REVIEW: Skyfall

By the way, I can safely say this review will be spoiler-free. Having been to the first ever screening of this movie, I'm actually sworn to secrecy about its plot. I've never been sworn to secrecy before! This is all very exciting.

Skyfall was a movie I just couldn't make my mind up about. I figured I was done with the franchise after I'd found Daniel Craig's Bond movies so disappointing - Casino Royale was a great action movie, but it felt so serious and gritty that it no longer felt like Bond, more like Bourne. And the less said about Quantum of Solace the better.

But then I found out Sam Mendes, one of my favourite directors (Road to Perdition still stands on my Top 10 list), was signed on to direct. I couldn't help but take an interest. And as we neared its release date, there were more and more signs that this would be a return to form - the return of Q, the new cast members (Ralph Fiennes, Javier Bardiem) to name a few. Yet even as I sat in the theatre itself, I still had my doubts. I'd been burned before, so I proceeded with caution.

Ten minutes in, all was forgotten. I was drawn in immediately by a thrilling, high-octane chase in the streets of Istanbul. One of the first things I noticed about Skyfall during these opening moments was how different it was to the previous two Bond movies. The style, humour and charm of the franchise is, thank God, back. Bond is back as the suave, effortlessly cool secret agent with the dry, witty sense of humour that defined the earlier films. His one-liners are back, and the banter between him and his colleagues is on sparkling form.

This is what I wanted. James Bond is finally fun again. As much as I appreciated Casino Royale, it was just so serious. The set pieces were great, the acting was great, but did I enjoy it? Not so much. Although I did appreciate the need for a reboot after the stupidity of Die Another Day (so camp it might as well have been a pantomime).

Perhaps the smartest decision here was to let Sam Mendes direct. His fanboy-like obsession with Ian Fleming is evident here, as this movie is clearly the work of someone writing a love letter to the franchise. But don't think for a second that this stands in the way of a highly original plot - it twists and develops in deceptively clever ways, and many of the surprises he sent my way caught me off guard completely. In fact, the script itself is very strong, and has real depth (as opposed to Quantum's style over substance approach).

The movie's strongest suit, though, is its characters. The new cast members all range from good to brilliant - Ralph Fiennes is a highlight as an M16 bigwig (who plays an important role in events), as is Naomie Harris as a fellow agent. However, the greatest addition to the cast is (as you may have guessed) Javier Bardiem's villain. The theory that a Bond movie is only as good as its villain proves to be true here, as Bardiem proves to be as menacing as ever (at times he reaches No Country for Old Men levels of evil) but also - surprisingly - the movie's funniest character in a sick way - the first scene between him and Bond was the funniest in the movie.

Yet this is Bond's film, and, to some extent, M's. There's a subplot involving their relationship which, while I can't spoil anything, proves to be the movie's most moving element. We see the characters as real people again, and we learn more about James' character than in the rest of the franchise combined. This was what has been sorely lacking in many of the Bond movies - humanity.

I say without exaggeration that Mendes has made one of the greatest Bond movies in 15 years, perhaps 25 years, perhaps of all time. It is an astonishing piece of film-making, that captures everything that makes the Bond movies so great, with an original storyline to boot. On no account should you miss this.

★★★★★

LOVEFILM REVIEW: Interstate 60

As a side note, I've recently become a member of LoveFilm, meaning from time to time you'll see a review of a movie I found randomly in the bowels of the internet. Just go with it.

Interstate 60 is an oddity. It has all the elements of a classic – a great cast, a talented writer/director, an interesting plot filled with great oddball characters – and yet no one seems to have heard of it. Here in the UK especially, there was no cinema release, no straight-to-video, nothing.

Which seems strange, considering the talents attached. Bob Gale, the co-writer of the first Back to the Future and the writer of its subsequent sequels, makes his directorial debut here, and does so very well. He creates a deconstruction of classic road movies, set in a surreal, magically realistic universe. The movie is about James Marsden at a crossroads in his life (figuratively and later literally), under pressure from his father to become a lawyer. During his 22^nd birthday, he wishes for answers in life, which a magically being (a mirthful Gary Oldman) overhears and grants. Marsden gets sent on a road trip to deliver a mysterious package, and along the way he runs into all kinds of trouble. Hilarity, poignancy and adventure ensue.

It's a good movie elevated by a great cast – Chris Cooper is particularly good as a businessman with an obsession for the truth (and dynamite), and keep an eye out for Christopher Lloyd and Michael J Fox (in a hilarious cameo), reunited on screen for the first time together since 1990. If you have the opportunity to watch this underrated and under distributed movie (I hesitate to use the word 'gem' as I hate the phrase), do, as there's nothing quite like it.

