Gemini Man (2019)

Three years before Will Smith spectacularly self-harmed Will Smith in front of millions of viewers, Will Smith starred in a film which had him trying to avoid being caused harm by . . . Will Smith. Many might have tried to call Gemini Man a prescient film when it was released, but nobody could have seen just how prescient it ended up being.

A high concept written by David Benioff, Darren Lemke, and Billy Ray, and directed by Ang Lee, Gemini Man is an action thriller based around the sci-fi idea of cloning a top assassin to then kill and take over from that assassin when they have come to the end of their usefulness. Smith plays Henry Brogan, and younger images of him are used to portray Junior (aka the clone). Brogan ends up being targeted when he's due to retire, and he ends up on the run with an agent named Danny Zakarewski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) as they attempt to stay one step ahead of the soldiers under the command of the ruthless Clay Verris (Clive Owen).

Although this film would have benefited from keeping the central idea a bit more of a mystery (I have mentioned it here because it's on the poster and was all over the marketing), it still manages to be quite good fun when delivering on the action front. Okay, viewers may get a bit impatient while they wait on Brogan to accept the strange reality of his predicament, but Lee and the writers try to keep everyone distracted with a fine opening sequence, a great late-night attempted ambush, and an extended gunfight that is inventive and thrilling. And that's without even mentioning the great moments that have Owen chewing the scenery in a turn that has him one step removed from Dr. Robotnik.

Smith is great in the lead role, and his familiar visage is used well for the younger version of himself. He's always convincing, and this feels like an a-list star doing their best to elevate b-list material. It's a gimmick film, but that gimmick is boosted by Smith's presence. Winstead is very good, and convinces in the action set-pieces, although she has to rely on Smith, sadly, and I still think she deserves a full-on action lead role with franchise potential (Kate came closest, but also seemed to quickly get lost in the sea of wannabe-Wickflicks). As for Owen, see my previous comment about him. It's no criticism. I love his performance here, and he seems to be having loads of fun in his role. The other person worth mentioning is Benedict Wong, playing a good friend/facilitator named Baron who wants to help keep our leads breathing.

It doesn't really matter how good the acting or the action is though. What matters is how convincing the film is when old Will Smith comes face to face with young Will Smith. I would say that, for the most part, it works well enough. Using a variety of tricks to hide his face for certain sections of the film, Smith the younger looks decent enough when finally allowed to be front and centre. There are a few moments that have him looking like a paused videogame character compared to the fully real humans alongside him, but they don't really unbalance the film. Until the very last scenes. I'm not sure if this was shot in reverse order or if the technology couldn't handle showing us this character in full daylight, but the very end of this movie has the worst computer imagery of the entire film, which makes it hard to get through the end credits while remembering the earlier highlights.

There are other mis-steps. Both main Smiths are a bit over-emotional when you consider their occupation, the timeline never feels quite right, and some turns in the third act feel a bit too hasty and implausible. I still rate this as a fun time though. It's not great, but it's good enough to help you pass a couple of hours.

6/10

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Volcano (1997)

As much as I love the craggy face and dour demeanour of Tommy Lee Jones, I have never looked at him onscreen and thought "that man needs to be a blockbuster star". That isn't to say that I don't like seeing him in films, and he's been great in some blockbuster fare, but he just doesn't feel like the kind of person who would be comfortable carrying a major event movie on his shoulders. Volcano proves that.

The plot is silly. A volcano starts to rise up in the middle of Los Angeles, causing the kind of mayhem that you would expect. Jones plays Mike Roark, the director of the city's Office of Emergency Management (which you get some information about in the opening scenes), and he's about to have one hell of an emergency to try and manage. Anne Heche is Dr. Amy Barnes, a seismologist who spends most of the movie giving people warnings that they tend to ignore until the volcano makes it impossible. And Mike is supposed to be spending time with his young daughter, Kelly (Gaby Hoffmann), of course, which gives us one more main character to watch being put in lava-centric peril.

The only writing credit for Jerome Armstrong, and one of the worst writing credits for Billy Ray, Volcano is, from my recollection, the weaker of the two major volcano movies released in 1997. Even when it is getting some things right, the earlier scenes of people discovering unexpected issues with heat building up under some L.A. streets, it's simply not as good as dozens of other natural disaster movies that I could recommend. The biggest problem is that the central idea never feels plausible, despite everyone involved having to keep a straight face. It also doesn't help when the script makes a clumsy attempt to show how working together on this emergency can  . . . ummmmm . . . end racism?!?!?

