Body Snatchers

I’m Podster Syndrome

Body Snatchers
USA 1993 Directed by Abel Ferrara
Warner Archive Blu Ray Zone A

Body Snatchers is the third of, to date, four adaptations of Jack Finney’s serialised novel The Body Snatchers, following on from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956 - reviewed by me here) and Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers (1978 - reviewed by me here). Although, with the tag line to the movie, still used on the latest Blu Ray packaging, of “The Invasion Continues”, you might be forgiven for thinking this is a sequel to the previous versions. However, that’s not really possible given both the timeframes and outcomes of those previous films, obviously.

Now, I didn’t have fond memories of this one from the previous time I saw it but, looking back at it again, I have to say that it’s not nearly as terrible as I remember. It actually, in its kind of watered down way, has some interesting things going on and it is relatively entertaining, once it begins to pick up the pace a little (the first 20 mins to half an hour are somehow deadly dull compared to pretty much any other version of the story).

There are strengths and there are weaknesses to this version and, I’d have to say (if my memory of the fourth one is anything to go by... it may not be but I’m revisiting it again soon for this week’s reviews), that this third one is the least interesting or watchable of the four. But, like I said, it does have its moments and some of it hangs together quite well. I’m not sure what, if any, of the blame for the content of this film lays with the director or with the studio heads so, I’m not going to point any fingers here. I will refer to it as the director’s film throughout but, take that with a pinch of salt is what I’m saying.

So this version really does ditch a lot of the story while drilling into the heart of Finney’s original concept. None of the character’s names and personal situations are the same as the original (and this version is unique in this, even in the gender swapped version that came next, the last names of the characters were retained). This one features a family of ‘sometimes protagonists’ and ‘sometimes antagonists’ (as so happens in these kinds of movies), headed up by Terry Kinney as Steve Malone, an inspector for the Environmental Protection Agency who is sent to a military base (where the entire film is set) for a month to check out that they are storing their toxic chemicals safely. So he moves there with his family... his wife Carol (played by the underutilised Meg Tilly), his little boy Andy (played by Reilly Murphy) and his teenage daughter, Marti (played by Gabrielle Anwar), who is the lead protagonist of the film. Indeed, one of the elements that the film brings back from the 1956 version is a voice over narrative, as given to the audience by her character.

After an unnecessarily long opening credit sequence featuring possibly the least interesting use of moving typography in the history of cinema, we have a sequence where Marti gets accosted in the toilets of a garage on the outskirts of the base. Here, a military guy comes up to her and starts dementedly telling her... “You're scared, aren't you? Good! They're out there, they're everywhere! They get you when you sleep! They get you when you sleep, you hear? Get out, get out or you'll be next!” It’s one of the few times the movie ties in with the ‘56 version as this is, obviously, very similar to what Kevin McCarthy was yelling in the road near the end of the original (and also, in his cameo in the 1978 one too, of course). It’s a shame they actually didn’t get McCarthy back for this version because I’m sure the fans would have loved it. That being said, I get annoyed when Marti says to the audience that we spend half our lives asleep because, honestly, it’s more like a third of our lives asleep so... yeah... just a thought.

At some point, the pods start replacing people and it all happens very quickly with all the usual clichés being touched upon and escalating into a chase movie but, being as it’s set on a military base, with more gunshots and explosions. Although Anwar is excellent as Marti, the story seems somehow less interesting from a teenage point of view (and I don’t know who the target audience was supposed to be but why have those wretched pop songs playing over bits of the movie?) and even Forest Whitaker’s performance, as a surviving paranoid human (doing the old “How did you know my name?” gag from the previous two movies, to the telephone switchboard operator) can’t really dial this film up from... okay attempt to great movie.

There are some nice ideas added into the mix in this version, though. There’s one scene where the little boy is in a military school and they are all doing some abstract finger painting. The teacher gets everyone to hold up their painting and every kid in the class apart from Andy has painted the exact same picture. This is interesting because it shows us quite conclusively for this film that the writers are thinking of the aliens as a collective hive mind and this is pushed further and made quite implicit in some lines of dialogue emphasising the concept of ‘collective’ versus ‘individual’ (aka pod versus human).

