#21: A WORKING MAN

STARRING Jason Statham, Michael Pena, David Harbour, Jason Fleming, Arianna Rivas, Emmett J. Scanlan, Eve Mauro, Noemi Gonzalez. Written by Sylvester Stallone and David Ayer, based on the book Levon's Trade by Chuck Dixon. Produced by Sylvester Stallone. Directed by David Ayer. Running time 116 minutes.

Stath is Levon Cade, an ex-Royal Marine commando now working as a site foreman for building construction family lead by Joe Garcia (Michael Pena) and Noemi Gonzalez (Carla Garcia) whose daughter, Jenny Garcia (Arianna Rivas) gets Taken and sold to Russian mob guys, leading to Levon to use his particular and unique skill-set to go off on a one-man-army rampage to bring her back while killing every single bad guy who gets in his way. Using a variety of guns, knives, grenades, boots and fists, while only suffering a slight twinge in his left bicep after carrying one gun too many. 

Featuring some, but not enough, amusing kills, particularly Jason Flemyng's demise, which comes all too soon, this is a Ronsil action movie delivering nothing new, or that exciting, just the Stath racking up the biggest kill score for one film since Arnie's vastly superior Commando. It's a by-the-numbers, A-Z romp which the Stath can do in his sleep, in fact I'm not entirely sure he wasn't sleep-walking through this.

I have a theory that Hollywood replace old actors with new versions, Brad Pitt for Robert Redford, Stallone, himself, for Victor Mature, and to a far lesser extent we see an attempt for them to try and replace successful directors of old – Christopher Nolan vying to be the new Stanley Kubrick (and failing) and J.J. Abrams struggling to be the next Steven Spielberg and now we have our first fully successful attempt as David Ayer becomes the new Michael Winner and boy does he nail it! He'll be writing restaurant reviews and coming up with catchphrases for insurance adverts before we know it. This film could have been made just was well by Canon Movies back in the 80s starring Charles Bronson. And boy, can you tell it's a Stallone scripted film, the action, the characters the cliches they all scream Stallone, it has all the subtly of a sledgehammer to the balls. Indeed, if this had been made 20 years earlier, he'd have starred in it too.

Despite this being very generic, the Stath continues to be very entertaining and every year he pumps out another action blockbuster, last year it was Ayer's The Beekeeper. Apparently next year Ayers is going to combine both into a film he's calling The Working Beekeeper Man, which will see not one but two Statham's wiping out not one but two families of gangsters, one American and one Russian. I'm already looking forward to it. 

This is intriguing for some of the British actors who turn up in it and also the fact a lot of this looks like it was filmed in the UK. There's nothing new here, but it's fun and silly and the Stah is the only action hero who is funnier the more seriously he takes it. 

6/10

#20: DR. STRANGELOVE - NATIONAL THEATRE LIVE

 

Starring Steve Cogan, Dharmesh Patel, John Hopkins, Giles Terer, Tony Jayawardena co-written by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley, directed by Sean Foley. Running time 150 minutes.

If you've ever wanted to see what an Am-Dram re-telling of Stanley Kubrick's truly superb and vastly superior 1964 comedy masterpiece Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, looks like then you've come to the right place. 

The film sees the events leading up to WWIII through the eyes of Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, US President Merkin Muffley, B52 pilot Major T.J. 'King' Kong, and wheelchaired bound Dr. Strangelove all played by Steven Coogan, who uses the genius move of just putting on a different funny accent for each character. 

Lacking the power, cast, and vision of Stanley Kubrick who directed the original vastly better film from a screenplay by Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George based on the book Red Alert by Peter George. This just feels like a poorly staged church hall performance that seems incredibly dull and boring in comparison and managing to be an hour longer than the movie. 

Most people will come for Coogan, well you'll get four times the dose but it's not vintage Coogan, more like going through the motions Coogan as he recalls his lines while remembering what accent to use, his least effective is his King Charles voice for Mandrake, while his Strangelove is the most successful. 

