The plane-hooking opening sequence is fun (just look at that shot of Felix Leiter and his DEA allies’ slow-mo charge forward – see, told you it was oh-so-’80s!), but the movie doesn’t really start to get good until Bond discovers the very brutal thing that happened to Felix Leiter and his new wife. The idea of Bond going rogue on a personal mission outside of MI6 is a good one, but not enough is really made of it. Unlike something like the later Mission: Impossible, it doesn’t feel like Bond’s former allies could be just as much of an obstacle as the bad guys: a while after Bond’s “with one bound he was free” escape in the scene with M, one agent turns up angry at him, then immediately dies, and that’s pretty much it. Bond’s licence to kill is revoked, but this has absolutely no effect on his ability to proceed to kill just as many people as ever. He even still gets to have Q helping him – in one of that character’s biggest roles, in fact!

Having said that, it’s not quite true to say that this might as well be an officially sanctioned mission: I really like the neat plotting of the way Bond’s solo quest for vengeance screws up two other groups’ attacks on Sanchez. The way 007 effectively fuels Sanchez’s concerns about betrayal within his organisation is also good, and the length of time Sanchez remains oblivious to the fact that Bond is his enemy makes for an extremely unusual Bond movie. Overall, perhaps because so much of the movie is kept relatively grounded and low-key, the plotting generally (with a few exceptions) progresses more logically than it does in most Bond films. (Everyone: for some excellent commentary on story structure points like this, go and read Andrew Ellard’s Tweetnotes on the movie. It is indeed the “knifiest Bond ever”!)

The sequence with Bond sneaking around Krest’s operation is a good one; the “maggot coffin” is a fun baddie takedown, and the scene has a satisfying conclusion thanks to how Bond kills Felix’s betrayer. (The way Sanchez dies at the end of the movie – hey, it’s a Bond film, it’s not a spoiler to say that! – is also one of the most satisfying in the entire series.)

The film contains two very good action sequences, the harpoon-plane-waterskiing (featuring gunfire to that da-dada-da-da Bond theme rhythm!) and the concluding tanker chase. They easily make up for the crap bar brawl (noteworthy only for the swordfish bit) and ninja attack. (Ninjas… who are Hong Kong narcotics agents? Mixing up your nations of the Orient a little bit there, aren’t you, writers?) The section inside Sanchez’ smuggling base ranks somewhere in between: the conveyer belt fight against Benicio del Toro is nice and tense, but the setting seems even more Made Of Explodium than the hotel in Quantum of Solace.

As it’s a revenge story, it’s understandable that Timothy Dalton’s performance would be more downbeat than it was in The Living Daylights. But, combined with a general lack of memorable dialogue for him, it does mean that I find him much less fun to watch in this movie than in his first one, which may be a big part of the reason why I like it a lot less. The two Bond girls are also far from the greatest of characters or performances.

(A ridiculously minor nit-picky point, which doesn’t really belong in a review but I want to moan about it anyway: one of the baddies kills Bond’s DEA ally and says, “Guess what? His name was Sharkey!” The emphasis in that sentence has always felt like it’s on the wrong word, as if he’s simply confirming that his name was what he already thought it would be, rather than drawing attention to the irony of his cause of death. For similar reasons, I get disproportionately annoyed with a likewise mis-delivered line in The Matrix: “The image translators work for the Construct program…”)

[003 out of 005]

Look, I admit it – I’m a sucker for cinematic experiments in metafiction and form. Such movies tend to attract critics’ comments like, “All this self-referentiality, not-too-subtle thematic interlinking, and chronological jumbling are mere gimmicks; once you’ve solved the superficial puzzle-box, there’s little of substance to them. They’re not really as profound or interesting as they think they are – they exist only as exercises for writers and directors to smugly say, ‘Look how clever I am!’”

But for me, that clever-clever self-referentiality, not-too-subtle thematic interlinking, chronological jumbling, and puzzle-solving is exactly what wins me over. (Usually.) And it certainly worked in the case of Cloud Atlas!

I have not read David “Not The One From Peep Show” Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas, but before going to see the film, The Fountain was the reference point I had in mind. And sure enough, of the above examples, The Fountain is the film that it most resembles, in its cross-cutting between vastly different time periods in order to emphasise symbolic links between events and characters.

I enjoyed the film very much. The 2144 segment was always going to have the most immediate appeal for someone primarily interested in this film because of the Wachowskis’ involvement, and it’s a relief to see that they have lost none of their flair for action direction. (If, indeed, it was the siblings and not Tykwer who directed that segment’s action scenes: the end credits suggest that they did, but interview comments¹ suggest that the credits give a misleading impression of how distinctly the film’s directorial responsibilities were divided.) However, all the stories had something to recommend them (the humour of the 2012 segment; the conspiracy of the ’70s thriller; the interaction between Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent’s characters in the 1930s), so that I was rarely disappointed when the film interrupted a story I was enjoying to switch to another one. The abruptness of the transitions between the different stories’ tones and genres was also something that appealed to me rather than a disorientating irritation. Overall I found it a very well-paced movie, flowing along about as well as any non-linear three hour movie ever could. (Although I could have done with a few less solemn, pseudo-profound statements about interconnectedness in the voiceovers.)

