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.

 

 

The Water Diviner

Russell Crowe as George Galloway in The Water Diviner.

I haven’t done a review for a while – largely down to the fact that I’m a lazy fucker, haven’t really seen anything that made me want to write about it and March was a bitch of a month at work.  If you feel cheated, please get in touch and I’ll refund your subscription fee.

Anyway, when an actor begins to direct it’s always worth seeing, hence my going to see The Water Diviner, directed by Russell Crowe.  Crowe is fantastically entertaining.  Sadly he’s far more entertaining in interviews than in his films. Seriously, you’ll have more fun reading this interview than you would watching any film he’s done recently.  When an actor gets in the directing chair you always look at the directors they have worked with previously and try to gauge what their film will be like. Crowe has worked with Ridley Scott several times, though not in any of Scott’s best work (I think Gladiator is overrated), and has also appeared in films directed by Darren Aronofsky and Peter Weir, his fellow Australian who directed the film Gallipoli, which is also what The Water Diviner is about, sort of.

It’s sort of about the Gallipoli campaign, it’s sort of a love story, it’s sort of about Turkish nationalism, it’s sort of about a relationship between a father and his sons, it’s sort of about loss, it’s sort of about Australian nationalism.  It’s sort of alright.  There is a phenomenon of “first film syndrome”, where a first time director throws everything at the film because they might not get the chance again, and The Water Diviner certainly suffers from a slight incoherence about its themes. It also suffers from having Crowe in pretty much every scene. If he spent more time behind the camera than in front of it, we may have had a better film, but then it probably wouldn’t have got made if he hadn’t agreed to be in it.

The Water Diviner is also what I”d call a Cargo Cult Film.  If you don’t know, during the Second World War, the Americans and Japanese turned up on Pacific Islands with vast amounts of materiel, building landing strips and bringing 20th Century equipment to people living a hunter gatherer existence.  When the islands were no longer strategically important, they left, taking their shiny things with them.  The islanders cleared their own landing strips, and built ersatz control towers, headphones made of coconuts etc, believing that this would bring the ‘planes and their riches back,  Obviously it didn’t work. They had all the right elements, but it didn’t fit together how it should have done, and the end results weren’t what they wanted.  The Water Diviner is like that; it has a basis in fact (the Gallipoli campaign), love and loss and romance and the birth of two nations (Australia and Turkey), but those elements don’t necessarily make the film an epic.

Some bits; a piece of magic realism that leads to a plot twist may have worked in the source novel, but on screen it doesn’t. The English characters are straight out of the upper class donkey school of officer (to be fair, that’s probably accurate for Gallipoli) and though the Turkish losses there (far, far more than the British or ANZAC deaths) are mentioned, it is only briefly, though I did like the pile of bodies marked “Turkish bones” by the side of the road while the Australians dutifully locate and rebury the allied dead.

The story of Gallipoli is as important to Australians and New Zealanders as Dunkirk and Arnhem is to the British, and in the hundredth anniversary it deserves a better commemoration than this. If Crowe directs again, he needs more focus, and less time on screen.