Tuesday 6 August 2013

Striking Distance


The press conference has barely begun when the idea to punch Bruce Willis pops fully-formed into my head. 

It’s one of the hottest days of the year and I’m lightly broiling on a boat on the Thames with about 50 other writers and media whores, attending the press junket for his new action/comedy RED 2.  I’m secretly hoping Willis will make an entrance by abseiling onto the boat from Hungerford Bridge and crashing through the window, after all they shouldn’t have put him on the water if they didn’t want him to make waves.  I know it’s highly unlikely though and console myself with a beer and a brownie.

Dame Helen Mirren and Weeds star Mary-Louise Parker are already in attendance, Dame Helen working the assembled hacks like a pro, killing time while we wait for Brucie to make his entrance by kicking off a debate about the impending birth of the Royal Baby. 

The Royal Waters had broken that morning and, right up until that moment, Bateaux London’s Symphony riverboat had been a sweaty little oasis of sanity away from the Kay Burley-led hysteria that gripped the UK’s media.

“We need more Queens!” the Dame opines before inviting suggestions for names.  There’s a few Victorias and Dianas but disappointingly no one suggests “Helen!”  The general consensus is that it’ll be a girl.  And human, as opposed to some Lovecraftian nightmare.  Later that day the baby is revealed to be a boy.  Which still doesn’t preclude him from making a very fine queen one day.

About 4 minutes after Mirren and Parker arrive, “the legend that is Bruce Willis” swaggers in to enthusiastic applause and whooping, trademark wry smirk firmly in place, and our host kicks things off by asking Mary-Louise Parker, bizarrely, if she actually drove the 2CV her character commandeers in one of the film’s lengthy chase scenes.

I’m a horrible driver and I don’t drive at all really.  Ever.” says Parker.

“And the one scene where they let me drive or asked me to drive, I drove straight into a wall. 

“And the director put it on a loop and watched it over and over again.  So no, they don’t trust me to even pull out of a parking spot.”

It’s around the time our host insists on showing off his schoolboy French by pronouncing 2CV “deux chevaux” and sharing with us his knowledge of the peculiarities of the Citroen’s gear shift that I start thinking about decking Hollywood royalty.

Parker has nothing but love for Willis though.

I love doing any scenes with him so, um, that’s, you know, the best part of the movie,” she says.  “But my character’s sorta helpless at action, she’s not really…she sorta fails miserably at it. 

“And it was fun to be bad at it, that was the fun part.”

The desire to punch Willis bubbles to the surface of my brain unbidden and ricochets around inside my skull, gathering speed, momentum. 

The schoolboy French is being deployed again, this time directed at Helen Mirren whose character infiltrates a psychiatric ward by masquerading as the Virgin Queen, Dame Helen being asked if it’s now “de rigueur” for her to have a regal moment in every film?

I can’t remember how that came about actually,” says Mirren.  “I think the writers had written, they thought it was very funny of course, that I would pretend to be the Queen.

“I think that I suggested it should be Elizabeth the First, who I have played, and I thought that would be a funnier take than being the present queen.  So, um, one forgets how these things come about, but certainly the writers thought it would be hysterical to see me play the Queen.

It’s not that I want to punch Bruce Willis!  God, no.  It’s just that…he’s Bruce Freaking Willis!  And he looks pretty damn good for a 58-year-old!

Vanity plays a big part in my staying in shape,” says Willis.  “I have to think about the food that I eat.  And I also have to think about lifting and moving around…ah, the weights.  Barbells.  Things like that.

He’s got 20 years on me and he’s in better shape than I’ve ever been but still…he’s only sitting about 30 feet away!  Once I get up and move into the aisle, I’ll have a clear run.  8, maybe 9, steps and a lunge is all it would take.

I don’t do that many stunts,” Willis shares.  “I would do the stunts if I could.  But I’m not allowed to ever, EVER…be hurt.

Let’s face it; this is the only chance I’m ever liable to get to take down one of the biggest action stars in the world!  Who wouldn’t think about it, fantasise about it?

