Film Review: John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

One of the riskier unforced errors a film can make lies in referencing a better movie, since it runs the risk of making the audience think about what they could be watching instead. Chad Stahelski's John Wick: Chapter 2 makes it twice in its first ten minutes.

First, it features a brief glimpse of Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. (specifically the thrilling scene of Keaton nearly being hit by a train while riding a motorcycle) projected against the side of a building during a car chase through the streets of New York in which Wick (Keanu Reeves) pursues a henchmen working for Abram Tarasov (Peter Stormare), the brother of the antagonist from the first movie. Stahelski certainly gets points for boldness, since not only does the scene serve as an introduction to the action, but he also has the sound of the chase sync up with Keaton's film. It's a clever distillation of the remixing and recontextualising of cinematic references that marks both John Wick movies, an ethos which extended to the film's brilliant poster, and it's hard not to admire the chutzpah.

Film Review: Spectre (2015)

There are few franchises as reactive as the James Bond series. Over twenty-four films and fifty-three years, it has had to adapt and change in order to survive, often taking on the qualities of the trend du jour in order to remain relevant. When blaxploitation cinema was at its height, Bond went to Harlem and fought against Voodoo gangsters. After Star Wars became one of the most popular movies of all time, Bond went to space. As Hollywood became obsessed with hard-nosed crime dramas focused on the drug trade, Bond dismantled a cartel and fed Benicio del Toro through a shredder.

Film Review: Spy (2015)

Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy) is an analyst working for the CIA. She's good at her job, but that job mainly consists of providing support to Bradley Fine (Jude Law), a stereotypically brilliant and dashing field agent who Susan not so secretly pines for. When a mission goes awry, Cooper volunteers to leave her desk and go after Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), the one person who knows the whereabouts of a nuclear weapon which will be auctioned off to the highest bidder in a matter of days. As she travels across Europe, Cooper has to contend with hordes of assassins who are after Rayna, but also her colleague Rick Ford (Jason Statham) who has gone rogue in pursuit of the same mission.

Film Review: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

"Stella!"

It wouldn't be going too far to say that Jurassic Park was one of the most important films for me growing up. There were a lot of other contenders, most of them Disney animations, but Jurassic Park was the first film I remember being completely floored by. It helped that I was obsessed with dinosaurs, as most six year olds were at the time and, it seems, still are, but the way that Steven Spielberg blended special effects with a lean story to create a sense of wonder and magic really captivated my little, still-forming imagination. It probably didn't hurt that it was one of the first examples I had encountered of a film being everywhere thanks to a huge marketing campaign, so even if I hadn't loved it, I would not have been able to escape it. Watching it (not to mention rewatching it) was a formative experience, to say the least, and while I wouldn't put it as my favourite film ever now (I'm not sure if it would even crack the top 100, assuming that I was crazy enough to make one), its importance in shaping me as a film lover is immeasurable.

Film Review: Furious 7 (2015)

Note: This review contains spoilers for the fate of Paul Walker's character, Bryan O'Conner. These have been hidden using white text, so highlight the blank space to read them if you have seen the film or don't mind having that part of it revealed.

Since the Fast and Furious franchise came roaring back to popularity with the fourth entry in the series, the tersely worded Fast and Furious, which followed the thought to be franchise-ending disappointment of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the series has gradually, if not subtly, reinvented itself. What started as a series focused primarily on illegal racing with various crime elements added to link the races has at this point become an odd hybrid of heist film and spy thriller, one in which a group of low-level car thieves are also martial arts masters. It feels as if it cross-pollinated with Vin Diesel's other early '00s hit xXx, with the end result resembling Pierce Brosnan era Bond movies, but with the archness replaced with aching sincerity.

Film Review: Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is just your average, everyday Russian immigrant trying to make a life for herself in America. She cleans apartments alongside her other family members, admires the jewelery and clothing of the people she works for, and plans to sell her eggs so that she can buy a telescope like the one her murdered English father (James D'Arcy) once owned. Unbeknownst to Jupiter, she is the heir to an intergalactic fortune, something which puts her squarely in the middle of a centuries-old rivalry between  Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Titus (Douglas Booth) and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), three siblings from the Abraxis family, all of whom want to kidnap or kill Jupiter to advance their own agendas. Pursued by various alien bounty hunters, Jupiter falls under the protection of Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), a disgraced space cop who also happens to be half-wolf. Together, Jupiter and Caine try to navigate the complex political maneuverings of the Abraxis, as well as the myriad explosions that keep interrupting their halting romance.

Film Review: John Wick (2014)

This does not last long.

