Infinite

The
Regeneration
Game

Infinite
Paramount USA  2021
Directed by Antoine Fuqua

Warning: Plot spoilers, I guess.

Infinite is a new science fiction action adventure based on a relatively new novel, The Reincarnationist Papers, by D. Eric Maikranz. Now, this information surprised me because the story is very much a riff in the vein of a Philip K. Dick kind of concept and yes, it’s yet another of these recent sci-fi movies which feels like it's exploring concepts from 1950s science fiction, it seems to me. However, it’s a nice enough concept but... it’s kind of wasted the way it’s been presented here.

The Infinite of the title is the name a certain, smallish underground section of the population give to themselves. They are basically people who, from adolescence, can now recall all their past lives leading up to this point... so they don’t have to learn new skills and are pretty much experienced at everything they’ve tried their hand at for thousands of years. When they die, their soul is just reborn into another body and so on. However, the Infinites are split into two warring factions. There are the Believers... the good guys of the film who want to use their special skills to benefit mankind... and the Nihilists, the bad guys of the story who want to destroy the world so they don’t have to keep coming back in new bodies.

To this end, many years ago, the main villain Bathhurst, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor (who nearly always makes a good villain but he seems to have some truly terrible lines here... much like all his costars in this), invented an egg of destruction which, when activated, will wipe out all life on the planet. In a blistering car chase action sequence at the start of the movie we see a character, one of three Believers who die in the opening sequence, steal the destructive egg and we are told later that he has ‘hidden’ it somewhere. Why Bathhurst can’t make another one is not really made clear but, anyway, it’s up to the Nihilists to find the egg so they can destroy humanity and the Believers to find the egg to keep it hidden or, preferably, destroy it. However, nobody knows where the main action hero at the start of the movie hid it before his death.

Enter Marky Mark Wahlburg. That character has now been reborn into his character, Evan. However, he doesn’t know he’s an Infinite because of him being treated as a schizophrenic throughout his life (and the tin plate in his head doesn’t help either). However, when both factions of Infinites realise it’s him, the Believers nab him from under the noses of the Nihilists and start trying to ‘jog his memory’ about the heroic action man he really is and, more importantly, where he hid the egg.

And that’s the main set up and I won’t say much about the plot. All the actors including those just mentioned and the likes of Sophie Cookson, Dylan O’ Brien, Toby Jones, Liz Carr, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson and Jason Mantzoukas... are all pretty good. However, the dialogue they are asked to deliver in the film is, generally, not. Take the aforementioned Ejiofor, for example. We’ve seen him play a villain in numerous films and he’s always so threatening and not someone to be trifled with. Here, however, nothing much he’s saying is worth listening too and that goes for pretty much all of the other characters in this. The only redeeming moment in his character is the fact that, with the beard and black costume choices he has, he does tend to come off as a kind of knock of Roger Delgado as The Master (from the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who), so I was at least able to enjoy his performance on that level.

Another huge problem is the opening of the movie. It starts off with this truly brilliant action sequence (rendered less effective by some rubbish rap song over a lot of it) but... it’s the best set piece in the movie. It’s too strong and makes all the other action sequences in the film which follow look bad in comparison. And I’m sorry but, Marky Mark riding his bike off a really high cliff in Scotland and managing to land it on the wing of a plane which has already been in the air for two minutes really doesn’t help things. This film is definitely going for the action stakes but, as far as I’m concerned at any rate, it really fails to deliver for a lot of the time. Don’t get me wrong, the film is entertaining enough and the kicks, punches, slices and explosions are fine... they just aren’t enough to save it and, coupled with the script... yeah, I was a bit underwhelmed by the whole thing. And I still can’t figure out why a secret society would advertise their whereabouts to the enemy by flying around in aircraft with a big Möbius strip logo on the side.

What I wasn’t underwhelmed with was the action score provided by the great Harry Gregson-Williams. This was, frankly, the only reason I bothered to see the movie, it has to be said, as I'd already bought a copy of the limited edition CD release from La La Land records and I wanted to hear how it played in the movie before listening to it as a stand alone. And how it plays in the movie is... mixed way too low when it could have been way better highlighted against all the bangs and pops of the drab action sequences. But I know the CD will get a fair few spins so, at least there’s that. Thanks to the company for allowing La La Land to put this one out.

And... not much more to say about this one. The film has some nice concepts such as an electronic acupuncture machine to help stimulate memory and a gun that fires bullets which capture the souls of Infinites so they can’t resurrect again, stored in a computer chip instead but... the execution seems lousy on this one, for some reason. Things just don’t seem to be either pumped up enough or gritty enough to be consistently watchable and, yeah, well I won’t be watching Infinite again anyway, I would say. If you like sci-fi action movies then it’s not absolutely terrible and it’s not too dull a diversion of an evening. Just don’t go in expecting an epic.

