For It Is Man's Number: roman griffin davis

Showing posts with label roman griffin davis. Show all posts

Wednesday, 29 April 2026

Prime Time: Greenland 2: Migration (2026)

With most people back in their main roles, both in front of and behind the camera, Greenland 2: Migration is an unexpected sequel to Greenland, obviously. Considering that film was about an Extinction Level Event (ELE), you would suspect that the story was all done. Not so. There may be some hope for those who found a way to survive. Especially if you're the Garrity family (made up of Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, and Roman Griffin Davis, the latter replacing Roger Dale Floyd as the youngest family member).

It is five years after the events of the first movie. A number of people are living in an underground bunker, but more trouble is coming. The environment is still harsh and dangerous, which forces people to come up with a plan to move. There's rumour of a habitable environment at a major comet impact point, but getting there will be a hell of a challenge. Your odds seem greatly improved when Gerard Butler is the head of your family unit though.

Mitchell LaFortune joins Chris Sparling on the writing duties this time, and the two of them have a fairly easy task. Remind viewers of the current situation, put the latest events in motion, take characters on a journey that keeps putting a number of obstacles in between them and the potential safety and optimism of their final destination.

Director Ric Roman Waugh feels very much at ease with his job. He knows what needs to be done, and he keeps most of the scenes focused on the star, Butler. It's a shame that he doesn't do much else though, with the experience of watching this movie akin to the trudgery that the onscreen characters go through. You could argue that nothing in the rest of the movie is as intense or entertaining as the opening scenes, and that makes the 98-minute runtime drag out as it becomes a case of waiting for what seems like an inevitable finale.

Butler does fine in his role, once again being enjoyably stoic and a very capable, if reluctant, hero. Baccarin gets less to do, but remains alongside him in a pretty thankless role. Davis has one or two moments that show him struggling to stay adjusted to post-comet life, but it feels like lip service to something that would surely be much more intense and difficult to process. There are a few other characters allowed to pop in and out of the narrative, but things stay pretty firmly held on the fate of the central family unit.

If you liked the first movie then you'll find some moments to enjoy here, but it's a big step down. There's no real sense of urgency, aside from the moments in the first act, and it's hard to feel truly worried about people we last saw surviving "the end of the world". Fingers crossed that we don't get a third movie, although that would probably involve a war for Greenland between the people living there and the inane 47th President of The United States.

5/10

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Tuesday, 28 October 2025

The Long Walk (2025)

I'm not saying I'm ancient, but I'm old enough to have read The Bachman Books before Rage was excluded from the collection by Stephen King. It was a pretty great read. Four novellas written by Stephen King, under the name Richard Bachman, between the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The highlight was The Long Walk though, and it's something that fans of King's work wanted to see turned into a movie for decades. Here we are then, but is it any good?

The short answer to that is yes.

The premise is simple enough. America seems to have slid into some kind of horrible totalitarianism, with culture and free thought frowned upon as everyone struggles to make ends meet. This leaves many desperate enough to nominate themselves for a place in the annual event known as The Long Walk. The participants are all teenage boys, one from each state. All they have to do is walk at a constant speed of at least 3 miles per hour. That may sound okay to you, but they get three warnings if they fall below that speed, and then a bullet. There are no toilet breaks, no rest periods, no relief from pain, just walking. Always walking. Until there's only one left. The winner, who will receive a huge sum of money and one wish granted. Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) thinks he has a chance, and knows exactly what he wants his one wish to be. Peter McVries (David Jonsson) seems to be a good ally during the contest, but both young men need to remember that only one can survive to the end. Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer) remembers this, and tries to goad others into wasting some of their energy, Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) looks like a very strong contender, and others trying to stay on their feet include Arthur Baker (Tut Nyuot), Hank Olson (Ben Wang), Collie Parker (Joshua Odjick), and Thomas Curley (Roman Griffin Davis).

Adapted from page to screen by JT Mollner, The Long Walk is directed well by Francis Lawrence (best known for helming a number of other movies about a deadly competition, a note that everyone is obliged to mention in any review of this film). There's only so much you can really do with the premise though. This is a film with a lot of conversations happening between people who are walking. It's punctuated by some sudden deaths, and those are sometimes delivered with maximum impact, but it's essentially a lot of walking and talking. Not great cinema, but still a great story nonetheless.

Lawrence has done himself a big favour with his casting. Hoffman does a fantastic job in his lead role, and Jonsson is almost equally good (if slightly hampered by the accent and occasional phrases that make him feel like he's mired in the bog of eternal King-isms). Plummer is even more hampered, but does well, and Wareing, Nyuot, Wang, and co. all do good work, especially when their full journey is shown via stages of physical and mental deterioration. Judy Greer has a couple of scenes that have her fretting over her son (Hoffman), something she does really well, and Mark Hamill is brilliantly cold and jingoistic as The Major, the military figurehead of The Long Walk and the one who will deliver the final shot before the winner is celebrated.