“This movie has expanded from the first,” says Mirren.  “They go to incredible locations, that they didn’t write me into, like Paris.” 

She continues: “The film is bigger in a sense and I think you always learn, that’s the great advantage of coming to do a second one, you can learn from the first and what was so wonderful about the first was these wonderful, fully realised quirky characters and the comedy and the romance and the action. 

“And that’s a very difficult balance - to make a film that has genuine love/romance in it, that has great comedy and has a lot of action in it.  And that’s the ball we try to keep in the air all the time through this movie. 

“But at the same time, playing it with great seriousness, if you like.  It’s not tongue-in-cheek.  All of these characters are very serious about who they are and what they do.  I think it’s just faster and funnier and a little more furious than the first one.”

Willis obviously agrees. 

“When we did the first film it was very ambitious; it’s not often that they try to make a film that has romance, action and comedy all in the same film. 

“I always thought that one part of it was gonna be kicked out but it stayed in and it all stayed in.  So this time the writers have just added more romance, more action, more comedy.” 

Who am I kidding?  I’m not going to punch Bruce Willis.  I love Bruce Willis.  Always have.  Not that keen on his politics - he banged the drum for Dubya, for God’s sake! - but he’s rarely made a film I haven’t enjoyed.  ‘Cept maybe Cop Out.  No one liked Cop Out. 

And he obviously had a ball reuniting with the cast of the first RED. 

“When we all got back together,” says Willis.  “I think it was just about two years in between or a year and a half in between, but when we started back to work, it was as if we had just seen each other the day before.  Everybody was already in character and showed up ready to work.

“I like to work in ensemble casts, I like to work with this group of actors especially.  I think we were very fortunate to get Tony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Byung-hun Lee and the cast we did the first film with. 

“All we try to do, all day long, is just make each other laugh and hopefully that gets on the screen and you’ll find something funny as well.  I like working with all these actors, I’m a big fan of Sir Anthony Hopkins.”

The problem with press junkets are that no one wants to ask anything controversial, no one wants to ask anything that’s going to rock the boat.  We all want to be asked back so no one’s willing to stick their neck out and ask anything interesting.  No one asks Mary-Louise Parker about her recent statements about her intentions to quit acting because the Internet’s nasty, instead someone asks if she likes the coat she got to wear in Paris.  No one dares ask Willis about that appearance on The One Show, even if it’s on all of our minds, though he is asked about his singing career and if he has plans to revive it or to take on a musical role?

Fortunately not,” says Willis.  “I don’t…I shout in key.  There are a lot of really good singers in the world and I’m really happy to let them handle all the heavy lifting.

“I just can’t stand to hear the sound of my own voice when I sing.  It really is…excruciating.”

Which is refreshing coming from a man who would’ve had a UK Number One but for the Pet Shop Boys.  So we’re not going to see a Jean Valjean, a Sweeney Todd or even a Captain Von Trapp any time soon from Willis.  But after a quarter of a century as Hollywood’s premier action hero, his performance in RED 2 is still fresh, still fun.

Well, I try not to take it very seriously,” says Willis.  “It’s just a difficult thing if you take yourself seriously or if you take the film seriously.  All I’m ever just trying to be is entertaining and the action sequences and things like that are just part of a certain kind of entertainment, not my favourite. 

“I like to try to make people laugh more than I like to fight in films.

Notorious for not enjoying doing press, the boat is easing towards the dock when Willis makes his feelings plain. 

“My favourite part of making films is the actual day-to-day process of getting in front of the camera and trying to make it seem lifelike, trying to make it funny, trying to make it romantic and all this (the press & publicity) is, I know, a good part of films.  It’s the sales, the explanation of how we made the movie or how we didn’t, but my favourite part is actually making the movie and going to work every day.”

And with that, the boat docks and he’s gone, the wry smirk playing across his face, and as the assembled press pack scurry to retrieve their recording devices, I idly wonder if I have time to blag another beer before going ashore.  

