"Sherlock Gnomes" (Guardian 11/05/18)

Sherlock Gnomes **

Dir: John Stevenson. Animation with the voices of: Emily Blunt, James McAvoy, Michael Caine, Johnny Depp. 86 mins. Cert: U

Whatever could have led diminutive megastar Elton John to bankroll a series of digimations headlining humble garden gnomes? The fragile tchotchkes debuted in Rocket Pictures’ 2011 venture Gnomeo & Juliet, which offered Ozzy Osbourne voicing an ornamental faun, a soundtrack of childproofed Elton hits, and near-unsurpassable novelty value. This flatly functional sequel relocates the trinkets from Stratford to London, where G&J’s honeymoon is almost over – she’s spending too much time in the garden – and a spate of gnome thefts attracts the interest of Baker Street’s finest, voiced here by Mortdecai star Johnny Depp as the same old supercilious pseud.

What follows lacks Pixar’s ambition and rich subtexts – Ben Zazove’s simultaneously overworked and underpolished script proceeds along that quest narrative line worn thin by years of multiplex filler – but gets so far on a very British daftness that is not entirely without charm. There are flourishes in the animation, equivalents to the parakeets and palm trees that once graced the exec producer’s specs: Sherlock’s deductive processes are illustrated in lively, hand-drawn black-and-white sketches, and we get the mildly radical touch of an African-American Irene Adler, now a moll running a speakeasy for dolls – voiced, in a bid for exportability, by Mary J. Blige.

The whole makes for painless, occasionally chuckle-worthy matinee viewing, but after two films, this still looks and feels like a franchise driven more by commercial calculation than creative inspiration, a pension fund for a multi-millionaire who surely doesn’t need the pocket money. The formula sits a stratum or two too close to the surface: easily relatable little things for the little ones, plus bouncy discofied versions of “I’m Still Standing” for accompanying baby boomers. It remains to be seen whether future jaunts up this garden path can crowbar in anything as artful as “Song for Guy” or “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”. 

Sherlock Gnomes opens in cinemas nationwide today.

"That Good Night" (Guardian 11/05/18)

That Good Night **

Dir: Eric Styles. With: John Hurt, Sofia Helin, Max Brown, Erin Richards. 92 mins. Cert: 12A

Sometimes cosmic misfortune is a film’s good luck. This creaky, sentimental drama might have passed gently into the televisual ether were it not that it granted the late Sir John Hurt his final lead role. (He subsequently took a supporting part in unreleased spy thriller Damascus Cover.) Its middling-to-minor pleasures stem almost exclusively from watching a sunhatted Hurt pottering around the Algarve as Ralph, an ornery old literary goat determining to use the days remaining in the wake of a bleak health diagnosis to organise the means and method of his passing, and attempt reconciliation with his estranged son.

Adapted from a play originally penned by N.J. Crisp as a Donald Sinden vehicle, Eric Styles’ film has one other advantage in roseate location shooting: every poolside conversation will do wonders for holiday-home sales. The human interaction, alas, remains hidebound: it’s another of those scripts about a writer where the protagonist has been developed at everybody else’s expense. Sofia Helin projects a thoughtful dignity as Ralph’s trophy wife, but her function is to absent herself so the boys can work through their issues; Charles Dance’s confidant is but a linen-suited device, conjured up to gauge the scribe’s internal doubts.

As he so often did, Hurt lends stiff material a measure of nuance and class, his plaintive growl nudging even Crisp’s more banal lines towards profundity: it practically counts as a public service that Styles should have got the actor to read Dylan Thomas before the closing credits. It nevertheless feels sad, if not sorrowful, that we’re mainly waiting for Ralph to die, not least so we can be spared from hearing another note of Guy Farley’s treacly score. The result, destined for quarter-full Silver Screen showings, inspires not so much rage against the dying projector light as rueful shrugs and tuts at the project’s muffed opportunities.

That Good Night opens in selected cinemas from today. 

