Movie Review: Priest (2011)

Priest (2011): If you recall my review of Legion, I wasn't such a fan of it. It was a film about the apocalypse, featuring angels shooting each other with submachine guns, that somehow managed to be completely and utterly boring. That film starred Paul Bettany as the main character and had Scott Stewart as the director. Well, because that worked so well, they've reunited one year later for Priest, a film set in a dark and doom-ridden future where the Catholic church has got all awesome and violent. At some point the humans had a war against vampires and the Church employed these soldiers of God, the Priests, to win said war. When the war was won, the Priests were deemed surplus to requirements and disbanded. This film follows Bettany's character, known simply as Priest, as he uncovers the comeback of the vampires and tries to rescue his niece after she is kidnapped, his brother (played by Stephen Moyer, who is smart enough to appear in about two scenes in total) is mortally wounded and his sister-in-law is killed.

The film fails for the same reasons that Legion did: it's just not that interesting. Visually the film is very drab, often taking place in either dungeons or Western settings, which I suppose is appropriate, but that style was done to death rather recently in The Book of Eli. In fact, most of the film can be knocked down with similar comparisons, as the entire film wouldn't feel out of place in the Underworld series. The only thing the Underworld series had going for it was Kate Beckinsale in her outfit and instead in this we get Paul Bettany running around with a cross tattooed on his face. Maggie Q's in it but if you want to ogle her you may as well watch Nikita, which is more entertaining than this film. Priest even takes the whole tedious hybrid theme from the Underworld theme, because that wasn't done to death in three fucking films.

Also an annoyance is the vampires. Why? Because they're not vampires. They're random CGI monsters. They don't like the sunlight but apart from that, they're just icky beasts. In fact, they resemble the Future Predators from the television series Primeval. We do eventually get one more conventional vampire, but that's at the film's culmination and the rest of the film is focused around these monsters and their albino human charges, so you get none of the actual interesting issues previously explored in the vampire genre and instead you get them stripped down to their most animalistic form, which makes for a nice action sequence but doesn't make for a particularly interesting story. The vampires from 30 Days of Night were ruthless monsters, barely human, but you could find motivation in them to explain their evils. In Priest they may as well be demons or hellhounds or magic aliens from the land of ZzogGx 56. They're rubbish.

Priest is a film that has learned nothing from the mistakes of Legion. Paul Bettany is a decent enough actor but he needs to stop making these shit films because there's only so many he can do before his stock seriously drops. He's just doing enough to save his credibility because his performances aren't really bad, but the rest of the film around him is utter garbage. Two thumbs down.

Movie Review: Hanna (2011)

Hanna (2011): Remember in Kick-Ass, when the little girl started shooting and slashing all the bad guys to death and calling them cunts? Oh, how we laughed. That's a bit shocking but it's mostly hilarious, we said. I'm LITERALLY laughing my arse off, rolling on the floor laughing. Well, Hanna takes that concept and applies it to a thriller chase movie, succeeding thanks to a few outstanding performances.

The film begins in Finland, where we see the titular Hanna (Saorise Ronan), a 16 year old girl, wounding a deer with an arrow before finishing it off without a second thought. We soon meet her father Erik (Eric Bana), who spends the first moments of this film looking homeless until he sorts himself out. Erik is training Hanna for something, constantly challenging her both physically and mentally, frequently going over a cover story should Hanna ever need it, because people would probably have one or two questions if you explained you lived in the snowy wilderness of Finland with a hairy man. References are also made to a mysterious woman (Cate Blanchett) who's going to kill her for a reason we're not initially privy to. When Hanna declares herself ready, the chase is on. The film's loaded with excellent action scenes where Hanna destroys nameless military goons with ease, plus the odd moment of comedy as Hanna fails to fit in with "normal" people having spent all of her life as a recluse.

The performances in this film are particularly strong and push the film from what could easily have been a slightly mindless movie into a very intense experience. Hanna herself is incredibly emotionless, like a robot programmed to survive, and that performance is an extension of Bana's, whose character combines the "emotionless assassin" with a fatherly twinge. One of the more bizarre performances is that of Tom Hollander, last seen on your television screens as a bumbling comical vicar on the BBC's Rev, who plays a murderous, whistling, bleach-blonde German henchman, a worthy second in command for any villain!

Hanna could easily have been B-movie fodder, perhaps starring the likes of Paul Walker. It could have been any chase movie, there's loads of them. Fortunately, the casting is tremendous and lifts things up to the next level and the movie never gets boring, it's always full of energy. Any slower sequences don't last an excessive amount of time and you always get the feeling that you're on the brink of things kicking off in a big way once again. Two thumbs up.

Movie Review: X-Men: First Class (2011)

X-Men: First Class (2011): This year is a busy year for fans of comic book movies. In the coming months we'll see the release of Green Lantern and Captain America, hot off the heels of Thor, so X-Men: First Class, jammed in between those films, faced a challenge when it came to standing out from the pack. Not only that, but it was charged with restoring credibility to the X-Men subcategory of cinema following the disappointing conclusion to the main X-Men trilogy and the flawed Wolverine film. Thankfully, Matthew Vaughn has managed to go a considerable distance to achieving that, albeit with one or two minor flaws. And, shockingly, the quality of the posters has been proven to not represent the quality of the movie itself...

This film follows the origins of the relationship between Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, otherwise known as Professor X and Magneto respectively (and played by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the original movies), also providing backstory on previously seen characters like Beast and Mystique while introducing new ones such as Sebastian Shaw. The acting from the main pair, Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy is tremendous, evoking memories of the previous performances while making them their own. McAvoy combines Xavier's intelligence with youthful charm, whereas Fassbender's interpretation of Magneto is more raw, less of a "thinking man's supervillain" and more of a flawed superhero, trying to work out the rights and wrongs of the world after being dealt such a poor hand in his youth.

The supporting performances are generally good. Kevin Bacon as Shaw is appropriately dastardly and the additional detail added to the relationship between his character and Magneto is very well done, setting a darker tone for the rest of the movie. Jennifer Lawrence was more annoying than anything, but Mystique in general has never really been that interesting of a character to me anyway. January Jones' performance as Emma Frost is not a standout one either, but she certainly looks the part and contributes more than enough as Shaw's arrogant second in command. Nicholas Hoult is pretty good as Beast, although his post-transformation appearance did get a few laughs - not a shock, he looks like Sully from Monsters Inc., not an issue that can be avoided really.

After that the characters fall into the usual X-Men trap of being rather underdeveloped and ten-a-penny. Some, this is for the best. Riptide looked a bit boring so I didn't really care to know much more about him. Azazel, on the other hand, is a massive man who... well, he's the Devil, basically. Well, not technically, but he's the spitting image of the lad (that lad being the lord of the underworld). I'd like to know SOMETHING about him. Many of the younger members of the X-Men team are kind of annoying in the way that young people are, what with their youth and exuberance and everything, and they fare poorly compared to their superior colleagues to the point where whenever there's a "mutant clubhouse" scene with the kiddywinks you're just waiting for Chuck 'n' Erik to pop up again and be awesome. I recall this being a bigger issue in some of the original X-Men films but it's still an issue here.

Some of the visuals in this film are particularly entertaining, and almost all of them involve Magneto being absolutely badass and destroying groups of villains, be it slashing them up with coils of barbed wire, pulling them along the floor and kicking them in the face, or destroying a cruise liner with the anchor's chain. You'd be hard pressed to find a better example of a superhero being made to look more ruthless and powerful, it's outstanding, and Magneto's cold persona shines throughout, building to the climactic scene with Xavier and Magneto, actually bettering the comics in a manner which I won't elaborate on for the sake of spoilers. If there's to be one defining thing this film succeeds in, it's making us sympathetic for Magneto and it allows us to understand the torn friendship between the two main characters in later instalments.

Overall, this ranks as one of the better films in the X-Men franchise and is a very good film. It still has some of the same issues as the others but they can be overlooked because it's generally good entertainment with some incredibly strong performances from the usual suspects, and the SUPER SECRET NO SPOILERZ PLZ cameo got a big laugh so yay! Two thumbs up.

Movie Review: Legion (2010)

Legion (2010): You might not think it at first, but a bit of apocalypse can be bloody entertaining. Stuff blowing up, people dying, chaos all over the place. It's usually good for something, at least in television and films. Probably not recommended outside of those mediums. I'm a long-time fan of the TV show Supernatural, which is focused around a lot of that crap. Demons and angels and all that nonsense, it's very good, so you would have expected me to look forward to Legion, which on paper is very similar to Supernatural. In execution, it really isn't. The majority of the film is set in a little diner way out in the middle of Who The Fuck Knows, America. It's all peaceful, until a nice old lady comes in, eats a raw steak, tells a pregnant lady her kid's gonna burn, calls everyone else a load of cunts and bites a guy's throat out before crawling on the ceiling like a spider and getting shot dead. That, understandably, shakes everyone up a bit. Turns out the big man upstairs isn't so happy with us nowadays. Remember the great flood, Noah and his big arse boat and that? Yeah boy. Course you do. SUPER successful bit of business. God's a smart guy, so guess what. SEQUEL. He's sending a load of angels to wipe us out. Except, for reasons nobody really explained properly, the pregnant girl's kid guarantees humanity's safety. If the kid dies, we die. Paul Bettany's an angel who's turned against pops and is trying to help, ripping his wings off and all that kerazy nonsense.

