Wednesday Thursday Reviews

Yes, it's late. The world is full of disappointments. Suck it up.

You know how occasionally you haven't seen a thing that most people have seen? A film or TV show? It happens. Life is short, the world is large, and distractions abound. The usual way of it is that someone will be quoting from the thing you haven't seen, while let's say chuckling doltishly to themselves, perhaps dribbling a little spittle down their chins and rolling their overly-moist eyes up into their skulls and rocking on the spot through the sheer delight of remembering something they liked. And you'll have to interrupt them and say, "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I haven't seen [whatever the thing is you haven't seen that most people have seen]." And they'll stare at you, and then reply, eight octaves too high, in a voice fairly drowning in incredulity, "You haven't seen [whatever the thing is]?" And you'll say, "Uhh, yeah, as I just said, I haven't seen [whatever the thing is]." And they'll stare at you some more, and then say, "You're seriously telling me you've never seen [whatever the thing]?" And you'll say, "Yep, that's what I'm saying." And they'll say, "What, like, never?" And this will go on for four and a half hours. And finally you'll say, "Look. This isn't some elaborate ruse. I'm not trying to trick you. Why can't you understand? I've just never seen [whatever], is all. Okay?" And they'll glance around, momentarily lost in an alien world where nothing makes sense to them any more... and then they'll recognise a friend in the distance, and they'll shout, "Kev, here, Kev, you will never bloody believe what this person hasn't seen!"

Anticipating a veritable slew of such lively back-and-forths with the release this week of a big-budget Mad Max videogame, and the knowledge that I'd never seen a single shoulder-padded, leather-lined, gas-guzzling minute of any of the Mad Max films, I went away and watched all of them. Every one. So now I'm just like you. We're the same. We're all morons together.

Here are some words from my brain about the different Mad Maxes:

Mad Max 1 (aka Mad Max)

This film is weird. For something called "Mad Max" it isn't very madmaxian. I don't know anything about Mad Max and even I can see that. There are barely any shoulder pads. There's not much sand, and what sand there is is on a beach, for Gibson's sake. Max hardly even gets mad -- and when he does he proceeds to get shot in the knee and then run over. Maybe it was the tightness of his leather trousers clouding his judgement.

There are lots of cars, and a smorgasbord of gay bikers, so it's not all bad, but still this is a disappointing experience.

People tend to think of this first film less in its own right and more as the piece that spawned a series, filtered through public consciousness, and influenced every post-apocalyptic movie, book, and videogame that came afterwards -- but it was also the inspiration, via its final scene involving a gruesome death trap, for the entirety of the Saw franchise, so good fucking going, I guess, guys.

Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior)

Better. Dwindling resources, car fetishes, a hellish wasteland picked clean by a mankind eking out a grim existence in its final twilight days. It's like a Friday night in insert-name-of-smallish-town-near-your-town-here. Hey-o!

The film is frequently silly, often camp, and firmly a product of the 80s, but it's interesting nonetheless. Co-writer/director/creator George Miller has an idiosyncratic style that starts to shine through the more of these you watch. I can never tell whether he's better or worse than I expected him to be. In some ways Road Warrior is utterly in thrall to common action-movie tropes, in others it cynically subverts them. The plot is mostly clichéd and predictable, but then something you hadn't anticipated will happen and you'll find yourself knocked for six. There are frequent elements that aren't quite satisfying -- stretches without Max that would be referred to in screenwriting workshops as POV issues, story beats unfolding without fanfare, misalignments of the archetypal hero's journey -- and you're never (or at least I wasn't) sure how much it's intended.

The end result, though, is a film that's unlike any other genre work of the period, and vastly more intriguing than the bland written-by-committee fare of today, polished pablum where every script element performs exactly as expected and nothing ever surprises. This at least is markedly its own beast.

