BOOTLEG REVIEW: North Sea Hijack

This review was originally published in 2016.

When a mad man takes over a major oil refinery and threatens to blow it up unless the British Government pays a ransom, there’s only one man who can save the day…

Taking a break from his James Bond duties, Roger Moore stars as the wonderfully named Rufus Excalibur ffolkes, a cat-loving, gin-swilling misanthrope who is hired to foil the plot of a mad bomber Lou Kramer (played by Anthony Perkins).   

Directed by Andrew V. MacLagen (most famous for the 1978 action picture The Wild Geese), North Sea Hijack came out in 1980, wedged between Moore’s appearances in Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only. 

More of a straight thriller than an action adventure like the Bonds, the chief joy of this film is its leading man. Casting off the easy-going persona he’s shouldered since the Saint TV show, Moore has a great time playing a total prick. While he can’t sell the machismo, his cultured tones make ffolkes’ abrasiveness more funny than off-putting.

As far as supporting players go, James Mason is the standout. He adds a touch of class as Admiral Brindsen, who is stuck between the eccentric ffolkes and the unstable Kramer. 

Speaking of the bad guy, Perkins is surprisingly ineffective. Playing a tough, unstable psychopath Perkins is never entirely convincing. He just seems too nice to make his abrasiveness come off as threatening. What was scary about him in Psycho, his sense of vulnerability, is a weakness here. He’s not terrible, but the role does not fit him.

More effective is Michael Parks as Kramer’s skeevy second-in-command. Milking his small role for all it’s worth, Parks is far creepier than Perkins, turning his stock character into a cruel, weak little imp who takes pleasure in the the hostages’ distress.

The movie as a whole is a solid, old-fashioned thriller. It takes a while to get going, and while MacLagen’s direction is competent but lacks the sweep and tension the material demands. In its favour, the Blu Ray transfer is excellent and the movie gets more involving as the movie heads into the final confrontation between ffolkes and Kramer.

Ultimately, North Sea Hijack is decent but — Moore’s performance aside — unspectacular entertainment. 

Bond reviews

Diamonds Are Forever

The Man With The Golden Gun

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill

The Living Daylights

Licence to Kill

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough (2010); (2017)

Die Another Day

Casino Royale

Quantum of Solace

Spectre (2015); (2016)

Colonel Sun

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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NOIR WATCH 2020: Decoy (Jack Bernhard, 1946)

Gangster Frankie (Robert Armstrong) has a fortune in cash hidden away. His merciless compatriot Jim (Edward Norris) and girlfriend Margot (Jean Gillie) want a cut.

After Margot seduces an innocent prison doctor, Craig (Herbert Rudley), the pair facilitate Frankie's escape from prison by faking his death and stealing his body from the morgue. 

And then everything goes wrong... 

Released by one of Hollywood's smaller studios, Monogram Pictures, Decoy is a gloriously bitter noir that benefits from its limited resources.

The low budget adds to the movie's brutish economy. There is no fat to scenes, no sugar-coating of motivation and no deviation from the characters' inevitable fall. All that matters are these characters and their obsession with obtaining Frankie's money. This world has literally no time for sentiment or doubt.

The movie opens with the ending, as the surviving participants riddle each other with bullets - watching the rest of the story play out in such limited surroundings reinforces the sense of predestination as these characters race toward their own destruction.

Confined to a small collection of sets (a doctor's surgery, an apartment, a diner), It reminded me of Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer's even more micro-noir. These are people who want to expand their horizons, but are limited by the movie around them.

In the role of Margot, British actress Jean Gillie is the movie's secret weapon.

Largely known in England for comedic roles, Gillie was married to director Jack Bernhard when this film was made. She only made a few American pictures before her return to England where she died in 1949 at the age of 33.

As the femme fatale of the piece, Margot is a remarkable. Like the movie, she is the archetype stripped to pure self-interest: tough, unrelenting and completely in control. In one sequence she coolly drives over one of her accomplices and then, when confronted by another weak-willed henchman, hands him her pistol.

When he loses his nerve, she gently takes it back and they drive away to find the money.