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of April 27-29, 2018:

1 (new) Avengers: Infinity War (12A) ***
2 (3) The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (12A)
3 (2) A Quiet Place (15) ****
4 (1) Rampage (12A)
5 (5) Peter Rabbit (PG)
6 (7) The Greatest Showman (PG)
7 (6) Truth or Dare (15)
8 (10) Blade Runner: The Final Cut (15) ****
9 (new) Cendrillon - Met Opera 2018 (12A)
10 (4) Ready Player One (12A) ***

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five: 
1. Custody
2. Beast
3. Avengers: Infinity War
4. Western
5. October


Top Ten DVD sales: 

1 (new) Pitch Perfect 3 (12)
2 (1) Star Wars: The Last Jedi (12) ***
3 (2) Ferdinand (U)
4 (3) Paddington 2 (PG) ****
5 (new) Pitch Perfect: Triple Pack (12)
6 (4) Justice League (12)
7 (8) Thor: Ragnarok (12) ***
8 (10) Doctor Strange (12) **
9 (6) Wonder (12)
10 (13) Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Ice King
2. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
3. Paddington 2
4. The Florida Project
5. Star Wars: the Last Jedi


Top five films on terrestrial TV:
1. Notting Hill [above] (Bank Holiday Monday, ITV1, 10.20pm)
2. The Princess Bride (Bank Holiday Monday, C4, 12.20pm)
3. Megamind (Sunday, C4, 2.30pm)
4. Buried (Friday, BBC1, 11.55pm)
5. The Quiet Ones (Wednesday, C4, 2am)

Stone me: "Avengers: Infinity War"

I concluded my review of Captain America: Civil War, the last fully serious dispatch from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with an expression of hope that future instalments might shake things up a bit. Avengers: Infinity War opens with a prologue in which some of the MCU's excess thespian baggage is decisively shed, lets barely a minute of its two-and-a-half hours pass without someone or other being flung across the frame, and concludes with the sight of several series heavyhitters apparently meeting their makers. Sometimes you have to set any scepticism aside and give a franchise points for trying. After ten years in existence, Marvel Studios has created its biggest bang yet: an all-stops-removed synergasm that, like those illegal-import Japanese Game Boy cartridges that allowed the player to access several titles at once, merges seven or eight of its franchises in the course of a single viewing experience.

Big bad Thanos, a mo-capped Malthusian built around Josh Brolin's recognisable square jaw, is himself attempting to correct the overpopulation of this universe - a self-reflexive irony that gets a little lost amid the boom-bang-a-bang ensemble mayhem laid on for us here. The Russo brothers, returned to the director's chair after Civil War's vast financial success, pursue multiple lines of attack. Infinity War begins on Asgard, where Thanos first reveals himself to Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston), then transmogrifies into a Doctor Strange sequel, checks in with Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and his emergent protege Spider-Man (Tom Holland), before repairing to space with the Guardians of the Galaxy and to Africa with the Black Panther squad. Along the way, there's even time for Captain America (Chris Evans) to return from the shadows of self-exile, where he has apparently spent his days cultivating a fulsome Joy of Sex beard, if nothing more in the way of a personality.

For a good (and I mean good) hour, Infinity War offers glimpses of madly enjoyable franchise mash-ups. Having Thor crashland on the Guardians' front windscreen allows two of the cinema's pre-eminent Chrises - Hemsworth and Pratt - to circle one another trading amusing quips, and allows us to note that both Thor and the Guardians are now vying for the title of the MCU's Most Improved. (Cutesy treeroot Baby Groot's growth into a sullen teenager counts as both a) unexpected character development and b) funny.) This initial sugar rush, alas, lasts only as long as it takes to reach the bottom of a medium-sized popcorn tub. We know exactly where Infinity War is headed - some fateful, seat-shaking face-off between the collected Avengers and their hulking opponent - but a stodgy centre section takes what feels like forever to get them all into position, and once more points up the incredible sameyness of this universe's action scenes. Time and again, our heroes spend ten minutes leaping onto their foes' shoulders to no effect, only for a previously unseen Avenger with upgraded powers - or, in the Captain's case, a beard - to turn up and help turn the tide.

