filmthug movies, reviews & rants

Tuesday, 6 August 2013

Easy as A, B, C… - The ABCs Of Death

Let’s get it out of the way right now; as a film, The ABCs Of Death is virtually impossible to review. Principally because it isn’t a film – it’s a mini-film festival with all the strengths, weaknesses, quality, tone and taste issues inherent in such an event.

So, The ABCs Of Death gives us 26 short films by 28 of the most interesting, inventive and talented directors (almost exclusively male – the likes of the Twisted Twins, Jennifer Lynch and Elisabeth Fies are notable by their absence) currently working in the horror genre from 15 countries around the world. Each film costs around five grand and lasts around five minutes with no space to breathe between segments and there’s no thematic framing story or link other than that of the alphabet and the child’s building blocks floating in blood that act as titles for each episode - oh, and each film must involve at least one death, often the more splatterific the better. There’s slasher movies, monster movies, revenge movies, torture-porn, sci-fi, CGI, Japanese pink films, puppet films and claymation starring killer robots, Nazi stripper foxes, murderous toilets, flatulent schoolgirls, vampire hunting mobs, Man’s Best Friend, Russ Meyer-esque Amazons, doomed samurai, innocent ducks and Death himself.

Wildly uneven, often childishly crude - there’s almost as much farting, excrement, and gouting semen as there is blood, guts and gore – the films themselves are something of a mixed bag; some gritty, some surreal, some stunning, some stunningly bad. Some, most notably Kaare Andrews dystopian sci-fi V is for Vagitus are begging for a big-budget, feature-length remake. Others, like Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s hilarious comedy of errors Q is for Quack (which involves two men, two guns and one duck) or Timecrimes director Nacho Vigalondo’s poignant A is for Apocalypse are simply good-natured fun while Ti West’s M is for Miscarriage is a supremely bad taste joke. Though modern horror feminist icon Angela Bettis disappoints with her spider’s eye view E is for Exterminate, Britain’s own Jake West surprises with S is for Speed, an ambitious, adrenaline-fuelled Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! pastiche that owes as much to Ambrose Bierce and Ingmar Bergman as it does Russ Meyer.

Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Z is for Zetsumetsu may contain ABCs’ most deliberately, shockingly, transgressively calculated image (rest assured - naked jiggling breasts are involved) but for sheer balls out, jaw-dropping nastiness that makes you want to wash your brain out with bleach, the masturbation contest at the heart of Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto’s L is for Libido may be the most unsettling, upsetting exploration of the dark side of human desire since Srdjan Spasojevic’s (who contributes the bloody R is for Removed) A Serbian Film. Perhaps the angriest, most overtly political (and the only truly feminist) film however is the brilliant, stunning X is for XXL by French director Xavier Gens, a graphic critique of body image, self-loathing and society’s obsession with thinness and traditional concepts of beauty.

The most satisfying segment though is Deadgirl director Marcel Sarmiento’s D is for Dogfight, a breathtaking, brutal, visceral and beautiful tale of love and loyalty that’s as heartwarming as it is disturbing; more A Boy And His Dog than Man Bites Dog (though it does feature a man biting a dog!).

Like a Sesame Street segment for serial killers (think a coked up Cookie Monster with a chainsaw carving his ABCs into Elmo), how much you enjoy The ABCs Of Death may depend on just how sick your sense of humour may be but the beauty of the concept is its diversity. It doesn’t matter if you hate one film, chances are you’ll like the next. Or the one after. Or the one after that. Hugely ambitious and gleefully boundary-pushing, The ABCs Of Death is destined to be a late-night cult classic.

David Watson

Directed by:

Written by:

Kaare Andrews, Simon Barrett, Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani, Adrián García Bogliano, Lee Hardcastle, Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Simon Rumley, Jon Schnepp, Srdjan Spasojevic, Nacho Vigalondo, Dimitrije Vojnov, Ti West and Yudai Yamaguchi

Produced by:

Julie Lind-Holm and Petter Lindblad

Starring:

Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Lucy Clements, Dallas Malloy, Erik Aude, Kyra Zagorsky and Iván González

Genre:

Horror

Language:

English

Runtime:

2 hours 4 minutes

Certificate:

UK Release Date:

Friday 26^th April

Rating:

4/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/the-abcs-of-death/

The People Vs…hang on, wait a minute... - The Look Of Love

“My name is Paul Raymond,” boasts Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) in the kitsch ‘70s title sequence of Michael Winterbottom’s The Look Of Love, “Welcome to my world of erotica!” What follows, despite this bold assertion and the acres of nubile female flesh on show, is 100 of the most unerotic minutes you’ve spent in the cinema since that screening of Schindler’s List you accidentally took Viagra before, as Michael Winterbottom sucks all the fun out of a life of sex, drugs, philandering, greed and tragedy in order to serve up Knowing Me, Knowing Nude: Alan Partridge’s Boobs and Bolivian Flake Adventure.

Reuniting for the fourth time with director Michael Winterbottom, Alan Partridge once again delivers the same performance he did as Tony Wilson in Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People or as Steve Coogan in Winterbottom’s The Trip, playing pornographer, theatre impresario, property tycoon and self-styled ‘King of Soho’ Paul Raymond as essentially a boring, self-absorbed cracker of painfully bad jokes. All that’s missing is Rob Brydon’s awful impersonations. Beginning in 1992 with a shattered Raymond mourning the death of beloved daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots) and watching a TV profile of himself on video, we flash back to the black and white (literally) ‘50s and are off on a whirlwind tour of Raymond’s life and times as he spends the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s building an empire based on selling women’s wobbly bits through strip clubs, theatre farces and jazz mags, in the process cheating on common-as-muck wife Jean (Anna Friel) with posh glamour model and vicar’s daughter Fiona Richmond (Tamsin Egerton), having threesomes with models and showgirls and snorting blizzards of cocaine with daughter Debbie before her inevitable and tragic drug overdose and death and his retreat from the public eye.

A glib, superficial retread of Milos Forman’s The People Vs. Larry Flynt that lacks that film’s depth, intelligence and humour, The Look Of Love never really knows what it wants to be. Constantly chopping between tones and styles, one minute giving us larger-than-life Carry On-style caricature, the next straight bio-pic, Winterbottom never allows us to get to know or care about his characters. His vision of Raymond as a Midas-like figure gaining the world but losing his soul is rather soulless and, while light on laughs, feels like it’s played for laughs. It doesn’t help that almost every significant male role is played by a British comic actor, all pitching their performances at the end of the pier with David Walliams good fun as Soho’s resident naughty vicar, Stephen Fry as a Lord Melchett-esque barrister and Matt Lucas shockingly awful in his one scene as the legendary Divine. Also terrible is Inbetweener Simon Bird who plays Debbie’s husband (the bloke who wrote the Shake n’ Vac jingle) although a gleefully obnoxious Chris Addison steals every scene he’s in as Dave Lee Travis impersonator and coke fiend scud book editor, Tony Power.

While Steve Coogan once again plays Alan Partridge, this time with exposed chest hair and a fur coat, the best performances in the film come from the women at its heart. Anna Friel hasn’t had a part this good in years and tears into it like it’s Kobe beef, her Jean is a funny, ferocious perma-tanned cougar while Tamsin Egerton is sexy and smart as that most wholesome of British sexpots, Fiona Richmond, and she and her pert, frequently displayed bottom, are two of the best things about the film though Imogen Poots once again dazzles as Raymond’s indulged and tragic daughter Debbie, bringing a wounded bunny vulnerability and real pathos to a role that ill serves the real Debbie. While she may not have been much of a singer and daddy may have bankrolled a show for her, there was a lot more to the real Debbie than just nepotism. By all accounts she was one tough, capable, foul-mouthed cookie, running her father’s publishing empire while battling breast cancer and her own demons. But Winterbottom and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh instead opt to portray her as a talentless spoiled brat, forever trying to be the equal of her father. The real Debbie would probably have had their balls for breakfast for such a thin sketch of her.