Apart from the pods’ psychology and the life cycles of the aliens, though, there are one or two other things which have been brought back from prior versions. One is a nice little nod to the town square seed pod distribution scene, which made its way into the previous two cinematic versions. The other two things are much more blatant though and are both strictly hangovers from the 1978 movie...

One is the ever present garbage trucks, collecting what are obviously the decayed human remains of the original human bodies. A moment made quite explicit when Meg Tilly’s character, who we’ve already seen disintegrate and reborn as a pod person, throws in the black bin bag containing her prior self. The other is the finger pointing screeching made famous by the ending of the previous version. This is used in a similar fashion to indicate the pod people are on to the humans but... it’s perhaps overused a little, truth be told.

I did find it somewhat astonishingly sexist (in a bad way), that one of the pod’s specific way of testing whether the male lead and love interest of Marti (played by Billy Wirth) is an alien like himself is for him to tell him that he’s “f*cked his girlfriend”. As if it’s established among the aliens that a human pretending to be one of them would not be able to contain his rage at such a notion and lash out in a human way. It’s a pretty preposterous and almost offensive notion, especially since the narrative has already expressed the idea of a hive mind at work so... they should know if he’s one of them or not anyway, shouldn’t they? And no need, then, for all that screeching and finger pointing either, I suspect.

The film is nicely shot and framed. Ferrara seems to know what he’s doing but it seems to be a competently made movie rather than a truly great one. He seems to favour dingy blue washes on this a lot and I’m wondering if this kind of palette manifests excessively in any of his other pictures (I’ve only seen one other of his, I think, although a friend of mine is an absolutely devoted admirer of his work).

I don’t think Body Snatchers did very well at the cinema but my understanding is that it wasn’t really given a chance to, receiving a delayed and limited theatrical release (I’m guessing the producers didn’t like it) before going straight to home video. So, in some ways it never really had a chance to make a dent and, yeah, I guess it didn’t. At the moment I’m thinking this is the least watchable of the adaptations of The Body Snatchers but, I have to rewatch the version with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig next... which will be my next review this week. 

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers at NUTS4R2

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

Body Snatchers (1993)

The Invasion (2007)

Black Panther

Wakanda Man Is He?

Black Panther
2018 USA Directed by Ryan Coogler
UK cinema release print.

Black Panther is the latest in the chain-linked Marvel Cinematic Universe movies which have set modern cinematic trends on fire since the debut of the first Iron Man film. It carries on directly from story and character elements set up in both Avengers - Age Of Ultron (reviewed here) and Captain America - Civil War (reviewed here).

Now, I’m not a big Black Panther comic book fan, truth be told. I remember I used to draw him occasionally as a kid (like most of the Marvel and DC superheroes) but I never really had any of his stand alone appearances... just the odd appearance in a hardback UK british Marvel annual or Marvel Treasury edition guesting in other heroes' stories. So, in terms of the comic book roots for this film, I can’t really talk with any authority.

I do, however, remember Klaw (aka Ulysses Klau) and was really stoked when he turned up in Age Of Ultron, portrayed by Andy Serkis, because I wanted to see him in the colourful costume and with the ‘sonic claw’ he used to wear on his arm. Alas, my biggest disappointment with this movie is that, although Serkis once again shows up to do the honours, I felt he was a really under utilised character and, alas, doesn’t have either the costume or that big metal stump  with the sonic antenna sticking out of it... which is a shame. I had further disappointment with this character’s arc here too... used as a bit of a plot point rather than a character in his own right... but I can’t say too much here because I want this review to be spoiler free.

As it happens though, in spite of this, Black Panther is actually pretty good and certainly holds its own with a fair amount of the MCU movies over the years. And in terms of art direction... well in that respect it’s probably the best of the current Marvel movies... at least in a visual sense.

