Anna

Model Behaviour

Anna
France/USA 2019
Directed by Luc Besson
UK cinema release print

Anna is a new action picture written and directed by Luc Besson. Someone who I used to trust a fair amount to get stuff like this mostly right although I have, it has to be said, been disappointed by a lot of his output of recent years.

I remember seeing his film Nikita with my best friend (no longer with me, alas) at the once great Lumiere cinema (also no longer with us) back in 1990. I think we went back more or less every week it was playing there to have another look at it. I saw it five times on their massive screen, if memory serves. The trailer for Anna looked very much like it was a differently dressed up revisiting of the themes and style of action of Nikita and, now I’ve got a look at it in my local, it has to be said, that’s exactly what it is... more or less.

It also has a lot less of an edge to it, it seems to me, than not only the glowingly brilliant original film but also of many of the retreads of the same material, some self-admittedly remakes and some not, by other director and writing teams. Films like The Villainess (reviewed here) have a lot more going for them than this. I don’t know why but the action sequences in this are just... okay... and the pauses between them seem a little less interesting than they could be. Films like Atomic Blonde and the John Wick series, for example, have a lot more kinetic brutality to their set sequences and, although Besson almost invented this hyper-stylised action world himself... by way of influence on other film-makers at the very least... you get the feeling that the action in this could be a lot more in your face than what we have here.

Besson has tried to compensate, somewhat, for the clichés inherent in this tale of a government created assassin in the way he’s given her a background incorporating a love of Matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls, which in turn defines the narrative structure of the piece (which almost lost me at the start because one of the timeline placements didn’t quite make sense to me as I was trying to do the maths in my brain). So what he does is he will have a sequence with what I am assuming is supposed to be a surprising ending, followed by a flashback from some years earlier which shows you how you got to that point in the narrative. And he keeps doing this all the way through and, although it’s a clever way of presenting the story, it does get quite old rather quickly and, much worse, tips you off before any real surprises or revelations about the state or allegiances of various characters are revealed. There’s a bit near the end, for example, when I couldn’t believe that Besson was being arrogant enough to try and fool his audience with the death of one of the characters when it was obvious it was going to be revealed as a staged moment a little later on in the narrative. I did feel quite insulted, in a way, that the director would think people would fall for this stuff.

Okay, so there are some nice things in this film too and a big plus is the strength of the performances. Sasha Luss is brilliant in the title role and she is doing very well holding her own against such strong actors as Helen Mirren, Cillian Murphy and Luke Evans. Actually, this really is a good role for Murphy and I’m convinced, by the way he plays this one here, that he would be an absolutely perfect fit for the straw haired Felix Leiter of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, next time they need to change the current actor portraying him in the movies. There’s also a wonderful performance by first time actress Lera Abova as one of Anna’s many lovers but, alas, as wonderful as she is in this movie, the character is somewhat poorly treated throughout and definitely underused, it has to be said. An epilogue to the main narrative giving us some closure about her would have helped, I think.

The other good thing here is the return of Eric Serra as the composer of the film’s score. This is a nicely appropriate piece of scoring with the exact same kind of soundscape you would expect from him... which is handy if you’re doing a ‘less than honest’ remake of Nikita, I guess. I hope this score gets a proper CD release at some point rather than just a stupidly flattened out electronic download affair as I really want to hear this one away from the visuals. This composer certainly hasn’t lost his touch over the decades, that’s for sure.

Ultimately, Anna is a fairly fun time at the pictures but it's hampered by a clever but somewhat impractical structure which, I suspect, dictated how some of the dramatic beats were allowed to fall and sacrificed a possibly more fulfilling experience in the pursuit of its own narrative experiment. It’s still, however, a very competent, polished piece of action cinema but I can’t help but be reminded of one of the earliest and most commonly found pieces of negative criticism of Luc Besson’s work back in the 1980s and 90s when his masterpieces such as Subway, The Big Blue and Nikita were first doing the rounds. It was said that he was a champion of ‘style over substance’ in his movies and, although none of us teenage kids saw this as a problem at the time... and in hindsight I’d still reject that proposition of a summation of his early works... I would say that his recent films such as the terrible Lucy (reviewed here), the so so Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (reviewed here) and this one are seeming to me more like films that totally justify that criticism but, in the worst way. Style over substance can be fine in my book but it needs to show us something either very beautiful or very different to make an impression in these media heavy, visually saturated times and, although Anna feels like it’s almost getting there, it wouldn’t be one I’d recommend to fans of Besson’s earlier works, I’m sad to say.

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets

Valerian Borrows,
Seeks In Moral Tales

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets

France 2017 Directed by Luc Besson

UK cinema release print.

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is based on the famous French comic strip Valerian And Laureline and stars the always interesting Dane DeHaan as Valerian and Cara Delevingne as Laureline. And there’s my first little problem with this movie right there... the strip is called Valerian And Laureline because they are both equal characters with Laureline often saving the day and rescuing her ‘male headed’ partner. Her role is in no way diminished in this movie and they are pretty much joint protagonists in this one so... why the heck has the girl’s name been left out of the title? What the heck is going on here?

