#65: DIE HARD

Starring Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia. Written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza. Directed by John McTiernan. Budget $35 million. Running time 132 minutes.  

New York cop, John McClane (Bruce Willis) arrives in Los Angeles on the literal eve of Christmas to spend the holidays with his estranged wife, Holly (Bonne Bedelia) and young family. Chauffeured to the Nakatomi building, McClane arrives in the middle of a joint Christmas/business celebration only to become right man in the wrong place and time when an army of highly deadly and well equipped Euro-trash terrorists, lead by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) hi-jack the office Christmas Party as a cover for stealing 600 million dollars worth of bearer bonds, not realising that one of the guests is actually a NYPD cop...

What follows is a masterclass in action cinema, and quite frankly one of the best films ever filmed, it's certainly in my top ten all time favourite films.

It's the film that made Bruce Willis, introduced the world to Alan Rickman and cemented John McTiernan as one of the best action directors.

I've always loved this movie, and last saw it on the big screen back in 2021, oddly enough I saw it back then with It's a Wonderful Life, which is the next film I saw. Seeing 'it', Die Hard on the big screen again is always a delightful experience, films need to be seen on the big screen, where you lose yourself in the experience in a way you don't at home. You seen things you miss on a small screen. Willis cared back then and it shows, Rickman is simply superb in his breakout role as the leader of the gang of ex-terrorists, Hans Gruber and the movie gave Robert Davi a brief golden period in his career, leading to the role of the villain, Franz Sanchez, in the Bond film Licence to Kill.

This is a glorious action film that has no need for shaky cam or frenzied editing to convey drama, it's got an endlessly quotable script and it's well plotted and has no flabby centre, the way it sets up the scenario and introduces the villains is a masterclass in plotting. That coupled with good practical effects, some nifty compositing and a 15 cert for bloody violence, plus bare breasts makes it one of my top ten favourite films!

10/10

#64: GODZILLA MINUS ONE

 

Starring Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando and Kuranosuke Sasaki. Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki. Visual special effects by Takashi Yamazaki and Kiyoko Shibuya. 

Budget $15 million dollars. Running time 125 minutes.

As the Second World War draws to an end, failed kamikaze pilot Shikishima (Ryunosuke) returns home in Tokyo suffering from severe survivor's guilt only to find his family home destroyed, his parents dead, and himself suffering from terrible flashbacks to when a juvenile Godzilla attacked his Pacific island airbase and slaughtered every one there, save him and the chief mechanic. But when another survivor of the Tokyo bombing, a woman called Noriko Oishi, whose parents also died in the bombing stumbles into his life, with a newborn orphaned baby, he takes  a job onboard a rickety old wooden ex-fishing boat hunting mines in Tokyo harbour to support them.

However, fate isn't done with him just yet or with Japan for that matter, and all hell is about to breakout, Godzilla style...

What follows is simply staggering, and one of the best films I've seen all year. Focusing on the ordinary man and woman in the street and more importantly an ordinary young family and the effects of Godzilla attack first hand, this is an astonishing film with real heart and emotion, much time is spent with the young unmarried couple and their baby as they start to rebuild their lives following the war, while all the time the ever-present ominous spectre of Godzilla looms ever closer. Ryunosuke's guilt ruins any chance he has at building a new life until Godzilla erupts out of the sea and he's given one last chance to fight for his future. 

Naturally when it comes to a Godzilla film you come for the action and Minus One does not disappoint, there are five set pieces, which will leave you breathless with tension, including a sea based chase that manages to out 'Jaws' Jaws, if you will as Godzilla chases down an anti-mining ship in the ocean. However it's when Godzilla makes land fall that the action truly unleashes leading to a genuinely extraordinary sequence that left the audience stunned into silence. And later on when silence is used to dramatic effect you could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium so invested was the audience. 

If your only connection with the Big G is through the Hollywood films of the past nine years and do yourself a favour and go and see this, I predict you've never seen anything like it. 

Making this a period piece movie was a stroke of genius, making the struggle against Godzilla all the more dramatic.