The film has good performances all around and that helps a lot for a movie with not many ties to the other films being present in the flesh, so to speak. Chadwick Boseman really seems to have grown into the role fairly quickly and he has some of the humour which the character was missing in Captain America - Civil War. Which is not surprising since his involvement in that movie came from his reaction to the death of his father. Martin Freeman returns here too, as the CIA agent he played in Civil War and he is also a heck of a lot more palatable this time around with him taking a more heroic role... though having an American accent coming out of his mouth is still just plain wrong and sounds quite terrible. Lupita Lupita Nyong'o, Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Daniel Kaluuya and Forest Whitaker are all, as expected, strong in their varies supporting roles and, I have to say, Michael B. Jordan as the villanous Killmonger is quite striking, both in presence and appearance here.

Okay. So there’s a lot of good stuff here with an almost ‘international espionage’ tone to some of the scenes (my favourite part of the movie was the ‘incident’ set in a casino in Busan) and the action is as competently handled as well as it is in all the other Marvel movies of recent years. That being said, in a movie which is pretty entertaining a lot of the time, I did have a few little grumbles with it.

Okay, so my main problem was that it was quite repetitive all the way through. You have three (technically) combat challenge scenes, three spirit journey scenes and the whole thing kept feeling like... "Didn’t I see this stuff enough earlier in the movie?" I take the point that most Marvel movies like this are somewhat formulaic in that they are ‘battle - pause - battle - pause - battle - pause’ movies but I just felt the types of situations which presented these conflicts could have been a little more varied in the execution. This is maybe, partially, due to the fact that the film doesn’t ‘globe hop’ as much as some of the others (most of it is set in the fictional country of Wakanda) and... I dunno... it just got a bit ‘samey’ after a while.

The only other problem I have with it is in the continuity of the Black Panther character in relation to his other appearance. We saw in Captain America - Civil War how he failed to stop the murder of his father and then took over the mantle of Black Panther. However, it turns out he doesn’t get his ‘panther powers’ bestowed on him - by the ingestion of a specific herb - until this part of the story, set after those events from the former film. So are we saying the version of the character in that one was not operating at optimum strength? Especially when, to be honest, I couldn’t see much (if any) difference between that version of the character and this one? I either didn’t understand something or there was some sloppy writing in here. Not sure which, to be honest.

These are all fairly minor grumbles though and there’s a lot of good stuff to make up for it.

I said the film has the best art direction of any of the MCU films to date and the colours utilised throughout are fantastic. I loved the clashes of the red costumes of the king’s personal guard against the various sets/locations and there are some amazing, probably artifically enhanced, skies in this film. It’s really nice to look at and marks this director out as someone to watch, I think.

It also has a really nice score by Ludwig Göransson but I’m really unhappy that, just like another MCU film Guardians Of The Galaxy 2 (reviewed here), the powers that be have not seen fit to issue a CD release of this one... instead going down the incredibly stupid ‘download’ route. Way to exclude the soundtrack listeners who wanted to purchase this thing people! This practice should be outlawed.

So there you have it. A pretty cool film. I don’t think it deserves all the unbelievable hype it seems to be getting and, frankly, it’s no Wonder Woman (reviewed here) but it is a pretty good entry in the series and it certainly doesn’t let the other movies down... although I didn’t like it as much as some of the others from the last couple of years of the ongoing saga, truth be told. It does have a certain power though and brings, again, a slightly different feel to the Marvel Cinematic Universe which will be useful in future crossovers... the next one being the big Avengers - Infinity War film in two months time. With regards to that, this film has two post credits scenes... one in the middle and one right at the end so, you know, you might want to stick around for those two. A certain character makes an appearance in the second of these who I was expecting to turn up in the main body of the movie properly and lend a hand, given the set up in a previous film but... oh well, at least he’s in here.

If you are a lover of the Marvel superhero movies then Black Panther is a little different and definitely one to have a look at... especially if you want to know what’s going on for the next one. Definitely give this one a go if this is your thing. A solid entry in the ongoing Marvel juggernaut.

Arrival

Cunning Linguist

Arrival
2016 USA Directed by Denis Villeneuve 
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Although absolutely no spoilers are in here, the fact that I talk about the syntax of the film could result in slight spoilerage if considered for a while.

