This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Of all the films what I done have gone and watched and that at the 2011 incarnation of the EIFF, widely held to be something of a damp squib, this is the only film that I felt completely failed at what it was trying to do. As such it was the greatest disappointment, especially given the generally puzzlingly high regard it seems to generally have garnered.

Post Mortem is set in Santiago, 1973, against a background of the impending coup d’Etat that would usher in a brutal rule under a military junta. A civil servant, Mario (Alfredo Castro) working at a morgue, transcribing doctor’s reports, becomes infatuated with a cabaret artist from the theatre across from his house, Nancy (Antonia Zegers). Their peculiar relationship takes a nosedive when she goes missing, along with a great many others, during the coup. Maio tries to track her down while also trying to deal with the sudden massive influx of bodies caused by their new military overlords.

Now, this film falls flat because there only seems to be one character that’s remotely sympathetic or, for that matter, believably human, and she soon gets shot for her troubles. Everyone else, including the two nominal leads, oscillate between creepy and unlikable.

Perhaps there’s something lost in translation here. While the broad strokes are obvious enough, I struggled to get a handle on anyone’s motivations and their actions from scene to scene were often inexplicable. Perhaps I’m just not in touch with the fiery Latin temperament, but I struggled to glean any enjoyment from this at all.

The pacing is way off. If it’s trying to build tension at any point I must have missed it, and my attention wandered so much I had to call out a search and rescue party. The two main plot threads of their relationship and the atrocities committed by the junta seem almost completely separate, and I found myself as disinterested in the film as Mario seems to be in the opening reels of the film with the politics that will soon inconvenience him so.

Does, however, win the prize for the longest single shot ‘building a barricade’ scene, which is surely worth something.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Some would call this film “Man som hatar kvinnor”. Chiefly the Swedish, I’d imagine. Stieg Larsson’s novel gets an adaptation for the screen, and I guess it must be good, seeing as it’s been immediately picked up for an English language remake. Well, that badge of honour has become rather tarnished of late, but The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo turns out to be a pretty decent thriller.

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) finds himself on the wrong end of the judge’s gavel in a libel case, sentenced to a few months in the slammer at a time apparently of his choosing. Odd. At any rate, he walks out of court and decides to distance himself from his magazine by resigning, to avoid bringing it into further disrepute. He has little chance to rest before he’s contacted by the aging ex-CEO of the Vanger Concern, Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube).

He wants Mikael to play detective for him. Some forty years ago, his young niece Harriet vanished without a trace. The police made no headway, although Henrik suspects foul play on the part of one of his family. In the absence of anything else to do, Mikael takes up the cold case.

Unbeknownst to Mikael, a young computer hacker / private investigator Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) has been employed to keep tabs on him, but soon winds up joining him in the search to uncover what happened to Harriet. Calling Lisbeth ‘troubled’ would really be doing her a disservice. How she got into her current dark, alienated state will be a recurring sub-plot that echoes the dark secrets that Mikael unearths about the Vanger family.

As murder-mysteries go, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a pretty effective one. The cinematography is, on occasion, absolutely breathtaking. The characters are interesting, well-acted and fleshed out with enough surrounding detail to avoid feeling like mere conduits for plot to run through. It keeps up a decent pace, and there’s never a dull moment.

It’s not perfect, and I think it may well be because there’s never a dull moment. I don’t think I’m being too controversial in saying that both the investigative techniques and events occurring to the investigators skate on the other side of the borders of believability. Not impossible, true, and there’s enough unpleasant people in the world doing unpleasant things to other people that nothing presented here is impossible. It’s pretty damn unlikely, though.

The genius of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is that it doesn’t stop for long enough to have you really think about it in any deep way. It’s also not a film that demands any deep inspection for anyone that’s not reviewing it for a website, so perhaps it’s biggest foible won’t be picked up on by most in the audience. Which is a good thing, I suppose, for everyone except me.

I enjoyed The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo whole-heartedly. There’s no point saying much more than that, and there’s also no point waiting for the Hollywood remake to go and see it.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

I had very much wanted, and perhaps expected, to love Attack the Block, mainly because the man behind it was Joe Cornish, of Adam & Joe fame. I say fame. Perhaps the age old Channel 4 Adam and Joe T.V. show and their Radio 6 broadcast aren’t exactly the most influential slices of pop culture to the world at large, they’ve had strong influences on everyone here at theOneliner in their tender, formative years and in our view can do little wrong. Attack the Block sadly doesn’t quite meet our perhaps unrealistic expectations.

