The Drop Review

A couple of years ago I reluctantly reviewed Bullhead, a Flemish-language film about abuses within the rural Belgian meat trade. I was surprised with what I saw, however. It was a nauseatingly brutal, engaging film, so violent in one part that I thought I was going to be sick. The director, Michael R. Roskam, must have impressed higher forces than me, because he was subsequently offered a big-hitting Hollywood crime drama with two huge stars. The result is The Drop, a New York underworld tale of money and murder.

The location is Brooklyn, in a run-down neighbourhood once run by Cousin Marv. The hulking bruiser of an American is played by James Gandolfini, of Sopranos fame, in what was his final film before a fatal heart attack. All the brooding, bastard thuggery that Gandolfini became so well known for is present in Marv. A decade earlier, some Chechen chaps muscled in, Marv ‘blinked first’, and the Eastern gangsters took over. Now he has to content himself with running a bar he once owned (originally called Cousin Marv’s), a location for criminals to store and collect their dirty money.

Tom Hardy is Bob Saginowski, a taciturn relative of Marv’s who tends the bar and keeps out of trouble. However, trouble comes to him in two ways: first, when he finds an injured dog in a bin and forms a relationship with the owner of the bin, Nadia (Noomi Rapace). Her ex-boyfriend (played by Matthias Shoenaerts, start of Bullhead) is a lunatic with a violent past who then stalks and intimidates Bob. Second, the bar is held up by a couple of small time thugs, and the Chechens want their money back. The police also become interested. The various happenings threaten to take Bob down, but is there more to him than meets the eye?

As New York based gangster films are want to do, religious motifs pop up time and again. Bob and the detective investigating the shady goings on are both devotees of the local Catholic church. So enters the redemption theme. In the face of unrelenting criminality, Bob is obviously trying to do some good. His care for the dog allows him to put his religious sentiments into practice, for until now he did not even take communion.

It is also a film rampant in all-American masculinity - just look at the three top-billed actors and their reputations. It seems as if the gangster genre really is an update of the Western, and Hardy is every bit The Man With No Name.

The Drop stems from a short story by one Dennis Lehane, who then scripted the film. I can see how the story would work well in novella form or even as a brief play – it has the brief, intimate examination of a section of life that is perhaps too cosy for a big blockbuster. Considering the names at the top of the billing, the story isn’t as complex as presented. Pairing of actors to provide an unyielding masculinity to the gritty, Brooklyn scene.

Review: Fury

Fury is a tale of two halves. The first is a distressingly uncompromising, complex look at conflict. The second is an entertaining but empty Hollywood war flick.

Action man Brad Pitt is tank ace staff sergeant Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier, a grizzled veteran of the fighting in North Africa and Europe. In the first scene we see him brutally ambush a German soldier on horseback, stabbing him in the face or something equally distasteful. Then we see him tenderly pet the white horse, sending it on its way with affection. (Hitler was of course fond of animals but less keen on humans. I don’t know why maniacal nutters are often that way.) He commands the tank ‘Fury’, which has survived for so long partly due to Collier’s commanding skill and partly due to luck. He has thus far managed to uphold his promise to keep his crew safe.

The crew consists of chubby Mexican ‘Gordo’ (Michael Pena), hefty hillbilly ‘Coon-Ass’ (Jon Bernthal) and religious zealot ‘Bible’ (Shia LeBeouf). They’re equally jaded, oscillating between pious disgust at war and blood lust. When their gunner is killed (‘the best goddamn gunner in the Second Division’ or something like that), rooky army typist Norman (Logan Lerman) is sent as a replacement. As is imaginable, the battle-hardened crew give him a hard time, and Norman finds its difficult to shoot down Hitler Youth conscripts.