Arrival is an adaptation of a sci fi short story I’ve not actually read by Ted Chiang called Story Of Your Life... so I can’t say how it is as an adaptation. This expanded (presumably) version of the story is directed by Denis Villeneuve, who directed last year’s movie Sicario (which I reviewed here) and who, since finishing this movie, has started filming a seemingly unnecessary sequel to Blade Runner (reviewed here). On that subject, I guess if I had to name a modern director who could take on a sequel to what is, after all, the greatest movie ever made, I think Villeneuve may be a good one to trust. I wouldn’t trust Ridley Scott after the way he’s ‘revisionist butchered’ the film in subsequent decades and, especially after having seen Prometheus... which seems to take joy in holding up all that was great about his astonishing movie A L I E N and then destroying the memory of it.

Anyway, back to this director’s Arrival. It’s not too long ago since we had a big, conceptual sci-fi movie playing in cinemas but they don’t come along as frequently as some of the other kinds of films made in versions of the genre so this is kind of a welcome change from the plethora of superheroes and space opera movies which have been howling for our collective attention in recent years.

Now, the thing about high concept sci-fi films like this one is they, generally, live or die on the strength of the mystery which is hiding at their core and which is usually revealed at the end of the movie. More often than not, the audience will work the ending out way before they are supposed to on these kinds of event films and this is either because they are too obvious or because the director telegraphs (or is forced to dumb down because of studio pressure) the nature of the ending. Alas, while Arrival is a pretty terrific movie, it’s no exception to this rule but... I’ll get to that in a little while.

Okay, so what’s good about Arrival?

Well, a heck of a lot actually. Villeneuve has equipped himself with some fine actors in this one with the main protagonist being played by Amy Adams, who is very well supported by the always watchable Jeremy Renner. They are both in terrific company as they are backed up by a team of good actors, headed primarily by Forrest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg.

The plot is very simple... Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, one of the United States’ top linguists, who is called upon by the military, in the form of Colonel Weber as played by Forest Whitaker, to try and communicate with an alien species who have landed twelve ships around the Earth at places where, apparently, Sheena Easton has had hit records. No, I’m not making this up and I did appreciate the odd bit of humour in what is, it has to be said... and this seems to be typical of this director... a fairly dry film. It’s a film that deals with big emotions but there’s something fairly distancing and clinical about the directorial style which mostly tends to render the emotional context as something which needs to be studied and observed rather than felt. At least that’s the way I react to Villeneuve’s work and I have absolutely no problem with this. Louise heads up the languages team and Renner’s mathematician character, Ian Donnelly, heads up another division and, every 18 hours when the ship allows some humans to go inside to make contact, the two are accompanied by military personnel to try and make some kind of breakthrough, for their country, as to what the aliens want and if their intention is hostile.

Of course, the world’s leaders are all conducting their own investigations with their own spaceships and, as tensions rise, Louise has to try and find ways to get the fragmented super powers talking again and to stop them from launching what seems an inevitable attack on the aliens, thus causing major disruption between the nations and possibly inviting death from the aliens. At least that’s what the story at first seems to be about if you are just accepting everything as it’s fed to you. I wasn’t but... yeah, like I said earlier, the film has a flaw and I’ll get to that in a minute.

Villeneuve, once again, gets the most out of his cinematographer by grabbing some really beautiful shots but the colour palette, asides from some strong reds near the start, is kind of subdued and neutral throughout the entire course of the movie. Everything looks very dialled down and flat although, in some shots, I did notice he tends to enhance a small part of the screen with a bright colour or striking object which, although it’s rarely the centre of your focus, does tend to balance the way the shot is received, it seemed to me. I’m not sure if that was a conscious decision to do that but, since these things take so long to light and set up, I can only conclude that it was.

However, despite looking like the cinematic equivalent of a page full of Helvetica, the shots are quite beautiful and, coupled with some very slow and fluid camera movement and less than speedy pacing, I have to say that it’s an immensely gorgeous looking film and it’s primarily on that basis, and the strength of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s riveting score, that I will be seeking this one out on blu ray so my dad can take a look at it at some point.

