Zurich Film Festival - Sicario

Sicario (121 mins)
Director: Denis Villeneuve
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is an FBI agent whom we first meet discovering a house full of dead bodies as she leads a kidnap response team working in Arizona.

Catching the eye of her superiors, she volunteers for a cross-agency task force taking on Mexican drug cartels. This brings her into contact with another pair of agents (Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro), who may be DEA or CIA or something else entirely, such is their reluctance to share information with Kate.

They take her into Mexico where she’s thrown into the midst of a big operation with no clue what she’s getting into or with whom. It’s as an expose of the grim reality of the effect the drug trade has had on Mexico where Sicario really scores, sparing no punches in showing the violence and vengeance tearing apart a country overrun with criminality.

Of slightly less interest is Macer’s concern that they have no jurisdiction over the border and that her two associates seem to have agendas of their own, and the question of motives and trust hangs over Sicario. The title comes from the Mexican word for hitman and it’s a solid and grown up drama, muscular and hard hitting.

Other than one very well staged shootout, much of the first hour is Kate shadowing and learning and events are seen through her eyes as she observes and questions. The tension comes from her and us not knowing anything though it starts to labour that point a bit in the middle, but there’s always a feeling that everything is under control and it’s heading in the right direction.

The problem is we’re led in to it in the belief that it’s Macer’s movie when in fact many of the best scenes feature Brolin and Del Toro, with the latter in particular growing to dominate the story. And a question begins to surface of whether Macer is actually much of a character and not simply something of a sideshow in a bigger picture, a passenger in her own movie. In many ways that’s fine, because fortunately the men played by Brolin and Del Toro are highly compelling, and this trio of excellent performances carries it through.

As an exercise in finely tuned craftsmanship, Sicario is certainly very impressive, and Denis Villeneuve continues to be a director to keep an eye on. There’s no real template for what it is as a movie, being very much its own beast which is definitely a good thing.

If it’s a standard cops and drugs thriller you’re after then Sicario is not that kind of movie. But if you go in prepared for something other than what you might be expecting then there’s a lot to take away.

Edge of Tomorrow review

Edge of Tomorrow (12A/PG-13, 113 mins)
Director: Doug Liman
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

An early summer movie season that’s been fairly strong so far continues to tick along nicely with Edge of Tomorrow, a smart and fun sci-fi thriller which demonstrates that Tom Cruise is still one of the best in the business.

Even though this is a summer blockbuster that may have a premise like an episode of Star Trek, and even though it nods to most of the sci-fi action of the last 30 years, it still comes across as fairly original. It’s based on a novel called All You Need Is Kill and for all that it seems to be in the vein of Starship Troopers, the clear and unexpected touchstone is Groundhog Day.

News footage opens the film to fill us in on the backstory, which at first comes across as the kind of thing we’ve seen umpteen times before: an alien invasion has left earth on the brink of destruction and our forces are gearing up for one last make or break battle.

During this prologue we’ve been quietly introduced to Major William Cage (Cruise). In a nice twist, he’s not a hero but a media relations guy, prized more for his recruitment skills than his soldiering. But his superior (Brendan Gleeson) has plans to send him into the fray anyway during a low key start where he has to come to terms with being sent to the front line with no training and no clue.

The real hero is Rita (Emily Blunt), known as the Angel of Verdun since a successful mission against the aliens. Most of Europe has been destroyed and taken over, so the plan is for a Normandy landings-style incursion into France to take the fight to the enemy. These so-called Mimics are brilliantly designed many-tentacled beasties that recall the sentinels in The Matrix, scary, fast-moving and very hard to kill.

Saving Private Ryan is evoked as they drop onto the beaches of France to take on the aliens, only for everyone, including Cage and Rita, to be very quickly slaughtered. But here’s where the unique selling point of Edge of Tomorrow comes into play, as Cage wakes up to find himself at the start of the previous day. That day then plays out exactly as it did before, only he knows everything that’s going to happen because he’s already lived through it even if no one else has.

Day after day he sets out on the mission and day after he dies, unable to make much progress or save Rita. But finally something clicks on one of the days, and Rita tells Cage to come and find her when he, as it were, gets back to yesterday. She trains him how to better fight the Mimics, while he tells her what will happen tomorrow so they can survive for as long as possible.

