Transformers Dark Of The Moon - Slightly less stupid

When you look back on your life, you’ll remember the big moments. Yet, life isn’t really big moments. It isn’t weddings and birthdays or that time you got drunk and attacked a cop. Life is the long stretches in between all of that. It’s the hours you spent driving to the wedding, or the beers you drank with your friends before throwing the punch. If life is what happens between big moments, then Transformers: Dark of the Moon is lifeless. It contains only big moments and none of the in between. It’s no way to tell a story. For the big moments to make any sense, you have to know how you got there. You’ll walk out of Dark of the Moon with a firm idea of who won in the end, but no real idea of the journey the film’s characters took to make their victory happen. Maybe you won’t care. 

You won’t care because even though you’ll have no idea how Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his soldiers got up in that building to fight Decepticons, you’ll be too busy being wowed by what happens while they fight them to worry about it. There’s too much exploding, too many robots transforming, too many long and lingering shots of a pretty girl posing, or smart people hacking, or comedic characters behaving comedically, or giant buildings falling, to really stop and realize that actually, none of this seems to fit together. 

It’s not an accident. I feel confident in saying that Transformers director Michael Bay knows he’s missing most of his story’s connecting tissue, and somewhere along the way decided we wouldn’t care and he didn’t either. It’s as if this is the perfect expression of what he’s been going for all along and never quite achieved with his other, comparatively life-laden films. Because of that it may be tempting to call this movie dumb, to accuse it of pandering to people without the soul or subtlety to stay with something smarter. I can’t do that. Movies for dumb people spell everything out for them, and even though Dark of the Moon seems crafted primarily to stimulate a series of easily reached pleasure centers and nothing else, it still asks a lot from its audience. 

In the process of skipping over all that life stuff to show us only those high-interest moments, the movie asks us to fill in those between bits on our own. Bay trusts that his audience is capable of doing that, he trusts that the people watching will have enough imagination to fill in all those missing, boring parts without him. He doesn’t seem to think he has to show you the flights of stairs Sam Witwicky climbed to get to the top of that building with his soldier pals, or the heaps of smashed girders and concrete they must have had to crawl over on floor twenty-six to make it up to floor one-hundred and twenty-seven. He’s too busy showing us all the robots they get to fight once there, and trusts that people watching will be smart enough to figure out on their own what it must have taken for them to find their way to the top. 

Is it bad storytelling? It would be if this happened accidentally, but if you’ve seen Bay’s other movies, you know this is a style he’s been working towards for awhile. It’s no mistake that he’s made a movie without all those life parts, this is what he’s always wanted, it’s just taken three Transformers movies for him to get there. Because of that there’s almost no point in telling you what this movie’s about. You already know. There are robots. There are things for them to demolish. They fight. You’ll have fun watching this and won’t even remember that the plot involves alien technology hidden on the dark side our moon being brought to Earth to cause trouble, let alone think about Sam Witwicky newly graduated from college and struggling to get a job. Sorry Shia LaBeouf, you are no longer needed in these films. 

It all works, after a fashion. It’ll never be as good as the first Transformers, when there really was a story to tell, when it really was a movie about life, wrapped around the relationship between a boy and his first car. The best movies do what Bay’s doing here and make it feel like a part of life too. This is not one of the best movies, it’s the best of what we’re left when you remove all substance, and what we’re left with is infinitely better than the middle ground tread by the previous Transformers film. Dark of the Moon has taken out all the bad jokes and the boring stuff to give us two and a half hours full of nothing but the biggest special effects any movie has ever offered in stunning 3D, and it’s doing it better than any other movie has before. 

Gone are most of the incomprehensible shaky cam effects of the previous movie, in a movie that’s nothing but action, Bay seems determined to give us action we can actually follow this time around. He succeeds in that. You’ll know whose head Optimus Prime just ripped off, when he rips it. You’ll know to clap when the battle’s won. You’ll believe there’s a gigantic building falling over in front of you, and in a summer movie that’s pretty good. I still wish the robots weren’t designed like gigantic piles of animated garbage, I wish the movie had time to give them all personalities before killing them off and asking us to care about it, but that’s just never going to happen. Michael Bay is no longer interested in that kind of Transformers film. 

Sure it’s far too long, a little exhausting, and it doesn’t really seem to contain any actual characters let alone a story for them to be in. Those of you worried whether Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitely would be able to replace Megan Fox should have remembered that. She’s not in this movie as an actress, she’s a posable action figure for Michael Bay to slide his camera over. The robots are only set pieces, the men primarily placeholders who stand and fire guns. More than either of the previous films, this Transformers 3 feels like an ultra-violent version of the two-dimensional cartoon it’s based on. I think I’m almost alright with that, when it’s done this well, in this kind of summer blockbuster. We’d probably all be happier watching another movie like Inception, but as long as those movies still get made, I guess there’s nothing wrong in sitting down with a Transformers: Dark of the Moon, once in awhile.

Grade - C- 
Its special effects and 3-D shots are undeniably impressive, but they aren't enough to fill up its loud, bloated running time or mask its thin, indifferent script

Transformers - Revenge Of The Fallen - Seriously, what happened?!?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an exhausting experience. It’s an assault on the senses, a visual blur of incomprehensible, never-ending action. It’s like standing in the middle of a dust storm and opening your eyes to let the grit pour in. Car parts fly around the screen as if in a scrap metal tornado, a tornado which we’re told is a group of robots beating the hell out of each other, but without a pause button it’s impossible to comprehend where one robot’s fist ends and the other’s face begins. It is of course accepted practice that any sequel must take everything the original did and make it bigger, faster, and more explosive. Revenge of the Fallen does that and takes it much, much too far. 

This is probably a good time for a positioning statement. I’m not some critical snob who sneers at Michael Bay movies and only gives good reviews to films in which people stand around talking. I grew up with the Transformers, I love the Transformers, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I loved the first movie… Michael Bay mega-ego and all. By using the simple, somewhat universal story of a boy and his first car as a starting point, Transformers connected with the audience and drew us in. Perhaps even more importantly in this kind of film, the action was exciting, interesting, and in its own way innovative. 

Enter the sequel. Remember all those minor problems in the first one? Sometimes the camera would move too fast or occasionally our view would be too zoomed in to really tell what was going on. Or what about those random subplots involving Jon Voight and the world’s hottest computer nerd, which never really went anywhere? Take all of those flaws, make an entire movie out of them, and you’ll have the sequel. Where the original film was held together by the simple notion of a boy and his car, the sequel is all over map. There’s Sam, back again and off to college. That would have been the perfect thing to hang this movie on, the idea of a kid growing up, leaving home, and becoming a man.Revenge of the Fallen explores that for all of five seconds before yanking Sam off on some endless chase across the desert in pursuit of we don’t really know what to stop some vague, ancient, evil Autobot nemesis. 

Truthfully the plot is impossible to sum up. Suffice to say there are bad robots and there are good robots and Sam Witwicky is the key to which side will end up winning. Sam brings his girlfriend along with him, for no particular reason other than that she’s Megan Fox and she’s really hot. Fox’s character in this film couldn’t be more superfluous. After the first hour or so she serves no purpose in the story and if Sam were even a halfway decent boyfriend he would long ago have forced her to go home rather than repeatedly throwing her in the face of machine gun fire. The film’s robot side characters rarely receive any better treatment than their human counterparts. Jetfire, a fan favorite from the cartoons, is introduced and gets a fully fleshed out storyline, but with the exception of Optimus and Bumblebee everyone else is merely background noise. Characters step on screen to take the spotlight and then suddenly vanish for no particular reason, never to be seen again. 

