In memoriam: Paul Morrissey (Telegraph 05/11/24)

Paul Morrissey, who has died aged 86, was an eccentric, sometimes testy writer-director whose input gave Andy Warhol’s initially static experiments in film a new, dynamic, sensational shape; the process began with a trio of censor-baiting provocations – Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) – and culminated in the 3D-enhanced Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974), which replaced the earlier films’ skin with offal, gleefully tossed in the audience’s lap.

The pair met in 1965 at a screening of Morrissey’s early shorts at the Astor Peace Playhouse, where Warhol was impressed enough to offer the younger man the position of cinematographer on the artist’s Screen Tests. Within a year, they were collaborating on a classic of the New York underground: Chelsea Girls (1966), a 210-minute portrait of the varyingly dishevelled dreamers who inhabited the city’s notorious Hotel Chelsea flophouse, directed by Warhol, shot by Morrissey.

Whether courted or not, scandal soon followed. Chelsea Girls, which sparked obscenity charges in the US, was banned by the British Board of Film Censors; with its drug use and full-frontal nudity, Trash caused a similar consternation, and only received its X certificate after the Board screened it to a room of middle-aged housewives who deemed it fit for exhibition. The critic Pauline Kael observed that “Morrissey’s films seem to be made by a dirty-minded altar boy.”

Nevertheless, Morrissey brought entrepreneurial smarts to the chaotic environment of Warhol’s Factory. He discovered Flesh’s thrusting young star Joe Dallesandro and added the singer Nico to The Velvet Underground’s line-up; he was pioneering in casting the transgender performer Holly Woodlawn in Trash; and he was crucial to the Warhol-backed, long-running magazine Interview, launched in 1970.

Yet the pair parted ways in 1975, after Warhol returned his attention to painting and other business interests, provoking Morrissey’s ire whenever his former collaborator came up in conversation; he felt his own contributions had been overshadowed. In 2012, he turned on an interviewer who’d lumped him in with an emergent indie movement: “I was not part of a movement, I. Made. My. Own. Films. They. Were. Not. Part. Of. Any. Movement. You’re incapable of understanding that, aren’t you?”

Paul Joseph Morrissey was born in Manhattan on February 23, 1938 to Irish-Catholic lawyer Joseph Morrissey and his wife Eleanor. He attended Fordham Preparatory School in The Bronx and studied literature at Fordham University; after graduation, he completed military service and worked in insurance and social care. In 1960, he opened the Exit Gallery on East 4th Street in New York, where he began programming underground films; the following year, he himself began directing.

In the wake of the Warhol years, Morrissey came to the UK to make The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), a sniggering Conan Doyle spoof co-written with stars Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, although reviews were little short of disastrous: Time Out dubbed it “truly one of the crummiest movies ever made”, and even Morrissey confessed “It’s the only film I’m connected with that I don’t think was very good”.

Thereafter he retreated to the American margins. Madame Wang’s (1981) satirised the L.A. punk rock scene; Forty Deuce (1982), from Alan Bowne’s play about Times Square hustlers, starred a pre-Footloose Kevin Bacon; Mixed Blood (a.k.a. Cocaine, 1984) was a ripe, Reagan-era drug war thriller. He went to Vienna for Beethoven’s Nephew (1985), a period piece that took up arms against the composer, decried by Morrissey as “a very pathetic person who happened to write very good music”.

The aptly scrappy Spike of Bensonhurst (1988), centred on a teenage boxer, found passing favour with Roger Ebert, who labelled it “not the best comedy ever made”, but noted “it has energy and local colour and a charismatic lead performance”. Funding dried up thereafter, although both Veruschka (2005), a documentary profile of the aristocratic model Veruschka von Lehndorff, and his final directorial credit, the migrant drama News from Nowhere (2010), screened at the Venice festival.

