John Wick Chapter 4

At My Wick’s End?

John Wick Chapter 4
USA 2023 Directed by Chad Stahelski
Lionsgate
UK cinema release print

Warning: An obvious implied spoiler at the end...

Okay so, the John Wick films have been a long ride. I never expected them to go through as many sequels but I’m kinda glad they did. John Wick Chapter 4 is an even longer ride than most of them, being about an hour more than the original film which kickstarted the franchise and... like the others to a certain extent, it’s all about attaining a purer form of action cinema. A stripped down, choreographed ballet of blood and fists which delivers body blow after body blow, piling them onto each and every main actor in amounts that, thanks partly to the Kevlar suits the characters wear and partly due to the poetic nature of the fantasy element on display here, no normal person could really survive all that well without rolling around on the floor for half an hour after one or two impacts.

And fans of the films will certainly, for the most part (I know one exception), love this movie as much as the others. It really takes that honed down action motif and divests it of all but the most necessary dialogue scenes with, of course, John Wick himself, played brilliantly by Keanu Reeves, being a man of few words. He allows others to do the talking for him for the most part but, even so, there’s not an awful lot of plot on display in this one.

What that means, of course, is that in the few dialogue scenes... and some of them are very well written, with the exception perhaps of the rather delusional musings of Lawrence Fishburne’s character (who does well with what he has to work with)... everyone else gets better lines than the lead star. And, along with Reeves and Fishburne, there are some excellent actors in this one... some I knew and some I didn’t. 

So, of course, returning is Ian McShane as Winston, the manager of the New York branch of The Continental, the shining outpost which goes a long way to defining the shadow world in which the assassins in these movies are able to work. Then there’s Lance Reddick as his concierge Charon, who sadly died, much too young, one week before this film’s premiere (there is a dedication to him at the film’s close... I guess it’s easier to quickly do this in the sad world of modern digital prints now).

There are also numerous new characters who are all brilliant but I’m just going to pick on three of them here. So we have the lead villain, this time played by Bill Skarsgård. I really hated him in this but, that’s because he plays the character so well, throwing in an arrogance and hiding his lack of intelligence behind a facade which I really can’t imagine anyone respecting. So good for him for making this person truly unlikeable.

Then there’s Caine, played by famous ‘martial arts’ actor Donnie Yen from the Ip Man films (which I’ve still not seen but, I have the first three piled up somewhere to watch and, I guess I’ll pick up the fourth at some point if I like those). It’s quite strange because, in Rogue One - A Star Wars Story, Yen played a blind character who was absolutely modelled on the famous blind gambler Zatoichi, who appeared in so many films played by Shintaro Katsu (and a few others). In this film, he’s once again playing a blind, unstoppable killing machine who uses sound to more accurately sense where his enemies attacks are coming from. I really think some enterprising studio needs to go the hole hog now and just make some new Zatoichi films with Donnie Yen recreating the iconic character.

Finally there’s Shamier Anderson as Tracker. Now this is an interesting one because he is, for all intents and purposes, a kind of less honed John Wick surrogate character. He works with a dog as his loyal companion which, of course, is something John would be sympathetic to too... Wick’s dog fixation is barely mentioned in this fourth part but there is a definite nod to it both in Tracker’s dependence and description of his working pet as an ‘emotional support dog’ and, also, in a nice moment where John Wick makes a tough decision and inadvertently wins Tracker’s heart over to his own cause. So, yeah, it’s actually an important character and, Wick and Caine notwithstanding, he’s probably the coolest person in the movie.

And, yeah, it’s full of action and heart... much like the others you are rooting for a fair few of the characters and, yes, it has emotional tension, not least from the relationship between former allies and friend Wick and Caine, who are pitched against each other here. It also looks great and has exactly the same kind of dark neon colour palette of its predecessors. And then there’s the end... and this is where the spoilers come in. The dramatic arc of the central character is possibly quite obvious to a lot of people and, yes, all I will say is that this film actually goes there. What’s the real sucker punch, though, for people like myself who were expecting an ending like this (there’s a post credits sequel too folks... stay past the end) is that, by the climax of the film, there’s absolutely an option for it not to end with what once seemed like the inevitable conclusion of the John Wick character arc so, yeah, I think it will hit some harder than others.

But, like both the director and lead actor have acknowledged here, the audience will certainly bring their own baggage with them when translating the endgame of the movie and, things which happen in the shadowy world of The Continental and The Table (a world where there never seems to be a shred of law enforcement to interfere in any killing portrayed on film... thus pushing it further into a fantasy land), are not as they might seem in the real world. In other words, no matter what the fate of the central character, there was always going to be a physical aid to help him remain undercover in his new life or death, as a necessity perhaps. All I’m saying is that, although the film might seem conclusive to some (as it does me), there’s certainly an option to do a John Wick Chapter Five at some point down the line (I've already heard rumblings of it this morning)... although whether Keanu Reeves, who’s not getting any younger, would be able to still do one is another matter.

Ultimately, I thought John Wick Chapter Four was a fine movie in the ‘distilled, minimalist action’ genre. I didn’t think it was the best in the series... I still prefer the second movie over all of them... but it does what fans of the franchise would expect it to do and is an entertaining, if over long, slice of thrills and spills. Miss it at your peril. 