Luckily the impotence of most of the movie’s supporting cast is rendered all but irrelevant since so little of the film is devoted to character development. Mostly it’s two and a half hours of non-stop, absolutely endless action action action. There’s not a five minute stretch in the entire film that isn’t filled with guns being fired, metal colliding with metal, and buildings being blown to hell. Unfortunately at no point in this violence fog is it ever entirely clear what’s going on. There’s a decent sequence towards the middle of the film in which Optimus single-handedly takes on three Decepticons. It’s fun, but that’s the last fun to be had in the movie as it quickly devolves into characters, both human and alien, standing around in the desert and shooting endlessly at each other. 

You’ll see robots grappling, blasting, screaming… but most of the time you won’t know which robots are screaming or shooting or dying or grappling. The first movie at least had the decency to give some of the main transformers names, gave us a few minutes to see them and figure out what each different character looked like. The sequel has dozens and dozens of basically interchangeable robots who exist primarily as cannon fodder to get shot, fall down, and then be replaced by another robot who magically falls out of the sky and looks pretty much the same. 

This isn’t a just problem of the way Bay chose to edit Revenge of the Fallen, but also in the way most of the transformers are constructed. When they change into their robot forms they’re all crevices and creases and gears and constantly changing parts. They’re all extremely complicated designs. It’s not the sort of thing you can see flash in front of the camera for only a microsecond, and still understand exactly what it is that you’re looking at. Bay though, treats them as if they’re all basic flat surfaces and flashes past robots in battle as if we already know what each bot looks like and so he doesn’t really need to waste much time showing it. 

It’s actually a huge relief when the robots transform into their vehicle mode, since it allows you to stop straining and struggling to figure out what that is flailing around in front of you. When they’re in their vehicle modes you can sit back, relax and whisper to your friend “oh yeah, that was Bumblebee all along”. Except you should have known it was Bumblebee all along, otherwise how do you know what’s going on? It’s frustrating and burdensome, laboring to figure out what that is in front of the camera when you should be sitting back, relaxing, and enjoying. 

It’s almost as if standard film projectors aren’t up to displaying the level of detail Bay uses in his action sequences or keeping up with the speed at which he runs them, and so it all ends up as a useless battle haze. Worst of all, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen clocks in at over two and a half hours. It’s unforgivably long and a brutally tiring, unrewarding experience; a torrent of random action thrown up against the screen without purpose or thought for the audience sitting there watching it. 

This time Michael Bay has gone too far. While it’s hard not to be at least a little impressed with the sheer volume of effects wizardry going on here, and while fans will almost certainly still find something to love simply in seeing their favorite characters back up on screen, it’s hard to consider Revenge of the Fallen anything but a failure. What should have been the ultimate summer spectacle is the ultimate in blockbuster over-indulgence, an already excess prone director given too much freedom and too much money to do everything he wants all at once. Someone put a muzzle on Michael Bay, before he eats his audience. 

Grade - D-
If you want to save yourself the pain, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

The Hurt Locker - I'm wonderful, how are you?

Kathryn Bigelow, who has not made enough great movies given the talent she so often flourishes, likes to pitch her films in “heightened emotional states”. These are her own words. Her milieus, however diverse, come super-charged: the roving cowboy vampires of Near Dark, gurgling with blood-lust; the adrenaline junkies of Point Break, funding their surf habits by holding up banks beneath Nixon and Reagan masks; or the techno-junkies dealing in brain clips in the underrated future noir, Strange Days. In K-19, a rickety Russian sub is hit by both radiation leaks and mutiny. Not for the former Mrs. Cameron the tribulations of the average schmo, but beautiful, young men (rarely does she break boundaries of age, sex or general attractiveness) getting high on risk while draped in her trademark high style; a luxuriant if sometimes potty dance of death.

For her latest, and best, adventure in extremis, she couldn’t have found a more heightened state if she went on location to the moon: the very earthbound world of bomb-disposal experts plying their knife-edge trade in the inferno of the Iraq war. It’s required her to strip back her artsy leanings for the stomach-churn of docu-intense vérité. Aside from the odd surreally beautiful, slo-mo dust blizzard care of the various explosive tremors, we are shoved face-first into a grungy hellscape patrolled by pinwheeling handheld cameras, designed precisely to throw you completely off-balance and strip away any cinematic grandeur. Indeed, the film itself does little more than follow the daily shift of confronting suspected IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), terrifyingly ramshackle Heath Robinson contraptions built from old shells and hidden elusively amid the wreckage of Baghdad.

Unlike the tirade of recently failed Iraq-themed efforts, the impenetrable geopolitics of the Middle East are not on Bigelow’s mind, nor are the straightforward slings and arrows of the modern combat flick. She’s all about visceral participation. The result is a spare, unyielding masterclass in the racking-up of tension to the point thrill distorts into exquisite agony — not a second relents. If you think the mindless clank of Transformers 2 is a rollercoaster ride, just try riding the steel-wire tension of the opening sequence, where a ‘regular’ mission inexorably slips into horrific mishap at the glimpse of as simple a thing as a mobile phone. While planted in reality, the film shares the oxygen-stifling grip of James Cameron’s Aliens and his finesse with the choreography of action. For every threat, the ground is surveyed, the dynamics assessed, putting you into the epicentre of the crisis. There is also something bizarrely science-fictional in the vision of a soldier, sweltering in the 140-degree heat of a protective spaceman suit, treading softly through the moonscape of empty streets to his dance with death.

Bigelow is especially good on the disorientation and flat-out weirdness of stalking the fragged ruins of Baghdad, where everyone — be they child, adult, old-timer or goat — is a potential trigger. The camera twitches and jerks to the soldiers’ rhythms, glancing toward every flicker of movement, deciphering every friendly advance. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (who gave such an unbearable doom-pulse to United 93) had four handheld cameras whirring simultaneously, generating 200 hours of footage, which the editors have pared down into bone-shards of storyline. The drama operates as a set of increasingly unhinged encounters between a team of young EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) ’tecs and their unpredictable quarry — even the plot twitches like it’s been lubricated with Red Bull.

“War is a force that gives us meaning,” trumpets noted war reporter Chris Hedges in the introductory quote used in lieu of opening credits. “War,” he concludes, “is a drug.” And we soon gather that hero/villain/fuck-up hybrid Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is addicted to the head-rush of communing with these piecemeal death-traps. He’s like the brooding son of Colonel Kilgore, minus the cowboy jingoism, and his nerveless gung-ho attitude will stretch relations with his fellow team-members, twitchy greenhorn Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) and gruff, pragmatic Sanborn (Anthony Mackie). A man running this close to death has to be borderline psychopath.

Iraq, it turns out, is merely context. As many of the Oliver Stone school of ’Nam films refused to dally with politics to embody the increasing delirium of experience, it serves as a setting in which to observe how the male psyche endures under impossible pressure. Screenwriter Mark Boal, a magazine journalist who has specialised in the human truths of the Iraqi conflict, writes in strafes of agitation and desperation. The result is a vivid study of existential confrontation as daily routine — how facing your own death becomes the ultimate trip.

