Kraven The Hunter

Join Kraven’s 
Hew Ground

Kraven The Hunter
UK/Iceland/Canada/USA 2024
Directed by J.C. Chandor
Columbia UK Blu Ray

Warning: This one has all the spoilers.

I think the suits in Hollywood are having trouble scratching their heads and wondering why their movie version of Kraven The Hunter failed. Well, pandemic aside, I saw pretty much every Marvel movie at the cinema whether I wanted to or not because I knew I’d really need to get a review of it up on my blog... and even I didn’t manage to catch this movie at the cinema. And the answer to why it failed at the box office is three fold and simple... and I say this because, now I’ve finally caught up to it (authenticity to the characters aside) it’s actually a pretty good movie. 

Okay, this movie failed because: Firstly it was following on from two other Columbia branded Marvel movies in the same year, the not well received Madame Web (reviewed here) and the okay but worst in the series Venom - The Last Dance (reviewed here)... which didn’t do it much favours, they should have maybe left an eight month gap between films. Secondly, the trailers for this thing looked terrible and, I’m pretty sure people my age, who remember the character from the 1960s and 70s, were a little baffled as to how a major villain from The Amazing Spider-Man comic was a) in a movie without Spider-Man and b) being portrayed as some kind of anti-hero rather than the bad guy he always was... and perhaps the comic character changed in the 90s or after but, yeah, this is not the Kraven I know (the Kraven I knew best was from the time when he joined The Sinister Six and also from the model kit I had as a kid, of Spider-Man perched on a wooden bannister, webbing a fallen Kraven on the floor). 

And even then, I would still have been up for catching this thing at the cinema and, I certainly planned to... but it was released mid-December 2024 and, I’m sorry, studio bosses need to realise that in the lead up to Christmas, when people are still buying and wrapping presents, not to mention writing and sending cards... and in the downtime just after when people are seeing friends and family... nope, people are not going to be interested in trying to plan their life around the stupidly inappropriate times these things are being shown at in the cinema. So, yeah, I believe that’s why this film failed and made such a loss for the company. 

Which is a shame because, as I said, it’s not a bad movie.

The film starts off  really strongly with Kraven (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) infiltrating a maximum security prison in order to kill the leader of a drugs/weapons cartel. After escaping we flash back to his childhood, with his brother and his dad (played by Russell Crowe) where we get his origin... which is contentious. In the comics he was just a relatively strong guy who was an expert hunter (which is why J. Jonah Jameson originally hired him to hunt Spider-Man) but, in this version of the story he’s given a potion to heal his wounds while simultaneously having the blood of a lion enter his system... all of which brings him back to life and gives him superhuman powers (oh, right, Marvel science then). Again, maybe this origin was retrofitted into the comics at some point but, if it was, I’m unaware of it. 

And then he becomes a kind of assassin who goes around taking out all the bad guys and, annually, checking in on his brother whom he deserted when they were kids. And then, as a result of him killing the guy at the start of the film, the global gangs are in a power struggle which also includes Kraven’s gang boss dad and results in his brother getting kidnapped.

And... it’s mostly pretty good. I’m saying that again because I’m going to talk about the bad stuff now and I don’t really want it to overshadow the positive stuff.

The thing is, there’s a woman who is Kraven’s pilot and we only see her from behind near the start of the movie and then, later, she’s referenced as she gives his leading lady, Calypso (played by Ariana DeBose) a lift to the jungle to meet up with him. So she’s obviously being kept in the shadows so she can be revealed as somebody important from the Marvel universe later in the movie... but that doesn’t happen. She just vanishes from the movie with no more mention of her (and we never get to see her face properly). So... I know this film had a somewhat troubled production and had to have some reshoots so, I’m wondering now if this big reveal was maybe cut to save for a later, never to be made sequel?

