X-Men: The Last Stand

Two immediate observations:

1. ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’ is a pile of shite.

2. ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’ was directed by Brett Ratner.

But wait, you say, aren’t those statements synonymous? And you’d have good reason for mounting an argument to that effect. But while Ratner’s filmography gives us nothing to which any description kinder than “mere hack work” can be applied, I’m not sure that the poisoned chalice he ended up with could have been salvaged by anyone at the point at which it was entrusted to his stewardship.

A brief history of the film’s production development goes something like this: Bryan Singer really wanted to make the third X-Men film but he didn’t have a fully formed concept for the film, whereas he was ready to go with ‘Superman Returns’. Meanwhile, the studio wanted ‘Last Stand’ in production ASAP and Singer reluctantly left the X-Men for the man of steel. In his wake, names like Alex Proyas, Zack Snyder and Darren Aronofsky were bandied about (I can only imagine the divine madness of an Aronofsky ‘X-Men’ film), but the closest ‘Last Stand’ came to getting a director who had potential to shape the material into something interesting was when Matthew Vaughn was approached. However, with a locked-in release date, Vaughan was concerned that there wasn’t enough time for the script development and pre-production necessary to accomplish the film he wanted to craft (i.e. a worthy successor to ‘X-2’), so he left the project. It would be another six years until Vaughan contributed to the franchise.

In came Brett Ratner, who by this point had helmed a handful of bland comedies and the redundant Hannibal Lecter instalment ‘Red Dragon’ (already filmed by Michael Mann in the mid-80s as ‘Manhunter’). Nothing about him seemed to scream ‘X-Men’, and it would be a cheap and easy shot to add that the finished product bears this out. In his defence, he came to a production rife with scheduling conflicts, producer interference (Ratner and the writers had to fight tooth and nail to retain the Jean Grey resurrection plot strand), a script that was basically a mash-up of two much-loved storylines from the graphic novels, and a surfeit of new characters, including the unspeakably awful sight of Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut.

Opening with half an hour or so of precisely the kind of soap opera storytelling that ‘X-2’ managed to avoid, ‘The Last Stand’ sets up: Jean Grey’s backstory, paving the way for her resurrection as the unstable Phoenix; Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) as Rogue (Anna Paquin)’s rival for Iceman (Shawn Ashmore)’s affections, a complication that exacerbates her feelings of loneliness and isolation; the development of a “cure” for the mutant gene and the divided feelings it inspires in the mutant community; and Magneto (Ian McKellan)’s denigration of same as he builds an army of disenfranchised mutants and plans to strike against a government he is convinced will force the cure on his kind.

Bear in mind that our first glimpse of Magneto was as a child in the Nazi death camps. His swift ascension from tub-thumping voice of the underdog at ad hoc meetings to charismatic leader of a private army infers a parallel with the rise of Hitler in the early thirties, and it seems – briefly, tantalisingly – as if the film might actually have the balls to do something with this subtext. Unfortunately not, and we’re treated instead to an increasingly cack-handed sequence of effects-driven set pieces whose narrative misconceptions are matched only by their shoddy execution.

(SPOILER ALERT) Interesting characters are written off almost dismissively. Mystique is shot by a tranq dart containing the “cure” after just one scene while, by contrast, the fuck-awful Juggernaut gets scene after tedious scene (note to Brett Ratner: ditching Rebecca Romijn-Stamos for Vinnie Jones is NOT a trade-up). Worse, Xavier not only buys the farm but has the indignity of doing so in what is far and away the worst scene in a movie full of scenes that frankly aren’t very good. Sure, a post-credits scene hints at his return by means of a cheat so blatantly insulting to the audience’s intelligence that it’s possible to imagine the warm splash of the script-writers’ urine coursing over your shoes as you watch, but this was in 2006, for fuck’s sake, and it wasn’t till ‘Iron Man’ two years later that staying around till the credits were over became de rigueur. (SPOILERS END)

And while I’m ranting, let’s talk about Rogue. What was Rogue’s special power again? Oh yes, the ability to absorb the strength, memories, powers and lifeforce of anyone she touches. And while the Rogue of the graphic novels certainly considered her abilities a curse, it didn’t stop her from kicking ass in industrial quantities. Moreover, her comic book backstory is considerably darker and more intriguing than anything the movies offered up, not least in her mentorship, at an impressionable age, by Mystique. This a Rogue who’s elegant southern belle demeanour belies a psychologically disturbed and tough-as-nails persona. The Rogue of the films, however, is a mopey emo with a perpetually quivering lower lip. And the script for ‘Last Stand’ renders her at her wettest and least interesting yet. It’s bad enough, through the arc of three films, reducing Rogue to this; but wasting the striking and appealingly quirky presence of Anna Paquin just makes it worse. 