One other thing I liked: Max is rarely heroic, but when he is his heroism is real, i.e. it entirely eschews fame or recognition or reward. This makes him come across stranger and sadder and ultimately more human than his action-film counterparts, those strutting suave cool guys whose hair styles and demeanours and entire performances are exactly that: performance, an act, bravery designed to be seen, theatre intended to be maximally appealing to us the audience sat safely at home watching the good guys always triumph, allowing ourselves to believe this is what the world is like. Max isn't about that. Max survives, he does what he has to, and if his humanity is occasionally awoken and he helps others then he doesn't do it with a cocksure grin and a glint of whitened teeth and an adjustment of his cufflinks -- he does it after weighing up the cost to himself, looking inside to see whether he actually still cares about people, and then helping them for their sake, not his. In the wasteland, we sense, people become who they really are.

Mad Max 3 (aka Beyond Turnerdome)

Larger than Road Warrior but also less focused, more child and box-office friendly. The one where they went Hollywood, essentially. If the previous films' plots were predicated upon some weird internal logic that you could never tell whether it was actually logic or just inexperienced filmmaking, but screw it it was interesting, then Beyond Turnerdome feels like a film made with extensive input from the suits. Max meets a gaggle of kids who're basically the proto-Lost-Boys from Hook (seriously, what with Hook and Waterworld, and like every Saturday morning adventure cartoon, my childhood owes far more to Mad Max than I was aware), and it's hard to believe all these children weren't inserted to help skewer the succulent PG-13 market -- especially as the film progresses and you realise no one is dying, or if they are it's mostly off-screen where maybe they fell off the cliff into some water and they're all right, who knows, don't think about it kids.

The set design is gorgeous, though edging into self-parody. The plot has its moments, and the proto-Lost-Boys were at least unexpected, but there are inconsistencies and contrivances everywhere. Characters are forever collapsing in the middle of nowhere and then conveniently being stumbled upon and saved when they're on the verge of death. The good guys get themselves into situations they could never survive, but then by some fluke they surely couldn't have been planning for do end up surviving. And all roads apparently lead to Barter Town, the lavish main setting but what would realistically only be an insignificant blip in an endless desert were it not for having cost so much to build and maximum screen time needing to be squeezed from it. The chase scene is rubbish as well.

Though on the other hand, the shoulder-pad quotient is through the roof, and it's got Tina Turner in it. A solid 3/5 Gibsons.

Mad Max: Fury Road (aka Mad Max 4?)

The last chronologically, but the first I watched. I didn't understand any it of out of context, so I went back and watched it again after the others. It's good. It's really good.

It's one long chase sequence, essentially, a high-speed, white-knuckle blast of bright, kinetic action, the camera soaring and swooping around clunky Frankensteinian vehicles hurtling across the desert spitting fumes, careening into one another, exploding in gorgeous orange blooms against a fiery Valhallan sky. Fury Road's world is an unforgiving one, filled with the twisted and mistreated, almost everyone in some way damaged, deformed, suppurating, broken. It is quite the marvel, a vision exquisite in its grotesqueness.

And again those same Miller touches, the idiosyncrasies in plotting, the subversion of tropes, producing, as with Road Warrior before it, an action film dazzlingly different from its contemporaries.

The Max of this film is barely introduced before he is captured, bound, shaved, muzzled, and branded; his trusty V-8 Interceptor is destroyed, and he is left rotting in the fortress of a cult leader whose front-line-fodder band of war boys use Max as a universal donor to refill their sickly and presumably irradiated blood.

This sense of weakness, disempowerment, emasculation is hardly a typical way to showcase your protagonist -- and nor is it the shocking abuse that justifies the later bloodlust of a revenge thriller: Max does finally escape, but only to fall into more mishaps, to struggle onwards, to continue doggedly surviving.

