Spider-Man - Across The Spider-Verse

Webs Are Flowing
Out Like Endless
Rain Into A Paper Cup

Spider-Man -
Across The Spider-Verse
Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos,
Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson
USA  2023 Sony/Marvel
UK cinema release print

Warning: Yep, there will be plenty of spoilers here.

Spider-Man - Across The Spider-Verse is the direct sequel to Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (reviewed here) and has been made back to back with its sequel, Spider-Man - Beyond The Spider-Verse, which comes out in cinemas this coming March 2024. So, yeah, if you’re expecting this one to end with an unresolved story plus a cliffhanger, you’d be absolutely right. In fact, don’t even bother sitting through the end credits on this one because, surprisingly, this one has no mid or post-credits scenes on it.

Now, I quite liked the first Spider-Verse movie, even though I had no idea who this Miles Morales was and, yeah, it took me by surprise. This second one also managed to take me by surprise because, after the densely packed previous installment, I really didn’t expect this one to be much more than a disappointing repeat of the first one at best. Well, I was completely wrong because... and I don’t often say this or take this kind of statement about new movies all that kindly or credibly but... this one is at least as good as the first movie, if not better.

The story on this one follows on from the post credits sequence of the last one, where Spider-Man 2099 (played here by Oscar Isaac) seems to be monitoring the state of the multiverse. However, Miles Morales (played by Shameik Moore), it turns out, is not even supposed to be the Spider-Man for his version of reality because, as it turns out, the spider that bit him in the first movie was actually from another dimension and this, plus a couple of other things happening, including a hilarious new villain called The Spot, have set up the interconnecting universes on a crash collision and, long story short, Miles father has to die to avoid a catastrophic incident. Cue many, many different multidimensional incarnations of Spider-Man trying to stop Miles from returning to his own dimension to save his dad from imminent destruction.

The film looks great, employing different animation styles and colour palettes throughout. It also has a superb voice cast including Hailee Steinfeld returning as Gwen Stacey, aka Spider-Gwen and various other actors, sometimes returning from other related Marvel movies. Such as J K Simmons once again returning briefly as J Jonah Jameson and, in a wonderful live action moment, Peggy Lu reprising her Mrs. Chen role from the two Venom movies. Biggest shout out, though, goes to the superb performance put in by Daniel Kaluuya as the British Spider-Punk. And, of course, all these wonderful performances wouldn’t be possible without the brilliant writers who make both the dialogue and story superb. Note to Hollywood... pay the damn writers who are, at time of writing, on strike. Get your priorities right here!

Now, I heard a review of the film which pointed out that there was a lot of stuff being thrown at the audience all at once but, underneath all that visual chaos, the film has a warm, beating heart which enables you to care about the main protagonists. I’d say yes to the second point but, honestly, this one didn’t hit me as much of an information overload of a spectacle as the first. There are a lot of visual and audio jokes for sure but I think I caught most of them and this one seemed, if anything, to make a lot more sense than I thought it would. To the extent that the big twist reveal near the end of the movie, such as it was, came as no surprise to me by that point in the story.

However, it was a logical story beat so it didn’t disappoint me as such and, that particular villain reveal aside, I also loved that another villainish character in this movie is as much one of the heroes as he is a villain. But his complex psychological needs to ‘parent’ what’s going on in the Spider-Verse kinda turns him into a villain too.

The film would be nothing, of course, without Daniel Pemberton’s follow up score to his wonderful job in the first movie and I am keeping my fingers crossed that some company will release this one on a proper CD at some point and, not just stick with a useless electronic download of the score.

And I think that’s me pretty much done with Spider-Man - Across The Spider-Verse. I absolutely expected it to be, well, not that great but, I absolutely loved it and will be first in line when the third movie comes out early next year. Would recommend this to anyone who loves the various Marvel characters and a script that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Good stuff.

Birds Of Prey and The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

The Riled Bunch

Birds Of Prey and The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn
2020 USA Directed by Cathy Yan
UK cinema release print.

Well, this film may not be the greatest action movie that’s been out there in recent times but it’s certainly distracting enough in that it never stops moving and really doesn’t give you any time to disengage from it before the next thing happens. Part of this is due to the flash backwards and forwards structure of the first half of the movie (the better half) and if this seems deliberately entangled to the point of a lack of clarity on the timeline at one point (yeah, I got just a little confused until I realised it wasn’t actually the police that picked up Harley Quinn in the earlier part of the film), I suspect the film would have been somewhat less potent if cut together in a more linear fashion. This structure also allows Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn (reprising her role from the earlier Suicide Squad movie, reviewed here) a chance to strengthen her character’s relationship with the audience by seeming to control how the movie plays out and also giving her some ‘Deadpool-like’ ‘breaking the fourth wall’ moments.

