2/10

Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice Review

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I’m a few days late behind this one. Everyone and their dog has been shouting their piece about Batman V Superman, it almost feels unnecessary to jump in this late. But it’s the biggest film of the year so far so I better review it.

Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice stars Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeremy Irons and Gal Gadot and is directed by Zack Snyder. BvS follows Batman (Affleck) as he tries to put down Superman (Cavill) in order to keep the world safe.

Let’s try and start with the good. A lot of the cast do good work. Ben Affleck fights off all of the criticism that was levelled at him when he was announced (go back and look at those tweets, it’s appalling how people attacked him) and turns in a very good performance as Bruce Wayne. Yes Bruce Wayne, any buffed up guy with a strong jaw and a smoker’s voice can play Batman and sadly he’s hardly in the film. Henry Cavill stands around being wooden for most of the run time, which is only heightened by the complete lack of chemistry between him and on-screen girlfriend Amy Adams. Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman does nothing until the final five minutes and Jesse Eisenberg is completely off as a mincing, stuttering Lex Luthor. The only really good actor is Jeremy Irons as Alfred, and that’s mainly down to Irons being a superb in basically any film he does.

And…that’s about it. Let’s get to work on the bad. EVERYTHING ELSE.

The main problem with the film is it’s script. In short, it’s ridiculous. Batman versus Superman is not a film title, it’s a scene. We already saw the “God versus Rich Badass” scenario in the first Avengers film, it was Thor against Iron Man. Although here, we don’t even get that. For a good two-thirds of the film it’s Bruce Wayne versus Clark Kent instead. Some lines, especially the one that makes Batman and Superman join up against another bad guy who pops out of nowhere (mainly for the fans, because NO ONE else will have heard of him) is hysterically dumb and contrived, it feels more like a spoof of superhero films than one that’s meant to be taken seriously. When we finally get to the last half an hour Zack Snyder remembers he was meant to be making a superhero film and tries to fit in as much explosions and punching as he can, until it becomes desensitising.

Another problem is the film’s length. BvS is 151 minutes long, way too long for what the film comes down to. Apparently there is an extra thirty minutes that Snyder took out of the cinema release, I guess that’s where all the plot is because there is nothing but the thinnest of plots in those two and half hours. It makes the film feel stuck in a weird limbo; it’s both overlong and too edited.

It’s wide knowledge that the film has been gutted, bringing it down from an 18 to a 12a rating and especially in the fight scenes the editing is extensive. It reminds me of Quantum of Solace, there is no pain. People are being thrown through walls and bones are breaking, but there is no “feedback”, no visceral connection between audience and screen. Again, it becomes comical about how much violence gets dished out and how little we feel involved in the action.

And since DC and Warner Bros. are wanting to set up ANOTHER BLOODY SUPERHERO FRANCHISE, BvS houses several little Easter Eggs as to who will be in their next two to three films. It’s so tiresome nowadays, why not focus on making the film that’s actually out good rather than just cutting your losses and trying to make money back with your next couple of films?

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is plainly bad. It was insanely overhyped, it’s badly in need of an editor and manages to make a film about two of the best crimefighters going toe-to-toe with each other incredibly boring. I know we’re still in the beginning of 2016, but I bet this will be on my Worst-Of list at the end of the year.

Score: 2/10 A fan service film if ever I saw one.

Point Break Review

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One of my favourite quotes on filmmaking is from director Jim Jarmusch; “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels with your imagination.” While people might be quick to dismiss it, those who know their film history can argue the difference. We see this idea in thousands of celebrated films; Star Wars, Daniel Craig’s James Bond films and nearly all of Tarantino’s filmography. Sadly, it’s the same reason why shoddy remakes are made as well. What a coincidence then, that a remake of Point Break is out this week. How does it stack up against the original?

Point Break stars Edgar Ramirez, Luke Bracey, Ray Winstone and Teresa Palmer and is directed by Ericson Core. Based on the 1991 film of the same name, the film follows FBI Agent Johnny Utah (Bracey) as he goes undercover to stop a gang of extreme sports athletes from disrupting the world economy.