There have been 33 Toho studio Godzilla films since 1954 and 37 if you factor in the US efforts and this is simply one of the best, if not the best one yet! 

A superb, dramatic and emotional film that actually managed to make me well up with emotion in the final battle. And I simply cannot fault this film. A friend of mine once said, that when a man is tired of watching a man in a monster suit trash scale models of Tokyo he is tired of life and I agree, however in this instance, I came for the destruction and carnage and fell in love with the humanity and the human drama. 

Simply one of the best films I've seen all year and I urge you to see it! 10/10

63: WANKA

 

Starring: Timothee Chalamet, Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key, Paterson Joseph, Matt Lucas, Mathew Baynton, Sally Hawkins, Rowan Atkinson, Jim Carter, Tom Davis, Olivia Colman and Hugh Grant. 

Written by Simon Farnaby and Paul King. Directed by Paul King. Budget $125 million. Running time 116 minutes.

Just like the poster for the film (see above) this is a sickly sweet, over sugared confectionary of a movie that will leave you feeling nauseous from the visual overload and bombarded by a parade of instantly forgettable musical numbers, because make no mistake, this is a MUSICAL, in tooth and roar. Not even the severely under-used Hugh Grant, the films MVP, can save this from slowly melting into a overlong slog of generic panto-like story tropes and plot points, despite the extremely talented cast of British comedians in all the back-up roles giving it their damdest! 

Game Timothee Chalamet presents us with a doe-eyed, innocent, and illiterate Wanka still grieving the death of his mother many years earlier and setting out into the big wide world to open up his very own chocolate shop right in the middle of a fabulous shopping arcade directly opposite a cartel of three highly ruthless, greedy and murderous chocolate moguls played by Paterson Joseph as Arthur Slugworth, Matt Lucas as Prodnose and Mathew Baynton as Fickelgruber. Together with the corrupt police captain, Keegan-Michael Key they try to at first intimidate Wanka before just giving up and just trying to murder him. 

The plot see Wanka get off a ship, make his way into the big city, only to end up penniless and the victim of a scam that sees him imprisoned in a guest house run by Olivia Colman and Tom Davis. There Wanka meets up with the other members of this rapidly expanding cast and devises a plan to escape, free the other prisoners, capture the baddies and punish the guilty. Oh, and find out who the young orphan girl Noodle, Calah Lane, is. Added to Wanka's To-Do-List, is find out who's the short orange creature sneaking into his room at night and stealing all his chocolate might be. Oh, wait he also has to build his chocolate empire and fulfill a dream his mother gave him. So it's amazing to think he and everyone else has any time at all to launch into a string of instantly forgettable and generic new songs and a couple of classics from the original and vastly superior movie starring Gene Wilder that this film oh so desperately wants to be seen as a worthy successor to. But find the time they do, and you'll be wishing they hadn't by the end of this.

Paul King directed the infinitely better and vastly superior Paddington films and it was this fact alone that drew me all in. Those two films were a delight, a funny, delightful and utterly British affair that lifted one's spirits and left you with a spring in your step. This not so, it starts promisingly and the effervescent and charming Chalamet leaps and dances into the fray, but as the film builds up its massive backstory and plot structure to support the final showdown and the setting of wrongs it becomes bogged down, scenes build to big song and dance numbers and the three act structure which sees our hero defeated and lost at the end of the second act is strongly in place and happy to provide all the tried and tested tricks of Syd Field's classic structure. 

There's a glimmer of hope right at the very end of the film where Wanka and the Oompa Loompa begin to build the famous chocolate factory and you wish the film had started there, rather than an earlier.

For me, the main failing of the film is the introduction of magic into the proceedings, something missing from the original. Here everything that Wanka creates has an element of the magical as part of the ingredients, all clearly inspired by the Hairy Potter films, and this I would argue robs the film of the actual magic of the first. Magic, like Star Trek science is just a lazy device that enables the writer to reverse the polarity of the proton fandango whenever it suits the situation. 