Even as she lies dying, Margot is still in charge. She commands the tough cop Joe Portugal (Sheldon Leonard) to give her the box filled with Frankie's loot, and clutches it to her chest.

After telling the whole story to Joe (who she has given the childish nickname 'Jojo'), she invites him to give her a kiss, and break the romantic tension that has underpinned their animosity. The taciturn cop lets his guard down and leans toward her. As he draws near, she laughs in his face. It is breathtaking.

After her death, the film's ends on a cruelly ironic gut punch.

Joe opens the box to discover it is filled with garbage. Sifting through it, he finds a dollar bill pinned to a mocking note from Frankie, declaring victory over those who betrayed him. The money will be left to the worms, just like everybody associated with it.

A short blast of ice-cold noir, Decoy is a delightfully nasty piece of work that is well worth a look.

Related

Death of a Cyclist

Night and the City

Ossessione

Elevator to the Gallows

Odd Man Out

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Warcraft (Duncan Jones, 2016)

An army of of Orcs led by an evil warlock has arrived in a new world, Azeroth. With their own world dying, they are looking for a new place to live.

Concerned with the welfare of his people (and his newborn baby), orc chieftain Durotan (Toby Kebell) is suspicious of the warlock's motives.

As the invasion begins, Azeroth military commander Anduin (Travis Fimmel) is tasked with figuring out who their new foe is and how to defeat them.

Throw in a corrupt wizard (Ben Foster), a Golem and a half-orc (Paula Patton) ostracized by her tribe, and you have Warcraft.  

Warcraft is one of those movies where you can see what the filmmakers are striving for, but the execution just cannot live up to the intention. That being said, I really enjoyed this movie (with some qualifications).

Now, I do not know much about World of Warcraft, but the sense I get from the movie is it is trying to  reflect the multiplay-ability of the game by covering multiple perspectives, and avoiding clear black and white moral divides between the inhabitants of Azeroth and the Orcs. This aspect of the movie is both its greatest strength, and its biggest weakness - because one of these narrative perspectives feels fleshed out and the other does not.

Let's start with the good stuff, which is basically everything involving the Orcs.

The protagonist of this part of the story is Durotan (Toby Kebbell), who emerges as the most well-rounded character in the film. The key difference betwen Durotan and the Azeroth characters is that the script grounds Durotan with strong motivations -  he is concerned with looking out for his family's future, and the lives of his tribe.

And as the movie progresses, he finds himself doubting the motives of his leader (who, in a nice complication, saves Durotan's son when he is stillborn). Durotan's conflict is the most interesting aspect of the film, and highlights the emphasis on nuance with the Orcs and their perspective that deepens half of the movie.

From the outset, the movie is intent on presenting Durotan and his people as complex empathetic creatures - he is introduced in bed with his pregnant wife, musing on the future. If you take away the CG, this could be a scene of any couple having an intimate conversation.

There are other scenes scattered throughout where the Orcs are shown going about everyday tasks. There's even a scene of them waiting. They get bored and start throwing stones at each other. This seems silly but because the movie spends time with the Orcs, they feel more real.

It helps that Toby Kebbell gives a subtle, heartfelt performance as a taciturn warrior who is struggling between growing distrust of authority and helping his people find a new home. He gives the movie a soul.

It is just a pity that the movie's success is dependant only multiple perspectives when only Durotan's is dramatically functional. And that is the key issue - there is half of acompelling movie here, but it is anchored to another story that cannot hold a candle to Durotan's conflict.

Every time the movie focused on Durotan and the orcs, the movie has focus and heart.

But then we have to cut away to the humans and the movie loses its centre.  

It is a strange movie where the characters giving you uncanny valley are played by human beings, while the motion captured performances feel totally natural.

Enough has already been said about Paula Patton's fangs, but the big issue is scripting. The problem is the orcs get the more interesting storyline - do we trust the intentions of those who lead us?

On the human side, there is an attempt to replicate that idea with the wizard Medivh (Ben Foster), but there is a lack of focus and intensity to the conflict here. There is nothing as personal or relatable as Durotan's love for his family and comrades - the closest we get is a tired revenge subplot that exists solely to give human Anduin (Fimmel) a motivation for the finale.