The environment that Fury creates is impressive. There is dirt everywhere – clothes, skin, ground, vehicles... they all have a pervasive mud and grime clinging to them. The soundtrack helps with the immersive feeling, not as in music but as in the sounds of war. There is an almost constant barrage of rumblings, gunfire, explosions and belching tank noise. In the tank itself we hear incessant clinking of metal, the tracks beneath whirring and the shells whizzing overhead. The screams and shouts of the crew just about cut through the ceaseless soundtrack of destruction: as a viewer, the feeling is one of submersion in total war, as much as that is possible in the safety of a cinema. The interior tank shots are plentiful enough to convey the claustrophobia and danger of tank warfare. If one of the objectives of Fury is to transport us into this type of enclosed, metallic combat, then Pitt and co. have succeeded magnificently.

The other thing that Fury does so well is to portray the complexities of war. Collier is not a righteous man: he shoots a prisoner of war where Tom Hanks’ officer protected one from mob justice in Saving Private Ryan. At yet at the same time he is fighting Nazism. At the heart of Fury is the examination of reality versus morality, ethics thought up in safety conflicting with the actuality of having to implement those ethics on the battlefield. What price is worth paying? To what degree can idealists keep their dignity and sense of right in the muddle of war? Fury’s war is not one of glory of righteousness, but child soldiers, murder and ceaseless slaughter. One particularly uncomfortable scene shows the horrors of wartime rape, with the audience having to see a post-battle town through the eyes of two terrified young women.

Filming and soundtrack aside, Fury brings war to life well by colouring its soldiers through superb acting. Pitt manages to portray the classic American army hero without resorting the simplicity: the nihilistic, brutalised soldier has clearly lost his soul somewhere back on the road. LeBeouf is often in the news for being a prat, but no one can deny his abilities. Bernthal really made me hate Coon-Ass in all his muscular chauvinism.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers decided that a spectacular final showdown was in order. When Fury is hit by a mine at an important crossroads, static and without working radio, the plucky Yanks find themselves in the path of an oncoming SS battalion. It’s always an SS battalion, as if an average army outfit would be too easy to defeat, and not nearly evil enough. Their last stand is hopelessly unrealistic, predictable down to the finest detail. The German soldiers are not skilled killers, masters of war who have honed their fighting abilities on the Eastern Front. Rather, they are clueless buffoons, running about with no sense of tactics. Only after dozens of them are killed does the camp, cowardly officer decide to abandon his policy of getting his men to charge straight at the armoured vehicle and instead crack out the anti-tank weapons. They are all hopeless shots, especially compared to the ace gunner Norman, who is now a skilful warrior, having been fighting for about two days. Hollywood often seems to forget that the Wehrmacht was an immense fighting machine, and unfortunately it took more than a few Brad Pitts to defeat it.

So Fury is doubtless highly gripping from start to finish, over two hours later. But the intelligent look at war in its muddled brutality, morality versus reality and man’s violent, nihilistic abilities is all in the first half; the second lets it down.

Review: Serena

Hollywood is fundamentally built on money, which helps to explain why trends occur: studios will seek to cash in on the success of certain films, genres and topics by releasing their own versions. It was only a couple of weeks ago that Gone Girl was released, about a flawed man brought to his knees by a disturbed, murderous wife, and now we have Serena, about exactly the same thing.

Set in the North Carolina forests just after the Wall Street Crash, Serena tells the story of one George Pemberton (Bradley Cooper), a logging tycoon trying to forge a lumber empire in straightened times. He soon meets the beguiling Serena soon-to-be Pemberton (Jennifer Lawrence), a disturbed young woman whose family were killed in a fire when she was 12. They marry, dedicate themselves to the lumberjacking and each other, and all is well.

No prizes for guessing that soon things go a little wrong, with George’s right-hand man threatening to betray them to the law. There’s death, romance and betrayal in the clear mountain air.

One of the main problems with Serena, an enjoyable but shallow affair, is that it is confused about what it is. The plot changes at the tiniest coincidence, people switch allegiances for unrealistic reasons, and the flimsiest pretences turn the film on its head. You think that you are watching one thing, only to realise that it’s another now, and you just don’t care.