Now, we have a fine dramatis personae of strong female characters played by some exceptionally good actresses here... in addition to Robbie we have Rosie Perez playing Renee Montoya, Jurnee Smollett-Bell playing a totally different version of Black Canary to the blonde, fishnet tight wearing version of the heroine I used to read in the 1970s (who was romantically linked to Green Arrow), the always watchable Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress, Ella Jay Basco as Cassandra Cain (who I think is running around as a new version of Batgirl in the comics these days?) and the always reliable Ewan McGregor letting his hair down as the main villain, Black Mask.

Now, my only real problem with the movie is that... well, I’ve never read any of the Birds Of Prey comics but the main attraction for me reading one would be the main character Barbara Gordon as team leader Oracle. Now I remember purchasing the excellent one shot/graphic novella The Killing Joke back in the 1980s where former Batgirl and daughter of Commissioner Gordon was shot in the spine by The Joker before he presumably raped her and took naked photos of her writhing on the ground. Unlike many of the more adult and experimental one shots of the day though, this one was firmly placed in Batman continuity so, instead of getting up and walking away, in the comics that came after, Barbara Gordon was confined to a wheelchair but became the eyes and ears of the team which eventually was known as the Birds Of Prey, Oracle. A pretty important character if you ask me but she’s nowhere in the movie and, since Black Canary is also absolutely nothing like the character I used to read back in the day, I think I can safely say that this new movie is about as close to the source material as... insert an engaging metaphor for something being completely far away from the source material as you can get right here folks. Which kinda sucks for fans of the comics but, since comic book continuity for me doesn’t really count for much after the 1980s (it’s just the way I am), then I’m not all that bothered about it either and what that does for me is allows me to look at a film like Birds Of Prey and The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (a character who isn’t really in the Birds Of Prey comics as a team character at all) with no pre-judgement on how poor an adaptation it is.

That being said, while the film is certainly clever... I’m not sure I’d agree with everyone who is saying it’s a really fun movie. It might be that some of the jokes weren’t to my taste (I think I only laughed once about two thirds of the way through and I can’t remember what it was I laughed at now) but it certainly wasn’t a dull movie and, if I really wanted to resort to the critical cliché lurking like an elephant in the room then I may even call it a rollercoaster of a movie... I won’t though so I’ll trust the reader to insert their own rollercoaster analogy in here too please.

Okay, let me dispel another bizarre rumour that I’ve read on Twitter over the last few days... this movie is, despite popular opinion on the matter, absolutely nothing like the 1966 Batman movie in tone, editing style or... well, really anything. I don’t know why people are saying that but, seriously, if you are going to go to the cinema expecting something that tonally similar to the good old days of Adam West then, well, I think you’re going to be disappointed. And, yes, I’ll admit I was a little disappointed in the movie but I really didn’t have time to dwell on that because the whole thing moves so fast, to be honest.

So... in a way I feel like this movie is a bit like the new, female Ghostbusters attempt of a few years ago... nicely put together with some nice chemistry between the actors but the humour falls really short of target. Also, I was surprised about the rating the movie has. Over here in the UK it’s a 15 certificate but I think it could maybe have been a 12A. I’m guessing it’s not scenes like cutting people’s faces off and throwing them on the floor in front of their loved ones before doing the same to them which got this film a higher rating because, frankly, as nasty as that sounds (and it’s certainly supposed to be to give Ewan McGregor’s villain a certain threat level), it’s handled in a fairly bloodless manner. I think it’s probably the amount of profanity in the movie that’s got the rating up there somewhere where very few superhero movies have been before.... or masked vigilante movies anyway (since this version of Black Canary has that silly canary scream which they added to the character fairly recently in 1969, I guess it’s almost a superhero movie, to some small extent).

Daniel Pemberton’s score is... I dunno, I couldn’t hear it through the sheer noise of the sound effects foley for the most part. He’s a great composer though and luckily for me they are releasing his score on a proper CD in a few weeks so I’ll be able to hear what is probably another in a long line of works of great musical art from this guy away from the punches, gunshots, revving motors and explosions of the film. Yeah, that’s one thing I will say, this movie is a really noisy experience... I kinda wish I hadn’t seen it in IMAX now but the time that performance was on was the more convenient for me.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about Birds Of Prey And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn. This is a good movie to distract you from the troubles of the outside world and that’s a good deal of what certain kinds of cinematic art are supposed to do, for sure. That being said, it’s nice if certain stand out moments from a movie stay with you and lurk in the mind for a while afterwards and, frankly, I got out from this just a few hours ago and have forgotten an awful lot. The best thing in this movie for me was Mary Elizabeth Winstead playing Huntress for laughs... so I’m glad the original character was nobody I knew about or was invested in. If you liked Suicide Squad and even DC movies like the recent Joker (reviewed here), then you’ll probably be okay with this one. I don’t know if these will continue to tie up with the DC universe the way it’s going at the moment but... well... time will tell I guess.