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Anty Hero

Ant-Man and the Wasp
2018 USA Directed by Peyton Reed
UK cinema release print.

So... hot on the heels of Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed here) we have the new Ant-Man movie kinda filling in on what was happening to this character just before the events depicted therein (for most of the movie... aside from two post-credits scenes here).
 
Ant-Man And The Wasp reunites Paul Rudd as the Scott Lang version of Ant-Man/Giant Man with Evangeline Lily as the Hope Van Dyne version of The Wasp. We also continue to catch up with both the original Hank Pym incarnation of Ant-Man, played once again by Michael Douglas... and the three ‘crooks turned honest businessmen’ friends of Scott, highlighting Michael Peña’s character Luis front and centre.

We also get a few new villains played by Walton Goggins as a business tycoon who was a character from the Iron Man comics and also, another character from Iron Man, The Ghost, is the main super powered problem for our intrepid hero’s here... although curiously, the character has had a sex change and is played by Hannah John-Kamen. That being said, she’s one of the most compelling and interesting characters in the movie so I had a good time with her here. Two other old school Marvel superheroes also, technically, make their first and second cinematic appearances...

First up we have Lawrence Fishburne playing the original Black Goliath, although he’s never referred to that on screen, only by his secret identity. Secondly, we have Michelle Pfeiffer playing the original Janet Van Dyme version of The Wasp. It has to be said she looks nothing like the original character (although, strangely, Evangeline Lily really does) but she does a really good job with the small amounts of screen time she has in this and brings a much needed gravitas to certain sections of the film.

Okay, so I didn’t enjoy the first movie all that much the first time around... although it kinda grew on me a little later. I did, however, enjoy Scott Lang’s appearance in Captain America - Civil War (although I liked that movie less than many of the others... my review here) and it’s the events of that film which lead to the set up in this one. After the ‘happy ending’ of Ant-Man (reviewed here), Scott Lang is no longer on speaking terms with Hope and Hank. Sure, he’s just about to end his two year house arrest and is not allowed to be speaking to them anyway, as they are wanted fugitives since Scott used the Ant-Man costume to help ‘Team Cap’ in Civil War. However, due to those events, they have fallen out anyway but, luckily, a certain incident from the first movie, where Scott visited the Microverse (sadly without finding any of the Micronauts), means they actually need certain information inside Scott’s head so they abduct him to help while an ‘ant’ covers for him wearing the security tag the FBI have put on him.

And then things escalate really quickly as the various characters I mentioned above start to appear and... well never mind quantum entanglement... everybody is getting tangled up in this adventure which has a fast pace and is hugely entertaining. In keeping with the characters, the film focuses a little more on the humour in various situations than the majority of the Marvel movies of late and when you inject that into some quite well choreographed action sequences where various vehicles, people and everyday household objects are shrunk or grown to giant size at the flick of a switch, the film just keeps buzzing along without ever really getting dull or outstaying its welcome.

Pretty much all the performances are fantastic and we also have Christophe Beck returning to composing duties although, and this is a really bad move again from Marvel, you can only get this thing as an electronic download rather than on a proper CD with a high quality recording (so they’ve lost this soundtrack buying customer with this poor decision).

Now when it comes to the ‘shrunken houses’ which Hank and Hope lug around with them... well first of all I will say that if you look around at various little characteristics of this, you’ll realise that it’s an expanded model rather than a shrunken building. This doesn’t, however, explain why you can just cart it around with you wherever you go without having the plumbing fixed up and electricity working. Nice idea but credibility is out the window here (as much as it could be when we have characters who can survive being shrunk and expanded at a fast rate without any lasting physical side effects to their well being).

Now, one thing I was disappointed with is in the differences between the trailers and the final presentation of the film. At least three of my favourite trailer moments never made it into the final cut of the movie and this is somewhat unfortunate. Maybe film companies should hold up on constantly promoting upcoming releases so early and instead wait around a few more months until they know roughly what footage from the final movie they have to play around with. I was waiting for lines and scenes which didn’t drop and this can be frustrating when you’re viewing a film for the first time.

The other thing is there are no great revelations in this one. My cousin in Australia saw this a few weeks ago and I pretty much described to him my predictions for the mid/end credits scene because it just seemed so obvious to me what was going to happen. Sure enough, the one thing you are expecting to happen here, if you’ve been keeping up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, does. However, even the obvious ending (which I won’t spoil here for you but I suspect most of you will have figured it out long before you sit down to watch this one) is tempered with a certain amount of tension because, ‘the thing that happens” comes at the actual worst time it could for these characters and gives a little more of a cliff hanger than the audience might have been expecting here (or at least, it did for this audience member).

The really nice thing about this movie, though, is that the main problem of the story is not conquered by opposition but by the spirit of camaraderie and kindness. Apart from Walton Goggins, all the other characters who take the darker route in this film are never portrayed as anything other than complex shades of grey and the denouement of certain situations, before the two post credit scenes, is pretty well put together and went exactly where I was hoping they would go. I think between The Ghost, Thanos and another character from this I won’t mention, Marvel are getting much more out of their villains than pretty much anyone else and they are not there purely to be just another antagonistic force anymore. So well done to Marvel for making this work.

