(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.
Showing posts with label Sean Penn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sean Penn. Show all posts
Sunday, 13 March 2016
Saturday, 22 August 2015
STATE OF GRACE
(Phil Joanou, 1990)
State of Grace came out in 1990, something of a banner year for mob stories in Cinema. Goodfellas, The Godfather Part III, Abel Ferrara's King of New York and another Irish-Mob movie, Millers Crossing were all released in 1990, and in the midst of those heavyweights, State of Grace got a little lost. But its a great little movie, surprisingly intense, dark and serious, and featuring three terrific performances from its leading men. it tells the story of Terry Noonan (Sean Penn) and his return to Hells Kitchen, the Irish neighbourhood of New York where he grew up running with teen hoods Jackie and Frankie Flannery (Gary Oldman and Ed Harris). Only now Noonan is an undercover cop, charged with bringing down the burgeoning empire built by Frankie, and Jackie is the neighbourhood psycho. Noonan soon rekindles his relationship with their sister, Kathleen (Robin Wright-Penn) and his loyalties are inevitably torn between duty and friendship. While that sounds like your stock undercover cop movie, its the gravity and intensity of the storytelling that makes State of Grace so memorable. Joanou has never put his visual sense to better use than he does here, with his camera conjuring up a vivid sense of Hells Kitchen in all its seedy glory, the gentrifying elements just beginning to crawl in alongside the taverns and the old tenements. The screenplay, by playwright Denis McIntyre, is resolutely serious and dour - it recalls the work of writer-director James Gray in its unremitting focus on the moral dilemma facing Noonan - and the story drifts inexorably towards a tragedy suggested from the first moments by Ennio Morricone's mournful, beautiful score. While Penn does his young-DeNiro thing and Ed Harris is as magnetic as ever, Oldman delivers what is possibly his best ever performance. If, in recent years, he has played one caricature too many, one shallow villain too many, revealed that manic grin one time too many, here he played a character who demanded such a performance. Jackie Flannery is a force of nature, prone to eruptions of ultra-violence, but loyal and sentimental and charming at the same time. Oldman makes him terrifying and hilarious and real, and he owes every psycho part he has gotten since to this performance. Joanou really gets to flex his directorial muscles in the films climax, an amazing slow motion gunfight in a bar while the St Patricks Day Parade passes by outside. Its a really self-conscious set-piece, the director calling attention to himself in the most obvious fashion possible, but it works brilliantly, somehow retaining the mood and style of the film while simultaneously exploding it.
State of Grace came out in 1990, something of a banner year for mob stories in Cinema. Goodfellas, The Godfather Part III, Abel Ferrara's King of New York and another Irish-Mob movie, Millers Crossing were all released in 1990, and in the midst of those heavyweights, State of Grace got a little lost. But its a great little movie, surprisingly intense, dark and serious, and featuring three terrific performances from its leading men. it tells the story of Terry Noonan (Sean Penn) and his return to Hells Kitchen, the Irish neighbourhood of New York where he grew up running with teen hoods Jackie and Frankie Flannery (Gary Oldman and Ed Harris). Only now Noonan is an undercover cop, charged with bringing down the burgeoning empire built by Frankie, and Jackie is the neighbourhood psycho. Noonan soon rekindles his relationship with their sister, Kathleen (Robin Wright-Penn) and his loyalties are inevitably torn between duty and friendship. While that sounds like your stock undercover cop movie, its the gravity and intensity of the storytelling that makes State of Grace so memorable. Joanou has never put his visual sense to better use than he does here, with his camera conjuring up a vivid sense of Hells Kitchen in all its seedy glory, the gentrifying elements just beginning to crawl in alongside the taverns and the old tenements. The screenplay, by playwright Denis McIntyre, is resolutely serious and dour - it recalls the work of writer-director James Gray in its unremitting focus on the moral dilemma facing Noonan - and the story drifts inexorably towards a tragedy suggested from the first moments by Ennio Morricone's mournful, beautiful score. While Penn does his young-DeNiro thing and Ed Harris is as magnetic as ever, Oldman delivers what is possibly his best ever performance. If, in recent years, he has played one caricature too many, one shallow villain too many, revealed that manic grin one time too many, here he played a character who demanded such a performance. Jackie Flannery is a force of nature, prone to eruptions of ultra-violence, but loyal and sentimental and charming at the same time. Oldman makes him terrifying and hilarious and real, and he owes every psycho part he has gotten since to this performance. Joanou really gets to flex his directorial muscles in the films climax, an amazing slow motion gunfight in a bar while the St Patricks Day Parade passes by outside. Its a really self-conscious set-piece, the director calling attention to himself in the most obvious fashion possible, but it works brilliantly, somehow retaining the mood and style of the film while simultaneously exploding it.
