There’s not really a lot you can say about The A-Team. It’s one of those movies that comes along every summer, where it looks like a lot of time, effort and money has gone into creating something deliberately okay but not great. It seems calculated to appeal to the widest audience possible, never doing anything to absolutely thrill them, but never offering anything that’s likely to turn them off either.

Perhaps unsurprisingly these type of films are often the one’s based on TV shows, old movies or other things, where from the very beginning people have been saying, ‘what’s the point in remaking that?’ And while sometimes they manage to overcome with, more often than not you end up with a movie like The A-Team, which has no reason to exist, other than to trade on the name of the 1980s TV show.

The basic idea is still the same, Hannibal (Liam Neeson), Faceman (Bradley Cooper), Murdoch (Sharlto Copley) and B.A. Baracus (Quinton Jackson) are four men convicted on a crime they didn’t commit. In this case, already soldiers of fortune who’ve become an elite combat unit, the quartet are in Iraq trying to recover the plates that have been used to print billions in fake bills. However on the way back, they’re double-crossed, and the plates are stolen. Unfortunately for the A-Team, the army thinks Hannibal and his team are behind this, so they lock them up.

When Hannibal later gets information about where the plates might be, he decides to break out of jail, round the rest of his team up and try and clear their name. Unsurprisingly, this involves a lot of running around, blowing things up, quipping and causing general mayhem. In fact it’s so brash and loud there’s little time for anything else. You don’t really care about these men or what they’re doing, it’s just onto the next situation and the next thing that needs shooting, exploding or fighting.

It is utterly brainless, but then so was the TV show, but it was fun. So if this, in a way where you can pretty much feel your brain dribbling out of your ears, but it goes so far into the ridiculous that you can either submit and just enjoy the silliness, or you’ll just get angry that so much money could be spent on something that contrives from the opening moments to be so dumb.

I would tell you whether Neeson, Cooper, Copley and Jackson are any good as the new A-Team, but to be honest the film spends so little time on their characters it’s difficult to tell. Instead let’s just say they do a decent job of running through the plot at lightning speed, making occasional jokes and generally seeming to have a whale of a time, irrespective of what’s going on on-screen. The only real weak link is Jackson, who was never going to fill Mr. T’s shoes, but you’d have thought it wouldn’t have been too difficult to find someone with a little more charisma, and his acting inexperience shows.  Jessica Biel pops up as a military woman who’s also Faceman’s ex-flame, and once more seems shoved into a role that’s based on her looking pretty, and ends up giving the impression she’s a worse actress than she actually is.

The A-Team is an insanely dumb movie, with more holes than a sieve, but it certainly runs along at quite a clip, includes plenty of references to the original TV show for fans, and offers just enough fun, as long as you don’t mind the fact you won’t have to engage your brain for a second. In fact just take a look at the trailer, as the wham bam style, constant rapid-cut visuals (to be honest, the editor on this film is probably in a hospital somewhere now, suffering from exhaustion) and general dumb inanity are what The A-Team offers for nearly two hours – nothing more, nothing less. If that sounds like your kind of film, you’ll have a blast, if not, you’ll just end up once more decrying the state of Hollywood filmmaking.

Overall Verdict: Instead of finding a reason to exist in its own right, The A-Team just tries for dumb, quick-cut fun. It delivers that, but little more.

Reviewer: Phil Caine

No wonder some scientists get annoyed with movies. It’s very rare that scientists invent anything that gets out of hand and starts killing people, but in films they just can’t help themselves. It’s as if the moment you put on a lab coat you’re suddenly imbued with a desire to play God and see how close you can get to the complete destruction of the planet, while affecting a devil may care attitude. However even though that Splice’s scientific credentials are a little off (despite tipping its hat a lot to ideas of ethics and boundaries), it’s still a very entertaining romp, which is actually more interesting for its bizarre psychosexual tensions that what it has to say about science.

Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play Clive and Elsa, renowned as being at the top of their field and hailed for having successfully managed to splice together the genes of different animals to create a completely new hybrid species (scientists, stop frothing. Yes, the way it’s presented in the movie is faintly ridiculous, but this is sci-fi, so go with it). Now they want to go further by using human DNA in their experiments, but the pharmaceutical company funding their work forbids it.