And there lies the problem with The Look Of Love; it’s all surface gloss. While he did have a fondness for threesomes, Raymond himself was far from the freewheeling, free-spending showman Coogan plays; he was by nature something of a prude and was a notorious miser, obsessively buying up Soho property while often refusing to pay staff at his magazines. Perhaps the scene that comes closest to capturing the real Raymond is the uncomfortable meeting with the illegitimate son Derry (Liam Boyle) he abandoned as a baby and never formally acknowledged. As he shows off his Ringo Starr-designed swinging bachelor pad to the nervous young man, it’s obvious that Raymond doesn’t have a clue what to say to his son but also doesn’t care. He’s just not interested. Ultimately, despite all the showgirls, all the sex, all the coke, what really gave Raymond the horn was money and its miserly pursuit, something the film never really gets to grips with preferring to portray him as, well, Alan Partridge with a libido.

The Look Of Love is a panto version of Paul Raymond’s life that Raymond himself would be hard pressed to recognise.

David Watson

Directed by:

Michael Winterbottom

Written by:

Matt Greenhalgh

Produced by:

Melissa Parmenter

Starring:

Imogen Poots, Stephen Fry, Anna Friel, Steve Coogan, Tamsin Egerton, Matt Lucas and Craig Izzard

Genres:

Comedy, Drama

Language:

English

Runtime:

1 hour 41 minutes

Certificate:

UK Release Date:

Friday 26^th April

Rating:

2/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/the-look-of-love-2/

Rebellion (L'Ordre et la Morale)

In the nearly two decades since his blistering debut La Haine, director Mathieu Kassovitz has probably become more famous for his acting role as the quirky love interest of goofy, lovable stalker Audrey Tatou in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie than for films like head-scratching potboiler The Crimson Rivers, his ropey US debut Gothika or the frankly stinking $70 million flop Babylon A.D. So it’s refreshing to see him return to form with Rebellion, his earnest, uncompromising account of a little known and shameful episode in recent French colonial relations.

In 1988, with French internal politics divided between the left and right over the Presidential elections, a group of indigenous Kanak separatists attack and seize a police station on the small French colony of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, in the process killing three policeman and taking a further twenty-six hostage.

Assigned to resolve the incident by incumbent French President Francois Mitterand, anti-terrorism expert Captain Phillipe Legorjus (Mathieu Kassovitz) and his team travel from Paris to the island to track down the separatists, defuse the situation and secure the release of the hostages through peaceful negotiations with separatist leader Alphonse (Iabe Lapacas). However Legorjus finds his efforts increasingly frustrated by the bullying military who harass and repress the local populace, inflaming their anger.

As Legorjus slowly gains the trust of the separatists and works to find a peaceful solution to the crisis, back home the rivalry between the left-wing Mitterand and his right-wing opponent Prime Minister Jacques Chirac intensifies. With public opinion swaying in favour of Chirac who’s calling for a swift, brutal resolution, Legorjus finds himself in a desperate race against time to avert the inevitable tragedy…

Taut, tense and possibly his angriest, most satisfying film since La Haine, Kassovitz’s Rebellion is a searing indictment of French politics, attitudes and society. Based on the memoirs of the real Captain Legorjus, the film is something of a labour of love for Kassovitz who worked for several years to win the trust and consent of the families of the nineteen dead Kanaks killed in the uprisingly. It’s also timely given that New Caledonia is once again pushing for independence and will be the subject of referendum next year.

Boldly opening and closing with the bloody aftermath of the French raid on the separatists, a shell-shocked Legorjus numbly walking through violent scenes of carnage as French soldiers beat and summarily execute Kanak prisoners, Kassovitz’s film pulls few punches, exposing the casual racism, bureaucracy, compromises, game-playing and political expediency that will lead to bloodshed. Given that we know from the first shot that events are going to end in tears, the focus of Rebellion instead becomes the morality of the principals, particularly the honorable, increasingly frantic, Legorjus who desperately tries to avert the tragedy he knows is coming.

While it’s overlong and lacks subtlety, Kassovitz’s Rebellion is a powerful, intelligent political drama that’s quietly furious.

David Watson

Directed by:

Mathieu Kassovitz

Written by:

Mathieu Kassovitz, Benoît Jaubert and Pierre Geller

Produced by:

Mathieu Kassovitz and Christophe Rossignon

Starring:

Mathieu Kassovitz, Iabe Lapacas, Malik Zidi, Alexandre Steiger, Daniel Martin and Christophe Rossignon

Genres:

Action, Drama, History

Language:

French

Runtime:

2 hours 15 minutes

Certificate:

UK Release Date:

Friday 19^th April 2013

Rating:

4/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/rebellion-lordre-et-la-morale/

Olympus Has Fallen - Rise Of The Heid-Stabber!

