Movie Review: In Time (PG) / Directed by: Andrew Niccol / Screenplay by: Andrew Niccol / Starring: Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy

Andrew Niccol is back as director and writer for this high concept sci-fi action thriller. The story takes place in a dimension where people stop ageing at 25 years old; they are left with one more year on their body clock to which they have to add more time to by working or stealing. In this reality, time is money and the rich live a leisurely life with hundreds of years on their clocks whilst the poor live on the edge scrambling to gather enough time to live for one more day.  Interesting ideas are played with whilst still managing to keep the pace fast enough for the audience not to dwell on some continuity issues and sloppy editing.

Niccol was also responsible for co-writing The Truman Show that dealt with a man whose whole life turns out to be a lie and an elaborate reality show. He penned and directed Gattaca that dealt with issues of genetic modification. They were both solid sci-fi dramas that stimulated the brain, but with action taking a front seat in his new film, some of the great thought-provoking ideas are not dealt with as they should be.

The rich and poor are divided in to separate living quarters that look great on the big screen. The New Greenwich of the rich is stylishly lavish and sleek whilst the industrial ghetto of the poor is sparse and dirty. Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) lives in the ghetto with his mother (Olivia Wilde) and they try to make an honest living, but inflation and pay issues make sure their existence is a race against the clock.  When Will meets rich stranger, Henry Hamilton (Matt Bomer) in a drinking establishment his life changes into a whirlwind of conspiracy and high speed chases; Henry has had enough of living and decides to end his life by giving Will his remaining one hundred years of time.

Justin Timberlake is a fine leading male, mixing action hero with suaveness works for the role and he manages to be entirely watchable and engaging. Amanda Seyfried as the leading lady, a rich girl searching for a thrill, is not as powerful in her role as she should be but plays off Timberlake well enough with some witty one- liners. Humour is dotted around the film and it is pretty clear from the start that Niccol is aware of the issues that come with a cast entirely made up of young people.

Niccol’s film presents some compelling and contemporary arguments, with issues of recession, the want for eternal youth, and a capitalist world at the forefront but fitting in so many ideas leaves some of the supporting characters quite one dimensional.  Alex Pettyfer plays a ghetto gangster who makes a living from stealing time from those around him, being more cartoonish evil rather than presenting any real danger. Cillian Murphy plays a timekeeper, policing any crimes against time and hunting down Salas as he tries to bring down the system, but you feel no real empathy with his position.

Niccol’s attempts to bring his usual intelligence to the table are somewhat lost in the latter half of the film as it turns into sequences of running around and a ridiculous attempt at a tense fighting scene involving Justin Timberlake and Alex Pettyfer looking intensely at each other whilst holding hands.  An entertaining enough mainstream thriller that doesn’t quite reach the heights of satisfying science fiction; in the end the ideas just don’t translate all that well onto the big screen.

Expected rating: 6 out of 10

Actual rating:

‘In Time’ is out now in US cinemas and will hit the UK November 1st

Review: The Adventures of Tintin – The Secret of the Unicorn (PG) / Directed by: Steven Spielberg / Screenplay by: Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish / Starring: (voices) Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Daniel Mays, Mackenzie Crook

Peter Jackson. Steven Spielberg. Steven Moffat. Edgar Wright. Joe Cornish. Can even all these talents, combining the daddies of modern blockbuster cinema (Jackson producing, Spielberg directing), the man who put the timey-wimey back into ‘Doctor Who’ (Moffat) and the two excitable young bucks of British cinema (Wright, Cornish) translate the very European charm of Belgian artist Herge’s ‘Tintin’ character into a new, 21st century, all-conquering animated franchise? The film is brilliant, let’s make no bones about it, but whether it’s got any realistic chance of attracting a big audience in 2011 is another matter entirely.

History lesson. Tintin, created by Belgian artist Georges Remi under the pen name ‘Herge’, first appeared as a picture strip in a Belgian newspaper’s children’s supplement in 1929 before spinning-off into its own series of comic strip albums and magazines on which Herge continued to work until his death in 1983. Tintin, fresh-faced young reporter of around 16 years of age, would regularly find himself involved in fast-paced swash-buckling adventures which took him all over the world – and occasionally into space. Tintin, accompanied by his snow-white fox terrier Snowy, the grumpy bearded Captain Haddock and the two bumbling and incompetent twin detectives Thompson and Thompson (whose name, incidentally, inspired The Thompson Twins, the electro-pop trio who had a string of UK chart hits in the mid-1980s, many of which are best forgotten) found themselves involved in all sorts of hi-jinks which straddled the genres, from fantasy, simple mysteries, political thrillers and eventually a little bit of science-fiction. In the UK the character became well-known in the 1960s and 1970s when the animated TV series made between 1958 and 1962 found itself a staple of summer holiday kid’s TV on BBC1 – “Herge’s Adventures of Tintin!” – but the cartoons and, indeed, the character, have fallen out of favour somewhat over the last few years. In the States, certainly, Tintin probably enjoys a profile only slightly lower than Jedward’s. What, one wonders, will cinema audiences used to the whiz-bang of today’s ever-increasing crop of super-hero and light sci-fi adventures, make of this quaint, old-fashioned, resolutely 1930s-styled and defiantly Gallic-flavoured animation which is really unlike anything else out there at the moment? 