Director Mick Jackson seems uninterested in the material, or maybe he's just not able to get the best out of it. That wouldn't be surprising, considering his filmography (although it should be noted that this is the man who helmed Threads, a TV movie often hailed as one of the bleakest and most terrifying TV movies ever made), but perhaps the fault can be shared between Jackson and those who gave him the job. There's nothing else that he's done that makes him seem like the right choice for a blockbuster like this.

I'd love to praise the cast, but I can't. None of them can overcome the horrible script, which also forces in some romantic longing between Jones and Heche in scenes that are truly cringe-inducing. Having said that, Jones still has a presence, as ever, and is very watchable in the moments that don't completely undermine him by forcing him into the box-ticking gruff hero moments. Heche is saddled with being the brains and exposition except whenever she needs to just stand back and look on at Jones being all heroic. Hoffmann is there to be kept safe, and nothing more. The supporting cast does have some treats, with Don Cheadle having some fun, and small roles for people like Keith David, John Carroll Lynch, Richard Schiff, and a decent selection of "where do I know them from again?" faces. I also have to praise Marcello Thedford, mainly because of his ability to tolerate some of the worst writing in scenes that show him helping out emergency workers who wouldn't necessarily be so ready to help him out if the roles were reversed.

I was trying to think of other things I might lightly praise, be it the score from Alan Silvestri of the cinematography by Theo van de Sande, but there's nothing. The special effects are generally okay, for the time, but it's a spectacle movie without enough proper spectacle, which wouldn't be so bad if it also had other stuff going on. It doesn't.

3/10

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Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Never you mind those other Terminator sequels, THIS is the one true sequel to the first two movies. This is the timeline to stick with. This is the film that will right any wrongs from previous instalments. That's what James Cameron would like you to believe anyway. And some people might have believed him, there's always a slim chance, but most of us had been burned before, with a lot of the same positive soundbites being used to sell increasingly inferior sci-fi action movies that were always suffering from a lack of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The good thing is that this will be, for many, better than Terminator Genisys (although that's not a high benchmark to surpass). I still slightly prefer the previous instalment, but that's just me. The other good thing is that this has a decent amount of screentime for Schwarzenegger. There are some more positives, but not enough to quite outweigh the negatives.

Fate has been changed, and humanity may be safe. To a degree. There will still be a war, deadly machines will still want to kill off the human race, but at least everyone may have avoided judgment day, thanks to the actions of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Which just means that it's time for a new person to become the prey (this time it's Dani Ramos, played by Natalia Reyes), a new protector to help her (an augmented human, Grace, played by Mackenzie Davis), and a newer type of robo-killer (REV-9, played by Gabriel Luna, a terminator that can operate his fluid exterior and metal endoskeleton independently of one another, if necessary). Sarah Connor ends up helping Dani and Grace, as does a surprisingly domesticated T-808 (Arnie).

Tim Miller is the man trusted to direct the action this time around, working from a script by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, and something becomes clear within the first 10-15 minutes. This has been created to remind you of how much you love the second Terminator movie. That's all I can think of anyway. There's no other reason to have such poor CGI on display (the first main action sequence in a factory setting is an embarrassment of rich embarrassments), and to kick things off with a sequence that essentially feels like a gauntlet being thrown down that it doesn't deserve to have grappled hold of in the first place.

Things do pick up after the first act, but it's a bit too little too late, and relies on a hell of a lot of goodwill, and NO moments of overthinking things, from the viewer. Paradoxes and illogical moments abound, while characters range from the horribly bland (Dani, the REV-9) to the horribly malformed by the needs of the script (Connor, the T-808). Grace is the high point, which is mainly thanks to the sheer willpower of the talented Mackenzie Davis.

I am struggling to think of those who will find this anything more than a sci-fi action flick with a couple of ridiculous set-pieces (most of the third act is chock full of the kind of action that relies on every viewer not just suspending disbelief, but deliberately forgetting how any physical forces around us actually work). Newcomers won't get the references, those who have enjoyed the series from the first film will wish they weren't getting the references, and everyone will be happy enough if this is the last ever attempt to yet again keep wringing money from something that became irrelevant at least a decade ago.

5/10

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Overlord (2018)

If there's one thing we all know by now it's that Nazis would have made an army of zombie soldiers if they could have. The only thing worse than a Nazi is a zombie Nazi, and they have appeared in popular entertainment quite often over the past couple of decades. They appear here, but the plot chooses to focus on the very real horrors of war, first and foremost, with the standard genre thrills mixed in slowly but surely until brought to the surface for the third act.

Starting with a group of soldiers being airdropped into Germany, Overlord is a tense and visceral experience from the opening scenes. The skies are shredded with anti-aircraft gunfire, meaning that many of the young men are killed before they even get a chance to jump out of their craft. The ones that land are immediately in great danger, and it never gets easier. But the mission is a vital one, destroying a radio tower that has been causing all kinds of problems, to put it mildly. The soldiers find someone willing to help hide them, a young French woman named Chloe, they start to figure out how best to complete their mission, but it all becomes even more complicated when they discover bodies being experimented on and a serum that seems capable of creating mutated super-soldiers.