A conservative Republican Catholic, Morrissey became known as a firebrand and contrarian, insisting “I think censorship is very good”, and that the Velvet Underground “were stupid and didn’t know what they were doing”. His most splenetic outbursts, though, were reserved for Warhol, whom Morrissey dismissed as “incompetent, anorexic, illiterate, autistic, Asperger’s — he never did a thing in his entire life. He sort of walked through it as a zombie and that paid off in the long run.”

Yet Morrissey’s early work endured as an alternative to an increasingly colourless and corporatised culture. In 1984, indie band Felt repurposed imagery from the Chelsea Girls poster for the sleeve of their second album The Splendour of Fear, while The Smiths used a still of a shirtless Dallesandro from Flesh on their self-titled debut LP. The horror films were revived amid the 1980s 3D revival and after the success of the similarly stereoscopic Avatar (2009), and Morrissey-shot footage added texture to Todd Haynes’ streaming-era doc The Velvet Underground (2021).

While dismissive of modern moviemaking trends, Morrissey occasionally betrayed a fondness for these early countercultural endeavours. Speaking in 1975, after the split but before the bitterness set in, he even afforded his former collaborator rare credit: “What Andy hit upon was that characters were vanishing from films, characterisation was disappearing and was being upstaged by a lot of cinematic claptrap. Andy completely eliminated the claptrap. He just turned on the camera and left the room.”

He is survived by a brother, Kenneth.

Paul Morrissey, born February 23, 1938, died October 28, 2024.

In memoriam: Dick Pope (Telegraph 04/11/24)

Dick Pope, who has died aged 77, was a twice Oscar-nominated cinematographer whose artistry and craft elevated the films of Mike Leigh as the latter expanded his filmmaking palette from the 1990s onwards.

 
Over twelve features, Pope was tasked with illuminating Leigh’s occasionally lugubrious view of human relations, a process that began with contemporary dramas Life is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993) and Secrets & Lies (1996) and continued through the acclaimed period dramas Topsy-Turvy (1999), Vera Drake (2004), Mr. Turner (2015) and Peterloo (2018).
 
Trained in documentary before pivoting to fiction, the bearded, affable, widely liked Pope became a trusted lieutenant, working efficiently within the idiosyncratic methodology – involving months of rehearsals – by which Leigh affords his actors unusual leeway to find the truth of his characters.
 
“[It’s] the same with two people just sitting there talking or with 60,000 people in the square [as in Peterloo],” Pope reflected in 2019. “[Mike]’ll go in there, and he’ll work out how to do the scene without anybody around him — just him and the actors — and then we go from there. I’ve always described it as a bit of a magical mystery tour, because you don’t really know what you’re getting into.”
 
Yet this round-the-houses approach invariably revealed a vision of Britain in which audiences were able to recognise themselves and their neighbours. Pope’s films with Leigh had identifiable microclimates, ranging from the breezier Life is Sweet and sunny Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) to the petrifyingly wintry Naked and the overcast All or Nothing (2002). In Another Year (2010), which tracked key Leigh performers over the course of twelve months, all four seasons were visible and felt.
 
That film was one of several that announced mounting ambition on Leigh’s part. Topsy-Turvy, on Gilbert and Sullivan and the creation of The Mikado, surprised even long-term Leigh admirers with its period detail and jollying musical numbers; Vera Drake dug deeper into history, uncovering the sorry saga of a backstreet abortionist; Peterloo, revisiting the 1819 massacre that bloodied Manchester’s cobbles, featured swelling crowd scenes.
 
Arguably the pair’s finest achievement – and the first Leigh feature to be shot digitally rather than on film – Mr. Turner necessarily recalled the work of its subject, the painter J.M.W. Turner (played by Timothy Spall). Logistically, this entailed such sleights-of-hand as passing off Lowestoft as the flatlands of Holland; there was also much scrambling to complete shots as the sun set behind boats and trains.
 
