Contemporary 2024 – Page 2 – The Magnificent 60s

Deadpool and Wolverine (2024) **** – Seen at the Cinema

Count me in. The buddy movie reinvented, the MCU legend trashed, all set in the ideal MCU location, The Void (worthy of two capital letters, I guess), the place where long-forgetten Marvel characters from the pre-Disney multiverse hang out, and it’s a fun ride. Whether of course this proves the death knell for the MCU after so much fan backlash and poor reviews remains to be seen. Next weekend’s box office will decide its fate one way or another.

But who the hell cares? If this is the extinction of the MCU, as some predict, then it is going out with a bang, a crazy superhero mash-up where you need to keep an MCU dictionary to hand so you can work who’s going to turn up next. Wesley Snipes, not seen in that Blade badass rig since 2004, and it’s not Capt America but Chris Evans’ earlier incarnation of Johnny Storm not seen since 2007, and there’s Channing Tatum as a character Gambit whose stand-alone picture never materialized, despite scoring highly in animated form.

Anything that MCU got wrong or was criticized for – the multiverse and the varying timelines – turn up here as plot. The “sacred time lime” is almost a character in itself and if you ever wanted to invent the most ideal/ironic MCU character, who else would that be but Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen)?

The entire storyline is so off-the-wall that you’d think it’s never going to work but then when Deadpool’s around walls are toys, especially the fourth wall, that magical trick of speaking direct to the camera. And it’s Deadpool and his continual wisecrack commentary on proceedings that turns what could be a s**tshow into a hoot.

But some of the twists transform what could be another deathly routine of superheroes saving the universe (yawn, what again?) into something more human. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) only wants to save his own tiny universe of half a dozen people, everyone who matters to him, and not a gazillion others. Somehow he teams up with the previously deceased Logan a.k.a. (in case you don’t have your MCU Dictionary handy) Wolverine to revive the moribund buddy movie, the best kickass bickering pair since Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon.

Or whatever. Anyway, they find themselves in The Void doing battle with that sweet Charles Xavier guy’s nasty twin sister Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin). And, yes, there’s still so much jiggering about with time that you’d think the Time Bandits or Doctor Who would be claiming copyright infringement. And sometimes you can almost hear the clack of the typewriter as the screenwriter tries to fix that last loose end.

But, as I said, whenever the going gets tough – especially when the going gets tough – you can depend on Deadpool’s motormouth to see the narrative through. Deadpool and Wolverine do make a great screen team, ideal opposites, growl vs grit, class vs. sass, and really you could just junk the narrative – or come up with an entirely different one – and still this picture would work because the two principles set the screen alight.

This is akin to when Guardians of the Galaxy ripped up the MCU playbook a decade ago and influenced every movie thereafter. The guess now is whether Deadpool and Wolverine will take MCU down a new stylistic avenue or whether this is a deliberate cul de sac. I’d guess not, since it’s going to be such a money-spinner, and I could see this pair worming their way into the new Avengers team to brighten up whatever doom-laden occasion is heading our way.

Maybe the MCU is giving the finger to the fanboys, hoping to attract a wider audience rather than pandering to an audience that seemed to have made up its mind about everything way in advance and wasn’t inclined to go along with any MCU experiment, feint or development. The audience I saw it with were clearly of mixed opinion, some feeling betrayed or at the very least insulted.

But I have a good bit less invested in the MCU. It takes me all my time to keep up with who’s who in this expanding universe. So treating this picture on its own merits, I thought it generated more than its fair share of laughs, and not always rude ones, although anyone with a woke inclination would be advised to steer clear.

Shawn Levy (Free Guy, 2021) directed.

Make up your own mind.

Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 (2024) **** – Seen at the Cinema

Unpacking Kevin Costner’s hefty portmanteau is a significant task since at times it veers into the unwieldy. But only once during the three-hour running time did I glance at my watch and that was over an hour in when I started to wonder when Costner in his capacity as star would appear. Anyone looking for anything heroic or iconic or in the vein of Dances with Wolves (1990) or even Wyatt Earp (1994) had better look elsewhere. This has more in common with the grimy westerns of the 1970s when heroes were hard to come by and the West was a cesspool of brutality.

There’s a heck of an arthouse sensibility to this ensemble piece, characters and situations appear with little preamble and often little consequential explanation, and we switch geographically and psychologically at the drop of a hat. Theoretically, I should be waiting until Chapter 2 pops into view in a few weeks’ time before attempting summation because it’s clear that some sections are unresolved here, assuming the ending is more of a trailer for part two than a speeded-up finale.

At $100 million – and same again for Chapter 2 – this would have all the makings of an over-the-top vanity project, especially after Yellowstone was thrown out with the bathwater. In some senses it’s closer to a series of vignettes puncturing the myth of the West. The wagon train section, for example, focuses on an over-entitled English woman who breaks several golden rules and encounters a couple of peeping toms while the wagon master (Luke Wilson) finds out just how powerless he is in trying to enforce discipline.

Virtually all the women are schemers. Ellen (Jena Malone) attempts to murder her husband and flee with their child, takes up with another fella who’s trying to run some kind of gold strike scam but unfortunately runs into the sons of the man she tried to kill. Her child, meanwhile, is being cared for by sex worker Marigold (Abbey Lee) who gets her hooks into prospector Hayes (Costner) but only as long as she can dump him for another man and dump the child on another family. By comparison Frances (Sienna Miller) is saintly, having survived an Indian massacre, but she makes no bones about making a play for married cavalry lieutenant Trent (Sam Worthington).

And the older ones are just as savage. Mama Sykes sets her sons out for revenge and an elderly lady in the fort batters two soldiers for trying to steal a child-sized bed. The latter is another vignette, the old woman, mourning the loss of one child, being maneuvered by a clever sergeant (Michael Rooker) into semi-adopting another, and that lass, in the most touching (or sentimental if you like) vignette, sending soldiers into battle wearing flowers she has cut from a quilt.

There’s not much point being a child here if you can’t fire a weapon. Native American kids are only too ready to aim arrows at white men and one young massacre survivor buys a pair of Colts to effect his revenge.

The main thrust of the tale is the land rush of the 1860s, when settlers dashed from east to west in the hope of a better life and in the expectation that the Army would take care of any Native Americans who got in the way. Lt Trent does his best to dissuade settlers from picking land that’s too far away from a fort to defend. The Apache chief tries his best to dissuade his son Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) from attacking the settlers, pointing out (somewhat improbably) that his tribe can find enough sustenance in the mountains.

From my own reading on the subject, namely The Earth Is Weeping by Peter Cozzens, this was true to life, the younger braves more likely to wage war, the older chiefs prescribing restraint and fearing consequence, and the rivalry between different tribes is cleverly dealt with, even though it’s hard to understand at the time the point of a lone Native American being hunted down and killed by a band of other Native Americans.

The titular “Horizon” is the name of a large swathe of land being sold back east to settlers as presumably a land of milk and honey, said settlers harnessing similar entrepreneurial spirit as the Pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic in search of same. Every now and then a character pops up to provided a potted history, Col Houghton (Danny Huston) one such, predicting the bloody end to the encroachment of land.

The biggest set piece is the massacre that interrupts another set piece, the kind beloved of John Ford and Michael Cimino, the local dance, that itself punctuated by other vignettes, the teenager too old to dance with his mother, another teenager playing with a loaded gun, until both teenagers are taught savage reality and this section ends with Frances hammering a shotgun through the earth to provide a source of air for her and her daughter trapped underground.

There’s a quirkiness here that would sit well with Robert Altman or the Coen Brothers or Yorgos Lanthimos. And the scene between Hayes and the younger Sykes gunslinger is pure Tarantino.

But there’s way too much hair. Authentic though it may be, the thickness of the beards makes it virtually impossible at times to identify the actor underneath. But despite the running time it’s also been brutally edited, hard to work out how Hayes goes from being hunted by the Sykes Gang to working on the railroad.

So this is a warning as much as a straightforward review. Don’t go in expecting the usual. This isn’t an exploration of the West in the manner of How the West Was Won (1962) with big stars and a ton of set pieces and Cinerama to pump up the action and roadshow to make the whole enterprise seem somehow more worthy.

The women steal the acting honors, especially Sienna Miller (The Lost City of Z, 2016) and Jena Malone (The Neon Demon, 2016). Directed with some style by Costner from a screenplay by himself and Jon Baird in his debut.

Plenty to see here that’s worthy of praise if you set aside expectations.

Under Paris (2024) ****

That’s no ironic four-star rating either. While this would easily go straight into the Top Ten Guilty Pleasures the fact that it’s so darn good takes it out of the So Bad It’s Good bracket. Netflix has taken time off from beating down Oscar’s door with $200 million arthouse epics to steal summer. In a Hollywood galaxy a long long time ago this is the kind of unexpected blockbuster that would have sneaked into cinemas on Memorial Day as counter-programming and hit the jackpot.

As well as tearing up with astonishing confidence every trope in the monster playbook and not even stooping to attempt the kind of artistic kudos that lassooed so much critical acclaim for Godzilla Minus One, this is truly a terrific stomp. And it hoodwinks the audience along the way. From the onset it looked more like Jaws Goes Woke with eco warriors determined to save a thriller killer no matter how many humans he gulps down. And then there was a side helping of gaga science of the Moonfall variety, in this case that a shark had beaten evolution by being able to breathe freshwater as well as the saltwater of its natural habitat (in case you don’t know a shark should suffocate in freshwater). Plus it grows at an unprecedented rate and it don’t need no male to replicate and can get pregnant within a month or so of being born.

So it’s not just one shark swimming up the River Seine in Paris, France, and hiding out among the skull-sodden catacombs, but it’s hundreds of the darned monsters. And the mayor of Paris is all set with a giant lunch box when she fires the starting gun for the Triathlon. So you’ve got hundreds of red-hatted swimmers heading in the direction of a giant shark. Not to mention that there’s all these unexploded shells loitering at the bottom of the Seine and what with all the commotion one way or another they are apt to go off and bring down all the pretty bridges across the river, the apocalypse so stunning you’re pretty well astonished that in all the carnage the Eiffel Tower remains standing.

So how the heck did we get to this? Well, three years previously, oceanologist Sophia (Berenice Bejo) has been tracking a particular shark near Hawaii in (eco-nod number one) the Pacific Garbage Patch only to watch the beastie gobble up her husband and the rest of her diving team. So now, turns out the shark still has an electronic tag and somehow (gaga science of course) it has made its way 7,500 miles to Paris where the beacon is picked up by eco warrior and computer whiz Mika (Lea Leviant) and her girlfriend Ben (Nagisa Morimoto) who head up Save Our Seas which aims to stop sharks being slaughtered.

Sophia alerts disbelieving cops (who, by the way, are really nice to homeless guys) to the problem and eventually, minus cameras of course, they take to the water. Up to this point all we get are brief glimpses of a fin and a flashing shape but once Mika and Ben decide to put into action their own ploy and assemble dozens of their followers in the catacombs where the cops are chasing the shark then all hell breaks loose. The shark’s no respecter of eco-dopes and the eco-dopes prove no respecters of each other, trampling over each other in the water once the feeding bell rings. This is the kind of movie where nobody gets hauled out of water unless they’re going to be missing their legs.

Having assembled all the usual suspects – venal mayor desperate to hide the truth, river instead of beach teeming with potential victims, a great backdrop in the shape of the catacombs – then director Xavier Gens breaks all the rules. There’s no Jason Statham here to knock sense into the beast, and there’s no clever Quint, and there’s no keeping the public out of harm’s way. Instead this is Joe Dante with a bucket of style. Tangle with sharks and you’re gonna get yours is the message here not the usual let’s have a happy ending.

There’s are some stunning images. Torches of dead cops float down to a skull-strewn river bed, an underwater flare reveals just how many sharks there are, a shark dragging a string of yellow buoys heads towards swimmers decked out in red caps, the bridges tumbling down, the ensuing tsumani (bet you never expected that). And on top of that there are some neat scenes. Sophia’s pompous ecology lecture is punctured by giggling kids who, checking her up on social media, point out her credentials are somewhat tarnished given she lost her entire crew to sharks. One sensible cop doesn’t go along with the usual sacrificial nonsense as his colleagues put themselves in harm’s way because his family means more to him than a shark.

This should have been Netflix going DTV. Instead, it’s Netflix showing Hollywood where to go.

Unmissable. You gotta see this.

The Strangers Chapter 1 (2024) **

Enough already. Dumb as ditchwater, virtually no thrills and they think we’re going to be queuing up for the next one? Have they gone crazy? Could I care less who is behind the masks? And what’s happened to the horror genre? This should be relatively safe territory, every now and then we’d get a gem like Megan or The Black Phone and someone would invariably reimagine one of the old standards, but even remakes of The Omen and The Exorcist have been tired and lacking any spark.

I’m not a huge horror fan but in the last few years in the absence of anything else been happy to top my weekly cinemagoing habit with a dose of the scary stuff. But this looks like it’s going as swiftly off the boil as MCU. Am astonished to find one-time uber-director Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger, 1993) behind this weak sauce, and apparently there’s going to be no let-up because the next two chapters are already in the can.

This might prove the all-time horror hubris as there’s virtually nothing here to suggest any reason for a sequel, and setting aside the question of artistic merit, the box office doesn’t sound like it commands anything except a quick turnaround into streaming. Miscalculation and misconception on a massive scale. Nothing more than a one-set horror outing with elements that have been better done elsewhere and really the dumbest of the dumb participants.

It’s only when you lock yourself in the toilet you realize you might have been better to stop in the kitchen and hunt for a weapon? Though, this being America, you can be sure of finding a shotgun in the shed. Your car’s broken down but there’s a motorcycle sitting outside your Airbnb with its keys in the ignition? You don’t even have the sense to employ the rusty nail you’ve pulled out of your hand while down in a cellar (you went into a cellar, have you no sense?) as a weapon as if you’re incapable of taking lessons from other onscreen heroes.

How can even get lost in the first place? Your mobile phone signal is what brings the cops in the end and yet it doesn’t work enough in the area to get you home in the first place?

You’ve got asthma but you constantly misplace your inhaler. You don’t whack the one member of the masked gang around the head with your shotgun but allow her to hold their knife high up in the air so it’s going to reflect the moonlight and let her confederates know where she is.

These inconsistences would all be acceptable was there any element of menace. This is just all handled so badly you can’t believe Harlin is an experienced director, 40-plus projects on his call-sheet.

So we’re in semi-Deliverance territory, though Oregon rather than hillbilly country, but the kind of place where they seriously look askance at vegetarians and unmarried couples and are constantly thrusting religious pamphlets at you. Loved-up couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Jeff (Ryan Brown) get, as I said, lost and stop at a Nowheresville diner long enough to be made to feel uncomfortable. Then, blow me down if Jeff can’t get his fancy vehicle to start, so they’ve got to spent the night in a cabin.

Someone keeps knocking at the door. Jeff has to leave Maya on her lonesome because he left his inhaler in said car, now residing in a repair garage, and the motorcycle lacks a pillion to accommodate her (nope, he just goes off on his own, otherwise we won’t be treated to the lonely woman in the old dark house where, yep, the lights go off).

Three people in masks, one a cut-price Leatherface number, the other two dollfaces, come a-calling with axes and knives and then…snoresville. If you stay on to watch the credits, there’s meant to be a chilling twist, but by then I guess most people are just happy to get out of the place.

I know there aren’t many like me who still religiously go to the cinema once a week. I’m not a paid-up critic who gets in for free. I’m just your ordinary cinema-lover and in the course of a year I’m expecting a few turkeys, but we are now dredging rock bottom, last year’s various strikes hammering studio output, so that even the traditional Memorial Day, that’s meant to launch the summer season, has been very poor. Hollywood was struggling enough post-Covid with the encroachment of the streamers and it in part depended on ordinary punters like me who would plug movies that fell beneath the radar to other less-compelled movie fans.

Avoid.

The Asunta Case (2024) ****

You didn’t used to get away with this. Until recently, screen murderers had to be unveiled or at the very least, if getting away with their crime, come unstuck in the final few minutes as with Jagged Edge (1985) or tip the wink to the audience in the manner of Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects (1995). About the only thing Netflix can genuinely take positive credit for is the invention of a subgenre of movies/series about unsolved crimes. And now it’s taken that a step further with programs where the killer(s) are apprehended but you never find out why they committed their appalling crimes.

The Asunta Case was very much the Spanish equivalent of the Madeleine McCann Case. The latter attracted global publicity, the former headlines that raged in Spain for years. However, Asunta, the 12-year adopted daughter of the recently separated Rosario and Alfonso, was soon found not far from the couple’s country estate, albeit with hands tied with red twine, and dead.

Although the couple fell under immediate suspicion, there was little sign of motive. Would the mother, a bundle of nerves and very thin, have been capable of drugging and suffocating the child and bundling her into a car and dumping her on a piece of waste ground? The father appeared a devoted parent and no cameras could find evidence of him anywhere near the estate or the area where the child was found.

So Netflix plays its usual narrative tricks. The couple appear guilty, then innocent, then guilty, then innocent. The investigating team hide evidence that doesn’t back up their case. A witness arrives late in the day. There’s a question of how bright the moon was that night. You can’t match two ends of this kind of twine to prove that the material that bound the child was the same as some found in a waste paper basket. Alfonso is accused of hiding his computer. Jail cells are bugged. There’s a hint that money might be involved. The media undermine the judiciary process by digging up juicy morsels that may or may not pertain to the case and may or may not influence a jury. In the absence of anything conclusive the evidence is almost entirely circunstantial.

What helps the Netflix tale most is the actress (Candela Pena) portrayng Rosario. I’ve no idea how accurate a portrayal this might be. But a more whiny, self-centred individual would be hard to find. Quite how she manages to conduct an affair just prior to the murder defies belief. As does Alfonso’s continued commitment to his unfaithful wife.

It could well be that Rosario’s witlessness, coming to pieces, is the result of loss, or, equally, the impact of guilt. She is a lawyer, so you would expect her not just to be above suspicion, but with a good idea of how the system works, enough to work her way around it. Alfonso (Tristan Ulloa) is a journalist so he, too, must be accustomed to the ways of the media and that refusing to talk will keep the media at bay long enough for his constant protestations of innocence to take effect.

As with most of these dramatized mini series, the information is structured in a way that keeps you on your toes. The situation for the investigative team is complicated in that the chief investigating officer, here deemed a “judge”, has to cope with a father with dementia while one of the cops is undergoing fertility treatment.

And the dramatists do the police work for them, presenting the circumstantial evidence as if it is fact. So what we are given are various options, how the couple could not have committed the crime, in which case the criminal, still at large, could strike again, and how they very much could. And this is after various red herrings dressed up very much as the menu du jour have been discarded, principal among which is the idea that the girl has been sexually abused, as she is seen early on wearing clothing and make-up inappropriate for her age, such photos found on the missing computer, and yet with a genuinely innocent explanation.

The investigation appears to focus more on Rosario – killer mother worse than killer father it would seem – although Alfonso’s implacability would drvie you to drink. The investigators don’t get off scot free either, complicit in permitting the judge to ignore evidence favorable to the defense. In the end the crime is solved, or at least a verdict reached, but the truth remains hidden, neither of the accused fessing up, no psychiatric reports to provide clarification, no suggestion that Alfonso did it to inflict terrible injury on the mother more than the child, which is often the case in child murders.

The dubbing’s annoying and you might enjoy this more watching it in the original Spanish with subtitles.

Whatever, it is totally absorbing, for the most part because of the mystery of the couple themselves, how they came to be in this position, and whether doubt remains.

Compulsive viewing.

Unfrosted (2024) **

It’s an easy trap to fall into. You believe a much-loved actor couldn’t possibly lead you so astray. You are determined to give him every chance to proof your instincts wrong. You turn off at 15 minutes, then you feel you’ve done him an injustice, after all he is a major figure making his directorial debut, shouldn’t you cut him more slack? You switch off again at 35 minutes and are hit by the same guilty feelings. So you stick it out till the end and what do you get? One decent sequence with JFK of all people berating our nincompoops for asking for a favor when in one of his most famous speeches he had pointedly said, “Ask not.”

Indulgence gone mad. Or, just another day in the wacky world of Netflix. Honestly, who in their right mind would greenlight the directorial debut of a television comic who has never made a movie, clearly doesn’t understand what makes a movie, and that a 90-minute picture needs a completely different approach to a 25-minute television episode, and as obviously couldn’t care less?

There’s enough to satirize in the world of business instead of some dumb satire about the creation of a cereal that defies convention. If it was such a massive success story why did it take so long so cross the Atlantic, a couple of decades as far as I’m aware. But then, over here, we were still struggling just to work out why we needed to buy a toaster when you could just toast bread under a grill.

Clearly, the director-star Jerry Seinfeld, who’s always been enamored of his own material, was bored with being so wealthy that he decided he would inflict his latest joke on a disinterested public. I own up to having been a big fan of the Seinfeld schtick of a show about nothing and perhaps that’s where he’s gone wrong here. Because this is about something. At the very least rivalry between two cereal giants.