Olympus Has Fallen

Rise Of The Heid-Stabber!

When the most secure, impregnable building in the Free World, the White House, is attacked and easily captured by an army of ruthless North Korean terrorists and the U.S. President (constipated Robert Redford-impersonator Aaron Eckhart) is taken hostage by their vicious leader, Kang (Rick Yune), who’s intent on single-handedly destroying South Korea and kicking off World War 3, the fate of the world rests on the broad, manly shoulders of incongruously Scottish, disgraced Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) who’s still haunted by his failure to save the First Lady (an all too brief Ashley Judd) in the freak Christmas car accident (ho, ho, ho!) that opens the film.

While statesman-like Speaker of the House Morgan Freeman (played by Morgan Freeman. And just how does Aaron Eckhart get to be the Man when Morgan Freeman is in the same party?) dithers and the sympathetic Head of the Secret Service Angela Bassett and douchebag General Robert Forster clash over how best to handle the crisis (Forster wants to send in the troops while Bassett wants to let Big Gerry do his thang), the bodies start piling up and it’s up to Mike to take the fight to the terrorists, rescue the Prez and save the world (or at least the USA) from nuclear annihilation. But the countdown to Armageddon is already ticking…

So jaw-droppingly, astonishingly, blood-splattering violent that practically every red-blooded, red meat-eating male in the audience will have to hastily cross their legs in embarrassment and place a coat or bag in their lap to hide the mahogany they’re sporting, Olympus Has Fallen is dumb, trashy, hugely entertaining, ultra-violent fun. Sure, it’s also shockingly xenophobic but the North Koreans are everyone’s current bogeymen of choice and the dirty S.O.B.s do callously gun down a patriotic American German Shepherd (along with much of the District of Columbia) during their attack on the White House so, you know, screw ‘em! It’s a wonder they didn’t try to barbecue and eat the dog right there in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue! These scumbags deserve to get their coupons chibbed* by Big Gerry Butler!

Practically every review you read of Olympus Has Fallen will have one thing in common – it will compare Antoine Fuqua’s muscular slaughter-fest to John McTiernan’s 1988 pared-down, stripped-to-the-bone, action classic Die Hard. It’s Die Hard they’ll tell you, in the White House!

They’re not wrong.

With its indestructible one-man killing machine taking on an army of evil foreign terrorists, Olympus Has Fallen does indeed owe a huge debt to Bruce Willis’ finest hour (or 2 hours 11 minutes if you want to pick nits). But it owes a much larger debt to the Steven Seagal-starring Die Hard knock-off, Under Siege where ship’s cook (and former SEAL) Seagal is the indestructible one-man killing machine, aided only by a big-boobed stripper with bigger beetle eyebrows, who must take on an army of mercenaries/terrorists who have taken over his battleship with the express intention of nuking Hawaii. Throw in a pinch of In The Line Of Fire and a scoop of Team America and you’ve got almost the perfect Saturday night slice of movie wish fulfillment for the modern emasculated male. In fact, possibly the only way Olympus Has Fallen could be improved is if it was just Gerard Butler and Jason Statham punching each other in the face for the entire two hours running time.

Far from fresh and original (the similarly-themed White House Down has lunkheaded beefcake Channing Tatum tread similar corridors) and in no way subtle, Olympus Has Fallen is stuffed full of slo-mo shots of the grubby, tattered, bullet-torn Stars ‘n’ Stripes, explosions that would make Michael Bay tumescent and a visceral, pulse-pounding air attack that results in such indiscriminate bloody carnage that it makes the opening half hour of Saving Private Ryan look like Carry On Abroad.

The supporting cast acquit themselves admirably; while Morgan Freeman is once more phoning in his customary elder statesman schtick, Eckhart makes a decent, intense President, Rick Yune is thoroughly despicable as Kang, Dylan McDermott is wonderfully slimy as Mike’s traitorous former best bud and Melissa Leo’s Defense Secretary is tough and ballsy. The same can’t be said however of the film’s other female actresses with Radha Mitchell, Ashley Judd and, most unforgivably, Angela Bassett, all criminally underused.