So, anyway, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is the latest movie from Luc Besson and, when I first heard he was taking on this project it didn’t set me to cheering, I have to admit. I used to love the films of Luc Besson... I remember seeing Nikita five weeks in a row at the Lumiere cinema, as it was in the day, in St. Martin’s Lane near Covent Garden when I was studying for my degree... I would probably have gone more if it had played longer than it did there. Nowadays however, I tend to see him more as a bit of a hit and miss director. He gave us some of the best French movies going but, somehow he lost his way and, for me, the first chinks in the armour were when he made his other big sci-fi opus, The Fifth Element. That could have been a really great movie but he made the mistake of having this truly irritating character played by Chris Tucker which made the movie practically unwatchable in places so... yeah... wasn’t too sure about that and nowadays I prefer him as a producer than a director, truth be told. Out of his more recent directing work, for every great movie like Angel-A and The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (reviewed here), you also get good looking but ultimately vacant junk like Lucy (reviewed here) so... I wasn’t holding my breath with this one, to be sure.

As it happens, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets is a pretty good sci-fi movie... and although it’s been shot in English, it does have a very 1960s French feel to it... kinda like the movie version of Barbarella but without the sex (to a certain extent... it’s a 12A over here). It’s beautifully shot, well acted and really nice to look at. A fun romp and one which I was hugely entertained by although, I have to admit, I’m not too sure if I could ever sit through it again. I’ll get to why in a minute.

The film starts off fairly strongly with a montage of the history of a space station, starting off in 1975 and working its way to the far future which uses a bunch of human/alien handshake scenes to establish how the ‘City Of A Thousand Planets’ came into being and all set to David Bowie’s awesome second version (the version which became a hit) of Space Oddity. Now, I have to say that this sequence kept me on the absolute edge of my seat... not because of anything that happens but because of what I was expecting to happen. All these alien handshakes at the start set me up to expect the good old “Arghhh. It’s pointing its finger pistols at us... kill them first.” gag which is a bit of an old one, to be fair but, no, nothing like this happens and so I was teetering on my seat for no reason. This is followed by a long introductory scene set on an alien planet called Mul which is pretty cool and which, this time, did go exactly as I was expecting because, in cinematic terms, why spend so long setting up an idyllic and peaceful race of beautiful aliens without following it up quickly with disaster striking with a bang at the end of the sequence? Without giving too much away, when the bang comes a certain kind of ‘shockwave’ (I’m being deliberately cryptic here because I don’t want to post any spoilers) catapults Valerian and Laureline into the movie length adventure. And that’s as much as I am giving away of the plot.

The film is fun to watch and has some nice concepts. The two leads are both excellent and the chemistry between them is good in that they work well together. That being said, it does kind of highlight a big problem with the film which, again, I’ll get to that in a minute. There are also some excellent performances and a lot of cameos too by actors such as Clive Owen, Rutger Haur, Rihanna and Ethan Hawke. The special effects all work well and the movie has a really well written and complex score by Alexandre Desplat. My understanding is that this is the score he had to leave Star Wars - Rogue One (reviewed here) for when he was required to 're-compose' for the version incorporating all the re-shoots (I wonder if we’ll ever get to hear what he did for that original cut sometime in the future). It’s a good, audio glue for the film and, though it does get into the broad stroke, ‘comedy scoring’ style for certain sequences, it’s still quite subtle in places, despite this element and I have to say he does a really good job with it here.

Okay, so let me tell you why the film is probably not going to get me back for another sitting and where I think it’s problem areas are.

Problem area number one... although there are some nice but incredibly old, seen-it-all-before, hard science fiction concepts in the movie, it never once seems to have any kind of surprises up its sleeves. Even the main ‘twist villain’ (and I use the term loosely here) is easy to spot the first time that the character comes on screen and, all the way through, you are just left wondering when the heck the penny is going to drop for the rest of the characters. So, while this film does have a certain ‘wow-factor’ in the beauty of its visual effects and the way some of the shots are put together, there’s nothing really outstanding or ‘next level’ in concept in the story. Maybe it’s because the comic has been around for 50 years now (at time of me writing this, it was first published in 1967) and so I’m pretty sure a lot of the things on show here have been cribbed by many movie makers over the years. Like the excellent John Carter movie (reviewed here), it’s probably been plundered so all the unique things about it nowadays make it look like it’s copying from other things. This film would have gone down really well in the late 1960s or early 1970s though, I can tell you.

The other thing is, as good as Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne are together here and as emotive as the ‘beautiful aliens’ element of the story is... it’s a surprisingly emotionless experience, to be honest. It’s not that I didn’t care about the characters (well maybe not much at all but I was at least on their side), it’s more like the direction is just so clinical and spectacular that the director just forgot to put a huge dollop of emotional warmth in it... or at least didn’t really highlight it as much as it was needed here. So even with Desplat’s stunning score, the movie really doesn’t match the emotional heights of something like, say, the new version of Wonder Woman (which I reviewed here). Which means I’m not invested enough in the characters as they are portrayed here to really get into things with them again. So no repeat business from me on this one, I’m sad to say.

However, I would recommend it as being an entertaining watch for the first time around and if you want to make the most of the stunning photography, then probably it’s something you should see at the cinema. An excellent time filler for people who like science fiction (especially if they liked Besson’s The Fifth Element) but I don’t think it will be everyone’s cup of tea, truth be told. Definitely worth a ‘first look’ though... not to mention a first listen.

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.

Lucy

Every Which Way But Lucy

Lucy
2014 France
Directed by Luc Besson
UK Cinema release print.

Warning: There are some spoilers here but I’d be very surprised if you hadn’t already worked everything out just from the trailer, to be honest.