David Watson


Exclusive to this blog as no one wanted to take the chance on publishing a piece where I fantasise about punching the biggest action star on the planet






The Iceman

The killer is huge, 6'4 1/2", 300 pounds of hard muscle running to fat.  Dark, almost black, eyes stare implacably at you from under heavy, sleepy lids.  There’s no mercy, no feeling in those eyes; he’s a black hole sucking the life right out of the room.  He’s a shark, a predator, a pure sociopath and serial killer, a sadist who found an outlet for his perverted desires by murdering over 100 people as a contract killer for the New York Mafia. 

Watching the infamous series of groundbreaking HBO documentaries from 1991 to 2002 on Richard Kuklinski is a sobering, chilling experience.  Balding, with a neatly trimmed goatee beard, he’s softly spoken and slightly breathless, a man who never needs to raise his voice.  Speaking in a matter-of-fact monotone, he recounts in conversation with a largely unseen psychiatrist the details of a career in murder that included stabbing, shooting, beating, strangling, poisoning and gassing his victims.

Known as ‘the Iceman’, not because of his coolness as many people thought but because he often froze his victims’ bodies to obscure their time of death, he made snuff movies of some of his victims, setting up time-lapse cameras to record the horror as he fed them, alive, to starved rats.  He was implicated in the murders of union leader Jimmy Hoffa and gangster Roy DeMeo.  He killed for money but also for pleasure.  He killed people for the sport and he killed people for the practice – experimenting with different methods, refining them, perfecting them.  He killed men, he killed women, he killed the innocent and guilty alike, his only moral restriction being that he probably wouldn’t kill a child.  Any film about him should be a horror show, a grand guignol, soaked in blood and perversity; it should make your skin crawl, should chill you to the bone.  Which is why Ariel Vroman’s pedestrian true-crime thriller The Iceman, based on Anthony Bruno’s best-selling biography is such a disappointment, turning a genuinely terrifying American bogeyman into an antihero with an admirable work ethic.

Starring Hollywood nutbag de jour Michael Shannon as Kuklinski, the film is content to follow the well-trodden path of Hollywood Mafia hitman movies – the rise and fall of a ruthless, efficient but honourable killer (no women, no kids remember) juggles everyday family life with murdering a lot of people before ultimately being brought down by hubris and the betrayal of a stinking rat.  Cliché-ridden and by-the-numbers, the film tones down Kuklinski’s excesses (none of the really horrible murders make it in or the fact that he used to choose random victims in the street as practice kills) charting his rise during the ‘70s and ‘80s from smalltime pornographer to terrifying contract killer as he carves out his own slice of the American Dream, marrying nice Catholic girl Deborah (Winona Ryder) and starting a family in suburban New Jersey as he commutes to the city doing hits for paranoid, psychotic mobster Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta, who else?) and forming a bizarre partnership with ice cream van-driving assassin Chris Evans.

As ever, Shannon gives his customary bug-eyed loon Marmite performance, which is somehow far less terrifying than his recent turn as foul-mothed, inventively sweary, Delta Gamma sorority sister Rebecca Martinson.  An intelligent sadist who, once caged, was genuinely interested in what allowed him to commit such horrific acts, collaborating on several documentaries and working with psychologists and profilers in an attempt to understand his bizarre pathology, The Iceman turns Kuklinski into a lumbering, near mute thug with intimacy issues.  Ryder meanwhile is bland in the thankless role of Kuklinski’s put-upon wife while Ray Liotta is just Ray Liotta again only more so.  There are nice turns however from Stephen Dorff as Kuklinski’s jailed paedophile brother and David Schwimmer (yup, Ross from Friends) as a doomed smalltime gangster.  Perhaps the best performance in the film however comes from Captain America himself, Chris Evans, whose Vietnam veteran turned ice cream assassin is as genuinely disturbing as his real-life counterpart Robert Prongay.

A two-star timewaster of a crime film, there is nothing as chilling in this film as the moment Kuklinski tells Dr Park Dietz in the 2002 documentary not to like him too much as he’s not a nice guy, The Iceman earns its extra star for a scene where sleazeball photographer James Franco weeps and begs on his knees for his life before being executed by Shannon.  Not enough films feature a sniveling Franco beg for mercy before being shot in the face.  

