47 Ronin

Let's say you're English. Or British. Either. Both. Anyway, let's say you're familiar with the legend of Robin Hood, pretty much *the* most important British legend alongside King Arthur. It's a story the basics of which you know well and you know broadly how it *should* go. So you go to a cinema to see the latest version and instead of what you're expecting there's an American in the main role.

Ah. Yeah, they already did that, didn't they?

OK. Well, leaving that aside, what about-

Seriously? He's a Kiwi. Come on.

ANYWAY. Let's imagine that you go to see Robin Hood and there's a COMPLETELY INVENTED character who's American-

Oh for fuck's sake. Although at least he disguised his accent a bit.

RIGHT. You go to the cinema and there's a COMPLETELY INVENTED character who's American AND WHO IS NOW THE MAIN STAR OF THE MOVIE and speaks IN AN AMERICAN ACCENT. As in, Robin Hood has become a sort-of sidekick to this completely invented American character.

Now you're starting to understand what we're dealing with here.

He is, to paraphrase Eddie Izzard, "the American dropped into a Japanese movie to make it sell".

I've done a little research, and the story of the 47 Ronin is one of Japan's best-known tales, although opinions differ on whether their actions were or were not a good example of bushido as is claimed by some. Regardless, the main idea is Lord Asano dishonours himself by striking an exceptionally rude guest called Lord Kira, and then has to commit seppuku to restore his family's honour, and then his now-landless samurai led by a bloke called Oishi go and kill Lord Kira to avenge him. So far, so Japanese - everyone's going to die anyway, but how and why they die is the critical thing.

OK, it might not be *just* a Japanese thing.

However, in this Hollywood-ised version of the tale at the heart of Japan's culture, the Japanese roles are upstaged by the completely created character of Kai, a Japanese-British 'half breed' who was apparently raised by demons. Lord Asano and his daughter Mika see something in the boy and decide to keep him, but he is regarded with scorn by... someone else.

OK. I'm mildly prosopagnostic. I have real trouble telling apart the faces of people I don't know. That's generally more difficult when everyone's wearing a fucking kimono and has the same damn hairdo. Someone doesn't like Kai, but I'm damned if I know who. I thought it was Asano's son, but then about twenty minutes in his daughter is apparently his only child, so I've no clue. And she's in love with Kai, because no movie about culture-appropriate vengeance is complete without lines like "I would search for you through a thousand worlds and ten thousand lifetimes" delivered in Reeves' trademark, completely emotionless husk.

So THAT'S what the reincarnation thing was about.

My film reviews normally contain spoilers, as I praise or (more usually) shit all over what I've just seen, but I'm not sure I can really spoil this movie. Besides which... nothing really happens. There's supposed peril-aplenty, but never really any tension or drama. For a movie which involves sword fights, demons, monsters and a fantastically hammy witch (Rinko Kikuchi apparently having attended the Eric Roberts school of acting for this role, perhaps to make up for Reeves' lack of emotion or... anything), the fact that it falls so flat is pretty much a miracle.

The only member of the cast who actually seemed to be enjoying herself.

I could harp on about the lack of logic; Kai and Mika being the same age as kids and then Reeves looking all of his nearly twenty years more when they're adults... presumably the same Hollywood ageing which allowed Jeremy Renner to be Gemma Arterton's brother in 'Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters; the demons which raised Kai giving him a bunch of swords when he needed them because... I'm not sure; Kikuchi's character trying to get the Lady Mika to kill herself before she's forced to marry Lord Kira - the witch's employer - because... I don't know; the witch setting up an ambush for Oishi's men and then happily reporting back that they were all dead even though most of them escaped, because... yeah, you get the idea. However, the real logical fallacy here came from trying to make a film for Western audiences which was tied to such an essentially Japanese story.

Few Western audiences are going to want to see a centuries-old story about a group of Ronin exacting vengeance for their dead master and then all ritually killing themselves; it's just not something which appeals to our psyches, in general. Yes, you can throw in demons and witches and giant samurais to try to glamourise it a bit, but all that's really achieved here is bastardising the original story without really giving it enough of a kick. You want to tell the story of the 47 Ronin, you tell the story of the 47 Ronin. You want to write a fantasy epic in Japan, you get a good scriptwriter and you write a goddamn fantasy epic in Japan, and stop trying to attach it to any 'true story' in an attempt to staple some credibility onto it.

Oh, and while you're at it, don't make this guy the second-largest on the film poster when he only has two lines, simply because you think his tattoos are cool:

Can anyone tell that the director for this had mainly done adverts previously?

It's all about the visuals, nothing about the content.

In conclusion: this is a film which tries to be two things and succeeds at neither, probably pissing off most of a nation in the process, and can't have done anyone involved any favours, least of all the serious Japanese actors involved.

Pacific Rim, or, B-Movies Are An Art Form

Went to see 'Pacific Rim' today, otherwise known as the movie made by Guillermo Del Toro to prove that no, he's not at all bitter about it not working out on 'The Hobbit', no, really, incidentally have you seen my massive robots hitting these things which look a bit like dragons? That's like totally awesome and completely coincidental GODDAMN YOU PEEDER JIGSON.

Let's face it, this mess could have been sorted a lot quicker

if the dwarves had just built themselves a decent mecha.

So, anyway - this was never going to be a movie in contention for an Oscar for screenwriting. It was always going to be a big, ballsy, stupid, gung-ho, rock-em-sock-em punchfest as giant robots called Jaeger battled weird alien monsters called Kaiju.

Not these guys, sadly, but that would have been hilarious. If you want

your head messed with, look up 'Kaiju Big Battel' on YouTube.

Yeah, there's going to be spoilers in here. Just so you know.

Is 'Pacific Rim' entertaining? Yes... to a point. However, there are just so MANY things wrong with it that after a while your brain sort of gets dragged down into a quagmire of "huh?" while you try to reconcile the different bits of shit with a normal cinematic experience. The first and most obvious thing to me was the pacing of it; I understand that there's a movie which needs to happen, and action which needs to take place, and so let's skip over the boring exposition. However, the opening monologue feels forced, and we just skip over so much stuff so quickly. Then we meet the hero, Raleigh Beckett.

