Send in the Clones

Conditions: Sunny in spirit

Film Review: Mickey 17

On paper this film has got the goods. A sci-fi adventure about an expedition helmed by a Trump wannabe on a giant spaceship to settle an alien planet and establish a new human colony, told from the perspective of a character who has been digitally cloned so he can be killed and replicated for science experiments. This has got to be something to see, right? But strangely the film ends up being less than the sum of it's parts. A brief prelude introduces us to the loser Mickey who along with his friend are on the run from a particularly violent Loan Shark they owe money to. Mickey has no skills so, desperate, he signs up to be an expendable - a role illegal on earth but those rules don't apply to space. In space Mickey gets replicated several times for various reasons but the majority of act two lies in the sudden and odd romance that develops between him and Nasha, a security officer. What she sees in him is a complete mystery, as Mickey to me seems like a complete idiot.

And that's not all, for a series of smart female characters seem to be very interested in Mickey as the film develops, despite him being quite stupid and expendable. One girl literally has to help him stop throwing up before she tries to throw herself at him. I remind you that this is a scientific space ship packed with smart and healthy characters. Eventually he gets replicated before he's actually dead and this complication leads us into act three, where Mark Ruffalo, doing a great job as a Trumpian leader, wants to declare war against the multi-legged aliens already populating the frozen planet they've landed on and sending the Mickey's on a cruel death mission.

In the surprise aftermath of finding out that different clones have slightly different personalities it's decided to end that program and make peace with the aliens. It's a more hopeful ending but jars harshly with the wildly nihilistic and hopeless film we started out with. The science crew sendups were very funny, but Mickey himself is kind of a blank hole in the middle of it all. Two alien sausages out of five.

- Peace out

Whoosh, Apocalypse

Conditions - Vacation-y

Film Review: Juror #2

Clint Eastwood directs a cracker of a courtroom thriller, where Nicholas Hoult is a juror for a murder trial that he realises he actually committed.  Accidentally, of course.  The film explores the guilt of an honest man with a family to protect, pushed up against a justice system that is tired, under staffed and stretched so thin it resembles more a broken machine than a system of justice.

Terrifically acted by Hoult and Toni Collette as the prosecutor it’s difficult to understand why this film got dumped to streaming when it would have been a great time in the theatres.  Eastwood has a great track record as a director and he’s really delivered on what may well be his last ever film, which is itself a sad commentary on the business at the moment. Four and a half babies out of five.

 

Film Review: Nosferatu

As I understand it, they made the original film as a rip-off of the Dracula novel back in 1922, changing various character names to get away with it.  Bram Stoker sued them anyway and won, but enough copies of the film survived for it to become a classic.  This is a remake, made with careful attention to the original but with naturally better effects.

Nicholas Hoult, having a great year, stars as an ambitious young man in the German real estate business who is sent to Transylvania to sign a deal with Count Orlok for an old mansion.  Turns out it’s a trap, since Orlok is a vampire who’s been having a ghost affair with Hoult’s wife, Lily-Rose Depp, since she was a young girl.  Willem Dafoe plays an occult scientist who believes Depp’s ‘madness’ is actually manifestations of this great evil demon who has come to their village.

It’s an entertaining tale, full of great imagery and just enough horror to be scary without becoming disquieting.  Depp does very well as the tormented but determined young lady who has to face down this ultimate threat, surrounded by some great character actors hamming it up.  Four shadows our of five.

 

Film Review: Flow

Set somewhere at some point in the future, Flow tells the tale of a little black cat confronted with some kind of terrible climatic wave of water that floods everything the cat calls home.  It scrambles aboard a boat that also has a Dog, a Capybara, and a Lemur onboard.  Joined by a bird that can’t fly, they are blown along a sea that takes them past and through amazing landscapes, lost monuments and an abandoned city.  Eventually the seas vanish and the boat ends up awash in a newly-emerged forest.

 

For an animated film with no dialogue it’s impressive how well we understand what each character is feeling, and what they are expressing to the others.  This is something of a magical film that impresses us with wonder and awe while intimidating us over how small and fragile a little cat is in the big world.  It teaches that we learn, we grow, and hopefully we survive.  I don’t think we’ll ever understand what happened to that bird though.  Five fishies out of five.