If you want to know what kind of movie John Wick is, the following description should give you a good idea. Having been beaten up by Iosef (Alfie Allen, muscling in on Tom Felton's monopoly on playing reprehensible twerps), the snotty son of Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), a Russian gangster, and having watched as Iosef and his men stole his '69 Mustang and killed his dog - a beyond adorable beagle puppy that happened to be a gift from his dead wife - the titular former hit man and assassin (Keanu Reeves) decides to get even. He leaves his New Jersey home - but not before dispatching a dozen of Nyqvist's henchmen - and heads to New York where he checks into a hotel. Not just any hotel, though: The Continental Hotel, a hotel that caters solely to the city's society of trained killers, all of whom obey a strict code of honour put in place by its owner (Ian McShane) and enforced by his concierge (Lance Reddick). It's like the Cheers bar, except everybody knows your name because you might represent a potentially huge payday.

Doctor Who - The Time of The Doctor

Coming a little over a month after the "The Day of The Doctor", one of the most triumphant episodes of the revived Doctor Who's run, "The Time of The Doctor" always ran the risk of being overshadowed by its bigger, flashier and considerably more expensive forbear. (I mean, seriously, some of the effects in this episode, particularly the early scenes inside the Papal Mainframe, looked like they hadn't been properly rendered.) It's unfortunate that it had to come so soon after the 50th anniversary spectacular, because any episode in which The Doctor regenerates from one actor to another should be given due weight and consideration, and it's a shame that Matt Smith's departure had to happen in the wake of something so widely celebrated. (Even if, considering that he took over the part from the wildly popular David Tennant, it feels appropriate that Smith's departure is affected by him as well.)

Film Review: The Lone Ranger (2013)

While helping to transport the dangerous criminal Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) so that he can be brought to justice, District Attorney John Reid's (Armie Hammer) train is attacked by Cavendish's men and the outlaw is freed. Reid heads out with a posse of Texas Rangers that includes his brother Dan (James Badge Dale), but which is promptly ambushed. Left for dead, Reid teams up with the Native American tracker Tonto (Johnny Depp) to hunt down Cavendish and avenge his brother's death. To protect his identity, Reid dons the mask and identity of The Lone Ranger, and with Tonto and his white, possibly mystical horse in tow, he follows Cavendish's trail, right into the heart of a huge conspiracy.

Film Review: Lone Survivor (2013)

In June of 2005, four Navy SEALs were sent out on a mission known as Operation Red Wings. The objective was to kill Ahmad Shah, a local Taliban leader who had been coordinating attacks against U.S. and Afghani government forces. Within hours of being dropped into hostile territory, the team consisting of Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Mike Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) and Matt Axelson (Ben Foster) had been ambushed, and the mission was thrown into disarray. Under heavy fire and with their communications disrupted, the four men had to fight for their lives. As the title of the film suggests, most of them did not survive.

Film Review: Thor: The Dark World (2013)

Even in a shared cinematic universe that features super-soldiers and men who transform into giant green monsters when they get a bit cross, Thor always seemed like a bit of an outsider when it came to becoming an iconic film character; injecting Norse mythology into Marvel's more science fiction orientated world seemed like it would be destined to lead to a work of disastrous camp. While Kenneth Branagh's Thor was a somewhat divisive film, with some saying its goofy sense of humour went too far in deflating the pomposity of its faux-Shakespearean stylings and others, myself included, saying that it struck just the right balance between the two, its main success was in establishing Thor (played with sly wit and bountiful charisma by Chris Hemsworth) as a believable, if larger than life, character, and it took him on an interesting journey from arrogant God to humble, worthy hero.

Film Review: World War Z (2013)

It's a Golden Age of the Undead these days, and of the hundreds of different zombie stories that have emerged in recent years, Max Brooks' novel World War Z stands out as one of the more ambitious. Using an epistolary style that retells a zombie apocalypse that has already happens, Brooks wrote a book which owed as much to Studs Terkel's The Good War or Haruki Murakami's Underground as it did Romero's Night of the Living Dead. By presenting the end of the world in the past tense, the book managed to be both exciting, inventive and, at times, oddly moving. It was not just a terrific zombie story, but a terrific book regardless of genre.

Film Review: The Wolverine (2013)

One of the interesting things about the X-Men films is that, even though the series now spans more than a decade and encompasses half a dozen films, the series has avoided becoming too bogged down in its own storytelling. Each film in the original trilogy might have built upon the one that went before, but they were largely self-contained stories. This was also the case with the execrable X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the half-decent X-Men: First Class, both of which played on the established characters without feeling like they were just pieces of a puzzle in the way that some of the Avengers-related films could. The sixth film in the series, The Wolverine, is the first to exhibit symptoms of being merely an element of a larger story, rather than a story actually worth telling in its own right.