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

Heaventh Seven

The Magnificent Seven (2016)
2016 USA Directed by Antoine Fuqua
UK cinema release print.

Okay... so Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was one of the great masterpieces of cinema. No one, I think, would debate that (and retain any credibility, for sure). This film is kind of selling itself as a remake of the first of the more famous remakes of Kurosawa’s classic, The Magnificent Seven, directed by John Sturges in 1960. That film is also a bit of a classic, albeit a second hand one, and I know that a lot of the cast were so in love with Kuorsawa’s original that they were chomping at the bit to play the US equivalents of the original Seven Samurai, as far as some of them could be said to have counterparts in their remake.

People perhaps don’t remember that when the 1960 version of The Magnificent Seven was released in the US it immediately flopped but, did quite well in the United Kingdom and was therefore given another, much more phenomenally successful release in the US immediately following its UK success. At least, that’s the story I know (and it’s a very similar story with John Carpenter’s original Assault On Precinct 13, if memory serves me correctly). So yeah, that version became a perennial classic too and whatever you think of it in comparison to the far superior, original masterwork by Kurosawa, it’s still a lot more of a great movie than a much later remake, the Roger Corman produced Battle Beyond The Stars (which I have a bit of a soft spot for too, to be honest, and which is reviewed here). It also spawned three sequels... Return of the Seven, Guns of the Magnificent Seven and The Magnificent Seven Ride.

Now, the reason I mention all this is because I personally find remakes much more palatable if they’re reworked in a different milieu rather than do it in the same setting as one of the previous versions. So Kurosawa’s chanbara became a Western and then a Star Wars cash in space opera (I believe there was an Italian peplum version of the movie too). I think it speaks to Kurosawas ability to put together classic stories in that exactly the same thing happened to his chanbara Yojimbo when it was remade by, among others, Sergio Leone as a Western called A Fistful Of Dollars and again, starring Bruce Willis, in the 1930s depression era USA as Last Man Standing.

What surprises me about this new take on the original is that Antoine Fuqua and co have decided to remake the Western version of Kurosawas tale as... another Western. Ummm.... would rather had seen something else done with it but I guess, like the recent Ben Hur remake (which I reviewed here) I can’t be too vocal about reworking this kind of thing when some of the remakes are already classics in their own right.

Now, it has to be said that this new version of The Magnificent Seven isn’t really a remake at all. The characters have different names and, for the most part, don’t have too many counterparts from either the original Kurosawa version or the John Sturges version. Although, it has to be said that Chris Pratt is kind of playing a slightly less dashing version of Steve McQueen and Byung-hun Lee is kinda the greatests swordsman from the original, by way of James Coburn’s knife thrower in the first remake. However, all the character names are different and their relationships to each other are different too... although the Takashi Shimura/Yul Brinner role is obviously the one played by Denzel Washington here (although he doesn’t play it the same way) because he has an all black outfit and is the man who leads the others. Ethan Hawke’s character is a little closer in the spirit of the Sturges version because he has a back story relating to Denzel Washington’s character and he plays something like the Brad Dexter role in this one... except he also plays something like the Robert Vaughan role too so, you know, he’s essentially one of the few visible counterparts in the movie and it’s an amalgam of two of them.

The story is the same in spirit but... different too. This time, the villagers live in a small town and the threat to them comes not from Mexican Bandits but from fellow Americans who have taken over their town via the local gold mine. So I guess you can say the film takes certain elements from both Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven but does its own thing with them. It’s more a classic Western than it is a remake but, that being said, there are a fair few homages to the originals. I’ll get to the music in a minute but there are a few lines and paraphrases from the Sturges version such as Denzel Washington’s take on Yul Brinner's “I’ve never been offered everything before” (or words to that effect, itself an homage in tone to Takashi Shimura’s “I understand” when he realises the true cost of the farmers’ sacrifice in Seven Samurai). Actually, about the money the Seven are offered here... we are lead to believe it is pooled together by the locals in town but when the Seven arrive, it’s pretty obvious that the two people who hire Denzel and his crew have done so without the knowledge of the townsfolk. So there’s a bit of a weird... “How did they raise the money?” moment I had in the movie just about there. Now as it happens, and this demonstrates the way in which the basic characters have mutated into something completely different for this version, Denzel Washington’s Chisolm character has his own motivations for taking on the job (which you’ll find out right near the end) but as for the others... hmm. Maybe a bit of a story logic shortfall there, I reckon.

