The Fall Guy

Blunt Stunt Hunt

The Fall Guy
Directed by David Leitch
USA/Australia/Canada 2024
Universal
UK Theatrical Print

Warning: Some minor spoilers falling from tall buildings.

The Fall Guy is a new movie reboot of an old TV series, which ran for five seasons from the early to mid-1980s, being Lee Majors’ big role after The Six Million Dollar Man got cancelled. And I have to be honest, I nearly passed on this one because, well, I never saw even one episode of the original show, so, I honestly can’t tell you how this new version measures up in comparison to the old and I certainly won’t be able to identify any of the little nods to the show which have undoubtedly been hidden away in this big screen version. Other little nods to certain things, sure but, not the original template show.

However, the trailer looked great and it features two of my favourite ‘movie stars’ in the lead roles, playing versions of characters from that original show... so we have the great Emily Blunt playing Jody Moreno and the all around likeable personality Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers (the original Lee Majors role).

For those unfamiliar with the term ‘fall guy’, it’s an industry nickname for a stuntman, the unsung hero of many an action movie (and more) since the dawn of movie making. This movie version of the property differs, I suspect, from the original by making this movie a romantic comedy drama, with all the stunts and action you’d expect from a film with that kind of title. After breaking his back when a stunt goes wrong, Colt disappears for a year and hides out from everyone, including camera gal Jody who was the love of his life (and vice versa). Due to his completely disappearing, the two are somewhat estranged but he’s conned into returning when the producer of a new film (played brilliantly by Hannah Waddingham), an action movie which is actually the directorial debut of Jody, says that Jody wants him to do the stunts for her new film. A little white lie, seemingly to get the romance back on track but, actually, for other reasons which, I guess most of the audience will see coming about half way through the film.

However, the leading man of the film has gone missing and the producer tasks Colt with tracking him down so he can finish the movie. Which is when the film becomes an action comedy/romantic comedy cross-breed thriller, as Colt tries to find out what’s going on in order to save Jody’s directorial debut.

And it’s a nice enough film, for sure... I think Blunt and Gosling have a lot of chemistry going for them and there’s plenty of action and comedy to keep most people happy, I think. Plus some really, quite nicely surreal sequences... including a unicorn which keeps popping up during a certain period of the movie. There are also some nice nods to things like, in one fight scene there’s a... wait. I want to say blink and you’ll miss it but it’s on the soundtrack so... I dunno, what’s the equivalent of blinking your ears? Yeah, that. Anyway, don’t blink your ears or you’ll miss a nice sound effect during one of the fights where, for a second, maybe two, you get to hear the old ‘bionic’ sound effect from The Six Million Dollar Man again.

There’s also what I think is a huge in-joke for somebody because the film that Jody is directing (and it even has the same tag line as the real one), is Metalstorm. Does anyone remember that? During the 1980s 3D movie phase, hot on the heels of Spacehunter - Adventures In The Forbidden Zone, they had Metalstorm - The Destruction of Jared-Syn (I even have the soundtrack on CD to prove it exists... not sure the subtitle was included in the marketing of the film here in the UK). Goodness knows why they picked on that title... a famous movie... as the title of the film within a film for this one but, maybe one of the key staff worked on that film back in the day?  

Now, there are some bad things in terms of the writing, specifically the story and its twists. There’s absolutely nothing in here you won’t see coming... no surprises at all. Well, okay, maybe the unicorn but, not much else and the unicorn isn’t really a story point (although it’s definitely one of the reasons why the film ‘had me’). So nothing too clever in the story department for sure but, it certainly makes up for it in the dialogue and other various flourishes. So, the film entertained me and, yeah, I guess that’s the main purpose of this one (except maybe to make a very convincing case, if one were needed, that stunt people should get a category at the Oscars). The Fall Guy is an immensely entertaining film and I’ll definitely be picking this one up on Blu Ray to show my folks when it gets a release... a nice little movie, on a blockbuster budget which certainly shows where that money all went.

