Review Category: DVD/Blu Ray

(Please don’t) stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. A former government operative locked away for a massacre he didn’t commit is taken out of prison and thrown into a reality TV show, in which he must battle a series of themed killers in order to win his freedom. Yes, that’s the plot of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cheesy 1987 actioner The Running Man. It’s also the plot of The Elimination Game (titled Turkey Shoot elsewhere, presumably changed here in the hope that someone will think it’s a sequel to The Imitation Game – I’d love to see their reaction).

But there’s nothing inherently wrong in re-using stories, right? We’ve been recycling and adapting narratives since ancient civilisations first borrowed bits of each other’s myths. The thing is, The Running Man had things to recommend about it – not least that it was ahead of its time. In a world where The Hunger Games has the dystopian reality telly thing covered (and has it covered rather well), this whole concept, particularly when nothing new is added to it, feels sadly old-hat.

Nor does The Elimination Game do a good job with this story. In Dominic Purcell, it’s found a star somehow less emotive than Arnie (he narrows his eyes at one point – that’s the extent of his acting) and without the cult appeal. The action sequences are unengaging, largely because Purcell’s Rick Tyler seems to put in little to no effort. The odds should be stacked against him, but he never takes a scratch and always seems to have the racial stereotype of the day lying dead before you realise the fight’s begun. At one point, an enemy faces him, raises her guns, and is immediately blown up by friendly fire. Scene over. Yawn.

Making this worse is the fact that director Jon Hewitt and his writing partner Belinda McClory seem uninterested in exploring Rick as a character – with his backstory needlessly held back for a predictable (and yet totally unbelievable) twist, we’re given no reason to care whether it’s him or his opponents who inevitably end up dead. The non-stop use of CCTV, news footage, and incredibly annoying presenters is also a problem – it alienates us from him as a character (at one point, the film cuts to a news report mere seconds into a car chase scene), making the act of following Rick’s journey as empty as if we actually were watching this reality TV show.

The Elimination Game takes a story that has been told before and tells it again, badly. With a character-less lead character, action-less action scenes, and nothing creative to add to the genre, it’s a difficult one to recommend.

Special Features: Trailer

THE ELIMINATION GAME / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: JON HEWITT / SCREENPLAY: JON HEWITT, BELINDA MCCLORY / STARRING: DOMINIC PURCELL, VIVA BIANCA, ROBERT TAYLOR, NICHOLAS HAMMOND / RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 12TH

 

It’s been a long time since Michael Douglas made the world cower at his tailored shoes in Wall Street. Not content with having another go at Gekko in Wall Street 2, Douglas is again cast as a shady businessman in Beyond the Reach; a man who is more likely to make you tremble than the average suited and booted psychopath who works in finance.

When Douglas’ successful company owner Madec wants something, he gets it. If he wants to go hunting out in the middle of the desert with his imported rifle and 6-wheel off-road vehicle, then he merely bribes the local sheriff, pays the deputy to take him out shooting and sets off into the unforgiving sun.

Deputy Ben (Jeremy Irvine) has just lost his girlfriend as she has headed out of the dead end town to go off for more schooling. Girl troubles are soon the least of Ben’s worries, though, as Madec accidentally shoots Old Charlie, a local drifter, and decides that as he has a huge business deal about to go through, a death on his hands would not be good for PR. When Ben chooses not to go along with Madec’s plans, the deputy becomes the hunted as Madec would rather watch him die than have his accident revealed.

Beyond the Reach has a neat little premise but does not have faith in the attention of its audience. The build up and the relationship between Madec and Ben is interesting and, as it hits its first major plot point, it has the potential to be a gripping thriller. However, the relationship between the two men could have been developed, moving beyond merely a bit of bonding over Wall-E references. The morality of taking bribes and hunting for sport could also have been explored further, but Beyond the Reach goes straight for action.

Just as it seems that the script has settled into a slow-burn survival thriller, the plot is packed full of unlikely incidents that keeps things moving at a decent pace but also strain credibility far beyond the breaking point. The cinematography and editing accentuate the heat and the danger of exposure that Ben is facing, but slowly dying of thirst or exhaustion would not an action-packed film make.

Instead, Douglas slowly goes full maniac, acting like a complete psychotic while throwing dynamite at Ben, shouting lines like “It’s your birthday, light the candle”. If that sounds ridiculous, wait until the script descends into a third act that is swift, underwhelming and sadly beyond ludicrous.

Jeremy Irvine is decent enough as the hunted young lover boy haunted by flashbacks to happier times with his girlfriend, while Douglas is clearly having a good time as a truly ruthless business-bastard. Beyond the Reach tries to inject a little subtext about business ethics, but it’s too little too late. What could have been a smart, tense thriller devolves into something so silly, you might think the screenwriter has been staring at the sun too long.

