The Boxtrolls review

The Boxtrolls (PG, 97 mins)
Directors: Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Possibly the weakest summer on record for animated movies closes out with this likeable but problematic stop-motion effort that can’t quite make up in charm what it lacks in coherence.

Though an American production, The Boxtrolls is adapted from a British book by Alan Snow called Here Be Monsters, and retains a mostly British voice cast led by Ben Kingsley and Jared Harris. The titular creatures live under the streets of a quaint but rather odd town, coming up from the sewers at night to scavenge.

They’re much feared by the townspeople, to the extent an exterminator is hired to rid them of the problem. What they don’t know is that the Boxtrolls are in fact perfectly friendly, if a little disgusting. What’s more, a young boy lives with them, raised as one of them and named Eggs (because of his box) since he disappeared from the town as a baby.

It’s a bit of a shaky start that fills us in on all this, introducing us to a number of characters defined more by their oddness than anything more tangible. Chief among these is Kingsley as the exterminator, Archibald Snatcher, sounding like Michael Gambon doing an impression of Terry Jones’ Mr Creosote from The Meaning of Life. The result much of the time is as incomprehensible as that suggests.

Elsewhere the voices are just a little too clipped in their Englishness, with Isaac Hempstead Wright from Game of Thrones as Eggs and Elle Fanning as Winnie, the young girl helping him as they take on Snatcher. The best stuff comes from Richard Ayoade and Nick Frost, who are on sparkling form as Snatcher’s accomplices.

It’s Pythonesque in other ways too, with a real Gilliam flavour to its bizarre and grotesque look, which kids generally respond to. It’s also incredibly brown and, for all that it’s delightfully rendered, never exactly nice to look at. The animation is lively though, allowing the film to ooze a playful charm to go with its homemade, hand-cranked vibe.

And things do pick up somewhat when, after years of the Boxtrolls being picked off by Snatcher, Eggs goes to the surface to try to save them. It’s a world where the ruling classes are more concerned with cheese (no, really) than the welfare of the people.

This commentary on inequality is the main thematic thrust and, alongside a strong message of the merits of family, the film’s intentions are certainly good. But there’s an inefficiency to the story that holds it back, Snatcher’s scheme is never fully formed, and the climax is interminable. The characters are never appealing enough, the Boxtrolls are largely anonymous, and the overall feeling is that this is more guts and gruel than heart.

The World’s End review

The World’s End (15/R, 109 mins)
Director: Edgar Wright
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The movie-making team of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright has been one of the biggest success stories of British cinema of the past decade.

With Shaun of the Dead and then Hot Fuzz they showed that home grown products can be original, imaginative, entertaining and, significantly, capable of drawing a sizeable and appreciative audience.

Now they're back with the long-awaited third of what’s become unofficially known as the Cornetto trilogy, with Pegg once again co-writing with director Wright for what could be described as a bit of a blend of Shaun and Fuzz, combing the first’s monster-bashing with the latter’s sinister small town setting.

Pegg returns alongside his co-star Nick Frost and joining them are Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan, completing the group of five friends whom we first meet as youngsters in the early 90s. Living in a sleepy small town, they're a rowdy but likeable group who set out to tackle the Golden Mile, a challenge to drink a pint in every one of the dozen pubs in town, from The First Post to The World’s End.

They never made it round all 12 but now, over 20 years on, Gary King (Pegg) is determined to recreate their crawl. But the rest have moved on, becoming respectable businessmen and family men. With little else going on in his life, Gary drags them back to their old stomping ground to try to relive their youths.

That would be enough for a lot of films, but Pegg and Wright are more ambitious than that. So on top of that setup, the lads quickly discover the town seems to now be mostly populated by aliens, or robots, or robotic aliens, in some Invasion of the Bodysnatchers style takeover.

The result is one of the year’s best comedies, hitting the mark in the early stages through the other guys’ reluctance to take part in Gary scheme, then later when they're facing down their enemies. But it’s also able to hit some strong dramatic and emotional beats. Fittingly, since we’re now dealing with guys who’ve left 40 behind, it’s even more thematically mature than the first two films, tackling aging and regrets, old memories and wounds, as lessons are learned and growth achieved.

Yet it’s still impressive that Frost and Pegg have kept their characters fresh from film to film, Pegg going from layabout Shaun to Fuzz’s hotshot cop to near-destitute alcoholic here. Frost has gone from an even bigger layabout in Shaun to a dim but sweet sidekick to a suited businessman, albeit one with a few smackdowns in his arsenal.

If there’s one level on which The World’s End doesn’t quite hit the bullseye it’s aiming for, it’s in the character of Gary. Set up in the beginning as someone who’s meant to grate, he’s positioned for a clear journey to reformed hero, which is fine but never quite impacts in just the way intended.

But we’re mostly on board for laughs, and this is a film that never forgets how to be funny for a second. Physical gags are brilliantly timed, humour is drawn from the characters, and every actor shines, although Pegg does bag himself many of the top lines.

It also manages to be an exciting sci-fi horror at the same time, while throwing in raucously choreographed brawls, even if everyone suddenly seems to have the fighting skills of Jackie Chan.

In the end, the second apocalypse comedy of the summer is not quite the perfect send-off the trilogy merited, but it’s a pretty close run thing. Pegg and Wright represent all that’s good about British genre filmmaking, and when it comes to collaborations between them, it would be a shame if this is the end.

