Always kill the devil quickly when you find him.

Dead Man Down

(2013)

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo's Niels Arden Oplev must really like pulp fiction. He takes something as lurid and preposterous as Stieg Larsson’s novel and treats the characters and story as with tasteful restraint. Such respectfulness encourages the viewer to treat it in kind, even if instinctively it’s clear that this is all rather trashy. Dead Man Down is the kind of material that could easily have been washed up as straight-to-video fare with a Statham or a Lundgren. It’s a less than subtle script that he chooses for his first English language film but Oplev maintains a sombre, reflective tone and so makes the somewhat absurd plot more palatable. If it’s not immediately obvious why he would be attracted to it, maybe it’s the opportunity, as with Lisbeth Salander, to achieve emotional resonance where there would usually be none.

J.H. Wyman’s screenplay pulls off some neat misdirection. In particular, the first 20 minutes set the tale moving without clear bearings; it’s actually a pleasant change not to have the rhyme and reason of the characters spelt out instantly. Elsewhere, there’s little to remind one of the sterling work he turned in throughout the recently ended TV series Fringe. Perhaps a science fiction canvas allowed such excesses to seem less glaring, because no one’s going to admit that the scenario he has come up with here is very likely. Victor, Colin Farrell’s Hungarian engineer, is out for revenge against Alphonse, Terrence Howard’s crime boss. To that end, he has inveigled himself into Alphonse’s organisation. His long game takes an unexpected turn when Beatrice, Noomi Rapace’s scarred beautician, reveals evidence of him murdering an associate in his apartment. If he doesn’t kill the man who left her disfigured, she will turn it in to the police. With Beatrice breaching his defences and his criminal associates getting closer to discovering the identity of whoever is preying on them, Victor finds himself in an increasingly desperate situation.

Farrell is buttoned down, his usual expressiveness suppressed beneath an immovable mask. He's rather good, as he usually is when he's not in a blockbuster. If Rapace doesn't quite connect, it’s in part because her character is not allowed the desperation and misery she really needs to contemplate such measures. And she's not nearly uglified enough to make the insults of "Monster!" plausible. There’s also strong support from Terence Howard, Dominic Cooper, Armand Assante and the always magnificent but ever-underused F Murray Abraham.

Victor's revenge plan is too intricate to be really likely to succeed, but Oplev ensures that it plays out suspensefully (there’s an excellent, tension-filled conversation piece between Victor and Alphonse in an empty office) until we reach a ridiculously overblown climax (of all the possible outcomes I envisaged, this one was very nearly the last). Which is good fun but seems like it muscled its way in from an entirely different movie.

Paul Cameron’s cinematography evokes a rich grey melancholy. The overcast gloom and creeping darkness is a character in itself, there’s a kind of beautiful despair to the imagery, lending a feeling that none of this can end well. I can only think that producer Neal Moritz offered the directing gig to Oplev by mistake, since this couldn’t be more different in tone to his usual fare (well, until the finale). This is the guy behind the Fast & Furious franchise and I suspect he was envisaging something slicker, punchier and less introspective. Dead Man Down (terrible title, but fitting the sort of film this might have been) is ultimately let down by being very goofy, but the clash of styles ensures you’re never quite sure how this one will pan out until it’s too late.

***

The Illumi-what-i?

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) (SPOILERS) In which Sam Raimi proves that he can stand proudly with the best – or worst – of them as a good little foot soldier of the woke apocalypse. You’d expect the wilfully anarchic – and Republican – Raimi to choke on the woke, but instead, he’s sucked it up, grinned and bore it. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is so slavishly a production-line Marvel movie, both in plotting and character, and in nu-Feige progressive sensibilities, there was no chance of Sam staggering out from beneath its suffocating demands with anything more than a few scraps of stylistic flourish intact.

What’s so bad about being small? You’re not going to be small forever.

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Is this supposed to be me? It’s grotesque.

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Whacking. I'm hell at whacking.

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Are you telling me that I should take my daughter to a witch doctor?

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That, my lad, was a dragon.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) (SPOILERS) It’s alarming how quickly Peter Jackson sabotaged all the goodwill he amassed in the wake of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. A guy who started out directing deliciously deranged homemade horror movies ended up taking home the Oscar for a fantasy movie, of all genres. And then he blew it. He went from a filmmaker whose naysayers were the exception to one whose remaining cheerleaders are considered slightly maladjusted. The Desolation of Smaug recovers some of the territory Jackson has lost over the last decade, but he may be too far-gone to ever regain his crown. Perhaps in years to come The Lord of the Rings trilogy will be seen as an aberration in his filmography. There’s a cartoonishness to the gleeful, twisted anarchy on display in his earlierr work that may be more attuned to the less verimilitudinous aspects of King Kong and The Hobbit s. The exceptions are his female-centric character dramas, Heavenly Creat

Gizmo caca!

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Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.

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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls… dyin’ time’s here!

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) Time was kind to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome . As in, it was such a long time since I’d seen the “final chapter” of the trilogy, it had dwindled in my memory to the status of an “alright but not great” sequel. I’d half-expected to have positive things to say along the lines of it being misunderstood, or being able to see what it was trying for but perhaps failing to quite achieve. Instead, I re-discovered a massive turkey that is really a Mad Max movie in name only (appropriately, since Max was an afterthought). This is the kind of picture fans of beloved series tend to loathe; when a favourite character returns but without the qualities or tone that made them adored in the first place (see Indiana Jones in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull , or John McClane in the last two Die Hard s). Thunderdome stinks even more than the methane fuelling Bartertown. I hadn’t been aware of the origins of Thunderdome until recently, mainly because I was

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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