I’ve always held the films of Luc Besson in high regard. Ever since I first saw Subway on TV many decades ago and had a look at whatever other films he’d done at the time. I remember introducing my friends to his work... The Big Blue was a big hit with them. I also remember seeing Nikita on the weekend of its release at the Lumiere cinema in London and going back another four times because I was so blown away by it. Besson still wasn’t that well known in this country but for us he was one of the big stars of the directing scene back then.

Besson doesn’t direct as much as he used to. He produces some very exciting action films and keeps his hand in now and again so... the prospect of seeing a brand new movie directed by him and scored by his old collaborator, Eric Serra, was an exciting one.

Alas, I have to say that I really wasn’t as impressed as I hoped I would be. The film tends to take up the naivety of some of his later projects (The Fifth Element springs to mind) and throws it up in the screen in such a way that the innocence of the content almost feels offensive. I’ll get to that in a little while but, from what I can see, the high octane action film promised by the trailer delivers at a certain level but is full of disappointment... at least for this viewer. There are three very serious problems to it, at least to me, and I’ll address those right now.

Number one is the trailer itself.

It’s a great trailer, actually, promising a story of a girl, played beautifully by the always gorgeous Scarlett Johannson, who accidentally accelerates her brain power beyond the 10% humans are mythically supposed to use (I think that’s actually an error by current thinking) and this gives her special, evolutionary powers. She goes to give her knowledge to a professor studying such things played by Morgan Freeman and all kinds of action hijinks ensue. Freeman, of course, has already been in a film which similarly covers the high speed evolution of human kind earlier this year and you can find my review of that film, Transendence, right here.

Unfortunately, the trailer pretty much shows the entire essence of the movie as, like the film itself, it counts up to the point where Lucy gets in touch with 100% of her brain capacity, and it’s pretty obvious to see exactly what the ending of this movie is going to be... just from the trailer. In fact, my cousin in Australia, where it had an earlier cinematic release, saw it a few weeks ago and I told him how I thought it would end based on the trailer and he basically said I didn’t need to watch it now. So, yeah, if you’ve seen the trailer you can pretty much predict how it’s going to end.

However, figuring stuff like that out doesn’t put me off seeing a movie because it can still be darned entertaining and, to be honest, a lot of movies are so predictable these days.

And in some ways, the movie does live up to the trailer in terms of the brilliant action and the superb performances all round. Eric Serra’s score is another great work and exactly what you would expect from him for a movie like this... although unless you like downloads (and I don’t have enough room on my computer for downloads) it has to be said that the only place you can buy the score CD at time of writing this review is from France... although, when I ordered it from French Amazon yesterday, it seemed to be a lot cheaper than it would have cost to purchase it over here so it’s maybe worth going on there if you like the score to this movie. I always enjoy Serra’s scores to Besson’s films... even if I don’t always like the film.

There are other problems with this, though, which I found far more problematic.

I said about the movie being naive but, perhaps, childish may be a better word. What it really is, however, is damned patronising. I thought I was probably alone in feeling that the delivery of the plot points was condescending but it turns out my friend who saw the film with me was made even more angry about it. Basically, every time somebody seems to make the slightest plot point in this film, we directly cut to a visual metaphor of what they are talking about. Talk about being spoon fed. It’s like even the most simple plot point is capitalised, emboldened and underlined in red pen and the director seems to be taking this tack all the way through. It doesn’t take long for it to become a truly insufferable technique.

At least when a director like Nicholas Roeg cross cuts to a relevant visual, it’s not a straight demonstration of the point that’s already been made... in fact, with Roeg, you often have to work hard to establish what metaphor he is trying to make and what consequences the disclosure of the little flashes of information will have on his characters. But in Lucy it’s just like somebody drawing an illustration after the fact. It really does insult the intelligence of the audience to the point where it very quickly became a distracting tactic. Not a fan of this “beyond dumbed down” approach at all, I’m afraid. It’s not like the central concept of the movie is in any way challenging so this really is just too much decoration of the cake, so to speak. So it would be safe to say that the editing style really grated with my mindset throughout the entire running time.

My final problem with the movie was in the ability, or lack of, in making me worry about the final fate of the characters. There’s no suspense there, partially because it’s pretty obvious what is going to happen to Lucy at the end of the movie but, mostly because Besson makes a mistake which has been the bane of some comic book writers for years. When you have a character who’s pretty much omnipotent, like Superman for example, you don’t worry about him being in peril and, therefore, don’t really care about what or who he goes up against in the course of a story. You know he’s going to be fine by the end of it. This is why the writers have to invent clauses to their original character set ups, such as Kryptonite, to have something which they can then bring in to put the hero under actual jeopardy. In Lucy, Besson makes the mistake of having a character who becomes completely able to handle herself and pretty much any situation within the space of the first half of the movie.

Consequently, when Lucy is facing down loads of mobsters and getting into car chases and gun fights, you have no worries that her life is in any way in peril. And so, of course, you don’t care what the writers throw at her... you know she’s going to be able to handle it without even trying. And so the film lacks a certain amount of suspense needed to give the action sequences the edge they really needed. This is not an easy problem to solve but I’m sure they could have had a stab which would have made sense within the confines of the story set-up if they’d have given it a try.

