(Jaume Collet-Serra, 2015)
Neeson has an obvious advantage over all of his current competitors for the title of King of Action Movies: he can really act. When the Rock or Vin Diesel or Jason Statham turns in a performance with any depth or emotion, we are surprised that they've managed that "Any". With Neeson, it's expected.
His only real current rival in that area is Keanu Reeves, who has added a surprising amount of melancholy and gravity to his persona as age has taken hold.
But Neeson has always been melancholy - he wears it like a cloak, swishing in his massive wake - its just that these days his action parts seem tailor-made for his presence. In Run All Night he plays an ageing, useless hit man for the Irish mob in New York, Jimmy Conlon. Apparently kept around out of sentimentality by mob boss Sean Maguire (Ed Harris, adding to his list of Irish mobsters), a childhood friend, Jimmy is a broke alcoholic , crippled by memories of all the people he has murdered. A convoluted first act sets up a situation whereby Jimmy ends up killing Sean's reckless gangster son in order to protect his own, civilian boy Michael (Joel Kinnaman), setting the two of them off on a night of chase and survival through New York as Sean sets hit men and flunkies after them. Also in on the hunt are the NYPD, though the detective who has been after Jimmy for decades (Vincent D'onofrio) may be their only hope of survival.
Collet-Serra is one of the more talented craftsmen working in mainstream American cinema right now and his classy, slick touch makes Run All Night one of the better Neeson actioners of the last few years. If the action scenes are somewhat underwhelming - and the low-key, small scale, determinedly local feel to the whole thing may even explain that to some extent - then the fine work by a great cast is more than enough to compensate. Crucially, Neeson is actor enough to rise to the task of playing opposite the likes of Harris and D'Onofrio, and his scenes with the former, particularly, lend this film an oddly poetic sense of longtime male friendships in the twilight years.
That's not to criticise the action scenes - a brutal, to-the-death fight between Neeson and Holt McCallany in a public toilet is a highlight, closely followed by a lengthy car-chase that avoids most of the cliches of that convention - rather to emphasise that the elements that really set Run All Night apart are the gritty feel it has for New York and the character acting throughout.
Probably the weakest element is the one that feels most like it has come from a different sort of genre film - Common as a preppy assassin Price, sporting a trench-coat and a laser-sighting on his pistol.
But generally Run All Night works splendidly; it is an unusually emotional, visceral mix of crime, thriller and action movies, and it uses Liam Neeson about as well as any recent film has.
Showing posts with label Liam Neeson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liam Neeson. Show all posts
Sunday, 22 March 2015
Tuesday, 23 September 2014
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES
(Scott Frank, 2014)
A Walk Among the Tombstones is a classical - almost generic - detective noir. And in the modern filmmaking climate of bombast and narratives so post-modern they're self-reflexive without even knowing it, that makes it feel almost radical in its purity and simplicity.
Adapted by writer-director Scott Frank (who has had success with tricky crime adaptations like Out of Sight and Get Shorty in the past) from one of Lawrence Block's long-running Matt Scudder novels, it casts Liam Neeson as the hero, a recovering alcoholic and ex-NYPD detective who now works as a private and unlicensed investigator. Refreshingly, Scudder is not the invincible super-warrior Neeson has played in the Taken films. Instead he is made a little vulnerable by his continued attendance at AA meetings. He takes a couple of beatings here, though his dry wit and fearlessness more than compensate in ensuring he still feels like a hard-boiled tough guy. Neeson is a rare action actor who is equally comfortable with emotional drama, and he gives Scudder a weighty soulfulness and melancholy. That is mostly expressed in the scenes depicting his relationship with TJ, a precocious street kid who fancies himself a detective.
The case brings a streak of nastiness to the film that all the best detective stories really need; throwing a tarnished white Knight into opposition against pure evil raises the stakes massively, and here that pure evil is in the form of two men who abduct the wives and girlfriends of drug dealers and traffickers and torture and kill them. Scudder is put on the case by Kenny (Dan Stevens), a middle class trafficker who paid the ransom demanded by the voice on the telephone and then had his wife delivered in small bags. Digging deep he discovers that these men are serial kidnappers, their depravity shocking.
