No.139 : The Double (2011)

The Double at the IMDb

Have you ever seen a spy film? If the answer is ‘Yes’ then you have already seen large chunks of ‘The Double’.

Richard Gere stars as Paul, a retired agent who spent 20 years trying to track down arch bad guy, Cassius. He’s called back into action when Cassius’ signature garrote murder technique is used to kill off a senator. Young whizz kid analyst, Topher Grice, is teamed up with the reluctant Gere to try and finally nail the bad guy.

Of course Gere is reluctant at first, but soon the young agent wins his grudging respect. With occasional input from an embarrassed looking Martin Sheen, playing a sector chief , the unlikely and mismatched duo start to fit the case together.

But wait! Can it be so straight forward? Will ‘the double’ of the title refer to a lookalike or maybe a double agent? Is everyone the person they say they are? Is anyone?

This was a really terrible thriller that made no sense at all, and had such unwieldy pot turns you’d think that the writers were plucking random ideas out of a big bowl and sticking them together to make a script.

The film opens with a scene of some Mexican migrants getting killed off for no apparent reason. Maybe it was lifted from a Trump election broadcast? It’s brought up later on but just as a minor plot point not the pivotal event that the scene suggests.

Gere is the clichéd, jaded ex-agent reluctant to get back on the job and even less keen to take a rookie under his wing. Topher offers little as greenhorn agent Ben, who starts out in awe of Gere but after a few scenes in his company stars to smell a rat - or was it a hamster?

The initial wrong foot was decently handled, but in retrospect it couldn’t have gone any other way. Who is the shadowy villain? Well you only have two choices and the title is a bit of a giveaway. As it is, we get wrong footed twice but not in a satisfying manner - in a ‘that doesn’t make a lick of sense’ kind of way.

The film probably sneaked a release on the back of its star names, but everyone looks disinterested and, apart from one decent car crash, there is nothing memorable about this film at all.

The same 'wire from the watch' murder gets carried out so often, you’d think the prop must have been rented for the weekend and they had to get as much use out of it as possible.

The characters are as thin as a steamrolled pizza with the female  parts being especially weak. Topher’s wife has nothing to do apart from simper a lot and fail to fall off a ladder.

Gere wins no empathy points at all and is downright creepy in places. In one scene at a pee-wee baseball game a lady asks him which kid is his. Gere say none, he just likes to watch. Why child services weren’t immediately called, I don’t know.

The film saunters to a low rent showdown in a warehouse with outrageous revelations being piled on top of a steaming load of unlikely events.

I’m not 100% sure who was doing what to whom at the end, but that’s OK - none of the characters did either.

THE Tag line - Double your fun - watch a party election broadcast instead.

33%

No.138 : The Colony (2015)

The Colony at the IMDb

My regular reader will remember that we have already reviewed a film called ‘The Colony' way back in Episode 114.

Fear not, no repeats on this channel, unless you are talking about the jokes. This is an entirely different ’The Colony’ and stars her off the Harry Potters. Which is the best Colony? Well read and find out. (it’s the other one).

Hermione plays an air stewardess  heading to Chile. The airline isn’t named and her nationality isn’t revealed so I’m guessing she’s English given no attempts are made at an accent. This is one of these inspired by true events’ films so they can basically make up what they like. Hernione, or ‘Lena’ to give her name in this is, paying a bootie call to her German boyfriend (Daniel Bruhl) whose character is conveniently called Daniel.

Daniel (the character) is a political activist and keeps himself busy designing posters for revolutionaries and attending rallies. Lena spots him from the airport bus and soon they are back at his apartment having very modest foo-foo. Their four days of delight are cut short when a military coup begins (well it is 1973) and they get rounded up. A man with a bag on his head grasses Daniel up and he gets carted off to the ‘Colony of Dignity’.

Lena makes some enquiries and after two minutes she is at the gate of said colony resplendent in a grey cardigan, a crucifix and slut shoes. They don’t do anything in the way of background checks at The Colony and she is immediately put to work peeling spuds. Daniel meanwhile is tired about being tortured all the time and pretends that the electric shocks have made him a mentalist. HUGE mistake. Next day the military show up and ask for a subject to test out the poison gas that The Colony is mixing up for them - and Daniel is the prime candidate.

Despite segregation the two manage to meet up and make plans to escape. Will they get away in an ending ripped off from ‘Argo’ or will they remain captive? (It’s the first one).

