Gladiator II

Maximus Carnage

Gladiator II
aka GladIIator
Directed by Ridley Scott
UK/USA 2024
Paramount Pictures
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Very small spoilers.

I really wasn’t expecting much from Gladiator II (or GLADIIATOR, as the actual film print reads) as I didn’t think too much of the first movie when it hit cinemas. For me, the first Gladiator had some nicely staged battles and a fantastic score by Hans Zimmer. Those were the two standouts for me... other than that, it was an okay movie, not a great one. So I really wasn’t expecting much from this sequel which, honestly... did anyone want a sequel to a movie where the title character, Maximus, died at the end... thus going a good way to negating any attempt at a possible follow on.

Well, I have to say that, although Gladiator II is a completely unnecessary follow up, I actually preferred it a lot more to the first film. I mean, it’s still not a great film but, yeah, it kept me entertained for much longer and, despite running for two and a half hours, it didn’t really drag either (I thought the first one did drag, somewhat, it has to be said).

This one is, in terms of story content, a kind of toned down remake of the first movie where, this time, it’s Lucius, the grown up son of Maximus, played here by Paul Mescal, who is captured after his wife is killed by his mother’s new husband. Said husband, Marcus Acacius, is played by Pedro Pascal but he’s not really a villain and he plays the character sympathetically. Lucius goes about conquering the new games devised by two Caligula-like ruling emperors (who are essentially the main villains, for a bit), with the intention of taking his revenge on Acacius but there’s more to it than that. Denzel Washington plays the guy in charge of the Gladiatorial school, so to speak and he wants to use Lucius to rise up for his own political ends. Washington is amazing in this, as is the returning Connie Nielson as Lucilla.

There are political conspiracies paced with, frankly, somewhat over the top Colosseum games which include... I dunno... some kind of genetically altered killer ape/dog creatures and a flooded arena filled with sharks. Um, I assume there are going to be one or two accusations levelled at director Ridley Scott that he’s jumped the shark with this movie, for sure. That being said, although the action sequences are maybe not quite as consistently engaging as the first film, they still work very well and the quieter scenes where violence suddenly intrudes into the narrative have positively Japanese levels of arterial spray (well, more like arterial floods) and certainly liven up those moments considerably.

But, I don’t really care, as escapist fantasy it’s fast moving and, well it’s Ridley Scott so, whatever you may think of his movies post-1982 (after his three masterworks The Duellists, A L I E N and Blade Runner, reviewed here), you know that the cinematography is going to be nothing less than stunning so, yeah, no surprises there (and he seems to be using the different qualities of image tone between the two films for the flashbacks as the very thing which makes them feel like a window to the past). What did surprise me was the last combat scene in the film as I didn’t expect to see a certain character turning out to be the real villian until about half an hour before the end (I thought he would become an ally)

And as an added bonus, we get a score by one of Zimmer’s stable, the great Harry Gregson-Williams, who of course gave us the incredible score to Wonder Woman. And yes, Gladiator II is on CD and this was the real motivating factor that dragged me into cinemas to see (well, hear) this thing and, on the music front, I was not disappointed. I can’t wait to hear this thing as a stand alone listen, for sure. It does have a fair few nods to Zimmer’s leitmotif on occasion (although not the Holst derivative, from what I could hear) but it does its own thing and has some nice orchestration.

So yeah, I think that’s me done with Gladiator II other than to acknowledge that Derek Jacobi’s returning character feels somewhat wasted, Connie Nielson is the absolute glue which holds the film (and the story, to an extent) together and I didn’t even mind the tongue-in-cheek ‘I Am Spartacus’ moment after the Coliseum sea battle scene. Definitely worth seeing this one at a cinema if you can spare the time.

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

Heaventh Seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book Of Eli

The Eli Bird

Catches The Worm

The Book of Eli US 2010

Directed by The Hughes Brothers

Entertainment In Video Region 2

I first saw The Book of Eli on its initial cinema release back in January 2010... which was about three months before I started writing this blog, so I’ve never had an opportunity to properly review it before. In the intervening year and a bit since that initial viewing... I’d kind of forgotten what a great movie it is. It’s especially perfect for people of a certain age (a little bit older than me) or people who have a fondness for a specific thread of cinema which was intertwined with actors like Yul Brinner or Charlton Heston in the early seventies.