Undaunted, the duo set to work in secret, creating the human-animal hybrid Dren, who starts growing and learning at an accelerated rate, while constantly evolving to become amphibious and in possession of a tale with a toxic sting. As you may have realised, this makes her more than a little dangerous, but instead of just letting her go on the rampage, as you might expect, the film descends into a more bizarre and perverse world of strange and fluid sexuality. This is a film that includes scenes that if looked at in certain ways, could be considered bestiality, bisexuality, incest, paedophilia and/or rape (in fact somebody raping themselves). Perhaps most perverse is that all this is all wrapped up in shell that initially presents the scientists and Dren almost like a family unit, so that when it all goes pear-shaped as Dren begins to change and evolve, it’s even more disturbing than it would have been otherwise.

Wisely, while many films would have just had Brody and Polley as being blinded by the possibilities of their work, before seeing the light when they realise what they’ve wrought, they remain far more human characters, making decisions that are often less than noble, a little bit selfish, foolhardy and sometime unlikable. Oddly though, rather than alienating the audience, this makes them all the more interesting, so that while it initially seems this is going to be all about how the frontier of science is like playing with matches, it changes into something stranger and more human.

Dren may be a movie monster, but she’s out of the Alien or The Fly book, where the monster is almost a manifestation of the sexual id. This time the sex is more open than it was in Alien, and whereas in that movie it was more about aggressive male sexuality, here it plays more into the tensions amongst and between the sexes, with Dren both male and female, and not exactly expressing the best of either.

While all this is extremely interesting and gives the film an almost Cronenbergian, unsettling vibe that most modern horror/sci-fi lack, it’s not without its flaws. While Sarah Polley is excellent, Adrien Brody once more shows that perhaps The Pianist was an aberration. His intensity suggests that he thinks he’s a lot better than he actually is, as he often comes across as being slightly unsure of what he’s doing. It’s also difficult to escape the feel that much of the movie is a tad derivative, even if it’s doing some interesting things with the ideas it’s borrowed.

The script could have done with some tightening too, particularly in regards to Dren, because with her shifting desires, actions and motivations, the film threatens to lose sight of her, turning her into a plot device after lots of good work setting her up. This never quite happens, but it threatens to. Equally, after the strangeness and daring of what’s gone before, the conclusion feels rather generic. In fact it’s something you’d have expected from a rather more run of more run of the mill film.

Nevertheless, despite a few flaws, Splice is undoubtedly superior sci-fi horror. In fact even if you stripped out the unsettling sexuality, it’d be worth watching for Dren, who’s a truly wonderful creation of physical and CG effects, underpinned by a wonderfully androgynous, seductive yet menacing performance by Delphine Chaneac. In fact the script problems surrounding her that are mentioned above, often seem to stem from the fact she’s such a strong creation that it’s sometimes difficult to control her.

Overall Verdict: Superior sci-fi horror, which may be a bit derivative, but goes to some wonderfully strange and unsettling psychosexual places, and offer a brilliant piece of character design in Dren.

Reviewer: Phil Caine

What’s the worst idea in the world? Trying to put a hat on a bear? Slamming your own tongue in a George Foreman grill? How about this, convincing a studio to spend millions of dollars on a movie you’re producing just so your kid can be in it? I imagine a similar train of thought passed through the minds of many a cinema enthusiast when this Will Smith produced project was announced 18 months ago. The very concept of the Hollywood elite setting up their over-privileged offspring with plumb roles is enough to grind the gears of even the most docile of film fans. Even more irritating is that Spawn of Smith’s lead debut is actually really good.
 
It would be unfair to call this a remake in the traditional sense of the word. Remake implies a rehash of old material – i.e. the same setting and same characters, but with different actors, tweaked effects and a more current script. The Karate Kid falls more under the category of ‘reimagining’, in that it contains similar themes and content to the original, but with a new spin on character relationships and the overall scenario.