BEYOND THE REACH / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: JEAN-BAPTISTE LEONETTI / SCREENPLAY: STEPHEN SUSCO / STARRING: MICHAEL DOUGLAS, JEREMY IRVINE, MARTIN PALMER, RONNY COX / RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 12TH

 

Magi is set in a world that spins on RPG mechanics – dungeons, builds and combos et al – without needing to rely on the tried and tested trapped-in-game trope. An exercise in world-building, the immersive setting is rich in history and thoroughly fleshed out, expanding on the first 25-episode series.

An alternate recreation of the ancient Old World, the lavish architecture, textiles and jewellery richly conjure a sense of time and place, and the attention to the tiniest details is inspired. The Middle Eastern setting especially benefits from the chirpy animation and dreamy environments. The ethos to environment is explored twofold in the writing and characters. There’s opulence to the design, with wardrobes that juggle style and functionality; a turban unfurling into a flying blanket, or a bracelet filled with life essence.

The sense of community and culture is evocative of Fairy Tail, and the depth of characters and their reams of backstory are easy to get invested in. Aladdin is something of a departure from your atypical lead, goofy, for sure, but also childishly curious and obstinately determined. But then, no one character takes precedence over the other. Alibaba is all gawky arrogance, while Morgiana has a steely resolve and gracefully bears the pain of her past.

In true fantasy tradition, the central friendship is divided, with each branching off for their own journey of fulfilment, betterment or discovery. In a quest for knowledge, Aladdin enlists in Magnostadt academy, a beautiful establishment that gives Hogwarts a run for its money. Alibaba, desperate to perform a total djinn equip, sets off to become a gladiator. Morgiana attempts to find out what became and remains of her people. The plotting here is well paced, devoting enough episodes to each character without swamping the wider events, instead using each person as a way to further the narrative, both on a personal and worldly level.

Magi is a series that frequently surprises and begs its viewers to look a little differently at events, and perhaps those of other shows. Nor does it shy away from the realities and iniquities of the world and its history, with slavery, sex trafficking and the grim reality of piracy at the forefront. The humour works as ballast, tempering and not shirking these darker parts.

If show’s like Fairy Tail and One Piece appeal to you but the intimidating episode count puts you off, then Magi is perfect, doing in 50 episodes what other shows take hundreds to fill. Left on the cusp of war, the second curve can’t come soon enough.

Special Features: Opening and closing

MAGI: THE KINGDOM OF MAGIC PART 1 / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: KOJI MASUNARI / SCREENPLAY: HIROYUKI YOSHINO / STARRING: ISHIHARA, KAORI, HARUKA TOMATSU, YUUKI KAJI, RYOUHEI KIMURA / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 

Supernatural horror flick, The Lazarus Effect follows a small team of medical researchers, led by Frank (Duplass) and his fiancée Zoe (Wilde), who have achieved the impossible by being able to revive the dead. After a successful, but unauthorised, experiment on a lifeless animal, they are ready to make their work known to the public. Before they can do this however, their deans learn of what they’ve done and their project gets shut down. Determined to continue no matter what, they break back into their lab to try and recreate the experiment, but Zoe is accidentally killed during the attempt, leading Frank to test the process on her. Zoe is revived, but the team don’t realise that they have unleashed a supernatural force that’s bubbling from inside her.

The concept of playing God and bringing the dead back to life is an old trope that dates back to the great sci-fi/horror works of yore like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and it’s a simple conceit that works when its done right. However, in the case of The Lazarus Effect, that idea gets awash in a sea of bland mediocrity and zero innovation, and suffers from the classic age-old problem of having a great setup and a failed result. It completely squanders any potential it had going for it, and makes way for a movie that feels longer than its 83-minute running time that would easily put its audience to sleep despite the loud bangs that are seeded throughout.

As far as the horror aspect goes, the film recycles a lot of tropes that have been done so much better in other works and goes for the tired “quiet, quiet, quiet, bang!” syndrome that has been worked to death in recent horror films like Sinister and The Conjuring. When, at certain points during the film, some characters sneak up behind someone and shout “Boo!”, you know things aren’t going well. It’s also horrendously paced, as the film drags things out and becomes too much of a slow burner, and could’ve benefited from being faster paced, plus the soundtrack is abominable.