Tintin aficionados will adore ‘The Adventures of Tintin’. Spielberg’s movie is pretty much a love letter to the original strips – Tintin himself is introduced so charmingly you can’t but help lower all your defences and let the film just take you along for the ride – and it’s a relief to see that no attempt has been made to modernise the character, to drag him into the 21st century, equipping him with a mobile phone and a vocabulary of hip teenspeak. This is Tintin as he was, as he’s always been and as he always should be. He’s pretty much a young Indiana Jones and ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’, which borrows reverently from original stories ‘Crab With the Golden Claws’, ‘Secret of the Unicorn’ and ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’, sees him pitched into adventure almost immediately as, at a flea market, he’s attracted to a detailed model of a triple-masted sailing vessel which he buys for “a pound.”  But others are greedily eyeing the model and before long Tintin (Bell) is sucked into a labyrinthine plot involving long-missing treasure linked to the ancestry of permanently-sozzled Captain Haddock (Serkis) and the sinister machinations of the “evil” Sakharine (Daniel Craig) who’s also keen to get his nefarious hands on the treasure.

So we’re off and running into a movie which throws us into set piece after set piece – bike chases, sea chases, air chases, desert chases – culminating in a frantic dockside climax and a resolution which tantalises with the prospect of a sequel yet to be greenlit. It’s breathlessly exciting stuff and surprisingly violent too. Ignoring any politically-correct lily-livered modern sensibilities, Spielberg piles on more fistfights than the last six Bond movies put together, a Tintin who’s handy with a gun and doesn’t much care who he fires it at, and, in Captain Haddock, a scene-stealer who dominates and owns the movie (because, let’s face it, Tintin himself is a bit of a faceless goody-goody). He’s pretty much an alcoholic, more concerned with reaching for the nearest bottle of whiskey and drowning his sorrows than helping Tintin put together the pieces of the mystery. Refreshingly, too, there’s been no tacked on teenage love interest here; there’s only one woman in the entire cast, and she’s the legendary glass-shattering opera-singer Bianca Castafior – Tintin’s got no time for romance when there’s a mystery to solve and besides he’s got the trusty Snowy yapping at his heels and, more often than not, saving the day.

It’s taken Speilberg years to get Tintin onto the big screen, years spent waiting for computer animation technology – or more specifically the motion-capture facility – to develop to the point where he could do Tintin justice. ‘Mo-Cap’, as I’ve decided it should be called, has come on in leaps and bounds form those creepy dead-eyed Robert Zemeckis efforts like ‘Polar Express’; here the characters all look real and believable, flesh tones are spot on, facial movements naturalistic and there’s a staggering attention to detail – you can almost count the hairs on Haddock’s forearms – which genuinely does make you forget that this isn’t a live action movie at all. You may find yourself wondering why this actually isn’t a live action movie, such is the realism of the characterisation, but then some other extraordinary action sequence will explode across the scene and all will become crystal clear again. This is a movie that needs to be animated.

Spielberg also struck gold in the casting department. Jackson favourite and motion capture regular Andy Serkis crackles and fizzles as Haddock; he gets all the best lines and all the best comedy (apart from maybe Snowy) and Jamie Bell acquits himself well as the pretty colourless Tintin. Daniel Craig’s obviously having a ball voicing the bad guy and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are often indistinguishable as Thompson and Thompson who, as Herge fans will recall, have a tendency to just turn up in the thick of all the action just when you think you’ve seen the last of them.

‘The Adventures of Tintin’ is an absolute triumph both in the scale of its technological achievement and in its often-slavish adherence to the style and tone of Herge’s original stories. But it’s absolutely out there on its own, this is unlike any other animation you’ve seen in the last few years, it has a unique style and atmosphere and, in determinedly recreating the European strips, it just doesn’t feel like a Hollywood action film much less a Pixar or Blue Sky mainstream animation. And these are absolutely its strengths. But there’s a chance that Tintin has fallen too far down the pop culture food chain to resonate with the Harry Potter/Transformers generation and for a film as bold, brassy and downright enjoyable as ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ that’d be something of a crying shame. Whatever its Box office fate, it’s ultimately one of the must-see movies of 2011. 

Expected rating: 6 out of 10

Actual rating:

‘The Adventures of Tintin – The Secret of the Unicorn’ is previewing across the UK until general release on 26th October.

Review: The Adventures of Tintin – The Secret of the Unicorn (PG) / Directed by: Steven Spielberg / Screenplay by: Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish / Starring: (voices) Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Daniel Mays, Mackenzie Crook

Peter Jackson. Steven Spielberg. Steven Moffat. Edgar Wright. Joe Cornish. Can even all these talents, combining the daddies of modern blockbuster cinema (Jackson producing, Spielberg directing), the man who put the timey-wimey back into ‘Doctor Who’ (Moffat) and the two excitable young bucks of British cinema (Wright, Cornish) translate the very European charm of Belgian artist Herge’s ‘Tintin’ character into a new, 21st century, all-conquering animated franchise? The film is brilliant, let’s make no bones about it, but whether it’s got any realistic chance of attracting a big audience in 2011 is another matter entirely.

History lesson. Tintin, created by Belgian artist Georges Remi under the pen name ‘Herge’, first appeared as a picture strip in a Belgian newspaper’s children’s supplement in 1929 before spinning-off into its own series of comic strip albums and magazines on which Herge continued to work until his death in 1983. Tintin, fresh-faced young reporter of around 16 years of age, would regularly find himself involved in fast-paced swash-buckling adventures which took him all over the world – and occasionally into space. Tintin, accompanied by his snow-white fox terrier Snowy, the grumpy bearded Captain Haddock and the two bumbling and incompetent twin detectives Thompson and Thompson (whose name, incidentally, inspired The Thompson Twins, the electro-pop trio who had a string of UK chart hits in the mid-1980s, many of which are best forgotten) found themselves involved in all sorts of hi-jinks which straddled the genres, from fantasy, simple mysteries, political thrillers and eventually a little bit of science-fiction. In the UK the character became well-known in the 1960s and 1970s when the animated TV series made between 1958 and 1962 found itself a staple of summer holiday kid’s TV on BBC1 – “Herge’s Adventures of Tintin!” – but the cartoons and, indeed, the character, have fallen out of favour somewhat over the last few years. In the States, certainly, Tintin probably enjoys a profile only slightly lower than Jedward’s. What, one wonders, will cinema audiences used to the whiz-bang of today’s ever-increasing crop of super-hero and light sci-fi adventures, make of this quaint, old-fashioned, resolutely 1930s-styled and defiantly Gallic-flavoured animation which is really unlike anything else out there at the moment? 

