Review: Nocturnal Animals (UK Cert 15)

Nocturnal Animals is the second film from fashion-designer-cum-director Tom Ford (after 2009's A Single Man)

Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is a Los Angeles art gallery owner whose privileged surroundings are providing her little comfort as her marriage is breaking down and her husband is sleeping with another woman. She receives a manuscript of a novel called Nocturnal Animals, written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) whom she cruelly mistreated then dumped. She begins to read the manuscript, a violent revenge thriller in which a young family are terrorised by a brutal gang of rednecks. 

Honestly, this film was one of the most pretentious piles of bilge I've had the misfortune of sitting through this year. Now, people who know me know I quite like films that certain people may describe as 'pretentious'. But this... this takes the cake. And then frames it badly on camera and gives it a lingering close-up to show how deep it really is. 

I don't know what's worse: the poor camerawork, the heavy-handed symbolism, the shoddy editing, the awkward and obvious juxtapositions or the facile script that has characters either spouting inane platitudes or fortune-cookie bon mots. The most egregious thing is A Single Man was a subtle, nuanced, occasionally very beautifully shot film. What happened? There's no subtlety here. No nuance. You are sledgehammered over the head with every piece of imagery- even down to casting Isla Fisher as Tony's wife Laura (because she looks so much like Amy Adams, don't you see? Isn't that clever?)- and, when you need to put a blatant jumpscare in to check whether your audience hasn't actually slipped into a coma, you're on shaky ground. Also, I have major issues with the opening which depicts several obese naked women doing a drum majorette routine in slow motion. Quite what is this supposed to mean? Is it a metaphor for the grotesque and soulless world of Los Angeles? If so, there are perhaps more appropriate and more tasteful ways to do it than to go down the route of fat-shaming. 

Performances are a mixed bag, to be fair. Amy Adams is an extremely talented actress that will undoubtedly win an Oscar one day, given the right role. And God love her, she's trying here. She's trying in earnest to turn this rotten sow's ear into a silk purse but there's only so much you can do with a script with the emotional depth of a stagnant puddle. Still, she tries to imbue Susan with some semblance of character which the script is sorely lacking. 

Gyllenhaal plays a dual role, as Edward and as Tony, the main character in the novel which is handily dramatised for our viewing... well, I'd usually say pleasure but in this case I'm gonna have to make an exception and say endurance. As Edward, he's sweet, naive, sensitive. As Tony, he's all of those things and then he isn't as the cruelty of the world breaks him. That is literally what this film is like. I'm really hoping one day Aaron Taylor-Johnson will look back on this film and cringe. Like I did, every time he was on screen. He's the leader of the redneck gang that intimidate Tony and his family and his performance is just dire. It is buttock-clenchingly, sphincter-tighteningly bad. He's about as intimidating as a wet paper bag and has clearly been directed to go for wide-eyed crazy as a default. 

However, there are some saving graces. Laura Linney is superb in her cameo role as Susan's ghastly, materialistic mother whilst there's a certain amount of gravitas to Michael Shannon's performance as Detective Bobby Andes, the taciturn and morally flexible lawman who helps Tony get some kind of justice for his family.  

I didn't enjoy the film. I found it boring, pretentious and convinced of its own worthiness. Am I wrong? Am I missing something? Seriously, if you watched Noctural Animals and liked it or enjoyed it or 'got' it, feel free to leave a comment below or drop us an e-mail and let me know what I'm missing. Because I genuinely couldn't see it. 

Frankly, if this is the best he can come up with, then might I respectfully suggest Tom Ford sticks to fashion design (which he knows a lot about and is very good at) rather than film-making. 

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Tez

Review: Avengers: Age Of Ultron (UK Cert 12A)

2012's Avengers Assemble was- it's fair to say- a bit of a hit. Under the virtuoso direction of Joss Whedon (an absolute maestro with ensemble casts), it pulled together the disparate characters that had appeared in the previous Marvel movies and brought them together as a team. Whedon is back behind the lens for Avengers: Age Of Ultron. 

The Avengers have to face a new threat- one inadvertently created by Tony Stark himself. When Stark jumpstarts a dormant peacekeeping programme- the Ultron initiative, designed to bring 'peace in our time'- things get out of hand pretty quickly and the team have to hunt down the rogue Ultron before his plans come to fruition. 

All of the regular actors just fit right back into the characters they've helped create, whilst the new cast and returning faces from previous Marvel films all add to the excitement.

