Bastille Day (2016)

American pickpocket in Paris Michael Mason (Richard Madden) steals the wrong bag when he takes one belonging to Zoe Naville (Charlotte Le Bon), for Zoe’s bag contained a time bomb she was just about to wander off with and throw into the Seine. Initially, she was supposed to deposit it in the office of a racist French nationalist party the film is too polite to name but when she realized said office wouldn’t be empty as promised by the boyfriend who convinced her of the whole thing, she changed her plans.

Michael’s inadvertent intervention ends with four dead bodies, an anonymous message that promises more violence of this sort to come on Bastille Day, and him hunted as the responsible party. Before the French can identify him, the CIA does. And because this is the CIA, they don’t give this rather important information to their allies  – because then they’d have to explain why they have access to surveillance cameras all over Paris – but send out reckless, violent, and nearly disgraced agent Briar (Idris Elba) to illegally detain Michael for a day to torture as much information out of him as possible. Briar might be a bit of a thug, but he’s also not stupid, and he quickly realizes that Michael isn’t responsible for any bombings. In fact, the whole thing will start to look to him like something quite different from terrorism and  only the beginning of a series of provocations set to use the fissures in French society to throw Paris into chaos for rather more petty reasons. Briar, once he’s got a whiff of what’s really going on, will stop at little to get to the truth and the people responsible, even if it means teaming up with a pickpocket and a woman who nearly did something deeply stupid and most certainly highly illegal.

I found James Watkins’s Bastille Day a surprisingly fun film. I’m generally quite sceptical about the slow but steady trickle of international productions seemingly following the lead of Luc Besson’s Europacorp in style and content. However unlike quite a few of these films as well as much of the actual Europacorp output, this one’s actually a neat little addition to the action and thriller genres.

It is even not completely stupid. Sure, the film’s attempt to include the influence of social media and the spread of information as parts of its plot is an interesting idea not very intelligently realized, and the bad guys’ plan has certain shades of the first Die Hard movie with Paris as the skyscraper, and obviously never reads as something that would actually work this way exactly the way they want it, given its dependence of large masses of people acting exactly like they want thanks to the magical power of hashtags, a mysterious Internet thing I’m not terribly sure the scriptwriters have actually encountered in the wild. However, as action movie background guff needed to get the violence and the chases rolling goes, this passes muster quite decently. And hey, while this isn’t a meditation about the worst sides of online culture trickling into the real world, or a film that has something clever to say about mass manipulation, the film’s background is rather more interesting than the usual “Idris Elba shoots the evil terrorists”, and at least tries to use elements of the real world. There’s also the little fact that the film uses its implausible plot with an impeccable sense for the kind of rhythm – which is what the thriller genre, with an emphasis on action like this one has or not, is all about - this sort of thing is supposed to have.

Watkins again turns in a not terribly charismatic but effective direction job, generally following the philosophy that action films are supposed to be edited in a way that enables the audience to follow what’s going on in them and doing a good job with that. The action isn’t exactly realistic in feel but also not terribly over the top, aiming for a middle of the road approach that works quite well for the film.

Idris Elba is an actor you could actually imagine to be physically capable of the stuff he’s doing here. Elba doesn’t, of course and alas, need to strain his considerable acting talents here much, for Briar is a pretty empty vessel; the film doesn’t even make much use of the mistake that brought him to Paris nor does it ever show any interest in explaining who its protagonist actually is apart from slightly insane and exceedingly violent. So all Elba has to go on is his physical presence, which is fortunately also considerable.

All in all, this is bread and butter action thriller stuff done right, even though it’s certainly not a classic of the genre.

Cool Breeze (1972)

Freshly released from prison, criminal mastermind and sharp dresser Sidney Lord Jones (Thalmus Rasulala) already has a new big plan to steal jewellery worth three million dollars. With the help of people like whiny, religious bookie Finian (Sam Laws) and former Texan football player turned small-time tough Travis Battle (James Watkins), whatever could go wrong?

Everything, of course, for the heist always goes wrong. However, the trouble isn’t just with Jones’s plan, and the following interest of the police, but also with the little fact that the project’s money man, Mercer (Raymond St. Jacques) has plans of acquiring all the pretty loot for himself. Things probably won’t end too well for anyone involved.

This Gene Corman blaxploitation film directed by Barry Pollack (who didn’t exactly have much of a movie career before or afterwards, it seems) is based on the same novel as John Huston’s flawed classic The Asphalt Jungle but never really plays in the same league. The jury’s out if it’s even trying to, if it just goes for the exploitative thrill of being a blaxploitation version of a revered Old Hollywood classic (which I’d approve of quite a bit, actually), or if somebody involved just thought the novel’s plot the archetypal heist movie story and structure, so why not use it.
In fact, to my eyes, the film’s main problem is that it doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind which of these three things it wants to be, and instead meanders back and forth between these approaches, while adding some comedy cops. Even though I think adding comically stupid white people to an exploitation movie is a time-honoured way to pay back some of the indignities people of colour had to suffer through in the movies, it doesn’t exactly help an already imbalanced film. Lincoln Kilpatrick’s (black) Lt. Knowles is a lot more convincing but the film muddles up his role and character too by only mentioning his corrupt ways in an off-side manner late in the movie when he’s putting pressure on Finian, which to my mind is just sloppy writing.

It’s this sloppiness that is the script’s main problem more often than not, leading to a film that just blithely wanders around the best bits of the movie it remakes (or of the novel it adapts), only from time to time stepping into the right spots, making changes seemingly at random and in spaces where there just isn’t any other way to go about things a few decades later. It would, for example, be too awkward even for Cool Breeze to cast James Watkins as a cowboy, so they go with the in itself rather clever “poor farming country boy with football talent he never truly managed to live up to” variant; too bad the film doesn’t know where to take this, nor how to fit it in with its various other elements.

Despite these major problems, Cool Breeze does have some recommendable aspects, too. The 70s atmosphere is as strong as in any blaxploitation flick, with some choice, naturalistically real feeling locations and the kind of period detail these films generally achieved by just going out and shooting, and don’t mind if you’re allowed to or not. Taken singly, and if you just pretend a movie’s single scenes don’t have to make a whole together, there are also some fine moments in the film. The scene between Knowles and Finian I already mentioned is, for example, tough and unpleasant, suggesting a lot of history between these two men, and telling no friendly lies about what kind of people the men involved are.
It would of course be much better if that scene and others of similar quality would ever add up to a movie with a coherent personality (or you know, a coherent mood, tone, theme, or plot), but then, those movies don’t give us a theme song where Solomon Burke declares someone is looking “like a cool dude”, so there’s something to be said for Cool Breeze’s approach.

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The Woman In Black (2012)

The young lawyer Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) has had a very hard time for the last few years. His wife (Sophie Stuckey) died during childbirth, leaving him to to raise his son Joseph (to be played by Misha Handley) alone with the help of nanny (Jessica Raine). The whole thing has left Arthur borderline suicidal, and has influence his job performance so much he's one mistake away from being fired.

His boss gives Arthur a - actually pretty harmless sounding - last chance assignment: to travel to a country village and check the documents one of the law company's female clients left behind in her house, Eel Marsh. Eel Marsh is connected to the village by a causeway that becomes impassable when the flood comes, possibly leaving anyone in it stranded far away from any help for hours.

Still, there's nothing dangerous in looking through documents, so the assignment sounds easy enough. To make good use of his unexpected stay in the country, Arthur plans to spend a nice weekend there with his son after his work there is finished, but that's before he understands what's really going on in the village.

For the place is plagued by a series of child deaths - all caused by the children themselves in one way or the other - that are connected to the ghost of a woman in black haunting Eel Marsh. Arthur will learn about that soon enough, though, and he'll feel bound to lay the ghost of the woman in black to rest to protect his own son.

While the output of the new old studio (that isn't really a studio as the old one was, of course) working under the revived Hammer moniker hasn't been without its problems, a film like The Woman in Black (adapting the same short novel by Susan Hill as the excellent - and very different - TV movie) goes a long way to convince me the people behind these films are taking the tradition they've positioned themselves in seriously.

The Woman (directed by James Watkins, whom I have now officially forgiven the script for the second The Descent movie) is a deliberately paced mood piece standing firmly in the tradition of the British ghost story and the gothic horror film (even if it takes place a few years later than usual in that latter sub-genre), the kind of film that takes its time building up its mood and clearly defining its characters before it lets the really spooky stuff happen, working hard and well for a sense of impending dread in its audience, until it culminates in a series of highly impressive scenes of horror that would never work as well as they do if they weren't so meticulously prepared through the build up.

The film also shares the often problematic obsession of contemporary scriptwriting with connecting its main character's background with what's going in the plot by any means necessary. For my tastes, this sort of thing often takes away from my enjoyment of a movie, because it - if it isn't applied exceedingly well - points out the how constructed a given plot truly is by going for an integration of all its elements that fits neither the way life works nor the way stories speak to me. Writer Jane Goldman (curiously also responsible for films as different from this one as each other as X-Men: First Class and Kick-Ass) mostly manages to avoid this feeling of overbearing artificiality (even though the film is of course as artificial as any other film), instead actually achieving - for most of the time, at least - the kind of thematic unity this sort of thing is always aiming for. Goldman's script - except for one moment of bad Hollywood kitsch right at the end that runs absolutely counter the mood of loss and dread running through the rest of The Woman in Black that made me roll my eyes and wait for a chorus of fucking angels, or at least Frank Capra's ghost - also allows itself to be very grim, seemingly sharing the feeling of loss hanging over its main character, not shying away from going to painful and unpleasant places without being gratuitous. It's really quite impressive.

"Impressive" is a proper description for most of the film, really, be it the decayed and truly creepy production design (milking the horrors of Victorian and Edwardian interior design and toys for all the horror they are worth), the sound design, Watkins ability to pace scenes of horror that could be unintentionally hilarious instead of frightening if done wrong just right, to Daniel Radcliffe's surprisingly nuanced and un-showy (generally, the worst mistake mainstream movie stars can make when actually having to act is trying to impress their audience with their seriousness and dedication to looking as if they're incontinent) acting, there's hardly anything the film doesn't do right.

I don't even mind the handful of jump scares. Which really is the highest compliment I can give a horror film.

 

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