Tintin aficionados will adore ‘The Adventures of Tintin’. Spielberg’s movie is pretty much a love letter to the original strips – Tintin himself is introduced so charmingly you can’t but help lower all your defences and let the film just take you along for the ride – and it’s a relief to see that no attempt has been made to modernise the character, to drag him into the 21st century, equipping him with a mobile phone and a vocabulary of hip teenspeak. This is Tintin as he was, as he’s always been and as he always should be. He’s pretty much a young Indiana Jones and ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’, which borrows reverently from original stories ‘Crab With the Golden Claws’, ‘Secret of the Unicorn’ and ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’, sees him pitched into adventure almost immediately as, at a flea market, he’s attracted to a detailed model of a triple-masted sailing vessel which he buys for “a pound.”  But others are greedily eyeing the model and before long Tintin (Bell) is sucked into a labyrinthine plot involving long-missing treasure linked to the ancestry of permanently-sozzled Captain Haddock (Serkis) and the sinister machinations of the “evil” Sakharine (Daniel Craig) who’s also keen to get his nefarious hands on the treasure.

So we’re off and running into a movie which throws us into set piece after set piece – bike chases, sea chases, air chases, desert chases – culminating in a frantic dockside climax and a resolution which tantalises with the prospect of a sequel yet to be greenlit. It’s breathlessly exciting stuff and surprisingly violent too. Ignoring any politically-correct lily-livered modern sensibilities, Spielberg piles on more fistfights than the last six Bond movies put together, a Tintin who’s handy with a gun and doesn’t much care who he fires it at, and, in Captain Haddock, a scene-stealer who dominates and owns the movie (because, let’s face it, Tintin himself is a bit of a faceless goody-goody). He’s pretty much an alcoholic, more concerned with reaching for the nearest bottle of whiskey and drowning his sorrows than helping Tintin put together the pieces of the mystery. Refreshingly, too, there’s been no tacked on teenage love interest here; there’s only one woman in the entire cast, and she’s the legendary glass-shattering opera-singer Bianca Castafior – Tintin’s got no time for romance when there’s a mystery to solve and besides he’s got the trusty Snowy yapping at his heels and, more often than not, saving the day.

It’s taken Speilberg years to get Tintin onto the big screen, years spent waiting for computer animation technology – or more specifically the motion-capture facility – to develop to the point where he could do Tintin justice. ‘Mo-Cap’, as I’ve decided it should be called, has come on in leaps and bounds form those creepy dead-eyed Robert Zemeckis efforts like ‘Polar Express’; here the characters all look real and believable, flesh tones are spot on, facial movements naturalistic and there’s a staggering attention to detail – you can almost count the hairs on Haddock’s forearms – which genuinely does make you forget that this isn’t a live action movie at all. You may find yourself wondering why this actually isn’t a live action movie, such is the realism of the characterisation, but then some other extraordinary action sequence will explode across the scene and all will become crystal clear again. This is a movie that needs to be animated.

Spielberg also struck gold in the casting department. Jackson favourite and motion capture regular Andy Serkis crackles and fizzles as Haddock; he gets all the best lines and all the best comedy (apart from maybe Snowy) and Jamie Bell acquits himself well as the pretty colourless Tintin. Daniel Craig’s obviously having a ball voicing the bad guy and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are often indistinguishable as Thompson and Thompson who, as Herge fans will recall, have a tendency to just turn up in the thick of all the action just when you think you’ve seen the last of them.

‘The Adventures of Tintin’ is an absolute triumph both in the scale of its technological achievement and in its often-slavish adherence to the style and tone of Herge’s original stories. But it’s absolutely out there on its own, this is unlike any other animation you’ve seen in the last few years, it has a unique style and atmosphere and, in determinedly recreating the European strips, it just doesn’t feel like a Hollywood action film much less a Pixar or Blue Sky mainstream animation. And these are absolutely its strengths. But there’s a chance that Tintin has fallen too far down the pop culture food chain to resonate with the Harry Potter/Transformers generation and for a film as bold, brassy and downright enjoyable as ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ that’d be something of a crying shame. Whatever its Box office fate, it’s ultimately one of the must-see movies of 2011. 

Expected rating: 6 out of 10

Actual rating:

‘The Adventures of Tintin – The Secret of the Unicorn’ is previewing across the UK until general release on 26th October.

Review: Paranormal Activity 3 (15) / Directed by: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman/ Screenplay by: Christopher B Landon/ Starring: Sprague Graydon, Christopher Nicholas Smith, Lauren Bittner, Kate Featherston

With the ‘Saw’ saga having lost its teeth long before it rolled out its seventh and final instalment last year, the ‘Final Destination’ series stuck in a loop and the ‘Scream’ reboot dead in the water, it looks as if the ‘Paranormal Activity’ franchise is our last, best hope for a decent long-running horror series. But this latest effort, the second sequel to the surprise low-fi horror hit of 2009, really seems to run the idea into the ground and take it as far as it can reasonably go without stretching the audience’s credibility to breaking point and beyond. It’s bloody scary all the same…