And so, my final thoughts on Lucy are that, while it is a pretty slick entertainment with good performances all around, excellent music and an interesting concept to play around with, the maddening, patronising execution of said concept is quite jarring and you will find yourself seething with anger and popping out of the spell of the movie at certain points throughout, I suspect. Not my favourite Besson by a long chalk but it certainly tries hard (perhaps too hard) to give us something we’ve not quite seen before in this particular wrapping paper and I just wish I could recommend it more. However, all this is swept aside when it’s got Scarlett Johansson shooting people and causing carnage... so if you are happy with that kind of level, then maybe go for it.

Three Days To Kill

Running Up That Kill

Three Days To Kill

2014 USA/France/Greece/Russia

Directed by McG

Playing at UK cinemas now.

Three months ago my cousin, who lives in Australia these days, saw Three Days To Kill at his local cinema and told me to go see it. To be honest, that’s the only reason I went because the trailers for films of this nature tend to look dire, whether the movie’s good or not, and the marketing on this one was no exception. I wondered why it had such a delay getting a release over here but now I’ve got a flavour of some of the reviews I’ve skimmed I see that... well, it’s not a very well thought of movie. Even Mark Kermode had a lot of bad things to say about both the film and its director which... well... this kind of reaction explains the delayed release to some extent, I guess.

One of my goals in writing this review is to partially dispel some of those ideas because, frankly, like my cousin, I had a fun time with this film.

Okay, so I much prefer Luc Besson when he’s sitting in the director's chair but, over the last ten years or so, he’s turned his hand more to writing action stories and then producing them for other directors, for the most part. He’s had a string of hits with these and I have to admit, although they are pretty much exclusively big, dumb action movies, they are almost all done extremely well and, as long as you go into the auditorium knowing the kind of film you’re going to see up front, you’ll probably have a fair time with the majority of the films he’s produced in this fashion.

This one is put together by a director who seems to have fallen from grace in his native Hollywood in recent years but he’s an artist who I happen to like a lot. McG is perhaps best defined by two action movies which, for me, ticked all the right boxes, Charlie’s Angels and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (and if you’re going to watch that second one right, watch the US unrated extended edition rather than the toned down version we got in the cinemas). These were both absolute masterpieces and if you’ve never seen either of them and you’re a fan of colourful, escapist fair with no hint of realism clogging up the story and getting in the way, then you really should make an effort to go see those two. Similarly, and I know this is going to be an unpopular statement, I think his Terminator: Salvation is about the only decent sequel to James Cameron’s original movie... there, I’ve said it, think what you will.

One of the reasons I like this director, and I see it here again on this film, is that I think he’s ahead of his time (or possibly just in tune more with his time) than a lot of people who go to modern action films tend to expect or make allowances for in the current cinematic climate. And I am talking about technique here rather than anything else because, you see, Three Days To Kill follows exactly the same path as all the previous Besson written and produced films... it’s big... it’s dumb... and in addition it has a fair few shortcomings in scripting, or at least what ended up there on the screen. It is, however, contrary to a review of it I quickly glanced at prior to seeing this myself, far from dreary or boring.

It has a thriller plot which is fairly standard. Ex-husband and estranged father to his teenage daughter... Ethan Renner, played very competently and amusingly by Kevin Costner, is a CIA hit man who is forced to leave the service after a big job goes sour and it’s found he’s dying of a rare disease. So he tries to make peace with his past errors and reintroduce himself into his daughter and ex-wife's life just when, as will always happen in movie land, he is given an experimental new drug which could get rid of his death sentence in exchange for one last mission for the CIA... a mission run by the lovely Amber Heard, as the improbable but sexily cool creation Vivi Delay (no I’m not making this up and this should tip you off to the kind of movie this is). Laughs and action then ensue as Ethan kills and interrogates his way to the one man he’s after while fighting off weird hallucinogenic side effects of the drug he’s on and trying to keep everything secret from his ex-wife and daughter. 

Now there are some problems with this movie. My main issues were as follows... 

There are a fair few too many “quality time” montages in here. It’s like there’s some extra padding in the movie when it really doesn’t need it. It seems to be pretty good doing its own thing without these extended kinds of sessions... at least that’s how it looked to me. Also, the timelines don’t quite add up. The movie uses the season of Christmas at the end to illustrate certain things about the main character in a shorthand kind of way but... it doesn’t quite tie in with the fact that the main character needs yet another syringe full of life extending drug. Not quite sure what message the writers wanted me to take away from that last bit, to be honest.

One last thing is that it is very predictable but... that’s not so much of a problem with this kind of film. Big dumb movie, remember? On the other hand, there are some very interesting components to the narrative flow which I’m guessing may be what is bothering some people but in reality probably shouldn’t.

The pacing and tone of certain characters and scenes aren’t quite a match for each other. For instance, Vivi Delay is basically coming on like an aggressive diva in full femme fatale mode and that’s kind of at odds with all the other characters and, incidentally, with how she is presented in the pre-credits sequence. However, that being said, this is the way real life works sometimes and I found myself enjoying the juxtaposition of these elements. They didn’t really make anything work less for me. I can see how some people might have found the unexpected contrast as something they’re just not used to having to deal with in a cinematic context, however.

The other thing that might have annoyed some critics/audience members, is the fact that it looks like McG is trying to push the editing a little further in terms of the use of scenes and sounds bleeding into each other. In this case, he carries on conversations while flicking between the scene where the conversation is taking place and a scene in the near past or future, backwards and forwards, and some people may find this hard to take on board, is my guess. It’s actually a natural progression, if you think about it, to the kind of overlapping dialogue techniques that Soderbergh was experimenting with in his excellent movie The Limey, in most respects. McG is just pushing the language of film a little more in, I suspect, an equally experimental manner to see if this kind of editing style can be made to cover more ground and give more insight to things on screen in a faster manner. 