Many people have complained of being distracted by the make-up, and Tom Hanks’ attempts at certain accents – it’s true that I was distracted by those things too, but with only a couple of exceptions, keeping an eye out for the different roles each actor took on was an enjoyable distraction.

Hugo Weaving has said in interviews that roles in mainstream blockbusters no longer really appeal to him as an actor. If that means he won’t be doing any more of them, then at least we have Cloud Atlas to represent the ultimate culmination of all his villain-portraying! (Although: yeah, he does resemble the Hitcher from The Mighty Boosh at one point…)

[4 out of 5]

¹ See Lana Wachowski’s comment in this AV Club interview:

We keep trying to explain to people that, first of all, the credit you see in the movie was this kooky thing invented by the Director’s Guild, because they couldn’t understand how three people could direct a movie together. And they have this convention that the only way directors can be multiply credited on a film is if it’s an anthology, so they invented this bizarre credit to allow their rules to make sense for our film.

Unfortunately, in Halo 4 there isn’t as much close-range fighting with Elites as I’d like, I’m not too impressed with the Promethean Knights, and time will tell how replayable the levels are. (The developers seem to have done less to encourage players to replay the campaign this time – although they’ve added a “personal bests” system to the website, the removal of Bungie’s “metagame” score/time attack system feels like a huge loss to me, and Campaign Challenges refresh much less frequently than they did in Reach.) At the moment my best-to-worst ranking of the campaigns is something like: Combat Evolved/Anniversary > Halo Reach > Halo 3 > Halo 4 > ODST > Halo 2.

Multiplayer is good, but when it comes to loadouts, surprisingly I’m not sure I like having quite so much freedom to choose weapons, armour abilities, and tactical/support packages – unlike Reach’s limited selection of presets, there’s so much freedom in 4′s loadout system that I seem to spend more time umming and ahhing and worrying about whether I’ve picked the right combination of tools than I do simply getting on with playing! However, unlike some players, I don’t have a problem with not knowing what opponents are using – it’s simply the choice of what to pick for my own loadout that bothers me!

I’m not too impressed with Spartan Ops; the mission objectives aren’t that interesting, and the unlimited lives means it feels like there are no stakes to anything – you’re just brute forcing your way through. Pretty cutscenes and bespoke voice acting are really no replacement for the customisability, Skulls, Scoring and Lives of Firefight. (A Halo mode without Grunt Birthday Party? Now that’s just wrong!)

Here are some more detailed comments about different aspects of the game…

PRESENTATION

Interesting that for the game’s menu system they’ve gone back to the chunky, screen-filling rectangular panels of the original game, when every game after Halo 2 has used a system of small text menus. Maybe it was mandated by Microsoft, for consistency with the tile-based Metro design of the dashboard? It’s an OK change, but in the pre-match lobbies, I preferred the way players and information were displayed in Reach.

Annoyingly, Challenge and Commendation XP earnings aren’t shown in the post-match XP breakdown, even though that seems to be the point when they’re added to your total. Can’t imagine why that was omitted!

In Reach, the Commendation screens displayed your overall totals for each type of action. In Halo 4, it only shows you the total number you’ve done within your current proficiency level, so you have to go to the website to see your true overall total – not a change for the better, in my opinion.

When you press the Back button to bring up the scoreboard in multiplayer games, you can no longer move while it’s displayed. It also no longer shows which players are in Party Chat like it did before. And when highlighting a player you want to review or mute, you can’t use the right stick – you have to switch to the D-pad. WTF is up with that – holding Back and using the D-pad do not go well together!

What do you mean, saved screenshots don’t get uploaded to the Waypoint website the way Halo 3 and Reach screenshots used to go on Bungie.net? A minor thing, but a step backwards from something that, back in Halo 3, was so innovative for a console game. In fact, even with the background video disabled I find the Waypoint website as a whole (which I think uses Silverlight?) much slower and more awkward than Bungie’s less flashy, but faster and more usable version.

The Saved Films system has taken a few steps back from previous games – not least because unlike Halo 3 and Reach it no longer shows clip lengths, only file sizes, which is information that’s less front-and-centre and less useful to know. After a good match, it’s quick enough to save a video from Temporary Files to Local Files – but because you can’t choose what name/description to give it, you then have to dig into the map list and find the video in order to give it a more unique description. Then you choose Save to give it a more descriptive name – but it doesn’t rename it, it saves a copy of it. So in order to delete the unwanted duplicate, you have to check the exact save time and file size of both copies (which would be easier if you could compare running times) before deleting the unwanted one. These are minor things, but again, they represent backward steps from Reach (whose file browser system wasn’t perfect either, admittedly).

