Netflix And Chill: Dead Man Down (2013)

As prone to the whims of Netflix as many others who browse the service, I saw that Dead Man Down was on there are remembered that someone had once told me it wasn't a bad little crime thriller. It was, according to some of the ways I had seen it labelled, actually a neo-noir, which made this month as good a time as any to check it out. And whoever told me that it wasn't a bad little crime thriller was quite correct.

Colin Farrell plays a man working for crime boss Alphonse (Terrence Howard). These are bad people who do bad things. But Farrell has more secrets than most. And that allows him to end up in a position where he can be blackmailed by Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), a neighbour who wants suitable punishment to be administered to the man who disfigured her in a road accident. Farrell is working on a masterplan that is now due to be complicated, Rapace grows closer to him as they prepare to deliver the payback she feels that she needs, and Howard and his crew (including Darcy, played by Dominic Cooper) start to "draw the wagons into a circle" as they deal with someone trying to cause division and death among their ranks.

Perhaps wrongly marketed at the time of release, I recall a lot being made of the fact that this from the director of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which gave Rapace her star-making turn) and I think there was a trailer that emphasised some of the action moments, which is what trailers do. I liked The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but didn't love it. And I wasn't willing to rush out and see Colin Farrell in another action thriller that wasted his talents in the middle of some bland mess. I believe others may have felt the same way (and we can all be thankful that we've had so many better performances from Farrell over the past decade since people stopped trying to sell him in those roles), but don't let that put you off.

Niels Arden Oplev does another good job in the director's chair, giving the film a similar look to his previous outing, but with more rays of light shining through here and there. The script, by J. H. Wyman, who has more experience with TV work than movies, is as good as it needs to be. Based around that old chestnut of "if you set out for revenge then you'd best dig room to serve two cold dishes", or something, the central pairing of Farrell and Rapace works well enough to have you worrying as it looks less and less likely that anything will lead to a happy ending.

Speaking of the two leads, they both do very good work here, even working at various times with various accents. It also helps a lot that the supporting cast has some great players mixed in. Howard and Cooper have large roles, but there are also smaller turns for Isabelle Huppert, F. Murray Abraham, and the always entertaining Armand Assante. A lot of the other cast members are generic gang member types, but that is perfectly fine when you are just waiting to see the bodycount go up and up on the way to a tense third act.

Not an easy film to assume that others will enjoy as much as I did, I still recommend checking it out. The 2-hour runtime flies by quickly enough, the familiar plot is handled well, and there are some surprisingly satisfying moments of violence as soon as the motivation for everything becomes clear.

7/10

You can buy the movie here.
American friends can pick it up here.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)

I was quite unimpressed when I first saw Mamma Mia! I wasn't exactly the target audience for it, I didn't think the songs were always as well worked into the plot as they could have been, and I found the antics of Meryl Streep and her friends just a little bit cringe-inducing. But it still sits on my shelf, surrounded by many better (and a few worse) movies. Why? Because it was one of the free blu rays that came with my first player, and I rarely throw out a film, especially a freebie.

You can already surmise that I wasn't keen to rush out and see the sequel, but see the sequel I did. I am a married man and that can mean compromising sometimes. My wife was going to join me for the latest Mission: Impossible movie so I could put a brave face on and accompany her to this movie. I did my duty.

The plot this time around sees Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) getting ready to open the hotel that she wants to make a success in honour of her deceased mother, Donna (Meryl Streep). Viewers also get to see the early years of Donna (played by Lily James) and how exactly she got herself in the predicament that eventually led to the events of the first film. There are some new faces, mainly in the scenes showing the younger incarnations of the men and women we already got to know as adults, another mix of ABBA hits, of course, and plenty of sea, sunshine, and sanitised -or-family-viewing sexual shenanigans.

Here's what happened when I watched Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. I had quite a good time. Not only that, I realised that I had been a BIT harsh in my judgement of the first film. I didn't enjoy it when I sat there, watching it in the comfort of my own home, even if I could singalong to the ABBA tunes. But that situation wasn't the best way to view it. It's a shared experience. It's fun for everyone, and the sequel aims for exactly the same end result.

