Prime Time: Brahms: The Boy II (2020)

I'm not going to spoil anything that happened in the film, but The Boy was a pleasant surprise. A supernatural tale that became an enjoyable thriller, it managed to perfectly mix the silly and the effective in equal measure. It was no classic, but I'd happily recommend it to people looking for some tame entertainment. 

It certainly didn't need a sequel though. And it certainly didn't need a sequel as daft as this.

Katie Holmes and Owain Yeoman play the parents of a young boy named Jude (Christopher Convery). After the traumatic experience of having their home broken into, Jude stops speaking. They head off for a little convalescence, and happen to end up in the same location as Brahms, the doll that seemed to spooky and lively in the first movie. Jude grows immediately attached to Brahms, and wants his parents to abide by a number of rules that ensure people treat the doll as he likes to be treated. Things start to get increasingly tense within the family unit, and anyone trying to separate Jude and Brahms does so at their own peril.

Director William Brent Bell and writer Stacey Menear both return for this second doll-centric tale, and it's almost as if they resent some of the decisions they made in the first film. This decides to push things further, to remove any ambiguity, and to take viewers on a journey that ends with some moments that are so ridiculous, and so far removed from the first film that I'm surprised Bell and Menear even decided to use the name. You could argue that the developed backstory makes it obvious that this follows on from the first film, but all of that could have been tweaked (or, better yet, just dropped).

Yeoman is the more passive of the two adults, just following the lead of Holmes, who has to show stress and worry from her earliest scenes. Neither of the leads ends up faring well, considering the nonsense they have to work with, but it's Holmes who suffers the most, mainly due to her having to seem freaked out by the doll even before things start to get stranger and stranger. Convery is good enough in the role of Jude, spending a lot of the film almost shielding himself with Brahms, and it is always good to see Ralph Ineson pop up in movies recently, even when his role takes him to as silly a place as this one does. 

If you're morbidly curious about this after seeing the first film, let that morbid curiosity go. There's a minimum degree of technical competence throughout, saving it being the very worst of the worst, but it's a pretty terrible movie. All it does is undo the goodwill earned by the first film.

 

3/10

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Logan Lucky (2017)

Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starring a cast of many familiar faces. Focusing on a big robbery. You could easily forgive the many reviewers who decided to describe this film as a blue-collar take on Ocean's Eleven. That's, basically, what it is.

Channing Tatum plays Jimmy Logan, a working Joe who finds out that he has to be let go by his employers, currently working on a job at Charlotte Motor Speedway. He's also upset by the news that his ex is about to move further away, making it tougher for him to have time with his daughter. So he visits the bar run by his brother (Adam Driver, his character is also a veteran who lost a hand in the war) and starts to formulate a plan to rob the Speedway. The plan relies on a number of skilled individuals, including a safecracker (Daniel Craig) who is currently serving time in prison. Do they actually have a chance of pulling this thing off?

Considering this is the kind of thing that Soderbergh has mastered over the past couple of decades, Logan Lucky is enjoyable enough, but also not as enjoyable as it could be. Unlike other Soderbergh ensemble films, few of the supporting characters make as good an impression as you'd expect. It's a major plus that Tatum, Driver and Craig make a very entertaining trio of leads, otherwise this might have been a complete bust.

The main problem lies with the script, written by a Rebecca Blunt (although the identity of the writer has been question by people who think it may be a pseudonym), which is never that funny, and also doesn't really feel that neat when it comes to the mechanics of the robbery. That may be the point, this isn't a group of smooth operators doing what comes naturally, but a heist movie still needs you to believe in the skill of those performing the main act, which doesn't happen here.

As well as the cast members already mentioned, who do great work, you also get performances from Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Seth MacFarlane, and quite a few others. Keough and Holmes do as well as they can with their characters, while MacFarlane struggles to make his unnecessary character work at all (not his fault).

There's fun to be had here, in the performances and some of the dialogue. You just can't help feeling that, especially considering everyone involved on both sides of the camera, it should be a lot more fun.

6/10

Logan Lucky is available to buy here.
Or, if you're in America, get it here.

Go (1999)

Directed by Doug Liman, and written by John August, Go is often described to people as a teen version of Pulp Fiction. Seriously, you'll find that phrase in almost every major review of the movie, so I decided not to buck the trend here. It's got drugs, some violence, plenty of dark humour, a great soundtrack, and a few main events shown from the viewpoints of different characters, which all means that the comparison point is a good one, even if Pulp Fiction is itself hugely influenced by a multitude of movies to have come before it.

Anyway, let me try to describe the various escapades. First of all, we get Ronna (Sarah Polley) looking to make some quick money as she faces eviction over the Christmas holiday season. She seizes her chance when a couple of guys (Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr) come into her work looking for her colleague, Simon (Desmond Askew). Simon often sells drugs so when these two potential customers start to enquire about any other potential supply avenues, Ronna decides to arrange a sale. She then has to buy product from dealer Todd Gaines (Timothy Olyphant), which puts her at serious risk if anything goes wrong during the proposed exchange. Things go wrong. Meanwhile, Simon is having a blast in Las Vegas with his friends (Taye Diggs, Breckin Meyer and James Duval). Vegas is such a glorious place to be, as long as nothing goes wrong. Things go wrong. There's more to discover here, but part of the joy of the film is finding out how the tales are interconnected and just what changes when seen from a different viewpoint.

Liman and August do a fantastic job here, keeping the energy levels up without the film every feeling hyperactive, and peppering conversations with great lines and references without it feeling overly-stylised. They also take a number of standard situations that we've seen done many times before and manage to give each one a twist, often weaving confidently between the sublie and the ridiculous. All of this would be impossible if it wasn't for the fantastic ensemble cast, taking the material and elevating every bit of it.

Polley, Wolf, Mohr, Askew and Diggs have rarely been better, and Olyphant is as great as he always is. Then we have William Fichtner as a slightly strange lawman, Jane Krakowski as his equally strange wife, Nathan Bexton as a pill-popper who hallucinates about conversations with cats and dancing with strangers to the Macarena, and even Katie Holmes does okay in her role. There's even a small, fun role for Melissa McCarthy that's worth looking out for.

There's one character I have yet to mention, and that is the soundtrack. Jam-packed with cracking tunes, Go has one of the best soundtracks of the 1990s. It's one that I listen to a lot, and it's also one that perfectly complements the visual style of the film. From the opening Columbia Pictures logo to the closing credits, this is another film that proves just how important the perfect song choice can be.

It's worth noting that what I find fun and cool could just as easily be viewed as tiresome and annoying by someone else. This is a film I used to recommend heartily to everyone until I started to realise that not everyone was won over by it in the same way as I was. I still heartily recommend it, but now do so with the standard, usually unspoken, proviso: No film is for everyone.

9/10

http://www.amazon.com/Go-Special-Sarah-Polley/dp/0767835093/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1418650151&sr=1-2&keywords=go

Disturbing Behavior (1998)

Disturbing Behavior is a film that I have a lot of fond memories of. It came along when I was just starting to upgrade my movie collection from VHS to DVD, the trailer was a great one, and it just kept intriguing me until I could finally get my hands on a copy. Of course, almost inevitably, I was left a bit disappointed when I finally got to see it, but a recent rewatch actually shows that it holds up as one of the better teen thrillers to come along in the '90s. It may be slick, and it may Katie Holmes failing at being a bit tough and edgy, but it's also impressively subversive throughout.

James Marsden plays Steve Clark, the new kid in town (with his younger sister, played by Katharine Isabelle), a young man who stands almost at the exact halfway point between the more rebellious kids and a group of teens who are so well-behaved that it's spooky. When he's warned about events int he local area by Gavin Strick (Nick Stahl) he shrugs it off as paranoia, the kid obviously smokes too much weed, but that doesn't spoil their friendship, especially when he gets to spend time with Rachel (Holmes). Unfortunately, it turns out that Gavin is the only one who realises the horrible truth of what's going on, and before you can say "Stepford teens" things get dangerous for Steve and Rachel.

Written by Scott Rosenberg, and directed by David Nutter, this is a film that contains a surprisingly high number of really great moments, many of them jarring nicely with the rest of the teen thriller framework. Even the opening sequence, which starts out like so many other teen movie moments, takes a very dark turn, and should clue viewers in to the fact that they're about to watch something that may not be as advertised. And the scene with Lorna Longley (Crystal Cass) trying to seduce Steve is one that won't be forgotten any time soon.

Marsden is just fine in the lead role, although he's never been leading man material (sorry to say, I like the guy but it's true). Holmes is okay, I guess, but a bit laughable at times with her desperate attempt to portray someone cool and tough. Stahl is the highlight, as sweet and likable as he is jittery and helpless. The rest of the young cast, including Cass, Isabelle, A. J. Buckley and Chad Donella all do fine work.The adults, including Bruce Greenwood, Steve Railsback and William Sadler, are all good, with the latter particularly amusing in his role (a man who knows a lot more than he lets on).

You may not end up liking Disturbing Behavior as much as I do, but I recommend giving it a try, especially if you've avoided it over the years because it looks like "just a teen thriller". It IS that, but it's much better than many others that have been released in the last two decades.

7/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Disturbing-Behaviour-DVD-James-Marsden/dp/B00004D37A/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1394042971&sr=1-1&keywords=disturbing+behaviour