Pope’s perseverance and diligence was rewarded with an Oscar nod, though with it came a measure of social-media infamy after Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs, in the live nominations broadcast, mispronounced the cinematographer’s name as “Dick Poop”. Pope met this regrettable flub with characteristic good humour: “You know what, I have been called a lot worse in my time.”
 
Born in Bromley, Kent in August 1947, Richard Campbell Pope developed an interest in photography as a child, selling photos to local newspapers as a teenager. An uncle suggested Pope combine his interests of photography and film by seeking an apprenticeship in the Pathé laboratories; thereafter, he worked his way through the industry’s ranks.
 
Pope’s first credit was as a clapper loader on the X-rated softcore drama Loving Feeling (1968), which Pope later described as “the dregs of British cinema”. He was promoted to camera operator, initially billed as Richard Pope, on the portmanteau A Promise of Bed (1969) and the David Hockney study A Bigger Splash (1973), and began to travel widely as a cinematographer, shooting episodes of Granada’s Disappearing World and World in Action.
 
Operating a camera on the Clash-scored Rude Boy (1980) steered Pope towards the music business, and he subsequently provided cinematography for a clutch of pop videos, including The Specials’ memorably nocturnal “Ghost Town” promo – a dry run for Naked, stalking the backstreets of Wapping – and the domestic melodrama of Queen’s “I Want to Break Free”, featuring Freddie Mercury in drag.
 
On television, Pope shot Channel 4’s Whoops Apocalypse (1982) and Porterhouse Blue (1987), for which he was BAFTA nominated. By then, however, he was working regularly in film, working unnerving wonders with the cornfields of Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin (1990) in the same year as the suburban Life is Sweet.
 
Naked’s sepulchral photography drew admirers in the US, where Pope’s credits spanned beyond mainstream fare – Disney basketball comedy The Air Up There (1994), actioner The Way of the Gun (2000), lavish magician saga The Illusionist (2006), for which he won his first Oscar nomination – to more independent endeavours, including John Sayles’ immersive, Alabama-set musical drama Honeydripper (2007) and Richard Linklater’s Bernie (2011).
 
But he always returned home, underlining his adaptability via the peppy, Eastbourne-shot teen comedy Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008), Leigh’s Cultural Olympiad short A Running Jump (2012), Krays biopic Legend (2015) and the delicately spun Supernova (2020), shot around the Lake District.
 
Pope’s final collaboration with Leigh, Hard Truths (2024), opens on UK screens in January, having been praised on the festival circuit: the Telegraph’s Tim Robey reported the director’s return to latter-day Britain is “both a solace and, in the best possible way, a slap in the face”, praising the film’s “biting humour”.
 
Asked why he kept returning to Pope, Leigh offered rare praise indeed: “A violinist who owns a Stradivarius is not going to arbitrarily use another fiddle. That is the tool and you can play anything with it.”
 
Pope is survived by his wife Pat.
 
Dick Pope, born August 1947, died October 22, 2024. 

On demand: "If You Were The Last"

Directed by Kristian Mercado from a script by Angela Bourassa, the likable straight-to-streaming romcom If You Were The Last cops to one of its influences early on by having its prospective lovers debate whether or not it was worth the time, money and effort to bring just one man back from Mars in Ridley Scott's The Martian, even if that man was Matt Damon. No such immediate cavalry is coming to the rescue of Anthony Mackie and Zoë Chao, astronauts stranded in a kids'-bedroom idea of space, complete with papier-mâché planets and a shuttle rec room done up like a sitcom den. So the pair spar and bicker, watch old movies together, grow weed (in his case) and - having exhausted all other options, and with their finite resources running out - eventually nudge up against the question of bowing out with one final big bang. As Chao thoughtfully tells her intergalactic roomie: "I mean, you have the only penis for a million miles." Other influences reveal themselves. The high percentage of art design on this spacecraft indicates a fondness for Michel Gondry's homemade fantasias - Chao's character has repurposed a rack of electric drills as vibrators - and with that comes the possibility that anybody who doesn't dig these leads might find the whole cutesy rather than the desired cute. In some ways, Mercado has to crank up the colour, to mitigate against the underlying bleakness of this scenario: a tie-dye rewrite of the Jennifer Lawrence/Chris Pratt dud Passengers - complete with a dead third wheel (played by a familiar comedy face) who serves as the astronauts' confidante whenever the plot demands - IYWTL has to usher us past our awareness things could get a whole lot worse if this pair weren't so obviously hot for one another and weren't bound for some kind of happy ending. On balance, they deserve it. Mackie and Chao, established supporting players seizing an opportunity to position themselves front and centre for ninety minutes, demonstrate good chemistry; more importantly, they bend this plot round in the direction of believable human conversation and experience. If the wider picture is cosmic, what's observed up close - two people undergoing a period of intense, dramatic change - isn't so far away from our own backyards finally. Fluff, but - as with those vibrators - skilfully mounted and pleasure-giving.