★★★★

REVIEW: The Sweeney

The Sweeney was originally a British television police drama starring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman, and aired throughout the 1970s. Seeing as I'm not my Dad, I can safely say that I've never sat through one of its episodes, nor do I ever intend to. From what I've heard, the show was a true product of its time. It was a violent, edgy drama that pushed the boundaries of what could be shown on television, something the BBC had largely whitewashed up to that point.

This then makes it somewhat confusing that the show would be moved to the present day in this newest incarnation of The Sweeney. With heavy violence being on display in pratically every theatrical release nowdays, it makes it seem odd to dig up old property with little relevance to today's society. But the plot deals with that. Kind of.

The premise is Ray Winstone and his chums (including Ben Drew, a.k.a Plan B) are old fashioned coppers who punch first and ask questions later. It's as if they're transported straight from the 70s, with their heavy swearing and misogynistic banter. Yet the twist is that new policing methods and protocols (in the form of the often underrated Steven Mackintosh) are intruding in on their old-fashioned sense of justice, threatening to shut it down for good.

Ray Winstone takes on the title roll of Jack Regan with much needed grit and machismo, the kind we've been seeing in Ray for his entire career. It makes you wonder whether they even gave him a script - maybe the director just told him where to go and he took it from there. Plan B is also quite good, and if the critics are to be believed his directing debut Ill Manors is very good too, making him a talent to keep a keen eye on.

The film itself isn't too bad, but nothing to shout about. Much of the plot is dull and clichéd, and seems to lack much needed pace at times (although the car chases and shootout sequences are undeniably thrilling). Also, the characters, who I'm sure were intended to be cheeky and fun, more often than not come across as plain childish, with a sense of humour shared only by teenagers. And I don't believe I'm the only one who found Ray Winstone's sex scenes to be absolutely disgusting.

But it is a competent and entertaining action movie, despite its unpleasantries. Yes, it's clichéd, but at least it manages to pull it off in style. And Ray Winstone punching people while making gravelly-voiced cockney threats will never cease to be fun.

★★★

REVIEW: The Bourne Legacy

It's nothing short of infuriating that Hollywood refuses to let its property go out on a high, or even let it die. If they aren't selling unimaginative films with a number on the end then they'll be desperately searching for an old franchise to dig up and reanimate in the form of a reboot – see The Amazing Spider Man or the new Total Recall reboot out later this month. Admittedly, sometimes this has worked out for the best (Christopher Nolan was nothing short of a saviour to the dying Batman franchise) but more often than not it is totally pointless.

In many ways, The Bourne Legacy feels like a reboot. Following the excellent trilogy of adaptations of Robert Ludlum's books, the latter two directed by Paul Greengrass and all three starring Matt Damon, it was expected that the series would remain finished, going out on the high of The Bourne Ultimatum. Not so. The key players of the franchise have been dropped – Greengrass and Damon are out – and some fresh meat been brought in – Jeremy Renner takes the main role, Rachel Weisz is the obligatory love interest, and Edward Norton is the new government baddie. On reputation alone, it seems as if the movie could work – the main actors are good, it looks to be a solid (if unnecessary) addition to the canon, and if all goes well could spawn a new trilogy. Not thrilling news, but not overwhelmingly bad either.

Yet somehow, it doesn't quite fulfil expectations, and to some extent feels like it belongs to a totally different franchise. To begin with, the film starts off by making no sense, and continues to be that way for a good half-an-hour/forty-five minutes before any hint of a plot begins to kick in. It does that thing that most Hollywood sequels do, in that it expects you to have complete knowledge of all events in the canon that precede it, down to the detail of names, places and events. Do you know how long ago the last Bourne movie was? 2007. I hate it when this happens, as they expect you to have watched the movie's predecessor the night before, which I simply refuse to do. A 'previously' would suffice. But anyway, as characters name dropped organisations, people etc. I had no clue whatsoever what was happening – and why I should care.

What I gathered is this – the CIA (or some shady government agency) has decided to pull the plug on a program of agents following the monumental cock-up that was Jason Bourne. The best way to go about doing this is – you guessed it – to kill off all their agents through some drug which gives the world's worst nosebleed. I wonder who thought this was a great idea. "Hey", someone said at a meeting, "we don't want those guys going around getting information and killing people and – you know – doing their job anymore, so instead of, say, offering them a generous pension and severance package, we should kill them all!" "Don't you think that's not a great idea” said someone else, “what with them being powerful trained killers who have proven themselves to be able to kill anyone else in the world at the drop of a hat?" Whereupon he was promptly escorted from the room for being a sane individual. I think it would be nice to give trained assassins a chance to turn their life around – who knows, under the right circumstances they could become care workers or go and build houses for starving African children. But no, they have to kill them, and as Renner's character avoids death by ballistic missile, he goes on the run to wean himself off some kind of mind-control job and to get revenge on those who betrayed him and – I don't know, start a cocktail bar on the coast of Barbados.

If I sound somewhat indifferent about this movie it's because I am. While the action sequences are serviceable, the characters presented here are so mind-numbingly boring and unvaried from what we've seen before it's hard to care about any of them. Edward Norton's character is given little else to do but bark at his colleagues and it seems Rachel Weisz's sole role is to act unstable and nervous all the time – a perfectly normal reaction to the violent events happening around her, but it does make her feel bland and somewhat like a tool. And as much as I liked Renner in The Hurt Locker and The Town I feel as if he can't fill the gap left by Matt Damon – you know, Jason goddamn Bourne, the character the franchise is all about – and I would personally be surprised if a movie as dull as this would spawn any sequels. Oh wait, it performed well at the box office, so I guess we'll be seeing The Bourne Legacy II: Electric Boogaloo sometime next year.

★★

FILM4 REVIEW: Paprika

This summer, I've become oddly obsessed with Japanese cult films. Not only have I watched Battle Royale and the majority of Studio Ghibli's works (which I must say are still as brilliant and mesmerizing as I remember them), but I most recently watched Paprika, a Japanimation about a machine that can enter people's dreams. The machine is stolen by a terrorist and the scientists who devised the machine must set about tracking the culprit down before they cause chaos.

Needless to say, it's a surreal affair. The Japanese are somewhat notorious for taking off on flights of fancy when creating these types of films, but in this case it fits. Dreams are known to go in odd directions, as our subconscious has no boundaries when exploring our vast imagination, and when expressing this through the medium of film it's clear than animation is best way to go about this. The dream sequences are often spectacular, as the animation on display here is, at its best, absolutely breath taking.

And despite its subject matter, the plot is surprisingly easy to follow, despite occasional surreal asides so typical of this type of film. The main character, played by Megumi Hayashibara, is a psychiatrist-turned-scientist, who wants to use the dream machine – called the D.C. Mini – to treat her patients by examining their subconscious. However, when she ventures into dreams (and this is where it gets a little complicated) she uses another personality called 'Paprika', who is her diametric opposite – while she is very cold and professional, Paprika is the embodiment of passion and life.

If presented differently, this could be a very hard to follow story element; yet in this film, everything makes a twisted kind of sense. Satoshi Kon, the director, grounds his dream sequences with a kind reality, and this is when the film is at its strongest. He also fleshes out the characters on display here substantially, giving those who could be lazily assigned to a stereotypical supporting role real importance – for instance, the abnormally fat creator of the D.C. Mini evolves from being a comedic sidekick into a character important to the narrative (not something seen frequently in Hollywood). And while the film loses its way somewhat towards the end – the viewer gets lost in a frenzy of bizarre imagery – it is still strong for its combination of fantasy, character development and, to a certain extent, mystery (the search for the terrorist is compelling throughout).

It's no wonder, then, that Christopher Nolan stated that this film was his inspiration for Inception. The parallels between the two films are clear – both explore how the line between dreams and reality begin to blur (Paprika explores this far more literally) and both explore the danger of living a different life within dreams, and how this can damage one's subconscious.

Admittedly, Paprika is sometimes a little too strange for its own good, and it's also somewhat irritating that it sometimes becomes clichéd in a Japanese way (yes, a young girl gets attacked by tentacles). However, it's still a good film, both compelling and imaginative, and is well worth a look. Just remember your totem.

★★★½

REVIEW: Prometheus

There's certainly a reason why I don't traditionally follow the hype of a new product, be it a movie, game or breakfast cereal. It's the mentality behind keeping an open mind before entering a new experience, so that my perspective can't be tainted by false promises or speculation. Yet from time to time, there'll be such a forceful wave of excitement radiating off something new that I can't help but be swept along with the flow as such, so much so that I feel as if I know the experience before, well, experiencing it firsthand.

This was, unfortunately, the case with Prometheus, Ridley Scott's eagerly awaited return to sci-fi, a genre he defined with great movies such as Alien and Blade Runner. There seemed to be a new trailer or piece of promotional material out every week, revealing a horrific number of details about plot (see this poster to see what I mean – it goes without saying that this is a spoilerific piece of marketing). And it eventually became impossible to avoid the sensation, the breaking point being interrupting Homeland's ad break to show us a "world premier" of the trailer, for Christ's sake. I found being told to tweet "#areyouseeingthis" borderline offensive – yes, I'm seeing this. I'm seeing an overlong trailer interrupting one of my favourite television shows to spoil the plot of a movie I don't want to learn. Now leave me alone.

However, like the fool that I am, I eventually succumbed to Prometheus' hype, and I'm afraid that this made my viewing experience all the more painful. For you see, in my honest opinion, I do not rate Ridley Scott's new movie very highly – in fact, I found it to be a tremendous disappointment.