It all leads, of course, to the sort of extreme ultra violence and gunplay that led Scudder to quit the police, and which Frank shoots with the same sort of classical precision which characterises most of the films old-fashioned virtues. It feels a little like the sort of modest crime adaptation that thrived in the '60s and '70s - Frank knows how this sort of pulp works, understands its pleasures and delivers them. He gets how important the villains are, he can see how crucial a strong sense of place is, and his film takes the time to do both these things right. It is tight, atmospheric, and commendably streamlined in its accurate recreation of the world of Block's novels. It's good to see a star like Neeson use his profile to get a film like this made.
A Walk Among the Tombstones is a classical - almost generic - detective noir. And in the modern filmmaking climate of bombast and narratives so post-modern they're self-reflexive without even knowing it, that makes it feel almost radical in its purity and simplicity.
Adapted by writer-director Scott Frank (who has had success with tricky crime adaptations like Out of Sight and Get Shorty in the past) from one of Lawrence Block's long-running Matt Scudder novels, it casts Liam Neeson as the hero, a recovering alcoholic and ex-NYPD detective who now works as a private and unlicensed investigator. Refreshingly, Scudder is not the invincible super-warrior Neeson has played in the Taken films. Instead he is made a little vulnerable by his continued attendance at AA meetings. He takes a couple of beatings here, though his dry wit and fearlessness more than compensate in ensuring he still feels like a hard-boiled tough guy. Neeson is a rare action actor who is equally comfortable with emotional drama, and he gives Scudder a weighty soulfulness and melancholy. That is mostly expressed in the scenes depicting his relationship with TJ, a precocious street kid who fancies himself a detective.
The case brings a streak of nastiness to the film that all the best detective stories really need; throwing a tarnished white Knight into opposition against pure evil raises the stakes massively, and here that pure evil is in the form of two men who abduct the wives and girlfriends of drug dealers and traffickers and torture and kill them. Scudder is put on the case by Kenny (Dan Stevens), a middle class trafficker who paid the ransom demanded by the voice on the telephone and then had his wife delivered in small bags. Digging deep he discovers that these men are serial kidnappers, their depravity shocking.
It all leads, of course, to the sort of extreme ultra violence and gunplay that led Scudder to quit the police, and which Frank shoots with the same sort of classical precision which characterises most of the films old-fashioned virtues. It feels a little like the sort of modest crime adaptation that thrived in the '60s and '70s - Frank knows how this sort of pulp works, understands its pleasures and delivers them. He gets how important the villains are, he can see how crucial a strong sense of place is, and his film takes the time to do both these things right. It is tight, atmospheric, and commendably streamlined in its accurate recreation of the world of Block's novels. It's good to see a star like Neeson use his profile to get a film like this made.
Saturday, 13 September 2014
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
(Ridley Scott, 2005)
Balian: You go to certain death.
Templar: All death is certain.
If Kingdom of Heaven - the Directors Cut, not the manifestly inferior theatrical version, which is 45 minutes shorter - starred anybody other than Orlando Bloom in the lead role, it would be one of Ridley Scott's very best films. Bloom has never been better than in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where he is required mainly to seem unearthly and beautiful - Legolas doesn't really have any personality in the realistic sense. He is a heroic ideal, and Bloom, blessed with his good looks, manages that without difficulty. In much of his other work he is similarly required to look pretty, but he is hopelessly out of his depth when asked to express any actual emotion. In Kingdom of Heaven, where he is asked to handle huge emotions - grief, despair, love - he is blank-faced. His single expression is a sort of empty smoulder - he seems to have walked off the set of an aftershave commercial. His character, Balian, is driven through the film by a search for his faith, yet Bloom looks like he's searching for his iPod and isn't all that bothered if he finds it or not.