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect, though, is watching ‘The Last Stand’ trying to plaster over all its narrative and aesthetic flaws with ever noisier and more chaotic action scenes. Where Singer shot action in a clean unfussy style, always aware of the spatial relation of character and setting during fights or chases, Ratner’s approach has more in common with an early 90s MTV video edited by a cocaine freak on an espresso bender. Flying bridges! Explosions! Massive chunks of rubble! It’s tedious, unengaging and a massive anti-climax after the carefully crafted movies that preceded it.

Clearly, a new approach to the saga was required. Which brings us to ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’. It says something about the quality control deficiency of ‘The Last Stand’ that I can bring myself to revisit ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ in such a carefree manner.

X-2

‘X-Men’ left much unresolved, not least the Cyclops-Jean-Wolvervine triangle, the enigma of Wolverine’s background, and matters concerning the mutant-bashing Senator Kelly, last seen being impersonated by Mystique. ‘X-2’ picks up the political thread of the narrative with an opening sequence which automatically establishes it as a classic of its kind. In a kinetic display of both editing and CGI that still looks the biz 13 years on, Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), a mutant seemingly acting alone, infiltrates the White House, gives any number of Secret Service guys the run-around, breaches the Oval Office and comes damn close to filleting the President.

This, needless to say, puts the government in a bit of tizzy and paves the way for Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox) – a man who might as well have “military-industrial complex” tattooed on his forehead – to influence policy and target the mutant community to his own ends. Stryker’s hatred of all things X has a provenance closer to home than he’d probably care to admit.

Meanwhile, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has done some digging into his amnesiac past but come up with nothing and returns to Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart)’s academy still champing at the bit that Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) remains committed to her relationship with Cyclops (James Marsden) when he’d prefer to be playing hide the mutant salami with her. Meanwhile, Rogue (Anna Paquin) is trying to kickstart a romance with Bobby Drake (Shawn Ashmore) a.k.a. Iceman, though Ice-moody-teenager would be an arguably better name. 

‘X-2’ skirts the pitfall marked “soap opera” but expertly avoids it (unlike, as we shall see, ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’). In fact, the handful of twee character interactions that returning director Bryan Singer sprinkles the first twenty minutes with only serve to emphasise what’s at stake when the plot kicks into high gear, Stryker’s men launch an assault on the academy, and the all-powerful Cerebro – the machine by which the already telepathic Xavier can locate and track all mutants – falls into the wrong hands.

Meanwhile, Magneto (Ian McKellan) – last since incarcerated in all an-plastic prison – finds an ingenuous (if slightly cheat-y) means of escape, and reunites with Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos). That Stryker, who has by this point captured Xavier, also has designs on Mystique finds himself the enemy of both the suddenly leaderless X-Men and the already antagonistic Magneto. The stage, to use an old expression, is set.

‘X-2’ is a mammoth leap forward from the admittedly accomplished first instalment. There’s much more action – the Oval Office opener; the attack on the academy; Pyro (Aaron Stanford) cutting loose on a SWAT team (his temperamental nature is something Magneto soon plays on); and an extended finale in Stryker’s secret base – but the characters remain the focus. Speaking of which, the new characters are by and large interesting (again, something that ‘Last Stand’ doesn’t always manager) and the arcs of most of the existing characters are at least slightly extended.

Wolverine remains the focus, certainly for the action set pieces, while Storm (Halle Berry) and Jean Grey get a bit more to do this time round. Berry seems more comfortable with the character. The interplay between Stewart and McKellan remains a joy to watch, while Romijn-Stamos once again bags a (wo)man of the match award for the sheer glee with which her sinuous and deadly Mystique walks away with the film everytime she sashays onscreen. Brian Cox is also awesome as all hell but – hey! – that should be obvious: he’s Brian Cox, motherfuckers, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else delivering a line lik “I was piloting black ops in the jungles of North Vietnam while you were sucking on your mamma’s titty at Woodstock” with such spine-crawling relish. Kudos, too, to Alan Cumming, who makes Nightcrawler creepy, dangerous and somehow dignified pretty much all at the same time.

