George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg are more than passable as jaded American soldiers. Ice Cube is merely OK as part of their team going on a mission to retrieve stolen gold.
It’s an interesting but uneasy balance of comedy, history and violence. The tone is all over the place and it doesn’t always work. It’s gritty without being believable, and it’s silly without being especially funny.
A surprisingly moving story directed by Peter Jackson.
In 1973, a girl named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is murdered by a serial killer (Stanley Tucci). But rather than vanish from the story, Susie narrates what happens next from an “in-between” realm between Heaven and Earth. She explores the impact of her death on her family, who she seems able to reach and influence in subtle ways. That family is played, affectingly, by Rachel Weisz (Susie’s mother), Mark Wahlberg (her father), Susan Sarandon (her grandmother) and Rose McIver (her sister).
It’s often an uneasy mix – and this is presumably deliberate – between the gruesome details of a serial killer at work and the almost whimsical dreamscapes that Susie now inhabits. She walks through psychedelic, oversaturated worlds that sometimes threaten to turn the film into a fantasy romp. But these sequences just about work because they can be seen to mirror the perceptions of a 14-year-old struggling to comprehend the enormity of what has happened to her.
If you can get past the slightly jarring combination of gritty and fantastical, you can engage with some profound questions about life and death.
A ludicrous mess. Part four of the popular series stars Mark Wahlberg as an inventor, Nicola Peltz as his daughter and Jack Reynor as her boyfriend. The baddies are played by Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammer.
The plot (borrowed from the internet): “The Autobots, a faction of robots from the planet Cybertron, are hunted down by an elite CIA black ops unit and a ruthless bounty hunter. They turn to a struggling inventor and his daughter for help.”
It turns out that it was the Transformers, and not a meteorite, that caused the death of the dinosaurs.
The robots have been given silly voices and accents, which makes them a lot less scary. One of them even seems to have a beard and a cigar. Why? It’s nice to see them transform out of cars and lorries, but it’s utterly exhausting to see so much “impossible” CGI so quickly unfolding for such a long time. The running time of 165 minutes is wildly excessive.
Everything is so big, loud, fast and explosive that the film quickly finds it has nowhere left to go. In dramatic terms, it’s a disaster: you are left completely numb by the relentlessness of it. But on the plus side, it’s unintentionally funny and some of the daft dialogue is absolutely priceless. For example: “Autobots, we’re going to prove who we are! That’s why we’re here!”
The logic doesn’t really make sense. There’s a theme about planet Earth being angry at the way we’ve treated it. But the story can’t seem to tell the difference between the chemistry of trees and the weather that causes the wind that makes them move.
The two stars are poorly directed and end up seeming laughable. It’s a shame because the premise – people in parks inexplicably kill themselves – could have been an interesting one.
Somehow, The Happening grossed $163 million worldwide.
Like I, Tonya, it explores how a desperate, manipulative mother can push to have her child succeed in sport – whatever the personal cost. Unlike that film, it doesn’t employ tricksy narrative devices or self-conscious fourth-walling and so it’s much more affecting as a result.
Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale are tremendous as the half-brothers driven apart, with the latter giving the intense, twitchy performance of a lifetime. His eyes say so much, and you never doubt that you’re seeing a real drug addict. Amy Adams is hugely sympathetic as the girlfriend who seems like Micky’s only hope and who wants to save him from his overbearing mother, terrifyingly brought to life by Melissa Leo. His horrible gang of catty sisters will also unfortunately stay with me.
In some ways it’s a terribly sad story, but it’s also a rousing one owing to the way it charts Micky’s rise to prominence within the boxing world. The fight sequences are difficult to watch, but then I could never understand a “sport” that involves punching someone in the head and causing brain damage.