Cornish’s flick is set in the tough council schemes of Laaaahhndaaahn focusing on a group of ‘hoodies’, young thugs interrupted from their usual entertainment of mugging people when an alien lands close to them. True to stereotype, they stave its head in, or whatever it is that it has in place of a head. However, their triumphalism is short-lived, as the relatively small and harmless creature they offed is chased by a large number of its elder, angrier compadres, all gunning for Moses (John Boyega), Pest (Alex Esmail), Dennis (Franz Drameh), Jerome (Leeon Jones) and Biggz (Simon Howard).

Also mixed up in this chaos are nurse, Sam (Jodie Whittaker), victim of that there mugging, dope dealer Ron (Nick Frost), one of his customers, the hapless misplaced middle-class type Brewis (Luke Treadaway) and the crime-lord big wig of the tower block Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter), mistakenly believing that this disturbance is Moses’ attempt to usurp him.

I think it might largely be my own fault that I didn’t enjoy Attack The Block. I had, for in retrospect no particularly good reason, been expecting a comedy. Sure, Attack The Block isn’t deadly serious, and there’s a few funny moments in it, but this is far from an out-an-out comedy.

It’s pitched somewhere between Alien and Assault on Precinct 13, although with a particularly unlikely set of ‘heroes’. It mixes action, chase and siege mentalities, and presents an interesting mix of genres. The language is also remarkable, a bizzare neo-London urban patois that’s a million miles away from cockney and also a million miles away from any other form of English, although from context everything’s remarkably understandable. It’s perhaps understandable why American distributers might be put off by the language, but I think that’s worrying over nothing. Few in Britain can speak this slang, but it remains comprehendible.

The problem, as it happens, is with them there unlikely heroes. A bunch of delinquent robbers are, by their nature, unlikable. This appears to be the film’s grand gamble, to feature genuinely unsympathetic protagonists, with I suppose the understanding that the gradual realisation of their personal responsibility over the course of the piece allows us to eventually be brought on side with them. I don’t see it myself, as everyone’s as much of a thug at the end of it as at the start, and realising past actions were immoral hardly excuses them.

There are impressive elements, for sure. Cornish gets a range of good performances across the cast, and the framing, pacing, editing, shot selection and all the other mechanical aspects of the film are well-handled – better handled than you’d expect from a first time feature director. The effects are surprisingly effective given the film’s budget, and generally don’t look as cheap as you might expect from a small U.K. indy flick about space invaders. Indeed, the aliens remind me of the aliens drawn on the side of the old Space Invaders cabinets, which themselves bore no relation to those in the game. I digress.

I just couldn’t engage with the film. I wouldn’t say I found it unenjoyable, it just made very little impact on me. The more I think of it, the more sure I am that I’m doing this a disservice purely because I expected something different to what it actually is. I think, or perhaps hope, that I’ll listen to this back in a year and feel foolish having watched it again and revised my opinion, but from where I’m sitting at the moment I can’t recommend it.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

The elevator pitch of “The Hangover – but with girls!” is understandable, but one that really didn’t have any appeal to me. The trailer didn’t help in the slightest, but not exactly because it mis-sells or mis-represents the film as often happens in this game. In the context of the film, the selections used in the trailer are funny. Outside of it, they are repulsive.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. That said, there’s not exactly a great deal more in terms of plot I can relate that isn’t immediately understandable with “The Hangover – but with girls!”. When Annie (Kristen Wiig)’s best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) decides to marry a wealthy banker, Annie is selected to be maid of honour, with all the attendant duties that, er, attend that. Help pick the dress, organise the hen night, so on so forth.

If things went swimmingly, there wouldn’t be much opportunity for comedy, so of course everything Annie touches turns to shit very quickly, and in one case literally. The stress and strain this puts on the relationship between Annie and Lillian drives her closer to her prospective husband’s seemingly perfect inlaw Helen, opening another angle of conflict to get some comedy milage out of. We’ve also got Annie’s burgeoning romance with highway cop Nathan Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd) to ruin for comic effect, which is more than enough to be getting along with.

And it does far more than simply get along, because Bridemaids is, if memory serves, the best comedy I’ve seen this year. As with any of these films, a compelling narrative isn’t the primary reason to watch it – although it’s a got a stronger and more sensible story than anything of the Todd Phillips comedies.

The characters, while exaggerated as befits the genre, are grounded in believability and the rivalries and friendships show a great chemistry. The performances are perfectly pitched and the comedy writing is at least as good as anything the Phillips or Apatow stables have ever produced.