If You Were The Last is currently streaming via NOW, and available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

Flights of fancy: "Bird"

Returning to the fictions of Brexit Britain after the overseas awayday of 2016's American Honey and the 2021 documentary Cow, Andrea Arnold opens her latest, Bird, with a sequence that plays almost like a French-and-Saunders-style parody of the Arnold aesthetic: a moptopped youngster, with dirt under her fingernails and a generally dreamy mien, is interrupted while filming a bird in flight through the metal cage of a motorway bridge by the arrival of a twinkly-eyed, heavily tattooed Irish charmer on a scooter touting a toad in a KwikSave bag. After two breaks from the auteurist norm, the new film feels to some degree like business as usual in Arnold-land. Once more, the camera arrives at a fringey Estuary setting (here, Gravesend), a menagerie of furred and feathered friends is emptied out before us (that bird and toad are just for starters) and we're introduced to a wild-leaning heroine - potentially as feral as any of the other creatures on screen - who's trying to figure out her place in this world. For Bailey (Nykiya Adams), the initial goal is to extricate herself from the chaos of the squat she's living in with that twinkly-eyed charmer (Barry Keoghan's Bug) and his young bride, who barely seem that much older themselves, and a brother (who may more precisely be a half-brother or a stepbrother: the chaos is partly that of broken homes) drifting aimlessly into crime. An early scene finds Bailey lopping off her abundant curls, the better to see clearer or redefine herself; and after waking up in a field, our heroine is duly presented with another migratory path, that of a heavily accented drifter in a dress, who introduces himself as Bird and promptly takes up residence atop an adjacent block of flats, watching over our girl. As he's played by Franz Rogowski, the philandering agent of chaos in last year's Passages, you could be forgiven for wondering whether Bird is less guardian angel than dreadful augury. He's inarguably an odd bird, though, and so is the film, for better and worse.

Having reassured us with that opening sequence, Bird quickly drifts further away from everyday British normality than Arnold has ever previously ventured. Yes, this camera takes in shopping precincts, towerblocks and bunkbeds alike, but the logic guiding its movements is dreamier than that of, say, 2006's Red Road or 2009's Fish Tank, synching with a heroine who forever seems on the verge of nodding off or waking up. (It explains Bailey's air of drowsiness, but the squat situation looks implausible in 2024, no matter how overstretched the authorities might be; these broken homes have been fractured altogether artfully.) Bird only begins to function narratively if we accept that Arnold has left social realism behind so as to flirt with magical realism, the trickiest of all genres to pull off in a cinema, dependent as it is on the viewer believing their eyes at all times. I fear it also only works if we then accept Arnold's redefinition of magical realism as "a series of random, mostly unconnected events". Gravesend here represents a fairytale kingdom, which may be a stretch for those who've never been there, and even for those who call it their home. The characters assume the same symbolic value as the caged pets and wild horses of Fish Tank: as his name indicates, Bird is less flesh-and-blood man than he is roaming metaphor, a representative of those migrants who have flocked to the Kent coast, and a model of a softer masculinity than Keoghan's brawling chancer or the toxic new boyfriend of Bailey's estranged mum. The "it really, really, really could happen" of Blur's "The Universal", which Arnold deploys as a recurring nursery rhyme or contemporary lullaby, sounds ever more like a director imploring us to close our eyes and take a leap of faith with her.

