Edge of Tomorrow

The chief pleasures of ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ are threefold: 

1. The sight of Tom Cruise playing a shallow, self-interested yellowbelly (at least during the early stretches of the movie) and necessarily emerging with a far more interesting performance than the central casting man of action that the script obligatorily has him morph into by the end;

2. The sight of Emily Blunt playing a pumped-up kick-ass action heroine for enough of the movie that her character’s nom-de-guerre “Full Metal Bitch” is more than earned;

3. The best take on the “protagonist continually relives same day” concept since ‘Groundhog Day’.

Note that “best since” should not be considered a synonym for “as good as”. What makes ‘Groundhog Day’ the exemplar of its particular subgenre is that it takes a hard sci-fi concept and yolks it to a romantic comedy narrative that has absolutely nothing to do with the science fiction genre. As with ‘Pleasantville’, it establishes its high concept bit of metaphysical chicanery straightaway and proceeds with such verve, likeability and imaginative energy that the audience don’t stop to ponder whether the suspension of disbelief has actually been earned. This might sound like a statement of the obvious, but consider how laboriously the likes of ‘Source Code’ and ‘Looper’ hammer home their big conceptual raisons d’etre, continually reiterating the rules and spewing exposition left, right and centre.

‘Edge of Tomorrow’ delivers two or three scenes of exposition dump but does so with brio and economy. One moment in particular (the massive suspension of disbelief bit which explains how an alien thingy can reset time) is done with such a sense of “thank fuck for that, we’ve figured it out, now we can go and twat the fucker” that audience response is less likely to be cynicism and mockery than a genuine gung-ho imperative to go kill alien thingies and then celebrate by adorning their collective bedroom walls with a poster of Emily Blunt in a khaki tee-shirt touting a weapon the size of Big Ben.

Speaking of Big Ben, the film is surprisingly set in the UK and Europe (the trailers made it look generically Stateside). A montage of news reports swiftly sets the scene: some unseen menace has been royally fucking up humanity and casualties are off the scale; however, a recent victory in war-ravaged France has (a) suggested a turning of the tide, and (b) made a poster girl of Sgt Rita Vrataski, a.k.a. Full Metal Bitch, a.k.a. the Angel of Verdun. Hold on to that last moniker: we’ll revisit it in a moment. 

Into the heart of the London-based command centre comes Major William Cage (Cruise), a former ad man now in charge of military PR: his toothpaste-commercial grin and slick interview technique have helped boost recruitment. When his new commanding officer General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) orders him to participate in a frontline amphibious assault on the coast of France in order to portray the glorious fight with even greater immediacy, Cage gets the willies and talk his way out of it. When this fails, he tries to blackmail Brigham.

Bad move.

Brigham’s security staff tazer Cage as he tries to make a run for it. He wakes up to the less than tender mercies of Master Sgt Farell (Bill Paxton, earning himself the Agitation of the Mind “man of the match” award for an absolute pearl of a performance that can only be described as what Clint Eastwood’s character in ‘Heartbreak Ridge’ would have been like if Eastwood hadn’t turned up on the first day of shooting and they’d cast Dirk Bogarde instead) who takes no small degree of pleasure in informing Cage that he’s now a member of a suicide squad.

Outfitted in one of those exoskeleton suits that every sci-fi movie between ‘Aliens’ and ‘Avatar’ has drooled over, Cage and his fellow cannon/alien fodder are dropped onto a beach in France. As you’d expect, he buys the farm pretty quickly. Then he wakes up to the less than tender mercies of Master Sgt Farell who … but you’ll have figured out the reset/restart element of the narrative already.

The beach assault is where ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ simultaneously gets its action movie funk on and becomes rather troublesome. The plus points first: it’s one hell of a sustained set-piece, with a good third of the movie concentrating on how Cage assimilates specific life-or-death details in order to progress further than a few yards inland without dying horribly; the effects are spot on; and the first glimpses of the alien thingies are pure nightmare – a sudden explosion of movement, a suggestion of tentacles, and the attack is all over in an impressionistic blur. Actual definition of the creatures, let alone their hierarchy (which becomes a key plot point), is withheld until much later in the proceedings. Also, the means by which Cage’s endlessly relived day take him in different directions – from callous survivalism as he lets his comrades die to a side-mission in which he enlists Vrataski’s help – are effected by the steady accretion of detail without ever seeming repetitive, which is no small feat.

There are, however, problems. The whole Angel of Verdun/allied beachhead aspects set up parallels with the First and Second World Wars so explicit that the film becomes freighted with a subtext it hasn’t earned, doesn’t deserve and can’t possibly hope to justify. In fact, the longer it goes on, with the sci-fi concept milked for all its worth and the character dynamics degenerating into predictability the closer Cage edges to becoming the hero of the day, the more it seems to cheapen its wartime touchstones.

The other problems are the backgrounding of Vrataski in the finale so that Cage can assume centre stage; the ennui of Cruise morphing into a generic tough guy hero when he was so much more fun to watch as a smarmy propagandist crumbling under an industrial-sized dose of his own medicine; and a final reset/restart that isn’t just a mockery of at least one last-reel act of selfless sacrifice but a narrative cheat.

That it’s still a hell of a lot of fun to watch is some testament to what director Doug Liman and his creative team get right. The early stretches give us the most entertaining Cruise performance since ‘Tropic Thunder’, Blunt hasn’t been this engaged with a role for ages, Gleeson is always good value and can I just repeat myself regarding the Bill Paxton “man of the match” award. In a way it’s frustrating that ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ isn’t a stone-cold classic, because the potential was certainly there. But as with Cruise’s earlier sci-fi outing ‘Oblivion’ what emerges is the ghost of a rigorously intelligent genre outing haunting the edges of the mainstream popcorn movie constraints that guaranteed its budget. The irony is that for its cap-doffing to commercialism, ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ did lacklustre business at the box office business. It says something that its DVD cover fixates on the movie’s tagline “Live. Die. Repeat” and consigns its actual title to the tiniest of lettering. Which part of that “Live. Die. Repeat” slogan will come to exemplify its shelf life remains to be seen.

Calvary

A Guardian review quoted on the DVD cover blurb breathlessly labels John Michael McDonagh’s ‘Calvary’ a “rich, ripe and altogether delicious whodunit with a difference”. Which is, to varying degrees, accurate. Although a better description might be a “who’ll-do-it”. A stark, single-take pre-credits scene sets the tone: Father James (Brendan Gleeson) takes confession from an off-screen antagonist who recounts how he was sexually abused by a priest as a boy, and how he intends to kill Father James – in the full knowledge that the latter is a good priest – a week hence in retribution against the church entire.

McDonagh’s script never states it explicitly, but the parallel is clear: Jesus, innocent of worldly corruption dies for the sins of the world; two thousand years later, one good, idealistic, genuinely caring priest will die for the sins of the church. The film’s called ‘Calvary’ for a reason.

Having said that, the cinematic template that informs its increasingly doom-laden aesthetic is not so much ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ as ‘High Noon’ … or at least a ‘High Noon’ where Will Kane wears a cassock instead of a sheriff’s badge, Frank Miller’s identity is kept hidden until the last ten minutes and there’s seven agonising days to the showdown instead of a fraught hour and a half. Again, the parallel is evident without being hammered home: both Will and Father James leave town at a critical point, only to turn back and face up to their date with destiny; both spend the finite time left to them in crucial interactions with the townsfolk. Both receive rejection from various quarters. Both benefit from the friendship of a wise elder who is nonetheless too old to be of any practical assistance – in ‘High Noon’, the retired marshal who was Will’s predecessor; in ‘Calvary’, an octogenarian novelist (M. Emmet Walsh) who is also waiting for the inevitable, but in his case via natural causes.

And both, eventually, face their enemy alone. The ending is where the similarities peter out, but again the title speaks for itself. Another difference: while Will petitions the townsfolk seeking help, Father James sets out to minister to them, to try to make a positive difference to their lives, one last time. An under-the-gun attempt to save someone’s soul; to justify the decision he made, in reaction to the death of his wife years earlier, to enter the priesthood. A decision that has complicated his relationship with his emotionally unstable daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly).

Thus it is that Fiona returns to Father James’s parish for a few days while he makes his rounds and waits for the inevitable. His rounds bring him in contact with cynical hospital medic Dr Harte (Aidan Gillen), soulless businessman Michael Fitzgerald (Dylan Moran), smart-talking gigolo Leo (Owen Sharpe), and jovial butcher Jack Brennan (Chris O’Dowd) whose joviality masks the horns of a cuckold – his flirtatious wife Veronica (Orla O’Rourke) is carrying on with mechanic Simon (Isaach De Bankolé). Rounding out the trouble souls are Milo Herlihy (Killian Scott), a socially awkward young whom Father James is trying to talk out of joining the army, and convict Freddie Joyce (Domhnall Gleeson) who summons Father James not so much for absolution but a bit of company and time out of his cell.