Thursday, 17 January 2013
GANGSTER SQUAD
(Ruben Fleischer, 2013)
Gangster Squad plays like somebody saw The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential and thought: I can do that.
Only they couldn't.
Instead what they made was a dumbed-down, simplified version of similar material. This is James Ellroy for the Playstation generation; what it takes from Ellroy and classic gangster pictures are the superficial things - the hats, the suits, the cars, the art deco architecture, the tommy guns. What it misses out is what makes Ellroy so good and so distinctive - the vicious characterisation, the sprawling narratives, the gaudy peppering of sex and violence, the intensity, the wit.
This is a film that manages to do everything it does badly. A massive climactic tommy gun battle is tedious and predictable. The romance between Ryan Gosling's charming detective and Emma Stone's moll is dull and somewhat perfunctory. Ganglord Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, channelling a villain from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy) intimidating then having inept underlings murdered in creative ways is second-hand and cliched. The scene where Josh Brolin's heroic cop O'Meara rounds up his squad is laughably silly, as is his voiceover narration ("Evil can only thrive when good men do nothing") while his relationship with his pregnant wife is copied more or less verbatim from The Untouchables but lacks the sincerity and charm of the equivalent scenes in that film.
The story follows the establishment of an off-the-books squad of Los Angeles cops in 1949, brought together in order to wage covert war against the massively powerful and ruthless mobster Cohen.
In reality the story lurches along from one middling action scene to the next, doling out cardboard character beats in between. It all looks very slick and pretty; too much so. These cops are immaculately tailored, their cars gleaming, hair beautifully coiffed. Every twist and turn is telegraphed, and Fleischer mainly seems to be showcasing his own ability to handle a big property like this one perhaps in the hopes of landing a big studio blockbuster as his next movie.
The real shame of it is the immense waste of that cast, filled with great faces and huge talent as it is. Only Penn really registers. Brolin is boring, Gosling seems to be parodying himself, and nobody else has enough of a character to really play. Instead they just concentrate on looking good and advancing the plot, much like the film itself.
Gangster Squad plays like somebody saw The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential and thought: I can do that.
Only they couldn't.
Instead what they made was a dumbed-down, simplified version of similar material. This is James Ellroy for the Playstation generation; what it takes from Ellroy and classic gangster pictures are the superficial things - the hats, the suits, the cars, the art deco architecture, the tommy guns. What it misses out is what makes Ellroy so good and so distinctive - the vicious characterisation, the sprawling narratives, the gaudy peppering of sex and violence, the intensity, the wit.
This is a film that manages to do everything it does badly. A massive climactic tommy gun battle is tedious and predictable. The romance between Ryan Gosling's charming detective and Emma Stone's moll is dull and somewhat perfunctory. Ganglord Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, channelling a villain from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy) intimidating then having inept underlings murdered in creative ways is second-hand and cliched. The scene where Josh Brolin's heroic cop O'Meara rounds up his squad is laughably silly, as is his voiceover narration ("Evil can only thrive when good men do nothing") while his relationship with his pregnant wife is copied more or less verbatim from The Untouchables but lacks the sincerity and charm of the equivalent scenes in that film.
The story follows the establishment of an off-the-books squad of Los Angeles cops in 1949, brought together in order to wage covert war against the massively powerful and ruthless mobster Cohen.
In reality the story lurches along from one middling action scene to the next, doling out cardboard character beats in between. It all looks very slick and pretty; too much so. These cops are immaculately tailored, their cars gleaming, hair beautifully coiffed. Every twist and turn is telegraphed, and Fleischer mainly seems to be showcasing his own ability to handle a big property like this one perhaps in the hopes of landing a big studio blockbuster as his next movie.
The real shame of it is the immense waste of that cast, filled with great faces and huge talent as it is. Only Penn really registers. Brolin is boring, Gosling seems to be parodying himself, and nobody else has enough of a character to really play. Instead they just concentrate on looking good and advancing the plot, much like the film itself.
Wednesday, 18 April 2012
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
(Paolo Sorrentino, 2011)
When you examine his work scene by scene, Paolo Sorrentino is among the World's best directors. His technical proficiency and ability to mould imagery through shotmaking, editing and use of music is quite spectacular and yields fitfully dazzling results. This Must Be The Place is no different in this, featuring many scenes which are beautifully shot, cut and scored. Sorrentino's eye is fantastic, consistently picking out interesting compositions and colour contrasts, isolating Sean Penn as protagonist Cheyenne in wide frames and distinctive landscapes.