Another major drawback is how the film is stuffed with easy symbolism. An analysis of its themes would reads like a school essay on American literature: the quest for the American Dream; the brutality of the frontier; man versus nature. Serena imports an eagle, taming it and teaching it to catch the snakes which are attacking the loggers. It soars above the action, gleaming in its golden United States pride. Yes, we get it. From the first scene to the last, there is a hunt for a local panther. Every so often, George leaves the action to stalk this elusive beast, drawn further into the wilderness which, one suspects, might overpower him. Again, we are insulted by the obviousness of these metaphors being stuffed down our throats.

As others have pointed out, Serena was filmed a couple of years ago. Since then, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence have starred in two critically acclaimed films, and in all likelihood this was edited to promote their time on-screen together. As a result, the fabulous supporting cast are woefully underused. Toby Jones, for example, is a righteous local sheriff who joins the action only when totally necessary. Characters disappear as suddenly as they appear. Rhys Ifans is an enjoyable watch as the brooding psycho mountain man, a mix of Bill Sykes and Anton Chigurh, and in my mind the Welshman plays it with a lot more depth than Bradley Cooper manages.

The relationship between Serena and George, then, is an important one. It forms the backbone of the film more than individuals or plot. But the problem is that there just isn’t enough in that element to support the whole movie. Lawrence has been given a meaty role, in which she thrives, but Cooper hasn’t. The outcome is a flat shadow of Silver Linings Playbook. There are whispers of Macbeth in their marriage, but that is to do an enormous disservice to the play. What a shame – truly a wasted opportunity. 

The filmmakers could certainly have improved the final product by keeping the action within the claustrophobic logging village, which would allow for a focus that is lacking. Instead of a Macbeth style tragedy, we have a rambling and vague story which just fizzles into nothing. There is no edge, no real soul. So, while Serena is nicely shot and perfectly entertaining, it is a film that will likely soon be forgotten.

Review: Gone Girl

Nick Dunne returns home on his fifth wedding anniversary to find a smashed table and a missing wife. I can't really say much more than that, otherwise the twisting plot of Gone Girl, David Fincher's new thriller, would be completely given away. Suffice to say it involves the disappearance of a woman and the subsequent investigation, and the slow shift of suspicion falling onto her husband. What has happened? Is Nick guilty of murdering Amy? Who to root for, and which of the two versions of events to believe, is at the heart of this tale of distorted reality.

Nick is a reasonably dislikeable man. He's smug, he's boring, he's selfish. But he forms an ostensibly perfect couple with Amy, fellow journalist and inspiration for her parents' best-selling series of saccharine children's novels Amazing Amy. 'We're so cute,' Amy muses prophetically 'that I want to punch us in the face.' Well, after the two lose their jobs in the recession and Nick forces a move back to his small Southern hometown, that punching pretty much becomes a reality. The marriage disintegrates, Nick has an affair and Amy goes missing.

Gone Girl is an odd blend of genres. Whilst ostensibly a thriller, with psychological and emotional questions at the heart, elements of comedy creep in with increasing frequency. The result is that you feel like you are dancing around evil with a perverted grin. There is much satire also, about the nature of celebrity and the role of the press and all that. Thankfully, this never becomes too obvious, avoiding the easy clichés. It also seems as if Gone Girl will turn into a standard police procedural, but this element slowly fizzles out. What you are left with is an idiosyncratic style that knocks the viewer off balance. ‘What did we just watch?’ is, I suspect, a common reaction.

Gone Girl has been adapted from a best-selling book by the author herself, and the writing is undeniably tight. However, it should be pointed out that what really brings the words to a four star production is the acting. At one point mocked and maligned more than anyone on earth, Ben Affleck is obviously well-suited to playing Nick, ‘the most hated man in America’. He captures the banal, reasonably flawed everyman of Nick Dunne, treading the line between sympathetic guy-next-door and pathetic adulterer. Carrie Coon is sturdy as his feisty twin; Kim Dickens is spirited as the Fargo-esque cop; Tyler Perry is greasily amusing as Tanner Bolt, the celebrity wife-killer defence lawyer; and Neil Patrick Harris is superbly comic as the excessively neat weirdo ex-boyfriend of Amy.