Of course, it's now accepted that a mega-blockbuster such as this, with the biggest and most fervent of inbuilt audiences, need not worry unduly about running times: its business is fan service, and the more of that it can offer, the happier the fans are assumed to be. The Russos have speculated that the follow-up may run to three hours, and it's a sign of where we are that such speculation should have been greeted with enthusiasm rather than gulps and panic in the streets. In the quest for billion-dollar openings, the mainstream motion picture grows bloated and distended, and drives grown-ups - who may have bills to pay, kids to babysit and better things to do than watching an endless procession of 150-minute fantasy movies - to the couch and Netflix. Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not believe the Marvel movies are killing off cinema - no other universe has got so many enthusiastic youngsters through the multiplex doors - but I do wonder whether they're killing off a certain idea of cinema, or just limiting what creatives might now do within the commercial cinema. 

If I've blown hot and cold on these movies over the past decade, it's because they've increasingly seemed to me to represent the best and worst of modern cinema; they're so big, and so long, that they've extended to cover all available points on the critical spectrum. (They're everywhere - eating up twenty of the twenty-five daily showtimes at your local multiplex - and, if you want to remain part of the conversation, you cannot miss them. Which is not to say they're all unmissable.) Granted, they're a qualitative improvement on the often futzing effects fests of everybody's youth: whole armies of dedicated technicians have been employed, working round the clock on state-of-the-art processing equipment to paint and populate every nook and cranny of this universe. (One of Infinity War's prettier grace notes: Thanos's ability to turn his opponents' guns and bullets into bubbles and butterflies.)

That they are, still, a mixed bag can be discerned from the acting alone. A funny thing happens when you set actors down in front of green screens and ask them to imagine magic rocks levitating above their heads: some appear to be slumming, while others look to have arrived at their natural level. Mark Ruffalo has the most expressive hands in all cinema, so you can't help but wish they were set to doing something more substantial than neurotically hugging his body to ensure the Hulk doesn't come roaring out. A repeat encounter with Stephen Strange, conversely, only reveals how Benedict Cumberbatch has failed to make the character anything other than a smarmy, resistible arsehole. (His scenes with Tony Stark - who can be an amusing arsehole from time to time - point up how Downey Jr. has succeeded where the Brit has not.) And absolutely nothing is going to interest me in the burgeoning relationship between Robo-Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen's deeply drippy Scarlet Witch, a dud development amid the so-soness of Civil War - put there for the 3% of nerds who've pondered what it might be to hook up with an android - that gets no lamer here.

On the plus side, there has been a rediscovery of something more than mild peril, signalled by the late image of Thanos towering over a newly tiny Tony, deprived of both his metal armature and the self-confidence that, until now, has followed from that. The stakes do seem higher here than in earlier instalments, leading - in Infinity War's conclusion - to a reorganisation/streamlining that recalls both December's The Last Jedi and the tactics of certain TV series whenever their lead actors' contracts are up for renegotiation. Even this, however, risks being a temporary development, liable to be taken back in Infinity War Part 2: we're asked simply to wait and see who, if anyone, rematerialises. It remains an indictment of this kind of ultra-maximalist cinema that it can be possessed of all this money and all these actors, and have the eyes of the world entire upon it, and still function only sporadically as drama. The rest is not exactly silence, as your eardrums would attest, but its transience brings it perilously close to seeming like the world's most expensive sideshow. Who's up next?

Avengers: Infinity War is now playing in cinemas nationwide. 

