Deadpool

One of the “funny” posters for Deadpool.

I wrote about Deadpool here. The gist of that piece is that its success shouldn’t be a surprise because it plays with the conventions of a familiar genre.  A friend said “It’s a success because the Western world is full of babied man children who love nothing more than being made to feel clever (fourth wall breaking), dick jokes and consequence-free violence.” while I wouldn’t disagree with that, I think it’s a good film with some issues.

Deadpool tells the story of Wade Wilson, a former special forces soldier turned some sort of mercenary, who seems to earn a living by beating up guys who pay unwanted attention to teenage girls. When he gets diagnosed with terminal cancer, he is offered a chance to get rid of it.  You know what happens next; he gets super powers, can’t be killed, etc etc.

I liked Deadpool, but after a while all the constant smart talking wears you down. He’s the friend who is funny on a night out, but you get bored of after a few months of the same jokes, and when you run into him years later you realise hasn’t changed at all.  How many jokes about Wolverine can one film take? There are times when you want a break from it. It’s like bingeing on reddit.

The motivation for Ajax, the person who experiments on Deadpool and becomes his nemesis is never really explored, and Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, allies of Deadpool in a weird way that is never quite explained (though they have a weird SR-71 type craft, so that’s cool – turns out that’s the jet the X-Men use. I don’t watch comic book movies, generally), are underused to the point of redundancy, and why it all ends on a disused aircraft carrier I’ll never know.

The casting is a little uninspired, too; Morena Baccarin plays Wilson/Deadpool’s girlfriend, after playing Brody’s wife in Homeland.  It’s as if the producers said “hey, we need someone to play the partner of a fucked up soldier, who can we get?”. Ryan Reynolds played a different incarnation of Deadpool in  X-Men Origins: Wolverine, too.

Deadpool is a nice idea; an adult comic book movie that laughs at the genre and itself, and has some nice moments – the opening credits are superb – but you’re left a little bit tired of the shtick by the end of it, and when Deadpool 3 rolls around you’ll be thoroughly fed up with the damn thing.

Triple 9

The poster for Triple 9, starring bloody everyone.

You can file Triple 9 next to the superb Killing Them Softly in the “ultra violent American films by Australian directors” section of your DVD or blu ray collection when it comes out. Killing Them Softly was directed by Andrew Dominik, and Triple 9 by John Hillcoat, who has a background in music videos, and also directed The Proposition, The Road and Lawless.

Triple 9 gets bonus points right from the start when the on screen titles tell us it’s in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Normally this sort of thing annoys me but it’s rare to see “USA” included; filmmakers do it for every other country, but not America, so it was nice to see here.

Triple 9 concerns a group of corrupt cops and ex soldiers who are also bank robbers; they work for the Russian mafia – one of them has a child with the sister of the matriarch of this Russian Mob, and when she demands they do one last job or he’ll never see his child again, they have to pull a “Triple 9” – killing a cop – to give themselves the time needed.

I’ll gloss over the fact that the film touches on the anti-Semitic trope of Jews running everything because the Russian Mob are also Jewish (with  Israeli passports), with cops and FBI in their pockets, but Kate Winslet gives a superb against type performance as the Russian mobster running everything. It reminded me of Kristin Scott-Thomas’s performance in Only God Forgives – someone having fun playing a role outside their usual wheelhouse.

The film is full of good performances – someone should write a TV show where Woody Harrelson plays a cop, it’d be great, but I did have issues with the casting; I can just about believe Chiwetel Ejiofor, educated at the same school as PG Wodehouse and Nigel Farage, is ex US Special Forces, but Aaron Paul as a corrupt cop and ex Special Forces seems too much. Casey Affleck (always excellent) is stretching it playing a former Marine, too.  There’s a fair few actors who have appeared in comic book films, or will appear in them. This is pretty much because that’s all that’s getting made right now, so expect more movies where Batman’s brother is in the same film as Wonder Woman and one of the Avengers.