 

Film Review: Carry-On

A lovely ode to action-thriller movies of Christmas past, Carry-On is a tale set in a busy airport near to the Christmas break.  Taron Egerton is a dispirited airport security agent with a pregnant wife who is suddenly forced by Jason Bateman (doing a delightful evil turn complete with scowl and low baseball cap) into a complicated plot to get a bomb onto an airplane.  Lots of twists and turns result as Taron desperately tries to trip up Bateman’s plan while Bateman gets angrier and angrier while trying to keep control.

It ramps up nicely as some extra characters - also under threat from Bateman’s team - are brought into the mix, while the local police and FBI start to investigate as well.  Of course eventually we have the final fight but the film overall is very satisfying.  Three plastic guns out of five.

 

Film Review: Gladiator 2

There was a story years ago about how Russell Crowe wanted a sequel to his Oscar hit, despite dying in the first one.  He told Nick Cave to come up with something and the result was an idea of Maximus battling demi-gods in the afterlife to return to Earth, then being cursed to live and fight on Earth in war after war throughout history.  It was rejected.

Instead, Ridley Scott developed a story about Lucius, Connie Nielson’s son.  G2 starts many years later with captured soldiers being taken from some conquered village in Africa back to Rome where they are then sent into the Coliseum to fight.  One of them becomes a clear leader and a star, and we learn eventually he is Lucius, who was sent from Rome by his mother to be safe. 

Now Lucius finds himself in a similar situation to his father (?  !!!) Maximus, in that his mother and various politicians want him to use his skills and popularity to overthrow the hated emperors, who themselves are being manipulated by Slave owner and Gladiator trainer Denzel Washington.

What I found most disappointing about Gladiator 2 was just how weak it was.  Paul Mescal is doing his best, but you would need someone pretty special to literally step into Russell Crowe’s sandals, and Paul just ain’t it.  The script isn’t up to snuff either, jumping about from one extreme to the other with seemingly no connective tissue.  Denzel is the only one really enjoying himself and swinging for the fences, but in the end the film feels like a placeholder.  They should have gone with the Cave script.  One handful of sand out of five.

 

Film Review: Wicked

Turns out there’s this big back-story to the wicked witch of the west.  And this back-story was turned into a very successful Broadway musical, and now has become a two-part film saga.  We start at the end, with the wicked witch dead and a village celebrating.  The good witch arrives and someone asks if she knew the bad witch.  Cue wistful flashback.

A complicated story emerges where long ago Elphaba comes to the university to study being a witch but everyone realises she’s naturally gifted and very powerful.  She’s also green, which seems to be a problem for the people of Oz and causes her to be ostracized and bullied her entire life.  She becomes roommates with Galinda the good witch, the popular girl of the school.  Starting out as enemies, they eventually become friends through some very good character scenes and are then granted a chance to see the Wizard in Emerald City.  But in realising the Wizard is a fraud, Elphaba makes herself public enemy number one and has to flee the city on a broomstick. 

That’s part one of the story, and at the end it feels like we are even further away from The Wicked Witch than when we started.  There’s lots of singing, which I didn’t like all that much but everyone is very good at it, and everything looks very good.  Hopefully part 2 actually has the story in it.  Three stood-on books out of five.  

 - Peace out

Give 'em hell, Indiana Jones

Conditions: A little shaky

Film Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

It's important to remember that Harrison Ford does actually have some integrity.  While others would be happier to see Indiana Jones return to form acting like it's still 1982, leaping around punching bad guys and grabbing the prize with a smirk, from the outset Ford said they weren't going to hide away from the simple facts of life, primarily that Jones is now in his 80's.  His last adventure still opens with a blast of course, dropping a de-aged Jones into a rip roaring WW2 adventure on a train, but once the introduction is past we are in the late 60's and Jones is retiring from being a professor and is facing up to some bleak choices in his old age. 

Fortunately his god-daughter arrives, who needs his help to find the Dial, which drags Jones off into one last adventure.  One that will take him across the middle east while trying to stay one step ahead of the Nazi's who are also after the Dial.  Jones (and Harrison) are trying their best, but you can see the occasional stumble, every now and then you see that Jones is an old man now, still with some heart though. 