I loved the Reach level Long Night of Solace, but one thing that kept putting me off replaying it was those long, unskippable cutscenes as it transitioned between the on-foot and space combat sections. (Same way the unskippable end sequence sometimes put me off replaying the original Halo level The Maw.) I haven’t yet replayed Halo 4′s levels enough to tell, but I do hope that it won’t turn out to contain cutscenes as gratuitously unskippable as that…

WEAPONS, ARMOUR ABILITIES, LOADOUTS

New Halo game, new grenade arc to get used to! This time you have to aim much higher than ever before, and I still haven’t got the hang of it…

Farewell, plasma rifle, needle rifle, and plasma repeater – never the most useful guns, but ones I always enjoyed using. The Storm Rifle seems like an alternate version of the Plasma Repeater, and I haven’t really found it very useful yet. Likewise, the Suppressor seems less effective than the human Assault Rifle.

I was a fan of the Grenade Launcher from Reach, and although it’s a shame that the sticky detonator loses the EMP effect, the fact it comes with its own radar screen is a lovely touch that can be very useful.

I like the Hard Light Shield much better than Armour Lock in Reach! It loses the satisfying boosting-vehicle-smashing capability, but because players using it are still mobile, it doesn’t bring gameplay to a halt in the same way. And because it’s only effective against attacks from certain angles and delays shield recharging, its strengths and weaknesses are better-balanced. Also, it seems to be the only decent defence against the ridiculous Incinerator Cannon that I’ve found so far…

The Thruster armour ability puts a nice little twist on fighting the Hunters in the penultimate Campaign mission, but at first I didn’t find it very useful in multiplayer: it doesn’t have the speed or range of Evade from Halo Reach, and it recharges far too slowly to use it more than once in any one gunfight. But then I realised that it’s not so much a tool for throwing off an enemy’s shooting/reload/melee rhythm (the Hard Light Shield is the thing for that), and more a defensive tool to escape behind cover when you have no chance of winning a fight. I’ve found it particularly useful on Abandon, where you can fall off one of the high building’s ledges and then Thruster-boost through a ground level doorway.

I like the mechanism used for the Boltshot charge and the Railgun – you have a bit more freedom to choose when to release them than you do with the Spartan Laser, but you can’t just hold it down and wait for something to touch your crosshairs like you can with the Plasma Pistol. (The Plasma Pistol runs down far too quickly for my liking, but I suppose that was how they chose to balance out the fact you can spawn with it.)

CAMPAIGN

Grunts’ backpacks don’t explode any more! BOOOOO!

The game may look lovely, but it feels less solid than in previous games. Lots of people seem to have had problems with dropped guns disappearing at annoying times – an example of developers needing to cut corners now they’re beginning to push the Xbox 360 too hard?

The Warthog engine sounds a bit weedy in this game…

Jackal snipers and Crawlers with Binary Rifles represent something of a return to the dark days of Halo 2. Oh well, at least this time glowy red things appear over their heads while they prepare to shoot, so you can place your headshots better than you could in Halo 2.

I played through the first mission on Legendary, reached the low-gravity section of the level, died a lot, quit out. Resumed it the next day, and when I shot one of the Jackal snipers, his Beam Rifle floated all the way over to me, and with its help I finished the level in one life – and now the Halo Waypoint website counts that as a Flawless completion, with a best mission time of 10 minutes! I really am not a fan of misleadingly corrupted stats such as that.

At first I thought that way the Jackal sniper’s gun floated over to me in that incident was a remarkable, rare event, but then I read this post by Lothar Hex on Rllmukforum, and since he experienced the same thing, now I suspect that that specific gun may be scripted to preferentially float in the player’s direction:

However I just remembered something from my Legendary playthrough that made me realise why I fucking love the Halo games. On the very first level when you exit the ship, I was fighting some enemies at distance, when I ran out of ammo, I backtracked and discovered a Covie sniper rifle lying near my start position and used it to clear out the enemies. On further playthrough I was looking for this rifle but it never appeared again. Then I realised what had happened. I had taken out the guy with the rifle, and due to the game’s low gravity the Jackal’s death throes had actually launched the rifle towards me because of the area’s low gravity. It just went to illustrate that you can play the game so many times, and the fights will almost never be exactly the same each time. Yes even though games like MOH and COD will have enemies who may try and flank, they are most designed around big set pieces. Halo is design in putting smart enemies in areas of a level and seeing what happens. That situation with the rifle may be a minor example, but the way my battle had turned out combined with the area’s physics and the enemies reactions to my action threw up a little scenario that I doubt could be reproduced so easily.