Written by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith, it's intriguing to see that this was developed from a story idea from the former, who has a background in more varied dramatic works. Smith seems to be the horror guy, of the two, but both have worked well together in balancing the wartime tension with the pulpy entertainment aspects.

Director Julius Avery, working on what is only his second feature, does a great job with the material. It's often dark, and the action is frantic at times, but you never lose sight of the identity and location of the various characters, and the set-pieces are perfectly paced. Special effects are great throughout, impressively bizarre and bloody, but the focus stays on the main characters, even while horrific oddities start to multiply around them.

The cast are another big plus. Jovan Adepo and Wyatt Russell are the two main soldiers, with Russell being the one who ends up in charge after so many deaths in the first act, and both of them do excellent work (I'm not familiar with Adepo but have already come to expect excellence every time I see Russell onscreen). Mathilde Ollivier is equally good as Chloe, a determined survivor with loved ones to look after, and the main villain of the piece is played with relish by Pilou Asbæk. Other characters are portrayed by John Magaro, Iain De Caestecker, Jacob Anderson, Gianny Taufer (a standout as the younger brother of Chloe), and Dominic Applewhite.

There may be a little too much familiarity here, which might explain why there were so many mixed/lukewarm reviews when this was released in cinemas, but Overlord takes the elements that we've all seen elsewhere and blends them into a fantastic piece of genre entertainment, with impressive visuals and a score by Jed Kurzel that's also worth mentioning (I know, I know, I always forget to mention scores, and I constantly apologise for it).

8/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.

The Hunger Games (2012)

Just when you think you can safely go along to the cinema without having to wade through fans of one teen-orientated cinematic juggernaut along comes another to assert itself as the new king of the hill. But, they all say, The Hunger Games is better than you think. It's full of more mature themes and better characters. It's darker and much better than any sparkly vampire movie. It's based on much better source material.

Well, I'll admit that there's some small degree of truth to that. However, The Hunger Games is still very much a watered down and sanitised film setting out to do little more than please the core demographic. In fact, I managed to convince my wife that the whole thing was nothing more than a metaphor for surviving high school (where popularity will get you through another day, competition is fierce, cliques develop and even if you survive to the end you'll find that you may have changed yourself beyond all recognition).

There was a great joke doing the rounds when the movie was released. It was a picture of the main characters from Pulp Fiction accompanied by the following caption: "You know what they call The Hunger Games in Paris? Battle Royale with cheese".

It's funny because it's true.

For those of you who have somehow avoided all of the hype and publicity, the plot runs something like this: It's the future and the rich and pampered stay in a lush capital city, miles and miles away from the outlying sectors that provide them with their essentials. Two youngsters (aged between 12 and 18) from each outlying sector are chosen each year to take part in The Hunger Games, a challenging experience that sees 24 enter a game zone and only 1 leaving alive. The Hunger Games is survived by those who are strong, smart and popular. Viewers remain mesmerised from start to finish.

I do have good things to say about the film. Most of the cast did a great job. Jennifer Lawrence in the main role once again shows why she's such a satisfying leading lady, Stanley Tucci is possibly one of the most dependable actors you can have in any movie, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth are both young men doing well in roles that have them playing . . . . . young men, Wes Bentley lends great support to his scene-stealing facial hair and there are quirky, and enjoyable, performances from Woody Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz, Donald Sutherland and a practically unrecognisable Elizabeth Banks.

The direction from Gary Ross (who also co-wrote the screenplay with novelist Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray) is okay but it also shows the work of a man unsure of just how to get the material up onscreen. This is not the same man who pleased us with Seabiscuit and, one of my particular favourites, Pleasantville. Nope, this is a man who knows that he has to cater to as wide an audience of teens as possible by glossing over subject matter that deserves far more mature treatment. The fact that the film doesn't quite make an enjoyable, cohesive whole (overediting is used to cover up the more violent moments, the heroine is almost completely passive for the first 3/4 of the movie and some of the plot holes seem pretty massive to me) actually makes me review it with a more charitable mindset. It's not a success but it tries as hard as it can to be all things to all people. Which we all know is a thankless, and impossible, task.

We also all know that there are many, MANY worse teen movies out there so if you end up being dragged along to this one perhaps it's best to just be thankful and try to enjoy individual aspects of it, as I did.

6/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hunger-Games-Blu-ray-Region-Free/dp/B0063FQRTO/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1336927635&sr=1-1