Angel Has Fallen

No Drone Unburned

Angel Has Fallen
2019 USA Directed by Ric Roman Waugh
UK cinema release print.
Well here we are again with Angel Has Fallen, which finds Gerard Butler reprising his role as ‘bodyguard to the president’ Mike Banning from the previous two installments Olympus Has Fallen (reviewed here) and London Has Fallen (reviewed here). Rejoining him for this movie in reprising a character from the last two is Morgan Freeman, this time promoted to President of the United States after Aaron Eckhart turned down a third shot in the role. In fact, Butler and Freeman seem to be the only two people reprising their roles in this one and even the brilliant Radha Mitchell, who played Banning’s wife in the last two, has been replaced with Piper Perabo here. I dunno, maybe all the others read a copy of the script before signing on for this one.

That isn’t to say the news is all bad here folks. Angel Has Fallen is an okayish kinda action movie but, it has to be said, it’s a pale shadow of the previous two films and I think they could have cooked up something a little better for the third one here, especially with the trajectory of the main character who is leading up to taking a desk job in his near future.

There are also a couple of really good actors new to the franchise jumping on here... namely everyone’s favourite bad guy Danny Huston playing... um... the bad guy and Nick Nolte playing Banning’s ‘estranged father who bonds with his son so he can save him at a certain point in the film’ before going in like the cavalry to aid Banning’s wife and child near the end of the story.

This one seems a little disconnected from the previous two films in the series because Banning’s obvious penchant for randomly stabbing bad guys in the head with a big knife seems to have gone dormant (admittedly, at least in the first movie, it was a necessary stealth tactic to kill people silently). So that viciousness to the character is less obvious and, honestly, that in itself is not a bad thing but, like I said, gives it a bit of a disconnect.

Another thing which lets it down, at least in terms of keeping some sort of stylistic continuity to the previous films, is that the action sequences don’t seem as brutal or over the top as the last two either. Especially in terms of the blaze of destruction as the bad guys wiped out most of London in the second movie. In this one, when a huge building is selected, almost arbitrarily, for complete destruction in the third act of the movie, you kind of get the feeling the studio heads are trying to pitch it back into that direction but, honestly, one building doesn’t cut it in the wake of that last film.

Okay... so one of the good points is that at least Banning has a little more depth to his, still fairly shallow, character. Being that he’s suffering from some kind of vague and unidentified illness which seems to be both something to do with his spinal column but somehow also something which causes almost narcoleptic episodes at unexpected moments. He is warned not to punish his body anymore and, while this character build up is nice, it’s also one of the reasons the credibility is shot to hell right from the start after we see him at both an outrageously realistically staged training session and, a little later, save the president, somehow, from an assassination attempt by a fleet of suicidal, exploding drones which kill everyone else but then, when both Banning and the president are found unconscious in the water afterwards, makes you wonder why the villains didn’t stay and finish the job. Also, I think Banning is in about three vehicular crashes in this one so... after the vague as mist diagnosis we heard earlier in the movie, things don’t really stay that credible for very long.

On the other hand, there are some nicely done things here too. After an interminable time which sets up Danny Huston’s character as a long standing friend and former war buddy of Banning... so you just know he’s going to be the villain straight away, as you’ll very quickly identify who his ‘partner in evil’ is going to turn out to be very early on in the film... Huston’s villain comes across as someone who has a lot of time and respect for Banning. Even in his inevitable death at the end, there is a certain dignity in the way his character is both portrayed by Huston and written by the writers that you don’t get in most of the movie villains on film (maybe Marvel's Thanos recently but, not that many).

The story, such as it is, is purely focused on Banning clearing his name after he’s framed for trying to kill the president (even while he is saving him) and also involves the FBI trying to figure out what the heck is going on. However, as great as Huston’s character is written, everyone else tends to be pretty thinly drawn and it must have been a real challenge to some of the actors here to add some flesh to their lines. For instance, Jada Pinkett Smith plays the top FBI agent in charge of tracking down Banning and she really has a good, powerful presence in the role actually. However, when she gets close to the truth of what’s really going on, she does something so dumb, with the expected consequences, that you have to wonder how she was even let into the FBI in the first place.

