The Revenant – failed Terence Malick tribute

Somewhere in The Revenant is a great revenge thriller but director Alejandro G. Iñárritu drowns that film in his own ego. The film meanders from brutal action to emotional dream sequence/flashback without ever really making us feel anything. Terence Malick he is not, despite how much he tries.

Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is part of a 19^th century expedition into the wilderness of America led by Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson). It’s rugged and cold with the locals as harsh as the landscape. Glass is left on the brink of death after being attacked by a bear and soon finds himself abandoned by the two men left to nurse him, including John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy). After a miraculous recovery Glass embarks on an epic journey to get back to civilisation and have his revenge.

That’s really all there is. Iñárritu hints at emotions with rousing music and over lit dreams but cowers before ever committing to them hoping the audience will feel some connection to the music video extracts. We don’t, leaving us with a film slight on story but thick with fat. It’s too long, too indulgent and never as entertaining as it thinks it is. Yes it’s shot brilliantly, even if the CG is often too obvious. Iñárritu has mastered camerawork we know that from Birdman but he still seems determined to push his new tricks in our face.

Hardy is bad, real bad. The character is paper thin and his mumbling dialogue leaves us with a one dimensional dick head, nothing more to him. DiCaprio probably deserves to win an Oscar and sure why not he’s waited long enough. It’s a shame he didn’t get it for something more deserving like The Wolf of Wall Street instead of this though. His role is reduced to shivering for most of the films way too long two and a half hours.

For a film that prides itself on its nightmare shoot in the depths of winter it takes a lot of conveniences. Glass pretty much ‘walks off’ an ankle twisted 180 degrees in a matter of days. He sleeps in soaking wet freezing clothes but barely gets a sniffle. It’s based on a true story that didn’t need any exaggeration but Hollywood doesn’t care.

It looks great and the set pieces are fantastic, but that’s it. It fails completely to connect emotionally leaving us with a very dull and overlong film.

2 out of 5

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – fails to create, only remix

You may hate George Lucas but at least the man created a universe. Even the much loathed (now but not at the time conveniently) prequels had new characters with some stand out sequences, but we were all delighted when JJ Abrams took over the Star Wars reigns. Why? JJ is a talented man no doubt, but he doesn’t create, he reboots, remakes and rethinks, and that is exactly what The Force Awakens does. It’s a badly made remake and when the hype dies it will end up in the prequel pile.

The galaxy is in chaos, as everything our heroes solved in the original trilogy is conveniently back again in the form of the First Order, an evil fascist militant movement intent on taking power using the Death Star 2.0. The solution lies with Luke Skywalker, who has been missing for some time, but a map found by a Luke Skywalker pre-Jedi-esque girl may give hope.

It really is that much of a similar story-line, with everything a remake (not an ode to) of something we’ve already seen. This works well with Darth Vader impersonator Kylo Ren because he actually get’s some drama to play with plus he’s one of the few good actors (Adam Driver) in the film but with the rest it is chaos.

Female Luke Skywalker (yes she is) Ren (Daisy Ridley) is a dull character with no personality. It doesn’t help that Ridley struggles to act, with every scene she’s in feeling like actors standing on set due to what seems to be limitations on how much she can do before the camera cuts. John Boyega fairs better as stormtrooper deserter Finn, but not by much. There’s still any real moments of acting lacking from these new characters.

Luckily Han Solo saves the day, with Harrison Ford obviously having fun reuniting with Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) and giving the film it’s best moments. When the old characters take center stage and the new are out of focus in the background the film works best.

Given all that Abrams said about not overusing CG the film still looks like a computer game. Yes there’s real sets here and there but when the action starts it’s back to the usual CG we’re all used to by now. It looks fine but there’s no stand out set piece. Less fine is the new CG characters, looking awful and lacking any expression.

A dodgy cast and CG I could forgive, but where the film really disappoints is in the directing. Structure, pace, drama, it’s all over the shop. The atmosphere we all saw in that first trailer over a year ago is completely absent, leaving us with a muddled array of scenes. At one point a major character walks right by another after a tragic moment, seemingly unaware of them. The internet has erupted with theories but the truest one is probably poor direction.

It’s not a complete disaster, hopefully the acting can be sorted out by the next film and the next director Rian Johnson is a much stronger director than Abrams so there is hope. And someone kick John Williams up the arse too, was there even a score to this film?

After such a long wait and such good trailers this really is disappointing. Maybe time will help deliver stronger sequels, we’ll see.

2 out of 5

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 – they threw it all away

Where did it all go wrong? The Hunger Games got off to a brilliant start with two of the best films you could hope for in a franchise. Unfortunately last year’s Mockingjay was a problem with what we can only assume to be greedy studio heads splitting the film into two despite it being based on by far the weakest book of the trilogy. Alas it wasn’t very good, and unfortunately the finale is even worse, ruining what could have been an exceptional film series.

Following on from Part 1, Part 2 picks up exactly where we left off with the rebels from the poor districts edging closer to the Capitol in the hope of bringing an end to the tyranny of President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Our hero Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is marketed in propaganda videos by rebel leader Coin (Julianne Moore) who has hopes for leadership of the new world when the war is over. Katniss just wants to get on with it though and put an arrow in Snow’s heart, taking her and a team of soldiers on a mission to a booby trapped Capitol.

It’s awful, no other words to describe it. Once this series left the arenas of the first two films it collapsed. They had a tougher challenge with a less solid book to build upon but they didn’t try too hard judging by Part 2, in which a lot of characters we spent time with pop up for a sentence here and there without ever really adding to the story or making an emotional impact. People walk around tunnels for half the film waiting for a set-piece we know is coming, speeches are made that are just awful, it’s just terribly ill-paced badly structured filmmaking. Acting wise its fine but as the quality of film is so insulting the performances are lost on us.

The only part of the film that is unique and interesting is rushed over. Bad as the third book was it still made some interesting observations about war and the lack of black and white good guys and bad guys. The film should have built on this but it doesn’t, instead giving us dumb conversations about our hero who we don’t really care about anymore, instead of something meaty to get thinking about.

I liked the first film, loved the second, but they are ruined now by awful closing chapters. Avoid and pretend it didn’t happen.

1 out of 5