As untroubled by anything approaching logic and sense as he is by the terrorist horde, Butler owns the film. Despite a dodgy Mid-Atlantic accent that’s part Sean Connery and part Sheena Easton, Big Gerry is at his charismatic, tough guy best, swaggering through the film, despatching baddies left, right and centre, snapping necks, popping caps and here a stab, there a stab, everywhere a stab-stab. In fact, given the amount of enemies, Gerry viciously knives in the face, a better title for the film would have been Olympus Has Fallen: Rise of the Heidstabber! You can take the boy out of Paisley but, on the evidence of his blade work, it seems you can’t take Paisley out of the boy.

While it would be easy to dismiss Olympus Has Fallen as ridiculous, violent, jingoistic twaddle, the film’s greatest strength (other than Butler) is that it knows exactly what its audience wants and delivers. Big, dumb, loud, thrilling and shamefully entertaining, Olympus Has Fallen is the film you’ll wish the last three Die Hards had been.

* coupons chibbed = faces stabbed.

David Watson

Directed by:

Antoine Fuqua

Written by:

Katrin Benedikt and Creighton Rothenberger

Produced by:

Gerard Butler, Ed Cathell III, Mark Gill and Alan Siegel

Starring:

Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Radha Mitchell, Dylan McDermott, Aaron Eckhart and Ashley Judd

Genres:

Action, Thriller

Language:

English

Runtime:

2 hours

Certificate:

UK Release Date:

Wednesday 17^th April 2013

Rating:

4/5

Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/olympus-has-fallen/

Friday, 19 April 2013

WALL-E Saves The World - Oblivion

Oblivion

Back in 2008, audiences fell in love with a soulful, big-hearted, little trash-collecting robot named WALL-E who saved the world and the future of mankind while cleaning up humanity’s mess. Fast forward a couple of years and replace the cute little robot with Hollyweird’s favourite, toothy, couch-jumping Xenu-botherer toting a rifle that’s almost as big as him and, in essence, you’ve got TRON: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion.

60 years after an apocalyptic war with an alien invasion force known as the Scavs (short for Scavengers), mankind has been forced to abandon the battle-ravaged Earth, evacuating the remaining population to a colony on Saturn’s moon Titan, leaving behind only a skeleton crew of soldiers tasked with repairing and maintaining the security drones that protect the giant harvester machines strip mining the planet’s natural resources that are essential for humanity’s survival among the stars.

Drone repairman WALL-E, sorry, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his devoted colleague and lover Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are nearing the end of their tour of duty on the Earth’s surface and in two weeks will join the rest of the survivors on the Titan lunar colony. Jack spends his days patrolling the skies over what was once New York and repairing security drones damaged by the Scavs still hiding in Eartg’s ruins while Victoria coordinates his searches and acts as his eyes and ears. But by night Jack is plagued by dreams, fragmentary memories, of a beautiful woman (Olga Kurylenko) he’s never met. Or has he?

When the beautiful EVE, sorry, Julia (Olga Kurylenko) literally falls from the sky in a damaged spacecraft, Jack finds his very existence thrown into turmoil as he’s forced to confront some horrific truths and finds the future of humanity rests on his shoulders.

Slick, glossy and pleasingly straight-faced, Kosinski’s sci-fi epic (based on his own graphic novel) is actually a rather sombre, thoughtful, ambiguous piece of work masquerading as a Saturday night, crowd-pleasing, balls-to-the-wall action flick. Concerned as much with the unreliability of memory, niggling paranoia and the persistence of love as it is with big guns, dazzling pyrotechnics and flashy CGI, Oblivion borrows liberally from some of the most iconic science fiction films of the last 50 years (Planet Of The Apes, The Matrix, Silent Running, Moon, 2001), drawing major inspiration (and stealing chunks of plot) from WALL-E, Philip K. Dick’s brilliant short story Second Variety (filmed as the little-seen gem Screamers) and Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space novels yet still somehow managing in the process to rise above its diverse influences to deliver a bold, refreshing (if not exactly fresh) vision of our post-apocalyptic future with, for once, a truly alien threat.