So, yeah... the action is nice, the score is appropriate and holds its own against the foley, for most of the time but, ultimately, Angel Has Fallen is not something I could see myself watching again (whereas I am tempted to go back and have a look at the first two again, at some point). It holds its own against some of the other action movies doing the rounds but it’s nowhere near as special as it might have been and just seems very dumbed down from its predecessors. So not much more to say... if you ike action movies then you may want to give this one some of your time. If not then... probably best to steer clear, I think.

Stan And Ollie

Lorra Laurel Laughs

Stan And Ollie
UK/Canada/USA 2018
Directed by Jon S. Baird
Entertainment One
Blu Ray Zone B

I skipped Stan And Ollie when it came out in cinemas... primarily because I knew I’d probably end up watching it with my dad on Father’s Day and I wasn’t so sure it would be any good, or at least not good enough to sit through a second time. As it happens, now that I’ve done exactly that on Father’s Day, I have to say that this is a beautiful movie, both in content and on a technical level too.

The film hasn’t made a huge amount of money given its budget but it has more than doubled it on worldwide box office and so, honestly, the film has not done that badly. It could... and certainly should... have made considerably more but I can understand why fans of both Mr. Stan Laurel and Mr. Oliver Norvell Hardy would be somewhat horrified that anyone would try and catch their particular brand of lightning in a bottle these days. Also, I’m pretty sure that not enough kids nowadays know about this dynamic, comedy duo who made a gazillion silent movie shorts followed by about another gazillion talkies (and the odd feature film), many of which were remakes of those early shorts, if memory serves.

When I was a kid, Laurel And Hardy shorts were playing on TV pretty much all the time throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. It was almost impossible not to catch at least one Stan And Ollie movie a week and, frankly, that was no bad thing. Everybody loved them. They were as much a fixture of daytime/early evening TV as the abundantly aired Tom And Jerry cartoons which also seemed to have disappeared from our screens around about the same time. And that’s what happened to Laurel And Hardy... they disappeared and suddenly stopped being broadcast due, I believe, to complicated legal wrangling about who owned the rights to the transmission of their films and it’s been only up until recently that they’ve started to be televised again. Alas, modern TV is not the beast it used to be and rather than be bombarded with these wonderful little films like I was when I was growing up, you have to go out of your way to look for these now and get lucky if you want to see one... although there is still the wonderful world of physical media such as DVD and Blu Ray if you want to do them right.

So most of the intervening generations between the 1980s until now just wouldn’t have had too much of an opportunity to be exposed to their films and I suspect this sad fact also played a role in the box office performance of this movie (although personally I think more than doubling your money is more than enough of a good thing).

The film had me right from the opening, it has to be said, with a beautifully designed shot after the opening credits which starts out as a static composition of Laurel and Hardy on the two sides of the screen in front of their make up mirrors during the making of Way Out West, with a void of dead area at the centre of the screen. As the two converse with their backs to the camera, we can see each of their faces reflected in their mirrors talking across the screen from each other. It’s a dazzling shot set up which completely threw me off listening to the content of their conversation at this point but then the shot doesn’t remain static, as the two get up and walk out of their dressing room... and then out and then back in through a studio for a long tracking shot as the conversation keeps going. It’s a gorgeous opening and it all just works really well because... not only is it technically brilliant and more than easy on the eye... it’s also wonderfully performed by the two actors. I’ll get to the performances in a little while.

The film then, after Stan has a brief run in with Hal Wallis (played by Danny Huston), who kind of put the two together in the first place and produced their films, shows us a little of the making of the film’s famous dance scene and then gets a little darker as Stan’s contract runs out and he tries to get Ollie to break his contract and come over to 20th Century Fox with him.

The story then jumps the 1950s and the rest of the movie concerns the two’s originally shaky but ultimately successful triumph on their last theatrical tour of the British Isles, before ill health forces Oliver Hardy to retire, a few years before his death.