James comes across like one of those pumped goons from 300, but with a swell of emotions that hiccup to the surface. He keeps attempting human basics — bonding with a local boy (amusingly flogging pirate DVDs to the soldiers), trying to discover common ground with his team mates, finding something, anything, outside of the vortex of bomb disposal — but he’s too on edge, sucking up adrenaline like a vampire, treating everything, and everybody, as if they are a death-loaded challenge to be overcome.

The effortless (and more than a little Oscar-worthy), not-quite handsome Renner, a relative unknown (note: star names on the cast list can be treacherous red herrings), creates a new form of war-damage. His is a life inverted: listless and out-of-kilter when fumbling with wife and child, almost serene when slowly following the red wires to their slippery conclusions.

The Hurt Locker, such a bruising, brilliant experience, can be viewed as the culmination, to date, of Bigelow’s heightened MO. Amongst her snorting satire of macho posturing that was Point Break crops up a pumped and tattoo-splattered surf-warrior derisively dubbed War Child. Now, heartbreakingly, she has found a true war child, a soul that can only function in country. Without the breast-beating of the Sarandon-Robbins crew, without much Bush-bashing at all, it’s a tragic picture of men defined by conflict.

If it lacks the grand breadth of the great war movies, the mythical elevation of an Apocalypse Now, say, Bigelow has envisioned a stunning microcosm of hell that asks the most nakedly important question of all: will they make it?

Grade - A+

 Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is thus far the best of the recent dramatizations of the Iraq War

Gladiator - Are You Not Entertained?!

It's ironic — in an Alanis Morissette kinda way — that a new breed of action hero should have been born of a film that harks back so resolutely to a past era. Not the era of ancient Rome as such, but of the Hollywood period epic which presided over the blockbuster pantheon from the days of silent cinema to the 1970s, when it was usurped by the more contemporary spectacles of blazing skyscrapers and overturned ocean liners.

Grand scale sci-fi and the FX revolution of the late 70s/early 80s effectively delivered the deathblow to the sword'n'sandal monolith. We can be grateful then that it was Scott, a director renowned for his majestic cinematic vision, who chose to breathe new life into the old war-horse. And what life it is.

After an initial period of uncertainty, Scott leapt aboard when he was shown a Victorian painting of two gladiators locked in mortal combat, the sunlight streaming into the arena and the vast crowd baying for blood. It's not hard to see what appealed to him: the intensity of the moment, the sweeping spectacle and the image itself, a portrait of a fantastically advanced society resplendent in cultural riches yet underpinned by obscene cruelty and recreational violence.

The opening battle scene, visceral, mud-spattered and drenched in blood, sets the tone. Hordes of extras crashing against each other in waves; agonising hand-to-hand combat; a deluge of flaming arrows and exploding fireballs turning the forest into a hellish conflagration; the noise and stench and chaos of the melee. And Scott puts us right in the thick of it. Brilliant use of Steadicam and stroboscopic editing give you a taste of military conflict from a time when to kill a man in battle meant standing close enough to feel his breath on your face.

The sequence is one of many stunning set pieces that punctuate the story of Maximus Decimus Meridius (Crowe), the star general of the Roman army who is betrayed by the Emperor Commodus, sold into slavery and forced to become a gladiator. Plotting revenge for the murder of his wife and child, he becomes a hero of the people, ultimately confronting his nemesis on the killing floor of the Colosseum. Originally the part of Maximus was earmarked for Antonio Banderas (that's why, presumably, he's Spanish). Banderas makes a lot of sense — he has the looks, the physicality and screen presence. But luckily, he bailed, leaving the way open for Crowe. Crowe has all the qualifications that Banderas has, but where Banderas' prowess as an action star is essentially cinematic (he looks good firing a handgun in slo-mo, basically), Crowe gives the impression that he genuinely is quite a bit harder than the average nail.

He is worlds away from the ludicrous, neo-narcissist musclemen of the 80s (Arnie, Sly et al) and doesn't fit comfortably into the mid 90s school of lithe pretty boys (Keanu, Nic Cage etc.) either. Instead, like the film itself, he's a throwback to the action stars of yesteryear. Kirk Douglas is, for several reasons, the obvious example: unconventionally handsome, athletic without being showy and, most importantly, as solid as a rock. (Douglas also played a gladiator in some film or other.) Crowe is not a big man, he certainly doesn't have a bodybuilder's physique, but in the fight scenes his victories are totally convincing, even when he's pitted against seemingly insuperable odds. The look in his eyes, wracked with pain, boiling with testosterone and burning with hate has a singular message: don't fucking mess.

The fights themselves are thrillingly orchestrated and again feature fractured, kinetic editing and dynamic camerawork. They are so exciting, in fact, particularly the one where Maximus fights the retired champion while snarling tigers hem them into the centre of the arena, you get the slightly uncomfortable feeling that the emotions they stir are not so very far removed from those experienced by the roaring crowd. Scott's Rome — part ancient metropolis, part modern Manhattan, part Speer's Nazi Berlin — are suitably awe-inspiring; Joaquin Phoenix enjoys himself immensely as the loopy Commodus and there's a host of fruity English thesps filling up the type of roles that were once the preserve of Jack Hawkins, Peter Ustinov and Larry Olivier.

David Hemmings is tremendous as the ringmaster Cassius, Richard Harris cuts the ham thick as Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Derek Jacobi (no stranger to a toga) is typically solid as a liberal senator. But of the character players it is, of course, Oliver Reed who leaves the most indelible impression. Reed died during the production, but his gruff, bravura performance as gladiator trainer Proximo is a fitting swansong and his final line of dialogue — "We mortals are but shadows and dust" — a hauntingly apt epitaph. That said, "You sold me queer giraffes!" is an even better one

Grade - B+

Crowe's steely, soulful performance makes this one of the best revenge films to date

Transformers - BOOM!

Watching one of Michael Bay's deafening action movies makes you realise how Wile E Coyote felt when Road Runner succeeded in dropping a One Ton weight squarely on top of him from an enormous height. As reviewers and critics alike staggered out of the press screening of Bay's latest offering, suffering from the triple-whammy of tinnitus, blurred vision and sheer resentment, we resembled a coach party outing from the local head injury clinic.

Urhhhhhh. Transformers is based, ultimately, on a toy brand from the manufacturer Hasbro. There. I've said it. A toy brand. It's not even based on a computer game. That's how fantastically de-evolved the whole sorry business is.

Anyway. A toy brand. But any sense of toy consumers - ie children, with their innocence, playfulness, imagination and charm - has been chucked overboard in favour of a boorish celebration of the film's dumbest and most reactionary demographic of 15-to-25-year-olds, to whose masturbatory needs Bay caters with passionate urgency.

Transformers are an extra-terrestrial race of beings who assume the appearance of cars or other types of hardware, but then with much whirring and clanking turn into humanoid-looking giants adorned with hi-tech looking visors in place of faces, and low-tech rusty bits of metal, nuts, bolts, plates and even untransformed car tyres all over the rest of their bodies, like genetically mutated creatures from a monster truck rally.

But it's more complicated than that: as described in the publicity material, the good ones are the Autobots®, and the bad ones are the Decepticons® - and heaven help you, incidentally, if you attempt to make free with Hasbro's trademarked names. The Decepticons® are a race of beings apparently so brazen in their evil that they have consented to have the wicked concept of deception actually enshrined in their own name! Deceiving is what the other team do as well, of course, but this dissembling is limited to the morally neutral business of suddenly pretending to be a car.

