Film Review: The Vow

The Vow. Rated PG (mild themes, coarse language, nudity and sexual references). 104 minutes. Directed by Michael Sucsy. Screenplay by Jason Katims, Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein and Michael Sucsy.

Verdict: Perfect Valentine’s fare. Just remember to keep your seat-belt fastened at all times.

Inspired by events in the life of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter, The Vow is a romantic drama that is as solid as a rock. And almost as interesting as one.

It all starts promisingly enough as we are introduced to two love birds – Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum, pictured) who leave a cinema and drive off into the wintery night. Moments later, after Paige takes off her seat-belt to have sex with Leo in the car, a truck slams into the back of their randomly parked vehicle, sending her flying head-first through the windscreen.

As an Insurance Commission of WA commercial about the importance of wearing a seat-belt, it might have all ended there successfully enough. But no. There’s another 100 infuriating minutes as poor old Leo desperately tries to remind his now-amnesic wife of how wonderful their pre-accident life together was. Standing in his way are Paige’s selfish parents Bill (Sam Neill) and Rita (Jessica Lange), and her smarmy lawyer ex-boyfriend Jeremy (Scott Speedman, of Underworld fame), who each prefer the Paige they remembered, manipulated and controlled in the years before she met the free-spirited Leo.

To their unending credit, Ms McAdams (Mean Girls, Sherlock Holmes) and Mr Tatum (Dear John) invest everything they have into the laboured, cliché-ridden script – and their devotion to the tasks at hand (and their charming and engaging onscreen chemistry) works entirely in the film’s favour. Ms Lange (Frances, Crimes of the Heart, American Horror Story) takes all of a few minutes in her brief scene in the garden to give the cast an acting master-class, while Mr Neill gives the impression of never feeling entirely comfortable with the fact that he’s in a scene at all.

Even though Mr Sucsy (Grey Gardens) directs with a fine sense of respectable intimacy, nothing can mask the film’s fatal flaw – which comes when Paige earnestly (and somewhat self-defeatingly) declares that she hopes, one day, to love someone as much as Leo loves her. The temptation to scream out of sheer frustration might be all too difficult to resist.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group

DVD Review: Daybreakers

Daybreakers. 94 minutes. MA15+. Directed and written by Michael and Peter Spierig.

With Undead (2003), their marvellous, low-budget sci-fi/horror film about aliens who arrive to save the residents of a small-town from a zombie plague, the Queensland-based Spierig Brothers – twins Michael and Peter – launched their filmmaking careers. Here was a fantastically imaginative addition to the celebrated genre that literally sparkled with invention, broad brushstrokes of tongue-in-cheek humour and great affection for zombified chaos. What, genre aficionados eagerly anticipated, would they do next?

It’s 2019, and a mysterious plague has turned most of the world’s population into vampires. The remaining humans are hunted and farmed for their blood, but as the human race nears extinction, vampire scientists – lead by haematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) – become involved in a race against time to develop a blood substitute before the vampires, themselves, become extinct.

While there is certainly a huge amount to enjoy about this occasionally clever, big-budget blood-fest, unhappily, all the sheer, unbridled creativity that defined Undead appears to have been shoe-horned into a slick, genre treatment that just ends up feeling disappointingly derivative and unoriginal. It’s not helped, either, by the miscast Hawke (Gattaca) or the unengaged performance from a sedate Willem Dafoe, who both appear uncomfortably ill-at-ease with the material.

On the other hand, Michael Dorman is great as Edward’s tortured, human-hunting brother Frankie, while Sam Neill has a field day scowling and prowling around all over the place as Charles Bromley, the head of his human-farming corporation. Isabel Lucas feasts on her cameo as his activist daughter Alison – and there’s a strong sense that this much more interesting relationship was somewhat strangely abandoned in the scriptwriting process.

Ben Nott’s steely grey cinematography, George Liddle’s (Evil Angels) production design and Bill Booth’s (The Proposition) art direction stylishly account for the handsome, sleek, futuristic science-fiction environments. Matt Villa’s editing manages to ensure that the script’s obvious fractures and structural flaws don’t seriously derail the whole affair – even if you do get the feeling that, particularly in the ultra-gory, blood-soaked sequences, it’s all getting a little too indulgent and out of control.

Ultimately, however, it is Steven Boyle’s superb, Nosferatu-inspired ‘Subsiders’ design (with Bryan Probets, Sahaj Dumpleton and Kellie Vella turning in memorable ‘Subsider’ cameos) that steals the show – and it is this sub-plot concerning near-death vampires turning into marauding, cannibalistic savages (together with some particularly gruesome scenes of their extermination) that really lifts Daybreakers into genre-defining territory.

It’s just a real shame that the comparatively boring human characters (including Claudia Karvan as a stereotypical heroine) keep getting in the way of all the action and real excitement – to the point where you end up wishing they’d just drive off into the distance a lot sooner than they do, never to be seen again.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspapers Group and was published in the print edition of the Midwest Times.