Best Scores Of 2017

 
NUTS4R2s Top
Fifteen Scores of 2017

Okay... so I’ve been fairly ruthless again this year with my selections. If the film was released first run either at the cinema or ‘straight to home’ releases then it’s eligible on my list, as long as the score got a CD release. If it only got a vinyl release or, worse still, some kind of rubbishy electronic download (okay, those two formats are almost as bad as each other these days), then it’s not going to be on here.

Also, no archival releases are on here. As with most recent years, there have been some absolutely fantastic CDs of great, past scores in 2018, most of which would easily win out against the newer ones... so it’s not really fair to let them be on this list.

Anyway, here’s are my picks in reverse (aka ascending) order...

15. The Limehouse Golem by Johan Söderqvist
Söderqvist wrote a pretty cool thriller score which included some nice string orchestrations for this Victorian mystery tale. I could also hear some very specific influences from Jerry Goldsmith making their way into the film (although I don’t remember if those sections I’m thinking of made it onto this album). This CD was a very limited release from Varese Sarabande but... well... at least we eventually got a CD version. You can read my original review for this movie here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/the-limehouse-golem.html

14. Wind River by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
Wind River had a very quiet and contained score, to match the icy visuals of this stark chiller. Everything seems like it’s a lesson in restraint as the score keeps sounding like it’s going to burst forth in anger at any moment. It also contains some vocal passages which I really didn’t like at first but which have grown on me and work as a part of the stand alone listening experience. My review of the accompanying film can be found here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/wind-river.html

13. Pirates of the Caribbean - Salazar’s Revenge/Dead Men Tell No Tales by Geoff Zanelli
Probably the best of the poor crop of sequels to the original, much better movie, Zanelli’s score uses the themes developed by Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer throughout and, it has to be said, he does so in a much less subtle but certainly way more entertaining manner than most of the sequel scores manage. I was pleased that this didn’t jettison the soundscape developed over the years and was delighted with the results. My review for the ‘not as good as the score’ movie can be found here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/pirates-of-caribbean-5.html

12. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women by Tom Howe
This is a lovely selection of cues from an amazing movie. When you have a dialogue based film with a script that sparkles the way this one does, without relying on any action sequences, some composers are better off just letting their music get out of the way as a support to the visuals. However, Tom Howe provides a rich accompaniment which raises the emotional highs and lows of the characters perfectly. It was an absolute nightmare to get hold of this CD, for some reason. After my third supplier told me it had somehow been lost in the post (How, when every other thing I ordered this year arrived safe and sound, did three copies of this from three different suppliers get lost in transit?) I despaired of ever getting to hear this before it went out of print but, thankfully, it’s here now and worth the wait. My movie review is here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/professor-marston-and-wonder-women.html

11. Happy Death Day by Bear McCreary
This is one of a few movies with scores by the wonderful McCreary in it this year, for what turned out to be a kind of teen slasher remake of Groundhog Day, no less. Bear’s score matches the slow burn shock of waking up every day and I love how the first four cues on the album, titled Day One through to Day Four, have similar, chilling, slow building openings to the tracks to enhance the familiarity of where the main protagonist wakes up every morning. The film wasn’t without some minor flaws but the same couldn’t be said for the score, which is absolutely marvelous.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/happy-death-day.html

10. Dunkirk by Hans Zimmer, Lorne Balfe and Benjamin Wallfisch
I’m not the greatest fan of Christopher Nolan’s, admittedly epic feeling, movies but I do like the scores on some of them and this one is no exception (thankfully, it’s no Inception, either). The film is quite intense in the way it piles on the suspense but I think, if you took away this score which, it seems to me, is doing all the work, then the whole film would collapse. So a score which, I suspect, saved the move in some ways. As reviewed here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/dunkirk.html

9. Spider-Man Homecoming by Michael Giacchino
The first of two Giacchino scores in my top fifteen this year is one which I wasn’t overstruck on when I first heard it (asides from the immediate impact of the Marvel Logo music being a new version of the old cartoon series theme). However, it’s really grown on me and it’s had a fair few spins this year. I reviewed the film here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/spider-man-homecoming.html

