BITE-SIZED REVIEW: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (Guy Ritchie, 2015)

When a group of ex-Nazis create their own nuclear weapon, US and Soviet intelligence pair agents Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Ilya Kuri (Armie Hammer) are forced to work together to defeat the villains.

I first reviewed The Man from U.N.C.L.E. when it came out in 2015. After the last five years (and the 50 year stretch of 2020), it feels like a lifetime ago.

Released in the middle of 2015's big slate of spy film releases, at the time UNCLE felt like the runt of the litter - not as entertaining as M:I 5, not as funny as Spy, not as gonzo as Kingsman. 

In the time since, I have watched it a couple of times and it just goes down so much easier. Shorn of the expectations of 2015, U.N.C.L.E. emerges as a breezy caper with a great sense of retro style and a pleasing restraint when it comes to its set pieces. 

The opening sequence is still a highlight, efficiently establishing the contrasting MOs of our odd-couple heroes through a clever action sequence that shows off their respective strengths.

Armie Hammer gets the best storyline, as a damaged man attempting to reconnect with his humanity. I do not quite believe the chemistry with Alicia Vikander's Gaby Teller (the duo's unwilling accomplice), but Hammer adds an understated tenderness to the blunt instrument. 

As the ice-cold villain, Elisabeth Debicki is fantastic. She is so good, I wished she had more screen time. 

If there is one flaw, it remains Cavill as Solo. He tries his best, but Solo requires star power and charisma. There is a natural chill to Cavill that works against his portrayal of Superman, and plays well as the human cannonball in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. There is a Cary Grant quality to Solo - he is a scoundrel who is supposed to be so charming that he can win over people. Cavill has the looks but he never projects the kind of ladykiller charisma that the character demands.

While Cavill is underwhelming, it is a testament to the movie as a whole that it still works. What I find most interesting is the way it shies away from turning U.N.C.L.E. into a straight action picture. Instead the film plays more like a heist movie. And the action sequences it does have do not overtake the overall mood of the movie - the boat chase is largely offscreen, reduced to background action while Solo enjoys a reprieve with a sandwich and some wine. The movie is filled with moments like this, where the filmmakers dwell on the individual idiosyncrasies of the characters over generic action beats.

The other joy of the movie is the score by Daniel Pemberton. While it is not based around the familiar theme tune, he has created a score that perfectly syncs with the style and tone of the movie. Recalling the work of Lalo Schifrin and Ennio Morricone, it is a great mood setter.

Overall, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is a fine caper movie. While it bombed on release, I have a feeling there is still life in this iteration of the property - I could see this re-emerging as a streaming series of 8 episodes. One can hope.

Previous review (2015)

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.

Johnny English (Peter Howitt, 2003)

After his incompetence leads to the deaths of every active British secret service agent, Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson) is promoted to field agent. While he tries and fails to figure out his new role, he stumbles into a scheme by French billionaire Pascale Sauvage (John Malkovich) to depose and replace the Queen of England.

Man, Johnny English. Of all the spy spoofs to turn into franchises, how did this one get through? Coming out post-Cool Britainia, post-Bond's revival and post-Austin Powers, Johnny English now feels stale for even the time of its release. 

The last example might be the most damning, as Johnny English does not share the same satiric frame as Mike Myers' spoof. The idea for the film originated with a series of adverts featuring Atkinson as an incompetent Bondian super spy - a great idea for 30 seconds, but as the basis for a feature-length movie?

I remember going to see it when it came out and I enjoyed it. I ended up going to see it again when a bunch of school friends wanted to see a movie. Outside of a few viewings on TV, Johnny English never stuck to my ribs outside of a few memorable gags.

Since we were in lockdown, I have been perusing Netflix and I found all three JE movies are on there. I decided to check them out and breezed through them on the weekend. 

While I was aware of the sequels, I had never seen them. On this viewing I was surprised that it managed to get a couple sequels. Aside from money, there really is not much under the hood with this franchise. I will go into it more as we progress through these movies.

To the original. 