And that’s me done on this one. Not much else to say here. A sequel which is certainly respectful to the first film in the franchise and I sincerely hope a third installment is on the cards. One of the post credits scenes gets a bit like a certain end scene in the 1980’s Flash Gordon movie and this tries to, by way of homage (I suspect), cast doubts on whether there will be another chapter in the saga. I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing more of this crew in the next Avengers movie, to be fair. One last thing though... very well done to the writers/director etc for the very last, post credits scene. Here, we have a potentially hilarious scene showing something quite fun but, because of events witnessed and a chilling message on a TV screen, the whole last moments of the film are a truly interesting juxtaposition of humour and post-apocalyptic terror, so to speak (you’ll know what I’m talking about once you’ve seen the film... if there’s anyone left still to see it after it got a, bizarrely, very delayed release in the UK). Kinda looking forward to seeing how the next year of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is handled because... well, I think it will be an interesting one, whether the films work tonally or not. As for Ant-Man And The Wasp... a huge slice of fun. Go see it.

Passengers

Woken Blossoms

Passengers
2016 USA Directed by Morten Tyldum
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah... there are a few spoilers in this one.

I kinda half avoided Passengers over the recent Christmas holidays because of the response I saw it getting on Twitter. However, when I returned to work, somebody told me it was actually very good (and that Jennifer Lawrence wears a bikini a lot) so I thought I’d better go and take a look for myself and see what kind of sci-fi movie this is and... well, it’s problematic.

There’s a kind of moral judgement to be made about a certain character in this movie, right from the early set up of the film, and although the director (who also directed the adaptation of Jo Nesbo’s Headhunters, reviewed here) found this aspect to be what made the story interesting, from what I read, this doesn’t make the character all that palatable the way he’s been played here by Chris Pratt. Possibly my own disappointment in Chris Pratt gleefully owning up to being someone who hunts animals may be some baggage I’m bringing to the film myself though... so I have to be careful about my gut reaction on this one.

It’s funny. If I’d have seen this as a kid in the 1970s, where it might have stood side by side with such classics as Silent Running (reviewed here) I would probably have had no problem at all with this film. As it is and with the current climate of madness to be found on various social media outlets, the central moral question is something which doesn’t sit comfortably with me... particularly the way it’s presented here.

So, okay... the plot is a ship carrying hundreds of passengers across the galaxy in suspended animation for well over a hundred years to start life in their new home malfunctions and one of the passengers, played by Chris Pratt, is woken up 90 years too early... with no hope of getting back to sleep again. After a year with just the robot bartender played by Michael Sheen to keep him company, he finds himself hopelessly on the verge of committing suicide because he is so lonely... and the director, and Pratt, play this for all it’s worth. And the reason the set up is so long... maybe half an hour... is because the story can only move forward if you can sympathise with Pratt’s character and the distraught state he’s in. However, instead of blowing himself out into space without a suit, he falls in love with the profile of another passenger, Aurora, played by Jennifer Lawrence, and wakes her up to keep him company... thus ruining her chances of ever seeing her destination. He doesn’t tell her he woke her... only that her pod malfunctioned like his.

And so the two fall madly in love and, in a whirlwind of interstellar cliché, Pratt is just about to ask her to marry him (being as they’re the only two souls around) when the android mistakenly reveals that Pratt ruined her future by waking her up. She then totally freaks, understandably, and cuts off all communication with Pratt. And here’s where the real problem with the movie kicks in. She could have either forgiven him after a few days of anger or, never forgave him. At least that’s the way I see it. There’s no slow burn that can fix this kind of dilemma that Pratt has been a bit of an eel, suicidal or not, and I think if she is going to go off and refuse contact for as many months as she seems to in the movie, then there’s no going back for them.

However, when one of the ship’s crew, played by Laurence Fishburne, is also woke by his malfunctioning pod, the three are forced to work together to save the ship to stop it, and its crew of hundreds of passengers in suspended animation, from blowing up. However, Fishburne’s character is not so lucky as Pratt’s and it turns out the machine didn’t wake him properly. He’s got maybe a day or two to live due to not coming out of hypersleep properly and then, for the final half an hour or so of the film, Pratt and Lawrence have to put their differences aside and work together. And this is where, for me, the film falls down flat in that Jennifer Lawrence’s Aurora soon forgives and rekindles her love for Pratt as they collaborate against their mutual peril. And it seems to me that this wouldn’t be something that could happen if she had already severed contact for as long as she did. There’s also the problem that giving her love and then making a certain decision she does about something near the end of the film, not going to say what, almost validates and empowers Pratt’s morally grey decision.

And this was a real movie killer for me, it has to be said.

Mostly everything else is pretty good about it... although the script is extremely cliché ridden and there are absolutely no surprises all the way through. The special effects and shot set ups are fine and all the lead actors, including Pratt, are giving some great performances. I’ve not seen Jennifer Lawrence in anything else other than Winter’s Bone (reviewed here) and her three X-Men movies (to date, reviewed here, here and here) but I’m really loving what she’s doing here and suspect that she could reach ‘movie star’ levels pretty soon, if she manages to avoid the career pitfalls of being a successful woman in the Hollywood community. Really think she’s got something going for her in terms of being a box office draw.