And it achieves it. The songs may be, for the most part, lesser choices but the laughs are more frequent, and simply better. Which makes this a slight improvement over the original. That wasn't clear from the beginning. The first 15 minutes or so had me rolling my eyes on a number of occasions, thanks to the sentimental moments and the poor musical number that feels shoehorned in to the first scenes featuring Lily James (as well as Alexa Davies and Jessica Keenan Wynn, playing her friends). James is good in her role, but things start to pick up when Julie Walters and Christine Baranski come onscreen, and then it's all a surprisingly consistent crowdpleaser as we move back and forth between the past and the present, with lots more fun coming from Hugh Skinner/Colin Firth, Josh Dylan/Stellan Skarsgard, and Jeremy Irvine/Pierce Brosnan. Andy Garcia is also very good, Omid Djalili steals his all-too-brief scenes, and Cher takes the baton from Djalili and almost walks off with the entire film.

Writer-director Ol Parker, helped by Richard Curtis and Catherine Johnson, shows that he knows exactly what the audience wants, and he builds everything to a completely predictable and enjoyable finale that will have even the most cynical viewers grinning. I'm not completely converted, not quite yet, but I WILL rewatch the first film at some point, and I may even let my wife persuade me to endure/enjoy a double-bill one day in the future.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a film that it is easy to turn your nose up at. It is a safe viewing choice, one or two risque lines of dialogue aside, and it suffers from an overabundance of sweetness in almost every character. It will also have you leaving the cinema with a big smile on your face, despite how hard you might fight against it.

6/10

This is the shiny disc version.
Americans can get it here.

Mubi Monday: Tamara Drewe (2010)

As is mentioned in almost every discussion of Tamara Drewe, it is a film based on a graphic novel (by Posy Simmonds) that is itself loosely, although not too loosely, based on "Far From The Madding Crowd", by Thomas Hardy. The Hardy novel is namechecked just a minute or two into the film, just in case people weren't aware of the connection, and I am sure that fans of his work will have extra fun spotting the similarities in this modernised riff on his work.

I must confess that my knowledge of Hardy extends to knowing of his name and seeing a couple of movies based on his works. I have not, as yet, ever made my way through one of his novels, and the chance of me changing that situation soon looks very unlikely, as my "to watch" and "to read" piles grow in inverse relation to the spare time I have available. I don't say this in an attempt to boast of my ignorance, because I really do wish that I had the time to get through more classic literature, but am rather hoping to acknowledge that others may enjoy Tamara Drewe more than I did.

This film just didn't work for me, which is surprising when you consider the wonderful cast. Gemma Arterton, Luke Evans, Dominic Cooper, Tamsin Greig, John Allam, and Bill Camp all give good performances, and they are all people I have enjoyed in other roles, but they just can't do enough to overcome the biggest problem; it's hard to care about most of the main characters.

Arterton is Tamara Drewe, a young woman who returns to the small village she grew up in, aiming to renovate the family home and sell it. She's blossomed during her time away, and also had a nose job. The main people taking interest in her return are a farmhand who used to be in love with here (Luke Evans), and maybe still is, a philandering writer (Roger Allam), the long-suffering wife of the philandering writer (Tamsin Greig), and a couple of young girls who spend their time being generally nosey and up to mischief. There's also a rock band playing nearby, which leads to Tamara getting involved with the drummer (Dominic Cooper), who is on the rebound after a very recent and public separation from his partner.

Director Stephen Frears has given us some great films over the years, including at least one personal favourite of mine (The Grifters), so I was pleased to see his name attached to this, along with that great cast. I'm not sure what went wrong here, and maybe other people would argue that nothing at all went wrong anyway, but it feels like he doesn't have a good handle on the material. The script, by Moira Buffini, doesn't help at all, and I am not sure if that is mostly her fault or a fault with the source material, but it creates a number of situations that could have been played out in a number of different ways and then, for me, picks the worst possible variant. The drama doesn't work because of the characters being largely impossible to care about, the comedy doesn't work because it's just not funny enough to make up for the more serious elements, it's not an enjoyable romance, and there aren't even any major consequences for MOST of the main players.

It looks nice enough throughout, the lovely rural setting helps to make this a comfortable vewing experience, it's technically all well and good, and the cast all do what's asked of them, but this is a disappointing film that could have worked better as a 6-part BBC series, in my opinion.

4/10

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