If the Catholic church’s ignoble history of child abuse hangs heavily over the film like a storm cloud – nowhere more poignantly than in a scene when Father James strikes up a perfectly innocent and good-natured conversation with a young girl holidaying in the area only for her father to furiously bundle her away from him based on nothing more than the fact that he’s wearing a black robe – then its other key theme flows quietly below the surface like an underground spring: the church as anachronism, the role of the parish priest an exercise in redundancy. None of Father James’s flock have any use for him, except to mock. Or terrorise.

‘Calvary’ mines the vignettes that constitute its loose narrative – some profound, some satirical, some just plain absurd – from a pretty heavy thematic seam. A late-in-the-game meditation on forgiveness sets up a final scene fade-to-black designed to force the audience to take a thorny question away with them and spend some time wrestling with it.

All told, ‘Calvary’ comes very close to greatness. There are some awkward tonal shifts – a problem that afflicted McDonagh’s debut ‘The Guard’ – and the script often seems to stumble as it reaches for a spiritual profundity that’s clearly beyond it. Nor is McDonagh particularly well served by some of his cast. While Gleeson and Walsh are as good as they’ve ever been – and Moran is a revelation, reining in his smartarse comic persona to create a portrait of bored insouciant arrogance with a dead-eyed void at the centre of it – Reilly, O’Dowd and Gillen flounder, unable to bring to their performances what the script requires of them. I almost want to say that none of these things really matter – because when ‘Calvary’ works, it works – but the truth is, there’s nothing as frustrating as engaging with a work that truly has magnificence within its grasp but falls short.

The Village

On 20th August 2004, I took my seat in Nottingham's UGC (now Cineworld) for a screening of 'The Village'. My mood: high anticipation. I'd rationalised 'Signs' as one of those occasional dips in quality that all artists are entitled to, and was confident 'The Village' would prove a return to form. There had been plenty of advance publicity. The trailers were creepy as hell. The cast was to die for: William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody ... Oh,yes, I was looking forward to this one!

An hour and three quarters later, as I wrote in my maiden post as a blogger, I stumbled out of the cinema mumbling vehemently. I felt that I had to get on my soapbox and sound off.

That soapbox was MovieBuff, my first blog. And here I am, four years later, in my third incarnation on the blogosphere, revisiting one of the most disappointing, dispiriting experiences I've had a in movie theatre (perhaps only rivalled by 'The Departed', Scorsese's flabby, tired, by-the-numbers desecration of the taut Asian thriller 'Infernal Affairs', and - yes - 'The Happening'). But let's remain in the past for a moment. Here's the rest of the article I wrote on 'The Village':

I will not spoil the film for those who have not seen it. The obligatory twist ending will remain under wraps (one clue: ten minutes in, a snippet of dialogue betrays a specifically modern context). Suffice it to say that the final quarter of the film turns everything that has gone before on its head, revealing more than an hour's worth of sumptuous and beautifully acted film-making as little more than obfuscation; a cheap parlour trick.

It doesn't help that trailers and advertising site the film firmly in the horror genre. Nothing could be further from the truth. The first full appearance of the creatures in the woods (or the creature, singular; only one of them actually shows up) provoked disdainful giggles from most of the audience. The revelation as to their identity elicited groans.

M Night Shyamalan is too intelligent a director, too consummate a craftsman, for 'The Village' to be dismissed as a bad film. Nonetheless, this hasn't prevented me from wanting to wallop him and ask for my money back. There are many good things on display: the quality of acting is uniformly high, the cinematography gorgeous and the music atmospheric (the acclaimed American violinist Hilary Hahn features prominently on the soundtrack). The frustrating thing is that these elements are bound up in the first three-quarters of the film; once Shyamalan reveals his hand, the audience is forced to dismiss all of these things as a con job. In short, the payoff kills the movie stone dead.

All that remains is the poignant and bravura performance by Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter of director and former 'Happy Days' alumnus Ron Howard). Her star-making turn can only be compared to seeing Kate Winslet for the first time in 'Heavenly Creatures'.

Ms Howard's glittering career starts here. Sadly, so does the M Night Shyamalan backlash.

Fast forward to a couple of hours ago. I'd made the decision from the outset to rewatch all of Shyamalan's films in order. It was, I felt, the only way objectively to assess the man's career to date. Between me and Paula's respective DVD collections, we had all of his films ... except 'The Village'. And I wasn't going to shell out for a copy, even a cheapie off eBay. I asked around and finally a colleague gave me a lend.