Elites in this game didn’t really make a huge impression on me. They seem to have a stance that makes them appear narrower than in earlier games, which differentiates them a bit from the broader Promethean Knights. But their behaviour didn’t stand out to me – largely, I think, because most of the combat in the game seemed to take place at longer range than in most other Halos. I’ll try a few missions with Mythic on, to see how they behave when they hang around for longer.

You know in mission 2, Requiem, where as you climb up the tower Cortana says “the Elites have issued a general alert – we’re about to have our hands full”, and then there are four grunts and a Sword Elite who rushes at you? I had to retry that checkpoint many times on Legendary, and found that by timing my sidestep away from the Sword Elite just right, we would continue circle-strafing around each other indefinitely (or until I meleed him a few times, unopposed). That’s not something I ever remember doing in previous Halo games, but here I was able to do it pretty consistently most times I restarted the checkpoint. I wish you could still use Theatre mode in Campaign, because it’s something I’d probably put on my File Share! (But I tried doing the same with a sword Elite I encountered in Spartan Ops, and he seemed to keep doing sword lunges that I couldn’t avoid. Different rank, different behaviour, maybe?)

Those Promethean Crawler dogs are really satisfying to kill with single headshots – just as satisfying as the balloon-like POP that Flood spores made in the original Halo (but only the original). Like Flood spores, their role is to harass rather than really threaten you, but unlike the spores they can do so at range, which is a change that works well. (Annoying that the ones with Light or Binary Rifles can sometimes one-hit-kill you on Legendary, though – but fortunately that orange glow usually gives you some warning.)

I was much less impressed with the Promethean Knights. They remind me of Halo 2 Brutes in their lack of feedback to weapon impacts. I’m normally a fan of flashy digital/Matrix code effects (like the way enemies dissolve in MGS2 Substance’s VR Missions), but in this case it didn’t work for me. There’s just not enough of a visible difference when a Knight’s shield is up or down. Not sure what I think of their teleporting attack – it mixes their attacks up in a good way, but unless you’ve got a close-range weapon like a shotgun, it can result in some cheap-feeling deaths.

Overall, although I like the Crawlers and Watchers, the Knights just aren’t differentiated enough from Elites for me – and they certainly don’t have as much character (no equivalent of “wort wort wort”!). Perhaps it’s time for Halo to introduce an enemy type that reverses the “plasma against shields, ballistic against flesh” mechanic (so you’d have to switch to a plasma weapon for an effective finisher, instead of a human bullet headshot), and the Prometheans’ digital nature could have provided a decent excuse for them to behave like that – a missed opportunity?

This post by Aimless on Rllmukforum pretty much sums of the Campaign’s combat for me:

Whilst I definitely rate the campaign highly, I don’t really enjoy fighting the Prometheans.

Crawlers are okay by me: they traverse the environment in a unique way but can be dispatched easily with precision weapons, so they bring a new dynamic to combat. Functionally Watchers are also interesting, although I think they miss a trick by not really requiring a specific approach; as far as I can tell they don’t have a weakspot or a particular vulnerability, so it’s just a case of shooting them with whatever.

For me the Knights are the real disappointment. Fundamentally they require a similar strategy to Elites — pop shield, go for the head — but I think they screw with the dynamic by teleporting away when you’re going in for the kill plus they don’t have the same level of feedback that an Elite’s gradual shield glow, and eventual pop, have. If I’m missing something then hopefully someone can fill me in, but as it stands I don’t really see what they bring to the table other than annoyance; on Legendary the shotgun variant strikes me as particularly cheap.

This is a bit of a tangent, but something I love about the original Halo is that even on Legendary you can take down a Hunter with a single magnum round in the right place. Now I agree they probably should be a little bit more resilient, but the thing I’ve always enjoyed most about the series’ combat is that when you know how to handle them any individual enemy is fairly trivial, the challenge arising from picking apart mixed groups, constantly adapting your approach based on the composition of hostile forces. Whilst this is largely true of Halo 4 — Grunts still only need a headshot, Jackals the one-two to hand and head — I often felt like the only particular strategy the Knights encouraged was “hold on to a power weapon, and don’t put it down or it’ll disappear”.

Here’s another quote from a Rllmukforum post (this one by Kayin Amoh) about something I too experienced in the Banshee sections on Heroic and Legendary:

Although I will say this – if you get into a banshee on Legendary, what happens is ridiculous. Enemies who’ll happily let you snipe them from range (AI at range can be a bit iffy, simply standing around as you pick off their buds) will all – and I mean ALL – immediately turn in your direction and turn you into a melted slagpile within seconds. It’s insane.

I find Banshees less fun in this game than they were before, and not just because of the enemies’ targeting priority: you can’t hover very well, and you can’t fly up as vertically as you could before.

