Two goods cops, one white, one Hispanic, do battle with a drugs gang – did someone mention Miami Vice? This cop thriller, set in the South Central part of LA, offers so much at the beginning but plays out like a fairly standard cops vs. drug-gang battle, albeit with good acting and nice photography.

Gyllenhaal and Peña are the two cops doing a Crocket and Tubbs, patrolling the streets of LA. When they pull over a driver they discover a huge money and guns haul – ‘two of the basic three food chains’, and are happy with their work. However they are baffled to discover that the case seems to be stalled in court, and decide to take their investigation further. They raid a suspect’s house to find evidence of human trafficking, but have their case taken over by forces higher than themselves.

It’s all well staged, with Gyllenhaal’s hand-held camera capturing much of the action for ‘a project’ he is working on – quite what that is is never explained. His and Pena’s banter in the police car is spontaneous, well-acted and occasionally very very funny, but ultimately it leads up a blind alley. Having introduced the theme of possible big city corruption the film never follows it up, happy instead to stage a series of shoot-outs and set pieces which are well done but frustratingly empty.

It becomes little more than a buddy movie, with the two men discussing women, kids and life and attending each other’s family parties. Gyllenhaal and Peña have genuine chemistry and seems to be enjoying themselves, and delighting in ribbing their fellow officers. A sequence involving saving a family from a burning house proves their commitment to the cause, and another involving two missing children proves nothing at all.

Overall verdict: In the end the story seems like a series of cases joined up to try and make one film, whereas it might have worked better as a TV cop series. A shame, considering the talent involved.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

After three hours of this ‘dance drama’ I looked at my watch – 10 minutes had gone by. Never has an 80-minute running time seemed so interminable.

It’s essentially a two-hander. A wet drip of a woman with doe eyes wanders around the underground in a daze. Coming out of Camden Tube station a man going the other way spots her, catches up with her and asks her out for a drink. Any woman in her right mind would shout for the police, especially in Camden, but she agrees.

He, Oriel, is a sexy Cuban dancer, with irritating wooden necklaces and stupid hair, and is convinced he has seen her dancing somewhere. She calls herself ‘Maya’ but is clearly hiding something, and claims she has never danced.

Undeterred he ploughs on, buys her a drink in a Cuban bar, then takes her to Sadlers Wells to watch a dance performance from the side of the stage. Maya seems transformed – well, she raises an eyebrow, which is about as animated as she gets. At the after-show party an agent seems to recognise Maya but she still insists she is not a dancer and storms out.

Oriel then pulls out his final card, by improvising a dance underneath London Bridge train station, without any passers by punching him or pouring beer over him – strange. Maya seems to be finally won over, but as they get intimate she reveals some of her secret past life to him.

It’s clearly made on a low budget – Camden High Street is dry in one shot, then rain-soaked, then dry again, but all that can be forgiven for a decent script and some sparky acting. This has neither. The dialogue is wooden and pretentious, it takes an age for anyone to say anything and when they do it’s stiff and uninvolving. The acting is just plain bad – Vargas is clearly supposed to be a sexy stud but just looks like an overfed student with a smelly flat, and Jourdain is just dreadful. She barely changes her mournful pout throughout the film, and wanders about looking like a member of the Royal Family who has drunk her fortune.

Overall verdict: It’s a vacuous waste of 80 minutes, and frankly confirms my suspicions about this modern dance lark – it’s idiotic bullshit.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

Any similarities between Private Peaceful and War Horse are entirely deliberate. Both are written by former children’s laureate Michael Morpurgo, and a children’s film this is, although one for older children – the war sequences are fairly tough and there is some bloodshed.

This story tells of the road to Flanders from a sleepy village in Devon, where two brothers enlist. Both, we learn in flashback, have already seen tragedy – Tommo Peaceful (George Mackay) has witnessed his forester dad dying under a falling tree, and both have fallen for the same girl. Molly.