The last act of the movie takes a step, it turns out Mads Mikkelson wants the dial so he can go back in time, usurp Hitler and bring Germany under a smarter leader.  As they fire up the dial and load onto an airplane Jones is along for the ride and together they all careen into the (even more) distant past. Once the dust clears Jones makes a choice to stay in the past, deciding he belongs there.  It's up to the god-daughter not only to bring him home but to then remind him why he should be home.  It's a bold way to end the adventures of this remarkable character, but when I ponder on it I think it's entirely fitting. Four memories out of five. 

- Peace out

Come With Me

Conditions: I'm not catching up, you're catching up

Film Review: Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever

Or: Two Funerals and a handover.  Chadwick Boseman's untimely death really dropped the Black Panther team in the cack.  After an amazingly successful initial film they were going to have to recast the iconic role for film 2, AND find a way to tastefully explain Chadwick's absence.  I'm pleased to see that they did exactly that, devoting a large chunk of the first half of the film to explain how the character died and hold an respectable funeral for him.  The overall problem is that this is meant to be an action film, and spending such a large amount of time n that, however necessary, is going to affect the pace of the film.  Subsequently the overall feeling is that this is a film about loss, with some action stuff shoe-horned at the end to wake everyone up.

It's not helped that they also kill off Angela Basset's character either, with another subsequent funeral.  This is a real mistake as she gives the best performance in the film, commanding and vulnerable as the new queen.  It's up to Shuri, the sister, to take the mantle of the Black Panther and frankly, she just doesn't seem right for the role. The new bad guy is called Namor, and he's a mutant king of a secret underwater kingdom made when people were infected with smallpox from invading colonizers and took to the water to escape.  It is as mad as it sounds.  Namor has these little wings on his ankles and has super strength and it's all just a little too much comic-book for me

Of course the two kingdoms must fight, and fight they do on some weird Wakandan ship getting besieged by whales towing water-bombs underneath.  Meanwhile Shuri and Namor are beating the crap out of each other all over the place.  Namor spears Shuri through the middle, so that's pretty much game over right?  Nope, Shuri extracts the spear and keeps on fighting, so I guess it's safe to conclude reality is no longer an active participant in these affairs.  Stay tuned for the next episode where they all probably end up in space or something.  One and a half spears out of five.

Film Review: Avatar 2: The Way of Water

Finally!!  We return to Pandora after what seems like a lifetime, and it's both familiar and also new.  JakeSully and Neytiri now have three kids, and have adopted two more when Grace's character from film one somehow gets pregnant, and Spider the human child of Quaritch was left behind and adopted.  Anyway, the new family's life get interrupted by the sky people, who once again land guns-first back on Pandora and set to work building a city and sending out military raids.  Quaritch is back, but in Na'vi form as his consciousness was uploaded to a new Avatar, along with the rest of his team.  They are sent in specifically to take out the Sully clan.  

James Cameron plays this pretty smart.  He knew if he'd just done another 'human forces fight the Na'vi in the forests' again most people would get bored with it quick, so he effectively skips over that part with a montage to get to the interesting bit: where Jake realises Quaritch is targeting his family so makes the decision to up and leave his clan.  He takes his family off to live with a clan that lives next to the sea.  This gives us an entirely new environment to explore, along with getting to know these new characters.  

The plot bubbles away nicely as Quaritch abducts Spider, but on realising who he is takes him under his protection as his team moves out to the coast and starts interrogating Na'vi villages for Jake's location.  The love-hate relationship between Spider and his father really makes this tick, and it all comes to a head when Quaritch and his hijacked whaling ship get a sniff of where JakeSully is hiding out.  This leads us to a rousing finish where the Na'vi, assisted by one of the whales, takes on the whalers and soldiers and their giant vessel.  It's terrific, as interested in exploring the world and the people as it is in delivering the thrills of conflict between these two forces.  And of course this sets us up nicely for the next chapter now we know where the lines are drawn.  Four Arrows Though The Canopy out of five.