The gun choreography is superb – the guys over at the Internet Movie Firearms Database will go crazy over it, especially a scene where an apartment block is cleared. I was half expecting Mick Gould, who works with Michael Mann on his films, to have been involved, but apparently he wasn’t.

There are places where it’s a bit too violent, but it’s a good film.  I wasn’t surprised to see that it was scriptwriter Matt Cook’s first film – he does try to cram a lot in, but he just about gets away with it.”La Kosher Nostra” is a good line, at least.

Along with Heat, it’s the film I’m going to watch before I do my bank heist.

That’s a joke. I think.

 

 

Son of Saul

The poster for Son of Saul.

Son of Saul is a Hungarian drama that won the Grand Prix at Cannes (the film festival that is; it didn’t win a Formula One race or anything), and is in the running for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

It’s set in Auschwitz, and is about the Sonderkommando.  If you don’t know, the Sonderkommando were inmates who were forced to clean the gas chambers and ovens, and collect the belongings of the people who were killed in the Holocaust.  It’s a grim, gripping, great film.

Stanley Kubrick once said about Schindler’s List “Think that’s about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.” I hope I’m not giving too much away by saying Son of Saul is no Schindler’s List.

Saul – played by Géza Röhrig, in what is his film debut – is a member of the Sonderkommando at the camp.  The film follows him – and literally follows him; the camera more often than not sitting just behind his shoulder, as he goes about his terrible work. You only see glimpses, out of focus, of events happening – people being put into the gas chambers, or shot in ditches and cremated using flamethrowers.

The main story is about Saul, and his efforts to give a proper burial to a child who he believes to be his son in the camp. As he does this, he gets caught up in an attempt to sabotage the ovens in the camp by means of gunpowder in the ovens, and he witnesses the photographing of the camps by the Sonderkommando (all our footage of the camps comes from after they were liberated; only a few photos, taken surreptitiously, exist of them in action).

You are never quite sure whether the boy Saul wants to bury is actually his son or he’s slowly going mad, but it’s a fascinating film, and its surprising that it was director Laszlo Nemes’s first film. The ending offers a glimmer of hope, which is quickly taken away.

It’ll only get a small release, probably, but it’s as good a film about the Holocaust as you’ll see, and not at all uplifting (and therefore closer to the truth). If you can’t stomach the nine and half documentary Shoah, then watch this. It’ll be well worth tracking down when it comes out in April.

 

 

The Revenant

It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, but your girlfriend won’t like this film.

I blame The Inbetweeners; it was a successful TV show that became a successful film, now everyone is trying to do it. The Revenant is the big screen version of the BBC comedy Rev, with DiCaprio taking over Tom Hollander’s role, and the location moving to the US in the 19th Century. It’s as if they’ve took no notice of the source material.

I’m joking, of course. The film tells the story of DiCaprio’s survival after he is mauled/sexually assaulted by a bear. There’s more to it than that, but I don’t want to spoil things. Suffice to say you know Tom Hardy is a bad guy because he uses the same accent he used in The Dark Knight Rises.

The film is directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, whose last film was the very different Birdman – he also apparently turned down the chance to direct the first series of True Detective – Jack Fisk was the production designer, and while nobody normally gives a shit about who the production designer was on a film, it’s Jack Fucking Fisk and, with rare exceptions, he only works on great films. Emmanuel Lubezki was the cinematographer, and he also only works on great films. Both Fisk and Lubezki are Terrence Malick’s closest collaborators, so that should give you an idea of what to expect, and the film was shot almost entirely using natural light and there are a couple of Malickian (or Fiskian, as there’s a similar one in There Will Be Blood, which Jack Fisk worked on too) fires.