Another thing this movie has in common with the Sturges version is Steve McQueen’s joke about the guy who jumped out of the window of a tall building. Chris Pratt tells this joke in this version (although I wasn’t too sure about his delivery of this the first time, to be honest) and then the writers have a field day with it and it becomes sort of a running gag in this movie... which is a nice idea but, ultimately, felt overused and therefore undervalued because, you will hear it five or six times throughout the feature and it certainly wears out its welcome at some points.

The final battle is pretty entertaining though. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not got the sheer spectacle and excitement of Kurosawa’s epic ‘rain and mud’ finale but it is pretty much a more engaging and tense shootout than the 1960 John Sturges version... which is something I didn’t expect to be typing. So there’s that.

The tone of the movie is strange, though. Instead of being a classic American Western like the Sturges, we have a movie which takes elements from that legacy but also from the American Revisionist Westerns and, very much, the Italian Spaghetti Westerns too, it seems to me. It’s a very postmodernistic, eclectic version of a Western and although the visuals mostly manage to make this mish mash of Western styles work, it’s the musical juxtapositions which manage to help glue it altogether.

This was James Horner’s last score. That is to say... he’d written some of it from his visits to the set and it was delivered to the director after his death. The rest of the score is by a guy named Simon Franglen but, unless the two composers were both writing in completely different styles (which there seems to be in the movie) then it’s kind of hard to tell where one composer is taking the reigns as opposed to another. And it’s a diverse mix with the emphasis on 1970s revisionist style scoring, classic Americana (I’ll talk about that in a minute) and Spaghetti Western writing... especially the tense underscoring you get to the preamble to some of the gunfights in this. That being said, Horner’s danger motif is front and centre a few times in the movie and, yeah, if you know Horner (or even Prokofiev, for that matter) then it will probably pop you straight out of the action.

One thing which one or another, or possibly both, do in a couple of sequences (but my best guess is it’s Franglen in this case) is suddenly revert back to the Coplandesque style of Americana Western scoring that Elmer Bernstein used, to a certain extent, in the 1960 version. Now, Bernstein's classic score is not actually used in this movie at all other than a somewhat weaker orchestrated version at the end credits... which actually seem to play out visually more like the opening credits to Sergio Sollima’s iconic Western The Big Gundown (aka La Resa Dei Conti reviewed here) than a classic American Western, it has to be said. Bernsteins scoring isn’t used anywhere else in the movie apart from, at a couple of times, a very slight use of a simplified, four note version of one of the melody fragments, repeated here as a background rhythm. It’s actually far subtler than it possibly should be on a big, broad Western calling itself The Magnificent Seven, so I don’t know if that was an intentional reference or not... but mostly the composers don’t take their cue, so to speak, from the memorable Bernstein classic which is probably even more famous than the film it was written for (and reused in the sequels).

And I don’t have much more to say about this one, it seems. The cast are fantastic, especially Vincent D'Onofrio’s turn as Jack Horne but, mostly, the Seven don’t seem quite as charming as the 1960s lot, nor indeed their 1954 counterparts in Kurosawa’s amazing Seven Samurai. They are, however, more politically correct in their genetic make up, it seems to me. You have a dark skinned actor leading a group of men who include a Mexican, an Asian and a Comanche Indian in their number. Which is absolutely great, of course, and makes for an interesting movie but, at the same time, I have to ask myself the question... would you get that kind of ethnic mix working side by side in the Old West? I don’t know the answer to that, actually, because I’m not very well versed on history, especially American history, but I do wonder if it’s a valid criticism or not as to whether this kind of mix of stereotypes would have made a happy, effective team in the late 19th Century.

At the end of the day, however, I’d have to say that this version of The Magnificent Seven (if you want to think of it like that) is brilliantly played, well shot and is blisteringly entertaining. If you like Westerns and are not too worried about how it matches up to any of the previous versions, then you’re in for a treat because this is a pretty good one. An exciting time at the cinema and perhaps one to round up your friends for. I could easily see there being a sequel to this at some point although, like I said earlier, the ending is slightly different than you might be expecting if you go strictly for the ‘counterparts’ game in terms of surviving characters. A fun film though and one I might even watch again some day... so that can’t be bad.

Olympus Has Fallen

Stabracadabra!

Olympus Has Fallen
USA 2013
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers lurking stealthily to jump out and stab you up!

In his new film Die Hard, Bruce Willis plays an action hero who is trapped in a building with a group of terrorists... woah.

Wait, wait. Okay... sorry folks. For a minute there I got my movies mixed up. Let me start this review again.

In his new film Olympus Has Fallen, Gerard Butler plays an action hero who is trapped in a building with a group of terrorists.

Yep, that’s nailed it good.