That's what I'm thinking of for the rest of the film. Well done.

But that's not all. His boss, played by Idris Elba, is called PENTECOST STACKER. That's not a name, that's a church shop job description. Whatever else Del Toro can do, he can't think up names for shit. Don't believe me? I mean, he'll do better naming the goddamn battle robots, right? Let's meet the contestants.

Gipsy Danger. Sounds like a pole dancer.

Striker Eureka. Two unconnected words, ahoy!

Cherno Alpha, aka 'The Russian one, so neither word has to be English'.

Crimson Typhoon. You win, hands down. All three of 'em.

Right, that brief sidewind into atrocious names dealt with, back to the pacing issue. Beckett's brother is killed while he's mind-linked with him in charge of a Jaeger, and he quits the whole 'fight the monsters' programme. Understandable. So he works in construction for five years, of which we get to see about ninety seconds before Stacker shows up offering him his old job back. Yes, there's a movie to be done and monsters to be fought BUT, we as the viewing public have barely had time to think "Oh, so he's down on his luck now and- oh, no he isn't."

So he's brought back to run a Jaeger, but he'll need a co-pilot, and it'll need to be someone whom he can form a good bond with. The Chinese one is run by triplets, the Australian one by father and son, he used to do it with his brother, the Russian one is run by... two Russians? Maybe both being Russian with appalling bleach jobs is enough, hell if I know.

So THAT'S what Zangief is up to these days.

Now we get into my second major bugbear with this movie - so many things are mentioned as apparent plot devices or simply as cool things and then... are contradicted, or just not followed up on. AGAIN AND AGAIN.

All the possibilities Stacker has lined up for Beckett to team up with are useless except his brightest star, his adoptive daughter, whom he absolutely won't let get into the Jaeger with Beckett because... reasons? I'm not sure if this was simply meant to be 'overprotective step-daddy' bit or more genuine concern about her ability to restrain her vengeful wishes for her dead family. Anyway, after about thirty minutes of "No, it won't happen. No, you're not piloting a Jaeger," he gives up for no apparent reason and she does the mind-meld with Beckett and, of course, it fails and she goes into a catatonic reaction thinking back to how she was nearly killed by a Kaiju when she was a kid (maybe this was triggered by Stacker giving her the shoe she was wearing at the time right beforehand? You know, bringing the old memories back? Nice work there) and she unconsciously activates the weapon and nearly blows the hangar up.

OK, so that didn't work. Any non-Russian woman is too weak to run a Jaeger, it appears. Gotcha.

But hang on, because when the next attack comes in and two of the other Jaegers are taken down (unsurprisingly, the Chinese and the Russian ones), Gipsy Danger and its two pilots are deployed. Rather than going back to his pool of admittedly slightly lack-lustre recruits to co-pilot with Beckett, Stacker sticks his adoptive daughter back into the machine even though she went catatonic and nearly blew the base up last time. And they function perfectly as a team for the rest of the film, with not even a mention of that first little problem which nearly killed everyone. I should also point out that she seems obsessed by Beckett before she meets him and has apparently studied him intently, and she tells him that she doesn't think he should be sent on the mission because he takes stupid risks but then she really wants to be his co-pilot. Girl, you need to get your head straight.

Also, one of the new Kaiju debuts an EMP which knocks out the circuits of the Jaegers and also Hong Kong. However, according to Beckett, Gipsy Danger "is analogue, she's nuclear". Now, I have a few problems with this:

1) The power source might be nuclear, but there's a shitload of electronics in there, including the damn mind-meld thing.

2) When the Russian Jaeger is getting pounded, one of the pilots screams "Water is getting into the reactor!" So... I'm not sure what's going on there.

3) EMP Kaiju doesn't even try that trick again when faced with Gipsy Danger, so it wouldn't have mattered anyway. I'd have expected to see it try it and be confused when it doesn't work, allowing the Jaeger to knock its block off.

Now, don't get me wrong - the fight scenes in this movie are amazing. The CGi is truly spectacular and you do really get a sense of the size and weight involved... at least, until one of the Kaiju spreads WINGS and takes off HOLDING GIPSY DANGER and then FLIES HIGH ENOUGH THAT THEY START TO LOSE OXYGEN. Let's remember that a Kaiju weight was given as 140,000 tonnes, and that Kaiju was smaller than this one. Let's remember that it's carrying a Jaeger as well. Let's remember that the higher you go the thinner the air is, so the more difficult it would be to fly. I KNOW I'm not meant to talk about physics when we've got massive alien monsters emerging from a rift in the floor of the Pacific Ocean, but come on. I can just about wrap my head around these things walking and moving on the surface of the Earth, but flying? And then there's the fact that a Jaeger can go undersea and the pilots can still breathe just fine, but they can't go to a high altitude?

Anyway, all that aside, they have a plan to drop a nuke down the rift to get back at the Kaiju. Meanwhile, Skinny Dennis Nedry is a Kaiju scientist who does a mind-meld with a secondary Kaiju brain they happen to have lying around, and he gets some success, and Stacker sends him off to track down a Kaiju black market dealer to get another brain to do another mind meld with. He blabs about this to the dealer (Rob Perlman playing Hannibal Chau - OK, that name is awesome), who points out that if they have a hive mind then now the Kaiju know about this guy. And when one of the Kaiju hits the city SDN runs for a bunker and the Kaiju attacks that bunker and it knows he's there and it seems to be reaching for him with its tongue and... then Gipsy Danger jumps it from behind and THIS IS NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN.

"Eh, no wonder you went extinct."

According to Skinny Dennis Nedry, the Kaiju are grown as warbeasts by an alien race which move from place to place, consuming resources and then moving on.

"I think you'll find that's our schtick."

But actually, my little Jurassic Park reference up there works better than you'd think (apart from them both being egotistical guys with similar accents) because according to SDN, the dinosaurs were this alien race's first attempt at this idea.

"Son, I am disappoint."

After narrowly surviving being chosen for... dinner? Kisses? Meaningful conversation? by the Kaiju, SDN returns to Ron Perlman and aggressively yells "You owe me a Kaiju brain, you one-eyed son of a bitch!"

