Love Lies Bleeding

The Joy Of Flex

Love Lies Bleeding
Directed by Rose Glass
UK/USA 2024
A24

Well Love Lies Bleeding is a very interesting film, to say the least. Lou, played by Kristen Stewart, manages a gym and has a none too great existence... but it’s love at first sight when Jackie, played by Katy O'Brian, comes to pump up her body in preparation for a body building competition to be held in Vegas. After some steroid injecting foreplay, the two become involved but, when Lou’s sister gets badly beaten by her husband (again), something snaps in Jackie’s brain and she tries to put things right in her own way. And did I mention the owner of both that gym and the gun club where Jackie is currently working as a waitress is also the long standing local villain, who also happens to be Lou’s father... played to the hilt by Ed Harris?

If this sounds like a classic set up for a 1940s/50s film noir then, bingo but, here’s the thing, the film is set in the late 1980s (Die Hard is mentioned as being a popular, recent film) and this has a similar feel to one of those retro-noir movies made in the 1980s for sure. But, the other thing about this movie is... it’s the second feature by writer/director Rose Glass, who had a big hit with her wonderful movie Saint Maud a couple of years ago (reviewed by me here). And this next piece of cinematic artistry is a worthy successor to that debut, although it’s in no way aligned with it tonally and this is a much more playful movie, shot through with a much more blatant sense of black humour.

The film looks beautiful, with a rich colour palette and some beautiful camera angles. Glass is not afraid to adopt a birds eye view shot and then hold it for a period of time when she feels it’s appropriate too... which reminded me of certain shots in Hitchcock’s oeuvre from time to time.

It also has a few surprises up its sleeves too with the director bringing in a couple of well placed, healthy doses of cinematic surrealism to throw into the mix, to wrong foot and certainly surprise the audience from time to time. There’s a wonderful moment during the body building contest when Stewart, who isn’t even in the same city, appears a couple of times and makes a truly spectacular entrance in one scene (in a way that totally is what using CGI in cinema should be about). Sometimes these dalliances with surreal occurrences can be excused as hallucinogenic states creeping up on a character due to persistent steroid abuse and at other times... well, there’s a wonderful denouement with Ed Harris which, admittedly goes the way you think it will in terms of deus ex machina outcomes but, spectacularly not in a way many people would see coming. Like the final shot of Saint Maud, this forces the audience to consider the duality of what they are seeing and to find their own interpretation of just what is going on by this point. Which is a nice gift to the viewer and something you can take away with you after the film is done.

Added to all this we have a fetishistic devotion to the way muscles can be pumped up on a body with a truly heightened sense of sound design and which, itself, is a constant foreshadowing for the scene I mentioned with Ed Harris in the previous paragraph. It’s another interesting element of the film that seems almost a throwback to a couple of decades earlier, when Darren Aronofsky was using fast cut montages with enhanced sound design in films like Pi and Requiem For A Dream.

And... while we’re on the subject of Aranofsky, this film is also scored by the composer for those films, Clint Mansell. And it’s got a very distinctive feel to it... sounding a lot more like his early works in terms of commenting on the atmosphere of a scene in a more vibrant way than some of his later stuff. I think he’s consciously, perhaps, trying to sound like something earlier for the sake of the time period of the film but one scene where I was really surprised was in the first sex scene between Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian, where Mansell’s score almost goes into full on 1980s porn soundtrack mode... at least that’s the way it seemed to me. It was a bit ‘off putting’ at first but when I figured out the way it fits in with the aesthetic of the piece, I kinda got into it.

And what more is there to say. Love Lies Bleeding, the second feature length film from Rose Glass, is something which at first feels very familiar but then evolves into something much more challenging to what your expectations might be, I’m pleased to say. I was really drawn into the quirkiness of the project and coupled with doses of sometimes uncomfortable, lethal paranoia, I really had a good time with this movie. I suspect it will totally divide audiences straight down the middle but, that’s okay... that just means a film has a powerful voice and falls closer to being an auteur piece than most. I’m glad that this kind of refreshing, cinematic surprise is still able to get a mainstream release these days and, yeah, I hope it does really well.

