Live by Night

Ben Affleck does quadruple duty as director, writer, producer and star in "Live By Night" - his forth film as director, and his first since the oscar-winning "Argo". But this one kinda comes unstuck - possibly because it's an attempt to do an old-fashioned epic gangster story, but it's one that struggles to come to life. The problem may be the overly-epic scope - much of the first twenty minutes or so, set in Boston, is a bit of a mess (Affleck feels a bit too old to play the naive young man caught between a gang-leader and his moll, and Sienna Miller as the moll doesn't entirely land as a force of fascination for two men). The film doesn't really come alive until the action relocates to Florida where Affleck gets caught up in rum-running and in setting up gang activities in a state dominated by the KKK and a hatred of both Irish (which he is) and Italians (which he's working for). 

There are a few moments of light - Zoe Saldana is a gorgeous presence as his eventual love interest, and Elle Fanning has some great scenes as the born-again Christian who frustrates his casino plan, plus Max Casella is an entertaining weasel. But the ending brings back a lot of the Boston elements in a way that doesn't feel like it's showing the film to best advantage - and in general, this never really finds a point to focus on - Affleck isn't dynamic enough to centre the film. It's a nice looking film with a period sheen, but that isn't quite enough to recommend it.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

A long running franchise can have its ups and downs. It's particularly unfortunate when the downs turns out to be the last film of the series. "Resident Evil: The Final Chapter" is the culmination of six films about the Umbrella Corporation, a more than usually irresponsible evil corporation that spreads a mass virus that turns everybody into zombies - well, everyone except our dwindling group of heroes (and a couple of non-zombie baddies). The last six films have seen Mila Jovavich as Alice, initially an amnesiac who wakes up just above an Umbrella facility as an outbreak starts, who has travelled the globe and beat up all kinds of infected creatures, often in fairly skimpy outfits, and accompanied by characters from the videogames that have inspired the series.

This one sees her all the way back to where everything began as the clock ticks down to the final end of humanity (yes, quite literally the clock, as apparently humanity's demise has a very specific schedule). Along the way Alice assembles a team to break back into Umbrella headquarters to unleash a cure, but of course there are surprise revelations along the way and Umbrella operatives to be fought off.

This one doesn't have the pristine design sense or general aesthetic pleasure of the last two films (Afterlife and Retribution) - whether it's a budget choice (the budget is noticably 1/3 lower than the last two films) or an attempt to capture a post-apocalyptic vibe, this one looks grittier and noticably takes place at night. There isn't quite the entertaining supporting cast that previous films have offered - only Ian Glenn really gets a chance to chew on scenery as the chief baddie - everybody else is painted in pretty shallowly.

Still, it does close off the series for a fanboy, which I admit I am. And it's a nice chance to say goodbye. So maybe not for the general audience, but for the fans, it works.

Split

M. Night Shyamalan has spent a fair bit of time in the artistic and commercial wilderness - almost a decade. With his more recent films, he's brought back down the budgets and started back with the more exploitationy horror films he made his name with. In this case, the story of a man with multiple personalities who kidnaps three girls for a sinister purpose, the basic premise does feel perilously close to torture porn (albiet with a show-offy central role for James McAvoy - while the character is described as having 23 separate personalities, we only get exposed to about five for any length of time, but that's enough to show McAvoy has some seriously good acting skills to his bow).

The "insanity = evil" element has been criticised a bit online, but in the context of the film it's used fairly unrealistically -  pretty early on there's a lot of speculation about supernatural powers being invoked, and indeed the finale does take this to its ridiculous extension. I do find there's a bit of stuff about childhood trauma here that isn't quite as easy to take as part of a far-fetched fun-ride  - I often find Shymalalan a little difficult to take as he tends to try to combine fantastic premises with realistic portrayals, and while McAvoy's performance doesn't exactly fall within realism, the general tone isn't one I'm entirely comfortable with.

I appreciate this more as a vehcile for a performance rather than anything else - I find the later turns in the plot to wander between distasteful and ridiculous, which means I don't quite have the fun I'd like to have with this kinda film. There is a last minute moment that invokes another recent cinematic trend that I almost undoubtedly can't talk about without spoilers, and supporting performances from Betty Buckley and Anya Taylor-Joy give a certain grunt to the film, but generally this never quite held me as a great horror film should. It's certainly reasonably competent, but it's not quite my thing.

Moonlight

"Moonlight" is the story of a young man at three different ages, as a child, as a teenager and as an adult. Growing up in a poor black neghbourhood with a mother sliding into drug addiction, and with an emerging sense of his own sexuality, Chiron's life builds in tension until an explosion of violence changes everything - and then later in life, the question becomes what can be put back together again afterwards?