However, there’s some bad stuff thrown in with the good which I’ve been intimating all through the review and... well... the problem is this.

Arrival places the solution behind its mystery dead front and centre. There’s a pre-credits scene to this movie and I so wish the director had not included this because, even before the title to the movie comes up straight after this, I’d kinda figured out exactly where the ending was going. It was always going to be a possibility that the movie ventures into the territory that it does... and I’m trying really hard to not give away spoilers here people... but the director really tips his hand very early on in the proceedings with the opening sequence, both with the nature of Amy Adam’s voice over to this scene and, even more tellingly, in the way he shoots around a certain something, deliberately not revealing something specific through blurry cinematography. This immediately got my brain thinking about why certain visual clues had been hidden and, of course, once your mind goes down that track it’s not too hard to think of the best logical conclusion... or at the very least, the way the film is really playing out towards a similar conclusion if you’re not caught up in the director and screenwriter’s parlour games.

Villeneuve reenforces his folly in a much cleverer way than, say, M. Night Shyamalan might try and cover his obvious slips in his movies. What Villeneuve does here is structure the film and the frequency of certain styles of scenes so that they play out in a way that the audience will, for the most part, trick themselves into misinterpreting some of the information. It’s my long held belief that the complex series of visual signifiers that make up the syntax of cinema stick in people’s brains as youngsters after watching only a few films or TV shows. For instance with flashbacks (which work slightly differently in some cinematic cultures, I’ve noticed) or other such things such as two shots of people talking and cutting back and forth, making up a conversation, have very pointed interpretations. So, if you screw around with the way they are really as opposed to being perceived, then you can allow the audience to fool itself. The strength of the opening sequence in the amazing film Pleasantville, for example, relies on the audience thinking that two characters are having a conversation before a long shot reveals the punchline that they are both in different places and a conversation ‘with each other’ isn’t happening at all at this point.

The director of Arrival uses another long held cinematic tradition, which I won’t name here, to fool the majority of the audience as to a certain element of one of the characters and I suspect it might work really well on some people. The only reason it didn’t work on me, I suspect, is because I have an unconventional outlook on life and don’t take for granted a certain linear element of people’s lives that they tend to latch onto as a scientific reality. And that’s all I’m saying about that so as not to spoil things for you but, alas, I did find the main conceptual twist to be jarringly obvious right from the pre-credits sequence, I’m afraid.

However, it doesn’t matter. The thing is... Arrival is a startlingly good presentation of a concept that has been done in a fairly different manner quite recently in the cinema and certainly in a more light hearted manner by some films over the last four decades. The pacing might be a little too European for some audience members (which was clearly the case in the screening I attended where people were kicking the backs of chairs or going out for a little walk half way through) but it really is a stunning film and I, personally, didn’t get bored by it once. If you are into conceptual science fiction then you’ll probably want to take a look at this one. It’s a film with amazing cinematography, great music and some interesting performances. And if you do find it as obvious as I did in terms of never quite taking you by surprise, the film more than makes up for it in other ways and ultimately I found it to be an entertaining, if not entirely thought provoking, lollipop of a movie.

TAK3N (aka Taken 3)

Mills And Boom

TAK3N (aka Taken 3)
2014  France
Directed by Olivier Megaton 
UK cinema release print.

Liam Neeson explodes back on the screen as Bryan Mills...

Unfortunately.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Liam Neeson, I think he’s a great actor and, funnily enough, I also loved the first Taken movie... otherwise I wouldn’t have subjected myself to seeing the third installment in the franchise. I love producer Luc Besson too, of course, and as for Olivier Megaton... well, I liked Transporter 3 and Columbiana (reviewed here).

That being said, while not a complete disaster, Taken 2 (reviewed here) had some big shoes to fill and it was not the greatest sequel, by any stretch. I think the problem with the franchise, in terms of my expectations of it, is that it opened so strongly. Asides from his more swashbuckling role in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (reviewed here), Taken was pretty much the first time we’d seen Liam neeson play a “hard as nails” action hero and he did so credibly in a film which made good on the promise of its trailer. Neeson is always believable at the very least, of course, but the script in the first one was very strong for the kind of movie it was and, alas, neither Taken 2 or Taken 3 live up to it, to be fair.