James Spader was a perfect casting choice to voice the villainous Ultron. He has one of those ridiculously silky, sensual voices- anyone familiar with The Blacklist will know what I mean- which is used to good effect here. Ultron's seductive purr as he plots his schemes is a pure joy.

New cast members Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen fit into the already huge cast really well- whilst I preferred Evan Peters' more comedic take on Quicksilver from X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Taylor-Johnson acquits himself well as the super-speedy Pietro. Olsen is just brilliant as Wanda (a.k.a. Scarlet Witch) and her mind-control powers provide the film with some of the best, most freaky and most moving moments. There's a great turn by Andy Serkis as arms dealer Ulysses Klaue and an unsettlingly sinister cameo by Julie Delpy. 

The script, also by Whedon, is jam-packed with smart one-liners and some real laugh-out-loud moments- which is great because there's a lot of drama and one scene in particular which I found unexpectedly very moving. 

The direction is really strong (as you would expect) even if there's a lot more movement of the camera than I remember from Avengers Assemble. Some of the action set-pieces look fantastic and may even warrant seeing the film in 3D- I saw the 2D version.

Go into this film as spoiler-free as you can. Seriously. So much happens that is unexpected and moving and funny and just downright entertaining that to know about it in advance would be to take the enjoyment right out of the film. I could write about this for hours, detailing every nuance that made me laugh or touched me. But I won't. All I will say is this: another absolute triumph for Marvel.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Tez

Review: Godzilla (UK Cert: 12A)

You can picture the meeting at Warner Brothers; several execs sat round a table. “Bleak and introspective, it worked for Batman and Superman, what else can we do?” Somehow someone at Warner Brothers manages to put bleak and introspective in the same sentence as Godzilla, a Japanese monster movie from 1954 about a giant, fire-breathing lizard that toppled buildings. Next item on the agenda: Who do we get on board as director? “How about the guy who directed Monsters?” someone pipes up. Monsters was the debut from director Gareth Edwards who, on a fraction of Hollywood’s big-budget blockbusters, gave us, in my humble opinion, one of the best films of this century. Yes, it involves giant jellyfish aliens who, when wound up, chuck cars, rubble, even people, into the air, but Monsters wasn’t about the impressive special effects, it was a subtle, emotional, at times stunningly shot, character-driven thriller. Getting the man who made Monsters to direct Godzilla is massively missing the point.

Godzilla’s opening is impressive enough. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is a physicist working at a Japanese nuclear power plant when an earthquake brings the whole thing crashing down, Brody barely making it out alive. Suspecting that there’s more going on than just a natural disaster, he becomes obsessed with finding out the truth. There’s a nice little twist later on when it’s revealed that gigantic dung beetle-like creatures, M.U.T.O.s (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Objects) are causing the earthquakes, not Godzilla. The M.U.T.O.s are responsible for wiping out Godzilla’s species, threatening to do the same to ours. Now Godzilla has woken up and he wants revenge.

Godzilla’s script, written by Max Borenstein, Dave Callaham and Frank Darabont, takes itself incredibly seriously. There are no one-liners, not even some nudge-nudge, wink-wink references to the Godzilla franchise. You wouldn’t complain if this was any other film, but Godzilla is all about giant monsters smacking each other over the head. What laughs you do get are unintentional; Ken Watanabe, somehow managing to stay stony faced when he yells, “Let them fight!”

Audiences don’t go to see a monster movie for multi-layered characters, they go for the action. Even for a monster movie, Godzilla’s humans are either clichéd, stereotypes, or are so stick-thin they may as well not be in the film. Bryan Cranston gets plenty to do in the opening ten minutes, but after that he spends the rest of his screen time either brooding or occasionally shouting at someone. Aaron Taylor-Johnston will probably get plenty of stick for Godzilla, with critics saying he can’t act. It’s not that he can’t act, all his character, Ford Brody, has to do is look serious, shoot things, or run for his life. There are several mentions that Ford works in bomb disposal, so that everyone keeps up, but without spoiling things, Ford’s efforts don’t make one jot of difference. Ken Watanabe plays the stereotype wise Japanese man, often sounding like master Yoda, but that’s all that’s asked of him. Elizabeth Olsen, as Ford Brody’s wife, gets a rough deal; she’s only in the film so she can run around and look scared.

Godzilla does have some impressive visuals, best of all being the soldiers sky diving into San Francisco, all happening in real time. We cut to POV shots inside the soldiers’ helmets, glimpsing a Michael Bay sunset before they fall in to a dust cloud, what’s left of the city’s streets all moody greys and blacks. Every once in a while, Gareth Edwards gives us creative, eye-catching set pieces; Monsters, but on a far bigger budget.

