July 17, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized

Film Fight: June 2008

5 more films for the fight…

Gone Baby Gone is the long delayed directorial debut of Ben Affleck (delayed due to the theme of child kidnapping being a little too close to the bone over the last year), and as debuts go it’s not bad. The mainstay of the plot is reasonable enough: kid gets kidnapped, private investigators who know the locals get involved, there’s more than meets the eye. The performances are for the most part decent, with one outstanding performance put in by Ed Harris; one scene in particular, we see some absolute brilliance in his act. All that said, the film is too clever for its own good. There are too many attempts at pulling the wool over the audiences eyes or twisting a little bit too much for comfort. A shame, because the film is solid, if nothing outstanding.

With the bar set to ridiculously low by Ang Lee’s Hulk, the franchise reboot starring Ed Norton doesn’t really have to work all that hard to improve. The Incredible Hulk is, then, a pleasant surprise, in that it manages to get a lot of things right for the genre. It doesn’t waste time on back story, origins or explaining relationships that are apparent by the interactions, accepting that people know everything they need to know about the Hulk mythos already. It gets moving, keeps a steady enough pace, holds interest, and then plummets with the action sequences towards the end. Sorry, but two CGI monsters who are not grounded in any approachable form of physics break any suspension of disbelief. It had been beating expectations until the final scenes, so to see a mindless fight that turns around for no good reason is a real waste.

Imagine, for a second, taking an entire season of Prison Break and cramming it into 100 minutes; no wasting time on pointless threads that spur things on, no wasted attempts and feeling cheated by do-overs, just the escape: welcome to The Escapist. Although it falls into a Brit crime caper directorial style at times, it manages to show a surprisingly amount of depth and care. The editing is also inspired. While often cutting early parts of a story (chronologically speaking) in amongst the ending is often just an awkward gimmick, cutting the escape and it’s problems in amongst the planning scenes is surprisingly effective. In places that would otherwise be dead weight, tension is kept high. The “But”? The very final moments of the film pull back a needless reveal that cheapens the whole. Without it, it’d be a strong film.

The second of the Narnia films is, unexpectedly, worse than the first entry. Prince Caspian is relatively rich source material (caveats about CS Lewis’ various leanings aside), so it’s disappointing to see such uninspired cinema. We have a largely fluffer plot, terrible performances (some of the kids have gotten worse), dreadful accents, poor CGI battles and an afterthought love interest. If it wasn’t for the cute mice, there’d be next to nothing good to say here. Not worth seeing.

Finally, Wanted is the Hollywood debut of Timur Bekmambetov, previously of Night Watch/Day Watch fame. Based, barely, on a graphic novel of the same name, Wanted is about a fraternity of assassins who follow the path set out by the seemingly random machinations of fate and them bringing someone into the fold who begins to disrupt their way of life. There’s plenty you could do with that as source material but sadly Timur has opted to make yet another piss-poor CGI heavy action yawnfest. The inconsistencies in this film make it painful to watch, the accents are atrocious (I’ve seen James McAvoy act elsewhere, what happened here?), and the whole thing turgid. There’s nothing worthwhile to recommend this film. It fails as an action film, as a story, and on every other level a film can. Awful.

So, despite a regrettable finale, The Escapist is this months winner!