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.

When Bella Met Thor

When first I heard that Kristen Stewart was going to be in a Snow White movie with Chris Hemsworth, I laughed. I figured that she'd be playing exactly the same character as she did in the one Twilight movie that I watched (in my defence, I had no clue what the series was at that time other than it was 'about vampires'); a poorly-acted portrayal of a female non-enity who alternated between looking mildly concussed and biting her lip in a doomed attempt to convey some form of emotion.


Turns out I was right.

Well, why mess with a winning formula?

Hemsworth, though - I was surprised by that. Since his portayal of Thor in, um, Thor (oh, and a little movie called The Avengers), Hemsworth has stepped thoroughly into action hero territory, and I'd have suspected he would not now be interested in playing second-fiddle to one of the most lambasted young actresses of our generation.

Turns out I was wrong.

So, I just swap the hammer for an axe, but keep the hair and beard?

Awesome, that means I don't need to grow them again for the next Marvel movie.

But let's leave aside the acting chops (or lack thereof) and focus on the movie itself. Snow White & The Huntmans is the bare bones of the old Snow White tale, taken and... well, I don't know exactly what they did to it, and I watched the damn thing. I don't even know what they were trying to do with it, except make a boatload of cash. But anyway, Charlize Theron plays a witch-queen person who waltzes into a kingdom, seduces the widowed king, kills him that night and takes over the place, then imprisons Snow White in a tower. So says the narrator, who has an accent that reminds me ever-so-strongly of the vocals from Turisas' cover of 'Rasputin' by Boney M.

Oh, those Russians...

No, don't ask me why he sounded Russian (possibly) when every character in the movie sounds English. Well, except Hemsworth, he's Irish. And a drunkard. Subtle, that.

I could talk about the good acting. Hemsworth, for example, is just as good as the nameless Huntsman as he is as Thor, mastering an Irish accent (he even grunts in an Irish accent) and veering appropriately between surly, gruff, angry, earnest and sorrowful. Then there are the Dwarves, where a number of 'name' English actors (Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, Bob Hoskins, Nick Frost and a few more than I recognised but couldn't put a name to) had their faces digitally projected onto smaller bodies, a few months before Peter Jackson comes back with The Hobbit and blows the entire 'band of dwarves' thing out of the water. Of these, Hoskins has the weakest lines as the elderly blind dwarf and responds by delivering them with no attempt at feeling; Ian McShane is as good as ever however, while Ray Winstone plays Ray Winstone with the same effortless ease that he has all his life.

"What're the odds on you winning Best Supporting Actor, Ray?"

"Fuck off."

Then there is the bad acting. Charlize Theron isn't helped by some appalling dialogue, but her screaming, scenery-chewing pantomime villainess lacks any sort of subtlety, and reminds me of Bavmorda from Willow (remember that?). And of course there's Kristen Stewart, pretty much the only other actress in the movie, who struggles along being mainly helpless in the first part of the movie, only to become reborn as some sort of armour-plated Joan of Arc type in the last bit, a role in which she is about as convincing as Wayne Rooney's hairline. However, for all her faults, it's not Stewart's fault that this movie is so utterly odd. That lies squarely with the writers.

Is this an action movie? YES! It has swords and axes and fights and a troll and assaults on a castle and (some) blood. Is this a fairy story? YES! It has a troll and dwarves (like, a separate race of gold-mining humanoids, not humans with a malfunctioning pituitary gland) and fairies and sorcery and some weird stag with branches for antlers. Is this a romance movie? YES! William, the Duke's son, is still in love with Snow White from childhood, and the Huntsman starts to fall for her as well, maybe, kind of. Also, Snow White kisses William, or who she thinks is William, but that's actually Queen Rivana in disguise. So actually, Kirsten Stewart kisses Charlize Theron. I reckon that's made a bunch of people happy.

The point is, the movie doesn't know what it is, and its attempts to be convincing simply lead to it falling down in other areas. Take Snow White, for example - she escapes from her tower and when she opens the door to the outside world she shrinks back from the sunlight, because she's only used to darkness. Fine, that works. Then she escapes through a sewer and jumps out into the sea and swims to shore. Right. So, cooped up in a tower since she was about eight or so, and then ten years later she can swim through crashing waves rather than go "oops, actually I never learned how to swim, or if I did I forgot by now, also I'm not exactly in the best of physical health here due to my poor muscle tone, glub, bye" and drown. And do this in a flowing dress, no less. Then there's the fact that all animals love her. That really is straight out of a Disney movie; two magpies show her where to find the loose nail that she uses to injure the Queen's brother and escape, then guide her to a handsome white horse that just happens to by laying down minding its own business by the sea and has no qualms about her jumping on and riding it.

Basically, these are the guerilla warfare experts of the natural world.

Not that the horse fares well out of this deal, mind you - she gets chased by evil Queen's Men on their barded black horses (all the bad people dress in black. The only black man in the movie works for the evil Queen. In case you didn't know that black = evil, this movie will guide you) and her horse runs into a bog, where it throws her off, then drowns why she reaches out powerlessly to save it. Poor old horse was just laying down, enjoying the sea air, when this girl comes along and jumps on it and rides it TO ITS DEATH. Nice one Snow White, you heartless bitch.

