No.183 : The Objective (2008)

The Objective at the IMDb

Box office Mojo gives this film’s domestic gross as $95. Having watched it, that seems about a hundred bucks more than it’s worth.

We open with a portentous voiceover which is never a good sign. CIA Agent Keynes tells us that 3 days after 9/11 mysterious signals were detected in the Afghan desert and he’s been sent to investigate. He meets up with the usual rag tag of soldiers who accompany him on the mission.

The briefing takes all of a couple of minutes as he explains they are going to get a statement from a holy man. The mission starts off OK as they visit some locals and hand out some candy. They gain a guide in the form of Abdul and head off to the mountains, where the holy man is hanging out.

Almost immediately they are attacked in an ambush and lose a soldier. They kill a few terrorists but their bodies mysteriously disappear. The fire fight takes out their jeep and most of their water supply and things predictably go downhill from here.

Keynes stays aloof from the men and is constantly peering at his thermal image camera. They witness some strange lights and before long their numbers are whittled down as men are vaporised by an invisible enemy.

Eventually Keynes comes clean to his rapidly depleting crew - they are trying to track an ancient and terrible force that took care of some British troops in the first Afghan war and which was documented by Alexander the Great. Unfortunately for us it’s not exciting aliens or monsters but some lights that form a triangle - excitement she wrote!

With further loses to dehydration and desertion, Keynes is on his own but he finds an oasis in the desert. Just as he has hope of recovery, his camera picks up a new image - will this be death or salvation?

I didn’t enjoy much about this film apart from the great Moroccan locations that doubled for the slightly more hostile Afghanistan. The acting was uniformly terrible with the lead being the most wooden turn since Pinocchio. The voice over was pretentious with philosophical gubbins being trotted out at every turn. The usual men on a mission clichés were all present and correct as was the standard ‘unit depleting one at a time‘ narrative.

The end, and indeed the whole film, didn’t make a lick of sense and I was really none the wiser about what was going on as the credits rolled. It could have been interesting given the location and overarching ideas in play, but the execution was awful and compounded by a terrible script and lamentable acting.

The Tag Line : Your Objective : Give this a miss! 23%

No.116 : The Lifeguard (2013)

The Lifeguard at the IMDb

 Kristen Bell stars in the title role who, when we meet her is a journalist in New York. We know things aren’t going great as the film stock is washed out in blue tones. She reports a story of a man who kept a tiger in his apartment and it later died after trying to claw its way out. As a metaphor it is a bit blunt and soon Kristen has fled the pressures of the city and headed home to her parents in Connecticut.

We learn that she’s near 30 and although young for a mid-life crisis she and her parents both feel she has failed up to her early promise when she was top of her class. She hooks up with some old friends including a fey man with a beard who has yet to come out as being gay and another who is trying to get pregnant and live the conventional life she feels is predestined to her.

Bell gets a job at an apartment complex pool as the lifeguard and soon makes friends with a bunch of teenagers including the janitor’s hot teenage son. Her two groups of friends start to mix and smoke pot  and stay out late much to the annoyance of her parents who don’t really want her moving back in, especially as she’s brought the cat.

After a run in with some young kids at the pool and with the cops who are bullying her skater pals Bell starts to reassess her life and falls into bed with her teenage chum. This sets her at odds with her wannabe pregnant friend who can’t even get her husband to slap his dick across her face. As the affair becomes public and the gay friend gets bolder a tragedy tells everyone that it’s time to get on with their lives and stop sitting about smoking hash and listening to indie music.

This ‘slice of life’ effort wasn’t really worth the effort. The usually attractive Bell spends most of this film with a scowl on her face and her listless existence is more tiresome than thoughtful. The film tries to have a melancholy air with a slow dirge soundtrack and lots of ponderous scenes of kids hanging about or slow-mo scenes in the pool. I appreciate these are rudderless people looking for a meaning to their existence but they just come across as dull and needy.

Bell does OK holding the whole thing together but she’s not that likeable and her motivations appear totally selfish throughout. The running theme of being trapped and needing direction is life is hardly going to excite the audience and at no point did I feel invested in any of the characters. She may feel she is daring taking a part where she has an affair with a teenager but it was low key stuff and I liked when the boy’s Dad, when confronted with the horror, basically said ‘that’s my boy’!