But there are other problems here; the tone and pacing and story all feel off at different points, and the whole thing hangs together too awkwardly to really work. It follows an 80s Goth pop star (Penn), living in bored tax exile in Dublin with his firefighter wife Jane (Frances McDormand) and his search for an old Nazi War Criminal spurred on by the recent death of his Holocaust survivor father. He drives across America, meeting a series of typical Sorrentino eccentrics before a strange final confrontation.
Penn is terrific throughout; funny and even moving, with Sorrentino's camera trained tight to him, his hair a mop of black dye, eyes ringed with make up, mouth red with lipstick. He finds the perfect voice for his damaged, childlike character, a fey and high-pitched whine, matched by his halting shuffle of a walk. But the film lets him down somewhat, keeping his character opaque and a tad enigmatic but for a couple of slightly pat emotional explosions. Sorrentino seems as interested in the gallery of people he meets on the road and his small network of friends in Dublin, all of whom are given nice little speeches and vivid quirks.
That makes the film overly-episodic, halting to introduce new characters and settings every few minutes, and all Sorrentino's talent and Penn's skill cannot balance that particular weakness.
When you examine his work scene by scene, Paolo Sorrentino is among the World's best directors. His technical proficiency and ability to mould imagery through shotmaking, editing and use of music is quite spectacular and yields fitfully dazzling results. This Must Be The Place is no different in this, featuring many scenes which are beautifully shot, cut and scored. Sorrentino's eye is fantastic, consistently picking out interesting compositions and colour contrasts, isolating Sean Penn as protagonist Cheyenne in wide frames and distinctive landscapes.
But there are other problems here; the tone and pacing and story all feel off at different points, and the whole thing hangs together too awkwardly to really work. It follows an 80s Goth pop star (Penn), living in bored tax exile in Dublin with his firefighter wife Jane (Frances McDormand) and his search for an old Nazi War Criminal spurred on by the recent death of his Holocaust survivor father. He drives across America, meeting a series of typical Sorrentino eccentrics before a strange final confrontation.
Penn is terrific throughout; funny and even moving, with Sorrentino's camera trained tight to him, his hair a mop of black dye, eyes ringed with make up, mouth red with lipstick. He finds the perfect voice for his damaged, childlike character, a fey and high-pitched whine, matched by his halting shuffle of a walk. But the film lets him down somewhat, keeping his character opaque and a tad enigmatic but for a couple of slightly pat emotional explosions. Sorrentino seems as interested in the gallery of people he meets on the road and his small network of friends in Dublin, all of whom are given nice little speeches and vivid quirks.
That makes the film overly-episodic, halting to introduce new characters and settings every few minutes, and all Sorrentino's talent and Penn's skill cannot balance that particular weakness.
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
TREE OF LIFE
(Terrence Malick, 2011)
For all the talk about this being a non-narrative film and a tone poem, whst surprised me about it is that for much of its central sequence it is a decidedly narrative experience. There are characters, tensions, events take place, people learn, suffer and grow, time passes in a mostly linear fashion. There is little plot, and Malick's style is far from the mainstream; instead it is elliptical, fragmentary, intent on the tensions and possibilities of the interplay between sound and image.
The story follows a middle-aged architect (Sean Penn), struck by a bout of inertia and depression in modern-day Dallas, shot by Malick at a perpetual low angle so that it's immense towers of gleaming glass and steel loom over his unhappy protagonist throughout. His mood is either sparked by thoughts of his boyhood and his dead brother or his depression leads to the thoughts; either way, we appear to spend much of the film inside his head as memories and fantasies wheel Past. As such Tree of Life recalls much great modernist fiction, microscopically examining the self in a stream of consciousness. Malick is an extraordinarily gifted director at capturing mood and texture; the sequences of life as a boy in 1950s Texas ring with truth and the vivid shiver of sense memory. It seems universal, this portrayal of the empty days and wonders and worries of childhood, since it reminded me in many ways of my own boyhood in Dublin in the 1980s.
Of course, Malick being Malick, he poses bigger questions through his intimate drama. Mainly through voiceover - but also through the dichotomy the boy feels between his father and mother, representing nature and grace, "wrestling" inside him and played out nicely in almost very aspect of his interactions with them - he teases the issue of faith and meaning in the world. The loss of his brother, an almost angelic presence in his scenes, complicates these questions, and is foreshadowed by a drowning incident the family witnesses and a friend badly burned in a house fire. There is something very "new age" about Malick's treatment of the issue of mortality and the afterlife, best (or worst) seen in the liminal scene that ends the film.
But his ambition is otherwise tremendous; the films best passage, the fluid intercutting of the first act, which juggles timeframes, modes and moods to dazzling, unprecedented effect, is followed by the 20 minute "birth of the universe" sequence, featuring some exhilarating fx and those controversial dinosaurs. While giving the personal questions central to th film's identity a wider, more Epic dimension, I understood this passage as part of Jack's struggles with the world. If much of the film sees him skirt the question of where and why his brother has gone, here he idly envisions where he (and everybody) came from, and by extension, why. The little dinosaur morality play we are shown makes sense in the context of the struggle between his parents and his uncomfortable positioning between them.