Blade Runner 2049

Morphology. Longevity. Incept Dates.

Blade Runner 2049
2017 USA/UK/Canada
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I could have written a spoiler free review here but I decided I wanted to address the issues that this film throws up a little more freely. So, fair warning, all the big spoilers will be covered here. If you don’t want to know this stuff then don’t read until after you’ve seen the movie. Lots of spoilerage per paragraph and you won’t see them coming until I blindside you with them so, seriously, if you don’t want to know, don’t read further than this warning paragraph.

To paraphrase another famous movie, this was not the sequel I was looking for.

That being said, I really wasn’t looking for a sequel to Blade Runner at all and I’ve always dreaded, even back in the 1980s when the subject first came up, that anyone would ever get around to doing one. I’ve already made clear my thoughts on the first film, which I first saw at the cinema in 1982 in its most perfect cut (as far as I’m concerned), the original studio cut. You can read my Blade Runner review here where I look at the various cuts of the movie and also detail my personal relationship with the film, helping to keep the movie alive long after it expired as a box office flop by going to see it with my friend at various midnight screenings before it suddenly started to gain popularity again in the 1990s. I must have seen the first movie somewhere between 50 and 100 times by now and so, yeah, I have a lot to be compromised by a bad sequel to a perfect movie which, lets be honest, doesn’t really need a follow up anyway.

So the first and most positive thing I will say about it is... it’s not a terrible movie. It’s actually, in fact, a pretty well made, modern science fiction film which harkens back to the 1950s or earlier for its central themes... themes which writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote the original source novel pillaged by the first movie, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, explored on a number of occasions in his writing career. So, for a nice, adult themed, science fiction movie... yeah, Blade Runner 2049 is quite successful in that sense.

As a sequel to the original film both in look and in spirit though... well that’s another matter and, much as I like Villeneuve as a director, I don’t think he does either of those things justice here.

For example, the film does, indeed, look spectacular but, honestly, compared to the look of the original movie which, it seemed to me, was much denser and more coherent in its portrayal of a crowded, urban environment in meltdown... this film felt a little inconsistent and sketchy. Maybe it’s because none of the establishing shots or fly bys of the various environments are long enough but... it didn’t really hit me the way it should do, I think.

The director eschews the classic opening titles of the first film and cuts to the intro text. At various places in the film we get text highlighting the various locations but, I can tell you, I was sitting fairly close to the front with a giant screen and those titles were so small I could barely make them out. The white type just about but the red type just above them... no way. Goodness knows how this would play in a home environment with a smaller screen. We then get a vista of landscape and, while its set in a different environment and we still get the giant eyeball shot to echo the first movie, it just all feels a bit ‘by the numbers’ to me. I’ve seen the first movie a gazillion times on some great screens and, almost without fail, the opening shots of the city on that old one flip flops your stomach over and dazzles with the sheer spectacle. Alas, this movie doesn’t have anything nearly as close as that opening and... yeah... I really felt it.

One thing this film does have which is similar to the original in terms of positive stuff is a cast of very good actors. Ryan Gosling is amazing (as he pretty much always is), Harrison Ford is... well, he’s Harrison Ford (so that means he’s always watchable), Ana de Armas  is pretty great as Gosling’s virtual companion, Sylvia Hoeks as a ‘bad gal’ replicant is actually more like the ‘andies’ in the original Dick novel than Ridley Scott’s movie (in that she’s actually genuinely evil rather than the like the morally superior replicants of the first movie) and Mackenzie Davis looks stunning as a working gal replicant who slinks about and is dressed similarly to Daryl Hannah’s Pris from the first movie. The film does, indeed, try and echo a lot of the beats of the first film and the gait of this particular character is one of the things which actually works as an homage here, I thought.

