Thor: the Dark World review

A bearded hero with a magical weapon on a planet of noble warriors clashes with an army of masked, laser-blasting invaders. 

Thirty years ago Krull, a British mash-up of sub-Tolkien mythology and Star Wars-style effects was launched on an unsuspecting world. 

Alas, the hero was rather bland, the cheap effects a bit rubbish (even for ’83), and the likes of pre-Eastenders Todd Carty, post-Carry On Bernard Bresslaw and a badly dubbed Lysette Anthony failed to make the project fly. 

Fast forward to now, and in Thor: the Dark World, a bearded hero with a magical hammer on a planet of noble warriors clashes with an army of masked, laser-blasting invaders. Only this time Marvel (with a far greater budget admittedly) hit the blockbuster nail squarely on the head.  

Chris Hemsworth is so perfectly cast as the eponymous Asgardian warrior it's hard to imagine anyone else filling those boots. The slightest smirk creates screen gold. (The god of thunder and charisma might be more on the money). 

With a snazzy new Marvel logo, Thor 2 hits the ground running with an epic battle, and escalates from there. 

Fans of the original should revel in the scale; director Alan Taylor exploits the skills learned on Game of Thrones to craft a 12A-friendly epic, hammering the various plot strands together to form a fun, frantic, dark, occasionally moving yarn. 

Anthony Hopkins can be annoying when phoning in his performances, but here adds gravitas as Odin; ’One Broke Scientist’ Kat Dennings delivers comic relief as Natalie Portman's sexy assistant Darcy; Idris Elba is given more screen time as gate keeper Helmdal, and the Warriors Three also return from film one.

As ever, Tom Hiddleston chews chunks of scenery as Loki; aside from Robert Downey Jnr’s Tony Stark, few actors are as funny or mischievous in the Marvel universe. 

(A Thor movie without Loki is as pointless as a Spider Man flick without Peter Parker). 

Rounding out the regulars are Stellan Skargard as boffin Erik Selvig, still a bit bonkers after being possessed in Avengers. 

Christopher Eccleston is on good form as the malevolent big bad Malekith, spouting Elvish dialogue, while his ship is gloriously ominous and aptly hammer-like. 

Assembling the multi-film plot strands from Thor and Assemble, this is huge fun. 

There's little doubt Marvel have mastered the modern blockbuster, melding great heroes, villains and effects with the brio of the original Star Wars and JJ’s Star Trek. 

Okay, Thor 2.0 is not perfect. Portman looks gorgeous, but her character is too wholesome and sadly a bit dull. Maybe thunder-wielding Gods need partners that are safe and yawnsome. 

I'd rather have seen Thor romance Darcy or Asgard squeeze Sif. (The latter’s sub-plot sadly goes nowhere fast, but may pay off in Thor 3). 

However, seen at midnight in 3D D-Box, TTDW was a pre-Hallowe’en treat. 

It also made me delighted that as a forty something, I lived long enough to see the comic heroes of my youth given the big screen epics they deserve.

Stay tuned for a couple of cracking credit cookies; the final one is rewarding and hilarious. 

Roll on Captain America: Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man, and let's hope we don't have to wait an age for the inevitable Dr Strange, Sub-Mariner and Silver Surfer movie. 

 

Luther - season finale review

So the third series of Luther is done and dusted, and what a finale.
By now you've either seen it, about to watch on catch up, or have wandered onto this section by accident.
Safe to say, there are mild spoilers ahead.

As ever, this was another showcase for Idris Elba, an actor so compelling, he should be goalkeeper for England at the next World Cup; he just needs to show up and can save anything.
An army of ILM effects experts worked for months to create the huge robots in Pacific Rim and Idris managed to overshadow them all.
Obviously Luther is made for a fraction of that film's budget; Idris’s Stacker Pentecost’s costume probably cost as much to make as the final ep of the BBC’s compelling crime drama.

Naturally writer Neil Cross saved the best for last, playing his ace card Alice, the posh psycho killer millions hate to love and vice versa.

Effortlessly played by Ruth Wilson, Alice’s greatest crime was to steal the best dialogue.
In a genre littered with cliches, she tap danced around any plot holes with the skill of a seasoned hoofer.
Okay, like any drama, it wasn't perfect.

There was the odd moment I started grumbling at the TV, namely during Mary's desperate search for a key while standing in front of a plate glass door.
I don’t know about you, but if someone's coming after me with a shotgun, I wouldn't let a pane of glass stand in the way. I’d smash it with the nearest thing to hand and start running like Jess Ennis on Super Saturday until the eloquent psycho gunman du jour is a safe distance away.

I won't bother you with the ups and downs of the second act as this was all about the finale, and like far too many thrillers, it resorted to the obvious: scale a tall building and face an impossible dilemma before the authorities show up.

Taking a leaf out of the Life on Mars and Sherlock BBC guidebook to series finales, Luther may not have been staggeringly original, but thanks to the scenery-chewing performances of Idris and Ruth, it didn't matter a jot.
Given the choice between saving girlfriend Mary and psycho femme fatale Alice, poor Luther was understandably torn.

Thankfully, Alice literally nailed her chance to escape when the possibility arose, and the result was more edge-of-the-seat drama than edge-of-the-sky rise.

There's been talk of an Alice spin-off project, which is not a bad idea. Ms Wilson is magnetic in the role of her life, and who wouldn't want to see Idris guest star in that for a short spell instead of carrying a series on his formidable shoulders?

Now the series trilogy is over, for my money it’s time to give Idris the big screen vehicle he deserves.
Given the nail-biting/slashing touches of this run, it could be something incredible.

