Three Films Make A Post: One Small Ember Can Burn Down Everything.

Monkey Man (2024): You really needn’t tell me that this somewhat overlong tale of revenge is Dev Patel’s directorial debut. It’s impossible to miss in a movie that feels quite this desperate to show how stylish and clever and original it can be visually. Patel often appears so unsure of his own simple narrative he bloats the film up with incessant flashbacks to things the audience has understood the first time around, and visual flourishes that detract instead of add. There’s a sense of desperation to prove that Patel can indeed direct like a real director surrounding the project that permanently gets in the way of the film simply working.

That’s particularly disappointing because Monkey Man is quite good whenever its director/writer/star gets out of his own way and trusts his instincts and those of his crew. There’s a really good action lead performance hidden below all of the guff, and whenever Patel calms down a little, there are also the makings of a really good – and stylish - action movie director visible. Just one who needs an editor – internal and external.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024): Guy Ritchie’s newest film wishes to have that problem. This one feels rather desperate as well. Here, however, the film’s not desperate to have depth it wants to express through style that only obfuscates what’s good about it, but wants so desperately to be FUN, it never relaxes enough to actually have or provide any. Making matters worse, it is so afraid of not being fun for even a single second, it never tries to find grounding anywhere. The film is an incessant bombardment of colour, edits, “clever” dialogue, and so on. None of which amounts to much beyond two hours of movie because there’s no weight to any of it – no tension, no suspense, no stakes, no human connection between what it laughingly calls its characters. It’s a movie so fun, it’s utterly bland.

City Hunter aka Shiti Hanta (2024): In comparison, Yuichi Sato’s adaptation of an 80s manga is a complete work of art, not because it is deep, or clever, or meaningful, but because it not only knows what kind of movie it wants to be – a light action number with a somewhat sleazy sense of humour – it goes about becoming that movie with simple, calm professionalism and a sense of fun that doesn’t have the air of an abused child star grimacing “joyfully” at you for two hours while tapdancing.

There’s no ambition here beyond providing an entertaining, violent hundred minutes of action and dubious humour, but that ambition, the film fulfils without fuzz – and with fine action choreography that’s not hidden behind obfuscating camera work and editing, nor suffering from being without impact.

Three Films Make A Post: In a city forever in darkness an ancient horror awakens.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham (2023): For large parts of its running time, this adaptation of the Mike Mignola, Richard Pace and Troy Nixey Elseworlds mini-series as directed by Christopher Berkeley and Sam Liu sticks rather closely to the original. In its first acts, its mostly makes some not terribly creatively handled gestures towards inclusivity it would have been weird not to include in 2023, and allows Oliver Queen a bit more heroism than the original had. For the finale, though, the script by Jase Ricci makes increasingly strange choices that muddle what was a pretty straightforward plot and climax in ways that seem weird, and pointless. I’d understand – if not like – changes to make things slicker or more contemporary, but farting around with a solid structure to replace them with a rickety construct of rotten wood makes little sense to me.

Otherwise, Doom certainly is one of the better DC animated features; it even shows some moments of visual creativity instead of the more factory like approach DC’S animation arm seems to prefer these days.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre (2023): Whereas this misbegotten attempt at some sort of comedic Mission Impossible thing by Guy Ritchie is at times astonishingly bad: jokes never hit – and are generally underwritten - action set pieces are bland and lifeless, scenes that shouldn’t be in the film at all go on forever. Even at his worst – and I’d say that’s at least half of his output – Ritchie usually knows how to pace quick, usually at least semi-witty dialogue and seems to be a director who appreciates the qualities of a good cast, but you won’t even find any of that here. This is just a lifeless, glossy yet cheap-looking waste of a great cast.

Acidman (2022): For my taste, Alex Lehmann’s film never quite rises to the set-up of “woman’s (Dianna Agron) attempts to reconnect with her long-time estranged father (Thomas Haden Church) and fix her own hang-ups in the process is repeatedly interrupted by his obsession with UFOs and his Alzheimer’s”. The film’s neither sad nor weird enough to really pull the set-up off quite as effectively as one would wish it to, and much of it turns out to be a pretty middle of the road “woman meets dad” indie that doesn’t seem to dare to become as strange or emotional as it could and should. It’s a nice enough movie, mind you – it only wastes its potential to be more than that.

Three Films Make A Post: A Disgrace to Criminals Everywhere.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): After more than two decades, I’m still not sure if I exactly like Guy Ritchie’s debut movie, but then, I’ve been known to have problems with movies whose main characters are all arseholes and idiots, particularly when  the film they are in appears to loathe them (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). What has endeared the film to me from the perspective of today is how insanely it is of its time: starting with the piss-coloured non-colour scheme, the showy editing, the post-Pulp Fiction ideas about coolness, and certainly not stopping with its very specific kind of digressive storytelling. As a time capsule, this is about as pure as it gets, and when the inevitable late 90s revival is coming around, this will be one of the aesthetic core texts.

Infinity Pool (2023): I was a great admirer of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, but this sometimes body horrific critique of the late-capitalistic mindset which is here exemplified in extreme hedonistic exploitative tourism doesn’t work too well for me. Often, it appears to be rather too in love with exactly the things it wants to criticize, but my main problem really is how little I found myself caring about anything and anyone in it going through their surrealisted-up version of rich people problems: Alexander Skarsgård’s doing his by now usual “weak man” shtick without ever finding a note from which to empathize with the guy, and Mia Goth’s ultra femme fatale is certainly riveting to watch but also empty of any nuance or humanity. The only actual identifiable human being, Cleopatra Coleman’s Em, is shelved relatively early, and from then on out, the movie is all about rich people being surrealistically horrible. The rather more interesting elements of the film concerning Philip K. Dick-style identity problems never really go anywhere interesting, so I found myself a bit bored by a very well shot film that uses the most obvious metaphorical systems in the most obvious manner.

Re/Member (2022): What would we be without time loop movies? Because you can time loop anything, Eiichiro Hasumi’s example of the form unites some typical YA business with ghosts and the fascination of Japanese pop culture with weird rules. Which does at least lead to a bit of originality, for there are very few movies about a group of teens bonding while time-looping through the experience of searching for the body parts of a dismembered little girl while being hunted by a monster.

The character work is very much like you’d expect in a Japanese teen movie, and Hasumi does tend to lay it on a little too thick in melodramatic sequences, but on the other hand, there’s also a sense of playfulness and fun on display when it comes to changing up the ways in which a group of teenagers might be ripped to pieces, farting around with game rules, or making third act twists entertaining.

Three Films Make A Post: Nobody Runs Forever

Wrath of Man (2021): What do you do if you somehow end up with a plot and characters that’ll at most give you an hour of movie, even though you really need to make one that at least scratches at the two hour door? Guy Ritchie apparently decided to go for a structure full of time jumps and perspective changes, like a cut rate Tarantino without brains or taste. Not that surprisingly, instead of solving the problem of too little plot and flat characters, this exacerbates it by rubbing (really, pressing) the audience’s noses in it, going out of its way to not just show but repeat over and over that there’s nothing at all going on here you haven’t seen before or these actors haven’t done before – often in much better movies that actually had something you’d call pacing, or a script. The film also suffers from some of the worst tough guy dialogue I’ve encountered in a long time (perhaps because Ritchie’s struggling with the LA surroundings?). Particularly the first act is chock full of some of the most idiotic macho dialogue you’ll ever have the misfortune to hear.

Séance (2021): Keeping with films that seem to wildly overestimate their intelligence, how about this pseudo neo giallo by Simon Barrett (co-writer of most of the films of Adam Green). It’s one of those films that seem inexplicably smug about their own intelligence while never actually bothering to put the work into showing said intelligence, pretending stuff that’s obvious from the beginning is a last act surprise, and apparently believing that even the tiniest change in a cliché is something to be praised by an adoring audience.

Worse for a film that so obviously wants to be a giallo is the mediocre sense of style. It’s a professionally made film, don’t get me wrong, but if you’re looking for style as substance (or even just style interesting enough to be worth mentioning), or an ability to create moods via visual storytelling, you’re out of luck. But hey, at least Barrett manages to show us all of Suki Waterhouse’s facial expressions quite extensively – or rather her one facial expression.

The Mule (2018): Leave it to this piece of what at first looks like oldmansploitation with and by the one and only Clint Eastwood to save my mood. It’s a leisurely paced peace of work, pretty episodically structured, yet it is that way because it wants to do a bit more than give Clint a final outing, in the process waving in the direction not only of his serious classics but also of the film star phase of his career when he was perfectly willing to share the stage with an ape. So there’s the expected amount of tear-jerking old age business (the film works for ever single one of your tears, though) about a guy who only learns what’s most important in life when he’s at the end of it, but also a lot of old man swagger, curious humour that charms the way Eastwood’s character is supposed to charm, encounters with the modern world that leave our protagonist bemused, amused and a bit wiser, a tiny bit of action, and a tendency to treat every single character as a complicated human being, be they cops, Mexican cartel soldiers or migrant workers.

Three Films Make A Post: Decide For Yourself

The Hunt (2020): Craig Zobel’s satirical horror movie (written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof) has apparently managed to incense the shouty people on both sides of US politics (the places where nuance goes to die). Which, having seen the movie, I very much suspect is what the film was aiming at, trying to express irritation with the way both sides tend to turn their opposite numbers into sub-human caricatures with a holier-than-thou approach lacking in any kind of self-reflection. Alas, I can only suspect that’s what the film is actually trying to say, for the script is an abominable mess of “ironic” clichés, plot twists that make no frigging sense, and a tendency to be vague where actual satire needs to be precise, and a general goofiness in the set-ups of its action that robs the film of all tension too. Otherwise, it’s certainly professionally made, but that sort of competence really doesn’t help against any of these flaws; it really makes them all the more visible.

Bloodshot (2020): Also missing the mark is this (sort of) superhero movie based on the Valiant character starring Vin Diesel as a revived super soldier who is a bit more upmarket than your Universal Soldiers or your Robocops. The script by Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer has exactly one good idea, but to get there, one has to wade through all the usual action movie clichés, directed at best indifferently, at worst badly by former effects man Dave Wilson (who is yet another example that special effects knowledge isn’t the only thing a director needs, even in effects heavy genres). That twist is pretty clever but happens at least fifteen minutes too late, and is of import for about five minutes, after which the film returns to the same old action movie clichés its twist is supposedly meant to subvert, still directed without punch or verve, featuring a Diesel who seems terribly bored by the whole affair. I don’t blame him.

The Gentlemen (2019): But let’s end this on a more pleasant note (well, perhaps not pleasant, exactly), with Guy Ritchie’s return to the self-conscious gangster action comedy. It’s honestly pretty great, the meta elements never getting in the way of the film, the jokes generally hitting as well as do the action and the old ultra-violence. It’s certainly not nice (and one could certainly raise an eyebrow at the film’s racial politics if one wanted) but it’s so fun I didn’t find myself caring. The acting ensemble with guys and gals like Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Dockery, Jeremy Strong, Colin Farrell and an honest to gosh brilliant Hugh Grant seems to have a lot of fun, too, and better, they do project that fun rather nicely, too.


The only major thing I’m not too keen on here is Charlie Hunnam sticking out like a sore thumb by presenting his usual charisma vacuum, but the rest of the film is much to fun for that ruin it for me.

Three Films Make A Post: Featuring the Longest Kiss in Cinema History!

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): Guy Ritchie's second movie about the adventures of a very pulp hero Sherlock Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. and his especially long-suffering Watson Jude Law shares all the virtues of the first movie, and is therefore pretty much as good as mainstream adventure cinema gets. It's fun, it's silly, it's playful, and so totally divorced from Victorian reality or the self-image of Victorians as evidenced in Doyle's work, it develops something of a subversive edge simply by treating both with as little respect as they deserve yet also with as much - probably more - love as they do.

Bonus points for a Moriarty who doesn't act like a hyperactive twelve-year-old, Noomi Rapace (who would make a pretty great pulp Holmes too, I think) and the most off-handed Reichenbach Falls ever.

The Life of the World to Come (2010): For some reason, this film doesn't appear on Rian Johnson's IMDB page, but this was made by the director of Brick and The Brothers Bloom anyway. It's a one take/long take concert film without an audience of The Mountain Goats (in this case in the form of John and Rachel) performing the whole of "The Life of the World to Come", the (not exactly religious) album on which all songs are titled with bible verses - which honestly is much better in practice than it may sound in theory; a description that fits The Mountain Goats in general.

For the most part, the film consists of the camera shifting position around Darnielle while he plays on the piano or the guitar, providing the film with an aesthetic that is minimalist and - thanks to the long take business - just a bit awkward at times, which again fits The Mountain Goats nicely, for this is the music of a guy who has always been willing to accept and own moments of awkwardness instead of excising them.

I'm too much of a fan of Darnielle (whose music, together with that of the Go-Betweens, Lucinda Williams, Epic Soundtracks, and the Fellow Travellers may very well have kept me sane at one point in my life) to say much about the quality of the music or the performance, except that the film made me cry just a little.

Finalmente… le mille e una notte aka 1001 Nights of Pleasure (1972): As a genre, the Italian sex comedy, even in its (in theory) more classy aspect, never did much for me, despite sharing at least the female half of its casts with those Italian genres of the same eras I do love. Their ideas about what's funny and mine just disagree a bit too much with each other.