This would have weight if the movie had devoted some time to Anduin's relationship with his son, but nothing about their relationship resonates as much as Durotan's with his wife and friends.

In his week-long podcast about Mission:Impossible - Fallout, Chris McQuarrie talked about the importance of emotion over information. With Warcraft, Durotan's conflict is couched entirely in emotion; the Azeroth storyline is all exposition, with no real emotional stakes.

There is a lack of verisimiltude to the human characters that is incredibly distracting - even when they are on sets, it feels like people are composited into environments. The production choices in this movie work well for the Orcs, but the look of human actors in these environments and costumes pushed me out of the movie.

There are parts of Warcraft that I found rather involving but any time a human character appeared, it felt like a completely different movie - it was like an adult animation meeting a LARP campaign.

The movie really flags whenever we have to sit with the inhabitants of Azeroth - it does not help that there is no Han Solo or Aragorn among the cast to ground it, and provide some sense of drama. Everybody is so po-faced, it feels like a blocking rehearsal.

There are no bad performances - Fimmel is okay, and Patton probably would be fine without those teeth - it is more a case of miscasting and a script that does not know how to make these characters feel like people with interior lives. Having to cross-cut between Azeroth and the Orc casts highlights just how much of a gulf there is between the different halves of the movie.

Other than this, as a viewing experience, while the exposition was a little disconcerting early on, the story is fairly easy to follow - it just feels so inert when the focus is not on Durotan and his tribesmen.

Warcraft is a movie about conflict that is deeply conflicted and compromised at almost every level. It is not a disaster on the scale of a movie I reviewed recently, but it is a mixed bag. That being said, it does hit at least 50% of its aims, and as such it is definitely worth checking out. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BITE-SIZED REVIEW: The Decks Ran Red (Andrew L. Stone, 1958)

Following the mysterious death of its captain, Captain Edwin Rumell (James Mason) is flown to New Zealand to take over the SS Berwind.

While Rumell gets used to running the ship, conspiratorial crew members Scott (Broderick Crawford) and Leroy (Stuart Whitman) are planning to kill the crew, sink the ship and collect a reward for the salvage.

As the ship gets underway, crew members start dropping dead. Will Rumell figure it out before it is too late?

I watched this movie for free on Youtube. At first I thought I had stumbled on a hidden gem: James Mason? Dorothy Dandridge? Broderick Crawford? In a murder mystery at sea?

And the title made it sound awesome.

Sadly, this movie takes the set up, the cast, some fun ideas for sequences and does almost nothing with any of them.

We know the villain's plan almost from the beginning, so there is no mystery. With this knowledge, one would then expect the movie to emphasise the suspense of our heroes trying to figure out what the villains up to, as the bodies pile up.

Nope.

The whole movie lies there - Stone shoots scenes largely in well-lit master shots, ruining any sense of atmosphere.

The sequence of the villains stalking the unsuspecting crew members in the engine room is incredibly stilted. Stone has no feeling for how to lay out the geography of the environment, nor how to block the action to create tension as the villains kill their victims. There is not even any chiaroscuro.

And while it is obvious that Stone is aiming for some kind of 'realism', he completely fails to create a sense of verisimilitude and bring the viewer into this environment. This is an engine room - noisy, smelly and dirty. The way Stone shoots it, it comes across like one of those showpiece ships they run tours of at naval museums.

The acting is solid, but the script gives nothing for the cast to do - there is a vague theme class in the relationship between the urbane Rumell and the crew, but that is never brought to the fore.

The movie only comes alive toward the climax, when Crawford, armed with a high-powered rifle, has the crew cornered in the mess hall.

The crew are allowed to escape on a lifeboat, but unknown to them Crawford plans to turn the ship around and sink their tiny vessel. Rumell swims back to the ship and sneaks aboard, where the cook's wife (Dandridge) uses her wiles to foil the villains' plan and give the captain the upper hand.

This finale is kind of fun, but probably because it is the only time in this movie where it feels like the story is going somewhere.