Snowpiercer

Scenes From
A Carriage

Snowpiercer
South Korea/Czechoslovakia 2013
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
Anchor Bay  Blu Ray Zone A

Snowpiercer is another fine movie from Bong Joon Ho, director of the absolutely brilliant, giant monster movie The Host and the ‘so so’ multiple Oscar winner Parasite. It’s based on a comic book I’ve never actually read called Le Transperceneige so, please forgive me that I’m not able to convey whether this is an accurate adaptation of the source material or not... I just don’t know. It’s also the movie that the notorious Harvey Weinstein famously sat on and blocked from release in the US (it’s still not been released over here in the UK*) for many years now due to the director correctly refusing to cut the film down. I got so fed up with not being able to see this, since there’s now also a TV series based on the work, that I finally got around to importing a Blu Ray release of this thing.

And, yeah, it’s not a bad film. It’s a nice 1950s style sci-fi novel concept (as modern sci-fi often is) although the whole thing feels a little bit dated to me in terms of the film reminding me of a lot of stuff I was seeing from places like Korea in the 1990s. That is to say, the film is kinda complex in terms of the amount of detail crammed into the thing... it made me think of some live action manga adaptations from the end of the last millennium.

The plot is of a post-apocalyptic Earth where nobody can survive (after mankind absolutely doomed themselves by bringing in the ‘big freeze’) unless they are in this specific, very long train which keeps moving and circling the planet on one large track over the course of a year... so, for example, you will always know from the wreckage of the place you are passing again when it is New Year’s Day. Stay on the constantly moving and self sufficient train and you live... exit and you freeze to death within minutes.

However, there is a class system established on the train, from the rich folk at the front, down to the lower classes at the rear who are more or less treated like prisoners in Nazi Germany and it’s here where our main protagonists work together to throw off the chains of their oppressors. The story tells of a group of characters played by the likes of Chris Evans, Kang-ho Song, Jamie Bell, Ko Asung, Octavia Spencer, Ewan Bremner and John Hurt as they finally organise themselves enough to try and fight their way to the front of the train and seize control of their situation. In their path, a whole host of bad guys and henchmen including Tilda Swinton, playing her evil character as kind of a Northern shop steward and the man at the top, Ed Harris.

And so, yeah, if this sounds all very like the original intended version of the late Bruce Lee’s Game Of Death, where his character was supposed to fight his way level by level up the tower... this is exactly what we have here. Except the tower is vertical, moving very fast and much longer. Plus there’s no kung fu action, of course.

As you can imagine from a cast as good as this, all the performances in this are superb (and it’s very grim too, because of it) but it’s the constant changes in interior locations and the inventiveness of different settings which continue to hold the interest as the story progresses. The first three quarters of an hour or more, for example, are really dark and grey and exactly the kind of colour palette you’d imagine for depicting a Jewish ghetto in a film set during the Second World War but, as new sections of the train are unlocked and revealed to the constantly diminishing band of survivors, everything gets more brighter and, of course more decadent as things go on, with the various ruling classes juxtaposed with our ‘low life heroes’ from the back of the train.

There’s a beautiful, breathtaking aquarium environment, for example, where the walls of one carriage are completely lined with aquatic life so the rest of the train can have sushi during certain times of the year. There’s a school room with kids and a somewhat irritating, singing teacher and even some ‘clubbing’ quarters where dancing, drinking and drugs is going on.

There’s lots of fighting going on too and it’s interesting how director Ho manages to get you to feel the emotional weight of some of the deaths when you’ve really only known certain characters for a half an hour. One interesting fight scene is where the incredibly long train is turning around on a huge u-turn of track, allowing a sniper to fire in a gun battle between two carriages while they are in view of each other. This was a nice touch and I have to wonder if this was in the original comic or if someone thought of this visual possibility purely for the film.