Secondly, the main villain here is The Rhino... another Spider-Man villain in a movie where the web head is nowhere to be seen. Okay, in the comics this was just a big guy in a Rhino onesy and, that would have suited me fine. Here, he’s just someone who can transform himself into a were-rhino when he taps into certain drugs. It all looks pretty awful guys. 

Thirdly... and I saw this coming a mile off because his talent for voice mimicry is highlighted throughout the movie.... Kraven’s brother becomes a third Spider-Man villain, The Chameleon, at the end of the film. And he does it by, in a completely dumbfounding and unexplained fashion, transforming into different people when required. I mean, literally morphing into them at will. What nonsense! In the comics he was a guy with a metal head who would slip realistic, latex masks over his noggin and mimic their voices to become them. Which sounds bad, I know but, heck, Tom Cruise and co have been doing that in nearly every Mission Impossible movie made so, yeah, they could have gotten away with it here too. And also, because it’s obviously planned for a potential sequel (again, this looks like it will never happen) then it’s just treated as a throwaway scene too... it doesn’t really work, in all honesty. 

And that’s me pretty much done with Kraven The Hunter. An actually pretty good film, despite those negatives and, I have to say I had a pretty good time with most of it. If you are a fan of action movies with a fair amount of violence and a little bit of goriness, then it’s worth giving a go. But I don’t think the franchise is going anywhere after this one, alas. 

28 Years Later

Jimmy Fixes It 
For The Infected

28 Years Later
Directed by Danny Boyle
UK/USA 2025
Columbia
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Big spoilers. Avoid reading until you’ve seen it.

28 Years Later is, of course, the sequel to both 28 Days Later and its follow up, 28 Weeks Later. The first was a very popular retake on the zombie apocalypse genre but with the zombies replaced by RAGE virus infected killer humans and it had a strong opening which was quite similar to John Wyndham’s novel (and various adaptations of) The Day Of The Triffids. I would say the first two thirds of that movie were pretty good but it all, for me, kind of runs out of steam when you get to the military presence in the last third. I loved the second film though, even if it was more of a traditional style entry into that specific sub-genre... I just don’t remember a whole lot about it, truth be told. 

This third installment, made some 23 years after the first installment and, once more by the same director working with writer Alex Garland, is not just a sequel to those movies but also the first part of a new trilogy of 28 Years Later themed films, the second of which is rumoured to star the main lead of the first movie (the then unknown Cillian Murphy) and is currently to be released in January of next year.

And it’s a pretty good, actually. It has a strong opening where a bunch of kids try to ignore that the house they live in is being overrun by zombies as they watch the Teletubbies on television, somewhere around the time of the first outbreak... and the movie, which then jumps the 28 years later to the main setting, harkens back to this cold open at the very end of the tale. 

The main lead for the remainder being a 12 year old boy called Spike, played brilliantly throughout by Alfie Williams. The film is a game of two halves followed by a left of field prologue sequence. In sequence one it’s made clear, with some mostly credible retconning, that the UK is the only place where the infected remained. The UK is therefore a quarantine zone to the rest of the world, the shores patrolled by boats from other countries to make sure nobody tries to escape the British Isles. Spike lives in a small village compound separated from the mainland by a causeway which is only accessible when the tide is low... and yeah, that’s an obvious plot device for bad timing when running from hordes of RAGE infected zombies, for sure. 

Spike is taken to the mainland by his father, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, to get his first ‘zombie kills’ as a kind of rites of passage. And this is where the one thing which is wrong with this movie comes into play... people stupidly putting themselves in completely stupid situations and making stupid decisions for the sake of a taut and intense series of frightening scenes. And, yeah, the film is quite intense and bleak, more so in the first half hour than in any other part of the movie, I would say... as Spike and his father barely make it back to their village in one piece. 

