Big Trouble in Little China

There are many reasons for a hero to embark upon a quasi-mystical quest, where he will be challenged and tested, where the arcane and the preternatural will confound his sense of reality, where danger lurks around every corner and his nemesis may take on unexpected forms.

Some heroes will embark upon such a quest for the love of a woman, or the lure of riches, or dreams of power, or because – in some strange way – it is their inescapable destiny.

Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) just wants his truck back.

How Jack came to mislay said truck is like this: he’s made a delivery to San Francisco’s Chinatown, he’s won a fuckton of money off his friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) in a card game and … Okay, I’ve got to pause for a moment. Wang really shouldn’t be playing cards with Jack because he’s due to meet his fiancée Miao Yin (Suzee Pai) at the airport prior to the happy couple tying the knot; and Jack should really have let him off the debt, given the dude’s about complete the nuptials. Just sayin’.

Anyway, Jack insists on accompanying Wang to the airport to meet his inamorata, after which Jack damn well expects him to settle the debt. Then a bunch of toughs who look like they’ve just stepped out of a Duran Duran video turn up, kidnap Miao, and Jack and Wang take off in hot pursuit. Said pursuit leads them into an alleyway wherein two rival gangs cut loose with knifes, guns and chop-socky movies. And then things get bat-shit crazy when three warrior brothers who can fly and utilize the elements turn up, followed swiftly by Lo Pan (James Hong), “a ten foot tall road block” as Jack puts it, who can beam fire from his eyes and remains impervious to having a fucking big Freightliner truck driven over him. Jack and Wang flee the scene, setting up the man-rescues-heavy-goods-vehicle dynamic of the narrative (with, oh yeah, the fate of Wang’s girlfriend also in the balance).

Jack and Wang are joined in their quest by crusading attorney Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) and wise old man Egg Shen (Victor Wong), who has his own score to settle with Lo Pan. Between the goofily engaging double-act that Russell and Dun provide, and the joie de vivre that Cattrall and Wong bring to their performances, the film’s entertainment factor is ramped up no end. Wong plays the wise, mystical seer like a live-action Yoda and delivers hilariously hokey lines as if he’s explaining the deepest secrets of the universe. Cattrall – about a million years before she was in ‘Sex in the City’ and looking damned hawt – imbues Gracie with the breathless comedic dynamism of, say, Rosalind Russell in ‘His Girl Friday’.

The script – credited to Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein, adaptation by W.D. Richter – maintains an unflagging pace and keeps the pithy dialogue coming. John J. Lloyd’s production design is atmospheric and eye-catching. The action scenes are energetic and Carpenter has the good sense to play most of what happens for laughs. Including the monsters, which to be honest look a bit cheap and cheerful and belie the film’s $25million budget.

It’s tempting to wrap up this review by describing the whole shebang as walking a tightrope between utterly stupid and incredibly cool, but it doesn’t so much walk that particular tightrope as perform back-flips along it while blindfolded and juggling throwing stars. It’s the most bonkers piece of work on John Carpenter’s CV, the least easily classifiable piece work by a director whose output generally falls into the categories ‘horror film’ or ‘siege movie’, and sometimes both. To be honest with you, I don’t know what the hell I’d classify ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ as … and that’s probably why I have so much fun with it.

Mini reviews

TROLL HUNTER

Like ‘Dead Show’, it coulda and shoulda been funny.

That’s twice fucking Norway has taken my money!

OUTLANDER

Jim Caviezel and John Hurt? What the hell’s going on?

You tellin’ me this ain’t the Sean Connery one?

SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

Theron’s sexy-evil, Hemsworth looks harried,

K-Stew’d shag a troll if the fucker was married.

Charlize Theron

Happy 37th birthday to Charlize Theron, who is eternally in my debt for vouchsafing that the ticket price I paid to go and see 'Snow White and the Huntsman' wasn't entirely wasted. Here's hoping for a Charlize-centric sequel: 'Evil Queen: Mad, Bad and Sexy With It'. Or something like that.

The Heroes of Telemark

Anthony Mann’s last completed film – he died while 1967’s ‘A Dandy in Aspic’ was still shooting; star Laurence Harvey stood over directing duties – ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ was one of a tranche of high-profile war movies made during the 1960s. Unlike the perennially popular Alistair MacLean adaptations ‘Guns of Navarone’ and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ – which bookend the 60s and pretty much define this strand filmmaking – ‘The Heroes of Telemark’ was a true story and didn’t have a coterie of Brits and Yanks battling the Hun, but a small group of Norwegian resistance fighters.

Naturally, box office considerations decreed that a coterie of Brits and Yanks had to be prominent in the credits, hence the presence of Kirk Douglas, Richard Harris and Michael Redgrave. And on the subject of casting requirements, Anton Diffring shows up as a Nazi officer. I’d have to check, but I strongly suspect it was a legal requirement for Anton Diffring to play a Nazi officer in every war film made in the 60s.

‘The Heroes of Telemark’ suffers from two things: its over-familiarity as a Bank Holiday or rainy Sunday afternoon staple of British TV programming; and its overshadowing by many other war movies. It doesn’t have the action, the bombast and the unlikely but effective pairing of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood of ‘Where Eagles Dare’; it doesn’t have the infectious score and stirring aerial sequences of ‘633 Squadron’. Nor does it function as an anti-war commentary on a specific operation a la ‘A Bridge Too Far’.

And for all that it was obviously intended as something of a prestige picture – it’s billed as ‘Anthony Mann’s The Heroes of Telemark’, with Mann’s name filling half the screen signature-style, and boasts a score by Malcolm Arnold – there’s an occasional shoddiness to it, not to mention a lacklustre execution of the effects work that time has not been kind to. The worst example is a horrible sequence documenting Rjuken’s bombing which cuts in black and white footage of bombers and relies on ground-based explosions and cheesy sound effects to suggest a bombing run while there quite clearly isn’t a single plane in the sky.

Also, much as I hate to say it, Arnold’s score is something of a mishmash – effective when providing an aural accompaniment to DoP’s Robert Krasker’s surveys of the snowy, inhospitable Norwegian landscape, but unable to find a definite thematic statement when it comes to the big action scenes. Watch a triple bill of ‘The Heroes of Telemark’, ‘633 Squadron’ and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and it’s the two Ron Goodwin scores you’ll be humming afterwards, not Arnold’s.

Elsewhere, Douglas and Harris turn in the kind of granite-voiced, square-jawed performances you’d expect; Ulla Jacobson and – in a small role, but making it count – Jennifer Hilary bring some warmth and humanity to the proceedings; the location shooting, particularly around the electricity plant at Rjuken, is striking and makes from some starkly memorable images; and Ivan Moffat and Ben Barzman’s script manages to keep the sequence of events more or less in order but does make a few digressions into Hollywood hokum.