That may sound like a complicated bit of shenanigans, but one of the key strengths here is that it’s all very clear to follow. Like a video game, Cage gets a bit further each time, learning from his mistakes and dying and restarting dozens, possibly hundreds of times until he gets it right.

It’s the very definition of repetitive action, with the beach landing and fight playing out over and over, but it’s far from a problem because we always get something a bit different. And it changes up as it progresses, taking us beyond the beach to the places their mission needs to go if it’s ever to succeed. There’s also room for some cheeky laughs in amongst all the dying, born out of Cage knowing the future and often at the expense of Bill Paxton’s hardnosed sergeant.

Blunt is convincing as a badass but no one sells this sort of thing like Cruise, who combines undimmed star power with the utmost sincerity so that we’re with him all the way no matter how preposterous the setup may be. His transformation into an action star may have come at the expense of more interesting dramatic roles but, even at the age of 51, all you need is Cruise.

The Adjustment Bureau (12A, 106 mins) review

The Adjustment Bureau (12A, 106 mins)
Director: George Nolfi
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The work of late sci-fi author Philip K. Dick has been very well treated by Hollywood over the years (Blade Runner, Total Recall) and just as frequently badly mishandled (Paycheck, Next). The Adjustment Bureau falls somewhere in the middle, offering some modest fantasy fun that’s most notable for its terrific star pairing of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. Damon plays a popular politician who meets and falls for Blunt’s dancer, but is then warned he must never see her again by a group of shady guys in hats. They seem able to predict the future and go to great lengths to keep them apart, with Damon determined to exercise free will and be with her. More romance than action-fest and light on any actual danger, The Adjustment Bureau is full of goofy rules that keep getting re-written, while chase scenes are slick without exactly fizzing with energy. It’s monumental hooey that only gets sillier the longer it goes, but Damon and Blunt share great chemistry and with stars on this form, it’s fairly compulsive stuff.

Gulliver’s Travels review

Gulliver’s Travels (PG, 87 mins)
Director: Rob Letterman
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Jonathan Swift’s 18th century novel, Gulliver’s Travels, will know it doesn’t contain a great deal of Star Wars references. With this modern day updating of the story throwing in countless 21st century cultural nods, purists may well baulk. But with a movie that’s positioning itself as a big daft Christmas effects bonanza, they're by no means the intended audience.

It clearly takes place in a world where Swift’s novel doesn’t exist, since Black’s character is called Lemuel Gulliver and no one else in the movie seems to think this is worth commenting on. He’s a schlubby nerd working in a newspaper mail room, and with a longstanding crush on the travel editor (Amanda Peet).

Gulliver somehow manages to bluff his way into getting a writing assignment from her, which involves him heading to the Bermuda Triangle where his boat is consumed by a vortex and he wakes up in the land of Lilliput where the tiny people there mistake him for a giant beast and imprison him.

This is where we’re given the first indication that all is not well with a script that rather throws us into situations, asking us to accept a lot of things without much introduction or explanation. Any sort of close examination will reveal that the writing is feeble, with great chunks of story appearing to be missing.

And yet it keeps on delivering uncomplicated fun and so, powering on, Gulliver meets Horatio (Jason Segel), a commoner in love with the princess (Emily Blunt), whom Gulliver subsequently saves and becomes a hero.

There’s also a subplot involving the jealous and deceitful Lilliputian general Edward Edwardian (Chris O’Dowd) that comes to the fore since the filmmakers don’t really seem to know what to do with Gulliver other than trot out references.

And yet this is where the movie delivers its funniest and most imaginative material, with Black’s semi-improvised shtick often hard to resist as he pretends that all the biggest movie plots of the last 30 years are episodes from his life.

Elsewhere it’s largely juvenile set pieces that offer a lot of bum and pee related stuff. And, as is invariably the case these days, the 3D is largely pointless though it does sometimes cover up the shoddiness of the special effects.

But it’s saved from disaster by the appeal of the cast, especially Black and Segel. Chuck in the likes of Billy Connolly and Catherine Tate as the king and queen of Lilliput and it gets by on its sheer silliness and goofy charm.

And unlike recent fantasy epics like Narnia or TRON, Gulliver’s Travels is never boring, it knows what story it wants to tell – even if it doesn’t always tell it too well – and for all its stupidity, it offers consistently undemanding entertainment.