A girl can only love one boy though, and she chooses older brother Charlie (Jack O’Connell), much to Tommo’s anguish. Both lads worship their mum (Maxine Peake, excellent) and put up with working as labourers on the estate of blustering old duffer Colonel (Richard Griffiths), who believes all fit men – and horses – should be sent off to war.

So off the two lads go, only to suffer more on the battlefields than they ever did as simple farm hands,much to their shock. Their sergeant is a sadistic psycho, their commanding officer a well-meaning buffoon, and the war seems to be run by, at best, idiots. The brothers will be fine as long as they stick together, but one will have to pay the ultimate sacrifice to save the other.

It’s difficult to criticise the film on many levels – it’s well-made, handsomely photographed, well-acted, thoroughly researched and the battle sequences are well edited. The script though reverts to stereotypes too often, even for a children’s film.

We have the red-faced military duffer, the shouty moustachioed sergeant, the doe-eyed English maiden, the well-meaning hard-working farmer. The two brothers are little more than caricatures – early on they save a dog from being put down to win the heart of the pretty girl, and save each other at the awful school.

Stalwarts Griffiths and Frances de la Tour do their best with cardboard cut-out roles, and Peake is sympathetic as the brothers’ long-suffering mother. However it all plays out somewhat predictably, and at 104 mins might be too long for the average age of its audience, which will presumably be around the 12-16 mark.

Overall verdict: If the kids loved War Horse and want some more of the same thing this fills the gap nicely. It’s a solid, if predictable, addition to the films about the Great War, although its place in the pecking order will be fairly low down.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

There’s one gaping hole in Stevan Riley’s excellent documentary celebrating the 50 film years of James Bond – there’s no Sean Connery interview.

That’s to say, all the other Bonds are clearly happy to sit in front of a camera and tell their stories. Connery is there alright – Riley makes up for no one-to-one interview by filling the first half of his film with excellent clips from the films, and Connery is heard in short bursts – radio interviews maybe? It would have been great to hear from the man himself in what is an amazing franchise and a fascinating story.

What we do get is a thorough telling of the Bond legend, starting off with some great reminiscences from friends of Ian Fleming, including Christopher Lee. The books were not an instant success, and there came a tricky period of negotiating film rights which, as Barbara Broccoli says, were to cause problems later. Firstly there was a black and white TV series, ‘Jimmy Bond’, which was as bad as it sounds judging from the mercifully brief footage.

It’s hard to believe but Connery was not the first choice by any means – he was ‘too muscly’ – but Cubby Broccoli asked his wife if she thought he was sexy and her reply sealed the deal. Then came the success, the great Bond films, the glamour and the trappings. There’s some great footage of a clearly startled Connery filming in Japan, where the set was mobbed constantly, making filming almost impossible.

The film pulls no punches in depicting the problems between producer Harry Saltzman and Connery – the actor thought Saltzman greedy, he pretty much admitted it – and the cracks began to show. Eventually they became too great and Connery bailed, with Barbara Broccoli claiming the producers made Connery into the star he was.

Then we get the rest of the Bonds having their say. By far the most entertaining is George Lazenby, hilariously recounting how he cheated by getting an audition, couldn’t act and just wanted to get laid. Footage of him at the premiere is pant-wettingly funny.

Roger Moore is a charmer but lacked threat, Dalton is philosophical about being so poorly treated – his performances were good, the scripts were not, as Broccoli admitted – and Brosnan just looks happy to have been involved. The story of how he got the gig before Dalton, lost it and got it back again is actually pretty interesting – more so than his films, which now look badly dated. To his enormous credit he has the grace to laugh at how ludicrous they had become.

Something had to change, and weirdly it was 9/11 which did it, Broccoli reveals. It was time for a new gritty Bond, one that rejected the flippant and got back to harsh basics. It was time for Casino Royale.