Film Review: Glass Onion

It's a delicate balancing act, but I felt the latest Benoit Blanc mystery is a little light on the Benoit Blanc.  The new film sets a bunch of unlikable people on an island, murders one of them and then has Benoit stumble around in the middle of it.  Then halfway through, the film backtracks and changes the start of the film retroactively to alter who we thought a certain character was.  Benoit appears to be one step behind throughout, but when the killer is revealed it all seems kind of obvious, so much so that Benoit effectively gives up effectively gives up and retires to the beach while the mansion burns down.

Edward Norton does a great job with a pretty awful character who is meant to be a sort of Elon Musk, but worse.  He's surrounded himself with sycophantic hangers on who are there for a weekend party but the truth is that this film is well named, and while there are many layers to it this is a see-through mystery pretty much from the start.  So it's really a case of waiting for the other characters to catch up.  They do a trick here that I'm not sure I like.  I won't spoil it but there's a key movement in the background that you just catch, then five minutes later they show it again and it's different, so you doubt yourself and think 'oh, I mustn't have seen that correctly.'  But there's a lie there, the replay is not the same action.  It misdirects, sure.  But I think it's a cheat.

I wonder if this is a story that had Benoit inserted into it?  Because that's kind of the feeling here.  It's very clever, very slick and Daniel Craig is doing fine work as the charming and eccentric investigator, but he and the audience are clearly frustrated at how simple this all is.  In the end everything burns down as a act of anger, rage and retribution while Daniel sits on the beach and muses.  I can't really figure out why they went with that as an ending as it doesn't really put anyone in a good light.  It feels more like a metaphor in that they introduce a thing at the start of the film and in the end find a way to burn it.  Two neckerchiefs out of Five.

Film Review: Nope

Meet OJ and Emerald, brother and sister who own and manage a failing horse ranch in the California hills they inherited from their father who died when a nickel fell into his eye from the sky.  Since then they've been selling off their horses to their next door neighbour to try and stay afloat.  They get suspicious about a cloud that doesn't move, and eventually, finally, they come to realise the neighbour has been feeding their horses to this UFO-monster in order to sell the spectacle to paying customers.

In this careful film from Jordan Peele, what's surprising to me is that the idea seems to be to spend a lot of time trying to scare the audience by almost showing them the scary thing.  The real action happens in the amusement park next to the horse ranch, and we only really get to that at the end.  Most of this film is seeing weird things off in the distance, or off to the side.  The neighbour is called Jupe, and he has a complicated backstory as a child actor who survived an animal attack while on the set of his TV show.  I feel like it wasn't explored enough.  And what with that and lead actor Daniel Kaluuya playing everything very restrained and reserved it's a film that mumbles a lot.

Finally the UFO monster comes into the open and tries to kill everyone, and it's a hoot, but the film has been so restrained for so long the change of tone is a bit dizzying.  We're never really sure what the plan actually is, or even if there is a plan.  But amazingly it all works out in the end.  One and a half Rains of Blood out of Five.

Film Review: Woman King

Set in the 1820's in West Africa, Woman King tells the story of the Agojie, the female warriors of the kingdom of Dahomey  led by Viola Davis.  The concept is introduced through a young girl called Nawi, who joins the warriors as a new recruit.  Another kingdom, the Oyo, are preparing for war with this kingdom and the Dahomey king, John Boyega, is trying to arm his soldiers ready for the conflict.  But Nawi turns out to have a connection to Davis, and in the conflict she is abducted, prompting Davis to put together a rescue party against the will of the king.

This is a powerful and dramatic film, existing as a showcase for Viola Davis to demonstrate what she can do with a terrific role.  The female warriors of Dahomey do not hold back, and are fully convincing in the many battle sequences.  It's a great film.

There has been some controversy around the topic.  In reality, the kingdom of Dahomey would sell slaves to be able to purchase weapons, and while this is addressed in the film the thinking is that it's not addressed enough.  But in reality all historical films aren't 100% accurate and it seems odd that so much attention was placed on this particular film.  Four Spears out of Five.

- peace out

Everything Movies All At Once

Let's try to play a little catch up, yes?

Film Review: RRR

While Hollywood has been busy crafting more realistic and P.C-friendly action movies, Bollywood has been on a big run of making as crazy and insane action films they can think of.  RRR is set in India just after the first world war, a country under the thumb of the awful and evil British empire.  Two native men have decided to fight back in their own ways, one as a rebel fighter and the other as undercover in the India regiment under British rule.  One is actually hunting the other but when they first meet they become fast friends.  As the story twists and turns loyalty is tested and the truths are revealed.  In the end of course they team up to take on the British rulers.