Um. No he doesn't.

He's a black market dealer and he doesn't owe you shit. You're not even offering him any money. He thought the whole 'mind-melding with a Kaiju' thing was absolutely idiotic. He nearly cut your nose off because you wouldn't tell him your name. You think he's just going to let you go mind-meld with a Kaiju now you know him, when he cuts up and sells Kaijus and as far as he's concerned what you know, they will know? That's got to be the stupidest-

Oh wait, here you are at the death site of a Kaiju and he's going to let you do it. Well I never.

Well, this Kaiju's brain is damaged, but there's a heartbeat in there! OH MY GOD IT'S PREGNANT!

This may be a larger job than you bargained for, ladies.

A biologically-constructed warbeast is pregnant. My mind is boggling at that one. Why would you build that feature in? When did it mate? I... yeah. Anyway, the offspring dies and SDN mind-melds with it and OH GODS THE PLAN WE HAVE ISN'T GOING TO WORK, because the plan involves dropping a nuke through the rift to severely piss off the guys on the other side who are sending all these monsters.

"I think you'll find that's my schtick."

So... this would be a... wait for it... JAEGER BOMB?? :D :D :D

(My wife takes credit for that one)

But the plan of dropping a nuke through never worked before, and they thought it would work this time because... I'm not sure. Stacker said he had a plan, but he never explained why he thought it'd work this time. Anyway, SDN and British Numbers Guy who did the mind-meld with him now know how to make the plan work, and they rush back and tell the guys at base, because Striker Eureka and Gipsy Danger are off to bomb the rift. Of course, Australian Dad's arm is injured so the new co-pilot for Australian Jerk Son is Pentecost "I'll die if I get in another Jaeger" Stacker, who neatly shits all over the idea of needing a good bond with your co-pilot by saying "I take nothing into the drift; no rank, no memories, no emotions", or words to that effect. Um... OK. So what you're saying is that if only humanity had crewed Jaegers with psychopaths, this whole 'close bond' thing wouldn't have been necessary? IS SOME INTERNAL CONSISTENCY TOO MUCH TO ASK, DAMN IT!?

I wonder where they got the nuke from? Perhaps they needed some weapons-grade uranium...

One for regular readers, this.

Blah blah, Kaiju attack, blah blah, malfunction, blah blah, bomb can't be released by Striker Eureka, blah blah, blow up to clear the way, blah blah, Gipsy Danger goes through the rift, blah blah send its nuclear reactor into meltdown, blah blah, eject in lifepods.

Eject.

Out of the Jaeger which is now IN ANOTHER DIMENSION and back through the rift into our world. Despite the fact that the truth uncovered by Skinny Dennis Nedry and British Numbers Guy is that the rift has to recognise a Kaiju's genetic signature to let it through. That's why the bombs had always bounced before. And sure, you were clutching a Kaiju on the way down but now you're on the way up and it's just going to let you through? I mean, let's not forget, every Kaiju so far has rampaged until it was killed. No Kaiju has ever gone back down the rift anyway, so when they're saying "it recognises the Kaiju's DNA and lets them through" they had to be talking about the way up, right?

Right?

Oh wait. Internal consistency. Nevermind.

So both pilots make it back to the surface after Gipsy Danger goes boom and collapses the rift with a nuclear blast, and Beckett is apparently dead after his trip back from the void, but he recovers to consciousness following no real medical attention by anyone beyond a display of emotion.

"No, seriously, I'm going to sue."

And with that the movie ends. So now let me address my third and final bugbear with the movie; the direction. I guess the 'pacing' bit could come into this (and also the sound mixing - there is no excuse for me to not be able to hear dialogue between characters in a cinema, even if I am deaf), but I'm more talking here about the portrayals of the characters. First of all, other than Skinny Dennis Nedry (who overacts a bit, but does so amusingly enough to get away with it), there's precious little truly good acting going on. Idris Elba is a good actor, but Pentecost Stacker is too one-dimensional to do much with. Sure, he threatens to cut loose occasionally, but even in his "rousing" speech near the end it's all a bit... dry. Raleigh Beckett might as well be "American Action Movie Trope a) Washed-Up Former Hero" and is almost completely unmemorable. Even Ron Perlman seems off - it shouldn't be hard for him to convince as a menacing, amoral black market dealer, but it just doesn't click for some reason.

Then there's the racial stereotyping. The Japanese girl is timid, the Russians are dour, the British Numbers Guy is painfully stereotyped, the Aussies are brash and obnoxious (although hilarious on one occasion when they do, as someone else put it, "something really brave, stupid and Australian"), and the Chinese all look the same (okay, they're meant to be triplets. Even so).

In conclusion, 'Pacific Rim' is a movie which could have been so much more... but possibly should have been so much less. It tried to strike a balance between brainless action smash-em-up and something with a logical plot and character dynamics, but the second part just ended up dragging the first down a little. If you're going to explain things then they need to actually make sense... at least, if you're paying to see it in the movies. If you're watching 'Sand Sharks' on Syfy then I'm quite content to hear Brooke Hogan talking about how the grooves on a shark's skin allow it to swim through the microvortices between grains of sand because no-one expects that to make sense.

All I can say is, thank gods this man never got hold of 'The Hobbit'.

A Good Day To Lose Morals

So, John McClane is back! Yippee-kay-aye, Mother Russia!

I heard that.

As the script-writers run out of things for John to get unfeasibly involved in State-side it turns out that he can now go and wreak his own brand of havoc over in Russia, thanks to the involvement of his son Jack. Now, I like Die Hard. The first one is brilliant, the second is good (both adapted from novels, don'tcherknow. Didyaknow? Nowyaknow), the third one has Samuel L Jackson and so is automatically good despite the baddie being Jeremy "who Hollywood calls when they need an English villain and Alan Rickman is not available" Irons, and the fourth is... well, it's entertaining enough, and there's amusement to be had seeing Kevin Smith playing an adult teenage nerd. So how does the fifth movie measure up?