The story, it has to be said, is fascinating. With Norway under Nazi occupation, a heavy water operation at Rjuken was crucial to the Third Reich in the race to develop an atomic weapon. Three operations – codenamed Grouse, Freshman and Gunnerside – targeted the plant, with Freshman providing for British SOE troops to land by glider nearby and assist the resistance in a ground assault. When an SOE team were killed after a plane and a glider crashed, Operation Gunnerside took the form of an incursion into the plant and sabotage of the electrolysis chambers. The damage slowed Nazi efforts, but production continued. Bomber attacks caused damage to the plant but did not stop production. The final, decisive, act saw the resistance sink the ferry which was being used to ship consignments of heavy water on the first stage of transportation to Germany. Subsequently, however, analysis of a heavy water tank salvaged from Lake Tinnsjo has suggested that the production at Rjuken would have been insufficient for Nazi requirements. Still, hindsight was available to none of the participants and there can be no doubt that the Norwegian resistance were heroic in their tenacity, bravery and ingenuity.

The script truncates the timeline, barely bothers with the British participation, omits the arduous survivalist fieldcraft employed by the resistance after Operation Freshman went awry (Ray Mears’ TV documentary and accompanying book ‘The Real Heroes of Telemark’ provides a commendable account of this element of the operation), and spends rather too long on the squabbling between Douglas and Harris’s heavily fictionalized characters.

The story was first told on film in a 1948 Norwegian production, ‘Kampen om tungtvannet’ (trans. ‘The Fight for the Heavy Water’), which I’ve not seen but apparently features appearances by several of the actual resistance operatives. There have also been numerous books. Mann’s film wins points for its location work and its emphasis on what was at stake, but leaves you feeling like the full story has yet to be told.

BOND-A-THON: A View to a Kill

Beware the temptation of the snap judgement. Particularly when undertaking a movie-thon whose entries you’re watching sequentially rather than ruminating upon retrospectively. And particularly when you haven’t seen some of those entries in quite some time.

I, dear reader, was not wary. Thus, from my review of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ on 12 June 2012: “ ‘TMwtGG’ is the franchise’s nadir,” an opinion that occasioned the redoubtable Tim of Antagony & Ecstasy to comment “the series' nadir? Now, that's at least one ‘Star Wars’ knock-off and one Chris Walken Nazi superman away from happening.”

And – lo! – reviewing ‘Moonraker’ on 1 July 2012, I was forced “to reappraise my earlier opinion of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ as the series’ nadir. Although perhaps ‘TMwtGG’ is more bitterly disappointing because of the flashes of potential it displays – ‘Moonraker’ simply starts bad and stays bad.”

And now I find myself squaring up to ‘A View to a Kill’, compared to which ‘TMwtGG’ and ‘Moonraker’ are not just great Bond movies, but masterpieces of world cinema. Indeed, compared to ‘AVtaK’, ‘Moonraker’ is ‘Citizen Kane’ with spaceships.

You can’t even say of ‘AVtaK’ that it starts bad and stays bad. It’s too desultory to attain the quirky degree of badness that can actually work, perversely enough, in a film’s favour. Only in its wildest dreams does ‘AVtaK’ aspire to being ‘so bad it’s good’. The cold, unavoidable fact of the matter is that it’s simply dull. John Glen’s direction is pedestrian. Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson’s script is a lame retread of tropes and character traits from earlier, better, entries. The action scenes are not only few and far between but lacking in dynamics, credibility and excitement.

As with ‘For Your Eyes Only’ and ‘Octopussy’, the title is from one of Ian Fleming’s short stories, but not a trace of the original tale survives. The pre-credits sequence actually has something to do with the film proper, as Bond (Roger Moore, pushing 60 and looking tired) retrieves a microchip from the body of 003 in the frozen wastes of Alaska while the Russkies close in on him. There follows a ski/chase scene (yup, another one) which ends with Bond ski-boarding to the strains of the Beach Boys before sailing off with a buxom beauty probably young enough to be his granddaughter in a mini-submarine disguised as an iceberg.

Then fucking Duran Duran kick in on the soundtrack, and Maurice Binder serves up arguably his most salacious and outright sexist title sequence yet – which is saying something for a guy who made a career out of projecting movie credits onto the gyrating silhouettes of naked women. If you’ve never seen the film before and these first six or seven minutes make you want to eject the DVD and go clay-pigeon shooting with it … friend, I wish you a steady hand and a good aim.

If you make it past the credits, this is what you get: M (Robert Brown) and Q (Desmond Llewellyn) identify the microchip as being manufactured by Zorin Industries and, worried that the KGB might have someone on the inside who has to access to a new type of chip that something something impervious to a nuclear pulse yada yada – the exposition is an exercise in what-the-fuckery and the science is so bonkers it makes your average Edgar Rice Burroughs ‘Barsoom’ opus look like Neal Stephenson – send Bond to infiltrate Zorin’s organization.

Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) is an American industrialist with designs on San Francisco’s silicon valley, so Bond naturally makes contact with him in Paris where he’s auctioning off some racehorses to be put out to stud because, y’know, he also owns some gee-gees. Let’s pause for a second here and contemplate two things.

One: I likes me some Christopher Walken. I like Christopher Walken when he’s reining it in and delivering carefully controlled character work (e.g. ‘The Dead Zone’), I like him when he’s being utterly undisciplined and chewing on the scenery like he’s not had a square meal in weeks (‘King of New York’, ‘Things To Do in Denver When You’re Dead’), I like him when he’s doing nothing more than transfixing the camera and drawling a monologue (‘True Romance’, ‘Pulp Fiction’), and I think he’s pretty awesome and able to rock an off-the-peg suit when he soft-shoe-shuffles through an empty hotel in a Fatboy Slim video. So it fucking kills me even to think about how awful his performance is here, let alone write about it. The deal with Zorin is this: he’s the product of Nazi experimentation, a born sociopath, later groomed by the KGB and then allowed to carve a capitalist career for himself in the decadent west. (I’m not saying this film is ideologically confused, but what the fuckety fucking fuck???) Walken’s characterization of a sociopath is: laugh contemptuously, strike a pose somewhere between John Wayne pre-gunfight and a man who’s just shit his pants, deliver a line reading notable only for its grammatically appalling diction, then laugh maniacally until the director yells “cut”. I can only assume John Glen was delayed in yelling “cut” on a few occasions, because there are several scenes in which Walken laughs maniacally, looks embarrassed, barks out a bit more maniacal laughter and my will to live ebbs a little more.