When it first began to happen in this movie I was a little disoriented  for a few seconds because I thought the lip synch was out... in fact, I noticed somebody has added it on the Internet Movie Database in the “goofs” section when, in fact, it’s just the opening salvo in this specific style of syntax the director is playing with. All I can say is... cut him some slack because he actually is achieving a purpose in some of these scenes with this style of working and once your mind quickly trains itself to keep up with the perceived anomalies and process them as a new way of reading the visuals and soundtrack, then it actually proves itself to be a legitimate technique to add to the tool box for film... in a not entirely dissimilar way that dropping a number of frames out of a film to jump characters a little way forward may have been first perceived as a dangerously distracting idea when it comes to editing. 

So there’s that.

Also, it has to be said, the film is not dull, the fight and chase scene choreography is often quite interesting and this is the first film I’ve seen in a long while (or ever maybe?) where guns routinely run out of bullets and have to be reloaded quickly without the director trying to make a big dramatic thing out of that. So that was kinda refreshing actually. Added to this are some of McG’s trademark colourfully lit sets and dream-like shot designs, used to highlight a lot of the Vivi Delay scenes to good effect and in contrast with the slightly more grittier, down to earth, lighting style of Ethan’s standard on-the-job environments. Coupled with some pretty great performances by much of the cast, including a solid job by Kevin Costner, an actor who I kinda lost my way with but am quite impressed with again now, because of his performance here, and you have a cracking little action movie which a lot of people would enjoy if they gave it a chance. I know the audience I saw it with were laughing and making “thrilled” noises in all the intended places at any rate. 

So, in conclusion, a big dumb action movie which works well on its own terms and also has a go at pushing the semiotics of the visual and aural elements of filmmaking. Not the best movie out there by a long chalk but certainly a respectable and, frankly, highly entertaining entry into the form of the modern, kinetic motion picture. Maybe take a look sometime?

Taken 2 (aka Taken - La Vendetta)

Skill List

Taken 2 (aka Taken - La Vendetta) 
2012 France 
Directed by Olivier Megaton
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: This review will have a very particular set of spoilers. 

Two days previous: 
“Okay movie, now listen very carefully. I have a very particular set of skills which makes watching films like you very easy. If I like you, I will say good things about you in my review. But if you don’t live up to the spirit of the first movie of this franchise... I will find you. I will watch you. And I will review you poorly!”

Now: 
You know I really loved the first movie in this series of films. We’d all seen Liam Neeson jump around with his Jedi skills in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, but I think this might have been one of the first times (if not, the very first?) that we’d seen him groomed by a director to be an out and out action man. We all knew he could look the part and that he could be convincing enough as an actor to make us believe it to an extent... but could he actually do a gritty, tough guy action movie without it looking really silly?

The resulting film was a resounding success. A popular movie with most of my friends (including me) and a fairly good profit “taken” at the box office... even though it turned out the initial cut of the film was severely compromised (this was thankfully restored on the eventual DVD release). Less successful was a follow up movie which Neeson headed up and which was trying to hit the same “audience vibe” as Taken. That one was called Unknown... and, unfortunately, the script let it down abysmally (see my review here).

I’ll say up front, right now, in case you think this is going to be a negative review and can’t be bothered to read anymore or skip to the end, that I had a lot less problems with Taken 2 than I thought I was going to have. I think it does have some things about it which are less than stellar but I feel, overall, the criticisms I am hearing of this movie are a little over the top and, frankly, inaccurate. If you want to hear what I think the basic problems are and whether you think they’ll spoil your experience at the cinema with this one then, please, read on.

I had some serious worries about Taken 2, and these worries stemmed from four sources. Number one was that, about a year and a half/two years ago, I read that Neeson hadn’t wanted to rush into a sequel based on the strength of the script he’d seen. I can’t remember which magazine news-feed was the source for this, but it said that Besson had replied something along the lines of... “whether you think the script is ready or not, we shoot at such and such time or... you can just not be in it”. At which point a key player in this as I see it, Mr. Neeson, got on board. A pay check is a pay check, after all. But this says to me that the script was really not in a state he wanted to touch.

Secondly... another revelation from one of the movie news-feed style sites about 6 months ago said that it would be Neeson and the character of his ex-wife, played again by Famke Janssen, who would be “taken” and it would be the daughter he spent the majority of the first film trying to rescue, who would be rescuing them. Nothing against the actress Maggie Grace (who readers may remember from Lost but, if not, then the over the top, but quite cool with it, Lockout, reviewed here) but, frankly, there’s no way the character as portrayed by her in the first film could do that here without compromising everything we know about that character and her abilities. However, while this rumour turned out to be totally true... I’m happy to say that they found a way of doing it while still retaining the “weak, spoiled brattishness” of the original character.

Thirdly... I saw the trailer.

It was awful. It’s too long and it doesn’t sell the film... especially since it gives away the story and, frankly, the story is the big problem with this movie. It feels unbelievably contrived, all to just get the name of the first picture into the title of the second... and that’s because it is contrived.

Fourthly... I’d heard there were some really bad reviews about this one on TV, radio and twitter shout outs... and I kind of believed them.