Ultimately, Passengers isn’t something I could probably see again but I don’t think it’s a bad sci-fi film and, although it’s morally ambiguous (if you do happen to see Pratt’s character’s actions in shades of grey) I don’t think that die hard fans of the genre will have too many problems with this movie. I think it could have been a lot smarter and a lot less clichéd but I don’t think appealing to anything but the lowest common denominator IQs was probably a factor in the production of the movie. I was a little frustrated because it felt a lot like there was a better movie trying to get out of what is, essentially, just another old 1950s sci-fi short story plot but, I’m guessing I’m really not the kind of science fiction fan that this movie is aimed at. It’s certainly not a terrible film though and although it’s no Silent Running, it’s certainly no Plan 9 From Outer Space either so... yeah, if you’re in the right mood you may want to give this one a look.

Mission Impossible III

Mission ImpossEyeballs

Mission Impossible III
2006 USA/Germany/China 
Directed by J. J. Abrams
DVD Region 2

Warning: Okay, so this one will need to have spoilers 
in it so I can talk about why this movie doesn’t work.

So here I am again, continuing with my Mission Impossible catch up, enforced by my dad. This third one came out 6 years after the last and I have to say that I am not as completely enamoured of the director of this one, as everyone else seems to be. I find it strange that each of these movies has a different director and they all bring to the gig their own specific visual style as opposed to seeking any continuity with the last one. Oh well, I guess that’s true to the nature of an episodic TV show of the time too, I guess... although I think it’s less obvious when you get less known directors who are happier letting the style of what’s been done previously dictate the art direction somewhat.

This starts off with a really strong opening scene which, I’m afraid to say, is also its biggest weakness. Here we have a captive Tom Cruise being interrogated, with his girlfriend tied and gagged in front of him while Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a really nasty character who counts up to ten and then shoots Cruise’s love interest right in front of him. It’s all thoroughly nasty and, therefore, thoroughly effective. Lot’s of problems here, though, which serve to highlight the main trouble with all of the entries I’ve seen so far in the series... it’s all too damned obvious what’s really going on.

So lets look at this opening scene shall we?

It’s got the lovely Michelle Monaghan in it playing Cruise’s leading lady. The producers are probably not going to waste her in a movie where she gets killed off before the opening titles have even started rolling... so you more or less know, due to the way this scene ends, that this is a flash forward to a later point in the narrative which we’ll be rejoining later in the film. Now Michelle can’t be another character wearing a mask because we can see very visibly she’s not wearing a throat mike except... oh yes she can... because they’ve taped her mouth shut so she can’t speak. What does that tell us? Well it tells us the director doesn’t want us to hear her voice as she isn’t wearing a throat mike... which means this woman who gets shot definitely isn’t Tom Cruise’s leading lady. So that’s that then. It’s all too obvious and drains the scene of any tension it might have had when we rejoin it towards the end of the movie. Really silly idea starting out with this scene, I think. It tipped me off straight away and also tells me there’s going to be a scene where Cruise’s wife (as she is) gets snatched. Damn silly.

Unfortunately, after the scenes which you just know you’re going to get establishing Michelle Monaghan’s character and a really cool action sequence where the rescue of an agent behind enemy lines goes horribly wrong (pretty much the best action sequence in the movie... it all goes down hill after that point in terms of on screen excitement... or at least that’s how I felt about it) the movie continues in using this same kind of policy of pointing out and showing you all its cards before any of them are actually played out.

Even in the first action scene we are shown an attempt to neutralise an explosive charge in a person’s head so we know Cruise’s character will be okay at the end of the movie (we are told that he has one in him during the pre-credits sequence so you are pretty much waiting for them to establish how to get one out or neutralise it as soon as they can). We are also given a new character played by the excellent Laurence Fishburne who is pretty much set up as a villain straight away and, since this is the way he’s been set up, you pretty much know he won’t really be the villain and straight away suspect Ethan’s friend/director character instead. This is pretty much spelled out in big letters for you when they trace the call of the lead villain directly to Fishburne’s office halfway through the film... from then on in you wonder why the filmmakers are trying to be so obvious with their misdirection and you know that Fishburne is almost certainly one of the good guys.

So yeah, this is the film where, like the first two movies in the series, I was just waiting for the penny to drop with the main characters for far too long again and kinda got bored waiting, to be honest. This is definitely my least favourite of this franchise so far because, well at least the second movie had fantastic cinematography and truly beautiful music.

Talking of music, I like Michael Giacchino a lot but the score in the mix in the context of the movie is a bit rubbish, to be honest. There was one cue in it which really made me stand up and say to my dad that this is why movie producers hire Michael Giacchino... because he’s really great at copying other people’s musical styles. And that cue I was responding too really did sound like it was coming from a 1960s TV show and it definitely hit all the right points for me. Unfortunately, when watching the end credits I found that this piece was, in fact, part of Lalo Schifrin’s underscore for the original series (quite apart from his main Mission Impossible theme tune which is used in every film in the movie series anyway) and so it was Schifrin’s original cue that I was responding to. Still, Giacchino is a cool composer and I look forward to receiving his score in the post soon so I can hear it without a layer of bullets and explosions over the top of it and evaluate it in a more ideal circumstance (even though that’s not the use it was originally composed for in terms of its primary function as a component element of a big movie).