Transformers both bad and good show up on earth, and one of the good ones insinuates itself into the life of an (allegedly) likable teen dork called Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), taking the form of a beat-up old car that his grouchy dad has agreed to buy him for his 17th birthday. Instantly, the car behaves like Herbie on crack, though it does facilitate his adorably klutzy wooing of a babelicious hottie called Mikaela (Megan Fox) who is supposedly a teenager but looks like Courteney Cox Arquette's world-weary older sister.

The good transformer is here to battle the bad ones, who arrive, triggering a spectacular fire-fight with US armed forces, with tanks and armoured trucks spinning through the air and crashing noisily - and I do mean noisily - to earth. They succeed in hacking into top-secret military computers sucking super-important data out of them with astonishing speed. The Pentagon recruits a super-cool army of pulchritudinous students to help them identify these cyber-attackers.

And it is at this point that Bay boldly ventures into the field of geo-political comment. One of the students wonders if Iran could be behind it. Another snorts: "It's way too smart for Iranian scientists - what about China?" Well, naturally. On the UN Index of scientists' smartness, Iran scores pitifully low, whereas the Chinese are a right old bunch of brainiacs. I and others have written about Hollywood's continued reticence about naming America's real-world enemies. This gratuitous, nervy dismissal of "Iranian scientists" comes closer than most.

Jon Voight plays the glowering secretary of state for defence, and John Turturro is an ambiguous and thoroughly unlikable operative with a secretive government agency who attempts to push our young hero around, and is duly punished by being embarrassingly stripped down to his underwear.

And so the crash-bang story continues with eardrum-perforating explosions and detonations. The Transformers fight humans, and each other. Nobody can hear themselves think. The soundtrack is at Krakatoa levels and the editing is frenzied, almost stroboscopic, so much so that you can't really get a clear look at what the Transformers actually look like.

It's all part of the sensory-overload that the great man himself delicately calls "screwing the frame". And he has outdone himself this time. In Transformers, the director and the frame have protracted and meaningful relations, and it is over two hours before Mr Bay as it were pulls on his trousers and promises to call the frame some time next week.

It won't be long before these lovebirds get back together.

Grade - C-

At its best, tolerable, at its worst, your standard Michael Bay blockbuster (bad basically)

Batman Begins - Welcome Back Bats

As the title suggests, this sets out to be radically different from the series inaugurated by Tim Burton's Batman in 1989 and trashed by Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin in 1997. Indeed, director Christopher Nolan gets even further than Burton from the camp of the 1960s TV show, to the point where you wonder how cartoonish Bat-foes like the Penguin could ever appear in Nolan's rusty, economically desperate Gotham City.

Whereas Burton sketched an Art Deco hell and shoved Michael Keaton on screen in a Bat-suit in the first minutes, Nolan puts off the moment when Christian Bale dons the mask for almost an hour. Influenced by the look and feel of the X-Men films, Batman Begins spends a lot of time in a world only just removed from reality before getting to the superheroics.The first act finds Wayne in a Chinese prison and a Himalayan monastery, transforming from bearded brawler to black-clad ninja as he flashes back to a lifetime of trauma that - in this version - began even before his parents' deaths, as he falls down a well and is terrorised by the bats which later inspire his night persona. Burton had Wayne's mom and pop killed by the hoodlum who would become The Joker, but Nolan reverts to earlier comics and makes the murderer a panicky no-one named Joe Chill, blurring the set-up so young Bruce and even Wayne Sr. (Linus Roache) must take some blame for the killings.

The Nolan who made Memento and Insomnia is at home with extreme psychological states - this might complete a Three Colours Of Neurosis trilogy by following memory loss and sleeplessness with phobia. It's certainly a smart move to cast the former Patrick Bateman as a Batman who always seems about to crack up. Bale even makes the old playboy-idiot act work, suggesting - as Michael Caine's dry Alfred notes - a man who needs to pretend to have fun because he might accidentally enjoy himself.

Batman maintains a secret identity, but he's recruiting an army for a war - forming alliances with Gordon (Oldman), the only honest cop in Gotham, and Wayne Enterprises' R&D man Lucius Fox (Freeman), while treating childhood sweetheart/Assistant D. A. Rachel Dawes (Holmes) as much as an informant as love interest (she takes the role played in comics by Harvey Dent, who becomes the disfigured villain Two-Face, suggesting a possible career-changing stretch for Holmes if this thread carries through).

With a city that looks less fantastical than Burton's, Nolan hits the streets and slums of Gotham to show a horrific escalation of evil that demands Batman's presence even as Gordon suggests he might make it worse; old-fashioned Mob guys (Tom Wilkinson) are edged out by masked freaks (Cillian Murphy, starily creepy even before he pulls on his Scarecrow hood) and a fanatical force run by the bastard sons of Fu Manchu and Osama bin Laden. Unlike Burton, Nolan doesn't skimp on action either, with brutal fights, vehicle chases and, in one great sequence, a mass escape from Arkham Asylum of serial killers and maniacs doped up with the Scarecrow's fear serum.

In terms of big-screen comic-adaptation triumphs, it's recently been Marvel who've been ahead (X-Men, Blade, Spider-Man); but, by learning several tricks from Marvel franchises, Batman Begins undoubtedly gets rival comics house DC back in the game.

Grade - A+

Significantly grittier than previous Bat-beginnings, this finds new things to do with, and say about, a character who's been around since 1938. In a year when the franchise watchword is "dark", this delivers the full noir with a side order of dementia.

Casino Royale - All in

The only thing missing from Casino Royale is a truly memorable theme song. Otherwise, this has almost everything you could want from a Bond movie, plus qualities you didn’t expect they’d even try for. It does all the location-hopping, eye-opening stunt stuff and lavish glamour expected of every big-screen Bond, but also delivers a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Fleming’s short, sharp, cynical book with the post-WWII East-vs.-West backdrop persuasively upgraded to a post 9/11 War on Terror.

From Goldfinger on -- especially in the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan films -- the usual gambit has been to open with a pre-credits sequence highlighting amazing stuntwork and a larger-than-life exploit. Here, with a new actor cast as a Bond only just issued with his license to kill, we get an intense, black and white scene set in an office in Prague. Bond has just killed his first man – as shown in brief, brutal fight flashbacks which strain the 12A rating – and confronts a traitor in British Intelligence, exchanging pointed dialogue which leads to the ice-cold agent’s demonstration that the second killing is easier (‘Considerably’). The famous iris pose brings in colour, and a brilliantly-designed (shame about the song) titles sequence that highlights not an anonymous beauty but the silhouette of Daniel Craig himself.

For a few reels, Casino Royale lets the new boy settle in to what could almost be a Brosnan or Dalton movie – hard-hitting, but tinged with the fantastical. Bond goes off the map to harry the organisation of ‘banker to the world’s terrorists’ LeChiffre, with a beddable beach beauty along the way, and a thwarted attack on a super-sized jet aeroplane which could have been the climax of any other adventure. Then, with a notable click into focus, the movie segues into Fleming’s tight, twisted plot. Readers will be amazed to find the book’s most memorable scene (involving a wicker chair with the bottom cut out) is included, as is Bond’s brutal Mickey Spillane-ish last line (though, here, he doesn’t quite mean it).