The second main section involves more stupidity as Spike escapes from the village with his mum, played brilliantly by the great Jodie Comer, in order to seek out a Hearts Of Darkness Kurtz like character who was once a doctor and, of whom, evidence is found that he still lives (due to Spike and his dad observing a fire in the distance when they were hiding from the infected). Jodie Comer’s character Isla keeps having strange, delusionary episodes and, sometimes mistakes Spike for her father. However, when they do find the doctor, played by the great Ralph Fiennes, he diagnoses brain cancer and informs them she hasn’t got long to live. You can probably guess what happens next. 

And it’s a quite gruelling film for the first half an hour, for sure... and there are some beautiful shots in it. The cinematography looks like a gazillion dollars which is why I am suitably shocked and impressed to find the whole movie was shot on an iPhone... because it does look like an epic, it has to be said. Not to mention some great artistic choices such as the 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 poem Boots used to chilling effect (as it also is in the trailer) and the use of the Lawrence Olivier version of Henry V to further push certain metaphors. 

The second journey out to find the doctor is still quite action packed but I would say it’s more about the visual poetry of the story rather than the fright factor... although there are certainly some unsettling scenes to be had from this second expedition outside the relative safety of the compound. 

And then we get to the end sequence which... I really feel I need to talk about. Spoilers... you don’t want to know. 

So Spike makes a decision, after delivering a newborn baby back to his home. A newborn but uninfected baby which is birthed by a zombie... from when Spike’s mum helps said zombie out, in terms of the delivery. And the decision he comes to is to stay outside and take his chances in the world of the infected. However, it’s not long before he finds himself cornered by a load of RAGE infected, fast zombies. And then, in the film's third or fourth example of unlikely deux ex machina, he’s saved by a group of blonde haired... well. 

Okay... 

So this ending reminded me of the kind of satirical edge that 2000AD comic used to get into trouble for in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In a bizarre twist, this group of people, who I thought at, first were supposed to be blonde, Swedish death-metal fans and who beat up and kill the zombies with what seems to be almost superhuman strength and agility... are something which I think some members of the British audience may find a little triggering. They’re all dressed in roughly the same way, with track suits, lots of jewellery and white/blonde hair which may or may not be wigs. But it was only when the leader (who I think is supposed to be the grown up version of the main Teletubbies watching kid in the film’s prologue) puts his ring laden hand out to Spike and says, “I’m Jimmy, let’s be pals.” that I realised I was observing a cult of people who based themselves on Jimmy Saville. 

Now, it has to be said, that since the first movie was set contemporary to its release, these later installments are taking place in an alternative timeline of the UK. So, what makes the Jimmy Saville thing an even more curious choice is the fact that, in this timeline, his various crimes had not yet seen the light of day in public. So it is a very unusual choice, especially since it seems to imply that the next part, directed by Nia DaCosta (who did a great job on The Marvels, reviewed here, as far as I’m concerned), will be picking up the story directly after this one. 

And that’s me done with 28 Years Later, I think. A pretty good movie and an unexpected sequel after all this time (I was still waiting for a 28 Months Later, myself). Worth catching at the cinema, if you want to be impressed with what an iPhone can somehow capture, I would say. 

Nosferatu (2024)

Nos Quite Feratu

Nosferatu (2024)
Directed by Robert Eggers
UK/USA/Hungary 2024
Focus Features
UK Cinema Release Print.

Wow, okay then. Robert Eggers’ new remake of Nosferatu is actually a pretty good movie. Alas, it’s doesn’t quite fall far into the great category for me due to one specific creative decision but, yeah, it’s a wonderful study in ‘gothic horror’ in all senses and people who are drawn to that certain kind of atmosphere should find much to enjoy in it. Alas, it falls just a little short of the first of the many versions of Nosferatu, specifically the 1922 W. F. Murnau film Nosferatu - A Symphony Of Horror but, as a powerful and somewhat feral piece of modern cinema, I think it’s nothing short of spectacular.