Ted review

Ted (15/R, 106 mins)
Director: Seth MacFarlane
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, makes his feature writing and directing debut with this high-concept fantasy comedy that shares several cast members and jokes with his monumentally bad-taste TV animation. MacFarlane also voices the eponymous Ted, a teddy that comes to life after young John gets it as a Christmas present in the 80s. Now a grown man, John (Mark Wahlberg) still lives with Ted, and he’s been seeing Lori (Mila Kunis) for four years. But she worries Ted is preventing John from making a commitment with her, and that perhaps it’s time he moved out. Though the structure is essentially that of a rom-com, it’s the same premise and the same joke as Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Paul from a couple of years ago, with a swearing, pot-smoking teddy bear replacing a swearing, pot-smoking alien. And like that film, it’s a moderately amusing one that doesn’t really know how to exploit the laughs beyond its central conceit. Like Paul, it relies largely on crudity and the sheer incongruence of its title character and, like Paul, there are fewer laughs than you might reasonably expect. It’s a case of throwing everything at the screen joke-wise in the hope that something sticks, with an OK number of guffaws among the ill-disciplined shenanigans. But it’s enlivened by some terrific cameos and is still a reasonably enjoyable movie experience, especially if you’re on the humour’s wavelength.

The Adventures of Tintin review

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (PG, 107 mins)
Director: Steven Spielberg
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Steven Spielberg’s first film since the much lamented Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull arrives as a huge, multi-million dollar gamble for many reasons.

First off, it’s an adaptation of what is a fairly niche property, Hergé’s 80 year old Belgian comic book. And, unknown for a film of this scale from the world’s most famous and successful filmmaker, it’s out in Europe now but won’t hit cinemas in the States until Christmas, the reason given that its Euro-ancestry makes it only right that it should play here first.

More to the point, the financiers will be praying it already has some hundreds of millions in the bank from its worldwide run before it arrives Stateside. That’s because the other massive gamble is that this is a motion capture animation, much like that notorious disaster from earlier this year, Mars Needs Moms, which was one of, if not the, biggest flops in box office history.

But it will sell on Spielberg’s name, and hopefully it will sell based on the fact that it’s really very good indeed, a rollicking adventure that contains several moments of unrivalled cinematic exhilaration from a director whom we’d thought had forgotten how to have fun.

We meet our hero, young reporter Tintin (voiced and performance captured by Jamie Bell) as he buys a model ship in a market, one which a lot of people seem keen to get their hands on, including the devious Sakharine (Daniel Craig).

The ship is the Unicorn, a replica of a real boat lost since the 17th century, and thought to have gone down with its secret treasure. Kidnapped by Sakharine, Tintin meets Captain Haddock, whose ancestor was captain of the Unicorn, and is played as a drunken Scotsman with a mostly agreeable but occasionally fishy accent by Andy Serkis.

It’s a blend of intrigue and action that spends much of the first half introducing plenty of engaging supporting characters, like Tintin’s dog Snowy, who frequently appears to be smarter than he is, and the useless detectives Thomson and Thompson (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg).

But it hits its stride during a marvellously inventive biplane sequence which takes Tintin and Haddock to Africa and the meat of the adventure, and an equally impressive flashback featuring the original Unicorn captain and his pirate encounter.

It’s at this point the action barely pauses for breath and when it most begins to resemble an Indy flick. The centrepiece, a chase through a Moroccan town, is truly breathtaking, although this does make it seem like the film peaks early.

A pertinent question might have been why it’s been filmed as an animation at all, and not simply live action. The answer to that lies in an astonishingly detailed level of richness and opulence in the design that would have been hard to achieve on any budget, and action sequences so fluid and imaginative that they would have been impossible as live action without the need for so much CGI that it would look like a cartoon anyway.

The issue of dead eyes and waxy features that has blighted so many mo-cap efforts also seems to have been addressed, with faces full of life and expression, although every once in a while the characters do move like they're on strings.

But that’s a tiny flaw, and let’s hope the gamble pays off, so that in a couple of years from now we’ll be enjoying the proposed Peter Jackson sequel, followed by many more Tintin adventures to come.

Paul review

Paul (15, 104 mins)
Director: Greg Mottola
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are Graeme and Clive, a pair of geeks on holiday in the States on a sci-fi tour of the southwest, where they plan to take in Area 51, Roswell and the rest.

But driving through the desert one night, they come across a runaway alien who goes by the name of Paul (computer generated and voiced by Seth Rogen). They go on the run with him, picking up Ruth (Kristen Wiig) on the way, with the government giving chase as well as Ruth’s father and a pair of rednecks.

Beyond that setup, there’s no real plot to speak of, simply a collection of daft set pieces. So it’s just as well that most of what we do get is so entertaining, with some very funny individual lines and moments.

With the vibe of Pegg and Frost’s Spaced, it’s a nicely British take on what’s usually a very American genre, though is it possible the pair are getting just a little long in the tooth to still be playing these guys? It’s their first movie together without Edgar Wright at the helm, and Frost and Pegg also collaborate on a screenplay for the first time.

It’s possible that Wright could have brought a little more pizzazz to proceedings, just as he did with his own recent Anglo-American effort, Scott Pilgrim. He may also have brought a little more polish to a script that’s funny but ultimately rather aimless, one that’s maybe a bit too quick to go for a swear instead of something clever.

Elsewhere, it’s positively bursting with movie references, with practically everything Steven Spielberg has made getting a nod. Apparently Paul has spent much of his time on earth giving sci-fi writers ideas, and one of the best gags sees him on the phone to Spielberg giving him the plot to ET.

There can be no getting away from the fact that Paul is pretty much a one joke movie, the joke being that there’s a smoking, swearing alien with the voice of Seth Rogen. The incongruity of Rogen’s booming tones coming from an archetypal little green man, and his way with words, generates frequent big laughs. If that’s not quite sufficient to hang an entire film on, it’s still enough to provide two hours of undemanding fun. Great title too.