Above all else, Bird has visibly been conceived as a hangout movie: arrive at an interesting, underfilmed location with bankable actors, a bunch of kids, an e-scooter and a Spotify playlist and start to thrash something out on the spot before the rolling camera. That search for spontaneity yields convincing bursts of chaos, like the party scene where Keoghan and his fellow squatters do shots and shout along to Sleaford Mods, drowning out a TV bringing news of the effects of climate change on central Europe. (Arnold is not incorrect in intuiting everyone's looking for an escape of some kind right now.) And every now and again, we spy an inspired choice, something precise, evocative and lovely: cutaways to the squat's youngest inhabitant reveal a tousle-haired girl indifferent to the mess around her and determined to press on with her colouring-in regardless. As ever, Arnold proves in thrall to the adaptability of the young - but is she also getting a bit too hung up on it? There is, regrettably, a lot of flapping around where you want Bird to soar: all the graffiti doodled on squat walls and bus windows can't make up, in this instance, for characters that struggle to hold the attention and a wider failure to pursue angles for further dramatic exploration in anything like the satisfying depth of Arnold's earlier work. (Keoghan, notionally Bird's most saleable asset in our accursed, post-Saltburn universe, is the biggest victim of this, either sidelined or forgotten about in the edit.) What's flown the coop is the vice-like plotting of Red Road and Fish Tank, artefacts from a moment when Arnold was presumably still having to present a case to funding bodies in the form of a script rather than - as one assumes happened here - pitching a feature that came to her in a dream and then trying to fill in the gaps around a handful of key images. I don't want to be too down on something so idiosyncratic and personal: this is, after all, the version of this story only this filmmaker could have arrived at, a Wings of Desire raised on party rings and Greggs sausage rolls. But Bird finally lands among Arnold's weakest films, as sorely overstretched at two hours as American Honey was pushing three. It pains me to say it, but one of our best modern directors is going backwards.

Bird opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

Unbreakable: "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"

Having done such a good job of profiling that elaborately dressed but troubled soul Alexander McQueen back in 2018, the blue-chip documentary pairing of Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui have selected what would appear a simpler proposition for their follow-up. Revisiting the life and work of the actor who made us believe he could fly, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is unabashed in its emotionality; it'd be a tough cookie who made it through the first half without shedding at least one tear. By earning the Reeve family's trust, the directors have unlocked a treasure trove of home movies that shed new, touching light on both Reeve the jockish wanderer turned international superstar and the fraught recovery process the actor had to undergo after snapping his neck in a horseriding accident in 1995. That accident is placed upfront here, pivotal as it was; and just when you think matters couldn't possibly get any more painful, up pops Reeve's old roommate and friend Robin Williams (or "Brother Robin", as the family refer to him) to remind us of someone else we've loved and missed. By now, everybody's damp-eyed and not seeing entirely clearly: only that might explain the edit-suite decision to leave in Glenn Close's on-camera assertion that had Reeve lived longer, Williams might still be with us, which seems speculative at best. Yet even the material that isn't heartbreaking moves us in some other way. Jeff Daniels recalls a conversation backstage on Broadway in 1977 during which co-star William Hurt warned Reeve against selling out by signing on for Superman; it's an anecdote made all the more poignant by Hurt's late-career decision to shill for Marvel. (Are we just crying for the state of movies now?) We learn Reeve's father, the standoffish poet Franklin Reeve, was disappointed upon discovering his son had won this role, and not - as he'd originally thought and cheered - a role in Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw; this development lets on all we need to know about this frosty father-son relationship, and why the son felt compelled to push himself as he did. Super/Man may be the first movie to open with the DC logo that goes on to trade in genuinely complex and perilously fragile human beings.