And then you have two genuinely outstanding performances which I think were worth the entry fee... although they are both fairly small roles. One is Robin Wright as Gosling’s boss. She really knocks it out of the park here playing an equivalent role to Deckard’s old boss Bryant from the first film in terms of inherent species-ism. She was great in Wonder Woman (reviewed here) and she is truly, old school, hard boiled, tough as nails here. Her final scene in the movie opposite Sylvia Hoeks is pretty memorable. And then we have David Bautista playing a truly sympathetic replicant. He shines in, literally, his only scene in the movie which is the opening sequence. I’m beginning to really like what this actor can do and this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen him perform so... yeah, very impressed with his performance here. So those two were the stand out performances for me in this film, it has to be said.

About that opening sequence though?

Well, it’s something I’ve been half wanting to see since 1982 in that it’s a throwback in spirit to an early draft of Blade Runner, as a way of establishing what the central protagonist does in an action sequence. Here it further serves to establish that Ryan Gosling’s character 'K' is also a superhuman replicant... so it proves useful. It also kickstarts the story when certain ‘clues’ are found on the farm residence where Bautista’s character is working. Instead of pulling the retired replicant’s jaw bone out and revealing a serial number as in that old draft screenplay I am referring to from the first film, Gosling just harvests one of the characters eyes as proof of something he already knows from what amounts to a mini, portable Voight Kampff test replacement he carries in his pocket. It’s actually a pretty good scene and plays with a lot of tension... Villeneuve using that ‘old chestnut’ of the boiling pot in the corner as a way of enhancing the suspense of the scene. And it works really well here. Here’s the thing, though... I remember back in the early 1980s, Phiilp K. Dick complaining about that scene when he read it in the script and saying that it was one of the worst things he’d read (or words to that effect), condemning the tone of the film Ridley Scott was about to make (although I understand that, from what footage was available of the original that Dick actually saw back in 1982 before his untimely death, he really liked the final film Ridley was making and praised it wholeheartedly). However, I can’t help but think that, with the reintroduction of a variant on that opening (which I kinda guessed they would be doing here, to be fair), he would be turning in his grave.

One of the things which I’ve always loved about the original is the fact that Deckard is never portrayed as being a replicant... something Scott tried to change on all subsequent versions of the movie. There are lots of reasons why he actually wouldn’t be a replicant (quite apart from the fact that Philip K. Dick’s original novel explores the same issue more implicitly and categorically states that he’s not an android)... for instance the weakness of him against any other replicant in the film (newer model or not). In fact he actually gets rescued from death by two replicants in that first film... admittedly by one who is trying to, at first, kill him at the end of the picture in the case of one of them. I’ve never believed for a moment that Deckard could ever be a replicant, despite Scott continuing to say he is... because the evidence just doesn’t stack up. My biggest worry would be that this film would paint him as a replicant but the writers are quite clever here. We have a scenario where Jared Leto’s Niander Wallace character... a more evil equivalent of Doctor Eldon Tyrell from the first movie... kinda assumes that Deckard is but poses the question to him because he isn’t certain.

And... I still think he isn’t. And here’s why...

Villeneuve has gone on record that the original studio cut is his favourite (like me) but that he’s made this one as a sequel to the Final Cut. I think not, actually. This film seems to me to be a sequel more to the original studio cut than people might, at first, realise. The story involves Gosling’s ‘K’ hunting the child of Deckard and his replicant lover from the first film, Rachel (played by Sean Young back in 1982 and again... wait, I’ll get to that in a minute). The back story here is that Rachel died about five years after 2019, in childbirth, due to a C-section. So there you go, if I got my timelines correct, already the film is sequelling the original ‘drive off in to the sunset’ ending where Rachel is deemed a special replicant with no built in, four year life span. Secondly, if Deckard was a replicant then how could he have impregnated Rachel? One or the other sex would surely be manufactured as impotent? Especially since a lot of them were destined to be ‘pleasure models’ and engage in sexual activity. After all, if you’re making replicants, you surely don’t want your male replicants running around shooting anything other than blanks in the reproduction department, do you? So, yeah, I’m happy to say that, as far as I’m concerned, this movie categorically proves Deckard is not a replicant. Finally. End of discussion and we can finally return to seeing that original ending with the origami unicorn fashioned by Edward James Olmos’ character Gaff (who returns in a brief scene with another origami animal here), as the metaphor for Deckard believing in a myth, for what it was. Thank goodness.

