I went from killer to cashier. Don't tell anyone.

The Gunman

(2015)

(SPOILERS) What were you thinking, Mr Penn? Particularly since you share co-screenplay credit. The Gunman is about the worst example of pampered Hollywood expressing its social conscience-easing behaviour one could imagine, as Sean’s reformed assassin plotline forms the backdrop for saying some important things about humanitarian aid (good) and big corporations (bad). Which is fine as a message, I’m with you there Sean, but finance a searing documentary about capitalist exploitation would have been a more convincing avenue with which to express yourself, rather than throwing $40m into in this sloppy, third-rate concoction, one that operates more as a bizarre vanity vehicle than anything approaching an indictment of corrupt business practices.

Penn’s Jim Terrier is former special forces, equipped with terrific abs (which he is contractually required to display as much as possible, while chain-smoking; I guess this is understandable if you’re in you’re mid-50s and going through a mid-life crisis) and a reasonable aptitude for surfing. He’s also a kick-ass assassin, posing as an aid relief employee. Following a black-ops venture in the Congo, in which Terrier shoots the Minister of Mining in order to ensure his employer’s contracts are not renegotiated, conflicted Jim drops from the radar. Six years later, he has become a charity worker, digging wells (I shit you not; now you can see why Sean developed the abs; it’s basically a Stallone screenplay, Penn’s Rambo III, if you will). But his former life is catching up with him, and it isn’t long before he’s luxuriating in a glorious bath of ultra-violence. And flashing those abs.

Everything about the screenplay, credited to Penn, Don Macpherson and Pete Travis and based on The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette, is an embarrassment of horrifying clichés and crude punctuation. It’s all the more bizarre that talent like Javier Bardem, Idris Elba, Mark Rylance (Mark Rylance!) and Ray Winstone (well, maybe not so much Ray “The Sweeney” Winstone) should appear in this crap. Possibly the persuasive powers of Le Penn.

Presumably he also ensnared poor Jasmine Trinca, whose work I was unfamiliar with but who is essentially required to stand by her man, a morally unconscionable psychopath who doesn’t think twice about his behaviour until he does, even when, or because, he announces “I can’t ask you to forgive me”. When Jim initially absconds, she takes second-best Bardem, artlessly identified as muscling in from the first moment we see him and even more artlessly identified as an imbecilic alcoholic who helpfully gets himself shot when Sean comes back on the scene.

Elba hardly features, but he does sit on a park bench with Jim, imparting some wisdom about when and when not to build a treehouse, and doesn’t want to hang him out to dry, which is incredibly charitable. Rylance, in an entirely pitiful bad guy part telegraphed as such, as every plot point is, is naturally moderately watchable simply because he is Mark Rylance, even when getting shot in the hand. Less so when getting gored by a bull, in a finale of ludicrously poetic and metaphorical proportions (Sean is the put-upon bull, don’t you see? DO YOU NOT SEE?) Winstone meanwhile, plays Ray Winstone, and, to his credit, he does the best Ray Winstone out there.

Jim may have done horrible things, but he’s broken up about it, suffers from PTSD and is full of regrets. Some, but not all, of these things lead to dizziness and vomiting. Most of them lead to bone-crunching or flesh-shredding mayhem as Terrier proves an unstoppable force, dogged even, bringing about peace through extreme measures. A particular highlight sees Jim abruptly punching a friendly neighbourhood mum on the nose, only for her to be revealed as a vicious, hypodermic-wielding hit woman.

Pierre Morel, despite the crushing unsubtlety (a field he has already ploughed with Taken) knows his way around an action sequence, but it’s disappointing to see him stuck with this mess, when a few years back there was a chance of him taking on Dune. In particular, Jim’s bruising battle with Number One Henchman Peter Franzen, actually instils the movie with something approaching urgency for a couple of minutes. He clearly needs a better agent. And Penn needs to get over the idea that he’s the silver screen’s answer to Bono (what with his perma-shades and endless capacity for righting wrongs). The Gunman might have had something to say in conception, but only ends up saying anything about Sean’s ego; when Joel Silver is barred from an editing room and the picture still ends up lousy, it’s the producer-actor-star who warrants the blame.

Comments

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

You’re never the same man twice.

The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
(SPOILERS) Roger Moore playing dual roles? It sounds like an unintentionally amusing prospect for audiences accustomed to the actor’s “Raise an eyebrow” method of acting. Consequently, this post-Saint pre-Bond role (in which he does offer some notable eyebrow acting) is more of a curiosity for the quality of Sir Rog’s performance than the out-there premise that can’t quite sustain the picture’s running time. It is telling that the same story was adapted for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents 15 years earlier, since the uncanny idea at its core feels like a much better fit for a trim 50 minute anthology series.

Basil Dearden directs, and co-adapted the screenplay from Anthony Armstrong’s novel The Strange Case of Mr Pelham. Dearden started out with Ealing, helming several Will Hay pictures and a segment of Dead of Night (one might imagine a shortened version of this tale ending up there, or in any of the portmanteau horrors that arrived in the year…

I fear I’ve snapped his Gregory.

Twin Peaks 3.14: We are like the Dreamer.
(SPOILERS) In an episode as consistently dazzling as this, piling incident upon incident and joining the dots to the extent it does, you almost begin to wonder if Lynch is making too much sense. There’s a notable upping of the pace in We are like the Dreamer, such that Chad’s apprehension is almost incidental, and if the convergence at Jack Rabbit’s Tower didn’t bring the FBI in with it, their alignment with Dougie Coop can be only just around the corner.

Now you're here, you must certainly stay.