From the archive: "Easy Money"

Scandinavia’s crime spree continues apace. Easy Money, an intricate, accomplished thriller from director Daniel Espinosa, sets out by sketching a network of grizzled uglymugs at large around contemporary Stockholm. Among them, there is the beardy, slightly scuzzy Jorge (Matias Varela), a low-level drugs trafficker of Latinate descent introduced effectuating an opportunistic prison break; there is also the beardier, scuzzier Radovan (Dragomir Mrsic), a mid-ranking Slavic heavy with his own reasons for getting his hands dirty.

Then there is JW, distinguished by the fact he’s played by the non-beardy and model-handsome Joel Kinnaman, from the US remake of The Killing. As a low-born economics student, JW lives in modest digs, swiping a flatmate’s milk for his morning cereal, yet he spends his weekends sampling the highlife alongside bankers and models, chiefly by maintaining rewarding contacts within the criminal community. Caught between two very different, possibly irreconcilable worlds, he’s starting to feel the strain, more so after he’s invited to step up from providing occasional favours to lending his hedge-fund know-how to a major money laundering operation.

That stress on knowledge rather than muscle immediately establishes Easy Money as a proposition a good deal more cerebral than the (otherwise not dissimilar) Pusher trilogy Nicolas Winding Refn completed over in Copenhagen. In the course of that visceral series, Refn elected to examine one character (and one social stratum) per film, only gradually revealing his full vision; here, Espinosa juggles several at once, and the result is a rare film to feel as densely packed as a superior TV miniseries. (One sequel has already followed in its native land, with another incoming.)

Easy Money opens up its field of vision to follow (and humanise) Radovan as he spends downtime with his young daughter – which raises the stakes a notch or two when the pair are ambushed in a multi-storey car park – while Maria Karlsson’s script shows off the extent of its research in a scene where JW discusses why Switzerland’s close ties with the EU make it a risky place to have a bank account these days. (Fear not, taxdodgers: alternative havens are apparently available.)

Around this, Espinosa manages an ambient evocation of a long hot summer in the city – the timing of the film’s (belated) UK release could scarcely be more felicitous – and how this gangster’s paradise is but seasonal, perpetually threatened by the next Molotov cocktail or round of gunfire; these boom times end suddenly, and with a bang.

Thus it is that Easy Money comes to engage with some very pressing and familiar social realities: it opens with a flurry of almost Bressonian close-ups of notes being pocketed, and turns on JW’s realisation of the extent to which he’s become the clean-shaven frontman for the kind of beardy, thuggish or otherwise criminal malfeasance carried out by certain real-world institutions. An American remake – starring, erm, Zac Efron – is, somewhat inevitably, in the works: it would take some feat of translation if the results were to be as filigreed and subtly gripping as their source.

(MovieMail, July 2013)

Easy Money screens on BBC2 tomorrow night at 12.25am; the sequels follow on Saturday and Sunday nights.

The company of wolves: "Beast"

The standout short in the touring program BAFTA Shorts 2014 was Keeping Up with the Joneses, a deftly spun tale of the unexpected that took a vaguely Tarantinoid set-up - two hitmen showing up on the front doorstep of a woman who wasn't one for lying down easily - and gradually, via its maker's attentive eye and careful deployment of actors, transformed it into something vastly more three-dimensional and lived-in. The director was one Michael Pearce, and in his debut feature Beast, he attempts - and pulls off - a not incomparable trick. The genre core here is a murder-mystery set in a coastal location (Jersey), such as might be familiar from Broadchurch, if not Bergerac before that. Yet Pearce films around it as if it were the basis of a fairy tale, not procedural drama, imbuing each development with a defamiliarising erotic strangeness. Take it as a sign of the confidence pulsing through the British film industry that a project this leftfield could get funded, let alone booked into the multiplex chains - and playing, as it was when I caught up with it, to rapt audiences. If, in its early stages, Beast can feel a perilously odd mix, there's something encouraging in the way it pursues its own logic, and grows surer of itself with every passing frame.