But these two apparently great companies are run by people who don’t notice that the cleaner sticking his mop in your face has a camera attached to it and the guy appearing at an inappropriate time in your business strategy meeting has (wait for it) a camera attached to his vacuum.

Sure, Seinfeld has rounded up a bunch of his pals and you can spot the likes of Amy Schumer, Melissa McCarthy, Christian Slater and Jon Hamm. It says a lot for their acting intelligence that they all thought this was a humdinger. I did like Hugh Grant playing Tony the Tiger since he’s grown a lot better at making a fool of himself.

The bizarre aspect of the whole enterprise is that there’s certainly a truth here. Any new product can have significant effect on other players in the market. Here, it was milk and sugar. A breakfast item that does not require milk is going to damage sales of milk, forever associated with breakfast and as one of the characters so crassly puts it the first thing everyone ever drinks (birth is the clue in case you need that spelled out). Sugar is coyly referred to as the “white powder,” making a connection with that other well-known epidemic, and only in passing ruminating on the damage sugar has done to teeth, without making the obvious link between why milk, which is so good for you, is associated with sugar, which is so bad,

In the middle of it Seinfeld prances around like an inane cat, the same dry delivery that worked in in his series painfully not working here. Everyone else looks as though they are having such fun, like this is a pantomime and everyone can just, well jolly gee, over-act to their heart’s content.

This kind of picture is by now par for the course for Netflix. Hollywood had a name for this kind of movie. Vanity project. Usually, it was the price to pay for being contractually saddled with a star so big. Or, having been saddled with such a disaster, you could extract payment in the form of them making a film they had previously balked at. Sometimes, you end up doing both of you an enormous favor, The Sixth Sense, a colossal hit, the price Bruce Willis paid for his vanity project. Who says vanity doesn’t pay?

The galling part is that the fact that I’ve stuck through it will be notched up as a success by Netflix, added to the millions of other watched minutes by which the company determines a hit, rather than having some way of measuring how many switched off a sixth of the way through like I should have done.

I don’t even know why I’m giving it two stars. In terms of laffs, it’s got as many as Orgy of the Dead, my all-time stinker.

Avoid.

Abigail (2024) ** – Seen at the Cinema

Someone hasn’t pointed out to the directors (there’s two of them) – or they’ve decidedly to pointedly ignore – the crazy notion that you need someone to root for in a horror film, even if it’s someone you start out disliking. Nor has anyone seemingly touched upon the grating error of the premise. You’re planning a $50 million kidnap, so you hire a team of top professionals, who turn out not to be able to control their liquor, get drunk or stoned within an hour of a 24-hour shift, and can’t even keep to their own basic rules which include not mentioning each other by name or revealing their faces to the victim.

The twist – that somehow they’re the ones trapped – would have a chance of succeeding if the principals were capable of extracting an ounce of sympathy from the audience. We’ve got an ex-junkie single mom too keen on playing the victim, an ex-cop, a muscle man from the Dumb and Dumber Selection Box, a sociopath, a rich girl looking for kicks and a guy who may be more mainstram but acts dodgy.

The other twists – that the kidnapped girl is actually a vampire and that her dad is some feared villain – don’t count for much unless it’s the girl we’re supposed to be rooting for because (twist number 22) vampires aren’t born that way but need to be bitten and guess who did that indoctrination, yep, the bad dad, so, technically, this counts as child abuse. So, technically, little Abigail would get my sympathy vote except she’s caught up in one awful movie.

What with exploding bodies, decapitated corpses, a lake of dead people, mirrors with miracualous properties and the usual stakes, garlic and crosses failing to work it’s a blood-drenched hotch potch that wears out its welcome very quickly. Not even worth it to see posh Downton Abbey alumni Dan Stevens and Matthew Goode sharpening their fangs.

Saw this on a double-bill with Challengers. This kind of counter-programming has worked in the past. But not here, sadly.

Challengers (2024) ** – Seen at the Cinema

Am getting a bit fed up with critical wishful thinking where reviewers pump up the latest effort from a “visionary” director, the movie they wish they had seen rather than the dreadful evidence of overblown miscalculation in front of their eyes. Hammy television-sized performances, fidgety faces, actors who don’t know what to do in a close-up, and a director who doesn’t know how to tell even as simplistic a tale as this without indulging in slow-mo, bizarre camera angles and sex in a storm.

Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All, 2022), in making easily the worst sports movie of all time, is an early contender for this year’s Razzies. And I’m hoping not too many people are going to fall for the marketing line that this is sizzling with sexuality when it is one of the most tepid you will ever see, beyond the kind of dialog that would have shamed Porky’s (1981).

And if you’re going to go down the Christopher Nolan flashback route, try and do it without just the title of “earlier” – if it had gotten any earlier we would have been back in the twentieth century. Any insights into tennis are restricted to the jaw-dropping revelation that there are winners and losers and not everyone’s teenage dreams can come true, and that the prom queen isn’t going to pick the sexiest lad but the one with the most financial promise.

If you’re interested, the plot goes something like this. Best pals and tennis prodigies Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) both fancy the same woman, Tashi (Zendaya), a cut above them in the prodigy stakes, and she thinks they actually fancy each other and engineers a scene where the two boys kiss each other. Having initially chosen the charismatic Patrick as her love mate, she changes her mind and opts for Art. A dozen or so years later – the chronology is less than exact – the rivals meet up again in a low-level tennis tournament, Art, supposedly a U.S. Open champ, Patrick a long-time loser who hasn’t made the grade.

None of the principals look as if they know one end of a tennis racquet from the other, but that doesn’t matter because the director is so busy with the dizzying visuals (including a tennis ball POV) he could have turned performing dogs into champs. Luckily for us, the moment there’s some kind of emotional climax (or attempt at one) the director hits us with some heavy music.

Josh O’Connor (Lee, 2023) has the saving grace of some screen charm but Zendaya (Dune: Part Two, 2024) blows her screen credibility with a gurning performance.

Awful.

Monkey Man (2024) ***

I can tell you right away why this hasn’t proved the box office breakout predicted. Way too slow, way too many ideas, way too much repetition, the obvious flaws of a debut director who nobody had the sense to rein in. Dev Patel (The Green Knight, 2021) is writer-producer-director and clearly took control of the editing suite because this should have seriously been pruned of about 20 minutes.

It’s a revenge thriller and supposedly the protagonist is better motivated because somebody didn’t kill his dog (John Wick, 2014) or his bees (The Beekeeper, 2023) but his mom. But this revenge is insanely slow-burn. It’s taken him the best part of two decades to take any action. And in the meantime, he’s had plenty of time to dwell on an idyllic childhood, and the bad guy who murdered his mom, because every two minutes whatever action there is stops dead so we can have another interminable flashback.

If you want a crash course on Indian mysticism and gods and religion, this one’s for you, but my guess if that wouldn’t be a priority for anyone turning up expecting the next John Wick or Beekeeper. And it that’s not enough side issue, there’s some malarkey involving a corrupt politician, corrupt cop and corrupt guru and a land-grab to boot plus the need to set free a whole bunch of sex workers. So, sub-plot mania.

I’m not sure I’m convinced either by the bongo-drum keep-fit technique that turns a loser in the ring into a top combatant, especially after, having spent an age demonstrating how much our hero has improved his pugilistic skills he fells his first opponent with a kick. Cage fighting without the cage, I guess.

But there are pluses, once the director sees fit to get to the action and not ramble on about philosophical mumbo-jumbo and there are a couple of fascinating characters, venomous brothel-owner Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar) who has the best lines, and the low-life Alphonso (Pitobash) with a souped-up tuk-tuk. But mostly, we’re stuck with Kid aka Monkey Man (Dev Patel) as he takes an age to work out how he’s going to get his revenge and makes the audience labor over working out what happened to his mom and why he got his hands so badly burned. Put those two ideas together and the audience has worked it out in a trice, but the director didn’t think so, so fed it in very slowly bit by bit.

Anyway, Kid is the kind of boxer who makes a poor living being fed to the kings of the ring, he gets paid more if he bleeds. And he’s not doing this for just the money, but, purportedly, to punish himself for his mother’s death and relieve the pain inside, some kind of insane self-harming, that only stops when a guru (the good one not the bad one) tells him he has to direct his inner violence to good purpose.