The backgrounding of Rogue, however, becomes more problematic. She’s given one thing to do in the big finale – land a plane – and she does so with such deer-in-the-headlights panic that it’s difficult to reconcile the Rogue of the movies with the Rogue of the graphic novels. (The worst is yet to come, however, so I’ll save my big Rogue-wuz-robbed rant for the next review.)

The franchise’s touchstone of alienation is given a good workout in this instalment. The idea of mutants as outcasts – social pariahs – is there in Rogue’s inability to engender a “normal” relationship; in the pieces of Wolverine’s backstory that begin to edge into place; in Pyro’s acceptance of Magneto as a father figure; and in Iceman’s betrayal by his own brother. A scene where Iceman’s parents first assure him that “you’re still our son” and then wonder “have you tried not being a mutant” establishes an analogue so self-explanatory that I don’t need to belabour it here.

‘X-2’ is what a superhero film should be: exciting, engaging, possessed of visual panache and a sharp wit; but a film, between all the effects and smackdowns, that grounds itself in who its characters are and what is truly at stake for them. It’s the film in which all the promise of ‘X-Men’ coheres. The ending – in which the shaky alliance of its protagonists with their arch-nemesis Magneto splinters under the latter’s megalomania, and which points to the emergence of Jean Grey’s Phoenix persona – seems to set up a third instalment with the potential to up the ante even further.

Then it all went wrong …

X-Men

Assuming you’ve been conscious and paid even the remotest attention to popular culture during the last decade, you might have come to the conclusion that your local multiplex exists solely as a delivery system for Marvel films, that there has been an overwhelming glut of superhero movies. But the superhero movie has been with us a lot longer than that; and when Bryan Singer gifted the world with ‘X-Men’ fourteen years ago, the genre was on pretty shaky ground.

Tim Burton’s gloriously stylised ‘Batman’ (1989) and ‘Batman Returns’ (1992) had, under the less-than-guiding hand of Joel Schumacher, devolved into the by-the-numbers tiredness of ‘Batman Forever’ (1995) and the flat-out awfulness of ‘Batman & Robin’ (1997). Superman spent the 90s mired on the small screen and it wouldn’t be till 2006, in the bloated ‘Superman Returns’ that he’d see the inside of a movie theatre again. Meanwhile, ‘The Shadow’ (1994) peddled a nice 30s vibe but failed to engage audiences, and ‘The Phantom’ (1996) gave us Billy Zane in purple and a poster with smeared with the useless tag line “slam evil”.

Then came ‘X-Men’ (2000) and the superhero genre got its shot in the arm. Singer had already made a name for himself with ‘The Usual Suspects’, the outright best of the half-decade long slew of post-‘Reservoir Dogs’ cooler-than-thou crime capers. His follow up, an adaptation of Stephen King’s psychologically chilling novella ‘Apt Pupil’, was perhaps too aloof in its execution, but it saw Singer working with Ian McKellen for the first time, and if there was a better actor he could have cast as Magneto in ‘X-Men’ … but what the hell am I talking about? McKellen is Magneto.

‘X-Men’ starts off in grim, muddy fashion – you can tell the director of ‘Apt Pupil’ is at work here – as a seemingly endless line of bedraggled prisoners are shepherded into one of the Nazi death camps. A young boy is separated from his family. He fights as much as his strength will allow as a cluster of guards drag him away. Then another kind of strength erupts from him: as he flings out his hand, almost like a demented conductor, the huge iron gates twist and buckle. A rifle butt lays him out, but the damage is extraordinary. And unnatural.

Put simply, this was about as far from George Clooney’s Batman and Chris O’Donnell’s Robin skating through Mr Freeze’s hideout as it was possible to get.

The next scene is an exercise in contrast: a leafy, privileged surburban home, an all-American girl – Marie (Anna Paquin), later to take the name Rogue – flirting with her boyfriend. They kiss; she almost drains the life from him. Disconsolate, outcast, Marie hits the road. She finds herself in a bar at the arse-end of nowhere. A bar where Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is picking up some ready cash cage-fighting. The fight over, the cash pocketed, Wolverine hits the road in his pick-up truck. (Rootlessness and marginalisation are strong themes throughout much of the franchise.) Rogue hitches a lift. En route to nowhere in particular, they’re attacked by Sabretooth (Tyler Mane), who turns out to be in the pay of Magneto (Ian McKellen).