Going into this viewing I was under the impression that English started out as a pompous ass, was humbled over the course of his mission, and then used what skills he had to thwart the villain and redeem himself. I was mistaken.

While the are some really good gags, and I am a sucker for Atkinson's overconfident bombast, this movie is remarkably empty. It would be one thing if the movie was chockfull of gags, but unless you are a small child who enjoys jokes about poo and people making faces in the mirror, the laughs dry up for long stretches. 

If you ignore the lack of a clearly defined central character, Johnny English is best enjoyed as a showreel of Atkinson's familiar personae as childlike physical comedian and confident spouter of absolute nonsense.

While he has a fine foil in Ben Miller's eternal beta Bough, English is so oblivious and arrogant that by the end of the movie I felt quite bad for both him and Natalie Imbruglia's Lorna Campbell, who both have to pick up the slack while English sails through the movie without consequence. 

There is something inherently funny about a character who fails upwards, but English is singularly unlikable.

Enough bashing. There are some really funny sequences and moments: the credit sequence, in which English gets lost in the halls of the HQ while the title cards zip onscreen, is a joy; English accidentally hitting an intercom while explaining his plan to attack the bad guys' summit, while his targets listen in.

This latter sequence might be my favourite, because of John Malkovich's exasperation with having to deal with English again. While he coasts through the villain role, Malkovich brings a much needed dose of venom to proceedings, as he is the only character to point out how annoying and useless English is.

Sauvage's bluntness does lead to one vaguely clever idea - when Sauvage discovers that English has gate-crashed his party, he just tells English's boss Pegasus (Timothy Pigott-Smith) that English has broken into his building and assaulted his staff. It feels like a (mildly) post-modern moment to have a villain immediately break the pretence of civility ala so many Bond movies (see Bond's ridiculous tipping of the hand in Tomorrow Never Dies).

One of the film's undisputed successes is its swaggering score by Edward Shearmur. Like Elmer Bernstein's score for Airplane!, Shearmur never leans into the hijnks, playing up every spy trope with melodramatic elan. 

Robbie Williams sings the theme song 'A Man For All Seasons', co-written by current Bond composer Hans Zimmer. A breezy little ditty with touches of Britpop, it nails the movie's tone, and that is meant as a compliment.

Johnny English is not great. In fact, it is probably best viewed while you are doing something else, but there are enough great gags to make it a reasonable time-waster. 

Ultimately, there is nothing that high concept about the pitch beyond Rowan Atkinson does James Bond. There are some laughs to be had in that idea, but there needed to be more to make Johnny English worthy of a feature runtime.

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: Wrestling with Shadows (Paul Jay, 1998)

 A documentary chronicling the career of Brett 'The Hitman' Hart, in the run up to the infamous 'Montreal Screwjob' which ended his tenure with Vince McMahon's WWF.

One of the best-known and well-regarded wrestling documentaries, Wrestling with Shadows works as both a portrait of its central figure, and a cinematic freeze-frame of a pivotal shift in the wrestling business.

Wrestling occupies a strange place in my headspace - I have only watched a few matches, but I am really interested in the history, the personalities and the moving parts of matches. In no way am I an expert so in case you are, hold fire.

The film adopts a fly-on-the-wall approach to Hart, following him as he trains, spends time with his family and wrestles with his place in the wrestling business. It does a really good job of breaking down the key components of story-telling in the ring, the importance of wrestling characters, and the growing conflict between Hart's understanding of these things with the massive changes thing place in his industry. 

For Hart, wrestling is basically about basic drama - good versus evil, one defined character facing another, with storylines that progress in a way that is natural with the personalities of the characters the wrestlers are performing as.

As a film, I found its focus... interesting. While Hart is the centre, the filmmakers seem to be aware of what Hart is leaving out, or what he is refusing to see. I felt this specifically in terms of Brett's relationship with his father Stu Hart. One sequence intercuts Brett and others talking about his father with shots of his childhood home. As the camera moves through the empty rooms, the soundtrack blends in old audio recordings of his father training/torturing would-be wrestlers. The juxtaposition of Brett talking about looking up to his father with the sounds of young men screaming in pain undermine the wrestler's romanticised view of his upbringing. 

