Under the Skin The Review

How much exposition do you need in a film? Those clunky scenes when characters discuss plot, stitching Scene A to Scene B? Obviously film is a visual medium, so in theory nobody needs say anything. 

In Under the Skin, director Jonathan Glazer decides less is definitely more, keeping dialogue to a minimum as Scarlett Johansson’s alluring alien arrives in Scotland and begins patrolling the streets for men. 

In short, it’s Species with A-levels. 

There are bound to be comparisons with Nic Roeg’s the Man Who Fell to Earth, the last time an intelligent, erotic, surreal study of an alien’s arrival on Earth made such an impact. That was almost 40 years ago. 

Since then we've had plenty of alien visitor movies, but many were teen-friendly offerings designed to make pots of cash or satires such as Brother From Another Planet and Morons From Outer Space. 

Glazer had spent a decade developing the movie, distilling the source novel down to its purest form. And the result is disturbing, mesmerising and unforgettable. 

Johansson is terrific in one of the boldest roles of her career. Initially a predatory, blank avatar unaffected by empathy, her visitor merely exists to trap men and use them.

’Why’ would be spoilerific. 

How she does it is part Hellraiser; asking guys back to her dingy house where they are understandably seduced, and then live to regret it. 

Through it all the soundtrack throbs and pulses. The camera largely taking a back seat as we watch the visitor watching the locals, searching for her next target. 

It's as voyeuristic as Rear Window or Blue Velvet, and just as compelling. 

Arguably the best scene involves a loner with “nice hands”, as affecting as anything you've seen all year. It's at this point Johansson’s lethal ET starts to gain a degree of humanity. 

Yes, I could describe more of the plot, who the nice handed character is, and lots more, but better to let the movie wash over you. 

UTS is a haunting, waking dream of a movie. It may have made a modest impact at the cinema, grossing a couple of million dollars in the States alone, but given the limited number of screens it played on, and the arty sensibilities, there's perhaps little wonder. 

Like all cult films, it will prove far more indelible than tent pole movies which dominate the opening weekend box office then vanish without a trace. 

Hopefully we won't have to wait another decade for Glazer’s follow up. He's too great a talent to languish in whatever limbo space ScarJo’s alien was born from. 

 

22 Jump Street. The review

The beauty of 21 Jump Street was it was a movie version of a TV series hardly anyone was desperate to see. 

The only place it could go was up, and was surprisingly hilarious.

So at the start of the sequel, 22 Jump Street, we wonder how much comedy is left to mine from that seam of TV-inspired nostalgia.

Surprisingly there's plenty, not least because the knowing script is happy to poke fun at the fact it's exactly the same plot, only this time set at college instead of school.

Once more, dream team Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are superb as the old school enemies turned rookie cop mates.

In a thrilling opener reminiscent of Beverly Hills Cop, Morton Schmidt (Hill) and Greg Jenko (Tatum) pursue a group of drug dealers led by Ghost (Peter Stormare). 
A truck chase that is both exciting and funny is rare, and this is both.

They fail in spectacular fashion, so Deputy Chief Hardy (the ever brilliant Nick Offerman)sends our heroes across the street to work for Captain Dickson (Ice Cube). Their mission: go undercover as college students and find the drug supplier of "WHYPHY" which killed a student who apparently bought it on campus.

Jenko befriends football players Zook (Wyatt Russell) and Rooster (Jimmy Tatro), while Schmidt falls for art student, Maya (Amber Stevens), much to the annoyance of her grumpy roommate Mercedes (Jillian Bell).

To reveal much more would be spoilerific. Safe to say, nothing is as it seems on campus; there are red herrings aplenty, one literal, while the comic timing is superb.

Having seen it after the woeful A Million Ways To Die in the West, which is often cruel and leaden in its delivery, there's a joy to the energy here.

The film-makers treat the audience with a degree of respect, and even though many of the gags seemed to go over the heads of many teenage cinema goers, for a fan of meta comedy such as Mike Myers' finest works, this was like catnip.