The fact that this set up requires far less suspension of disbelief than its predecessor is a certainly a plus. In the original, Ralph Macchio sure was lucky there happened to be an elderly karate master working in his town; otherwise the movie would have been called “Pretty Boy Gets His Face Punched Off”. Moving the action almost entirely to Beijing gives proceedings an altogether more organic feel and the idea that everyone and their mum knows how to dish out the pain seems slightly more plausible. Also, the memory of the Americans and the Chinese working together to create art will be nice after the inevitable nuclear conflict of those two nations, when we’re all fighting each other for the last tin of cat food in a burnt out desert wasteland.

So Jaden Smith has a problem. He’s a street-smart hip-hop kid, raised on the mean streets of Detroit, and lives such a charmed life that he doesn’t even hang his coat up (that’s more important than it sounds). His dad’s been killed by a dastardly scriptwriter intent on leaving a nice father-figure shaped hole in his background, and now his mother’s job has relocated the both of them to Beijing. Suddenly Detroit is looking like a picnic compared to China and her non-English speaking, noodle-eating, face-punching populace. After a run-in with a cute love interest and her non-too-impressed kung-fu fighting brother (or half-brother, that bit was never properly cleared up), our young hero takes a fairly savage beating, but finds sympathy from a mysterious maintenance man (Jackie Chan) with a deep knowledge of kung-fu, who offers to teach him how to physically and mentally overcome his obstacles.

Smith, for his part is passable. The resemblance between the young actor and his highly accomplished parents is uncanny, with an equal split between Pinkett intensity and Smith attitude. He shows plenty of promise, sinking his teeth into what is essentially a fairly limited character. Jaden’s comic timing is not quite up to the family legacy quite yet however, and the few scenes of heightened emotion seem a little forced. That said, child actors that can pull that off from the get-go (Jodie Foster, Kirsten Dunst, Haley Joel Osment, Abbie Breslin) don’t come along very often and, seeing as he’s only just celebrated his 12th birthday, I have no problem cutting the kid some slack.

It’s refreshing to see Chan take a detour from his normal kung-fu slapstick routine. Combine this with the highly underrated, straight-to-DVD thriller The Shinjuku Incident, and hopefully this is a sign of the old master trying his hand at something new. Here he provides an anchor for Smith’s slightly wild and uneven performance, as the veteran keeping things mellow when things threaten to fly a little far down Youth Street and make the whole thing impenetrable to anyone over 16. Chan also takes the lead in making the chemistry between the two characters work. His Mr Han is never disapproving or doddering, but patient to the point of jadedness, which is an excellent counterpoint to his young protégé’s rapid fire street smarts. 

A strong back-up cast provide a further boost. Taraji P. Henson is as sharp and as solid as you’d expect from someone with an Oscar nomination under their belt. Her urban mom puts a brave face on her drastic change of life, while Han Wen Wen is a sweet love interest without ever becoming too sugary and annoying. Special mention however must be made of Zhenwei Wang, whose bullying antagonist Chen is brimful of menace. His glowering stare and penchant for beating the tar out of anyone who looks at him funny make the character as scary a 12-year-old as you’re likely to meet outside of Peckham on a Friday night.

Stylistically, the movie sits very comfortably between its 80s origins and a polished 21st century fight-fest. Obvious homages to the past are paid, and eagle eyed and eared fans will notice various nods to the previous movie, both visually and within the dialogue.  The story is eminently predictable, but presented with a very definite guilty pleasure vibe to it. Combine that with some genuinely quite brutal fight sequences and you’re left with almost the perfect recipe for how to reboot a beloved family franchise. Almost.

This will undoubtedly be mentioned in almost every other review in print or spoken word, but it is such a thorn in the side of an otherwise great film that it very nearly forfeits that fifth star all by itself. The Karate Kid clocks in at two hours and twenty minutes.  That’s long. Really damn long. Just to put that in perspective for you, that’s 40 minutes longer than Toy Story 3, 30 minutes longer than The A-Team and just short of an hour longer than Shrek 4. Come on people! The primary audience for this movie is the male 9-16 bracket, not a demographic famed for its attention span. Maybe there’s some message in here about the patience inherent in Kung-fu, but at some point, patient story-telling turns into over-indulgence.  I never thought I’d be inwardly yelling at a kid’s action film to get on with it, but here it is, and frustratingly, it’s nothing an extra week in the editing suite couldn’t have fixed.