It's a pity, because he is surrounded by a truly classy cast of mainly European supporting actors, most of whom seem totally at home in the Medieval World Scott painstakingly, beautifully creates. Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Jeremy Irons, Kevin McKidd, Martin Csokas and Brendan Gleeson all have big masculine presences, and Bloom seems dwarfed by all of them in his shared scenes. Eva Green is a fascinatingly complicated leading lady here, and Edward Norton offers a somehow Brando-esque but very effective voice performance as the masked Leper-King, Baldwin.
This is a complex, thematically ambitious epic, spending much of its running time detailing the political and religious divisions which beset the factions within the Holy Land during the Crusades. It is also an exploration of ideology and of the difference between faith and religion. That could be dull, but screenwriter William Monaghan, who wrote the dazzling dialogue for The Departed, shows that he can do the same for a vastly different world here, though there are a few clunky exchanges. Its contemporary resonances, dealing as it does with a battle in the Middle East between Christian and Muslim forces, are unavoidable and well-handled. It is fair-handed, with Saladin, the Commander of the Saracens, played by the charismatic Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, emerging as one of the best and most likeable characters, while many of the Christians are plainly rabid animals using their religion as justification for slaughter.
The real glory of this film, though, is Ridley Scott's direction. It seems a synthesis of much of what he has done before - the reconstruction of Old Worlds in Gladiator and 1492 and The Duellists is here attempted on an even bigger canvas, and it is achieved more vividly and more beautifully than in any of those films. The ferocity of the battle scenes in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down is replicated here, again on a bigger, more beautiful scale. The contrast between the wintery mud and misery of Continental Europe in that era with the exotic melting pot of the Holy Land is brilliantly evoked. Indeed, the whole thing is textural masterpiece, always sensuous and visceral, with moments of pure poetry scattered throughout the story.
Its commercial failure is still no surprise. Aside from the gaping hole at its heart where a leading man should be, it's flaws are obvious and even its strengths are partially uncommercial - it is more complex and adult than any of the other modern epics, its conclusions about religion and war too ambiguous for popular acceptance. If Gladiator used a simple revenge story to great effect, Kingdom of Heaven has no such basic structure, its tale of a man searching for faith and redemption far too interior to drive such a big narrative emotionally. The film it most reminds me of is Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, another Epic with a miscast leading man and a downbeat, complex tone.
Balian: You go to certain death.
Templar: All death is certain.
If Kingdom of Heaven - the Directors Cut, not the manifestly inferior theatrical version, which is 45 minutes shorter - starred anybody other than Orlando Bloom in the lead role, it would be one of Ridley Scott's very best films. Bloom has never been better than in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where he is required mainly to seem unearthly and beautiful - Legolas doesn't really have any personality in the realistic sense. He is a heroic ideal, and Bloom, blessed with his good looks, manages that without difficulty. In much of his other work he is similarly required to look pretty, but he is hopelessly out of his depth when asked to express any actual emotion. In Kingdom of Heaven, where he is asked to handle huge emotions - grief, despair, love - he is blank-faced. His single expression is a sort of empty smoulder - he seems to have walked off the set of an aftershave commercial. His character, Balian, is driven through the film by a search for his faith, yet Bloom looks like he's searching for his iPod and isn't all that bothered if he finds it or not.
It's a pity, because he is surrounded by a truly classy cast of mainly European supporting actors, most of whom seem totally at home in the Medieval World Scott painstakingly, beautifully creates. Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Jeremy Irons, Kevin McKidd, Martin Csokas and Brendan Gleeson all have big masculine presences, and Bloom seems dwarfed by all of them in his shared scenes. Eva Green is a fascinatingly complicated leading lady here, and Edward Norton offers a somehow Brando-esque but very effective voice performance as the masked Leper-King, Baldwin.
This is a complex, thematically ambitious epic, spending much of its running time detailing the political and religious divisions which beset the factions within the Holy Land during the Crusades. It is also an exploration of ideology and of the difference between faith and religion. That could be dull, but screenwriter William Monaghan, who wrote the dazzling dialogue for The Departed, shows that he can do the same for a vastly different world here, though there are a few clunky exchanges. Its contemporary resonances, dealing as it does with a battle in the Middle East between Christian and Muslim forces, are unavoidable and well-handled. It is fair-handed, with Saladin, the Commander of the Saracens, played by the charismatic Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, emerging as one of the best and most likeable characters, while many of the Christians are plainly rabid animals using their religion as justification for slaughter.