The acting is solid, but the characters are either types or baffling. It is hard to tell exactly what the script wants Rumell to be - is he an intellectual? Is he too green? While the finale would make you think Rumell is discovering his mojo and proving himself to the crew, he never really has a moment of failure to justify his redemption.

The one moment that is kind of interesting is when Dandridge takes it on herself to help Rumell by disarming Leroy (Stuart Whitman), Scott's flunky. Until this point, she has been an exotic object for the camera and Rumell, who brings it up when she arrives onboard with her husband (who conveniently decides to fight a gunman with a throwing knife and fails). It is a neat sequence, but it is built on nothing.

It is especially frustrating because the moving parts in this sequence are there. On paper, the idea of a hero having to swim back to a ship and overpower a gunman before the ship reaches his crew-mates' boat sounds awesome - you have a ticking clock and plenty of obstacles to turn out a real slam dunk of ending. Sadly, it never comes alive.

The Decks Ran Red is the textbook definition of a movie crying out for a remake. With better direction and a fleshed-out script, it could be a fun potboiler.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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IN THEATRES: Underwater

In the depths of the Mariana Trench, an underwater oil drilling station is hit by an earthquake. In order for Nora (Kristen Stewart) and the other survivors to reach safety, they will have to trek across the ocean floor to reach another part of the complex.

However, they quickly realise that there is another danger out there waiting for them. Something hungry...

Oh the ignominy. Delayed and dumped in January by Fox's new overlords, Underwater initially comes across as something to avoid. Which is a shame because beneath the simple title is a fast, nasty genre thriller with a strong cast and a firm grasp of how to milk the suspense and terror from its familiar premise.

Evoking Alien, Jaws and the enjoyable cheese of Leviathan and Deep Rising, Underwater is one of the most enjoyable mainstream genre movies I have seen in a long time.

While the movie is not original, the filmmakers know why the movies they draw from work, and apply the same approach - the deliberate pacing; the focus on tight, claustrophobic framing and hyper-real sound design.

Even when the characters leave the collapsing station to trek across the ocean floor, the water is so murky that it is almost impossible to differentiate the setting from the creatures tracking them.

The frame is filled with broken debris from the station or limited by depth of field. We only ever get a sense of the immediate surroundings, creating a sense of claustrophobia that is maintained throughout the film.

The filmmakers emphasise the limitations of the human form and the technology we have created to protect it. Some of the most effective moments in the film are tight close-ups of Stewart's face in profile inside her helmet.

The cinematography rarely goes to a wide shot - the few establishing shots we get of the exterior of the station are god's eye-view shots of our heroes sluggishly moving in heavy diving suits. Not only does it emphasise their vulnerability in this environment, it continues the film's focus on disorienting the viewer, and preventing us from getting a clear grasp on where they are and where their foes could be.

In a film filled with pleasant surprises, the most welcome was the way the filmmakers show their antagonists. While the creatures are mostly produced by a computer, ala Alien they are kept out of frame, or obscured by mine-en-scene. Sometimes it is just because the water has such a shallow depth of field the characters and the viewer cannot grasp what is out there. It makes the effects uncanny but in a way that works for the film, rather than taking you out of it.

As far as the acting goes, this is Kristen Stewart's show. Stewart has proven time and time again, from Panic Room through Personal Shopper, that she can anchor a movie and provide an emotional credibility. She is marvellous in this movie - delivering an understated, vulnerable performance that never feels like cookie-cutter action heroine. She gives Nora a nervous energy that feels totally organic to the situation, and finds ways to make the inevitable adjustment feel natural without turning the character into a tote action hero.

What takes this movie over the top is the ending, which offers a reveal that expands the threat our heroes face while giving a tip of the hat to horror fans. I will not spoil it, but what was great about this reveal was that once again, the filmmakers never offer a clear look at what our heroes see, while still giving it a sense of scale and weight that highlights how totally screwed the humans are.

