Prime Time: Daredevil (2003)

While most people really seemed to dislike the film when it came out, I've always had a soft spot for Daredevil. It has since been overshadowed by a superior small-screen interpretation of the character, but it still retains a certain charm, feeling even further removed nowadays from the many other bombastic superhero movies that always seem to pit the main characters against either god-like enemies or potential world-destroying threats.

Written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, this is the tale of Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Ben Affleck), a blind man who works as a lawyer by day and serves up any extra justice required by night. Things are getting tougher on the streets as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan) starts to tighten his stranglehold on the criminal network. At least there's a beautiful woman, Elektra (Jennifer Garner), to get to know. But there's also the dangerous and quite bonkers Bullseye (Colin Farrell) looking to push in for his own particular dance.

It's hard to think of a film that feels more absolutely 2003 than this, from the cast to the stylistic choices made for the visuals, from the soundtrack to the attempts at grittiness. If you haven't seen the film in a while then I tentatively recommend giving it a go, especially when you get to the early scenes that show our hero happier than most to push some villains right off the mortal coil.

Affleck isn't the best fit for the lead, sadly, although he tries. This was during a time when he seemed a bit too smooth and smug, traits that seep into his portrayal of a character who is much more captivating when worn down and roughed up (as they try to make him by the third act). Garner isn't given much to work with, and I think she fares much better in the spin-off movie, but she tries to make the most of a couple of moments that allow her to flex her action skills. Duncan is superbly imposing as Fisk, really helping to lift the movie up on his broad shoulders, and Farrell . . . well, Farrell is an absolute blast for every moment that he's onscreen. He just seems to be in a different movie from everyone else, but that's the more fun and entertaining movie. Jon Favreau is an amusing "sidekick", and the cast also includes Ellen Pompeo, Joe Pantoliano, Leland Orser, David Keith, and Erick Avari, as well as one or two other familiar faces (and, yes, there's also a Stan Lee cameo here). 

It's a shame that the tone wasn't consistent throughout. The same can be said for the action. The film works best when it has some darkness and weight onscreen, but other times (a playground "flirt fight") are almost painful when trying to be a bit too cute. And once Bullseye appears onscreen then it's game over. He's the one you really want to see for the rest of the runtime.

There's still plenty to enjoy here, including the way we're shown Daredevil's reading of the environments and a good musical score from Graeme Revell, but this remains more of a miss than a hit. It's neither as slick or visually-impressive as many other modern spectacles, nor is it as entertaining and brutal as the more recent take on the character. I'll retain a soft spot for it, but I probably won't revisit it again for another decade or so, if ever. 

6/10

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Netflix And Chill: Family Switch (2023)

Jennifer Garner is Jess, a busy mother with a successful career. She doesn't really like her daughter, CC (Emma Myers), focusing on playing football matches ahead of other ways to fill her time. Jess is married to Bill (Ed Helms), and neither of them seem to realise how their son, Wyatt (Brady Noon), is doing at school. Wyatt is a very smart young man, but he's very uncool and a bit miserable. There's also a baby. And a dog. This is the family at the heart of Family Switch, a film in which a familiar Freaky Friday scenario happens to the mother and daughter, to the father and son, AND to the baby and family dog.

Based on the book "Bedtime For Mommy", by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Family Switch is brought to the screen by writers Victoria Strouse and Adam Sztykiel, and director McG. While none of these names tend to instil pure joy in the hearts of most film fans, I would say that all of them have had times when they have managed to deliver decent entertainment (and McG has been working particularly well on Netflix projects). Sadly, Family Switch fails in almost every way it tries to work.

It’s a Christmas film that doesn’t make any decent use of the holiday, a bodyswap movie that mistakenly assumes more is better, and a star vehicle that wastes the more established names in the cast. And you just know that everyone involved thought they were making something in line with the classics of this particular sub-genre, which explains the scene in which the characters onscreen cheekily reference a number of other titles that are all much better than this.

Garner and Helms get the worse end of the stick, perhaps simply due to them having to act like teenagers for most of the runtime, but both Noon and Myers improve every scene that they’re in. Both of the younger screen stars are likable and funny, and I will look forward to whatever is next for them much more than I will look forward to whatever Garner and Helms line up. There aren’t many standouts in the supporting cast, although both Rita Moreno and Matthias Schweighöfer have fun in their small roles, and the less said about the CGI helping to visualize the swapped behaviour of the baby and the family dog the better.