STORY

With rare exceptions (Second Sight comes to mind), I’m not a player who attaches too much importance to videogames’ storylines. Generally, all I need in an action game’s plot are are excuses for it to send me to a variety of memorable settings, to fight enemies in varied ways. The Halo games generally do that very well, but it’s not a universe that I have much interest in pursuing in in media other than videogames.

Having said that, the specific trappings of Halo 4′s plot were rather less appealing than those of previous Halo games. Like the Ark of Halo 3, Requiem is a much less interesting Big Dumb Object than the Halo rings were. The Didact makes a much more generic antagonist than eccentric old 343 Guilty Spark, and the Composer’s activation seems a much less urgent threat than the Halos firing, or Reach getting obliterated. To me, the Master Chief’s aim of getting Cortana back to Halsey to fix her rampancy seemed a more interesting reason to hurry along than yet another “It’s The End Of The Universe As We Know It”.

I don’t really like seeing what the Forerunners looked like. The fact that they were unknowable long-dead creatures, communicating only through their Monitors and the glyphs and architecture they left behind, added a lot to the atmosphere of level exploration in Halo games. I preferred that to finding out that one of them is still around, and basically just looks like Lord Voldemort…

MULTIPLAYER

The announcer’s pronounciation of “LAWST” annoys me every time!

The two Regicide modes are great fun – better than standard free for all.

As for the maps… I seem to have a lot of success on Abandon (especially whenever I get a SAW in an ordnance drop, mwahahahahah!) I don’t mind playing a lot of Ragnarok, but I’m not keen on the way Haven seems to get selected every time it’s an option. Complex feels a bit like Powerhouse from Reach, but I’m not sure it’s as good.

The key to the movie’s success is, of course, the casting of Robert Downey Jr. He delivers offhand jokes, almost to himself, in ways that make it feel like he’s improvising while everyone else is sticking to a screenplay,* and it’s simply a lot of fun watching him on-screen – especially in scenes alongside Paltrow’s Pepper Potts. Terrence Howard makes a much better Col. Rhodes than Don Cheadle did in the sequel; it’s much more believable that he’d be Tony Stark’s friend.

As Tony Stark’s buddy Film Crit Hulk once pointed out, it’s nice that here’s a summer blockbuster in which the action is the least interesting part. In that blog post, the all-caps critic also says, “EVERYONE SEEMED LOVE THAT IT SPENT SO LONG BEFORE TONY ACTUALLY BECOME ‘IRON MAN’ SO THEY GET EXPERIENCE ALL THE GREAT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT TO GET THERE. EVERYONE LAUDED THE FUN SENSE OF ADVENTURE THAT CAME FROM HIM ACTUALLY BUILDING THE SUIT”, and I completely agree: the section where Tony gets back to the US and carries out his first experiments with building the suit is perhaps my favourite sequence in the movie. (Yeah, OK, I admit that a lot of it has to do with the way it appeals to the gadget-nerd techno-fetishist in me.) All good superhero origin movies should contain a scene where our hero first experiences the joy of what their superpowers allow them to do (see for example Superman running alongside that Smallville train, or even Neo grinning as he spars with Morpheus), and the test flight of the Iron Man Mk. II suit is one of the very best.

Something I find interesting is the way that the film both has its cake and eats it: it’s based around the idea of a warmonger coming over to the side of the peaceniks, and yet also contains gleeful scenes of t’rr’rist-slaughter which are pure right-wing hawk revenge-fantasy. (I admit I do find some of the film’s depictions of the Bad Brown People fairly uncomfortable at times.)

I do wonder if the little bit of non-linearity that opens the film was only included because of a belief that the audience would grow restless unless the movie opened with a bang. Whatever the reason: I’ve always found that little piece of “how we got here” flashbacking very effective. The high-altitude icing problem setup and payoff also works similarly well (it’s to the film’s benefit that it’s not the final thing that defeats the villain), even if it’s not exactly subtle.

I’ve never read it, but the most famous Iron Man comics storyline is Demon In A Bottle, which tackles Stark’s alcoholism. The Marvel Studios movies haven’t adapted this on-screen yet, and it doesn’t sound like they will do any time soon. This makes a nice change from the way Fox approached X-Men 3 and Sony approached Spider-Man 3: rushing to hit the most famous comics storylines and characters as soon as possible, then getting greedy and cramming too many of them into one movie. Having said that, we do get several sequel-setups: Rhodey’s “Next time, baby” line is a little too cheesy for me, the Ten Rings hints are OK, and as for that post-credits epilogue… I can’t remember if it had been spoiled for me in advance of seeing the movie back in 2008, but I remember thinking that although it was a fun tease, it was something that would almost certainly never come to pass. It’s really quite wonderful to think that the thing set up in that cameo not only happened at all, but actually matched my very high expectations!