That said, the tears begin to dry up around the halfway mark; Bonhôte and Ettedgui don't always seem to react to the notes coming down from heavyweight corporate producers (DC, HBO Documentaries, CNN) as decisively as they might have. Cutting back-and-forth in time - not unlike Superman setting the Earth in reverse - the pair overuse one potent visual contrast: that between the gym-bulked, kiss-curled Adonis Reeve in the red-and-blue romper suit and the drawn, waxen, understandably hesitant figure in the wheelchair with integral respirator. That juxtaposition may just be unavoidable in retracing the arc of this life: no-one has ever looked better in superhero costume, nor appeared better suited for a particular role. Susan Sarandon and Whoopi Goldberg attest to how this Supes filled them with horny delight, but the most revealing scrap of archive details the look of wonder in a group of kids' eyes as Reeve passes them on the street. Setting out the thesis the actor swapped one form of heroism for another, namely lending greater visibility to disability, the film flirts with hagiography: lots of talking heads announcing how wonderful Reeve was in any configuration. But there were complications, too: the deterioration of the Superman series, from tentpole Warner Bros. blockbuster to corner-cutting Cannon Films pick-up; the failure to land a comparably memorable second role (Bonhôte and Ettedgui might have made more of a case for Reeve's non-franchise endeavours, but the life overshadows the art); divorce from first wife Gae Exton; the aggressive pushing for cures that suggested, even after his accident, Reeve was still thinking like an alpha. Propelled by snappy cutting - for which editor Otto Burnham rightly gets third credit - Super/Man covers a lot of ground, but there are curious structuring and storytelling choices. Bonhôte and Ettedgui delay a segment on the actor's second wife Dana until late on, obliging us to revisit footage very similar to that we've already seen; ugly CG interstitials remind us everybody's still operating within the umbrella of the artless DC-verse; and the access to Reeve's family results in an overextended conclusion. (No-one can bring themselves to say goodbye again.) It's an honourable tribute, but some of that early power and force gets frittered as the world turns.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 25-27, 2024):

1 (new) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

2 (1) The Wild Robot (U) **

3 (2) Smile 2 (18)

4 (4) Transformers One (PG)

5 (3) The Apprentice (15) ***

6 (7) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

7 (5) Terrifier 3 (18)

8 (new) The Room Next Door (12A) ***

9 (8) The Substance (18) **

10 (6) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Godzilla Minus One/Minus Colour

2. Dahomey

3. A Nightmare on Elm Street

4. Saw

5. Gilda

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (new) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12)

3 (new) It Ends with Us (15)

4 (4) Despicable Me 4 (U)

5 (3) Twisters (12) ***

6 (2) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

7 (10) Longlegs (15) **

8 (12) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

9 (13) Practical Magic (12)

10 (21) Dune: Part Two (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

2. Late Night with the Devil

3. Twisters

4. A Quiet Place: Day One

5. Blur: To the End

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Shawshank Redemption (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)

2. Memoria (Saturday, Channel 4, 1.35am)

3. The African Queen (Saturday, BBC2, 2pm)

4. Airplane! [above] (Friday, Channel 4, 12.05am)

5. Paddington 2 (Sunday, BBC1, 3.05pm)

"Singham Again" (Guardian 01/11/24)

Singham Again **

Dir: Rohit Shetty. With: Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh. 144 mins. Cert: 15

A curious way to celebrate Diwali, all told – by the strobing lights of an erratically piloted squad car. Opening with a special shoutout to the Jammu & Kashmir Police, this is the fifth entry in the so-called Cop Universe envisioned by producer-director Rohit Shetty, following two prior Singhams and two spin-offs, 2018’s Simmba and 2021’s Sooryavanshi. Throwing back to the slaphappy mass cinema of the 1970s and 80s, 2011’s first Singham was a smalltown Western of sorts, the saloon doors of its Goa copshop being the obvious giveaway. The sequels have got bigger and emptier: this one leaves us watching shopworn action tropes being wrapped in the flag of nationalism and listlessly if noisily tossed around.