There are a couple of laughs here and there (I don’t mind a heavily-signposted fart gag on occasion), a dance number that feels shoe-horned in to remind you of other dance numbers we have seen in this kind of fare, and a very safe and predictable finale you could almost write up once everything has been set up in the earliest scenes.

Not a good Christmas movie (I really wouldn’t even count it, considering the lack of holiday spirit, and I am very easygoing with movie labels), not a good bodyswap movie, and not a very good comedy. It’s just not good.

3/10

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Netflix And Chill: The Adam Project (2022)

A time-travel action comedy with a number of lovely moments of sweetness throughout, The Adam Project is a film that manages to deliver what you expect from it, yet also makes one or two decisions that prove mildly surprising, considering how by-the-numbers you may expect it to be.

Ryan Reynolds is Adam, a man who travels back in time to 2022. His vehicle is damaged, as is he, and it won't begin the self-repair program until a healthy Adam can command it. Which means Adam needs help from his younger self (played by Walker Scobell). Young Adam is currently being a bit of trouble for his mother (Ellie Reed, played by Jennifer Garner), mainly due to him grieving the loss of his father (Mark Ruffalo) just over a year before. There are bad people trying to capture Adam and take him back to his own timeline, headed up by Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), but Adam has made his leap into the past because he thinks the timeline has already been corrupted. He doesn't want to be in 2022 though. He wants to be in 2018. And young Adam may need to join him on the next part of his journey.

Director Shawn Levy has been delivering easygoing hits for a couple of decades now, giving us films such as Cheaper By The Dozen, The Pink Panther, the three Night At The Museum movies, Real Steel, and, most recently, Free Guy. That's not to say that you necessarily view him as a great director, and let's not be too quick to forgive him for The Internship, but he's a relatively safe pair of hands who manages to work well with comic actors. Between their previous collaboration and this one, he may well be the person who helps Reynolds deliver his best, non-Deadpool, work (although he's also now directing the third Deadpool movie, which doesn't feel like an obvious match, but let's wait and see how that goes). This is definitely up there with his better films, and it's easily one that provides a bit of something for almost everyone.

Writers Jonathan Tropper, T. S. Nowlin, and Jennifer Flackett have a very mixed filmography between them, from The Maze Runner movies to Nim's Island, and TV work that includes Banshee and Big Mouth, but they seem to have worked well together to craft something that provides a perfect mix of laughs, action, and heart, with enough science to allow for cool tech, and to allow for the plotting to work, without getting bogged down in too many conversations about the timelines. There IS a set approach to time-travel here, explained well enough, but it's an approach with rules that allow the whole thing to be feasible. And also allows Reynolds to enjoy another big magnet set-piece, as he does seem to love his big magnet set-pieces.

People seem to complain nowadays about Reynolds doing the same thing in every movie he makes. That's a fair comment, in some ways, but it's also something you could say about any comedic actor in their "bread and butter" roles over the past three or four decades, at least. I like his work, and he's excellent here. Scobell, in his first film role, gives him a good run for his money though. Often just as quick-witted and quick to open his mouth, Scobell has all the smart-ass attitude, but with the attitude of being a cute young kid to underline the occasional punchline/insult. Garner and Ruffalo do very well in the role of the loving parents, viewed in very different ways by the two Adams because of how the loss of one parent affected their lives. Keener is a great menace, flanked by a strong and capable fighter named Christos (played by Alex Mallari Jr), and she has a great way of trying to persuade older Adam that things can be fixed, they can go back to how everything was, while prepping weaponry to destroy him if he continues to disobey her requests. There's also a small role for Zoe Saldana, once again being a perfect combination of loveliness and badassery.

It's an overused compliment when it comes to modern family entertainment, but this really does feel like something that could have been made in the late 1980s. The quality shines throughout, from the music and cinematography to the performances, and the sweetness is offset by the sense of fun, and the odd swearword thrown around. There are also one or two moments that may make you cry, even as you realise how easily you're being emotionally manipulated. This is definitely a film worth making some time for.

8/10

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Nine Lives (2016)

Here's the thing. I don't tend to always plan this blog. Don't get me wrong, I have moments of clarity in which I remember how much easier I can make my life if I plan more than a day ahead. That means I will start to watch Christmas movies early and plan reviews for December. I will also try to schedule reviews of new releases to coincide with cinema or disc releases, when I remember. But my default approach to blogging movie reviews is to keep watching lots and lots of films and then deciding what reviews I want to write, and when I want to schedule their appearances. Which is why I didn't expect to resurrect this blog and have two Kevin Spacey movies making an appearance in the first week. Feel free to skip over this if you like, but I have already clarified my position at the start of my review for Baby Driver.