[4 out of 5]

–

* OK, admittedly Downey mumbles a lot of the best lines so you could easily miss them. But its nowhere near as bad as his mumbling in the Guy Ritchie version of Sherlock Holmes – inaudible dialogue from the lead character is pretty much all I remember of that movie…

So the music video aspects of the film work well enough – the problem is pretty much everything else.

The plot: Ringo and his aunt get on a coach for an outing to an unknown location. (I wonder if the presence of Ringo’s aunt was intended to be reminiscent of Wilfred Brambell’s role as Paul’s Grandfather in A Hard Day’s Night?) The passengers observe some bizarre events, and some wizards up in the clouds observe the coach’s progress. (Those wizards were the main thing I remembered about the film from when I watched it as a kid, but it turns out that they’re only in it for about two minutes.)

Hilarity ensues!

… Except it, er, doesn’t.

Some of the sketches would be called Pythonesque if not for the fact that a) the film was made almost two years before the first episode of Flying Circus was broadcast, and b) they’re not funny. (There is something of The Meaning of Life’s Mr Creosote in the spaghetti scene, and Victor Spinetti’s incomprehensible drill sergeant is very much like a stock Python character.)

A couple of John Lennon’s brief snippets of narration hint at the sometimes hilarious wordplay in his books “In His Own Write” and “A Spaniard in the Works”. For example, one line of dialogue in the film is followed by the narrator’s storytelling addition “… he said”, and I like his deadpan uncertainty over whether there are “four or five magicians” (perhaps prefiguring Yellow Submarine’s “Once upon a time, or maybe twice”). But these snippets appear rarely and don’t last more than a sentence or two – I wanted more of them!

One bit that is mildy amusing is the cut from Ringo’s Aunt daydreaming of a romance with Buster Bloodvessel, to the reality of the man drearily droning on and on. (Only mildy amusing, though.)

Late in the movie, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band turn up to provide the soundtrack to a stripper’s performance (“CENSORED”), and to some extent they outshine the Beatles in their own movie.

—

In The Beatles Anthology, Paul McCartney’s main defence of the film is to say “Where else are you going to see a performance of ‘I Am the Walrus’?” but he also makes the claim that he’d heard that “people like Steven Spielberg” saw it in film school and were impressed/influenced by it. I’ve always been skeptical of that claim… but then, in the Arena documentary that accompanied the BBC’s October 2012 broadcast of the film, who should turn up but Martin Scorsese, confirming that he for one genuinely thinks it’s a remarkable film.

Some of the talking heads in that documentary remark on how the film’s approach of drawing upon avant-garde* experimental influences (lack of plot or script, Ringo Starr messing about with lenses in his role as Director of Photography(!), random shots of cheering crowds) and filtering them through working-class Liverpudlian childhood nostalgia (a charabanc coach trip) is representative of exactly what the Beatles did so successfully in much of their music. These are good points – at least until the moment the doc gets Macca attempting to tie MMT’s experimentality to Un Chien Andalou, which is just a little bit of a stretch. (And of course the documentary illustrated the comparison with THAT shot – ARRGGHHH!)

So it’s not a good film. But the story behind it is interesting for what it says about where the Beatles were at that point – after Brian Epstein’s death and dominating the world with Sgt Pepper, they were casting about wildly for new ideas, which eventually led to them going off to India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and founding Apple and trying to make a fly on the wall documentary about themselves, and we all know what happened with that. So the film’s scriptless nature is nicely representative of all that – but it doesn’t really make for a very fun film to watch.

[2.5 out of 5]

—

* “French for bullshit”, I think someone once said. I wonder who?

Spoilers below.

The first thing that hits you about the film: as was clear from the first trailer, it looks utterly fantastic. God bless Roger Deakins! Skyfall, like Quantum of Solace, does not begin with the traditional gun barrel sequence; but just as Casino Royale incorporated the “turn and shoot and blood” action into the movie itself, Skyfall’s opening shot subtly does the same with the “walking in from the side” element. By far my favourite action sequence in Skyfall is an apparently-one-take fight scene shot entirely in silhouette – it’s almost certainly my favourite 007 hand-to-hand combat scene since the train fight in From Russia With Love, and its success is as much down to the cinematography as to the choreography.

Whatever you thought of Quantum of Solace, love it or hate it, there was no doubt that it was attempting some new things for the Bond series. (“But they weren’t new things for the Bourne series LOL!!!”) Skyfall also tries many new things, but as the 50th anniversary movie, it’s appropriate that it should also refer back to the past, and it does so very well.

This blend of the old and new is one of the most effective things about the film. Skyfall feels like a big departure from the 007 formula thanks to things like M being featured a lot throughout, the majority of the film taking place in the UK, and the focus being on the villain’s threat to M and Bond rather than a large-scale planet-threatening scheme. Even things like quotations from Tennyson poetry and discussions about Turner paintings contribute to making the film seem different from all the others. (Also, here’s an excellent observation about the film that unfortunately I can’t take credit for: Skyfall climaxes in Bond’s secret lair, an exact reversal of the formulaic idea that these films must conclude with him infiltrating a bad guy’s high-tech HQ.)