However, Rosamund Pike is in a league of her own. Her cool, focused face is that of the archetypal sociopathic femme fatale. She can switch from one person to another, from good to evil, so powerfully yet with the minimal of physical changes. Watching her makes you wonder why she hasn't been in more since Die Another Day, but perhaps now she will be – a true slow-burner.

Gone Girl is further enhanced by its visual style. All due praise should be heaped on those who had a hand in the filmography. Capturing the precarious world of this McMansion suburbia is achieved through an incredibly measured, precise view of it all. It is like watching the surface of a pond on a windless day. Clear, bright lighting bathes the clean counters, large homes, spotless SUVs. The still feel that is evoked gives the creepy feel of the small town and happy couple whose superficial perfection belies serious problems. It also mirrors Amy’s icy plotting. 

Gone Girl seems to be asking what is behind suburban charm and superficial perfection, something which is not a novel concept. But that reading is deceptively reductive. On a higher level, Gone Girl asks us about what we really understand of the people we think we know, and when in life does illusion take over? Gone Girl should be viewed again and again to peel back the layers of artifice and really get to the bottom of its themes. Fittingly, it feels almost like you haven't really understood what it's about, probably because you're being lied to all the time. There has been a lot of talk about its true meaning, and it seems as if the trickery of Amy and, to a lesser extent, Nick is also evidenced by writer Gillian Flynn and director David Fincher. I would not say that Gone Girl is really any kind of a social satire. So what is it really? Just call it a thriller and enjoy the experience.

Review: Magic in the Moonlight

It feels like it was only last week that audiences were passionately praising Blue Jasmine, and here we have another jazz-driven Woody Allen rom-com to tuck into. Maybe he should slow down a little, choose his projects a little more wisely, and that way be ensured that every release receives the rapture of Blue Jasmine. This time, we follow Colin 'tortured gent' Firth as Stanley Crawford, a misanthropic magician who loves nothing more than debunking spirit mediums and séances. Crawford stomps around, crushing anyone who believes in other dimensions because he's a bit of pathetic misery guts. After a successful tour, an old friend lures him to an aristocratic abode which is currently entertaining a young mystic. Sophie Barker (Emma Stone) captivates him, and the two avenues that this film can explore are by now fairly obvious: 1) Is she for real? 2) Will Crawford and Barker get together? Hilarity ensues.

Magic in the Moonlight is whimsical and feel good, with the now-standard jovial jazz soundtrack melting over the saccharine story. This is what Allen does so well - he presents the inexplicable facets of love (often impossible or problematised love) with a deftness and lightness of touch that any master magician would be proud of. This results in movies that are so easy to watch that you can almost feel the intelligence being slipped past unnoticed. Having said that, don't expect anything particularly profound. The driving philosophy seems to be 'yeah, love's great, it can't be explained, even rational science types need to embrace the reckless unknown sometimes.'

And yes, Allen's insatiable thirst for the Old World continues. Gone are the serious intellectual characters of Annie Hall or Manhattan, with their cardigans and earnest neuroticism, instead replaced by slick, bouncing worlds in genteel Europe. This time it is the South of France, although I think that he was unable to resist a Cabaret homage with the first scene being set in a Weimar-era Berlin nightclub. The 1920s also affords him the colourful sartorial glamour which Gatsby films use to such great effect.

The pairing of Colin Firth, established actor and affable English gent, with the younger Emma Stone, who made a name for herself in the drunken teenage masterpiece of a comedy Superbad, seems unorthodox. Then again, the protagonists in Midnight in Paris weren't even from the same historical period. It works pretty well, though - no Bogart and Bacall but perfectly believable. I would say, however, that Firth is weak in comparison with his past performances. Maybe that is because he is playing the nihilistic misanthrope too well, but he just seemed a little... annoying. His outbursts seem contrived and his speeches are boring.