Dialogue is sparse, characterisation minimal, but with the confidence of something that knows the right word or action can imply so much more than a million clumsy words or actions can state. Charlize Theron is brilliant as Furiosa, the fleeing lieutenant that the cult leader sends his war boys -- and by extension their blood-bag, Max -- to reclaim. Furiosa has a stump for an arm, a shaved head, grime all over her; nothing about her is glamourous or sexualised. She looks precisely as old as Theron is (late-30s considering the few years the film spent in post-production), and she radiates beauty, strength, depth, and occasional vulnerability. Tom Hardy is a good Max, skittering and twitchy, a man reduced to an insect-level existence, living moment to moment, yet sometimes finding scraps of his old humanity not yet peeled away by the blowing winds and burning sands. His Australian accent is the pits, but that's my only complaint.

There's an excellent three-way fight between Furiosa and Max and the emaciated war boy who Max is chained to (played with wide-eyed lunacy and a touch of sweetness by About a Boy's Nicholas Hoult). The upper-hand belongs to one, then the other, then another, no one is quite sure whose side anyone is on, and it's all filmed to be violent, clumsy, slightly humourous, and hard to predict. And this is the larger film, too. A riotous journey, brutal, unique and unrelenting. A fitting return: the best of the lot, I reckon.

Now I wonder what that videogame is like...

Wednesday Reviews

The Wolverine

Hey, pachinkos! Am I calling you traditional Japanese betting games involving rains of metal balls there to insinuate you're all nothing but endless gaping maws into which our culture's wealth is squandered? As a memento mori to remind us that, despite our best efforts to catch them, the moments of our lives slip through our fingers like so many tinkling orbs? Or maybe I'm implying that you regularly get fondled in harshly lit back-alley amusement arcades by desperate old men with pocketfuls of loose change? Actually I was doing none of the above, but merely introducing the theme of Japan as a soft lede for this review of 2013's Tokyo-set superhero film The Wolverine. And though that wouldn't have been enough to work by itself, all this meta commentary has just about provided the necessary opening. Who said you can't have your cake and eat it, too? You just have to be able to put up with a cake that tastes faintly of self-loathing. But then doesn't everything, eh?

So, The Wolverine. After subjecting myself to the soggy, insipid mess of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (or X-Miaow, for sort of short) last week, you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm some kind of perverted sadist for rushing headlong into this with nary the time to wipe the tears from my home-made latex Wolverine costume. But I'm not. This film is an attempt to right the wrongs of X-Miaow, directed by James Mangold (of Cop Land and Walk the Line fame), with a story inspired by a much-loved comic book run from the 80s -- and it's only bloody brilliant.

Well, it's all right. It's way more involved and assured -- from the opening shot you feel safe in  Mangold's experienced hands -- and it's made by a bunch of people you can just tell all actually give a damn about doing justice to the character and underlying mythos.

Where X-Miaow tried to colour in the gaps in the canvas of the established cinematic canon, and ended up smudging the lines, drawing over bits that were better to begin with, then spilling a pot of paint all down its trousers, The Wolverine opts instead to rip its character from the old canvas and dump him in a new scene and see what happens. It's typical fish-out-of-water stuff as the gruff, no-nonsense Wolverine gets transported to a Japan dictated by custom, tradition, and the ever-looming presence of the Yakuza -- and the contrast between character and setting is used to paint the clearest portrait of old Claw-Hands yet put to film.

Mangold has fun with the tropes, as does the ever-enthusiastic Hugh Jackman, archly beefed up here for his, what, like sixtieth outing as Wolvy? The character fits as comfortably on Jackman as the familiarly faded denims; you can tell he relishes the role, clearly enjoying himself while working hard to stay true to the source material.

The film begins with a weathered and world-weary Wolverine living rough in the mountains, having hung up his claws and abandoned the superhero life following the events of X-Men 3. But though one particular memory weighs heavily on him, and was certainly the catalyst for his change, this is not the whole picture. More, we get the sense of an old soldier who has experienced too much killing, a man sick of who he was born to be and the only thing he knows how to do, worn down, past caring, not so much consciously running away as having simply accumulated too much shit and finding something deep and automatic within himself has snapped and lead him away from everything he knew. It's Paris, Texas, essentially -- only as far as I remember Harry Dean Stanton never killed a grizzly bear with retractable adamantium claws.