8. Blade Runner 2049 by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch
This unwanted sequel to the greatest movie ever made really missed the mark in a big way but I was really interested in seeing what the director’s more recent collaborator, Jóhann Jóhannson, was going to do with the score. Alas, he was replaced fairly late in the game with Zimmer and Wallfisch, both excellent composers in their own right but almost every decision about this film seemed ‘off’ to me. However, this final score, with an overpriced limited edition soundtrack which then turned out to be not so limited after all, is an okay listen, although it never quite seems to get to the heights of sonic empathy it really sounds like it wants to in terms of relating to the original Vangelis score for the original classic. The CD album suffers from the placement of songs dropped into the score which doesn’t help maintain a steady atmosphere in places. My review of Blade Runner 2049 is here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/blade-runner-2049.html


7. War of the Planet of the Apes by Michael Giacchino
My second Giacchino score is his second score for the Planet Of The Apes series but, it’s also the first one of the modern films, as far as I am concerned, that doesn’t sound out of place with the stylistic leanings of the majority of the scores from the original, five films from the late 1960s and early 1970s. This one has some really great stuff in it including a kind of march for the apes to counter some of the rich, emotional stuff at other points in the movie. I reviewed this one here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/war-for-planet-of-apes.html

6. A Ghost Story by Daniel Hart
About the worst thing you can say about this truly interesting score by Daniel Hart for this amazing film is it’s too short. I could quite happily have listened to a double CD of this stuff. It even has a not unlistenable song on it which carries a lot of the emotional weight at times. My look at A Ghost Story is here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/a-ghost-story.html

5. Shin Godzilla by Shiro Sagisu and Akira Ifikube
The score from Shin Godzilla is a far greater achievement than the actual movie itself, as far as I’m concerned. Shiro Sagisu’s new material blends in perfectly with the new recordings of Akira Ifikube’s melodies from some of the original films and it’s a pure joy to listen to this. The CD is a bit pricey, as it comes from Japan but, worth every penny as it’s been in my player quite a bit since it arrived. I recently reviewed this one here.
https://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/shin-godzilla-aka-shin-gojira.html

4. La La Land by Justin Hurwitz
Despite what I said in my initial review, this film has both a strong score and a pretty good, if small, range of songs in it too. When I’d listened to the songs a second time, after writing my review, I realised just how great they were and what I’d been missing. The album had a strange release in that it was split, unnaturally, into two albums... one for mainly score and one for mainly songs... which is an expensive way to do it, especially when I suspect most people, myself included, were going to recompile it into a proper album reflecting the combined order in film sequence. Then, towards the end of the year, a third double CD in a box was released with even more stuff and alternate material which is finally, more or less, what should have been released in the first place. My slightly wrong headed review of this movie is here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/la-la-land.html

3. Jackie by Mica Levi
I was absolutely gutted this music by relative newcomer Mica Levi didn’t win the Oscar for best score last year. Well, at least it got nominated, I guess. Like her earlier Under The Skin score, this one is just pure genius and may take you to emotional places you didn’t realise you had. Any other year, this may well have been my number one choice but, as you can see below, the competition for the top spot was tough in 2017.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/jackie.html

2. King Arthur - Legend of the Sword by Daniel Pemberton
Well, this is one of those ‘not so rare as you may think’ instances when a quite terrible movie has a truly stupendous score which takes on a life of its own as a stand alone listen. This is right up there with Pemberton’s equally cool score for the same director’s recent reboot of The Man From U.N.C.L.E and it basically feels like... well... medieval rock n’ roll. The percussion and various other effects like the use of breathing as a musical instrument really serves to give a fresh and ‘beyond toe tapping’ suite of musical delights. I gave this one a lot of play and you can read my response to the less than stellar movie it’s trying its best to support here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/king-arthur-legend-of-sword.html

1. Wonder Woman by Rupert Gregson-Williams
I couldn’t believe I missed just how brilliant Rupert Gregson-Williams’ score for Wonder Woman is on my first listen through at the cinema. I sure as hell twigged it when I heard it away from the images which inspired it, though. This is a case of my number one film from 2017 and the score from the same both taking the top spot. While Gregson-Williams occasionally uses Hans Zimmer’s Wonder Woman theme from Batman VS Superman (to very good effect... less is more) he also introduced numerous rich, extremely emotional and, for sure, powerful themes which tend to sweep me off my feet every time I listen to it. In fact, when I was walking around London with earphones on and listening to this thing, I began to start tearing up exactly the same way that I do when I see the movie (actually, tearing up may be a bit of an understatement). A truly soulful set of cues which, considering just how much good music has been left off the CD, really needs an expanded 2-3 disc release from one of the boutique soundtrack labels like La La Land or Intrada. This disc has been played to death by me this year and I suspect it will be getting a lot of spins by me over the next decade or more. My review is here.
http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/wonder-woman.html

Molly's Game

Tech The Walls
At House Of Molly

Molly's Game
2017 China/USA Directed by Aaron Sorkin
2018 UK cinema release print.