Now I’ll mention this in my reviews of both the original and other remakes/influenced works later on at this blog (hopefully this year... I’ve been post-Christmas sales shopping so I can revisit some of the key works) but, a quick and dirty history of the story behind the original goes something like this. Murnau wanted to make an adaptation of Dracula and Bram Stoker’s widow was against it. So he went and adapted the story anyway, changing all of the names and locations and still, I suspect, basing a lot of it on Stoker’s stage adaptation of his own work. When the film was finished and released, Stoker’s widow sued and a court ordered that all prints of the film be destroyed. However, at least one print must have escaped this fate otherwise we wouldn’t still know of this celebrated film now and the various works influenced by it wouldn’t obviously exist either.

This new version stars Nicholas Hoult as Thomas, the Jonathan Harker substitute for the story. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of Hoult, to be sure but, the kind of timidity in which he infuses most of the roles I’ve seen him in is certainly a good bit of casting because in the silent version he was a bit of a pasty, overacting milquetoast and so Hoult is able to do an incredible job here. Lily-Rose Depp (daughter of Johnny) plays his wife Ellen (the equivalent of Mina Harker in the book) and she is a very powerful force in the movie... although, is it me or is there a trend in actresses this last year or so to try and outdo Isabelle Adjani's performance in Zuawski's Possession (reviewed by me here)? However, she's almost, I would say, more powerful than Bill Skarsgård, who gives an absolutely amazing performance as Count Orlock, the Nosferatu of the title... I’ll come back to him though because, as good as he is, he’s also the problem here to some small degree.

Backing up these actors are Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney and the always brilliant Willem Dafoe (playing a wonderfully enthusiastic version of the Van Helsing equivalent character). The film has a somewhat haunting atmosphere with some beautiful framing (check out the last shot of the film with Dafoe’s head highlighted in the mirror by the side of him) and some very pacey editing which, combined with the excellent sound design and a wonderful score by Robin Carolan, really gives a kind of adrenalin rush to the precedings, for sure.

I find Egger’s cinema a bit hit and miss but this is certainly my second favourite of his films (trailing slightly behind The VVitch, reviewed by me here). This is almost, as I said, a truly great movie but it doesn’t quite make it. Or rather, it is a great movie but it’s not the best adaptation in terms of visual interpretation and, okay, no holding it off any longer, this is where I get to what is, for me, the bloody, risen from the grave, elephant in the room...

The problem with doing a movie based on Nosferatu is... you really should keep the iconic look of the central monster. I mean, that original creature make-up has had a heavy influence on countless visual works based on vampire lore, just think of things like the TV mini-series of ‘Salem’s Lot (reviewed by me here) or the fairly recent film The Last Voyage Of The Demeter (reviewed by me here). The bald head and the double pronged, exaggerated incisors coming down from the top of the mouth but much closer together than in a traditional vampire story make the Nosferatu vampire instantly recognisable. However, although Skarsgård absolutely nails the ferocity and power of the creature here, the filmmakers have chosen to give him a big moustache, a bit more hair on his bonce and completely taken away the double prongs protuding from below his upper lip.

In short, they’ve completely changed the look. Now, I know the look they’ve gone for here is way closer to the original Dracula as described by Bram Stoker in his original novel (so that’s possibly a mitigating factor here because it’s rare anyone even comes close) but it’s a huge loss to this particular film, I reckon.

Now, the film-makers have done their best to hide their creature behind shadow for about three quarters of the movie and kept him, more or less, in silhouette throughout and, to be fair to them, that obscured vision of the creature does at least invoke the original creature design in memory. Alas, it only helps to increase the disappointment when you get a clear look at the creature later and realise that they’ve reimagined him... what a shame.

So, yeah, that’s heavily influenced my verdict of the new Nosferatu movie, truth be told. It’s fantastically well acted, brings the Sturm und Drang of the cinematic and literary sources and is a genuinely entertaining piece of cinema... shame about that creature design though. It doesn’t quite make it.

Godzilla 3D ( aka Gojira 2014 aka Godzilla 2014)

Aphid And Goliath

Godzilla 3D 
(aka Gojira 2014 aka Godzilla 2014)
2014 USA/Japan
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big, giant sized spoilers breathing fiery destruction in your face... although, to be fair, it’s a movie about big monsters. How spoilerish could it be.