When a feisty Japanese girl with mad katana skills arrives to tell Wolverine that an old friend in Tokyo who is dying wishes to see him one last time, we recognise the herald calling him to adventure. An adventure, we know, that will force him to confront the pain he has been hiding from and offer him an opportunity to rediscover his raison d'etre.

It's pulpy stuff, for sure, but deftly handled, and as Wolverine's plane touches down in Tokyo we find ourselves drawn in.

Sadly, the film doesn't maintain the purity or cohesion for its duration. The plot ceases to make much sense approximately two minutes after arriving in Japan, and the early grittiness gradually gives way to primary-coloured villains, dastardly double-crosses, and the seemingly obligatory CGI-heavy action scenes so overblown as to shatter any suspension of disbelief the actors have worked to engender (though in fairness one fight above a moving bullet train does provide some satisfying physical comedy).

The thing holds together -- there is a nice scene about Nagasaki recovering from the Bomb, and an unexpectedly tender romance -- and the pace picks up after a convoluted second act for a suitably climactic showdown, but here, again, the better character-based drama is overshadowed by secret mountaintop lairs and armies of samurai and battles with ten-foot-tall chrome warriors wielding magma swords.

The film has done enough for us to stay invested to the end, but it's a shame that something that began like an accomplished graphic novel would turn out to be more of a children's comic. A well-constructed comic, replete with sufficient pay-offs and successful character arcs, but one that in the end finds far less to say than it made you hope for.

But maybe I'm asking too much. This is still a boisterous and enjoyable superhero movie that never takes itself too seriously while taking its duty to its fans very seriously indeed. The characters are believable -- the inclusion of a number of female leads who exist outside and above their relation to the male characters shouldn't need to but does deserve mention -- the script is tight, and Mangold directs with a steady hand. For better or worse, you can tell everyone involved in the production of The Wolverine really cared about bringing to life the story of an indestructible metal-clawed mutant. And their passion will make you care, too.

And that's enough superhero films for me for the moment, I reckon. See you on Friday! x

Wednesday Reviews

I'll put that diary up on Friday, but for now here are some musings about a film I watched, to keep you occupied...

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Deadpool, then, eh? Deadpool, Deadpool, Deadpool. All anyone seems to be banging on about these days. But what is a Deadpool? For the uninitiated, he's the star of the leak of a teaser for a trailer for a new Marvel film that's coming out, and the internet is very excited about him and which of his quirky catchphrases he'll be repeating when the real teaser for the trailer for the new Marvel film is finally released. On tenterhooks myself, I tell ya. But not personally knowing quirky-catchphrase one for this Deadpool chap, I thought I'd investigate X-Men Origins: Wolverine, an X-Men spin-off prequel (sprequel? prequoff?) from 2009, in which Deadpool features as a side character and has his origins explained. 

Except after sitting through two hours of flaccid, cliché-ridden dirge I went on Wikipedia to discover that, although the upcoming Deadpool film stars the same actor, playing the same character, in the same cinematic universe, the film-makers have completely re-imagined his back-story for the new film, making the crap I watched even more irrelevant than it already blatantly was. Which is nice.

X-MO:W (does that work?), then, tells the story of a young Wolverine (he's the angry one with the metal claws) and how he became Wolverine. Except that was sort of already covered in previous X-Men films, and what's added here doesn't make any sense if you think about it too much. It's like they've taken a rather nice painting -- no Monet, but I thought Bryan Singer's X-Men films had heart -- and tried to colour in the gaps, but ended up going over the lines here and there and smudging some of the original work. At best you'd say the new stuff has no real reason to exist; at worst it ruins your impression of the original.

