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Green Zone
Director:
Paul Greengrass
Starring: Matt Damon, Greg
Kinnear, Jason Isaacs, Brendon Gleason, Amy Ryan.
The posters deliberately make you
think this is a continuation of the Bourne Trilogy and with Damon in the lead
and Greengrass (who did the last two Bourne films) directing, in some ways it
is. But whilst the Trilogy is without equal as an action series, Green Zone is a
much more complex shoot-em-up. Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller,
posted to Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction that provided the
justification for the US and Britain going to war. Miller is as tough as Bourne,
obstinate and determined and it’s that determination that puts him in harm’s way
as both Iraqis and some of his own side want him dead.
Greengrass is comfortable with political shenanigans – he started out years ago
in current affairs, making World In Action documentaries – and used as a
starting point Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s mind-boggling “Imperial Life In The
Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone”. But he doesn’t allow the politics to
get in the way of the action.
What’s clever, however, is that Damon’s character is a believer – he’s not there
to rock the boat. But Damon is superb at capturing Miller’s growing sense of
disbelief about the corruption, incompetence and malevolence he sees in the
Green Zone (the secure area in Baghdad occupied by the Coalition Provisional
Authority, in case you didn’t know) .
Soon he’s pitted against Jason Isaacs badass soldier - and nobody plays villains
better than the man who stole the show from Mel Gibson in “The Patriot”. Brendon
Gleeson, simply one of the finest actors around, is brilliant as an ambiguous
CIA man. Amy Ryan plays a disappointingly cardboard cut-out journalist.
Intelligent action movies don’t come along that often so grab this whilst you
can.
Shutter
Island
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo
DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow,
Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Elias Koteas
Dennis
Lehane’s novels have been served well by Hollywood.
Eastwood made a decent fist of “Mystic River” and Ben
Affleck’s brilliant direction of “Gone Baby Gone” even
overcame his decision to cast his runty, irritating
brother as the tough-guy lead. Scorsese, though, is the
icing on the cake.
Like Clint Eastwood, Scorsese is having a late flurry of
creative activity, although he has overall been more
consistent in his output. I don’t agree he’s America’s
greatest living director, as many claim – he’s been too
narrowly focused for that and is pretty rubbish with
female characters – but he’s been loosening up nicely.
In “Shutter Island” he returns to the Gothic sensibility
of his remake of Cape Fear. It’s 1954 and US marshall
DiCaprio is sent to an offshore lunatic asylum for the
criminally insane with his sidekick Ruffalo. They are
there to investigate the disappearance of a murderess
from her cell but DiCaprio also wants to confront Elias
Koteas, an arsonist he thinks killed his wife
(Williams). If that weren’t plot enough, when the two
cops meet psychiatrists Kingsleyand Von Sydow they
become suspicious that unethical medical experiments are
being carried out on the island.
Di Caprio, who has replaced De Niro as the Scorsese
muse, does haunted tough guy well. And the tricksy plot
in the novel mostly makes its way to the screen. Which
means that the set-up for the first seventy minutes is
overturned comprehensively in the rest of the film.
Ruffalo I’ve never got. He’s one of those actors , who
seems to do well without any discernible talent or
charisma , that makes you think there’s some secret
society at work ensuring these people have jobs. Chaz
Palmienteri, Joe Mantegna and Danny Aiello are in the
same boat (or society?). I jest, of course, you lawyers.
These fine actors all have won their success entirely on
their acting chops, I’m sure. Shame they leave those
chops at home when they make movies.
Scorsese, of course, likes to reference other films even
more than Tarantino. So here there’s Hollywood B horror
galore. Flashbacks of DiCaprio’s war, images of death
and madness are stylised but effective. Scorsese
screened two Hitchcock films for his crew and cast – “39
Steps” and “The Wrong Man”. I can’t say why because it
would be a shame to give the plot away but when you see
it, you’ll know. But watch out for homages too to
British director Michael Powell’s “Black Narcissus”. (Scorsese’s
regular editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, married Powell late
in his life.)
Scary, suspenseful, twisty and atmospheric. Go see it.
The Girl
With The Dragon Tattoo
Director: Niels Arden
Opley
Starring: Michael
Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace.
Stieg Larsson’s
immensely popular “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is
going to be made into a Hollywood film, possibly
starring BAFTA award-winner Kristen Stewart as kooky
Lisbeth Salander. But in the meantime here is the two
year old, two and a half hour, Swedish film version of
the mega-selling first part of the Millennium trilogy,
with Noomi Rapace as Salander and Michael Nyqvist as the
journalist Blomkvist.
I’ve long been bemused by the popularity of the source
material, which I found indigestible and trite, even
whilst it was dealing with important and shameful
aspects of Sweden’s history. Salander, the pierced and
tattooed wild child-cum-ace private investigator/hacker
was for me wholly unbelievable. But I know there are
around 23 million people in the world who disagree with
me and bought into the story of the punk hacker teaming
up with a disgraced journo (Blomkvist) to solve a
decades old crime.
The source novel is 500 pages long so there’s a lot to
pack into the film, even at its extended running length.
(The film is actually a condensation of two 90 minute TV
movies. The other two parts of the trilogy have also
been made into two 2-part TV movies in Sweden.) For that
reason (and because it would be difficult to put on
screen) much of Larsson’s comments on the misogyny and
corruptness of Swedish society are lost. And, whilst the
fascist crimes hidden in Sweden’s past are brought
forward here, the concluding part of the film is all a
bit of a rush.
The film is more whodunnit than thriller and both it and
the source material owe something to Chandler (the rich
man summoning the journalist to his big house to
discover the truth about a past crime is, essentially,
the start of “The Big Sleep”) and bits of Agatha
Christie – neither of which is a bad thing.
Thanks to actress Noomi Rapace’s blistering performance,
the complex, contradictory Salander actually makes more
sense on screen than in the novel – I could actually
believe in her as a real person for the first time. The
opposite is the case with Blomkvist – already pretty
much a cypher in the novel, here he is almost blank,
despite being embodied by fine actor Nyqvist. In
consequence, the unlikely pairing of the two in the
novel becomes even less likely in the film. Not a spark
flies.
The film looks good and there’s a cool musical score but
overall the film is as disappointing to me as the novel.
But no doubt 23 million viewers will say I’m wrong.
[And I’ve just seen the new edition of Empire film
magazine and seen that Kim Newman, whose opinion I
usually value, has given it 5 stars, the top rating the
magazine gives. That’s one more than the mag gives to
Scorsese or Paul Greengrass. And that is just bonkers.]
From
Paris With Love
Director:
Starring: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
John
Travolta, so long defined by his snake hips (even
beneath the late-life pasta layers) and his luxuriant
hair is really going the other way these days. First
there was the tonsorial challenge of “The Taking of
Pelham 1, 2, 3”, now he’s a bearded slaphead in this
crazily enjoyable action movie set in Paris. The
director also made the dodgily enjoyable “Taken”, in
which Liam Neeson’s ex-CIA operative fed every American
parents’ nightmare about Abroad by warning his daughter
how dangerous a trip to Paris might be. When his
daughter was then kidnapped and drugged to be sold into
prostitution by Eastern European rent-a-baddies, Neeson
was not only proved right, he was impelled into a
vigilante revenge trip that made Death Wish seem like a
family film. Nasty right wing stuff …that I’ve watched
about a dozen times.
I realise I’m reviewing an old film rather this one
because this one should be as enjoyable but the right
wing stuff just intrudes too much. Of course lone cop
movies were inherently fascist long before Dirty Harry
came along but even Dirty Harry was nuanced compared to
this. Travolta’s CIA operative is out to bust a Chinese
drug ring in Paris but in doing so he tangles with every
stereotypical foreign baddie you can think of, ending
with a middle eastern megalomaniac.
All nasty stuff but, as with “Taken”, boys will still be
thrilled by the set-piece fights, car chases and big
bangs. A lot of shit gets blown up. Travolta - as over
the top as only he can be and still get away with it -
and Rhys Meyers, as his straight man, make an
entertaining odd couple but it’s still a guilty pleasure
of a film.
Perrier’s
Bounty
Director: Ian Fitzgibbon
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Jim Broadbent, Brendan
Gleason
I’m
not sure why this doesn’t quite work as it has similar
ingredients to those that made “In Bruges”, a film with
a similar tone, such a success. Indeed, it features that
film’s Gleason, having fun as a vicious, foul-mouthed
mobster. Jim Broadbent is equally foul-mouthed as the
father of Cillian Murphy, who is desperately trying to
repay an overdue debt whilst dodging hoodlums at every
corner. It’s entertaining enough and these actors are
always good to watch but, in the words of George Clooney
in Out of Sight, it just doesn’t have that “Thing”.
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