The film fails on several levels, but one fundamental thing that even some of the worse filmmakers have managed to satisfy: It's really, really fucking boring. Here you have a film based around THE END OF HUMANITY, and instead it's like one big action sequence followed by 20 minutes of tedious sitting around and shite forced dialogue with characters staring out into the dark waiting for the next big set piece. I'm not sure that Michael Bay can even tie his own shoelaces but in his films he just goes mental with the special effects and you're at least guaranteed a loud noise or bright light that will keep your eyes open for the majority of the film's running time. This has none of that. It's dull both in the content of the script and in an aesthetic sense. None of the characters are particularly easy to like, I think technically we're supposed to like The Pregnant One and The Boy One, but other stereotypes featured are The Dad One (played by Dennis Quaid, oh dear), The Teenage Rebel One, The Uptight Mum One, The Thin Black One and The Fat Black One. Some live, some die. No tears were shed. The only moments of entertainment come from the aforementioned evil granny and a later scene involving a similarly evil child. These are high comedy. I suspect those were intended to have a comedic edge. I suspect the filmmakers wanted there to be other plus points. Don't think they succeeded with that one. Two thumbs down.

Movie Review: Total Recall (1990)

Total Recall (1990): So after finding out that Minority Report was initially pitched as a sequel to Total Recall, what better reason than to watch said Arnie film? After all, it's science fiction, it's early 1990s, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger. How can it go wrong? The answer is, well, not really. It's exactly what it sounds like: A 1990s science fiction film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The film focuses on a man in the future (again, 20whatever) named Douglas Quaid, played by Arnie. He's just an average bum, working on a construction site. BUT HE'S NOT. How boring would that be, if he was just an average bum. OR IS HE. And there we have the question throughout the film. Yer boy Arnie's got aspirations of going to Mars. To display this, the opening scene sees Arnie on Mars in a space suit with some woman. He falls down a hill (more of a slight incline), then his eyes bulge and he wakes up screaming. This makes him decide "Mars is for me", so yeah, he's pretty thick. His wife, played by Sharon Stone's, not so happy about this. Probably because of the bulging eye thing. So he decides to go for some new experimental treatment that will implant memories of him going to Mars. Except it doesn't work, and halfway through the procedure he goes a bit mental and they throw him out, eradicating all records of him even being there. When he wakes up, he gets attacked by people he considering his friends and gets messages informing him he's actually from Mars and he's not who he thinks he is. The film goes on to detail his attempts to work out who he is.

Uh, huh.

The future in this world's much more entertaining that Minority Report, although it's a whole lot freakier. As you see above, there's a woman with three tits. There's also a main character who reveals his brother, a small baby-like organism attached to his stomach. I say baby-like, it's basically a talking baby. And said baby gets shot in the fucking head, which is the closest to that that I have ever seen in a film. There's also a man with a head that's all, like, folded up, but that could probably happen so that's not as funny. The film's also loaded with quality Arnie zingers, which is really what you employ the man for. You've got the best, "You think this is the real Quaid - it is" followed by relentless gunfire, plus the classic "You wouldn't hurt me, I'm your wife" followed by a shot to the head and "Consider that the divorce". The film is relentlessly corny but that's all part of its charm and it's thoroughly entertaining. The bits toward the end where they deal with some shit about mining on Mars are a bit of an afterthought despite their best efforts (until the final scenes, really) and the ending's a bit of a cop out but the stuff around the middle concerning Quaid's identity where he's on the run is rather good. The film's not one of the best but it's completely entertaining and a lot of fun. One thumb up.