This just made me want to rewatch the original film. So it's not all bad, but I certainly won't be watching it again.

4/10

#19: THE ALTOID KNIGHTS

STARRING: Robert De Niro, Robert De Niro, Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis, Kathrine Narducci, Michael Rispoli and every Italian American male actor over the age of 58 in Hollywood, or so it would seem. Written by Nicholas Pileggi. Directed by Barry Levinson. Budget $45 million. Running time 123 minutes.

From the men who've brought us, Goodfellows, Casino, American Gangster, Bugsy, Diner, Rainman, Young Sherlock Holmes and Sphere comes this long, bloated, dull dirge featuring two Robert De Niros for the price of one. Charting, or at least based on the last two great American Mafia dons, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese in the twilight of their years, with one, the nice one, Frank (Robert De Niro), wanting to retire with his wife Bunny (Debra Messing) and Vito (Robert De Niro), the really grumpy one wanting to take the other down, despite both being best friends since childhood. Vito killed two witnesses and had to go to Italy to avoid prosecution and so Frank took over the business, built a vast criminal empire and ran it, apparently without war, grief or internal conflict. But once Vito came back to the US after WWII he wanted everything back and then more and went to war to get it. 

What follows is a really slow, boring film interspersed with flashes of violence to wake you up, which was good for me, because it woke me up twice in time to watch people get killed. 

Filled with an entire cast of elderly overweight and mobility impared Italian-looking white men, except for the criminally underused and simply superb Debra Messing, this film becomes an absolute slog which leaves you lost at sea with a veritable who's who of now long-dead American Mafia gangsters with impenetrable names all sitting around in clubs, or diners playing cards while Robert De Niro as Vito does his best Joe Pesci impersonation as the dangerous Vito, while Robert De Niro delivers a measured performance as the seemingly kindly, nah saintly gangster who never carried a gun, Frank, loved his wife Bunny and had two dogs.

Starting with a botched assassination attempt on Frank Costello (Robert De Niro) by one of Vito Genovese's (Robert De Niro) men, the whole slow moving hunk gently trundles along gathering no momentum on it's pub-crawl through historical events until Frank, agrees to hand over all control to Vito at a gangster BBQ retreat with the heads of every crime family in America leading to the entire dismantlement of the Mafia in America. 

Sounds like a great idea for a film and it is, shame it's not this one. In the hands of a in-his-prime Martin Scorsese this could have been a masterpiece but not so in Barry Levinson's hands, with a script originally written by Nicholas Pileggi back in the 1970s and turned down by every studio til now, this is a gangster film that lacks bite or any real drama. There are no young bloods vying for power just sad, slow moving old men played by sad, slow moving old men and when hits happen they happen with all the speed of an assassin on a zimmer frame.

Rather than watch this, go back and watch Goodfellows and Casino back-to-back and have a great evening rather than a thoroughly mediocre one.  

5/10

#17: JOHN WICK

Starring Keanu Reeves, Micheal Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Adrianne Palicki, Ian McShane, Willem Dafoe, John Leguizamo and Bridget Moynahan. Written by Derek Kolstad, directed by Chad Stahelski. 101 blissful minutes of pure heaven.

Four films in and it's time to rewatch the original back up on the big screen, and what a delight!

Keanu Reeves is John Wick, retired assassin for the mob, grieving for his dead wife who saved him from his life of evil. Now John's days are spent thrashing a beautiful vintage 69 Mustang Mach 1 muscle car around an airfield and looking after Daisy the dog a posthumous gift from his wife to help him grieve. But when the son of his old friend and boss, Russian crime boss Viggo Tarasov, and his posse of hoods, break into Wick's house one night, beat him half to death, stealing his car and unwisely killing Daisy, Wick dusts off his old killing box and heads to town for vengeance.

