"The Blueblack Hussar" (The Guardian 13/09/13)

The Blueblack Hussar (18) 99 mins ***

“Don’t tread on an ant/You’ll end up black and blue,” warned Adam and the Ants’ manifesto-writing hit “Antmusic”. Thirty-odd years later, Jack Bond’s intriguingly unguarded fly-on-the-Ant-wall doc finds Adam himself a mite stomped-on by mental health issues and music-biz vagaries: down but not quite out in Paris and London, he’s a neo-Napoleon, returning to punk in a bid to escape pop exile. Even the cringier moments – dollybird backing singers, dodgy new lyrics (“I want to f*** you in the ass”), Mark Ronson’s Pepe Le Pew hair – prove somehow revealing, and Ant remains a singular character: puckish and potty-minded, yet secretly sensitive, and possessed of a fine Bryan Ferry impersonation. Those expecting “Goody Two Shoes” will leave disappointed, but – liberated from the need to please anybody but himself – the dandy of yore seems, if not happy, then content, wearing his bruises and battlescars as he once did warpaint. 

The Blueblack Hussar screens in selected cinemas on Tuesday.

"Insidious: Chapter 2" (The Guardian 13/09/13)

Insidious: Chapter 2 (15) 105 mins ***

2011’s Insidious was one of those rattly New Horror funhouses that irked the purists yet loosed a lot of spare change from jumpier cinemagoers’ pockets. For this inevitable sequel, co-creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell return to their Saw playbook, installing spooked parents Patrick Wilson (complete with newly suspect squarejaw) and Rose Byrne (now the best hysteric in the movies) at grandma Barbara Hershey’s house before shifting backwards and sideways around them to establish a tricky continuum with the first film’s events. Again it tends to treat its gotcha moments as throwaway wind-ups designed to spill and thus sell more popcorn, but the narrative reframing – opening up a Twin Peaks-like multiverse in which further chapters may yet unfold – is ambitious, and Wan remains a crafty enough director to draw one’s eye warily across the frame. You shouldn’t feel quite so daft for flinching this time round.

Insidious: Chapter 2 is in cinemas nationwide.

"42" (The Guardian 13/09/13)

42 (12A) 128 mins ***

The week’s other sporting true story – how, in 1946, Jackie Robinson became major league baseball’s first African-American player – will evidently have had greater resonance across the Atlantic; its small, optimistic UK release is a bit like distributors asking audiences in Poughkeepsie to gather for The Laurie Cunningham Story. Still, writer-director Brian Helgeland has given it a handsome, faultlessly sincere treatment, sounding a few pragmatic notes – dramatising how Robinson (newcomer Chadwick Boseman) was initially recruited by Brooklyn Dodgers chief Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford, blustering) to tap an emergent black fanbase – before charting Robinson’s trial by and triumph over racist crowds, teammates and opposition managers; rousing climaxes, mostly well-earned, arrive every half-hour. Amid a roster of valuable supporting players (Christopher Meloni, Lucas Black, Alan Tudyk), Boseman hits his key scenes out of the park, making a swell couple with Shame’s Nicole Beharie, while Helgeland stages Robinson’s signature base-stealing with undeniable aplomb. 

42 opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Borrowed Time" (The Guardian 13/09/13)

Borrowed Time (15) 86 mins **

London Film School graduate Jules Bishop’s debut rearranges the usual geezer plot mechanics into a makeshift urban fairytale, more Children’s Film Foundation than Kidulthood. Theo Barklem-Biggs is the tracksuited drip coerced into burglary to settle his debts; Phil Davis the property’s owner, possessed of an 18^th century blunderbuss and various tatty life lessons – and really it’s only Davis’s unsentimental fleshing out of this whiskery, Steptoe-esque coot that saves the film from total familiarity. Boosted by colourful East End location work, it exudes a certain low-key, pootling charm, but often gets sloppy: who casts Perry Benson as a middle-class snob? 

Borrowed Time opens in selected cinemas from today.

"The Artist and the Model" (The Guardian 13/09/13)

The Artist and the Model (15) 105 mins **

Another movie romanticising the relationship between an aged artist and a younger woman; the usual male-gaze reservations apply, and somehow it’s only more dubious that here it’s a refugee (Aida Folch) being sheltered by a fictional French sculptor (Jean Rochefort) during the Occupation. Shot in that classic-era Blancanieves monochrome, Fernando Trueba’s film is initially ravishing to behold. Yet in the absence of much dramatic heft, such complacent beauty soon wears off; set it against Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, a far more rigorous interrogation of this dynamic, and it’s but a lightly shimmering afterthought.

The Artist and the Model opens in selected cinemas from today.

