You’ve got a knife. I’ve got a spoon.

Hummingbird

aka Redemption

(2013)

The Stat’s back and this time he’s baring his soulful, sensitive side amidst the usual skull-cracking. Steven Knight, a talented writer whose early credits on The Detectives shouldn’t necessarily be held against him, makes his directorial debut (as many dissatisfied writers are wont to do eventually) on Hummingbird, and it’s a mixed bag. Knight seems to be fully engaging with his archetypes, but does so to the point that his tale is doused in clichés. Material so self-consciously heightened requires a director and stars who can make a virtue out of the excesses; that everyone here is merely competent lays bare the overwrought corniness at its core.

Alternatively, perhaps Knight has just been lucky that the likes of David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises) and Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things) have shepherded his previous London-set thrillers to the screen. Promises has a number of things in common with Hummingbird, not least the strong silent man of idiosyncratic morals working for the mob and on a mission that requires him to weave a path through the corrupt underbelly of the city. But Eastern Promises etched out a genuinely tense and dangerous scenario, and one with twists in its tail. What you see is what you get with Hummingbird; Stat comes on the balding hairy homeless man before transforming into the shiny bald bruising machine we all love. He’s tortured, drowning his sorrows and PTSD in drink; the picture provides an over-explanatory flash back to the root of Stat’s “Joey Jones” current problems but Knight’s choices of military service (Afghanistan) and drone strikes feels manipulative and cynical. And worse, crushingly obvious. At least the era of haunted ‘Nam vet had some resonance (until Stallone showed up to take part). Movies appropriating the Middle Eastern conflicts seem to be united in portraying (heroically) troubled ex-soldiers, fully ripped, who slot into a all-purpose action roles. There’s even the gall to claim “commentary” in the depiction, which rarely amounts to more than an “Isn’t it awful? Now let’s get to the action bit”.

So the Stat is a wanted man, and haunted by what he done (“They put me up a mountain and told me to kill people. What did they think would come back down the mountain” he impressively soliloquises). Really, there’s little difference between this and the average Stat movie; it just has a few pretensions (I was going to say “more pretensions” but Revolver’s about the only one that could also apply to). I prefer the literal UK title (Hummingbird; at one point Joey hallucinates a flock of the birds, a nice little moment that unfortunately descends into your rote flashback/trippy sequence) than the dead horse-floggingly literal US one (Redemption; do you reckon that could be what it’s about? Perhaps you should announce it on the poster just in case there’s any possibility of doubt)? The French title’s the best one for ignoring the tone of the picture, though; Crazy Joe indeed!

If Stat’s traumas are sketched in broad strokes, the women in his life are even more so; hookers and nuns. His mission is to dispense justice on the man who murdered his homeless friend, and he’s aided and abetted by a soup kitchen nun (Agata Buzek) with her own traumatic past (unfortunately the flashback to how Cristina deals with her problem has that reek of movie implausibility and so pulls the rug from under any impact it might have). Joey and Cristina have a romance so unlikely, you become convinced Knight is purposefully baiting his critics to call foul. And while it never for a moment convinces, not helped by some atrocious dialogue, there’s good chemistry between Stat and Buzek. We also find Stat playing to his gay fan base; he falls into an empty flat decorated with rippling man flesh and pretends he’s its occupant’s (Danny Webb) boyfriend.

While it’s good fun to see the Stat as the underdog regaining his stride - he does a work out montage, attacks some heavies with a spoon, and then goes to work for the Chinese mob – Knight allows it all to come to him much to easily. He has a flat, a car, a credit card, waiting in the post and a wardrobe filled with perfectly fitting suits (and a very jaunty cap). As usual, Stat in action is a lot of fun, taking down a gang of footie fans and then attacking with that spoon the duo who set on him in the opening scene. Knight broaches ideas of moral equivalency clumsily, using Cristina as a nagging conscience. Joey is willing not just to go into moral grey areas to track down his prey; he plunges into darkness. But the picture never does anything with the idea that his participating in human trafficking is a justifiable sacrifice in service of his cause.

The resounding box office failure of Hummingbird doesn’t seem to have dented the careers of either the Stat or Knight. The former remains a safe bet as long as they keep the budget down or stick him in an ensemble franchise (as Lee Christmas, or in Fast & Furious); he’s been a draw for more than a decade now, and he’s generally reliable no-brainer entertainment value. Knight is on a roll, with the success of Peaky Blinders on the small screen and a rash of screenplays coming up for the big. He’s also had time for his sophomore directing gig, Locke with Tom Hardy. In the case of Hummingbird, aided by old hand cinematographer Chris Menges, Knight at least doesn’t disgrace himself. Perhaps given time he can truly impress.

**1/2

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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