Two: as a purpose of comparison between the literary and filmic incarnations of Bond, the books generally present tighter and more claustrophobic narratives than their big screen counterparts, with the bulk of the action usually occurring over a comparatively short period of time and confined to a single locale or a very limited arena of activity – ‘Casino Royale’, ‘Moonraker’ and ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ are good examples. Ergo, the three-quarters of an hour in which Double-OAP – sorry, Double-O Seven – goes undercover at Zorin’s Parisian pad, snoops around, uncovers evidence of conspiracy, tangles with both Zorin and his feisty second in command May Day (Grace Jones), and has his mettle tested in a rigged steeplechase, is probably the closest any of the movies have come to a cinematic representation of the novels’ mise-en-scene. And you know what? It makes for a pretty damn boring viewing experience.

It’s during this exegesis in ennui that Bond comes into contact with American heiress Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts), our Bond girl du jour – not that she really comes into play until the last forty minutes or so – and here we come to the next bone of contention. Roberts had won the hearts and hormones of a generation of teenage boys courtesy of her roles as Julie Rogers in the 1980-81 seasons of ‘Charlie’s Angels’ and as the scantily clad heroine in ‘Sheena’. Embodying all-American girl-next-door looks and the kind of figure that could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window, Roberts was always going to be Bond girl material. However, while thespian talents aren’t always a prerequisite for Bond girl iconography, Roberts’ acting style is akin to a deer caught in headlights but concentrating so hard on reading off a cue-card that it hasn’t realized the headlights are so close and, oh fuck, attached to a speeding truck.

Then we have the terminally unlovely Grace Jones. Her acting style is more like a rabid dog caught in headlights. There’s a scene where she makes out with Walken. The fact that my eyes were rigidly on Walken throughout says nothing about any latent preferences on my part.

Then we have Fiona Fullerton as a Russian agent with whom Bond enjoys a brief interlude. Don’t get me wrong, she’s a stunner … but her attempt at a Russian accent makes the guy who played Schultz in ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ sound like Bruno Ganz.

Then we have Patrick Macnee. Just as there’s an academic paper to be written on the Bond/giallo correlation – Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celli, Barbara Bach, Barbara Bouchet (albeit in a non-canon Bond role) and former 007 George Lazenby all having appeared in notable examples of the genre – a study of the crossovers between James Bond and ‘The Avengers’ (Steed/Peel version, not Marvel comics) similarly awaits authorship. Honor Blackman (Catherine Gale from 1962-64) essayed Pussy Galore in ‘Goldfinger’, while Diana Rigg (the iconic Emma Peel between 1965 and 1968) and Joanna Lumley (Purdey in ‘The New Avengers’, 1976-77) both appeared in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’. Guest stars included Christopher Lee, Vernon Dobtcheff, Julian Glover and Geoffrey Palmer, all of whom memorably contributed to the world of 007. So it was probably inevitable that Steed himself, Patrick Macnee, would eventually get a role in a Bond movie. Tragic that he got it – and such a thankless role at that – in this one.

A young Dolph Lundgren makes a small appearance. Mainly because he was Grace Jones’s consort at the time and visiting the set when Glen found himself missing an extra. I mention this purely to illustrate my desperation in finding things to say about ‘AVtaK’.

Ultimately, this is a sloppy piece of filmmaking. The ridiculous lengths to which Zorin goes attempting to dispose of Bond makes the average Saturday morning serial with its cheating cliff-hangers look like an example of documentary realism; the over-elaborate set pieces (notably an assassination at the Eiffel Tower) swiftly become ridiculous; the schism between the jokey portrayal of Bond and Zorin gleefully machine-gunning helpless people who were about to drown anyway are irreconcilable in terms of tone and context; and there’s at least half an hour’s more running time than there is plot.

Any saving graces? Not the finale, which is so ludicrously staged and badly edited as to make the “off” button leap from a remote controller in a paroxysm of audio-visual mercy killing. Nor the gadgets, which are limited to a remote control camera that Q employs for state-sanctioned voyeurism in the final scene. Nor the nods to previous Bond movies, including the villain-as-cheat gamesmanship already embodied by Auric Goldfinger (likewise Zorin’s briefing of his criminal brethren is an unashamed copy from that film) and Kamal Khan, as well as the reappearance of the stolen Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington as referenced in ‘Dr No’. This latter is inexplicable even as an in-joke since the painting was returned in 1965, twenty years prior to Eon Productions shunting their lamest Bond movie yet onto the cinema screens of the world.

Sam Mendes

Happy 47th birthday to Sam Mendes. Here's the trailer for his forthcoming Bond movie 'Skyfall'. To say I'm excited is like saying Oliver Reed imbibed the occasional pint now and then.

 

BOND-A-THON: Octopussy

“You know what I like about you Brits? ‘Octopussy’! I must have seen that movie … twice!” – Homer Simpson

I’m probably one up on the redoubtable Mr Simpson. I’ve seen ‘Octopussy’ three times. Once at the cinema when I was eleven. It made the kind of impression on me that anything in ‘Scope and with a notable quotient of buxom women would have made on me at that age. Second time, it was on TV when I was probably in my late teens or early twenties. I thought that Roger Moore looked kinda old and the back projection was dodgy. Sliding the DVD into the player a few nights ago, I wasn’t holding out much hope. “It’s the clown one,” I remember saying desultorily to Mrs F; “see you in a couple of hours.”

Turns out third time was the charm. With only a couple of minor quibbles, I really enjoyed ‘Octopussy’: it strikes a decent balance between the globe-trotting élan audiences had come to expect of Bond movies and a (for the early-to-mid 80s) timely Cold War narrative. John Glen, helming the second of his five consecutive 007 opuses, retains much of the grittiness of ‘For Your Eyes Only’ and again keeps the gadgets to a minimum (though he does throw in a painfully laddish scene where Bond uses some of Q’s surveillance equipment to check out a nubile young woman’s décolletage).

Like its predecessor, ‘Octopussy’ takes an Ian Fleming short story as its starting point; well, two actually. Bond’s attendance at a Sotheby’s auction, attempting to sniff out the buyer of a fake Faberge egg is a fairly faithful rendition of ‘The Property of a Lady’, while the short story ‘Octopussy’ provides the backstory that connects Bond and the mysterious jewel smuggler and circus owner of the title. Fleshing out these disparate elements, the script – ‘Flashman’ legend George Macdonald Fraser throwing in his talents with Richard Maibaum and Michael G Wilson – divides its time between India and Berlin as Bond unravels the connections between rogue communist General Orlov (Steven Berkoff), playboy millionaire Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan) and Octopussy (Maud Adams) herself.