From the archive: "Masti"

The Hindi film Masti takes as its starting point the (terrible) old joke about there being three rings for a man upon settling down: the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and suffering. A trio of uni friends, once committed bachelors, reunite almost a decade after graduation, and vow to get away from their variously loyal, controlling and devout spouses by each starting an affair; the real trouble arises when they all contrive to fall for the exact same woman. Though its fantasy sequences are very Scrubs or Ally McBeal, the dubious sexual politics, speeded-up bits, references to "blue films" and exaggerated sound effects could only have derived from extended exposure to 1970s-era sitcoms.

Indeed, Masti is resolutely unsophisticated, with lower-than-usual Bollywood production values, and playing so broad it barely fits on the screen: compared to the range and subtlety typically exhibited by Shah Rukh Khan, the three leads here (Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani and Ritesh Deshmukh) are more like the minor players - the Eddie Kaye Thomas and Thomas Ian Nicholases - of the American Pie features. The comic nightmare of the second half - introducing the formidable Inspector Sikander (Ajay Devgan) - is handled with slightly more assurance, but this is still the kind of piece where even as dead bodies begin to line the plot, director Indra Kumar is attempting to squeeze in yet another married-man-mistaken-for-gay-man joke. Exhaustingly shrill and hectoringly camp, as warnings against playing away go, it comes in somewhere between Eyes Wide Shut and John Wayne Bobbitt's Frankenpenis. Only with (not bad) songs.

(April 2004)

Masti is available on DVD through Eros; a belated sequel, Grand Masti, opens in cinemas nationwide today.

From the archive: "Hellboy II: The Golden Army"

Here's a welcome, if not wholly successful, franchise salvage job. Derived from the Mike Mignola comics, 2004's first Hellboy did very little business in a summer where the more conventional Spider-Man 2 was breaking box-office records - a pity, as it set out one of the few recent story universes that felt as though there was more for sequels to explore. The film performed steadily on DVD, receiving a boost - and the full Special Edition treatment - two years later when director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth took the cinema by storm. Now del Toro has used the clout afforded him after the latter movie to jolt Mignola's characters back into life for Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

For the uninitiated: Hellboy is the codename of a creature raised from the fiery depths by Nazis during a World War II experiment, only to be liberated by American troops and brought up by an English professor to do good rather than evil - and he's grown increasingly pissed off that the rewards for so doing are far less. On screen, he's a big red hulk played by Ron Perlman who stomps out crime in Manhattan, assisted by an amphibian fish thing and his pyrokinetic (and, in this instalment, pregnant) girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair). Evil is represented by the former boyband star Luke Goss, looking like a cross between Marilyn Manson and Legolas as a disgruntled underworld prince hellbent on turning the stuff of bedtime stories - trolls, tooth fairies and beanstalks - against New York's citizens.

Del Toro's forte has always been using effects to bolster his stories, rather than merely as money shots for the trailers. Though his latest has been shot on Eastern European locations using British and American actors and a considerable amount of digital work, The Golden Army nonetheless constitutes a seamlessly integrated universe - to the extent that, in a cherishably self-reflexive moment, the eight-foot-high, gobstopper-red Hellboy can proclaim, while walking through a marketplace populated by the habituees of the Star Wars cantina, "Nobody's looking at us. We blend right in!" (As one of his entourage is a faceless German in a dining suit - "over und out!" - this is quite the claim.)

Yet elsewhere, The Golden Army can appear so integrated that it sometimes seems as though a saturation point of some kind is being reached. The first Hellboy offered a rookie FBI agent as a way into this world - sacrilege for the fanboys, for whom this seemed a regrettable concession to the mainstream, but a useful startpoint for the franchise, allowing an outsider's eyes to acclimatise to these most distinctive of environments. The wow factor is, if anything, even greater here, but after a tremendously enjoyable opening half-hour, the assembled spectacle begins to swamp the finer details of the plot. Is it possible for a film to be too imaginative?

Still, if I couldn't tell you exactly what was going on during the latter stages of The Golden Army, it sure as hell looks and sounds fantastic. Del Toro is capable of effortless felicities - a sound cut from the young Hellboy brushing his teeth to the footsteps of an approaching army; a gunshot that momentarily appears to shatter the camera lens - and has a deft way of deflecting false sentiment. (The best line is "I'm not a baby, I'm a tumour.") Every element on screen, from the fish-eye contact lenses the amphibian sports to the computer-generated fairy poo and malevolent beanstalk curd the hero encounters has been lovingly overseen, while the ending sets up the intriguing possibility of a third film in which Hellboy becomes a Helldad. Could Hellboy perhaps be the new Shrek?

(July 2008)

Hellboy II: The Golden Army screens on ITV1 tonight at 10.15pm.