Film Review: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

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The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Rated PG (mild coarse language and sexual references). 122 minutes. Directed by John Madden. Screenplay by Ol Parker.‬

Verdict: The magic of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel refuses to fade.

When The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel became an unexpected smash hit of 2012, it was only a matter of time before a sequel would find its way onto the screen. The first film’s perfect mixture of wonderful performances from Britain’s finest actors (including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson) and its intoxicating Indian locations, ensured that audiences flocked to it.

It’s perfect blend of humour, romance, adventure, drama and quiet worldly contemplation found its way into the hearts of its audiences – and Australian audiences, in particular, loved it.

With his Best Exotic Marigold Hotel now at capacity, Sonny (Dev Patel) and Muriel (Maggie Smith) travel to America to try and secure finance to enable them to purchase another hotel to continue to build on their dream of owning a chain of Best Exotic Marigold Hotels. If the investors’ inspector approves of the new location, the funds will be provided. When a wealthy American, Guy (Richard Gere), arrives, Sonny believes him to be the inspector, and does everything he can to make sure that he will have no choice but to approve his plans for expansion.

There is no faulting the performances from the outstanding cast, most of who are reprising their roles. Patel is wonderfully entertaining as the desperately ambitious Sonny, and Maggie Smith is simply divine as Muriel. On the back of her popularity in Downtown Abbey, Smith has been enjoying a luxury of big screen opportunities recently, and she never disappoints. The camera adores her, and she
receives excellent support from the superb Dench and Nighy, both of whom play the delicate theme of finding genuine love, late in life, to absolute perfection.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.

Film Review: Jupiter Ascending

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Jupiter Ascending. Rated M (violence and science fiction themes). 127 minutes. Written and directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski.‬

Verdict: Cinderella meets Star Trek.

Unbeknownst to Earth-bound cleaning lady Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), she is the queen of an alien race who must be eliminated so that the powerful dynasty, led by the ruthless Balem (Eddie Redmayne), can take control of their home planet’s valuable resources. Fighting to ensure that Jupiter is restored to her rightful place as leader of the Free World is Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a pointy-eared warrior with a wicked set of skates, who will do whatever it takes to keep Jupiter alive.

Witnessing Jupiter Ascending is like watching someone desperately trying to rescue a burnt roast dinner, with exactly the same level of impending doom and embarrassment. At its best though, it is a sumptuous visual feast that appears unable to be contained within the screen across which it blazes. But for the sheer audacity of creating a film that is so beautiful, baffling, boring and shambolic – often all at precisely the same time – you’ve simply got to hand it to The Wachowskis (The Matrix trilogy, Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas).

Jupiter Ascending is delivered to the screen with such unabashed confidence, style and budget that it almost seems rude to suggest that it hasn’t worked. The many expensive, big action set pieces are so dark and ill-defined that it is often impossible to work out what’s going on.

Tatum, who spends much of his time looking extremely uncomfortable, skates endlessly around the galaxy with his shirt off rescuing the hapless Jupiter, while Redmayne makes the bizarre choice to either whisper or scream his dialogue. Kunis, on the other hand, floats through the story looking as though she hasn’t the faintest idea what’s going on. Which is perfect really, because most of the time neither do we.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.

Film Review: Kingsman: The Secret Service

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Kingsman: The Secret Service. Rated MA 15+ (strong violence and coarse language). 129 minutes. Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Screenplay by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn. Based on the comic book by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons.‬

Verdict: An abundance of violence undermines a potentially great film.

It’s either an incredibly brave or equally naïve creative team who would dare to take on the celebrated spy movie genre, which has been enjoying something of a renaissance with Daniel Craig’s spectacularly produced outings as James Bond in films such as Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and 2012’s superb Skyfall.

Trust Vaughn (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class) to throw caution to the wind and deliver a timely variation on the grand themes associated with espionage, which also packs a mighty punch in relation to the perils of our reliance on our precious mobile phone technology.

When special agent Harry Hart’s (Colin Firth) colleague is murdered during a mission, he visits the man’s widow Michelle (Samantha Womack) and young son to offer his unconditional and life-long support. When the boy, Gary ‘Eggsy’ Unwin (Taron Egerton), grows up to become a troubled teenager desperately trying to help his mother break out of an abusive relationship, Hart returns and offers Eggsy the opportunity to end the relentlessly abusive cycle and make something of his life.

Firth and Egerton are fantastic as the stylish Hart and his protégé, and Kingsman only works as well as it does because of their committed, engaging and enthusiastic performances. Samuel L. Jackson is wickedly entertaining as the lisping villain Richmond Valentine, who plans to solve the problem of climate change by eliminating most of the world’s population via their SIM cards.

The only problem is that if Vaughn wasn’t as convinced that we need as much ultra-violence on screen to make a lasting impression, he would be a film-maker whose films would reward close, and a good deal more devoted, attention.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.

Film Review: Birdman

Birdman. Rated MA 15+ (strong coarse language). 119 minutes. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Screenplay by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo.‬

Verdict: Batman meets Birdman.

Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is famous for playing superhero Birdman in a successful series of films. Desperate to inject his life and career with some artistic integrity, Thomson puts everything he has on the line to write, direct and star in a Broadway play. His Birdman alter ego, however, has other ideas about how easy it is going to be for him leave the much-loved character behind once and for all.

Deep within this hectic collision of style over content lies a fascinating premise. Hollywood stars have long envied their theatre-making colleagues (and vice versa), while famous celebrities appearing in plays can guarantee sold out seasons that run for months. So what are the differences between film and theatre for actors? And why does Thomson believe one ‘star turn’ to be more important than the other?