David Watson


Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genres:
Crime, Drama, Thriller
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 46 minutes
Certificate:
15
UK Release Date:
Friday 7th June 2013
Rating:
3/5
Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/the-iceman-review/

Byzantium

Forget the teen angst of the Twilight saga’s emasculated sparkle fairies or the curiously sexless (despite being clad in sprayed-on rubber!) werewolf-battling Matrix-rejects of the Underworld series – vampire tales are all about sex!  And not the wholesome “true love waits” sex of Stephanie Meyer.  No, we’re talking about nasty, animal hungers, of lust and desire, obsession and death, the illicit appetites that reek of corruption and twisted sexuality. A dark, erotic, feminist twist on his homoerotic 1994 Interview With The VampireNeil Jordan’s Byzantium is a sensual, adult fairytale that nods to the gender politics of Angela Carter (who also inspired Jordan’s best film, The Company Of Wolves) while framing the eternal battle of the sexes in a wintry, seaside-set vampire movie.
16-going-on-200, Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) is stuck forever as a teenager, endlessly trying to come to terms with her immortality by repeatedly writing, then destroying, the story of her life, the pages of which she throws to the winds.  Soulful and lonely, she feeds only on the elderly who are ready to die and grant her permission to kill them.  Masquerading as her older sister, her mother Clara (Gemma Arterton) is her only companion, a stripper/prostitute-cum-avenging angel who kills and feeds on the violent, abusive men she encounters.  Living secretly in the shadows, constantly moving, constantly on the run, the pair are hunted by a dark brotherhood of male vampires who are determined to destroy them.
After Clara kills one of their number, the women are forced to flee, washing up in the dilapidated seaside town that was there home two centuries before where Clara seduces and manipulates the grieving Noel (Daniel Mays) into offering them sanctuary in his decaying boarding house, Byzantium, which the entrepreneurial Carla promptly turns into a brothel, killing the town’s pimps and offering their girls a safe working environment.
Lost in her own memories, Eleanor enters into a tentative relationship with the terminally ill Frank (Caleb Landry Jones) which may at last offer her some respite from her solitary existence.  She starts to open up, sharing her past with him, arousing in the process the suspicions of creative writing teacher (Tom Hollander) who reads Eleanor’s story and believes she may be abused and possibly disturbed.  And all the while, two enigmatic, black-clad men Darvell (Sam Riley) and Savella (Uri Gavriel) close in on the two women…
Melancholic and resolutely unglamorous, Byzantium is a darkly seductive, beautiful jewel of a film.  With the mother/daughter relationship at its heart it owes as big a debt to Catherine Cookson as it does Anne Rice, juxtaposing Clara and Eleanor’s modern-day existence with the Napoleonic Wars-era low-born Clara’s ravishment and ruin by rakish, syphilitic, sea captain Jonny Lee Miller and her subsequent descent into prostitution which forces her to give up her illegitimate child.  So far, so melodramatic.  When the promise of eternal life as one of the undead is dangled before her, she seizes it, only to find herself oppressed by the same virulent misogyny and class snobbery in the exclusively male vampire society. Rebelling, she uses her sexuality as a weapon, striking back against the abusers of women, a transgression she must be punished for by the ruling vampire patriarchy.  Often, the vampire is used in horror fiction as a metaphor for disease, for pestilence; the Middle Ages Europe’s terror of the Black Death, the Victorian fear of syphilis, the modern HIV/AIDS epidemic.  But here it’s aggressive male sexuality, as symbolised by Jonny Lee Miller’s villainous cad malignantly raping young girls and consciously spreading the Clap, that’s the disease while Arterton’s vampire is most definitely the cure.
After a few dodgy years (let’s be honest, other than The Borgias TV show has he done anything good since 1999’s The End Of The Affair), it’s good to see Neil Jordan back on form and delivering an intelligent, complex, subtle piece of cinema that credibly grounds the vampire in the modern day, the ramshackle hotel and closed season seaside setting a scruffy echo of Harry Kümel’s 1971 classic Daughters of Darkness, while Moira Buffini’s brooding script emphasises the ordinariness and humanity of her protagonists.
The cast are terrific with Ronan delivering a delicate performance with real steel at it’s core as the eternal teen and, while Caleb Landry Jones comes across as a wan stalker and their romance is, well, anaemic, it’s fascinating watching Ronan blossom into a woman and take control of her sexuality over the course of the film without seeming to do a damn thing. While Sam Riley doesn’t have much to do other than look purposeful and ambiguous, Hollander and Mays steal practically every scene they’re in and Jonny Lee Miller makes a wonderfully repellent boo-hiss villain, the film belongs to Arterton who delivers an earthy, mischievous performance, her beautiful monster grabbing our empathy even while she’s often profoundly unlikable.
A seductive, stylish, beautiful slice of horror, Byzantium stakes it’s claim as a vampire movie with heart.