So, when I got to the cinema I wasn’t exactly expecting to have a good time. Actually, though, as a non-stop action movie... it’s not a bad way to spend an hour and a half. Although the story really is badly handled... concerning a group of older thugs who are the fathers, uncles, cousins and brothers of a load of people Neeson’s character Brian tortured and killed his way through in the first movie to get his daughter back. This lot are out for revenge so when Brian goes on holiday with his daughter and ex-wife (with the obvious subtext that she won’t be his ex for much longer but become part of a family unit again), the old geezah running the show is out to kidnap and torture the lot of them.  They get Brian and his wife but lose the daughter and Brian gains access to cell phone communication while in captivity long enough to get his daughter to find him and get a gun to him (just in the nick of time for him to shoot her own would be killer)... but then he carelessly loses the wife again and, after dumping his daughter at the American Embassy, he tracks the people who survived his initial escape and kills all of them too... rescuing his wife in the process.

It’s actually not, to this untrained observer, a good structure to have as a script for this type of film. Even Kurosawa would show the audience a straight line to map out the action and then follow on through the basic outline to give a film a straight A to B feeling. This is not the only way to go with your story, obviously... but since it’s dealing with just a few incidents, this story for Taken 2 did feel like it kinda derailed itself and then reacted to new information halfway through. It’s like the climax came about two thirds of the way through... and then the film started a new act and climax which felt kinda tacked on and redundant. Would have liked a less messier way of having the same events occurring than the framework this one was hung onto, to be honest. it leaves you feeling a little unsatisfied.

However, what does work in this one, even if some of the events surrounding the characters still feels a little too concocted for convenience in their back story (as in the ex-wife having trouble with her new husband and separating so she’s free to get all doughy eyed over Brian again), is that the characters all feel like the people they were in the first one. I’d heard a criticism that this film didn’t feel like it was a Taken movie (whatever that is) and I’d disagree. I think all the characters, and actors for that matter, were faithful to their origins in the first movie and so this does genuinely feel like it’s another installment in the franchise... a weak installment, but certainly a continuation nonetheless.

Similarly, the action scenes are all as fast and furious as they were in the original and feel like they are coming from the same place. However, and this is where it gets truly annoying, the UK version of the film has had cuts made, at the suggestion of the BBFC, so the studios can keep it down to a 12A rating and get more kiddies in. Now I did know this before I saw it but, since this particular cinema trip was pretty much window shopping until the opportunity to buy an uncut version on DVD occurs (be it from France, America or possibly the UK), I relaxed my rules about seeing something cut because I didn’t want to buy this one without trying if it was awful, and since it all goes on a Cineworld Unlimited card anyway. How much of a difference could it make, I thought to myself.

Well, unfortunately, the answer to the last question is... a lot.

The editing in the fight sequences seems even more aggressive and choppy than it actually really is, is my guess, because for about half the people who Mr. Neeson sent to their final oblivion, I couldn’t even figure out how they had been killed. Were they stabbed, garrotted, strangled, shot, had their necks broken? I don’t know. One minute they were fighting and the next they were kind of laying on the floor dead... the victim of another annoying, senseless and careless censorship edit. I’m pretty sure in one fight, even, Mr. Neeson was hammering away at two guys, he kills one and then he has no opponent left... lost in the final UK cut. This is something to note then, please, film censors and studios who stupidly collaborate with them... if you keep showing acts of violence with no real consequence other than people laying around on the floor afterwards... then you will be sending a very seductive message to impressionable people throughout the land watching this stuff. People will start imitating it... after all, stuff like this doesn’t really hurt, does it? Yes, it bloody well does and censors need to let these things be seen to serve as warnings of the fragility of the human body and to help prevent the kiddies from... you know... trying this at home.

Okay, so censorship rant over with... Taken 2 is certainly not the film that it’s predecessor is, that’s for sure. However, fans of the first movie and action fans in general should still have an okay time with this movie. In fact, a friend of mine mentioned today that he’d seen it this weekend and really liked it, even though he’d not seen the first movie. So I don’t think a great deal of people are going to have too much of a problem with it... and judging from the money it took this weekend, I doubt very much if the studio cares whether they did or not. Expect a third outing a few years down the line is my guess... although I don’t know who’ll have to get “taken” in the next one... maybe the president?

Lockout

That Touch Of Clink


Lockout France  2012
Directed by James Mather & Stephen St. Leger
Playing at UK cinemas now

Okay... so movies set in prison are not usually my kind of thing but the title of this film is the least interesting thing about it and misleading in that it’s really not about prison... it’s just set in one. I saw this off the back of seeing a trailer for it in the cinema and it looked to me more like an action movie in the style of something like Escape From New York than a dyed in the wool prison movie... and it helped, of course, that it turns out that the prison is in space.

Now, the basic premise does share a modicum of similarity with the aforementioned John Carpenter classic, in that a man sentenced to go to this very prison has to go in and rescue the President’s daughter. That man is Snow (played by Guy Pearce from Neighbours) and the girl is Emilie (played by Maggie Grace, who played the dopey character in Lost). Right from the outset, though, this film establishes itself as a quality action product and not the dull prison-riot in space movie you might expect from it.