We open with Kiddie-Wolverine running away from home with his brother, who possesses similar powers of regeneration and cool slashy attacks. This is all in Olden Times, by the way, for it turns out Wolverine is dead old, and over the opening credits we see a montage of the brothers fighting back-to-back (that's their thing) in the American Civil War, the Trenches, the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan, and Vietnam. The two leap about, bop baddies on the heads, shrug off bullets -- it seems war is loads of fun when you've got bone claws and can't be killed.

Apparently Brother-Wolverine likes war a little too much, though. We can tell because he keeps gunning people down he doesn't need to while grinning maniacally. You're supposed to slash their faces off while looking miserable, you muppet!

It all goes too far -- and too Casualties-of-War -- when Broverine attempts to rape a young girl in Vietnam, then viciously attacks the G.I.s who tell him that's not such a hot idea. Wolvy rushes to Brovy's defence -- Brovy's a nutter but they're bro-bears, what you gonna do? -- and so they're both carted off to face the firing squad together. Which set piece might prove more dramatic if we didn't already know that neither of them gives a shit about being shot. "Wake me up when it's done," Broverine whispers. Yeah, ditto.

So the credits end, and we're into the film proper, as a shady military dude comes to visit the boys in prison (hey, they survived the firing squad!). Military Dude says his name is Stryker, who we remember as the bad meister from X-Men 2, only here he's younger and not played by Brian Cox (the actor, not the physicist -- though there's an idea for casting!). Stryker asks what the firing squad was like, and Wolverine replies that it "tickled", and they all have a big laugh, and the brothers go off with Stryker to join his mutant black ops squad, and the traumatised Vietnamese girl and the dead G.I.s are conveniently forgotten. Casualties of war indeed.

The black ops squad is called Team X (they love their Xs!), and is comprised exclusively of Glowering Men. There's the one who likes swords (this is Deadpool, but he's not Deadpool yet, he's just called Wade), there's the Chinese one, the big one, the one who's Merry from The Lord of the Rings -- whose singular role in the gang is to fly the plane with his mind, which is cool and all, but I reckon a regular pilot would have been cheaper -- and there's William.

Sorry, "will.i.am". This is tricky, because on the one hand his name is his property and it's a bit harsh on him to refuse to call him whatever makes him happy, but on the other hand it's a bit harsh on the fucking English language to spell your name all in lowercase with full stops everywhere, so I don't know.

Anyway, William can disappear and reappear somewhere else, which I'm sure I've seen at least six mutants do in these films already, and he also likes cowboy hats.

Team X engage in some Witty Banter in the back of the plane for a while (during which time I imagine Merry being like, "Haha yeah good one, well yo' momma is so fat she-- oh shit I forgot I was meant to be flying this plane, we almost crashed into the ocean there, haha, oh well, jokes"), then they go assassinate a bunch of Nigerians. They're (Team X are) after a chunk of meteorite that later turns out to be the stuff Wolverine's metal claws get made out of, but no one in the film seems to care much, and neither do we.

Wolverine decides to abandon the gang here because of all the assassinating, which I guess he didn't sign up to this black ops squad for, and goes off to become a Canadian lumberjack and fall in love with a hot Native American girl instead. Which is fair enough, really.

All goes swimmingly, for a time, until Broverine reappears and murders Native American bae, but not before bae can spout some faux-ancestral folk tale about a mythical wolverine that TOTALLY WON'T BE SYMBOLIC LATER ON.

Wolverine gets pretty miffed about what's happened to bae, so goes to find Broverine and duke it out -- though, just to reiterate once again, neither of them can die. They punch each other for a while, neither of them dies, and then Broverine leaves. Wolverine gets taken to hospital with multiple stab wounds, the doctors think he's going to die, but then he doesn't die.