Magneto and his blue-skinned henchwoman Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) have a plan to strike back at a government initiative – spearheaded by the oleaginous Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) – to further disenfranchise a mutant population already regarded with fear and suspicion by the general populace. Magneto’s plan involves Rogue’s particular “talent”.

Long story short – and ‘X-Men’ packs a lot of characters and exposition into its slender (100 minute) running time – Wolverine and Rogue end up at an academy run by wheelchair-bound Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), former comrade of Magneto. From the off, they’re opposite sides of the same coin: Xavier the idealist and Magneto the reactionary. Singer’s genius was in casting Stewart and McKellan – their chemistry is palpable, the way they play off each delightful to watch. The script (by Singer, Tom DeSanto and David Hayter) is literate and wryly funny. The pace is brisk even as great chunks of information are lobbed out.

And yet … and yet …

For all that I love ‘X-Men’, it’s never seemed entirely complete. In some respects, it feels like it ought to be an origins story (the concentration camp scene certain piques that expectation), bringing the team together and establishing the Xavier/Magneto conflict, yet only Magneto is given any real backstory. That Xavier is basically thrust onscreen as a fully-formed character is something that only works because of Stewart’s gravitas as an actor. Elsewhere Wolverine and Rogue seem to be the principle focus by which the viewer is guided through the groves of Xavier’s academy, with the likes of Cyclops (James Marsden), Storm (Halle Berry) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) given only the briefest of introductions before they’re thrown together to combat Magneto.

It’s worth mentioning that the franchise’s increasing focus on Wolverine can be plotted against how little it does with Rogue (she becomes less and less interesting as a character throughout the arc of the initial trilogy), which seems an absolute waste of Paquin’s talents. It’s also worth mentioning how tin-pot Magneto’s operation seems to be – far fewer resources than Xavier has at his fingertips, and even less manpower – and it says everything about McKellan’s performance that he makes Magneto a genuinely dangerous character despite only having a nude polymorph, a brainless thug and a couple of abandoned buildings to work with. 

Nor does the film particularly trade in big action set-pieces: sure there’s Magneto flipping police cars with a dismissive gesture of the hand (I love the way McKellan orchestrates scenes of chaos and destruction as if he were conducting a delicate piece of chamber music), and some hand-to-hand in and around the Statue of Liberty, but on the whole ‘X-Men’ is more interested in character. Which, ironically, emphasises the inadequacies in characterisation that render Storm, Jean Grey and any number of others as ciphers rather than integral members of the team. Janssen does well with virtually no material, already establishing the dynamic between her relationship with Cyclops and the immediate attraction to Wolverine which will inform the next instalment; but Berry looks lost much of the time. The unlikeliest candidate for a good performance – former model Romijn-Stamos – ends up walking away with every scene she’s in: her Mystique is serpentine, calculating, seductive and sexually mocking in a way that Jennifer Lawrence hasn’t yet been able to capture in the franchise’s new timeline.

It’s not often you can say of a tent-pole superhero movie that it could have done with being longer; such is the case with ‘X-Men’. It’s entertaining, stylish and freighted with a cast who, for the most part, gel very effectively given how much of an odd mix they present. But it still seems like three-quarters of a movie: a curtain-raiser that kept back its final act for development as a sequel.

The Wolverine

After the disappointment of ‘X Men Origins: Wolverine’ – its clunky title the first of its problems – it looked as if atonement was ripe when Darren Aronofsky was announced as director of ‘The Wolverine’ working from a script by Christopher McQuarrie. A marriage made in fan-boy heaven, right?

Not to be. Aronofsky left the production citing unwillingness to be out of the country, due to family commitments, for the length of time the Japan-set shoot would take. The internet rumour mill speculated on a falling out with the producers after Aronofsky demanded the kind of full creative control Christopher Nolan wielded on the Batman trilogy.

Whatever the reason, what we’re left with is ‘The Wolverine’ written by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank (from Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s savagely minimalist graphic novel) and directed by James Mangold. And while it’s a distinct improvement on ‘X Men Origins: Wolverine’ – and indeed on ‘X Men: The Last Stand’, the events of which provide this film’s uneasy backstory – it remains curiously bland, never quite delivering on the sum of its parts.