As with most comedies, there’s not an awful lot to say about them other that whether I find it funny or not. I most certainly did, and if you have shown any inclination at all for the sort of films that fall under whatever umbrella term we’re using for Hangover-like R-rated comedies these days (‘gross-out’ seems to have thankfully faded, but I’m aware of no suitable replacement) then Bridesmaids is a must-see.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Say what you will about X-Men 3: Last Stand, and what you’d mainly say is that it wasn’t very good, it did at least leave the mutant world in an interesting state. So the obvious course of action was to forget about it entirely, do a Wolverine prequel and then this general X-men prequel, with a young Professor Xavier and Magneto knocking around in their formative years. Potentially a dodgy move, with the franchise in danger of vanishing up its own behind, as would perhaps befit the fourth/fifth, depending on how you’re counting, instalment in the franchise. That’s it turned out so well is a welcome surprise.

This goes all the way back to a young, pre-wheelchair Xavier befriending everyone’s favourite blue shape shifter Mystique, forming a brother/sister like bond, before going on to show us a young Erik Lenhsherr being “persuaded” into developing his powers at the ruthless Nazi hands of a Mengele-style nuttier who will go on to be known as Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon).

Jumping forward a few years to the height of US/Soviet cold war tensions, we rejoin Michael Fassbender’s proto-Magneto doing a spot of Nazi hunting, in an attempt to track down Shaw. Meanwhile, Shaw has gathered a small gang of dangerous mutants, known as the Hellfire Club, and is busy being rich, playing the Americans and Russians off against each other and being an all round bad egg.

Xavier’s called on by the CIA as an expert in mutations after the agency suspect something extra-human is going on with the Hellfire Club members, and soon he crosses paths with Shaw co-incidentally at the same time as Magneto does. Saving Magneto from certain death at the hands of the suddenly all powerful mutant Shaw, the two form a believable bond that retroactively makes their respect for each other in the previous films make sense.

They team up, somewhat reluctantly, with the government in a bid to hurriedly find and train a team of mutants to go up against Shaw’s squad, including a young Hank ‘Beast’ McCoy, Cyclops’ relative of some yet to be determined nature Alex ‘Havok’ Summers, and the ironically named Darwin, given the series’ chronic misunderstanding of the concept of evolution.

I suppose I ought to get the negatives out of the way first. The basic plot feels familiar, and is somewhat hackneyed. A number of the supporting cast of mutants seem to be introduced only to sling some fancy powers around, and have paper-thin characterisation. There’s a few scenes, particularly early on with Erik’s Nazi hunting, that would have been much more impactful without the thumping soundtrack accompanying it, although admittedly that might have put it’s 12A certification at risk.

Everything else is vastly enjoyable. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender give tremendous performances and create a believable basis for respect and friendship that’s been missing all along, and both have great fun with the roles. The scripting of both characters is spot on, and it’s one of those film where we can not only understand exactly why the bad guy (Magneto, in this case) forms the philosophy he goes on to act on, and more than that, sympathise with it more than Xavier’s nominal “correct” course of action.

As for Kevin Bacon, well, he’s an absolute riot to watch. I had for some reason feared a reprise of his Hollow Man take on things, which would not have been pleasant, but his Sebastian Shaw is a tremendous bad guy – as good a comic book villain as there’s been, I’d say. The action is well handled, and doesn’t feel like a layer of plot polyfiller as can be the case, and director Matthew Vaughn keeps up his track record of not having made a film I haven’t loved.

It’s certainly the best of the many comic book adaptations to appear this year, and indeed it’s the best I’ve seen in a long time. Highly recommended.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

As directors go, we don’t see an awful lot of Lone Scherfig. However, she was responsible for 2002’s most excellent Wilbur (Wants To Kill Himself) so it would behoove us to pay attention to her output. For An Education, she directs Nick Hornby’s adaptation of Lynn Barber’s memoir, at which point there’s now enough talent behind the camera to warrant immediate investigation. So, let’s do that.

Twickenham in the 60’s doesn’t exactly swing. Indeed, the girls school that soon to be 16 year old Jenny Mellor (Carey Mulligan) finds herself in barely sways in a strong wind. Her almost stereotypically middle class English father Jack (Alfred Molina) does his best to drive Jenny’s studies along. It is, after all, vital to receive An Education to allow her to go off to Oxbridge university and “get on” in life, for some vague, undefined value of getting on.