Anyone who’s read my review of ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ will be aware of my issues with the casting of Charles Grey, just two films after he appeared as an ally of Bond’s in ‘You Only Live Twice’, as the agent’s arch-nemesis Blofeld. I will have a similar thing to say about Joe Don Baker’s transition from baddie to goodie between the Dalton and the Brosnan episodes. For now, let’s just say that I find Maud Adams’s reappearance in the franchise, after being killed off in the earlier ‘Man with the Golden Gun’, equally as distracting.

Other niggles: the horrible “Tarzan” moment; the stunt casting of tennis champion Vijay Amritraj (necessitating a visual pun that you can see coming like the QE2 on a duck pond); a slight slackening of the pace during the India sequence; and the overplotting that links the jewel smuggling, the faked objets d’art and Orlov’s plot to detonate a nuclear device on an American air force base in Germany, make it look like an accident and thus force Europe’s hand over unilateral disarmament, thereby leaving the borders open for Russian invasion.

If I were being über-critical, I’d also mention the film’s inability, at least for its first half, to settle on a villain. Is Khan the puppet of Orlov while Octopussy is the eminence grise behind the whole operation? Or is Khan allowing Octopussy to believe she’s the prime mover and equally manipulating Orlov? Or is Orlov one step ahead of both Khan and Octopussy? And likewise which is the fake or the real Faberge egg at any given point in the movie? And why do Orlov and his forgers go to so much trouble creating fakes of incredibly famous jewels that would surely be pegged as ersatz, or at the very least have their provenance subjected to the most exacting scrutiny, the moment they came up for auction, when their must be infinitely similar ways of raising capital for black ops? And if the knife-throwing twins (David and Tony Meyer) who are one of the acts in Octopussy’s circus are already working for Orlov, why does he need to involve Khan and Octopussy in his nefarious scheme?

But this really is me being picky. That a Bond movie – moreover, a Roger Moore Bond movie – can be this bothered with plot, character interaction and the tangled-web machinations of its villains is something to be applauded. The fact that it can do this whilst retaining the arch and slightly camp humour that best suited Moore, as well as permitting him a genuinely badass moment comparable to the Mercedes/cliff face moment in ‘For Your Eyes Only’, just adds to the enjoyment. In this regard, the pre-credits sequence sets the tone nicely: it starts low-key with 007 disguising himself in order to infiltrate a military base, ups the stakes with his capture before he can complete his mission, develops into an audience-pleasing large scale action-fest, all duelling planes and big explosions, and concludes with an archetype Roger Moore nod to the gallery and a one-liner that manages not to be as groan-inducing of most of humour in a Bond movie of this era.

This balance is well maintained throughout. The action scenes are solid enough, with only the back projection during Bond’s fight with Kahn’s hencemen on the roof of a speeding train letting the side down. Chases – on foot, by car or in motorised rickshaws – predominate, and a last-reel attack on a fortress by Octopussy’s army of women provides action and eye-candy in roughly equal measure. It’s nice to see M back, even through Robert Brown’s characterisation doesn’t quite have the curmudgeonly gravitas of Bernard Lee, and it’s refreshing to have a Bond movie which doesn’t conclude with quarter of an hour of things blowing up in a secret hi-tech base. 


And yes, Moore is a bit long in the tooth for all this; and yes, the cynicism of Orlov’s plot is sugar-coated somewhat by the (quite literal) three-ring circus that goes on around it; but ‘Octopussy’ is never less than entertaining. It was Moore’s penultimate appearance, and it’s a shame really that he didn’t bow out on it. Then we’d have either had ‘A View to a Kill’ configured around a younger actor or been spared it altogether.

Leonor Watling

Happy 37th birthday to Leonor Watling, the kind of actress who puts the first "va", the second "va" and indeed the "voom" in "va-va-voom!"

Why does that first picture make me think that being a wooden crate is highest state of being to which I could possibly aspire?

Rumour has it Danny Trejo is also in the movie ...

In no way, shape or form am I a fan of Lady Gaga's music, but holy freakin' Christ, this character poster has just boosted my already priapic excitement for 'Machete Kills' by about five thousand percent.

I'm Not There

The biopic is a very easy genre to get wrong. Compressing someone’s lifetime into a two and a quarter hour film forces some uneven narrative choices. Focus on one period of the subject’s life? Before they were famous? The subject on the cusp of fame? At the height of their fame? The aftermath of fame? Or try to encompass the entire timeline, building individual scenes or sequences around the more dramatic and/or controversial moments, thereby running the risk of reducing the film to a “greatest hits” package rather than engaging aesthetically with the subject’s life and legacy.

Point of comparison: one of my favourite biopics of the last decade, Stephen Hopkins’s ‘The Life and Death of Peter Sellers’ is based on Roger Lewis’s biography of the same title. Hopkins’s film runs a shade over two hours. Lewis’s book is an epic 1,100 pages.

So: to Todd Haynes’s ‘I’m Not There’. And I must admit, off the bat, that I have only the most superficial knowledge of Bob Dylan’s life. I’m still debating whether this proved advantageous or onerous to my appreciation of it.

What Haynes does, essentially, is reimagine the biopic as fantasia, not so much examining Bob Dylan’s life as exploring various facets of him – his influences, his alter ego(s), his obfuscations and his contemporaries. In order to isolate each of these, while still incorporating them into a patchwork quilt of a whole, Haynes casts a different actor – and often employs a different aesthetic approach – to each facet. Hence we have Ben Wishaw as Arthur Rimbaud, facing interrogation and beguiling his questioners with evasive cant; Christian Bale as both Jack Rollins, the earnest and almost cripplingly shy folk singer and Pastor John, his post-conversion alter ego; Heath Ledger as Robbie Clark, the charismatic but arrogant actor playing Rollins in a Hollywood biopic; Richard Gere as an aged, in-hiding Billy the Kid about to find himself back in conflict with an equally decrepit Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood); Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, a folk singer who angers fans and critics alike by adopting the electric guitar and enters into a war of words with TV interviewer Keenan Jones (Greenwood again); and Marcus Carl Franklin as a prepubescent black kid calling himself Woody Guthrie and spinning tales, with an ornery pragmatism beyond his years, of a life spent riding the rails.

The cast give it their all, with Bale and Ledger in particular delivering, if not career bests, then performances that deserve comparison to their absolute best. Blanchett is revelatory – the gimmick of casting a woman as one of the six aspects of Dylan ceases to be a gimmick within seconds. Blanchett’s drawn and haunted face is the perfect counterpoint to Quinn’s long dark night of the soul as he drifts down into 60s netherworld of Warhol acolytes. Kudos, too, to Michelle Williams as the Edie Sedgwick inspired Coco – although not playing Sedgwick directly, Williams channels her waif-like enigmatic allure far more effectively than Sienna Miller in ‘Factory Girl’.

Haynes’s appropriation of the avant garde aesthetic during this sequence is a spot-on pastiche, arguably the most perfect fusion of time, place and music in a work that sometimes wavers dangerously in its fine-line walk between artistic extrapolation and pretentious wankery. The oddest exegesis of his approach is in the Billy the Kid scenes, which play out like Peckinpah b-roll spliced with some Jodorowsky outtakes.

It’s frustrating, fascinating, flawed and fanciful to greater or lesser degrees. It thumbs its nose at the reviewer, challenging to be met on any terms other than its own. It ends with some brief footage of Bob Dylan onstage, a reminder that the film has, at one and the same time, brought us no closer to the real Dylan and vastly broadened our perspective of him.

Angharad Rees

i.m. Angharad Rees, 16 July 1949 – 21 July 2012

BOND-A-THON: For Your Eyes Only

With the proviso that you turn off the DVD at 1:58:22, thereby saving yourself an excruciating scene in which Margaret Thatcher (Janet Brown) conducts a flirtatious telephone conversation with a parrot she believes to be agent 007, ‘For Your Eyes Only’ is the high point of the Roger Moore years with a back-to-basics aesthetic that atones in a most welcome fashion for the excesses and idiocies of ‘Moonraker’. (Parenthetically, John Gardner’s turgid 1989 continuation novel ‘Win, Lose or Die’ has Bond in the role of counter-terrorist, safeguarding Thatcher and George Bush at a summit conference. Which is strange because he usually finds himself pitted against crackpot megalomaniacs hellbent on world domination.)

‘For Your Eyes Only’ marks two notable firsts in the franchise: it’s the first Bond to feature a writing credit for Michael G. Wilson, and the first to be directed by former editor John Glen. Both men would continue in these roles for the next four movies. At what point in pre-production and who banged the drum for it the loudest I can’t say, but the decision was made to back away from the outlandish spectacle of ‘Moonraker’ and take the character (and, to a greater or lesser degree, the series) back to basics. Less gadgetry, tighter action sequences, more focus on narrative. ‘For Your Eyes Only’ strikes the right balance, delivering what is basically a thriller while remembering that Roger Moore is the punster Bond and allowing him to toss off the requisite amount of audience-friendly quips.

The plot is a magnificent piece of MacGuffin deployment, cheekily revisiting the race to recover a gizmo that threatens the safety of British nuclear submarines scenario of ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. Here, the device is still within the wreck of a British naval vessel; a spy-boat of sorts operating in foreign waters and therefore unable to benefit from an official salvage operation. When Sir Timothy Havelock (Jack Hedley), an oceanologist with ties to the government, is murdered in front of his daughter Melina (Carole Bouquet) by a hitman identified as Hector Gonzales (Stefan Kalipha), Bond is sent to intercept Gonzales and find out who he’s working for.

Bond’s briefing is given by MI6 Chief of Staff Bill Tanner (James Villiers) and the Minister of Defence (Geoffrey Keen), during which it’s mentioned the M is “on leave”. It’s a subtle and graceful acknowledgement of Bernard Lee’s passing and I’m glad that they didn’t replace him immediately. Robert Brown would take up the mantle for the rest of the Moore years and during Timothy Dalton’s short-lived tenure, before Dame Judi Dench made the character her own in ‘Goldeneye’.

Bond discovers Gonzales – who, for such an infamous and supposedly deadly hitman, is (a) crap at hiding his identity and (b) really easy to track down – hosting the kind of pool party that wouldn’t be out of place in an Akon video. Before he can brace the pistol-packer (or hit on any of the chicks), Melina pops up with a crossbow and gets some payback. An awesome moment courtesy of an awesome actress. Bouquet is never less than fabulous whatever she’s in. The scene where Melina witnesses her parents’ murder is the best bit of screening acting by anyone in any Bond film, and DoP Alan Hume is wise enough to zoom in on Bouquet’s piercing eyes. The look she projects right into the camera – an expression knife-edge between heartbroken and vengeful – is powerhouse.

Added to this, Melina is easily the best-written Bond girl in the series to date; there’s no simpering, no swooning, no floundering around waiting to be rescued by Bond (in fact she saves his ass at one point, the only Bond girl to do so since Claudine Auger’s Domino in ‘Thunderball’). Nor is she paired up with 007 for the whole movie. During the first half particularly, she drifts in and out of the narrative as Bond flits from Spain to Italy to Corfu, always a striking presence, her cold-blooded agenda giving the film a real edge.

It’s tempting to wrap the review up here and now with a simple reiteration: this movie is a rattling good unpretentious thriller and Carole Bouquet brings her A-game. But that would be to rob a few other luminaries of some well-earned words of praise. Moore delivers in this one; he hinted at it in ‘Live and Let Die’, but here he plays Bond with gravitas. Indeed, he comes as close as he ever would to the brutal Bond of Connery circa ‘From Russia with Love’, particularly when he despatches an assassin who’s garrotted a colleague. The assassin’s Mercedes, its escape route interrupted by Bond’s bullet, teeters on a cliff edge; Bond coldly walks up to it, tosses in the dove pendant (the killer’s calling card) taken from his friend’s body, and lands a hefty kick against Merc, sending it plunging. A Falstaffian Bond he may be in virtually every other film, but in this one scene Roger Moore is badass.

A raised glass to Topol. As Milos Columbo, a former freedom fighter now enjoying life as a smuggler, Topol is evidently having a blast, cracking nuts, packing heat and looking way cooler in a leather jacket than a paunchy middle-aged guy with a grey-haired comb-over has any right to. Topol’s flamboyance contrasts nicely with Julian Glover’s rigidly controlled characterisation of Aris Kristatos. And it’s a change to have a Bond villain who’s not a world domination obsessed sociopath with a penchant for monologues. Here, Kristatos is basically a businessman looking to do what all businessman do – make a fuckton of money, albeit by murderously obtaining an intelligence item which he can sell to the Russians (in the form of M’s opposite number General Gogol, played again by Walter Gotell).

Weak points? The score is pretty horrible (when Sheena Easton’s title song can be said to be the high point musically, then you know something’s wrong), any and all scenes involving Kristatos’s Olympic protégé Bibi (former skating champion Lynn-Holly Johnson) are borderline embarrassing, a snowbound chase scene that runs almost ten minutes gets fairly tedious very early, and there’s another one of those protracted underwater sequences that the Bond movies are so fond of.

