No.249 : The Meg (2018)

 The Meg at the IMDb

Jason Statham stars in this ‘hunt the fish’ thriller that is ‘Jaws’ in all but name, but also takes the time to rehash every seafaring cliché that you could point a harpoon at.

We open in the past with Statham in charge of a rescue attempt on a stricken sub. He gets most of the men off but has to close the hatch on the last few when an unknown force starts to attack the sub. He’s haunted by the decision and retreats into a refreshing bottle of Chang beer, in one of the many overt examples of product placement on show.

Nothing will get Statham back in the water, and we head off to a sea exploration lab off the coast of China. Dwight Shrute, who seems to have done well out of the beet business, is coming to inspect his billion dollar investment. He’s come at a good time as the deepest trench of the ocean is about to be explored by one of their submersibles. The diverse crew see lots of nice sea life but are then attacked, and rendered disabled, by a megladon, a prehistoric shark that can grow to 70 feet. With life support for only 18 hours left they may as well start writing the obituaries…unless Jason can be tempted out of his retirement? Well it is his ex-wife that’s in peril and his name’s over the title; so he'd better get packed.

The rescue goes well, apart from the standard sacrifice of a crew member, and all that’s left is to take care of ’The Meg’ before it kills anyone else. They could just leave it alone, but that wouldn’t make for much of a film so they set off with a few schemes, the first several of which are doomed to fail, as you‘d expect.

After catching their prey an even bigger fish appears; with the crew and hardware decimated, how can it be stopped now that its heading to Amity, sorry, some Chinese beach where it‘s bright coloured inflatables day?

I avoided this film when it came out as it looked rubbish. You know what they say about making rash judgements? That’s right, they are often correct. The ingredients were all here -  Statham in an obvious cash in monster movie, a genre that makes it hard to be original and a Chinese Co-Production which led to several Chinese characters being shoe horned in for no discernable reason, including a cute wee girl who possibly was an ill-advised passenger on a boat under constant megladon attack.

It really was by the numbers, with the troubled Statham trying to gain redemption whilst struggling with a CGI fish that changed size depending on what was required of it. Shrute should be ashamed of his outing as the billionaire financer who for some reason was getting into the fish exploitation business. He had no arc to speak of and even when he went off piste to avoid the lawsuits he was hardly a malevolent genius or even a misguided do-gooder he was just ‘can you show me the way to the bank?’ throughout.

Statham gave his usual effortless performance playing the same baldy Cockney who inhabits all of his films. He had no journey or emotional range and it looked like he was just waving a harpoon against a green screen until the run time hit the contractually agreed length.

The effects were decent in places but there is only so much that you can do with a big fish chomping on people and boats. There was plenty of gore but that was pretty comic, with the buckets of chum the only realistic blood on show.

If you watch ‘The Meg’ you pretty much get what you deserve. There may have been a message about the environment or over fishing in there, but it was hard to pick it out amongst all the CGI, product placements and cardboard cut-out characters who were designed to keep the demographic and screen time to the backers’ requirements. A cookie cutter film that could have done with a shark bite to the script to jazz things up just a little.

THE Tag Line : MEGa Disappointment  - 35%

 

No.248 : The Duel (2016)

The Duel at the IMDb

Woody out of ‘Cheers’ and the less successful Hemsworth brother star in this derivative western that starts out in decent, if predictable fashion, but ends in farce.

The film opens in 1863 after some captions tell us about the Mexican / American War and the uneasy truce that now exists. The Texas Rangers have been set up to keep the peace but frontier justice still prevails. We meet a bald Woody in the rain who is about to take part in a ‘Helena Duel’ which sees the two men tied arm to arm, armed with a small knife each. They then get all stabby with each other until only one is left standing. Woody, not surprisingly as he’s the headline actor, wins the day but the body of his dead opponent is mourned over by the corpse’s now orphaned son. Bet that’s significant!

We fast forward 22 years and that mourning son is now a Texas Ranger in the shape of Liam Hemsworth. He’s called in by his boss, Death out of ‘Bill & Ted’, and asked to investigate a series of dead Mexicans who are showing up in the river. They suspect Woody is involved as he has a secret settlement just upstream. Rather implausibly he sends Liam undercover on the pretext that sending a garrison would be problematic and says that our hero should report back with his findings.