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/byzantium-review/

Humour is so over-rated! - The Hangover Part 3


Don’t you find humour is such an over-rated quality in comedy?  Thank God then for Todd Phillips who’s managed to free us from the tyranny of laughter, nailing the coffin lid down on his Hangover trilogy with the anti-comedy The Hangover Part 3, a film able to boast fewer chuckles than Claude Lanzmann’s side-splitting Shoah.

After coming off his meds (anti-psychotics surely?), accidentally decapitating a giraffe (funniest moment of the film but in all the trailers) and indirectly causing the death of his beloved father (Jeffrey Tambor), it’s clear something has to be done about drunken, sociopathic manchild Alan (Zach Galifianakis) so it’s up to the other members of the Wolfpack – Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms) and Doug (you know, the other one, Justin Bartha) – to stage an intervention and drive him to a rehab facility in Arizona. 

But once on the road, they’re waylaid by crime lord Marshall (John Goodman) who kidnaps the hapless Doug (with the cancellation of The New Normal how much worse can things get for Bartha?), threatening to kill him if the gang can’t deliver teeth-grindingly annoying, camp Asian gangster Mr Chow (Ken Jeong) who once rather unsportingly stole $21 million in gold from Marshall. 

Having escaped the Thai prison he ended up in at the end of the last film, Chow’s on the run and, as Alan is his only friend, Marshall figures if anyone can find him it’s the Wolfpack.  With just 3 days to find Chow, steal back the gold and save Doug, their quest will take them from Mexico back to Las Vegas where it all began…

Crass, crude, lazy, racist, misogynistic, homophobic and unforgivably unfunny, the Wolfpack are back!  And, just like a real hangover, The Hangover Part 3 kills your brain cells and leaves you feeling soiled.  Just to be clear, we’re not talking the good kind of hangover where you wake up with the taste of strawberries on your tongue, in a four-poster bed, next to a pneumatic Louisiana blonde with cornflower-blue eyes and a neck like spilt milk.  We’re talking about the kind of hangover where you wake up in a hedge, soaked in vomit and wee (not all of it your own), with blood on your hands, a mouth that tastes like the floor of a taxi and the vague sense that something baaaaaaaaaaad happened, something that was all your fault.  And you’d be right.  It is all your fault. 

You…we all liked The Hangover.  The first film was fun; an obnoxious slice of Frat Pack, gross-out douchebaggery that followed the misadventures of its drug-addled heroes as they desperately tried to piece together how exactly they lost the groom on his stag night, in the process striking comedy gold and becoming the most successful R-rated comedy ever made.  If it ain’t broke why bother even trying to fix it so the second film was more of the same only bigger, louder, cruder and less funny, its cultural high point being the not entirely consensual bumming of one of the gang by a Thai ladyboy.  But it still elicited a guilty giggle or two.  After all, a smoking monkey and implied male rape are always funny.  Aren’t they?  Which brings us to the trilogy’s epic conclusion and the rule of three: the third part of any trilogy sucks!  Just as the third Godfather couldn’t hold an altar candle to the original and Return of the Jedi wasn’t a patch on Star Wars, The Hangover Part 3 effectively kills off the series by destroying your fond memories of the first film.  Which does not bode well for the hugely anticipated The Human Centipede 3.