This was a decent enough film that passed the time but was in no way memorable or as statement making as it thought. Half an hour in they started a ‘Day 1’ caption that went up to Day 132. Although some were skipped it felt like we lived them all. There was no real point to this timetable as most of the stuff happened at the start or in the last few days.

The Colony was quite well realised but ‘The Cult’ would have been more appropriate - maybe they wanted to avoid confusion with the band? The cruel overlords led by Michael Nyqvist were good in a boo-hiss sense with his nastiness later being replaced by him being a total nonce. Boo hiss indeed.

Hermione was decent, but clearly the star of the show - even in the work camp she had nicely fitted blouses and platted hair to die for. She was also a bit stiff in the love scenes, with her main motivation being to keep the sheet as close to her chest as possible. Obviously this blog isn’t looking for titillation, but it does take you out of the scene when the character is coy about showing her boobs to the boyfriend she hasn’t seen for weeks. The Potter fan boys do get a couple of thrills especially when Lena is ordered to remove her blouse. A few expelianiouses in the fan boy pants there, I bet!

The eventual escape from the colony was a bit easy and the flight from Chile was too familiar. The closing captions said that basically nothing changed following the events of this film, which isn’t surprising as it appears to have been mostly made up. Worth a look, but no where near as much fun as the other ’The Colony’.

The Tag Line : 132 days of torture 55%

No.137 : The Bargee (1964)

The Bargee at the IMDb

I found this film on an obscure satellite channel and it does seem something of an unknown given it has fewer than 300 ratings on IMDb. This is a bit of a surprise given the stellar British cast and the writing team of Galton & Simpson who gave us Steptoe & Son and Hancock, starring Will Smith. Having viewed the film however, I am happy to let it resubmerge itself in the canal of mediocrity. It was really dull and apart from a game of ‘it’s that guy out of…’ it doesn’t have much to offer.

Part of that is down to the era in which it was made. Released in 1964 things hadn’t quite started swinging in the sixties yet, and the glory days of the 1970’s sex comedy starring Robin Asquith were still many years away. This one does try to be a bit cheeky and risqué but it gets bogged down in a moral maze and a selection of house coats that are anything but sexy.

Anyway our hero Hemel  as played by Harry H. Corbett, is named solely for a weak joke about being born in Hemel Hemstead - this allowed for an obvious zinger  about being born somewhere else with an even worse name and this weak gag meant he was stuck with the unlikely moniker for the rest of the film.

Hemel works the canals, slowly transporting goods up and down the country, with his cleverly named cousin Ronnie, played by Ronnie Barker. Where do they get their ideas?! There is a prescient scene at the start where the man at the docks says that the industry is winding down and that a young man like Hemel (Corbett was 39 at the time and looks 50) should get out now. This advice falls on deaf ears as Hemel has a power of shagging to do. Or ‘get some dinners’ as they coyly put it.

He has a girl at every lock and sends postcards ahead to them heralding his visits. All the girls think they are the one and are desperate for the oily rag and bone, er,  canal man to marry them. Ronnie is not so lucky and bemoans that he always gets the ugly ones. Mirrors were not in common use until 1965. Hemel’s first date goes wrong when the ‘beautiful girl’ he plans on meeting is in fact an ancient looking bar maid with a massive bouffant. Hemel gets his dinner but when she finds out about his other girls she chases him up the canal as his boat put-puts along at 2 m.p.h.

The long dull stretches of sailing up the canals and navigating locks are made even more dull with their encounters with Eric Sykes who plays an annoying man in a cabin cruiser. He plays the part well; that is to say he is really annoying in every scene he is in.

The film slowly meanders to the main action which involves Hemel getting a girl and Ronnie taking care of her over protective Dad down the pub. After they leave we learn the girl is pregnant and the Dad starts a siege at the lock. Soon the entire occupancy of The garret Club has shown up and our likely lads are nearing the lock on their return journey. Will Hemel come clean and start a new life away from his boats? Or will the new wife add to her general humiliation and set sail with him?

This film started OK but it spluttered to a halt as soon as Eric Sykes hoved into view, and never got back into gear again. The values of the film were all over the shop - I guessed the men were supposed to like Hemel and envy his free and easy life style. As it was he just came across as an unlikeable creep. Barker was poor too as the illiterate cousin who needs the captions on his girlie mags read out to him. His part was wafer thin and you can see why he started to write his own stuff.