The script is atrocious. While the original had some moments of “surfer dude” talk about fighting against “the man” and “the system”, the remake just goes overboard, with every two seconds being filled with conversations about being “one with the earth” and “fear is the master, you are the slave”. It’s less of a script and more a collection of inspirational bumper stickers. The times when it isn’t the surfer dude mantra, is expository, leading to some hilariously bad lines. It feels like so much of an afterthought, I wouldn’t be surprised if the action scenes weren’t even shot for the film, instead a script and additional scenes were created after to get it into cinemas.

The action scenes were promising at first, but most are rather boring. The remake tries to one-up the original by staging several extreme sports; snowboarding, wing-suit gliding, base-jumping, free climbing, motocross and of course, surfing. They are linked together by something called the Osaki 8, a mythical set of eight ordeals to honour the forces of nature. This is obviously the films major selling point, and sure, it’s nice to see some breathtaking scenery, but even in what are supposed to be the high-octane scenes of the film, it falls flat. I’ve linked it back to the characters, we don’t care about them. We haven’t warmed to them so we aren’t bothered that they are coming so close to death. In fact they don’t care either. One of them dies half way through and literally after a ten second scene of mourning him, they are back to partying, drinking and having sex. It’s feels so absurd that I was shaking my head in disbelief.

It gets worse when the film tries to be Point Break though. There is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the Ex-Presidents scene in the original, this time with Barack Obama, Vladamir Putin and George W. Bush instead of Reagan, Nixon, Johnson and Carter, and obviously the film ends with the 50-Year Storm wave. But the worst moment in the film is the re-enactment of, in the words of Nick Frost, “firing your gun up into the air while screaming argh” scene. Once I saw Utah pick up a gun, all I could think was, “Don’t do it, please don’t do it.” It’s ridiculous and out-of-place and really doesn’t make sense in the film. There is none of the bromance of Reeves and Swayze from the original, so it makes no sense for Utah to not just shoot Bodhi where he stands. I would actually be more lenient on the film if it wasn’t a Point Break remake. If it had changed a few of its characters and it’s story aspects then it could have been passably enjoyable. That’s how The Fast And The Furious started out and look how well that’s done.

The French director Jean-Luc Goddard once said: ‘It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.” Director Ericson Core has taken Point Break to the depths of cinema hell. Don’t waste your money, I’ve haven’t even seen Deadpool yet and I bet it’s more enjoyable.

Score: 2/10 Take the film out of the cinema and shove it down the toilet.

(I did go and see Deadpool and it was more entertaining. Read the review here).

The Last Witch Hunter Review

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Actor pet project films are always interesting to watch. Vin Diesel, being a large Dungeons and Dragons player, talked with screen-writers to try and get a big-budget adaptation of his favourite past-time into theatres, and finally, after three years, they made it. Does Diesel’s passion for table-top role playing games come through in the film?

The Last Witch Hunter stars Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie, Elijah Wood and Michael Caine and is directed by Breck Eisner. the story follows Kaulder (Diesel) an immortal witch hunter who works for the secret society The Axe and Cross, to defend the human world against those in the Witching World who would attempt to destroy it.

The film starts with a very Dungeons and Dragons style battle set in the Dark Ages, as Kaulder and other hunters attempt to rid the world of the Witch Queen. It’s a fun opening, full of swords, bows and arrows and magic spells and it also shows us what Vin Diesel looks like with a full head of hair. This Dark Ages setting though is soon dropped, with the Witch Queen’s apparent death and Kaulder being cursed with immortality, so the film transports us to modern day New York, where Kaulder is still fighting to keep the worlds of witches and humans separate. It’s similar to Men In Black or R.I.P.D. in terms of a two-world story but it never comes anywhere close to being as good as those two.