As Oblivion’s everyman protagonist, Cruise is decent if a little miscast, delivering a nicely understated performance which never quite convinces as your regular working stiff. No matter how much he plays down his Messianic craziness, the Cruiser is always playing the hero even long before his Jack realises he is one. Why else would he ride around Kosinski’s stunning ruined vistas on a motorbike when he could zip around in his cool insect-like spaceship other than the fact the Cruiser likes to race motorbikes? Far better casting as Jack would have been Game Of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau who’s relegated to the secondary role of grizzled resistance fighter. Though Cruise convinces as a man who, when faced with the choice between two seemingly idyllic heterosexual relationships, would rather go to war with a malevolent alien machine intelligence. The film also features a fantastic triumvirate of female performances with the exquisite Olga Kurylenko definitely the kind of woman who’d make anyone, not just Tom, question their beliefs if she fell out of the sky on top of them while Melissa Leo is creepily cheery as Jack and Victoria’s ruthless space-bound boss. The finest performance in the film though comes from Andrea Riseborough who manages the feat of being twitchy, sexy, poised, vulnerable and ambiguous in every scene she steals.

Without wishing to reveal any of the film’s major twists (c’mon, you know from the trailer Morgan Freeman is basically phoning it in as the film’s Morpheus!), Oblivion is a little obvious, offering few surprises, and it’s never quite as clever or stirring as it wants to be but it is a jaw-droppingly gorgeous, exciting piece of pure entertainment that may just end up being the first iconic sci-fi movie of the next decade.

David Watson

Directed by:

Joseph Kosinski

Written by:

Joseph Kosinski, Arvid Nelson, Michael Arndt and Karl Gajdusek

Produced by:

Peter Chernin, Dylan Clark, Joseph Kosinski, Barry Levine and Duncan Henderson

Starring:

Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko, Andrea Riseborough, Morgan Freeman, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Lindsay Clift

Genres:

Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Language:

English

Runtime:

2 hours 6 minutes

Certificate:

12a

UK Release Date:

Wednesday 10^th April 2013

Rating:

4/5

Simon Killer - Too much Simon, not enough killing...

Simon Killer

Mind The Gap

After a traumatic break-up with his high school sweetheart and long-term girlfriend, recently graduated American student Simon (Brady Corbet) heads to Europe for the Summer to lick his wounds, get his head together and soak up some culture.

Adrift in Paris, Simon wanders the streets alone, alienated, disengaged, until he’s lured into a strip club-cum-brothel where he meets vulnerable prostitute Victoria (Mati Diop), first paying for sex then entering into a tentative romance with her.

As the two become closer, Simon hatches a dangerous scheme to blackmail Victoria’s customers. But as Simon’s plan spirals out of control and Victoria becomes increasingly needy, Simon’s genial mask of sanity slips, hinting at the callous, fledgling sociopath lurking beneath.

Beautifully shot, cold and morally ambivalent, Antonio Campos’ second feature Simon Killer is an icy, ambiguous exercise in voyeurism and manipulation that aims to leave you as alienated as its vacuous, amoral protagonist.

With his bland, all-American hipster good looks, surface charm and underlying creepy neediness Simon could be any privileged, middle class kid on a Gap year; that friendly, if boring, Mid-Western jock sat on the stool at the end of the bar after hours in O’Neill’s, that overly chatty guy at the urinal next to you with no regard for personal space or splashback, that creepy stalker haunting the fringes of the dance floor.

It’s just that instead of wandering round the Far East smoking dope, wearing tie-dyes and questioning his sexuality after a drunken fumble with a ladyboy, Simon sexually and financially exploits a Parisian hooker and then beats her half to death before heading home to Mom.

Sexually explicit but profoundly unerotic, Campos’ Simon is a portrait of disaffected, alienated, amoral youth. Callow and serious, he’s self-absorbed and humourless, impossibly seems to be having less fun than the audience and, as wonderfully played by Corbet, he’s a glib, compulsive liar and spineless coward. Simon is a fantasist, a voyeur with hidden shallows, and Corbet reflects the audience right back at themselves with his dead-eyed stare. Mati Diop as Victoria is sweet and vulnerable; she’s every privileged, middle class kid’s fantasy woman, the stereotypical fabled hooker with a heart of gold. Their doomed amour fou while predictable is undercut with a mounting sense of dread and unease.

