Time Trap

Temporal
Tantrum

Time Trap
USA  2017
Directed by Mark Dennis & Ben Foster
Pad Thai Pictures

Warning: Okay... I tried but no, I’m going to
have to have some slight spoilers in this one
to talk about the premise of the title. I haven’t
seen the trailer but I suspect most of what I
reveal here gets mentioned in that anyway.

Time Trap is a great little sci-fi movie I would probably never have bothered about if it hadn’t been for someone recommending it to me... so thanks very much to Lee, the coolest ticket seller at Enfield Town train station, for giving me the heads up on this one. This one took me completely by surprise because, due to the scant locations and settings, you could tell that this must have been made fairly cheaply and movies which take on ideas of temporal mechanics, as implied by the title, usually need some money pumped into them. However, the end half an hour is probably where most of the big money was spent and, despite this, the film looks great all the way through, just like a big Hollywood production. It takes on a big idea at a small scale but it works beautifully.

Starting on a shot from the interior of a van with a dirt aged window, Hopper (played by Andrew Wilson), accompanied by his dog, opens the van and finds a clue to what he is looking for. An illustrated notebook. He then finds a cave and, looking into the cave he can see the form of a cowboy at the back with a gun pulled on someone around the next corner. Except, the figure is unmoving. He puts this together with knowledge so far hidden from the audience and decides to go back to base to get properly equipped. He’s a professor and he doesn’t want his students to go on his hunt for answers this time around. So his two students grudgingly obey him and the professor goes back off alone to the van and the cave he has discovered. He ties a rope going down to the entrance of one exit and then goes back to the entrance he found earlier. And that’s the last we, or anyone else in the film for that matter, see of him until much later in the story, as he doesn’t return back to the others the next day.

Turns out Hopper was searching for a van full of hippies looking for The Fountain Of Youth in the local mountains, who went missing in the 1970s. The camper van he found was obviously theirs. What the students don’t know, though, is that the hippies were actually Hopper’s parents and young sister. However, the students and their friends... comprising Taylor (played by Reiley McClendon), Cara (Cassidy Gifford), Jackie (Brianne Howey), Veeves (Olivia Draguicevich) and Furby (Max Wright) set off to find Hopper. Most of them go down into the other entrance of the cave and they all get into trouble, especially when they find one of their number, who didn’t go down, dead in the cave. After a while they realise the situation they are in... they have kind of found the Fountain Of Youth (although this is merely an interpretation of the way time plays out in the cavern) and also an actual water source which heals people really well (even dead ones). However, the problem is, the Fountain Of Youth, in this iteration, gets that name from the way that a year outside the cavern goes by in just a few seconds inside the cave. They find this out when one of their number gets back out for half an hour to find a ravaged, post apocalyptic desert of a world with a giant triangular spaceship orbiting. However, to the people in the cavern, she’s only been gone a couple of seconds when she returns.

Worse, there are pre-historic guardians in the cavern, who pretty much want to kill any strangers and, also, a futuristic space guy who may or may not be after them, once one of them has accidentally alerted the beings on the spaceship of their presence ‘out of time’. Okay, that’s enough of the story because I really don’t want to spoil it.

The actors are all pretty good in this, especially since it’s the teenagers of various ages who are the focus of the main thrust of the story here. Good jobs done by all and the caverns are nicely lit and there’s some bright and colourful photography in some of the scenes. Also, the story doesn’t seem to make the huge time travel errors that a lot of studio films do. I thought it did for a minute there but then I realised I was thinking about the way time passes in this movie in the wrong way and realised the exact opposite of what I thought was happening would indeed happen. Yeah, I’m not getting any younger and my brain is easily confused these days.

Another thing I loved about the movie is that it set up, fairly early on, what I thought were two major cliché moments for later on and then completely went against my expectations by not revisiting either. One is the fact that the main protagonists of the film are all quite young and I’d thought they would have to be so, at some point later in the story, one or two of them could come face to face with their older selves. I’m delighted to say, this doesn’t happen.