The acting is really quite poor. Vin Diesel is playing the same character as always, but the main problem is that he seems to be trying to blend all his words together. It sounds like he’s gargling gravel, without hardly any sounds being recognisable as words. Michael Caine and Elijah Wood seem to be retreading their roles of Alfred and Frodo from Batman and LOTR respectively, but both look bored to be in The Last Witch Hunter. Caine especially, who speaks in a monotone voice and doesn’t change his facial expression once in the film.

The story, despite a few good moments of lore-building, is very undercooked. Even with all the lore that the story tries to cram into the film, none of its engaging. I fell asleep for a good five minutes in the middle of the film and when I woke up I didn’t care if I had missed anything important. The problem I can trace it all back to is Vin Diesel’s character Kaulder being an immortal warrior. The film tries to play Kaulder off as the best fighter in the world (much like another Vin Diesel character, Riddick), but that doesn’t make him empathetic.

The best heroes are ones where we can see they are in peril. Characters like John McClane (except in Die Hard 5) or any one of Jackie Chan’s characters, we empathise with them because we can sense the danger they are in. Even Wolverine in the X-Men series, despite being immortal there is always at least one character who can best him in each film. Kaulder on the other hand, is always on top of the situation and never seems to have any trouble taking down wave after wave of enemies. Even though the film tries to de-power him in the final act, the stakes never feel high enough that we think Kaulder will lose.

All in all, The Last Witch Hunter had the crux of a good, if overused idea at its heart. But a weak script, abysmal acting and an un-sympathetic main character make it one of the most boring to watch. I would give the film a lower score, but it doesn’t actively offend me. It’s just tedious.

Score: 2/10 Vin Diesel can do better than this.

Pixels Review

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I wasn’t really looking forward to going to see Pixels. I had read and heard lots of reviews that were slating the film and I wasn’t feeling particularly motivated to go and watch it. But, as it was on its final few days in the cinema, I thought I may as well go for the sake of film journalism.

Pixels stars Adam Sandler, John Gad, Kevin James, Peter Dinklage and Michelle Monaghan and is directed by Chris Columbus. After aliens misinterpret a collection of 80s video games in a NASA probe as a declaration of war, it’s up to veteran gamer Sam (Sandler) and his friends to save the world.

The acting (if I can even call it that) is all over the shop. Adam Sandler as usual is just playing himself, an overgrown man-child who never knows when to shut his mouth. According to several people in the film he’s meant to be a super-smart guy who invented gadgets at university but the way Sandler saunters around the screen, it conveys the exact opposite. Josh Gad is alright as the more socially awkward gamer Ludlow, always clutching at Sandler’s sleeve for support, but it quickly turns into him screaming at an insanely high pitch. Peter Dinklage is wasted in the film, I feel a little bit sorry that he had to perform some of the worst lines ever committed to paper (and then don’t feel sorry because he probably only did it for the money).

The script is the main problem with the film. The story has thousands of plot holes and doesn’t have any coherence in its tone or logic. For instance, Kevin James, who plays the President of the United States (because that’s totally not self-aggrandising) in the beginning says that his wife hates him, but throughout the film they are seen to be smiling and having fun together. It’s as if the two screenwriters, Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling wrote the script over a lazy weekend and then never revised it, just giving it straight to the actors on the first day.

The jokes are the same childish attempt of humour that were in Grown-Ups (1 and 2) and can be seen coming from a mile off. Many jokes are made at the expense of the three gamers, most of which are based around the tired, outdated stereotype that all gamers are basement-dwellers that still live with their parents. For a film that is trying to fly the flag for video games, Pixels instead just demeans the audience that it’s trying to pander to. the film also is laden with homophobic and racist jokes, with an entire sequence where Josh Gad is screaming at a platoon of Navy SEALs, using homophobic slurs to try and pump them up so they can take on the alien video game characters.

Although, these jokes are nothing compared to how the film depicts women. The film obviously doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test (although that’s not a mark of quality), since all the women are either crying in the closet while drinking wine, demonised by their husbands or are a literal trophy, given to the gamers after beating the aliens at Donkey Kong. It’s cringe-worthy to see a film in 2015 that still treats women as the tropes of the damsel in distress or as objects that are given in exchange for good work.