Adding to both this emotional weight and the gravitas of some of the action scenes is Marco Beltrami’s excellent score (I need to put this one on order soon). I was especially taken with a ‘call to action’ around halfway through the film where the underlying rhythm of the piece echoes, or actually creates, the sound of the locomotion of the transport. Very nicely done.

Okay, short review then because I’ve not got a whole lot more to say about Snowpiercer other than the fact that there’s a nice kind of twist as to where the narrative is going which you might suspect is coming at some point if you keep your eye on Ho’s regular actor Kang-ho Song... but may not realise is an option until this character starts offering up some science about their situation. It’s an okay ending but doesn’t neccessarily answer anything unless you are able to assume there’s a little more to what you are seeing than you have been shown... at least in terms of the aftermath of the film’s denouement. Not as good as The Host (which also stars Kang-ho Song and Ko Asung) but, at least for me, a solid science fiction vehicle with an interesting premise. 

*Wrote this a few months ago... it’s coming out over here in the on Blu Ray very soon.

Geostorm

Disaster Piece

Geostorm
2017 USA Directed by Dean Devlin
UK cinema release print.
Warning: What the heck... there are some partial spoilers in here.

Wow. Geostorm really is a load of old bobbins.

And I don’t mean bobbins you can re-watch every now and again because it has a certain, good natured quality to it and has a script that revels in it’s bobbinsy nature, winking slyly at the audience in a knowing way. This is the kind of, admittedly slightly entertaining but ultimately not all that interesting variety of bobbins infested movie-making which really isn’t going to stand the test of time and will forever be relegated to that time slot on Boxing Day TV, when everyone is too tired and attempting to digest the festive mixture of Turkey and Christmas Pudding in their gut to be too concerned with anything more taxing than this kind of thing on in the background. This, to me, seems to be Geostorm’s natural place in the world.

The movie features a cast who are all more than up to the meagre challenge this movie provides... okay, so some of the ‘floating around in space - let’s try to copy some of those Gravity moments’ stuff must have been challenging for the actors, to be fair. However, although they all take their roles very seriously and turn in some pretty believable performances... well, they absolutely have to be believable performances with a story and script like this. Geostorm is certainly ambitious, for sure, in a disaster created by ‘a bad guy’ scenario set in Earth’s near future kind of way... but it doesn't really live up to the execution of that ambition in any really enjoyable way.

The plot to Geostorm goes something like this...

In 2019, the Earth is/was ravaged by global storms that left us defenceless against an ever increasing planet that is trying to survive the fallout from global warning etc. Luckily, Jake, played by the always reliable Gerard Butler, has invented a costly weather neutralising system controlled by the International Space Station, effectively throwing a physical net around the earth with numerous ‘weird science’ ballistics that keep our weather calm and as it should be. However, three years after being fired by his little brother Max, the other leading action hero style male protagonist of the movie played by Jim Sturgess, Jake is recruited to go back into space and ‘fix’ the whole satellite net system, a project called Dutch Boy, due to some random weather disasters happening in various countries. However, it soon comes to light that this is not a small series of random cataclysmic malfunctions at all but a bid for global domination (if you take things to their logical conclusion) by the main villain of the piece, who you will spot at least an hour before the reveal, unless you’re somehow ambivalent to the less than subtle intricacies of Hollywood typecasting syndrome.