You’ll recall how the original ‘Paranormal Activity’ popularised (to the point where it’s starting to wear out its welcome now) the modern ‘found footage’ movie-making fad which in its basest form allows Hollywood to foist cheap films onto the public under the pretence of “ooh, look, this was made by people who were there, it might even be real…” The first film introduced us to Katie (Kate Featherston) and Micah (Micah Stoat) who are being troubled by unexplained occurrences in their new home. Micah sets up elaborate camera-recording equipment to film their bedroom at night and the film tingled our spines with banging doors, thudding and rumbling sounds, dusty footprints, all building up to an intense and disturbing conclusion. Last year’s sequel was more of the same but, strangely, dialled down a little. Katie’s sister Kristi (Grayden), her husband Daniel (Brian Boland) and their kids move in to a house in Carslbad, California and after what they assume to be break-in they install CCT cameras for their own security. But the cameras reveal something sinister and supernatural is at work. Less in-your-face and yet equally as suspenseful as the first film, ’Paranormal Activity 2’ offered no explanations but clearly suggested that whatever phenomenon is at work here, it’s something to do with the two sisters. This third movie takes us back to 1988, when Katie and Kristi were children themselves and, with rather more primitive technology, their stepfather Dennis (Smith) records night-time activity around the house and in the girls’ bedroom. And this time the scary gloves are off because this is seriously creepy stuff, at one point hair-rising in a very literal sense.

The spirit which manifests itself to young Katie and calls itself ‘Toby’ is very angry and restless indeed and Dennis is soon gawping at videotaped footage of Katie climbing out of bed and having whispered conversations with something unseen and a quilt with a mind of its own which turns itself into a ghostly white-sheeted shape and gives the babysitter the heebie-jeebies. Soon afterwards the house seems to be at the centre of a violent earthquake, furniture hurls itself about the room and during one night’s viewing Kirsti’s bed and then the girl herself are violently flung around. It’s hardly surprising that the audience I saw ’Paranormal Activity 3’ with were screaming and squealing like stuck pigs (when they weren’t stamping off to the toilet every ninety seconds… go before the film starts, damn you!) at every new supernatural shock. Even a couple of early joke-scares have the desired effect, as nervous tension boils over into genuine jump-in-the-seat surprise-cum-relief.

The real scares, however, are left for the final reel when the family, not unreasonably, abandon their home when all the kitchen utensils and cabinets are lifted into the air and come crashing down and the family flee to Kirsti’s mother‘s house. But even here they aren’t safe as we soon realise that it’s not the house that’s the trouble, it’s the girls. Mysterious possession, a snarling devil-child and a shadowy figure lurking in the darkness are waiting in store at dead of night…

‘Paranormal Activity 3’, directed by the Joost-Schulman partnership which impressed with ‘Catfish’ a couple of years ago, takes us back to the first movie with much more explicit supernatural shenanigans and a palpable sense of nervy dread throughout the film’s brief eighty-odd minute running time. Performances from another cast of unknowns are suitably-naturalistic and the film’s at its best when we’re staring at a video-camera image waiting for something or someone to appear in anticipation of that heart-stopping moment when something happens that we didn’t see coming. Considering it’s set in 1988 and filmed with ‘clumsier’ equipment, the film has a more ‘directed’ look than either of its predecessors and there are a few unlikely footage setups that the script could scarcely avoid if the plot was to move in the required direction.

Three films in and ‘Paranormal Activity’ is still capable of delivering that delicious thrill of fear of the unknown which less subtle current slashers and torture porn movies can’t replicate because there’s nothing left unshown, nowhere for the imagination to run riot. ‘Paranormal Activity 3’, like its predecessors, taps into the very core of our terror of something we can neither see nor understand, something which reason tells us is impossible despite the fact it’s happening right before our eyes. It’s rare for a horror series to maintain its credibility and its reputation three films down the lines and I’m not sure where a fourth movie could take us, but as Halloween approaches there’s not likely to be a better film out there this year if you want a few cheap thrills and a good old shriek.

Expected rating: 6 out of 10

Actual rating: 

‘Paranormal Activity 3’ is now haunting cinemas all over the UK.

Review: Contagion (12A ) / Directed by: Steven Soderbergh / Screenplay by: Scott Z Burns / Starring: Marion Cottilard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bryan Cranston

Time for Hollywood to address once again one of our greatest current primal fears – the ever-present grumbling threat of a devastating global pandemic – in Steve Soderbergh’s latest terrific, pulsating ensemble thriller, a movie which is neither science-fiction nor horror but rather a bold and bald “this is how it would really be” almost documentary style drama presented without frills and fuss and, refreshingly, no huge explosive apocalyptic set pieces. For this, we can suspect, really is how it would really be, Mankind wiped out, or at best brought to its knees, by the implacable and unpredictable power of Nature herself. 

When one of your starriest stars – Mrs Coldplay Gwyneth Paltrow herself – pegs it after five minutes (it’s literally a cough-and-spit appearance) and we’re treated to the sight of her skull being opened up during a Centre for Disease Control (CDC) autopsy shortly afterwards, we can safely assume that no-one’s likely to be safe for the next 110 or so minutes (and sure enough she’s not the only A-lister to bite the bullet) and this isn’t going to be your routine ‘brain at home’ Hollywood blockbuster. Soderbergh brings his grounded sense of realism to what in the past has been depicted as an eyebrow-raisingly silly scenario (think ‘Outbreak’ – ‘have you seen this monkey?’) as his globe-trotting camera takes us to Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and various points in between as we see early sniffling, sweating victims of this new virus touching things, staggering about busy city streets, carelessly and unthinkingly transmitting something deadly and invisible to everyone they meet. ’Contagion’ tells us that we really ought to keep our hands in our pockets as not only do coughs and sneezes spread diseases but also touching doorknobs, cocktail glasses, credit cards and even our faces. Eeek.