Hill may have dropped the ball with some comedies over the years (The Watch for example), but following his superb turn in The Wolf of Wall Street, here he's terrific as the likeable co-lead, the yin to Tatum's nice but dim yang, Jenko. 
The latter is happy to send himself up, not least with a great in-joke about the wonderfully silly White House Down, while his eventual reaction to a character (spoiler) half way through is comedy gold.

He also looks superb in the breathless action scenes, running, jumping, brawling. Okay, Hillmay be the star when they tour the interview circuit, but Tatum is a genuine movie star when it counts.

This may be a lads' comedy, but the two female co-stars, Amber Stevens and Jillian Bell, are brilliant: the former an even cuter, younger Zoe Saldana-alike; the latter a funnier, youngerMelissa McCarthy-alike. If there's any justice both will be in a possible 23 Jump Street and no doubt plenty of other Hollywood offerings in the coming years.

Superbly helmed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, two of THE most reliable comedy directors working today, this is the perfect antidote to any spring or summertime blues.

Recommended.

 

Follow Roger Crow on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RogerCrow

The Edge of Tomorrow - The Review

The Edge of Tomorrow - The Review

For 30 years I've loved The Twilight Zone, a passion rekindled recently with the Blu ray box set. 

Those relatively cheap black and white dramas, many penned by Rod Serling, were either 30 or 60 minute ’what if?’ dramas. They created great premises for broader canvases, bigger budget, big screen offerings, some of which (Real Steel) were turned into A-list epics. 

The Edge of Tomorrow could have been another of Serling’s mini masterpieces, the ’what if’ tale of a soldier resurrected to fight an alien war on Earth. 

In this case Tom Cruise is William Cage, the cocky PR man railroaded to fight against an extra-terrestrial enemy. However, his unit is decimated in a Saving Private Ryan-style attack in Normandy, and Cage wakes up a few hours earlier to live the day over and hopefully glean enough information to defeat the enemy. 

Yes, it's a video game-style premise with Cage’s seemingly unlimited lives a handy perk as he tries to level up.

He's helped by Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the poster girl warrior who may or may not know more about Cage’s condition than he first thinks. 

What follows, for the first two thirds at least, is a snappily paced mix of Groundhog Day, Starship Troopers, Aliens and The Matrix, as our heroes fight whizzing, murderous creatures with the aid of clunky exo-suits. 

At one point Cage’s automated metal skeleton runs out of energy and powers down. He steps from it and leaves it standing, an empty shell. And for me that is the third act. 

Whatever wonderful ’story battery’ powered this multi-million dollar vehicle simply runs out of energy and becomes a generic, by-the-numbers adventure, hampered by the same murky, digitally graded darkness that plagued X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Hunger Games 2. 

I'm so bored of action scenes taking place in darkness, especially when the antagonists are so abstract. 

Through it all, Cruise is his usual committed self, but Blunt steals the show as the fearless posh trooper, who lights up every scene she's in. 

In a nice nod to Aliens, Bill Paxton is the gruff Sergeant Farell, commanding his drop ship troops. The scope of the movie is impressive, and director Doug Liman handles the action with flair, but the ghosts of Mr and Mrs Smith and Jumper’s humdrum finales return to haunt us. 

Whether by design or accident there is a feeling we've been here before with Tom’s earlier work, notably Minority Report (outwitting the enemy with pre-emptive moves) or last year’s elegant but sterile Oblivion (hero attempts to destroy big alien brain intelligence thing and wipe out enemy forces in one fell swoop. Smart move, but yawnsomely predictable.) 

Sadly the final scenes are also a let down, as are the closing titles. Recent Marvel offerings Iron Man, Avengers Assemble and Thor: The Dark World have offered stylish, engaging credits, but EOT looks like it was created a decade ago with a generic closing song and a feeling that the budget had all been spent by the time those last bits had to be tagged on. 