In terms of entertaining set pieces: excellently. The first movie was obviously a very claustrophobic movie, by necessity. From DH2:DH onwards however, we had chases: snowtrak chase, taxi careering through Central Park, car being chased by cars, helicopter, fighter jet. There is certainly an epic chase in this one featuring a van, a military armoured vehicle and two different trucks driven by McClane senior,  with muchos crashes and stunts. The ending scene is highly impressive as well, as anything that crashes a helicopter into a nuclear power plant gets my vote.

"Not even God knows what you're doing!"

The acting? Also good. Willis's McClane has adapted and evolved, and he's no longer the reluctant hero but now the belligerent tough old bastard who does what he does because it's what he's done for so long, although that does come at the price of some of his character's three-dimensionality. Jai Courtney is convincing as an even more hard-bitten version of his father, a CIA operative who organises prison breaks, blows up buildings and uncovers caches of guns without blinking. The dancing bad guy Arik is rather over-the-top, but Sebastian Koch convinces well as Yuri, the eventual mastermind of the whole series of unfolding events.

However, it's the events themselves that bring the film down, in my reckoning.

First of all, it's the fact that at the end of everything, the McClane boys are entirely irrelevant to the vast majority of the plot. The jailbreak that gets Yuri and Jack out was masterminded by Chagarin, the defence minister Yuri is supposedly going to testify against, and even though the CIA must have known about it to plant Jack in the courtroom, they weren't involved in it. But of course, Yuri knew about it too, and *his* plan involving his daughter working as a double-agent was based on this. In the end, the McClanes were nothing more than an irritation to everyone wanting Yuri to get kidnapped by Chagarin's men, and only turned up at the end to piss on Yuri's eventual plans. Now, granted the fact that they did this stopped the shipping of a bunch of nuclear warheads out of Chernobyl that Yuri had made ages ago out of the uranium there...

Did someone say uranium?

Now, I'm fairly certain that domestic nuclear power stations don't involve weapons-grade uranium. However, I'm not a nuclear scientist so I'll let that one slide. I am however dubious about the whole setup at Chernobyl in the first place, given that it was allegedly Chagarin's men being ready to extract the file and having the mysterious radiation-eating spray to get rid of the problem, but then actually it was Yuri's men being ready to shift out the crates. Shouldn't Arik or someone have gone "hang on, why are all these guys here, and what's with all the helicopters?"

Also, Chernobyl? That's in Ukraine. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. You're telling me that two Americans with various injuries can drive a car with a boot full of automatic weapons and grenades over the border from Russia into Ukraine and no-one bats an eyelid? Maybe they just shot the border guards.

...in fact, maybe they did. This is my greatest problem with DH5 - the fact that John McClane loses all sense of morality when he leaves the USA. The first four Die Hard films were defined by the fact that he was the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time and he did what he did to protect people. Normal people. Yeah, OK, it was his wife involved in the first two, but still. However, as soon as he gets to Russia and sees his son, who's charged with murder let's remember and as far as McClane Snr knows is dodgy as fuck, breaking out of a jail and running away, what does he do? Does he hold up his hands and go "OK, I screwed up here, best stay out of the way"? No.

John McClane steals a truck and heads off in pursuit.

What's more, when he crashes his first truck he assaults a driver and steals another truck and heads off again. Using this truck, he drives over a whole host of other vehicles including ones with screaming people in simply so he can chase down his delinquent son and the people who seem to be in pursuit. It's not his job, he's just interjecting himself. If there was any incident of him showing regret for his actions, I wouldn't mind so much, but as it is he comes over as the worst stereotype of an American abroad - he can do what he wants because he's an American, and all you people should just speak American so he can understand you.

I can only assume that this is acceptable to Hollywood because the people involved aren't Americans. I'm sure McClane commandeers a few vehicles in previous movies, but that has been because the lives of many people have been at risk (and he's been acting as an officer of the law). Here, he's simply being a bloody nuisance, because he has no evidence that anyone's life is at risk other than his son's, who was about to stand trial for murder anyway and would have been "lucky to get life".

There's also the issue of his son casually tossing Yuri off a building into helicopter roters to be shredded. Yes, the image is a homage to Hans Gruber's demise (although why McClane doesn't mentioned anything about Gruber when he shoots down the glass ceilings in the ballroom is beyond me), but the difference was that Gruber dropped to his death because he was dragging Holly McClane to her death with him and was about to shoot John in the head. Jack kills Yuri simply because he doesn't want to leave him alive.

Willis has said that he'd like to do one more movie and then retire the character. I'm hoping the last instalment is back up to scratch, as this one was a little disappointing.

The 007 Returns, or, 50 Years Of Misogynistic Imperialism

BOND IS BACK!

That's right, Britain's most famous secret agent was dogged by funding problems, but now that's all been sorted out and we have Skyfall, the film we've been waiting years for, where Bond throws off the shackles of his gritty reinvention and gets really fucking confused about exactly what's meant to be happening where, and why, and in fact what has already happened in his own goddamn internal timeline.

Scuse me?

See, Casino Royale was good, I mean it was good. Granted, it was based on a Fleming novel. I liked Quantum Of Solace too, I've no idea how much of the original short story it contained as I haven't read that, but while it has its detractors I am not one of them. So I thought the team behind Bond might have actually hit their stride on this one. Unfortunately, I am not convinced that they have. The plots of the other two Daniel Craig vehicles made sense... perhaps not in a real-life, real-world way all the time (because we know that MI6 doesn't work like the Bond movies depict it working), but you knew where you were. LeChiffre was gambling to make a return on the investments of warlords and the money was funding the organisation we came to know as Quantum. Dominic Greene was controlling the utilities in Bolivia to extort money from the government and make more money for Quantum. The plot of Skyfall is very different, and indeed rather disappointing in comparison.

"First two films were good, third one disappoints? Yeah, I can relate."

The film starts in Turkey where someone has nicked a hard drive from a laptop. We learn that this hard drive contains a list of all NATO agents undercover in terrorist organisations, to which I ask: WHY was this list ON A LAPTOP IN TURKEY? This is a list that is surely made up of information which could be collated on a computer in London. It's never explained why they need to be in Turkey. Even if you need a piece of information from Turkey, why you'd need to take the ENTIRE FUCKING LIST with you is completely beyond me.