While its components may be familiar, Underwater is an example of filmmakers taking the right lessons from their influences, and delivering a solid piece of entertainment. Check it out before it leaves theatres.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

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BOOTLEG REVIEW: Starboy (The Weeknd, 2016)

[A version of this review was published in 2017]

Following the pop success of his sophomore LP Beauty Behind The Madness, The Weeknd heads deeper into his musical inspirations to come up with an album that blends his thematic progressions with the sounds of eighties synth-pop.

Compared with his previous work, Starboy is more of a refinement of The Weeknd’s aesthetic than a progression. It’s like being stuck in the head of a party animal after a bad night — albeit if his inner monologue was in the form of song. Guest stars include Daft Punk, Lana Del Rey, Kendrick Lamar and Future.

‘Party Monster’ is a plaintive cry, this time from a lothario who loses himself in meaningless one night stands while pining for the attentions of his lost love. ‘False Alarm’ signals a turn into more ominous territory with a heavier focus on EDM-like beats and processed vocals. It ends with a wordless female vocal that segues into ‘Reminder’, in which our hero tries to remind his love that he has always been honest about what kind of man he is (i.e. one who drinks and sleeps around).‘Rockin’’ is more of an up-tempo dance number about the price of fame and relationships.

Around this point, individual songs start to blur into each other. If there is a flaw, it is a sady common one. The fact is, Starboy is about eight tracks too long, and the recurring themes of rejection and self-loathing start to feel repetitive.

The second half of the album picks up considerably. Songs like ’Secrets’, ‘Love to Lay’, ‘A Lonely Night’ and ‘Nothing Without You’ counter the dour, repetitive subject matter with stronger melodies and dance beats. The vague disjunction between the production and theme adds a certain ironic bite, while also softening the darkness of the lyrics.

Built on a snippet of Tears For Fears' 'Pale Shelter', 'Secrets' ended up being my favorite track from the album. For me, it best epitomized The Weeknd's ability to blend the melancholic with the ecstatic is at its best here (the music video is pretty good as well).


’Love to Lay’ and ‘A Lonely Night’ are built on similar lines but push the bass to the fore (the latter even includes an EDM break during the bridge). The lyrical themes remain the same: He’s a bad boy; she’s a bad girl, yadayada.

There are plenty of good songs, but such a long track list demands a level of ambition and eclecticism that is somewhat lacking. If you are a fan, you will be satisfied, but casual listeners are probably better cheery-picking songs on Spotify.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BOOTLEG REVIEW: Anything But Words (Banks & Steelz, 2016)

[originally released in 2017]

In a year filled wiht great albums, Anything But Words is one of 2016’s real surprises. On the surface, the debut of super-duo RZA and Paul Banks sounds like a gimmick. An unlikely collaboration with one of rap’s greats and uh, the lead singer from Interpol, Banks & Steelz goes against the wisdom that musicians from different musical genres can’t mix.

Right from the start, Anything But Words dispels any fears of a mismatch. ‘Giant’ speeds along on roving guitar as RZA speed-shouts verses like he’s plugged into a city grid. The fact that it manages to avoid sounding like nu-metal or a novelty single is a testament to just how well their dynamic works.

Their success is even more evident on tracks which should favour one of the collaborators over the other. Listening to the synth pop of ‘Ana Electronica’ or the post-punk rock of ‘Speedway Sonora’, the interplay between RZA’s raps and Banks’ baritone is so deft that it never jars. They feel like they have been at it for years.

Even the guest stars don’t feel like intruders. Kool Keith appears on ‘Sword in the Stone’ (featuring some welcome touches of fuzzy guitar and electronic piano), while Florence Welch plays RZA’s love interest on ‘Wild Season’, Method Man and Master Killa on ‘Point Of View’, and Ghostface Killah on ‘Love and War’.

The film is filled with surprises. ‘Conceal’ is a slow, prowling groove that exists on the border between nu wave and a seventies slow jam, while ‘Can't Hardly Feel’ and ‘One By One’ highlight the diverse origins of trip hop, mixing Banks’ drone-like chorus with RZA’s verses in a way that recalls hip hop and electronica.

A winning combination which never comes across as a gimmick, Banks & Steelz are one supergroup that is worth paying attention. If you missed Anything But Words the first time, it is worth checking out.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.