Liam is a modern henpecked man with a Mexican wife who nags him into taking her along. The two head into town and are soon welcomed, with Woody appointing Liam as sheriff. He is meant to come over as all culty but that turns out to be a spelling mistake, as he has designs on the wife and in brainwashing the town. As is standard, he has a sadistic and dim son who sets about the hooker with a heart with his knife. At times it’s like western cliché bingo here!

Woody’s wise words start to turn Liam’s wife’s head and when she gets ill things start to fall apart. Liam susses out Woody’s grand scheme and is captured - he’s then set loose to be hunted by Woody’s paying customers . Can he survive and win his woman back? Is this about revenge or just a long metaphor about the poor treatment of Mexican immigrants? Or maybe it’s just a directionless mess with more unintentional laughs than drama?

This was a strange film, it was almost like several scripts had been cut into pieces and randomly stuck back together. The opening brutal scene of the knife fit was well done and I expected this to be a film about revenge and redemption. It was fine that they chose not to go down this path, but the route taken instead was signposted ‘Ridiculousness’.

Woody was portrayed as the Messiah type figure who perhaps had supernatural powers, but after an hour it was revealed that he was only running a ’Westworld’ type operation, where patrons could shoot Mexicans for $200 a pop. It would have worked too if his idiot son hadn’t dumped the bodies in the river rather than bury them as instructed!

Liam uncovers the terrible conspiracy but is captured. Amazingly Woody makes him the subject of the next hunt but also gives him a rifle and ammo. Predictably Liam takes out all of the red shirts and our two headliners have the duel of the title. And what a laugh it is! The two shoot at each other for five minutes whilst ten feet apart. Then, low on bullets, Liam tips a big rock onto Woody Wile E. Coyote style. Now trapped with his leg pinned Woody goes all ‘127 Hours’ and stabs his own leg off with a penknife. It is glorious in its mentalness.

There is no big lesson here apart from don’t watch this whilst drinking red wine or you’re liable to redecorate your walls with each burst of outrageous action.

It may have been that the film set out to redefine the western a la ‘Bone Tomahawk’ and lost its nerve, but it ended up as risible nonsense that had more laughs than a tickling convention.

THE Tag Line : You Mexican’t Be Serious 41%

 

No.193 : The Outfit (1973)

The Outfit at the IMDb

No, it’s not a nice film about a pretty dress; ‘The Outfit’ is a pretty brutal gangster pic from 1973 that is seemingly a Tarantino favourite.

We open with a priest pulling something lethal from his pants. Don’t worry, it’s only a gun and I’m not sure he’s a priest. He and a cabbie gun down a man building a wall - must have disliked his pointing work. Meanwhile Robert Duvall is getting out of jail having done ‘two and a quarter’ for a firearms charge.

He’s picked up by Karen Black and learns that it was his brother who was killed in the first paragraph. Black goes to a motel with Duvall but he smells a rat and manages to avoid being whacked by ‘the outfit’ - basically the mob. Duvall and his brother had robbed a mafia bank a few years back and the deed is coming back to haunt them.

Not one to go on the defensive Duvall takes the mob on and demands $250k from them to back off. He hits a variety of card games and scams and eventually the mafia agree to pay him off. Of course the money drop is a trap but after escaping with his henchman, Joe Don Baker, Duvall decides to go up against the big boss, Robert Ryan.

Will he get the justice he doesn’t really deserve and who will get out alive?

I enjoyed this straightforward revenge picture that didn’t try to be overly complex, instead relying on some good planning and tense sequences. The near bald Duvall is great as Macklin although he is a bit of a low talker. 'Quiet menace' they’d no doubt call it, but speak up Bob! He was cunning and lethal in a fight, although I have to say ‘The Outfit’ weren’t really at the races; falling for every old disguise and misdirection trick in the book.

Black was OK as the moll, but she and all the female characters fared badly with ‘shut up’ the usual response they earned to every utterance. I liked one trouble making lady, who was a spit for Dee out of ‘Always Sunny’, who offered her charms to Baker and wasn’t impressed at his rejection. Another got a straight right to the chin and Black got a right good slapping for daring to touch Duvall’s pistol - and him just out of the joint too!