Okay... so Rachel. Just under a year ago I complained about the bad job the computer graphics guys had done with resurrecting Peter Cushing’s character in Rogue One (reviewed here). Something I still  stick by now. Well, we have a similar disappointment here where Niander Wallace has created a new version of Rachel who looks somewhat similar to what she did in the original (presumably voiced by Sean Young? It doesn’t say in the IMDB). Except, like Cushing in Rogue One, the CGI character looks really dodgy to me and if I didn’t know she was a recreation of a younger character, I would still see that something was really ‘off’ about her here. This just doesn’t work for me and although the way the character bows out of the film is quite dramatic, it kind of takes the edge off any emotional response to the character I might have had, I think.

One last thing...

There’s a scene in Dick’s original novel emphasising the lack of empathy the androids have which is where, after finally saving enough money up to afford to buy a real animal (a sheep which Deckard names Groucho), one of the female androids throws it off the roof and kills it. There’s a similar incident going for the same emotional beat here, where Gosling’s virtual companion has deliberately put herself in a situation where she has become... for all intents and purposes... mortal. The lead replicant villainess destroys her in a similar throwaway moment and this, at least, is something which I think Philip K. Dick might have been able to appreciate. So there’s that.

Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s new score is trying hard to be like the Vangelis original but it gets way too overbearing a lot of the time. I would have preferred to hear what Jóhann Jóhannson would have done with the movie before he ‘left’ the project. Interestingly, there’s a moment at the end where, from what I can tell, ‘K’ dies from his wounds. As he lets go of his life, we get a new version of the Vangelis Tears In Rain music from the original movie, which underscored the death of Rutger Hauer’s character. However, since the replicants don’t seem to die from injuries too seriously unless shot somewhere vital, it seems to me that you could interpret this moment as 'K' just having a rest for a while. After all, there’s no visual metaphor like the release of the dove from the replicant’s dying hands as in the 1982 version. So it’s interesting that, unless you know the music, you may not realise the character has died at the end, I suspect. However, I could be wrong and placing too much emphasis on the strength of the original score, to be fair. The soundtrack is filled with lots of similar (and in some cases identical), ambient sound effects as the template movie and sometimes, just like the original, you may have a hard time trying to work out where the music ends and the sound design kicks in.

The thing which the story did really well is to actually fool me with the twist reveal of the child of Deckard and Rachel. I was pretty sure who it was all the way through the movie until this moment it’s spelled out and it gives the character in question a new beat, as it were, in that the person is obviously ‘recruiting’ a replicant army by giving memories to various artificial characters. It’s a nice moment in a film which looks great (although not nearly as good as the original) and is full of nice moments such as this. However, for me, even though it’s trying, it just doesn’t feel anything like a sequel to Blade Runner. It doesn’t quite get there... but it does get close on the odd occasion.

One last piece of symmetry with the original, though, was the audience size. When the film came out and flopped back in ‘82, I remember being in a cinema with my parents and there were literally maybe just over ten people in the audience. Well, quite surprisingly, since this new movie has had such high praise, I found myself in the same situation in a 3D screening on opening night, where there were again just over ten people. Which puzzled me and, I can tell you, I saw two couples walk out of the movie at various points. Which I find quite interesting because, whether it lives up to the original or not (and I’m siding with ‘not’), it’s still quite a nice piece of cinema on its own merits.

My friend, who I have been seeing screenings of the original film with since the mid 1980s, was with me for this performance and I think his reaction to the movie pretty much sums it up the best for me. As we both left the cinema, he looked in about as pretty much a state of mixed irritation and dejection with Blade Runner 2049 as I was feeling. He turned to me and said six words... “What was the point of that?” Other than to point out the studio were going for some cash again, I really couldn’t think of a good answer or disagree with his sentiment. For me, I’m afraid, it’s too bad this sequel won’t live... but then again, who does?