The real glory of this film, though, is Ridley Scott's direction. It seems a synthesis of much of what he has done before - the reconstruction of Old Worlds in Gladiator and 1492 and The Duellists is here attempted on an even bigger canvas, and it is achieved more vividly and more beautifully than in any of those films. The ferocity of the battle scenes in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down is replicated here, again on a bigger, more beautiful scale. The contrast between the wintery mud and misery of Continental Europe in that era with the exotic melting pot of the Holy Land is brilliantly evoked. Indeed, the whole thing is textural masterpiece, always sensuous and visceral, with moments of pure poetry scattered throughout the story.
Its commercial failure is still no surprise. Aside from the gaping hole at its heart where a leading man should be, it's flaws are obvious and even its strengths are partially uncommercial - it is more complex and adult than any of the other modern epics, its conclusions about religion and war too ambiguous for popular acceptance. If Gladiator used a simple revenge story to great effect, Kingdom of Heaven has no such basic structure, its tale of a man searching for faith and redemption far too interior to drive such a big narrative emotionally. The film it most reminds me of is Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, another Epic with a miscast leading man and a downbeat, complex tone.
Thursday, 24 July 2014
NON-STOP
(Jaume Collet-Serra, 2014)
Over the course of a few mid-budget genre entertainments, Serra has transformed himself into one of Hollywood's premier craftsmen. His movies operate as efficient thrill-machines, yet there is undoubtedly more on offer if you want it; in Non-Stop it's not too difficult to detect an allegory for modern America and its troubled relationship with its security services. But it works perfectly well as an action-thriller too, giving Liam Neeson more to do than the Taken franchise does.
Neeson possesses an air of soulful melancholy and Serra has utilised that both here and in Unknown, in each film pushing Neeson's protagonist through a sort of identity crisis before he can really indulge in teh sort of righteous ass-kicking his fanbase presumably expect.
Here he plays Marks, an Air Marshall with numerous problems - debts, alcoholism, guilt over the death of his daughter a decade before. What should be a routine New York to London flight is derailed when Marks starts receiving texts from a mysterious passenger who knows an awful lot about him. Demanding $150 Million be wired to an account, the mystery man tells Marks that if he does not co-operate then a passenger will die every 20 minutes.
Marks then has to figure out who his opponent is, keep the passengers safe, and keep himself together, while the stakes keep on escalating; the plan is seemingly to frame Marks, and his own actions don't help him prevent that - he stumbles from mistake to disaster while the media decides he is a hijacker and the passengers begin to panic.
Over the course of a few mid-budget genre entertainments, Serra has transformed himself into one of Hollywood's premier craftsmen. His movies operate as efficient thrill-machines, yet there is undoubtedly more on offer if you want it; in Non-Stop it's not too difficult to detect an allegory for modern America and its troubled relationship with its security services. But it works perfectly well as an action-thriller too, giving Liam Neeson more to do than the Taken franchise does.
Neeson possesses an air of soulful melancholy and Serra has utilised that both here and in Unknown, in each film pushing Neeson's protagonist through a sort of identity crisis before he can really indulge in teh sort of righteous ass-kicking his fanbase presumably expect.
Here he plays Marks, an Air Marshall with numerous problems - debts, alcoholism, guilt over the death of his daughter a decade before. What should be a routine New York to London flight is derailed when Marks starts receiving texts from a mysterious passenger who knows an awful lot about him. Demanding $150 Million be wired to an account, the mystery man tells Marks that if he does not co-operate then a passenger will die every 20 minutes.
Marks then has to figure out who his opponent is, keep the passengers safe, and keep himself together, while the stakes keep on escalating; the plan is seemingly to frame Marks, and his own actions don't help him prevent that - he stumbles from mistake to disaster while the media decides he is a hijacker and the passengers begin to panic.