So it’s Jake in space kicking butt while Max and his secret service agent girlfriend are trying to stay alive on Earth, even though they have to kidnap the president of the United States to get authorisation for Jake to be able to flush a virus out of the system on Dutch Boy. And that’s your basic set up and... it’s all fairly breakneck in its pacing but terribly, terribly clichéd and, even with a semi-interesting car chase through an intensified lightning storm sequence, the movie never gets really great or, even, very good, truth be told. Butler and Sturgess are both fine and so are their supporting cast, including nice turns from Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Adepero Oduye, Ed Harris and Andy Garcia. However, this really doesn’t help with the script and although there are some nice effects shots, the eye candy nature of some of these always seems to be tempered with some spectacularly silly moments such as an ‘it’s okay, the dog’s alright after all’ shot which, frankly, the movie could do without, at least not quite as frequently as it does stuff like this here. It even has a long, protracted ‘goodbye’ scene for Butler as he sacrifices himself to save humanity... only for it not to mean anything five minutes later because... oh look, there was a ‘back door’ escape route off the self destructing space station after all. Ugh!

Also, there’s an immense amount of title dropping in this movie to keep reminding the audience, constantly, that there’s a lot at stake. If Geostorm is the new buzzword in the 'made up pseudo-science section' of the script department here then they certainly found a lot of ways to get it into the dialogue in as conspicuous a way as possible. People keep talking about the damned Geostorm all the time, in case we’ve forgotten where the movie is supposed to be heading. It’s not quite as bad as, most of the time, as “We’d better get a move on or that damned Geostorm wil be geostorming down on us before we can geometricise our geostormingly bad science!” Okay, so that’s not really an actual line of dialogue from this film but... it might just as well have been. Oh and, you know, since this movie is called Geostorm, as we’re being constantly reminded, it would have been nice to actually see the Geostorm happening, rather than have it averted at the eleventh hour to leave the audience wondering when they’re going to get to see the actual manifestation of the much repeated title taking place.

Throughout the running time, I never once felt like the writers were treating their target audience as anything other than super dumb and, really, that goes for the science too. I’m no expert in the scientific realm, not even close but, I can’t help but think that if they’d run a disclaimer on the end of the credits saying “No scientists were seriously harmed during the writing of this screenplay.” then the Scientist Humane Association would be up in arms. Not that there actually is a Scientist Humane Association but, who knows, after watching this thing then people living in the real world may just want to form one.

Okay so, as you can see, I didn’t get a huge amount out of Geostorm. Even cool composer Lorne Balfe’s score to the movie never really seems to give any real lift to the proceedings, which kinda disappointed me. That being said, I just listened to a few sample tracks from the forthcoming CD and they are actually pretty good away from the movie so I’m guessing the score was just mixed too low and the sound effects were burying it in a lot of places. Grabbing great scores to terrible movies is something of a hobby of mine so I may well put this one on my Christmas list.

And that’s really all I’m going to say on this one. Geostorm has some great talent which appears to be completely wasted in what seems to amount as... well... it’s definitely a kids movie, it seems to me. I can’t imagine actual adults out of their teens are going to take much of a liking to this but, like I said, I bet you’re going to be seeing a lot of this one airing on TV stations during public holidays in a few year’s time. Not something I can recommend, in all honesty and... well, it is a disaster movie, for sure but... not necessarily the kind of disaster the producers were hoping for, methinks.

mother!

Writing Home

mother!
2017 USA Directed by  Darren Aronofsky
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, I’m going to discuss most of this with “big spoilers” full on and right from the outset. If you don’t want to know then please don’t read.

Sigh.

Darren Aronofsky used to be one of my absolute favourite modern directors. The first three feature films he made blew me away. They were like a triumvirate of works of genius that repeatedly hit and engaged the brain on every level from the opening scenes through to the breathtaking finales. So yeah... Pi, Requiem For A Dream and The Fountain... three truly spectacular works. Even the director’s fourth feature, The Wrestler, was a pretty cool film. True, I couldn’t watch it more than once like I could his first three, which I would be happy to leave on repeat play throughout various stages of my life but, it was still a great film.

Unfortunately, Aronofsky starting mis-stepping, for me at any rate, with Black Swan (reviewed here), which I was so looking forward to and which managed to somehow underwhelm me on almost every level. And then he brought out Noah (reviewed here) which... honestly didn’t endear me to him and made me laugh when he decided to have giant rock creatures helping Noah fight off all the pesky humans who wanted to get on his ark. He might as well have had Transformers in there, to be honest.