I did really like this, and it's been good to see many others reacting positively to it, but I can't judge it on purely technical aspects. I think at least some of my reaction stems from finally seeing ANY adaptation of the story in film form. The material is strong enough to make up for any minor failings, and maybe the fact that it is here for us in 2025 will help us avoid making a reality that comes all too close to this kind of fiction. Or maybe we're all just too tired and befuddled to do anything other than keep walking toward a depressingly bleak future.

8/10

Friday, 17 December 2021

Silent Night (2021)

If there's one thing we Brits can do it's exploit our civility and manners for entertainment purposes. And we have used that for many different movies, from classic murder mysteries to dark comedies, from the sci-fi horror of something like Prey (Norman J. Warren, 1977) to the unfolding dinner party with a big secret in Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948). This material has been mined by many other countries throughout the decades of cinema, but I like to think that they all stem from observations of British people in their home environment.

Silent Night, the first feature from writer-director Camille Griffin (who also casts all three of her sons in roles of varying importance), shows a group of seemingly well-to-do British people gathering at an isolated home for an evening of dining, drinking, conversation, and probably more drinking. It's a dinner party with a difference, that difference being the looming end of the world.

While this is an interesting premise for a movie, and could have been a showpiece for any actor, Griffin stumbles due to a lack of tonal focus or consistency. She may have wanted to make something that weaves from comedy to drama to horror, but every one of the better moments just makes you wonder how many other ways the film could have played out in a much more satisfying way.

The main fault lies with Griffin’s script, especially when she doesn’t give anyone the kind of razor-sharp dialogue that the film craves. None of the main characters have the steel required to lift it up to a level of greatness. If this had been made fifty years ago with a main role for Bette Davis, THEN you have something closer to greatness.

Keira Knightley and Matthew Goode are the host couple, both doing well with what they are given (mainly being polite and attempting to put a brave face on things), and their three children (the characters played by Griffin’s children) include another star turn from Roman Griffin Davis, playing the most important person in the film. Lucy Punch, Annabelle Wallis, Kirby Howell-Baptiste and Lily-Rose Depp play the women, all with various approaches to their impending fates, and Sope Dirisu and Rufus Jones are the two male guests, supporting their partners as they deal with some unfinished business.

Things step up a notch in the third act, and the very end features a great little “punchline”, but the end result is more of an interesting, incomplete, almost-ran than an outright winner.

6/10

Thursday, 13 February 2020

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Based on a novel by Christine Leunens, Jojo Rabbit is another film written and directed by Taika Waititi, and another great mix of humour and emotion. It may not be his best film, and it's easy to initially view it as his weakest, but I suspect that it will grow on most people, over time.

Roman Griffin Davis is Jojo, a young boy living in Germany towards the end of WWII. Every child has an imaginary friend at some stage, Jojo has Hitler (Waititi). He also has a real friend in the shape of Yorki (Archie Yates), a loving mother (Rosie, played by Scarlett Johansson), and lessons in the best way to serve Germany from the likes of Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell) and Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson). Jojo's worldview is challenged when he discovers that his mother has been hiding a young Jewish girl (Elsa, played by Thomasin McKenzie) in their home.

I've seen some criticisms of Jojo Rabbit that seem to want to boil it down to "be nice to Nazis, because not all Nazis are bad" and I've seen comments being critical of opinions on the film that seem simplistic and naive. Both of these things are true, to some extent, and that stems from the way in which Waititi has wrangled his message of hope and optimism into a fun satire that is itself wrapped up in a layer of wide-eyed childish innocence and absorption. It may not be as simple as it seems, at first glance, but none of the more complex thoughts undo the central ideas of always maintaining the capability of love destroying hate.

Davis is superb in the main role, which will come as no surprise to anyone used to Waititi's knack for picking absolutely wonderful child stars for his project. Although not in it as much as I would have liked him to be, Yates is quite hilarious as the friend who isn't going to strain himself by thinking of the world events unfolding around him. Johansson is a solid anchor, and a pivot around which everything, and everyone, revolves. McKenzie is easily on par with Davis in her role, and the comedic turns from Rockwell and Wilson help, even underlining a couple of very serious moments in the third act. Alfie Allen does well in a small role, Stephen Merchant is very funny in his one main scene, and Waititi plays his sprung-from-the-mind-of-a-child version of Hitler very much like a version of him sprung from the mind of a child.

With the mix of quirky characters, the shot composition, and specific soundtrack choices, fans of Wes Anderson may occasionally forget that this is a Waititi film. It's been given a layer of artificiality that helps to create just enough distance between what we know of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and what we're being shown onscreen. The whole thing is a tightrope-walk, of course, but Waititi is up to the task. I can even see his reasoning behind some of the decisions made that I don't entirely agree with.

Imperfect and odd, Jojo Rabbit manages to do what it sets out to do. It makes you laugh, it provides some immensely powerful moments, and it sends you onward with a sense that there is always hope for humanity while individuals continue to hold on to their natural ability to, against some major odds, do the right thing.

7/10