Battle of the Five Hours

Conditions: Bloody Hot.

Film Review: 2014

And so again it's time to look back, in anger mostly.

The Good

Gone Girl
- David Fincher redeems himself with this cracker of a thriller starring Ben Affleck and, especially, Rosamund Pike.

Lucy
- It's the damnedest thing, but the combination of a great performance by Scarlett Johanson and some great direction for Luc Besson leads to a film that doesn't make much sense and ends on a downer is actually a pretty great experience.

Guardians of the Galaxy
- They took the idea and flew with it. The characters clicked, the story was interesting, the bad guy was ...well, suitably intimidating. It wasn't packed with references to Nick Fury or any of the other idiots. It packed a lot of heart into a space adventure.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
- This one was the first post-human film to come along in a long time, and boy was it terrific. By concentrating on the Ape characters and their politics, and treating the humans as the underhanded sneaky bastards we are, it really crackled into a complicated confrontation between two species trying to survive.

The Lego Movie
- On paper it shouldn't work, but the earnest voice talent and the spectacular animation combine to really make this a fun and thrilling romp, with more than a hint of satire about it.

Edge of Tomorrow
- Tom Cruise plays against type in this science fiction alien time-travel war movie, where he plays a coward who is dumped into the middle of the battlefield before gaining the ability to reset the day, so he can figure out how to save it and himself. With a terrific assist from Emily Blunt, this is the best movie about war and computer games ever.

Godzilla
- When they said that the beast in the New York movie wasn't really Godzilla I was confused, because he looked the part and kept knocking over buildings. But this film proved their point. This is Godzilla, literally a force of nature who doesn't give a shit about Humans and is only interesting it keeping the balance of forces. A powerful, atmospheric film about giant monsters hitting each other.

Noah
- Russell Crowe gives us the story of a man driven mad by the orders of God. It's powerful, it's crazy, it's actually pretty good.

The Monuments Men
- George Clooney found an interesting and previously unexplored angle on WW2, and went and made a charming film about it. Good for him.

Robocop
- Not a simple rehashing of the original film, the remake tries to do some things differently to the Verhoeven classic. And they do work. However the PG13 rating and an insistence on shaky cam detract quite a lot.



The Meh

Interstellar
- I have a lot of respect for Christopher Nolan, he is committed to making intelligent blockbusters. But in the grand manner I feel he has finally outreached himself. Interstellar is bold and amazing, but it falls apart in the end. There's no shame in that.

Before I Go To Sleep
- Good little thriller film starring a permanently-confused Nicole Kidman trying to deal with a memory problem

Hercules
- The one with The Rock. It was ok. The Rock punched a horse at one point.

Days of Future Past
- It's the X-Men, starring Hugh Jackman, again. This time we go into the future, then back to the past, in order to change the present because Zzzzzzzz.

Escape Plan
- Sadly the pairing of Schwarzenegger and Stallone in a prison movie doesn't quite have the punch it should have had. Arnie is not the problem here, it's really Stallone getting lumbered with a sagging plot and a some big compromises to drag along.

300: Rise of an Empire
- Sort of a side-quel to the first 300 film, the film suffers for not having any of the mad and charismatic Spartans in it. Eva Green is terrific however.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
- The meh-est Jack Ryan film of them all. All I really remember is the dinner scene where Cathy Ryan flirts with the bad guy while Jack rifles through his office.



The Ugly

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies
- It's over. It's finally, finally, utterly, over. Thank god.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1
- I consider the Hunger Games to be the biggest tease in the business at the moment. Three films in and we're still waiting for what the first film promised: the revolution. Instead we got more of the 3 way romance between Katniss and two dudes. This had better be going somewhere good.

Fury
- Guess what, Tank service in WW2 was hard, and dangerous, and pretty much awful. No, really!

Sin City – A Dame To Kill For
- Lightning hasn't struck twice this time, and the sequel to Sin city just doesn't have that old magic.

Expendables 3
- If you list all the actors one after the other you can't help but believe the film is going to be terrific. That basically is the marketing campaign after all. But the actual film is so weak and bloodless it's just a shadow of former glory. It's really sad.