Reintroducing Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) as a vagrant bumming around the Yukon territory and haunted by memories of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), he’s soon approached by Yukio (Rila Fukushima) who summons him to Japan on behalf of dying industrialist Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi). Logan first met Yashida at Nagasaki – the film gives us a mushroom-cloud shadowed prologue that’s as crassly exploitative as the Chernobyl sequence in ‘A Good Day to Die Hard’ – and Yashida feels he has a debt to repay. The ulterior motive is soon revealed: he wants to extract Logan’s recuperative powers and basically become immortal. Logan understandably declines but before he can head back to the States, a power struggle for Yashida’s empire erupts and his granddaughter and heir apparent Mariko (Tao Okamoto) is kidnapped. Logan and Yukio form an instinctive alliance while more double-crossing goes on around them than an average week in British politics. Participants include: Mariko’s fiancé, the corrupt minister for justice Noburo (Brian Tee); her former inamorata, the bodyguard Harada (Will Yun Lee); and her father Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada). Weaving between them and spinning her own manipulative web is the sexy-but-deadly Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova, vamping it up in fine style).

Mangold takes his time setting up these characters, making for a low-key and action-light first hour. Indeed, big action set-pieces are pretty sparse for a major $125million superhero movie. A kinetic fight on top of a bullet train is mercifully brief, the whole thing over and done with in slambang fashion before it gets too silly, and even the obligatory extended showdown at the end doesn’t drag on as long as seems to be the norm in these kind of movies. Ultimately, Mangold allows Jackman to give us more of the character of Logan than previous outings have allowed, and the actor seizes the opportunity. A subplot wherein his recuperative powers are weakened allows for both an exploration of his vulnerability and a crowd-pleasing return to full-on Wolverine anti-heroics once he realises what’s been done and reverses the process.

But for all the good work, the film gets bogged down with excess baggage. Logan’s weight of guilt over Jean Grey’s demise in ‘Last Stand’ is handled clumsily. There are too many subsidiary characters are written in purely to overcomplicate an essential simplistic narrative. There’s an undertone of racism that is paradoxically more noticeable for the filmmakers’ attempts to disguise it. For all the talk about honour and Japanese history and culture, it’s just so much tommyrot when you stop and think about how the indigenous characters are portrayed.

Mostly, though, what prevents ‘The Wolverine’ from hitting the heights it could have reached is its lack of either a directorial signature or a specific visual aesthetic. Blandness afflicts it in frame after frame. A good 80% of the movie takes place in Japan, a country where the bustling vibrancy of its modern aesthetic exists, and indeed synergizes, with the stoic classicism of ancient tradition. It should be artistically impossible to shoot a movie in Japan and emerge with footage that’s anything less than eyeball-grabbing. Somehow Mangold manages it, and the possibilities of Aronofsky’s take on the material seem an even greater loss.

BOND-A-THON: GoldenEye

‘GoldenEye’ was released in 1995, six years after ‘Licence to Kill’ – the longest hiatus in the Bond franchise, and the first real gap since the three years between ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ and ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. The Dalton films had done well enough at the box office, with ‘The Living Daylights’ earning over $191million from a $40million budget and even the much-maligned ‘Licence to Kill’ – which was considered, comparatively, an underperformer – netting $156million against a lower budget of $35million, so what went wrong?

A load of legal wrangling, that’s what. The Bond films were made by Eon Productions, under the auspice of parent company Danjaq, with financing and distribution from MGM/United Artists. In 1989 Australian corporation Qintex acquired MGM/UA, intending to merge it with Pathe. Qintex licenced Pathe to broadcast the Bond movies worldwide on television, incurring the wrath of Danjaq who had not granted permission for this. Danjaq instigated legal proceedings and production on the next 007 film was thus delayed.

Dalton had signed on for three movies. His third outing was intended to commence filming in 1990 for a 1991 release. 1990 came and went. So did 1991. Ditto a couple more years, and in 1994 Dalton resigned from the role. Almost a decade earlier, contractual obligations to ‘Remington Steele’ meant Pierce Brosnan had lost out in replacing Roger Moore. With no such obstacles in place this time round, the producers promptly cast him.