Secondly, there’s a scene before the teens enter the cave when they do one of those group selfie things that they always seem to do in horror films these days, with the express purpose of revisiting the photo at the end of the movie so you can see how decimated or changed the ‘survivors’ have become in contrast to who they started out as. Again, it was refreshing to see that, not only doesn’t this happen, it wouldn’t actually have meant that much if it had. However, it does make me wonder why I had to waste a few seconds watching a bunch of teens take a selfie but, well, I guess that’s what people do nowadays.

And, yeah, I don’t want to say much more. The score was nice but, alas, unavailable on CD so it’s not like I’ll get to listen to it away from the picture and, the special effects, most of which come to light in the film’s last third, were pretty good too. Nothing too spectacular but certainly holding up next to what other low budget pictures are able to rustle up and the effects shots in this are fairly ambitious in places, it has to be said.

And that’s me done on Time Trap. It’s exactly the kind of high level science fiction concept you would expect to read in a 1950s short story and the directors, cast and crew pull it off surprisingly well. I would definitely buy this as a physical media purchase if I could just find someone willing to ship the DVD to the UK cheaply (which is proving problematic). Definitely one of those neat little movies which should have had more fanfare and marketing than it actually got, I think. 

Inferno (2016)

Inferno, Rest, Trains

Inferno (2016)
2016  USA/Japan/Turkey/Hungary
Directed by Ron Howard
UK cinema release print.

Not to be confused with the amazing Dario Argento movie of the same name, Inferno is the third of the big screen adaptations of Dan Brown’s popular Professor Robert Langdon series, this one being based on the fourth book... which is kinda strange but then the series started off with the second book, The Da Vinci Code and then made a sequel out of the first book, Angels And Demons (the movie of which I reviewed here). So why they’ve missed out The Lost Symbol I don’t know but I’m sure, if this series of movies continues to make as much money as the novels have done, they’ll get to it.

Like the first two movies, this one is once again directed by Ron Howard (who played Richie Cunningham in the TV show Happy Days back in the 1970s) and all I can say is, I still can’t figure out what his directorial signature is. Other than, for the most part, making some pretty entertaining and, usually, quite popular movies. My experience with the series thus far is... The Da Vinci Code was an okayish movie (and it had Audrey Tautou in it, so that helped) and Angels And Demons was an outstanding modern action thriller. This third one is incredibly entertaining too but, I think it also has some problems... just not quite enough to outweigh its sense of fun.

The movie, once again, stars the always watchable Tom Hanks as Professor Langdon (an actor I first saw in a TV movie called Mazes and Monsters and liked him in that so, you know, it’s good that he’s made a but of a name for himself now) and he is aided and abetted (character wise) by a very strong cast including Felicity Jones, who played Mrs. Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (read my review here) and who is about to become very famous heading up the release, in September, of Star Wars: Rogue One. The film also stars Sidse Babett Knudsen (who I last saw in The Duke Of Burgundy (reviewed here), Ben Foster, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ana Ularu and... oh yeah, they’re all amazing. You will believe in these characters and the unusual things they say and do for sure... you will have no problem suspending your disbelief here, that’s for sure. So that’s one of the huge plusses that the movie has.

The film starts off in the midst of an ongoing story and we're catapulted right into the heart of things as we have a completely discombobulated Professor Langdon suffering from hellish hallucinations based on a famous illustration of Dante’s Inferno from The Divine Comedy. The pace is, beyond anything the second movie threw at the audience, quite blistering. However, for the movie as a whole that’s a bit of a double edged sword because, although you won’t get bored here and the action will whizz by at a rate which will leave you wanting to catch your breath maybe just a little more than the director and editors allow that to happen here... you will also be as discombobulated as Professor Langdon from the outset of the film. Although things make more sense as the film speeds on, you will find yourself just wishing it will all calm down at some point.

