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.

BRIDGE OF SPIES

(Steven Spielberg, 2015)

Whether you love or hate Steven Spielberg, it is impossible to deny his talent as a visual storyteller. The talky dramas which are scattered throughout his later career (Lincoln being the most recent example) are chiefly interesting for the ways in which he tries to keep them visually exciting. Sometimes it can feel as if he is struggling against his material rather than attempting to adapt it.
That is not the case with Bridge of Spies, which feels like a large-scale '60s prestige drama, all big themes and important moments. Spielberg treats it that way, shooting it with a respect for classicism which is pleasing and which works.
The script - written by Joel & Ethan Coen, whose presence is evident in a few repeated phrases, alongside Matt Charman - is a little disjointed in its transition from the USA to East Berlin and different phases of the story crank into place without any elegance of subtlety (never a Spielberg strength, to be fair).
Tom Hanks does his honest, intelligent thing as Jim Donovan, a Brooklyn Lawyer chosen to defend Soviet Spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) when the Government, his family and an angry public all just want it to be done and dusted. But Jim takes this duty seriously  and makes the trial a problem, securing life imprisonment for Abel when execution looked likely. This means that a few months later, when the Soviets capture SpyPlane pilot Francis Gary Powers, Jim is the man chosen to travel to East Berlin - as the Wall is being constructed - and negotiate an exchange.
Much of the action, then, revolves around men (invariably) engaged in important conversations in various rooms. Spielberg focuses on keeping it handsome, coherent and well-performed, all of which it is. When the screenplay gives him a chance to cut loose, he takes it: making Powers' shooting down a short, frightening vignette, and showing the capture of US student Frederic Pryor on the very day the wall is erected. His feel for place and atmosphere is still precise and nuanced, for all that he puts a Hollywood sheen on every shot and moment. At this point in his career, Spielberg's strengths are his weaknesses, and that storytelling ability sometimes seems too smooth and too easy ( a late shot of children climbing a Brooklyn fence chiming with an earlier shot of people scaling the Berlin Wall is a groan-inducing moment).
The cast help keep the many expository scenes flow painlessly. Rylance is especially superb, making Abel goo-humoured and melancholy; inimitably human.
Classy grown-up Hollywood entertainment, then, and I would expect no less of Spielberg.

BLITZ

(Elliott Lester, 2011) It is perhaps a little surprising that films as utterly generic as Blitz still get made. That may be unfair. While the main plot thread here is unbelievably familiar and dull in genre terms - a gruff, uncompromisingly violent Detective hunts a maniacal serial killer on a cop-killing spree - the proliferation of sub-plots suggest an entirely different, more interesting film. Unfortunately, all they do is suggest. Set in a London captured by director Lester as a grimy, coldly magnificent concrete metropolis - he shoots architecture far more sensitively than he does people - it initially seems like a Jason Statham vehicle-by-numbers. The first scene finds Statham's Detective Brant witness some teen thugs attempting to break into a car outside his flat in the middle of the night. Of course he picks up a hurl - an excuse for the screenplay to pay some tribute to the source novel, by Irish crime author Ken Bruen, as Brant lectures the criminals on hurling being an Irish game mixing "hockey and murder" - and ventures out to inflict some punishment. But Statham, while undoubtedly the lead character, is only given a shade more screen time than the others who crowd the narrative here; Paddy Considine's Detective Nash, who wins Brant's grudging respect as a cop despite being "a poofter", Zawe Ashton's crackhead young PC Falls, Mark Rylance as a newly widowed Police Commander, and of course Aidan Gillen, never less than utterly over the top as the killer, Weiss. Then there are name actors in even smaller parts; Luke Evans as a Detective who gets involved with Falls and David Morrissey as a tabloid hack contacted by the killer. That all makes the film - a snappy 97 minutes - a thoroughly overstuffed bird, struggling to finish it's story lines and sacrificing any depth in, well, all of them. The cop vs killer plotline gets more time than anything else, but even then it feels thin, lacking the emotional weight or even narrative hook which might make it interesting. As it is, Gillen's charismatic hamming and Statham's reliable action-lead brooding make it merely watchable as we wait fortheir ultimate showdown. Considine, one fine monologue aside, is largely wasted along with everybody else. The action scenes are few - this is a thriller, not an action film - but nicely handled, and the whole thing is reassuringly slick and expensive-looking. What it reminded me of was Danny Cannon's forgotten Young Americans; an audition piece, awkwardly grafting American genre cliches onto a British base with questionable results.