Serra is excellent on the claustrophobia of his setting. This is a red-eye flight and cinematographer Flavio Martinez Labiano lights it in purples and blues. The rows of seats become as much a plot point as a visual motif - they obscure the actions of passengers from Marks, and one great shot pans from his anxious, doubtful face to a sea of eyes on faces turned and peering at him over seat-backs.
The action is sparse here; this is more of a pure thriller, with lots of slow-burning suspense, but Serra pulls off a couple of fine set-pieces, most obviously the brutal fist-ight inside the onboard toilet.
The final act is undoubtedly silly, as the villains and their motivations are revealed, but by then its too late and most audiences will be hooked. Neeson is excellent and the supporting cast are all fine, but Serra is the real star here, taking such unpromising material and making a rousingly skillful entertainment of it.
Saturday, 8 February 2014
THE LEGO MOVIE
(Phil Lord, Chris Miller, 2014)
The Lego Movie is the most satisfying kids film since the period a few years ago when Pixar was still reliably great. It manages to be hilarious, bitingly satirical, exciting, thought-provoking, epic and consistently visually inventive throughout. Considering it's based on the brick construction system toys, that is an impressive feat.
Writer-directors Lord and Miller see the potential in the property to craft an ambitious, energetically tangential story which is full of references to other movies, in-jokes, post-modern gags and lots of nods to the adults in the audience.
At heart, its a remake of the Matrix, with its "chosen one" story focused on Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), a construction worker who is happy to conform, and ardent in his desire to be just like everyone else. He follows the "instructions", a book informing residents exactly how to live (buy overpriced coffee, listen to popular music - "Everything Is Awesome" is a horrific earworm after a single viewing of this film). These brief scenes are a dazzlingly paced, brilliantly funny satire on conformity and consumerism, and they quickly give way to a brilliant action scene after Emmet stumbles across a mysterious artefact which bonds to his body, is questioned and one the verge of execution at the hands of Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) before he is rescued by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a "master builder" who can create lego vehicles in seconds.
She explains the plot to him (in a scene which typically, cheerfully thumbs its nose at the very idea of such expository scenes): President Business (Will Ferrell) is set on destroying the Universe with his ultimate weapon, the Kangle (a tube of glue) which can only be stopped with the artefact stuck to Emmet's back. With Bad Cop on their trail, Emmet, Wyldstyle and her boyfirend Batman (hilariously characterised as a bit of a jockish dick, in love with his own dark and mysterious image and beautifully voiced by Will Arnett) jump across zones in this odd Lego Universe, from the Old West to "Middle Zealand" to Cloud Cuckoo Land, meeting a collection of recognisable pop culture characters and lego figures along the way.
From there it only gets more ambitious and epic, until a final act revelation which recontextualises and deepens everything we have seen suggests that this is actually that rarest thing; a transcendent kids film.
Besides that it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, fantastically exciting, and truly beautiful in its inventive use of the possibilities of the lego-verse.
The Lego Movie is the most satisfying kids film since the period a few years ago when Pixar was still reliably great. It manages to be hilarious, bitingly satirical, exciting, thought-provoking, epic and consistently visually inventive throughout. Considering it's based on the brick construction system toys, that is an impressive feat.
Writer-directors Lord and Miller see the potential in the property to craft an ambitious, energetically tangential story which is full of references to other movies, in-jokes, post-modern gags and lots of nods to the adults in the audience.
At heart, its a remake of the Matrix, with its "chosen one" story focused on Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), a construction worker who is happy to conform, and ardent in his desire to be just like everyone else. He follows the "instructions", a book informing residents exactly how to live (buy overpriced coffee, listen to popular music - "Everything Is Awesome" is a horrific earworm after a single viewing of this film). These brief scenes are a dazzlingly paced, brilliantly funny satire on conformity and consumerism, and they quickly give way to a brilliant action scene after Emmet stumbles across a mysterious artefact which bonds to his body, is questioned and one the verge of execution at the hands of Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) before he is rescued by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a "master builder" who can create lego vehicles in seconds.