Director Martin Campbell, who set a high mark in GoldenEye that subsequent craftsmen haven’t matched, returns, and regular scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade get Oscar-polishing assist from Paul Haggis. There are nods to tradition, with respectful Aston-Martin product placement, but also refreshing breaks from established practice. Judi Dench’s imposing M is held over, but supporting comedy characters like Q and Miss Moneypenny sit this one out. Mads Mikkelsen’s LeChiffre has a physical tic and a lethal girlfriend, but this villain interestingly has as much to lose as the hero, playing cards because he lost terrorist money and needs to make up the shortfall before his clients kill him.

There are miscalculations (a collapsing building in Venice is a gimmick too many in an emotional finale which would play better without all the noise) and audiences who just want a handsome fantasy figure might find a muscular Bond with perpetually bruised knuckles and the beginnings of a drink problem too much of a stretch. But long-running series can only survive through constant renewal. Casino Royale is the most exciting Bond film, in conventional action terms but also in dramatic meat, since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with the added advantage of a star who finally delivers what the credits have always promised: ‘Ian Fleming’s James Bond’.

Grade - A-

Contrary to pre-release nay-sayers, Daniel Craig has done more with James Bond in one film than some previous stars have in multiple reprises. This is terrific stuff, again positioning 007 as the action franchise to beat.

No Country For Old Men - what's the most you've ever lost on a coin toss?

Depending on your take, the Coens have been off their game, under par, or basically crap of late. Of course, the devotee (easy to spot: goateed, bespectacled, Little Lebowski Urban Achievers T-shirt) might posit some notion where they were deliberately sabotaging their own reputation in some advanced form of self-mockery. Who knows? It remains tough to argue that Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers are of the same calibre as the preceding nine straight wacko-treasures (yes, including Hudsucker) that sealed their glowing rep as the hippest geeks around.

Well, this fresh in: whatever mosquito was buzzing in their ears is now a small red stain on the flock wallpaper. The Coens have rediscovered their mojo, with, dare we say it, a new maturity. There is also something back-to-basics about No Country For Old Men, adapted from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s violent neo-Western. It’s got Blood Simple’s dark moves, that clammy sense of death lurking in the barren Texan landscape. And being a knotted tale of crime innately wrapped up in an imposing location, it shares DNA with Fargo and Miller’s Crossing.

What surprises is how the film remains both recognisably McCarthy’s terse and sorrowful parable, and a Coens enterprise bathed in oil-black humour. Despite the fact that the brothers lift much of the dialogue verbatim from the page, in the mouths of their cast the lines sound like choice Coenisms: all jazzy syncopations or deadpan comebacks. “If I don’t come back, tell my mother I love her,” Josh Brolin’s sort-of hero Llewellyn Moss tells his wary

but perceptive wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) before he heads into the mouth of trouble. “Your mother’s dead,” she retorts. “Then I’ll tell her myself,” he sighs.

The plot is triple-headed, with the narrative shifting focus whenever one of the leads seems to be taking centre stage. We start eyeing the tremulous determination of Moss, a local hunter who happens upon the remains of a drug deal gone badly wrong. Cadavers cook in the desert sun, even a dead dog, and a trail of blood, splattered like ink along the parched ground, leads Moss to a case containing two million dollars. He elects, as all noir folk are supposed to, to take the money and run. Bad move considering the clean-up guy is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a killer with the implacable dedication of a Terminator and the domed haircut of a psychopathic Monkee. What proceeds is a startling chase movie scattering through the border towns, grimy motels, and dry gulches of West Texas. Always two steps behind is the old man of the tale, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a lawman longing for retirement, facing an evil that he can no longer decipher. This is a new crew for the brothers to play with. Jones is a perfect fit for the weatherworn Bell: he is Texan to his core, and looks as if he is entirely the product of McCarthy’s Biblical prose. Age has granted him stillness as a performer, and he gives the movie a grace above its lashing violence. Brolin, battered from pillar to post, is the strong, doomed heart of the story. But Bardem’s is the role with flamboyant possibilities — a stone-cold killer obsessed with chance, holding lives to the random toss of a quarter. He is the embodiment of evil as blank force made breathtakingly plausible. With his Spanish accent flattened, his voice seems to come from a place not wholly human.

Those who find the Coens’ smarty-pants routines insufferable will find relief in the naturalism on show. This is not a world fastened beneath the hermetic seal of their whirligig genre-bending, but one that lives and breathes and bleeds. There is something resonant in Bell’s soulful philosophy, something tender in Moss’ love of his wife.

And we still get all the off-centre mannerisms that made the brothers so much fun to begin with. Although, silence is a tool we’ve not encountered before. Sure, Billy Bob Thornton barely uttered a syllable in The Man Who Wasn’t There, but we had his interior drawl. Here, between the bursts of visceral action, the film hangs on a terrifying soundlessness and the striking atonal power of sharp noises against nothingness: a bulb being unscrewed, a footfall on a wooden floor, the soft breath of wind over hardscrabble terrain. Even Carter Burwell’s score is defined by its imperceptibility — made up only of low groans and eerie whistles.

If the final act strikes out against formula to downplay rather than crescendo, it is true to the book. The simple satisfaction of traditional showdowns is evaded for a lyrical note that strikes both as deeply pessimistic and strangely pure. There is something of Miller’s Crossing’s noble farewell about it. Those brothers from another planet have returned to Earth.

Grade - A

Violent, poetic, gripping, thrilling and blackly funny: that’ll be the Coens doing what they do best then. Now with added humanity.

The Dark Knight - Why So Serious?

The hero is a billionaire industrialist who likes to beat people up. The only good cop in the city employs dishonest ones. The psychotic terrorist torturing civilians and chopping up criminals… Well, he’s just about the most charismatic character you’ll ever meet. Welcome to Gotham, where no good deed goes unpunished. And welcome to The Dark Knight, an anarchic, malevolent fury of a movie that takes a switchblade to the face of summer conformity and carves a work of twisted beauty out of it.

Anticipation and escalation were the key words in the build up to, post-Indy, 2008’s most hyped and combustible blockbuster. Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan has talked of making a bigger, bolder picture, unfettered by the origin-construction constraints of the still-excellent Batman Begins. The marketing has been masterful: a lesson in tease and please from 42 Entertainment (earning what must surely be the only mention of a movie’s PR firm in an Empire review; whatever, they deserve it). Then, just as the Sturm und Drang around The Dark Knight built to a frenzy came the January death of Heath Ledger. Peeks at his performance as the Clown Prince Of Crime had already prompted whispers of Oscar, of the birth of an icon. Cynics suggested his passing would boost the box office; pessimists griped that a comic-book movie could never serve as a suitable epitaph to the Brokeback Mountain star.

And — yes — as was, perhaps, always inevitable, The Dark Knight is Ledger’s movie. It is a towering performance. From his menacing, pencil-packing greeting to Gotham’s Mob fraternity (one of the most economic and effective character introductions ever), to the threat and fire he conjures in exchanges with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sexy, sophisticated brief and “The Bat-maaan”, to the Sophie’s choice surprises of the third act, he is pure, powerful, immense. A force of fucking nature. Informed by Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke and Jeph Loeb’s The Long Halloween, Ledger’s Joker is anarchy in a three-piece, a ruthless villain who cares for nothing, not even himself. His function, crafted in the hive mind of the Nolans and as Ledger plays him, is to cause chaos, to question everything, to push everyone to extremes, to show Batman there are no rules to this game.