While the first film felt fresh and original, this third installment feels tired and cynical. Junking the amnesia formula which served so well in favour of a B-grade action movie plot, The Hangover Part 3 re-unites the old gang, with the notable exception of closet Phil Collins fan Mike Tyson (and who’d have thunk we’d miss the subtlety and comic timing of that lisping celebrity rapist?), but no-one’s doing this one for the love.  Todd Phillips obviously has an infinity pool to pay for and compromising photos of Bradley Cooper who looks less like an Oscar-winning actor here than a hostage. 

With his lizardy charm, Cooper could play douchebag, pussy-hound Phil in his sleep and proceeds to do just that, occasionally waking up long enough to make an exasperated WTF? face at whatever Galifianakis is doing while Helms’ uptight Stu is so marginalised the sole reason he’s in the film is to act as a plot device, enabling the Wolfpack to get their mitts on some (legal) drugs.  Which leaves all the more room for Galifianakis to shamble around, flogging his psychotic manchild schtick to death while Jeong’s shrill, offensive Chow screeches, is vaguely sexually threatening and, of course, gets his Wee Willie Winkie out again coz tiny penis jokes are always funny.  Aren’t they? 

Heather Graham’s happy hooker turns up as a now pregnant hausfrau for no real discernible reason other than to re-unite Galifianakis’ creepy Alan with the now 4-year-old baby from the first film in a scene that’s obviously meant to be heartwarming but feels just a little, well, Operation Yewtree, the film having gone out of its way in one scene to explicitly state that Alan is a sex offender, giggling “Public masturbation on a bus…” while reading aloud his own lengthy criminal record, making you want to scream at the screen: “No!  Don’t go in the tent with him!”  Which is probably the reason for the inclusion of Bridesmaids’ Melissa McCarthy who continues to milk her 15 minutes, appearing here as a conventional heterosexual love interest for Alan because, you know, he can’t be a kiddie fiddler if he’s with that chunky gal from Mike & Molly.  In fact, The Hangover Part 3 could be seen as a companion piece for Cooper’s Silver Linings Playbook, both films featuring damaged, mentally ill manchildren being saved by the love of similarly damaged women.  Screw psychiatric treatment, all you need is love!

A moronic waste of 100 minutes of your life, The Hangover Part 3 even manages to make spending $21 million dollars on hookers and blow look boring.  Pray this was the last one.  

David Watson


Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genre:
Comedy
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 40 minutes (approx.)
Certificate:
15
UK Release Date:
Wednesday 22nd May 2013
Rating:
0/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/the-hangover-part-3-review/

Anaemic crime drama Blood


In a shabby, nameless, seaside town the brutal murder of a 12-year-old girl has dark consequences for cop brothers Joe (Paul Bettany) and Chrissie Fairbairn (Stephen Graham).  After finding voyeuristic photos of the victim and other girls in his possession, the brothers quickly identify smirking local kiddie fiddler and religious nut Jason Buleigh (the excellent Ben Crompton) as the main suspect but are forced to release him due to a lack of evidence.

Egged on by their increasingly senile father Lenny (Brian Cox), a brutal retired cop given to fondly reminiscing about the good old days of vigilante justice (when if you couldn’t batter a confession out of the baddies you took them on a one-way ride out to the local estuary), Joe and Chrissie take Buleigh for a drive, intending to put the frighteners on him and fit him up.  However Joe, whose daughter is around the same age as the victim, goes too far and, in a booze-fuelled rage, beats Buleigh to death.

Desperately trying to cover their tracks, like many a noir hero before them the brothers find themselves investigating their own crime.  But when the true killers are caught, Joe and Chrissie are shattered by the realisation they’ve killed an innocent man.  Haunted by the sins of his past and tortured by guilt, Joe becomes increasingly erratic and dependent on alcohol, arousing the suspicions of their dogged, by-the-book colleague Robert (Mark Strong).