Saying that, considering giant monsters scrapping is what audiences are paying to see, chances are they’re going to be disappointed. It’s like the Transformers films never happened. The San Francisco Bridge was meant to be a stand-out moment, but it’s all too obvious that Godzilla and the M.U.T.O.s are not part of the scene; everyone is screaming and running away from something that isn’t there. You wonder whether having the film’s climactic fight shrouded in clouds of dust was actually in the script, or if Edwards came up with this as a way to disguise the below par CGI.

Godzilla could have been a fun, no-brainer blockbuster, but the deadpan script drags it down, exposing the many flaws in its threadbare narrative. Why do the soldiers sky dive into San Francisco when they could have just walked in? If you’ve got a gigantic egg that you know is about to hatch, why do you only guard it with what looks like some flimsy-looking wire? More bizarrely, why does the film try and suggest that Godzilla and Ford Brody aren’t all that different from each other? Godzilla is set in the real world, it wants to be taken seriously, yet has massive skyscraper-size flaws in its logic. If Godzilla had been Jerry Bruckheimer, or Roland Emmerich’s baby, it would have had its tongue firmly in its cheek; you could have forgiven so many of its mistakes. Instead, for the most part, Godzilla fails on all counts, occasionally being tiresome to sit through.

A sequel has already been given the go-ahead. Hopefully someone at Warner Brothers will realise that you can’t remake a franchise that includes King Kong vs. Godzilla and expect people not to laugh.

2 out of 5

Matt

Review: Kick-Ass 2 (UK Cert 15)

Everyone’s done this: a new film comes out, your friends see it first, and when you tell them you've not watched it they stare at you like you've stepped out of a giant CGI spaceship. “ You've not seen (insert film here)? What’s wrong with you?! It’s AMAZING!!” So, you traipse along to the cinema and, yes, the film was alright, you've seen worse, but it wasn't the life-changing experience your friends promised you. That film for me was Kick Ass.

Now, before you start firing a World War Three-scale barrage of abuse, just hold fire while I talk about Kick Ass 2, as many of the problems I had with the first film crop up in its newly released sequel.

I’ll play the superhero for now and talk about what’s great about Kick Ass 2. While there aren’t many howl with laughter moments (although a scene involving UK boy band Union J is a highlight), it is more-or-less consistently funny, with Chloë Moretz’s foul-mouthed one-liners sounding like something Shakespeare secretly wrote. There are some great performances: Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a cheer-worthy hero as Kick Ass, Chloë Moretz is one of the best things about the films, Jim Carrey more than makes up for a lack of Nicolas Cage, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse is his usual effortlessly funny self as well as getting to turn up the diabolically evil all the way to eleven in this sequel (his costume looks like an S&M version of Jacko’s outfit in the Bad video). The action, while, oddly for a sequel, not as big-scale as the original, is fast paced, well edited, with plenty of wince inducing injuries. Jim Carrey disowned the film because of its violence, which seems strange as, while both films use household objects in plenty of inspired ways, I've still seen far worse in more highbrow, critically swooned over films.

And now I’m going to wear my evil grin as I become the villain and discuss what’s not-so-great about Kick Ass 2. For me, it’s the same problem that dogged the first film: it doesn't know what it wants to be. I get that the Kick Ass films are a homage to super heroes, with plenty of nudge-nudge, wink-wink jokes aimed at comic book readers, but are they also trying to be stand-alone super hero films in their own right? I ask this is because both films don’t succeed at doing either, and it’s the scripts that have to take the flack here. The humour in the Kick Ass films isn't quite as knowing and well-observed as it needs to be, but to make matters worse is the truck driver gear changes in tone. With the Kick Ass films you can go from foul mouthed one-liners and tongue-in-cheek violence, to bleak-as-hell preaching about the consequences of one-man vigilante missions, then back to another of Hit Girl’s one-liners, all in the space of five minutes. If anything – and this might be because Matthew Vaughn, co-writer and director of the original, gets a producer credit with this one – the sequel feels even preachier than the first.

For me, this is what stopped me getting caught up in the hype of the first film. With Kick Ass 2, the same applies, but even more so. That said, the sequel is enjoyable, funny and has the same glossy editing as the original.

Kick Ass 2 is worth a look, and there are far worse ways of killing nearly two hours of your life, you just find yourself wishing there had been a Hit Girl spin-off instead.

3 out of 5

Matt