Seriously people! Remember those gritty, widescreen, school-of-hard-knocks science fiction movies which were made in the early seventies... often dealing with a post-apocalyptic or dystopian future society with a lone protagonist out to beat the odds? I’m talking about those groovy flashes of celluloid scientifiction like The Omega Man, Rollerball, Planet of the Apes, Westworld, Soylent Green or The Ultimate Warrior? Well this movie is almost a direct throwback to those harsh sci-fi dreams of bitter pills and high ideals and although Denzel Washinton plays the lead in this movie, quite solidly and brilliantly I should add, this is seriously a film that Yul Brinner would have picked up and had a lot of fun with...

And just to up the stakes a little in the astonishing unlikeliness that such a film should exist coming from modern Hollywood, this film also pushes the “lonesome-gunslinger” element which would often be found in those kinds of narratives and really pushes the boundaries between post-apocalyptic sci-fi and the Western... and in this case it’s very clear that The Book of Eli is very much a spaghetti western in all but name and costume.

I’ll try not to give away too much here because, although the twist ending is something which is fairly easy to get near on your own, the variation on that twist (and the characterisation clues to that specific brand of that twist which I obviously didn’t pick up on) is actually a pretty good one and makes even more sense when you watch the film a second time.

The Book of Eli features Denzel Washington as Eli, roaming a dog-eat-dog future-got-f*cked-world carrying a book which he doesn’t let anyone else see or touch if he can help it. He is on a quest to head West, where he is seeking “a safe place” for the book. Meanwhile, Gary Oldman as Carnegie, the villain of this particular piece, is constantly sending his rapacious thugs, who work for him enforcing his laws in the one-horse town he has in his grip, to look for a specific book which is the ultimate weapon for reuniting humanity. And for reuniting... what we’re really talking about is controlling. The book in question has a cross on the cover and Oldman is very much aware of its power... and so desperately needs the book that it turns out Eli has in his possession... tension rises and the situation is exacerbated until Eli, and Mila Kunis, are forced to make a run for it to retain possession of the all important book.

The film is pitch perfect and never really puts a step wrong all the way through... even down to the casting of Flashdancer Jennifer Beals as Mila Kunis’ blind mother. And she’s in some really good company on this one... there are some great little actors in here... like musician extraordinaire Tom Waits as a shotgun-cautious shop owner. And Malcolm McDowell as... oh no, don’t want to spoil that crucial appearance for anyone. And a small turn by Michael Gambon and Frances De LaTour who turn out to be a little more than what they first present themselves as to “our heroes”. Yes... you read that right... Francis De LaTour. If you want to see Leonard Rossiter’s landlord Miss Jones from Rising Damp frenziedly wielding automatic weaponry then this movie is for you.

There’s really just good stuff to say about this movie. Like highlighting just how interesting the cinematography is, which ranges from orange and blue palettes (ok, maybe that colour scheme is getting a bit... um... popular these days but it works for me) dominating certain scenes to a very drained or desaturated look to some of the exteriors... so much so that some of the stuff almost, but not quite, looks like it’s shot in monochrome. This is presumably to give some of the exteriors the feel that “something bad for the planet” has taken place in the last decade or more and it really pushes the point home on a subconscious level methinks.

The images are accompanied by a quite beautiful score by composer Atticus Ross which, while it does nothing to push the obvious spaghetti western angle of the movie (and possibly rightly so since this film has such a solid, heart of a story beating inside it) has kind of an ethereal tint to it which sounds, to these ears anyway, like a cross between a mature blend of Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas and Simon Boswell’s Hardware, and which helps push the atmosphere of desolation permeating the film at all levels. This is heady stuff. However, if you do want at least a musical concession to the films of Sergio Leone (albeit not one of his westerns), which perhaps helped inspire a certain styling to the way this film is shot, then you need look no further than Carnegie’s bald-headed right-hand man, who tends to whistle snatches of Ennio Morricone’s score to Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America at certain moments during the film. A nice little touch but a jingle I would personally have taken from one of Leone’s westerns... jus to help push the point home.

I don’t think there’s really much more I can say about this movie now other than I can’t recommend this film enough... but I will make one more comment because I don’t think this film did very well and I think it deserves a lot more support from audiences than it has so far received. There’s been a lot of talk in recent times about the emergence of an “intelligent science-fiction” and films that have been stuck with this label are quite often not very inspiring or... as it turns out... I any way intelligent. The Book Of Eli is definitely, however, one of the few films that really lives up to the expectations of the new “intelligent sci-fi” syndrome and its champions. The difference being that this movie is very much a film which centres on a kind of emotional intelligence... and perhaps the emotional heart of the proceedings without really worrying if audiences are going to “get it” or not. This film is a well written, well acted and well directed piece of “science-fiction road movie” and should definitely not be missed by anyone who loves such things.