Having said all this... it’s got a few nice things in this movie too. Seeing a mask sculpted and made and then collecting a voice for the throat mikes in the field at not very much notice is all very interesting and the performances of the cast in this are all pretty cool... to the extent that they’re allowed to be... seeing that the script manages to telegraph every little twist at least a half an hour before. The “one eyeball pointing one way and the other wobbled in another direction” death face of the young agent Cruise loses in the early action scene is also impressive in that it’s a neat idea of showing that something exploded inside her brain without actually demolishing the exterior of her head and because it’s also quite disturbing. It’s a very powerful piece of imagery and the camera does dwell on this a couple of times to get maximum usage from it. So that’s pretty good.

There’s no need, though, for yet another “Tom Cruise is left dangling” homage to the first movie (just like the last one did when that original sequence really wasn’t that great in the first place). What were they thinking?

All in all, not my favourite Mission Impossible film and, even though they were just as obvious, the first two definitely have more edge to them than this one, I think, in terms of both watchability and visual splendour. i guess I’ll be watching Ghost Protocol soon then.




Mission Impossible at NUTS4R2
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to click on one of the titles below to take you to my review.

Mission Impossible
Mission Impossible 2
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol 
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation 
Mission Impossible: Fallout

Man of Steel

Zeal Before Nod

Man of Steel
2013 USA/Canada/UK
Directed by Zack Snyder
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Some big Kryptonite nugget sized 
spoilers lurking in here later...

You know, in some ways, I owe Superman a lot.

When I was two or three years old, I was encouraged to read via Superman and Batman comics which my dad or my uncle would pick up from the stand, long gone I imagine, at the Angel, Edmonton in the very early seventies (1970 in fact, I suspect). These comics, along with Green Arrow/Green Lantern, World’s Finest, Shazam!, Justice League Of America, Daredevil and The Amazing Spider-Man and also the annual Christmas time reprints in such tomes as The Batman Bumper Book, The Superman Bumper Book and, wait for it, The Superman and Batman Bumper Book, were pretty much how I learned to read and by the time I got to junior school I was already out-reading all the other kids in the class (and writing epic length tales of imaginary spaceway heroes in some lessons too, from what I can recall). I particularly remember the cover to one specific Superman comic I read which, unfortunately, was the only comic which didn’t survive my childhood because I just read it too much and it finally fell apart. But the cover was so good to a kid my age... Superman VS The Electronic Ghost of Metropolis. It would probably cost an inappropriate amount of money these days if I were to track it down in the chance I could read it again but that cover will always live on in my memory.

So Superman meant a lot to me and I remember how thrilled I was when I used to watch the reruns of the old George Reeves The Adventures Of Superman show when I was a kid... and even the old Superfriends cartoon show. And I still have my Superman reels for my old 3D viewmaster somewhere about, I’m sure. When the first of the Christopher Reeves movies came out at the cinema, many years later, it was an event almost as big as the Star Wars movie of the previous year. All the kids loved both that and the sequel and I even got on well with the third in the series at the time... barring one scene which totally enraged me... but that’s another story.

Years later I discovered the old Max Fleischer Superman cartoons from the 40s and was absolutely blown away by the visual sophistication of these which, I believe, are the most expensive cartoon shorts ever made. I remember when a film some years ago called Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow was released into cinemas and I also loved that for being able to so perfectly invoke the spirit and visual feel of those Fleischer animations.

As the years have gone by I’ve rewatched all the old George Reeves shows on DVD and, more importantly for this fan of the last son of Krypton... about seven or eight years ago I now acquired and watched on DVD the very first live action Superman theatrical serials from 1948 and 1950, starring Kirk Alyn in the title role, who will now always be my favourite live action Superman, I think.

Now, as far as the new Man Of Steel movie goes, it has to be acknowledged that I really wasn’t looking forward to it. Two reasons for this, actually... one was the fact that every trailer I’ve seen for this movie was... well... a bit rubbish. Two was the fact that, in their wisdom, the producers decided to get rid of Superman’s red pants. To explain to all my international readers (and thank you all so much for coming on here and reading, you’re all very much appreciated), I am English. In the UK the term pants is not what we call trousers as it is in the US, apparently. Over here it means underpants, or Y-fronts or... um... I dunno... men’s knickers. It’s long been a jokey but undeniable fact that Superman wears his underpants, the wrong way around, over his trousers. Funny or not, though, it’s always been an integral part of his costume and, along with one or two other minor but equally unwelcome tweaks to the uniform, these basic “no brainer, you don’t change these things” elements have been unnecessarily tinkered with in this movie. So even going into the screening I knew this was not going to be a proper Superman movie. No red knickers... no Superman!

But... I trusted Zack Snyder as a director and he’d not let me down in even the most challenging movie properties before this. He took liberties with Watchmen, to be sure, but certainly not as many as with Man Of Steel and I thought, even though it didn’t have the fake alien squid monster (which it really should have) it still kinda worked as a movie. Dawn Of The Dead, a reboot of one of the classic zombie movies, was also really cool (and works better when you realise it’s really not a remake of the original in anything but name and location similarities). I even thought Sucker Punch, a much maligned movie on its initial cinema release (don’t worry, a film that good will be rediscovered and lionised to classic status in approximately 23 years time) was a brilliant and highly cinematic experience (reviewed here). So on the strength of these I went along to see Man Of Steel anyway.