You could see this film as inspiration for a lot of features that followed, with Black running down two henchman going straight into ‘Breaking Bad’ and the showdown at the end  being seen many times since, in lesser productions.

The film zipped along with several robberies planned and executed in some detail. I thought the ending was a bit pat but at least it proved the old adage of always take a white coat with you on your murder sprees.

Duvall did well to bring some empathy to a scumbag character and you couldn't help but admire his quite determination to gain his flawed version of justice. I probably preferred ‘Charley Varrick’ which tread very similar ground, but there was plenty to like here and you can see why it is still well regarded in a crowded genre.

THE Tag Line : No Hair : Doesn’t Care    76%

No.133 : The Statement (2003)

The Statement @ the IMDb

He makes a lot of Definite Article  movies does Michael Caine and we thank him for that. Still we’ve yet to see ‘The Magus’!

This one opens with some captions to set the scene - it’s 1944 and the Nazis are occupying France with the help of the Vichy government. We cut to some scenes shot in black and white, which is no doubt helpful to people who can’t distinguish between the past and the present day. Anyway a young Frenchmen is helping the Germans round up some Jews who are then shot. This young man sounds like Michael Caine which is helpful as he doesn’t look anything like him. I quite liked this technique - at least it was different to the usual fade into the older version of the character ploy.

We then move to colour as someone types out ‘The Statement’ - a document naming Caine’s character and the reasons why he has been executed by some Jewish revenge seekers. If you doubted their motivation they have went the extra mile by getting a large STATEMENT stamp made which is used to emboss the document in bright red ink. The trick is how to get the document onto Caine’s dead body as the old boy is still kicking - and kicking hard.

We first meet him at a pavement café enjoying a beer. His idyllic lifestyle is soon to hit a few bumps however, as a man with a photo of Caine is eyeing him up. Unfortunately he’s not an autograph hunter and soon gets bumped off by the septuagenarian swastika wearer in a scene that was surprising to the victim, but not to anyone who’d been paying the least amount of attention.

We then move to Paris were a new judge (Tilda Swinton) has been appointed to investigate crimes against humanity - and Caine is top of her list. Strange the French gave this high profile job to a 30 year old Scottish woman but at least she has Jeremy Northam (Cyber) to give her a hand, but little else. The two take an age to make much progress, hampered as they are by the machinations of the catholic church and a shady organisation run by Baron Munchausen.

After the best part of two hours they eventually get close to their quarry - will the STATEMENT be delivered and will those responsible for letting Caine roam free for 40 years be brought to account?

For a film you probably haven’t heard of ‘The Statement’ has a great cast with recognisable names well down the list. Folk like Colin Salmon and Frank Finlay show up for five minutes and are never seen again. I guess shooting in the south of France did appeal!

Caine, who looks like Edward Woodward in ‘Common as Muck’ throughout this film, is pretty good as the conflicted collaborator and murderer. He’s conflicted in the sense he’s a devout catholic but doesn’t mind killing folk and threatening his wife‘s (Charlotte Rampling)  dog (Benni). He clutches his religious medal and prays at the drop of a body but it was hard to take to him despite his nifty shooting and roof running skills. If you don’t like Caine’s character much you don’t get much from the ‘good guys’ with Tilda Swinton and Northam not exactly setting the screen alight. A lot of the film is taken up with arguing and looking through records, and they could have trimmed 20 minutes from the middle third no bother at all.

That’s not to say it wasn’t a decent effort with a couple of exciting scenes and workmanlike, if unspectacular, acting throughout.

Some of it was a bit far fetched though - the Catholic church covering up decades of misdeeds? Surely not!

THE Tag Line - Deserves a Caineing 58%

No. 132 : The Hand (1981)

The Hand @ the IMDb

 “What a pile of shit” Michael Caine declares midway through this schlock horror nightmare - whether he was talking about the production is unclear but such words would be a bit harsh. Just a bit though.

Caine plays Jon Lansdale a successful newspaper comic strip artist whose creation ‘Mandro’ pays for a nice life with an unfeasibly young, and new age wife. Lansdale is a bit of a dick from the off and enjoys yelling at his wife whilst she is driving him to the shops. This ends badly for him however as his drawing hand is lopped off by a passing truck as he tries to wave a car back. This scene was fantastically realised as the hand goes flying and Caine, covered in blood, starts screaming - possibly at his agent.