She explains the plot to him (in a scene which typically, cheerfully thumbs its nose at the very idea of such expository scenes): President Business (Will Ferrell) is set on destroying the Universe with his ultimate weapon, the Kangle (a tube of glue) which can only be stopped with the artefact stuck to Emmet's back. With Bad Cop on their trail, Emmet, Wyldstyle and her boyfirend Batman (hilariously characterised as a bit of a jockish dick, in love with his own dark and mysterious image and beautifully voiced by Will Arnett) jump across zones in this odd Lego Universe, from the Old West to "Middle Zealand" to Cloud Cuckoo Land, meeting a collection of recognisable pop culture characters and lego figures along the way.
From there it only gets more ambitious and epic, until a final act revelation which recontextualises and deepens everything we have seen suggests that this is actually that rarest thing; a transcendent kids film.
Besides that it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, fantastically exciting, and truly beautiful in its inventive use of the possibilities of the lego-verse.
Saturday, 25 August 2012
BATTLESHIP
(Peter Berg, 2012)
Aping the peculiar glossy bombast of the blockbuster cinema of Michael Bay, Battleship is a little surprising, proving to be better than anything Bay has made in over a decade. It's still a bloated, sporadically terrible mess of cliches and moments stolen from other films, but there is some wit here and a few capably-delivered action sequences.
Based obviously loosely on the Hasbro board game, the film focuses on Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) a young screw-up with impulse control and maturity issues (we know this because characters mention it repeatedly, cringily foregrounding his character arc for the idiots in the audience) who is forced to join the US Navy by his officer brother (Alexander Skarsgârd) and swiftly finds himself promoted to the role of Weapons Officer on a Destroyer. During an International Wargames gathering off the coast of Hawaii, after he has ruined his career and destroyed his chances of winning the approval of the Admiral father (Liam Neeson) of his girlfriend (Brooklyn Decker), an attack by Alien vessels seal Hopper and his crewmates inside a vast forcefield, rendering them, yes, you guessed it; humanities last hope. What ensues is lots of cgi battles and destruction, together with a couple of neat references to the board game - an aerial shot of the two sides in formation as on the board, and a late sequence when the Navy have to fire blind and anticipate exactly where their technologically superior enemy will be in the ocean.
Meanwhile Hopper's girlfriend Sam is given something to do, finding herself in a crucial location at just the right time, teaming up with a crippled veteran (Gregory Gadson) and a Scientist (Hamish Linklater in the Jeff Goldblum part) to fight some aliens on land.
Added to all this are a few standout sailors (Rihanna and Jesse Plemons) and a revoltingly earnest celebration of ageing US veterans, folded into the generally jingoistic fetishization of the might of the US Military.
The characterisation is primitive, the dialogue at times embarrassing, and the whole thing caked in loud music, from Steve Jablonsky's score to a succession of rock songs by the likes of AC/DC, the Black Keys and Stone Temple Pilots over more or less every scene. The aliens (humanoid but for some Star Trek-style adjustments to cranial architecture and number of fingers) and their technology are almost throwaway in their over-familiarity, an early sequence set during a soccer match features perhaps the worst cinematic example of such I have ever seen, and the cast are almost uniformly wasted.
Still; it is better than any of Bay's Transformers films (which it most obviously resembles) due to Berg's occasional flashes of wit (the alien missiles looking like pegs from the board game, and Kitsch's misunderstanding of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", for instance), his slightly more classical style - not quite so many cuts and slo-mo Money Shots as Bay prefers - and a couple of decent action scenes.
Sunday, 29 January 2012
THE GREY
(Joe Carnahan, 2012)
An adventure tale so primal and simple it could have been told with little alteration at any point over the last three centuries, The Grey finally sees Carnahan make good on the promise he displayed with the terrific Narc a decade ago.
