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Wednesday, 27 January 2010 |
Armored seems like an efficient, no-nonsense, old-fashioned little b-movie, until you find it actually cost $25m dollars to produce. Chicken feed compared with the likes of Avatar and Sherlock Holmes, of course, but still you have to wonder what could have cost so much. Easy answer: the incongruously starry cast, headed by Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne and Jean Reno - as armoured-truck security-guards who plot an audacious $42m heist (why not $25m?).
The trio are actually supporting players, but as the leading man - Columbus Short, playing their conscience-stricken, Iraq-war-veteran collaborator - is a relative unknown, he's actually eighth billed in the credits. This is, nevertheless, quite a wise choice of role for an up-and-coming actor - harder to see what attracted his illustrious co-stars to the project, apart from what must have been quite beefy salaries (Dillon being a relatively recent Oscar nominee for Crash.)
Perhaps they saw Nimrod Antal's Budapest-made debut feature Kontroll (2003) and scented talent. For a while the native Los Angeleno of Hungarian ancestry, who studied in Budapest, was very much touted as the next 'European' director likely to graduate from arthouses to multiplex and big-budget enterprises.
He seems to be playing something of a "long game" career-wise, with his first Stateside job being the economic thriller Vacancy (2007), and his second being the only marginally more ambitious Armored. Antal remains more of a matter of promise than achievement - and there certainly isn't much progression in terms of essential quality from Kontroll to Vacancy to Armored.
He handles first-time screenwriter James V Simpson's tough-guy ensemble and situations with reasonable skill over the brisk 88-minute running-time, hommaging Michael Mann's Heat with dutiful doggedness as he propels us forward through the notably un-twisty plot with a combination of dourness and machismo. Indeed, the only female speaking part is a nameless child welfare officer, played by Drag Me To Hell's unforgettable toothless crone Lorna Raver.
Antal finds some pleasingly rusted post-industrial corners of Los Angeles for a film whose geographical setting is very carefully (and expertly) unspecified throughout. But he isn't exactly stimulated by such landscapes - and perhaps he should consider a sojourn back in Hungary to recharge his creative juices. Rather like the shell of Armored's eponymous vehicles, as far as Antal is concerned Hollywood's top tables are proving somewhat impenetrable at present.
¦ Empire cinema, Sunderland, UK, 26.Jan.10 (£2.95) ¦ |
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Saturday, 16 January 2010 |
Being the second-best film of the past decade to pivot on the protagonist's avid pursuit of air-miles isn't any kind of disgrace, considering that the numero uno is Paul Thomas Anderson's transcendent masterpiece Punch-Drunk Love (2002).
This, the third film from director Reitman after Thank You For Smoking (2006) and Juno, is another reasonably "well-made" character-driven affair that spells out its wider social implications in emphatic terms. Here the focus is on a relatively content cog in the corporate wheel, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), whose job it is to fly all over the United States sacking workers on behalf of bosses too lily-livered to do so themselves.
Ryan has embraced the potentially alienating aspects of his unusual profession with gusto - to the point of unhealthy self-sufficiency and disconnect from his nearest and dearest. The film traces his progress to a sort of redemption and a kind of self-awareness, these journeys prompted by his interactions with two women: a younger colleague (Anna Kendrick) and a fellow denizen of airport lounges and upmarket chain-hotels (Vera Farmiga).
The results are slickly absorbing in a manner rather calculatedly designed to please more mature cinemagoers, though the film is more a matter of incidental pleasures than particularly surprising or enduring delights - the opening titles, showing the USA from the air, are executed with particular plomb.
Indeed, while the scenes between Clooney and Farmiga see both performers in slyly beguiling form (Clooney cementing his gritty-suave leading-man prominence, Farmiga maintaining her steady upward curve towards overdue stardom), in general Up in the Air is content to maintain a steady altitude-level throughout.
Indeed, the picture's title - with its implication of unresolved ambiguities - is, in the end, all too apt. To leave certain questions unanswered isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself - as John Sayles so amusingly illustrated with the audacious non-climax climax of Limbo (1999). This being more of a mainstream Hollywood affair, however, Reitman and co provide a series of endings, which never quite cohere into a satisfying close. As Ryan Bingham knows so well, termination is a tricky business indeed.
¦ Cineworld cinema, Boldon, UK, 16.Jan.10 (£6.70) ¦ with thanks to C P Heron |
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Friday, 08 January 2010 |
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Pointless, paceless, plodding biopic of Ian Dury (1942-2000), influential proto-punk front-man of Kilburn & the High Roads (1970-75) and then Ian Dury & The Blockheads. An unimaginative, cliche-ridden account of a notably unconventional, spikily confrontational and instinctively iconoclastic individual, it's of note only for Andy Serkis' predictably full-blooded, moving and consistently spot-on Dury impersonation.
But even a full-tilt Serkis can't do much to overcome the drab visuals, tepid direction and leaden script (which spans roughly a decade without anyone, adults or children, seeming to age) - deficiencies that are inescapably (and interminably) exposed on the big screen. As a more ruthlessly-edited 75-minute BBC Sunday night play (in the vein, say, of the M.Sheen-as-K.Williams enterprise Fantabulosa!) S&D&R&R might conceivably have passed muster. As a two-hour film, however, it's pretty much dead in the water.
Among the recent/current wave of "lo-fi" British music pictures, this one lands roughly halfway between the dire disaster that was Telstar and the watchably deluxe soap that is Nowhere Boy (the likes of 24 Hour Party People and Control are in a different league.) Dury fans may well applaud, but their ranks are most unlikely to be swelled by such an unfortunate missed-opportunity misfire.
¦ Empire cinema, Sunderland, UK, 8.Jan.10 (£5.80) ¦ |
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