It is, also, a renewed sign of British indie cinema's new regionalism - that desire to eschew London for fresher air and faces - tied once more to a sympathy for characters being left behind at the margins. Our heroine is Moll (Jessie Buckley), an inquisitive tour guide who has the misfortune of living with a deeply conservative mother (Geraldine James, cornering the market in these roles after last year's Daphne) and within an ever more upwardly mobile clan who tamp down her modest achievements at every turn; the film's barely ten minutes old when she's overshadowed at her own birthday party by her sister-in-law's announcement that she's having twins. Enter Pascal (Johnny Flynn), local hunter-gatherer, and a man very briskly and economically established as having dirt under his fingernails and mud on his boots. Fascination ensues: here is exactly that wildness long purged from Moll's supposedly civilised household. Pascal attracts suspicion elsewhere, on account of his foreign name and the fact he looks and talks kinda funny, but he sets Moll to dreaming of open doors, and is soon offering to lead our girl by the hand into the woods - always a risky business when there is, as we're informed early on, a killer on the loose.

Identifying who that killer is will have to wait: Pearce's framing suggests that, like Pascal, he's possessed of a far more pressing urge to disrupt the haut-bourgeois complacency represented by mummy dearest. Beast has been touring the festival circuit for some months, seeking a place of its own, but that it should land in cinemas at this moment makes it a potent alternative to the garden fete cinema of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Pearce constructs his images not from cucumber sandwiches, but the earth itself: he uses it not just to bury his tale's bodies, but also to counter the sterility of the environment his heroine has been kept in. It yields one tremendous tableau - Moll reclining in bliss on a couch after being taken in a field by Pascal, legs spread, face begrimed, filthy fingers sullying mother's cushions - and plentiful transgressions besides: Moll stopping her tour bus to throw up at the roadside after recalling the grisly crime scene photos she's been shown, or spotting a stray hair sprouting from her neck, a sign of unruly life yanked out whenever the urge to conform is strong, left to grow when she's feeling more relaxed in her body.

Yet Pearce has ways of drawing us deep into this world. Bold sound design helps - we are surely not so far here from a British equivalent to Twin Peaks, the highest bar for dreamy coming-of-age tales - as do some of the most arresting casting choices of any recent Britfilm: even passing, one-scene day players - The Survivalist's Olwen Fouéré, as the faintly otherworldly detective drafted across the mainland to investigate the killings - linger long in the memory. With his patchy, lupine stubble and raspy, foghorn voice, Flynn is as puzzling a suitor for us as he might be for Moll, a Prince Charming we have (and owe it to ourselves) to figure out. Buckley, too, is a discovery, although at first I wondered whether she was being misapplied: she initially seems just a touch too RADA, too Rebecca Hall poised, to be as suggestible as the character has to be, and the suspicion lurks that Pearce might have been better served by someone more readily feral - one of Andrea Arnold's recent leads, perhaps. (Even Moll's red-riding dye job seems a shade too professionally and assiduously applied.)

Then, of course, I realised: Moll is every bit as much the princess as Emma Watson's Belle, tempted out of her safe space and into a whole new (in this case, social realist) context where your class can count against you, and innocence can be deadly. By this point, the performance had started to click and correct itself: you watch Buckley beginning to slough off some of those primmer, squarer edges, much as Moll decisively yanked off that hair, until the point, in the film's gripping final moments, where the character stands fully revealed before us. Her process of transformation remains tricky, and by no means for the faint of heart, but Pearce emerges from these two hours as an unusual and intriguing talent, apparently uninterested in Downtonisms, unlikely ever to cast Simperin' Lily James to ramp up his production budgets. Who needs her? In Buckley's Moll - messy, mucky and mixed-up, although not so much she cannot finally make out the wood from the trees - Beast may also just have given us the most compelling female character the British cinema has thrown up in decades.

Beast is now playing in selected cinemas.   

On demand: "Captain America: Civil War"

While Thor and the Hulk were away enjoying themselves in last year's gargantuan goof-off Thor: Ragnarok, the remaining Avengers were working through an almighty playground tiff. In theory, the throughline of Civil War, the third Captain America movie after 2011's limp origin story The First Avenger and 2014's vastly improved The Winter Soldier, is a growing split within the ranks of the home team. On one side, there is Robert Downey Jr.'s arms-dealing free marketeer Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man, who - in an uncharacteristic reversal, not terribly well explained in this script - has decided it's time for the Avengers to be made subject to third-party oversight; on the other, Chris Evans's previously moderate, old-school Steve Rogers, a.k.a. the Captain, who insists everyone should carry on much as before. In practice, for at least sixty of its 150 minutes, the film plays out like a noisier, not much more enthralling version of the any other business section at your local bowls club's annual general meeting.

This was the first of the thirteen Marvel Cinematic Universe titles that I'd left to the home entertainment sector - a combination of Euro 2016 and life meant I missed Civil War upon its initial theatrical outing - and small-screen viewing only pointed up what thin gruel these features are: once the spectacle that sends devotees scurrying to the IMAX on the opening weekend dwindles, these films really do amount to a whole lot of nothing. There is, granted, a new tension within the web of MCU enterprises, which follows from their very interconnectedness: what may seem to more forgiving fans like a suspension of the usual rules of narrative engagement will likely appear to everybody else as the kind of flouting and can-kicking to which corporate ventures have always been prone. Twenty minutes into Civil War, we're whisked off to a funeral for a character (Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter) who hasn't appeared in the film and, in fact, died somewhere else in the universe; subsequent events overlap with the narrative of this year's Black Panther; and at one point, we're even introduced to a plucky young fellow by the name of Peter Parker (Tom Holland, in his first outing as Spider-Man).

In short, these movies now only make complete narrative and emotional sense if you've brought into them as a package - a calculated, non-creative executive decision that sits closer to Stark's cutthroat capitalism than Rogers' compassionate conservatism, and which, on a basic level, demands the viewer hands over £30 rather than £10 to make head or tail of what's going on. Granted, you get more sprawl for your money, if sprawling is what you seek from your leisure time. The films' narrative diffuseness is rivalled only by their geographical diffuseness: this one leaps, with neither rhyme, reason nor visible onscreen jetlag, from Lagos to Bucharest to Berlin, destinations connected by nothing other than that they're all viable overseas territories. One of the reasons The Winter Soldier compelled so was that it spun a comparably self-contained Washington conspiracy yarn, one that could have occupied a single season of TV's Homeland. Civil War might have achieved something similar by locking Tony and the Cap'n in a room for two hours to sort out their differences, yet its mind and feet keep wandering elsewhere: for most of its first half, Cap is heading off in pursuit of boring old Bucky (Sebastian Stan), an escapee from the previous film, who never seems more than an inconsequential and aggravatingly tedious loose end.

You lose track of the fine actors - Hope Davis, John Slattery, William Hurt et al. - caught begging for scraps from the Marvel table to feed their families while the camera returns to Evans, whose baby-Costner handsomeness hasn't become any less bland or more interesting with age, and Stan, who seems no more or less anonymous whenever Bucky deigns to pop his helmet off. The insistence on keeping every character in play stems from a wider desire to sustain a wildly profitable yet grindingly monotonous formula: a setpiece every half-hour, no matter that it may be entirely devoid of peril so long as our heroes have powers enough to see off the gravest threat. Even when turned against themselves, these action figures would rather toss out glib, easily deflected quips than anything truly wounding. You can stay to the end of the end credits, and nobody - not even the film's pallid villain-in-chief (Daniel Brühl, at his most Brühlest) - dies: the board is reset, the pieces readied to go again, for a price. Again, I don't doubt you could admire the logistical savvy and technical clout, the sheer empty scale of it, but I will go into this week's Avengers: Infinity War, the next great synergasm of 21st century American cinema, clutching only to the vain hope that something will happen to shake this series up - and a newfound respect for those 20th century action movies that used their two hours to tell one story involvingly and conclusively.

Captain America: Civil War is now available to stream on Netflix.