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

Apparently Hummingbird is called Redemption in other parts of the world, which shows both a disturbing lack of trust in an audience’s willingness not to dismiss a film based on a very, very mildly esoteric title and a puzzling effort to also mislead them, unless these days the path to redemption is based on staving heads in. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

We join Joey (Jason Statham) as a down and out drunk on London’s mean streets, apparently sharing a semi-detached box with Dawn (Vicky McClure). When a couple of thugs come round, apparently with the ill-thought out strategy of mugging homeless people, escalates into what seems like an impending rape, Joey fights back, and takes a bit of a beating for his efforts. Scarpering, he shakes off his aggressors by stumbling up fire escapes, across rooftops and into a penthouse apartment, or top floor flat as we call them in Britain.

In a stroke of luck, the owner of the flat won’t be back for six months, and Joey takes the opportunity to get his life back together. For given values of “together”. In this instance it means quitting the booze, shaving off his hilarious straggly hair and “borrowing” some suspiciously closely tailored suits from his unsuspecting host and, after a short stint in a Chinese restaurant where his unique set of skills are unwittingly uncovered, becoming an enforcer for the local branch of Triad, Triad, Triad and Sons, Legitimate Business Incorporated.

Over the course of the piece we uncover why Joey’s so troubled, his traumatic past as a soldier in the Iraq war haunting him. He also starts saving up his entirely legitimately earned cash from his honest, respectable job to support his long estranged wife and daughter, and also to help out some of his friends from the street. A particular focus for this is a nun, Sister Cristina (Agata Buzek), who runs the nightly soup kitchens and becomes something of an unusual love interest in the film.

Given the overarching grimness of the tone, it’s not much of a surprise to discover Cristina has her own skeletons rattling around in her cupboards, however the main event that drives the narrative towards a conveniently synchronous conclusion comes from Joey finally tracking down what happened to Dawn, who was “encouraged” to become a prostitute and fell victim to a notoriously violent city-boy client who went a little too far. Joey swears vengeance, which doesn’t seem very redemption-y to me.

For me, Hummingbird‘s main problem isn’t what it does badly, which is perhaps only the odd bit of clunky dialogue and delivery, it’s the things that it does well. It just does two things in particular well that serve mutually exclusive aims.

The world Joey finds himself in is necessarily bleak, grim and occasionally upsetting, and for a lot of this time director Steven Knight wrings a pretty decent bleak, hopeless tone from the material.

The problem with that is the contrast that seems to have been forced on the film due to Jason Statham being the lead actor. To be clear, this isn’t stunt casting, as he’s more than capable of holding the dramatic and emotional tones asked of him. In fact, he probably delivers more than the script credits him for. The problem is more with the perceived need to show Statham as a dangerous man by having him get into cool-looking, Statham-esque one vs. many fights, which it does pretty well, but at the cost of creating an entirely different mood that is much less conducive to sympathising with the characters struggle.

Well, I say struggle. Thing is, other than one slightly weird hallucinatory hummingbird interlude, Joey doesn’t really seem to have all that much of a struggle, at least after kicking the booze. He makes some attempt at justifying that he was keeping himself sozzled in order to avoid hurting people, but when off the sauce he seems perfectly capable of controlling himself. It’s not, as it turns out, something that has a major impact on the story, which is weird in and of itself.

For something that seems to want to be more concerned with Joey’s mental struggles with coming to terms with his past, it spends far too much time showing him kicking arse in the present, to the point of becoming more of a revenge fantasy than the serious drama it’s pushed as. Which is something of a shame, as I suspect it’d make a stronger straight up drama than it makes drama with Statham fan-pleasing punch-ups shoehorned in.

Structural and tonal anomalies aside, at least the film does, in the main, does find a reasonable level of success, in the main because Jason Statham’s an terrifically likable screen presence. So, from a certain point of view, Statham’s presence is both the main weakness and greatest strength of the film. Which seems unusually fitting with the contents of the film. Very zen.

