The Girl On The Train

Carriage Return

The Girl On The Train
2016 USA Directed by Tate Taylor
UK cinema release print.

Oh dear. You know, I’ve been in a similar situation with a much anticipated movie based on a best selling novel before and I really should learn to trust my instincts more. I’ve only got myself to blame, I guess. I saw the trailer for The Girl On The Train a while ago and, frankly, it looked like a dull, Hollywoodland ‘almost-thriller’ that I could easily bypass as being an unremarkable film. And that’s what I should have done. Instead, just like my previous bad experience with Before I Go To Sleep (which I reviewed here), I bought into the idea that it was a much loved ‘modern classic’ of a novel... or at the very least a phenomenal best seller... and so I squashed my gut reaction and decided to give this one a go. Besides... it has a terrific lead actress and new score by Danny Elfman so... it seemed like the sensible thing to do.

So here I am now living with the fact that I’ve wasted my time on another clunker of a movie when I could, instead, have used that time for some genuine cinematic art... however, as I learned a long time ago, it’s necessary to see the really useless stuff to be able to harbour an appreciation for the good stuff too, so... I guess it wasn’t a completely wasted journey.

The Girl On The Train alleges to be a thriller and, although it kind of comes from an interesting structure in terms of the way it slowly reveals things in the past of the three main female protagonist’s lives in a non-linear fashion, it is still quite a dull movie. Now I don’t mind slow paced films... put me in front of a Russian movie where the highlight of the film is the quick condensation of heat from where a coffee mug had been left on a table and as long as it’s got great cinematography and intrigues me with the way the camera explores the situation, I’ll be fine (and you get an extra point if you can work out exactly which movie I was thinking about there). The pacing on The Girl On The Train is fairly slow but it’s not the problem here.

Neither is the story, to some extent, which looks at three women who find themselves fighting back against male antagonists that subtly, and less than subtly, brutalise them and make them question their beliefs. It’s got a positive message so that’s all good.

And the acting is really sound too, with Haley Bennett, Rebecca Ferguson doing a cracking job and with Emily Blunt playing the title character, really doing some good work here. Blunt has a tough time and is the main focus of the film, giving us an interesting study of a struggling alcoholic which is actually, almost cleverly but, you know, not quite that cleverly, used as a plot point later on in the movie. No problems with any of this and the construction is almost like a giallo in some moments... although it’s a pretty toothless giallo, to be sure. I did find myself wondering, about half way through the movie, what would have happened if they’d have given an old Italian director who used to crank out gialli back in the late 1960s or early 1970s the same kind of material to work with. I suspect it would be a lot less plodding than what we have here.

I don’t know for sure but I’m guessing the book is a lot more gripping than the film, where you can presumably be more in tune with the thoughts of the various characters. Unfortunately, although I totally believe in the ability of good cinema to portray, wordlessly, the inner struggle of the characters on screen in what I call the ‘cinema of reflection’... the director doesn’t really manage to catch that here, I would say.

Everything seems so obvious, to be honest, and I was waiting for some kind of twist to rear itself at the end of the movie to bite me on the backside for being so complacent during the rest of the time but, in all fairness, there is no twist ending. This is literally just a whodunnit kind of movie and, although there are a fair few suspects who might have been able to facilitate the film’s central crime, the killer is telegraphed somewhat early in the set up of the movie, it felt to me, and I was left with a movie going experience which, unfortunately, left me far from the edge of my seat.

Danny Elfman’s score is a bit low key too. It’s far from one of his big, splashy compositions he’s known for and this harkens back more to his scores for smaller movies like A Simple Plan, in some respects, although, certainly within the context of the movie, I found this less enjoyable. That being said, when Emily Blunt’s character starts piecing things together towards the end of the picture, the score’s rhythms and hues come more sharply into focus to heighten the sense of tension that the film is struggling so hard to achieve. I suspect the score is one of those compositions that work better away from the actual 'venue of the imagination' it was initially written for... so it might be worth a pick up on CD at some point.

And that's about all I’ve got to say about The Girl On The Train. Sorry about the short review but nothing else comes to mind. I’m sure the book must be better than this and, despite having a great cast who mostly do a bang up job, it’s not really doing much for me as a movie and I can’t say I’d recommend it myself. I won’t be making the return trip from the same carriage anytime soon.

Hardcore Henry

First Person Standing

Hardcore Henry
2015 Russia/USA
Directed by Ilya Naishuller
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Extremely slight spoiler in here which gives almost nothing away... just a minor surprise the first time something happens.

I first saw the poster to Hardcore Henry about six weeks ago at my local cinema. I’d never heard of the film before and the title and design of the poster didn’t exactly make me want to go and see this one. I was more than happy to let another dubious action movie pass me by. However, a couple of weeks ago I watched the trailer for the movie and that changed my mind. Sure, it looked like a mindless bullet fest shot on high levels of adrenalin but it also looked completely demented and, furthermore, it looked like it had all been shot from a first person point of view. And by that I mean... imagine if you were playing an old computer game like Doom or Quake or the original Duke Nukem... the whole movie is shot like that, where you are the main character as accessed by the camera’s eye. Something we’re used to seeing in the horror genre to a certain extent but, even then, the character is usually a person armed 'with' the camera... this is slightly different in that the camera viewpoint is supposed to be the eyes of the titular Henry.

