BASTILLE DAY

(James Watkins, 2016)

This is so bad.
Elba plays Briar, a walking cliche. A US Government agent seen as ill-disciplined, insubordinate and reckless, he is also plainly amazing at his job. Which is beating people up and looking hard. Though his bosses don't understand that, and they've pulled his ass out of Baghdad after an Op went wrong and compromised a source. I can barely write this shit; I don't know how the actors can stand to say it. Elba looks grim and growls a lot.
He doesn't have an actual character here. Nobody does. They just pull faces at one another, sometimes in sync with the dialogue, often not.
Anyway, Briar finds himself in Paris and eventually lumbered with an American pickpocket (Richard Madden) whole actually lives in a garret. They are embroiled in a cockamamy scheme dreamt up by a French SWAT team which involves bringing the city to its knees through a combination of hashtags (no, seriously, there is a line of dialogue that says "The hashtags will tip it over"), rioting and wanton bombing.
Briar has other ideas. His bosses shout at him. He shoots people and chases them. He doesn't really do one-liners, even. Kelly Reilly slums it through a few scenes as his understanding boss. She literally looks asleep during one scene. Which would be fine but she has to speak dialogue. Madden does a nasal American accent and his character reacts to stuff happening around him. I can't remember anything else about him. He has a beard? Thats it.
The bad guys are swarthy Mediterranean types, and we all know you can't trust them.
After a few scenes that are recognisably set in Paris - look, thats the Eiffel Tower out the window! - most of the film looks like it was shot in an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bucharest. A crowd of rioters parade down what looks like an alley behind some lock-ups.
Luc Besson must see this type of Eurocorp rip-off and laugh his socks off.
Elba is being talked up as the next Bond, and he shares the right kind of bruising physicality with Liam Neeson, but aside from that his action hero chops aren't tested here by the fact that he only registers as a figure against landscapes, and never as a human being in any recognisable way.
There are at least two redeeming action scenes: Elba chasing Madden along rooftops, and a five-way fight scene in the back of a police van.
Otherwise: this is worse than every Jason Statham movie ever.

THE GUNMAN

(Pierre Morel, 2015)

So hilariously generic in its particulars that it plays almost like a parody, The Gunman is a pretty waste of an awful lot of acting talent.
Sean Penn plays the action lead here, but he is not really fully committing to a Liam Neeson career revival which this was obviously envisioned as. Instead, he co-wrote the screenplay and presumably ensured that this otherwise stock Euro-spy action thriller has some worthy stuff about mining in the Congo and multinational culpability. He's in good shape for a middle-aged man and does well with the action stuff, but director Morel seems more concerned with making everything look painterly than mounting effective action sequences.
Then there's the fact that the characters are all flat and underwritten. And no matter how charismatic Idris Elba, Javier Bardem and Ray Winstone are, they can't make puppets any more realistic. Only Mark Rylance really animates his role. The love triangle is awful - pointless and desultory.
The locations look great, Morel has a fine eye and a nose for ambience, and there are a few divertingly well-done action beats, but overall, and considering it is based on Manchette's The Prone Gunman,  this feels like a major missed opportunity.

THOR: THE DARK WORLD

(Alan Taylor, 2013)

