Will Smith’s back in black - and he makes this look good…

That’s right, it’s 27 degrees outside with nary a cloud in the sky, so naturally I opted to spend a couple of hours in a darkened, air conditioned box (with a surprisingly high number of other people in my defence). In all fairness, I can’t say I was expecting much from the latest entry to the MIB franchise. The first was a fast funny odd couple pairing that showcased a wisecracking Will Smith at the height of his powers, when he ‘owned’ Independence Day weekend. The second was something of a hash, a cash cow trading on the goodwill and fond memories generated by part 1.

Part 3 comes to cinema audiences unbidden, 10 years after the original. When Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) is erased from history with terminal consequences for planet Earth, Will Smith’s Agent J goes back in time to save his taciturn partner and by extension, the rest of the human race.

What should follow is a wisecracking journey to the swingingest bit of the swinging sixties, lots of jokes about drugs and free love and some ill conceived jokes about race. Instead MIB3 goes for a half reboot, attempting to pull a Bond by evolving into a darker, more grown up version of its earlier incarnation. Apart from the shaky opening sequence, (an oddly unthrilling and uninformative jailbreak that seems to have been written purely in order to dress Nicole Scherzinger up in PVC), the latest MIB pares its alien thrills to the bone. Yes, there are still ‘celebrities who are really aliens’ jokes etc., but on the whole, the extraterrestrials are confined to the background (quite literally in the case of much loved faves from the original film), along with the naughtily named O (MIB head honcho, Emma Thompson).

Instead, the focus is all on the relationship (or seeming lack thereof) between Agents J and K, which has morphed from odd couple to in need of couples counselling. Having said that, the film doesn’t really kick off until Smith travels back to the sixties to partner up with a younger but no less taciturn Agent K (Josh Brolin). It turns out that Brolin makes for a better Tommy Lee Jones than Tommy Lee Jones himself, flexing an effortless deadpan Texan charm in contrast to Jones’ increasingly grumpy old man. Even Smith has grown up - he’s still smart mouthed but (perhaps reflecting his real life interest in doing more serious roles in the years since MIB2) he’s also markedly toned down.

Time travel is notoriously tricky territory for film-makers, rife with paradoxes and whatnot. However, Sonnenfeld and the writers have done pretty well - if you don’t scratch too hard at the surface, it all just about holds together. Instead, MIB3’s weaknesses are most obvious when it tries (without quite succeeding) to recreate the anarchic buzz that first threw J and K together. It also rather ignores its fairly bog standard (and strangely absentee) villain, yet another unfriendly E.T. bent on destroying the planet, blah, blah, blah…

It’s also a shame that the effects - which in this day and age I would expect to be flawless - also stumble. The 3D is largely decent, but occassionally slips into double vision territory (note to film-makers: stop using paying audiences as guinea pigs while you figure out how to use the latest technology). Less forgiveable are a handful of shonky effects - infrequent, but enough to distract.

Happily however, the understated chemistry between Brolin and Smith manages to paper over a lot of the cracks - by finally building a believable relationship between J and K, it succeeds where the previous films never dared try, even providing a real lump-in-the-throat moment that explains K’s detached gruffness towards his partner. Like its stars, and this installment’s alien sidekick (Griff, adorable) the whole movie is a little more zen. That’s not to say that all the levity is gone, it just deploys a little less alien goo and a little more bone dry wit.

Anyone going in with low expectations of a bog standard MIB film will hopefully come away having mostly enjoyed something slightly different. The first was a quirky one-off, the second a show off, but the third seems like a fitting end to the series - if they’ve any sense, and no pressing alimony payments, everyone involved will hopefully leave it there.

                             Time to exercise a little self-censorship…

I’ve finally discovered the gaping flaw with the Avengers – the sucking cinematic vacuum it’s left in its wake. Over in the US, it’s already sunk Hasbro’s Battleship with third week takings that would put most opening weekends to shame. 

Here in Blighty, the competition is even more feeble – this week’s big openers are headed up by Sacha Baron Cohen’s dictatorial turn in his first scripted lead role, and his follow up to social dysfunctionalites Borat and Bruno. The Dictator charts the life and times of Admiral General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen), supreme leader of the (fictional, lest there be any doubt) state of Wadiya, cast adrift in New York city after a failed assassination attempt as his uncle (Ben Kinglsey) plots to bring democracy to the oppressed Wadiyan masses. Just to clarify, it’s quickly established that this is A Bad Thing, making Aladeen our petulant idiot of a hero. 

