TOTAL RECALL

(Len Wiseman, 2012) This remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1990 adaptation of Philip K Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" takes little from either piece of source material. The barest bones of the plot are used, as are a few character names, and director Wiseman throws in a couple of sly references to Verhoeven's film - there is a three-breasted prostitute, and a limb is lost in an elevator. But this is a very different film; darker, grittier and tighter. It is perhaps the closest thing to a genuine b-movie among this summers crop of blockbusters; at its heart a man-on-the-run thriller, driven along by a relentless succession of huge cgi action sequences of varying inventiveness and interest. Its world-building is adept enough; the story takes place in a future where War has rendered all of Earth uninhabitable except for Great Britain and Australia, and workers travel from the latter to the former via an immense tunnel through the earths core known as "The Fall". The two different territories steal from different dystopian visions; Britain is a towering, gleaming megacity, all flying cars and synthetic policemen, while "the colony" is an Aisan-inspired floating shantytown, filled with food karts, neon and rain-slick street markets. That reflects another big difference between this and the 1990 version; here is a film influenced by the current economic situation, where the world depicted is defined by the conflict between the rich and the poor, rather than Verhoeven's use of mutants on Mars. Onto this there is laid an espionage plot; Doug Quaid (Colin Farrell) is a construction worker plagued by a recurring dream of another life. He visits Rekall, a company who implant memories of a more glamorous, exciting life into your mind, but his visit is interrupted by the arrival of a team of policemen. Displaying combat acumen he didnt know existed, Quaid kills them, discovers that his wife (Kate Beckinsale) is not really his wife, and now wants to kill him, and finds himself on the run with Malena (Jessica Biel), a beautiful Resistance "terrorist" who knows him as Hauser, a former Government spy turned terrorist leader. After all this, one notable scene aside, the film barely flirts with the idea of whether or not these events are real or implanted. But then it has little time for any ideas; Wiseman is too busy driving from one video game-influenced pursuit to another. A parkour-esque chase over Colony rooftops, balconies and through alleyways, a high-rise car chase over and under freeways above what was once London, a game of cat-and-mouse through elevators that go sideways as well as up and down through tunnels and vertiginous shafts, and a zero-gravity gunfight. There are scenes and beats shamelessly stolen from The Bourne Identity and Minority Report, but the world is sumptuously mounted and convincing, Farrell is a winning lead, Biel and Beckinsale are as good at the action as they are at the little drama required of them, and Bill Nighy and Bryan Cranston provide classy if underused support. It is always watchable, occasionally thrilling, and ultimately forgettable.

THE A-TEAM

(Joe Carnahan, 2010)

How to walk the fine line between silly and stupid? Ask Joe Carnahan, who manages to make his adaptation of the massively successful 80s action series irredeemably silly without ever quite tipping over into stupidity. He gets the tone just right; the particulars of the plot, the iron cast cliches of the Globe-trotting heist-cum-conspiracy involving mercenaries, the US Military and the CIA: all this is played absolutely straight, all tough guy dialogue, fast-cutting and slick visuals. But the iconic characters of the four members of the A-Team themselves, while reproduced quite faithfully from the tv show, are cartoonishly appealing and leavened with only the slightest traces of realism.
We have Liam Neeson as Col. Hannibal Smith, the cigar-chomping man with the plan, Bradley Cooper letting his smug smoothness carry his work as Lt Templeton "Faceman" Peck, UFC star Quinton Jackson as Bosco "B.A." Barracus, the hard man with a fear of flying, and Sharlto Copley as Murdock, insane pilot and comic relief. Copley gets most of the funny bits, and his Murdock has a genuine edge of suicidal mania absent from the original. Patrick Wilson's villain is witty and interesting by the standards of the genre; CIA Agent as ivy league City trader, he invokes Call of Duty, appreciates combat acumen and code names as "awesome", and is generally a post-Tarantino reading of the standard action movie villain. Jessica Biel has less of interest to do, but she gets perhaps the film's single funniest line (it works better in context): "They're trying to fly a tank".
The story is an origin story; depicting the first time the four characters work together, and how they are framed and imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit, it skips from Mexico to Iraq to Germany to Los Angeles and takes in nocturnal raids on convoys, assassination, prison escapes and gunfights in city centres.
The real silliness, however, is reserved by Carnahan for his set-pieces. The aforementioned tank-flying is inspired, but each of the big action scenes manages to combine thrills with laughs. Only the climax - a big face-off in the classic action movie setting of. Dock - is a slight letdown, with too much shoddy cgi (and even then, that is almost balanced by a couple of fine action and character beats).
Carnahan directs all well - though it strays too FA towards visual incoherence on a few occasions - it's funnier than many comedies, and it contains the them from the tv show.
But more than that, all you really need to know: they fly. A tank.