The beauty of that first shot is built on throughout the course of the film and there are certain echoes in other shots as the director sets up a few things where reflected surfaces feature heavily in the way you watch the two interact, from time to time. It’s almost voyeuristic in the way it sometimes uses reflection as a distancing device but the ultimate expression of the strong sense of ‘fly on the wall’ effect you get here is in one of the last scenes in the movie, where Stan and Ollie are once again re-enacting the little dance they performed at the start of the film on the stage in Ireland. The director brilliantly keeps panning back from their feet to dwell on the shadows of these two projected behind them before coming back to them and then doing this a few times. It’s amazing how much tension this creates in the movie because, each time the camera slides back to the dancing silhouettes, you feel like this could be the moment Oliver Hardy takes a fall and it would be just too horrible to watch as anything but the visual metaphor of a projected shadow. As it happens, things don’t play out exactly the way I thought they would but, obviously, I’m not going to spoil that experience for you with this review.

So let’s get to those all important performances...

I’m not exactly the biggest fan of Steve Coogan so consider me doubly impressed with his performance here. Yeah, everybody will say it’s easy to ‘do Stan’ but it’s really not going to be as easy as people think. Coogan looks, sounds and acts so much like the real Stan Laurel that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. This way of giving the ‘real life’ Stan characteristics which he may or may not have had in real life but certainly had in his on screen characterisations (so probably did, I guess) pays dividends when we get to the actual drama and dark sections of the picture. He’s as believable as you could ever hope for and the same can also be said of the great John C. Reilly. Reilly is always watchable but here he’s also unrecognisable as himself and there’s very little you could latch on to, to try and distinguish him from Oliver Hardy. He’s played absolutely perfectly here by Reilly. Well... wait... my dad did make the comment that he couldn’t look at the camera and treat it like an intimate friend in quite the same way as Oliver Hardy could but, frankly, it’s more than good enough for me to complete the illusion and nobody is ever going to get these things 100% right... that would be impossible.

So yeah, these performances are tip top, as are the more caricature-like cameo performances of past actors such as James Finlayson and Harry Langdon. However, let’s not stop there because, although there’s not much to compare them to, the wives of Laurel and Hardy are equally impressive, with the always wonderful Shirley Henderson playing Mrs. Hardy and the equally enthralling Nina Arianda as Mrs. Laurel. Frankly, it would have been easy for either or both of these two characters to be upstaged by Coogan and Reilly here, given the nature of their performances but... these two do a fantastic job of portraying two wives who don’t really get on that well but who are an absolute rock for their respective husbands. There are so many good acting turns in this movie but these two are definitely two of the best.

The film also has a pretty nice score by Rolfe Kent which does some interesting things. I wasn’t sure about it first as, although the main Laurel and Hardy music that everyone associates with the two characters (The Cuckoo Song) is used only sparingly throughout the film and, pretty much, only as source (or diegetic) music, Kent goes off on a different tack. However, it’s pretty good and what he seems to be doing... and I’m not great at analysing music or expressing it in words so go easy on me here if I’m saying this the wrong way... but he takes the base rhythm of the famous music in a much understated orchestration and weaves that into the fabric of the score to give it a lighter touch than you would expect but, as it happens, it works beautifully and is never heavy handed or inappropriate throughout the film.

So yeah... that’s me done with the Stan And Ollie biopic and, frankly, it’s a great one. Fans of Laurel and Hardy should definitely brave this one, I think, as it’s never once disrespectful of the great men being portrayed and performances, sets, lighting, editing, music and cinematography all come together to compliment each other nicely here. Definitely one for all the family and a very moving film too, as it happens. A wonderful job here by everyone involved.

Wonder Woman

Blood n’ Wonder

Wonder Woman
2017 USA/China/Hong Kong
Directed by Patty Jenkins  
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very slight hints at spoilers.

I was actually quite apprehensive about going to see the latest of the DC superpowers movies. Not half as much as anxious as I am about seeing what looks like quite a dreadful attempt to put the Justice League of America on screen later in the year but certainly, given the last three films by the studio... the terrible Man Of Steel (reviewed here), the not too terrible Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice (reviewed here) and the passable but superfluous Suicide Squad (reviewed here)... were all much less than great movies, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to how the studio might screw up Wonder Woman. As it turns out... I needn’t have worried. This movie is easily the best movie they’ve put out in the last five years and even towers above a fair few of the Marvel movies released during the same period.