Don’t worry if you experience an overwhelming sense of déjà vu while watching director Nick Murphy’s moody, brooding, downbeat Blood.  If you think you’ve seen it all before, that’s because you have.  Based on the Beeb’s 2004 crime drama Conviction, with its dodgy cops, dark deeds and practically Biblical morality Blood is a gloomy rag bag of noir clichés and face-slappingly ludicrous plotting (would two cops really take their doolally dad, who has a habit of blabbing, out a’murdering with them?) that slims down the original 6-hour drama into a malnourished hour-and-a-half yet still manages to feel ponderous, squandering the talents of one of the best British ensembles in years.

In a triumph of casting that’s as head-scratching as the plot, Blood asks us to believe Bettany and Graham are the fraternal progeny of Cox (none of whom share a consistent accent despite being possibly three of the best actors the UK has to offer), a situation that would surely lead the three detectives to immediately deduce that Cox’s dead wife dallied with the milkman.  Similarly, their performances are as all over the shop as their accents with Bettany’s swaggering top cop descending into a twitchy, violent, guilt-wracked bundle of neuroses, Cox chewing the scenery as the old senile liability while the dependable Graham subtly underplays.  As the women in the brothers’ lives Natasha Little and Zoe Tapper are wholly superfluous but there’s strong support from Mark Strong as the cop on their case, a surprisingly good turn from Adrian Edmondson as an anxious agoraphobic witness and the skin-crawling Crompton as the doomed paedophile. 

Ultimately, despite a top-drawer cast and moody atmosphere, Blood is a plod drama that really plods.

David Watson


Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genre:
Thriller
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 32 mins
Certificate:
15
UK Release Date:
Friday 31st May 2013
Rating:
2/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/blood-review/

The Liability

A swaggering, immature waster and petty criminal, Adam (Jack O’Connell) is the titular ‘liability.’  After crashing his gangster stepfather Peter’s (Peter Mullan) car, Adam is forced to take on a little job to pay for the damage; driving the gruff, taciturn Roy (Tim Roth) on a no-questions-asked mission.

World-weary and efficient, Roy is a professional hit man on his last job.  His daughter’s getting married and he’s lost his taste for killing.  He’s looking forward to retirement but finds the chatty, enthusiastic Adam getting under his skin and, against his better judgement, agrees to show him the ropes.

The easy job becomes complicated however when a beautiful and mysterious woman (Talulah Riley) stumbles across their woodland disposal of their target, a Russian gangster, who they’re in the process of chopping up.  Roy doesn’t like leaving witnesses; the girl has got to go.  But when she escapes with a piece of incriminating evidence, Adam and Roy are forced into a deadly game of cat and mouse as the secrets behind Roy’s last job and Adam’s involvement are revealed.

A tight, blackly comic, little Brit crime thriller with two fantastic central performances from Tim Roth and Jack O'Connell, it’s almost inevitable that Craig Viveiros’ second feature film, The Liability, will be compared to Stephen Frears’ 1984 thriller The Hit in which jaded assassin John Hurt initiated eager young novice Tim Roth in the killing game.  This time round however Roth is the seasoned veteran mentoring the eager young O’Connell and while their partnership is just as deadly, it’s shot through with a dark, witty affection for it’s odd couple pairing that Frears’ po-faced The Hit never managed.   

While the script by John Wrathall holds few surprises, director Viveiros wisely eschews the temptations of Mockernee gangster movies and instead concentrates on the budding relationship between Roth and O’Connell’s mismatched pair.  Roth is as reliably great as ever as the quiet, laconic, business-like hitman Roy while O'Connell is wonderful as the mercurial, irritating Adam.  Always the best thing in whatever he’s in, O’Connell has charisma to burn and makes the brash, cocky chav Adam a likable, vulnerable protagonist.  There’s a genuine warmth and humour to his relationship with Roth, their scenes together really sing, and they're ably supported by Talulah Riley on smouldering, vampish form as the not entirely innocent witness and the monstrous Peter Mullan as possibly the vilest stepfather you’ve seen outside of a Grimm fairytale. 