In the original film, it's shown that Wonka is a true chocolate scientist constantly experimenting with unusual ingredients to create new taste sensations, here, Wanka just chucks in the wings of a flying beetle so the eater can fly. Also, as someone who eats chocolate, it's bizarre to see everyone in this film never savouring the chocolate but just crunching into it and munching it in one go, just like you would chomping down on a block of Dairy Milk, happy knowing you've still got a kilo to go. 

There's also a distinct lack of the malevolence of Roald Dahl in the writing, everything here is twee and far too nice, even the baddies are sweet and no one dies horribly. And once again we've been given the origin story of a character which gives us nothing new, and only diminishes the character in question by piling on un-needed emotional baggage.

It's not a terrible film, it's just far too sweetly sick, it's just like Easter Sunday morning where the sight of all your chocolate eggs piled high looks absolutely wonderful but the feeling after you've polished off five kilos of the chocolate goodness or this will leave you craving something more substantial and meaty.

6/10 

  

 

#62: LOVE ACTUALLY

 

Starring Hugh Grant, Liam Nesson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightley, Martine McCutcheon, Bill Nighy and Rowan Atkinson. Written and directed by Richard Curtis. Budget $45 million. Running time 136 minutes.

Taking place in the three week run up to Christmas, Love Actually follows 11 separate stories of love as they barrel towards a violent, blood-soaked slaughter in an airport when a young boy is cut down by police men's machine guns as he races through security to illegally board an aircraft. 

Ranging from down right sweet stories of love, like the Prime Minister of England  (Hugh Grant) falling for a Downing Street tea girl (Martine McCutcheon) or the platonic love between aging rockstar Billy Max (Bill Nighy) and his manager Joe (Gregor Fisher) to the downright despicable like Alan Rickman cheating on his wife, Emma Thompson and the truly appalling story of a sex obsessed Englishman going to the States to shag any woman he can find. 

This film now 20 years old is starting to show its age, with some exceedingly uncomfortable bits of humour, like fat-shaming, some awkward attitudes towards sex and nudity, and the truly creepy stalking antics of photographer/artist Mark who rocks up to his best friend's house on Christmas Eve with hand written notes professing his obsessive lust for his friends new wife. 

Luckily, Hugh Grant's charm and Emma Thompson's acting chops save the day, just.

7/10   

#61: NAPOLEON

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby. Written by David Scarpa. Directed by Ridley Scott. Budge $130-200 million. Running time 157 minutes long.

Unlike the film this review will be blissfully short. 

The life-story of history's shortest historical figure, Napoleon, or Nappy as his mates called him, from the time he lead an assault to take a fort in the Seige of Toulon to the bit when he was exiled on a Caribbean island and died.

Gotta say I was well pissed off by this, expecting, as I was, a bio pic of Abba's breakthrough Euorvision song entry of 1974, Waterloo! Imagine my disappointment then that rather than watching the rise of the greatest Eurovision Song band of all time I had to watch the rise and fall a grumpy little megalomaniac in a funny hat.

Racing through 28 years of the diminutive one's life at breakneck speed you don't get time to breathe as key events are ticked off the unseen checklist of the director. Battles are staged, beautiful costumes are worn and bits of history are dispensed with the rapidity of candy pellets fired from a Pez head.

Ridley Scott directs with all the uninterested passion of a bloke just checking off one more item from his bucket list. He famously quipped that in the time it took Martin Scorsese to make Killers of a Harvest Moon he'd bashed out four films. Ridley, that's not something to be proud of, maybe you should consider slowing down and tightening up the scripts a bit more before filming. 

Anyway, it looks good, the acting is okay, although Vanessa Kirby is royally wasted in her role as the apple of Boney's eye, and Joquain Phoenix does what he always does, mope around and look very earnest. And the film becomes unintentionally hilarious at several points during this film, never more so than the sex scenes which are hysterical.

Ultimately all this does is make you wish that Stanley Kubrick had got to make his version of Boney's life rather than Ridley Scott who pays homage to Stan by trying to mimic the wonderful candle light cinematography of Barry Lydon, although all he manages to do is make a murky and gloomy looking film. Although the battle scenes are extremely well done and fantastically well mounted.