La La Land

Doo Lally

La La Land
2016 USA Directed by Damien Chazelle
UK cinema release print.

So it turns out that the new movie La La Land isn’t a great film... but it’s a pretty good shot at trying to shoot an old fashioned musical from a certain golden age of Hollywood’s history and, almost, really nailing it. I have a couple of reservations about it but I’ll bring those up in a minute.

I had the chance to see a preview of this movie at last year’s London Film Festival but I didn’t bother because a) I didn’t think too much of the lead actor and b) whenever someone tries to update the musical in a modern era, they usually fail abysmally. It was only towards the end of 2016, when I started hearing unqualified raves about La La Land on Twitter, that I got half excited about it and decided I’d probably check it out when it finally got a release over here.

Now, the film stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as the two lead protagonists. I’ve always liked Emma Stone and think she’s an extremely talented and engaging actress. Ryan Gosling, however, is someone I’ve previously had a problem with and it was all based on one film, Drive, which he did okay in, to be fair, but which I thought was best summed up if you stuck and ‘L’ on the end of the title. I’d only seen him in that one thing, by choice, until I saw him in last year’s The Nice Guys... which I loved. Now my review of The Nice Guys is here but, in a nutshell, I hated both lead actors but went to see it anyway, on the strength of the writer/director of that film. And Gosling did great in it... winning me over especially with his Lou Costello impression in one scene. La La Land marks the second time I’ve quite warmed to a Gosling performance so I think I have to give him the benefit of the doubt, for now. The jury is still out but it’s 2 -1 to him and I’ll give him a chance next time I see his name attached to a project.

La La Land is a musical which stars Stone as an aspiring actress and Gosling as an aspiring jazz musician... two perfect career goals for your characters if you are making a musical, methinks... marrying the potential careers of these two characters to the format of the movie itself. So the writer was onto a bit of a winner there, right off the bat.

The opening of the movie is an ambitious but not great musical sequence set on the highway which put me in mind of Alan Parker’s musical Fame more than the kinds of 1930s - 50s musicals the film seems to be inspired by. It’s a sequence which is cleverly cut to make it look like one long shot (instead of a few long takes which I suspect is nearer the truth of its actual genetic, cinematic make-up) but my first big problem with this movie is clearly shown here and it didn’t impress me, it has to be said.

The problem with this and a lot of sequences in the film is that the songs are just not strong enough, I feel, to support the quite technically accomplished performances given by the actors and the crew in the service of La La Land. I actually found myself being more appreciative of the actual musical score between the songs, if I’m being honest and, for a musical, that’s probably not a good thing. That being said, although the tunes aren’t instantly memorable, they are repeated enough throughout the movie that by the last third of the film they do have a certain familiarity and, I suspect, if I were ever to watch this movie again, I’d probably get more out of them than I did here.

That being said, it does have everything else a great musical should have in it and, for the most part, it’s quite successful in hitting the notes it aims for throughout the running time. I’m a big fan of the late 40s to mid 50s MGM musicals and there are definitive homages to the formula used in such movies as On The Town, Singin’ In The Rain, An American In Paris and The Band Wagon, to name a few of my favourites, to be sure. Now, some of these sourced out sequences don’t, I would have to say, quite make it. The midfilm romantic number you always get is a sequence which the makers of La La Land have set at the same observatory as seen at the opening of Rebel Without A Cause and its the obvious moment where the lovers finally get to know each other and act out their musical harmonies. The surrealist element of these kinds of moments... well, you know, more of a surrealist element than bursting into song every ten minutes... which is a key ingredient of the form, is a lovely concept and it has everything going for it... I just think the resulting sequence is a bit lame. Then again, I always did find that mid-romantic moment in a lot of those MGM musicals a bit lame so, you know, there’s a good argument here that the director really nailed it.