And if you need an investor BBC Films, I'll happily shell out for a new coat.
It has to be a lot cheaper than Stacker Pentecost’s Pacific Rim threads.

Luther: series three is released on DVD on July 29

Pacific Rim - The Review

Cancel the apocalypse, put your brain in neutral and enjoy one of the silliest, yet most engaging films of 2013.

See giant robots tackle huge monsters; witness Idris Elba swaggering around giant sets like he owns the place (and we don't mind if he does as he's my favourite alpha male actor), and get that feeling you're watching a mash-up of Independence Day; Transformers; Iron Man; Akira and Godzilla.

Director/co-writer Guillermo del Toro and his army of effects experts deliver a knockout slice of escapism which may utilise familiar tropes, but is never dull.

The two-plus hours flies by, but while Burn Gorman's scientist deserves a Razzie for most annoying screen character of the year, when you're dealing with a comic book movie this epic, you can almost forgive him for the OTT eccentricity.

One key problem with the movie was I had such a hard time understanding what anyone was going on about, I wondered if my hearing was going.

Sample dialogue: "Mumble, mumble, Jaeger, mumble Kaiju, mumble Stacker Pentecost, mumble..."
You get the picture.

Like Man of Steel, lots of buildings get destroyed in a series of outrageous set pieces.

However, there's a joy to this carnage, and as with MOS, we see little collateral damage, but a gag with an executive toy helps lend things a sense of cause and effect realism. It's a light, engaging touch that generated at least one giggle from me in an almost empty cinema.

(This was plain old 2D flavour. No D-box, Imax, 3D and it was still good fun.)
Yes, the characters were very basic, but the ever-reliable Ron Perlman lent colour to proceedings as Hannibal, a black market monster parts trader.

Nice to see Guillermo's obsession with ’things in jars’ is still present and correct, and like the sublime Hellboy, this works like a charm on its own terms. I would have liked more sucker punch moments, such as the flashback scene where a key protagonist rises from his giant robot, and we feel a swell of pride. Well, I did anyway.

Actress Rinko Kikuchi also deserves more of a role in a possible sequel; she spends much of the third act barely saying a word. Admittedly she is co-piloting a skyscraper-sized automaton against lethal alien reptiles, so I doubt I'd be spouting much memorable dialogue under similar circumstances.

However, there is a feeling she's mirroring Return of the Jedi's Billy Dee Williams and The Matrix Revolutions' Laurence Fishburne as 'the pilot in the third act starved of memorable, if any dialogue'.
It's almost like the writers built up such a head of steam juggling all the other characters, they couldn't be bothered with her by this point. A shame as she deserved better, especially with such a likeable backstory.

Will there be sequels? Possibly, if it can gain enough traction in North America and the rest of the world's lucrative key markets.

As the UK is around eight per cent of the world box office, I doubt its backers are too concerned with whether Blighty cinemagoers flock to their local multiplexes during one of the hottest weekends of the year. It should make enough money on Blu-Ray and DVD when its released in the run-up to Christmas.

GDT has done a great job of setting up his colourful universe, and while I'm not bothered if Charlie Hunnam's likeable but generic character returns, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing the giant Gipsy Danger stride across my cine screen again in the near future.

Trans-Four-mer: why does Pacific Rim looks like a quartet of other films welded together?

“Go big or go extinct’ is the tagline for Guillermo del Toro’s new movie Pacific Rim, a snappy phrase for the supersize generation, where bigger is supposed to be better.
Back in the summer of 1998, posters for Godzilla screamed a similar soundbite: ‘size does matter’.

Maybe, but monsters can be as big as you like in these ground-rattling, Imax-friendly days, but without a decent script and a likeable cast, such films can be dead in the water.

Thankfully del Toro is one of the most creative, original film-makers working in Hollywood at the moment, and has been since he made breakthrough movie Cronos more than a dozen years ago.

I’m proud of the fact my first date movie with my wife was Hellboy, a film I never tire of watching, while his arthouse offerings The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth deserve every bit of praise thrown at them.

So when I heard he was making Pacific Rim, a multi-million dollar sci-fi epic about giant mechanoid warriors fighting huge monsters, my first thought was ‘Robot Jox versus Godzilla’.
“Robot what?” you may quite rightly say.

Well, back in the 1980s, cult film-maker Stuart Gordon, the man behind icky horror classics Reanimator and From Beyond, helmed a low budget fantasy epic about warriors in giant mechanoid suits who square off against one another in vast arenas. It was ‘Rocky with rivets’ if you like.

Inspired by the Transformers toyline (17 years before Michael Bay turned the idea into a multi-billion dollar franchise) it crashed and burned at the box office.

Given the fact Iron Man 3 made around $1.1billion worldwide, it’s little wonder Hollywood money men are falling over themselves to find another project in which guys in mechanical suits spend a lot of screen time trading blows.

With Gareth Edwards, maker of low budget cult hit Monsters, now hard at work on a new version of Godzilla, there are big hopes that can succeed where Roland Emmerich’s 1998 version failed.

If anyone can stitch together assorted genres such as robot warriors and Godzilla-style monsters then it’s Del Toro, the man who perhaps wisely dropped out of The Hobbit after months of pre-production to work on this epic instead. (A version of HP Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness also fell by the wayside).

Given the fact Peter Jackson’s opening movie in the Tolkien trilogy was a bit of a let down, let’s hope Guillermo can work his magic on this mecha-monster mash up.

Naturally it comes with a rallying speech provided as standard in all fantasy epics these days, though given the fact Idris Elba is the brilliantly named Stacker Pentecost inspiring the troops, it’s worth ignoring that nagging sense of déjà vu from Independence Day and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.