Attached to those new elements you have numerous crowd-pleasing backward nods to Bond tradition. Remember how in Die Another Day, all the cute 40th anniversary/Film #20 callbacks were all crammed not-very-creatively into one John Cleese Q scene? I wouldn’t say that Skyfall’s backward nods are much more subtle than those, but they’re all introduced much more tastefully, and are more evenly paced throughout the film, and I welcomed all the moments of levity they bring to the movie. The Daniel Craig sub-series is gradually reintroducing the staple elements of the Bond franchise, so that even played-out old Dr Evil clichés like deadly exotic animals can feel new again. (The appearances of Q, Moneypenny, and M’s wood-panelled office are the most obvious example of this, but we also get several jokes about gadgets, and I liked how instead of hearing the line “shaken not stirred”, there’s simply a closeup of the martini being prepared.)

Anyway, enough of that; let’s talk about the action!

The pre-title sequence is outrageous in a very good way. It builds and builds and becomes more and more over the top in a ridiculously entertaining way that reminded me very much of the videogame Metal Gear Solid 3 (and not only because early on in that scene we see someone using what looks like the infinite ammo magazine from that game). Come to think of it, MGS3 also features a a hallucinatory sequence being triggered by a high fall into a river…

One of my only real problems with Casino Royale was that its novel-faithful structure inherently meant that its flooding/collapsing building climax couldn’t help but feel like an afterthought. No such problems with Skfall’s climactic action scene, which is very well built up (“Some men are coming to kill us. We’re going to kill them first”), delivers all the spectacle and tension you’d want from a blockbuster, and feels of a piece with the rest of the movie in a way that the aforementioned Casino Royale finale did not. (Having said that, it does occasionally threaten to turn into Bond Home Alone¹ – and surely M would know better than to use a torch in that situation?)

The strong emphasis on Bond and the villain’s relationships with M works very well. The World is Not Enough had M more prominently involved in the plot than he or she had been in any previous Bond film, but that movie never really took full advantage of that idea’s potential. Skyfall does.

Javier Bardem’s villain has generally been pretty strongly praised by most people. It is a good performance, and his status as Evil Mirror Image of Bond links him to baddies like Alec Trevelyan and Red Grant, which is always something I welcome. The shot that first introduces him is excellent, too. His flamboyance is entertaining, but is the whole “villain gets captured halfway through the film but it turns out they’re still one step ahead and completely in control (and maybe even planned to be captured)” thing a bit played out by now? Mission: Impossible 3, The Dark Knight, the most recent episode of Sherlock, Avengers Assemble… and now Skyfall, and I found Skyfall’s version of it one of the least interesting examples from that list.

Although I knew in advance of watching the film that Skyfall would not continue the Mr White/Quantum plot thread from the previous two Craig movies, the way the film conspicuously avoids any mention of the Quantum organisation was a little distracting to me. It felt like Quantum should have been somehow linked to Silva, because their actions were so similar to his: Quantum breaching MI6 security by planting a sleeper agent as M’s bodyguard, compared to Silva breaching MI6 security via their computer systems. (The SIS infiltrated twice, two films in a row? They really are a bit crap at this security lark!) The sort of conspiracies Quantum were involved with also sounded pretty similar to the ones Silva described in his “you can pick your own missions” speech to Bond. So it seemed a waste not to link them. (FAN THEORY TIME: Maybe Skyfall’s villain could have been folded into that overarching storyline with a couple of lines of dialogue explaining that the reason Quantum and their embedded agents had remained undetected by MI6 for so long is that Silva had been advising them with his knowledge of MI6′s methods?)

Problems with the film? Well for one thing, perhaps because of some Photoshops from a few months ago, whenever Q was on screen I could never shake thoughts of Richard Ayoade’s Moss From The IT Crowd! And if people thought that Quantum of Solace’s action scenes belonged in Bourne rather than Bond, then some of Q’s Hollywood Hacking actions and the conversations over the radio earpieces feel like they edge into Mission: Impossible territory.

When I first heard Adele’s theme song, the previous Bond tune of which I was most reminded was “The World is Not Enough”, in its arrangement and “good chorus, unmemorable verses” structure. Bond composers often incorporate the melodies of the films’ theme songs (or secondary themes) into their scores, and the melody of “TWINE” was well-integrated throughout that film. (Other good examples of this being done: “You Know My Name” taking the place of “The James Bond Theme” until the very end of Casino Royale; melodies from k.d. lang’s “Surrender” being more prominently featured in the score of TND than the song itself was in the end credits; and John Barry making good use of The Pretenders’ “Where Has Everybody Gone?” in his score for The Living Daylights.) Although Adele’s “Skyfall” has grown on me since the first listen, it’s a shame that I didn’t really notice its melody being very prominently incorporated into Thomas Newman’s score for this movie. (Although I hope to pay more attention to the score when I watch the movie again.)