One big thing it has got going for it is the sheer talent of the cast and crew at getting a lot of hugely subtle things timed right. Gosling, Watson and some of the other actors are absolutely gobsmacking in terms of getting some quite complex stage direction absolutely right and one can only stand back in admiration when you see these things. It’s one thing to marvel at the timing of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire when they do some absolutely amazing things but when you get two leads here, for example, who are not noted for their ability to sing, dance or do some quite physically disciplined things... well I was pretty impressed by the performances, I must admit.

Now, in spite of these many jaw dropping moments, one of the things that makes La La Land a very good movie and not a great one, at least for me, is the lack of ambition to do something different with the form rather than just repeat it. Yeah, okay, there’s a certain wisdom in learning to walk before you can run but I felt like a lot of the sequences were trying so hard to get the atmosphere just right from those great musicals of yesteryear that they forgot to really add anything truly unique to the formula. which is a great shame but... well, combined with some musical numbers which don’t, as I said, have the strongest tunes and lyrics in the world then the film does feel kind of flat in some key places where I truly believe it could have shone. A lot of those musicals were pushing successive boundaries in their day and I would have liked to have seen something I hadn’t seen before here too.

However, that being said, by the last third of the movie I was blubbering uncontrollably at certain scenes and really cursing myself, I have to say, for having seen the trailer. All I’m saying is that, if you haven’t seen a trailer for La La Land before you see this movie... keep it that way. A certain shot in that trailer will telegraph a little ahead of time the kind of ending this movie has and... you wont’ want that. Every MGM musical I can remember from a certain period had a long, surreal and, for want of a better term, ‘arty’ sequence which would play just before the main plot elements resolve themselves. The movie makers use exactly the same tactic here but, well... there’s a point at the start of this sequence which you’ll be anticipating from the trailer and which will tell you everything you didn’t want to know about the ending which will be coming up later... which is a darned shame.

That being said, I’m not going to blame the director for that badly telegraphed ending... just the marketing people... and future generations won’t be lumbered with the trailer automatically before viewing like many people on the first release of a film are. So for future audiences this little wrinkle should iron itself out. At the end of the day, La La Land is a film that, although it starts of a little underwhelmingly, does build to a more immersive experience and there are enough visual movie references throughout the film to keep most cinephiles happy. It’s most important quality, though, is that it has a lot of heart and on that basis alone, not to mention the efforts of the hardworking cast and crew, I’d have to say that this one is definitely worth catching at the cinema if you fancy it. It doesn’t stand above many of the mesmerising musicals from Hollywood's furtive history but it can, with a pinch, stand alongside some of them and... that’s really no mean feat in today’s movie marketplace. It’s probably a good ‘date movie’ too so, you know, give it a go maybe.

The Nice Guys

Of Nice And Men

The Nice Guys
2016 USA Directed by Shane Black
UK cinema release print.

I have to be up front here and say that I’m not the biggest fan of either of the two leads of The Nice Guys. In the case of Russell Crowe, that stems from some of his behaviour off screen when it comes to journalists and it’s nothing to do with his skill at the craft of acting, which he's obviously very good at and which really should be what I’m looking at with an unclouded view here, anyway. Especially since it seems to be a fact these days that any stories reported by various ‘news machines’ are either fabricated to cause sensation or are, at the very least, not often showing all the sides of a story. So I’ve been slowly going through a process of letting the guy off the hook over the last few years, as far as my appreciation of him as an artist is concerned, at any rate.

As for Ryan Gosling. Well, I’ve only seen him in Drive and, to be honest, although I was quite impressed with him in it, I really wasn’t the biggest fan of the movie and, again, it’s probably not something I should let put me off going to see another movie with him in. However, that’s how it is with these two actors and their effect on me and if I’d have only heard of the title of this movie and the principal leads, unfairly or not, you probably wouldn’t have gotten me into a cinema to see this one... that’s for sure.