This excellent plan is thrown into disarray on meeting the charming, erudite and apparently loaded David (Peter Sarsgaard) who soon makes his romantic intentions known, despite being about double her age. Soon he’s taking her on romantic trips and so forth, beguiling her parents into allowing this, and generally performing a variety of activities that do not involve An Education in the formal, scholastic sense. Of course, it’s not all cupcakes and frosting, as this is a drama after all.

An Education is a coming of age tale, albeit one drenched with a coating of nostalgia for an era I can’t really comment on. What with me not being alive then and all. Jenny is left to ask questions of what exactly she’s looking for in this life, and whether or not that’s best served by slaving away in service of a university place or if the best course of action is the more immediately impressive, flashy life it appears David could provide for her.

So is examining her life worth the time and effort? I’d say so. Mulligan proves to be a charming and captivating central performer, and Sarsgaard proves to be equally effective in his role. Support from Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper is equally polished, although it proves to be Molina who steals most of his scenes. There is no weak link in the piece, and it’s recommended as a fine example of ensemble casting as much as anything else.

While it’s certainly not the most narratively driven work you’ll find, as a character and a period piece it’s well into the top tier, and it makes a reasonable case for including itself in the films of 2009 lists. It may, perhaps, not quite make it due to the almost unreasonably strong showing from the first six months of that year, but it’s certainly a film you should see.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

I have, of late, started to get very worried when films launch with innovative, edgy marketing or gather any sort of ‘internet buzz’, as history teaches us to then prepare for a crushing disappointment. Hearing that, Stateside at least, this Peter Jackson produced, Neill Blomkamp directed sci-fi affair was gathering points in both of these categories proved troublesome. Calling it a crushing disappointment would be a trifle harsh on the poor little film, but I’m left slightly non-plussed by the general rapture aimed in its direction.

It starts off promisingly enough, at least. Presented as an after-the-fact documentary, it deals with the surprising sudden appearance of a massive alien spacecraft over Johannesberg. After a period of it hovering there doing nothing particularly interesting, inquisitive humans bust out the cutting tools and crack it open. To their surprise, although admittedly the situation is hardly lacking in surprise from the outset, they find a horde of aimless, starving insectoid alien workers dossing around in their own filth, the “leader” class apparently missing.

Seeing as the aliens don’t appear to be able to fend for themselves, us benevolent humans set up a refugee camp for our Star Brothers. Or more accurately, they’re kept segregated in a prison formed from slums, where humans quickly begin to fear and loathe them.

District 9 follows Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) as he heads up an operation of borderline legality to shift ‘the prawns’ to a camp further from the center of Jo’Burg by any means necessary, humans sentiment finally reaching a tipping point where they want these aliens taken out of sight, and out of mind. Most would probably prefer simply taking them out. Wikus is something of an unlovable loser, but he hasn’t had time to fully alienate (hoho!) the audience before plot develops onto him.

Exposed to an alien toxin/virus/thingy designed by seemingly the only intelligent alien amongst the ‘fugees, Christopher, Wikus starts to go through “the change”. Not the menopause in this case, as he begins a transmogrification into a human-alien hybrid. Going on the run from the authorities, who declare him a dangerous public enemy, Wikus must work out how to reverse what’s happened to him before his ex-employers harvest him for science and weapons research.

So starts a prolonged chase structure, in this case tricked out with the optional ‘mindless violence’ sports kit. It is, I suppose, entertaining enough, but this seems to be another film that’s sold us a dummy. It’s marketed as having a more thoughtful take on the situation, paralleling the many social issues caused by immigration and segregation, and indeed that’s how it starts, with the faux-documentary trappings giving it a relatively convincing sheen.

Then it develops something of a multiple personality disorder when it throws all of that out of the window and becomes a Big Dumb Action film, that occasionally lapses back into the TV style presentation gimmick as something of an afterthought. I like thoughtful sci-fi concepts, and I like Big Dumb Action films, but only rarely do these combine into something great.

District 9 doesn’t quite manage to combine them into something great. It would stand a decent chance at doing either of these styles very, very well independent of each other, but the whole here is less than the sum of its parts. Not, you understand, that it’s a bad film. Aside from jarring clash of styles, the only other major point I can come up with against it is that Sharlto Copley and his character isn’t interesting enough to really carry the film. Oh, and I could go a very long time without hearing that Afrikaans pronunciation of ‘fooking’ and be happy. This becomes less of an issue as things head into the final act.