The big turning point was a bit of a surprise but the character involved wasn’t one we had invested much in and although a catalyst for change it seemed unlikely given what had gone before. There were a couple of sex scenes but they were modestly played with the only nudity some poor bloke who got his shorts dropped.

The needy and demanding people shown in this film could easily be categorised as ‘first world problems’ with the availability of beer their most pressing concern. The general gloomy mood of the film is not one that would engage the viewer and when Bell makes her inevitable return to the big city we have to wonder if her trip was really worth the bother.

THE Tag Line : Lifeguard Needs Saving!   56%

No.99 : The Grudge (2004)

The Grudge at the IMDb

This was the first in a spate of American remakes of Japanese horror films and having watched the result I won’t be seeking out any of its contemporaries or indeed sequels. It’s not because I was scared or anything; I just thought the whole thing was a bit pointless and forgettable.

The film opens with the always wooden Bill Pullman getting out of bed and falling off his balcony to his death. This is before the credits and you wonder if this is to be the shortest star turn this side of Steven Seagal in ‘Executive Decision’. Alas there are flashbacks so Bill will return!

We move across town to a catatonic woman who needs a full time carer. The carer makes the huge mistake of poking around in the attic and gets snatched away by an unseen force. Her ever caring employers don’t give a toss as they have Sarah Michelle Gellar on standby. Buffy and her douche boyfriend are staying in Tokyo and the vampire botherer is volunteering her assistance to the needy. Sadly she’s not much use as after five minutes she gets menaced by a big ball of smoke and we cut away.

We then meet the catatonic woman in more lively times as she and her son and her wife are viewing the same house - it’s a flashback you see. Soon they are all either staring at the ceiling or fighting with the bath as hands and faces reach out to ruin their days.

Back in the present Gellar is talking to the cops who recount earlier tales of woe from the haunted house. For some reason they haven’t boarded it up despite it taking care of more Americans than Pearl Harbour. Gellar does some handy online research and finds that several unexplained deaths have occurred at the house since the tragic death of a young boy - could this be the same one who keeps popping up as people start to scream?

The curse of the house gets mobile and starts to bother people from afar. Gellar is worried that she may be cursed, but before she can act the police chief is heading over to the demonic detached with some cans of petrol. Elsewhere Gellar’s boyfriend has been reading her research and is heading over for a look - huge mistake. Gellar runs over to save her man and solve the mystery but wait - Bill Pullman has moved in - isn’t he dead? Will the hairy wide eyed girl shriek some more and will someone please feed that cat?

This was a decent enough film but you could see it was a Hollywood makeover from  the start with all the affecting and original stuff looking out of place against the American enclave that has apparently moved to Tokyo, complete with near perfect Japanese. Gellar and Pullman get no sympathy from me whatsoever what with her big jumper and him dropping splinters in every scene.

The curse angle was overplayed with literally every house occupant getting a dose - don’t these cops keep records? The first time the familiar long haired girl appeared it was quite chilling but half a dozen times later you’re like ‘come on love, get a new act’. The creepy small boy was overused too but I liked him appearing in the background even when the characters didn’t spot him.

The deaths were mostly off screen with a lost lower jaw the worst of the gore. People by and large just disappeared which may be a bit scary but give me a zombie invasion any day. The ending was unsatisfying as it cried ‘here comes the sequel’ and nothing much was explained apart from ‘it’s a haunted house , live with it’.

The film was probably better in its day but for now it seems a pretty blunt and unsophisticated horror flick that relied on cheap scares over any slow burning fear or menace.

THE Tag Line - You’ll Grudge the £2 Rental   56%

No.79 : The Grey (2011)

The Grey at the IMDb

Liam Neeson sheds his hard as nails killer with wife problems image from ‘Taken’ to play a hard as nails killer with wife problems in this survival thriller. You can’t say the man doesn’t have range.

Neeson works as a hunter for a petroleum company in Alaska - basically when a work crew goes out to fix the pipes it’s Liam who shoots the wolves. He’s not happy though, and neither are we as we have to listen to five minutes of sentimental voice over as he writes what may be a suicide note before heading out to the pub. He downs a couple of shots, and presumably because the kebab shop is shut, heads outside to eat his rifle.

He’s about to end the film early when some howling makes him think twice - huge mistake! He heads for home the next day but his flight is of the no frills variety - the fare doesn’t even include a proper landing! Before the plane goes down he pisses off a friendly workmate so we know he’s not exactly a people person, well for now at least.