However, I saw the trailer for this, which was quite engaging, and it also mentioned the writer/director of the movie and... that’s where I sat up to take notice. The Nice Guys is written by Shane Black, who is one of the all time great, modern screen writers with such classic, fun movies like the original Lethal Weapon movie, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and, yes, even Iron Man 3 to his name. He’s one of the few modern Hollywood scriptwriters I will bother giving some time to and this is the main reason why The Nice Guys was on my radar and why I got myself to a cinema to see it.

The other reason was because I’d heard some samples from John Ottman and David Buckley’s score a couple of weeks before and.... it sounded awesome. The trailer hadn’t managed to make me aware of the time period the film is set in before hearing these samples but the movie takes place somewhere in the mid to late 1970s (you’ll notice things like Jaws 2 playing at the local cinema in the film) and the score certainly highlights this with an amazingly funky, seventies cop show aesthetic which wouldn’t be out of place in an old episode of Starsky And Hutch, to be honest with you.

But how was the actual movie... asides from the excellent score?

Well, it was exactly what I would expect from a Shane Black movie, to be honest. A pretty darn good, fun time at the cinema with some characters who, although you probably won’t be able to identify with them, will certainly have you rooting for them as the plot thickens throughout the movie and they find themselves more in jeopardy at every twist and turn. Black’s camera eye is absolutely perfect with some great shots and a lot of his, almost trademark, zooms across the city landscape but the chemistry between the two principals is pretty great and, coupled with Black’s absolutely beautiful script, the two work absolutely brilliantly together.

Crowe and Gosling play tough guy Jackson Healy and, not so tough, private detective Holland March, who find themselves caught up in a web of big corporation treachery, starting off with the death of ‘adult’ movie star Misty Mountains... a death scene which looks like it was ripped straight off the cover of my old 1970s Panther edition of J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash. As the two try to find another of the women who starred with Misty in a certain ‘experimental movie’ which actually plays an important part of the plot, the two steal the show in a series of set pieces and comedy routines which will have you laughing out loud. In fact, it was only when Gosling goes into as much of an ‘homage’ to an old Abbott and Costello routine as the director thinks he can get away with, that I realised that Crowe is playing the ‘straight man’ and Gosling is playing the ‘funny guy’. Of course, being as it’s Shane Black, he layers the characters with a lot more depth and, dare I say it, pathos... and this stops the two characters becoming too much like cyphers for old time Hollywood comics. He does manage to indulge himself in the writing without doing any damage to the credibility of the characters, though, so that really helps and, as you can imagine, the movie zips along at high speed.

Another element which helps keep the movie afloat is the awesome actress Angourie Rice, who plays Holland’s daughter Holly. She is the light of reason and sanity in her dad’s world and Rice really does an amazing job with this character throughout the running time. Of course, Black is no stranger to having credible and gutsy teenagers in his scripts. It was a strong element in almost all of those movies I mentioned earlier and something of a cliché for him as a writer. Of course, the film is full of clichés but it reminded me a lot of Stephen Sommers’ version of The Mummy in some respects. As in that the film is very aware of itself. It knows it’s milking every cliché and, doing it quite stylishly, but it’s also not afraid to let the audience know it’s in on the joke. It knows the audience is going to see things way before they happen... the villain of the piece is very obvious when that character first appears on screen... but it’s kind of the point, I think. Black is very clear about foreshadowing a lot of the things which will happen later on in the movie and he wants the audience to be free to be thinking about other things rather than the story elements, I suspect. Either way, it makes for a very entertaining ride so I really don’t care too much that a lot of the movie is quite obvious... it just seems to work well.

Now, I can see why the box office isn’t as great as might be expected on this one. The two anti heroes aren’t exactly role models and, although the film doesn’t feel exactly anticlimactic (even with a slightly awkward couple of epilogues to the main action to round the movie off), I think it maybe could have done with souping up in the action department a little more in a couple of scenes. Maybe a car chase moment would have been nice.