Transformers: Age of Extinction
- Well here it is, the bomb of the year. And I really have little more to throw at this horrible franchise which somehow continues to find lower parts of the barrel to scrape. Blah blah, underage girls. Blah blah, Transformium. Blah blah, robot dinosaurs. Blah blah blah. Who would have thought it would ever have come to this, to where I really do feel ashamed that I paid money for and sat through this thing, this terrible, terrible thing. Think on how much time, effort and money has been put into making these films, and the ones that will be made in the future, and weep. Not for me, though. I have officially had enough. More than enough. I have lost all possible hope that there could ever be anything interesting or of value from these films. And I will not watch any more of them. Take that, Bay.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier
- No, I won't do it. I won't rank it higher. Yes it's fiercely plotted. Yes the action sequences are terrific. Yes Chris Evans is brilliant in the role. But dammit, this film is essentially trying to rewrite history, and I won't stand for that. America did not somehow get tricked by the likes of Hydra into committing terrible things. America voted Hydra into power, and was all too happy for them to do terrible things in the hope it would make them feel a little bit safer. Bullshit inspirational speeches and a waving flag don't do shit for me.

Need For Speed.
- Vroom. Screech. Zzzzzz.

47 Ronin
- Sadly, the Samurai seem to be so obsessed with death that when a bunch of them set out for revenge they still see the ultimate ending as them stabbing themselves in the stomach. Depressing.



Film Review: The Hobbit – The Battle of the Five Armies

Well finally here we are, back where we started from, all those years ago. The third Hobbit movie holds no surprises for those of us who have struggled through parts 1 and 2, and the previous LotR films before that. Some speeches, a lot of running, and long extended battle sequences. Given how bloated these films are, and the time gaps between them, there is an issue of trying to remember who was who again, and what s going on. We begin exactly from the point we left off 12 months ago. Smaug, the most ineffective Dragon I have ever seen, has gotten tired of being unable to kill even one of the fat bumbling dwarves in the castle, so has flapped off to try his luck against something even less maneuverable: the city of Laketown. And so we are treated to a short sequence of chaos and horror as the people of Laketown desperately try to escape the ensuing inferno. Eventually Smaug is shot down, and the Dwarves can relax upon their achievement of regaining the mountain – all due to complete luck and other people’s sacrifices.

But immediately there is a problem. Now that they have the mountain, how are they going to keep it? Thorain the would-be Dwarven king has gone mad with gold fever, walling up the holes Smaug made to prevent the Laketown survivors from finding any shelter. Then the Elves show up, wanting some bracelet thing. War, it seems, is inevitable. It get’s more inevitable when a Dwarven army arrives from out of absolutely nowhere. And then finally the Orcs arrive, I suspect because everyone else by now is at the mountain and there wasn’t much else to do. Anyway that’s four, if you’re keeping count. And so we get to it, and there is much thrashing and slicing as everyone teams up against the Orcs, even Thorain eventually, once he’s shaken off his whole gold fever thing. The fifth army eventually arrive, made up of the giant eagles which have made a rather depressive and cliched habit of showing up at the end of these things to save the day again.

If there is a criticism of these battles to be made, and I suspect there is more than just one, it is that the Orcs are the most weakest and stupidest of creatures ever. They are enormous monsters, wielding huge weaponry, and yet are totally useless at doing anything other than dying quickly whenever any of the key characters get near them with a sword. Not even a sword – I’m sure at one point a few are taken out by thrown stones. They fall seemingly by the millions, replaced cleanly, digitally from an infinite well somewhere. It’s at the same time both savage and amazingly boring. In the end, inevitably, Bilbo Baggins, the little hobbit whose tale this is, is lost amongst the scale of it all, even getting knocked out at one point. This best of all condemns the bloat and the chaos that has been bred into these movies, too frantic and lush for their own good. We finally return back home and along with Bilbo we wonder, well. What was all that about. Two stabbed orcs out of five.



- Peace out