Wonder Woman made her first appearance in comics in 1941, which is a time period a bit further in the future to the setting of the majority of this movie. For some reason the writers here decided to take her out of her original World War Two setting and instead go back to the First World War. I’m not complaining though... it works really well for the movie. She was created by psychologist William Moulton Marston, who invented one of the key components in what is commonly known as the ‘lie detector’. He also tended to inject the stories with a lot of oblique references to what we know these days as BDSM (which may mean he was a lifestyle practitioner himself... I don’t know) and so if you ever wondered where he got the idea that Wonder Woman would utilise a magic golden ‘rope of truth’ with which she could tie up unsuspecting captives and compel them not to lie... well there you go.

This film is pretty much pitch perfect and the director, Patty Jenkins, does an absolutely astonishing job here. Bookended by a scene set bang up to date with the recent DC movies, we first see Diana Prince (aka Wonder Woman aka Princess Diana of Themyscira) as she receives a gift from Bruce Wayne (although Ben Affleck is not present in the flesh in this movie). The gift is an old watch and the photograph of Wonder Woman standing with her allies in World War One which we first caught a glimpse of in Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice. I was pretty sure that photo would be making an appearance and its used here as the element which allows us into the movie length flashback of Diana’s exploits during World War One.

The film actually keeps the same kind of tone, visually, as the Batman Vs Superman movie (with lots of bleak colour palette) but this serves to highlight the times when stronger colours are suddenly used to good effect and it’s also very well used, as it was in that previous movie, in contrast to Wonder Woman’s magic lasso... the colours absolutely pop whenever it’s used in action.

Despite some reviews I heard where the pacing was criticised, I found the speediness of this movie to be pretty good and evenly paced throughout.

After the opening bookend we start with Diana as a child on her invisible island of Themyscira (or Paradise Island as it used to be known before a well known writer was let loose on one of the many revamps of the character some decades ago) and watch her grow up as an Amazon in training... preparing for the day the God of War will return to destroy humanity. We are presented with the... I’m sorry but this was such an obvious reveal from the start... so called ‘mystery’ of the ‘God killer’ and this is used later for pretty much the only moment in this wonderful film you might see coming. Soon the actresses playing the younger versions of the title character mature into lead actress Gal Gadot and she rescues the main male protagonist, Steve Trevor (played by Chris Pine), when he accidentally pierces the veil which hides Themyscira from the outside world and also accidentally brings an army of death dealing German troops, hot on his tail, who kill many amazons before they are slaughtered themselves.

When Diana learns of the ‘war to end all wars’, as it was known before we stupidly had a second one to warrant the first with a numeric designation, she shuns the wishes of her mother and accompanies Steve to the outside world to see and destroy Ares, the God of War.

That’s the basic set up but let me say that, apart from the really obvious reveal of the ‘God killer’ towards the end of the movie, the film is so less formulaic than you would reasonably expect it to be and it also plays on the innate sexism of its audience - male and female alike - in one sequence by refusing to conform to having a certain fight scene between two characters when you are probably thinking, all the way through the movie due to the expectations of how these things are usually written, that it’s a pretty inevitable scene. Instead, the film actually managed to surprise me in regards to a reveal towards the end of the villain of the piece and, if you read my reviews regularly then you’ll already know that there’s nothing I like better in cinema than if it can actually catch me off guard and surprise me.

And it all looks so brilliant and, yep, the cast are fantastic, too.

Gal Gadot, as she did in Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice, absolutely nails Diana as a title hero you can believe in. Demonstrating a strength of character and also a sense of vulnerability and mental progression which matches the writing and rewards the viewer with a pitch perfect performance. She really is a great Wonder Woman and a worthy successor to Linda Carter in the good old 1970s TV show of the same name. I was really in awe of this performance and thought she brings a carefree but responsible attitude to the character. And luckily for DC, the supporting cast are also all great. Chris Pine probably puts in the best performance I’ve seen him do here. Lucy Davis as Etta is perhaps a little underused but shines whenever she is on screen. Elena Anaya, who was so good in Room In Rome (reviewed here) makes for a menacing presence as a German villainess, as does the always remarkable Danny Huston, playing her boss. It’s also good to see the Scottish well represented by the likes of Ewen Bremner and James Cosmo and especially great to see one of my all time favourite actors, the amazing David Thewlis, here too.