Wintry and mesmerising without ever being engaging, Simon Killer has plenty of Simon but precious little killing and manages to make being fingered by a Parisian hooker look unexciting.

David Watson

Directed by:

Antonio Campos

Written by:

Antonio Campos, Brady Corbet and Mati Diop

Produced by:

Josh Mond and Matt Palmieri

Starring:

Brady Corbet, Mati Diop, Michaël Abiteboul, Marc Gaviard and Alexandra Neil

Genre:

Drama

Language:

English

Runtime:

1 hour 41 minutes (approx.)

Certificate:

UK Release Date:

Friday 12^th April 2013

Rating:

2/5

Far from entrancing...

Trance

Forgettable

So, you’ve just pulled off The Greatest Show On Earth with the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony…what do you do for an encore? Well, on the basis of his vacuous new ‘thriller’ Trance, if you’re knighthood refusenik Danny Boyle, it appears you may just have gone home and masturbated furiously in front of Inception and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

Fine art auctioneer and degenerate gambler Simon (James McAvoy) owes a lot of money to some very dodgy geezers. Deep in the hole, he teams up with the ruthless criminal gang led by goatish Gallic gangster Franck (Vincent Cassel) to rob his own auction house of a Goya painting worth millions of dollars. But the heist doesn’t quite go according to plan and, one bump on the noggin later, Simon wakes up with amnesia and no clue where he hid the painting.

When threats and physical coercion don’t aid Simon’s powers of recall, Franck sends him to possibly the world’s least professional hypnotherapist Dr Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) in an attempt to jog his memory. However, as Elizabeth explores the darkest recesses of Simon’s fractured subconscious in an attempt to discover the truth, the lines between obsession, love, desire and reality blur, cross following double-cross, as everyone betrays everyone else to a pounding middle-aged techno beat and Simon wonders if he can even trust himself…

A flashy, empty remake of screenwriter Joe Ahearne’s 2001 TV movie, Trance is a thriller about amnesia that induces just that; 20 minutes after you finish watching it you’ll be hard pressed to remember a damn thing about it. In the days that follow you may experience mild flashbacks. Stay away from petting zoos as the sight of a billy goat may cause Vincent Cassel’s face to swim unbidden to the surface of your subconscious. The buzz of an electric razor may force a Pavlovian exclamation of “Pubes!” This is nothing to worry about. Give it a week. You will forget.

With its gang of criminals trying to break into their victim’s mind, Trance desperately wants to be Danny Boyle’s Inception but has none of that film’s intelligence, precision or style. With its themes of obsession and the elusive, unreliability of memory, Trance would also quite like to be Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind but lacks that film’s quirkily goofy melancholy. Instead, what it resembles most, is Wolfgang Petersen’s hysterically overwrought, 1991 psychosexual thriller Shattered in which befuddled amnesiac Tom Berenger wanders through the film looking constipated and trying to remember who the hell he is and what the hell he’s done while Greta Scacchi breathily rubs herself against the furniture like an unspayed cat.

While the heist itself, with its Trainspotting-lite narration by McAvoy, is thrilling and intricate, and McAvoy is charismatic and likeable as Simon, Cassel (standing in for Michael ‘Tripod’ Fassbender who had the brains or good fortune to jump ship before filming) is laughably miscast as Franck, lacking the suavity, the icy intelligence and the sex appeal the role needs while the best you can say of Rosario Dawson’s performance is she’s exactly the sort of unconventional, rule-bending hypnotherapist you’d expect would include shaving her hoo-hoo as part of her client’s therapy. The film also has a worryingly cavalier attitude towards its minor characters with one suddenly turning a bit rapey FOR ABSOLUTELY NO LOGICAL REASON and poor Tuppence Middleton again finding herself ill-used. The increasingly frantic plot lacks plausibility and as none of the main characters are particularly likeable, the film is devoid of tension, the well-telegraphed series of unsurprising twists that cap the film rendering Trance a loud, migraine-inducing slice of smug tedium.

Callous, amoral and tired, Trance is entirely forgettable.

David Watson

Directed by:

Danny Boyle

Written by:

John Hodge and Joe Ahearne

Produced by:

Danny Boyle and Christian Colson

Starring: