No.239 : The Foreigner (2017)

The Foreigner at the IMDb

Jackie Chan sorting out the troubles in Northern Ireland sounds like a recipe for disaster but this was a really enjoyable and well made thriller.

Jackie, looking all of his 63 years, plays a restaurant worker in London. He is protective of his daughter but lets her head into a dress shop as he parks his car. Huge mistake! The dress shop explodes killing the daughter and several others. An adjacent bank has been bombed taking the frock shop out in the process.

We see the investigation going on, along side the cell of IRA bombers celebrating their success. They are the ‘Authentic IRA’ and are keen to derail the peace process in their bid for a united Ireland. Pierce Brosnan plays a Gerry Adams type government minister who used to be in the IRA but now works to try and maintain the fragile peace. His bosses in London charge him with finding those responsible but we suspect early on that Pierce knows more than he’s letting on.

Meanwhile a grieving Jackie is looking for answers. He is initially fobbed off by the police and Brosnan but they don’t realise who they are dealing with - it’s Jackie Chan for goodness sake! Jackie spots Pierce’s likely involvement early on and gets his attention by setting off a home made bomb in his office toilet - must have had extra chillies in the Madras.

There are a lot of twists and double dealing but eventually the terrorist cell is identified; but what are their targets, who is giving the orders and can a quest for revenge ever end well?

This film rattled along at a great pace and it boasted excellent performances from its two leads. Brosnan was especially good in his most Irish outing since ‘Taffin’. His Nord Iron accent did slip at times but he was good value as the sleekit minister unable to detach himself from his past. He had some good lines calling Chan ‘a fookin’ wanker’ at one point.

Chan kept away from his usual wisecracks and elaborate fight scenes, playing a more introspective character who was like a force of nature flying through endless Irish henchmen. There were fights of course, but they were pretty brutal with Chan himself taking plenty of licks.

The action scenes were well done, as you’d expect from Bond director, Martin Campbell and the plot was twisty without ever being confusing or needlessly complex.

The rights and wrongs of the political situation weren’t really addressed with the murder of women and children being condemned and only the rogue cell being the out and out and out bad guys. Brosnan’s was a conflicted character who had our sympathies at the start but his façade was slowly pulled down by Chan’s interventions until he was revealed as the villain of the piece, albeit with decent initial intentions.

The only thing I didn’t like was the title which makes the film sound like some BNP propaganda effort. The words ‘the foreigner’ are never used and Chan says at one point he’s a British citizen. I guess the original book title ‘The Chinaman’ was rejected as it sounds a bit racist. What not call it ‘Chan v Bond : Irish Style’? I’d have definitely watched it before now if it had been!

THE Tag Line : Well Maybe You Should Be Watching This! 80%

 

No.220 : The Deceived (TV) (2020)

The Deceived at the IMDb

A change of pace for us now as we delve into the box sets section of the ‘My5’ app - Channel 5’s online offering. I’m sure this show would have broadcast on their main platform but it passed me by. I don’t watch much Channel 5 to be honest, as I largely dismiss it as a lot of tabloid nonsense and soaps. This sweeping view wasn’t totally discouraged as the inescapable ads that peppered this app viewing were for programmes about being fat and WWF Divas. ‘The Deceived’ may however be their attempt to get away from such risible rubbish (there was also a trailer about a show about what happens to your rubbish) as this was a pretty decent, quality production.

The series has only four episodes of about 44 minutes each so you could easily see it off in one evening, as we did. It’s debatable whether there is enough material to fill two and a half hours of viewing, but lubricated with a bottle of wine it passed the night in a decent, if largely unmemorable manner.

The film opens with Cambridge student Ophelia eyeing up her bearded lecturer, Michael. Michael has a beard that a bird could nest in and looks like Mac out of ‘Always Sunny’, but the girls all agree he’s dreamy. The two meet up in the time honoured fashion of her dropping papers and him helping to pick them up, and soon they are having awkward looking sex in his office chair. Michael’s wife is a successful author and he’s living in her shadow, but he does have a new book of his own coming out.

He seems to put it about though, and Ophelia gets warned off when she and a friend witness Michael fighting with another woman. He then disappears and after some detective work Ophelia tracks him to his remote home village in Ireland. It turns out that Michael’s wife Roisin has died in a fire and he has returned home to sort out the house and her affairs. His day gets even better when Ophelia announces that she’s pregnant.

She moves into the creepy, half burnt out, family pile and soon starts to hear strange noises coming from a locked room. She also gets attention from a local handyman and an overbearing mother figure who suspects that Ophelia may not be the literary agent that she claims to be.

As the episodes go by a young man appears looking for his missing sister and Ophelia starts to see and hear strange goings on. Why is everyone feeding her tea and what really happened to Roisin on that fateful night?

I quite liked this workmanlike mystery thriller. As soon as it got underway you knew where it was going and the only cliff-hanger was which of the obvious outcomes would the writers chose for the big revelation. There was more than a little of ‘Rebecca’ about the whole enterprise with it clear to us that Ophelia wasn’t going nuts, and that there were strange happenings afoot.

I’m not the sharpest at such things but even I cottoned onto the twist by episode two and it was a long 90 minutes wait to see things pan out in the predicted fashion. To be fair it was well made with rural Ireland and Cambridge both looking great. The cast was largely good with there being no big names to distract you. Emmett J Scanlan in the lead had most of the heavy lifting to do, and he carried it off well moving from charmer to…something else, with relative ease. I was less sympathetic towards Emily Reid as Ophelia who was a bit needy and annoying.

Overall I think this could have been condensed into a 90 minute film as there was plenty of padding and subplots, like that with the builder, not going anywhere. There was nothing you haven’t seen before, but as a lockdown time passer you could do worse.

THE Tag Line : No Mystery Here! 61%