A fun, violent, freewheeling road/buddy/hit man hybrid movie, The Liability is a quirky, cheerfully amoral antidote to the dodgy geezers having it large and playing Charlie Big Potatoes in your average sub-par Guy Ritchie or Nick Love knock-off.

David Watson


Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genres:
Action, Thriller
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 22 minutes
Certificate:
15
UK Release Date:
Friday 17th May
Rating:
4/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/the-liability/

It shouldn’t happen to a vet… - Upstream Color

Upstream Color

Imagine for a moment gentle reader that you’re on holiday.  You’re on holiday in Switzerland.  You’re having a rare old time; it’s a veritable non-stop orgy of yodelling, fondue and Toblerones. 

Then, deep underground at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, two particles collide, tearing a hole in the fabric of space-time, in the very fabric of reality, sucking you into a parallel universe where Little England’s favourite Sunday night veterinarian, James Herriot, is plying his trade not in Yorkshire but in Texas where America’s Greatest Living Filmmaker, Terrence Malick, hires him to write a paranoid sci-fi love story.  With cute pigs. 

While that’s not the story behind writer/director Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, the beautiful, mesmerising, meandering follow-up to 2008’s hugely overrated, low-fi sci-fi Primer, it might have been more fun.

Described by Sundance’s publicists as “A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives,” Carruth’s Upstream Color strives for ambiguity with a would-be existential romance that asks all the expected, obvious questions about love, memory, identity and freewill beloved of American Indie filmmakers while stirring in a dash of tasteful Cronenberg-style body horror to keep things fresh.   

An unscrupulous con-man (Thiago Martins) cultivates bizarrely narcotic maggots which he force-feeds to our heroine Kris (Amy Seimetz), drugging and hypnotising her, emptying her bank accounts and causing the loss of her job, leaving her infested with psychotropic, telepathic worms which she tries to cut from her own body before an enigmatic scientist/vet (Andrew Sensening) removes and transplants them into a cute little pig he keeps in an enclosure with her porcine friends.

Trying to rebuild her shattered life, Kris meets and falls in love with Jeff (Shane Carruth), whose body bears similar scars to her own and may just be a victim of the same weird experiments as her.  As their relationship develops, their memories and identities melt and merge, causing them to descend into fear and paranoia and forcing Kris to take drastic action.

Never as clever or fascinating as it thinks it is or as tricky or complex as its rapturous reviews would suggest, Upstream Color is an elliptical, deliberately obtuse, woozily pretty film that, despite its sophomoric pretentiousness, succeeds in intriguing without being anywhere near as involving as it should be. 

Seimetz is as wonderful here as she was in Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way To Die or her numerous mumblecore outings, her Kris is vulnerable, damaged, hesitant, courageous, while the surprisingly charismatic Carruth acquits himself well as her spiky suitor, the two making an affecting, edgily sweet couple whose hesitant romance you want to see succeed.  Less successful however is Carruth’s sci-fi elements which lend Upstream Color a heavy-handed quasi-religiosity not unlike Malick’s recent films (The Tree Of Life, To The Wonder).  An undeniably hypnotic, technically brilliant (it’s one of the most densely edited films you’ll see this year), aesthetically gorgeous, sensual piece of cinema, Upstream Color also somehow manages to be ponderous, a little too smug, too impressed with itself.  An exercise in cod-profundity. 

Bold, baffling, enthralling, frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying, Upstream Color is a willfully obtuse piece of work that seems determined to make you feel something, anything, despite itself.  And if you don’t fall in love with Seimetz, you’ll definitely fall for those pigs.

David Watson


Written & directed by:
Shane Carruth
Produced by:
Shane Carruth, Casey Gooden, Ben LeClair, Scott Douglass
Starring:
Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth
Genre:
Sci-fi, Romance, Indie
Language:
English
Runtime:
96 minutes
Rating:
2/5
Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/upstream-color/