BOND-A-THON: Licence to Kill

‘Licence to Kill’ presents us with a plethora of firsts and lasts. It’s the first Bond film not to take its title from a work by Ian Fleming (although the script incorporates elements from the novel ‘Live and Let Die’ and the short story ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’), and the first to gain a 15 certificate. It’s the first Bond movie where a previous actor reprises the role of Felix Leiter – David Hedison, who essayed the role in ‘Live and Let Die’. It’s Michael G. Wilson’s first as co-producer, a role he took on after Albert R. Broccoli took ill during filming.

It’s the last to feature Timothy Dalton as Bond, Caroline Bliss as Moneypenny and Robert Brown as M, the last to feature a credits sequence designed by Maurice Binder, the last to be directed by John Glen and the last to be produced by Broccoli. Richard Maibaum co-scripts for the last time, and editor John Grover and cinematographer Alec Mills similarly bow out from the franchise.

‘Licence to Kill’ feels like it ought to be an autumnal, elegiac work. Instead, it’s full throttle action thriller, with a viciousness not seen since the early days of Connery and a hard-edged depiction of 007. When those who dislike the Dalton films complain that they don’t feel like Bond movies, it’s ‘Licence to Kill’ they point to specifically. There’s no uber-villain, merely a Colombian drug lord. There’s no world-threatening scheme, just a clever means of transporting cocaine. There’s no briefing from M – Bond goes renegade for personal reasons. Gadgets are kept to an absolute minimum, although – ironically – Q (Desmond Llewellyn) gets his most expansive role. Likewise, the Bond girls are (in different ways) survivors rather than wallflowers. And the pre-credits sequence acts as a prologue to the film proper rather than being a show reel for the stunts team.

Let’s start with this sequence. Bond and Leiter are en route to the latter’s wedding, Bond on best man duties, when the Coast Guard inform Leiter that a drug baron he’s been investigating, Sanchez (Robert Davi), is on American soil and therefore arrestable. Sanchez has made a risky incursion in order to wipe out a rival who’s stolen his girl, the sultry Lupe Lamora (Talisa Soto). Leiter, seemingly forgetting the impending nuptials, goes tearing off in hot pursuit, inviting Bond along in an observational capacity only. Predictably, Bond doesn’t do observation and when it seems like Sanchez is about to fly out of US airspace, Bond engages in a dangerous in a dangerous stunt with a helicopter to put paid to Sanchez’s plans. This done, the pair of them parachute out and Leiter gets to the church on time, if rather dramatically. Roll opening credits. 

The curtain-raiser over and done with, Act One delivers some nasty business: Sanchez pulls off an escape, his goons kill Leiter’s bride-of-a-few-hours and dump Leiter himself in a shark pit. Bond, on his way to the airport and in something of a maudlin mood after a chance remark at the reception puts him in mind of the late Teresa Bond, nee di Vicenzo, hears of the escape and heads back to Leiter’s home on an instinct. Here he finds Leiter in a body bag, severely lacerated and barely alive. Bond’s mood changes from maudlin to righteously pissed off and he goes out for revenge.

Working his way through Sanchez’s chain of associates, from corrupt DEA official Ed Kilifer (Everett McGill) to marine research head honcho Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe), Bond’s blunt tactics attract the attention of Leiter’s CIA colleagues who haul him in for a little chat. M is in on the act and gives 007 a royal bollocking for neglecting an assignment. After a terse exchange, Bond effectively resigns, gives the CIA goons the slip and goes renegade, his licence to kill revoked. (The film originally went into production as ‘Licence Revoked’, but the title was changed after doubts that audiences wouldn’t know what “revoked” meant. This is more than a little bit sad.)