The plane goes down in the wilderness with only half a dozen survivors who include both Liam and the man he had words with - awkward! The guys gather up the salvable stuff and once we establish Liam’s gun is wrecked we meet the bad guys in the form of a pack of mostly CGI wolves. These guys aren’t after dinner, they only want to assert their authority over these interlopers. Liam assumes control and given his wolfy knowledge the rest fall in line despite the normal grumbles.

What follows is what you’d expect in the form of the group being relentlessly whittled down by the lupine louts. There are some slight deviations to the ‘Ten Little Indians’ format but as you’d probably guess we end up with Liam and one cannon fodder guy and a showdown with the marauding pack.

I quite liked ‘The Grey’ but I felt it was writing a smart cheque that its script couldn’t cash. The attempt to make Liam deep and thoughtful failed despite the constant call-backs to his wife who may have left him or is dead. There was a lot of spiritual stuff going on throughout with a couple of near death workers experiencing visions of what they loved most.

This would suggest we are delving into the realms of metaphor or allegory but I’m not buying. You could argue that they were all dead from the off and it was how they met their fate and faced it was what mattered. Indeed some of the guys don’t fall prey to the wolves with the weather and a direct lift from ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’ taking care of two of them.

The tension never really scaled the heights I expected with the attacks too far apart and too much time spent jabbering on about the meaning of life. If I wanted my mind expanded I’d gets some LSD - what you want in a Liam Neeson survival picture is some man on wolf action.

I did like a few scenes especially early on, when the darkness was lit up by more and more wolf eyes. At this point the guys knew they were screwed and that kind of fed into their approaches going forward. The ensemble cast mostly of lesser known actors did well and each got a decent dispatch.

The finale was kept enigmatic with a post credit snippet giving us a clue. I don’t always need a definite conclusion, and a helicopter showing up to save the day may have been stretching it, but something less inconclusive may have been more satisfying.

The film is worth a look but at two hours it does plod at some points and I really needed more bang sticks for my bucks if I was going to rate it higher.

THE Tag Line :  No Result - Going to Extra Time 70%

No.52 : The Bridge (2006)

The Bridge at the IMDb

Here’s nice uplifting documentary to cheers you up - bunch of folk killing themselves by flinging themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge. If that’s not enough to put a spring in your step the clips of the suicides are inter cut with interviews of those left behinds, sometimes to literally pick up the pieces.

The film was made in 2004 and caught most of the 24 suicides who plummeted off the bridge to their near certain deaths. The director set up a long lensed camera at a suicide hot spot on the bridge and over the months he filmed he gained dubious footage of damaged people ending it all.

The actual suicide footage, although tremendously powerful lasts a matter of seconds so clearly he had to go and find some padding in the shape of talking head relatives who were largely trying to find some sense in the senseless and selfish acts. There is also further padding with long and arty establishing shots of the bridge and of various bridge users which soon causes a sense of ‘is he over next’ in the viewer.

There is no narration to the film and it seems somewhat random. There is an attempt at a central spine to the film in the shape of Gene, a long haired layabout, who pops up throughout.If I was being cynical I’d say that Gene’s story is focused upon because he was the one that they had the best death footage of. His relatives were also quite eloquent but unable to add much to what a pretty straightforward tale of depression followed by suicide.

The point of the film is hard to establish and it’s almost pornographic the way the ‘money shots’ are carefully doled out through the 90 minutes running time. I’m sure the random and uneven feel to the film would be explained as a narrative on the damaged people’s motivations but it’s more likely it was cobbled together using the best footage and the relatives who were willing to talk for reasons unknown.

It would be hard not to be moved by the film given that we share the last seconds of several peoples’ lives and the big finale is genuinely shocking but the lasting impression is one of sadness that these desperate people never got the help they needed.

I would have liked to see more of the other side, the poor buggers charged with recovering the bodies and State officials who could explain why the world’s favourite suicide spot doesn’t have higher barriers or catch nets. I guess the attitude is that if they are going to kill themselves it’s better to do it here than onto a busy freeway.

Almost every suicidee found a positive advocate but for the most part the tales were consistent in terms of depression and escalating attempts to take their own lives. Sometimes suicide attempts can be cries for help or for attention but the guys we saw here knew there was no going back.

The overall feel of the film is of one built around a few seconds of footage with bricks of worthiness and head shaking. The actual effect is one of grubby exploitation with no message I could see.

THE Tag Line : Take Me Away From The Bridge 52%