I really wanted to like Tom’s latest. I adore his positivity and enthusiasm for big crowd pleasers like this, but feel that when you strip away the shell of the movie, you're left with a sub-standard Twilight Zone episode with a rubbish pay-off. 

A real shame. 

XMen days of future past. The review.

The future is rubbish. (Isn't it always in sci-fi epics?)
Shape-shifting Transform...er...Sentinels have laid waste to the mutant world. 
Making a Last Stand, (another one), Storm, Professor X, Magneto, Kitty Pryde, Frozonefrom The Incredibles (oh, apparently not), and a few other mutants playing Portal (for real) take on the mighty Destroyers from Thor (oh, apparently they aren't, though they seem to be variations of them).

Thankfully Ms Pryde has the power to send the long suffering X types back in time so they can get their collective derrières kicked again.

What our heroes need is someone who can go back to 1973 and stop Miles Dyson inventingSkynet... er, the little guy from Game of Thrones - Trask (the always wonderful Peter Dinklage).

The 'Sarah Connor' in this Terminator-style X-Men epic is Raven, aka Mystique, who still looks very blue and rather plastic. At no point does she 'put metal in the science oven'. Or will she get an Oscar for this. But Jennifer Lawrence is still one of the greatest young actresses you've ever seen.

So while she tries to kill Trask in 1973, Hugh Jackman shows off his stunning pecs (like crumpled wrapping paper stuck on an Action Man) and his rear end, for which millions of mums were truly grateful.

As Logan, aka Wolverine, is sent back to his 1973 body, he has to persuade Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and the young, doped up but still groovy Professor X (the brilliant James McAvoy) to help him break Magneto (Michael Fassbender) out of his plastic Penatgon prison and stop Mystique killing Trask.

Of course Magneto is the uber villain whose friendship with Xavier usually consists of a game of chess, saying "Charles" a lot, promising to help, and then betraying him with OTT set pieces involving twisted metal. It's like GroundX Day.

On the plus side, Fassbender is as great as ever and looks very cool in a hat. A bit like Bowiein the 1970s. All cheekbones and intrigue.

Thankfully our heroes are helped by Quicksilver, the breakout new star of the show whose lightning-fast reactions give us the movie's best set piece. A bullet-time kitchen scene filled with wit, style and panache.

Geeks of course spent part of the movie explaining to indifferent partners how Quicksilverwas also that kid in the post-credits sting for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Only played by someone else. And his sister is Scarlet Witch. Or will be. Only not in 1973. 
Still following? Good.

Director Bryan Singer has a lot of fun with his best film since X-Men 2. Yes he's spinning about 20 plates at once, but does a good job of keeping most of them rotating, even if he spends a little too long on young Xavier meeting his aged self.

The movie is hugely ambitious, brilliantly made, nicely edited and scored (both by John Ottman), and you can see where the budget went just by watching the credits. 15,000 people worked on the movie, and I'm guessing 14,000 were just slaving over laptops creating the impressive effects.

The whole thing is engaging enough and features some of the best thesps in movies. But for me it needs a sucker punch moment. That scene which grabs the heart strings and makes me a little misty eyed.

Sadly there was none of this here, possibly because when every other person in a movie has a gift, it's hard to be amazed. It's like the old Python sketch, Bicycle Repairman. In a world where everyone is a superhero, you yearn for someone normal.

Naturally I'll be among the millions who flock to see X-Men: Apocalyspe in a couple of years, and imagine another 15,000 folks will be kept busy animating bits of fractured metal and the like. However, I'd rather see a movie shot like the outstanding NT version ofCurious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, without a single effect on a simple stage, for the sake of one sucker punch moment, where I care about the fates of the protagonists instead of just being indifferent to their inevitable resurrection.

Sometimes less really is more Bryan.

Godzilla. The review

It's rare I get to feel like a kid on Christmas morning while watching a movie. More often than not filmmakers have contempt for the audience or signpost everything so far in advance, you feel like an A level student in a kindergarten.