En route to his final confrontation with Sanchez and the drug lord’s borderline psychotic protégé Dario (Benicio del Toro in only his second film role), Bond enlists the help of Leiter’s contact, pilot Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), introduced in a splendid scene in a dockside bar where she deters an aggressor by ramming the business end of a double-barrelled shotgun in his groin, holds her own in a barroom brawl and blows a hole in the wall to facilitate a quick exit. Pam is tough, resourceful, saves Bond’s ass at one point and also looks glamorous as all hell. And kudos to Wilson and Maibaum for a script that doesn’t compel her to do something stupid or have to get rescued in the final reel. Lowell is definitely one of my all time favourite Bond girls and her contribution to the canon still remains undervalued.

Lupe Lamora, on the other hand, is cut from the same cloth as Domino in ‘Thunderball’ or Andrea Anders in ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’: the kept woman of a dangerous antagonist who sees Bond as her way out of an otherwise insoluble situation.

Davi plays Sanchez for what he is, a ruthless businessman whose business just happens to be narcotics; it’s a performance as far removed from the cartoon villainy of most Bond villains as it’s possible to get. Del Toro, however, doesn’t get to do much more than sneer and strike macho poses – there’s certainly little hint of what he would go on to – but the suggestion of a homoerotic subtext between Sanchez and Dario is something of a throwback to the casual homophobia of ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and the one unfortunate element in a film that otherwise ranks very high in my personal 007 league table.

The action sequences are impressive, particularly Sanchez’s rescue from an armed convoy, staged to great effect along the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys. Things do get a little over the top towards the end, though, with Kenworth tanker trucks popping wheelies or tilting to drive on one set of wheels to dodge a missile.

But on the whole, ‘Licence to Kill’ works very well as a darker, edgier approach to Bond, shorn of corny one-liners and the first entry in the franchise for fucking ages not to end with some personality-challenged bit of eye-candy gasping “oh, James”. This alone earns it kudos.

Snatch

Let’s call it WTF Syndrome. Mainly because You’ve Never Seen [Insert Film Title] Syndrome is a bit long-winded, and the friend/colleague/family member uttering these words in a tone of diamond-hard incredulity will usually follow up with an equally disbelieving “what the fuck” anyway.

We all have WTF Syndrome movies is our lives. Movies that passed you by on their first release – sometimes for reasons that seemed valid at the time, sometimes for reasons you now can’t recall for the life of you, sometimes because they just plain disappeared under the radar – and which, for equally ephemeral reasons, it took you years to catch up with.

I seem to remember skipping ‘Snatch’ when it first came out because the general consensus was that Guy Ritchie had followed up his iconic debut ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ with basically more of the same, on a bigger budget, only not as good. This at a period in time when the multiplexes were awash with too-cool-for-school Tarantino copyists. (Which, to be honest, I’d pegged ‘Lock, Stock’ as, albeit better made and more genuinely witty than the norm.)

A few months ago, cruising Tesco for groceries and household goods beer, I noticed the box set of ‘Lock, Stock’ and ‘Snatch’ for £5. ‘Snatch’ was the 2-disc release. Bargain. Into the shopping trolley it went.

And on the shelf it sat for a while.

I finally slid it into the DVD player a few nights ago … and enjoyed an hour and thirty-nine minutes of top-flight, laugh-out-loud funny, Cockney-accented nonsense.

And I don’t mean “nonsense” in a pejorative term. The closest I can come to describing the plotting and overall aesthetic of ‘Lock, Stock’ and ‘Snatch’ is like a P.G. Wodehouse novel. Except with guns. And swearing. Your average Wodehouse novel consists of a foppish toff, a meddling aunt, a potential fiancée, a big social event and the always lurking potential for cringing embarrassment at same. The machinations of a handful of characters and a couple of overlapping incidents are shuffled with the blink-and-miss-it legerdemain of a game of find the lady. Sit down and try to unpick the narrative after you’ve set the novel aside and you’ll be engaging in an exercise in pointlessness. Best just to go along for the ride and laugh at some good clean fun.

Same deal with ‘Snatch’, only Turkish (Jason Statham) and Tommy (Stephen Graham) – the luckless protagonists at the centre of Ritchie’s filmic whirlwind – are about a million miles (and several postcodes) removed from Jeeves and Wooster. And Jeeves would never be seen dead at a bare-knuckle boxing match, even if it meant getting Bertie out of the soup. Nor could you imagine Aunt Agatha heisting a diamond the size of a fist under the auspices of American crime boss Avi (Dennis Farina).

But I digress. ‘Snatch’ basically boils down to these two plot strands: (i) two boxing promoters get caught up in a rigged match organized by the downright sociopathic Brick Top (Alan Ford); (ii) Franky Four Fingers (Benicio del Toro) nicks a fuck off big diamond and various individuals want it. Both deals go south. Very quickly.

This is how the boxing side of things goes south: Turkish sends Tommy and the heavyweight boxer they represent, Gorgeous George (Adam Fogerty) to buy a caravan from Mickey (Brad Pitt), a pikey* whose extended family talk a barely comprehensible lingo and spend their time drinking and brawling. A financial dispute sees George and Mickey get into a fight. Mickey soon demonstrates why he goes by the nicknamed “One Punch”. With George subsequently incapacitated, Brick Top gets a bit narked at Turkish, reminding him that Turkish is supposed to be providing him with a nice ringer who’ll take a dive on cue in the fourth round. Turkish’s one chance at avoided vivisection at the hands of Brick Top’s goons (after which he’ll be fed to Brick Top’s pigs) is to persuade Mickey to take George’s place. Except that One Punch Mickey knows as much about taking a dive as Bertie Wooster does about the criminal underworld. Fight night comes around, Mickey does his thing, and the shit hits the fan. Dahnit?

This is how the diamond heist goes south: Franky Four Fingers absconds from Antwerp with the hot rock, under instruction from Avi to lie low, acquire a piece from Russian expatriot Boris the Blade (Rade Sherbedgia), stay away from the casinos, and wait for Avi to set him up with his London contact Doug “The Head” Denovitz (Mike Reid). You know that big cliché in American cinema of a few years ago with white characters acting like they were black? Doug’s an East End dodgy geezer who acts like he’s Jewish. Franky hooks up with Boris, who asks him to place a bet on his behalf on an illegal boxing match at a bookies run by Brick Top. Boris owes a debt which precludes him placing the bet himself. Boris then recruits pawnbroker Sol (Lennie James), wannabe Yardie Vinnie (Robert Gee) and corpulent getaway driver Tyrone (Ade) to rob said bookies and remove the diamond from Franky’s possession at the same time. The robbery goes tits up; Sol, Vinnie and Tyrone find themselves on the receiving end of Brick Top’s less-than-tender mercies; Franky gets caught in the middle; and Avi, enraged that the diamond has dropped off the radar, immediately flies out to London and engages the services of professional hard nut Bullet Tooth Tony (played by professional hard nut Vinnie Jones) to track him down.

This is the simple part of the narrative.

From the opening scene, where the progress through a heavily guarded building by an equally heavily disguised Franky and his crew is charted on a succession of CCTV screens, it’s clear that Ritchie is in full-on style-over-substance mode. And why complain when the style is this stylish? Not to mention self-deprecating. Ritchie immediately segues from his ‘Peeping Tom’-style opening to a robbery scene of such ludicrous over-stylization, all jump cuts and freeze frames and OTT camera-work, that your average MTV video looks like an Andrei Tarkovsky film by comparison. The guy’s taking the piss – and he continues taking it, sometimes obviously and sometimes subtly, for the rest of the film.

In a collection of stereotypes that would be considered racist if they represented non-criminal social groupings, Ritchie gives us the dour but temperamental Russian arms dealer (“Boris the Blade, a.k.a. Boris the Bullet-Dodger.” “Why do they call him that?” “Because he dodges bullets”), the Oirish tinkers (“Da ye like dags?” “What?” “Dags.” “Oh, dogs. Yeah, I like dags”), the tea-drinking Lahdan gangster who snarls and threatens like he’s auditioning for an OAP remake of ‘Get Carter’, and the smart-talking wide-boy who comes across like he’s just stepped out of some bizarre unscreened episode of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ that got mixed up with a reel of ‘The Long Good Friday’ in the editing room.

He also draws brilliantly funny – and, in the case of Alan Ford, terrifying – performances out of an ostensibly mismatched cast. Seriously: in what other movie would you find Brad Pitt doing a pseudo-Irish accent with Jason Flemyng playing his brother and Sorcha Cusack as their dear old ma, or America’s go-to character actor for mob roles sharing a split-screen transatlantic phone call with ‘Eastenders’ regular Mike Reid?

The dialogue is priceless: Turkish’s continual “before ze Chermans arrive” line rips the piss out of many a bad UK sitcom, the bickering between Sol and Tyrone is hilarious; and every time Mickey opens his mouth and a blarney-tinged screed of gibberish rolls out, the result is pant-wettingly funny. The boxing scenes are like ‘Raging Bull’ kidnapped, re-edited and satirized by the Monty Python boys. The shoot outs are like John Woo on laughing gas. The set-to between Bullet Tooth Tony and Boris the Blade (a.k.a. Boris the Bullet-Dodger), when it becomes apparent how Boris earned the second of his nicknames, is easily the funniest thing Ritchie has put on film.

Like I said before, it’s total nonsense. But damn, it’s funny as fuck. As stylish as fuck. And quotable as fuck. And – I’ll go out on a limb here – probably more accomplished and more all-round entertaining than its kudos-grabbing predecessor.

Sadly, Ritchie’s reputation went as far south as Turkish’s boxing promotion and Franky’s diamond heist after ‘Swept Away’. ‘Revolver’ bemused critics, ‘RocknRolla’ went some way to restoring his standing and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (which I must admit I haven’t seen and have very little interest in seeing) has given him his biggest box office returns to date. There’s a sequel in the works. Give me ‘Lock, Stock 2’ or ‘Snatch: The Next Chapter’ and reunited him with The Stat, Vinnie Jones and Jason Flemyng and things might start cooking again. Guv’nor.

*ie. a gypsy.

The Wolfman

In a guest article written last Halloween, my friend Paul Rowe compared the golden age of the Universal horror movies with the current trend for remakes and wondered:

“Why, at a time when even the most low-budget shoot has production values that the movie-brats of the seventies could have only dreamed of, does every director shoot horror movies as fucking action comedies!?!?”

He continued:

“I had my hopes briefly raised when I learned that the upcoming remake of ‘The Wolf Man’ was to be set in Victorian England (predating the contemporary set 1941 version) and would remain faithful to much of George Waggner’s original. Benicio Del Toro as Larry Talbot? I licked my lips. I’ve since learned the director is Joe Johnston. Joe-‘Jurassic Park 3’-‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids’-Johnston. ‘The Wolf Man’ as family-friendly actioner anyone? Er … no; no thanks. Even with Andrew Kevin Walker, who came over all gothic for ‘Se7en’ and ‘Sleepy Hollow’, having contributed the screenplay, things don’t bode well.”

Which pretty much summed up my thoughts on the prospect. ‘The Wolfman’ had been announced in 2006 with Benicio del Toro executive producing and starring as Larry (now Lawrence) Talbot. As Paul noted, the script was by Andrew Kevin Walker and promised to augment the original with new characters and different character dynamics. Mark Romanek, who had earned good notices with his second feature film ‘One Hour Photo’ (and drawn an unforgettably sinister performance out of Robin Williams) was confirmed as director in February 2007. Less than a year later, it was announced he had left the project, with the old chestnut of “creative differences” cited.

The future of ‘The Wolfman’ remained indeterminate. Brett Ratner was considered as a replacement. Brett Ratner, a bargain basement Michael Bay who doesn’t even have the common courtesy to be Michael Bay. I am still offering prayers of gratitude to a God I don’t believe in that this excremental turn of events never came to pass. Other possible included Frank Darabont, James Mangold and Martin Campbell. As it turned out, Joe Johnston got the job.

This more than anything counts for my trepidation over ‘The Wolfman’, and explains the brickbats it has received critically. The thought of a re-imagining of George Waggner’s atmospheric and quietly subversive classic with the director of ‘The Mist’ at the helm – or, to an only slightly lesser degree, the director of ‘Walk the Line’ or the director of ‘Casino Royale’ – presented a “what if?” so potent that surely un film de Joe Johnston could never live up to it.

Then I read Francisco’s review on The Film Connoisseur (which I am still convinced was the first review of the film to surface on the blogosphere): it was unreservedly enthusiastically. Francisco even divined the rationale over the choice of Johnston as director:

“To me Johnston is the go to guy for making a Hollywood film that plays by the rules, plays it safe. No artsy fartsy risky business here. He is the kind of director who will direct a film, tell the story, and follow the rules set by the studio. He is not what I would call a trouble maker of a director. This guy plays ball with the studio execs and makes the movie they want to see. And for ‘The Wolfman’, which is a film Universal Studios obviously cares much about, Joe Johnston was a good choice.”

So me and Paul went along, with low expectations but a piqued curiosity. When I say low expectations, I mean that Paul had no expectations and all I was taking to the table was the prospect of Emily Blunt looking quite fetching in period garb.

When it was over and we emerged blinking into the light of Showcase Cinema’s car park (then spent an embarrassed quarter of an hour walking up and down after we realized we’d lost the car), there was nothing for it to vocalize a vaguely admission: we’d enjoyed it. We’d enjoyed it a hell of a lot.

In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that ‘The Wolfman’ is possibly the best Universal horror movie remake since Coppola’s garish and overblown but still hugely entertaining take on Dracula (and come, when you’ve got a young Monica Belucci as one of the brides of Dracula giving off a vibe that there might be more than just a blood sucking on the cards, what’s not to like?).

Okay, I’m in damning-with-faint-praise territory here, since the rest of the Universal remakes – Branagh’s bloodless, ball-less and boltless take ‘Frankenstein’ and the tripartite of cinematic evil done by Stephen Sommers in the form of the ‘Mummy’ movies and the stultifyingly bad ‘Van Helsing’ – represent a low tide mark in quality control that will forever remain unchallenged so long as Tommy Wiseau never decides remake ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ in a kid’s paddling pool with the leftover special effects from ‘Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid’.

‘The Wolfman’ rises above the other Universal remakes because, unlike Branagh’s ‘Frankenstein’, it offers a fun, rip-roaring, entertaining hour and three quarters at the flicks; but at the same time (unlike Sommers’ crimes against celluloid) it never tips over into histrionic stupidity freighted with increasingly desperate spasms of CGI.

What ‘The Wolfman’ does have to offer is a script that cleaves closely enough to the original to preserve good memories, yet opens out to embrace enough of its own little quirks (the inclusion of Inspector Abberline – here played by Hugo Weaving – of Jack the Ripper fame is an offbeat yet strangely intriguing conceit) to prevent it from being just a slavish copy but with more souped up effects.

The casting is a tad hit and miss. Del Toro turns in a peculiarly muted performance. Anthony Hopkins chews the scenery like a good ’un, evidently having more fun on a movie set here than he has in a good few years. Anthony Sher doesn’t just chew the scenery in his small but zealously attacked role as a physician – he swallows it down and then has the horizon for dessert! Art Malik brings a touch of gravitas to a nothing role. Weaving plays Abberline like some antecedent of Inspector Regan in ‘The Sweeney’; you wonder why he never managed to get the Ripper down the cells and beat a confession out of him. Emily Blunt is underused as Gwen Conliffe (here the fiancé of Lawrence’s murdered sibling, not just a flibbertigibbet Talbot picks up at the local antiques shop) during the first two thirds of the film. She provides its emotional charge in the final frames, though.

Johnston conjures up some atmospheric visuals, giving fans of the original (or of the classic Universal monster movies in general) everything they could want in turns of swirling ground-mists, dark tranches of woodland, gypsy camps and fearful villagers, but with the eviscerations ramped up to satisfy the requirements of the modern gorehound. He also throws in an unequivocally not-in-the-original asylum sequence that explodes into a fragmented, hallucinatory sequence of images that suggest the ghost of Donald Cammell had been summoned in an after-hours editing room séance. It’s a scene that’s grand guignol, Gothic and grotesque purely for the sake of it – and it’s the best scene in the movie!

The real star of the show, however, is Rick Baker’s visual effects, and ‘The Wolfman’ homages his work on ‘An American Werewolf in London’ with the casting of one of the darts players from that film as well as taking Talbot (in his lycanthropic incarnation) on a little detour rampage through London, vaulting rooftops, crashing through chimneys and thudding into omnibuses. It’s not subtle, it lacks the dark melancholy subtext of the original, and it probably won’t be half as much fun to watch second time around – I think that much of my enthusiasm comes from expecting ‘The Wolfman’ to be freakin’ awful and deriving a genuine delight in being proved wrong – but damned if it wasn’t the best fun I’d had in the cinema in six months (and yes, that includes ‘Avatar’) … or at least until I saw ‘Ponyo’ a couple of days later. But that’s another review.

Wolfie vs. Wolfie

Over the last couple of decades, the great Universal monster-protagonists have been subjected to big-budget, high-profile and generally disappointing remakes: Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (1992) was entertaining but overblown, Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ (1994) was anaemic – and doesn’t the pompous shoehorning of the author’s name into the title tell you something? – and Stephen Sommers’ ‘The Mummy’ (1999) and ‘The Mummy Returns’ (2001) were just plain execrable.

Sommers then went on to make ‘Van Helsing’ (2004). It is better that we do not speak of ‘Van Helsing’.

Now ‘The Wolf Man’ gets the treatment, with Joe Johnston calling the shots, Andrew Kevin Walker co-scripting and a quality cast headed up by Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt.

I had my doubts, but an enthusiastic review by Francisco at The Film Connoisseur has heightened my anticipation and I’m looking forward to taking in a screening of the film next week.

In the meantime, my guest review of George Waggner’s 1941 original is online at The Death Rattle.

And while I’m on the subject, has anyone noticed the similarity between the soon-to-be-iconic image of Emily Blunt on the remake’s poster art and Kelly Reilly in ‘Eden Lake’?

Could it be that werewolves are the new chavs?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

There’s a scene in Terry Gilliam’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ where Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) – thinly fictionalised versions of Hunter S Thompson and Samoan attorney Oscar Acosta – are driving through the neon-lit artifice of Las Vegas in a convertible. They pull up next to a car full of straight-laced, middle-aged, middle-class white people (let’s call them ‘squares’ for short). Duke is hunched over the steering wheel, under the influence of just about every narcotic substance known to mankind; Dr Gonzo is hanging out the window, whining and blubbering pathetically, his moustache and the side of the car pebble-dashed with vomit.

The squares try heroically to ignore him. Then Dr Gonzo addresses them directly: “You folks wanna buy some heroin? God damn it, I’m serious. All I’m trying to sell you is some pure fucking smack. This is the real stuff. You won’t get hooked. I just got back from Vietnam ... I wanna sell you some pure fucking smack ... puuuuure ... fuuuuuuck ...”

One of them snaps: “God damn it, you bastards!” he yells, hammering on the car window with his fist. “Pull over! I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you.”

Which was pretty much how the critics reacted when ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ was originally released in 1998. “Simply unwatchable” opined Mike Clarke in USA Today and he wasn’t alone in that opinion. The majority of the film-going public didn’t even have an opinion – ‘F&L in LV’ did about $10 million at the American box office, earning back just over half of its budget.

I saw it on the big screen back in ’98 and loved it. Bought the video – loved it. Wore the VHS out and bought the DVD – still love it. And yet most people I talk to haven’t seen it; many have never heard of it. It came as pleasant and long-awaited validation, when I started the new job a few weeks ago, to find that one of my colleagues had not only seen the film but loves it wholeheartedly, and we had a grand time comparing our favourite scenes.

‘F&L in LV’ is zonked-out, screwed-up film-making with an emphasis on self-destructive behaviour, illicit substances and the over-consumption thereof. Politically incorrect? Hell, yeah. Irresponsible? Probably, but who’s counting? Not me. There’s a case to be made that we need a few more films to be irresponsible and politically incorrect – otherwise cinema, as with any art form that’s not given a thorough shaking up every so often, stagnates.

‘F&L in LV’ sets out its stall in the first scene, Duke and Dr Gonzo cutting through the desert in a big open-top car with fins and whitewall tyres and a flame red paint job. They’re on the outskirts of Barstow and the drugs have just kicked in. “We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers and laughers,” Duke enumerates (Depp’s pitch-perfect voiceover is one of the chief joys of the film). “Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into locked a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”

By this time the pair have hallucinated a sky full of attacking bats. It gets worse: checking into a plush hotel, Duke’s base of operations while he ostensibly covers a motorcycle race in the desert, the psychedelically patterned carpet comes bleeding to life. A lounge full of bloated gamblers turns into a rutting grotesquery of giant lizards.

It gets worse: Duke and Dr Gonzo freak out, run up epic room service bills, destroy said hotel rooms, skip paying for both, damage cars, terrorize the innocent, insult authority, brandish weapons, rail against a government and a country going to hell, and merrily drink, snort and in any way possible ingest everything they can get their hands on, all the while encountering any number of other oddballs from an underage and possibly mentally deficient artist (Christina Ricci) who paints nothing but portraits of Barbara Streisand (Duke warns Dr Gonzo off her thusly: “in a few hours, she'll probably be sane enough to work herself into some kind of towering Jesus-based rage at the hazy recollection of being seduced by some kind of cruel Samoan who fed her liquor and LSD, dragged her to a Vegas hotel room and then savagely penetrated every orifice in her little body with his throbbing, uncircumcised member”) to a traffic cop (Gary Busey) who enthusiastically pursues a way over-the-limit* Duke only to let him off with a warning and ask for a kiss (“I’m very lonely here”).

For all that the critics didn’t get it and the majority of cinema-goers didn’t bother with it, ‘F&L in LV’ achieves a perfect marriage of source material, cast and director. It’s a blast, a trip and a head-fuck. Anyone whose sensibilities are easily offended would do best to avoid. But to anyone who likes cinema in the fast lane, 100mph, drunk in charge and not wearing a seatbelt, all I can say is: buy the ticket, take the ride.



*In both senses.

Che - Part Two

‘Che – Part Two’ is at the same time more immediate and less satisfying that its predecessor.

More immediate because it’s free of the self-consciously arty black-and-white New York City sequences that interrupt the flow of part one; because the pursuit of Guevara and his small band of Bolivian freedom fighters by a remorseless military gives the film a constant senses of movement, as well as imbuing every frame with threat and tension.

Less satisfying for mostly the same reasons.

As with the first film, it’s not a biopic – it’s a treatise on the logistics of organising a revolution. As such, it feels very much like a variation on a theme. The main differences are geographical (Bolivia instead of Cuba) and historical (the ’60s, not the ’50s; Guevara is an older man) – but the principal different is the outcome.

The Cuban revolution was successful. Guevara’s Bolivian campaign was a failure.