 Unfortunately, John Wick turns out to be, Baba Yaga (The Boogeyman), a hitman feared by all and famous for killing three men with one pencil. To protect his son, Viggo puts a bounty of 2 million dollars on his John's head and unleashes an army of killers to get him, including the enigmatic assassin, Marcus played by Willem Defoe and Miss Perkins, Adrianne Palicki, the ultimate femme fatale.

And that's the plot, more or less. What follows over the next 101 minutes is simply the best Western action film of the 21st Century so far. It is one glorious, relentless, unflinching continuous gun and fist fight for 95 fantastic minutes, from one audacious action set piece to the next, each more awe-inspiring that the last, the sequence in the night club will leave you blissfully dazed and that's just after the brilliant assault on his house by a gang of heavily armed men. But this isn't just a balls-out action film, there's also humour and great performances too, coupled to stylish direction and superb soundtrack.

Keanu Reeves gets mocked a lot for his wooden performances, but here he brings a world weariness and believability to the role. He gets beaten and takes knocks, no Arnie invincibility here. He might be the worlds most lethal killer but he's also vulnerable to blades, bullets and car crashes, of which there are many.

Simply cannot think of a reason not to love this film, it's just about the most fun I've had at the cinema in an absolute age and I loved it. Go and see it and have a blast, I just hope there's a sequel.

10/10

#18: TERMINATOR 2

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Edward Furlong, Linda Hamilton,  Robert Patrick and Joe Morton. Written by James Cameron and William Wisher. Directed by James Cameron. Running time 137 minutes.

Eleven years after the events of Terminator and Skynet is trying it on again by sending another pesky unstoppable cyborg back in time to terminate someone, this time it's 10-year old John Connor (Edward Furlong), rather than his mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton). However Skynet are upping their game by sending not a cybernetic endoskeleton hidden inside the body of a 6' 4" Austrian bodybuilder but prototype, shape-shifting T1000 (Robert Patrick), a liquid metal killing machine and it's up to a reprogrammed T100, Arnie to save the life of the leader of the future human resistance. After that it's a perfect masterclass in action, featuring note-perfect action beat after beat building to a dramatic showdown in a foundary.

Originally released back in 1991, this is a digitally restored, which I last saw in 2017. And it was an utter delight to watch it again up on the big screen. It's a simply superb film. The script is tight, the dialogue utterly memorable, I was able to silently whisper each line of the film, so ingrained was it in my psyche. Seeing it again on the big screen in this new digital 4K transfer was a treat, the effects remain surprisingly convincing, but the biggest revelation is the in camera effects and stunts, which in this day and age of cgi remain simply staggering. By god, they fly a helicopter under a bloody bridge!

If you've only ever seen this on your TV and you get a chance, give this a go! It's a staggering and thrilling experience and deserves to be seen up there back on the big screen. Cameron is a consummate action director, perhaps the best we've ever seen and his skill with the camera is perfection and never does he need to resort to shaking his camera like his army of imitators. And despite being well over two hours long, this film never relents, never gives up and just keeps coming. Seriously the time just flew by!

A note perfect and exhilarating 10/10.

#16: IN THE LOST LANDS

 

STARRING: Dave Bautista, Milla Jovovich and Arly Jover. Written by either 15 monkeys on one typewriter or Constantin Werner and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Budget $55 million. Running time 101 minutes. 

Jesus H. Christ. Do I really have to try and write a synopsis for this piece of shit? Would it make even one iota of difference to you, I mean I doubt any of you are actually going to go and see this, I mean seriously if you had even any niggling sensation that, just from the poster alone you have to know this is a piece of shit?

Set in the far flung future following a war, blah blah blah, Milla is a witch who seems immortal and grants wishes and Dave, is a legendary hunter and together they're going into the Lost Lands to look for a werewolf in the Lost Lands. Filmed exclusively against green screen and featuring a palette of colours as broad as sepia and night blue this is an ugly film filled with shitty tracking shots across digital backdrops with acts of violence thrown up over us every few minutes to stop us from going to sleep, although it didn't stop me. Characters are introduced to be slaughtered by a demented church warrior in a secondary story arc that ends abruptly before the third act robbing the film of an even vaguely entertaining through arc. Bautista is big, bloated and boring, but not as boring as Jovovich who seems to have cornered the market in female action stars. This one's directed by her husband who also directed his wooden wife in the Resident Evil films.