I’ll be honest, I thought the opening – an attack by Native Americans – was superb, and shocking, and as good as anything I’ve seen on screen in the last year.  I liked the ending, too, but the middle could do with some cutting. I know we’re meant to be impressed with DiCaprio’s acting, but when he’s acting on his own it’s hard to be too impressed.  Acting is reacting, and he doesn’t react to anyone for  much of the film.  There’s a weird vision set in a church that I imagine was only included because they found it on set that is out of place. A bit where he keeps warm by climbing into the carcass of a horse reminded me a bit too much of the bit in The Empire Strikes Back where Han saves Luke on Hoth by putting him in a Tauntaun after he was attacked by a Wampa.  I don’t think there is a single English speaking woman in the film.  Domhnall Gleeson does a nice turn, after playing Oswald Mosley in The Force Awakens. The guy seems to be everywhere, and very good in everything now. The fucker.  It’s a very brutal film, with lots of bloody violence.  You need a strong stomach to watch it.

As with 13 Hours, it’s hard to tell the men with beards apart. It’s very bloody, the landscape looks beautiful; with the Malick influence natural light and the Canadian locations, some shots reminded me of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (why doesn’t Andrew Dominik make more films?), which is high praise indeed.

The Revenant is bloody, long, worth watching but like so many films just lacks the extra little something to make it great.

 

 

 

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

The poster for 13 Hours, channeling Black Hawk Down in many ways.

In the Second World War, the Long Range Desert Group – essentially doing the role that is now done by the modern day SAS – roamed all over North Africa, and had notable successes in and around Benghazi.  If you’re like me, you can’t help but look at a picture like the one below and think you were born at the wrong time.  What this country needs is a good war.

The Long Range Desert Group, somewhere in North Africa, sometime during the Second World War. They’re cooler than you’ll ever be.

Sadly, 13 Hours may be about guys with guns and beards in the Libya, but it sure as hell isn’t about the LRDG. On September 11th, 2012, the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi was attacked, and the ambassador and one other work were killed, as were two contractors working as security at a nearby CIA annex. Since 2012, Benghazi has been shorthand for attacking the US Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton in particular, for their perceived lack of response. The sort of right wing arseholes  who use it as a stick to beat Clinton with are the sort of arseholes who would like this film.

I had issues with the film right from the explanatory text at the beginning, which states that in 2011 the US, Britain and France began bombing Libya. This is true of course, but omits the fact that this was an intervention to end the Libyan Civil War that had begun as part of the Arab Spring. It makes it seem like the US and its allies just decided to bomb the country out of the blue, which was not the case. The film doesn’t get much better than that.

13 Hours follows in the recent tradition of films fetishising the US Special Forces that came in the wake of Operation Neptune Spear, the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Act of Valor, Lone Survivor and American Sniper are all part of this movement, the latter two of those three I liked, and Act of Valor is nothing put pure propaganda, and more like a computer game than anything I’ve seen on a cinema screen.

Like Lone Survivor and American Sniper, 13 Hours was released in the US on Martin Luther King weekend, because what we think of when we think of Martin Luther King is tooled up men killing people, right?

Unlike Lone Survivor and American Sniper, 13 Hours isn’t very good.  It’s genuinely hard to tell the tooled up blokes with beards apart, and hard to care about them too.  It’s also hard to believe the film’s underlying narrative of soldiers = good and CIA/state department = bad. There is some interesting stuff about how different groups in warring countries can’t be trusted, but I’m clutching at straws. There’s some fairly dodgy lines that at least imply that the Americans don’t really care what happens to Libya, and that it is up to Libyans alone to solve the problem. Only one Libyan character has any meaningful role. Women are either crying wives or hard ass CIA agents (who are reduced to nurses at the end.

13 Hours is directed by Michael Bay, and he obviously cared about the film, but I doubt anyone outside the hoo-rah, support our troops above everything, Democrats are evil, right wing isolationist community will. It’s a very poor Black Hawk Down clone – one of the characters even mentions that incident at one point. Michael Bay at his best (The Rock? Armageddon, maybe? is still nowhere as good as Ridley Scott at his worst (Robin Hood). Four Americans were killed, and they deserve better than this.

I wrote my MA dissertation on post 9/11 US cinema, I love a modern war film as much as anyone. If I ever stopped being a lazy bastard and wrote a script, it’d be about a true story group of special forces and CIA under attack. I should love 13 Hours, but I don’t. If you can’t make me like it, you can’t make anyone like it.