Mindhorn

High concept goes lo-fi in this British comedy that treads similar territory to 2013’s ‘Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa’. Hell, Steve Coogan’s in both of them. Here Coogan plays Peter Eastman, an actor who’s done rather well in a forensic detective TV drama called ‘Windjammer’, a spin off of 1980s hi-tech cop show ‘Mindhorn’ whose protagonist was played by insufferable egomaniac Richard Thorncroft (Julian Barratt) and which ended after three seasons when an embarrassingly drunk and coked up Thorncroft publically humiliated himself on a talk show, offended everyone associated with the show, dubbed the Isle of Man (the series’ setting) a “shithole”, and announced that he was off to Hollywood.

Twenty five years later, having abjectly failed to make it in Tinseltown, Thorncroft is reduced to making commercials, attending auditions for rubbish parts, and haranguing his long-suffering agent (Harriet Walter). When Paul Melly (Russell Tovey), the chief suspect in a murder case, contacts the Isle of Man Constabulary to say that he will only talk to Mindhorn, Chief Inspector Newsome (David Schofield) and D.C. Baines (Andrea Riseborough) reluctantly contact Thorncroft and ask him to resume his old role. What follows – as you’ll probably guess, given the involvement of both Coogan and ‘Mighty Boosh’ regular Barratt – is a comedy of embarrassments that is, by turns, genuinely funny, dispiritingly predictable and ploddingly laboured. The moments where it really hits its stride are certainly worth the ticket price, but ‘Alpha Papa’ it isn’t.

One of its funniest set pieces is the opening, which sets up the dynamic of the ‘Mindhorn’ TV show. Full of macho posturing, overly-dramatic line deliveries and opening credits delivered in a hideous font, it’s a spot on piece of spoofery. Imagine ‘Mindhorn’ as a cross between ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ and ‘Bergerac’ with Thorncroft’s performance akin to that of “John Actor” playing Monkfish in the recurring ‘Fast Show’ sketches. (Mindhorn/Monkfish: I’m stating the obvious here, aren’t I?) Indeed, Thorncroft’s casual sexism recalls Monkfish’s “put your knickers on and make me a cup of tea” ethos.

Director Sean Foley, whose first film this is, mines a lot of humour from the cult of 1980s. A running gag about ‘Mindhorn’ merchandise pokes fun at any number of American hit shows of the era, while the ATV logo is sneakily inserted in the ‘Mindhorn’ opening credits. And there are a handful of bitchy jokes about ‘Bergerac’ (the John Nettles starrer that was set on Jersey). Essie Davis’s role as ‘Mindhorn’ co-star and romantic interest Patrica Deville is a thinly veiled nod to Louise Jameson’s nothing role on ‘Bergerac’.

But beyond nostalgic box-ticking for 80s TV fans, what does the movie have to offer? Sad to say that Barratt is probably the least of its attractions: not only does Thorncroft have to be an arrogant price for 90% of the running time to make the concept work, but Barratt seems to enjoy playing the façade a little too much, and when the time comes for the character’s redemption in the final act, it all feels very forced. Fortunately, everyone else is on form – Davis, Riseborough and an hilariously irascible Schofield are a delight to watch, Tovey takes a very trickily written character (Melly’s mental deficiency, while again necessary to the plot, verges on exploitative) and does fine work, and Simon Farnaby nabs the Agitation ‘Man of the Match’ award for his broadly comedic yet oleaginously creepy turn as Clive, Thorncroft’s former stuntman and now romantic rival.

The hour twenty five minute running time is just right. The pace is generally decent, except when Foley takes too long to set up a joke or labours the payoff (some business involving a switched videotape is a case in point). There’s one set-piece – an assassination attempt and a high speed getaway that are assumed to be part of a civic parade, a bored dignitary giving a running commentary on the whole thing – that is inspired in its concept and pitch perfect as an archetype of British humour. Had ‘Mindhorn’ scraped together another three or four moments this good, and Barratt redialled the performance just a tad, it could have been great. But there’s no reason why the same team, with just a slightly sharper approach, can’t deliver a bona fide belter next time round.

Oblivion

‘Oblivion’ is a masterpiece of production design that desperately wants to be a cerebral Tarkovskian study of ravaged landscapes, existential turmoil and questions of identity … but has to, y’know, throw in some hamfisted mainstream narrative tropes in order to justify its budget.

Opening with a slab of voiceover exposition, we learn that an alien antagonist destroyed the moon (causing all manner of natural catastrophe) prior to invading Earth. Someone on Earth authorised the use of something called “the nimbus” (I’m guessing the President of the United States in the first instance and a heavy duty piece of thermo-nuclear kit in the second), effectively “winning the war but losing the planet”. Now there’s a radiation zone, a number of power plants that process Earth’s remaining air and water power to provide energy for off-world space station The Tet, and an atmosphere-straddling platform occupied by Jack (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), technicians who maintain the power plants and the drones that safeguard them. Oh, we also learn that Jack and Victoria had “memory wipes” in order to protect “the security of their mission” prior to taking the job. I assume this was done before their induction course. As the film begins, Jack is experiencing pre-destruction-of-Earth hallucinations which he assumes are memories, while by-the-book Victoria just wants to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and jet off to Titan (Jupiter’s moon, where the last enclave of humanity are holed up) when their detail ends in a fortnight.

Anyone who hasn’t even hazarded a guess about where this is going by now will probably view ‘Oblivion’ as an entirely original and genre-defining work. The rest of us will happily tick off its many and unsubtly referenced influences while we sit back and bathe in the visuals.

Because that’s the thing. For all that ‘Oblivion’ is a derivate piece of work (particularly in the increasingly hackneyed second half where it becomes a patchwork quilt of ‘Independence Day’, ‘I, Robot’ and ‘Moon’), it’s the most genuinely gorgeous thing I’ve seen on the big screen this year. Jack and Victoria’s cloud-based operations centre is kind of like a two-up-to-down designed by Frank Lloyd Wright complete with helipad and swimming pool. A scene in said swimming pool comes close to a sort of visual poetry. Director Joseph Kosinski and DoP Claudio Miranda conjure eerily effective visions of a dune-covered New York which are a million miles away from the usual post-apocalypse imaginings. The technology is memorably rendered, too: Jack’s scout craft and the drones themselves have a propulsive sense of movement and engineering, while also looking careworn and, despite their sleek profiles, realistically utilitarian in their design. Only the late-in-the-day visualisation of a maleficent supercomputer as a slightly misshapen amplifier covered in sentient mould lets the side down.

Performances vary: Cruise delivers with a likeable everyman persona; Riseborough finds nuances in a character who could have been decidedly one-note; Olga Kurylenko is saddled with a nothing role and does even less with it; Morgan Freeman continues to be one of the coolest blokes on the planet, claiming entire scenes for himself by doing little more than lighting a cigar or wearing a knee-length leather jacket.

The script is anodyne at best, edging into total mess on more than one occasion. Example: Jack gets shot in the shoulder at one point and the wound is never reference, depicted or treated for the rest of the movie. He’s shot and then, oh fuck it, he needs to do some heroic running, jumping and falling down stuff, so let’s all pretend he never took that bullet in the first place, ’kay?

Ordinarily, I’d have marked ‘Oblivion’ down for its failings, consigned it to the file marked “ho hum” and probably not ever bothered writing about it for Agitation. But I keep coming back to how damned good it looks, and to the world-building and attention to detail of its first half as Jack goes through the motions of a routine job in an extraordinary situation; a guy who punches the clock, patches up the drones, patrols the wastelands and somehow isn’t satisfied with the way things are; a guy who’s just starting to think beyond the accepted parameters.