But mainly, though, the problem with ‘For Your Eyes Only’ is well … the bookends. It starts with a sequence that I’ve sat through half a dozen times now and which still strikes me as odd in its tone and utterly out of place with the rest of the film. Bond is visiting a churchyard, where he places flowers on a headstone. The inscription reads “Teresa Bond, 1943 – 1969, beloved wife of James Bond. We have all the time in the world.” Thus, ‘For Your Eyes Only’ – one of the few post-‘OHMSS’ entries that acknowledges Bond as a widower – starts on a reflective, slightly melancholy note. A priest hurries over and tells 007 that his office has sent a helicopter for him; some kind of emergency. Bond clambers into the whirlybird, only to see the vicar making the sign of the cross. Soon enough, the pilot’s been electrocuted and the helicopter is being flown remote control by an individual in a wheelchair with a bald head and a white cat on his knee.

This character – who is absolutely not Ernst Stavro Blofeld if a lawyer representing Kevin McClory happens to be present, and who patently is if you’re Albert Broccoli and you’re wanting to make a mono-figured gesture to the aforementioned Mr McClory – has great fun sending the helicopter spiralling and plunging through the sky and Bond struggles to wrest back control of the machine. He eventually does, and turns the tables on his nemesis in memorable fashion. All of which is exciting/suspenseful/attention-grabbing on paper, only it’s staged against an abandoned gasworks so grim in its architecture and emptiness that the high-flying hi-jinks just don’t gel. It’s an anodyne approach to criticise a Bond film for having a pre-credits sequence that has sweet FA to do with the actual plot, but when that selfsame sequence is also so stylistically at odds with the rest of the production, it rankles.

And then there’s the last scene. Which we mentioned earlier and will not be extrapolating any further, other than to say it’s horrible and excruciating and unfunny and makes the Bond-chases-a-midget ending of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ look like Tarkovsky.

A much more satisfying conclusion – SPOILER ALERT – is after the climactic assault on Kristatos’s mountain-top stronghold, Bond finally recovering the device only to find General Gogol and a machine-gun packing minion ready to take it off him. Bond flings the gizmo out across the precipice. It shatters (to the accompaniment of a crap sound effect) and Bond gives Gogol a sheepish grin. “Détente, comrade,” he declares, “you don’t have it and we don’t have it.” Gogol responds with diffident shrug and grins back as if to say suits me, pal; you went through all that for nothing, I enjoyed a day out of the office. (SPOILERS END) It’s a nice little moment, underplayed and without any of the smugness generally inherent in Moore’s Bond. It’s also one of the rare moments where a Bond film manages to make an actual comment on the nature of espionage, no matter how moribund.

Barbara Stanwyck

Here's to Barbara Stanwyck, born on this day in 1907 - one of the slinkiest dames ever to drive a guy to commit murder (and I mean that in a nice way!)

Excuses, excuses ...

Um. Yeah. Okay. According to the proper order of things, the Bond-a-thon should notched up another entry today with ‘For Your Eyes Only’. I should also, by now, have watched and reviewed the latest LoveFilm title (‘I’m Not There’) and penned a little something on ‘Scott Pilgrim vs the World’ (picked up dirt cheap a couple of weeks ago).

However, my film watching has plummeted in the last week or so. Several reasons: I’ve been reading a friend’s manuscript (crime novel: pretty damn good so far), my sister-in-law has got engaged, work has been doing its best to excise the proverbial pound of flesh from me, and – somehow – I’ve been on a roll with the short fiction. In less than a fortnight, I’ve completed two short stories (‘The Chamber’ and ‘The Assimilation Device’), one piece of flash fiction (‘The God Particle’, inspired by the Higgs Boson coverage and with a tip of the hat to Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’; you can read it here), and made inroads to the tune of 2,000 words into something that is worryingly urging me to consider it as a novella.

So: please bear with me. I’ll be unholstering my Walther PPK and checking in with Q branch at the weekend; expect some 007 early next week. In the meantime, I’ve started a new blog with a purely pictorial aesthetic, celebrating pulp book covers (mainly sci-fi) – it’s called Seduced By Starlight (classy, no?) and you can check it out here.

Ernest Borgnine

Ain’t many of Peckinpah’s cadre of men’s men left … and today we lost Ernest Borgnine.

“Walk softly, boys.”

i.m. Ernest Borgnine, 24 January 1917 – 8 July 2012

Robert A Heinlein

Celebrating Robert A Heinlein's birthday on The Agitation of the Moon. 

Iron Sky

The war movie. It’s a strange beast. The genre encompasses pared down character studies, ‘Boy’s Own’ action spectaculars, psychological dramas, brutally realistic accounts of actual campaigns and blisteringly ludicrous men-on-a-mission blockbusters.

Sometimes what you want of a war movie is an unflinching commitment to finding the truth of its subject matter, so you watch ‘Downfall’.

Sometimes what you want is a razor-sharp satire of the dangers of giving too much power to what Michael Moore would call stupid white men. So you watch ‘Dr Strangelove’.

And sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes the only thing that hits the spot …

… is Nazis on the moon.

Timo Vuorensola’s ‘Iron Sky’ gives you not only Nazis on the moon (as well as Nazis in fuck off big Zeppelin-shaped spaceships) but homages to ‘Downfall’ and ‘Dr Strangelove’, not to mention a conceptually brilliant inclusion of Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’.

 I’d not be doing my job as a reviewer if I didn’t admit that ‘Iron Sky’ doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts, doesn’t go as batshit crazy with its wonderful central conceit as you want it to, and ladles on the ironies of its Strangelovian denouement a little too heavy-handedly … but, ach mein Gott if it didn’t have me twenty minutes in with an inspired spoof of the Hitler Reacts meme.

The plot goes something like this: at the end of the war, the remnants of the Third Reich split for the far side of the moon. Fast forward to 2018 and The President (Stephanie Paul), a gung-ho Sarah Palin type (she has a lot of stuffed animals of a decidedly Alaskan genus in the Oval Office), has backed a moon landing in order to bolster her re-election campaign. Rather cynically, she’s pushed Afro-American astronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby) into the spotlight just so she can use “black to the moon” as a publicity slogan. (The mission, I hardly need to add, is to the dark side of the moon. The dark side. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the film’s most subtle racist joke.) The President’s entire campaign is the work of PR guru Vivian Wagner (Peta Sergeant) … and in case you didn’t get that joke, there are motifs from ‘Der Ring Des Niebelungen’, ‘Tannhauser’ and ‘Der Fliegende Hollander’ all over the soundtrack.