The Avengers 4.1:The Town of No Return
The Avengers as most of us know it (but not in colour) arrives fully-fledged in The Town of No Return: glossier, more eccentric, more heightened, camper, more knowing and more playful. It marks the beginning of slumming it film directors coming on board (Roy Ward Baker) and sees Brian Clemens marking out the future template. And the Steed and Mrs Peel relationship is fully established from the off (albeit, this both was and wasn’t the first episode filmed). If the Steed and Cathy Gale chemistry relied on him being impertinently suggestive, Steed and Emma is very much a mutual thing.

He’s a good kid, and a devil behind the wheel.

Baby Driver (2017)
(SPOILERS) Pure cinema. There are plenty of directors who engage in superficial flash and fizz (Danny Boyle or JJ Abrams, for example) but relatively few who actually come to the medium from a root, core level, visually. I’m slightly loathe to compare Edgar Wright with the illustrious likes of Sergio Leone and Brian De Palma, partly because they’re playing in largely different genre sandpits, partly because I don’t think Wright has yet made something that compares to their best work, but he operates from a similar sensibility: fashioning a movie foremost through image, supported by the soundtrack, and then, trailing a distant third, comes dialogue. Baby Driver is his most complete approximation of that impulse to date.

How dare you shush a shushing!

Home (2015)
(SPOILERS) Every so often, DreamWorks Animation offer a surprise, or they at least attempt to buck their usual formulaic approach. Mr. Peabody & Sherman surprised with how sharp and witty it was, fuelled by a plot that didn’t yield to dumbing down, and Rise of the Guardians, for all that its failings, at least tried something different. When such impulses lead to commercial disappointment, it only encourages the studio to play things ever safer, be that with more Madagascars or Croods. Somewhere in Home is the germ of a decent Douglas Adams knock-off, but it would rather settle on cheap morals, trite messages about friendship and acceptance and a succession of fluffy dance anthems: an exercise in thoroughly varnished vacuity.

Those dance anthems come (mostly) courtesy of songstress Rhianna, who also voices teenager Tip, and I’m sure Jeffrey Katzenberg fully appreciated what a box office boon it would be to have her on board. The effect is cumulatively nauseating though, l…

Cool. FaceTime without a phone.

Sense8 Season One
(SPOILERS) The Wachowskis do like their big ideas, but all too often their boldness and penchant for hyper-realism drowns out all subtlety. Their aspirations may rarely exceed their technical acumen, but regularly eclipse their narrative skills. And with J Michael Straczynski on board, whose Babylon 5 was marked out by ahead-of-its-time arc plotting but frequently abysmal dialogue, it’s no wonder Sense8 is as frequently clumsy in the telling as it is arresting in terms of spectacle.

I frequently had the feeling that Sense8 was playing into their less self-aware critical faculties, the ones that produced The Matrix Reloaded rave rather than the beautifully modulated Cloud Atlas. Sense8 looks more like the latter on paper: interconnecting lives and storylines meshing to imbue a greater meaning. The truth is, however, their series possesses the slenderest of central plotlines. It’s there for the siblings to hang a collection of cool ideas, set pieces, themes and fascina…

And you people, you’re all astronauts... on some kind of star trek.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
(SPOILERS) Star Trek: First Contact (also known as plain First Contact, back when “Star Trek” in the title wasn’t necessarily a selling point to the great unwashed. Or should that be great washed?) is probably about as good as a ST:TNG movie could be, in as much as it actively rejects much of what made the TV series what it is: starchy, placid, smug, platitudinous exchanges about how evolved humanity has become in the 25th century. Yeah, there’s a fair bit of that here too, but it mainly recognises that what made the series good, when it was good, was dense, time travel plotting and Borg. Mostly Borg. Until Borg became, like any golden egg, overcooked. Oh, and there’s that other hallowed element of the seven seasons, the goddam holodeck, but the less said about that the better. Well, maybe a paragraph. First Contact is a solid movie, though, overcoming its inherent limitations to make it, by some distance, the best of the four big screen outings with Pic…

Death to Bill and Ted!

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)
(SPOILERS) The game of how few sequels are actually better than the original is so well worn, it was old when Scream 2 made a major meta thing out of it (and it wasn’t). Bill & Ted Go to Hell, as Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was originally called, is one such, not that Excellent Adventure is anything to be sneezed at, but this one’s more confident, even more playful, more assured and more smartly stupid. And in Peter Hewitt it has a director with a much more overt and fittingly cartoonish style than the amiably pedestrian Stephen Herrick.

Evil Bill: First, we totally kill Bill and Ted. Evil Ted: Then we take over their lives.
My recollection of the picture’s general consensus was that it surpassed the sleeper hit original, but Rotten Tomatoes’ review aggregator suggests a less universal response. And, while it didn’t rock any oceans at the box office, Bogus Journey and Point Break did quite nicely for Keanu Reeves in the summer of ’91 (inflatio…

Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved. Rejoice.

Split (2016)
(SPOILERS) M Night Shyamalan went from the toast of twist-based filmmaking to a one-trick pony to the object of abject ridicule in the space of only a couple of pictures: quite a feat. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss several of his pictures, including his last, The Visit, regarded as something of a re-locating of his footing in the low budget horror arena. Split continues that genre readjustment, another Blumhouse production, one that also manages to bridge the gap with the fare that made him famous. But it’s a thematically uneasy film, marrying shlock and serious subject matter in ways that don’t always quite gel.

Shyamalan has seized on a horror staple – nubile teenage girls in peril, prey to a psychotic antagonist – and, no doubt with the best intentions, attempted to warp it. But, in so doing, he has dragged in themes and threads from other, more meritable fare, with the consequence that, in the end, the conflicting positions rather subvert his attempts at subversion…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog