Star Trek Into Darkness Isn’t Perfect, But Delivers Solid Blockbuster Goodness

As was the case when it came to me watching Star Trek in 2009, I know little about, and care even less for, the history of Star Trek and the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  I can reel off the names of the ship’s crew, some of the enemies the series has created and know enough about it to recognise when it is being parodied or referenced in television or popular culture, but I’ve never watched any of the various TV series set in that universe, and although I’ve seen bits of the previous films, I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually watched them or not.

But despite that, I still enjoyed JJ Abrams’ rebooting of the series in 2009, and as a fan of a lot of his work (he has been involved at some level in so many TV and film projects that it’s almost impossible to be an Abrams completest, or like everything he’s been involved in), that meant that Star Trek Into Darkness became a film I wanted to see.

The 2009 Star Trek was an origin story (Enterprisers Assemble, if you will), and Into Darkness picks up the story with the crew of the Enterprise more established as a team, working together to save an alien species from extinction by preventing a volcano from erupting and destroying their planet.  But Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) has done this without permission, and when his First Officer, Mr Spock (Zachary Quinto), hands over a true report of the alien encounter, Kirk is demoted to First Officer level, losing control of the Enterprise.  But after a terrorist attack in London, a man named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) attacks an emergency meeting of Starfleet command and kills Admiral Pike, Kirk’s mentor and the man who demoted him.  So Kirk is restored as Captain of the Enterprise, and goes after Harrison, planning to stop his from attempting further attacks.

After that, I have to admit that I got a little lost about the plot.  John Harrison is clearly an unhappy man and has very personal unresolved issues with certain members of Starfleet command, and he has a complicated plan to get revenge.  Like the Joker in The Dark Knight, Raoul Silva in Skyfall or Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3, Harrison’s plan is a little sketchy and over-elaborate.  He wants revenge and has an idea of how to get it, but it’s not really clear what his end-game is. If he gets his revenge, what next?  You could probably spend a lot of time picking holes in his plan, and thinking ‘Well why didn’t he just do that instead’, but ultimately a villainous plan like that isn’t really much more than a Macguffin, a way to bring the good guys and the bad guys together to beat each other up until one man (or one crew) is left standing.

So Star Trek Into Darkness doesn’t really dwell on the whats and whys of the story, and instead moves along at a rapid pace that keeps you entertained and interested for the duration of the film.  There are very few scenes of people standing around telling themselves (and the audience) what is happening any why, and it’s never too long before another big (and impressive) set piece enters the story, giving the film a real impetus.  And it’s only really after the film has ended that you might find yourself thinking ‘Wait, why did he do that?’ or ‘Why did that thing do that?’

Because Into Darkness is hugely entertaining, moving from one location to another with and one battle to the next without pausing for much of a breath.  If the plot is lacking, the action more than makes up for it, as Kirk and his crew battle Klingons (who look more bad-ass than they have previously, although they are only briefly in the film), Harrison and other, unexpected enemies.  It also does a good job of establishing the bonds that have grown between the crew of the Enterprise, particularly the relationship between Spock and Kirk as they become great friends, while still unable to fully understand the differences between their species.

While the Enterprise crew are more developed and all give good performances, there’s little doubt that Cumberbatch is the standout in the film.  He’s already firmly established himself as a TV star in Sherlock, but he excels in his biggest film role to date, and is sure to get himself plenty of offers for big roles in film in the future (but hopefully not so many that gaps between series Sherlock get too big).

Star Trek Into Darkness isn’t a perfect film; at times it relies a little too much on familiar beats from the original series, whether it’s in the dialogue or the way certain characters act, and yes, the plot is bit flimsy when you really think about what’s just happened.  And perhaps the weakest part of the film is the abrupt ending, which really does seem to come out of nowhere.  It’s almost like Abrams and his writers realised they’d reached the two hour mark and just decided to stop, with the resolution of the film coming just a little bit too easily given what has happened before.

But the film is ultimately what it should be; a fast-paced and exciting sci-fi blockbuster that improves upon what made the first (or more accurately, the eleventh) Star Trek film a success.  What happens next is somewhat uncertain as JJ Abrams has another space-related franchise to re-invent (I forget its name) before he can consider directing a third film, but it certainly feels like the right tools are in place in front of, and behind, the camera to continue the story of the Enterprise over the next decade or so.

@TheGlassCase

The 10 Worst Films Of 2012

With the exception of what I consider to be the worst film (and it’s the worst by a considerable margin), there’s no particular order to my list of the films I enjoyed the least in 2012.  While I think it was actually a pretty good year for films in general (there were at least another eight films I considered squeezing into my top 10), there have plenty that I really didn’t enjoy at all, so here are 10 of them.

The first one I’ve written down is Battleship, which is indeed an ‘adaptation’ (which doesn’t seem like the right term) of the popular board game.  The plot is very basically ‘The US Navy vs. Aliens’, and err, that’s it really.  It’s a couple of extremely loud, very boring hours of people shouting, firing guns, and being the visual representation of the ‘America! Fuck Yeah!’ attitude displayed in Team America: World Police.  The biggest problem with Battleship is that it is in no way fun or entertaining, even with Rihanna often on screen to say things like ‘Boom!’ (what range she has).  Battleship’s leading man, Taylor Kitsch, managed to be the star of three rubbish films in 2012 (Battleship, John Carter and Oliver Stone’s Savages) but this is by far his worst.  The one thing Battleship had going for it was the best unintentional comedy of the year, which involves veteran Navy men coming to the rescue in slow motion as ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC blares over the soundtrack.

As a long-time fan of Tim Burton’s work, I was looking forward to Dark Shadows after a fun looking trailer made it look like a deliberately cheesy romp.  How wrong I was, as this was instead a turgid mess of a film, with a terrible script from Seth Grahame-Smith (he’ll be back later), and all the things you normally associate with a Tim Burton film, only all those things are becoming incredibly repetitive after 16 films.  One of the things that annoyed me most about Dark Shadows was the score (and the same goes for Frankenweenie), with Danny Elfman churning out something that sounded like out-takes from Edward Scissorhands, or any of the other films he’s scored for Burton.  Frankenweenie was marginally better, but Burton’s career is in danger of becoming a parody of itself.

I should have known something was up when A Fantastic Fear Of Everything started and there were only nine other people there to watch it, on the day it was released.  Simon Pegg stars in the directorial debut of Crispian ‘Kula Shaker’ Mills, a man who had a habit of talking utter bollocks during his time in Kula Shaker, and who clearly has no talent at all when it comes to writing and directing films.  But he and Pegg must be good mates, because that’s the only reason I can think of for this film being made.  It’s a mish-mash of the style of Bunny & The Bull and The Mighty Boosh without any of the comedy they both had, and a plot that is paper-thin and desperately trying to be quirky, like a Wes Anderson film with none of the humour.  Without Pegg it probably wouldn’t even have made it to DVD, let alone the cinema, and I can’t stress enough that you should never consider watching it.

It’s time for me to deconstruct Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and mention Seth Grahame-Smith for a second time.  For he managed to write two of the worst films of 2012, with AL:VH being just as bad as Dark Shadows.  This film is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, a Russian film-maker who looked to have a promising career in the making after the brilliant Night Watch (a supernatural thriller set in Moscow), but has lost his way since.  This film is drenched in slow-motion shots, with literally every death in the film shot in slo-mo, something which starts to grate after about 20 minutes.  On paper it’s a decent idea, but in reality the script is terrible, the actor playing Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) looks more like Liam Neeson (another, ‘more on him later’ victim) than Lincoln, and it gets boring very quickly.  It’s safe to say that people will remember Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln much more fondly, and I can only hope that Grahame-Smith has been locked in a cupboard to stop him writing more turds like this.

I’m not really sure what Nic Cage does with the money he makes from acting, but he clearly goes through it at a rate of knots given a) how frequently he’s in a film and b) how frequently the films he is in are rubbish.  Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance is one of those rubbish films he’s made, which isn’t really surprising when you remember that the first Ghost Rider film was also rubbish too.  The most disappointing aspect of this film is not that Nic Cage is rubbish in it (because that happens a lot too), but that its directors, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the maniacs behind the Crank films, do such a tame job on the film.  If you’ve seen a Crank film you’ll know that they’ll try pretty much anything, but Spirit Of Vengeance is rated 12, and it shows, as it basically has no balls at all.  Cage is phoning it in, possibly more than he ever has, and the plot is so uninspiring that I can’t remember a thing about it.  This is one Marvel franchise that’s going nowhere fast.

Taken was a surprise hit when it was released in 2008, mostly because of Liam Neeson making that phone call.  I didn’t think it was a particularly great film, but after being such an unexpected success, a sequel was inevitable.  Sadly, Taken 2 is significantly worse than the first film, with such high levels of stupidity in all areas that it feels like literally everyone involved suffered concussion while doing their part in bringing it to the screen.  This is a film that involves Maggie Grace (in reality 29, in Taken 2 seemingly trying, and failing, to convince as 21 or younger) chucking hand grenades around in Istanbul to general indifference, driving a car (without having a license) like she’s in a Need For Speed game, and because it has a 12 certificate, sees Liam Neeson offing bad guys by giving them really angry looks.  The Albanians seeking revenge on Neeson are portrayed as absolute morons, emptying entire rounds of bullets blindly round corners, peeking through holes in the wall to get shot in the face, and Neeson apparently kills the big bad guy by backing him up against a wall.  Neeson should really know better, and should probably give Danny Glover a call to be reminded that he’s ‘too old for this shit’, because he definitely is.

In the trailer, Sinister looks like a decent horror movie.  Ethan Hawke plays a true crime author who moves his family into a house where an unsolved murder took place several years before (without telling them) and weird shit goes down.  He finds Super-8 films in the attic which show murders taking place across America in different years, each time with a mysterious witchy-looking figure watching on, and he gets dragged deeper and deeper into the true nature of the crimes.  I actually thought the first half of the film wasn’t that bad, but it really loses its way in the second half, with the supernatural element to it falling flat, and the end is deeply unsatisfying.  It’s not a particularly long film, but I got bored enough that I started looking at my phone during it, and discovered that Ziggy from Season 2 of The Wire was in the film.  That was far more interesting than actually watching the film, which lacked scares and, more importantly, plot to mess up a reasonable start and result in a terrible film that will do nothing for the careers of anyone in it.

I wouldn’t exactly say that I had high hopes for The Man With The Iron Fists, but the trailer at least made it look like entertaining nonsense.  Sadly, it is just dull nonsense, with terrible acting, directing and writing, which is disappointing as I like The RZA, the production genius (musically) behind the Wu-Tang Clan and general cool guy.  And the disappointment comes in spades, as he is the writer (alongside Eli Roth, which I’m sure makes them the exact opposite of a dream team), director AND plays the titular metal handed chap, which was the worst idea of the lot, as he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, even if his whole head was made of sharp metal capable of slicing said bag to shreds.  Kung Fu movies aren’t exactly renowned for their wonderful acting and layered plots, but the plot and script of this film are so garbled that it’s both not long enough (because I couldn’t really tell what was supposed to be happening) and too long (because it’s really bad).  RZA plays a blacksmith who gets his hands chopped off and seeks revenge, but even that doesn’t happen until the second half of the film, which is only 90 minutes long.  I don’t know what Russell Crowe is up to starring in dross like this, or what he was trying to do with his character, and not even the presence of the lovely Lucy Liu can save this film from being absolute garbage.

You know you’re in trouble when the tagline for a film called Alex Cross is ‘Don’t Ever Cross Alex Cross’.  You know you’re in trouble when that film is directed by Rob Cohen, the (not) visionary director behind the likes of XXX and The Fast And The Furious.  You know you’re in trouble when you cast Tyler Perry (famous for dressing like an elderly woman) as the genius detective Alex Cross in Alex Cross.  You know you’re in trouble when you cast the annoyingly handsome Matthew Fox (Jack from Lost) as a skinny nutcase who wants to teach Alex Cross (remember, played by a man famous for dressing as a granny) ‘a lesson in pain’.  And most importantly, you know you’re in trouble when you watch Alex Cross.  Even when Cross was played by Morgan Freeman (you know, a real actor), the films based on James Patterson’s novels were poorly received, so quite how anyone came to the conclusion that Perry was the man to relaunch the franchise is a mystery that even Alex Cross himself (even if he was played by Don Cheadle) could solve.  In case I haven’t made it clear, Alex Cross is a very bad film and Tyler is no more a convincing leading man than I am Kylie Minogue’s bottom double.

So that brings me on to the worst movie that I saw in 2012, and here we go:

In a year when the found footage genre was given a welcome shot in the arm by the excellent Chronicle (which made my top 10), it reached a new nadir with the utterly repellent Project X.  It’s a film about a house party that got totally out of hand, and it’s almost difficult to know where to start when it comes to summing up just how unfunny, puerile and just outright offensively bad it is.  This is a film where the three leading characters (think the three guys from Superbad, but with no redeeming features at all) are basically total dicks, with no respect for anyone, let alone their families, and who put together a party that destroys the house and the surrounding neighbourhood all while the film is trying to make it look like this is a really cool thing to do.

There’s no such thing as good dialogue in this film, and it’s often blatantly offensive, portraying the women in it as desperate sluts and incapable of living without boyfriends who cheat on them at the drop of a hat, and that’s probably the least offensive thing that happens in the film, because I haven’t even gotten to the part where a dwarf is stuck in an oven.  It didn’t take long before I was imagining how much fun it would be to repeatedly punch any of the three leads in the face (particularly Oliver Cooper who plays the abhorrent Costa), which was a lot more fun than actually watching the film.

But the worst thing about the film is how it ends.  The party has taken place at the house of Thomas, who appears to actually be a fairly normal, decent student, but the next day he’s destroyed his home, his father’s car is in the swimming pool, and the entire neighbourhood has been terrorised by the absurd events taking place throughout the night.  So you’d think that his father would beat the living shit out of him and throw him onto the street, right?  Wrong!  His father is actually delighted by everything that’s happened, because he didn’t think that Thomas ‘had it in him’!  Had it in him to be an irresponsible little shit who destroyed everything you’ve worked your whole life for?  What wonderful paternal advice!

Project X is a nasty, horrible film, and the worst I’ve seen this year by a long way.

@TheGlassCase

Movies Of The Year: The 10 Best Movies Of 2011

Attack The Block (Joe Cornish)

 

Joe Cornish has directed some of the classic movies of recent times, including Titanic, The English Patient and Trainspotting.  Admittedly he directed the toy remakes of them for The Adam And Joe Show, but his are now regarded as the definitive versions of those movies.  He returned to directing in 2011, with the excellent Attack The Block.

The story of a gang of surly London teenagers facing off against vicious alien creatures, it is a very British science-fiction movie.  The script is fresh and up to date, with references to the FIFA video games, and text messaging playing an important part in the plot (“This is too much madness to explain in one text!”).  The young cast all give convincing performances, with some of them making their screen debuts, but it is John Boyega as the gang leader Moses who dominates the movie.  He delivers a powerful performance as a reluctant hero, battling vicious aliens to protect his friends.  Boyega is set to be the breakout star of the movie, and has already been cast in Da Brick, an HBO show produced by Spike Lee and based on the life of Mike Tyson.

Attack The Block is funny, smart and entertaining, and was undoubtedly one of the highlights in a great year for British cinema.

Paul (Greg Mottola)

The trio of Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright and Nick Frost have enjoyed great success on TV and in film.  Having worked together on Spaced, Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz, Wright went off to do his own thing with 2010’s excellent Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and this year, Pegg and Frost went to America to make Paul.

Teaming up with Superbad director Mottola, Pegg and Frost wrote the tale of two geeks on a road trip to America’s UFO hotspots, who find themselves being chased by shadowy government officials after reluctantly picking up an alien hitch-hiker.  The script is littered with references to classic science-fiction movies, but they almost always work and rarely feel forced.  It is also an all-star cast, with appearances by some of America’s biggest comedy stars, including Saturday Night Live regulars Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, Jane Lynch (Glee), Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development), and Hollywood royalty in Blythe Danner and Sigourney Weaver.

The biggest challenge for the movie is Paul himself.  An entirely CGI character, the film would have died on its arse if it didn’t work properly.  But it does indeed work, and voiced by Seth Rogan, Paul has some of the movie’s best lines.  Paul is a hilarious love-letter to classic sci-fi, and Pegg and Frost have created one of the movies of the year.

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

If you went to the cinema on a regular basis this year, there’s a good chance you saw at least one Ryan Gosling movie.  He had starring roles in four movies released in 2011, starting with Blue Valentine in January, with Crazy Stupid Love and The Ides Of March later in the year.  But there’s little doubt that Drive was his best role.

Drive was originally conceived as a big budget thriller starring Hugh Jackman, but it became a lower budget, more intimate movie after Gosling and director Refn signed on.  Set in Los Angeles, it’s the tale of ‘The Driver’ (Gosling), a mechanic and movie stuntman by day, and a getaway driver by night.  A man of few words, the driver befriends a neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), who has a young son and a husband in prison.  By the time the husband is released from prison, the driver has developed a strong relationship with Irene, and when he discovers that her husband owes money to local gangsters, he decides to help.

Gosling gives one of the performances of the year in the lead role, despite having very little to say.  His actions speak louder than words, with his character capable of extreme violence and threatening behaviour when required.  Albert Brooks is excellent as Bernie Rose, a local mobster, and Mulligan and Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston give strong performances in supporting roles.

The Tree Of Life (Terrence Malick)

I’ll be honest, I really enjoyed The Tree Of Life, and even I found it difficult going.  It is a very slow paced movie, there’s little dialogue, and a large chunk of the film is made up of a collage of images that appear to show the birth and growth of the universe, with extra added dinosaurs.

Terrence Malick’s movie is light on dialogue and possibly even lighter in plot, focussing mainly on a young boy, Jack (played superbly by newcomer Hunter McCracken), growing up in Texas during the 1950s.  Malick asks a lot of McCracken, but he delivers with a staggering performance, showing the whole range of emotions a young boy will go through as he becomes a man.  Brad Pitt plays his strict father, and also gives a strong performance as a man driven to making sure his young sons become men in the way he thinks is right.

The Tree Of Life is a movie that will divide opinion.  It was cheered and booed at Cannes, where it won the Palme D’Or, and several people walked out when I watched it.  But it is a beautifully shot movie with stunning images and strong performances from Pitt, McCracken and Jessica Chastain.  Give it a chance, and The Tree Of Life will enchant and astonish you.

Source Code (Duncan Jones)

Duncan Jones’ first movie, Moon, was one of the best of 2009.  An intelligent science-fiction film with a terrific performance from Sam Rockwell, it was released to critical acclaim.  Source Code is his second film, this time featuring Jake Gyllenhaal, who also gives a strong performance.  Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, an army helicopter pilot placed into the ‘Source Code’ an advanced piece of technology that allows him to experience the last eight minutes of a person’s life.  He is doing this in an attempt to identify a bomber who is threatening to destroy Chicago.

Stevens experiences the last eight minutes of Shaun Fentress’s life, a man who died when a bomb detonated on a train headed into the city.  At first he is confused by the process, but as he relives it again and again, his instincts kick in, and he begins to explore this alternate reality, and find the man responsible for the bombings.  Stevens also interacts with Captain Colleen Goodwin (Vera Fermiga) and Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) when he is not on mission, and both characters have key roles in him discovering the truth about where he is and why.

Like Moon, Source Code is another intelligent sci-fi movie.  There are no aliens or overblown CGI battles, but it is a cleverly executed thriller that marks Jones out as a director with real talent.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)

With an outstanding performance from Natalie Portman, Black Swan is a dark psychological thriller, based around Portman’s character Nina, driven to madness by her desire to be the lead dancer in a production of Swan Lake.  Her rivalry with Lily (an equally impressive Mila Kunis) and her relationship with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey) bring out conflicting sides of her personality, and she starts to lose control.

Portman gives the performance of her life in a challenging role, and the supporting cast including Vincent Cassel and Winona Ryder all give strong performances too.  Darren Aronofsky’s reputation for directing challenging, dark but visually stunning movies continues to grow following the success of The Wrestler, and he earned an Oscar nomination for his directing.  Portman went one better, deservedly winning an Oscar for her performance.

Black Swan is of course infamous for that seduction scene between Portman and Kunis.  But Black Swan offers so much more than titillation, and it would be a mistake to highlight that scene ahead of the rest of the movie.  It is a movie that explores sexuality and the dark sides of personality, with every character having positive and negative tendencies.  There are horror and fantasy elements to the movie, with Portman’s transformation into a literal black swan beautifully shown towards the end of the movie, and Aronofsky continues to deliver quality movies.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (Rupert Wyatt)

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes is one of those rare things, an intelligent big budget Hollywood blockbuster.  A prequel to the classic Planet Of The Apes (not the Tim Burton one, and let’s never mention that again), Rise is the tale of how the apes rose to power.

One of the best decisions made by the makers of the movie was to go to Weta for special effects work, the team whose outstanding work on the Lord Of The Rings trilogy made them one of the go-to companies for state of the art effects work.  The highlight of their work on Rise is undoubtedly Caesar.  Caesar’s evolution, based on Andy Serkis’ performance is wonderfully convincing and makes the film great.

Like many prequels, sequels and remakes of recent times, Rise features knowing winks to the movie that inspired it.  The space mission that resulted in Chuck Heston and co crash landing in the original takes place during the movie, and how the apes rose to power is referenced in a clever final scene and credits sequence.

James Franco gives a good performance as the scientist who accidentally triggers the rise of the apes, and John Lithgow is similarly strong as his father, battling Alzheimer’s.  With some stunning set pieces (including a gorilla killing a helicopter), Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes stood out amongst the big studio productions of the year.

Submarine (Richard Ayoade)

Richard Ayoade has become a well known face in British comedy.  With roles in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd, he’s proven himself in front of the camera.  But he’s also a director, working on music videos for bands like Arctic Monkeys, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Kasabian.  His first movie is Submarine, is a coming-of-age comedy set in Wales, based on Joe Dunthorpe’s 2008 novel.

Submarine has a terrific cast, with Craig Roberts (Oliver Tate) and Yasmin Paige (Jordana) giving great performances in the lead roles, ably supported by Paddy Considine and Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor as Oliver’s parents.  It also has a very funny, very clever script, with several knowing nods to movie clichés.  Paddy Considine sends himself up as a moronic lifestyle guru, and Taylor and Hawkins give quietly brilliant performances as two people apparently falling out of love.

Aoyade’s debut has drawn comparisons to the work of Wes Anderson, and it does have the same mix of comedy and drama as movies like The Royal Tenenbaums and Bottle Rocket.  But this is a uniquely British version of that style, and is funny, touching and genuine.  It’s an accomplished start to Aoyade’s career in movie directing, and as he also wrote the script, he’s marked himself out as a genuine new talent in British cinema.

The Guard (John Michael McDonagh)

After watching The Guard, you’ll find yourself wondering what Don Cheadle thought when he first read the script.  As FBI agent Wendell Everett, chasing an international drug smuggling ring in Ireland, he suffers all kinds of abuse, as the local police and population have a less than friendly reaction to a black American cop asking questions.  But what must have made him say yes to the script was the simple fact that it is hilarious.

But Cheadle is not the star of The Guard.  That honour goes to Brendan Gleeson, who is brilliant as Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a policeman with an unorthodox attitude toward policing.  Gerry enjoys the company of ladies of the night, looks after his mother (suffering through cancer) and likes going for a morning swim in the sea (and he claims to competed in the Olympics).  His relationship with Everett is a hostile one, despite both having the same goal.  The main men in the smuggling ring are played by Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot and Mark Strong, who argue about philosophy when they aren’t importing drugs.

The Guard is hilarious, but the plot is also strong and plays out as a drama.  Director McDonagh is the brother of Martin McDonagh, writer and director of In Bruges.  He wrote The Guard and it has similar humour to his brother’s movie, but is possibly even better.

Movie Of The Year: Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols)

Michael Shannon is starting to establish himself as one of the best actors in America.  A brilliant performance in a minor role in Revolutionary Road earned him an Oscar nomination, and his role as Curtis LaForche in Take Shelter could (and should) earn him another nomination.  His performance is extraordinary, as a man who may or may not be losing his mind as he experiences violently vivid dreams about a huge storm coming.

His dreams start to affect his life, as he tries to hide them from his wife (Jessica Chastain) and gets distracted at work.  Visions of the storm drive him to rebuild an old storm shelter in his back yard.  This confuses and angers his wife, and causes him problems at work, as his colleagues and boss start to question his behaviour.

Take Shelter is a slow burning movie.  For most of the running time, Shannon’s performance is subtle and understated.  His character takes a methodical approach to rebuilding the storm shelter, while at the same time exploring what may be causing his dreams, fearing the same mental illness that his mother suffered when he was a child.  Things come to a head when his friend confronts him at a community dinner, and in one of the movie’s most powerful scenes, Shannon explodes into life.

Curtis’ dreams become more violent and disturbing, and his obsession with the shelter and protecting his family continues to grow, before the movie reaches a stunning climax.

Shannon’s performance towers above the rest in 2011, and Jeff Nichols has written and directed a truly brilliant movie.  Take Shelter is the best movie of 2011, and I urge you all to watch it.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol Review

Tom Cruise is a man that divides opinion.  People seem to love him or hate him as an actor, and his personal life tends to generate as many headlines as his movies.  Whatever your opinion of him, it’s hard to deny that he is a proper Hollywood star.  2011 is his 30^th year of making movies, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is his 33^rd movie.

The fourth movie in the franchise, Ghost Protocol is directed by Brad Bird, who helms a live-action movie for the first time, after directing Pixar’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille.  The action takes place in Hungary, Russia, Dubai and Mumbai, with Cruise returning as Ethan Hunt, leading a disavowed IMF team attempting to stop a Swedish born Russian terrorist from acquiring and launching nuclear weapons.  Simon Pegg also returns as Benji Dunn, having first appeared in Mission: Impossible III.  The other members of the team are Jane Carter (Paula Patton, Precious) and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker).

The movie begins with Benji and Carter breaking Ethan out from a Russian prison.  After the breakout, Hunt and the team attempt to break into the Kremlin, in order to identify a terrorist known as Cobalt.  But Cobalt is a step ahead of the team, and triggers a bomb that destroys part of the Kremlin, framing the IMF team in the process.  Hunt meets with the IMF secretary (Tom Wilkinson), who explains that Hunt’s team has been disavowed, after the president initiates Ghost Protocol.  The secretary has resigned, but gives Hunt one last mission, find Cobalt and prevent him from starting a nuclear war.  The car Hunt and the secretary are travelling in is ambushed and the secretary is killed, leaving Hunt and analyst Brandt trying to escape after the car crashes into a river and Russian security forces fire shots into the water.  Following their escape, Hunt and Brandt join Benji and Carter, as they plan the next move.

Their mission will take them to Dubai and Mumbai, where most of the action takes place.  As you’ll know from the trailer, the Dubai part of the movie takes place inside (and outside) the Burj Khalifa, the tallest structure in the world.  In order to hack into the building’s security servers, Ethan has to scale the outside of the building and break in to the server room.  In Mission: Impossible II, Cruise climbed a mountain in Utah without safety harnesses, but in Ghost Protocol he climbs the outside of the Burj Khalifa, taking the kind of risks that give Hollywood producers nightmares.  It’s a tense scene in the movie, so one can only imagine how fast hearts were beating when the scene was actually being filmed.

The movie offers up the standard fare for modern action thrillers.  There are car chases and explosions, fist and gun fights, and spectacular settings being destroyed in various ways.  But there’s something missing from the movie.  The plot is fairly bog standard, we’ve all seen a ‘shady Russian has a nuclear device’ plot-line in any number of movies in the past.  The script also suffers.  Pegg essentially becomes sidekick Simon, his character for the most part doing nothing other than fiddle with electronic devices and make quips while the rest of the team get on with the action. It becomes grating after a while, and dilutes the dramatic elements of the movie.  The bad guys are under-written, and we learn little about their motivation for wanting to spark nuclear war.  Brad Bird’s direction is fine, with some spectacular shots, and he handles action fairly well.

Pegg aside, Cruise does exactly what you expect, leading the film with ease, with Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton also joining him in doing the physical stuff.  Michael Nyqvist has little to do as Cobalt, other than a fight scene with Cruise late in the film.  Overall, the film never quite lives up to expectations.  It feels rather tame and predictable in the post-Bourne world, with not much new or original to separate it from the pack.  It’s not a bad movie, but you’ll be left wanting more.