Besides... I wanted to hear what Hans Zimmer was going to do with the score.

Now, I took my folks out to see this and frankly, the cross section family assessment of this movie is as follows...

Dad: That was a terrible, terrible, atrociously bad movie.
Mum: It was a bit long winded and could have done with being a lot shorter. Not very good.
Me: It wasn’t completely terrible. It was way too noisy. There were no red underpants.

So... well there you have it. But let me give you a little more about what I thought of this noble intentioned monstrosity.

Well, firstly, it’s like no Superman movie you’ve seen before, even though it’s practically a remake of the opening half hour of Superman The Movie and most of Superman II. After a spectacularly realised set piece that shows the rebel General Zod and his cohorts defeated and Jor El (Superman’s father) himself becoming a fugitive on his own planet before the baby (Kal El) is finally launched towards Earth and Krypton destroyed... we are propelled immediately into a series of early “adult Superman” adventure sequences with him performing various, low profile, super-powered rescues. It would be fair to say that the director hits the ground running but, frankly, as spectacular and as enjoyable as the early Krypton scenes are on a purely cinematic level, they really are inappropriate to the subject matter, I felt, and would have been much better off in a Flash Gordon movie (for the record, I would love to see Zack Snyder direct a Flash Gordon movie, especially if it’s done in the proper time period). There’s an element of adaptation to this movie, whether you like that or not, and this “interpretation” of Krypton was beautiful but just not what was needed, I feel.

Also, another problem for some will be the eliptical way in which Snyder tells his tale of Superman. It’s, quite appropriately, much more like a comic strip, jumping backwards and forwards in time so we can get to the action as well as seeing his defining years on Earth at the same time without slowing down the high level of energy on the screen (this film is nothing if not pacey). It’s another example of Hollywood wanting to have its cake and eat it at the same time but, for the majority of the film it really kind of works and I was certainly buying into this technique for a while. However, if you’re a complete novice to the legend of Superman and unfamiliar with any of the previous versions (and there are many who are these days, I promise you) then you may have a hard time following the back story is my guess. The crash landing of young Kal El’s space capsule on Earth, for example, is never even shown... we just have to take the implication which, if you don’t know the story, may be a bit of a leap, is my guess.

There are some good things about the movie, though...

Superman could never fly in the early comics... he could leap tall buildings in a single bound though and this later developed in the strip into the kind of high flying ariel stunts we are used to associating with the character post-1930s. This new version pays homage to this in its “first flight” sequence and it’s  a really nice nod to those origins. It reminded me of a similarly successful scene in the much maligned John Carter movie, when the title character in that film (and Edgar Rice Burroughs original source novel) has to learn to cope with extra muscular activity in a gravity a lot lighter than on his home world (review here). So this was all good when it comes to Man Of Steel. Although, he didn’t have red pants on, of course, so... it wasn’t really Superman.

The performances are all superb, although many of the characterisations are quite off. It’s not the fault of the actors, presumably, if they’re being written like that in the script.  Larry Fishburne makes a surprisingly cool version of Perry White and Ma Kent is brilliantly played by Judge Hershey herself, actress Diane Lane. The title character, played by some guy I’d not heard of called Henry Cavill, really looks and acts the part as far as he’s allowed, although he does look extremely worried all through the movie. Also, losing the kiss curl (and that’s been done before many times too) is a big mistake. It’s not just a kiss curl you guys, it’s the "S" symbol. It’s as much a part of the Superman costume as his red underpants... oh, wait.

Hans Zimmer’s percussion heavy score, too, is excellent but quite noisy. Not as memorable as some of the Superman scores in the past but certainly he’s had a good go at it and I look forward to hearing the score CDs when they finally arrive in the post.

Anyway, yeah, there are some nice things about the movie but... the number of bad things happening maybe outweighs all that.

The plotting is atrocious, for example and completely relies on a ridiculous piece of “deus ex machina” towards the end of the picture which really is just a piece of technical sounding mumbo jumbo and which seems to make mockery of physics. I know I’ve bandied the “deus ex machina” term around a lot just lately in my reviews but, honestly, if Hollywood stops doing it then I’ll stop calling them on it. Sheesh! And for your information, I suspect deliberately creating a black hole over a big city on the planet Earth may actually do even more damage to the planet than Superman, Zod and his crew do. Not just disappear and... oh, don’t get me started.

It’s kind of fitting that a modern incarnation (minus red knickers) of a classic character who made his debut in a 1938 issue of Action Comics should be part of a film where the emphasis is solely on action... unfortunately, and this really surprised me from this particular director, the action sequences are edited together really badly. I couldn’t work out what was going on half the time, I have to admit. It was all going by super-fast and mostly super-incomprehensibly and I so won’t be taking my hard earned super-cash to another screening of this movie if I can help it. Although I’ll probably buy a reference copy on DVD when it hits later in the year (or when it goes in the sales). Seriously, all that over zealous energy was pretty much non-stop caving my brain in on a Friday night and making me go all sleepy. It really is a case of “zeal before nod” as far as this film is concerned.