Overall, however, the Karate Kid succeeds where other remakes have failed. It embraces its corny 80s roots whilst at the same time injecting a healthy dose of high octane action. Jaden Smith, pushed to front and centre by his fortunate parentage, passes most of tests presented to him, and helped along by a decent script and impressive action, delivers the kind of quality movie experience I suspect a lot of people were secretly hoping he wouldn’t.

Overall Verdict: A genuinely pleasant surprise. Although a touch overlong, The Karate Kid provides a slick balance of modern punchy action and retro comedy fun.  Ideal for older kids and teenagers and engaging enough to keep adults interested as well. Highly recommended.

Reviewer: Alex Hall

It took Christopher Nolan eight years to write Inception, cryptically describing it as a contemporary sci-fi action thriller “set within the architecture of the mind.” Nolan does big – really big – films, but there’s something slightly impersonal about Inception, which is full of ideas and some great moments, but never quite fits together in a satisfactory way. It is complicated, technically dazzling, looks amazing and features great performances, but is almost equally pretentious, overlong, baggy and sometimes plain dull. Compared to the usual summer blockbusters it’s great to get your teeth into something so huge, but it’s ultimately a triumph of style over substance.

Describing the plot could take as long as watching the film, but actually at its heart is pretty simple. Maurice Fischer (Postlethwaite) is a Rupert Murdoch-like media owner on his deathbed. He is going to donate his empire to his son Robert (Murphy), but rival Saito (Watanabe) wants the empire broken up, and wants Robert to do it willingly. The only way that will happen is to get inside Robert’s head and implant the idea in the form of a dream – enter Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team. Cobb has devised a method of invading people’s minds to find their subconscious secrets, called inception.

He agrees to do the job, reasoning that if he pulls it off he will be finally able to clear his own mental demons that keep plaguing him – he is keeping alive his dead wife in his dreams, which keep invading his work. If he can finally lay her memory to rest he will be able to face his kids again. So to accomplish the job he assembles a crack team consisting of Arthur (Gordon-Levitt), Ariadne (Page), Eames (Hardy) and Yusuf (Rao). They have exactly 10 hours to get inside Robert’s head on the flight to Australia to get the job done – the problem is Cobb’s subconscious keeps popping up, and he also discovers he will have to go three layers into Robert’s head to come out alive.

Dreams within dreams within dreams – oh blimey does it get complicated. Cobb explains at the beginning that when you’re in a dream everything seems real, and the special effects boys have a whale of a time making that come true. Paris streets bend round, hotel lifts become gravity-free zones, water bends in a glass, even entire cities appear with no people inside the buildings. As visually stunning as this is though, it’s still the story and the characters which drive it, and Inception falls down a little here. Cobb’s team are merely ciphers, having no inner life of their own – Arthur and Ariadne do share a brief kiss but it’s very chaste. Neither do we care very much about Fischer’s will and testament, which is the film’s Maguffin, but it’s a flimsy idea to hang a movie on. It’s also worth noting that the film contains no jokes or humour – Nolan simply doesn’t do funny.

All is saved however by the film’s real idea, Cobb wrestling with his subconscious about whether to keep his wife alive, even if it is only in dreams. DiCaprio and Cotillard share several haunting, affecting scenes where he is clearly disturbed at her presence yet tempted to keep the illusion going, as he misses her so much. A scene where we see her ‘suicide’ is as affecting as it is confusing, and that’s saying something.

The performances here are absolutely exemplary, led by DiCaprio’s tortured, frenzied Cobb. Even when we are in dream-within-a-dream territory – and sometimes it’s exhausting just keeping up with the various levels – DiCaprio is there with a frown and a line to help us out. Cotillard is equally strong as his vision – literally – of a wife, and the supporting cast are all on great form, even if they are just given some plot to explain. Ellen Page in particular has a role requires her to explain what she’s doing without her having much idea of what exactly that is, but she is an actress of such skill that she manages to pull it off.