With Gwyneth out of the picture our everyman figure is her husband (Matt Damon, easily the most interesting actor working in Hollywood at the moment) who seems to have a natural immunity and who, whilst not the ‘star’ of the film as such, is threaded throughout the movie as he tries to protect his daughter from infection as society starts to crumble and the rule of law collapses. Elsewhere our attentions are focussed on the medical brains desperately trying to find the source of the disease as well as everybody who may have come into contact with a carrier – a task which becomes increasingly difficult as the virus spreads alarmingly and the body-bags start to pile up. Laurence Fishburne exudes a sort of charismatic calm as Dr Cheevers, the CDC chief who’ll stop at nothing to find a cure for the virus but who is equally capable of hiding the truth from the public (for undoubtedly all the best reasons). His frontline medical gal is Kate “I was in ‘Titanic’” Winslet who is terribly earnest in her rather faceless and underwritten – and ultimately thankless – role. Jude Law rocks up as a pesky “we demand to know the truth!”  blogger with a dodgy Australian accent and seriously bad teeth and whilst he’s not exactly a bad guy he doesn’t half get on your nerves after a bit, especially in his video link TV debate with Dr Fishburne where you really wish someone would give him a slap and tell him to stop being so smug.

But ‘Contagion’ isn’t about its cast, it’s about the effective sense of mounting dread it develops as the virus spirals out of control, eventually mutating into something potentially far worse and the utter helplessness of all our scientific minds with all the resources at hand to fashion a vaccine which will halt the spread of the disease. Scenes of San Francisco streets piled high with rubbish, public panic at food distribution points, looters setting fire to stores and raiding houses are unsettling enough in themselves and for British audiences may even bring back uncomfortable memories of those three or four strange days in August this year. But just when ‘Contagion’ reaches what seems to be a point of no return and it really looks as if things aren’t going to turn out too well for us human types, the film loses its momentum and its bottle and throws in a lazy and convenient resolution which, whilst not totally undermining the rest of the film, does tend to deflate its impact a little as it seems to have been lifted form a box marked “with one bound they were cured” and there are a couple of signing-off scenes with Damon and Fishburne which may well set off your “too schmaltzy!” alarms.

A few narrative grumbles aside then, ‘Contagion’ is a tense and sometimes troubling movie which really does make you stop and think and appreciate just how easy it would be for Mankind to take a fall on the back of a mere quirk of Nature. Just to lighten the mood then (ahem), catch this if you can, it’ll bug you if you don’t, the time flu by when I was watching it, I…  (Stop it now – Starburst Ed). Bah. Spoilsport.

Expected rating: 8 out of 10

‘Contagion’ is spreading across UK cinemas now (sorry).

Review: The Three Musketeers (12A) / Directed by: Paul W.S. Anderson / Screenplay by: Alex Litvak, Andrew Davies / Starring: Logan Lerman, Ray Stevenson, Mads Mikkelsen, Luke Evans, Matthew Macfadyen, Christoph Waltz, Milla Jovovich, Orlando Bloom

If you’ve not already deleted it from your recent memory, recall for just a moment ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’ which appalled most right-thinking cinema-goers earlier this year and yet, frustratingly, hoovered up tumps and tumps of money all over the world, dammit. Remember just how bad it was, how sluggish, lumbering, lazy, self-indulgent and frankly unspectacular. And how bloody long. Here, astonishingly, is the antidote to that ghastly, cynical abhorrence. Here’s the film that’s everything ‘On Stranger Tides’ could have been and really should have been. Here’s the film that swashes all the buckles ‘On Stranger Tides’ mislaid so carelessly. Here’s ‘The Three Musketeers’, directed by, of all people, the much-derided Paul W.S. Anderson (best known for the apparently endless ‘Resident Evil’ movie series – one of my guilty pleasures, I’m only slightly ashamed to admit) who has somehow, against every imaginable odd, turned out a big, mad romping comic strip adventure guaranteed to boil the blood of Alexander Dumas purists even as its heady mixture of swordfights, ludicrous (and wilfully anachronistic) spectacle wins the rest of us over by sheer force of numbers.

Make no mistake about it, ‘The Three Musketeers’ is nonsense, popcorn filmmaking of the trashiest order, and yet it’s done with such zest and fun that it’s hard to be offended by a film which has its tongue so far in its cheek it’s virtually drawing blood. And if it’s spectacle you want, it’s here in spades in some of the most breath-taking effects sequences I‘ve seen in years – some of which, charmingly, were actually achieved by the use of miniatures instead of relentless CGI. We’re on fairly familiar solid ground here at first as the film follows the traditions of previous film versions of the book by uniting the fresh-faced D’Artagnan (played here by bland newcomer Logan Lerman, the film’s only real weak link) travels to Paris and meets up with disillusioned Musketeers Athos (Matthew McFadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans) and Porthos (Ray Stevenson). Before long the four are involved in some admittedly-woolly plot about stolen jewellery (the safety of which appears to vital in determining the future security of France and its foppish lovestruck King (Freddie Fox) and the double dealings of the duplicitous Cardinal Richlieu (Christoph Waltz) and his one-eyed henchman Rochefort (Mads Mikkelson) and not forgetting Anderson’s missus Milla Jovovich who gets to practice her best ‘Resident Evil’ moves , somersaulting through tripwire designed to protect the precious jewellery and whizzing down escape ropes like some 18th century Tom Cruise. Comic relief of the ‘useless fat bloke’ variety is provided by James Corden as Planchet (played by the late and legendary Roy Kinnear in the classic 1970s Richard Lester ‘Musketeer’  movies ) who is either endearing/irritating (delete according to taste).