There are five writers credited here, and Barry Sonnenfeld is the director, for this very simple story of a businessman (Kevin Spacey) who is so busy with all of his dealings that he is neglecting his family (mainly his wife, played by Jennifer Garner, and daughter, played by Malina Weissman, but he has also failed to appreciate the qualities of his eldest son, Robbie Amell, who works for him). One cat-purchasing encounter with Christopher Walken later, a terrible accident, and Spacey finds himself in the body of the feline that he just bought for his daughter's birthday. Will he learn valuable lessons? Will he be able to ever return to his own body, currently comatose? Will the CGI continue to look worse than most of the scenes in Cats & Dogs (which was over fifteen years ago)?

The cast all seem strangely unembarrassed to be in this, which I have to put down to some very good performances. Spacey only has to give a vocal performance, for the most part, so gets off easier than some of the others, Garner is once again wasted in a role undeserving of the talent that can be drawn out of her, Weissman is very good in the role of the young daughter who still dotes on her absent father, and Amell is just fine. Walken has fun in his small role, Mark Consuelos is the ambitious businessman below Spacey, and there's also a cat, of course, which is cute enough when not being made to look odd with "amusing" FX work to keep it acting and reacting more like a man stuck as a cat, as opposed to a normal cat just being itself.

I could name the five writers here, but their names aren't familiar to me and this hasn't encouraged me to check out anything else they may have been, or will be, involved with. This is bland entertainment seemingly created by throwing words and scenes into a hat, drawing out pairs that are matched up, and then ensuring that all potential fun or excitement is drained from every scenario. And I have no idea how Barry Sonnenfeld ended up directing this, and how he could put this out to viewers as a final product. Everything looks incredibly cheap, making me think that most of the budget went on the cast before anyone realised how much would be needed to get everything to a minimal cinematic standard.

I wasn't expecting this to be the cat's whiskers, nobody seeing the trailer would, but I didn't expect such a stinky hairball.

3/10

For anyone deranged enough, the link to buy the movie is here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nine-Lives-Blu-ray-Kevin-Spacey/dp/B01JS45VNY

Arthur (2011)

A remake of the much-loved 1981 movie, this time around drunken, childish Arthur is played by Russell Brand, Hobson is played by Helen Mirren and the love interest has become Naomi (played by Greta Gerwig). Luis Guzman is the chauffeur, Jennifer Garner is Susan Johnson and Nick Nolte is her scary father.

A quick reminder of the plot. Arthur is a drunk but a very, VERY rich drunk so that’s fine. The fact that he’s always in the news isn’t so fine and so his mother (played by Geraldine James) tells him that he must marry Susan Johnson or be cut off from the money. This happens, annoyingly enough, just as he meets and falls for the lovely Naomi.

Written by Peter Baynham (with plenty of lines and spirit, pun intended, lifted from the original) and directed by Jason Winer, Arthur could have been something really enjoyable. Russell Brand can do an eccentric drunk in his sleep so everything else should have fallen into place, right? Wrong. For some reason it was decided to make Arthur less of a staggering drunkard (though he’s drunk a lot of the time) and more of an outright man-child in this version, meaning that we have to suffer through an appalling performance from Brand that has him putting on a very childish voice and acting just like someone who’s been doped up with drugs. I’m sure this choice was made so that the film wouldn’t be seen to be deriving fun from alcoholism in these PC-infested times but it’s a bad choice and throws off the whole film. 

Everyone else is good and that’s a great shame because it simply highlights the poor performance from Brand, someone who I have so far always enjoyed in movie roles. Mirren makes a more than adequate replacement for John Gielgud and the bond between Arthur and Hobson is more obvious and easier to understand this time around. Gerwig does just fine as Naomi and Garner certainly does well as Susan Johnson, who is a colder and more calculating character in the remake than she was in either of the 80s movies. Guzman is very funny and Nolte is believably fear-inducing.

There are individual moments of fun, and a nice selection of movie cars, and the main character eventually gains your sympathy as the movie winds towards a predictable finale but this is inferior to the original and inferior to many other comedies released this year. 

5/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arthur-Triple-Blu-ray-Digital-Region/dp/B004Q9SYYA/ref=sr_1_8?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1371664113&sr=1-8&keywords=arthur