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

This latest in the interminable line of zombie movies is, I guess, somewhat unsual in being an adaptation of a book. To my knowledge at least, the undead d’jour for literature is still rather more vampiric in flavour. Still, Max Brooks’ collection of first hand recollections was highly entertaining and while this movie has close to nothing, apart from zombies, in common with the book it does a solid job of capturing the spirit of the piece.

Brad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a seasoned U.N. Investigator who’s given up a life probing some of the world’s most dangerous situations in favour of spending time with his family. It all seems quite cosy until Philadelphia, played here by Glasgow, gets over-run by 28 Days Later type speedzombies.

Escaping the city by the skin of his teeth, his old U.N. boss offers him and his family a berth onboard a small U.S. Navy led flotilla that’s one of the only safe places from the zombie hordes, on the condition that Gerry heads out with a small task force to trace the origins of this menace, and hopefully, find a cure.

Following this trail leads him to a South Korean military base, a freshly walled-off and besieged Jerusalem and despite the few hints left in this cut, not Russia, what with the whole last third of the film being reshot and all, instead building to a climax in the rather more glamorous and exotic Cardiff.

I suppose seeing as it’s come up, we should address most folk’s largest concern going into World War Z. If you’ve been keeping your ear to the ground, or even a few feet from the ground, you’ll have heard of the significant chopping and changing to the film occuring after it was pretty much complete. Seemingly, it was rather more concerned with setting up a sequel than finishing Gerry and his families’ own story, which is somewhat understandable as the narrative’s much more concerned with the source of the zombie menace rather than any of the survivors and their emotions. While that’s still a pretty credible contender for major problem with the film, the new ending at least ties the first and final reels together.

It should be said, however, that if you’re going to call an audible and re-write a third of the film, this isn’t a bad example of how to do it. It’s far from seamlessly folded back in, which I guess is unavoidable. While, as mentioned, the odd hint of a Russian finale remain, the problem’s less with a Belarussian airplane diverting, somewhat out of the blue, to Cardiff as it is with a rather sudden change in atmosphere and stylistics, and if it wasn’t for the incontrovertible fact that it’s so much better than what preceded it it would be a real problem.

Y’see, a lot of World War Z is based on the mass-scale CGI hordes of zombies swarming around causing bother, as you’ve no doubt seen on the trailers. That’s fine for what it is, but by the time we reach Israel a certain amount of fatigue has set in, so the change to a super-tense, small scale, intimate zombie avoiding stealth-em-up provides an unexpected and gripping finale.

So, it turns out that although I was expecting the worst for World War Z, it has delivered a pretty enjoyable film. It’s also a zombie film unlike most other zombie films, which has understandably thrown some people. For instance, if you like your zombies all Romero’d up, ready to slowly rip people apart in showers of gore then this perhaps isn’t the film for you, as its U.S.A. PG–13 rating would imply. While it’s pretty good at building up that somewhat silly “sustained threat” advisory, there’s little in way of explicit or even implied nastiness that you would been forgiven for anticipating from a zombie flim.

The vast bulk of the other issues people seem to be having with the film harken back to the issue mentioned earlier, that this root cause investigation leaves us with a film that’s closer in structure to Contagion than to Day of the Dead. I’d argue that you ought to have been expecting that, given the source material. That said, I take the point that once Gerry’s family is tucked up relatively safely, the normal, more personal reasons to empathise with Gerry leaves us with rather more high level, abstract goals that you may find more difficult to invest it.

There’s a few other niggles, but they’re almost entirely stylistic differences of opinion rather than anything that’s obviously not working. For example perhaps the only flaw in that stealth portion comes from zombies chattering their teeth as though they’ve got some sort of dental echolocation thing going on, which is a touch too silly to have the chilling effect intended. I’m sure others have their niggles, but I’m left with nothing else worth mentioning.

Now, had this film not taken a sharp left turn in the final third I’d probably agree with those decrying this as a big, bland, loud, overly CG reliant, diet zombie movie. The earlier running didn’t leave me as cold as the perhaps prevailing critical opinion, but I could certainly have taken or left it and would have little to praise it for other than the unique, broader focus taken as compared with most zombie films. It’s really that final stretch than moves this from average and forgettable to something interesting and worth recommending, and which incidentally could have been done on a fraction of the budget.

Which actually seems to be a common theme, in that the most interesting zombie movies I’ve seen over the past decade are not the big budget films either the bad (Resident Evil) or the good (Dawn of the Dead), but the low to no budget stuff like Warm Bodies and Pontypool. Just sayin’. Anyway, regardless of the amount of money spent on footage that’s ultimately gone on the shelf, World War Z is a credible contender for your summer blockbuster movie budget.

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

It would seem that Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is a successful New York executive, if his sharp suit and centrally located Manhattan apartment is anything to go by. Just the sort of single guy any of the girls from Sex and the City would be overjoyed to meet, were I writing this a decade ago. There’s one minor hang up any prospective suitor would have to deal with – he’s addicted to sex.

Brandon can’t get enough of the old in-out, sating his desires with one night stands, prostitutes and when all else fails, pornography, Mother Palm and her five daughters. His lifestyle of slavishly looking for something to ejaculate into looks to have hit a minor complication when his semi-estranged sister comes to stay.

Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a sometime lounge singer with enough issues of her own to be getting along with puts a slight cramp on Brandon’s activities, and the pair seem close to having frank discussions about whatever the hell happened to them in their childhoods that’s had such a lasting impact on them. However, they don’t, a bold move in storytelling terms that certainly piques interest and gives the leads a mysterious air.

It is, however, the only engaging aspect to either of their characters, which is a bit of a problem in a character piece. Both leads are too damaged to be relatable, and even when Brandon shows moments of vulnerability, I find myself too cut off from him and his drives to care one way or the other about his fate.

Shame is a well made film on so many levels that I feel a little guilty for not liking it. It seems to have been designed as the sort of film any self respecting internet based film review vector ought to be falling over. It’s impeccably acted on the parts of Fassbender and Mulligan, and it has a consistent vision and sense of style that’s sadly rare in modern film-making.

All of the good is sadly outweighed by the characters I’m supposed to be studying in this character study being so far outside my scope of experience that I can’t really care about them, and let’s be honest, the starting point of rich white guy / sex hound isn’t automatically engaging the sympathy glands so it’s already starting at a disadvantage.

A large part of the plaudits this film garners seems to come from its study of sex addition, certainly an under-explored area in cinema. A part of me wonders, however, that if this had been about heroin addiction it would be as well received.

I didn’t enjoy Shame, although it’s not exactly the type of film where enjoyment figures into its value proposition. After all, no sane person enjoys, say, Requiem for a Dream, but I could still recommend it as an engaging and powerful film. I can’t do the same with Shame. All of the elements seem to be there, but there’s nothing in there that grabbed me and I would up just being bored of it all, and there’s few things worse than that for a flick.

Given the risk-adverse, sterile homogeneity that passes for the bulk of modern film-making, I want to see far more films like Shame being made. I just hope I like them a little more than I liked Shame.

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

Sandy (Jason Bateman) is a mild mannered middle manager by day, but by night transforms into a mild mannered loving family man. All in all, a thoroughly nice guy, and one truly undeserving of having his identity stolen by Melissa McCarthy’s malicious Miami malcontent Diana, who goes on to empty Sandy’s bank account and credit cards. What a rotter.

It couldn’t come at a worse time, as he’s in the middle of changing jobs and the catastrophic black hole his credit rating has now entered threatens his career. The police are sympathetic, but explain that they can only investigate offences committed in Sandy’s native Denver and can’t advise their Miami colleagues to look into this for presumably very good reasons that we don’t need to worry our pretty little heads about.

This despite knowing where Diana is going to be, via conveniently efficient and resourceful beauty parlour receptionist finding out his phone number and calling Sandy to confirm fake-Sandy Diana’s appointment. A desperate plan is hatched, as Sandy decides to head south with the last of his money, apprehend Diana and drag her back to Denver whereupon she can be arrested, Sandy’s name can be cleared and life can return to normal.

Simple! Or not so simple, as while finding Diana isn’t hard, holding on to her is, thanks to her proficiency in throat-punching. As you would expect from a comedy, things start snowballing in ridiculous fashion in short order, especially when Robert Patrick’s bail-bond jumper bounty hunter and a gang bosses’ two enforcers also wind up on the hunt for Diana, for reasons that are again largely glossed over but serve to cause obstacles for our protagonists to overcome while bringing them to a better understanding and respect for each other.

If all of this sounds like an excuse for a loosely plotted road trip with arbitrary zany situations, well, you’re not wrong. However no-one’s watching this for the story or character development, so let’s not focus too heavily on how generic those aspects are in this film. Although they are.

Like all comedies the only remotely relevant criteria for judging is how funny it is. So how funny is it? It is adequately funny.

Oh, you want more detail? Well, the genericism in the plot and characters for the most part runs through the situations that Bateman and McCarthy find themselves in, and by themselves aren’t all that inherently amusing. Its saving grace is that the situations are populated by Bateman and McCarthy, and McCarthy’s gift for improvisation and Bateman’s continually under-rated talent as a straight man means that they salvage a lot of the scenes quite handily.

Now, I wouldn’t be recommending that anyone immediately stop what they’re doing and rush out and see this, but I seen far worse comedies that have amused me less and not felt as though I need to bring action under the Description of Goods act, so I’d be content to give this a mild recommendation to anyone in the market for an undemanding comedy.

However, until I sat down to cobble this together I had paid no attention to two things: critical reception and box office. The former is torrentially negative, the latter Scrooge-McDuck-Coin-filled-swimming-pool positive. Now, for once, I’d go with the box office being a better bellwether for your likely enjoyment of the film. Sense of humour is a particularly difficult thing to judge, especially when you’ve only got your own twisted personality to go by. Given the amount of cash this has raked in, it seems to be in tune with a broad enough range of twisted personalities that statistics tell us you’ll probably enjoy it.

So, who are you going to trust – cynical bastard critics like me, or the incontestable might of statistics?

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

For the obligatory jokey intro to this, I could not decide whether to go with a riff on the somewhat out of date Xbox role playing game Oblivion, or the really out of date Terrorvision song Oblivion from their seminal 1994 album How to Make Friends and Influence People. So let’s all just agree that something particularly hilarious was written here, and move on to the parts of the review actually relevant to the Tom Cruise vehicle currently bothering the multiplexes.

There’s been an apocalypse! Oh noes! As Tom’s character Jack informs us, there’s been an invasion, from a foe known as Skavs. Humanity won, although you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise given the state of the planet, levelled and largely barren. The survivors of the war have headed off world, leaving a skeleton crew of drones and maintenance personel in outposts, one of which contains Jack and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). They look after the colossal machines extracting the water from the oceans for off world transport, under occasional threat of attack from pockets of Skav survivors trapped on the planet.

And so it goes, until a craft crashes in Jack’s area. Checking it out, he finds human survivors, cryogenically sleeping in escape pods. He’s not long on the scene before his drone buddies show up, but rather than aid his rescue attempts they start blowing the pods up. You just can’t trust robots, I telling you. Even the little Roomba electro-dreams of vacuuming you to death.

He manages to pull rank on the drones enough to get one pod back to the outpost, where he finds that it contains Julia (Olga Kurylenko), which he finds surprising, as he’s also been dreaming about her and a non-ruined earth. This would be the start of his realisation that Things Are Not What They Seem, although the trailer has given us something of a head start on him.

Given that it’s unveiled relatively early in proceedings, it’s not a deal-braking spoiler, but I feel it’d make for a better film if we were not forewarned of everything Jack’s about to uncover, for at least for the first two thirds of the film, so I’m not going to promulgate that information. I do this out of a sense of loyalty to you, dear comrade, and also as it gives me an opportunity to use the work ‘promulgate’.

So, if we’re not going to talk about the plot, what else can we discuss? I find that a little bit of a struggle, as I don’t think there’s all that much of interest in the film. Not that it’s necessarily bad, you understand. Just not that it’s all that interesting.

Call me a curmudgeon if you must, but the whole post-apocalyptic, desert reclaiming ruined cityscapes visual thing has been done so often that even when it’s done well, and Oblivion does it well, just doesn’t seem all that interesting anymore. Even in IMAX, it’s nice, but not jaw-dropping. The more futuristic elements of Jack’s refuge, runabout and weaponry fare better, with a pleasing futuristic sheen reminiscent of the Mass Effect video game series. The drones also remind me of their non-evil counterparts from Terrahawks, although they can’t match their personality.

The performances contained within are generally more than adequate, although Morgan Freeman’s tending more towards his “paycheck” attitude than I’d like in his relatively brief part, but nothing too obnoxious is going on. M83 provide a pleasing soundscape, and it seems director Joseph “Tron Legacy” Kosinski is convinced of the value of a good soundtrack between this and the Daft Punk laden Tron outing, and he has a good understanding of the pacing and beats of the story.

Now he just needs to find more interesting stories. I don’t intend to come across as harsh, admittedly partly because I’d like to see more big-budget sci-fi stuff in the future, but also because Oblivion‘s far from a bad film. It’s just one that’s a great deal more predictable than it thinks it is. The supporting elements to the story are well enough put together to stop the film collapsing, but it should be building on top of those, not slumping down all over them.

Overall, despite not really containing anything that’s actually bad, it’s just a little bit too close to mediocre to recommend.

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

I generally consider Baz Lurhmann to be a name to run away from, screaming. Not, really, on the grounds that his films are badly made, they’re just not films that I want to see made. And so Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge happily fly by with me paying them no heed and Lurhmann getting none of my money.

This generally happy détente however is shattered by the release of The Great Gatsby, which on the surface seemed more like Luhrmann trolling his detractors than a serious attempt at filmmaking. The surrounding PR speak talked nigh-on exclusively about spectacular glittering parties and costumes and the love story at the heart of it, which to anyone who has read the book will sound like the most vapid, point-missingly superficial reading of Fitzgerald’s work. Thankfully, like all PR speak, it’s not reflecting reality, so the pre-emptive lynch mob really ought to put the pitchforks down.

To be fair, they’d be forgiven for picking them back up again after the first 45 minutes, but it does settle down later on into something that’s far truer to the spirit of the novel than you’d expect. Mainly because the first 45 minutes are a shock-and-awe campaign of mental anachronisms.

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. The story, for the uninitiated, concerns Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a writer turned Wall Street broker, moving to Noo Yawk’s (fictional) West Egg, renting a modest house in the shadow of a massive mansion that wouldn’t look out of place on a castle rock.

While back in the city he re-acquaints himself with his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), who is married to Nick’s old college chum, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), a man with more money than he knows what to do with largely garnered from his families inheritance than the sweat of his brow. They reside in similarly massive mansion in the similarly fictional East Egg, the poshest of all the eggs, directly across the Long Island sound from Nick’s neighbours stupefying abode.

Said abode, it turns out, is home to Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), and while the man himself is rarely seen at them his home is frequently bedecked with the most lavish of parties, where all of New York’s swinging, roaring young things appear to make merry in a borderline revolting display of opulence and extravagance. Nick possesses something of a rarity, an invitation to one of these parties from Gatsby, rather than the everyone else’s self-invitations.

Gatsby takes an interest in Nick, as a friend, sure, but with the soon explained ulterior motive of obtaining a meeting with Daisy – an old lover. From here, if you’ve not read the book you could probably see where this is going, but what’s made Fitzgerald’s book so enduring that it’s not about love, but obsession – with women, with status, with money, with class, and how it drives and influences the characters.

It’s a character piece, at the end of the day, with some very complex characters with interesting backstories that are teased out over the course of the film, and that’s still very much the meat and potatoes of this film, helped by DiCaprio’s strong performance, although you will rapidly tire of him calling people “sport”.

As scions of monied families Mulligan’s Daisy and Edgerton’s Tom are suitably odious, privileged and charming in various combinations, changing as their situations change through Gatsby’s catalysing neuve riche personality.

Maguire’s Carraway is an odd fruit, initially more of a dispassionate observer becoming drawn into the web of games this world’s monied strata play with the lives of others, seemingly on little more than whims, for little more than kicks. Maguire’s the only character, or perhaps performance, it’s difficult to separate the two, that I just couldn’t bring myself to like as much as the story demands I should, which does present a bit of a problem as he’s narrating the movie.

Ah, yes, the movie. The story’s stood enough of the test of time that there’s little point me battering away against it. I remembered not liking the novel all that much, but the more I consider it the more I’m minded to concede I may be wrong on that point, or remembering inaccurately. But as a movie, Baz Lurhmann’s take on it is undeniably odd.

As mentioned, the opening salvos are a disorientating barrage of sound and fury, with a bizarrely anachronistic soundtrack and some CG locations that might be realistic if this was set in Mordor rather than New York. Coupled with the utterly pointless, even more so than usual, use of 3D, in my opinion it’s doing more to drive away with its discordancy than it is to draw people in with it’s glamour offensive.

I can see some logic behind it now, certainly more so having watched it than my earlier near-automatic dismissal of it, but it doesn’t quite work for me.

Which is a shame, because there’s a decent amount of the remainder of the film that I’m quite fond of. Niggles with Maguire aside, there’s strong performances from a strong cast and when it stops deliberately overplaying its hand, it’s still left with stunning locations with elegant period detail that’s visually very impressive.

Ultimately it’s just too idiosyncratic for it’s own good, but it’s probably made me think more about how something like this could or should be handled than anything else of late, so that’s gotstabe worth something, right?

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

The sequel to 2009’s unexpectedly great reboot sees Jim Kirk (Chris Pine) back on the good ship Enterprise, starting off with another boy’s own adventure rescuing a budding civilisation from being blown up by a volcano, then rescuing Spock (Zachary Quinto) from inside the same volcano, shattering the Prime Directive while doings so.

This is deemed so offensive to Starfleet Command that Kirk is demoted and removed from command of his ship, a plot point that lasts for at least three minutes before a terrorist attack wipes out Kirk’s father figure Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood), along with many other senior officers. Swearing vengeance, he convinces Admiral Robocop (Peter Weller) that he should get his ship back, and track down the renegade special ops Starfleet officer (Benedict Cumberbatch) that’s behind the attacks.

He tracks his nemesis to the homeworld of the Klingons, and as approaching in full Starfleet colours would risk a war with the galaxy’s most warlike aliens, they are sent off undercover to capture ol’ Benedict. This happens with surprising ease, although it turns out that all is not quite as it seems, and perhaps Robocop hasn’t been telling them the whole truth. Or is this another manipulation? And so on, and so forth.

In a great many respects, you can adequately sum up Star Trek Into Darkness by saying that it’s more of Star Trek, and that’s no bad thing in my book, and indeed I enjoyed my time with the film greatly. However, it’s not as good as its predecessor for a number of reasons.

The story has been, I think unfairly, criticised for being full of plot holes, largely by the tedious nerds that drove the Trek franchise into the ground. In a space opera so riddle with future-tech magic, what I’ve seen cited seems rather petty, although in the grand picture I take the point. This is a script that’s putting opportunities for emotion and action above making sense, and for the most part I’m on board it feels as though the first film wasn’t quite as compromised in this regard.

While the relationship between Kirk and Spock is as strong and well-realised as the first film, and Cumberbatch is an excellent third axis for the dynamic, the rest of the cast fares less well. In fact, I’d almost rather have seen them written out of this film rather than shoe-horned into their one scene, regardless of how little sense it makes. We need to disarm a bomb! Quick, fetch a medical doctor! That’s the best course of action, and not at all one determined by the fact that otherwise Bones McCoy (Karl Urban) would have one line in the whole film!

If you want an ensemble piece this is not the one for you, however to be fair it’s not presenting much of a barrier to enjoying it. In other regards, it’s doing rather well at balancing humour, drama and action, bombing along at a terrific pace and generally doing much the same things right that the 2009 vintage did.

Just not quite as well.

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

It’s not uncommon for movie series to rather run out of steam by the third installment. Even those designed from the outset to be trilogies often start fizzling out, and even in the more successful examples, few people would say that the third outing is the best. It is, then, perhaps with a slight sense of trepidation we’d approach Iron Man 3, and a gratifying sense of relief when we realise that we could make a credible case for it being the best of the franchise thus far.