As an aside, I have to document my love for Arnold films where he's just given a normal stereotypical American name and profession, yet he looks like Arnold and he sounds like Arnold. He's Jimmy Smith but he speaks with a thick Austrian accent. Nobody ever points it out. Nobody makes fun of it. Nobody notices it. Not even his American wife or his American kids, who appear unaware their father is Austrian. I love Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

Movie Review: Minority Report (2002)

Minority Report (2002): There's shedloads of films set in the future. In said future, we have it all. Wheels? Pah, stuff your stinking wheels. Who needs wheels, mate? We can fly! What? You actually have physical screens for your TVs and movies? Wake up, granddad, we have holograms to handle that shit. Oh yeah, and did I mention the shoes with the electronic laces? Yes indeed, this is a well-covered subject in film, which is why Minority Report doesn't stand out on paper, but in execution this is a fine mesh of Hollywood special effects and genuinely interesting storylines.

The year is THE FUTURE, 20somethingorother. I forget. Not that far in the future, no aliens yet (that we know of). The cops are really smart here because they can tell when someone's gonna commit a murder before they do it thanks to these three mutants who can see the future. Sitting in a swimming pool all day allows them to pool their thoughts together, because it would, wouldn't it. Relaxing and that. Tom Cruise is one of said policemen, until it turns out he's apparently gonna murder someone. He's not so happy about this (understandably), and a chase begins. The scientific stuff at the start is done fairly well, it sets the scene, establishes all the characters to the basic roles - Cruise is the good guy, Colin Farrell's the bad guy, Max von Sydow's Tom Cruise's mentor and confidante. It's easy to zone out when they get into the technicalities of it all with the bald people in the pools and that, mostly because the main one, Agatha, reminded me of the lead queen one from the Borg in the Patrick Stewart Star Trek stuff. However, when the chase kicks in the film becomes very entertaining as it builds to the supposed murder. The film has a twist that makes you rethink the way you've previously perceived major characters and one scene in particular really caught me by surprise.

The ending of the film is the only really contentious thing, as it is more conventionally happy than you may think, in contrast with the rest of the film which is all rather dark, the film being drab in appearance and rather bleak and dystopian overall. The film focuses a lot on determinism, whether we can change our future or whether it's all mapped out for us, and combines this with a look at the extreme "police state" seen in the film, where an overly-authoritative regime completely eradicates murders but also seems to reduce the overall quality of life for the citizens that are being protected. There's also the idea of the precogs, the mutants who predict the murders, not being allowed a decent quality of life, essentially being kept as slaves. These threads are all mostly tied up nicely at the end, although these ending in a more dramatic "negative" manner would surely have made them more memorable because the positive note it ends on mostly leaves the viewer empty in what was an otherwise very interesting film. Two thumbs up.

Movie Review: Catfish (2010)

Catfish (2010): I'm no big fan of horror films, as will soon become apparent. My fear of things that go bump in the night is well known, particularly among the group of four friends who went with me to the pirates section of Madame Tussauds in Amsterdam (which we visited in between getting madly stoned and whatever else it is you do in Holland, weep and yelp Denish Bergkamp! I suppose). This was no pirate exhibition, this was putting a load of perverts in tightly-packed cells, turning the lights off and getting naive (fuckin' idiot) tourists to walk between them. What's this got to do with Catfish, you may be asking. This film creeped me out much, much more than any Dutch pirate could ever aspire to do.

Catfish is a documentary film by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost focusing on photographer (and Ariel's brother) Nev Schulman's ongoing relationship with a young girl named Abby who contacts him by email and posts him watercolour paintings of his own photographs. As things develop, the friendship goes onto Facebook and we're introduced to Abby's mother and half-sister Megan in addition to various other friends. The family member we hear most from is the mother Angela, which is fairly innocent on the surface. The film, on this level, is rather tame, it's just some girl who likes painting and is being encouraged by her mum. However, things become increasingly creepy as Nev's relationship with Megan becomes deeper while more and more holes appear in the family's story. The truth of the family becomes apparent with about 40 minutes remaining as opposed to the very end of the film, and simply allowing the utter absurdity of the situation to set in is rather horrifying as we see that what we'd been told is, in fact, completely false. You sense that this isn't just the audience's emotion - at various points members of the filming trio attempt to bail, varying from quitting the project as a whole to simply going back to the car to avoid the awkwardness.

What was most amazing to me was the text at the end updating the audience on what had occurred after the film's conclusion which adds another twist, revealing that even some of the film's revelations were, in fact, not altogether true. Catfish is a film that is nothing on the surface but becomes a very interesting and slightly frightening insight into the more peculiar members of our society and the webs of lies that can be spun with the use of social networking platforms. Whether it's all real or not I'm not sure, and I'm not going to spend much time deconstructing that particular facet. It's presented as a documentary and, in this case, I'll take it at face value, even if one of the more blatant messages of the film is to do exactly the opposite of that. Two thumbs up.