Inception is the product of Christopher Nolan’s mind, which is clearly full of big ideas. Ultimately though the movie comes across as a bigger-budget Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind mixed with a bit of Memento, with lots of special effects thrown at the screen. Most of the budget is up there on the screen, but sometimes it might have been better to tone things down a little and focus a bit more on character rather than set pieces. A sequence towards the end in a snow station looks more like a calling card for a Bond director than a scene from Inception, and the opening sequence goes on way too long.

Ultimately though you have to applaud Nolan for the sheer bravado with which he throws ideas and images at the screen. Even if he doesn’t fully succeed, he still creates a fascinating movie, and you can’t say that about many British directors – and if you can see it at an IMAX screen you really should, it looks amazing.

Overall verdict: Visually dazzling, complex, labyrinthine look inside a man’s subconscious, which has more ideas than it knows what to do with but still weaves an amazing pattern and grips for most of its long running time.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

If you don’t know whether you like the Twilight films yet, it’s unlikely you’re going to try to find out now, but if you’re on the edge, you may find Eclipse more fun than you expected. As the film’s initial performance in the States showed, the franchise has a ridiculously loyal following, which gave it a near record opening day (second only to New Moon), but the following day the gross dropped by two-thirds, meaning that while it still made plenty of cash, it’s a core of fanatics that drives the series’ popularity.

Thankfully though, as a film in its own right Eclipse tries to deal with some of the earlier movies’ shortcomings (which are far better than the they’re given credit for, but rather flawed), and while it’s unlikely to convert new fans, it is pretty entertaining. The main thing that threatened to stymie the Twilight movies, is that while the love triangle between human Bella, vampire Edward and werewolf Jacob (as many have noted, the films have a sort of bizarre sexuality, where a teen girl must choose between necrophilia and bestiality) is absolutely central, there’s actually very little movement possible on that.

The passion between Bella and Edward was set so early and so deeply that everything would crash down if they tried to mess with it too much, while Jacob’s love is destined never to be reciprocated. As a result another movie which largely just revolved around them mooning over each other and not actually doing all that much, threatened to be a trip too far (Bellas phantom Edwards in New Moon really did stretch things to breaking point, but that’s author Stephenie Meyer’s fault more than the film’s). While there is a lot of that (what else did you expect?), Eclipse also adds in more plot, and gives time to some of the other characters, which helps expand the Twilight world and ensure that the insular broodings of the teens feels like it’s more than just about their own self-involvement this time around.

The slightly sprawling story sees the core trio dealing with the decisions made in New Moon – most notably that after graduation Bella will become a vampire. Neither Edward nor Jacob want this, but she’s determined, although as the film goes on starts to see things a little differently. Meanwhile an army of newborn bloodsuckers has started to amass in Seattle, which may have something to do with vengeful vampire Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard), who’s still pissed off that the Cullens killed her boyfriend in the first film. This causes the Cullens and the werewolves to broker an uneasy alliance, which of course mean plenty more love triangle mooning. Of course, having been introduced in New Moon, the Volturi are bound to turn up at some point, to see whether, as promised, Bella has been turned.

One of the issues with New Moon was that while it was very talky, not a huge amount actually happened, but here there’s more room for things to breath, so that we get to see, for example, some of the backstory of the Cullen clan, which, to be honest, is often more interest than Bella and Edward in the present day. Everyone still spends more time talking about things than actually doing anything, but director David Slade wisely chooses to ensure there are enough slick action set-pieces to keep things moving along very nicely, and it certainly feels more visceral this time, bringing out the darkness of the story, which was slightly obscured in the first two films. Eclipse also tries to add in a bit of humour, which while slightly clunky is a welcome relief from the OTT seriousness of the first two movie.