As the sterner of those parents, Brad Pitt does some of his best ever work, presenting a complex, flawed man who loves his sons but cannot help but transfer some of his frustration on them. Jessica Chastain has less to work with. Presented as a saintly presence, she is luminous and good at grief. The boys are all well-cast and excellent.
The thing most people will take from Tree of Life is its pure sensual beauty. Stunningly photographed by Emmanuel Luzbeki, whose sensibility compliments Malick's well, it fetishises 1950s Americana in some indelible, unforgettable imagery. Malick has always had a fine eye, and here the mix of perfectly composed still tableaux with countless swoops and sweeps of his camera - many at hip level, better to capture the subjective eye of a child - is exhilarating. The use of some lovely Classical pieces alongside Alexandre Desplaat's score only makes it even more lush and ravishing.
People go to a film like this expecting answers of some sort, I think. But Malick only asks questions and treats an audience like adults by leaving the rest to us. The fact that he has the ambition and poetic vision to make such an assured, complex and exquisite film - and the fact that he is allowed to - seems like a minor miracle.
For all the talk about this being a non-narrative film and a tone poem, whst surprised me about it is that for much of its central sequence it is a decidedly narrative experience. There are characters, tensions, events take place, people learn, suffer and grow, time passes in a mostly linear fashion. There is little plot, and Malick's style is far from the mainstream; instead it is elliptical, fragmentary, intent on the tensions and possibilities of the interplay between sound and image.
The story follows a middle-aged architect (Sean Penn), struck by a bout of inertia and depression in modern-day Dallas, shot by Malick at a perpetual low angle so that it's immense towers of gleaming glass and steel loom over his unhappy protagonist throughout. His mood is either sparked by thoughts of his boyhood and his dead brother or his depression leads to the thoughts; either way, we appear to spend much of the film inside his head as memories and fantasies wheel Past. As such Tree of Life recalls much great modernist fiction, microscopically examining the self in a stream of consciousness. Malick is an extraordinarily gifted director at capturing mood and texture; the sequences of life as a boy in 1950s Texas ring with truth and the vivid shiver of sense memory. It seems universal, this portrayal of the empty days and wonders and worries of childhood, since it reminded me in many ways of my own boyhood in Dublin in the 1980s.
Of course, Malick being Malick, he poses bigger questions through his intimate drama. Mainly through voiceover - but also through the dichotomy the boy feels between his father and mother, representing nature and grace, "wrestling" inside him and played out nicely in almost very aspect of his interactions with them - he teases the issue of faith and meaning in the world. The loss of his brother, an almost angelic presence in his scenes, complicates these questions, and is foreshadowed by a drowning incident the family witnesses and a friend badly burned in a house fire. There is something very "new age" about Malick's treatment of the issue of mortality and the afterlife, best (or worst) seen in the liminal scene that ends the film.
But his ambition is otherwise tremendous; the films best passage, the fluid intercutting of the first act, which juggles timeframes, modes and moods to dazzling, unprecedented effect, is followed by the 20 minute "birth of the universe" sequence, featuring some exhilarating fx and those controversial dinosaurs. While giving the personal questions central to th film's identity a wider, more Epic dimension, I understood this passage as part of Jack's struggles with the world. If much of the film sees him skirt the question of where and why his brother has gone, here he idly envisions where he (and everybody) came from, and by extension, why. The little dinosaur morality play we are shown makes sense in the context of the struggle between his parents and his uncomfortable positioning between them.
As the sterner of those parents, Brad Pitt does some of his best ever work, presenting a complex, flawed man who loves his sons but cannot help but transfer some of his frustration on them. Jessica Chastain has less to work with. Presented as a saintly presence, she is luminous and good at grief. The boys are all well-cast and excellent.
The thing most people will take from Tree of Life is its pure sensual beauty. Stunningly photographed by Emmanuel Luzbeki, whose sensibility compliments Malick's well, it fetishises 1950s Americana in some indelible, unforgettable imagery. Malick has always had a fine eye, and here the mix of perfectly composed still tableaux with countless swoops and sweeps of his camera - many at hip level, better to capture the subjective eye of a child - is exhilarating. The use of some lovely Classical pieces alongside Alexandre Desplaat's score only makes it even more lush and ravishing.
People go to a film like this expecting answers of some sort, I think. But Malick only asks questions and treats an audience like adults by leaving the rest to us. The fact that he has the ambition and poetic vision to make such an assured, complex and exquisite film - and the fact that he is allowed to - seems like a minor miracle.
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