This doesn’t mean Christian Bale is sidelined as either Bruce Wayne or his suited, re-booted vigilante. There’s no repeat of Keaton’s eclipse by Nicholson’s “I’d like eggs with that” Joker turn in Burton’s Batman. Bale is too muscular and committed for that, the Nolans’ script too evenly interested in every character in its universe. So, Batman is more conflicted than ever, still clinging to his parents’ memory but minus the scowly brooding that can make DC’s darkest hero feel like a moody teen. Now his concerns are much more immediate: how to neuter a threat that could destroy a city, how to empower a new DA without blowing his cover, how to work outside the system without bringing it down. He’s Dirty Harry with a conscience: a conscience The Joker plays like a violin.

Pre-release presumptions about The Dark Knight being the comic-book Heat are valid, if not all-encompassing. Visually the comparison is spot on, and regular Nolan cinematographer Wally Pfister deserves props: ironically The Dark Knight brings Batman out of the shadows, through a burnished, Michael Mann Chicago into a daylight noir. But while The Joker and Batman are both costumed “freaks”, they don’t completely share the McCauley/Hanna dynamic. De Niro’s criminal, for one, had principles; The Joker has none. And Mann’s film was as much about being a professional as being a cop or a criminal, meaning the characters that are most thematically similar are Gary Oldman’s hard-working lieutenant and Aaron Eckhart’s idealistic lawyer (yes, they do manage to pull off that oxymoron), who are trying to change their world without recourse to gadgets or PVC underpants.

And so on and on (it runs an epic 152 minutes), Nolan navigates through a moral maze and some pointed politicking, but without ever stinting on stunts or explosions. It is thoughtful but never dull, and the OTT action and expansion — underscored in IMAX sequences which will no doubt look spectacular on the enormo-screen are generally to its benefit, even though Nolan still appears more comfortable and engaged with interacting people than trucks and Batbikes. After a blistering opening, there’s a second act lull and a story shift not quite as elegant (or, some might argue, even coherent) as you’d expect from the director of The Prestige. But The Dark Knight is spectacular, visionary blockbuster entertainment: pretty much everything you could hope for and then some. It isn’t perfect but then, like its hero, like his late co-star, and as Nolan’s fitting tribute so ably observes, nobody is.

Grade - A+ 

Ledger’s performance is monumental, but The Dark Knight lives up to it. Nolan cements his position as Hollywood’s premier purveyor of blockbuster smarts – and the Batbike is kinda cool, too.

Cloverfield - We’re All Gonna Die! Grab Your Video Camera!

 


 

Godzilla meets the Queasy-Cam in "Cloverfield," a movie that crosses the Monster Attacks Manhattan formula with "Blair Witch." No, Godzilla doesn't appear in person, but the movie's monster looks like a close relative on the evolutionary tree, especially in one closeup. The closeup ends with a POV shot of the guy with the video camera being eaten, but the camera survives. If he'd left the camera's light on, I might have been reminded of the excellent video of my colonoscopy.

The movie, which has been in a vortex of rumors for months, is actually pretty scary at times. It's most frightening right after something Very Bad begins to happen in lower Manhattan, and before we get a good look at the monster, which is scarier as a vaguely glimpsed enormity than as a big reptile. At least I think it's a reptile, although it sheds babies by the dozens, and they look more like spiders crossed with crabs. At birth, they are already fully formed and functioning, able to scamper all over town, bite victims, grab them in subway tunnels, etc. I guess that makes the monster a female, although Godzilla, you will recall, had a baby, and the fanboys are still arguing over its gender. (Hold on! I just discovered online that those are not its babies at all, but giant parasitic lice that drop off and go looking for dinner.)
The film, directed by Matt Reeves, is the baby of producer J.J. Abrams, creator of TV's "Lost." It begins with home-video-type footage and follows the fortunes of six twentysomething yuppies. The lead character is Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is about to leave town for a job in Japan. At a farewell surprise party, Hud (T.J.Miller) takes over the camera and tapes friends wishing Rob well, including Jason (Mike Vogel) and the beautiful Lily (Jessica Lucas). Hud is especially attentive toward Marlena (Lizzy Caplan), who says she's just on her way to meet some friends. She never gets there. The building is jolted, the lights flicker, and everyone runs up to the roof to see all hell breaking loose.
The initial scenes of destruction are glimpsed at a distance. Then things heat up when the head of the Statue of Liberty rolls down the street. Several shots of billowing smoke clouds are unmistakable evocations of 9/11, and indeed one of the movie's working titles was "1/18/08." So the statute has run out on the theory that after 9/11 it would be in bad taste to show Manhattan being destroyed. So explicit are the 9/11 references in "Cloverfield" that the monster is seen knocking over skyscrapers, and one high-rise is seen leaning against another.
The leaning high-rise contains Beth (Odette Yustman), who Rob feels duty-bound to rescue from her 49th-floor apartment near Central Park. The others all come along on this foolhardy mission (not explained: how after walking all the way to Columbus Circle they have the energy to climb 49 flights of stairs, Lily in her high heels). Part of their uptown journey is by subway, without the benefit of trains. They're informed by a helpful soldier that the last rescue helicopter leaving Central Park will have "wheels up at oh-six-hundred," begging the question of how many helicopters it would take to rescue the population of Manhattan.
The origin of the monster goes unexplained, which is all right with me after the tiresome opening speeches in so many of the 30 or more "Godzilla" films. The characters speculate that it came from beneath the sea, or maybe from outer space, but incredibly, not one of them ever utters the word "Godzilla," no doubt for trademark reasons. The other incredible element is that the camcorder's battery apparently lasts, on the evidence of the footage we see, more than six hours, maybe 12. The entire film is shot in Queasy-Cam hand-held style, mostly by Hud, who couldn't hold it steady or frame a shot if his life depended on it. Those who went to the screening apparently complained that they felt dizzy or had vertigo, but no one barfed.

Mercifully, at 84 minutes the movie is even shorter than its originally alleged 90-minute running time; how much visual shakiness can we take? And yet, all in all, it is an effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it. One question, which you can answer for me after you see the film: Given the nature of the opening government announcement, how did the camera survive?

Grade - B (Interesting blend of Sci-Fi and Found Footage) 

X-Men - The Last Stand

One reason why action franchises  are so prone to failure is because it’s so easy for them to collapse under their own weight. Each new instalment feels it has to outdo the last, delivering bigger set-pieces and cramming in more characters while such piffles as structure, pace, dialogue and all-round coherence are thrown to the wind. This was true of the pre-Begins Batmans, the Christopher Reeve Supermans and the Blade flicks. But X-Men, like its Marvel stablemate Spider-Man, has thus far managed to withstand the added strain.

      X2 was, above all, a masterful juggling/balancing act on the part of Bryan Singer. He expanded the X-universe while simultaneously taking us deeper into the characters — from frontline heroes like Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) down to supporting players like Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Pyro (Aaron Stanford). Well, Brett Ratner’s stepped onto the tightrope Singer vacated, and Fox/Marvel have chucked him even more balls to juggle. So alongside the discovery of the ‘cure’ and the renewed mutant-versus-mutant battle that ensues, we have the drama of now-schizo übermutant Jean Grey’s (Famke Janssen) return from her watery grave, plus all the small soapy strands that concern the teenies — will love-rival Kitty Pryde (Hard Candy’s Ellen Page) persuade Rogue (Anna Paquin) to take the cure so boyfriend Iceman can finally cop a feel?

     Perhaps understandably, Ratner’s not even sure where to start — we jump from a “20 years ago” prologue (enticing) to a “10 years ago” prologue (less so) to “the not-too-distant future” before our first popped corn hits stomach acid. He and his scriptwriters then get round the surfeit-of-characters problem by, almost admirably, throwing a few balls away; let’s just say the X-mansion grows a few gravestones.