The success of the Marvel project - a vast, overarching series of interlinked blockbusters starring the companies most famous characters (with the exception of the X-Men and Spider-Man, owned by rival studios) has begun to sink into the films themselves. The Avengers was such an enormous success that there is a winning feeling of confidence flowing through the two post-Avengers Marvel movies; Iron Man 3 and now Thor: The Dark World. If Kenneth Branagh's original film had the difficult job of introducing a fiddly concept to the general public, Taylor's film dives headlong into the complex mythology of the character and his world, presuming that they will already like and know the character enough to go with it.
So this film is a fast-paced romp through the sci-fi, fantasy and super-hero genres; tremendously assured in its world-building, layering detail onto our understanding of Asgard and the nine realms while awkwardly positioning a familiar plot involving the death of the universe due to an ultimate weapon into place. Christopher Eccleston, largely wasted, plays Dark Elf Malekith, very much a Star Trek villain in the wrong universe, seeking the Aether, an ancient substance that can transform matter into dark matter. This brings him into contact with his old enemies on Asgard, where Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his Warriors Three have been striving to bring peace to the nine realms after the actions of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in the first film and The Avengers. Then there is Thor's love interest from the first film, Jane Foster (Nathalie Portman) still lovesick for the Asgardian in London, where she stumbles across a strange red substance...
While the spectacle is a given, what works well in the two Thor films is the humour, twinkling away at the ridiculousness of the concepts, but never making fun of them. This is a big part of the appeal of Hemsworth's performance - he is charismatic, but funny about it, charmingly aware of himself - but also of the film itself. The way Foster is introduced - on an awkward date with Chris O'Dowd, asking about her "guy trouble" and nicely oblivious to the fact that the guy is a Demi-God - is a good example of this. Thor crumpling himself into a car and jealously asking about this rival (Fosters response: "Seriously?") extends the joke, and the lightly "realistic" response of many smaller characters to the outsized events occurring around them frames the action in a pleasingly ironic light.
Yet it still works very nicely as pulp. The fight scenes are plentiful and pleasurable, the design and effects making this version of Asgard even more expansive than the one we saw in the original film. The smaller Asgardian characters - Rene Russo's Frigga and Idris Elba's Heimdall, particularly - are given great action beats, while Hiddleston's Loki gets to strut his stuff. He and Hemsworth have great chemistry, and the decision to team them up is a solid one, giving the film a very different dynamic.
Of course it all comes down to the usual super-hero bullshit: destruction of property, a one vs one fight involving huge punches, and a final powerful effort. But it's always staged well, and that Marvel confidence sells it.

PACIFIC RIM

(Guillermo Del Toro, 2013)