And so we come to mother! which I thought had quite an interesting and edgy trailer but, after having been let down by this director twice in a row now... well, I really wasn’t holding my breath to go and see this thing. However, I then got wind of a critic (via 'Twitter buzz') who had called the movie something along the lines of “the most disgusting and depraved, vile film ever to be allowed in a movie theatre” with the clear warning that audiences should not go out to support this kind of thing. So, of course, my ears immediately pricked up and I was all full on about to going to see a movie that would provoke such an unequivocally negative response and I suspect the person who wrote that review did more to get people into cinemas to see this movie than the actual trailer campaign did. No publicity is bad publicity is something I’ve always, more or less, believed but with many films, such as this one, this is a case of bad publicity being hugely more preferable and influential than any positive press could be.

To be frank, though, having seen the movie myself now... if that reviewer genuinely felt like that about mother! then, honestly, he or she needs to get out and see some more films because there’s pretty much nothing here that hasn’t been seen before. It’s not really that impressive as a movie and certainly not going to disturb anybody but the most sensitive, 'wrapped in cotton wool' souls, I would have thought. Pseudo film reviewers who say such things should maybe get a life (and stop getting my hopes up that the film is a lot more vital to the art of the moving image than it actually is).

Okay... let’s get to the good stuff first, which won’t take long.

Jennifer Lawrence is someone I’m really getting the hang of lately. She is absolutely excellent in this role and, I would say, pretty much carries the movie on her lonesome. Javier Bardem, who I first saw in Jamon Jamon many years ago at the cinema, is an actor I’m not all that familiar with but he’s pretty great here, too, as a successful writer struggling to write new poetry. And both these titanic actors are ably supported by the likes of Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer and Domhnall Gleeson... and, of course, they’re all great in this too.

Not only that but Aronofsky manages to take these pitch perfect performances and fashion a movie which, at the very least, engages some interest at the start and patiently renders his vision in a way that’s assured and leaves the audience in no misunderstanding about what is going on within the narrative... which could have got out of hand with so many of the crowded frames filled with noise, chaos and people, especially towards the last twenty minutes or so of the movie. Which really is no mean feat... Aronofsky knows how to craft a movie.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s one thing to be able to render your vision above and beyond the level of most of your contemporaries but... when the vision is a little lacking or simplistic, as I felt it was in this film, then it doesn’t matter how good you are technically, the film is not necessarily going strike true with an audience. Or at least hold their interest for the entire time.

The first thing he gets wrong here, from my perspective, is that he telegraphs the end of the movie right from the start and, once you kind of get the hang that the movie is probably somewhat cyclic in nature, it kind of becomes a dead give away that the whole thing is not necessarily to be taken on a ‘realistic’ level and that the film is merely a kind of metaphor for the creative process, with all the central characters merely prose within the writer’s wrestling imagination. And once you realise this, probably from sometime around the first half an hour, the inevitability of the nature of the ending becomes something you are just kind of hanging around to see when the characters will catch up with that concept. Of course, they never really do because, you know, they are just characters within the fiction of the fiction... um... if you see what I mean. They are the fabric of the creative process and it kind of becomes like there’s less at stake here than you might have, at first, thought.

The film is quite Buñuelian, in some ways and while I was watching the film I couldn’t help but thinking that the director had maybe seen the truly great The Exterminating Angel (reviewed here) a few more times than was good for him (which, it turns out, was a bit ‘on the nose’ because I just found out that Aronosfsky is listing it as one of his influences on the making of this film). The lunacy and chaos of the film feels like that mixed with the kind of freeform visual stream of consciousness of The Monkees’ movie Head and Fellini’s Otto E Mezzo (Eight and a Half) although, to be honest, I could watch all of those three films I just mentioned quite often whereas mother! is not something I’d ever need, or want, to bother to see again in my lifetime.