Time passes and soon the stumpefied Caine is getting fitted for a prosthetic that looks like it has been salvaged from a terminator. He suspects his wife is getting a bit too close to her yoga instructor and his agent is keen to let a young artist take over his strip. Caine meanwhile is having trouble adapting to his new single hand life and has flashbacks about the incident whilst pondering about the fate of his hand, that was never found.

With wife trouble escalating Caine heads off for a teaching job in California where he can talk to bored students and brood in his lonely log cabin. Things look up however when a young student shows up at his home and takes her clothes off - clearly a wavy hair / stump fetishist.

Despite trading the wife in for a younger and less annoying model Caine keeps spiraling further into madness and we wonder if the black and white flashbacks of the disembodied hand killing a tramp are for real or just his frenzied imagination at work.

With the wife ready to take their daughter away and his bit on the side having gone missing we have to guess if Caine is doing all the murders or is the disembodied hand really the culprit?

Despite my better judgement I enjoyed ‘The Hand’. It’s rubbish but it knows it’s rubbish and doesn’t pretend otherwise. Caine is manic throughout with his hairstyle getting ever madder as an insight to his mental state. The hand is well done and despite people clearly holding it on whilst it strangles them it’s a good laugh to see it scuttling about the place.

The film does stretch itself somewhat with a final wrong foot but as a study of madness and loss it is well done and it has a few unintended laughs peppered throughout, which adds to its appeal.

This was an early directorial outing for Oliver Stone before he got all political and for pure enjoyment purposes I’d put it up there with his best. Caine is of course working for the pay cheque but he gives it his all and is happy to go deep with the murder and sex scenes, despite the ridiculousness of each.

THE Tag Line : Give it a big hand! 68%

No.75 : The Debt (2010)

The Debt at the IMDb

A bit of ‘secrets and lies’ now as Helen Mirren tries a funny accent and keeps her clothes on - Boooo!

Helen plays Rachel, a Mossad agent, who is celebrated in her homeland for killing a Nazi war criminal in the 1960s in East Germany. The mission is coming back into the public consciousness as Mirren’s daughter has written a book about it and the launch sees Mirren and her fellow agents reappraise past events.

Mirren does a reading from the book and we flash back to witness her shooting their fleeing captive after he manages to get free, leaving her with an ugly facial scar. All is not well however when one of her fellow agents jumps in front of a truck on the way to the reunion and another has gotten wind that their 30 year old secret may be falling apart.

Mirren’s wheelchair bound ex-partner and fellow agent discuss the death of their friend and his motivation for this. We flash back again to the start of the mission and see how the rookie Rachel posed as a wannabe mother so she could get a closer look at the alleged Nazi surgeon - not as close as the look as her gets of her, given he’s working as an obstetrician.

They manage to capture their man but after a bodged escape they are left in their grotty flat for ten days while the Israelis plan their way home. The evil Nazi doctor begins to plant seeds of dissent between the flatmates and after stealing a plot point from ‘Breaking Bad’ he escapes. The three agents agree that they’ll keep the lie that they killed the Nazi and disposed of the body - secure in the knowledge that the Nazi would lie low.

Alas, the best laid plans fall apart as you’d expect, as the wheelchair bound ex-agent Tom Wilkinson finds out that a Ukrainian hospital patient is claiming to be the undead Nazi - and not in a fun zombie way. With one agent dead and the other in a wheelchair it’s up to Helen to travel to the Ukraine and try out her handy fluent Ukrainian and see if she can pay the debt she’s been living off for 30 years.

This was a pretty workmanlike thriller but it had a lot to like. The narrative flow jumped back and forth and the payoff from the ‘real’ telling as opposed to the ‘fictional’ one was signalled some way off. Given they reused a lot of the footage there was a sense of deja-vu but it was well worked with the tension racked up as the world closed in on them.

The flashback to the mission took the best part of an hour and although 1965 East Germany was well realised it did drag a bit - we all knew a debt was going to be incurred and that it’d be up to Helen to pay it off so it took a bit long to get there. I did enjoy the scene with the evil doctor as he probed his patient and would be captor both literally and mentally. Jesper Christensen, who you’ll know as ‘Mr White’ from ‘Quantum of Solace’, was excellent as the malevolent medic , with evil pouring from every loaded statement.

Mirren did her usual class act, although her Russian heritage showed in her Ukraine scenes and her lack of an Israeli one did so equally when she put on their accent. Tom Wilkinson did his usual angry routine and it was a shame we didn’t see more of Ciaran Hinds who must be the worst ‘Frogger’ player in history.

The film avoided preaching too much about the rights and wrongs of what transpired, but that tended to leave you somewhat unsympathetic towards the characters all of whom where aloof and distant. It was a well played and directed film but it could have used a tighter edit and maybe a bit more humanity to allow us to invest in the characters. There again maybe an investment in ‘The Debt’ is best avoided!

THE Tag Line - We Always Get Our Man - Eventually   71%

No.73 : The Veteran (2011)

The Veteran at the IMDB

What a rip off ; there was nobody healing animals at all throughout this film!

What we get is a kind of ‘Harry Brown’ meets ‘The Bourne Identity’ as a soldier returns from Afghanistan to his sink estate home to find it under the control of drug lords. Our man isn’t intimidated and smacks a few around. The local kingpin is impressed and offers him work which he refuses, despite the veiled threats of 'choosing sides'.

Meanwhile, a meeting with other ex-soldiers gives him the chance to get back to some kind of work, running black ops for a shady intelligence outfit, as you do. All the while we realise he is on the edge, with subtle clues like him constantly punching walls giving away his inner torment.

His first operation goes well as he uncovers a back street bomb factory but he soon gets in deep as he befriends a possible double agent woman and engages with his always shouting boss, Brian Cox. He slowly realises that his two worlds are not so far apart and that and it’s going to take a lot of shooting to clean up the estate and stop a possible terrorist outrage.

I didn’t really take to this film from the off. The grim sink estate setting and washed out colour palette did nothing to draw me in and the lead lacks any sympathy or charisma whatsoever. The feral yoof were well realised but it never really touched upon why they are being furnished with Uzi 9mms by the shady intel community. They is some blather about ‘GOD’ - Guns, Oil and drugs but why the poweres that be would align themselves with some foul mouthed youth isn’t addressed.

 I think the director was trying to set a sense of disconnectedness with our hero’s action scenes being so random that we weren’t sure if it was real or fantasy. This is maybe burrowing too deep, as at the end of the day it was a mish mash of a plot tail-ended by some crowd pleasing vermin control.

It is hard to be too tough on a film that clearly has a shoe-string budget but if the script had been more rounded and clear there would be a decent film to be had here. Brian Cox looks like he did his couple of scenes in a day, despite his high billing and although you might recognise a couple of faces the names will escape you.

The blood soaked finale was out of step with the rest of the film and you have to wonder if they thought- ‘Sod it let’s have a big shoot out’. The action was well choreographed and the hardware impressive. The finale with its hints towards a damned future was seen a mile off and it’s just a shame things ended with so many plot threads left hanging.

THE Tag Line : Call a Vet - this needs shooting  56%

No.66 : The Bravados (1958)

The Bravados on IMDb

Gregory Peck and Joan Collins are the unlikely stars of this 1958 colour western.

Peck plays Jim Douglas, a rancher with revenge in mind. We open with him approaching a small town and being warned off by a guard - the sheriff don’t want no strangers in town, see. Despite this warm welcome Peck finagles his way in after the sheriff marks him down as a pervert with a thing for hangings. The small town is having a four man hanging event the next day and all they need is the travelling hangman to show up so the show can go ahead.

Peck offers to help out but is soon boozing in the bar with Joan Collins. Collins looking well senior of her actual 25 years at the time of filming is an old flame of Peck's and is disappointed to hear that he’s married with a child. Slowly we learn that our man is a widower and that the four men due to be hung are those he has marked as responsible. With the hangman now arrived things should go smoothly - but wait! While the townsfolk, including a reluctant Peck, are at church the bogus hangman springs the four bad guys and the chase is on.

Peck organises the posse and soon they start to catch up with the felons. The bad guys make the classic mistake of splitting up, and it doesn’t take long for the remorseless Peck to thin their number to one. Can he put to rest his demons, and are his motivations just and indeed correct?

This is an enjoyable western that doesn’t attempt to do anything new with the genre. The jail break and chase are all you’d expect with some brutality from Peck notwithstanding. His moral ambiguity towards the end is in sharp counterpoint to the cheering townsfolk who care little about what exactly the bad guys did just as long as they did something.

Peck is excellent as the driven Douglas and looks to be doing his own stunt riding and lasso work. He cuts a mean figure in black and he’s pretty no nonsense with the pleading bad guys. His mask slips towards the end as the doubts set in but at least he’s rewarded with the lovely Joan who seems very keen.

Joan’s character is ill defined and it’s not clear if she’s meant to be American or English - or indeed Spanish as she shows up for church in a red flamenco dress. Her acting is consistent throughout - consistently awful that is. She doesn’t convince at any level and looks like a refugee from a make up commercial who wandered on set. Her emotions go from ‘Just let them go’ to ‘Kill them all’ in literally one scene and it’s not hard to see why her career floundered for many years, until she started taking her clothes off.

Of the remaining cast there wasn’t a lot standing out apart from a young Lee Van Cleef who wasn’t quite at his moustache twirling best. The horny escapee didn’t convince nor did their purty hostage who did little more than scream a lot.

The locations were fantastic and used to great effect in some panning shots that showed the difficulties the trackers faced.

The big reveal at the end was signalled from the off but if you watch this as a simple ‘posse’ film you’ll enjoy it, although I doubt it will stay long in the memory.

THE Tag Line - Kill ‘em all and let God sort them out - 68%

No.43 : The Losers (2010)

The Losers at the IMDb

This ‘men on a mission’ thriller isn’t anything ground breaking or original but it has a lot of laughs and action which I imagine is pretty much what it sets out to do.

The plot is the familiar ‘fish out of water’ scenario which sees our five man CIA black ops unit go on the run when a mission goes awry. Their mission, to take out a drug lord, goes ahead despite the baddy’s compound being full of kids - just like in ‘Clear and Present Danger’. Our men can’t let a big missile blow up the kids (and the bad guys) so they decide to steam in and save the brats in what seemed a bit of an unlikely decision for a bunch of hard assed mercenaries. Still we need to know they are the good guys early on, so fair enough.

They manage to get the kids out but are targets for death themselves and only survive due to them giving up their ride for the soon to be angelic infants. Now off the radar our guys set out and a revenge mission of their own against the mysterious Max who is keen for a big war to start so he can deal weapons and seize power. With our men without money and arms they are stuck in Bolivia until a sexy babe offers them a deal to get back to the USA, in return for offing Max Headcase.

Our team are soon back in the arms of Uncle Sam and set up some elaborate plans to track down and take out the bad guys. Of course there are bumps in the road in the shape of a traitor in the gang and some hidden agendas but essentially it’s just a big man hunt with a sequel looming large at the end.

The plot summary there may make this sound a pretty simplistic film and that’s because it is. The plot goes from A to B to C with no real deviations. It’s kind of like an A*Team set up with our guys on the run and trying to clear their names while righting some wrongs.

I enjoyed the film throughout and I was glad to see it’s comic book origins weren’t hidden like a dirty secret. A few times the characters dissolve into their cartoon equivalents and the cracking opening credits had Jock infused panels all over the place.

The characters were all spot on and it was good to see a few familiar faces bring the strip to life. Of the main five you have Stringer Bell, Johnny Storm and The Comedian with a couple of decent turns making up the numbers. I particularly liked the hat fetishised sniper who, like every movie sniper in history, never misses a shot. Also good was Zoe Saldana who spent most of the film in her bra and acting mysterious and the always reliable (apart from all the time) Jason Patric as Max, whom I bet was written as enigmatic but just came across as a tit.

The action scenes were all well done with the armoured car hijack and money plane show down both great sequences. I also liked Johnny Storm picking off the guards with his lethal fingers in one of several funny set pieces that set the film above many of its contemporaries.

Over all the film is largely mindless and forgettable, but for the 90 minutes you are watching it you’ll have a few laughs, some sexy action and plenty of explosions - sound like a good deal to me.

THE Tag Line : Losers : A Winner! 69%