Let me start by engaging in specifics as to why I rated the movie this way. It was not the fault of the highly attractive cast – no, most were cast well and acted well, namely Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba and an excellent Michael Fassbender as a David Bowie-esque android. Nor was it totally the fault of the direction of Ridley Scott himself – the CGI was (for the most part) beautiful, and the man always knows how to draw a viewer in with awe-inspiring cinematography. No, I believe that the downfall of Prometheus lies within its plot and screenplay, and overall structure as a 2-hour long, self-contained film.

The plot concerns an interplanetary spaceship called "Prometheus", which is sent to explore an unknown planet which may contain the creators of human life. Once there, ancient ruins are explored, mysterious alien artefacts are discovered, and – spoilers – everything goes wrong. Upon first glance, this may seem like standard space opera affair, which would be a reasonable conclusion to draw from not only the trailers but also the fact that the film takes place in the same universe as the Alien franchise, and has been (rightly) touted as a prequel to the films.

Yet, somehow, Prometheus manages to defy expectations and come up with something completely different. Rather than providing a clear, consistent narrative, the film instead meanders somewhat and, having set up its premise, never truly delivers. The key theme behind the movie appears to be psychological horror as opposed to its physical counterpart in the form of Alien, and it also enters philosophical territory when contemplating the origins of life itself. These kinds of ideas could certainly work on a film such as this, but unfortunately they are poorly executed by the movie's screenplay. Scenes will go on between characters for too long, and then the action will uncomfortably change to sub-par survival horror. Characters act far too stupidly in dangerous situations, and are unconvincing in their roles as supposedly smart scientists. There is far too much unnecessary deliberation and dips in momentum between set pieces, and the movie cannot for the life it decide whether it wants to be metaphysical or not – it swings between two ends of a spectrum throughout its running time, ultimately settling on the metaphysical but far too late for its own good. A superior movie would support its themes and ideas with a strong plot, but in this case the plot simply buckles under the tremendous pressure.

If I had to sum up my rambling thoughts about this movie with one word, I would probably describe it as either "incomprehensible", "convoluted" or "inconsistent". I realise that that is three words, but in terms of structure and narrative one hour or so into the movie this is how I find much of my thought process. Undoubtedly, the movie has its strengths, and upon viewing Prometheus one should expect to be surprised, as the movie goes places one would not expect – though how positive this aspect truly is is debatable. Also, despite my earlier criticism there are several exciting moments during the feature, although a viewer with an aversion to blood and gore would do well to avoid this one, as there are some truly horrific scenes throughout the movie. However, do not expect to walk out of the cinema feeling satisfied, for this is not a movie which provides answers – it ends with (what I found to be tedious) inevitability, and there is a plentiful population plot holes which I continue to puzzle over. One could say that it simply does not live up to the hype.

★★½

REVIEW: Avengers Assemble

When you think about it, Avengers Assemble could have gone very wrong, very wrong indeed. A combination of being a successful comic book franchise as well as a culmination of several different film franchises means you have a large fan base waiting eager to judge, where any form of cock-up will result in heavy criticism and an almost unrecoverable backlash (remember Spider Man 3?).

So thank God that this film manages to avoid that. It's good. It's very good. In fact, I'd go so far to call it a masterpiece in its own right. Everything you come to expect from a film with this much hype is there - it delivers and then some.

For those of you who have been living in a cave for the past few years, Avengers Assemble (formerly known  as simply The Avengers) is the combination of the major Marvel comic book characters into a major world-saving squad. This involves (from their respective films) Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), as well as somewhat lesser characters of Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). The concern was to whether characters from such different franchises would mix well in a collaborative film effort, in a project which must tie together a great deal of strands and still resemble a good, coherent film. Yet the Avengers pass this test with flying colours.

A great deal of the success of this film may be due to director Joss Whedon, a geek icon/hero/deity. The shows he created, such as Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, were praised for their great scriptwriting and characters. These qualities are certainly present in this, as the banter between characters truly gives the film its spark.

However, credit must also go to the tremendous cast as well. Downey Jr. is perhaps the highlight as quick-witted Tony Stark, but everyone has their moment to shine - including Mark Ruffalo, the third actor to play the Hulk, who fits Edward Norton's shoes very comfortably. Fans will no doubt be glad to see their favourite characters brought to life with such vigour and enthusiasm.

It really is hard to find flaw with Avengers Assemble. While the film doesn't truly come alive until its major players are introduced, and some characters are a bit hard to take seriously sometimes (come on Scarlett, how much damage are you really going to do with a pistol?), it still feels like a true cinematic treat, one of the sorts which come along rarely. Popcorn entertainment at its most enjoyable and intelligent level, I recommend you watch this as quickly as possible.

★★★★★