The Railway Man (2013)

Based on a true story from Eric Lomax's memoir. 

Patricia (Nicole Kidman) meets railway enthusiast Eric (Colin Firth) and the pair quickly fall in love and marry. But Patricia soon realises that Eric remains deeply traumatised by the suffering he experienced in a Japanese POW camp during World War II. While working on the Thai-Burma Railway he had been tortured by the Japanese military secret police, including their interpreter Takashi Nagase, and was never able to come to terms with the horrors he endured. 

It’s an emotional story, extremely well-handled. Firth and Kidman are both excellent. You can really believe they are in love, and the scene in which they first meet, on a train journey, exudes warmth and charm. I wanted more of that. You can also believe how damaged Firth is. 

The younger and older depictions of the key characters work well, and the time transitions are elegantly managed. 

The ending is unexpectedly satisfying.

Ronin (1998)

Woeful action thriller directed by John Frankenheimer and written by John David Zeik and David Mamet. 

Robert De Niro stars as one of a team of special operatives working in France, hoping to seize a special suitcase from a super-criminal. But, inevitably, there are double-crossings and other complications... 

It’s deeply odd. The directing is off, somehow, with strangely framed shots and stilted camerawork lingering on the wrong details. Whenever someone is portrayed as waiting, they are forced to sit and sip coffee. That soon stands out as a conspicuous, awkward directorial tic. People just can’t stop drinking coffee in this film. There’s a kind of flatness that comes from a below-average script and actors who don’t believe in the lines they’re speaking. Jean Reno and Sean Bean have a degree of presence, but unfortunately they don’t have fleshed-out characters. Even De Niro is clearly struggling to rise above the shoddy material. 

The “Ronin” concept falls flat, with forced references to Japanese warrior culture not really working at all. It looks cheap, and it’s amazingly dull for a film with so many high-speed car chases. Parts of it are so ridiculous that it becomes laugh-out-loud funny. 

The music is intrusive and ill-judged – for example, when a “romantic” theme is matched to a dramatic scene. 

All in all, a total mess that should be regarded as a set text for film students wanting to learn how not to make a thriller.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Adapted from the Swedish bestseller by Stieg Larsson, this is a surprisingly disappointing thriller. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and couldn’t. 

1. The plot is made complicated by poor storytelling but is actually very simple: a journalist (Daniel Craig) and a young, troubled computer hacker (Rooney Mara) investigate a girl’s disappearance from 40 years ago, uncovering the secrets of a wealthy family. 

2. It’s highly stylised, but the aesthetic seems deliberately ugly. 

3. It’s unnecessarily violent: the scenes with Mara and her abusive social worker seem completely gratuitous. She could have filled in her backstory as dialogue. Did we really need to see it?

4. Something about the story doesn’t ring true. I never believed in the characters or the main relationship between Craig and Mara. In fact, there’s no chemistry between anyone. 

5. The film seemed too impressed with its own tech. There are way too many shots of laptops being typed into. There are also too many shots of Mara riding a motorbike. 

6. It’s unevenly paced. One unexciting scene in which Mara researches in a library seems to go on forever. But then the “action” (and there’s very little of it), is oddly rushed. 

On the plus side, Daniel Craig is always watchable. But unfortunately that isn’t enough. Maybe the original Swedish film from 2009 is better.