Ultimately, Magic in the Moonlight is nothing to write home about, but it's profitable business as usual. Allen delivers because he's so well-practiced at the rom-com that it would be hard to fail. There are some laughs, a tight plot and a nice musing on love and life. Put Magic in the Moonlight in the same category as To Rome With Love and you'll be happy enough to see it.

'I see... a poor choice of headgear...'

Review: A Most Wanted Man

With this being the last leading role of the late Philip Seymour-Hoffman, A Most Wanted Man was carrying the weight of expectation. There was also a danger that it would be received as just that: Seymour-Hoffman’s final starring performance, and thus celebrated regardless of its quality. Thankfully, the finished article is worthy of praise both for the actor’s efforts and its own genuine merit.

Hamburg: the present day. 9/11 is still fresh in the minds of the security services, whose petty rivalries and bungling incompetence allowed the Twin Towers attack to be planned in the German port town at the beginning of the century. Between unwelcome American spooks and humourless German secret service officials we follow Günther Bachmann. Günther (Seymour-Hoffman) is part of a small espionage team that cultivates informants from within the nation’s Muslim community. They start from the bottom up, as Günther tells us that it takes a minnow to catch a barracuda and a barracuda to catch a shark. The plot revolves around Günther’s plan to follow a recently arrived Chechen terrorist to ensnare a businessman suspected of funnelling charity funds to militant groups. Günther’s Western rivals have different plans.

All eyes are doubtless of Philip Seymour-Hoffman, who was so critically celebrated in life and whose death this year shocked. He masterfully controls the screen without dominating. His typical brooding presence is not the braggadocio flurry of DiCaprio or the flamboyant madness of Nicholson, rather a realist series of flinches and shuffles which carry piercing eyes so full of gravitas. This translates as an extraordinary ‘watchability’, an unexplainable X factor on-screen. His Günther is depressed, anonymous, a chain-smoker who perhaps is fond of the piano. That and whiskey (or whisky, I didn’t see the national derivation of his brands I’m afraid). His old overcoat shabbily covers a man who soldiers on in a work environment so full of evil and madness despite the personal consequences. Frankly, I cannot see DiCaprio or Nicholson carrying it off – think of Oldman as Smiley but more at home in a greasy kebab shop.

Adapted from a John Le Carré novel, AMWM is largely what you would expect. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy comparisons are wholly appropriate. It is slow, contemplative, the grey apartment buildings of Hamburg matching the grey stubble-flecked face of bloated Günther (Günther seems a perfect name for a fat man for some reason). Locations are old postwar blocks, grimy wooden bars and bare bunkers for housing grabbed suspects. The cinematography supports the setting: functional, washed, still. The story is one where only the most necessary of details are explained, but the plot is actually fairly simple in case you are afraid of having to join too many dots. I can imagine it working even better as a book: in film format, I almost wondered what it was trying to say.

The overall sense, therefore, is that of cynical nihilism. The pointlessness is pervading, the utter futility of this century’s Great Game hammered home visually, thematically and atmospherically. It definitely intends to question what our secret services get up to, and whether the ends justify the means, but goes one step further and asks what are the ends anyway? Common tropes of the espionage genre are present, and maybe this is an updated Spy Who Came in from the Cold. If you are a fan of the James Bond end of spy films and detest the boring Carré style, then avoid AMWM. But if you’re not an idiot, book a ticket now.

SPOILER ALERT: The ending distinctly resembles that of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where a few coppers jump out of a squad car and arrest King Arthur for murder as he leads the charge on a French castle. This finale is not, unfortunately, quite as witty or anarchic, although similarly subversive.

Review: Lucy

Filmic Frenchman Luc Bresson has had a prolific career, output-wise. This year alone he is involved with three films. The only one which he has directed, as well as written and produced, is Lucy, a sci-fi action-thriller which seeks to say more than it does.