While this aspect of the film adds some nuance to Hart, the most fascinating element of the film is the conflict between Hart's old-fashioned approach and the new 'Attitude' era of ambiguous characters and shock tactics. Hart is a man out of time, struggling to find his place.

The film climaxes with the Montreal 'screw job', the match which was supposed to see Hart hand over the title belt to Shawn Michaels in a DQ, a way of handing off the title without damaging Hart in front of his home crowd before he headed off to rival promotion WCW (which was in the ascent at the time).

Instead of what Hart believed was planned, the match ended with Michaels pinning Brett for a count-out. Having the camera crew there on the sidelines adds an added layer of tension, as the camera darts after Hart as he storms from the ring; his wife interrogating wrestler Triple H; Vince McMahon stumbling down a hallway with a black eye. 

The film has been assembled to build toward this betrayal, almost like we tracking a great tragedy like the Titanic. The movie opens with a tease of what is coming, and the film repeatedly foreshadows what is to happen, with scenes of Brett questioning the motivations of his boss, Vince McMahon.

While Hart was able to get out of McMahon's employ, I left the film with the sense that Hart was still questioning his purpose in the business he had dedicated his life and body to.

Wrestling with Shadows does a pretty good job of explaining wrestling, without getting too lost in minutiae. It is more interesting as a character study of Hart, and as a conflict between one individual's creativity and the commercial imperatives of their employer.

Passenger 57 (Kevin Hooks, 1992)

When international terrorist Charles Rane (Bruce Payne) is arrested, he is placed on a commercial flight to face charges. What his FBI minders do not know is that Rane's comrades are also onboard.

After they take over the plane, Rane and his lackeys have to deal with an unexpected obstacle - another passenger who happens to be the airline's new security specialist, John Cutter (Wesley Snipes). 

It is amazing how your opinion of a movie can change. Sometimes it just takes time. Or a lockdown. 

I reviewed Passenger 57 a couple of years ago for a feature on 'Die Hard on a... ' action flicks, and I do not remember being that excited about it. I remember catching it on TV once when I was a kid, but on re-watching the film for the article, I was a bit underwhelmed. Coming off of Blade and Snipes' other action vehicles, I was surprised at how small-scale it was - the plane is a regular commercial airliner, and a lot of the action takes place on the ground, a deviation from the Die Hard template that I held against it in the ‘Die Hard on a…’ article. 

Passenger 57 recently popped up on Netflix, and I gave it another shot. Time has been kind because this movie is great.

So many movies nowadays are 2-2.5 hours long, and feature world-destroying villains and computer-generated set pieces. Compared with those lumbering Disneysaurs, Passenger 57 is spry and unpretentious.

This movie is 84 minutes long. Not 184 minutes. 84. I cannot emphasise how much I love this.

It starts, blasts through the bare essentials of character and plot set up, and then we are into the action. While it does not boast the frenetic editing of action films from later in the decade, Passenger 57 moves at a good clip with no dead spots.

And while the movie is smaller in scale than comparable films like Air Force One and Executive Decision, I enjoyed the juxtaposition of a banal domestic flight with the struggle between the OTT terrorist and Snipes’ action hero.

I had dismissed the fairground set piece in my earlier review, but as with the plane, I really enjoyed how straightforward it is - Rane is doing what almost no villain in a ‘Die Hard on a’ movie does: attempting to escape. He only ends up ducking it out with Cutter at the fairground because he is trying to hijack a car in the parking lot. There is no dastardly scheme - he just needs an escape vehicle. 

The one aspect of the film that I bump up against is the way the filmmakers present Cutter's escape as the initial hijacking takes place.

Cutter is in the bathroom when the hijacking takes place, and he sneaks out to watch the action go down and grab the plane phone. Script-wise, this works fine. But with the way it is shot, it always looks like Snipes is in full view of the terrorists. Another element that I noticed was the absence of noise from the engines. He makes so much noise when the terrorists are so close it just comes off really strange. 