OK, let's move on. Someone kills the agents, nicks the list. Bond and Moneypenny (as she is eventually revealed to be) give chase. The bloke they're chasing fires using a handgun with some sort of massive double magazine on the bottom. Remember this, it links to a point I will be making later. Bond chases him onto a train, gets shot in the upper right of the chest but not slowed down much (really?), then they end up fighting on the roof. Moneypenny has a shot, not a clear one, M tells her to take it. She shoots and hits Bond.

Two questions: Firstly, having hit Bond, why not then use another shot to kill the other guy? If the list is that important, don't rely on one 50/50 shot, hose the roof down and kill both of them, have done with. Secondly, since Bond heard M give the order, why the fuck didn't he break off and run away to let Moneypenny have a clear shot? "You should have trusted me to finish the job" he says to her later, but come on. That'd be like confronting a bigger, stronger, faster villain with just your fists when the existence of a city is at stake and one gunshot could get rid of him easily.

"Look, I can totally explain that."

Aaaaaanyway. Bond pretends to be dead for a while but comes back when someone blows up MI6. He fails his tests to go back onto active duty but M passes him anyway for... no apparent reason, really. He then digs out the shrapnel from the gunshot inflicted by Train Chase Guy and tells someone to analyse it. It's a depleted uranium round, very rare, only used by three people.

Um.

You remember that part about the MASSIVE magazine on the bottom of the handgun? Were they ALL depleted uranium rounds? They don't sound that rare to me, in that case. Now, if it was a single round from a sniper rifle then OK, I could buy it, although I'm not sure why you'd need depleted uranium anyway. But this guy was shooting the things off like they were going out of fashion, where did he get all that uranium from?

"Did someone say uranium?"

Yeah, could be.

Bond's gets sent to Hong Kong, finds the shooter again, kills him without getting the information he needs about who hired him (I seem to remember this being a problem in the last movie too) and then bumps into a girl marked for death who works for the someone who's behind all this. You can tell she's marked for death because she has long fingernails, and Fleming hated long fingernails on a woman. Seriously, you read the original novels, all the long fingernail girls die, Bond gets with the short fingernail girls. It seems this tradition has been carried on.

"I won't apply for a role, then?"

There's a fight in a casino and some awesome Komodo dragon action, but there's your hint that we're slipping back into the old ways; grisly henchman deaths via vicious creatures, anyone? There's a reason Mike Myers parodied that in the Austin Powers movies. Bond heads off out to the island lair of the bad guy, which looks oddly familiar to me.

I don't see why Bond didn't just let Sly and his team deal with

this fellow, since they were in the area anyway.

The bad guy's an ex-agent called Thiago Rodrigues. M gave him up the the Chinese because he'd been a naughty boy and gotten too enthusiastic about spying on them. They tortured him and his cyanide capsule disfigured him but didn't kill him. In fact it burned a lot of his mouth away (left his tongue intact, strangely enough) and he has to wear a false teeth/upper jaw thing. When he takes it out, his face is ruined. Hmm, former government figure who has been disfigured and now has a grievance against the people he used to work alongside?

"I believe you'll find that's my schtick."

Anyway, Bond manages to capture him (not saving marked-for-death girl in the process - he said he'd help her but kind of failed at that) and takes him back to London. Only it turns out he WANTS to be captured and has in fact set up a system in his laptop which New Q (who previously asked Bond "what were you expecting, an exploding pen? We don't really do that sort of thing anymore", see, that's self-referential comedy there folks) decodes only to find that it opens all the doors in MI6's new headquarters.

I can't help but feel that he should be presenting Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

So... the bad guy has been captured, but actually he wants to be captured and this was part of his whole grand plan all along?

"I believe you'll find that's my schtick."

From here the film descends from the unlikely into the farcical as Bond rescues M from an assassination attempt by Rodrigues whilst dressed as a policeman-

"Seriously, I'm going to sue in a minute."

-with no explanation of why or how he's managed to buy off half the Metropolitan Police Force so he can get given a change of clothes or drive around in one of their cars.

"I mean, at least when I did that I could sort of explain it by having

taken advantage of the mentally unstable and easily suggestible."

Bond takes M and they change from her car into an Aston Martin DB7, and when she complains about the suspension he flicks the gearstick up to reveal a red button and threatens to eject her. Funny? Yes. Distracting? YES! So are we saying that this is the same Bond that went after Goldfinger in the 60s, because he has that car and knows its tricks? Even though that Bond was reporting to an M who had a Miss Moneypenny, and now Bond's meeting Moneypenny for the first time? If you're going to be self-referential then you need consistency. Even if you're running the logic that actually 'James Bond' is a codename then it beggars belief there could be two Miss Moneypennys. Besides which, Bond isn't a codename because they go back to his parents' home of Skyfall, and there at one point we see the gravestone of his parents, both of whom have the surname 'Bond'.

"Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?"

"No Mr. Bond, I expect you to have some respect for your own damn timeline."

In the meantime, New Q is laying a 'trail of breadcrumbs' with the approval of Ralph Fiennes as George Mallory so that Rodrigues can follow them to Skyfall. Now, I get the logic of going to Scotland... sort of. Rodrigues has demonstrated that he can turn the systems against them, so you go somewhere there's no systems, merely a house and a moor. I get that. Why the hell you wouldn't organise some sort of military response to shoot the bastard when he catches up though, I don't know. Also, WHAT IS THE TRAIL OF BREADCRUMBS? We get absolutely no information on what this is. Pictures? Traffic camera images? False radio messages? Nothing. But somehow they lay a trail that 'only Rodrigues could follow' to lead him to Bond's ancestral home.

Long story short, Bond fails at keeping M alive. Oh, it's dragged out somewhat with lots of explosions and the like, but essentially she dies anyway, although he kills Rodrigues too. Seems kind of a wasted journey really, just so gay Two-Face/Joker with fake mummy issues can sort of succeed at what he sets out to do. That's nought out of two for Bond trying to keep women alive in this movie, although the fact that he gets shot by one might sort of even the score, I'm not entirely sure.

Anyway, at the end of it all Bond is still active, Moneypenny's taken a desk job and George Mallory has taken the role as M. So we have Ralph Fiennes in charge of MI6.