Nothing new to offer, apparently based on a RR Martin short story, he who wrote Game of Thrones books.

The action in this is shit, the acting is shit, the characters are shit, the look of it is shit, the script is shit, the motivation is shit, the CGI is shit, the soundtrack is shit, the special effects are shit, there wasn't one thing about this that wasn't shit. Indeed this wasn't even shit enough to become funny, this was just shit from beginning to end. And not in the way that 'bad' became 'good', but shit in the way that only shit can be shit. As someone who has to pick up dog shit on a daily basis, since I stupidly got myself a dog, I have to deal with more than my fair share of shit on a daily basis, so I'm really quite annoyed with myself today since having picked up not one but THREE big bags of dog shit today I then took myself off to the cinema and sat down to watch this huge, steaming pile of shit. The worst thing about dog shit is feeling the heat of it in the palm of your hand through the thin plastic bag. But at least that only last a few seconds before its thrown into a bin. But not so with this, I had to sit there for a whole 101 minutes of unrelenting, middling shit. I wouldn't have minded it so much if it had been explosive diarrhoea, but no, I had to put up with a pile of thin, pathetic sticks of shit.

3/10 

#15: OPUS

STARRING: Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Juliette Lewis, Murray Bartlett, Amber Midthunder, Stephanie Suganami, Young Mazino and Tatanka Means. Music especially written by Nile Rogers and The Dream. Written and directed by Mark Anthony Green. Budget $10 million. Running time 104 minutes. 

The Menu has a lot to answer for, since this is clearly inspired by that infinitely better 2022 film. This one sees six people, journalist Ariel, our heroine, (Ayo Edebiri), her boss Stan (Murray Bartlett), TV talk show host Clara (Juliette Lewis), radio shock jock Bill () influencer Emily (Stephanie Suganami) and papararazzi photographer Bianca (Melissa Chambers) invited  for a fabulous weekend to witness the return of a rock god, Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich), after 20 odd years, and the release of his new album, Ceasar's Revenge. It turns out that in the 20 odd years since he last released an album he's only gone and started a cult called the Levelists who all live with him in his Utah compound, or commune. It turns out each of the six invited guests, save one, have major historical issues with said Moretti, as will become clear, but there's more at work here than just a simple tale of revenge, there's also a sinister conspiracy and cult with grand designs.

But there are more literal skeletons in the closet than hot cakes at play here and when our six invited guests arrive at the rock god's cult-like commune you quickly realise not all is right here, and that the outcome isn't going to be good, especially when one of our band discover a secret stash of cyanide on the eve of a final night of revelations. Then there's just the odd matter of a 'TWO YEARS LATER' coda to wrap things up and reveal what was really going on. 

Best thing in this by a goddam country mile is John Malkovich who I'm sure probably exudes menace and malice even when he's asleep. It's been a long time since I've seen him play a villain and it's great to have him back having fun. Sadly this film is too wrapped up in its bigger picture and truth be told, it's not that entertaining. This isn't a bad film or even a shit one, I just wish it's been better. our heroine, Ariel, Ayo Edebiri, isn't that likeable, she comes across as a over privileged and needy and the other invited guests are just cyphers and cut-outs and lack the bite and depth of the Menu inspirations. There's also a lack of any real menace. 

At one point one of our characters is killed and the next day when the others ask about them they're fobbed off. However in the very next scene they arrive in a room where there is one chair fewer, and none of them say anything. This bugged me deeply. Along with the fact we never really learn what it was exactly it was that made them the target of Moretti's ire, and the final 'shocking' reveal, when you think about it, means that they weren't even that relevant to Moretti's plan.

7/10