It is based on the real situation at the time and both characters did exist in real life, but the story itself is a fantasy, albeit a very fun and enjoyable fantasy.  The drama advances to as much heights as the mad action sequences do, including a man singing about his freedom running like a river as his blood pours onto the ground while being tortured, and a plan to unleash a division of wild animals into a British tea party.  The two actors makes this work beautifully, and the passion and imagination bubble through from start to end.  A great adventure.  Five out of five studded whips.

Film Review: Jurassic World 3

All things must eventually end, including long-running franchise trilogies.  This one has had it's misteps, but overall the saga of (checks notes) Claire and Owen and their run of  administration of dinosaur island through to their now crusade to free the dinosaurs and bring down anyone else trying to run a dinosaur island reaches a stopping point.  They're also parents in a way of the clone girl from the last film, and her and the baby raptor are kidnapped by the evil Dr Wu in order to try and figure out how to stop a plague of genetically modified locusts he has unleashed.

Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neil are all shoe-horned into the plot too, picking up from where they got left, all there to help infiltrate and take down park number, let's say 5, in Italy.  Lot's of close calls and nasty dino encounters spice up the various character stuff as the bad guys have their plans fall apart around them.  Again.  The overall idea is to let the dinosaurs do their thing despite how that never works, but it was always more interesting watching things fail and nasty people getting hunted and eaten.  Three and a half teeth out of five.

Film Review: Top Gun Maverick

Well, after 35 odd years the sequel no one wanted has whooshed back onto screens, allowing us to check in on Pete Maverick Mitchell and how life is treating him.  And from the first scene we see nothing much has changed, he's still a hot head.  After crashing a test plane he gets promoted upward to teach at the Top Gun school.  There's a difficult mission the fly boys and girls need to do and it's felt Maverick is the only one that can teach them.  But Tom Cruise can't teach people how to be Tom Cruise.  All Tom Cruise can do is be Tom Cruise to the best of Tom Cruise's ability to Tom Cruise, and hope that Tom Cruise stands as an inspiration to others.  Tom Cruise.  So of course in the end he leads the mission himself.

There's a lovely moment early on that sums this thing up, some general barks at Tom Cruise about how the days of hotshot pilots are over and that drones are going to take over everything, and Tom Cruise stops and turns directly to the camera, flashes that smile and says "maybe, but not today".  And he's right.  What a great film this was, fun and exciting, willing to explore Maverick's aging character a little, see his choices of how he's lived, and of course drop him into a terrific plot about the best of the best.  Val Kilmer has a touching cameo too.  Five danger zones out of five.

Film Review: Everything Everywhere All At Once

This one's a doozy.  What starts out as a plot by a tired husband and wife to try and sort out their taxes turns into a wildly insane plot concerning people spanning the mutiverse and jumping from one life into another.  Wife Michelle Yeoh is informed by husband Ke Huy Quan they are battling their daughter (Stephanie Hsu) who is trying to destroy all the multiverses and is very powerful.  Incredible action sequences and mind-bending logic leaps follow as Michelle and Stephanie battle over the fate of the universe and their relationship as mother and daughter.

There's so much imagination on display it's a little overwhelming.  Best not to hold on too tight and just let the crazy ideas flow wildly over you.  It does make enough sense but it's really about the emotional journey taking place as Michelle realises and revolutionizes who she is and what she is doing.  There's so many tangents, so many in-jokes and references and call backs and just all in nuttiness it's a remarkable achievement.  But it does all get sorted in the end.  Four and half rocks out of five.

Film Review: Thor Love and Thunder

For the second Taika Waititi led Thor film we get more of the same irreverent hi-jinks with Thor and friends as they crash through a plot that seems more serious than the movie is.  It's concerning a character called Gorr the God butcher, a man who gets the means to kill Gods and so sets about doing it, and the film kind of seems okay about it.  There's a special place he can go to and ask a person to just do it, which is wildly convenient but there you go.  Thor has to chase him around the galaxy for a bit, and we're all dragged along for the ride.  