I'm fairly sure this can't be a good thing.

No wait, he's wearing a suit and has a nose and everything.

I'm not entirely certain that's an improvement.

Overall, Skyfall is certainly watchable, but it's a long way from the masterpiece of cinema that everyone's been hailing it as. It's a little too self-referential for Bond's 50th anniversary, and has tried to have a complex plot without addressing the plot holes in it. Granted, plot holes are not exactly unknown in Bond films but this is the gritty, realistic New Bond which has led us to raise our expectations of a movie's feasibility. It feels worryingly like we're slipping back towards steel-jawed villains and space lasers, and while that was fun... we've done that already.

The Expendables 2: a.k.a. "I Just Blew Up Your Plot"

    So, The Expendables was quite fun, really. A bit short on plot in some respects, but there was a plot there, you know? And some side plots, a bit of backstory, some downtime and vague musings by Mickey Rourke, that sort of thing. Although as these guys point out, it maybe should have been either ridiculous action OR soul-searching, not both. Well, looks like someone took their words to heart, because The Expendables 2 is definitely ridiculous action with pretty much no soul-searching. Or decent dialogue. Or acting. Or plot.

    I know, I know. Who'd have thought it, right?

    No, but this is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I can get behind a decent, brainless action movie (although I get behind ones with a brain much more, see my review of The Avengers for details), but this is NOT a decent brainless action movie. This one plays to the egos of those involved too much, and focuses on simply getting as many washed-up action stars (plus Jason Statham, Yu Nan and Liam 'not as successful or muscular as my brother Chris' Hemsworth) in as possible.

"Sorry guys, I've been saving New York. Take the runt."

    Don't get me wrong, there are good moments in this clunker, but the ones that aren't based on in-jokes about previous movies are few and far between. Jet Li's brief appearance at the beginning to beat people up with frying pans is one-

"I gotta get me one of these!"

    -and Jason Statham's fight scenes are impressively visceral. Otherwise, most of the good stuff comes from an unlikely combination; Bruce Willis, effortlessly showing that a balding, middle-aged actor who can act is infinitely more menacing than a muscled-up thug with a bad moustache (if I was faced with the choice of pissing off Church or Barney Ross, I'd piss off the slack-mouthed mumbler in a heartbeat); and Dolph Lundgren.

This isn't just to remind you that 'Masters Of The Universe' exists, I promise.

    I loved Lundgren in this, more so than the first one. Unlike the other one-dimensional characters, Gunnar Jensen's chaotic, drug-addled 'action troll' managed to be both hilarious and tragic at the same time. Maybe it was just me, but you genuinely got the idea that Jensen desperately wants to be a bit normal again but simply can't manage it and so falls back into deliberately being obnoxious and macho rather than trying and failing, and Lundgren manages to illustrate this well. Also, Dolph Lundgren can do this which automatically makes him better than the rest of the cast.

    Oh, Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris. Christ, but that man can't act. At all. Like, at all. Even throwing in a Chuck Norris fact didn't make up for the true awfulness of that man's time on screen. Arnie suffered from it too, apparently forgetting how to deliver his own catchphrases with any sense of genuineness (although his brief interchange with Willis which ends with him muttering 'Yippee-kay-aye' was rather amusing).

    Finally, Van Damme.

    Oh, Van Damme.

"Hi, I'm Jean-Claude Van Damme. You know those beer adverts I've been doing?

My dialogue in this film makes that look like Shakespeare."

    Let's be honest, JCVD has never been regarded as a good actor. Ever. He's been regarded as someone who can do a pretty good fight scene or, more recently, a shitload of drugs. However, in this movie he doesn't really get a chance, as his dialogue is simply ridiculous and often doesn't really make a great deal of sense. Much like the plot, which seems to kind of revolve around five tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium, but is basically an excuse to kill off Hemsworth in case he was to get any ideas about upstaging the rest, and then track down JCVD for some revenge. Nothing about the last twenty minutes of the movie really makes any sense at all, from JCVD's mob not realising that there's a bunch of heavily-armed mercenaries waiting in front of a helicopter as they arrive at the airport to ferry off their plutonium, to JCVD himself setting up a final fight scene with Stallone for no apparent reason. Instead of just getting on the plane that he's loaded up he hangs around in some random hangar waiting for a one-to-one fight, when everything he's done up until that point has been about getting the plutonium as quickly and (relatively) efficiently as possible.

    However, nothing in this movie is as unrealistic or as amusing as watching Sylvester Stallone trying to run.

    Had this movie had even the plot of the first one, I'd have been applauding it. As it is, all the extra stars and jokes can't save it from being just a poor excuse to take some money. That said, it sounds like they want Harrison Ford for the third instalment, and you know I'd watch that...

The Dark Knight Retires

    When I saw the trailers for The Dark Knight Rises I was intrigued, but also worried. Intrigued because the 'epic conclusion' sounded very final, much more final than most movie series that aren't based on a pre-existing base like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Worried because Tom Hardy's Bane was wearing a mask that covered his mouth, which meant that old deafo over here had two choices; go to the cinema without my hearing aids and risk being unable to understand Bane's dialogue, or go with them and risk being deafened by Death Metal Batman.

"Don't mind me, I'm just trying out for vocalist in Amon Amarth.

Also, do you have any Strepsils?"

   The theme of the movie seemed very current; Bane appeared to be leading some sort of revolution based on tearing down the established order and creating a far more anarchic society. Given last summer's London riots and the recession in general, this promised a very interesting film.

    It more or less delivered. More or less.

    Let's get to the summary, before I start blathering about spoilers and plot points: it's good, it's not as good as the first two Nolan movies. Freeman's still excellent, Oldman's still excellent, there's a couple of surprising twists, Caine is still excellent, Bale's Bruce Wayne still reminds me overwhelmingly of Bale's Patrick Bateman, and Hardy's Bane voice is ridiculous.

    Yes, you heard me, ridiculous.