The opening flashback action sequences are pure “James Bond in the future” as we see the last 10 minutes of Guy Pierce in action as a secret agent on a mission which has just gone wrong. After an awesome fist/gun fight with a bunch of generic “bad guys”, his secret service friend is killed and he is given possession of what Hitchcock would have called a McGuffin (a term I hate but use here for simplicity and clarity). Suddenly, since it looks like Snow has killed his friend, his own people are gunning for him. He has to get a “briefcase” to his partner while avoiding everyone who is out to get him. He does so but is caught and sentenced to be imprisoned in “suspended animation” on a prison satellite for 30 years. But when the presidents daughter (who has gone to see just how well the prisoners in this place are faring) gets caught in a “break out” accidentally caused by the stupidity of one of her assistants, she and some of the staff of the prison suddenly become bargaining chips for the inmates who have all been let out of stasis and are very much running the asylum. Since half of them are suffering from either some kind of psychosis from the “suspended animation” techniques employed or have their own twisted, damaged outlook on life... running the asylum is exactly what it turns out to be. There are some decidedly unstable people in charge of things now.

Enter Snow (dropped in via a spacesuit and entering through an airlock) who is sent in by his own people to get the girl out and who agrees to do this because he is told by a friend that his partner Mace, who had possession of “the briefcase”, is now one of the prisoners.

That’s pretty much the set up and its about as much as I’m going to reveal here story wise. Now let me tell you about the film itself...

Well... it’s pretty great actually. As I said, it starts off with a James Bondesque action sequence including a very fast bike/car chase where the stock has been either treated in a strange manner or, as I suspect, there’s much more CGI going on in the chase than my mind could comfortably comprehend. Somethings been done to it and it looks kinda interesting and I haven’t seen anything quite like this short sequence done before on film that I can recall... for all I know, all the actors in this sequence were CGI too. There’s some kind of interesting texture or shake to those speed shots which give it a very unreal quality.

Guy Pearce is really having fun with this role. He takes the cliché of the standard “Bondian quip” up to the level of constant banter where pretty much almost every sentence out of his mouth throughout the whole movie is a playful joke or dig at something. You might think this couldn’t work or would dilute the script down to nothing but a parody of itself but, actually, Pearce manages to elevate this role into something extremely entertaining without losing the audiences trust in the character. Despite his constant jokes, you always feel that this guy can be extremely dangerous and is the ideal person suited to the role of getting Emilie out of harms way. With a lot of people I might say they were just overacting and got lucky... but I know Pearce from other movies and he’s a pretty talented actor. I trust the actor to know what he’s doing by delivering the lines in the very stylistic way he does in this movie (it’s really over the top) and he comes through in this one with shining colours. Also, when you find out his first name at the end of the movie and realise which Hollywood “film star” he’s named after, this larger than life style of acting makes perfect sense for the character.

All the acting is good here though... with special mention of Maggie Grace who also has a certain integrity to her character which you can trust and take to the bank. She’s a character who is deliberately stereotyped by other characters just so the audience can see she’s not that person at all and sympathise with her... works really well. Lot of respect for her in this one.

It doesn’t hurt, either, that there are two main villains in this one who are such a great pair of movie villain clichés but who play their roles really well and convincingly... and by that I mean one plays the role really nastily and out of control while the other plays the role really nastily and completely in control. Yes, you guessed it... we have two brothers who are inmates here and one is the loose cannon psychotic who just does whatever he wants and gets everyone, including his own people, into trouble... while the older brother is the controlling influence (as much as he can be) but who is just as nasty as his brother if you don’t do what he says. Like I said, typical set up and the two actors here play it beautifully. You’ll feel pretty anxious when they’re around.

Although the movie is filmed in English, this one’s actually produced by famous director/producer Luc Besson. I don’t know if he had much to do with the actual way this one was shot, designed and edited but, if he did, then it just lends credence to the fact that the French really know how to make a sci-fi/actioner (it’s a bit of a Western too) brimming over with coolness. Everything works really well in this one... the suspense scenes work well because the performances are so intense and the action scenes are actually edited in such a way that you can actually tell what’s going on for once. Hooray for that. So many movies these days are edited so aggressively that you just can’t follow the geography of the action and work out what’s going on. I often wonder if that’s because the crew sent to shoot the action work on some of these things just don’t know enough to get the right amount of coverage for the shots that are required. This one you should have no problem with. The action manages to be raw and aggressive without losing the audience comprehension. Perfectly put together.

So okay... the chemistry between all the leads is good. The acting’s pretty good. The action, editing and even the music is all good too. Besson eschews his normal techno sound for a good solid, almost John Barryesque score by composer Alexandre Azaria and it works really well. Azaria is, of course, no stranger to composing scores for films produced by Besson, seeing as he provided some pretty good scores for the second and third movies in The Transporter series.

The story, too, is kinda okay although, to be fair, you will figure out who’s really behind things by the halfway mark and you’ll just be waiting for Snow to confront that character when the inevitable scene comes near the end. You’ll also, I suspect, have figured out that the main characters are being told the location of “the briefcase” in a cryptic way long before anyone on screen realises (about half an hour before probably)... so that’s not great.

However, some slight weaknesses in the writing are more than compensated for by what surprised me as being a really well oiled action fest of a movie. Plenty of “blood n’ thunder” in this one, followed promptly by their mates “rough n’ tumble”, means that the movie never gets boring and though, it’s true, the characters are thinly drawn stereotypes for the most part... you will probably really like them and accept them as people you can get happily involved with for an hour and a half. A refreshingly well directed acting piece which I would love to see “sequalised” at some point. A Snow franchise would be more than welcomed by me if the craftsmanship on display is as good as it is on this one. If you’re into science-fiction movies or action movies or, heck, even Western movies... you might like to take a look at this one before it disappears.

