Epic review

Epic (U, 102 mins)
Director: Chris Wedge
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

With an output over the last decade or so that includes Robots, Rio and the Ice Age movies, animation studio Blue Sky has a track record that could probably be best described as spotty.

That mediocre run continues with their latest big budget animated adventure, another in which you can see the money up on the screen, but which is tonally all over the place and sorely lacking when it comes to memorable story or characters.

The title would suggest something sweeping and grand, and while that’s what aimed for, it’s really not what we get. Instead we’re served up a rather po-faced mythology about noble forest-dwelling Leaf Men who need their queen to choose her heir, something that can only happen once every hundred years. If she can’t find someone the forest will be desiccated by the baddies, rat-like creatures called Boggans.

The Leaf Men are responsible for the balance of the forest, and this slapping around the head with its eco-message is the first of Epic’s missteps. The battle with the Boggans is represented by fairly impressive if frantic action, mostly consisting of bow-and-arrow fights and chases on the backs of saddled birds, ripped from Avatar but also providing the most enjoyable moments of the movie, impressively choreographed and pleasingly executed.

Meanwhile, in the real world, which is populated by plastic-looking people, late-teen Mary Katherine (Amanda Seyfried) goes to stay her nutty professor father following the death of her mother. She wants a normal dad, one who isn’t obsessed with trying to find the tiny people at the bottom of the garden, but throwing in the dead mother is a desperate grasp at gravitas that never really gives us anything to invest in.

When the queen (voiced by Beyoncé no less) is attacked by the Boggans while MK (as she likes to be called) is passing by, before you can say Honey I Shrunk the Avatars she has been zapped down to the size of the Leaf Men. She comes into possession of the Life of the Forest, a magical pod she’s charged with keeping safe until some gobbledegook about it blooming in the moonlight can come to pass.

Aiding her in this is a pair of comedy molluscs in the shape of Chris O’Dowd and Aziz Ansari, and though some humour is important, does it really need to be provided by a talking slug and snail? Also inhabiting this forest world of good versus evil is a young guy called Nod (Josh Hutcherson), who is yet to earn his stripes among his Leaf Men soldier community. He’s a crashing bore, saddled with that glossy-haired animated hero look that hasn’t changed since Aladdin and was most recently repeated in the equally lacklustre The Croods.

The story never develops to a level beyond your bog-standard eco-toon like FernGully, and last year’s Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings covered much the same ground with better results. It’s not as dull or unengaging as some recent efforts, but still pretty flat and thematically there’s more than a hint of The Wizard of Oz in the young woman who is discontent with her own existence.

Look to the source material as blame for that. Epic is based on an illustrated children’s book called The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs by William Joyce, who also wrote the stories on which last year’s Rise of the Guardians was based. It’s a title that, while a clumsy mouthful that couldn’t possibly be used for a movie, at least gives a much clearer picture of what’s at play here.

It’s a fine swarming spectacle bursting with colour, majoring in bucolic grandeur to offset the tedious and goofy world. But though very pretty indeed, green and lush and detailed, all it really achieves is to prove once again that animation needs to be much more than just a series of good looking pictures.

Along with the nice visuals, an accomplished voice cast manages to keep it tolerable. A restrained and solemn Colin Farrell is Ronin, the leader of the Leaf Men, while Christoph Waltz wheels out another of his fast-talking villains.

But if ever a title makes promises the film can’t cash, this is it. Pedestrian, ordinary, derivative and bland are all words that could be used to describe Epic, but if there’s one thing it most assuredly isn’t, it’s epic.

Horrible Bosses review

Horrible Bosses (15/R, 97 mins)
Director: Seth Gordon
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

If you ignore the disappointment of The Hangover II, it’s been a rather good summer so far for bawdy comedies. That run is continued with Horrible Bosses, a no holds barred spin on the old Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton vehicle, 9 to 5. Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day star as three disgruntled friends who each loathe their respective bosses in the shapes of Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell and Jennifer Aniston. All miserable at their work, they hit on a scheme, a la Strangers on a Train, to kill each other’s bosses, which involves the hiring of a somewhat ineffectual hitman (Jamie Foxx). In terms of setting up their situation and antagonists, Seth Gordon and his writers do a cracking job, but what really makes Horrible Bosses tick are its stars. Heightened scenarios are played to perfection by a stellar line up, some like Bateman and Spacey doing their well honed thing, others like Aniston subverting their images with equal success. It’s daft but it’s hilarious, which is what matters most, and it builds with consistent laughs so that, while unquestionably ridiculous, it’s fresh and free enough to forgive. Feeble title notwithstanding, it’s up there with Bridesmaids as one of the year’s best comedies.

The Way Back review

The Way Back (12A, 132 mins)
Director: Peter Weir
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Inspired by the real life tale of a small group of prisoners who escaped a Siberian gulag early in WWII and walked all the way to India, this is a sort of Great Escape: What Happened Next. Facing certain death, the men break out of the camp prepared for a trek of many months, among them a Pole (Jim Sturgess), an American (Ed Harris) and Colin Farrell’s Russian psycho. This leads to a plodding midsection that threatens to become repetitive through endless cycles of watching them walk for a bit, camp for a bit then walk some more as they battle hunger and thirst through deserts, forests and mountains. It’s solid, handsomely mounted and on an epic scale, but there isn’t a great deal of meat to the drama, nor any particular tension, though the three stars offer commanding portrayals of characters of limited interest.

London Boulevard review

London Boulevard (18, 103 mins)
Director: William Monahan
★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

London hard-man Mitchell (Colin Farrell) has just been released from prison when he is hired as a minder cum handyman for Charlotte (Keira Knightley), a world-famous but semi-retired actress. As a constant target for paparazzi, she lives practically as a recluse, and Mitchell divides his time between her home and trying to avoid the attentions of the local crime lord (Ray Winstone, naturally) who sees big things in him. This latter aspect provides passing interest in a very sub-Carlito’s Way manner, but when the screen is given over to the impossible to swallow romance between Mitchell and Charlotte, London Boulevard attains school play levels of badness. Whether it’s the dreadful dialogue, the complete lack of characterisation in their non-existent relationship or the amateur hour acting from an unusually stiff Knightley and deer-in-headlights Farrell, the result is less a movie than a flimsily connected patchwork of scenes, many of which look as though they were shot without the benefit of a director.