      Yet, Ratner is missing Singer’s versatility, and X3 lacks the sharp focus if its predecessor, as if unclear what it should be doing when not delivering a set-piece. The script, too, lacks the polish of Singer’s second X, and even the esteemed Ian McKellen has trouble with a few of his clunkier lines. Meanwhile, Vinnie Jones as towering powerhouse Juggernaut is just wrong, wrong, WRONG. Why shove some old footballer in a leathery bodysuit when one phone call to WWE supremo Vince McMahon would throw up any number of genuine oily manbeast-machines?

     Two things rescue this so-called “Last Stand”. First, its shameless pandering to the fanboys. They’re tossed plenty of treats, including a glimpse (finally) inside the X-mansion’s Danger Room and the introduction of various new muties like Beast (Kelsey Grammer — excellent), Angel (Ben Foster — forgettable) and Leech (the ubiquitous Cameron Bright). Oh, and if the words “fastball special” mean anything to you, rest assured, Ratner’s been thinking of you during the action scenes.

    Which brings us to X3’s second saving grace — those aforementioned set-pieces. This is where Ratner gets it totally right. Whether it’s that big show-off Magneto flying the Golden Gate Bridge to Alcatraz, Wolverine and Beast going feral on a bunch of baddie mutants, or Jean Grey reducing people and buildings to their constituent atoms, there’s enough smash-bang fun and CG-savvy here to make you happy it’s summer again. Just don’t expect it to get under your skin the way X2 did.

Grade - C

The Hangover

Director Todd Phillips scored his biggest hit with 2003’s ribald, R-rated romp Old School, a film that proved beyond question — as if we didn’t know it already — that the spectacle of grown men communing with their inner adolescent and behaving like frat boys is a recipe for comedy gold.

Phillips treads broadly similar ground with The Hangover (written by Lucas and Moore of Four Christmases ‘fame’) but, ironically for a movie that celebrates the male of the species’ innate ability to screw things up and act like a complete idiot, he exhibits a great deal more maturity than he did with its likable but hit-and-miss forebear.

On the face of it, The Hangover doesn’t look particularly promising, nor, to be honest, terribly original. The ‘bachelor party gone wrong’ is a well-established comedy sub-genre and the prospect of yet another bunch of shit-faced yuppies getting into scrapes with hookers is hardly one to savour. Mercifully, and very astutely, The Hangover avoids the clichés — the majority of them, at least — by starting where most movies of this ilk finish: in the aftermath of the ruinous carousing rather than the preamble to it. In fact, sparing us the gratuitous party scenes is not just good sense but an intrinsic element of the narrative since, thanks to a self-administered mickey that turns out to be roofies rather than E, the central characters have no more idea of what went on the night before than we do.

Following a brief establishing set-up, the action kicks off when a trio of groomsmen (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis) wake up in the apocalyptic wreckage of their Las Vegas hotel suite to discover an abandoned baby in the closet, Mike Tyson’s tiger in the bathroom and the inexplicable absence of the groom himself (Justin Bartha), who is due to get hitched in 24 hours’ time. From that point on the film becomes a twisted, and unerringly hilarious, detective story as the hapless ‘worst men’, their memories wiped clean by date-rape drugs, have to piece together the events of the previous evening, track down their missing buddy and get him to the church on time. The trouble is, they have very little evidence to go on save for a missing front tooth, a collection of hospital wristbands and a wedding ring on very much the wrong finger.

The pacing is furiously fast and the laughs keep coming as our increasingly desperate heroes are assaulted out of the blue by characters and events they have no hope of comprehending. Rarely has that sinking, morning-after realisation that things are much, much worse than they seem been better evoked than when a valet parking attendant rolls up not in Bartha’s future father-in-law’s vintage Merc but a stolen police car. Truthfully, the film abounds with such moments, most of them vastly more raucous. And, true to form, Phillips delivers at least one incident that will have you rubbing your eyes in disbelief, even while you’re laughing your ass off. As for bizzaro celebrity cameos, they don’t come much more off-the-wall than Mike Tyson singing along to Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight and smashing Galifianakis full in the face at the climax of the iconic drum fill.

What really gives The Hangover wings, though, rendering it every bit as endearing as it is profanely funny, is the chemistry between the leads — Cooper as the group’s cocksure alpha male; Helms as the neurotic whiner, and Galifianakis, in a star-making turn, as the token beardy weirdy. Their guy-centric sparring is so effortless, a direct product of their characters and the relationship between them, it seems almost inconceivable that it originated in a script. Of course it did, and full credit to Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (with input from Phillips) for that — no matter how crammed full of side-splitting set-pieces a movie is, if the characters aren’t convincing or likable you’ve got nothing. In The Hangover they are both, and the film benefits on that score from them being relatively unknown. A state of affairs that, on this evidence, is not likely to last.

The best way to summarise this would be that it's a  furiously paced, inventive and flat-out hilarious take on a tried-and-tested formula. An exemplary bromantic comedy that doesn’t sacrifice heart in pursuit of laughs, maintaining plenty of the former and a superabundance of the latter.

Grade - B+

Star Wars Episode 3

In perhaps the most blatant instance of a Star Wars character plugging a plot hole, at one point in Return Of The Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi brushes aside the lies he told Luke about Vader with this infamous equivocation, "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." So then, from a certain point of view, Revenge Of The Sith, simultaneously the middle and last Star Wars movie, is the best sequel, and the most pleasing surprise, in the entire saga.

In true Saturday morning serial fashion Sith begins with a chapter left-over from a previous adventure: the rescue of the Chancellor from General Grievous by Anakin, Obi-Wan and the saga's best sidekick: R2-D2. Fast, loose, inventive and within touching distance of funny, this is the spiritual sequel to the original escape from the Death Star, reloaded with full Jedi powers. Like a fragment from a lost civilization, this episode hints at countless Clone Wars escapades that sadly exist only in the extended universe — still, at least we have that bit where Jar Jar falls over the explosive marbles captured on film.

The sequence ends with the saga’s single most audacious shot since the Star Destroyer first passed overhead — the front half of Grievous’ flagship The Invisible Hand screeching to a halt yards from camera — and it becomes clear that faced with the thankless task of directly dovetailing into a timeless classic everybody from Lucas down has raised their game considerably. ILM finally seem to have finished the digital toolkit they’ve been toying with since the late nineties fashioning flora and fauna that has real weight and substance for the first time. There are 2,200 effects shots in Sith — more than Menace and Clones combined — and there’s not a single specimen of bad compositing, which is more than can be said for 2006’s SFX Oscar winner King Kong.

Also flawless is Gavin Bouquet’s production design - indeed, Sith's most unambiguous joy is watching Bouquet and Lucas retrofit their galaxy - often there seems to be no escape as the mismatched trilogies crunch together, but a deft aside or throwaway motif always gets us out of the compacter.

So far, so certain point of view - however Sith carries a far graver responsibility than the prequels it quickly outclasses. Lucas himself admitted that fully 60 percent of his original outline was slated for this bridging episode, which means that all the unanswered questions that made the prequels permissible in the first place are addressed here. In other words, Sith is it: this is where the myths get set in stone, Lucas can muck around on Naboo all he likes, but if he screws up the birth of Vader, big black 'ain't ever going to be the same.