This one starts off by setting up the majority of the bad guys by showing them doing some nasty stuff at the start of the film... which is pretty standard and almost a basic requirement of a movie like this. However, it has to be said that the drastic things they do at this point really don’t help the credibility of the rest of the storyline. The absolute seeming lack of interest by the police in terms of the impact of this opening on the rest of the story (aka, the police would have been keeping a closer eye on someone who they are not all that worried about in this movie because it would spoil the so called “surprise twist” for the audience) really compromises the logic and any chance of realism for the progression later on in the film.

Once this sequence is done we are onto an opening credits section of “the urban landscape from above, at night” but, before you reach for the panic button, I’d have to say that the opening titles are really well handled and the cityscapes on view are treated in a much more interesting way - by using fast dissolves and fast zooms to highlight certain areas and accentuate the links between various shots in the urban sprawl. This, coupled with typography which doesn’t stay in any one place for too long and leads your eye on to different parts of the screen, works really well and I was quite impressed with the overall treatment of what could have been another big opening movie yawn.

The downside to that is, of course, the rest of the movie is never really as good as the title sequence. Everybody, at least in terms of the actual actors performing their roles, is all very good - heroes, villains and supporting characters alike. There just doesn’t seem to be much happening with the story line and, worse, some of the bits in the movie don’t even make any sense other than it gives the writers something to hang another dumb and, in some cases, confusingly edited, action sequence on to. Why, for instance, does Bryan go to all of that trouble and place himself in an extreme danger situation which might be impossible for him to get out of, just so he can go say “Hi” to his kid without actually telling her anything more or giving her anything useful to do. It makes no sense.

In addition to Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace and the “totally wasted in minor roles these days but truly cool actress” who is Famke Janssen, we have Forest Whitaker who is basically there to serve the same function as he did in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Last Stand (reviewed here) and, like in that movie, he does a really excellent job in this picture... even going so far as to give his character a knight from a game of chess and arming himself with the elastic band from his “Bryan Mills” file and adding little gestures involving these props. It just seems though, unless there’s a much longer cut of this movie struggling to get out from somewhere, that these are distractions to stop the actor from getting bored because he seems to not have all that much function in the story in terms of his character, truth be told. He senses the dangerous and righteousness of Neeson’s personality but, for the whole movie, he still remains one step behind. It would have been more interesting if he at least contributed more to the plot and maybe teamed up and helped save Liam Neeson and the token person who gets tak3n towards the end to justify the title... but nothing like that actually happens and his character, while beautifully played, seems to be nothing more than superfluous throughout the whole movie, I’m afraid.

I know this is a fairly short review from me on this one but, alas, I really don’t have too much more to say about this movie. The original Taken was a remarkable debut in the series but, so far, the sequels have been just okay... certainly nothing capturing the special spirit of the first movie in the series. Because that first one was truly great I was hoping that the third one would be a heck of a lot better than the lacklustre second movie but, it seems, I was sadly mistak3n.

The Last Stand

Last Man Standing

The Last Stand
USA 2013
Directed by Jee-woon Kim
Playing at cinemas now.

When an escaped prisoner is on the lam, his team ride into town to make sure that nothing can stop him going through the place which is the only town in between him and his escape route to the Mexican border.

But the sleepy town in question’s sheriff has other ideas...

Yeah, you guessed it. Jee-woon Kim, the South Korean director who gave us such films as the original version of A Tale Of Two Sisters and his rip-roaring tribute to the spaghetti western, The Good, The Bad, The Weird (reviewed here) has delivered us yet another “western-dressed-up-in-action-movie-clothing”. This time, however, it’s more like one of those 1950s John Wayne westerns where the sheriff is protecting the town from attack by the inevitable “bad guys”.

I’ve talked about this on here before, I think, but Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s my belief, is one of the few modern movie actors who brings exactly the same “larger than life” star quality to contemporary cinema that such actors as John Wayne and Errol Flynn used to bring with them. Toting all that baggage around isn’t always what’s good for the film, and sometimes they are just playing the same old variations of themselves, but their personality is so engaging that what they did bring to their pictures was worth it’s weight in gold at the box office. And Schwarzenegger’s role of Sheriff Ray Owens in The Last Stand is just the kind of part that calls for that easy. laid back style of acting blended with larger than life personality and the governator definitely delivers in spades here.

Now, talking of box office, it’s beyond amazing to me that this movie seems to have bombed in America... I don’t know why because I thought it was really great fun. Yes it’s cosy and comfy and formulaic and, maybe, a throwback to some of the action fests of the 1980s... but this really isn’t a bad thing and the “old school” oater plot combined with “action scenes on acid” direction from Kim, makes for a considerably entertaining time at the local cinema and, just in case some of the contemporary movie audiences these days have possibly forgotten this... art can also be entertainment and popcorn fodder like this one still requires a large amount of skill behind and in front of the camera... and if you like action movies or old westerns, then you might want to give this one a chance.

The performances are standout with some great “old friends” of cinema doing a fine job in terms of making it all look easy. Forest Whitaker is fantastic, as is Luis Guzmán (wearing a cowboy hat, no less, to really push the point home) and I have no idea who Johnny Knoxville is, but he’s a fun watch in this. You also have young Jamie Alexander from Thor doing a brilliant job as the main female lead and, of course, the always watchable Peter Stormare playing the principal, villain’s henchman. And, as one last nod to the film’s status as a western, you have an excellent, stand out cameo from one of cinema’s greatest character actors, Harry Dean Stanton. This is a good cast of people who make the thinly drawn characters easy to believe in.

And when I say thinly drawn characters, yeah that could be a negative in many movies, but here it works okay because the film is really well written (in some ways) and the clichéd set of protagonists (and antagonists) who populate this movie are so familiar to audiences these days, that with just a few broad sketches, you can reliably fill in all the blanks and it’s like you’ve been living with these people for years.

So stereotypes? Yeah.

But lovable stereotypes who you believe in and don’t want to see come to any harm... which obviously helps a lot in your emotional investment in the movie.

Now, on the whole, the editing during the action sequences is blistering but comprehensible... save for one sequence when I knew that one of the main characters had gotten blown up and killed but... he then turns up 5 minutes later unharmed. This is because I’d not been able to keep up with decoding the shots fast enough and got confused with which car had been hit with a rocket launcher. Maybe the next time I see it, which will be on DVD from whatever high street store sale is left standing by the end of the year, what with HMV in the way it is now, I’ll be able to decipher that stuff easier. It is just one little sequence in a movie full of absolutely wonderful action editing though, so maybe it’s not the editor’s fault and maybe not enough coverage was shot to be able to fix it in editing.

Either way, it’s a minor grumble for a film full of well edited action sequences which are violent, no doubt about it, but also have a certain sense of humour about them. I don’t know if it’s strictly right or morally cool to laugh when somebody is blown apart before your eyes and the arms land on a couple of people, causing them inconvenience, but it got a big laugh out of the audience I was watching it with and the tone of the piece tells you not to take the bloody, visceral nature of the on screen shenanigans too seriously.

Similarly, the dialogue is quite corny and clichéd throughout a lot of the film (although I wonder if I would have perceived it as such if I was watching it in Korean with English subtitles) but big Arnie and the gang play it with a knowing wink and despite there being some dialogue that may make a younger, more serious audience wince, the tone is pitch perfect and plays more as a parody than a series of clunky lines. You know the game the movie makers are playing with you here, and feel invited to join in, rather than alienated.

All in all, I thought this film was very well handled, hugely enjoyable and Schwarzenegger proves that he’s still as watchable and reliable as he always has been. It definitely deserves to do better than it is fairing at the box office at present and I’m hoping that, when the time comes for the DVD release, people will start to generate some good word of mouth on this little, action gem.

Hopefully Arnie will be back!