So yeah, after seeing that trailer, I was pretty much up for going to see this... although I still had my reservations. Had I registered that Sharlto Copley was in it, I would have probably crossed it off my ‘to watch’ list, to be honest... I’ve not been a fan of Copley in the few films I’ve seen him in. Luckily, I didn’t realise he was in it because, not only is the movie a fairly enjoyable one if you’re into the whole gung ho action thing but... Sharlto Copley is also really good in this. Maybe I just don’t like his native South American accent which the actor usually uses in his films... it’s possible I’ve been reacting to that in the past. Copley ditches that here in favour of... a whole bunch of other accents but... okay, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

As I said, Hardcore Henry is a first person shooter of a movie and, as it starts, we see the memory of Henry as a young boy. At least, that’s what we assume it is at the time. This is then followed by a title sequence that really sets the bar on the level of violence in the movie. Now, I’m not sure if it was just me but in terms of graphic, gory detail, the rest of the movie really doesn’t live up to the quiet ferocity of this opening credits design. I say quiet because the credits are all slow motion shots set against a soundtrack and are almost, in some ways, a spiritual cousin to some of those old Bond title sequences. However, these particular credits concern themselves with close up shots of various areas of the human anatomy as violence with a variety of implements is brutally committed to said body parts. So a slow motion knife entering a person’s neck from one side followed by a shot of it exiting, still in slow motion, from the other side... that kind of thing. I’m not someone who condones violence in real life but in art such as painting, film and fiction I am happy to enjoy it on the level that it occupies and, since I haven’t seen a title sequence quite like this before, I found it all kinda interesting to be honest. The opening credits end with the camera following the trail of a bullet which has just penetrated somebody’s eyeball. Possibly this is all what has happened to Henry before the film starts proper. These credits are pretty much the only part of the movie which are not shot in strict, first person viewpoint, in fact.

We then return to that POV camera angle when we ‘wake up’ as the title character gains consciousness. It’s clear the character is recovering from some violent procedure and that his girlfriend (Estelle, played by Haley Bennett) has rebuilt him/us as some kind of cybernetic killing machine. Now the key here is that, cleverly on the part of the writer, the character has no immediate memory of anything that has happened to get him into this state, including remembering the lady in question. He can’t even speak until she downloads a new voice into him and, just before this is about to happen, the room caves in and we meet the main villain of the piece. So Henry is silent throughout the film. People are killed and Henry has to go on the run to escape certain death at the hands of the deadly Akan (played by Danila Kozlovsky) and his endless army of trained killers. Luckily, every time Henry is on his own, the plot unfolds just a little more and he stumbles onto someone who can help him, to tell him the next bit of his mission, whether that be keeping himself charged up and alive or... something more specific.

The first person to help him is a guy called Jimmy, played by Sharlto Copley. He doesn’t last long, though, before his brains are shot out the front of his head but, every time a new development occurs... there’s Jimmy again to help. In one guise or another. Basically, Sharlto Copley plays a number of, lets call them incarnations for the sake of this review, of Jimmy over the course of the film and each Jimmy is a different variation of him... druggie, punk rocker, British army officer... that kind of thing. Copley plays them all really well and I found this constantly, recurring character with numerous South Park style “Oh my God, they killed Kenny” moments to be very entertaining. After a while, as the plot develops, you’ll also get to find out why there are so many ‘Jimmys’ and the gradually emerging picture of the world that Henry has been resurrected into is one of the things that holds the interest throughout the film.

That’s the basic set up and the structure is a bit weak, to be honest, in that if it didn’t have a back story to the situation evolving in the background... well it might be a bit of a dull film after a while. I actually thought, before I went to see this, that an hour and a half of first person style, non-stop action would get a bit boring as it wore on but the director is quite good at keeping the momentum and interest going throughout the whole of the movie... somewhat surprisingly. This includes some ferocious edits to the footage that allows the director to cut to a later moment in a scene without losing the audience in terms of what’s going on... he can eliminate the unnecessary bits without it being a major jolt on the visual cortex and, again surprisingly, the action sequences are really easy to follow, even when they are at their most frantic (which is quite often). Having the odd gimmick like overlapping subtitles to convey a chatter of voices doesn’t harm the movie either... although I wonder how that moment must play out in other markets around the world.

I did have a couple of problems with it, one of which is the structure of the forward momentum of the picture. There will be a mindless but mostly entertaining action sequence... then we’ll get a few minutes of calm where one character explains a little more of what is going on. However, as that situation  carries on it will always suddenly conclude with some kind of violence or explosion or occurrence of extremely aggressive mayhem... which will then lead into the next action sequence before another bit of calm. Stop... repeat. The whole of the movie works in exactly this fashion, one scene after another, even throwing a Frank Sinatra musical number sung by various Jimmys singing alternate lines, at one point, before the violence suddenly erupts out of the blue again... and it’s a shame that this kind of repetitive structure was used all the way to the end, to be honest. It’s just enough of a calm before each storm to hold one’s interest but I can’t help but think what the impact of some of the action sequences would have been if there had been more downtime in between punch, crunch, slice and dice sessions. Probably a lot more potent, is my guess.

The other problem I had was with the main bad guy, Akan. Kozlovsky’s performance is fine but the villain, with his all powerful psychokinetic powers, seems somewhat out of place in the narrative, it seems to me. Perhaps more suited to being plucked out of a Japanese manga and rendered in an anime rather than finding himself grafted onto the narrative here. Still, I can see that when you basically have a title character who slowly finds his feet into being a kick ass killing machine, you have to have a villain who he can’t just knock down in 30 seconds flat and I’m guessing the writers introduced the concept of a villain with superhuman powers precisely because of this. Personally, I found it a little intrusive into the narrative style of the rest of the piece but... yeah, it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the movie too much, it has to be said.

Ultimately, Hardcore Henry does exactly what it says on the tin. If you like considerably over the top action thrills and a fairly proportionate dose of blood and guts in the mix, then chances are you’ll have a blast with this movie. Not exactly the best action film I’ve seen but it certainly has its moments and action fans will not want to miss out on seeing this one at the cinema... so give it a go, maybe.