So I found myself rather surprised when (house favourite) Antonio Margheriti's provoked quite a few smiles and even two or three guffaws from me here. The film's combination of low-brow comedy, nudity graciously provided by actresses like Barbara Bouchet and Femi Benussi (and, if that floats your boat, to a lesser degree actors like Gino Milli and, well, whoever plays the other semi-nude guys), and pretty nice to look at production design doesn't exactly add up to something everyone should see, but the film is a fine enough piece of exploitation for those evenings when something deeper, cleverer or less friendly would be too much. This is also another film that supports my theory of Margheriti being - generally (let's pretend we don't know his war movies) - one of the most good-natured of all Italian genre directors, for there's really nothing nasty about the film, even when the joke's by all rights should feel nasty. I imagine Margheriti as a happy man.

 

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Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and his associate/common-law wife Dr. Watson (Jude Law) are putting the finishing touches on the case of the fiendish Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), who has delighted London with a series of black magic murders.

After Blackwood is caught, Holmes falls into his usual, bored funk, in this case deepened with his annoyance about one of the facts of life even a bastard genius has to live with - people are leaving. To be exact, Watson is about to get married to his fiancée Mary (Kelly Reilly) and is going to leave Holmes behind in their Baker Street abode.

A sudden appearance by Holmes' old flame/enemy Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) who has been hired by a shadowy character to convince Holmes to search for a certain Reordan (Oran Gurel) is proves to be an excellent distraction for our unheroic hero. But the life of a consulting detective can never be interesting enough, and so it is very much to our hero's delight when news reach him that the freshly hanged Lord Blackwood seems to have risen from the grave. That seems like an excellent excuse to keep Watson away from the married life! And might Irene Adler's missing person have something to do with the Blackwood affair?

After having suffered through more than one bad British Tarantino rip-off directed by him, I didn't think Guy Ritchie had anything good (beyond distracting Madonna from making records; something he also isn't very good at) in him. I'm happy to say I was wrong.

Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes imagines the character as a two-fisted pulp hero who has more in common with Doc Savage or (to take a British example) the mid-period Sexton Blake than with the way most other interpretations of the consulting detective show him. This might distress or annoy a certain part of Holmes fandom that can't abide versions of Holmes which put their weight less on the armchair detective side of the character and more on Holmes as a man of action. Others, like me, will probably be glad about a Holmes film taking liberties with a character that has become part of our cultural background, and turned into a piece of modern mythology that is based on much more than Arthur Conan Doyle's writings. Like all mythology, Holmes gains his strength through re-interpretations and re-imaginings. I really wouldn't see much point in a film about the detective that's trying to copy the Brett or the Livanov version. After all, these interpretations of the character already exist on screen; re-hashing them without Brett and Livanov would be an exercise in futility.

Watched as the pulpy adventure movie it is supposed to be, Ritchie's film succeeds quite brilliantly. Ritchie shows a firm hand at throwing Holmes and Watson into silly-awesome set pieces, racing them through them and just stopping for enough breathers to nod in the direction of various other Holmeses and Watsons, and to put a bit more emphasis on the complicated emotional relations between Holmes, Watson, Mary and Irene. This would probably not be all that exciting if the set pieces didn't work, but work they do, with all the breathlessness that a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster and classic pulp storytelling share. There's a sense of utter glee hanging over the film, as if Ritchie had finally been let loose to play with his perfect toy box. This enthusiasm and sense of fun is what divides Sherlock Holmes from other pieces of mainstream cinema as produced by people like Michael Bay; where Bay and his ilk are filling their films with the things their focus groups demand, Ritchie seems to put the things on screen he himself finds fun. As should be obvious, I'm all for a well-placed bit of fun.

Just as obviously, I can't stop talking about this Sherlock Holmes and its sense of fun and glee without mentioning Robert Downey Jr.'s performance as the title character. After this and his work on Iron Man, I'm convinced that Downey is the perfect actor for the well-paced screen spectacle, perfectly fit for physical acting and possibly the most note-perfect over-actor since Vincent Price (whom I'd loved to have seen as Holmes). As you know, Jim, a good over-actor does not merely chew the scenery, but knows exactly how much of this treatment a film needs and - more importantly - can take, and does not bite off more of a given film's face than necessary. Downey is really glorious as Holmes, and he is expertly supported by Jude Law's straight man with a fist and a sense of irony.

My only problems with the movie are Hans Zimmer's score, which sounds a bit too much like something written by a man who very desperately wants to be Ennio Morricone, but just isn't, and Rachel McAdam's inability to project the charisma the script demands of its Irene Adler. Both problems are notable, yet never grow large enough to endanger the film's exhilarating effect.

Sometimes, Hollywood blockbusters do deliver what they promise.

 

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