And once Sith starts forging myth, fingers are burned. The shortcomings may be familiar by now but they rankle more than ever here. Just as it was becoming possible to tune out the constant clanking of Lucas' lumbering dialogue the words are invested with real import. And just as we were getting used to the declarative ‘30s-style line readings that Lucas alone finds an adequate substitute for acting, the drama is asked to support some really heavy shit. Many of the key components of the Star Wars legend — Vader’s birth, Padme’s death — are ultimately undone by dialogue that is ludicrous either in intent or execution.

Sometimes you simply think “Noooo!”

Most damagingly, Anakin's conversion to the dark side is rushed through during a slack middle act where the chosen one bounces back and forth between Mace Windu and Palpatine like a confused teenager in a soap opera love triangle. The self-inflicted 20-20-60 story split that starved Episodes I and II of real incident, leaves Lucas with far too much ground to make up here: so far we’ve gathered that Anakin is arrogant, horny and has bad dreams —well, we all know it’s just a short-step from there to baby killer.

The delicious McDiarmid does his best to make the dark side sound seductive but unless you are steeped in Force lore (for the record, once Anakin cracks open the door, the flood-gates burst and it is near-impossible to resist) this critical moment - the moment - utterly fails to convince.

Mercifully then, the Star Wars myth is so powerful, so pre-imagined by so many, that much of it requires no explanation bar our constant narrator: the peerless John Williams. The twin duels that bring the third act to a rousing close confirm Sith as not just the darkest but also the prettiest entry in the saga — the lava landscape of Mustafa, in particular, has obviously been bubbling in Lucas imagination for nearly thirty years. (A few shots also benefit from having best pal Steven Spielberg play around with the “pre-viz” animatic software.)

In the end then, it depends on your point of view. As a sequel to the prequels, Sith is more than anyone can reasonably have hoped for, a movie that made it okay to be a Star Wars fan again. However, a few fans will always cling to a different truth, to an alternative universe where at least one prequel was the equal of the original trilogy. And for those people, Revenge Of The Sith, the last chance to get it right, will always rate as the biggest disappointment of all.

Grade - B

Zodiac

Jack The Ripper is remembered 120 years after he put down the knife for two reasons: a) someone (almost certainly not him) wrote taunting letters in red ink to the media and the police signed with the catchy ‘trade-name’; and b) he was never caught and cannot definitively be identified. The Metropolitan Police may not

be working the case, but the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 are still open, and therefore the Ripper might as well still be at large and dangerous. Because the mystery remains unsolved, he is still frightening. How much more frightening, then, is San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer — who took great pains (including swatches of a victim’s bloody shirt) to prove that he wrote his own letters to the press, has also eluded the police for decades since his first crimes, and might conceivably still be alive?

Part of the modern-day ritual necessary for taking on board any horror, from the average killing spree to the 9/11 attacks, is to get the facts of any case straight in a succession of chronicles — paperback true-crime bestsellers, couple of TV movies, and (eventually) a more considered cinema film. With Zodiac, this pattern is frustrated — we have the books and the movies, but there are crucial gaps in the intricate and exhaustive tapestry of hard evidence. Robert Graysmith, the doodler and puzzle addict who picked up the case when more official investigators had walked away, is convinced he knows who the killer was, and David Fincher’s film adaptation of Graysmith’s two books on the case eventually comes near to the same conclusion. However, there’s really no way (short of the silly detours into fantasy that afflict most Jack The Ripper movies) of providing the ‘closure’ demanded of Hollywood films by audiences, development executives and screenwriting guru Robert McKee. Therefore, Zodiac was fated from its inception to be an uncomfortable experience, a whodunnit with the last few pages torn out, a film biography of a faceless man.

Even something as incendiary as Spike Lee’s Summer Of Sam or as disreputable as the endless schlock biopics of Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy are able to deliver approximately happy endings — they caught the bastards! In the two-and-a-half-hour haul of Zodiac, we see all the certainties of the serial killer genre shredded. David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the bow-tie-wearing cop on the case, is a model of West Coast cool whose manner of wearing a gun-holster was copied by Steve McQueen in Bullitt. If this were a conventional movie, he would catch the killer — but Fincher shows the confident supercop become a crotchety, tired, greying figure, quietly bereft when his longtime partner (Anthony Edwards) transfers to something nine-to-five like fraud. In a crucial sequence, Toschi attends a special premiere of Dirty Harry — which fantasised a shoot-out finale to kill off a villain modelled on Zodiac, who actually tries to carry out the schoolbus attack the real murderer merely threatened — and walks out in disgust, muttering, “Whatever happened to ‘due process’?” Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) comes on like that epitome of 1970s radical chic cool, the underground journalist with a mainstream outlet, making brilliant leaps around the befuddled authorities and going after the Zodiac like Woodward and Bernstein went after Nixon. He ends up drinking himself out of a job and hiding out on a boathouse, still paranoid that the killer will come after him.

Though Ruffalo, Edwards and Downey Jr. are outstanding in their various crash-and-burn approaches to the case, the film is built around Jake Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith, a boyish outsider who makes a few connections no-one else does and later devotes his whole life to a private crusade, to the extent of roping in his preteen kids as research assistants. Gyllenhaal is excellent, but suffers through a few too many scenes with poor Chloë Sevigny — who gets stuck with the traditionally annoying Teri Garr-in-Close Encounters role as a wife who nags her husband about spending too much time on the business we’re interested in. As always, it’s impossible not to sympathise with the character — but audiences also wish she’d shut up and let Graysmith get on with tracking down that last stray witness and joining the dots no-one else has bothered with.

It’s a truism that serial killers are media creations, but Zodiac — who may have taken his name and symbol from a watch advert, was perhaps inspired by the 1932 movie The Most Dangerous Game, and wanted a lawyer who had guest-starred in a Star Trek episode to represent him — remains a phantom of the tube and newsprint. Murderers who are caught get shown up as pathetic human beings rather than Lecter-like masterminds, but Zodiac was either clever or lucky, and remains a phantom. Fincher offers us his creepy, misspelled letters in voice-over and brings a hooded form on for one of the killings, but the film’s most unsettling moments come when the possible Zodiacs are around: convicted paedophile Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch) or repertory cinema programmer Bob Vaughn (Charles Fleischer). As in Seven and Fight Club, Fincher boasts an unparalleled ability to present ostensibly friendly, deeply twisted people credibly — one of Zodiac’s few melodramatic moments, as Vaughn spooks Graysmith so much he flees the suspect’s house, works entirely because of the unnerving performances.

While this isn’t as straightforward as Panic Room, Fincher’s previous film, it lacks the highly wrought style of Seven and Fight Club — and the few holdovers from his earlier method (like the frequent California downpours which strike whenever the characters aren’t depressed enough) don’t quite match the less-showy All The President’s Men-like docudrama manner used here. Whole stretches are merely conventional, with hits of the ’70s on the soundtrack to counterpoint the killings and cop-shop or newsroom scenes that could have come from a TV show of the time, like The Streets Of San Francisco or Lou Grant. Wonderfully acted as it is, there’s still a sense that Fincher — who is evidently as hung up on Zodiac as James Cameron was on Titanic — is working a notch or two below what he is capable of. Screenwriter James Vanderbilt’s CV includes Darkness Falls, Basic and Welcome To The Jungle, and his draft really could have done with a brush-up from some less pragmatic talent to make this as deep and affecting as it is long and brilliantly detailed.

 Grade - A