That very minor grumble aside, though, I would absolutely recommend The Nice Guys to anyone who is a fan of modern, action cinema. And it’s also nice to see people like Kim Basinger and Gil Gerard on our screens again... although I was too caught up in the one liners to actually spot Buck Rogers in the movie but... I will go back to take another look for him when this one comes out on Blu Ray. A terrific picture, some solid and very fun performances, nice and definitely not confusing editing and a terrific score. Not much to not like in this one and definitely the best time at the cinema this week, I reckon. Catch it there while you can.

Drive

Drivel

Drive 2011 US

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

Screening at UK cinemas.

This is not going to be an easy film to write about. I knew that when I’d finished watching it. Truth be told, I didn’t think a lot of it, as an overall product which hangs together at least, but at the same time I can’t quite pin down what it is about it that is so soulfully missing for me.

There are things I could site like the fact that the movie is almost a celebration of style over substance, the medium is the message and all that... I could even tag up the emotional, Pinter-like vacuum that the lead characters inhabit as being a turn off to some folks and possibly being a contributing factor in my lack of appreciation for the movie... but the thing is, that’s not it. If you know my taste by now from being a regular reader (and if you are a regular reader then I thank you from the bottom of my heart) then you’ll know that I love plotless movies where the mise-en-scene takes over and permeates the picture to the degree that it’s all you can watch.

Likewise the “cinema of reflection”, where nothing much is said and the images play out almost as a silent movie, is another thing I enjoy very much... so you would think this film would be tailor-made for me. So neither of those potential “reviewery” type of criticisms apply on this one... and my real problem is that I can’t pinpoint just what was so disappointing about this movie all in all.

It certainly had enough going for it.

It looks and feels like a late sixties/early seventies movie in the way it’s edited together with long shots and takes which evolve slowly and go along at their own pace. There’s a brilliant colour palette and sense of lighting going on in the overall shot design which just adds to some truly stunning compositions that show a fascination with pitching characters in and out of vertically striped compositions.

There’s some brilliant acting going on... Carey Mulligan is always going to be great (well, after all, she was Sally Sparrow in the Doctor Who episode Blink... she can do no wrong) and Ron Perlman is as professional and watchable as always. Ryan Gosling, who I’d not seen before, was also surprisingly good as he, quite blatantly actually, tried to combine Steve McQueen’s performance from Bullit and cross fade it with nods to young Ryan O’ Neill and young Warren Beatty. This worked really well and was used to offset little pockets of exploding violence which are scattered and used to punctuate the film.

So everything was working well, especially for the first twenty minutes which showed some really interesting “stop and start” intelligent getaway driving for a change... could have done with some more sequences like that in the movie. They really had me siding with the “smartness” of the character from the start and I was well on the way to really enjoying this movie when... it just didn’t make good on that initial promise. It didn’t really go anywhere... it doesn’t have to, of course, and again that’s not necessarily the reason why I had such an adverse reaction to it... but something wasn’t quite making it for me. Wish I knew what the heck that was. Left the cinema thinking... “Wow. That could have been a really great movie... instead, it was less than mediocre”... and that I couldn’t watch it again.

On the other hand, the really bad thing about it was the truly terrible and corny music throughout the film. The songs in it really were a touch too far and I would have given composer Cliff Martinez a lot more room to breathe and do something really driven instead of having whole sequences turn into cheesy cornball song commentary. The music choices could have been a lot better on this one and may have helped lift the film closer to what was needed to make it more of a vital piece of cinema as opposed to the “could have been a contender” status it now has. Trust me, this film won’t really be remembered ten years from now unless it’s on the strength of the director who seems to have done a fair job at juggling some of the components here... hopefully he will learn from his mistakes, which for me defines what this movie is. A glorious mistake in some ways, perhaps, but certainly not quite what I suspect it was aspiring to.

Never mind, there’s always next time. I’ll take a hasty, handbrake turn and burn rubber away from the DVD release of this one when it finally squeals into shops. I’ll park my ride somewhere else rather than watch this one again, through rose-tinted windscreen wipers.