For It Is Man's Number: paul ready

Showing posts with label paul ready. Show all posts

Monday, 31 March 2025

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

If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A subscription/follow costs nothing.
It also costs nothing to like/subscribe to the YouTube channel attached to the podcast I am part of - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErkxBO0xds5qd_rhjFgDmA
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews
Or Amazon is nice at this time of year - https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/Y1ZUCB13HLJD?ref_=wl_share

Sunday, 27 August 2023

Netflix And Chill: Heart Of Stone (2023)

I am often accused of being too kind in my movie ratings and reviews, and that is absolutely fine with me. I go into EVERY movie with optimism, and I always remember that the final result in front of my eyes is the result of people working together to get a clear vision onscreen. Sometimes it is only a handful of people, sweating and struggling to pool resources, and sometimes it's a huge number of people who can get their hands on whatever they need for their glossy blockbuster. Heart Of Stone falls into the latter camp, and it's one of those films that allows me to be unkind. Because it is, undoubtedly, one of the most soulless and unexciting pieces of garbage that I've seen in a long time.

Gal Gadot stars as Rachel Stone, a woman working as part of a MI6 team. She's a technician, supposed to be able to stay safe and observant while others do the action stuff, but they don't realise that Stone is actually working for a global peacekeeping agency known as The Charter. The Charter has the advantage of being able to feed agents information from a powerful AI device they call The Heart (see? see where the title comes from?), a super-computer that can hack into any digital device and offer fluctuating predictions on the potential success of every possibility for a field agent on a mission. Someone wants to get to The Heart though, and that could allow them to become a very powerful super-villain. There's treachery, changes of alliance, and horribly inept set-pieces all thrown together on the way to a finale that feels as smug as it does predictable.

It has become all too easy lately for people to dismiss a film by saying "it feels as if it was written by A.I.", but that certainly feels like it was a factor here. A Netflix film, and we know that they often design their movies around certain patterns and factor they have seen in their viewing data, the humans actually responsible for this screenplay are Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder. While I wasn't surprised to see that Rucka was used to the Netflix style, having also had a hand in The Old Guard (a film I have yet to muster the enthusiasm to watch), I was very surprised to see Schroeder attached to this, considering her work in recent years on both Hidden Figures and Christopher Robin, as well as being an extra helping hand on the screenplay for Frozen 2. It's equally surprising to see Tom Harper sitting in the director's chair for this. I can only imagine that he either wanted a different kind of challenge, wanted a big payday, or both, considering his past couple of movies were the very different, and apparently much better, The Aeronauts and Wild Rose. What isn't surprising is that neither the writers nor director put any kind of personal stamp on this. Heart Of Stone is a star vehicle. It just doesn't have a good enough star in the lead role.

I like Gal Gadot. I do. She's pretty great in the role of Wonder Woman, even if the films are very often not the best vehicles for the character, and I have enjoyed her in most of her other movie roles. Superhero movies aside though, she's never really been given a lead role, and Heart Of Stone clearly shows why this is the case. She doesn't shine as she should, unable to give the role the mix of humour and charisma needed. It doesn't help that she's surrounded by a cast of equally dull performers, whether that's caused by their own acting or the script is something I'm still debating internally. Jamie Dornan and Alia Bhatt are the wost offenders, but even someone as good as Sophie Okonedo seems to be delivering her lines as if she'd rather be doing anything else instead. Both Jing Kusi and Paul Ready are a bit more enjoyable, and I was most disappointed when their limited screentime came to an end. The other cast member worth mentioning is Matthias Schwieghöfer, who proves himself a highlight once again, having won people over with his turn in Army Of The Dead, leading to his lead role in the spin-off, Army Of Thieves. He works well in his role here, despite having to deliver exposition while portraying "intel guy monitoring and moving around computer data depicted as an augmented reality display surrounding him".

There was one action set-piece I quite enjoyed here, a chase involving cars, bikes, and a chunky van, but I even watched that while wondering whether or not I preferred a similar sequence in the recent action comedy Murder Mystery 2. As for the rest of the film, it moves from one bit of over-edited greenscreen nonsense to the next, keeping you stuck alongside a lead character you don't care about as things wind towards a tiresome conclusion that lets the film end EXACTLY how you think it is going to end. This is the kind of hollow and artless work that ends up on Netflix because it isn't good enough to end up anywhere else. It certainly isn't good enough to end up on your viewing schedule. Treat yourself to something better. It won't be hard.

And, yes, I know many will still think my final rating here is too kind.

3/10