" explains his boss, and he really does! But as the film goes on we see him as a very timid shut-in, and Carlyle portrayed it perfectly, especially as the odds are stacked so heavily against him. Alongside him is Emma Thompson as his mother (though one questions the age gap between the actors themselves) a woman who wants nothing to do with him apart from use him any way she can to go on parties with her friends, and Ray Winstone as a bitter, grudge-ridden police officer on the verge of breakdown. The three of them are actually very good in their roles, and I say that as someone who generally doesn't care for Winstone in most of his roles.
But while the actors look like they are having a good time, and it is great to see familiar "everyday" Glasgow streets specifically around the Bridgeton area, for a black comedy it didn't feel especially funny or even quotable. It has swearing, a lot of swearing, and a lot of Glaswegian (poor Americans may need subtitles!) to promote its humour. There were a couple of laughs, but for me it got a little repetitive as time went on, and it certainly jumps the shark for good measure at its climax. Where did that come from?
At best it is a curiosity as Carlyle's debut in the director's chair, but even as I write this review I consider it entertaining but intensely cliched and repetitive.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Forest Whitaker carry this boxing film higher than its fairly average pedigree would normally allow.
Billy Hope is at the top of his game in professional boxing, but when a terrible incident sees his wife shot and killed, he finds himself unable to cope with the loss and risks losing his daughter too. Can he prove himself to both her and those around him before he loses everything?
I purely wanted to see Southpaw because of leading star Gyllenhaal and his physical transformation for the role of a heavyweight boxer. He is proving time and time again now that he throws himself into the role, and the film opens with relish; showing Gyllenhaal as a terrifying storm in the ring who's reckless fighting style has him bloody and bruised before he can destroy his opponents.
The first half of this film is a bloody, bleak and quite oppressive experience. The word "endurance" came to mind several times and I imagined that this was thematically deliberate; the audience experiencing the struggle with Billy while his character battles far worse injuries than any he takes in the ring.
This hard opening, watching a simple man's life being systematically destroyed was a struggle at times, and not just because of its content but because I found the characters a little shallowly written at first. Even when things go wrong, I didn't feel much emotional attachment to those suffering the consequences.
But, after the first half the film develops into the more formulaic boxing film storyline (yes, there is a training montage!) and while this might sound like a bad thing, I actually became a lot more sensitive to their emotions at this point.
There are a couple of scenes between Gyllenhaal and his new trainer Wills played by Forest Whitaker that are very powerful and meaningful. Gyllenhaal does not disappoint in any of his scenes, seamlessly going from simple brute to mellowing father extremely well. He also shares scenes with his daughter, played by young Oona Laurence (who was a very good child actress!) which are also very emotional and intense.
The film ends much stronger than it began, a slow boil weighed down with obvious foreshadowing and a weak, unmemorable script. But if you power through the stiff, unrelenting start, it becomes a gritty story of finding one's self-respect and inner strength.
Okay so, I had my doubts about It Follows; horror films have become something of a laughing stock recently, but in fact... this film is really good!
After sleeping with a guy she likes called Hugh, Jay begins to see a mysterious figure approaching her that no one else can see. Its intent on murdering her can only be stopped by passing the curse on to someone else.
I certainly had my doubts about It Follows, I figured it would be a sledgehammered moral story about sexually transmitted disease in the guise of a spooky ghost story. But the critics loved it, and now I can see why.
Horror films today are generally quite terrible: poor scripts, poor screenplays and cliches, or at best: debatable acting, overuse of gore and violence or making everything found-footage.
But It Follows doesn't trend into any of these modern problems or tropes, at worst you could say its all about teens, again. But that isn't really the case (and really, horror's main demographic is teenagers, so it makes sense as a necessary trope).
This is a stalker film, a lot like John Carpenter's acclaimed Halloween, the camera pans softly and slowly across suburban America, while subtle synth music lifted gently from early 80s thriller and horror genres makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It is a film of omnipresence, our lead character Jay is left mortified and frightened of the world around her, afraid of something no one else can see.
The metaphor that this film hammers in is less about the act of sex and more about the nature of growing up, and the fears of adulthood.
The atmosphere is thick, layered on with stretches of silent ambiance, but our characters do get a chance to act. Jay has friends to help her recover from her initial encounter with Hugh, but they must also help her when things get far, far worse. The acting is decent across the board, the script is minimal but not insultingly mumbling; enough to get the point across. A lot of our young characters intentions and feelings are expressed silently or quietly.
I had plenty of theories as to where the story would develop, but I did not expect the direction the film took. Any escalation throughout the film felt natural and none of it forced. The supernatural "rules" implemented were not exhaustive or convenient to the plot; they were just enough to inspire possible loopholes while at the same time restrict our protagonists. What jump scares there are they are used sparingly, equally so with any visual effects.
It is as simple as it can get, and often with horror films the simpler it is the more haunting and memorable it becomes.
If you are a fan of horror It Follows is a must see, and even if you aren't but like a old fashioned scare once in a while, this is for you too.