Albert R. Broccoli acted as consulting producer only on ‘GoldenEye’ – he died a year after its release – and effectively handed the reins to his daughter Barbara Broccoli and long-term Bond alumnus Michael G. Wilson. Writer Richard Maibaum – who had contributed to every Bond film apart from ‘You Only Live Twice’, ‘Live and Let Die’ and ‘Moonraker’ – died in 1991; the original draft of ‘GoldenEye’ was by Michael France, with a rewrite by Jeffrey Caine and some script polishing courtesy of Kevin Wade and Bruce Feirstein. The second film in the series, after its immediate predecessor, not to have an original Ian Fleming title, it was nonetheless named after Fleming’s house in Jamaica.

Having approached and been, albeit very politely, turned down by John Woo, the producers offered directorial duties to Martin Campbell who had made a name for himself on the small screen with ‘Reilly, Ace of Spies’ and ‘Edge of Darkness’. After five straight films directed by John Glen, the emphasis was on new blood. Along with Brosnan as the new Bond, ‘GoldenEye’ gives us a new M (Dame Judi Dench, turning in arguably the best performance on offer and redefining the character into the bargain) and a new Moneypenny (Samantha Bond).

The plot, however, is old hat. In an exercise in recycling, we have a renegade Russian general who forms a trio of villainy with a femme fatale and an egomaniac with pretentions to class (shades of ‘Octopussy’) – one of whom has their own personal train (further shades of ‘Octopussy’) – and steal military hardware by means of seducing/impersonating an officer (‘Thunderball’) in order to effect the control of a satellite (‘Diamonds Are Forever’) which they intend to control from their fully kitted-out secret base hidden in a crater (‘You Only Live Twice’) for the purpose of triggering an electromagnetic pulse (‘A View to a Kill’) over London and thereby causing global economic meltdown.

L to the M to the F to the A to the O. Seriously. Trigger the fucker over New York or – more realistically – Tokyo and you’d achieve that. But London? I doubt it’d affect the Dow Jones by more than half a point.

For a film that tries desperately to be of the moment (an inspired title sequence, perhaps the best in the whole franchise, depicts the fall of the old Soviet regime) it seems peculiarly regressive. The Red Menace gets such a bashing you’d think it was still the 80s and Roger Moore was giving it all for Queen and country. The script’s attempts at addressing a more politically correct audience – an aspect of the film that received much comment in the press back in 1995 – consists of Moneypenny giving Bond a mild telling off and M giving him an outright bollocking. Oh, and femme fatale Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen) is Bond’s match as a sexual predator.

But apart from that, Bond himself remains the smug cocksman of the Moore years. And even when Brosnan tries for a harder edge to the character, what emerges is still something of a backwards step from Dalton’s Bond.

Ah yes, Pierce Brosnan. Here we come to a major problem with ‘GoldenEye’ – and a major problem with the three films that follow it. In the pantheon of actors who have essayed the role, if we characterise Sean Connery as the definitive Bond, George Lazenby as the awkward Bond, Roger Moore as the suave/smarmy Bond and Timothy Dalton as Bond played straight, then in Pierce Brosnan we have the pouty Bond. There are many attributes I want to see in Bond, no matter who’s playing him: I want to see ruthlessness, tenacity, style, nicely tailored suits, fine wines and vodka martinis; I want to see hardware, fast cars and an effortless way with the ladies. I do not – repeat not – want to see pouting. Pouting is for effeminate sparkly vampires, not for hard-living secret agents with a licence to kill.

To be fair, there is much to be said in favour of ‘GoldenEye’. The title sequence is an absolute belter, a ten-minute movie in miniature that offers suspense, action and a freakin’ great payoff with motorbike chasing plane as both hurtle towards a sheer drop. Then that unexpectedly inventive title sequence kicks in while Tina Turner belts out the theme song. Written by Bono and The Edge, and with Turner channeling her inner Shirley Bassey, the theme song is the best in a couple of decades. The good work continues in the first half, with some actual espionage (it’s always good when the filmmakers remember that Bond is a spy), a winning heroine in the form of Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco) and a brilliantly noirish scene in what can only be described as a graveyard of statues. The cool stuff culminates with the film’s most outlandish and boyishly entertaining sequence, about which I have only three words to say: tank chase, baby!