Well that’s the first movie of my year done and dusted. Molly’s Game opened on New Years Day here in the UK and I knew it would probably be a pretty good one, based on the trailer and the one reason I wanted to see this... Jessica Chastain.

I’ve liked this actress since I first saw her in the excellent horror movie Mama (reviewed here) and my fondness was compounded by seeing her in other fantasy roles such as her excellent turn as the lead villain in Crimson Peak (reviewed by me here). However, it was her true powerhouse of a performance in last year’s absolutely astonishing Miss Sloane (reviewed here) which made me realise just what an actress for the ages she really is. If you want someone who can carry a film with a performance of someone who can demonstrate a confident sense of power while simultaneously showing the vulnerability of a character’s facade shining through, then Jessica Chastain is the actress for you.

And she relly does carry the movie on her shoulders, along with some very able support from the always watchable Idris Elba as her attorney and some nice work from Kevin Costner as her dad, which gives him some of the better dialogue of his career to work with, as far as I’m concerned.

The film tells the real life story of Molly Bloom (who wanted Chastain to play her in this film iteration of her, apparently) and is based on her book of the same title. In it she tells the story of how, after dropping out of being an olympic skiing champion after an accident which cost her a lot of her spine, she became embroiled in running gambling games for her awful boss, before setting up and running her own, ‘mostly legal’  gambling dens which were then raided by the FBI who arrested her for connections to the Russian mob, amongst others (people who she did not know were connected in any way to a criminal organisation, by all accounts).

The film is interesting in that the structure is all over the place, flashing back to childhood versions of the character and also to different points in her adult life whenever it needs to but one of the strengths of the great writing from the director here is that this jumping around never feels chaotic. Instead, it informs the steadily unfolding story of Molly’s problematic career choice in a way that it slowly reveals certain key aspects of her character and her relation to those around her in an intelligent and, luckily for the audience, entertaining manner.

The film’s biggest strengths are the quality of Sorkin’s dialogue and the incredible performances of all concerned here. Even the minor characters seem well acted and add value to the whole. There are a couple of points I’d have to be a little critical of, however.

One of the disappointing aspects of this movie, I felt, was that the shot design is merely extremely competent, rather than outstanding. Sure, the film is dominated by interior sets and the director sometimes makes use of the vertical, rectangular blocks to cut out a pleasing composition on occasion but... nothing that really stood out in the same way that, for instance, the aforementioned Miss Sloane shone in terms of the visual aspect of the picture. That being said, it’s probable that the director made the decision to steer clear of allowing the compositions to draw attention to themselves, perhaps assuming that this would be a barrier to the smooth running of the film. Personally, though, I don’t think that would necessarily be a valid choice (if, indeed, it was the direction he went with here) and I think films like this one, which are mostly all about the dialogue plus the information given to us on the ‘voice over’ narrative, can benefit from a more overt, visually arresting style.

The only other bad thing I could see here was that I was thrown into absolute confusion by the fact that the lawyer played by Elba was able to read Molly Bloom’s real life published book while, simultaneously, she’s still looking for a publisher for it. I was not clear as to whether they were talking about a second book or something else. The IMDB cleared that up for me when I saw that, yes, the book wasn’t published yet in real life at the time of the events depicted in the movie and that, somehow, we were being asked to believe that the book was somehow, like Shrödinger’s Cat, in two possible states of being at the same time... already published while at the same time, unpublished. I don’t know why we are expected not to question this but it was very clearly something which confused the heck out of me and I don’t know why the writer/director did that.

The amazing Daniel Pemberton’s score is, sadly, not that evident in the mix and didn’t make much of an impression on me during the course of the film. However, there is a CD being released for this in four days time and I might have a listen to the samples once they’re up to see (or hear) if it’s something that would reveal a more rewarding experience away from the movie if I bought a copy. As it stands, though, it certainly doesn’t jar with the on visuals or general tone of the piece and it is, at the very least, an appropriate score for the movie. So there’s that.