The saving grace of the film was in the bit parts with people like Derek Nimmo, Richard Briers, Arthur off ’On the Buses’ and Mr Barraclough all showing up in a variety of stereotype roles.

The pacing of the film was awful with lots of scenes running well beyond their sell by date. The siege at the lock went on for so long that one of the characters had to go for a crap half way through!

At nearly two hours there was probably enough here for a decent one hour TV episode - adverts included. It was a bit of an oddity with a sex crazed deviant having to work against 60’s censorship and ankle length skirts, and failing miserably to offer any titillation whatsoever.


THE Tagline : Don’t touch this with a ten foot bargee pole. 45%

No.136 : The Apocalypse (2007)

The Apocalypse at the IMDb

This film only garners a measly 1.7/10 on the IMDb across 2600 reviews so it must be worth watching, even if only for the odd ironic chuckle. Sadly it fails even on this front and, even worse, it even tries to gets some Christian values in your face to boot!

We open with five young people sitting around a campfire discussing their relationships. Once decides to go for a piss - HUGE mistake - as he is instantly flattened by a meteorite. The rest panic and flee, with another hapless youth falling into a large lava pit and disappearing.

We cut to our hero, Jason, a USDA Ranger, whatever that is - not a cop, but he has blue lights on his truck. He’s called to the station by a colleague who doesn’t tell him what to expect. He arrives to find the station under a large meteorite - well, he didn’t expect that! As the two look at the carnage, slightly non-plussed it has to be said, another meteorite flies overhead and destroys the city of Monterrey. Even this doesn’t elicit much of a reaction and certainly no pressure wave, fall out etc. To be fair there is a handful of ashes that fall from the sky, but that’s not much to show for the 100,000 reported dead.

Meanwhile down in L.A. four hot girls are watching the carnage erupt on TV. One of them, Lindsay, is the daughter of Jason and is failing to contact her mother Ashley who is the ex-wife of Jason. Keeping up? Eventually Mom makes contact and she and Jason agree to head south to meet up with the daughter - they have heard that the world only has four days left as an ‘extinction starter’ meteor is on the way. This is described as being the size of Texas - strange that ‘Armageddon’ used the same comparison - I guess its like us comparing things to the size of Wales.

As the ‘action’ takes place we are aware of strange events happening. No, not that this guff secured funding, but that people are disappearing. It’s almost like the actors are getting called back to their regular jobs at McDonalds. The once couple, Jason and Ashley, head off on their perilous road trip which is full of dangers such as land slides, tornadoes and tsunamis, which thankfully for the budget, mostly happen off camera. Even the rescue helicopter is heard and not seen - someone must have spent that day’s budget on a cup of coffee.

As they near L.A. the disappearances start to increase and Lindsay’s boyfriend is spirited away from his bath tub hidey hole by a very localised tornado in a crescendo of religious music - only to be found outside five minutes later in a wrong foot that fooled no one - more religion is coming! Soon it’s down to just Dad to find his daughter before the big one hits - will he find her? Let us pray!

I should have been altered to the likely quality of this film when I saw Asylum’s logo on the credits. They are famous for piggybacking big Hollywood films with cheap copycats and this is no different - apart from the added extra of plenty of religious stuff.

You can’t expect much, and on that front it certainly delivers. You will have never seen any of the cast in anything else and this film appears to have killed any acting careers they may of had stone dead - and rightly so. Some characters look like they have wandered on set when delivering pizza and others deliver performances that would shame a porno movie.

The special effects are dire and are the worst kind of painted on CGI you can imagine. The ‘tsunami’, which is seen from the air, was just like a dark line being drawn on a map. You also get characters running from meteor showers that leave small puffs of smoke and nothing else. Their terror looks genuine however, but that’s probably just in anticipation of the reviews.

The religious angle is in your face from the start with people all discussing their faith from the get go. Our hero and his wife split when their daughter died and Ashley tearfully admits to not having been to church since that sad day. I say ‘sad’ but the actress displayed more of a ‘meh’ vibe. Anyway, one of the few highlights is when, after hiding in a church, she stops for a quick pray only to be struck by lightning - subtle stuff!

This is a total howler with a punch you in the face message and has no merit whatsoever. ‘Pray with me’ is the final line - pray you are never condemned to see this one!

The Tag Line : End of Days? End of Film Please. 12%