Barry Jenkins' film is a marvel. I haven't seen as deeply concentrated a character study in a while, one that paints the contradictions of growing up different to everyone around you, where even your closest friends may betray you, and how those feelings can still tear at you years later. The last third in particular is a masterpiece of subtext - a simple conversation where the weight of two characters' history lies underneath everything they say.

Performances throughout are exemplary - the three performers playing Chiron (Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders and Alex Hibbert), Naomi Harris as his mother, Mahershali Ali as the drug dealer who simultaneously enables his mother and is his protector, Janelle Monae as the dealer's kind girlfriend, and particularly Andre Holland as Chiron's oldest friend.

This hit me in several places I live, and feels utterly gripping in its portrayals of the brutal elements of life and the moments of tenderness that holds you through them.

Lion

"Lion" is the kind of prestige film I feel a bit bad for disliking. It's certainly very worthy, and for the first half an hour or so, is pretty good film-making, as young Sunny Pawar plays Saroo, a child whose world collapses when he accompanies his brother to a train station and loses him. Getting on a train, he finds himself in a part of India he doesn't know, not even being able to speak Behghali. Finally he ends up in an orphanage, where he is adopted by a Tasmanian couple. Twenty years later, while studying to be a hotel manager, he reconnects with his Indian past and his quest to find his real home begins...

Unfortunately, it's about where that quest begins that this film loses me a bit. I'm not sure if it's the leap from the vibrant Pawar to the somewhat more brooding Dev Patel, whether it's the somewhat aimless romantic subplot with Rooney Mara (who gets the worst version of the obligatory girlfriend plot, the "girlfriend is largely ignored because her man has something more important in his life that he doesn't want to share with her, but she'll accept it once he's solved it" one), or whether it's that a lot of the other subplots feel underpowered (Nicole Kidman basically has one Oscar-Scene-Speech but is otherwise doing a lot of polite nodding, while David Wenham gets less than that). The scenes of the search tend to boil down to one guy in a room doing a lot of googling, which is never particularly fascinating. And while the resolution, yes, is appropriately cathartic, it didn't make up for the slight tedium that had crept in for the previous 45 minutes or so.

This is not necessarily a bad movie, and for some people, they're going to buy into the search and the struggle for connectednesss more than I did. But for me this is an interesting concept and story that doesn't quite land emotionally.

XXX: Return of Xander Cage

The original “XXX” was one of the more obnoxious blockbusters of the early 2000s. Starring Vin Diesel as an extreme-sports-star-turned-superspy, it attempted to give the spy movie genre “attitude”, but managed to look ludicrously dated pretty much the moment it came out. While, yes, it did have the pleasures of stupid fun action and globe-hopping locations, Diesel himself didn’t come off particularly well – irritatingly arrogant, snide, acting like a massively over-roided teenager.

This belated follow up levers off the success of the “Fast and the Furious” franchise, which has benefitted from surrounding Diesel with a multi-ethnic team of similar car-driving hoons, which softens his arrogance considerably. Here, he’s surrounded with similar acceptably-rebellious meatheads (Ruby Rose, Rory McCann and Kris Wu), and initially posed up against a team of similarly multi-ethnic neer-do-wells (led by the ludicrously charismatic Donnie Yen, with Deepika Padukon, Tony Jaa and Michael Bisping has his goon-force). Samuel L. Jackson makes a minor appearance as Diesel’s old recruiter, with Toni Collette being the woman running the agency and Nina Dobrev the tech-geek who's never been a field agent before and who inevitably will end out in the field at some point. 

The basic plot is still pretty much your standard spy shenanigans (there’s an object that does evil things, Yen stole it, Diesel has to get it, twists and turns ensue), there’s a dopey reminder that Ice Cube was in a dodgy sequel-by-name-only, and generally this is a thoroughly pleasant way to watch a lot of explosions, shooting and people being kicked and thumped.This does what a good franchise film does - it entertains and it makes me want to come back and hang out with these people again at a later date. It's empty calories but entertaining empty calories.

Jackie

The best biopics tend to pick a very specific period in the subject’s life – say, a particular day or series of events – rather than try to cover the lot from cradle to grave. This allows them to delve a bit deeper into how that person really ticked – how this one event altered them, with more intense focus, rather than having to try to shove in every famous event of a person’s life.

Natalie Portman delivers in spades as Jackie Bouvier Kennedy – largely focused on the week immediately following her husband’s death, as she attempts for the last time to stage manage the legacy of a president. There’s a hell of a lot of surface calm covering up rage and frustration – an immaculate sense of complete control  with turmoil held underneath. It’s a film that is very much about surfaces – about how the country presents itself in a time of crisis, about whether a person can will themselves and their world into greatness.