Fellow Brit Charlie Chaplin proved decades ago that The Dictator is a neat conceit – as a breed, world leaders are rich comedic pickings, whether they be deranged authoritarians or decadent democrats. The problem is that having chosen to make an inherently political comedy, Cohen and company singularly fail to inject enough politics or comedy into their scattergun project.

This has nothing to do with the type of humour - The Dictator runs the gamut from satire to slapstick to (some very literal) toilet humour. For my money, some of the most incisive jokes - including not one, but two about gender biased infanticide, not to mention an extended gag about the benefits of a little dictatorial rigour when running a business - are both politically incorrect and wickedly funny. Others are more subtle - the ‘Wadiyan’ covers of everything from REM to Snoop Dogg on the soundtrack should raise a gentle smirk, while a handful of cameos and bit parts (most notably a blink and you’ll miss him Ed Norton) steal focus. The key players, including a wastefully toned down Anna Faris, are left to shuffle from scene to scene in the hope of stumbling upon a decent joke.

Unfortunately, The Dictator is a film of hits and misses - mostly misses. I’ll admit that humour is all about inexplicably personal preferences, so it’s perfectly possible that I just suffered a massive sense of humour failure yesterday. If so, I wasn’t the only one - judging by the laughter (or lack thereof) in the rest of the cinema, there was barely a tickled funnybone in the joint. 

What’s most disappointing is the promise of Cohen’s background in political satire. His original creation Ali G was as much an astute political interrogator as he was a shell suited moron, and the spiritual predecessor of both Borat and Bruno, asking his hapless celebrity interviewees wilfully obtuse questions, to intermittent comic effect. 

Sadly, Cohen’s Oxford University honed wit appears to have gone fishing. The Dictator never picks a side, instead firing off its blunted wit in every conceivable direction in a relentlessly nihilistic attempt to satirise everything. Thus Cohen’s Aladeen is a bloodthirsty buffoon, while all Americans are either raging xenophobes or armpit hair cultivating liberal hippies. Swipes at Gaddafi, Sadaam, Kim Jong Il et al are a little hard to swallow when it turns out that democracy is just as bad.

Cohen tends to steal scenes when he’s in supporting mode (his gay French NASCAR driver in Talledega Nights springs to mind), but apparently he isn’t yet capable of carrying an entire film. Like an extended sketch show, his performance is only as good as the jokes, so… If only he’d remembered to take his Ritalin, Cohen might have been able to focus on one thing long enough to write something funny and astute, a sort of Airplane meets Wag The Dog. Instead, we get The Dictator, a film that isn’t funny enough to fulfil its comedy obligations, and isn’t smart enough to be satire. It would seem that having a rampantly free media isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…

         Perhaps better left in the darker recesses of Tim Burton’s mind…

Scion of a Liverpudlian fishing family, Barnabus Collins (Johnny Depp) diddles the maid (Angelique, a mouthwatering Eva Green) and breaks her heart, only to find out that she’s a foaming at the mouth brand of insane - oh and a witch with enough mojo to turn him into a vampire and have him buried alive. Resurfacing two hundred years later in 1972, Barnabus finds that the times they have a-changed…

Any number of directors have had their talent outpaced by technology (naming no names), allowing them to fulfill every fantastical whim on screen, regardless of whether it looks good or makes one quivering iota of sense. Tim Burton on the other hand, appears to be a member of that rare breed whose talent has yet to fully adapt to the newer, whizzier tools of his trade. So far we’ve had phantasmagoric, pixel perfect imagery and wonky storytelling with Alice in Wonderland 3D, and now…Dark Shadows, which seems to be even more of a step backwards. Once upon a time, Tim Burton’s gently nightmarish touch was a breath of fetidly fresh air amongst the enjoyably brash but nonetheless cookie cutter films of the eighties and nineties. Unfortunately, Dark Shadows is a markedly unevolved offering, Burton’s macabre vision limping on screen tired, muted and setting up the bad kind of camp. 

But not half as camp as Johnny Depp’s Barnabus Collins. Depp’s piratical shenanigans were inspired because they were subversive, a PG anti hero who drinks, thieves, womanises and worse - in a Disney movie based on a theme park ride. Sadly, his langorous Barnabus Collins is a throwback to the day so of Hammer Horror. This was no doubt the ironic intention, Depp’s lugubrious Christopher Lee homage serving to highlight Collins status as fish (factory owner) out of water. Instead, Depp’s overly mannered vampire (with the emphasis on the vamp) teeters on the edge of ridiculous, like being forced to watch your formerly cool uncle cousin ham it up in the local am dram society performance of Macbeth.

I’ll happily confess to being wholly unfamiliar with the original series, apart from a handful of YouTube clips. However, like them or loathe them, many of the best adaptations aren’t afraid to shake up the original source material, whether it’s stripping Wolverine of his iconic blue and yellow spandex, morphing Emma into an air headed valley girl, or introducing swearing and racial tension to Wuthering Heights. Unlike those offerings, Dark Shadows is unlikely to inspire great admiration or hatred - it simply drags along listlessly for nearly two hours to very little effect. In the process, Burton manages to waste a fantastic cast - only Depp, modern matriarch Michelle Pfeiffer and (im)mortal enemy Eva Green have anything much to do, and even that mostly involves spouting some pretty wooden dialogue. Green is perhaps the surprise winner of Dark Shadows: her spurned witch is an unhinged, vampy marvel, despite having little to work with apart from a jaw dropper of a red dress and probably the only decent effects in the whole film. 

Johnny Lee Miller, Chloe Moretz, even Burton’s long time beau Helena Bonham-Carter and the rest of the extended Collins clan are by comparison practically absent, only occasionally called upon to fill some airtime by mumbling or shrieking on cue. It’s little wonder that Bella Heathcote (pulling double duty as mysterious governess Victoria and Barnabus Collins’ dead wife), turns in an ethereal performance that can’t help but get lost in the maelstrom of oddness. Chuck in a werewolf sub plot that comes out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, and a painfully obvious set up for what is now an unlikely sequel, and Dark Shadows fails even to capture the shonky, offbeat charm of its source material, instead settling for dull and awkward. Even the room busting sex scene glimpsed in the trailer is strangely clunky in all its glory, typical of the film’s badly deployed effects. Such visual cheesiness may well be another attempt at irony-cum-homage, a sly nod to the original show’s budget sixties production values, but if so, Burton and co have definitely overreached, merely achieving weirdly underwhelming instead of gloriously bad. 

A fish-out-of-water tale like could have been tailor made for Burton and Depp. Sadly, Dark Shadows is one of those films where the trailer has most of the best bits (the sole exception being an early joke at the expense of McDonalds). It’s hard not to lay the blame entirely at the door of auteur Burton, whose uniquely camp visions are perhaps no longer best served by the live action format. Indeed, I’m still hopeful that Frankenweenie will turn out to be a welcome return to form, but in the meantime, Dark Shadows should perhaps stay there. 

The OAP-Team: New Expendables 2 trailer which neuters cinema’s greatest R-rated lunks with a PG rated sequel (thanks for nothing Chuck Norris - http://www.joblo.com/movie-news/is-chuck-norris-to-blame-for-the-expendables-2-getting-a-pg-13-rating). And is apparently targeted at an audience stupid enough to confuse Hemsworths Liam and Chris. For shame…

             You’d have more fun getting a wedgie from your older brother

Ostensibly a look at sibling relationships through the lens of a mock doc that comes across as the mutant brainchild of Robert Altman and Kevin Smith, with its youth oriented, gratuitous swearing and multi stranded, ensemble structure. It’s actually 83 shallow and pretentious minutes spent in the company of a clutch of annoyingly vapid and self-obsessed people during the course of a film that is most notable for occasionally featuring Cory Monteith of Glee notoriety. About the only marginally interesting thing in the movie - the comic book style visuals used to introduce and switch between characters - quickly wears thin.

Sisters & Brothers is a meandering, plotless self indulgence that I’ve already suffered through once, and refuse to waste any more time thinking about - I suggest you follow my lead.