When I saw Gareth Edwards first feature, Monsters, four years ago (reviewed here), I noted that I quite liked it but the last act left me unfulfilled. I wanted to see a giant monster carnage fight sequence at the end and, since it was shot on a very lean budget, I’m guessing money would have been one of the deciding factors as to why that didn’t happen? Either way, that’s not a problem when it comes to this movie because the director has graduated from his original Monsters to a feature involving the original King Of The Monsters... so this film does seem like a bit of a natural evolution for him, thematically, and it’s been released just in time for The Big G’s 60th anniversary... which is nice (although I would have preferred to see a Toho film, in some ways).

I don’t remember what age I first saw the original 1954 version of Godzilla but it must have been sometime around when I first saw King Kong on television. I would have been about 4 years old so around about 1972 I would guess. Actually, the story of my original encounter with King Kong, very late at night, is a nice one for me but I’ll save that for another review, I think. All I remember about the original Godzilla is that, when I later saw the third film from the original first wave (The Shōwa Series) of the three waves (Shōwa, Heisei and Millennium series) of Japanese films about the character, King Kong Vs Godzilla, when I was about 5 or so, I was stoked to see the two giant monsters fight.

Of course, in the first four films or so of the Shōwa cycle, Godzilla was still pretty much a villain or, to be more precise, an uncontrollable beast that people needed to clearly defend themselves from and stop at any cost. By the time we got to the next few films in this first cycle, Godzilla had pretty much been subtly transformed and recast as Japan’s avenger and guardian, coming out to fight against whatever giant monsters were out to stomp Tokyo and its neighbours.

Now this is kind of relevant here because Gareth Edward’s new take on the legend is actually not really a reboot of the 1954 version. In fact it acknowledges the 1954 version without paying too many respects to the creation and legacy of the character in any great way. The film’s occasional stabs of postmodern homage lie in the date he was first spotted (1954), the name Serizawa, given to Ken Watanabe’s character but seemingly nothing to do with the original character from the 1954 film, plus occasional visual or typographic references to Mothra and other kaiju eiga elements thrown up in parts of the frames. There’s one more big piece of homage in the design of the title character... but I’ll get back to that later. What the director does do, however, is reestablish the role of Godzilla as an avenging guardian to the world, coming out of retirement to fight a world under attack by giant monsters who, in this movie, take the form of oversized aphid-like creatures who are swallowing radioactive devices like losenges, to feed and reproduce from.

If the plot sounds silly, well... it really is.

The story in itself is fine, tonally,  in terms of the history of the character... but I did have a lot of trouble with the dialogue in certain places when it comes to dealing with the fantastical elements of the story. They have some great actors in this movie, you see. The main leads, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen (as a husband and wife in this one, after playing brother and sister as Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, reviewed here, and coming soon in the same roles in the 2015 movie, The Avengers: Age Of Ultron), are both more than fine in their performances and give the movie some likable characters to get behind. However, there are some real heavy weight, long respected actors here like the aforementioned Ken Watanabe, alongside Juliet Binoche, David Strathairn and Sally Hawkins and, though the director uses little character sketches for each of these, and other action “sequence characters” (I’ll get to that in a minute)... it has to be said they’re mostly just standing around wasted in this film and the lines they have to deliver, for a lot of the time, are absolutely preposterous. It’s strange because, although the story itself is quite silly, it does work as a credible whole within both the world they create for this movie and also as something which isn’t out of place in keeping with the sensibilities of some of the Toho movies... but the dialogue itself is terrible. So that was kinda bizarre... I felt.

That’s about the only real weakness of the film, other than a couple of personal preferences, that I could find. In other words... I was thoroughly entertained by this movie and a lot of that, I suspect, is to do with the director’s approach to the material. Judging from this film, Edwards has two really potent signature elements which seem to work really well here...