Following on from the events of Avengers Assemble, there was always the possibility that not having an Earth threatening, er, threat for Robert Downey Jnr.’s Tony Stark to go up against might be a little anticlimactic, but I’m sure comic book aficionados were mollified by the news that the Big Bad of this film would be The Mandarin, apparently the rogueiest of Stark’s rogues gallery. Or so I’m told, as I don’t read the comics I don’t rightly know. I’m no nerd, man.

Anyway, Iron Man 3 sees Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow) firmly in charge of Stark Enterprises, while Tony sits in his basement and tinkers with endless new suit designs, much to Pepper’s annoyance. Turns out that there’s more than Stark’s usual line of self absorption going on, as his battle with nuclear explosions, inter dimensional portals and revelation of advanced aliens meaning us ill will has rather knocked him for a loop. Suffering from post traumatic stress flashbacks and panic attacks, while desperately trying to up his technological game to ward off future threats to the planet and Pepper has left him with a rather fragile mental state.

As such, he’s more than happy to ignore the terrorist threat to America embodied by the Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley), a mysterious, enigmatic menace only seen in video messages, coming across as a hybrid of Bin Laden and the Stranger from The Big Lebowski. With the government deciding that while this is a serious threat, it’s not yet one that demands the attention of Marvel’s mainstream superhero properties, a military manhunt is undertaken led by James “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) and his re-branded Iron Patriot suit, War Machine being deemed too aggressive, PR-wise.

Further complicating things are the involvement of Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian, another scientific prodigy in the Marvel universe’s already oversubscribed genius club, who’s hawking Extremis, a wonder drug that can regenerate and heal injured tissue. Handy stuff, but his organisation has something of a reputation for playing fast and loose with safety standards. Given the law of conservation of characters, I don’t think I’m revealing too much to say that he’s tied up with The Mandarin and will become another enemy for Tony Stark, for admittedly quite poorly explained reasons.

After a preemptive strike on Stark’s home sees him knocked out and flown on autopilot to the other side of America, he’s left dragging a battered, non-functional power suit to a small town to repair, regroup, and work out what the hell’s going on. You would not thank me for discussing the plot much further, but there’s as much, if not more, of Tony Stark in this film than there is Iron Man.

Spending so much time without his suit is something of a masterstroke for the film. While I’ve enjoyed the previous Iron Man films, the overwhelming CG-ness of the action in them makes for some rather bland set-pieces. The expressionless iron mask isn’t the most sympathetic protagonist, hence the frequent use of that really awkward in-suit, HUD reflection close up of Downey Jr. used so often. Here it needs to be dug out less frequently, while still containing as many exciting and rather innovative fights and set-pieces.

Stripping Stark from his suit also makes him physically vulnerable, which when combined with the aforementioned emotional vulnerability, makes Stark a rather more well rounded character that you can at least come close to imagine might not succeed in his struggle, rather than breeze through it. Much as I enjoyed the other films, they weren’t high on sense of danger. Forcing Stark to rely on his ingenuity and intelligence rather than just wheeling out another multi-billion pound prototype powered armour for much of the film makes his character much more interesting, and makes the excesses of the final set-piece much more satisfying.

Iron Man 3, then, largely addresses my major issue with the rest of the films in the series. The rest of the reasons to like the franchise are still in place, headed by the performance of Downey Jr which is as charismatic and funny as always. The supporting cast are universally solid, and Kingsley in particular is fantastic. The effects work is as solid as you’ve seen.

This doesn’t make it the perfect summer blockbuster, if you’re going to be all boring and analytical about it. The bad guy’s motives, in the abstract at least, are sound enough, but the way it ties into Tony Stark is massively contrived. You don’t have to look very far to see gaping plot holes, and this Extremis stuff is dangerously close to out-and-out magic in a world at least somewhat grounded in technological reality.

In fact, as a tightly plotted story, this might well be the weakest of the three. This, it turns out, doesn’t matter in the slightest, because it’s the most enjoyable of them by a good distance. It’s odd to think that this is Shane Black’s first turn in the director’s chair for a film with firepower of this magnitude, indeed only his second time in the chair at all. For someone who’s work has been so influential in the action genre, it’s odd seeing how restrained he’s been in his output.