Film Review: Pacific Rim (2013)

It's been twenty years since Guillermo del Toro's debut feature Cronos was released, and in that time he has managed to build not one, but two careers as a director. In one, he makes small, intimate Spanish-language dramas which use the supernatural as allegories for Mexican-American relations and Spanish history. In the other, he is a director of big-budget, energetic action spectaculars like Blade II and the two Hellboy movies. (He even has two more sidelines if you count his extensive work as a producer of other peoples' films and his sideline as an author of pretty good vampire novels.) Despite the seemingly vast gulf between his careers, what makes his work interesting is that it all feels personal. All his films share his vivid love of colour, his sense of wonder at the power of storytelling, and his giddy, enthusiastic imagination. He invests himself and makes even his grandest epics feel human, even when his characters aren't.

Film Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)

Marvel are in a pretty strong, if unusual position these days. The release of The Avengers was the culmination of years of careful, costly work bringing some of the company's best known characters to the big screen in separate films, then bringing them all together for one epic adventure. It was an unprecedented endeavour, and one which could have fallen apart spectacularly if too many of the films failed, but it wound up delivering a film that was a critical and commercial triumph that took even the most ardent Marvel fans by surprise. The only problem now is that they have to follow The Avengers with more standalone movies, and it's a tough transition to go from something so grandiose to something relatively small, because any success will pale by comparison: even Wish You Were Here looks puny compared to Dark Side of the Moon.

Film Review: Pain & Gain (2013)

Danny Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) is a trainer at the Sun Gym in Miami, Florida. He's a smart guy who believes that hard work will pay off if you believe in what you are working towards, be it killer deltoids or a nice house with a big lawn. But Lugo's been knocked back a few times in life, not least of all because of his white collar criminal past, in which he used his intelligence to defraud people of a lot of money. Given a second chance by the gym's owner (Rob Corddry), Lugo starts looking for his shot at the big time.

Film Review: Oblivion (2013)

In the year 2077, Earth has become a wasteland, ravaged by a war between humanity and alien invaders. The humans won, but the cost was immense. The devastation wrought on the environment as a result of the invaders' destruction of the moon and Earth's use of nuclear weapons forced most of the survivors to leave for a colony on one of the moons of Saturn. Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is one of the few who remains as part of an operation to harvest the planet's remaining resources and send them to Titan. Jack is nearing the end of his contract, and while his partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) is excited about leaving, he has mixed feelings. He's plagued by dreams of a woman he's never met (Olga Kurylenko) and uncertain why the last surviving aliens, known as Scavs, continue to attack the remote drones and harvesting machines he maintains. What could it all mean, and how does his off-world commander, Sally (Melissa Leo) factor into everything?

Film Review: Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Zero Dark Thirty begins with a moment that is shocking in its simplicity. Over a black screen, we hear the actual voices of those caught up in the horror of the September 11th attacks, beginning with the relatively calm words of people on the ground trying to figure out what was happening, gradually building to phone and black box recordings of the victims themselves. The voices overlap each other, growing more deafening until they form a wall of fear, death and incomprehension.  It's a remarkably effective way of recreating the events of that day without feeling exploitative or crass, instead placing the audience at the whirling centre of the maelstrom.

Film Review: Skyfall (2012)

One of the key images in Skyfall, the twenty-third James Bond film and the third to star Daniel Craig as the super-spy, is of Bond standing on a London rooftop. As he gazes out over the city, he is framed alongside such indelible symbols of Britishness as The Houses of Parliament and the Union Jack. It's a quiet and contemplative moment, particularly in comparison to the percussive, rollicking juggernaut that surrounds it, but it's one that underscores one of the underlying ideas behind the film. Seeing as its release coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the series, Skyfall has to pay due diligence as a celebration of the legacy of EON and Cubby Broccoli, who helped to make James Bond as much an icon of British culture as the aforementioned building and flag.

Film Review: Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Videogames are built upon repetition. Collect the rings, drop the blocks, perform a Fatality, these are the foundation upon which an entire medium and accompanying culture have grown. Each time through, the players might get a little bit better, they might keep failing at the same point, but the mechanics of the game remain essentially the same. But what if the characters carrying out that repetition had lives of their own? What must it be like to have to go through the same limited selection of motions and actions every day? And what of the bad guys, the ones who throw the punches and the barrels, who spend their days being the focal point of constant anger and frustration? To paraphrase Camus, should we imagine Donkey Kong happy?