One is a philosophy of always leading you into something else with a little revelation. While the director doesn’t eschew establishing shots, he does tend to leave them in the dust at several points and, instead, starts from things being revealed in close up and then going wide. For instance, while looking for something in a storage facility in the Nevada desert, a storeroom door is opened and just a bright light is revealed. We then cut and pull back so we can see that the storeroom has a big hole in the other side of the room where “something big” has broken out into the surrounding desert. A very similar kind of reveal happens when some firemen go into a room in a suite in a hotel, only to find that the other side of the room is missing and opens out into the city landscape, where an aphid style monster has ripped through half the suite.

It’s a really interesting way of shooting things and the director persists with this kind of “reveal detail” in either large or small scale occurrences throughout the picture. But not only that... he also uses exactly the same technique in reverse a couple of times. For instance, we are just about to glimpse one of the first proper shots of Godzilla with one of the insect-like monsters getting “into it” with some killer combat moves in long shot... when a safety door is shut in front of it and the screen goes to darkness for a half a second before cutting to another point in the story. There are a few moments like this and it’s a good way of whetting your appetite for the main bout a little later.

So yeah, reveals are this director’s thing... at least on this movie. But there’s something else he does too.

I noticed that for the scenes of carnage, a lot of the time the director will focus on a few characters that are entirely incidental to the story and are only around for, pretty much, the action sequence they are in. He makes you care about specific humans, caught in the turmoil of having giant monster action in their close proximity, and he follows these minor throwaway characters throughout their specific scene. It sounds like it shouldn’t work because you don’t have time to get involved with, basically, “star extras”... but he does it really well and, somehow, manages to pull it off beautifully. I really felt for the bus driver in the bridge sequence, for instance, even though I knew I wouldn’t see him again after that scene was over. The director uses this kind of “acquire a character for a short time and then jettison” approach all the way through and makes it really work... I applaud him for that.

My only grumble with that, of course, is that some of the other actors, like Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn, could really have done with having their characters expanded a little more, I felt. Giving them a little more purpose would have helped a bit... as would ageing some of the actors and actresses for the fifteen year time jump near the start of the movie. Strange that some of them look more or less the same in 2014 as hey did in the sequences set in 1999... at least, that’s how it struck me.

What else? Well you have Godzilla him/herself (don’t even go there... I am not getting into that whole Gojira gender argument, thanks very much).

One of the problems... on of the many problems... with the previous US outing in 1998 was the fact that Godzilla was all CGI and didn’t look anything like any of the classic Toho incarnations of the character (no wonder the Japanese incarnation whipped the US version’s backside in just a few seconds in the last of the Japanese movies, to date, Godzilla: Final Wars). The fact that pretty much every Toho Godzilla movie shot in any decade of the characters monstrous career has featured men dressed in suits stomping on miniature sets as the sole way of portraying the character has given them a look and feel that G-Fans love. If it looks too much more functional than something that could be done with the “man in suit” approach, then it was going to turn a lot of people off. Luckily, the version of Godzilla in this movie is very respectful to the look and design of the original (and the many different, evolving suits over the years, during the course of 30 movies). It looks like the man in suit has come to life and we get a much more expressive version of the classic look we know and love... and yes, you will feel sympathy for this version of Godzilla and you will be rooting for him to get the upper hand on his opponents as they gang up on him...

Which leads me nicely into the choreography of those battle scenes.

As I said before, the director holds back and teases you, showing you through the eyes of the various human characters who will take up our attention in the foreground of a shot while things are happening in the distance (a similar tactic was taken in the movie Cloverfield, although that was a more natural thing to do because it was shot as first person footage). Towards the end, though, he stops teasing and you get some full-on giant monster wrestling. This doesn’t really deteriorate into one of those fights where Godzilla and other various kaiju start throwing rocks or bits of buildings at each other... which is okay for the intensity of this one actually. It’s up close and personal with The Big G and the aphids getting in each others faces.