As for everything else about Molly’s Game, though... pitch perfect and the good stuff here more than outweighs the problems I had with it. Certainly a good one to start the year off with and I have already started recommending it to my friends to take a look at. I can only keep my fingers crossed that they’re all at least as good as this one in the coming months.

King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword

A Mage A Day Helps
You Work, Rest and Play

King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword
USA 2017 Directed by Guy Ritchie
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Any similarities between this movie and the legend of King Arthur are purely coincidental.

Remember that famous moment in Arthurian legend where giant, armoured elephants taller than a couple of skyscrapers attack Camelot with giant, spiky clubs they hold in their trunks? Yeah, me neither. Yet... here they are.

I’m not a fan of gangster cinema but the few films by Guy Ritchie I’ve actually seen - the two Sherlock Holmes films and The Man From UNCLE reboot (reviewed here)- were pretty cool movies, as far as I’m concerned. However, when I saw a trailer for King Arthur - Legend of the Sword a month or so ago it looked absolutely horrendous and I made a decision, there and then, to trust my instincts and stay away from the movie. However, I then found out that Daniel Pemberton was re-teaming with Ritchie after his fantastic score for The Man From UNCLE and, furthermore, while King Arthur - Legend of the Sword was taking a critical drubbing, Pemberton’s score was being singled out as the best thing about the movie and was doing very well in the Amazon music charts (and not just the soundtrack part of it). Since I also knew there was already a CD release of this score... well, I had to go and see this after all. And, I must say, as far as Pemberton’s score goes, at least... I wasn’t disappointed.

To be fair to Ritchie and his excellent cast and crew... the trailer for the film makes it look much less appetizing than it actually is. King Arthur - Legend of the Sword is actually a huge slice of fun and its greatest tragedy, in my eyes, is that it looks like it had a truly great movie waiting in the wings in some alternate cut. However, it’s not without its huge problems and I think the final edit probably hinders the movie way more than it should.

The great thing about this film, the primary strength, is its cast. They’re all very good. Charlie Hunnam is very likable as Arthur, Jude Law makes an excellent villain in King Vortigern, Eric Bana is excellent as Uther Pendragon (for the few minutes he’s in it), British treasure Neil Maskell is wonderful as the likeable guy who ends up as motivation fodder at a critical point in the story and the Merlin substitute, played here as a female mage by Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, who I last saw in the unbelievably cool I Origins (reviewed here) has absolutely the most amazing screen presence in this film. Even Mr. Posh Spice gets a halfway decent moment in the proceedings.

The dialogue isn’t bad either and the opening ten minutes, pre-credits, and the credits themselves are very strong sequences. Pre-credits is the big ‘elephant’ scene I mentioned above, as Uther saves everybody from the evil attacking Camelot before heading to meet his own fate in the betrayal of a close friend and the titles themselves play out over Arthur growing up in a brothel and becoming ‘street savvy’ in Londinium. Unfortunately, this is all the strongest stuff in the movie and, as much as I admired Ritchie’s technique and the way in which he uses the syntax of splicing film to create a finished result, I really think it goes into overdrive too quickly and too long here.

Oh, and the music... as I said before, Daniel Pemberton’s score is absolutely top notch and I expect to see it listed in my top five scores at the end of the year. Truly astonishing work and this guy is definitely one to watch. I’ll probably never watch this movie again in my life but the CD soundtrack is going to be on my turntable for months, when it arrives, I’m pretty sure of that.

So, okay... lets talk about the two things I think let the film down a little.

This doesn’t stick to Arthurian legend at all. There’s no Merlin or Morgan Le Fey... although I’m sure that in the subsequent films that Ritchie was planning on releasing before this flopped big time at the box office, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey’s unnamed mage character would have taken on one of those two mantles. There’s no Guinevere, no Lancelot and other bits of legend are played with fairly hard so they almost become unrecognisable. Also, this is set in a time, according to the script, when magicians were plentiful and roamed side-by-side with normal people... so we have, to an extent, fantastical elements not uncommon in something you might expect in the heroic fantasy genre. That being said, I’ve no idea why giant snakes were so prominent unless Ritchie loved the John Milius version of Conan The Barbarian as much as I did because some of the magical sequences seem to be a little at odds with common sense or follow through here.

Another main difference is that King Arthur, once he’s learned how to wield Excalibur without fainting and lapsing into unconsciousness, can do magic stuff himself... drawing on power from his sword in a similar manner to the way Michael Moorcock’s famous character Elric Of Melnibone gains power from his black, soul sucking sword Stormbringer. So, you know... big changes to Arthurian legend there. Alfred Tennyson might be twirling poetically in his grave at this point.