Yes, the end of it is just CG shit blowing up, but it does it about as well as anything else. It’s just not what I expected it to be doing, so I left a little non-plussed by it. I couldn’t find anything to engage in it, and viewed at arms length the dents in the bodywork are all too noticeable. If you can embrace it I’m sure you’ll have a better ride than I did.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

For Troll Hunter, or Trolljegeren, we join a group of Norwegian students initially going on a trip to investigate sightings of a bear and possible illegal hunting of said bear. While heading out into the remote parts of their country, they uncover a terrifying secret, kept from the population by the government.

Norway, it transpires, is in fact home to many hulking great trolls, normally content to stomp around their territories far away from humanity. On occasion they get to close for comfort and the surly, near-stereotypical gamekeeper / Troll Security Service operative Hans (Otto Jespersen) must take care of the problem. And by “take care of”, we mean “kill”, just for clarity.

In a gambit hardly redolent of innovation, it’s presented as “found footage”, and I find the opening text’s repeated, strident declarations of authenticity to be inordinately annoying. This is a film about trolls. Of course it isn’t fucking real, do you think I’m an idiot or something? There’s a thin line between willing suspense of disbelief and insulting your audience, and this film stomps right over that line, then sets up a tent on the other side of it.

At the risk of copping out completely, Troll Hunter just is what it is. I didn’t expect much from it and it delivered exactly that. The effects work is good considering the movies’ budget, but not actually good in real terms – but I’ve seen worse.

Jespersen proves to be the film’s main hope of tying the film together, as it settles into its mockumentary groove following Hans’ day to day life. He’s almost up to the task, and the transition from initial hostility to somewhat reluctant narrator of events at least gives us some reason to buy into the character’s life. It’s not quite enough, however, especially when saddled with the group of students who range between forgettably bland and quite annoying.

While no-one’s ever going to accuse Troll Hunter of being a character piece, but all these troll encounter shenanigans just aren’t all that interesting a concept, for this scrivener at least. I’m assuming that there’s more trolls knocking around in the stories of your average Norwegian’s formative years, which might pre-dispose you more kindly to watching a few different types of troll bop around in night-vision CG before returning for another half hour of very little happening to characters of very little interest to us.

That said, it’s pitched (and titled) squarely as a film about a troll hunter, and on that basis I can’t really complain all that much about it. I didn’t like it very much, but I don’t find it offensively dire like much of the Hollywood horror output that I’ve simply stopped watching. In the interests of remaining positive, it’s really not my sort of thing, but if it does sound like your sort of thing, it’s an adequate example. There’s no point unleashing the Vitriol Cannon on a film called Troll Hunter for being a daft film about trolls, any more than there’s a point hating Twilight for being a dull film about a shiny vampire’s love life. Its colours are obvious, and nailed firmly to its mast for all to see from a good distance. I leave it to you to decide whether to salute them or not.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Stop! Romero Time! One of the longest running series in film returns with yet more zombies shuffling around chowing down on people. Mainly taking place on a small island off the coast of America, which given the names of all concerned might as well be Ireland, a generations-old rivalry extends into the Zombie Era as Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) and Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) clash over how to treat the living dead.

Muldoon wants to keep friends and family contained and pacified, in the hopes that there will one day be a cure, or a miracle, or something that returns the deadheads to normality. O’Flynn has a more conventional approach to the zombie menace – shoot them in head. This disagreement in philosophy soon becomes a disagreement in arms, and O’Flynn’s clan turns out to be on the loosing side of that. O’Flynn is exiled to the mainland.

It’s not long before he runs into ‘Nicotine’ Crocket (Alan Van Sprang) and his small group of… well, not mercenaries, exactly. A band of ex-soldiers who figured they’d be better off on their own would fit better. While remaining sceptical, they decide that they have a decent shot for survival by heading out to the island, helping O’Flynn gain dominance over the Muldoons.

How does that work out for them? Well, it’s a zombie film. Expect eatings.

It’s not exactly a traditional zombie film, though. I suppose Romero has tired of the usual man-the-barricades setups that zombie outings often devolve to. It’s also no work of social commentary or satire, although I’ve always been slightly puzzled by that line of praise for Romero. Much as I like Dawn of the Dead, holding it up as an arch, Swiftian satire of commercialism seems to be pushing things a bit. More realistically, I’d imagine the idea for Dawn came about by saying, “You know what would be cool? Zombies in a mall”.