That is really the only part of the movie that does not work for me - I do not usually go in for Cinema Sins-style 'logic gaps', but in this sequence, the filmmaking choices threw me out for a minute.

What really elevates Passenger 57 are the performances by the leads. 

As Charles Rane, Bruce Payne is playing the usual cliche Euro-trash villain, but he leans into the character’s most despicable attributes so much it feels like a commentary on the ubiquity of Euro-trash villains in Hollywood action movies.

This movie would still not work however without Wesley Snipes. When he enters the movie, it feels like everything is revolving around him. He is so charismatic I could not believe this was his first action movie.

In some ways, this movie feels like the first chapter in a franchise - Snipes is super-charismatic, has plenty of one-liners and even introduces himself as 'Cutter, John Cutter’, like he is an established character. He is also responsible for all the major turns the movie takes, from forcing the plane to land to foiling Rane’s attempted escape at the fairground. He even does a forward roll before killing a sniper a million miles away. 

While Snipes has kept his hand in the genre since, it is a pity that he never brought John Cutter back to the screen. Here is hoping the numbers on Netflix are big enough to convince some executive to green light Passenger 58.

You can read the article I reference at the start of this review here.

BITE-SIZED REVIEW: The Trollenberg Terror AKA The Crawling Eye (Quentin Lawrence, 1958)

In the middle of the Swiss Alps sits the majestic Trollenberg. A popular site for climbers, the Trollenberg has gained new notoriety when climbers begin to die on the mountain. American scientist Alan Brooks (Forest Tucker) arrives at the base of the peak to study a mysterious fog that is slowly making its way down the mountain.

Are the two phenomena related? 

(spoilers)

I first saw a clip of this movie in Small Soldiers, which I watched when I was really young. The image of a giant eye with tentacles reaching for the camera stayed with me for years, until I stumbled upon the movie about a decade ago.

A UK production based on a TV play (ala Quatermass), The Trollenberg Terror is not a great movie. But it is peppered with fun b-movie touches that make me love the whole thing, warts and all.

On this viewing, I did feel the lack of forward momentum. The movie was made on a low budget, and the filmmakers do not really take the action out of the hotel lobby. What helps the movie's pace are a couple of vaguely suspenseful moments (including a surprisingly graphic murder with a pickaxe) and a peppering of odd moments.

There is a subplot involving a young psychic (played by Janet Munro) who starts to pick up messages from the unseen threat up the mountain. While the movie is slow and stagey, some of the oral storytelling is quite effective - especially when the psychic starts narrating one of the invisible enemies' attacks from their POV. 

I grew up listening to tapes of old 40s radio shows, and scenes like this carry a similar atmosphere. It might not be cinematic, but it worked for me. 

The most effective element of the movie is the fog that precedes and obscures the film's antagonists. You can see the influence on John Carpenter's The Fog, and the filmmakers behind The Trollenberg Terror milk a lot of suspense from the fog machines, particularly once the third act creaks into view. 

The third act is where I rediscovered my love for this movie. The Trollenberg Terror spends most of its runtime teasing some great 'terrifying' monstrosity, and finally turns from a pretty staid drawing room mystery to a OTT fifties monster movie, complete with a collection of bug-eyed nasties that resemble Shuma-Gorath from the Street Fighter/Marvel game.

If you like monsters, and fifties special effects, you will find a lot to like in the final 15 minutes of The Trollenberg Terror. While it is hokey, it is genuinely exciting. 

I probably have not sold this movie very well, but it is only 84 minutes long and available for free on the internet so...

BITE-SIZED REVIEW: Kiss The Girls (Gary Fleder, 1997)

When his niece goes missing, detective Alex Cross (Morgan Freeman) is drawn into the hunt for a killer who is collecting women who fit his specific idea of perfection.

When Kate (Ashley Judd) escapes the killer, Cross partners with her to find the killer and rescue the other women he has kidnapped before it is too late.