Oh, also, the troll? She stares it down and it goes all soppy and stops trying to kill her and the Huntsman. Dwarf-Hoskins babbles on about her being "life itself!" and the whole thing is so stupid. You seriously can't get away with that sort of shit in a movie these days, not unless it's a cartoon Disney job where the heroine sings a duet with a little bird or something.

However, all this pales in comparison to the poisoned apple/kiss/zombie-warrior-Snow-White finale. After a bit of Fellowship Of The Ring-style wandering in the wilderness with the Huntsman, William and the Dwarves, she gets tricked into eating a poisoned apple by the Queen (who flew there as a crow, or crows, or something), but the Queen gets interrupted by Huntsman and William before she can cut Snow White's heart out. Now, Snow White is the only one who can kill the Queen, because of her 'fairest blood', or some such shit. What the hell this means, I have no real idea, but I think it's because she's pretty (so says the mirror on the wall). Certainly, the only other women in the movie have deliberately scarred their own cheeks because that way they're of 'no use' to the Queen, who it seems abducts and sucks the life from pretty women to stay young (we see her doing it to one girl in a very Dementor-esque manner). This in itself pisses me off, because the inherent message is "unless you're pretty, you're fuck all use to the world". However, if Queen Rivana holds Snow White's beating heart in her hands then all her problems will go away and she'll be forever young, as she'll have killed the only one fairer than her! "Immortality," breathes Theron, "immortality forever!"

Um, yes. That's sort of what 'immortality' means, you know?

Anyway, despite the fact that only Snow White can kill her, Rivana turns into a murder (haha) of crows and flies away from William and the Huntsman, when actually she could have quite easily just killed them both and got on with things. So Snow White is dead, or in a coma, or... hell if I know, no-one ever says. But they finally get her to William's dad's castle where she lies in state. Now, William has already kissed her, he kissed her as soon as she 'died'. Nothing happened. Put her in the castle, Huntsman gets drunk, rambles a bit about how she reminds him of his wife, then kisses her.

She wakes up.

WHY?

Let's make this clear, there is no indication that she's anything other than dead, at this point. OK, so you know the story, you think she's in a coma or under a spell, some sort of suspended animation so Queenie can do her open heart surgery without Snowy thrashing around, fine. Regardless, why the hell is it the Huntsman who breaks the spell!? Or jolts her out of the coma, or brings her back from the dead, or whatever. Is it the alcohol on his breath? Is he actually Thoros of Myr? Did he shove a couple of defibrillating pads onto her out of camera shot? Nothing, no explanation, not even Hoskins trotting out something like "true love it must be, yes, hmm".

Even worse, Snow White then wanders out into the courtyard of the castle where everyone looks astounded and gives the most appalling rousing speech I have ever seen or heard in my life. About the only thing I can remember is something about iron melting and "I will be your weapon!"

"Stand back, I'm going to act at them!"

And everyone just falls to their knees and goes "Okay then, zombie girl!" or similar. I guess she's a princess, and eccentric behaviour is expected from royalty, but coming back from the dead goes a bit far, surely?

Anyway, off they trot for the Inevitable Final Confrontation, this being an action movie (possibly) and all. Snow White leads an assault on her father's castle with William and the Huntsman by her side. She's in armour, William's in armour, the Huntsman don't need no stinkin' armour because he's that badass, or something. Rivana lets her come, because she still wants to eat Snow White's heart. And so they have their final confrontation and Rivana bitchslaps her about a bit and then goes to stab her in the chest (um, breastplate? She's still wearing her armour) but Snow White BLOCKS using a move that the Huntsman taught her right when they first met, and stabs the evil queen right back, and Rivana dies. Because it's not the knife that matters, it's the person holding the knife, and this person happens to be prettier than anyone else and so everything she does is made of awesome. Maybe?

In the process of this, Snow White has gone from being a gentle-hearted soul who couldn't harm anyone (well, except the Queen's brother) and who told the Huntsman that she could 'never do that' with regard to stabbing someone, to a fiery swordswoman who happily cuts down guards on the way to  killing the Queen. Although she sheds a tear after killing Rivana, so presumably that makes it all OK.

Finally, Snow White is crowned. Her sceptre is some sort of tree branch, because she's practically nature incarnate, yo. And everyone goes "HAIL!" and William smiles and the Huntsman pops up at the back of the hall and smiles and... the movie ends.

For crying out loud. Even a Disney movie gives the audience a romantic payoff. The only kisses that happen in the movie are a brief one where she thinks she's kissing William but it's actually Rivana in disguise, and Hemsworth's borderline necrophilia to revitalise her. I mean, I really don't go and see movies for romance, I go to see them for action and explosions or comedy or preferably all of the above plus some nudity, but if you're going to tease a romance then at least have the balls to follow through and deliver. But of course, if she gets with the Huntsman then what's William's actual *point* in the movie? Plus, Hemsworth is clearly meant to be far older. If she gets with William then why is it Hemsworth's kiss that revitalises her rather than William's? The movie seems to have avoided this conundrum by simply ignoring it.