I squared up to it. I had a bottle of wine to hand. I consoled myself that there was a big pile of ironing to be done while I was watching it, so at least the evening wouldn't be wasted. I told a deep breath and slid the DVD into the player.

"Cannot read disc."

You're never supposed to use the deus ex machina in fiction. It's a nice little added bonus, then, when one happens in real life.

One day, I'm sure, I'll see 'The Village' again. If, on that day, I realise that I was wrong all along and it's a masterpiece awaiting rediscovery, then I'll revisit the Shyamalan-a-thon and publically admit it.

In Bruges

"Two manky hookers and a racist midget. I'm outta here," opines Ken (Brendan Gleeson). "I'm coming with you," his friend and fellow hitman Ray (Colin Farrell) replies mournfully, their evening's misadventures yet another blow to Ray's already jaded opinion of Bruges.

It's to this history-heavy and nightlife-light Belgian town that Ken and Ray have been sent by their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) after a bungled job. Ray, all bored sighs and mumbled disenchantment, is like a moody teenager. "If I'd grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me," he grumbles upon arrival, having barely seen anything of the place, "but I didn't, so it doesn't." He only brightens up when they come across a film crew shooting a pretentious dream sequence for an art-house movie. "They're filming midgets!" he exclaims delightedly, rushing off to watch.

Said midget, Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), prefers the epithet dwarf. Ray, however, isn't above demeaningly calling him Shorty when his coke-addled rant turns to the race question. Not that Ray isn't a walking xenophobe himself. He heaps abuse on Belgium in general and Bruges in particular, gleefully gets into a fight with an American (he twats the fellow with an almost cheery "that's for John Lennon, you fucking Yank cunt") and is visibly deflated when he discovers later that his antagonist is actually Canadian.

Or how about this exchange between Ken and Jimmy:

Ken: Are you American?
Jimmy: Yes, but please don't hold it against me.
Ken: I won't. Just try not say anything too loud or crass.

Martin McDonagh's debut film 'In Bruges' is essentially a two-hander for its first half, a post-Tarantino 'Odd Couple' with its contract killer heroes (I use the word 'heroes' loosely) bonding, bickering and bantering against a picture postcard backdrop, while Jimmy and on-set drug pusher Chloe (Clemence Poesy) weave in and out of their interactions. And it's very funny. McDonagh's script zings with hilarious and quotable lines, even if you wouldn't drop any of them in front of your mother. I can't remember a film since 'Sexy Beast' with so many instances of the 'c'-word.

Take the following conversation, the film having veered into darker territory with revelations about the nature of the bungled job and Harry's arrival in Bruges to take matters in hand. Ken stands up to his boss and offers him a few home truths:

Ken: Let's face it, Harry - you're a cunt. You've always been a cunt. The only thing that's gonna change is that you'll become an even bigger cunt. Maybe have some more cunt kids.
Harry: You retract that bit about my cunt fucking kids.
Ken: I retract that bit about your cunt fucking kids.
Harry: Insulting my fucking kids! That's going overboard, mate.
Ken: I retracted it, didn't I?

The 'Sexy Beast' comparison is apt, not just for the language but in the usually suave Fiennes's full-throttle performance as a dangerous mob boss, a la Ben Kingsley's in Jonathan Glazer's film. But whereas 'Sexy Beast' lost the plot after a rivetting first half, 'In Bruges' doesn't put a foot wrong, ramping up the tension and sense of danger once Harry puts in an appearance, but without sacrificing the surreal humour or losing sight of its characters' humanity.

This last is the ace up McDonagh's sleeve. You shouldn't really give a damn about any of these characters: Ken, Ray and Harry are killers by profession (Ray's blunder, revealed at a key moment, weighs heavily against him), Jimmy is a coked-up self-important bit part actor who parties with - well, Ken put it best - manky hookers, and Chloe deals drugs and wastes herself on a thuggish skinhead boyfriend. Shit, just typing that sentence is enough to make me appreciate just how heavy-handed and grim 'In Bruges' could have been in lesser hands.

However, Martin McDonagh, an acclaimed playwright set to garner the same kind of encomium in the film world, brings enough insight, intelligence and lightness of touch to the proceedings to make you care about the characters (even Harry is a man of principles who takes care not to endanger a pregnant woman), and - Peckinpah-esque ending notwithstanding - to make you laugh out loud. The performances are uniformly excellent, with Farrell proving a revelation.

'In Bruges' doesn't necessarily want to make me go to Bruges (at a guess, it wasn't endorsed by the Belgian Tourist Board) but I do want to go back to my local multiplex and see it again.