Similarly, I’d imagine the idea for Survival came about by saying, “You know what would be cool? Zombies in a Western”. That’s as close to a genre pigeonhole that Survival fits into (well, outside of Zombie Horror, obviously). It’s practically a remake of A Fistful Of Dollars, but with zombies. Although given that Fistful is practically a remake of Yojimbo, we also open up the possibility of a Samurai film with zombies, which would obviously be super-awesome.

If this is sounding like waffling here, it’s because there’s not an awful lot to latch on to with Survival of the Dead. It does it’s job well enough, it’s reasonably entertaining, there’s a few funny lines and a couple of amusingly arcane methods to kill a zombie on display.

I don’t even have too many bones to pick about the parts of it that are not, perhaps, top drawer stuff. The effects work is endearingly rather than distractingly shonky, and the overblown acting and storyline isn’t exactly out of place in a world where the dead have risen to walk the dead and eat the living.

It’s tough to hate any film that was MPAA-rated R for “strong zombie violence/gore”, and I don’t hate Survival of the Dead. It’s just that it’s a very forgettable film, and in a world with no shortage of zombie films it doesn’t shamble out from the crowd.

While I’m not going to proclaim myself as the world’s biggest Romero fan, I’ve no grudge against the man or his work. While Survival of the Dead was a perfectly agreeable way to while away ninety zombie-filled minutes, it’s not a damn thing more than that.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

As someone who has played altogether too much Fallout 3 in his life, it’s always disappointing to see the name “Paradise Falls” used in films and not take the opportunity to have it overrun with super-mutants and slavers. In Legion, it’s used as the location of a remote diner / petrol station in the middle of the desert, owned by the grumpy old Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid). Assisting him in what’s about to become hell on earth are Percy (Charles S. Dutton), Bob’s son Jeep (Lucas Black) and a heavily pregnant waitress Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), whom Jeep happens to be deeply in love with.

An unusually busy day for the diner sees a squabbling family of three stranded there, along with Kyle Williams (Tyrese Gibson), who has a certain hint of the gangster to him. A more unusual visitor on this particular day is the Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany), who warns of the forthcoming apocalypse based fun and games. Turns out, for no particularly explicable reason, the bun in Charlie’s oven is the only hope for the future of mankind and he’s sworn to protect her.

Seems that God’s decided to hit the franchise reboot button on Planet Earth, and rather than the usual boring “big flood” option, he’s going old-school. He’s taking over the minds of ‘the weak-willed’ and converting them into, err, stretchy limbed zombie monstrosities and unleashing them on the remainder of humanity. Original! The big man’s still got it.

Still, turns out these horrors are not immune to mankind’s greatest inventions, high calibre weaponry. So, the scene is set for a somewhat bizarre firearms based defence of the diner that, inevitably, is going to see a good number of our heroes meet grisly ends.

Now, the trailer for this looked quite exceptionally terrible, and it’s somewhat subverted my expectations by not being utterly irredeemable. Not, you understand, that it’s good, or even anywhere on the acceptable side of mediocre. There’s still a few elements in there that, to my very great surprise, aren’t completely obnoxious.

There’s a few pretty amusing lines scattered throughout. Once you get over the incredible bombastically high concept plot it settles down into a mildly entertaining Terminator / Zulu / Every Zombie Film Ever groove. They’ve even managed to find a character suited to Dennis Quaid’s absence of charisma in the irritable diner owner. There’s glimmers of something decent in here, amid the problems.

However, there’s a lot of problems. Chiefly, to me at least, there seems to be a massive disconnect between the script and the direction. This film is, for the most part, played so straight-faced and earnestly that when it tries to present something so insanely high concept such as, say a rebel Archangel teaming up with humans to face the forces of evil that arrive in an ice-cream van that it comes across as laughable rather than dramatic.

With a lighter touch, this could have been an awful lot of fun. As it stands, it’s pretty disconcerting. The massive difference between what I perceive, at least, to be a more knockabout script and the absolute po-faced gravity that everyone involved seems to be taking it is more than enough to sink this film.

Bettany, I’m sure, does everything that’s been asked of him in his role, but really an awful lot more should have been asked of him. He is, after all, supposed to be an angel, not just another guy, which is very much how it’s played here. A more ethereal or other-worldly slant to the character would perhaps have helped sell the concepts better, or at least better than making him grimace and wield an assault rifle would.

There’s other problems, in as much as none of the effects work or acting performances ever get above ‘acceptable’, and I’m probably just being generous to it because I’m genetically incapable of truly hating any film where an old woman gets sconed in the head with a frying pan thrown by a dude with a hook for a hand.

So even despite that there sconing, a recommendation to avoid is hereby issued.