The doc rightly lauds Casino as a huge return to form, but then makes no mention of its disappointing follow-up Quantum Of Solace, which was hit by the writers’ strike and rather rushed. It’s strange that it’s not included – the film has no problems including the other ‘unofficial’ Bond movie, Never Say Never Again, fascinatingly revealing the conflict between Connery and Moore which Moore won at the box office at least. Broccoli wisely says: “It proved there is more to Bond than just one element – they had Connery, we still had Bond.”

Overall verdict: A great way to warm up for the 50th anniversary of James Bond and the imminent release of Skyfall, including a Sam Mendes interview. It had better be good Sam – as the film hints, nothing goes on forever, not even James Bond.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

 

The horror genre has taught us many things: don’t piss off rednecks; don’t read satanic texts aloud; shoot zombies in the head; and never, ever move into a house where a family was massacred. Obviously, Sinister’s Ethan Hawke has never seen a horror film…

Ellison Oswald (Hawke) is a true crime writer desperate to reach the same heights of success he reached with a novel he wrote 10 years ago. In a bid to strike gold and expose even more mistakes made by police officials, Ellison moves his family out to a small town where a shocking murder still haunts the local population. Unbeknownst to his nearest and dearest, Ellison has moved himself, his wife and his two kids into the actual house where the grisly killings took place.

Upon discovering some mysterious home movie footage stored in the otherwise abandoned attic, Ellison begins to unravel an eerie story of sacrifice and multiple murder. As the project spirals out of control, Ellison realises that in order to keep him and his family safe, he must abandon the project and flee the crime scene. But, it might already be too late…

Mixing found-footage frights with out-of-your-skin scares, Scott Derrickson’s jumpy tale of creepy houses and masked bogymen doesn’t exactly rewrite the horror book, but it does provide some slick shocks that make for perfect Friday night thrills.

The whole thing feels incredibly familiar and the unfolding story is largely absurd, but The Exorcism of Emily Rose director is back on track after the dull and dreary The Day the Earth Stood Still, and at least two balls-in-the-throat moments keep the heart pounding to Sinister’s bitter end.

Overall Verdict: A jumpy Friday night shocker that’s guaranteed to send the popcorn flying.

Reviewer: Lee Griffiths

The director’s name is Oliver Megaton? Is that a real person? On the evidence of watching the film, Megaton, who sounds like a Transformer, could quite easily be a robot. The film itself looks like it was written by a computer and acted by zombies, which is quite a feat.

Anyone who has seen the first Taken will know exactly what to expect from this. This time around though it is Neeson’s Bryan and wife Lenore who are taken and their daughter Kim has to turn into an all-action hero to free them, at which point it becomes the same film as the first one.

Bryan is now retired and living in LA, but when he gets offered one final security job in Istanbul he takes it. Lenore and Kim fly over to surprise him but are kidnapped by a gang headed by the father whose sons Bryan hacked down in the first film. Using a hidden mobile phone Bryan guides Kim into saving him, but Lenore is still missing and together they must track her down.

Everyone knows the routine here, you know who the bad guys are as they all have dark skin, bald heads and massive leather jackets. Istanbul is a suitably shabby city which American have no trouble navigating around, and there’s lots of grenades, guns and weapons being fired off in all directions.

There also seems to be a huge amount of product placement going on from a certain computer giant – phones, tablets and laptops appears in every other scene, all very obvious.

As a B-movie with a cast to match it certainly delivers what fans would want, it’s just a shame there isn’t a bit more wit or genuine pacing to it. The visuals are relentlessly grubby and hand-held, and the acting is terrible – Neeson seems to be getting worse as he gets older, not better. Was there really a need to have his daughter running around in a red bikini for much of the film? Apparently there was.

Slotted in between the latest Bourne film and the forthcoming Bond movie, Taken 2 fills a slot to keep the action fans happy, but it really belongs in the bargain bucket at your local DVD shop. It’s forgettable stuff – apart from that director’s name.

Overall verdict: Predictable B-movie with a couple of well-staged chases and stunts, but nothing you haven’t seen done better before.

Reviewer: Mike Martin