One of Marvel's main characters is one of the harder sells, and while Ant-Man isn't a game changer it has risen above the criticism and difficulties during its development.
Hank Pym, a scientist for Shield developed a super particle that compresses the space around atoms, allowing objects to be shrunk down. But when Howard Stark and others wanted to use this science, Pym hid it away. Now though, to stop others developing their own weaponised version, Pym needs someone younger to become the Ant-Man.
I will be the first to admit, I had little hope for Ant-Man. Not only does it (to my un-geek-cultured, non-comic-reader mind) sound ridiculous, but a favourite director Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim Vs the World and Hot Fuzz) dropped out of the project midway through to be replaced by Peyton Reed who has a much less credible resume (Yes Man, The Break-Up, Bring it On) and that is isolated from the fact that Ant-Man has also been in development hell since 2006!
There was every reason to believe that Ant-Man would be either laughed off stage or for it to take up the mantle: "When Marvel lost it".
But while the scope of Ant-Man feels more like the first Iron Man film than recent sprawling Marvel flicks, perhaps in result of its long development time, this retro feel actually works in its favour. Paul Rudd stars as Scott Lang, a father and ex-husband just released from prison for robbery, a man struggling for cash and is approached by the legendary Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) to train and become a superhero thief.
That's right, Ant-Man is Marvel's heist movie! Scott Lang's friends are a trio of streetwise thieves, including Michael Pena in a comedic turn, while Pym's fiery, headstrong daughter Hope is played by Evangeline Lily (redeeming herself completely from the stupidity of Tauriel from The Hobbit) and there's a great sense of bigger things going on but this story is a slice of life. It has a great moment where Lang, when faced with impossible odds, yells: "Why don't we just call The Avengers!?"
With a small scale but frankly excellent acting from our heroes (especially Michael Douglas) Marvel hammers home with a lot of fun and humour. There were a couple of real laugh-out-loud moments, and not just that one from the trailer. It is a well known fact now that Marvel makes comedies, but you know what... after the depression that was Terminator Genisys, Ant-Man was great levity!
I will say though, once again Marvel's formula strikes again with a film that knows how to develop heroes but cannot make a decent villain. Much like Iron Man with Obadiah Stane, Darren Cross is little more than a dark side of Hank Pym's brilliance. Marvel have had twelve films now, twelve, and Loki is the only one people can argue is memorable.
That and, by its very nature, Ant-Man is extremely CGI heavy, perhaps more than even Guardians of the Galaxy? Not to say it is bad CGI (in fact it is great to see him shrink and grow!) and I cannot suggest an alternative, but it does become a bit of an ocean of computer effects at times.
There's lots of good performances, a great sense of fun and adventure as well as a little bit more world building for Marvel's Cinematic Universe. It isn't a game changer, but it isn't the train wreck people are afraid it might be.
2012's Spring Breakers is hard to review as a Brit who has no concept of what Spring Break can really be like. It is a beautifully shot but grim film.
Four college girls want to go on Spring Break to escape their repetitive normal lives, but haven't the money to pay for it. Three of them resort to robbing a restaurant to remedy this and Spring Break is theirs... only their trip goes in unexpected directions when they befriend a drug dealer.
The film's gaudy advertisement is deliberate; these girls are airheads of the modern generation, grown up on MTV and broken pop idols, they act with vulgarity and complete ignorance of consequence and their surroundings. Supermodel looks, yes, but utterly unlikable.
The dislike I have for he characters (while quite deliberate of the film) not withstanding, I found the film's screenplay too obvious for the most part. One of the four girls is somewhat reluctant and is a Christian, being told early on that "she will have a means of escape should things go wrong in life", and that her friends had "demon blood" and shouldn't be trusted.
Yikes, foreshadowing much?
From the beginning we get gratuitous shots of bikini clad bodies (it would make Michael Bay blush) nudity, drug and alcohol abuse, during which the scene edits are often exaggerated with the sound of a pistol being reloaded or a gun being fired.
This film is not subtle, nor is it ever light. Spring Breakers is a Natural Born Killers-esque dive into psychosis and depravity. We watch as outsiders as four thoughtless, stupid girls are lost because they don't understand the gravity of their situation.
It is a hard film to like. Critics praise it and the public despise it. On the surface it may appear to be heartless, empty and shallow... but those problems are central to the characters, the girls are all of those things and the film embraces it.
You could also argue that it is a film designed by someone who hates "spring breakers" and extroverts who, to them, deserve what's coming to them; that the story being a direct message towards rape culture.
James Franco plays the drug dealer who befriends them after he bails them out of jail, and he looks like he's having a lot of fun with the characters, the film's climax was not what I expected.
It isn't a film I will watch again. It is extreme and full of deliberately unlikable characters, as well as glamorising lifestyles far, far removed from my own even though it does everything to trash them.
A spin-off from the Despicable Me films, Gru's loveable minions get a prequel; showing us how the fan favourite babbling twinkles got to where they are now. Sort of.