For all the acclaim his more "personal" (read: arty) films have received, I like Del Toro best when he's working in commercial cinema. There his love of monsters, his exceptional design sense and imagination are kept the right side of self-indulgence by the conventions and demands of genre. His two Hellboy films are inventive, funny, odd blockbusters precisely because he has to funnel his own imagination into a rigid structure. Likewise Blade II, probably his most uncharacteristic film, is still a taut, satisfying superhero-horror. Even The Devils Backbone, more arty and personal, is a chilling ghost story as much as a drama of Spain in the Civil War era.
Pacific Rim, then, seems like it cannot possibly be one of his personal films. It gives Del Toro his biggest budget yet, after all, and he makes sure every dollar is up on the screen. But it feels utterly personal. Del Toro is a huge genre afficionado, and this film is a mash-up of Japanese giant monster movies, anime, WW2 fighter pilot flicks, disaster films and modern blockbuster cliches. More than that, there is a real sense of joy here, which is perhaps the main quality differentiating Pacific Rim from all the other cynical, tired examples of disaster porn released every summer, this one included.
Set in a battered, beautifully textured very-near future it reveals a world in which an inter-dimensional portal named the Breach has opened in the seabed beneath the Pacific Ocean. From it have emerged immense monsters, named Kaiju (Japanese for huge beast) which destroy coastal cities, killing thousands. Humanity respond with Jaegers (the German for "hunter"), equally immense robot-warriors piloted by two people, psychically linked by "the drift". But the Kaiju, who are classified, like storms, by their size, keep on coming, getting bigger and more successful in their battles with the Jaegers. Del Toro and his screenwriter Travis Beacham tell this story through a series of reliable tropes familiar from a hundred other movies.
For example, the story focuses on the experiences of Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam), an ex-Jaeger pilot traumatised by a pre-title loss, lured back by his old boss, the taciturn Stacker Penticost (Idris Elba) who has his own hidden emotional issues and a plan to use the decommissioned, dwindling Jaeger programme to close the Breach once and for all. Raleigh has to quickly adapt to a new co-pilot, Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) who wants to avenge her parents' death in a Kaiju attack years before. Raleigh has to deal with resentment from the other Jaeger pilots and prove himself and his partnership with Mako. Meanwhile, a pair of squabbling comic relief scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) study Kaiju body parts in an attempt to understand what the creatures actually want, and end up involved with black market Kaiju organ trader Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman).
There isn't much new there besides Beacham's knack for creating some wonderful names for his characters. But Del Toro approaches it all with a loveable, wide-eyed earnestness and enthusiasm. The world is filled with telling, nifty little details and lived-in textures, suggesting an entire, fully imagined universe beyond what we see here; and both Kaiju and Jaegers are brilliantly designed. Each battle between robots and creatures is thoughtfully choreographed and bigger in scale than the last. And the scale of these scenes is genuinely awesome - these fights feature Jaegers picking up cargo liners to beat Kaiju around the head with them, monsters erupting from inside buildings, bridges snapping like twigs, and at one point, a fight in the outer atmosphere. The Jaeger pilots all have their own fighting styles - something underlined when Del Toro throws in a few fistfights between pilots at ground level - making each battle a fascinating clash in styles. If all that attention to the detail of how a giant robot would fight a massive monster sounds boron, then Pacific Rim is not the film for you. Skyscrapers topple casually, but this is a film without the flippant disregard for life on show in Man of Steel or Star Trek: Into Darkness. 
Instead here we are shown and told about the evacuation of populations - and hear that the inland "safe zones" are the preserve of the wealthy, the sort of resonant detail tossed off by Del Toro that really gives the movie a rich sense of self -  and see numerous shots of fleeing, terrified civilians. Gratifyingly, Del Toro is a classicist in style, so Pacific Rim, while superficially akin to the Transformers films, is always coherently shot, and the action scenes are visceral and gripping without any of the hyperactive editing or ostentatious shotmaking of those films. When a Kaiju rips off a Jaeger's arm here; you understand exactly what has happened, and how. It is a thoroughly impressive and often beautiful visual spectacle.
Where it is problematic is in its approach to characters. As the above plot synopsis suggests, there is a corniness here in conception and plotting reminiscent almost of something like Independence Day in its sense of naiveté and old-fashioned story virtues. These characters mouth some truly awful dialogue and face some excrutiatingly melodramatic choices, all of it played totally straight and with no little intensity and almost no humour (although some of it feels almost self-parodic at times). Hunnam's inconsistent performance doesn't really help, either; it feels as if he can't decide to play the macho badass or the hollow shell of a man, and instead winds up at an ill-defined somewhere in-between.
But the tone; that evident love and investment into the material, that just about pardons these segments and renders these problems beside the point. The point here is to watch huge monsters fight huge robots, a spectacle done with as much wit and intelligence as it could possibly be. The few shards of pure Del Toro imagination which appear in the last act - particularly the glimpses of the world of the Kaiju, not unlike the Lovecraftian visions of the climax of Hellboy.
As dumb, massive blockbusters go, it doesn't really get much better than this.

THE LOSERS

(Sylvain White, 2010)

The Losers was released in the same year as The A-Team and The Expendables, all three of them action movies with big doses of comedy about combat units composed of larger-than-life macho personalities either betrayed or on missions or both. And while it doesn't quite have the gloriously unhinged sense of fun of Joe Carnahan's The A-Team, The Losers is a more enjoyable movie than Stallone's The Expendables. It doesn't take itself remotely seriously - not even as seriously as the comic series upon which it's based, which is a decent pastiche - and it's absolutely stuffed with dumb action movie cliches. Director Sylvain White's roots as a music video director are obvious in the hyper-kinetic ADD editing, and often quirky angles and a few laughable money-shots, but its frequently beautiful for all that, has a few really funny sequences, and a strong cast for this sort of material.
The Losers of the title all have silly macho names (so much so that Zoe Saldana's Aisha laughs when they're introduced to her and says "Really?") like Clay, Roque, Pooch, Cougar and Jensen. They have a single personality trait each - Jensen (Chris Evans) is the jokey motormouth computer whizz, Cougar (Óscar Jaenada) is the cool, deadly, near-mute cowboy hat-wearing sniper, Pooch (Columbus Short) is the down-to-earth one (he has a pregnant wife) and pilot and driver, Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is the leader with a weakness for women, and Roque (Idris Elba) is the second-in-command, with a weakness for arguing with Clay. They banter and bicker in the usual cliched fashion throughout, but a lot of that is amusing, and it sets up a nice dynamic with the pyromaniac action scenes.
The plot sees this group abandoned and stuck in Latin America after a moral decision in the middle of an operation leaves them considered as enemies by their own Government. Jason Patric's villain is behind all this, of course, and he gives them something to focus on. Patric plays this character as a straight-up comic figure; theatrical, sarcastic, enjoying his own nastiness. He may be the best thing in the film.
It is nicely atmospheric in parts - location shooting certainly helps - and is entirely predictable every step of the way, but is made no less likeable for that.