While there were a few lines that I smiled at, such as when Professor Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man appears and tries to appeal to the alien version of Pac-Man. It’s a really nice scene, but it’s swiftly ruined by a crass bout of profanity when Pac-Man bites his creator’s hand off. This was my favourite scene of the film, until I started reading up on the film for this review, when it was revealed that it wasn’t the real Professor Iwatani, and instead just an actor. Knowing that it isn’t the actual creator having a sweet moment with his creation, the scene is robbed of all the impact that it managed to have.

To be honest, Pixels isn’t Adam Sandler’s worst film. But with its uninvolving action sequences, lame jokes and it somehow seeming to drag on forever (despite being only 106 minutes), Pixels is one of the dullest of the year.

Score: 2/10 It will bring you to tears by how boring it is.

Hitman: Agent 47 Review

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I believe I am a pretty big video game fan. Being born in the 90s I grew up with a least one console in my home during my childhood years. One of my favourite franchises is the Hitman series, a long running stealth game franchise about being…. well a hitman. Be it the games, books or even the first Hitman film starring Timothy Olyphant (which is a guilty pleasure of mine), I love the franchise and it’s protagonist, so when I heard about a reboot I was all for it.

Hitman: Agent 47 stars Rupert Friend, Hannah Ware, Zachary Quinto, Thomas Kretschmann and Ciaran Hinds and is directed by Aleksander Bach. The story follows Agent 47 (Friend) a genetically engineered clone who is out to stop an organisation known only as the Syndicate from obtaining a woman with very special skills.

As always, let’s start with the good. The best actors by far are Rupert Friend and Ciaran Hinds. I believe Friend is the best on-screen adaptation of 47, he looks the part with his shaved head and barcode tattoo, he walks and talks just like the character should and has the presence of “you-have-no-idea-who-you-just-messed-with”, which is something I felt Timothy Olyphant was lacking in his portrayal. Ciaran Hinds is also good in the film, playing a retired scientist who knows a lot more about 47s past that he’s letting on. To be honest Hinds is brilliant in basically any film he’s in. I mean, he made the second Tomb Raider film fun to watch.

The film at times looks stunning, especially when the third act rolls around and the characters head to Singapore. The camera swoops around the almost futuristic city, soaking in the beautiful architecture on display. A key scene in the third act takes place at the famous Gardens by the Bay is spectacular to look at, as well as a few shots of the amazing infinity pool at the Parkroyal at Pickering hotel. The finale, which takes place on top of a helipad, also uses the city for it’s stunning backdrop. These shots of the city at night are beautiful and it fits straight into the globetrotting story that Hitman is used to.

Now for everything else. The rest of the actors are appalling. Some, like Thomas Kretschmann just look bored with the material, others like Hannah Ware and Zachary Quinto are just hamming it up making bad dialogue sound even worse. Quinto is especially bad, giving off a wide-eyed mad dog look for most of the film. Ware is monosyllabic and her primary dialogue is just the f-bomb repeated at varying degrees of volume.

The fight scenes are also below par, feeling more like action for action’s sake. Shoddy CGI is used to make bodies crumple for long falls, barely hidden stunt doubles are used, and the camera is shaking around and cutting around ten times per second. When will directors learn that this doesn’t look good on screen? With the camera cutting every time there is an impact, the fights loses any sense of momentum and geography, to a point where during one scene I clocked out for a couple of minutes because I was so bored. The only fight scene that is worth any merit is at the end, where the film takes a leaf out of John Woo’s book by setting everything to slow-motion, giving 47 his two trademark silver pistols and letting us watch the almost balletic gunplay unfold, with some synchronised shooting finishing off the scene when a sidekick comes to help him.

