Three Films Make A Post: An Edge-Of-Your-Seat Thriller!

Murder 101 (1991): This TV mystery by Bill Condon with Pierce Brosnan really wants to be a twisty, cleverly constructed example of its genre, further emphasising this by adding certain meta elements via Brosnan’s hilariously melodramatic creative writing lessons. Unfortunately, the kind of clever-clever mystery this wants to be really needs to actually be cleverly constructed, whereas Murder 101 is more confused than elegantly confusing, and simply not terribly interesting for most of its running time. Brosnan’s character is such an egotistical twit that it’s pretty hard caring about what’s happening to him, as well.

Fire Music (2018): Apart from not really managing to squeeze as much of twenty years of free and avant jazz history into ninety minutes as one would ideally want to see, and then bizarrely pretending forward thinking jazz stopped with the advent of the Crouch/Marsalis bubble, this is as wonderful a music documentary as one would hope for, working as an excellent antidote to the conservatism of something like Ken Burns’s jazz documentary series. It’s chockfull of valuable and incisive archive material, wide-ranging interviews with a good handful of surviving musicians. It also really works as a movie, for director Tom Surgal does not use the interviews as sound bytes but lets them inform the structure and rhythm of his film, using archive material and visual collages very much in the spirit of the kind of music the musicians are talking about.

Synth Britannia (2009): Not quite a great as Fire Music, but still far away from the talking head nostalgia fest this easily could have turned into, this is a serious exploration of the roots and development of what would become British synth pop, not just aiming for the most obvious and successful examples of the form but also finding time for its more avantgarde roots. Some more details about how synth pop lost its more experimental impetus beyond “it’s the money” would have been nice, but there’s still quite a bit of substance to the interviews.

The film is not quite free of the tiresome rockism versus popism nonsense British music writers are so obsessed with, but it’s fortunately not really concentrating on it.

In short: The Misfits (2021)

A bunch of, well, misfits on a Robin Hood trip (Nick Cannon, Jamie Chung, Rami Jaber and Mike Angelo) attempt to rope experienced conman Richard Pace (Pierce Brosnan) into their newest project of stealing terrorist gold. Even though his archenemy Schultz (Tim Roth) is involved with the terrorists, Pace is rather reticent doing anything for no monetary gain. Fortunately he changes his mind when he learns that his estranged do-gooder daughter Hope (Hermione Corfield) is part of the gang. So, after more than half an hour of feet dragging, a heist does eventually ensue.

Poor old Renny Harlin’s newest movie The Misfits has some major problems. Harlin himself isn’t one of them – while this isn’t one of his more interesting and stylish directing jobs, he does his best to get picture postcard shots of Dubai, Pierce Brosnan and the two or three fast cars that were in the budget.

Alas, he has to work from a terrible script by Kurt Wimmer and Robert Henny (who both have written some terrible films in their time, with a couple of decent ones sprinkled in) that seems to have little idea on how to properly structure and pace a heist movie. Sure, as with nearly every heist film made in the last decade or so, the Fast and Furious films have clearly become structural models, so one can’t go into a film like this expecting old school heist movie beats, but if you aim for being a big fat action heist movie with cars, you actually need to deliver the action early and often and find a way to sandwich the character work in-between. The Misfits seems to have been made in the belief that such a thing is easy, and so of course drags when it should move and moves when it should take a breather. It certainly doesn’t help that the film can’t actually afford big set pieces, and is simply not clever enough to then come up with clever ones it can actually afford.

Instead, there’s quite a bit of absolutely terrible comedy, drab character work, and a heist without tension with “twists” you can at best shrug about.

There’s also the little problem that an ensemble movie like this actually needs a fully capable ensemble: while Brosnan is certainly not unwilling to work, he also seems rather too conscious he is slumming. Chung and Corfield are perfectly decent presences throughout, at least. Roth – the villain with the most screen time and theoretically a great actor for this sort of material -seems too bored to do much whatsoever, and Cannon’s performance is simply terrible, not just because he has to deliver most of the “funny” lines (though that certainly isn’t helping). Angelo and Jaber for their parts are just kinda there, doing nothing any man-shaped piece of cardboard couldn’t do just as well. All of which makes it rather difficult to root for or against anyone here.

Three Films Make A Post: PATHETIC EARTHLINGS...WHO CAN SAVE YOU NOW?

Fast Company (1938): I know, Edward Buzzell’s film is only an attempt to launch another detective couple like The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora Charles, but I really like the resulting mystery comedy a lot. Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice as our central couple have highly enjoyable chemistry, the dialogue’s fast and very funny, and the mystery plot goes by sprightly and without major hindrances to the enjoyment of the dialogue, so there’s little about the film that isn’t enjoyable and charming. It is not quite on the same level as the first Thin Man yet who’s making comparisons while he’s charmed?

As an added bonus for the bookish like me (and hopefully you), our heroes work as rare book traders and part-time book detectives, a fact I would probably make more of in my imagined remake where she is the more action oriented and he the one who stays behind, but it’s still the sort of thing that helps the movie become something a bit more than just an easy attempt to jump on a bandwagon.

Cut-Throat Struggle for an Invaluable Treasure aka 塞外奪寶 (1982): Despite beginning with a massacre of Shaolin monks and the ensuing theft of the Buddha’s teeth, this Hong Kong martial arts film directed by Hui Sin and Leung Wing-Tai is more of a comedy than anything else, if a comedy not prone to the outer heights and depths of martial arts slapstick. In its choreography, its sense of humour and its needle-dropped score, this is pretty much a typical second tier film of its time, and like a lot of these films, it’s damn entertaining while doing what it does with professionalism and style.

The fights are pleasantly varied in style and form, their execution is fine, and the film has a nice flow to it, even if the plot is just going through the motions to get from one fight to the next. As an added, and unexpected, pleasure, Cut-Throat Struggle is also full of very pretty location shots for its characters to fight in, adding the cheapest of all special effects.

Seraphim Falls (2006): David Von Ancken’s fascinating film starts as what looks like the final act of a modernist Western, but gradually turns into something much more surreal, the film’s outer landscapes mirroring those of the protagonists, until the difference between the metaphorical and the real becomes diffuse; people who like connections coming from Abrahamic religions will have particular fun here. In its own, peculiar way, Seraphim Falls does tell a very Western-like redemption story, even if it at first pretends to be more of a Spaghetti Western-like tale of vengeance; it’s just that the film’s concept of redemption is a bit different from that of many movies in the genre that came before it. While it is going on its way to redemption, the film plays with various audience expectations (like who the hero of the tale might be), and gives Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan, as well as a bunch of excellently cast minor characters, much space for performances that are at once real and as idiosyncratic as the film needs them to be.

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