Christian Bale plays Gorr straight, basically in a different movie to everyone else.  And Natalie Portman is back!  As Thor, because she has some link to the hammer which has reformed itself.  Also she has cancer.  If all of this sounds slapshot, well that's because it is.  These films work because Chris Hemsworth is fun as Thor and the film keeps throwing imaginative stuff at us.  I imagine if it ever actually stopped it would just die.  Maybe for the next film we'll get to see and angry Russell Crowe as Zeus and his son Hercules, but I wouldn't count on it.  These things seem paper thin to me.  Two and a half CG swirls out of five.

Peace out

Well If It Isn't The Consequences Of My Actions

Conditions: Ominous

Film Review: Nightmare Alley

I sometimes get confused when these kind of films come along because it's not easy to see what the point is.  Your usual film has someone who rises above some setbacks to triumph in some way.  A more daring film might have the main character fall but in falling allows others to succeed, or just falls outright.  But this film is the type where the main character is a bad guy, spends the whole film as a bad guy, and ends the movie as a bad guy.  It's a dark and dirty film that sort of drags you along.  You know it's going to go wrong, the bad guy will get his comeuppance, but when it does there's no satisfaction to it.  

Bradley Cooper stars as Stanton, we first see him burying a body and setting a house on fire - scenes that repeat and develop as the film goes on.  It's like the 1930's and he joins a traveling carnival and finds he has some talent for working a crowd.  He falls in love with a girl and the two of them go off to the city to run their own act where he pretends to be psychic.  This gets him the attention of the rich and powerful, and he gets into a complicated relationship with a psychiatrist who he can use to get information on his targets.  A very rich and powerful man hires him to get in contact with his long dead wife, and that sets us up for the big finale where Stanton thinks he can make his big score.  

Bradley's character just uses people to get what he wants before going on to the next.  He gets too high an opinion of himself and starts to believe he 8can do anything.  When it finally bites him you don't feel glad so much as hopeful it will soon be over.  Despite how well the film has been shot by director Guillermo del Toro the characters are so closed off there's not much to examine.  It's like a game of poker with really good players who give nothing away.  We the audience don't really have all that much to work with.  Bradley's last shot has him cry-laughing into the camera about his fate and it's the best shot in the film, but we needed more of that emotion throughout.  Two scars out of five.

- peace out

Shoulda been Sharks With Frickin' Laser Beams

Conditions: What The Hell Was That?

Film Review: No Time To Die

Spoilers. When an actor takes on a long standing role it's totally understandable that they would want to personalize it a little bit, find a way to make their take on the character a little bit unique to the actor or actors who came before. That's fine. Daniel Craig wanted a more personal Bond, one who hurt on the inside as well as (slightly) on the outside. And I think it was a good idea. Mostly. But the long-running relationship with Lea Seydoux's Madeline seemed to make less and less sense the more movies they appeared in. As the new one starts they're living together, supposedly madly in love before he gets blown up at a cemetery. Bond then decides the smartest thing to do is break up and go live by himself in Cuba. Naturally. A plot then descends, concerning a new weaponized virus that can be programmed to kill people that's gotten into the hands of a classic island-dwelling villain, but the new 007 tells Bond to stay out of it, so he teams up with the CIA for old times sake to try and snatch the Virus-maker. When that goes sideways Bond shows up in London to shout at M for a bit before finishing things up with Blofeld. Predictably, Blofeld's stupid plot blows up in his face and he's killed remotely by new bad guy Safin (Rami Malek).

Safin and Madeline have history, so he then decides to kidnap her and Bond's daughter (gasp!) and take them back to his island fortress, busy making lots of virus stuff. Bond and 007 then team up to go raid the island, save Madeline and daughter, and kill Safin. All this is stupid, but now is where it really goes downhill. Confronted by the apparently surprising fact that neither Madeline nor the daughter want to live on his crappy island Safin just ...lets them wander off. The navy has arrived and Bond tells them to fire missiles at the island while he goes in to open the fortress blast doors. And rescue everyone, and put them on a boat. But wouldn't you know it, somehow the blast doors are closed again. Gee you'd think Bond of all people would know to disable blast doors on an evil villain's island fortress. So he says goodbye to everyone in the boat and goes back up the stairs again but not before getting shot up by Safin. As one would expect this just gives him a limp.