Abandoning the political stage, a heavily disguised Guevara (Benicio del Toro in even more impressive form than part one) fetches up in Bolivia. With no supplies and with none of the manpower he had as Castro’s right hand man, he attempts to transform a painfully small and disorganised group into guerrilla fighters. Everything is against him: his health worsens (the asthma attacks he suffered before have become more severe, more debilitating); his men are undisciplined and infighting abounds; food is hard to come by; the peasants they are fighting to protect betray them under bribery and threats from the Bolivian army; American involvement exacerbates things.

The two films are yin and yang. Opposites but mirror images. Part one is the rise of Che Guevara. Part two is his fall. Part one is about the planning and coming together of a revolution. Part two is about disintegration. Part one ends in triumph, part two in failure.

Part one works as a stand-alone film. Part two doesn’t. It needs the events of the first instalment for context, otherwise it would be too fragmentary, too downbeat; the sucker punch of the ending wouldn’t resonate half as effectively.

When I wrote about ‘Che – Part One’, I was disappointed that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see the four and half hour roadshow version. I’m glad now that that was the case. The similarities would have been too pronounced.

So would the differences.

Che - Part One

Q. When is a biopic not a biopic?

A. When it’s Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che – Part One’.

But before I get into the whole biopic discussion, some thoughts on the title. Early word, when Soderbergh premiered the film(s) at Cannes, was that he’d made two stand-alone but thematically connected films (shot in different aspect ratios) entitled ‘The Argentine’ and ‘Guerilla’. Then I heard that a limited American release offered film-goers the opportunity to experience the whole thing in a single four-and-a-half-hour sitting – a “roadshow” edition called ‘Che: A Revolutionary Life’. Now it shows up in the UK as ‘Che – Part One’ and, opening next month, ‘Che – Part Two’ – which, according to some of the American film sites I follow, are the titles of the two halves of the “roadshow” version.

So why, particularly when they’re being released a month apart, aren’t the UK showings going under the titles ‘The Argentine’ and ‘Guerilla’? With different aspect ratios, and occupying different timelines and geographies (the Cuban revolution of 1958-59 in the former; the failed Bolivian revolution of 1967 in the latter), it’s clearly only a film of two halves if seen in the “roadshow” format, nor does it seem quite as simple as saying one film is the sequel to the other.

But enough! Two paragraphs and 200 words on the title alone!?!

To business: ‘Che – Part One’ is not a biopic because it tells us absolutely sod bugger all about Che Guevara the man, apart from the fact that he trained as a doctor before becoming a revolutionary (which I already knew from ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’) and he suffered from asthma. Nothing else. His background – nada. His motivations – zilch. His personal life – a single line of dialogue mentions a wife and child in Mexico; nothing beyond that.

It would be easy to say, by this definition, that the film fails. But that’s not the case. Putting aside a disjointed first 15 minutes and some intrusive voiceover (specifically during the action scenes; voiceover should not be used during action scenes), it’s an emphatic success. And it’s a success as a biopic. It’s just not a biopic of Che Guevara (a performance of gravitas and control by Benicio del Toro).

‘Che – Part One’ is a biopic of a revolution. Soderbergh’s direction, as controlled and unflashy as his leading man’s performance, concentrates on minutiae; you could almost say this is a film about logistics. Recruiting men? Make sure they bring their own rifles. Half your fighting force illiterate? Establish a school within the camp. Anyone wounded? Establish a field hospital as well. Any renegades amongst your men, taking advantage of those same oppressed peasants you’re fighting for? Use discipline – execution if necessary.

Soderbergh and his cast (good naturalistic acting here) build up a wealth of detail, keeping you entrenched in the hills and forests with Guevara’s men for much of the running time, finally taking the revolution to the streets in a superbly orchestrated and sustained set-piece at the end.

Thus the film coheres: it’s not the story of a man – it’s the story of his actions.

Posted to coincide with Steven Soderbergh’s 46th birthday. Many happy returns, sir.