That is to say... it’s a movie made up of mostly short sharp shots. The modus operandi here seems to be why listen to a line of expositional dialogue in a master shot when you can split it up into three totally different angles of a character when they are delivering a line. I guess it makes the dialogue more interesting but it's usually also punctuated, very quickly, by another dose of action/suspense as Hanks and Jones are hunted by pretty much every authority on the planet... as Professor Langdon tries to stop a virus which promises to unleash death on over half the world very quickly (people who are familiar with the story as it’s represented in the book, which I’ve not read myself, should be aware that this movie has a quite different ending to the original novel). As a consequence, however, it’s all very choppy and there are some points, even in scenes where nothing much is happening, where you just wish everything would slow down and go back to a single master shot at some point.

I’m guessing one of the other reasons the people who made this have decided to subject this movie to a ferociously intimidating piece of editing (although it's never dull) is because there is a so called twist about two thirds into the movie and they're maybe trying to distract you from it but, honestly, if you haven’t worked out what that twist will be within five minutes of the film's opening sequence starting you’ve not been paying attention because, honestly, Howard pretty much telegraphs this not so revealing reveal quite a lot throughout the movie. I was kinda disappointed, actually, when it happened because... well, who wasn’t expecting that? Obviously, I won’t give that twist away here but it’s exactly what most people, I suspect, are thinking throughout the movie and saying to themselves... “C’mon Professor Langdon, when’s the penny going to drop?”.

So there’s that.

However, like I said above, although there are a lot of problems with the story... or at least with the way the story is presented in this medium here, there are enough plus points to kinda outweigh it and still give you a good time at the movies.  And one of those plus points, of course, is Hans Zimmer’s amazing score.

I kinda liked Zimmer’s score to the first movie in the series but wasn’t completely crazy about it. His second score, though, to Angels And Demons, was simply a fantastic modern work and certain tracks from that are never off my iPod or CD player for very long. This third score is better than the first and certainly holds it’s own with the second... although I need to hear it as a stand alone performance before I can decide whether I like it better than the second or not. The music obviously uses Zimmer’s already established Robert Langdon theme but, also, it seems to use a lot of references to the action themes from Angels And Demons in some of its slower passages too... especially through the first third of the movie, which surprised me because that means I’ve now got absolutely no idea how the leitmotif works with this set of films. Why the heck was that in here? I haven’t got a clue but I do know a good soundtrack when I hear it and this one is pretty cool. As to be expected from the pacing on the movie, there’s a lot of action music and percussion so it should be quite a ‘rocking’ listen when I finally get the CD to this one. I’ve come to respect Zimmer a lot over the last decade or so, after initially dismissing him at the early stages of his career. He also knows how to rock a concert venue as you can read in my review of his London concert from earlier in the year here. 

All in all, although Inferno is quite predictable, a bit choppy and aggressively edited (not to mention quite noisy for a lot of the time), it’s also got some beautiful visuals (when you get time to focus on them), some great acting, an amazing score and, frankly, there are a lot worse big budget type popcorn movies you could be spending your cinema cash on at the moment. I’m not hearing a great critical reaction to it at the moment but I’m hoping that it will do enough at the box office so that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks will reunite for a fourth one (and preferably with Hans Zimmer in tow). Hopefully they’ll sink their teeth into The Lost Symbol next.

The Mechanic

Gunning Up That Kill

The Mechanic (2011)
USA 2011 Directed by Simon West
Momentum Blu Ray Zone B

I have to throw my hands up in the air with this one and say that I haven’t seen the original 1972 Charles Bronson movie on which this one is based. I will try to take care of that at some point, though. Now, the reason why I find myself watching this version of The Mechanic at this particular time, especially since it’s a movie that I deliberately ignored at the cinema due to its being a remake, is because I saw a bus side advert the other day for a sequel, Mechanic Resurrection, and... well, I like a good Jason Statham action move as much as the next person.

This one actually isn’t bad. Director Simon West is not a director I have had any problems with in the past, unlike some high profile critics who seem to be allergic to him. I’ve only seen a few of his movies but I’ve quite enjoyed them. This one is no different and although I’ve seen at least one movie where Jason Statham wasn’t able to save the picture (that would be War), it’s hard to actually waste an actor of this talent and neither Statham or the director drop the ball here.