Most of the film’s problems do come from the script, which feels like it’s been written by someone who was brought up solely on a diet of 80s and 90s action films starring either Schwarzenegger, Stallone or Van Damme. The writer, Skip Woods is the genius that also wrote the screenplay for films such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, A Good Day To Die Hard and the other Hitman film. While the film does have some fun little Easter eggs for fans of the franchise with recurring characters, locations and assignments from the games, as well as a few lines of funny throwaway dialogue to liven up some dead actions set pieces, the rest was a collage of action clichés that made me shake my head in disbelief.

It shouldn’t be hard to write a story for a good Hitman film. With hundreds of pages of great storytelling from both the games and the books, Skip Woods could have created something that was fun and enjoyable, or at least competent. There are gaping plot holes throughout the film, as well as some sub-plots that go nowhere apart from a few lines. There are even a few teasers and an end credit scene that hint at a possible sequel and franchise. Even as a die-hard Hitman fan, I am very apathetic about Hitman returning to the screen.

In conclusion, Hitman: Agent 47 is not just a generic action film with dull characters and shoddy fight scenes; it’s an insult to the character of Agent 47 and the people who created him.

Score: 2/10 The first film was better.

Child 44 Review

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After I finished watching Child 44, I was exhausted. Was I exhausted by a film with a compelling story that made me sit on the edge of my seat for the entire run time? No, quite the opposite in fact, as I was battling to stay awake.

Child 44 is about an officer in the Soviet Union called Leo (played by Tom Hardy), who after a grisly child murder is committed, takes it upon himself to catch the killer. The film also stars Noomi Rapace, Gary Oldman, Vincent Cassel, Jason Clarke, Fares Fares and Paddy Considine. And with a cast list that good the film fails to deliver anything spectacular.

I did manage to read the first couple of chapters of Child 44 before I saw the film, and when reading it I thought the story was exciting and gripping. It’s a shame then that it doesn’t become anyone of those things when transported to the cinema screen.

To go back to actors for a second, performances from nearly all of the actors involved are very wooden, most notably Tom Hardy, who looks bored in his role as Leo. The only actor that seems to be bringing anything to the screen is Gary Oldman, who in the fleeting few scenes where he actually gets some lines of dialogue delivers them with some much needed character. All the actors don Russian accents in the film, but these fluctuate as well, with Hardy giving a thick accent, while other actors such as Paddy Considine and Charles Dance not displaying any Russian accent, leaving the film feeling stilted. Also, the film hardly uses any of some of its bigger names, the aforementioned Considine and Dance, along with Vincent Cassel and Jason Clarke, all of whom have hardly any time on screen.

The director, Daniel Espinosa directed one of my favourite films of recent times, Safe House, starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds. However, looking at Child 44, you would be hard pressed to even think they were made by the same director. Espinosa makes some odd choices during the film, with extreme close ups and shaky handheld camerawork littering the first half of the film. Fortunately the camerawork becomes a bit more coherent as the film goes on, but descends back into jumbled messes for two uninspired fight scenes. It’s shame because Espinosa knows how to create well shot fight scenes, (just watch Safe House), but here he fails spectacularly, giving us no clear shot of the action.

The films length is also a problem. The film is just over two hours long, which when coupled with the uninvolving action on film left me at certain points to nod off for a couple of seconds. It was through sheer determination that I managed to stay awake, just to get through the film to see if it would eventually get any better, it did not. There are certain scenes that feel over padded, and maybe they were sticking close to the source material by including it in the final cut, but it just fills the film with needless subplots that don’t go anywhere.

To add onto that, the story is a grab bag of ideas, corruption, child murder, redemption, but none are carried throughout the entire film, they’re just picked up and dropped whenever the film feels like it. This leads to an overall confusing storyline, with characters making revelations without any prior knowledge, making certain plot points feel more like deus ex machina.

In summary, Child 44 has a formidable cast list, but even that is not enough to save weak direction and a dull script, leading to a dud of a film. I might say if you’re a fan of the book you might get some enjoyment from seeing it on the big screen, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Score: 2/10 Don’t bother wasting your time on this one.