Bella is still a complete wet blanket, partly due to the fact Kirsten Stewart can only seem to manage one emotion, so that while the plot tries to give her more to do and expand her character’s maturity, she still comes across as a whiny little girl. However the film does manage to bring out another side of Jacob and Edward, showing a little more depth and self-awareness, so they don’t just come across as a couple of guys who really need to get over themselves.

Of course all the expected is there too. Jacob is incapable of keeping his shirt on, Bella and Edward look at each other passionately and moodily, Edward is conflicted about everything, and despite a little humour it’s still immensely self-important, but Eclipse is undoubtedly the Twilight movie that works best as a movie in its own right. It won’t convert haters (who do seem to loath Twilight more on principle than because any of the films have actually been all that bad), but those on the verges of the phenomenon may find that with a quicker pace, as well as more humour and action, they’ll enjoy Eclipse more than they expected.

Overall Verdict: As a film, it’s probably the best of the Twilight saga, expanding the series’ scope, as well as offering a quicker pace, and a better sense of both the light and the dark sides of the story.

Reviewer: Phil Caine

There is one moment which sums up this extraordinarily powerful and moving film. Brenda Blethyn’s Elisabeth, a country-living mum who has come to London to find her daughter after she went missing following the 7/7 attacks, walks across a railway bridge plastered with ‘Missing’ posters featuring dozens of faces. The enormity of what happens suddenly hits her, and all she can utter is a desperate ‘goodness’.

After 9/11, Hollywood gave us Reign Over Me, a story that descended into sentimentality way too quickly and failed to move. Before we get too proud of this response to our own comparable tragedy, note that the director is French and responsible for the superb Days Of Glory, which told of the Algerian response to World War II. Here he tackles not just the grief of a tragedy but the effect it can have on the survivors.

The story is pretty simple. Blethyn’s Elisabeth is living a tough life working a farm in Guernsey, having lost her husband in the Falklands. She is devoted to daughter Jane, who stops returning calls after 7/7. Stricken with worry, Elisabeth visits Jane’s apartment in grimy north London, where she slowly learns that her daughter had moved in with Ali, a French-African Muslim, and they were studying Arabic at the local mosque. Elisabeth is just getting her baffled head around that when Ali’s father turns up looking for him. Ousmane (Kouyate) is an African who left his family years ago to work in France, he speaks no English and doesn’t even know what his son would look like now.

Elisabeth is mystified and horrified in equal measure, and is also convinced that Ali has somehow brainwashed her ‘good girl’ daughter, but the evidence, in the form of pictures of the couple together, suggests otherwise. She calls the police to deal with Ousmane, and his vague answers don’t help his cause, but that fact is they both have missing children, and decide to work together to find them.

The film’s huge strength is in using its simple plot to tease open many issues. The two main characters are almost from different planets – Elisabeth is protestant, fusty, bewildered by London’s ethnic mix and at one point barks to her brother on the phone, ‘the whole place is full of Muslims’. Ousmane by contrast seems physically slight, slow of movement but philosophical, religiously devout and equally determined to find his missing offspring. Talk about the odd couple.

They are up against a city that seems utterly alien – London has never looked bleaker, even Regent’s Park is colourless and stale – and a system that seems incapable of helping them. An early scene shows a sympathetic police officer taking Elisabeth’s details but warning her that there are lots of parents in the same predicament – ‘we can’t help you’ seems to be the message.

The two performances are from two very different acting schools, but that actually suits the material well. Blethyn is stout, matronly, determined but with fear in her eyes every time she hands out a ‘Missing’ leaflet. The late Kouyate, walking steadily with his stick, is doe-eyed, sombre and stately, never smiling, never laughing, never crying. To its huge credit as the story heads towards the couple becoming romantically involved it pulls back, a wise decision – that would smack too much of political correctness.

Overall Verdict: Overall London River lets the subject matter speak for itself, and is all the more moving for it. There are a few false moments, especially when Elisabeth utters the tired line, “our lives aren’t that different”, and Ousmane’s final act smack too much of metaphor. Compared to Reign Over Me though it’s a understated treat, and a reminder of that terrible, dreadful day in London.

Reviewer: Mike Martin