Minions, named exactly that, have existed before humans and yet their purpose has always been to serve a master. From Tyrannosaurus Rex to cavemen, but the Minions had to hide from one particular angry boss, and when they become disillusioned three of them bravely set out to find the tribe a new master.
For me Despicable Me was a pretty good film, mostly because of main anti-hero Gru; it was a refreshing turn on the superhero genre. The second film drops the ball a little with not only a deviation for Gru (as natural as it was) to a hero / smitten lover. The minions too, the minions overrode the movie.
Now they have their own film? The multiple babbling yellow blobs have a whole movie to fill? Ouch.
But luckily for us the Minions movie is barely an hour and a half, perhaps even eighty-five minutes? So the movie doesn't do the worst thing imaginable: outstay its welcome. Parents rejoice!
The film runs much like its trailer does (a little like this year's Shaun the Sheep in that regard) we start with possibly the best segment, a narrated nature documentary-esque sequence that moves through different time periods. That's Geoffrey Rush (Pirates captain Barbossa) as the narrator, and the whole film could have been in this format for all I care!
But no, we had to have some story besides the Minions. Enter Scarlet Overkill, voiced by Sandra Bullock, perhaps the Minions best chance at a new master. I hate to say it... but Bullock's voice acting and the character of Scarlet generally was quite irritating. I guess there was too much shouting? I never really thought she was the capable super villain the film was portraying her as.
I didn't know what to expect from the Minions solo outing, but it certainly wasn't them battling Scarlet over possession of the United Kingdom and the Queen's crown! Enter a lot of British puns and humour, which vary between great and tired, somewhat reminiscent of Ardman Animation Studio work.
The film has a frenetic pace, as one might expect, once enemies have been made the Minions find themselves in danger constantly, while at the same time being their usual gormless and innocent selves. The Minions aren't as toilet-humour prone as I had expected, and their language is quite endearing at times... even if it was a little like watching a new generation's Teletubbies.
It got a few chuckles from me, which is more than I would have expected! It wasn't fantastic, it wasn't bad either though, certainly one for the kids to enjoy. I would argue it is better than Despicable Me 2 but not a patch on the first film.
Additional Marshmallows: Co-director Pierre Coffin not only created the original Despicable Me films, but also voices the Minions themselves!
So it finally happened, the studios bent the Terminator over their knee and snapped it in half like a twig, making the entire series feel about as relevant in the process.
From what one can gather from the plot, when Kyle Reese is sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor from a cyborg assassin known as a Terminator, he discovers a new timeline from what we are familiar with from the 1984 The Terminator film. Sarah has been protected by another Terminator since she was nine. Now this new trio must do battle with multiple enemies in a final effort to stop the apocalyptic artificial intelligence Skynet from being created.
Terminator Genisys is a travesty of gargantuan proportions, not just because it is the total undermining of two of cinema's finest achievements (that isn't just me saying that, it is fact) but it is a terrible action film with one ugly script and no heart.
Within the first thirty minutes this film compacts the first two movies: we get a jumble of action sequences that set the tone; we get shot-for-shot scenes of The Terminator's 1984 arrival (neatly halted before any actual gore occurs, befitting of this trashy 12A nightmare) we get regular Terminators, we get T-1000s we get old Arnie, we get future war scenes. All packed so tightly it is a complete mess; like watching a 30-minute Youtube video of "all the best Terminator fights from all of the movies", and about as well edited.
That's only the start! It doesn't let up. As evident of the script, this film cannot rely on talking; when it does it descends into a constant stream of time-travel mumbo-jumbo and critically laughable chemistry between our main protagonists Reese and Connor. While Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke isn't bad as Sarah, she has such a young face that when coupled with her "I'm a soldier, grr-grr I am strong and I don't need you" attitude, she comes off like a brat at times. No fault of hers, the script made her that way. This is no Terminator 2 Linda Hamilton.
Then there's Jai Courtney... who I don't think studied who Kyle Reese actually is before walking on set. There's nothing behind his performance, and this is not the Kyle Reese we all know - critically his character should be the exact same as Michael Biehn, he's the only one this new timeline hasn't altered.
Arnold's reprise of The Terminator is... quite average actually. At worst he is The Expendables answer to this franchise: the catchphrase "Old, but not obsolete" is thrown around liberally. The film prefers to stick with the Connor/Reese romance, occasionally throwing Arnold in to glare at them, asking Sarah: "Have you mated with him yet?" All of his lines are okay, but they are all used at least twice!
You could go on and on about how bad this film is, the layers upon layers of nonsense, but it is often best to use broad strokes.
Genisys, in my opinion, is the worst Terminator film made to date. When a film looks bad from the trailer, the poster and even the promotional material and lives up to that, you know it is failure.
Additional Marshmallows: I don't know why JK Simmons is in this film.
Additional, Additional Marshmallows: What they do to Skynet is worse than Helena-Boham Carter in Terminator Salvation.
Additional, additional marshmallows: During the nonstop opening thirty minutes we get a "tense" moment that involves molecular acid. The scene is so poorly established that I wouldn't have been surprised if a xenomorph from Aliens was about to jump out.