The other thing is Ritchie’s cinematic language here. Remember those scenes in Soderbergh’s The Limey where he cuts between two different scenes of the same two people to make up one conversation? Well Ritchie does it all the time and while I have observed this trait in him before and while he always, here included, does it very well... using short edits of alternate situations and also just generally cross-cutting between scenes to tell the story... here he seems to be doing it without any thought as to how the abundance of such an approach affects the whole piece. Like he and the editor were on some kind of really wonderful drug while cutting this movie and... it works great as a means to an end but I wish he’d have tempered it back because, honestly, it really gets tiring after just five minutes, let alone a whole movie's worth of fast cutting. Seriously, was there any shot in this film held for more than a few seconds? This really is MTV generation editing taken to a point way farther than it maybe should have been allowed to get.

You need some pauses...

If you look at some of the most iconic action movies of all time coming from the likes of Akira Kurosawa or Sergio Leone or even Steven Spielberg, one of the things you’ll notice straight away after you’ve seen just a few is that they are all about the pausing and build up between action sequences. You make the action moments stand out by pitching them against something which anticipates and teases those sequences. In this film, however, even the long dialogue scenes, of which there are many, are cut together like hard hitting action scenes so, when the three or four action sequences do come along, quite apart from being hard to follow, they are diluted and lose literally all impact because they have nothing to be seen in contrast to. Now it’s obvious from this that Ritchie has the coverage on the various scenes because he keeps cutting back to them.... so I wish he’d have just ramped down from the ferocious editing in some of those sequences a little more and let them play out without chopping about so much because, overall, the film gradually wears you down to a point where the final battles feel like a complete anticlimax and you really do feel like the movie just needs to end soon, to be honest.

And it’s such a shame because Ritchie is so obviously a great director and I wish he would have just reeled himself in a bit because I’m sure, with the footage he already has, this could have been a truly groovy and successful movie. However, it isn’t... the people have spoken with their wallets and, alas, it’s time to move on from this somewhat unique take on King Arthur and his Merry Men. No wait, that’s not right. Although it does seem like the film is trying to be more Robin Hood with magic party tricks and less King Arthur at some points.

So... you know what. If you’ve got nothing better to do one evening, I’d still say go and have a look at King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword because, frankly, you can learn from and be somewhat entertained by a spectacular failure as you can from a film which totally gets everything right. It’s not a great film but it’s not without its moments and, over and above all the mess that this movie is, it’s still got some kick ass, killer music by Pemberton which is really worth the price of admission. The movie is a bit of a write off, to be sure but... there are things work salvaging from the wreckage if you feel you’ve got the time.

The Man From UNCLE

A Few Of My Waverly Things

The Man From UNCLE
2015 USA
Directed by Guy Ritchie
UK cinema release print.

Hmmm... okay, so this is one of those films that make reviewing these things both interesting and, frankly, extremely frustrating. I saw the trailers for this and the tone looked somehow wrong and, well... it certainly is but there’s a lot of good stuff here too.

I used to watch The Man From U.N.C.L.E as a kid on TV, mostly in the many movie incarnations... some of which were just edited versions of compiled episodes and others which were original stories (if memory serves me correctly). It’s been a long time since I saw any of those projected onto a big screen... I think I saw one or two around about the early to late seventies, on screenings at holiday camps etc when I was a kid. I remember the biggest factors in me getting into these things, as it always seemed to be, were the musical scores on these. Although the original The Man From UNCLE theme by Jerry Goldsmith is what most purists will probably cite as the best, I personally prefer the reworkings and scores by other composers such as Gerald Fried and Richard Shores... once the unusual time signature of maestro Jerry’s had been changed to something more usual (which I really don’t mind in this particular instance... not nearly as much as the original composer did) and made more typically jazzier. I used to hum this stuff all the time as a kid.

Now I don’t know much about Guy Ritchie but I saw his excellent Sherlock Holmes film and his not that bad but, not great, sequel to it some years ago. I can see that he’s a great talent and has some nice, possibly even innovative stuff, going on in his films. As such, I was expecting at least a half watchable movie from this and The Man From UNCLE is certainly more than that. However, the film at no time seems like either and extension or a reboot which is faithful in any way, shape or form to the original series or movies... and it really seems to make no attempt to be that, it has to be said.