    All the way through the film, I was trying to think why Bane's voice sounded so bizarre, so completely out of keeping with the man it was apparently emanating from. The first thing is that it doesn't sound at all like it's coming from the same place as everyone else's; obviously it's meant to be coming out from the mask, but the difference when he first spoke was the difference between someone speaking in front of a camera on location and a voice-over done in a studio.

Trust me, I've watched enough nature programmes to recognise the difference.

    Then there's the actual voice itself. It's too... fruity. Bane looks the part, but he doesn't sound menacing. He sounds like a bit of a toff, actually; generally cheerful, with a slightly odd accent that I couldn't place. But now I'm out of the cinema, let me tell you who he sounds like to me.

 "No, Mister Wayne, I expect you to die."

    Whoever it was who did the voice for Gert Frobe's Auric Goldfinger, that's who he sounds like. He doesn't sound German, of course, but otherwise that's the general feel I got from it. Although a friend of mine described it as 'a drunk Patrick Stewart trapped in a cupboard', which is also not a long way off the mark. And let me tell you, that's a very different feel to what I got from the trailers, and what I was expecting. And not in a good way. But enough of my problems with Bane; what about the movie itself? Well, I'm not going to go any further without talking about some SPOILERS so if you haven't watched it yet and want to be surprised, read no further.

    You know how in The Dark Knight, the Joker's plans seem feasible at the time, but when you think about them afterward then actually they probably weren't? That's because you got drawn in by the film and by Ledger's masterful performance. In TDKR, I was watching it going "well... that doesn't really make any sense". For example, Marion Cotillard's 'Miranda' character getting to snog Bruce Wayne after apparently hassling him for... months? Years? about the clean fusion energy plan that turns out to be the key to the whole movie. And then one random rain storm after he's lost all his money and he's prepared to bed down with her. Right.

    Most of the rest of Cotillard's character is well done. She's actually the main antagonist, you see; she's Ra's al Gul's daughter and hates Batman for killing him and wants to destroy Gotham, but you don't get to know this until right at the end. Until then she's just pegged as Disposable Love Interest Who's Not As Hot As Anne Hathaway. That was a very unexpected twist, and it impressed me. But how does she intend to destroy Gotham?

   With a fusion power core that's been turned into a bomb. OK, fine.

"Let me know how that works out for you."

    That she has driven around the isolated city for five MONTHS before it's going to go off. Wait, what?

    Now, Bane's explanation to Wayne as he dumps him into the hell-hole prison that both he and Talia al Gul escaped from is that Gotham will suffer because they'll have hope that they can escape even if it's unobtainable. However, infant student of human psychology as I am, I would argue that that's bullshit. The difference between being in the prison and seeing the apparently reachable sky above but never being able to get up to it (unless you're Talia al Gul or Bruce Wayne) and living out the rest of your days there is VERY different to five months of an anarchic society followed by instant, uncomprehending oblivion in an atom bomb explosion. There's no doom there, no crushing depression of your own failure. There's misery for a while (although a lot of the citizens are portrayed as quite enjoying the new freedoms) and then obliteration. Might as well do it straight off while they're all shitting themselves after you've collapsed the football stadium, which would also prevent Batman from having five months to heal from his... broken back?

"Five months? Fucking amateur."

    Their first fight, Bane beats Batman up, takes his lunch money (well, the R&D department under Wayne Enterprises) and breaks his back. Or something. Leaves a vertebrae protruding, anyway. Which, it so happens, can be fixed by hanging from a rope under your armpits while a prisoner hits you in the back under direction from a failed prison doctor. Who knew? And then you can do a load of press-ups and sit-ups and climb out of a pit and get back to Gotham from... I dunno where. Somehow. Although you have no money. And presumably YOU don't know where you are, either.

    I should point out here that Bane has a whole load of disposable manpower who are prepared to die for him and his cause. Much like Ra's al Gul in Batman Begins, or the Joker in The Dark Knight. Someone even asks at one point "where does he get these guys from?", and it's a question that's never satisfactorily answered. I guess they're League of Shadows members, they're just scruffy killers instead of the dapper ninjas Ra's used. Makes perfect sense.

"At least mine were insane."

    Speaking of Ra's al Gul, Liam Neeson shows up for half a minute in a dream sequence while Bruce Wayne's hanging around waiting for his back to fix up. Not only do dream sequences generally suck, but it's never made clear whether al Gul is meant to be alive again (which I think he could do in the comics) or whether he's some sort of fever dream... in which case he's a fever dream that gives Bruce Wayne accurate information that he could not otherwise have come by. However, also speaking of unexpected cameos, I got a kick out of the appearance of this guy:

Uhhh...

    No, wait, sorry. This guy:

"Death! By exile."

    Cillian Murphy as Dr. Crane turning up as the 'judge' in the 'people's sentencing court' was rather amusing, yet also well done. Both he and Nolan deserve credit for making the Scarecrow into a legitimately unnerving villain in the first film and a useful cameo character in the second two. Another unexpected appearance was the guy who plays Sergeant Wu in Grimm showing up as a police sergeant here. Not getting typecast then, Jimmy?

    Moving on; there's very little to say about the veteran trio of Oldman, Caine and Freeman other than they all deliver excellent, assured performances that anchor the film. Freeman has less to do, of course, mainly needing to be calm and speak in his own voice. Caine's portrayal of Alfred is more haunted and less relaxed than in the previous movies, and the scene where he finally tells Bruce Wayne about the truth of Rachel's choice of Harvey over him is magnificently handled. Oldman has the best of it, of course; his Commissioner Gordon is haunted by his own demons, where he praised Harvey Dent who threatened the lives of his wife and son and used the Act set up in Dent's name to smash organised crime, but he's also a man of relative action. This isn't the 'drive the Batmobile, blow up a pylon' of the first film, this is Gordon who jumps down a manhole in pursuit of thugs, throws himself into a sewer to escape Bane after playing unconscious, gets up out of his hospital bed to shoot the men sent to kill him, and hijacks the bomb truck to place a signal blocker on it. He's the human face of the 'good guys' in the movie, and damn good job he does of it too.

    Now, onto Catwoman.

I don't mean 'onto' literally, but I wouldn't object.