                                               One slice too many…

Nine years after Jim and his band camp honey got married, someone, somewhere decided that a 13 year high school reunion would make a plausible excuse to reboot the American Pie franchise. Sadly, as anyone who’s ever attempted to microwave a Mr Kipling apple pie should already know, reheating leftover pie is unlikely to result in haute cuisine.

The original American Pie movie revived a defunct genre, and arguably kickstarted the broader, and apparently endless trend for gross out movies majoring in sexual humour/humiliation. It may not have been new (four best friends attempt to lose their virginity before graduating - internet sex tapes and other humiliations follow), but it managed to be sweet and funny while subjecting every one of its lead characters to some degree of, and surprisingly female friendly despite the rampant misogyny. 

Fast forward 13 years, 2 funny but distasteful cinema releases and 4 tawdry straight-to-DVD sequels later, and the magic is gone. Ironically, one of the character’s has an epiphany at the end that neatly sums up the fourth American Pie: “It’s never going to be like it was in high school”. Stifler (Sean William Scott) is still one of cinema’s greatest D-bags, but it turns out that the desperate virgins we could laugh at and empathise with have been replaced by rather dull grown ups (Chris Klein’s Oz and Mena Suvari’s Heather are particularly insipid) whose lives are even less interesting than mine. 

It’s not only the cast and audience that have moved on - the movies have too. The Hangover and its imitators have handily cornered the market on grown up gross out while the number of enjoyably sub par nostalgic reunion/male menopause flicks (Wild Hogs, Hall Pass, Hot Tub Time Machine and Grown Ups to name but a few) have mushroomed in the intervening years. Without the youthful exuberance of the original to paper over the cracks, Reunion is laid bare. The relationships are shallow, the women are unforgivably sidelined (you have to wonder if Alyson Hannigan was just doing her less successful co-stars a favour during her How I Met Your Mother hiatus), and the humour is tepid, particularly when compared to the ladyboy baiting, stripper marrying, tiger kidnapping antics of the Wolf Pack. It’s telling that the biggest laughs are courtesy of Jim’s dad (Eugene Levy), the best joke of the movie coming (ahem) after the credits start to roll. 

No doubt the low production costs, acceptable box office and the rekindled interest of a cast that (with only a couple of exceptions) has done nothing in the interim probably make the sequel being teed up in the final scene (American Pie: Vacation anyone?) somewhat inevitable. But personally, I found the film about as inspiring as this review - I’ve definitely had enough pie to last a lifetime. 

                                      A triumph of mood over plot…

The American is one of those films we’re supposed to love because very little happens, hardly anything is said, and it stars George Clooney. To be fair, his dead-eyed performance, suffused with a quiet paranoia, is impressive. But The American is still an oddly predictable exercise in film making. Clooney lives a life so ascetic that a monk would feel impoverished, which is more than a little clichéd, and every plot twist is depressingly obvious, from who’s getting a bullet in the back of the head, to the inevitable denouement played out in the last desperate scenes.

There’s also a wearyingly familiar motif of disposable women (who are apparently all prostitutes or double crossing), about which the less said, the better. 

Where it does raise an element of interest is in the application of a cold, isolated style of film making to a warm Mediterranean setting and characters. Anton Corbijn’s direction maintains the status of Clooney (and the viewer) as an outsider, even as Violante Placido’s hooker with a heart starts to break down Clooney’s defences. This is a film that deliberately eschews visual flair, but from the snowclad mountains of the opening scenes, to the immobile, off centre shots of which the rest of the film is composed, it’s easy to spot Corbijn’s roots as a photographer. 

Even the action, when it occasionally erupts, is sparse and muffled, as though no-one wanted to risk detracting from the mood of the piece. By the time the screen fades to black, the stylised ending will come as no surprise. If you’re in the mood to watch a motif rather than a plot, then The American is probably the film for you - 90+ minutes of paranoia and loneliness where others might have inserted a plot makes for a strangely interesting, if unexciting, viewing. 

I was feeling smug about getting to see it before US movie nerds - now, not so much…

totalfilm:

The Avengers cast talk Marvel sequel plans

Avengers Assemble blasted into cinemas this weekend in several territories around the world, claiming a not inconsiderable chunk of box office change ($178.4m internationally). And there are going to be plenty of excitable fans clamouring for an Avengers sequel…