Stryker comes to visit Wolverine in hopsital and tells him he should let him inject his body with metal from the meteorite so that it'll fuse with his (Wolverine's) skeleton, because that's the only way they can defeat Broverine. It's pretty clear the real reason is so that Stryker can do Nefarious Things, but maybe Wolverine has taken a few too many knocks to the head because he looks at Stryker stood there trying not to like cackle evilly to himself and shrugs and goes, "Yeah, sure, whatever. YOLO, eh?"

So Wolverine gets a shiny metal skeleton instead of the stupid bony one the rest of us have to make do with, but then while he's still strapped in the injecty tank and unconscious Stryker is suddenly all like, "Cool, now to erase his memory and extract his DNA in order to make an even more powerful mutant," -- except Wolverine is only pretending to be asleep, and he leaps up and is all: "Oh, thou Icarian fool, blinded by hubris, unable to feel satisfied with the perfectly adequate super-regenerative metal-bodied mutant you possessed, you wanted more -- but now, just as Icarus's wings were melted by the sun, so shall your face be melted by my kick-ass adamantium claws, bitch!"

... Which is to say, he breaks free and slashes some guards and runs away to hide in a barn.

Look, how much more of this do you need? X-Miaow (for thus it shall be named) is not good. It slouches on for another hour of insipid dialogue, nonsensical plot twists and surprisingly incompetent CGI-based action scenes. Wolverine discovers that Broverine and Stryker are in cahoots, and goes off with William and another mutant we don't care about about in order to set things right. William gets killed and the newly-introduced mutant does nothing at all. Wolverine has a fight with Wade, who's now called Deadpool and has everyone else's powers (gets retconned though, so nm). Wolverine doesn't fare too well (though, again, can't be killed), but then Broverine turns up and they fight back-to-back (like at the start!) against Deadpool, because Broverine doesn't want anyone killing Wolverine but himself. Deadpool gets decapitated, all the characters who survive into the other films leave, and then Wolverine gets his memory wiped so the plots of the other films can make any kind of sense.

It's all just so limp, so long and loud and dull. The script is the main offender, carelessly derivative and filled with characters flatter than the pages they've been pulled from. The direction is tolerable but uninspired -- Gavin Hood keeps all the elements together but displays little love for the source material, giving the impression of moving from Tsotsi and Rendition to this popcorn-fare not because of care for the character, but because it was a job.

A good superhero film should explore bold themes of heroism, redemption and sacrifice, with costumes and villains and explosions all supersized to match. There's little of that here. Wolverine isn't even heroic. The only time his actions are motivated by anything other than revenge or self-interest is when he lets some mutant children out of a cage Stryker has imprisoned them within. But Wolverine is stood right there at the time -- he doesn't even have to find a key or anything, he just slashes the cages with his claws. It's the equivalent of a multimillionaire giving a fiver to charity.

All of which is a shame, because there is the shadow of a better film hiding somewhere within this detritus. According to Hood, he wanted to make Wolverine a war veteran suffering PTSD, but executives dismissed the idea because they thought it would bore the audience. How sad, because I can totally see how that would have worked. Wolverine as a mutant murder machine, used as a weapon in America's wars for a century, physically indestructible but slowly accumulating the psychic burden of so much killing. The film following his struggles to free himself both from the shackles of government control and from his own violent, primal urges. These struggles would be neatly embodied in Wolverine's relationship with his brother, a mutant who embraced and revelled in his nature where Wolverine repressed it. The two would periodically clash in snarling, frenetic duels where the brother's savagery would initially give him the edge, until Wolverine learned to accept his inner rage and integrate it within his greater being, becoming both the Animal and the Man holding its leash, able to use his violence without being used by it.

Sadly, the suits that sign the checks decided to go in a different direction. Their approach wasn't a failure, at least from a commercial standpoint -- the film more than made back its budget -- but then we're judging the film as a product to be bought and sold rather than as a story with the power to speak to something inside us, to make us better people. Earning a few dollars for your studio is hardly the worst thing in the world, but it's not very heroic, either.