When Washington is taken prisoner by the moon Nazis, he meets stereotypical blonde Aryan poster-girl Renate Richter (Julia Dietze). Renate is engaged to the arrogant and ambitious Klaus Adler (Götz Otto, who actually was in ‘Downfall’). How ambitious is Adler? Well, he only wants to execute a putsch against against incumbent Führer Wolfgang Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier) – a man who really fucking hates it that everyone still shouts “Heil Hitler” when they address him – and install himself as ultimate leader of the thousand year space Reich. Renate’s head is turned by Washington and she convinces him to go along with a purification programme which essentially turns him Aryan. (I told you the racist jokes got less subtle, didn’t I?)

When Renate’s scientist father Doktor Richter (Tilo Prückner) discovers that Washington’s iPhone has greater processing capability than any of the equipment in the moon base, he gets permission from Kortzfleisch to use it to reactivate the Nazi destroyer-class spaceship Götterdammerüng (I told you Wagner was all over the place) only for the experiment to fail as the battery dies after mere seconds. Adler, Renate and the newly Aryanized Washington are dispatched to earth to round up more mobile phones. It’s in New York, however, that Adler and Renate meet Vivian, who is so impressed by their chiselled good looks and propagandist spiel that she builds The President’s entire re-election campaign around Nazi ideology.

Meanwhile, Kortzfleisch – tired of waiting and suspecting Adler of treachery – decides to launch his fleet against earth without the Götterdammerüng. The President is delighted: “All presidents who start a war in their first term always get re-elected.”

‘Iron Sky’ is a movie that should have had a budget of $100,000,000 and a script by Terry Southern, Hunter S Thompson and Christopher Brookmyre, preferably on a day when they drank the Jack Daniels distillery dry and got fucked up on some seriously manky crack. As it is, it cost $7½ million and was written by Michael Kalesniko (whose biggest previous deal was the Howard Stern biopic ‘Private Parts’) from an original story by Johanna Sinisalo (who apparently won the Finlandia book award about a decade ago) from an original concept by Jarmo Puskala (who wrote Vuorensola’s previous outing ‘Star Wreck: In the Perkinning’), all of which smacks of a bunch of people sitting around going “Yeah, but, Nazis on the fucking moon, dude!” until someone actually managed to turn it into something remotely resembling a plot.

The effects work vacillates between the fuck-awful and the holy-fuck-that’s-actually-quite-impressive; the humour vacillates between clever and cringe-worthy; the performances – I gotta be honest here – are uniformly pretty decent, with Kier’s camp Führer and Sergeant’s foul-mouthed but foxy PR bitch emerging as standouts; and the set pieces fluctuate the most drastically of all, Washington’s attempt to talk down some gangbangers pissed off at Adler and Renate proving stultifyingly unfunny, whereas a summit conference in which the Finnish and North Korean delegates are the butt of the joke hits all the right satirical notes.

It seems pissy to quibble, though. Vuorensola shoots for the moon (pardon the pun) on a prohibitive budget and gets more right than he gets wrong. The steampunk (Reichpunk?) aesthetic is brilliantly realized. Nazis on the moon is a sparsely populated subgenre (‘Iron Sky’ rubs shoulders with an early Heinlein novel ‘Rocket Ship Galileo’ and the odd episode of ‘Star Trek’, ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’ and ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ and a bizarro 60s Japanese production called ‘Attack from Space’) and Vuorensola’s opus stands, for now, as its defining statement.

Ludivine Sagnier

Reviewing 'Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1' a few days ago, I said of Ludivine Sagnier that she'd be capable of making a priest kick a hole in a stained glass window. The lady celebrates her 33rd birthday today. Here's to shattered stained glass windows everywhere! 

BOND-A-THON: Moonraker

Memory can play tricks on you. It had been a while – actually, a good decade or so – since I’d last seen ‘Moonraker’ and I recalled it as being dumb but fun. Mrs F had the same recollection and, though she’d not participated in any of the viewings for the Bond-a-thon beyond a couple of the Connery titles, sat down to watch it with me. We groaned, face-palmed and talked sarcastically over the movie for two solid hours.

The trickery of one person’s memory may be considered unfortunate, two people’s smacks of conspiracy. “Why did I waste two hours on that piece of shit?” my wife enquired as the end credits rolled. I could offer no answer. It may be of some cold comfort that at least she doesn’t have to write this fucking review; one, moreover, that forces me to reappraise my earlier opinion of ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’ as the series’ nadir. Although perhaps ‘TMwtGG’ is more bitterly disappointing because of the flashes of potential it displays – ‘Moonraker’ simply starts bad and stays bad.

How bad? Even allowing for the extravagancies and unsubtleties that are emblematic of the Roger Moore opuses, ‘Moonraker’ is god-awful. The pacing is leaden, the action scenes perfunctory, the humour sub-juvenile, the plot meaningless, the gadgets dull, the Bond girls duller and the villain dullest of all, Michel Lonsdale not even attempting to act but delivering a series of monotone line readings with all the conviction of an automaton.

Let’s spend a few hundred words finding out why, wrap this up as quickly as possible, and in ten days’ time we can enjoy ‘For Your Eyes Only’ which at least has Carole Bouquet, Topol, some nice scenery and no fucking idiotic space battles.

‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ ended with the promise “James Bond will return in ‘For Your Eyes Only’”, however producer Albert Broccoli – his antennae, as always, attuned to what was bringing in the biggest box office bucks at any given moment – realised that audiences were responding to sci-fi spectaculars. ‘Star Wars’, released the same year as ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, had left 007 standing in terms of ticket sales (and ‘TSWLM’ was no flop either, earning its budget back at least ten times over). ‘For Your Eyes Only’ was put on hold and ‘Moonraker’ was rushed into production.

The biggest rush job was arguably the script. If Christopher Wood took more than a weekend over it, I’d be amazed. Wood was the chap Lewis Gilbert brought on board to add a dash of humour to Richard Maibaum’s script for ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. Earning himself a solo writing credit for ‘Moonraker’, Wood basically rewrote ‘TSWLM’ substituting “up in space” for “under the sea”. Hence we have reclusive billionaire Stromberg who wants to destroy earth and rule a new master race under the sea reimagined as reclusive billionaire Sir Hugo Drax who wants to destroy earth and rule a new master race in the stars; sexy helicopter pilot Naomi replaced by sexy helicopter pilot Corinne; the plot kickstarter of a stolen submarine rehashed as a stolen spacecraft (deepening levels of self-plagiarism here, with ‘Moonraker’ essentially ripping off ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ which essentially ripped off ‘You Only Live Twice’); Bond’s emergence from the sea in a car/submarine occasioning a nearby drinker to glance at the bottle and shake his head in disbelief restaged as Bond’s transition from canal to piazza in gondola/hovercraft occasioning a nearby drinker to … well, you get the picture.

