Mubi Monday: Bring Them Down (2024)

I really wanted to like Bring Them Down, an Irish drama featuring a number of actors that I have liked in many other movies. Sadly, it feels like many other films I've seen over the past few years, although it's not as good as any of them. It's particularly irritating to see such a great cast being slightly wasted in something that could have been much better.

Christopher Abbott plays Michael, a young farmer who is trying his best to keep the family business afloat while being overlooked by his father, Ray (Colm Meaney). Times are tough, so tough that a nearby farming family becomes a bitter enemy when young Jack (Barry Keoghan) steals a couple of animals and claims that they died. That lie is revealed when Michael sees the animals displayed at a market, which leads to a confrontation between himself and Jack's father, Gary (Paul Ready). Things start to get worse from there.

Co-written by Christopher Andrews and Jonathan Hourigan, with Andrews also making his debut as a feature director after getting a few shorts under his belt, it's hard to really pin down how this fails. I think it's just too many moments that we've seen before without enough added to the material to make it seem really fresh or worth our time. This is a patchwork movie, and some of those patches are almost identical to other films that you could either revisit or watch for the first time.

Abbott does okay in the lead role, even if he suffers in comparison to almost everyone else onscreen. This is definitely time for people to try to make him a thing, but I'm not sure he's truly deserving of the push. Keoghan, on the other hand, deserves all of the positive attention and praise he's been getting over the past few years, and he delivers yet another effortlessly mesmerising turn here. Meaney is fantastic, Ready is very good indeed, and a couple of excellent supporting turns come from Aaron Heffernan and Nora-Jane Noone.

There's a lot being mixed in to a big melting pot here (family pressure, problems handed down through generations, the difficulties of making ends meet in a vocation where profit margins can depend on one good animal), but none of it is able to come through clear enough. To overuse the analogy, a lot of the flavours overwhelm one another, and you're just left with a load of bland mush. Even the non-chronological presentation of events, we get shown things and then taken back to see them from another perspective, doesn't really add the impact and tension that it should.

If you want some great Irish-set movies then I can give you a good half dozen or so. If you want films set against the harsh life of farming then I can probably recommend a few of those too. Great Barry Keoghan films? Easily done. Better roles for Colm Meaney? Just as easy. There may not be anything here that's awful, but it's shocking that so much of it feels so disappointingly average.

5/10

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Beyond The Rave (2008)

Remember when Hammer tried to take Dracula and place him into modern times? They tried their best, bless them, but the end results were poor, and seem much more dated today than any of their movies set in a yesteryear full of quaint villages, bustling taverns and aristocrats lording over local commoners. I mention those movies because this movie, from the reborn Hammer, suffers from, essentially, the same fate.

It's a vampire film, with the vampires all setting up a big rave to catch all of their victims. Among the potential victims are Ed (Jamie Dornan), a young man about to head off for active service in Iraq the next day, and his girlfriend, Jen (Nora-Jane Noone). There are also some hard gangster types (led by movie bruiser Tamer Hassan) about to get way out of their depth.

Originally released as a series of webisodes, Beyond The Rave never shakes off the feeling that it's a number of scenes stitched together with very little thought given to the overall storyline. The fact that the movie still contains the episode numbering, appearing every few minutes, doesn't help, but there's also a real lack of logic throughout, a few characters who appear and disappear at random, and a third act that's very hard to care about, thanks to the mix of derivative moments and sheer stupidity.

The acting isn't that great, although anyone expecting Tamer Hassan to do anything other than act tough and spit out expletives really shouldn't be looking in this direction anyway, but it's far from the worst aspect. Dornan and Noone make for decent leads, Matthew Forrest is likable enough as Necro, their friend, and Sebastian Knapp is stuck portraying his vampire character in the bored, moping style. Sadie Frost has a cameo, but makes a great impression with her memorable scene, Steve Sweeney is okay as one of the other hard men tagging along with Hassan, and the rest of the cast simply pop in and out of the screen without making much of an impression.

Viewers will be unsurprised to find out that director Matthias Hoene followed this up with (the much more enjoyable) Cockneys Vs. Zombies. Thankfully, with that movie he had a much better script. Writers Jon Wright and Tom Grass really drop the ball here, apparently just content to rip off the opening sequence of Blade and fill out the rest of the movie with random moments that obviously seemed a good idea while they were struggling to stretch their weak material to feature length. Prime example, an old vampire who spends his time getting stoned and talking to ravers who bump into him in the woods could end up interesting or laughable, but instead just ends up being another diversion. If his character had a decent resolution then I must have blinked and missed it. As far as I'm aware, he just disappeared after his two main scenes.

There are some decent tunes in the soundtrack, some sexy female vamps, a few decent bits of gore, and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . well, actually, that's about it. It's not quite among the very worst vampire movies out there, because there are a lot of cheap vampire movies that are SO bad, but it's not really worth your time either.

4/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Rave-DVD-Jamie-Dornan/dp/B003OUV1K6/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1393891671&sr=1-1&keywords=beyond+the+rave