I read Kiss The Girls last year. I have never read James Patterson before, but the premise sounded interesting and I think was fooled by the fact that it had been made into a movie. 

I have now watched Kiss The Girls and I feel the same way about the movie: the premise sounded interesting and I was definitely hoodwinked by the assumption that the movie would be better than the book.

Kiss The Girls is the kind of potboiler that makes for a good genre movie - take the premise and the characters, strip out any extraneous stuff and flesh it out. As a cinematic thriller, Kiss The Girls comes off a bit inert.

This whole movie feels like a desiccated meal. All the components are there, but it needs water and heat to expand. 

I have a hard time pinpointing what is off about Kiss The Girls. The pace never racks up and the tension is never really there. There are sequences which should be scary, but they never quite pick up the way the filmmakers think they do.

With regards to the book, I found the characters uninteresting and plot over-complicated. The movie does a pretty good job of translating the story, but the only real improvement is the performances by Freeman and Judd, who make Cross and Kate credible.

Judd has a potentially meaty role as a woman who refuses to be defined by her experience. This is an interesting idea, particularly when most of the men around her seem to want to write her off, or bundle her away. This feels like a teaser for a more nuanced and deeper character study, and this movie is not that interested in building on Kate in a way that does not fit the formulaic plotting.

As far as the filmmaking goes, it is fairly by-the-numbers. There a couple instances of slow motion which come off as cheesy rather than effective (Double Jeopardy suffers from a similar use of the technique). Overall, I found the aesthetic of Kiss The Girls more interesting as an artefact, the fossil of a genre that has more-or-less migrated off the big screen to the small one, mostly in the form of the Law & Order spinoff SVU or Criminal Minds.

There is probably interesting essay in there, but it will take a meatier movie than this one to get me to delve into it.

IN THEATRES: Unhinged

On a bad day, single mother Rachel (Caren Pistorius) gets on the wrong side of another driver (Russell Crowe), who turns his sights on destroying everything she holds dear. 

Race with the Devil, Road Games, Breakdown, Duel... 

There have been some great thrillers involving cars. I have a soft spot for this type of movie - there is something so stripped down and visceral about limiting the story to the road. 

I do not watch trailers, but I caught a snippet of Unhinged and I got excited. Crowe's casting sounded good (and almost a comment on his real-life actions), and the film looked like unpretentious fun.

Unhinged rides the line between a character study of the motivations that turn men into spree killers and a trashy slasher. The filmmakers' inability to figure out which side to lean on means the film is completely unremarkable. I was struggling to remember it half an hour after leaving the theatre.

The film tries to contextualise Crowe's Tom Cooper as a man broken by the rat race and America’s healthcare crisis. However, the character is so cartoonishly evil in his ability to destroy the protagonists’ life that it is hard to buy.

Crowe does a good job in the early scenes, playing Cooper's simmering rage just right. 

But once the chase begins, his performance begins to feel silly, all the nuance shaved and moulded to fit the generic villain template.

The big problem with Unhinged is how rote and unoriginal it is. From beginning to end, nothing about Unhinged feels fresh or surprising. It does not help that the movie is dour.

Not that this movie should be light in tone, but there is such unrelenting meanness - and a predictability to the thriller mechanics - that make it kinda bland. There is a consistent grimness to a lot of average thrillers nowadays - I felt it with some of the Screen Gems and Blumhouse movies I have seen -  and Unhinged falls into the same mire.

I watched a TV movie a couple months ago with a similar premise. Entitled Death on the Freeway, it is about a serial killer in a van who waits until he gets cut off by a woman driver and then will try to run her off the road. even though it is directed by Hal Needham (Smokey and the Bandit) that movie actually found a way to write a thriller that had a good sense of suspense AND made the villain's actions part of a broader commentary on the misogyny the lead character faces. 

Compared to that movie, Unhinged is a leaden mess that lacks the intelligence to integrate and expand upon its themes, rather than use them as a jumping-off point for generic plot mechanics.