This doesn’t quite sustain its length – there’s a period of about ten-twenty minutes near the end where it seems the film is slightly turning its wheels, covering the same ground repeatedly rather than progressing anywhere. A lot of the minor characters are played by established names which does make it particularly odd that their parts are pretty functional rather than anything more interesting. And the ending is a little too eager to wrap everything up patly, while the rest of the film allows few easy resolutions. But this is a powerhouse vehicle for Portman, and she meets its demands with aplomb.

 

Assasin's Creed

The video-game-to-movie model has a 20-odd year history now, but there isn’t a “respectable” movie in the catalogue. The best you can hope for is something that has a diverting kinda fannish fun – for me, the “Resident Evil” series is the standard, throwing hyperprocessed action, Mila Jovavich in skimpy clothing , hordes of zombie creatures and a half-baked conglomeration of game lore at the audience. You might get a few thrills here and there, but you’re probably not going to learn anything particularly deep about the human condition, beyond “hey, evil corporations sure are evil”.         

“Assassin’s Creed” doesn’t even get there on the surface fun level. Justin Kurzel’s film has a top level cast (the poster boasts three Oscar winners or nominees, and actors as qualified as Charlotte Rampling, Brendan Gleeson and Michael K. Williams shows up for additional actor cred) but none of them are playing characters with any depth beyond the surface “heroic assassin”, “corporate baddy”, “scientist lady”. The plot is a fairly dull trudge through a storyline that feels awfully generic, and never really has the true joy that an insane plot about genetic blood memory, mystic artefacts and world dominating corporations really should have. The parkour –heavy fighting action that has made the games a franchise reliable here feel like every other action movie we’ve seen in the last decade or so from Bond to Bourne, and Kurzel’s fondness for smoke and grey filters just means we get an oppressive-looking dour drone of a film (this didn’t help his “Macbeth” much either).

I do not mind stupidity in a movie. I do mind being bored. I was desperately bored by this film, and it never really rose above the run-of-the-mill.

Passengers

This is already controversial, largely because of a misrepresentative advertising campaign that, perhaps understandably since both Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt are young attractive movie stars, concentrates on the chemistry between them and the space adventures they have together on a generational starship that will take 100-odd years to reach its destination (where both of them are awoken 60 years too soon).

Of course, it's a little bit more complicated than that, as Pratt is initially the only one awoken - about a year into his isolation, sliding into insanity, Pratt makes the decision, knowing what it means to rob 60 years of her life, to wake Lawrence up. It's odd that this is the choice that's made - the producers know that Lawrence is the bigger star - they paid her more, she's been in more hit movies than Pratt (admittedly most of them had the words "Hunger Games" attached), but still, the female character can't be the one to make the discoveries, she has to be the one to be led through the film by a bloke. He's given a more pro-active occupation (engineer) as opposed to her journalism, which aforethought the film never produces anything except that he likes reading what she writes - she's not, apparently, a particularly investigative journalist...

Look, this is not hideous. Pratt and Lawrence have a nice sparky chemistry when the plot gets out of the way, the effects look nice, and both young stars also get a chance to show off their bodies (Pratt airs his butt twice, Lawrence spends some time in a bikini). But there's a better film that this could have been with a bit more thinking.

Red Dog: True Blue

This is a simple boy-and-his-dog story about coming of age in the late sixties-early seventies - I must admit I haven't seen the first "Red Dog" film, but the dog here is more or less a device to help tie together the various events as a boy goes out to stay with his grandpa in the middle of Western Australia while his mum is suffering from mental illness (the potential here for an interesting examination of mental illness is largely skipped - the mother only appears right at the beginning of the film and we're otherwise informed on how she's doing). Along the way he meets a diverse range of people from the local aboriginals to a pair of stockmen with a secret (this secret literally appears in one scene and has no relevance to the rest of the movie whatsoever) to his first crush on his attractive young tutor, plus Lang Hancock (another scene that kinda only matters while it's going on, and a very weird one since it's a kinda comfy lovable Lang we get - is there some mining money financing this?)

The framing device of this being the recollections of a businessman who grew up allows Jason Isaacs to make an appearance (and between this and the trailer for "Lion" seen at the same session, it's looking like a good year for British actors doing Australian accents), plus allows the prequel to use a bit of footage of the first film. Bryan Brown does his gruff Australian thing as well as ever. Levi Miller looks overly-trained as a kid actor - there isn't much naturalism in his line readings and it does make him a slightly unengaging protagonist. But apparently he's going to be a thing in the Australian film industry for a while (since he's also in the upcoming "Jasper Jones"), so I'm going to either have to put up with him or just not watch Australian movies for a while.

This is cheesy Australian myth-making, but I will say the sad bits did get me weepy, the happy bits got me grinning and the outback looks suitably impressive. It's firmly middle-of-the-road comfort food.