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