The movie tells the story of a professional, elite assassin called Arthur Bishop, played by Statham. He is depicted as a sophisticated killer who tends to take out especially nasty people when called for by his ‘supplier’, Harry, played by Donald Sutherland. We know he’s a cultured man because he listens to vinyl records of classical music and works on his vintage Jaguar in his spare time.

As Statham’s voice-over narrative tells us, among other things, there are various ways to kill people and different kinds of hits required, depending on the kind of message you want to send. This is demonstrated in a somewhat clichéd opening sequence which follows Statham killing a man who the writers have already implied, via visual short hand, is not a nice person. The man drowns in a cleverly baited kill by Arthur and there’s a nice sequence where he swims under the corpse of the man he just killed, using the arms to swim so that it looks to the target’s body guards that he is still alive.

We then have the similarly clichéd moments where Sutherland’s character pays Arthur and we see that the two have cultivated a genuine friendship over the years. All this is just another set up by the writers, of course, because Sutherland becomes the subject of the next hit, which Sutherland’s partner asks Arthur to carry out, showing him how Sutherland sold out his colleagues and had them killed. Arthur doesn’t want to do it but he takes the job before somebody else does and gets Sutherland to ‘escape’ from his own building's security system, thus luring him into the open as a target for Arthur. Sutherland doesn’t try to stop what’s going to happen and says he’d rather it was Arthur than someone else.

Yes, I know it’s all very obvious and you know exactly what’s going to happen next, pretty much all the way through the movie, but Statham is such a charming actor and the movie is packed with enough set pieces, both action led and character led, that you kind of forgive it its faults and let it run through without really questioning it, I think. At least that's the spirit that I watched it in.

However, Sutherland’s death leaves a loose end... his thuggish son Steve, played by Ben Foster. Arthur Bishop grudgingly takes him under his wing and teaches him how to be a professional hitman, although Steve tends to mess things up a lot and almost paints a target on their backs in terms of the way they are being perceived by the rest of the profession. Arthur has a good piece of advice which I’ll share here because, although it seems to not mean much at first, it does push an interesting point in terms of why someone should actually listen to what their mentor tells them... “Good judgement comes from experience... and a lot of that comes from bad judgement.”

The story goes on to then expose the sell out by Donald Sutherland as a faked plot to gain power by the partner who sent Arthur in to kill his boss. So Arthur and Steve have to find a way to take out the man who set Sutherland up but... will Steve find out that it was Arthur who killed his dad? And, if he does, how do you think he’s going to react.

Well... somewhat predictably, it has to be said, although as I mentioned before, this doesn’t matter much when you have an action filled script with the likes of Jason Statham, Donald Sutherland and Ben Foster making it all come to life as skillfully as they can. The director utilises some nice colour schemes in different sections of the movie and he uses the juxtaposition of them to good effect throughout the running time. For instance, a bar that Statham hangs around in is bathed with a yellow light while a parking bay in a multi-story tower block is painted and lit in neutral blues and whites. There’s some really nice lighting in this movie and the director keeps these different colour schemes coming which, in turn, keeps everything relatively fresh and watchable.

At the end of the day, the film is about betrayal and the way it leads to similar betrayals, of a kind. It’s about friendship and the complicated stuff that gets in the way and, although it seems like it should be quite weighty... it really isn’t. It’s a light piece of fluff but, even so, it’s the right kind of light fluff, to be fair and it also has a nicely put together score (released on CD in two different, complimentary versions, apparently) by Mark Isham that is quite listenable away from the film, too, I suspect. It has almost an old, silver age sound to it, which is quite refreshing, while still retaining a modern edge that keeps it relevant and, more importantly, appropriate to the on screen shenanigans of these two, scallywag assassins.

Ultimately, The Mechanic is not as wild or addictive as other Statham action movies like The Transporter and Crank films but it’s not too far off in tone and if you like those, then you will probably have an okay time with this one. As for me, 'mission accomplished' and I’m all geared up to see the sequel, which opens this Friday in the UK. I’ll let you know how that one goes.