Birdman, instead, reads and plays like a bad soap opera, and Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams) and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s (Gravity) vision for the film to run as one long, single take simply becomes torturous. There is hardly a moment of stillness or silence, which only reveals a drama so riddled with clichés that it cannot possibly survive any kind of intelligent interrogation.

Keaton, who was obviously cast because he played Batman twice in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), has his moments, and the rest of the cast are obviously working incredibly hard to meet Iñárritu’s gruelling expectations.

But Birdman’s fatal flaw is the scene where the film turns into what is obviously a Birdman film, with spectacular special effects and swooping prehistoric creatures. His alter ego snarls that this is the film that the people want to see. In this case he is, rather unfortunately, absolutely right.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.

Film Review: The Imitation Game

The Imitation Game. Rated M (mature themes). 114 minutes. Directed by Morten Tyldum. Screenplay by Graham Moore. Based on the novel by Andrew Hodges.‬

Verdict: A great story, perfectly told.

Truly great films, those rare beasts in which every single element merges into a flawlessly unified whole, have been sadly lacking in our cinemas. And it is not until a film like The Imitation Game comes along that you realise just how potentially short-changed we have been as film-loving audiences. 

The Imitation Game begins by insisting that we pay attention in case we miss something. A direct address to an audience is an audacious start to 34 year-old Graham Moore’s superb debut feature-length screenplay. And as the captivating drama of all that follows carefully unfurls under Tyldum’s expert direction and Benedict Cumberbatch’s magnificent central performance, you find yourself disappearing into the story no matter how hard you might try to resist.

Charged with trying to work out how to decode Nazi Germany’s Enigma code, mathematics genius Alan Turing (Cumberbatch) and his colleagues work day and night inventing a machine that will be capable of deciphering the millions of coded messages being used by the German command to smash the allied naval forces during World War 2. The human brain, Turing declares, is too slow, and set against the backdrop of annihilation on the high seas, the code-breakers must race against time to give the allies greater opportunity to pre-empt the German attacks.

Within a uniformly outstanding ensemble, Keira Knightley is great as code-breaker Joan Clarke, with whom Turing would develop a profound and lasting relationship. The scene where she dismisses his anxiety-stricken declaration of his homosexuality is an absolute highpoint, and it is difficult to imagine that Cumberbatch could have been as good as he is without Knightley’s career-best supporting turn as his closest, and most important, confidante.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.

Film Review: Wild

Wild. Rated MA 15+ (strong sex scenes and drug use). 115 minutes. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Screenplay by Nick Hornby. Based on the autobiographical novel by Cheryl Strayed.‬

Verdict: Mother Nature fails to show up in this intimate story of survival and redemption.

With rare candour and an unashamed sense of wanting to light the way forward for others who have suffered the torture of domestic abuse, the intimate details of Strayed’s downward spiral after the collapse of her seemingly perfect marriage and the untimely death of her mother Bobbi (Laura Dern) result in a riveting survival story.

Similarly to Tracks (2013) and Into the Wild (2007), Wild explores a journey into the wilderness, where life as Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) knew it is supposed to be challenged by the experiences of the environment beyond her far from ordinary day-to-day existence. In this case, the wilderness is represented by the 4,286 km long Pacific Crest Trail that starts at Mexico’s border with the USA and ends at Canada’s.

Using an array of often rapid fire flashbacks to the devastating experiences of the past, Vallée (who also edits brilliantly with Martin Pensa), has connected the various tormented conflicts from Strayed’s past into a near-perfect whole, to which Witherspoon and Dern (both of whom have been nominated for Academy Awards® for their work) respond superbly. Dern, in particular, brings extraordinary truth through vulnerability to her performance that makes her painful exit from the story almost too difficult for it to recover from.

While the counter-intuitive rhythm provides the film with a deeply unsettling sense of time and place, a significant problem is that the hiking sequences remain mostly unremarkable. With few exceptions, there is little sense of impending danger or remoteness, to the point where the experience too often resembles a walk in the (national) park.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.

Film Review: Unbroken

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Unbroken. Rated M (mature themes and violence). 137 minutes. Directed by Angelina Jolie. Screenplay by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson. Based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand. 

Verdict: An incredible story about the power of Faith. 

Since the end of hostilities in 1945, writers and filmmakers have turned to World War 2 as a source of rich dramatic material. The treatment of Prisoners of War by their Japanese captors has featured prominently, with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983), and The Railway Man (2013) just three of the most well-known films to explore the subject. And unless you have been living under a rock for the last decade or so, you will know how gruesome that subject can be. 

While Jolie, cinematographer Roger Deakins, a quartet of writers and an outstanding ensemble of actors have undeniably made an excellent film, Unbroken struggles to bring any new insight or justification to the essential conflict, which it pursues with relentless, almost breathless, vigour.

Louis Zamperini’s (superbly portrayed by Jack O’Connell) story is an incredible one, and the best of Unbroken is when the film focuses on the extraordinary good fortune that ensured Zamperini’s continued survival against all the odds. It is little wonder that Zamperini made a pact with God to serve Him for the rest of his life if he was to survive the horrors that he endured on a daily basis – a pact Zamperini held to until he died in July last year.

Mutsuhiro Watanabe’s (Takamasa Ishihara) obsession with breaking Zamperini’s body and spirit becomes, simply, incomprehensible, and Unbroken’s bleak, brutal and unforgiving second act becomes harder and harder to watch. And then the reason crystallises. It is not a film about forgiveness in the same way that The Railway Man is. Unbroken, instead, is one of the most perfect films about the power of an unbreakable Faith – especially in oneself – in recent memory.

This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.