The film also does the unspeakable crime of wasting a completely talented cast and giving them bland one-dimensional characters that you neither care nor root for; Olivia Wilde, who has proven to be solid actress when given great works like Drinking Buddies and TV’s House, struggles to breathe life to proceedings and clearly deserves so much better than what’s given to her. Others like Mark Duplass, Sarah Bolger, Donald Glover and Evan Peters are also left to flounder around thanks to a lifeless and witless script that doesn’t give them much range or proper characterisation.

Whilst The Lazarus Effect boasts a talented cast and has a great setup that shows a lot of promise, yet the film completely wastes it all on bland characters, dull pacing, tedious exposition and tirelessly recycled plot devices. This could’ve been so much more than what it actually is, and that is a real shame.

THE LAZARUS EFFECT / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: DAVID GELB / SCREENPLAY: LUKE DAWSON, JEREMY SLATER / STARRING: OLIVIA WILDE, MARK DUPLASS, EVAN PETERS / RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 19TH

When a young family in the French countryside are attacked and killed by a hulking figure, a huge and hairy man is taken into custody where a trio of public defendants are assigned to his case where they attempt to ascertain the truth about him.

As should be apparent from the film’s very title if not the plot rundown, we’re talking werewolves. It’s a little subtler than your average monster flick, at least in the beginning, where we’re treated to a scientific deconstruction of lycanthropy, equating aspects of the associated physical characteristics with various genetic conditions.

As the film begins there is a distinctive found footage feel to it, but for once out of a degree of necessity rather than an overplayed stylistic gimmick, as a handheld recording shows the initial attack while police recordings and news reports swiftly bring us up to speed with developments. The style is soon abandoned once the story proper gets underway, but the film nevertheless keeps a close-up shakeycam technique that maintains the feel of found footage despite it being clear there’s nobody actually recording it.

The film takes a swift and intense change of direction at the halfway point, after which anything about the film that could have set it apart, including a possible conspiracy surrounding the suspect’s arrest, is abandoned for some standard action sequences and sub-par CGI gore. A few moments stick in your mind such as computer effects subtly augmenting physical transformation or one character who thinks he might have become afflicted collecting a necessary genetic sample by slicing through his eyeball with a shard of glass, but for the most part it’s nothing you’ve not seen two dozen times before.

Despite William Brent Bell and Matthew Peterman also being the director and co-writers of the boring (and infuriatingly climaxed) The Devil Inside and the annoying Stay Alive, with Wer they had the potential to create something distinctive and different. It’s just a shame they didn’t.

WER / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: WILLIAM BRENT BELL / SCREENPLAY: WILLIAM BRENT BELL, MATTHEW PETERMAN / STARRING: A.J. COOK, SEBASTIAN ROCHE, VIK SAHAY, SIMON QUATERMAN, BRIAN SCOTT O’CONNOR / RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 19TH

 

The ambitious project from Kim Longinotto, Love is All is a strange compendium of a century of romance, love and courtship, but more than anything, it’s a montage of film clips from feature films, documentaries and public information films that were taken entirely from the last century, all held together by a soundtrack from Richard Hawley. It explores love in all its forms across the most turbulent decades, including the very first kiss captured on film, the trials and tribulations love and how it impacts families, and the free love and gay liberation.

As the film goes, and as we listen to Hawley’s beautiful accompaniment, we are taken through what feels like a dizzying montage of archive surprises and delights, which include the comedic innocence of A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), the manic energy of Piccadilly (1929), Don’t Be Like Brenda (1973) with its cautionary tale story, and charming cross-cultural fun of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). During the course of these clips, you see a kaleidoscopic change of attitudes and moods towards the concepts of race, gender, sexuality and multi-culturalism, all handled in an ambitious and natural manner.

This is the kind of film that will struggle to find an audience and some people might lose patience with it, but as it stands, the film is ultimately charming in its own right. On the one hand, it has an underlying political thread about the way in which social attitudes have changed over the course of the twentieth century, yet it also cleverly shows how love has also changed with the times. The film takes all these footage pieces from what is an extraordinary archive and puts them together in a way that finds interesting connections between them, despite the fact that some is from cinema whilst others are from public information films.

Love is All is like watching a living, breathing personal poem about the changing nature of love and courtship over a hundred years, and Hawley’s melodic voice makes the film all the more nostalgic, moving and heartbreaking. Everything is brought together extremely well through the music, the montage works effectively well, yet despite that, there is a story being told within that musical montage. There’s clearly an agenda, a message being told, a story being laid out but in a very subtle, showing how the world and its social attitudes changed over the course of many decades. Not for everyone, but it is an enchanting watch and it’s definitely worth viewing for Hawley’s amazing soundtrack.

LOVE IS ALL / CERT: 12 / DIRECTOR: KIM LONGINOTTO / MUSIC: RICHARD HAWLEY / RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 19TH