American expat Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is coerced by her cowboy hat wearing douchebag of a boyfriend into delivering a mysterious briefcase to an even more mysterious Mr. Jang. Mr. Jang, you will not be surprised to hear, is an organised crime boss in Taiwan. The briefcase, you will be even less surprised to hear, contains drugs. Our naive Western protagonist soon finds herself thrown into the heart of the city’s underworld, beaten by Mr. Jang’s overfed henchman (always impeccably dressed, though – somehow their victims’ blood only ever splashes on their faces, hands and cuffs, never touches the suits) and taken captive.

All the while, we watch a scene from a Parisian university. Morgan Freeman, in another role which epitomises sage (the possession of wisdom not the herb), delivers a lecture in human brain capacity. This professor Norman explains that we only use about ten percent of our brains, and theorises as to what would happen if it were to increase.

And then, just when Lucy didn’t think that her day could get any worse (she was well behind with her exam revision by this point), the sharkskin-wearing Al Capone of Taipei decides that she is to be a drug mule for a new narcotic. During captivity, however, she is kicked, releasing some of the CPH4 drug which has been stitched into her stomach. The effect that this has is to increase Lucy’s brain power – in 24 hours she will be operating at one hundred percent. Lucy gets mad. She kills a load of baddies, gets the drugs removed and flies to Europe to speak with Norman and get a hold of this crazy situation. Mr. Jang becomes decidedly disgruntled.

The story is obviously absurd. These days film executives seem to think that to make sci-fi more realistic for the audience, they must throw in some cod science rationalising the preposterous plot. Thus we have the professor character explaining, in terms that your average viewer will understand despite not possessing advanced scientific qualifications, that it is perfectly possible to fly or time travel or become a fish. The whole ‘we only use ten percent of our brain’ statement is deeply flawed (or so Wikipedia informs me), but because Lucy doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously I don’t begrudge the mumbo jumbo particularly. I do think, though, that by reining in the ridiculousness Besson could have said something interesting. As it is, the bits that make you pause to consider life and all that come very early on. Norman’s lecture takes us through human history and what we do with intelligence (‘we seem more concerned with having than being’), which is all pretty profound.

At the beginning Lucy’s plot is interspersed with narration from Norman and clips of events in nature. This mix of contemporary storyline, warm Freeman musings and National Geographic stock footage provides an unexpected and novel style. A riveting caper of a plot with philosophical thought about the nature of existence sure sounds good. However, Lucy descends into a smorgasbord of high-octane action sequences. It was all balanced so well initially, but the filmmakers simply abandoned the idiosyncratic montages in favour of cheap thrills. As the David Attenborough bits fall away we just watch martial arts in Asian prisons, car chases etc. The overblown shootouts, piles of bodies and characters being blasted around rooms by CGI force fields are straight out of a Summer blockbuster textbook.

Both Morgan Freeman and Scarlett Johansson are expected to pull off stellar performances, and so it is easy to overlook how well they go about their acting. It’s business as usual for Freeman – you know what to expect, and he delivers no less. But Johansson provides that emotional charge which takes a scene from stuff happening to stuff happening that we invest our emotions in. Her journey from terrified victim to ruthless survivor is worn like a mask on her face. Angelina Jolie was apparently the first choice, and I think that Lucy is improved immeasurably by an actor who can seem like a real human in these situations rather than a cardboard action figure. Choi-Mink Sik (Mr. Jang) has the necessary blend of urbane businessman and lunatic warlord, and looks a bit like a Korean Gary Oldman. Can’t say whether that was intentional or not. 

People have cited 2001, Inception and Leon (which starred the Gary Oldman featured in the above paragraph) when discussing Lucy. It is miles off those films in terms of intelligence, originality and entertainment. It feels like a waste of a promising spark of inspiration. Nonetheless there are some interesting scenes enhanced by captivating acting. The fundamental idea underpinning Lucy is how humans are evolving and where life will be long after we have gone. This gets you thinking about more than your immediate situation, as greater aspects of existence are highlighted for a couple of hours. It is incidentally this ability to transport you to a different place that makes cinema so powerful in the first place.