I think I'll stick to infinitely better 1970 movie Waterloo starring Rod Steiger and directed by Sergei Bondarchuk.

6/10

#60: SALTBURN

 

Starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe and Carey Mulligan. Produced, written and directed by Emerald Fennell. Running time: 131 minutes.

Feeling like a 21st Century reworking of Evelyn Waugh's classic Brideshead Revisited, Saltburn finds 'fish-out-of-water' working-class scholarship boy Oliver Quick, Barry Keoghan, arriving in Oxford and slowly drawn into the posh set by the seductive charms of super-rich Felix Elspeth, Jacob Elordi. With the summer holidays looming and Oliver grieving over the sudden death of his father, Felix invites him to stay with him and his eccentric family lead by Sir James and Lady Elspeth, Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike at the family pile of Saltburn, a staggering opulent and sprawling stately home in Buckinghamshire.

What follows is a slow and unsettling decent into deception, seduction and ultimately murder most foul as truths are revealed and lies discovered.

Featuring a superb cast perfectly headed by Barry Keoghan who totally powns this film, but that's not to take anything away from the rest of the cast who are all superb in their respective roles.

Darkly funny, sinister and refreshingly nasty, this is a good looking film with some lovely flourishes including a very impressive naked dance.

Very satisfying. 8/10

#59: HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES

 

Starring Tom Blyth Rachel Zegler, Peter Dinklage, Jason Schwartzman, Hunter Schafer, Josh Andres Rivera and Viola Davis. Written by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt, directed by Francis Lawrence. Budget $100 mill. Running time 157 minutes.

The prequel to the Hunger Games movies starring Jenifer Lawrence is set at the time of the 10th Hunger Games, so 64 years earlier, and gives us the origin story of President Snow played by Donald Sutherland.

In this we watch the rise and partial fall, before rising of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) from insanely handsome University kid studying, I think, The Hunger Games to rookie in the army before head game designer of the Hunger Games, before striding off into the sunset to one day become President. The film sees Snow and a bunch of other University students forced to become Mentors to this year's crop of Hunger Game tributes and he's given someone from District 12 who turns out to be Rachel Zegler's travelling bard, Lucy Gray Baird. Somehow he and her manage to survive while putting up with some serious heckling, bullying and sabotage from Professor Casca Highbottom, Peter Dinklage who used to be Snow's dad's best friend and seems to bear a serious grudge against the Snow family. Overseeing everything is the truly demented Dr. Volumnia Gaul, Viola Davis head game designer and all-out psychotic. And to bring some much need shits and giggles we have the fantastic Lucretius 'Lucky' Flicherman, Jason Schwatzman who's the TV host and the best thing in this film. 

It's long and rather tedious. Despite a good looking cast headed up by Tom Blyth, Peter Dinklage, Jason Schwartzman and Viola Davis, this can't save the film from being exceedingly one note and I'm sorry to say rather dull. 

For a bleak, dystopic, exceedingly nihilistic movie about a gladiatorial fight-to-the-death, I'm happy to report it's a totally blood free experience, despite the copious amounts of throat cuts, head smashes, stabbing, poisonings, public executions and machine gunning going on, so you'll be happy to bring your 12 year-old and under children in the knowledge that no one dies, they're just sleeping.

The actual 'Hunger Games' part of the film is the most thrilling and when it ends awkwardly two thirds of the way into the movie, we're then subjected to a protracted pre-prologue sequence as we watch our 'hero', Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) sent to District 12 to plot his rise to top again. 

Offset by a lot of bleakness this film strangely marries 1950 design aesthetic with grunge and violence and then throws in some frankly cringey good-ole America folk songs as sung by Rachel Zegler's Lucy Gray Baird, who's a bard about things like her ex boyfriend getting hung and you have the year's funniest non comedy since Fast and Furious X.

When the Hunger Games part ends you quickly realise you have no interest in the rest of the film and with well over half an hour left to run, you sort of resign yourself to watching it all, because, well you've made it this far. 

Looks good, Tom Blyth, Jason Schwartzman and Viola Davis make it just about worthwhile and at least it's not another superhero movie.

6/10