So in the end he limps up the stairs and opens the blast doors just in time to heroically stand and watch the missiles come in and blow him up. And so they killed James Bond. So they actually did that.  Craig wanted to, and for some stupid reason the filmmakers listened to him and went along with it.  Overlooking for a moment the madness of killing the character off at all, this, of all the things Bond has faced over the decades, was nowhere near enough of a plot or a villain to be the actual death of James Bond. Safin has no actual personality at all, other than being weird.  The virus thing is cute, but has no actual presence or weight to it.  Ultimately the thing about Bond was that he was a fantasy.  This guy who could get into any situation through charm and cunning, could save the day and escape with a wink and a joke.  He was a survivor, perhaps the ultimate survivor who while being gently adapted as the decades rolled by remained recognisable throughout.  In more recent years it felt like the films had to apologise for the character more and more, treating him as a dinosaur and having him be more fallible even as he still would win in the end.  Did our society finally become so hostile to an old fashioned idea as James Bond that he became toxic and had to go away?  Well they're going to keep making movies about him, I guess somehow hoping the audience just forgets they killed the character off.  But it undermines the very idea of Bond and the whole franchise.  It seems sad.  In fact the whole movie feels bogged down and sad about itself. Ana De Almas is by far the best thing in it, and that's just a cameo.  Zero stiff drinks out of five.

- peace out

Am I Vengeance?

Conditions: Slow

Film Review: The Batman

After Christopher Nolan was done with Batman, Zach Snyder had a go by incorporating the figure into his Justice League movies. Subsequently his Batman was louder, angrier and I guess flashier too as Affleck had to battle Superman and be a leader to a bunch of superheroes, and - when it came to fighting intergalactic monsters - sort-of stay out of the way. With all that thankfully behind us the studio can return Batman to what he's best at: rage-punching thugs in dark alleyways.

The Batman, now featuring Robert Pattinson, stands as another reboot but without having to go over the old territory too much. There's no yet-another-depiction of Thomas and Martha Wayne getting murdered down the alleyway, no need to have angry Bruce discover an old cave, or develop new technologies with his butler. No we start with an established Batman putting the fear of the dark into Gotham's lowlifes, a very driven Batman who calls himself Vengeance and terrifies the victims as much as he does the scum. His biggest worry is if he's actually making a difference in his brute force approach to crime stopping.

The story is driven by the villains, as is so often the case with these films, and here it's the Riddler at center stage. He's in the mode of a Zodiac-style serial killer who wants to kill important Gotham authorities to show how corrupt Gotham is and he likes to leave elaborate notes and clues for Batman and the police. Paul Dano does great work here as the demented serial killer even as he is mostly shrouded in a mask and a boiler suit. The focus of the film is on the corruption that Gotham seems to be mired in, the Riddler using his terrorist attacks to pull the veil off the way justice seems to work in the city. Gotham looks fantastic, a rain-soaked gothic clutter of streets and alleys. Colin Farrel plays the Penguin as the owner of a high class club, totally disappeared underneath some amazing makeup.

It's a glorious film, absolutely soaked in the aesthetics of a dark crime thriller. Batman spends more time in crime scenes surrounded by his one ally Jim Gordon (a terrifically growly Jeffrey Wright) and a bunch of uneasy cops looking at evidence than he does swinging from the rooftops, and it's handled well.  Director Matt Reeves really does a great balancing act here between action and intrigue. As for Robert, his Batman isn't just more comfortable in the suit than out of it, when he's out of it the guy looks lost and adrift. This is, amazingly, another different take on the idea of Batman, fighting to catch up with the machinations of a serial killer in a city sliding out of control.  And as the story progresses Batman realises that his hardcore fear-based approach to crime busting may not be the way that society changes for the better.  Nothing like having a little character growth in a Batman film.  There's even a near-romance with Catwoman to shock him out of his shell.  The fights are great, the car is terrific, the mood is suitably grim and dark, the Riddler is a suitable villain, it's great having Batman seemingly back on the right track again.

Four and a half heavy footsteps out of five