A plane carrying some Oil Workers crashes in the wastes of Alaska and the few survivors have to contend with the elements and, worse, a hungry and aggressively territorial wolf pack as they make their way South on foot. They are led by Liam Neeson's bruised, melancholy "salaried killer", whose job was to protect the Oil Workers from the wildlife at Camp, making him the closest thing they've got to a survival expert. But the wolves and the weather start to pick them off one by one and they start to turn on one another as the chances of survival recede..
It's too seldom American cinema produces Action films which satisfy on a visceral, sensual level as thrilling entertainments, and yet offer something more substantial in addition. Carnahan's film works throughout as a thrilling adventure - almost a survival horror, in it's unblinking portrayal of the physical and psychological toll the experience has on its band of survivors - yet it also stands as a sober, serious consideration of mortality and how we process and regard it. The group of crash survivors are a well-drawn collection of characters, finely acted by a macho cast, each allowed a few grace beats in the face of their own death. The conflicts and bonds between them are given a strong, believable dynamic from the start.
The crash scene is terrific: simultaneously frightening in it's bewildering maelstrom of tumbling sensation and thrilling; and the mens reaction to that horror, their stunned shock and grief, echoes through the first half of the film. Only their horrified awareness of the reality of the threat offered by the wolves shocks them out of that state. Neeson's character begins the film in his own grief; suicidal and intoning a noirishly downbeat narration of despair to a beloved and lost wife we see in flashback, and his leadership is an abject failure, since their numbers dwindle right from the start.
The wolves - heard more than seen, and usually only glimpsed as dark shadows in the trees and snow or howling snapping teeth and claws - seem as much a symbolic, existential threat as a physical one, and their relentless pursuit forces these men to reveal their vulnerabilities and fears. This is what makes The Grey surprisingly moving. The mens humanity is revealed in the moments before they die, making their fates - some awful, some almost noble - seem all the more tragic. The often long dialogue scenes where they discuss life, love, death and God are borne along on a sort of hard-bitten poetry; the authentic wisdom and repressed emotion of working class men opening up to one another.
Of course, this is still an action film and Carnahan gets all of the set-pieces just right. The wilderness itself is a vividly rugged presence, the men struggling even to walk across stretches of it, and each encounter with the wolves is disturbingly elemental (the highlight is a scene where multiple pairs of eyes appear glinting in the darkness). The photography, by Masanobu Takayanagi, is a grainy symphony of smudgy earth colours and off-white skylines, the script perfectly judged and paced. And Neeson is a fine lead for this sort of material, effortlessly convincing at the physical stuff but also soulful and Intelligent enough to carry the dramatic scenes.
But Carnahan is the star here, concocting a film that works brilliantly as a genre piece without sacrificing any emotion or intelligence.
An adventure tale so primal and simple it could have been told with little alteration at any point over the last three centuries, The Grey finally sees Carnahan make good on the promise he displayed with the terrific Narc a decade ago.
A plane carrying some Oil Workers crashes in the wastes of Alaska and the few survivors have to contend with the elements and, worse, a hungry and aggressively territorial wolf pack as they make their way South on foot. They are led by Liam Neeson's bruised, melancholy "salaried killer", whose job was to protect the Oil Workers from the wildlife at Camp, making him the closest thing they've got to a survival expert. But the wolves and the weather start to pick them off one by one and they start to turn on one another as the chances of survival recede..
It's too seldom American cinema produces Action films which satisfy on a visceral, sensual level as thrilling entertainments, and yet offer something more substantial in addition. Carnahan's film works throughout as a thrilling adventure - almost a survival horror, in it's unblinking portrayal of the physical and psychological toll the experience has on its band of survivors - yet it also stands as a sober, serious consideration of mortality and how we process and regard it. The group of crash survivors are a well-drawn collection of characters, finely acted by a macho cast, each allowed a few grace beats in the face of their own death. The conflicts and bonds between them are given a strong, believable dynamic from the start.
The crash scene is terrific: simultaneously frightening in it's bewildering maelstrom of tumbling sensation and thrilling; and the mens reaction to that horror, their stunned shock and grief, echoes through the first half of the film. Only their horrified awareness of the reality of the threat offered by the wolves shocks them out of that state. Neeson's character begins the film in his own grief; suicidal and intoning a noirishly downbeat narration of despair to a beloved and lost wife we see in flashback, and his leadership is an abject failure, since their numbers dwindle right from the start.