For me, the movie needed to have at least two things in it besides characters who were like the originals... that was a variation of the original Jerry Goldsmith melody line plus baseline to give it a musical identity and, of course, those signature scene changes which sent the camera fast panning off to the left or right with a jumble of “incomprehensible to the eye” image movement which snapped you into the next location. I thought that the studio would at least retain these things but, alas, it really didn’t and I think this hurts the film tremendously in terms of being an addition to The Man From UNCLE universe.

As far as the characters are concerned, the movie puts too much history into the characters and this means they have been severely changed from their earlier counterparts. Bond author Ian Fleming originally created the Napoleon Solo character for TV before being pulled off of the project due to contractual conflicts with the Bond series of films (again, if my memory serves me correctly). However, the character name, at least, made it into the book of Goldfinger (and the movie version, reviewed here, although in the film he’s just referred to as Solo), so that’s kind of interesting in terms of development times. The character name was used in the book five years before the show aired so I’m not sure if that was a long development time or just a case of Fleming using an old name he liked... he also contributed the character April Dancer, who would later be played by Stefanie Powers in the TV show The Girl From UNCLE. 

In this updated version, Solo has somehow become an ex-thief and Ilya Kuryakin is a big gorilla of a Russian who suffers from psychotic episodes. This is a far cry from the original characters and it really puts the final nail in the coffin as far as continuity with the originals goes.

That being said, Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer are both absolutely great playing this movie’s versions of Solo and Kuryakin... the audience just has to accept they are playing different characters. They are ably supported by Alicia Vikander and Elizabeth Debicki playing both ally and villain in this although, it has to be said that Debicki seems a little underused as the main antagonist. One wonders if there was a much larger film, much of which was left on the cutting room floor for this one. Certainly the visual absence of a pay off scene involving Kuryakin and Count Lippi, in a nice reference to Ian Fleming’s Count Lippe character in Thunderball (reviewed here) and the use of montages which promise larger action sequences than were revealed, perhaps, may indicate that this movie has been heavily trimmed... probably by the director I should imagine. All that being said, the film is a joy to watch once you can get over the fact that the only character who is remotely like his original source is Hugh Grant channeling a younger version of Leo G. Carrol’s Mr. Waverly character.

The film is set in the 1960s and that’s certainly good. The director seems to enjoy playing with a kind of hyper real version of the sixties which is not a million miles away from the style employed through various espionage films over the years... just not really The Man From UNCLE franchise. One of the things he does is employ split screen techniques such as those popularised in movies like the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair and he has a great slant on this at the end of the first sequence he does in this manner, where the vertical split from two separate, parallel displayed shots is pulled away revealing that you are actually seeing a single shot which is split by a vertical in the composition already. He does this less successfully later in the movie but the first time he does that here it’s a nice little reveal.

Another interesting thing he does is to take the old horror cliché of having something important happening in the background of a shot which the main characters are unaware of, the audience witnessing what’s going on before the characters realise it. He uses it for comic effect and, certainly, the first time he does this it works quite well. However, I have to say that it becomes something of a signature flourish throughout the film and, by the third time he relies on this technique, I was getting a little tired of it, to be completely truthful.

However, asides from all these little moans, it’s actually a great little 1960s style homage movie with bright colours, nice dialogue, great performances and a very freestyle shooting methodology - Ritchie seems to use every kind of different camera move and trick in the book and it’s really to his credit, and the editor’s, that he manages to make it all work so well without ever once jarring the viewer. There is a certain positive chemistry between all the lead actors and actresses too, which really helps the film, even though these are not the characters you are familiar with from the original show.

Daniel Pemberton’s percussion heavy score is the icing on the cake. Ritchie uses a number of songs, many of them put to surprisingly good use on the soundtrack, but Pemberton’s sixties style spy score is absolutely brilliant and this soundtrack was an instant purchase for me on CD. My one regret, as I stated earlier, was that the powers that be had decided not to use the original theme tune, which would have greatly lifted the movie more into UNCLE territory and I would have really liked to have heard what Pemberton would have come up with  for this. I was already a fan of his score for The Awakening (movie reviewed here) and it was a blast to hear him having the opportunity to do something this flamboyant in a modern film score... hopefully he will become a bit more well known in the industry after this because, Goldsmith cues or not, it’s a pretty cool score.

And that’s about all I have to say about The Man From UNCLE: The Guy Ritchie Affair. It’s not the best version of the source material it could have been. In fact, it couldn’t be much further from it even if the director had tried to update it chronologically to modern times. However, it is a great little gem of a movie and if you are not someone going in with any expectations that it needs to live up to the original, then you should have a lot of fun with it. Like the 1960s Modesty Blaise movie, this film is an absolutely appalling adaptation... but it’s a really fun film. Go see it.