After much japery and swordplay, the Musketeers take the only course of action open to them to retrieve the craftily-pilfered jewels. They somehow get hold of a sailing ship packed with… er… machine guns and flamethrowers and tether it to a massive dirigible air balloon. Unfortunately boo-hiss baddy Rochefort, in a classic ‘mine’s bigger that yours’ gambit, has somehow managed to get an even bigger one (oo-er) and before long, the two ships are blasting seven bells out of each other in the air above Paris. Here’s where you really need to finally give up on any expectation of ‘The Three Musketeers’ paying anything other than the vaguest lip service to the source material, just as the film seems to be saying ‘To Hell with this, look what we can do…’ and fills the screen with relentless action, from the aerial battle itself to a thrilling final rooftop sword fight between D’Artagnan and Rochefort before the inevitable slightly cutesy resolution which, you’ve guessed it, can’t avoid the  ‘One for all, all for one’ calling cry of the Musketeers that the audience has been waiting for. If ‘The Three Musketeers’ has any resonance in the 21st century, it’s a scene which can’t help but send a shiver up the spine. As, indeed, does the coda, which sets up nicely a sequel which I’m  hoping comes along sooner rather than later.

At a lean 110 minutes Anderson’s film (yes, it’s in 3D and yes, it’s neither better or worse than any other 3D experience I’ve endured this year) doesn’t hang about and it doesn’t outstay its welcome, lessons that a certain ’Pirates’ franchise need to learn for any future Jack Sparrow outings. ‘The Three Musketeers’, meanwhile, is ultimately just great fun. It’s a movie that’ll either really annoy you if you expect some historical verisimilitude or even some resemblance to a book you might have read twenty years or more ago or will, much more likely, just entertain you with its swordplay and its bangs and flashes, its inherent stupidity and its relentless sense of fun. Oh, for God’s sake, just go and have a good time and stop worrying about art.

Expected rating: 5 out of 10

Actual rating:

‘The Three Musketeers’ is swashing its buckle all over the UK now.

Review: Real Steel (12A) / Directed by: Shawn Levy / Screenplay by: John Gatins, Dan Gilroy, Jeremy Leven / Starring: Hugh Jackman, Dan Gilroy, John Gatins, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly, Anthony Mackie, Hope Davis, James Rebhorn, Olga Fonda

It’s great when as a film fan you can find yourself still able to be surprised. There have been a lot of surprises in 2011, things that were supposed to be sub par but turned out to be genuinely great. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a good example as is Joe Wright’s Hanna. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the year though is that director Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen, Night at the Museum) has made a pretty damn good movie. Even the story for Real Steel screams something that shouldn’t work and I know a lot of people who have rolled their eyes at the trailer. Real Steel is perhaps just as much of a family crowd pleaser as Super 8 was and is bafflingly saddled with a 12A certificate.

You must know the story by now but for those who haven’t been following the marketing campaign; Real Steel takes place in a world where robots have replaced the traditional human in the boxing ring. This has occurred for a few reasons as we are explained to in a key scene, but what it mainly boils down to is money. In this world we find former boxer and now hopeless gambling addict Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) who is eking out a life as a small time boxing manager to a series of increasingly knackered looking robots. Charlie is on a bit of a downward spiral, taking money for his robot to fight a bull at a fairground and is in deep for some money with some shifty redneck types. All seems lost and just as things can’t get any worse Charlie learns that his 11 year old son Max (Dakota Goyo) is now orphaned as his former girlfriend and the kid’s mother has died. Seeing an opportunity to make some quick cash out of Max’s prospective adopted parents, Charlie agrees to take Max for the summer whilst the rich new parents go on holiday. The two of them don’t get on, Charlie sees him as an inconvenience and Max resents his father for being absent most of his life, but gradually Max becomes more and more interested in the robot boxing world. When Charlie’s latest robot who was once a sure thing gets pulled apart and with even his long term friend Bailey (Evangeline Lilly) getting sick of him, Charlie finds himself in a scrapyard with Max looking for parts to build a new robot with. Through an accident where Max nearly gets himself killed, they find a ‘sparring bot’ called Atom buried under the earth. Feeling that it saved his life, Max insists on taking Atom with them much to Charlie’s disapproval. The child bonds with the robot who can mimic his actions and they find that this robot that nobody wants is more resilient than most. Finding that they are bonding over their love of the sport and their affection for Atom, Charlie and Max start to tour the underground boxing circuit with the robot and find they are having much success. This leads them to the corporate dominated big leagues and a confrontation with the undefeated champion where Charlie finds he has to rely on his old boxing skills to survive.

Real Steel is reminiscent of the great boxing dramas of old where you would have an underdog come back to face adversity and prove everyone wrong until the point where you cried happy tears when it all goes right. It also manages to do this without ever feeling syrupy or maudlin. Hugh Jackman is essentially playing a complete bastard who would do anything for money and he does many questionable things but manages to still make Charlie likeable. Dakota Goyo is also solid as the kid of the film who never becomes annoying although you can see how easy it would have been to cross the line. The way the two characters bond is great stuff and the actors are backed up by some really great scenes of back and forth and some comedy that doesn’t rely on slapstick or the easy fart gag. The script by John Gatins adapted from a short story by Richard Matheson is actually a pretty good lesson in packing a lot of information into a short running time. The film never feels sluggish or has long scenes of exposition, yet through a great structure it manages to build a totally believable world. You get the history of the robot boxing league and get exposed to both the seedy underbelly as well as the glossy big money side of things. Never does a scene feel superfluous though and it keeps ticking on, coming in at about two hours.

The robot special effects are also very impressive. Since the success of Transformers, I find it surprising that there haven’t been a lot more films’ featuring giant robots, but Real Steel is the first one coming out four years after the first Transformers film. Here they use a mix of CGI and practical effects and combined with the sound effects you get a real sense of the weight and carnage that two robots fighting can cause in the ring. The design of the robots is relatively simple, they look like humanoid beings as that’s what they were created to replace and they do not have the many moving parts and gears that the Transformers have. Our main robot Atom is simple but also designed to elicit feelings in the viewer with his big blue eyes. Although Atom is a well thought out creation, he also happens to be one of the major flaws of the film. They hint that the robot may actually be sentient and something more than just a drone, you get this impression in two major scenes but they don’t develop it more than that. It leaves you hanging a bit but on the other hand had it gone into that territory it may well have crossed that delicate line.