Also, the writers use the classic fight dramatics which tend to go down well in these kinds of movies. Godzilla comes in and beats up the bad guys. Then the bad guys, or in this case “bad loving guy gal monster couple who want to hatch their eggs and destroy the world”, team up on Godzilla and do him some damage, thus invoking audience sympathy and concern for our big, scaly reptilian... um... thing. Then Godzilla gathers up his/her last remaining strength and gives one big final push and beats the living daylight out of the enemies... finally bringing in one of the old, key favourite weapons in, frankly, the most brutal and satisfying way I’ve ever seen Godzilla use it, to be honest. If you’re a fan of the character then you’ll know just what I’m talking about but, if not, then all I can say is the way I worded the spoiler warning at the top of this article was definitely a tip off to the killing blow, so to speak, in this film.

Another interesting thing, and I’m not sure if many of the audience would have noticed it at the time, is the echo of the main human protagonist, who happens to be a bomb defuser in the army, in the title character. It’s brought home visually by linking two scenes. There are a couple of completely preposterous moments in this movie when human characters you thought must have died... didn’t. It’s a big leap of the imagination in two particular places but one of these, when you think you are looking at a burn victim, is actually our human hero who is laying on the ground recovering, covered in thick dust. There’s a similar scene near the end of this one when you think Godzilla has sacrificed himself for humanity once too often and has died for our sins (the character actually dies a few times in the Japanese films... including the 1954 original). However, it turns out Godzilla's just unconscious and also covered in dust and scarring, which is kind of a nice touch, I thought.

One more thing I should address here is the music, of course. One of the first teaser trailers for this film featured one of my favourite composers, György Ligeti, on the soundtrack. Surprisingly, the music from that teaser is used in the corresponding scene in the movie proper... which is not something I was expecting. Now I love Godzilla scores and have all the soundtracks to these movies, mostly in the form of the six hugely, wallet munching Japanese boxed sets of the entires scores (and bonus tracks) which were released at irregular intervals over a 5 or 6 year period in commemoration of the character’s 50th anniversary. So I know the various classic Godzilla films provided by a number of composers, especially those by the Masaru Sato (who worked with Kurosawa a lot) and, the man who injected the series with three classic themes for the character (just on his very first outing) and who also invented the distinctive roar... Akira Ifikube.

Now I wasn’t in any way worried about this score because I knew it was being composed by Alexandre Desplat, one of my favourite contemporary film composers. I knew this guy could do a good parody of Ifikube if he wanted to but, in all honesty, I don’t hear a heck of a lot of Ifikube’s influence, and certainly none of his famous themes in this score. In fact, the end title musical suite that Michael Giacchino composed for the aforementioned Cloverfield is about as good a classic Godzilla parody score as you’re going to get. Desplat, it seems to me, hasn’t payed enough homage in his score and, I know some people say that he has but, honestly, I just can’t hear much more than the faintest influence in this.

That being said, though, Desplat’s score is nothing, if not appropriate to the visuals on screen and the rhythm of the editing and, once you resign yourself to the fact that nobody thought it was a good idea to pay the rights to use some of Ifikube’s original themes, you’ll probably realise that it’s still a fantastic, kick ass score and it works very well away from the movie too, as a straight listen. The score CD arrived in the post a couple of days before the UK release date of the movie so I had a chance to lower my expectations in terms of postmodernistic musical jokes on this one and realise that, once again, Alexandre Desplat has turned in a damn fine score in a year which includes, so far, his outstanding work for both The Grand Budapest Hotel (reviewed here) and The Monuments Men (reviewed here).

And there you have it. This movie has great acting coupled with clunky dialogue. You will find your powers of being able to suspend disbelief in some of the expository speeches a little hard to maintain but the action is pretty solid and the direction is interesting and noteworthy. If you’re a lover of Godzilla movies in general... it’s way better than the previous US effort and, possibly, better than some of the later Toho originals. If The Big G is not someone you’re familiar with but you like ridiculous action sequences anyway... then you might also want to check this movie out. It’s a mostly good Godzilla flick with a lot of heart... and that’s quite an achievement in the modern, US blockbuster movie stakes these days. Stomp along to your local cinema and take a look.