    Anne Hathaway is very attractive, as of course Catwoman needs to be. Well, as any costumed heroine or villainess needs to be in any hero/superhero movie, comic, TV depiction or pretty much anything, really, whereas their male counterparts can be attractive or otherwise as need demands. That's cos it's mainly heterosexual men running these things, innit. Kyle (she's never called Catwoman, only referred to in a couple of headlines as a mysterious jewel thief nicknamed 'The Cat') even has heels on her outfit, which is bloody ridiculous in such a generally reality-based series as Nolan's. However, visual appeal aside, Hathaway does an excellent job of portraying Selina Kyle as a largely amoral thief who does (surprise surprise) turn out to have some morals in the end. It's never entirely clear why she's stealing so much in the first place, though, something about owing the wrong people but we don't know who or why, really. But this aside, her performance is a good one, swerving expertly through the degrees between slinkily confident and desperately uncertain as needed. And now let me move on from her to detail my main problem with this film.

    Batman's a glory-seeking idiot, Bane's a fool, and Gotham would have been fine if Selina Kyle was in charge.

    Batman doesn't use guns. He doesn't use guns. Yet after eight years out of the field and with a strapped-up knee to boot, he goes down into the underground to engage Bane in single combat. Sure, Kyle leads him there and double-crosses him, but it's not like he wasn't after a confrontation anyway. Alfred warned him about it, but still Bruce Wayne goes after Bane and gets his arse handed to him. If he'd taken a gun, he might have been able to kill Bane. OK, he'd have been shot down by Bane's goons but he doesn't fear death and, here's the important part, as far as he knew that would have been an end to it. He doesn't know about Talia al Gul at that point, Bane's the enemy. Ignore your pride, shoot the fucker, end of story. But noooo, Batman has to do his hand-to-hand act and ends up handing the city and an atom bomb over to the lunatic.

"I am disappoint, son."

    Meanwhile, Bane's nearly as bad. So you want to punish Batman, BIG FUCKING DEAL. The guy's resourceful and you're being sloppy. Kill him, or at the very least keep him where you can always keep an eye on him. Let him watch you destroy Gotham from inside Gotham rather than on a TV in a prison somewhere miles away where you have no clue what he's doing. Joker gets away with his "I can't kill you because you're too much fun" because The Joker is chaos incarnate. The Joker's just having fun, pushing at humanity from different angles to see what breaks, he has no agenda beyond what he decided to do this morning. Bane has a very specific, set plan that he intends to follow which comes from someone else's agenda, and he endangers it by taking some time out to impose some theoretical punishment not only on Gotham but on Batman. SLOPPY.

"Oh you!"

    Selina Kyle shows up as Bane is about to kill Batman and blows him away with the Batpod's cannons straight away. Bang, crispy villain, solved. It's basically the moment in Star Wars where Han Solo shows up and blows up one TIE fighter and sends Vader careering off in the other direction; idealistic but hopelessly outmatched 'hero' has their life saved by a mercenary you're meant to think has fucked off and left them to their fate. That's the sort of approach Gotham needed, not some self-righteous prick in a cape getting all moral high-ground about guns and failing fairly abjectly as a result.

    All that said, the second fight scene between Batman and Bane, where Batman knows to target Bane's mask and knocks out the painkilling gas is well-done; Bane's fighting becomes much more vicious and uncoordinated as a result, and the contrast is clear.

    I know this is dragging on a bit, the film is nearly three hours, give me a break.

    ANYWAY, in conclusion the intrepid heroes can't get the core back into the reactor to prevent it from detonating and so Batman uses his 'Bat' helivehicle to take it out over the sea and allows it to blow up and he dies and boo-hoo it's all very sad. Only in the Second Big Twist it turns out that he didn't actually die, because he'd fixed an autopilot that Fox had said was broken and...

...I dunno. You tell me how having autopilot saves you from a megatonne atom bomb that's gone off a mere five seconds or so after you disappeared from view. I mean, really? Where did you get to in those five seconds after you ditched it? More than the six mile blast radius? That's impressive speed on your flying vehicle, sir. I call bullshit. But Alfred sees him and he's happy and is with Selina Kyle, but that's all Alfred needs to know. Which personally, I think is more bollocks. Nolan should have killed Batman. That would have been truly defining for the series, even if it was the last one and DC reboot in another eight years or so. Did he never intend to? Did he get cold feet? Did DC veto it? I have no idea. But he should have done, instead of taking the easy way out. The thing is, it's not like Wayne needs to survive, because he's done being Batman anyway and there's this guy to take over:

"Hey, you just met me, and this is crazy,

But I'm in this film a lot, so ignore the lack of background maybe?"

    I've got no fucking clue why John Blake is in this movie, really. He doesn't really do much except work out who Batman is years ago when he's a kid, keep it to himself, get all moral over Gordon when he finds out that Gordon lied about Harvey Dent's death, and run around a bit figuring things out too late to be any use and getting into scrapes that he needs to be rescued from. Oh, and at the end, Wayne's will requires all of Wane Manor to be left 'untouched', which means Blake is free to find the entrance to the Batcave and all the equipment. But there's a problem with that, too. See, OK, his middle name is 'Robin'. But it's all very well having Batman's shit, but not if you've not got Batman's mind to make it work. And not if you haven't got Lucius Fox to repair and redesign it for you. And not if you haven't got Alfred to help out, lend a hand, stitch you up afterwards and so on. And not if you haven't got Bruce Wayne's money to get around these problems in other ways. Basically, Blake has stumbled across a small armoury that he doesn't know how to use, can't repair and can't replace. Have fun, boyo.

    For me, the film needed to end after the scene where Fox, Alfred and Gordon are at Bruce's headstone, or possibly when Gordon sees the Batman statue unveiled. Everything else after that smacked of the happy-ending bullshit that ruined the cinematic release of Blade Runner. Bruce Wayne was an idiot and didn't deserve a happy ending, although I'm kind of glad that Alfred didn't end up feeling like such a total failure.

   So that's my long and incredibly rambling review of a long and fairly rambling film. It boils down to decent entertainment with some excellent performances and a couple of very unexpected twists, but most of the characters could have achieved their intended goals a hell of a lot easier than how they actually went about it, and that sort of ridiculousness REALLY bugs me.