There’s some nifty stuff about how he manages to get a job in the club/ restaurant (it’s never clear) owned by Queenie whose only connection to the tale is that his mother’s killer, police chief Rana (Sikander Kher), is that he was carrying a box of matches with her logo. I’m sure he could have just gunned the police chief down in the street since this is the kind of guy who swaggers around as if he owns the street, but the narrative dictates he needs to gain access to the club/brothel’s inner sanctum and that’s where Alphonso comes in.

Once it gets going it’s satisfying stuff and with some excellent occasionally innovative fight scenes. Not so sure about the soundtrack, “The Rivers of Babylon” as a throat is cut, “Roxanne” when we reach the brothel. But there’s too much sub-plot to wade through before the action gets core.

When Netflix, hardly an arbiter of taste, rejects your movie, you should take note of their objections which I guess would be the same as mine rather than trying to foist those flaws on the public via cinema release, no matter if Jordan Peele is your staunchest supporter. It’s no surprise to me this hasn’t won a release in India either – blamed on its political stance, apparently – because the same problems would apply.

So that’s a shame. A director with too much to say and decides he might only get the one chance to say it so dumps it all into his debut picture. Let’s hope he gets a second chance and is mature enough to listen to an editor.

Excellent action but, boy, you have to wait.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) ****

Monster mash-up that delivers. Hollow Earth hits the target, a better parallel universe/ multiverse/monsterverse than all the other verses put together, not to mention it’s also of the versus inclination with any number of big beasties (I lost count to be honest) going head-to-head and super bonkers malarkey of giant apes riding prehistoric monsters. Plus, if you’re of a sentimental nature, and given that this week I’ve been hit from all side by tales of a maternal bent, whose heart would not give a whimper to see big bad Godzilla all curled up for the night in the Colosseum in Rome. Or for that matter Kong taking a paternal interest in a bad wee mini-Kong. Compared to the emotions stirred by these giants, boffin Ilene (Rebecca Hall) struggling with her maternal issues comes over as rammed-in and wishy-washy.

Having taken Mother’s Instinct to ruthless task for its illogical plotlines, I am happy to do a complete somersault and let the monster punch-up off scot-free for all its inconsistencies and coincidences because, heck you know it, fun always triumphs. Plus we’ve got a hippie vet Trapper (Dan Stevens) who, despite awkward accent and Hawaiian shirt, is loose enough to chill out straight-laced Ilene with podcaster du jour Bernie (Bryan Tyree Henry) on hand to add humor.

Throw in some Aztec/Inca-style ancient civilisation, the revival of another Japanese kaiju in Mothra, people who communicate with telepathy, all sorts of daft exposition, Godzilla snorting up radiation like it was coke, pyramids of various kinds, more rabbit holes than you could shake a bunny at, an ape that goes all Raiders of the Lost Ark with a whip made out of bones and full-on Planet of the Apes knockdown.

I’m not even going to bother with the plot, what I can remember of it, except to say Ilene and Trapper need to get Godzilla and Kong together to take on the giant ape villain and the monster he rode in on otherwise (guess what) (I think) the world as we know it (or at last this invented world) will cease to exist.

The humans do their best not to get in the way of the fun. Trapper is smart and glib and occasionally a genius and Ilene is smart but weighted down with maternity while the object of her affection is stuck with the where-do-I-belong trope and mostly stares off soulfully into the distance. It’s the monsters that bring the humanity. That little scamp of a baby giant ape takes some handling, always ready (literally) to bite the hand that feeds him while you gotta feel sorry for Godzilla having to tramp through all those cities that someone stuck in his way when all he wants is a nice nest close by a nuclear plant.

Plus we get ice ice baby. The bad ape’s chained prisoner blasts out ice instead of fire, like he’s an exile from the Night King, but at least he’s not like the latest Ghostbusters iteration that’s been heavily trumpeted in the trailer only not to appear till what seems like the last five minutes in order to give Bill Murray a weak punchline.

This was easily the best part of this week’s Quadruple Bill. I’m not even going to review Ghostbusters – it seems to have got lost in the family nonsense that’s infecting virtually every decent series, meaning we’ve now got to accommodate the size of casts that used to be an attraction in pictures like Lawrence of Arabia, but now feels like an overstuffed very threadbare cushion, and could we care less.

Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs Kong, 2021) directs though spare a nod for the CGI team.

Let’s hear it for these mean mothers.