A musical gag is also repeated: a snatch of Maurice Jarre’s score to ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ as Bond crosses a desert in ‘TSWLM’; a bit of Elmer Bernstein’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ theme as Bond rides a horse dressed in western gear. Elsewhere, a security keypad plays the famous motif from ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (Spielberg repaid the homage by featuring the Bond theme in ‘The Goonies’, which he produced), and a hunt is opened by horn players sounding the opening notes of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’, the Richard Strauss tone poem forever associated with ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Just one of these would have maybe provided a cute little touch; stuffing them all into the film, along with its plentiful self-borrowings, turns it into a tedious plod through a decaying mulch of unoriginal material.

Jaws (Richard Kiel) returns, ostensibly in Drax’s employ but helping Bond during the mind-numbingly horrible space station battle at the end. His reversal of sympathies was due to Broccoli receiving tons of mail from kids whose imagination had been captured by the steel-toothed giant in the previous and had written to ask, in so many words, “Please mister, we think Jaws is dead cool, can’t he be a goodie this time and help Bond?” And so their requests were fulfilled; ergo a little more kerr-chinggg at the box office. Also, the big dude gets a girlfriend [insert “Jaws scores” pun here] and is allowed to deliver his only line of dialogue (“Here’s to us”).

By this point in the franchise, putting the words “Some Actor isJames Bond 007 in ‘Totally Interchangable Title’” over a big ballad and some naked women gyrating in silhouette was a guarantee in and of itself of at least $150million in box office returns, and for me it’s this foregone conclusion of profitability that makes ‘Moonraker’ such a depressing thing to watch. Every bit of it is a cynical calculation with a dollar bottom line that’s so unabashedly obvious it swamps even the faintest smidgin of technical ingenuity or entertainment value. More depressing is the fact that it worked; for all that ‘Moonraker’ took a deserved kicking from the critics, it made $210million from a $34million investment (double the budget of ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’).

Still, columns of figures are not the yardstick for this Bond-a-thon; these are tentpole movies whose mainstream appeal should be based on how entertaining they are; how much fun to watch. And ‘Moonraker’ delivers very little in the entertainment stakes. Everyone involved seems to be going through the motions: Gilbert’s direction is pedestrian, Moore’s performance is perhaps his most wooden turn in the franchise, Corine Cleary and Lois Chiles – saddled with underwritten characters – just phone in it, Lonsdale as mentioned earlier merely reads his lines and leaves it at that; the action scenes lack any frisson, with a potentially exciting speed boat chase reduced to a yawn-inducing a few minutes of padding and the explosive finale managing by some weird reverse alchemy to be as OTT as it is boring.

There’s not much else to say about the whole fiasco – at least not without getting into an overlong diatribe on how little sense the plot makes, even by the logic-starved standards of your average Bond movie, and I really don’t want to waste any more time or words on ‘Moonraker’ – except that it marks Bernard Lee’s final appearance as M. Which is a bloody shame. He deserved a better swansong.

Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1

Here’s irony for you: ‘Mesrine: Killer Instinct’, at 110 minutes, could have done with being at least half an hour longer to develop and expand the material; to give a real sense of the period of time that the film covers; while on the other hand the sluggish ‘Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1’, at two hours ten minutes, could have done with being at least twenty minutes shorter.

Although ‘Public Enemy’ adheres to the same tick-box approach to the narrative of Jacques Mesrine’s life, presenting us with a “greatest hits” compilation of prison breaks, shoot outs, verbal sparrings with judges and brutal retribution on gentlemen of the press who dare paint him as anything other than the Robin Hood figure he seems to believe he is, what makes it such a long haul is its inherent lack of suspense. We know how it’s going to end.

‘Killer Instinct’ opens with a terrific split screen sequence in which Mesrine and vampish consort Sylvia (Ludivine Sagnier) attempt a low-key flight from Paris, only to be ambushed by a bunch of gunmen in the back of a truck. The rest of ‘Killer Instinct’ plays out in defiance of its protagonist’s fate, and it’s precisely this attitude that gives the film its power.

‘Public Enemy’ starts with the bullet-riddled body of Mesrine being removed from his car, crime scene tape around the scene and police officers keeping the crowds back. The architect of this coup de grace is immediately revealed as Commissaire Broussard (Olivier Gourmet). A flashback has Mesrine being interrogated by Broussard post-arrest. Something about the structure the film falls into annoys already. It’s too self-conscious. Mesrine’s almost good-natured bantering with Broussard is evidently meant to come off as poignant or ironic in light of his inevitable demise as a result of Broussard’s operation, but it just reinforces the sense that ‘Public Enemy’ is a long haul towards a denouement we watched one movie ago.

I’ve watched the film twice now and really wanted to like it both times. And there are some effective moments – such as Mesrine playing to the gallery at a retrial, taking the piss out of the judge prior to pulling off a risky but ballsy escape – but there’s barely a frame that doesn’t betray how enamoured director Jean-François Richet has become with his subject. Two examples: Mesrine post-jailbreak romping with a couple of hookers while fellow escapee François Besse (Mathieu Alamric) tuts and shakes his head; and Mesrine coercing a family to get him through a roadblock, making the children laugh and giving the parents a big wad of cash as a thank you. The first example essentially says (adopts Cockney accent) “Oy oy saveloy, one o’ the lads, innit? He shoots he scores. Get in there, son, it’s yer birthday.” The second would have you believe (same accent) “Gor blimey, guv, that Mesrine geezer, he’s yer axshul bleedin’ Robin Hood, innit, stealin’ from the rich ‘n’ givin’ to the poor, Gawd bless him!” Both sentiments are total bollocks.

Late in the game, Richet seems to remember that Mesrine was stone-cold killer and throws in a weirdly protracted sequence in which the gangster lures a journalist who has impugned him a print with the promise of an exclusive interview only to deliver a beating and a burial alive. It’s a stark reminder of Mesrine as a dangerous and unpredictable man, and gives some indication of how dark and nasty ‘Public Enemy’ could have been, but coming after so much larking around and rose-tinted adulation, it just seems awkward.

Cassel remains just as compelling in the lead role, so often rising above the script’s deficiencies; he really is one of the best actors in the business. The period evocation, here focusing on the 70s, is just as detailed and evocative as in ‘Killer Instinct’. And Ludivine Sagnier doesn’t just provide the romantic interest but matches Mesrine in all manner of badassery. She alone gives the film a frisson no-one else achieves.

If Cassel’s Mesrine would sell his grandmother down the river to pull off a bank job or instigate a prison break, Sagnier’s Sylvia would make a priest kick a hole in a stained glass window. I know who I’d throw in my lot with.