Which reminds me... I was quite disappointed that Snyder didn’t use the famous line “Kneel before Zod” in this film. Unfortunately,he  didn’t succumb to the same kind of post modern referencing temptation that J. J. Abrams did in his latest Star Trek movie, it would seem (Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!).

There are a few more things that I think this movie could have done without changing. The “mild mannered reporter” incarnation of Clark Kent, for example, is saved for a reveal right at the end of the movie... which bothered me quite a lot actually. It’s also kind of annoying that Lois Lane is right in on the identity of Superman pretty much right from the start of the movie, when she accidentally gets embroiled in an incident in this version's equivalent of The Fortress Of Solitude and then uses all her reporter’s know how to track down her alien rescuer to the Kent’s home in Smallville. I suspect that, at DC, this might also be known as “pulling a Mary Jane/Gwen Stacey” in terms of watching what does and does not work at the box office. Although it seemed to fail on them as a ploy in the much panned but quite good Green Lantern movie from a few years ago (and reviewed here).

The one thing which really killed the movie quite a bit for me, though, was the death of gazillions of millions of bystanders. In Superman movies, innocents tend to not get killed, even during the big street battles with Zod and his crew in Superman II from what I can recall. Kal El would simply not tolerate not being able to rescue someone. It’s just not on and would do a lot of psychological damage to him, I think. During this movie there is a reign of destruction against the Earth which sees literally millions of innocent people dying. In the old Superman The Movie version from 1978, the character even breaks the director’s vision of “verisimilitude” (and annoyed us Superman fans no end) by having the man of steel magically take time backwards and heal the world rather than suffer anyone dying.  In this movie the gloves, and the red pants too, apparently, are off. Millions die and quite often due to the last son of Krypton himself  doing as much structural damage as the main “villains” of the piece. Superman loses his innocence and then compounds that by committing an act of murder at the end of the film when he chooses to end Zod’s reign of terror the only way left open to him. Superman makes the decision to kill and loses his “big boy scout” label in the process.

I think this was all very wrong and, frankly, if they wanted to make another Batman movie then they should have done just that. Superman is a different kind of hero to Batman... this is why they always work so well with each other. They possess strengths of character which fill in each other’s weaknesses. It’s a mistake to make one too much like the other... especially over the simple box office knowledge that bleak and vicious plays better than strength of morality in the cinema these days. It’s a shame but... there it is.

Okay, I’ve said a lot of negative stuff here but I don’t want to come down too hard on this movie. Lots of it was throughly entertaining and I don’t think a younger audience is going to be too concerned over the morality issues of the tale (even if there was a direct biblical analogy thrown into the mix in one scene). If you’re a fan of big budget action films then Man Of Steel might be right up your alley but if you, like me, have a big soft spot for the character, then you might want to have another think at whether you want to see this one. If you do though, and you find yourself wondering how Superman got into such a sorry state of affairs, just keep reminding yourself of one thing... “If he’s not wearing red pants, he’s not Superman."

Contagion

Bugs N’ Kisses

Contagion
2011 USA/United Arab Emirates
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Warner Brothers Blu Ray B 

Warning: Spoilers slowly mutating and spreading 
throughout this review as you read it.

Okay, so Contagion was a movie I really wanted to see when it came out in cinemas at the end of 2011 but I was already well into my 3-4 month Christmas preparations by then so I just couldn’t claw back any time to get out and see this one. I forgot about it after that, in all honesty, but when I saw a copy of the 2 disc Blu Ray/DVD edition in my local exchange shop going for a fiver, I finally remembered I’d wanted to see this one.

It’s interesting because, at the time it came out, I don’t remember this one being particularly marketed on the strength of the director and, considering it’s got a very big cast of ‘movie star’ actors like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslett, Lawrence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law and Elliot Gould in it, it’s no wonder that the movie was kinda sold on its cast rather than any of the non-acting crew. In fact, because there are no credits at the start of the film, I managed to go all the way through the movie without knowing who directed it... although I did pick up right from the outset that the way this movie was shot was definitely something above average. I’d just assumed it was an old Hollywood director from the 60s and 70s come out of retirement to get that kind of ensemble piece going... but now that I know it’s Soderbergh and compare it to the last film I saw by him at the cinema, Side Effects (reviewed here), it all makes sense now.

Contagion is, for the most part, a quite impressive beast of a movie. It manages to look and feel epic in scope without really becoming too bloated by its own ambitions, although the second half of the movie did drag just a little in some places... but for the most part, especially in the first half, I was absolutely riveted.

Since I hadn’t known who the director was before I watched it, my main attraction for actually giving some time to this “virus movie” (yeah, it’s Outbreak without the monkey, but that’s okay) was actually Gwyneth Paltrow, who is an actress I seem to rate a lot higher than most people do. I rarely watch the kinds of films she’s in so I was looking forward to seeing what she was like in this one but, unfortunately, it turns out that she doesn’t make it through maybe even five minutes of the movie before dying from the virus she’s contracted on the day before the opening scene. There are some scenes with her later on in the movie where Soderbergh cleverly uses standard film footage and then freezes it at specific moments as a metaphor for the long distance security cam footage of this character that Kate Winslett’s character is reviewing simultaneous to this... but for the most part her quick death and the subsequent death of her son while Matt Damon is away having to deal with her dying in hospital, is merely used to make an opening point.

