Tolkien

This tends towards being about four separate films about the pre-writing history of JRR Tolkein, looking at how his experiences influenced him when he eventually wrote some of the best selling novels of all time. We get his early romance with the woman who became his wife, we get the early bonding at school with other artistically inclined boys, we get his struggles in the early years of Oxford, and we get his experiences in the trenches of World War 1. And while Nicholas Hoult does a fine job in each of the phases of Tolkein’s life, the stop-start nature of this means the film is only occasionally absorbing. It’s a very British story of young men coming together as comrades over common causes, about emotional reticence and about transcending class barriers. But there are a couple of decent breakout moments – particularly the study of eccentric Oxford behaviour with Derek Jacobi – and the impressionistic looks at the war utilising elements of Tolkeins fantasies has some interesting images. But in the end this really suffers from never deiciding what essential narrative about Tolkein’s early life the film wants to tell – thereby failing to serve any of the four possible underlying narratives particularly well.

X-men: Dark Phoenix

The X Men series has been rolling out films for much of the last two decades. But it doesn’t always rise to its full potential – content to cruise on some fairly familiar superhero tropes (the two different approaches to action from Professor Xavier and Magneto, the mutants saving a world that hates and fears them, using powers as a metaphor for teenage angst). And “Dark Phoenix”, while it’s not the worst of the films, is one of the more underwhelming. There’s a lot of things that seem to be here just because they’ve been done before – the last three films have deliberately each been a decade apart, but while the last three films used the respective decades of 60s, 70s and 80s to add a bit of visual flair, there’s nothing essentially 90s-ish about this – it’s shot with no particular personality at all. The cast are reasonably decent but don’t get a lot to do to bust out of the scripted motions (James McAvoy maybe gets a bit more guilt, and Nicholas Hoult gets to be a bit angrier) – everybody else coming back tends to be blanded out. Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey is meant to be the featured character, but she’s rarely really given much of a chance to do more than stand around, look angry and smash things.  Jessica Chastain gets a chance to be just as much an undercharacterised baddy as Oscar Isaac’s Apocalypse from the last film – she never really gets a chance to be anything other than a vague tempter on Jean’s shoulder, without any real impact. In the end, this isn’t actively awful, but it is, alas, mostly pretty dull.

THE GANGSTER, THE COP, THE DEVIL

The breakout performance of “Train to Busan” was a guy named Ma-Seong Doek – virtually unknown before, his combination of beefy musculature, bearish charm and sensitive dad soul saw audiences take him to their heart. This film is basically a chance to appreciate him all over again – this time, as the somewhat more dapperly-dressed Gangster of the title, whose skirmishes with The Cop of the title are interrupted when, driving home one night, he’s stopped and then attacked by a serial killer. Surviving, he teams up with The Cop to pursue the Devil who struck him down, but their differing methods see a whole lotta danger.

This is, to be honest, not the most innovative Korean movie ever made – the characters are pretty basic, and the fights, while violent, aren’t at the cutting edge of modern action. And there’s some distinctively Korean cultural things going on – the Cop’s moralising sits very oddly when he’s frequently just as if not more violent than the Gangster, and Ma-Seong Doek’s charisma does slightly tilt the balance between them – the film may have been better served if both leads were equally interesting. Still, this is pretty entertaining in a “familiar yet definitely from somewhere other than here” kind of way, and it’s nice that it also finds plot-related reasons for Doek to take his shirt off occasionally.

Rocketman

The music bio is exceptionally easy to parody, with the same combination of early struggle, rise to success, personal drama, spiralling collapse and uplifting finale applied to virtually anything from Queen to the Four Seasons to Johnny Cash. And to a certain extent, “Rocketman” doesn’t challenge the formula – Elton John has a messed up childhood, a startling rise to fame, and a laundry list of addictions and personal problems. But playing this as a slightly surrealist musical, told by Elton as he recounts his story to a support group in rehab, allows this to colour outside the lines a little bit – songs are repurposed to where they might fit the narrative best rather than sung strictly in order of release (and, due to the film acknowledging Bernie Taupin’s role in writing the lyrics, there’s no cheesy moments when Elton’s suddenly inspired to write a song by someone dropping a choice phrase into dialogue). There is a little bit of box ticking to work through the various addictions (shopping, sex addiction and several of Elton’s various costumes get montages, and bulimia gets a quick shoutout), but there’s also some great surrealism in the images to capture how pivotal moments of the story felt from the inside. For an authorised bio, it’s reasonably unsparing of Elton’s dignity, allowing him to be flawed, petty and petulant. As well as Taran Egerton’s lead as Elton, there’s some great supporting cast work – Jamie Bell as Bernie Taupin gives the less visible partner his own purpose and dignity, Richard Madden is suitably creepy as manager John Reid, and there’s a great cameo from Tate Donavan, playing the height of diffident California cool as the owner of the Trocadero. It’s a fun and enthralling celebration of a great musician, with a lot of delightful surprises

Gozilla II: King of the Monsters

In the wake of his destruction of large parts of San Francisco, Godzilla has been spending the last few years puttering around the ocean peacefully looking after himself. But meanwhile the monster-hunting organisation Monarch has been tracking down other creatures, and rogue factions apparently want to awaken them. And only Godzilla can possibly stop them …

This is an old-fashioned monster mash, as four of the most popular creatures from the Toho series (big G, Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah) meet and fight in various international locations. Unfortunately, there’s also a human cast – made up of a lot of actors who have a history of being good in other things, who absolutely do not have enough going on to make them even vaguely interesting. There’s a decent thread going on here that could sustain this (including material that makes this one of the first blockbusters to think maybe it’s better if all of humanity is eliminated), but none of the characters pop as anything other than exposition devices, their interpersonal dramas failing to really register as anything other than the worst kind of filler. It’s a great set of creature designs and effects demonstrations in search of a movie to go around them. But dammit the epic monster fights are still kinda cool.