Surely it’d have to be seen as a bit of a risk to put Shane Black on this job, but he’s knocked it out of the park, taking some major risks which might infuriate comic purists, giving fresh twists on the characters, and setting up something close to a fresh start for Stark’s next outing, be that his own franchise or Avengers 2.

It’s a brilliant bubble-gum tent-pole spectacular, and if that’s what you’re in the mood for there’s little reason not to love Iron Man 3.

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

There’s rather a lot to recap in Cloud Atlas, were you foolish enough to make an attempt to try. However, Mama didn’t raise no fool, so instead let’s give it a rather more glossed over and probably amazingly confusing overview.

The central premise of the film is to cut between a number of stories, with a number of different styles, happening over a number of time frames, with a consistent number of actors. So, for example, you might have Jim Broadbent running around in a contemporary retirement home farce, only for a few moments later to find him as Captain of a galley sailing back from the New World.

Amongst these smaller stories we have such wildly divergent characters and stories as Ben Wishaw’ young composer apprenticing himself to Broadbent’s cantankerous old master, Halle Berry’s 70’s investigative journalist uncovering a conspiracy at Hugh Grant’s nuclear power plant. A futuristic tale of oppression and genetically modified servants, and a even further futuristic, post-fall tribal Tom Hanks helping an outsider find a satellite uplink. And that’s only the half of it.

Oh, and in all of these stories, Hugo Weaving is evil. Oooh, that Weaving.

Now, Cloud Atlas is not only biting off more than most films could chew, it’s biting off more than most ten hour mini-series could chew. While that does leave some of the stories within the story as perhaps a little under-served, some skilful editing, direction and a clutch of really great acting performances means that Cloud Atlas pulls off a very high percentage of the stunts it attempts.

For a film that is, in your boring linear Earthling time, pretty damn long, it really doesn’t feel it, whipping by at a grand old pace helped, no doubt, by its very frequent swapping of narrative focus. In fact my only main technical bone to pick with the execution of the film is also partly its strength. The effects, make up and prosthetics used to give the actors such a wide range of looks and characters is quite often breathtakingly well done, with actors occasionally looking completely, convincingly unrecognisable. On other, thankfully rarer, occasions, it’s done so badly that its presumably an elaborate practical joke, particularly everything in Future-Korea, which is borderline racist in its hamfistedness.

The very things that make Cloud Atlas such an interesting and unique cinematic experience are also the very things that ensure it can’t be an unqualified success. While admittedly it does carry off it’s sharp changes in narrative tone far more often than seems reasonably possible, there’s still too many times where it’s either disorienting or just plain weird, which is never a pleasant experience for an audience.

That said, it’s certainly the most unique, grandiose and lavish experiment you’ll see in a cinema this year, and possibly this decade. There’s surely a broad base of appeal for that, no matter your opinion of the central (let’s face it) gimmick of the film. If you do find your teeth set on edge by what is, I suppose, the logical conclusion of the thankfully somewhat abated in recent years fractured narrative technique, then this could we be three hours of torture, but it’ll also be visually appealing, well written and well performed torture, and a torture that covers so many different styles of torture that you’ll probably like at least some of the torture strands so much that it won’t feel too torture-y. I must stop writing torture so much, it’s like I’m in the Bush Administration.</CUTTING EDGE SATIRE>

Overall, I have to say I enjoyed Cloud Atlas, and found its unique narrative bouncing to be an engaging exercise in film-making. This is certainly not to say that it pulls off every move that it tries, more to say that I’m happy that there are film-makers willing to make these moves. It was a big gamble, and for me it pays off although given how much it’s pushing against conventional narrative, and given the only vaguely explained rationale for going through these narratives, I can’t really blame anyone for deciding it’s not for them and giving it a wide berth. Box office numbers would seem to suggest that this is what came to pass, but I’d urge those to at least give this a chance on rental or streaming, where it’s perhaps a little less daunting in scope from the comfort of your armchair. You might just like it.