Thank heavens Monsters director Gareth Edwards has given us such a terrific movie inGodzilla, or to coin a phrase for the text generation: OMGzilla

This is the sort of film Steven Spielberg used to make with Close Encounters and War of the Worlds: personal stories set against epic backdrops.

It's got the feel of Cloverfield, but without the stomach-churning found footage angle, or the annoying characters, and rubbish dialogue.

The great cast is the first piece of the puzzle to get right in Godzilla 2014, and in Aaron Taylor Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen (wonderful) and the especially good Bryan Cranston, there's a solid foundation for the fantasy that unfolds.

The story gives us enough of the right material to believe the motivations of protagonists and antagonists - nuclear testing; heroes forged by loss; grown-up hero desperate to keep his family, and others together; smart scientists and military folk colouring in the grey areas and giving us enough exposition to carry things forward. Cue final smack down.

There are some terrific touches, such as the HALO jump (scarlet flares scoring the misty skies) and assorted shots of the eponymous beast emerging through the fog like Night of the Demon.

The score by Alexander Desplat is classical and thrilling, while the effects range from the special to the okay.

It's tightly paced, brilliantly directed, hugely satisfying and doesn't outstay its welcome.

Edwards has successfully made the leap from indie filmmaker to blockbuster director with ease.

I can't wait to see what he does next.

The Amazing Spider-man 2. The review

For the most part, The Amazing Spider-man 2 is exactly what you expect: likeable teenager Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) continues to fight crime, while romancing gorgeous girlfriend Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone). 

We have plenty of stunts, shots of Spidey freefalling towards the streets of New York City, and several minutes of him swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper.

In 3-D, it looks fabulous. 

What's far less fabulous, is Jamie Foxx as the geeky underling who eventually becomes Electro: think Watchmen's Dr Manhattan, with clothes and bad monologues. 

His dialogue would have sounded embarrassing in one of those 1960s/1970s Saturday morning cartoons.

If you can gloss over his take on Jim Carrey’s vengeful loser Edward Nygma in Batman Forever, the rest of the movie has a lot going for it.

The relationship between Parker and Stacey is magnetic; Dane DeHaan is fantastic as sick rich boy Harry Osborn, and there are good turns from the likes of a returning Sally Field, Campbell Scott and Chris Cooper.

For the most part it's entertaining stuff, but I was yearning before a sucker punch moment that director Marc Webb supplied with his first Spidey movie (the cranes scene), or Sam Raimi with the original Spider-Man 2 years ago (Aunt May’s packing up speech).

Thankfully TASM2’s third act takes some unexpected twists and turns, but those expecting to see a lot of Paul Giamatti as Rhino in the major clash promised by the extensive adverts will be sorely disappointed.

(Think The Underminer scene from The Incredibles, and you get the idea).

As good as Andrew Garfield is as the eponymous Web Slinger, it's Emma Stone who steals the show.

She has more substance than Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson in the original trilogy, and actually helps our hero instead of screaming a lot in the third act.

It's also refreshing that Spidey doesn't lose his mask every half an hour like in the Raimi movies.

So, not a perfect movie by any means, but thanks to that third act, Foxx’s earlier sins are (almost) redeemed. 

Transcendence. The review.

I wanted to like Transcendence more than I did.

The directorial debut of Christopher Nolan's favourite cinematographer, Wally Pfister, it boasted a top drawer cast and a great idea.

After all, any movie with Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy and Paul Bettany have to be worth a look, didn't it?

The tale of an assassinated computer genius who becomes a digital avatar/Godlike figure was pretty heady stuff. But while the tale unfolded intriguingly, it went nowhere fast.

Too many tracking shots of solar panels does not a great thriller make.

The special effects are pretty good, the performances are all top-notch and the script isn't bad either.

While I am all for sci-fi thrillers that are more cerebral than explosive, this was anti-climactic.

And that may be the main reason it underperformed in the states.

It's bound to attract a cult following on DVD and Blu-ray, but I doubt many people will be desperate for a second viewing on the big screen.