Spooks: The Greater Good review

Spooks: The Greater Good (15, 104 mins)
Director: Bharat Nalluri
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Spooks finished its television run on the BBC four years ago after nearly a decade of spy action. It’s a curious thing to bring to the big screen, a show which no doubt has a loyal following, but also one that needs to work to satisfy long-term fans but also stand alone and be accessible to newcomers.

Whether it manages the first can only be answered by those in the know, but that it undoubtedly manages the second is to its great credit. It begins with a prisoner transport, with a terrorist named Qasim being moved in an armed convoy, with his bad guy cohorts in pursuit.

MI5 boss Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) makes the call to allow the prisoner to be rescued by his associates rather than risk a gunfight in an area busy with people. It might be realistic that they don’t put up much of a fight around civilians, but it doesn’t necessarily make for exciting cinema. What it does do is kick off the plot, which quickly reveals that it wasn’t so much feeble police work as it was about signs that point to a conspiracy.

The CIA are miffed that Qasim is on the loose, and Harry is forced to carry the can, leaving him out of a job and faking his own death in order to do his own digging. This in turn forces Harry’s former bosses to bring in Will Holloway (Kit Harington), an ex agent currently in Moscow who is brought back to London to track down Harry. Harry has disappeared, intent on finding the mole himself while also trying to stop Qasim from orchestrating a major attack on London.

It’s once Harry and Will get together that the film starts piling on backstory and histories which may or may not be part of the show’s mythology. It doesn’t really matter, since it works just fine either way, and it’s soon clear that this is serious, tough stuff, full of life and death decisions that give the title its resonance.

Harington may be the marquee guest star, but Firth is the beating heart of Spooks and Harry is a tremendous character, and pretty much the only main player to have made the transition from the TV show. Honourable, but also dangerous, uncompromising and full of tricks, his insistence that agents can either do well, which is to follow orders, or do good, which is to do the right thing, gives the film an edge of questionable morality over others of its ilk.

There’s not much glamour going on here though; this is British spying, where the reality is London traffic and pouring rain. Harington gets to do a small amount of Bourne-style clambering and acrobatics, but it’s playing wannabe in these scenes and close-up fights, something for the trailer rather than a true representation of what the film is.

Wisely it doesn’t try to overplay the action though, with the focus on intrigue making it gripping as a result. Mostly it’s very good at detailing actual spy-work, something that’s often missing from modern day espionage movies. It’s Bond without the superhero, mired in politics and really quite absorbing, with secrets and hidden codes all part of the shenanigans of this particular spy game.

The plot barrels along, twisting this way and that, stretching out several genuinely tense sequences, and always leaving the question hanging of who is on what side. Some previous investment in this world might offer even more value, but even for audiences discovering Spooks for the first time it’s still a lot of fun.

Midnight Run Blu-ray review

Midnight Run (18, 126 mins)
★ ★ ★ ★ ★

FILM
Once in a decade, or perhaps even less, a movie comes along where the chemistry of everyone involved just clicks and the results are far better than the constituent parts ever suggested they could be. On paper Midnight Run looks like a fairly standard crime caper, wherein a bounty hunter has only a couple of days to transport an embezzling accountant cross country, with both the police and the mob in chase.

But in practice it’s a work of rare brilliance, thanks first and foremost to its miraculous co-stars Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, a pairing that has rarely if ever been matched in the annals of buddy comedy. Antagonising each other from minute one, both play it absolutely straight and mine every scene for maximum laughs, while director Martin Brest marshals the action superbly.

The structure is airtight, the profanity-laden script remains endlessly quotable, and perfectly cast supporting play from the likes of Joe Pantoliano, John Ashton and Dennis Farina as the bail bondsman, a rival bounty hunter and the gangster with whom De Niro and Grodin both have a connection just adds to the laughs. Throw in Yaphet Kotto as an exasperated fed and what you get is deep fried gold in every scene. De Niro may have sullied his comedy account with junk in the years since but be in no doubt, over a quarter of a century on, Midnight Run is still one of the best action comedies ever made.

DISC
You'd struggle to call the upgrade to Blu-ray a revelation, with an image that's generally on the soft side. But scenes have decent depth and detail and it's certainly a step up from DVD.

Extras are interview heavy but they're bang up to date and they're terrific. Top of the tree is Grodin, who talks about winning the role and who else was in the running (including, believe it or not, Cher!) alongside his disdain for pandering to class systems. Joey Pants and John Ashton chip in similarly fun anecdotes about getting their roles and their acting careers in general, and alongside screenwriter George Gallo, each of these chats is well worth checking out. They run over an hour in total, and while it would have been great to hear from De Niro, he probably wouldn't have offered anything remotely as interesting as these guys.

The Gunman review

The Gunman (15/R, 115 mins)
Director: Pierre Morel
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Sean Penn becomes the latest actor to take a shot at over-50 action stardom with this overwrought Euro-pudding that has ideas way above its station for a movie from the director of Taken. A prologue set a few years ago in war-torn Congo introduces us to Penn as part of a team of mercenaries protecting a humanitarian aid crew. While they're there they also happen to have a sideline in assassinations, and Penn’s shooting of a government official comes back to haunt him in the present day when he links an attempt to kill him to the plot. As an exercise in globe-trotting, The Gunman is slick, its fights are crunching and the body count is massive, and Penn does get to showcase some nice skills in a couple of decent action sequences. But it’s all rather dour and much too leisurely to convince, jazzed up with a classy cast (Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance and Idris Elba are in there too) yet hardly any more legitimate than The Expendables, with its attempt to call attention to humanitarian issues proving risible. It’s a Jason Statham movie that thinks it’s fancy, too silly to be taken seriously and too serious to be any fun.

Run All Night review

Run All Night (15/R, 114 mins)
Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

There’s something to be admired about the ambition of this thumping thriller that looks on paper like another delivery from the Liam Neeson action assembly line. Playing a much more interesting character than he often has recently, Neeson works as a hitman for neighbourhood mobster and long-time friend Ed Harris. When Harris’s wayward son botches a deal, Neeson is forced to kill him, in turn forcing him and his own estranged son to go on the run. It’s muscular stuff, featuring the standard punch-chase-shoot shenanigans, and every bit as daft as you could hope for. It may be called Run All Night, but it’s not quite as non-stop as the title suggests, with quite a few diversions along the way to slow the pace. Still, that offers some moments for reflection between Harris and Neeson, and a good deal more character depth than expected, even if it does borrow its plot points liberally from Road to Perdition. Neeson still has a particular set of skills, this time with some substance to back it up, topped off with a fun cameo from the only actor in the world even more grizzled than he is.

Jupiter Ascending review

Jupiter Ascending (12A/PG-13, 127 mins)
Directors: The Wachowskis
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

If you're after a full-on bonkers fantasy epic that's as beautifully designed as it is camp, then Jupiter Ascending should fulfil most of your requirements. Jupiter (Mila Kunis) is the ordinary earth girl who learns she's a reincarnated space princess, with Channing Tatum as her half-wolf, half-albino, pointy-eared, hover-booted protector in an immensely silly intergalactic power struggle. A first half on earth is mostly a series of stylish fights and rescues, and while the second half gets a bit more talky and plotty, the move to space allows The Wachowskis to go daft with their gadgets and set design. They already reinvented the action wheel with The Matrix so there's not really anything here to make jaws drop, but they can still put together an elaborate, FX-heavy sequence without having to resort to crazed editing. It’s might be missing that massive action centrepiece, but there’s always something worth looking at, Eddie Redmayne hams it up magnificently as the baddie, and in terms of fun it’s far more Flash Gordon than John Carter.

Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb review

Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (PG, 98 mins)
Director: Shawn Levy
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Talk about stretching an idea so thin you can start to see through it. The premise of the first Night at the Museum movie eight years ago was that a magical tablet could bring the exhibits of a New York museum to life at night, which was realised through what at the time were fairly nifty computer generated effects.

Ben Stiller was Larry, the night security guard at the museum who got caught up in the middle of the mayhem when dinosaur skeletons and Attila the Hun starting running amok. Now Larry is in charge of putting on a show for dignitaries, who think the animated exhibits are special effects.

Before we get to that there’s a prologue set in 1930s Egypt that gives us a bit of half-hearted background on the tablet, as some Indiana Jones-style tomb raiders disturb it amid the standard warnings of a curse.

For reasons never explained this curse involved absolutely nothing happening for nearly 80 years, but now the tablet is corroding and the exhibits are going screwy. The solution, invented by the film’s writers for no reason other than it would be nice to go to London, is that they must go to the British Museum to try to free the curse.

Or something. Because none of it follows a remotely logical or coherent path, and there’s really very little to it in terms of threat or excitement. The situation is paper-thin, the jokes are lame and the special effects aren’t even particularly special. It looks pretty horrible too, the direction is lacklustre and it seems scaled down from previous instalments.

There’s the need for some uninspired padding involving Larry’s teenage son, and whether he will or won’t go to college. Another exciting subplot to look out for in the fourth film; will Larry do the dishes or leave them until the morning?

Yet for some reason it’s perfectly watchable and affable, mostly thanks to a game cast, and mostly thanks to Dan Stevens. He pops up as Sir Lancelot and has some fun with the action shenanigans while also demonstrating a nice way with comic timing as he fails to understand anything going on around him.

We also get the final acting appearance of Robin Williams, who reprises his role as Theodore Roosevelt. It’s hardly a fitting send off, with he and just about every character other than Larry and Lance given insufficient material to make any impression.

In the end this is unlikely to be remembered as one of the great trilogies. Really it barely passes muster, and in a few years there might not even be many people who remember it was a trilogy at all.

But it rattles along quickly and it’s never dull, which actually counts for something. And if it looks like it’s only scraping a third star by the skin of its teeth, which it is, that’s because it’s Christmas, and it’s because we get to see Dick Van Dyke dance.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies review

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (12A/PG-13, 144 mins)
Director: Peter Jackson
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

It’s been a fair old trek to get to here, this final part of the Hobbit prequel trilogy. And, much like the experiences of its characters, it’s been a frequently exhausting and arduous journey punctuated by individual moments of relief and enjoyment.

The late decision to make three films rather than two has meant it’s often felt like you were journeying across Middle Earth in real time, and it all began to smack of cashing in. We certainly get value for money in terms of minutes in the cinema, even if this finale is a relatively brisk sub-2.5 hours, but an awful lot of that time feels like we’re treading water.

Has it been worth it in the end? Will many people plough through the six-film marathon of these plus the Lord of the Rings trilogy or will they, like now happens with Star Wars, judiciously skip the weaker entries in order to get to the good stuff?

Certainly one element where this is likely to score with fans is in the linking done to Rings. Some of it might be a bit clunky and forced, but more often than not the bridge building is both fun and evocative and likely to put a Christmas re-watch of Rings on a lot of people’s agendas.

But for now, we rejoin this poor relation directly after the end of last year’s second film, as dragon Smaug wreaks his desolation on the village of Laketown. Exposing the somewhat arbitrary stopping point of Part 2, this episode is swiftly resolved, leaving dwarf leader Thorin (Richard Armitage) in control of the mountain hall of Erebor and its enormous piles of gold.

The trouble is he’s turned mad with power, and a lot of time is spent on Thorin’s intransigence, which is threatening to be the catalyst for war, with the elves and men also ready to stake a claim to the treasure. But it’s nowhere near as compelling as the hold the One Ring had over Frodo and mostly there’s a lot of sitting about, which at least makes a change from all the walking in the first two movies.

Having really shone in the second movie, Martin Freeman is sidelined here as Bilbo becomes a minor character in his own movie. But when Bilbo does get involved, he proves the worth of Hobbits and offers a reminder of why we love them.

It’s difficult though to have any great investment in these characters beyond Bilbo and wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), which is a major issue. Billy Connolly turns up as a dwarf king with bizarrely computer enhanced features, to swear and stick the nut on orcs but, as ever, almost none of Bilbo’s companions stand out.

Lord of the Rings succeeded because we cared deeply about the Fellowship, but that’s sadly lacking here. It also worked because it blended real world locations with brilliantly realised visual effects; now it looks like none of it might be real at all, especially darker scenes. Just because Peter Jackson has the ability to create anything with CGI, it doesn’t mean he should. Frankly at times it looks ridiculous, and when you’ve got dwarves riding rams up mountainsides you’ve probably gone too far.

This is highlighted even more by the truly horrific High Frame Rate process, which makes proceedings look like a filmed play, shiny and inauthentic and totally lacking in filmic texture. It’s not too bad when no one has to move but most of the time it’s embarrassing, and it’s astonishing that someone thought something that looked as bad as this was acceptable to project for top dollar.

Still, Jackson is more than capable of conjuring greatness in bursts, starting with Smaug’s terrifying, fire-breathing onslaught, even if we then have to wade through the added guff and padding of the arguments among the Laketown survivors.

But the movie is called The Battle of the Five Armies, and when the men, elves, dwarfs, orcs and various sundry beasties go head to head, it really earns its corn. Pretty much the final hour is a massive ruck that impresses with its sheer scale at least, though some of the armies look a little too mathematically precise in the way they're computer generated. Things get much more involving when it splinters off into individual fights, some of which are exciting and entertaining, some of which go on forever.

In the end, if it works at all, it’s because of the world we’re in, it’s because of what Tolkien has created and it’s because Lord of the Rings exists and we know there’s so much more to see here.

No doubt Jackson cares about the product he’s delivering with this prequel trilogy, but ultimately it will probably be looked upon by audiences as an obligation rather than a necessity.

Horrible Bosses 2 review

Horrible Bosses 2 (15/R, 108 mins)
Director: Sean Anders
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

The law of diminishing returns for comedy sequels comes into effect with this grim retread that once again stars Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day as a trio of hopeless friends who turn to crime when their luck deserts them. After the events of the first movie they’ve quit their jobs with the intention of running their own company and have invented a shower device, the demonstration of which on a chat show makes for a very early example of just what level of coarseness this return is going to be reaching for. When a flashy businessman (Chris Pine) and his father (Christoph Waltz) go back on a deal, they decide to kidnap and ransom Pine and, to no one’s surprise they're even worse kidnappers than they are murderers - they were dim in the first film, but they surely weren’t this dim. You can 100% guarantee that Day and Sudeikis will behave like morons, with every plot point driven by their idiocy, and it soon becomes tiresome. It’s thoroughly undisciplined, with people just allowed to talk until one of them hopefully says something funny, which is very rarely the case. Paying no regard to logic, which again can be overlooked if the laughs are plentiful enough, the series has gone from pretty funny to pretty much a laugh free zone. Quite the most remarkable cast is topped up with a visit to Bateman’s old boss in prison (Kevin Spacey), while Jennifer Aniston returns to lash on the crudity. A relaxed Bateman does his low-key exasperation while Day screams every line in deeply wearying style, and in the end it’s far closer to headache-inducing than funny.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 review

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 (12A/PG-13, 123 mins)
Director: Francis Lawrence
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The final book in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy gets a now standard two-movie split, and if you haven’t seen the films that have preceded it, you haven’t got a chance with this first part.

It begins immediately after the events of the second film, Catching Fire, with Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) taken from the Games arena and waking up to find herself in the supposedly destroyed District 13.

We’ve had glimpses of the bigger picture before, but now that what was essentially training in the Games is out of the way, we can get down to the real business. And that aim is full-on revolution, the overthrow of the corrupt and authoritarian government of the Capital, led by President Snow (Donald Sutherland).

The rebels are fronted by Philip Seymour Hoffman and newcomer to the series Julianne Moore as President Coin. Katniss’s actions in the arena have been the spur for uprising in the Districts, and they want her to be the face of their campaign, to film propaganda videos that let the people see there’s hope.

She’s more interested in the fate of Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who is being held in the Capital, and it’s this tension that drives the drama rather than a reliance on set pieces. Because, goodness knows, it sure ain’t an action film, which is far from a bad thing.

As the third part in a four-part trilogy, there were always likely to be some pacing issues, and occasionally events that could take up one minute of screen time can be stretched into three or four. Some characters are afforded more screen time than might otherwise be the case or we’re introduced to people who don’t feel entirely relevant.

It’s a bit like trying to make a full meal from a limited set of ingredients, but it’s compensated for by a dramatic escalation of the threat level. Snow is going to town to destroy every threat posed by the Districts, stopping at nothing short of genocide, and the dangers are very real indeed.

This is serious, sturdy stuff, looking at fascism and totalitarianism and evoking World War II with its air-raids and underground shelters and wars of information. It’s also reminiscent of the third Matrix film or Return of the Jedi with its hidden rebel base antics, and the groundwork is worth it for a number of powerful, stirring moments.

Lawrence holds it all together as ever, with another committed and impassioned performance that reveals the steel of Katniss and demonstrates that she’s the best young actress on the planet. By the time this series closes out next November, we’ll hopefully be left with a sci-fi saga to be treasured for years to come.

Interstellar review

Interstellar (12A/PG-13, 166 mins)
Director: Christopher Nolan
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

There are very few directors out there who would be given a budget the size of Interstellar’s for a non-franchise or non-adaptation movie. But very few directors are Christopher Nolan, and this is 2014’s most anticipated movie, and has been since it was first announced.

It’s also been a fine year for Matthew McConaughey, and he caps it with the lead in this vastly ambitious sci-fi epic that’s two parts magnificence to one part frustration. He plays Cooper, a one-time pilot who is now a farmer, as are many people since a crop blight led to a world food shortage and turned many parts into a dustbowl.

But life has to go on in this near-future world for Cooper and his son and daughter. He’s all about the pioneer spirit, living in a world where he’s no longer able to use his skills, until he encounters a team of scientists led by Professor Brand and his daughter Amelia (Michael Caine and Anne Hathaway), They have a plan to leave earth in order to find new inhabitable worlds since, as Brand puts it, “mankind was born on earth, it wasn’t meant to die here”.

This sends Cooper, Amelia and another pair of astronauts on a two-year journey to a wormhole that’s been discovered near Saturn, and to whatever lies beyond that. That’s all you really need to know, because from this point in there are many thrills and surprises to be discovered in a film that’s all about what we leave behind for future generations. There are echoes of 2001 in its silent, balletic space sequences, as well as in some of the more surreal imagery that Nolan unleashes in the later stages.

A lot of the time it’s hard science, as actual rocket scientists come up with plans for how to save mankind. Questions of relative time may scramble the brain, but it’s done with the utmost sincerity and not without humour, which is a welcome touch. It’s not an action film, certainly not a single-minded one like Gravity, so that shouldn’t be expected, but when Nolan does throw some in, he runs with ideas and visuals that make for jaw-dropping sequences.

For all its spectacle though, it’s the immense force of the human drama that gives Interstellar its impact. The implications and the scale of what we’re dealing with here can be difficult to contemplate, and when it concentrates on its profound examination of humanity, it approaches brilliance.

In most regards, this is exactly what we should be demanding from our blockbusters. It’s conceived with intelligence and far-reaching intent and executed with immense skill, yet it never quite achieves that moment of transcendence that it seems to threaten for the first two hours.

There’s plenty of room for trimming in its much too generous running time, and Nolan throws into the mix the kinds of characters and plot developments you might expect from lesser filmmakers, undoing a lot of good work in a final hour that at times can be sluggish and ponderous.

So the year’s most anticipated film has turned out to be a good one, at times a very good one. But in the end does it really amount to much more than you might find in the very best episodes of Star Trek?