On the minus side, the immediate post-credits scene with Bond and Onatopp chasing each other around some hairpin bends is several minutes of pointlessness and the music that accompanies it is awful. Eric Serra’s original score is a whole lot of nothing much. The casting of Joe Don Baker as Bond’s CIA contact Jack Wade rankles. I don’t have any issue with his performance (Wade initially dissing 007 as “stiff-assed Brit” is priceless, ditto his subsequent tendency to address Bond as “Jimbo” or “Jimmy”), it’s just another instance of the producers casting someone in diametric opposition to the character type they played in a previous Bond film. As Charles Grey appeared first as ally (‘You Only Live Twice’) and then as villain (Blofeld in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’), Baker had earlier appeared as villain in ‘The Living Daylights’ and now shows up as one of the good guys.

Regarding Sean Bean as the treacherous former Double-O agent Alec Trevelyan, the decision to portray him as the opposite side of the same coin to Bond underlines the whole Brosnan problem. I can quite easily imagine Bean, particularly at the mid-90s stage of his career when he was winning a legion of fans as Sharpe in the TV adaptations of Bernard Cornwell’s novels, as Bond. The physicality and the rough charm are there; that steely glint in the eye promises ruthlessness. Sean Bean looks like he could kill a man and casually order a vodka martini. Pierce Brosnan looks like he belongs in a shampoo commercial.

Taken

Who are your favourite big screen tough guys? Bogart? Cagney? Eastwood? Maybe the muscle men action hero types: Stallone, Schwarzenegger, van Damme? The martial arts brigade, perhaps: Lee, Li, Chan? How about heroic bloodshed poster boy Chow Yuen Fat? Takeshi Kitano?

No doubt all of them would stake their claim to the title. So let’s leave them queuing up outside the Movie Tough Guy Club while Liam Neeson strolls right in with a VIP pass, a fucking big gun, a thousand-yard stare and a palpable disinclination to put up with anybody’s shit.

On the basis of ‘Taken’ alone – although there are plentiful indicators in his back catalogue, from ‘Darkman’ to ‘Batman Begins’ – Liam Neeson is the big screen tough guy I’d want in my corner if the chips were down and the bullets were flying.

‘Taken’ – directed by Pierre Morel from a script by co-written by Gaellic genre factory Luc Besson – gives us Neeson as Bryan Mills, a former secret service operative estranged from his high-maintenance wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and doing his best to be there for his seventeen year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and resenting the pull on her affections exerted by millionaire step-father Stuart (Xander Berkeley).

When Kim decides she wants to travel to Paris with her school friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) – a trip devoid of adult supervision – Stuart and Lenore blithely okay it. Mills, however, is dubious. Lenore and Kim pressure him and reluctantly he consents to the trip. His worst fears are confirmed during Kim’s first night on French soil when she and Amanda are abducted by Albanian gangster types who supply brothels with doped up American girls and auction off the better looking abductees to Arab sheikhs. (And, yes, the depiction of said foreign nationals is every bit as stereotyped as that last sentence implies.)

Mills is on the phone to Kim when the Albanians come calling and the connection remains unbroken long enough for him to deliver this little homily: “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”

This is the point at which Liam Neeson becomes the Angel of fuckin’ Vengenace. There’s a lot of actors who would have made a meal of that monologue; delivered it through clenched teeth. Neeson delivers it with the cool deadly formality of someone who would rip your heart out and serve it to you on a skewer rammed into your scrotum rather than look at you. Someone would won’t break a sweat at doing such a thing, nor consider it particularly excessive. Remember that line Michael Caine has in ‘Get Carter’ before he decks the fat bloke: “You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape. With me, it’s a full-time job.” Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills as the kind of guy for whom it’s a full-time job.

‘Taken’ unfolds with all the grim determination of its protagonist. Such criticisms as can be levelled – twenty-somethings Grace and Cassidy don’t quite convince as naïve teenagers; Holly Valance is bland in a supporting role; the bad guys are one-dimensional – are hardly valid when ‘Taken’ not only achieves exactly what it sets out to do (ie. serve as a delivery system for action scenes), but does so with such honesty, immediacy and lack of pretentiousness that its plethora of chases (vehicular and pedestrian), shoot-outs and hand-to-hand smack-downs add up to a full-throttle action/revenge movie that make most examples of its ilk look tired and anaemic by comparison. ‘Taken’ is about as good as this kind of movie gets.