The new film’s narrative pretext is that the criminal network tracked by Ajay Devgn’s supercop Bajirao Singham, now senior superintendent of Kashmir, has expanded outside India and beyond cackling erstwhile foe Jackie Shroff. The real main event, however, is watching guest stars grit their teeth and try to wrestle something – anything – out of 2024’s most indifferent screenwriting. As Mrs. Singham, Kareena Kapoor Khan makes wafting gestures towards artier endeavours before assuming her given place in this universe of damsel-in-distress. Deepika Padukone’s regional commander goes AWOL amid a lot of boysy crossover, not least real-life spouse Ranveer Singh, reprising his gabbily irritating Simmba.

The uniform, at least, remains a snug fit for the eternally poker-faced Devgn, whose low energy invites misreading as nation-saving cool, but Shetty’s fawning over the character smothers dramatic interest and permits no concession to the complexities of the present moment. Middle-aged attempts to update the cop’s jargon – having Singham broach the concept of situationships, say – prove cringeworthy; the offhanded Islamophobia troubles. Shetty’s surely hoping that holiday audiences will be forgiving, presented with a selection box of star names, but this puffed-up pablum doesn’t deserve a paying crowd so much as exasperated punctuation bolted to its title by way of a warning. We’re doing this again?!

Singham Again is now showing in selected cinemas. 

On demand: "Singham"

A franchise-launching hit in the summer of 2011, Rohit Shetty's Hindi police procedural Singham - a remake of a Tamil success from the previous year - has Ajay Devgn as the last good cop in Goa, a character helpfully defined for us in the lyrics of a thumping opening theme song: "He's a child at heart/Mischievous and fun/But if you cross him/You will feel his wrath." Crossing him on this occasion: a gleefully corrupt construction boss (Prakash Jha), who within the first ten minutes has confessed to his underlings that he's murdered a child with his own bare hands. It is, then, an open-and-shut case - you could switch it off after those ten minutes, confident you knew exactly where it was heading, and that you'd be in for a far more edifying evening's entertainment doing almost anything else - so Shetty stuffs the two hours between credits and conclusion with dumb-as-nuts action and broad pantomimic comedy: supporting characters who make crank calls in funny voices, grown men getting hit on the head with coconuts. Playing everything as a joke enables it (and us) not to take any of the corruption, injustice and police brutality we witness too seriously: the whole is not unlike watching an episode of Law & Order if the franchise had fallen not to conservative master tactician Dick Wolf but Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider.

It's almost transcendentally basic, and you can sort of see why it became a hit. Set out in bright, warm colours that mimic the film stocks of old - this Goa's grass is a shade of green only experienced on LSD trips - it does nothing to challenge or complicate its vision of "righteous cop cleans up the streets"; while in some respects a throwback to the mass cinema of yore, it actually plays as far less nuanced than certain Hindi crime movies of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. Shetty's route-one camerawork does all the heavy lifting, establishing an off-kilter world in a flurry of Dutch angles before approaching the hero at knee height and gazing adoringly upwards. With his matinee-idol 'tache, Devgn certainly looks dashing kicking ass in a vest and taking his belt to his foes' backsides - you can well imagine matinee mums and grannies swooning - but the mischief and fun promised in that first song go AWOL along the way; instead, key scenes are stolen by Jha, reprising his role from the original, and seemingly having a blast playing a character with no redeeming features whatsoever. Some solid car- and person-flipping stuntwork, but much of it borders on the braindead, and it makes the average Fast & Furious movie of this period seem like James Ellroy.

Singham is available to rent via Prime Video, along with its sequel Singham Returns; a third film in the series, Singham Again, opens in selected cinemas today, and will be reviewed here in due course.