Real Steel is fantastic family entertainment that will have you leaving the cinema with a big grin and very happy children if you are lucky enough to have kids to take along. Why it’s a 12A is baffling as I can only remember one possible scene of violence that may have caused the BBFC to pause for thought. Don’t be put off though, this is a film the whole family can enjoy (Mum and Dad too) and it’s not often in these days of increasingly bland product that I can say that. Suddenly Shawn Levy’s long mooted version of DC Comics The Flash doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.

Expected rating: 6 out of 10

Actual rating:

Real Steel hits UK cinemas October 14th

He’s back! And it’s about time! Or is it? Created for a series of Barclaycard TV ads back in the late 1990s, Rowan Atkinson’s bumbling, fumbling MI7 secret agent Johnny English made his feature film debut in 2002 and, whilst the film was a significant Box office hit in the UK and across Europe, it’s hard to imagine that too many people were clamouring for a return engagement with this least super of super-spies. Eyebrows were raised when it was announced that Atkinson, not the most prolific of comedy actors, was resurrecting the character for a much-belated sequel and it’s probably fair to say that not only weren’t expectations particularly high, they were probably never really got far off the ground.

‘Johnny English’, which I revisited prior to tackling the sequel, never seemed to find the right tone, its Bond parodies too broad, its plot farcical and its protagonist (John Malkovich horribly overplaying his role as Pascal Sauvage, French fashion guru turned would-be monarch) just too silly. Atkinson’s English was  too consistently incompetent and a descent (literally) into lavatory humour made the last half-hour or so a bit of a chore. But everyone deserves a second chance and what a pleasure (and a surprise) to report that ‘Johnny English Reborn’ is a leaner, slicker, altogether more spectacular affair, trotting the globe in the best traditions of the classic Bonds and borrowing clichés and even situations from 007 without ever attempting to poke fun at them. This is very much an affectionate homage, reminding us of the days when Bond films were both thrilling and fun and a far cry from the two most recent dour and heavy-going entries in the 007 franchise. ‘Johnny English Reborn’ is an action-packed adventure thriller and it’s also very, very funny. Who knew?

Johnny English is on a Tibetan retreat after another royally cocked-up assignment. Drafted back into MI7 by its new boss Pegasus (Gillian Anderson looking mighty fine) English finds himself tasked with tracking down the cabal of assassins determined to kill the Chinese president as he embarks on a series of peace-keeping talks with the British Prime Minister (Stephen Campbell Moore). Against all odds English finds two of the conspirators (more by luck than judgment) and eventually discovers that the third is rather closer to home than anyone expected.

It’d be asking too much of even the most wide-eyed audience to expect it to believe that an agent as relentlessly incompetent as English was in the first movie could ever conceivably be kept in active service so the script goes to some pains to depict English as a bit more worldly-wise this time around, a bit cooler in crisis and a lot more confident around the ladies. But he still gets it wrong in spectacular style (his ongoing mistaken identity struggles with Pik Sen Lim’s gun-toting assassin are a hoot and a half) and the movie is packed with clever verbal and physical sequences which remind us what a huge comic talent Atkinson is and what a shame it is we don’t get to see more of him these days. Surely it’s only Atkinson who can still raise a smile with a line like “Let’s kick some bottom.” Amidst all the spectacle and the elaborate set pieces, Atkinson gets his best laughs with a simple sequence where he’s in a meeting with the PM and his MI7 bosses and he can’t control the height of his chair and later when he physically reacts to a mind control drug he’s inadvertently consumed.

‘Johnny English Reborn’ is a bigger, faster film than its predecessor in every way. A chase scene around Hong Kong (where English cooly outwits his free-running adversary before indulging in a bit of clumsy dockside kung fu) is followed by an ingenious fast-speed wheelchair race around London (don’t ask, just don’t) and the film’s climax has its tongue right through ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s cheek with its confrontation in a mountaintop fortress and a final struggle aboard a cable-car. The film’s also struck gold with its supporting cast. Dominic West is clearly having fun as the urbane ‘Agent One’ Simon Ambrose, Rosamund Pike is a far more convincing potential love interest for English than Natalie Imbruglia in the first film and even ‘Torchwood’s Burn Gorman is along for the ride as a sinister bad guy. Early disappointment at the non-appearance of English’s former assistant Bough (Ben Miller) is quickly assuaged by Daniel Kaluuya (currently appearing in ‘The Fades’ on BBC3) who is hugely impressive as his new young sidekick Tucker.

Maybe ‘Johnny English Reborn’ caught me with my guard down or, far more likely, it’s actually a much better film that I might have expected – and it’s certainly a far better film than some of the sniffier critics have suggested. This year’s comedy movies have travelled further than ever down the gross-out route, from ‘Horrible Bosses’, ‘Bad Teacher’ and the UK’s massively successful ‘Inbetweeners.’ But ‘Johnny English Reborn’ is simple, relatively-unsophisticated old school British slapstick; there’s no swearing, no nudity, nothing at all to frighten the horses. It’s a refreshing knockabout comedy and a family film in just about its purest modern form. It may have taken Johnny English the better part of a decade to make his way back to the big screen but, on this form, I’d be happy to see him back up there for a third romping adventure. Just don’t leave it so long next time, Rowan.