For anybody still in any doubt... yes, Olympus Has Fallen bears a similar structure and stimulates the exact same thrills that the original Die Hard movie did. The simplistic plots to both are uncannily alike and when I tweeted less than an hour before going to see this new one that I was just going off to see Die Hard 6: Today Is A Good Day For Olympus To Fall, I really wasn’t expecting the similarities to be so blatant and while I think the original Die Hard has a lot of edge over Olympus Has Fallen, in both its witty visual and musical language and, also, its good humour, the slightly more straightforward Olympus Has Fallen is also quite entertaining and is actually quite competently made.

That being said, the film doesn’t quite satisfy enough at the end.

Similarly, a film I liked years ago by the same director, The Replacement Killers, also suffers from the same lack of over the top panache in the “end game” stakes but then again, that might not be what the director was aiming for with this one. And while it’s far from a perfect action movie, it’s certainly very well crafted... not particularly in composition terms but certainly in the editing. It’s not the jumpy MTV generation style of visual jiggery pokery you might be expecting from an action fest of this magnitude and there are some nice, fluid and longer shots amidst the “dazed and confused” style of editing going on in some of the more insanely loud sequences in the movie. And at least the shots all seem to match up to each other.

What I’m trying to say here, I guess, is that the action sequences, of which there are many, won’t leave you confused and wondering about what’s just happened... it’s all very well put together and easy to understand. They’ve started getting a little better at this kind of stuff again just lately in Hollywood it seems, as opposed to five or so years ago when you couldn’t follow hardly anything in these types of action jamborees.

Olympus Has Fallen is a phrase used for when The White House has been “taken” and it’s certainly been taken in no uncertain terms in this movie (a group of terrorists with a particular set of skills, no doubt). Aaron Eckhart, an actor I rate quite highly in modern Hollywood, does an excellent job of playing a president who is taken hostage with his staff in his own bunker in The White House and Gerard Butler, who is not such a slouch himself, plays the action hero with a tragic link to the president’s recent past life and is the “man of the match” and “on the scene” when it comes down to being the only “weapon” that stands between the nuclear destruction of the USA and North Korean terrorists. Although one of the ways he does this, and there seems to be an abundance of this kind of action in this particular movie, is to run around stabbing terrorists in the head.

I’m not kidding. That seems to be almost a mini theme of this movie. Stabbing people in the head. I’m not sure you can even do that all that efficiently, can you? I understand a high speed bullet will go through a person’s skull but surely a blade weapon which isn’t launched at “deadly miles per hour” is just going to glance of the skull of a person, isn’t it?

Apparently not, it would seem, and the person who knows this the best is Gerard Butler... who will basically stab anything in the head that moves in this film. Now, yes, I know he’s got to be all stealthy and not fire off any shots lest the terrorists know he’s there and “shhhh... be wery, wery quiet, I’m hunting rabbit”... and all that but, seriously, there’s more head penetration action in this flick than Deep Throat. What can it all mean? A disturbing trend setter perhaps.

Anyway, Gerard is obviously the man for the job and we watch as he runs about the floors of The White House, getting a couple of people to safety and figuring out how to get into the bunker before atomic death reaches Washington in fairly more realistic way than Martian death rays or giant reptiles. He’s ably supported by a brilliant cast, too, including the aforementioned Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster and the much wasted Rhada MIichell as “the wife of the action hero”, who is there to provide the odd poignant moment while Mr. Butler’s character takes a shot (in the head) at redemption to make up for the time six months prior to these events when he fumbled saving the life of the President’s wife.

And that’s what this movie is about. Redemption!

Well, okay, redemption and, you know, stabbing people in the head really a lot. It’s about that too.

I have to say that the character set ups in this one, dead Presidential wife, teaching the President’s son all the nooks and crannys of The White House etc are really kinda obvious, but at least what’s on the written page is executed extremely well and this extends to Trevor Morris’ excellent score which is appropriately flag waving and percussive and matches the on-screen fireworks pretty well... although it does get buried under the sound effects quite a lot, I'm afraid. I’d like to hear this as a stand alone score away from the film but, sadly, so far it’s only available as a download and not on a proper CD... so I probably won’t get the opportunity. Still, if we’re lucky, somebody might release it at some point.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about Olympus Has Fallen. If you like the Die Hard kinds of action movies and you want to see one that succeeds in all the areas a movie like that needs to succeed in and which presses all the right buttons, then this movie is it and you won’t regret giving it some of your time. That being said, it’s not something I’d probably look at again as opposed to the Bruce Willis films, which I probably will give a spin every ten years or so. But, again, having said that... I’d be fine with queuing up for a sequel and seeing how that goes. If explosions and bloody mayhem and err... head stabbing... are your thing, held up by some solid acting from all the principle cast (and the various people being stabbed in the head), then you should probably get down to your cinema to see this one while you can.