Colombiana

Zoe Job

Colombiana 2011 USA/France

Directed by Olivier Megaton

Screening at UK cinemas

Warning: There are slight spoilers dealing with the earlier scenes of this movie in the following article.

You know, this movie doesn’t seem to be that well liked from what I’ve heard from other people. I’m quite up for a decent action movie though... Akira Kurosawa’s probably my all time favourite action movie director and there are also people like John Frankenheimer who I have a lot of respect for. And, for the most part, I’ve really liked this recent wave of action movies produced and co-written (but not directed) by French auteur Luc Besson such as The Transporter series, Kiss of the Dragon, the Taxi series (with some exceptions), the District 13 series (well, the brilliant first movie anyway) and, of course, the Liam Neeson actioner Taken.

However, I had heard some bad things about Colombiana, especially concerning the silliness of the first twenty minutes or so of the movie which tells the back story of Zoe Soldana’s lead character Cataleya when she was a school girl. So I was somewhat cautious and perhaps even a little cynical when I sat waiting for the lights to dim in the theatre last weekend for this screening.

As it happens, I really needn’t have worried. Colombiana is a pretty solid action vehicle for the excellent Soldana to own in her role (she was great in both Star trek 11 and The Losers too) and I’ve been trying to think of why this movie has had such a negative reaction from some people... with one reviewer even refusing to review it and warning people to not bother watching it as, "it’s not a real movie". Seriously?

I’ve possibly made this point before but I think it bears repeating here... I think the action genre, in particular, seems to have a certain section of its core audience who want to believe that the desperately exhausting athletics and damn near impossible stunts that tend to define these movies at the moment are actually doable in real life and that just a couple of minutes of the intense physical prowess on display wouldn’t turn even an above average Olympian into a shivering heap on the floor. They talk about films like, for instance, The Transporter and Charlies Angels 2: Full Throttle (both excellent action movies) as though they should be more grounded in reality... and dismiss anything remotely over-the-top in the fabric of these films, even though most of the films they do embrace have an equal “silliness factor” in them*... just maybe presented in a less in-your-face and, dare I say it for the action genre, more subtle manner?

Films like The Transporter, Crank, Charlies Angels, Machete and a whole host of others dare to push the legacy left by such great stunt-actors as Douglas Fairbanks in the spirit of having fun and not taking themselves to seriously, and in my book that’s a very valid and often refreshing area to take a movie into. These films have reached a point, not dissimilar to the horror genre which tends to have less complicated rules and trappings, where they can revel in their own silliness and actually use these qualities to enhance the on-screen thrills in a way which earlier stereotypes of their genre wouldn’t have had the confidence to do.

In defence of Colombiana, it’s not as over the top as some of those movies mentioned above and, for the life of me, I really can’t work out where the problem lies for some people. I loved the opening sequence, especially the “surprise vomit scene” which actually did make a few of the members of the audience respond in a vocal manner.

I also loved Zoe Soldana’s first scene as Cataleya, which is featured in the trailer. Her turn as a very drunk driver so she can get put in jail with the person she is gunning for is “really epic drunk playing.” I tip my hat to her once again. This sequence is all pretty cool as she escapes from her cell, revenge-assassinates her target and then returns to her cell so she can be released on bail the next morning in her false identity. However, there is a bit of a stupid mistake in this sequence, with all deference to this film’s detractors, in that to get to this guys cell she temporarily disables the fan in a ventilating shaft so she can get through (hey, at least this film even acknowledges that such unlikely crawlspaces are blocked with machinery). Unfortunately, this fan is set spinning again just as she gets through... as a suspense sequence that really wasn’t working for me to be honest. However, when she has to make a quick exit from the cell in question, she goes right back through the ventilation shaft again... but this time it’s not been in any way disabled (and nor could it have been). Bit of a clunker that.

Back on the plus side, the editing during the action sequences in no way renders the narrative incoherent and it’s good to see that in this one, at least, the editing didn’t get in the way... although I have to say that some of the unnecessarily fast edits and short shot times in the non-action sections were a little less palatable to my eyes.

As I was watching this movie I realised how the story for this one must have developed because, without those opening childhood scenes thrown into the mix, this film could easily have been the follow up to Leon (aka The Professional) in that the central character is easily the same character that Natalie Portman’s Mathilda would have grown into... with the very same “special set of skills”, to quote another Besson produced action movie, to her name. It wouldn’t surprise me if this script started off life as the Leon 2 project that Besson was regularly courting Portman for a return to the character in. I hope that, due to the fact that this movie has now been made, the idea of a sequel to Besson’s classic movie and the rich promises found therein, are still able to come to some fruition at a later date. I’ll be in the line for my ticket.

At the end of the day, Colombiana is a good turn-your-brain-off (or in my case, leave your brain off) action movie and, while the characters lack a certain depth and subtlety (in line with characters in other movies made in this manner) there’s more than enough to keep you interested all the way through. If you like your action movies... this probably won’t rock your world but it won’t leave you feeling cheated anyway. And Zoe Saldana’s energy charged acting style is kinda interesting to watch too... she’s got a certain on-screen something and I can’t quite put my finger on what that something actually is at the moment. Maybe someone here can give me a nudge in the right direction?

*Schwarzenneger outrunning a small nuclear explosion in Predator, for instance.