The wolves - heard more than seen, and usually only glimpsed as dark shadows in the trees and snow or howling snapping teeth and claws - seem as much a symbolic, existential threat as a physical one, and their relentless pursuit forces these men to reveal their vulnerabilities and fears. This is what makes The Grey surprisingly moving. The mens humanity is revealed in the moments before they die, making their fates - some awful, some almost noble - seem all the more tragic. The often long dialogue scenes where they discuss life, love, death and God are borne along on a sort of hard-bitten poetry; the authentic wisdom and repressed emotion of working class men opening up to one another.
Of course, this is still an action film and Carnahan gets all of the set-pieces just right. The wilderness itself is a vividly rugged presence, the men struggling even to walk across stretches of it, and each encounter with the wolves is disturbingly elemental (the highlight is a scene where multiple pairs of eyes appear glinting in the darkness). The photography, by Masanobu Takayanagi, is a grainy symphony of smudgy earth colours and off-white skylines, the script perfectly judged and paced. And Neeson is a fine lead for this sort of material, effortlessly convincing at the physical stuff but also soulful and Intelligent enough to carry the dramatic scenes.
But Carnahan is the star here, concocting a film that works brilliantly as a genre piece without sacrificing any emotion or intelligence.
Thursday, 12 January 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
UNKNOWN
(Jaume Collet-Serra, 2011)
Part 2 of Liam Neeson laying waste to Old Europe, in other words. Here, instead of the invulnerable super warrior he played in the simplistic but enjoyable Taken, he plays a Scientist whose life seems to have been stolen from him while in Berlin for a Conference. Only it's all far more Twisty-turny than that. Directed with stylishly brisk efficiency by Serra but essentially soulless, most of the cast play comfortably to type: January Jones as an Ice Queen and Aidan Quinn as a slimily ambiguous antagonist, for example, with Diane Kruger registering surprisingly well as a Bosnian Immigrant Cab Driver who aids Neeson.
There are a couple of decent set-pieces (Serra is a solid craftsman and in a couple of his earlier films; notably Orphan and even Goal 2, has shown that he possesses am unusually fine eye) and it puts a Bourne-style location , Berlin in Winter, to atmospheric use, but really it's all too cold and anonymous to have much impact. The exception is a scene in the final act between the two old pros in supporting roles, Bruno Ganz and Frank Langella, which seems almost to have been edited in from a different film entirely. It's a scene of quiet confrontation, completely told in dialogue, full of retreat and acceptance of mortality, and thrillingly acted by both men. It's a shame the rest of the film doesn't have the same sensibility.
Part 2 of Liam Neeson laying waste to Old Europe, in other words. Here, instead of the invulnerable super warrior he played in the simplistic but enjoyable Taken, he plays a Scientist whose life seems to have been stolen from him while in Berlin for a Conference. Only it's all far more Twisty-turny than that. Directed with stylishly brisk efficiency by Serra but essentially soulless, most of the cast play comfortably to type: January Jones as an Ice Queen and Aidan Quinn as a slimily ambiguous antagonist, for example, with Diane Kruger registering surprisingly well as a Bosnian Immigrant Cab Driver who aids Neeson.
There are a couple of decent set-pieces (Serra is a solid craftsman and in a couple of his earlier films; notably Orphan and even Goal 2, has shown that he possesses am unusually fine eye) and it puts a Bourne-style location , Berlin in Winter, to atmospheric use, but really it's all too cold and anonymous to have much impact. The exception is a scene in the final act between the two old pros in supporting roles, Bruno Ganz and Frank Langella, which seems almost to have been edited in from a different film entirely. It's a scene of quiet confrontation, completely told in dialogue, full of retreat and acceptance of mortality, and thrillingly acted by both men. It's a shame the rest of the film doesn't have the same sensibility.
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