Matt Damon is not the main protagonist of this movie though... or, to put it another way... Matt Damon is one among many main protagonists throughout the film (as indicated by the actors playing them in the cast above) and as a result, no person stays as the focus of the film for very long. It’s also a film about the way characters can drop out of the narrative when you least want them too and it all meshes together to present an experience which is very much about a disease and the effects that disease has on every one (whether they have contracted the disease or not) and so, for instance, Kate Winslett’s World Health Organisation employee who is working for Lawrence Fishburne becomes this film’s Marion Crane character (Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho) as the story strands you are following with her character come to an end when she ends up being a customer in one of the big triage sites she has set up to deal with the onslaught of the virus. Her death works really well and, although you obviously have some warning of the end coming with her character, the slight shock value is not really deadened all that much by the inevitability of her situation.

However, in some scenes, this tactic about the film being about the effects of a disease rather than the people, backfires somewhat when the characters are maybe a little too fully explored than necessary (which is why I believe the second half of the movie loses it just a little) and while it’s very interesting and brilliant to explore just how Lawrence Fishburne’s character manages to get himself into trouble with the government just by showing a little empathy or the way in which Marion Cottilard’s character is kidnapped and used as a bargaining chip specifically because of her relationship with the World Health Organisation... or even how Jude Law’s unsympathetic (for the most part and dependent on your view of homeopathy and greed) blogger gets taken down by the CIA, I think we didn’t really need to have such closure on the ends of these mini stories because they detract from the “virus sweeping everyone along in its wake” kind of sensibility which a lot of the rest of the movie has in spades.

Actually, Lawrence Fishburne has to get an extra mention from me because he has been given some of the best lines (the dialogue is very 1970s “Hollywood crisp” in some sequences) and because his character is just so righteous and sympathetic that you would always want to be fighting in his corner. He is portrayed as a boss who actually does care about his workers and their personal physical and mental health as much as the jobs they need to carry out for him.

I said I knew right away that this movie had been directed by someone special. Well there’s at least two interesting things going on with this movie which I think I’ve got Soderbergh pegged on now. One is the way in which the colours go from very neutral to quite colourful (especially in the sequences with W.H.O workers in their more natural office environments, which are usually accompanied by some bright warm yellows and oranges) as opposed to the washed out greys and blues of the rest of the film and then switch back again from scene to scene. Even a bright green used to desaturate the feel of the shot at the start looks very drab because, as you probably know, green lighting usually kills off or neutralises flesh tones and this is used to give the usually glowing Gwyneth Paltrow a real visual sense of being someone who is feeling run down which, coupled with her excellent acting, works really well, of course.

The other great thing Soderbergh does is to have the camera lingering on little details in the shots... which is a tactic I’ve seen him use before to highlight certain details but which, in this movie, is used almost specifically to allow the audience to reflect on how something might be carrying the killer virus that is the main subject of the film. A folder left on a desk, for example, suddenly makes us think twice after the owner has walked off and we stay at the desk with a file. Or the way in which, instead of following Matt Damon and his daughter out of the hospital environment, our camera eye stays behind to linger and watch the door to the outside world slowly shutting, to make us think of the possible consequences of Matt Damon maybe being a carrier of the infection. That kind of thing is done at suitable intervals and it all raises this movie up and gives it a certain lift and entertainment value where another director might have made less of a point of it.

My only real complaint about the film, other than it trying to bring too much closure on certain scenes (the Stockholm Syndrome style reaction of Marion Cottilard towards the end after she has escaped and then goes back to warn her prior captors is something which stretched credibility just a little and which I could honestly have done without), is the score... which is quite wonderful in it’s own right as a score by Soderbergh regular Cliff Martinez but which seems to give us a little too much of a high in some scenes, where it deviates from it’s quiet, sinister tone into something more like techno dance in certain sequences. It’s a valid way of scoring the scenes in which it does this, I think,  but I kept asking myself if I should have been tapping my feet when everyone was fighting for their lives against a killer bug. It maybe works more appropriately in Italian giallo or horror movies than it did here but, still, it managed not to stretch things too far, maybe, and all in all it’s something I’d like to hear away from the movie if I get a chance. So that can’t be bad.

The ending scene was a slight disappointment, perhaps, only because you knew how this film was going to end from the first shot. The movie catalogues the number of days the virus has been active and we start the opening of the movie on Day Two and carry on from there... so it’s really not rocket science to figure out that with such an important moment remaining undisclosed, we will flash back to Day One for the finale and it certainly doesn’t play badly. Just might have been nice to be a little less predictable there, maybe.

So, anyway, my verdict for this movie is very much that it’s a film which is an impressive piece of screen art. It takes what is ostensibly a big name, Hollywood style cast and manages to pitch them against each other in the service of the story and main messages rather than use them as performances to just hang big movie moments on. This is a film which is put together as a creative and expressive piece, as much as a film like this could be, with the kinds of funding modern movies need and I was really pleased to have seen it. Definitely worth your time if you like big disaster movies or Soderbergh movies in general.