There’s a certain stylistic dynamism to a lot of the scenes and, although there were a lot of slow motion scenes which were a little distracting, I can see why director Patty Jenkins chose to use these and, overall, I think she’s done a fantastic job here, giving the modern DC cinematic universe their most credible and polished film to date. There was one shot which did puzzle me but I think I’ve maybe worked out why she did it now. I’ve seen other directors do similar things but she only does this once in the movie and so it kind of stuck out a little. There’s a scene where Steve Trevor suggests to Diana that she “follow the smoke” while he looks around to find a motorbike and then we follow her progress as she gallops off into action on a horse. For some reason, the shot is turned on its side and it looks really alien to what you would expect to see. The shot then cuts to a similar shot the right way up. It looks pretty odd and I don’t know whether the shot was actually shot at this angle or whether it was actually turned on its side during the edit. Looking at the overall effect, though, I’m guessing that the camera movements in the shots proceeding, coupled with the direction in which the bike which Trevor finds is pointing, meant that the director decided she wanted the next shot to follow through on the ‘right to left’ forward motion of the preceding shots and so used that version of the shot in the final movie to keep momentum going. Maybe it looked even more jarring if she cut a ‘right way up’ version directly in? Who knows? That’s my best guess on that one though.

As per usual, I have a couple of slight criticisms of the movie but they are very minor things, to be honest.

The first is that I thought that the film could have maybe had just a few more humorous one-liners in it. Sure, there’s humour in here but I just felt it could have been a little less poe faced on occasion. Although, of course, we are dealing with The Great War which is not something to be humorous about and, also, it feels like the current crop of DC movies almost have 'a lack of humour' written into their brand guidelines... so I’m not too fussed about and it works so well with less of that comic element in it anyway that I’m certainly not complaining.

The other thing, though, is the lack of blood. It’s the First World War. People are getting blown up in this movie, mutilated, dying in various horrible ways and even getting run through with a sword. And it’s all quite bloodless. I don’t blame the director for this. She probably well knows that she might have been fired if she didn’t deliver a film suitable for young children so the studio can get a bigger profit (and you just need to look at the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies to see how far this ridiculous predilection for grim violence with no blood to appease the censors can be taken) but I do feel that the gravitas of the war and the message that violence is a bad thing would have been better served by showing, just a little more, the direct consequences of that violence. The director does her bit by showing the mutilated bodies of the survivors to strike home the horror of war and Diana’s awakening to that horror but... it just felt unnecessarily bloodless is all. Like I said, though, we are unfortunately living in a social climate which makes those kinds of censorious decisions a necessary choice in an art form which can only thrive when commercial considerations are accommodated so... yeah, I guess the director does pretty well getting in what she is able to in this one.

Rupert Gregson-Williams score to the movie is serviceable but feels a little bland and unnoticeable in a lot of the movie... like it could have done with more textural contrast to make some of the cues stand out. However, at a couple of key points he, or whoever made the decision, does the right thing and brings in musical continuity by referencing Hans Zimmer’s Wonder Woman theme from Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice. The theme was already prominent in the various trailers for this movie and I’m glad the powers that be saw sense and used it here... he also goes with a full on rendition of this theme at the start of the end credit music so, you know, special shout out to DC for considering the musical continuity, finally. And at least this one has got a proper, physical CD release so there’s at least that. Having now listened to that CD release, I can  confirm that, as a stand alone listen away from the images, it’s really powerful and was maybe suffering a little in the movie from being slightly buried in the final sound mix in some points. There are some nicely subtle textural contrasts here... they just can't necessarily be heard amongst all the blood n' thunder of the final cut.

If you are a fan of superhero movies then Wonder Woman is absolutely unmissable. It feels like a completely epic cinematic spectacle and, well... that’s because it is. If you are not all that familiar with superhero movies, however... go see this one anyway. It doesn’t matter because it’s a pretty fine example of the current trends in cinematic art done almost perfectly and should be supported by all enthusiastic cinema goers. An all round positive recommendation from me for this one to pretty much everyone I know. Both Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot deserve some serious recognition for this. Can’t wait to see what direction the sequel takes us. I’d personally like to see Wonder Woman in both the Second World War and the Vietnam War in future movies, maybe?