The continuous assault on the senses never really matches the madcap lunacy of, say, The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (another film this might be said to superficially resemble at a genetic level) and instead maybe drifts off into the 1960s mainstream Hollywood, bloated and relatively less interesting hijinks of movies like What’s New Pussycat? (which I still have a slight, soft spot for, nonetheless) or the Peter Sellers vehicle, The Party. The resemblance is there, perhaps unintentionally and, like those kinds of Hollywood attempts at recapturing the madball antics of earlier generations, mother! kind of falls flat on its face in terms of continuing to engage interest after the, quite compelling, first half hour ...before the languid pacing and tranquil camerawork give way to handheld chaos and an almost reactive way of tracking the action.

So there you go. I didn’t really like mother! too much but it’s not in any way extreme or too disturbing like some of the word of mouth is suggesting. I think the film’s biggest problem is that, after a while, the constant pandemonium which the director is trying to bombard you with just gets a bit boring and you kind of can’t wait for it to end so you can get some peace and quiet. Which is a shame because, like I said before, I truly believe that Aronofsky was one of the great directors of modern cinema and I just wish he would be again. This film, though, feels a little like a diluted, ‘seen it all before’ kind of experience with a simplistic story and, alas, for me... that doesn’t quite tick all the boxes, I’m afraid. If you want to see what stunning work this director can really do then check out Pi or Requiem For A Dream. Those are the two movies that are really going to hook you.

Run All Night

Running Up That Kill

Run All Night
2015  USA
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra 
UK cinema release print.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that this new movie starring Liam Neeson is a bit of a hard boiled action thriller. He’s done quite a few of these kinds of projects now, since his deservedly popular role in the first Taken movie, but to be honest, the films he’s been doing in this mode are always fairly hit and miss and the kinds of roles he’s been taking have become something of a cliché, to be honest. That’s possibly because he’s so credible in these kinds of roles, I expect. That being said, though, I sincerely hope he doesn’t abandon these roles too soon, before he has a chance to do a couple of sequels to the excellent A Walk Among The Tombstones (reviewed by me here) at least.

Run All Night is his third film for director Jaume Collet-Serra, following his work with him on the lamentably awful Unknown (reviewed here) and the surprisingly enjoyable Non Stop (reviewed here). I’m happy to report that, of the three films he’s done with this director, Run All Night is by far the superior movie to the other two, being both immensely enjoyable and actually making sense and following through on its own internal logic... something which I feel Unknown was not quite able to do. It’s also quite a gritty, anti-hero role that the always watchable and talented Neeson brings to life in this movie and it’s usually quite fun to watch the actor tap into his dark side for this kind of part.

The film centres on Neeson’s character Jimmy Conlon, who is a washed up killer for the mob, headed up by the ageing Shawn Maguire, played by the always brilliant Ed Harris. The film concerns the way these two veteran hard men deal with their relationship with each other after Conlon has to shoot Maguire’s son, played by Boyd Holbrook, in order to stop him from killing Conlon’s own, very estranged son, played by Joel Kinnaman. The film then becomes a bit of an action fest as Conlon does his best to keep his son, who hates him, and his son’s family, out of harms way as Maguire goes all out to settle the score.

And, yeah, there’s action galore and it’s all very well handled because it’s treated in quite an “in your face” kind of manner with loud gunshots that spell out ugly death. It doesn’t try to turn the violence into too much of a kind of kinetic ballet as some films choose to do (rightly or wrongly and for whatever artistic reasons) and instead lets you really feel the suspense and danger inherent in the situations portrayed on the screen.