PROMETHEUS

(Ridley Scott, 2012)

There are lots of little things - and a few very big things - to admire about Prometheus.
Admire yes, love no.
This is a chilly, downbeat film, it's look dominated by the textures of steel and rock, and love just slides off it's beautiful surface. And it is beautiful. Ridley Scott, for all his flaws as a storyteller, has always had an outstanding ability as a shotmaker, and this film is at times absurdly beautiful, giving him the time and space to create a future world and fill in it's many crucial gee-whizz details. That stuff - the look and design of the ship, the spacesuits, the weaponry and clothing, the technology the characters use casually - is important in science fiction and Scott excels at it.
All of that, together with a patient, unembarrassed way with exposition, makes the first hour or so of Prometheus an involving experience. We witness two archaeologists find some cave paintings on the Isle of Skye which contain a pictogram matching ones they have found from other ancient civilisations across the globe. Then the film jumps forward a few years as they awaken from hypersleep as their ship - with a crew of scientists, doctors and corporate security - arrives at the planet the pictograms mapped for them. They are searching for the origins of life on earth and hoping for answers. What they find is something very different.
These passages suggest this will be a piece of idea-driven, relatively adult sci-fi. And partly, it is. But as it develops it introduces some weak material about Dr Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and her faith, before finally succumbing to it's basest commercial instincts and transforming into a horror film of sorts, with elements of body horror, tentacles in dark corridors and other overly-predictable genre beats you knew were coming.
They are well-mounted as these things go - Scott is too accomplished and experienced a director to mess up those moments - but all the potential and interesting questions of the first act are squandered in the rush for spectacle and excitement. Scott's recent films have all suffered from similar problems - he seems determined to make audience-pleasing movies, no matter how rote and tired that might make them in their dull following of established structures and techniques to assure a narrative is resolved. That's is only exaggerated in a film which starts out seeming distinctive and unusual.
But there are those little things to admire. The cast is splendid; Michael Fassbender steals the film as David, the enigmatic, somewhat smug robot with his own agenda, but Rapace is good in the lead (despite being saddled with a truly awful scene where she weeps over her own ability to bear children), Idris Elba and Charlize Theron do well with underwritten, one-dimensional roles, and English character actors Rafe Spall and Sean Harris are great as the only crew members who react normally (ie. with stark, acknowledged terror) to what they find in the alien pyramid.
Then there is a hammy but effective Guy Pearce, buried under make-up as the Billionaire funding the mission, in what is a surprisingly negative portrayal of a Rupert Murdoch type in a film produced by Murdoch's 20th Century Fox.
The design of the alien structures and creatures is front and centre and though it feels a little second-hand, it mostly works within the look of the film.
The film resonates with a few isolated scenes; Rapace's grisly, visceral self-administered surgery is probably the best passage throughout, though the scenes of Fassbender alone on the ship, watching and imitating Lawrence of Arabia, playing basketball and studying languages, run it close.
The closing scenes, which link with the Alien films and suggest a direct sequel to this film, are less successful. For all its early ambition and overstuffed insistence on a few big ideas, Prometheus isn't quite thrilling or interesting enough to warrant a sequel on it's own merits. But it works as a solid piece of grown-up genre entertainment. Perhaps hoping for anymore in such an expensive mass-market product was unrealistic. If only that first hour or so hadn't suggested that it could be something more..