Kick-Ass 2

Assed & The Furious

Kick-Ass 2
2013 USA/UK
Directed by Jeff Wadlow
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers.

I quite liked the first Kick-Ass movie (my short review here) but for some reason I never really liked it enough to get around to taking another look at it. Sure, it was cute and quirky and the Hit Girl character alone was worth the price of admission... but it wasn’t the same kind of phenomenon to me as it was to some of my friends. So having said that, it would be true to say I didn’t exactly rush back to the cinema to see the sequel and, instead, I waited for a week before finally making it along there.

Although the visceral use of violence has been somewhat toned down for this sequel (although I don’t think that was a deliberate move on the part of the producers), the film still manages to pack a punch... but there’s no “shock value” or real surprises this time around. Now normally I would feel this is a sign of a sequel which doesn’t live up to the quirky promise of the first movie but, in the case of Kick-Ass 2,  I’m going to have to call it as an exception to the rule...

Although there are certain triggers and trappings which connect very heavily with the first movie (including the title character’s all important and heart-felt voice over narrative), this film does things a little differently and, it seems to me, has actually gained somewhat by having a more formal, Hollywood style structure (and that’s really something, by the way, for me to say that about a movie)... with the story cross-cutting between the three main characters Kick-Ass (played by future Quicksilver Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Hit Girl (played by Chloë Grace Moretz) and the ‘super-villain’ The M*therf*cker (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse).

It’s not totally a film about kicking the stuffing out of a bunch of evil people but a look behind the hearts and moral concerns of those people. Yeah, I’m sure, from what I can remember, the first film also covered this area, but Kick-Ass 2 seems to tackle the issues that arise from the lifestyle its main protagonists choose in a more head on and mature manner than the first... and I really appreciated this. It also seems to take the consequences of all the negatives in this arena and highlight them in a more serious manner, rather than just throw them off as another joke. Not that the movie isn’t a laugh riot, of course.

I also liked the action scenes which, while the violence is less shocking and ‘matter of fact’ than the first movie, are still choreographed quite well. My three favourite action scenes being a scene where Kick-Ass is dressed as a pimp on his first re-training mission with Hit Girl coming to the rescue, the scene where Hit Girl in her civilian identity has to show off her dance moves (which she achieves by intercutting a four villain battle in her head) and the sequence with Hit Girl, right after the funeral of a major character, where she rescues Kick-Ass from a speeding van by climbing all over it, avoiding hails of bullets and getting up close and personal with the driver and the gang... with her fists. These sequences are all shot and, fortunatley, edited in a way which won’t leave you scratching your head about what’s going on while still giving you an action high... if that’s your kind of thing. All glued together with a brilliant, consistent piece of action scoring by Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson. Hot stuff!

There’s some nice stuff too where the movie gives a stylish nod to it’s comic book origins. For example, a scene in which a group of gangsters are talking in a foreign language is not translated with traditional subtitles. Instead, the characters all have comic book talk bubbles coming out of their mouths which translate what they are saying. This is followed up with a nice sucker punch near the end of the movie where Hit Girl gets one final insult in after she’s done killing arch villainess hench-woman Mother Russia... which she delivers in perfect Russain with another speech bubble translation. Nice touch that.

The film tries to have its cake and eat it at the end of the movie. It’s set up that Kick-Ass and his ‘superhero’ chums can’t go back to the lifestyle they were living and Hit Girl, too, has got some additonal problems by the close of the story... but it also seems to be just crying out for a third part and, I have to say, after spending some time with this one, I am hoping the powers that be will find it in their wallet motivated hearts to bring on a third version. I’m ready for it and... if you see this movie... maybe you will be too.