Never get any good humans these days.

Jack the Giant Slayer

(2013)

I can’t say I’m very surprised to discover that the director of Superman Returns has no sense of fun. Bryan Singer has mostly disguised this for the best part of two decades by shooting thrillers, or making sure his comic book movies take themselves very seriously. Jack is his stab at a family fantasy movie, and he’s all-at-sea.

Not that Singer has any great claim to auteurship. A few of us thought he had the makings of a voice when his sophomore film, The Usual Suspects, sprang out of nowhere. It showed astonishing confidence, and still ranks as far and away his best picture. Because it was in a crime story, and came in the wake of Tarantino’s reinvigoration of the genre, there was an expectancy that he and writer Christopher McQuarrie might be the next big indie voices on the scene. Instead he quickly settled into the role of slightly-above-average journeyman with the first two X-Men. Then Superman returned. It was as handsomely lensed as ever from his regular cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel but utterly deaf to narrative drive. After the strengths of X2 in that department, it was a double disappointment (he gave up the third X-Men to make it). Valkryie was decent, solid, respectable. Unremarkable. All became clear. Welcome to Bryan Singer’s oeuvre.

Which is why I at least expected Jack to be decent, solid, respectable and unremarkable. I wasn’t quite prepared for how inert the whole enterprise is, though. Singer’s a competent director even here, but his film barely has a pulse. This is formula, production-line movie making, of the sort where no one is quite sure why they ended up making a film of Jack and the Beanstalk, less still one that cost nearly $200m (which is what it grossed at cinemas; there’s no dressing that up positively).

As per the fairy tale, Jack (Nicholas Hoult) gets hold of some magic beans and it isn’t long before one gets soggy and sprouts (I have no idea how he keeps his other beans dry throughout, as he’s regularly soaked to the skin). There are a host of divergences, designed to beef up the plot but lacking any real drama. Roderick is set to marry king Ian McShane’s daughter Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson). He’s a rotter of course, as he’s played by Stanley Tucci, and plans to supplant the king. And rein over the giants at the top of the beanstalk. With a crown he has fit for purpose. It’s all a bit convoluted and simultaneously uninvolving. Tucci generally lifts anything he’s in, but he has nothing to sink his teeth into; no great lines and a disappointing shortage of overacting. His best moment sees him pushing a hapless knight off a cliff, and it’s not all that funny. Having Tucci as a bad guy is designed to ensure that Jack and Isabelle have the blame for all the death and destruction shifted away from them (it is their fault really, though).

Lending unmemorable support are Ralph Brown, Eddie Marsan, Ewen Bremner and Ewan McGregor. The latter starts off looking like he’s going to have a whale of a time, coming across as amusingly debonair and over-confident. Unfortunately the script and dialogue fail to sustain him, and he’s left being a jolly good sport. He’s even been persuaded to utter, “I’ve got a jolly bad feeling about this” at one point.

There are points where Hoult reminded me a little of a very young Hugh Grant; appropriate given that they both starred in About a Boy. Hoult’s a decent actor, but here he’s shackled into coming on as yet another bland Brit pretty boy star (see also Ben Barnes). There’s no shame in being an actor rather than a star; certainly, that’s been McGregor’s fate despite flirtations with the big leagues. As it stands, Hoult just reflects the inoffensive lethargy Singer brings to bear. The costume department are one step ahead in informing the “don’t give a shit” tone when they give Jack a peasant leather hoodie to wear. It was all the rage amongst young farmhands in such quasi-mythical times.

If the beanstalk is reasonable, the giants are a let down. Rendered with CGI rather than prosthetics, they have the usual problem of a lack of physicality. They also lack presence, and personality (yes, there’s one who snots everywhere, but that’s not really what I mean). The “giants” on a budget of peanuts in Trollhunter were much, much, more expressive, weird and humorous. I’m hard-pressed to come up with a scene that has any spark to it; the giant’s kitchen at least has the attraction of scale, with McGregor being turned into a sausage roll.

It rather reinforces what a strange decision it was to turn this into a live action movie. Surely it’s natural home is as an animation, where the visuals will be seamless and there’s an opportunity for various light-hearted approaches (the traditional Disney take on fairy tales, or the Shrek-it-up DreamWorks angle)?

For some reason Singer adds insult to tedium by foisting a miserable prologue and epilogue on the viewer; the idea is to show the power of storytelling, I suspect. But when the opening is furnished with CGI that would have looked crap in the mid-90s (Its supposed to be basic, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be distractingly bad) and the ending makes a frankly baffling attempt to connect the kingdom of the story with the British monarchy (is Singer one of those soggy misplaced anglophiles?) it has the opposite effect. The credited writers on this flaccid pudding are Darren Lemke (who has worked on DreamWorks; Shrek Forever After and this year’s Turbo), Dan Studney (TV mostly) and old pal Christopher McQuarrie - who resolutely fails to polish the giant turd (David Dobkin also gets a story credit; all those cooks and an inedible broth).

Singer’s decision to return to the X-Men franchise (which he’s continued involvement with as a producer) is a sure sign that he’s creatively bereft. Perhaps he never really had much impetus. McQuarrie seems a lot more lively and invigorated as a director, and he can write too (well, most of the time). If you were really desperate for a beanstalk fix, you’d be advised to investigate a screen version of the tale that celebrates its 40^th anniversary this year; Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, and just a wee giant, in The Goodies and the Beanstalk.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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