Expected rating: 5 out of 10

Actual rating:

‘Johnny English Reborn’ is in UK cinemas now

It looks as if Hollywood’s love/hate relationship with sharks might have just turned to boredom/indifference judging by the waterlogged US Box Office of this latest fiersome fish flick, a tired and at times hilariously-desperate attempt to resuscitate a sub-genre which has been chugging along since ‘Jaws’ and its least-said sequels, the ‘Shark Attack’ straight-to-DVD titles, ‘Deep Blue Sea’ and more recent efforts like ‘The Reef‘. It’s not difficult to imagine the Hollywood bean-counters at work here. “Hey, ‘Piranha 3D’ did boffo business, get some more kids into bikinis… and do sharks again!! In 3D!!! Let’s do lunch!” High-fives all round. In fact, maybe it’s just the 3D that’s turned people away – I’m as happy as I hope you are to read that the latest research indicates people are fed up of jamming those stupid plastic glasses over their noses and struggling to watch sticks and debris looming out of the murk at them. Or maybe it’s just that ‘Shark Night 3D’ isn’t an especially good movie. I reckon it’s a little bit of both…

So what do you get if you chose to cough up and spec up for this little gem? Well, the same old same old to be honest. Bunch of teens rush off for some reason I can’t recall to splash’n’ski at isolated Lake Crosby (where they can’t get signals on their cells, would you believe their luck?) but harmless fun in the water turns into ‘armless’ (geddit?) terror as one of them gets shorn of one of his pesky limbs. The gang soon realise there’s something nasty and finny and hungry out there in the water and before long, inevitably, the death list starts getting longer as the shark gets hungrier. But wait! There’s a twist in the tail (sorry) because, in an eye-bogglingly inane plot development, it turns out that the sharks (and there’s more than one of ‘em) haven’t found their way into the lake by accident. Oh no, sir, they’ve been put there by devilish redneck bad guys who are after making a quick killing by filming quick killings and flogging the footage to cable TV subscribers. Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up…  Just to make sure the audience understands that these guys are like, really bad, one of them has spiky shark’s teeth…he’s as bad as the sharks!!

‘Shark Night 3D’s main problem – apart from the fact it’s a bit dumb – is that it doesn’t even deliver on the blood and gore you might expect from sensationalist stuff like this. ’Jaws’ was way more graphic than ‘Shark Night 3D‘, and that was made over 35 years ago. Here shark victims just thrash about in the water a bit and disappear in pools of (not much) blood or else they get scooped up by sharks which hurl themselves out of the water. Where are the slow dismemberments, the agonised half-chewed bodies trying to heave themselves out of the water? Bah. ‘Shark Night 3D’ wants its cake (and its PG13 rating in the USA) but can’t be bothered to eat it; the film ends up toothless when it should be terrifying.

On the plus side – and yes, there are some pluses – director David R Ellis (’Snakes on a Plane’) keeps the action moving well enough, the unknown cast are enthusiastic if little else and some of the 3D sequences (especially the underwater scenes and the odd bit where a shark Comes Right Out At You!) are fairly effective if you like that sort of thing. But ‘Shark Night 3D’ is just too tame and derivative and its script too creaky and predictable for it to linger long in the memory. Without the Unique Selling Point of the buckets of gore which at least made ‘Piranha 3D’ worth a look, this one, like the remains of the shark’s unfortunate victims, is likely to sink without trace.

Expected rating: 5 out of 10

Actual rating:

‘Shark Knight 3D’ is in UK cinemas now

In the immortal word balloons of an EC comic book, ‘Good Lord! Choke!’ sum up the film Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence).

Beginning where the first film left off, we pull back to view a creepy, greasy, spectacled, mole-like human named Martin (portrayed by newcomer Laurence R. Harvey) who is watching Tom Six’s movie on a DVD player as he lives out his miserable life as an underground parking attendant.

A devout fan of the first Human Centipede, he keeps a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and photos from the movie underneath his bed that he relishes with delight each time he studies it. After all, if it’s written that the movie was 100% medically accurate, it must be true!

Believing that he can accomplish in real life what was fantasy on film, he finds his victims in the garage and takes them to an abandoned warehouse, amassing a group of people in order to create a 12 person human centipede.

He then lures the film’s star from the first movie, Ashlynn Yennie who plays herself – under the auspice of appearing in a Quentin Tarantino vehicle – with the intention of using her as the first centipede in his dark creation.

Lacking any kind of medical training, he makes use of what household items he can find in his run-down flat, a home he lives in with his abusive mother (paging Norman Bates!) and uses the only anesthesia on hand – a crowbar to the head of his victims.

Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) is disturbing torture porn with psychosexual gratification thrown in, masquerading as a borderline pseudo snuff film.

Running a scant 88 minutes, it was like pulling teeth (and yes, there is a scene like that in the film) watching it. The gorehounds will salivate over the film as there is no shortage of shock value that’s gone beyond pushing the envelope, including a world-class feces scene that Paul Verhoeven and the late Pier Passolini would be jealous not having thought of. Lots of close-ups of cutting, slicing and maiming are pretty grim, but the quick shot of a newborn baby being crushed underneath a car gas pedal seemed like Cannibal Holocaust meets Monty Python.

Dialogue is minimal (Martin doesn’t say a word throughout the movie, but that’s his character) and mediocre at that, with only a few good lines throughout. Overall, it’s a weak script full of plot holes and unappealing characters.

With the exception of Miss Yennie, the cast was mostly composed of first time actors looking for their big break (sure, performing at the Old Vic and getting into RADA is tough, but I’d have recommended pursuing any other avenue over appearing in this thing). The standouts are Viven Bridson as Martin’s mother Mrs. Lomax, Maddi Black in a brief appearance as the prostitute and Bill Hutchins as the perverted, Lomax family physician Dr. Sebring.

I can see how the UK has banned this film. I don’t blame them. Yet I’m sure if British readers really want to view it, they’ll have few problems finding it in some form or another.

I don’t know what they’re smoking in the Netherlands nowadays, but I suggest Tom Six should stay away from the Bulldog Cafe.

This movie is 3D rated – Disgusting, Degenerate and Dumb.

Expected rating: 4 out of 10

Actual rating:

The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) is out now in the USA.