Out of five stars, I give 'Snow White & The Huntsman' the score of 'fish'. Because it's only fitting that the score has as much relation to the scoring system as this movie does to cinematography.

Beneath An Iron Sky

My liking for shit movies is becoming legendary. And I mean 'legendary' in its sense of 'well-known', like  how a musician becomes 'legendary' if they're still around for long enough, not because they're actually any good. Anyway, my friend Nick said "hey, you should see Iron Sky, that's probably up your street". So I looked into it, and FUCK ME, IT'S A FILM ABOUT NAZIS FROM THE MOON.

Not even Rebekah Brooks could fuck this up.

Yeah, there was no way I was going to miss this.


Now, as it happened it was originally scheduled for a one-day-only release in the UK (since changed; cunning/cynical marketing? Genuine bending to fan pressure? Don't know, not that bothered), and on that day I was off work. So to the cinema I went!


I had a few reservations. This was a largely fan-funded movie. Did that mean it was going to have wobbly sets, a poor-quality script, appalling acting and generally look like a made-for-the-Syfy-channel monster movie? Or was I not going to be that lucky (I love those movies)? I also had reservations about the portrayal of Nazis (always a difficult line to walk, I feel).


I needn't have worried. Except that the sets didn't wobble, the actors could (largely) act and the script was, in general, hilarious.


The broad plot is that a future American President - it's Sarah Palin. It's obviously Sarah Palin. She looks like Sarah Palin, she sounds like Sarah Palin (or at least, says the right things, I've no idea if the accent is right), they never call her anything except 'Madam President' and she's as dumb as Sarah Palin - desperately wants to get re-elected and so decides to send a black man to the moon (slogan: "Black To The Moon? Yes She Can!").

See?

However, the US are also looking for an energy source called Helium 3 there, and the cover for that to the UN is that this is just a blatant re-election publicity stunt by the President. Just that alone made me love this movie. However, there are NAZIS ON THE MOON and they capture the black male model sent there, thinking he's the head of a coming invasion of Earth shocktroops. Cue the predictable shock and confusion of the Nazis as they find a man who's black.


It should be awful. It should be cringe-worthy. But, and believe me my Political Correctness antennae never come out of overdrive, it's not. The Nazis are generally portrayed as sadistic, Aryan-supremacist fucktards, yet ridiculous enough for the film to make a continual and deserved mockery of them. However, there is a notable exception.

Anyone else getting a flashback to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?

Julia Dietze plays Renate Richter, a 'teacher' who believes in the Party line and that the National Socialist Party genuinely is the party of love and compassion that will heal the Earth. Of course, that's not exactly true, given that her psychotic fiance wants to destroy it. But there are also depictions of the general soldiers and citizens of the Nazi moonbase who are just going about their day to day lives and aren't really doing or planning anything evil ("Do you suppose the Fuhrer has saurkraut three times a week as well?"). Yes, Dietze's character and characterisation is almost unbelievably naive (I loved her reference to 'The Great Dictator' as "one of the world's most famous short films", as she's only seen an edited-down version that portrays Hitler in a positive light), but it works in the context of the film. And yes, Götz Otto's Klaus Adler is ridiculous, but you can imagine that a Nazi officer from a Nazi moonbase that's been Nazo for seventy years would be like that.

There is one character that seemed a little clumsy; the advertising mogul/chief aide who advises the President, played by Peta Sergeant. Her lines are overblown and her performance is anything from subtle - not that this is a movie that's made for subtlety, but there's being unsubtle and then there's being Joey Barton. However, it's forgivable for when the character is upgraded to a General with an accompanying hilarious outfit.

I genuinely don't want to give too much away about the movie, because it's an unpredictable beast; it's certainly not just the stupid comedy I was expecting. There is a lot of comedy in it - the cinema was laughing uproariously at points - that sometimes stops just short of being too near-the-knuckle, but there's a lot more than that. It's a clever comedy, ludicrous a claim as that may seem about a film that has Space Nazis as its main selling point. Also, with its multi-national origins that don't include Britain or America, it's interesting to see how the world is portrayed. The depiction of Palin is absolutely merciless, and America's foreign policy in general doesn't come out much better either ("The United States has no military interest in the moon" says the Defence Secretary to the United Nations; "What about natural resources interest? We know you sometimes get confused about the two!" retorts a Middle-Eastern man). Which is not to say that other countries get off either, as North Korea gets roundly mocked as well, while Britain is reduced to one man in a tweed jacket and a satellite with the Union Jack on (not that we're not used to that from American cinema too).

All through the movie, I was thinking "this is actually pretty good! Good in a real way, not good in a few cheap laughs way". And then I got to the end. And the end, I must admit, kind of blew me away. In a sort of 'the poppies ending to Blackadder Goes Forth' way.

Go and see this movie. I think it will be worth your while. Unless you're a Republican American, I guess.