Rachel

Sinster

 Film & TV Reviews
Oct 212012
 

Sinister

I was looking forward to seeing this movie, having not witnessed a scary film in quite a while. Coming from the makers of Paranormal Activity and Insidious, both scary films, Sinister has a decent pedigree, so it seemed worth watching.

The film centres on Ethan Hawke, who plays Ellison Oswalt a writer of books on murder cases. Oswalt has moved into a new house with his family, except this house is different – it’s the site of an old murder. Whilst searching through his house he finds a box which contains a projector with some film reels of family movies. Except these films contain something else – at he end of them is the grisly murder of those families. Furthermore there is something else that the family movies don’t reveal and that is what happened to the youngest member of the family. At this point the film lives up to its name  – it is sinister. From here you wonder where the film is going after providing the setting. However the film disappoints  and we then bear witness to nothing except the Oswalt character watching the films obsessively.
Such is the theme of the movie about films within a films, that it is the equivalent of watching someone watching the Blair Witch Project. Sinister as a film uses Oswalt as a plot device. What happens to him and his family are merely there to fill in the gaps around the home movies he watches.


Because the film is about a guy watching home movies Sinister is a house bound film, mainly based in the one room, Oswalt’s office. The house is mainly darkened and filmed with wide shots creating this tension that something is going to jump out. However the scares are few and far between and not much really happens outside of the home movies and their murders.
It’s only in the final third of the film when stuff starts to happen when the endless obsessing of the films and their murders finally comes into fruition. From now on the film is finally a horror film – the use of shocks and the occasional jumps are used to good effect. However the moods of the film up to that point leaves the scares fairly muted.  In the end you have two parts to the film, a fairly intelligent moody piece to begin with and a spooky horror film at the end, but they never really marry together into one coherent film.
If you want to see a not very scary horror film and a not particularly intelligent film then try Sinister out. There are a lot of better horror films out there and nothing makes this film stand out to be worth bothering with. How ever it is a well made film and creates a mood and a few shocks that does as the title suggests – it is sinister.

3/5

By Kieth Hudson

The Sweeney (2012)

 Film & TV Reviews
Sep 262012
 

The Sweeney

 

How do you make a film about police in the UK cool? British police don’t carry guns and you can never get far enough away from the stereotype of the bobby on the beat. This film makes a kind of compromise and the police in The Sweeney run around carrying baseball bats. when things finally warm up are they allowed gubs, but by, then all realism has been thrown out of the window.

The film stars arch cockney Ray Winstone as Jack Regan. Winstone is a great actor but this role is way too type cast and one that stifles him as an actor. It’s a clichéd role  of the old school, high testosterone policeman who gets results and doesn’t care how he gets them. A yawning problem  with Winstone in this film that he is way too old to be doing an action film like this and as a result he huffs and puffs his way through the film. He is so unconvincingly when he gets a chance to be so pretend virile – by having an affair with the IA chief’s wife – that he’s fooling no one. For younger audiences there’s Ben drew (AKA Plan B), as George Carter, the more considerate side kick. He’s alright  but the role never asks for any greatness in acting. It also stars Damian Lewis as chief putting a slight accent to cover his real life poshness. Then there’s the true bad guy the IA chief, Lewis (Steven Mackintosh) the antithesis of Ray Winnstone’s supposed virility. He is desk bound, anemic too worried about playing the rules, attacking police instead of criminals etc. He is as much of a cliché as Ray Winstone’s character.

The plot is pretty forgettable – it concerns the shooting of an innocent woman at a break-in at  a jewellery store. Some stuff happens, the investigation leads to a bank heist which is badly handled by the Sweeney and develops into a shoot out in Trafalgar Square which results in carnage. Winstone’s character has responsibility for the débâcle and it leads to him being briefly put in prison before being inexplicitly set free by his colleagues. It all ends with a car chase through a caravan park in Gravesend – but I can’t remember why.

It’s obviously that the director Nick Love was aiming to make a slick, Hollywood style crime caper, but on a low budget. The plot could have done with more humour, more of a nod to the old TV and films that this film was supposed to be based on. There’s little realism or any attempt to make one except to show the characters occasionally in an office. The film is helped along by lots of moody aerial shots of Canary Wharf and the City of London which sets the scene for a lot of the set pieces.

The Sweeney isn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it’s also not that great. The creators tried to marry British policing with slick American action but couldn’t quite make it work. The film is big and brash but it’s flimsy material. It may be entertaining to watch in the cinema but it’ll be totally forgotten afterwards.

2/5

By Keith Hudson

Total Recall (2012)

 Film & TV Reviews
Sep 192012
 

Remakes are hard to pull off – especially if the film that is being remade is a cult classic like Total Recall.  The original version of this film was a dystopian sci fi set on Mars and was based on a story by Philip K Dick writer of mind-bending stories. It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger .and was ultra violent but had a lot of iconic moments, for example a woman with three breasts (who is also in the new version). The newer version diverges from this, mainly by being set on earth but is also different in style but keeps the sci fi theme. It might not be a straight remake, but that doesn’t stop it being compared to the first film.

In the 22 years  since the original was made the biggest advances in film making has seen the increased usage of CGI, which in comparison makes the original film look fairly creaky. The remake uses CGI to create a monumental landscape quite a lot like Bladerunner (another Philip K Dick based film) with its constant rain, neon lights and colourful population. The effects enhance the action scenes to a point when you don’t know what’s real and what’s been created.

The latest version of Total Recall creates a different setting for the film but also with changes in the script. In a not very convincing future, chemical warfare has obliterated all life except in two places – Britain (United Federation of Britain) where the establishment live and Australia (the Colony) where all the poor people live. Movement between the two opposite sides of the world is through a metro that passes through the Earth’s core called “the Fall”. One of these commuters is Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrel) who works on a synthetics production factory. Quaid craves more from life and goes to a site that creates synthetic memories of a fabricated experience, called Rekall. However things go wrong and Quad discovers he is already a real life spy and the life, his reality until then was fake. Thus his wife at the start of the film isn’t his wife any more, and is hell bent on killing him and he meets a woman of his dreams who is in fact his girlfriend in the new reality (played by Jessica Biel). So far so Philip k. Dick. The film then turns on the action as Quaid tries to find out who he really is, and who of the people he meets are real. The film keeps the confusing tempo going – and that’s what helps the film rise above the generic sci fi shoot em ups. The action scenes of the film are reminiscent of another Philip K Dick adaptation – Minority Report. The action scenes are well executed and are integrated into a convincing futuristic landscape.

The ultra violence of the original movie has been toned down to be acceptable for a 12A audience which seems to be the default certificate for a movie these days. The film lacks those iconic moments that really set up a good sci fi There’s no Kuato fastened to the belly of a man and in comparison Bill Nighy as head of the resistance cannot really compare.

Another downfall of this version of Total Recall  is in the casting. Though Colin Farrel is a better actor than Schwarzenegger he lacks the charisma Arnie has. The chief bad girl, the original/fake wife is played by Kate Beckinsale looks particularly miscast and never really convinces. None of these or any of the other actors rise above themselves and none put in a memorable performance

Although Total Recall is no patch on the original, and maybe forgotten in a few years, it is still an enjoyable action movie with some nice aesthetics action and mind bending plot which elevates itself slightly above the mundane.

 

Written by Keith Hudson

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