What the film really has going for it, though, is the dramatic undercurrent of the ageing Neeson and Harris both trying to survive in a world that’s moved on from their old school ways of doing things. Both thrust back into an incident where those exact kinds of brutal methods are what they are now having to embrace again to come to terms with, and try to survive, their current situation. And all of this is bolstered with the subtext of Neeson’s son having to trust his father and the possibility of Jimmy Conlon’s partial redemption in his son’s eyes... or at least his acceptance. And, frankly, when you have actors in a movie who are as good as this... it’s rare that they’re not going to deliver the goods in terms of the emotional weight required. They certainly all do an excellent job here.

Now, I really hate to use the clichéd critical term that the movie is a bit of a roller coaster ride... but even if that phrase outstayed its welcome almost before critics started applying it to every mildly kinetic action movie possible, the truth is that this film certainly lives up to this phrase in terms of pacing and it really does whizz along quite quickly... although the actual arc is relatively slowly set up. Nevertheless it’s shot in such a way that the build up itself is hurtling along at quite a breakneck speed and you’re not going to find yourself yawning or checking your watch at any time throughout this movie, I suspect.

That being said, though, my one negative criticism of the movie is that the editing style was quite aggressive all the way through the picture. Now, don’t get me wrong, there were some lovely transitions in this movie, and some nice use of sped up cityscape zooms and transitions to get you arriving at the next sequence, but I would have to say that the average shot length in this movie, which also has quite a lot of moving camera in it, is probably only a few seconds. Even the scenes which shout out for a slower treatment, like rambly conversations between main characters, seem to be cursed with being made up of lots of little alternate angles and edits when, perhaps, it might have been better to let some of these scenes play out more in their master shots, rather than try and speed them up with constant cutting.

Even so, though, if you can handle that spin on the pacing solution, which I guess is one way to keep things moving, then you should certainly have a good time with this one. There’s a lot to like in it. It rarely gets confusing, even with all the aggressive editing, so that’s also a big bonus on this one... especially during the jumpy, fighty, chasy, shooty sequences.

One thing I would like to take a minute to shout out on this one is the excellent score by a composer called Tom Holkenborg, otherwise known as Junkie XL. Now, I’ve got his music to the second of the 300 movies (reviewed here) and I have to say that I thought that was an okay score... although I’ve noticed on various film music message boards that there seems to be a general rejection, in some quarters, concerning this guy’s music... and I don’t know why this is. Now, I don’t know how this score will stand up as a stand alone listen (although I’ve ordered a copy of the CD from the US so I hope to be able to make a judgement on that in a few weeks) but the way it works in this movie is pretty good. There is a strong melody line, almost but not quite a leitmotif approach, which plays out for Neeson’s character and it’s mixed in with typical but immensely listenable and supporting modern action scoring. Here’s the thing, though... it’s also very well spotted...

That is to say, just like masters of the craft such as Jerry Goldsmith, the places where it’s been chosen to either have music or not, is quite well thought out and effectively followed through. To use an example of another master Hollywood composer, think about the pod racing scene in John Williams’ score for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (reviewed here). Once the race scene starts, the music is killed off in its entirety for almost the full duration of the race, allowing the sound effects to take over and present a more raw experience, with Williams only bringing in his score towards the end of the sequence to bolster a specific incident and its repercussions on the outcome of the race. In Run All Night, Junkie-XL does a similar thing with a high impact car chase... leaving it almost completely unscored until near the end of the sequence where he suddenly (and wisely in terms of orchestration) starts bringing in some percussion to top off the action and then bring you back into the sound world of the film afterwards... very nicely done. I think this guy is probably a fairly skilled composer and I think the soundtrack community should give him more of a chance, to be fair.

And that, I think, is all I got to say about Run All Night. Well shot, nicely lit, beautiful acting, appropriately handled scoring but a bit jarring on the eyes in some places due to what I feel is maybe a little bit of a case of overenthusiastic editing. If you’re a fan of Neeson’s action movies, though, then this one is certainly one of the better, not to mention most credible, of those... so you shouldn’t have any worries about giving this one a go and you probably won’t want to pass this one up... even if I stooped to calling it a roller coaster. Embrace the cliché.