Single favourite moment of the film? Gotta be Bond’s “radio” line, which is a wonderfully triumphant moment that put a huge grin on my face.

[4.5 out of 5]

—
¹ Yes, that’s the reference point I choose to use, because unlike everyone else who’s comparing that bit to another movie, I haven’t seen Straw Dogs.

Sometimes I wish Roger Moore would come back
With an underwater car or some kind of jetpack
Or a hover-gondola and a Union Jack

– Joe Cornish, “The Something of Boris” (an Adam and Joe’s Song Wars entry)

As Cinebro’s review illustrates, “silly” is the operative word when you’re talking about this film. But there’s nothing wrong with silliness; silliness can be very funny, if it’s done well. So although I remembered Moonraker as being by far the worst Bond movie, this time, I went into it hoping to be able to judge it more generously – approaching it with some optimism that it would succeed as a daft spy comedy rather than fail as a spy adventure.

Unfortunately, I think very little of the comedy in this is done well. Forget comparing it to The Naked Gun – this isn’t even Spy Hard.

I’ll start with some positives. The cable car action sequence is good (even if at first, the camera positions in the wheel house set confusingly make it look like Jaws is following Bond and Goodhead down from the top, rather than coming up from the bottom on the opposite car). And I like the look of Drax’s construction facility as Bond flies over it at the start of the film. In fact, Ken Adam’s sets are consistently one of the best things about this film – although I may just be saying that because twenty years later they inspired the brilliant Aztec mission in the GoldenEye videogame!

The movie’s pre-title sequence is based around a fantastic parachute stunt sequence – which, unfortunately, is undermined when it concludes with a wacky bit involving a circus big top, and a bizarre transition into the film’s opening credits (falling umbrellas WTF!). Jaws’ appearance in this opening also undermines the later scene in which he’s introduced by walking through a metal detector, which is genuinely fun (an example of the film succeeding in the tone it aims for), and would have made a much better introductory scene for the character. Speaking of Jaws, I have to admit I’m quite fond of the two moments in the film where Bond and Jaws meet and acknowledge each other with a smile before they begin fighting.

What surprised me on this viewing is just how little talking there is over the course of the film. There are large sections of the movie that play out in silence. Surely this must be the Bond film with the fewest lines of dialogue? What dialogue is there gives us some of the comedy that does work, in a few brief but memorable lines:

- “His name is Jaws, he kills people.”
- “Look after Mr Bond. See that some harm comes to him.”
- “Mr Bond, you persist in defying my efforts to provide an amusing death for you.”
- “At least I shall have the pleasure of putting you out of my misery.”
- “You missed.” “Did I?”

Note that most of the above examples are spoken by the film’s villain, Hugo Drax – but apart from a few lines like those, he’s played very flatly as Bond-villain-by-the-numbers, and isn’t very memorable.

I remember the Moonraker novel being one of my favourites of Fleming’s books, but the film bears almost no resemblance to the book (unless you count the Minister of Defence’s very brief reference to playing Drax at bridge). Bond’s following of clues throughout the film is not at all interesting and not particularly logical, and Drax’s initial attempts to kill 007 seem to be motivated not out of any concern that Bond might discover his plans, but simply because he’s a Bond villain and trying to kill Bond is what Bond villains are required to do. That centrifuge sequence is OK, but comes across rather like a repeat of the rack exercise scene from Thunderball.

I’ve always enjoyed the posts on each of the Bond movies on the “I Expect You to Die!” blog, and that site’s writeup of Moonraker lays out the movie’s flaws particularly well. I like its summary of the similarities between Moonraker and its predecessor The Spy Who Loved Me:

TSWLM: Teaser involves ship being mysteriously stolen, the girl Bond is macking with tries to have him killed, and the teaser climaxes with a Bond parachute stunt.
MR: Teaser starts with a ship being mysteriously stolen, the girl Bond is macking with tries to have him killed, and the teaser climaxes with a Bond parachute jump.

TSWLM: The plot involves an insane billionaire who believes humanity has become corrupt; he wants to eliminate all humans and start over from his undersea base.
MR: The plot involves an insane billionaire who believes humanity has become corrupt; he wants to eliminate all humans and start over from his satellite base.

TSWLM: The main henchmen is a mute giant named Jaws.
MR: The main henchmen is a mute giant named Jaws (with added bonus: a mostly mute Japanese henchmen!!)

TSWLM: The Bond girl is a Russian spy!
MR: The Bond girl is an American spy!

TSWLM: A special Bond vehicle comes out of the water onto dry land, as tourists and animals do double takes.
MR: A special Bond vehicle comes out of the water onto dry land, as tourists and animals do double takes. Except in this one, we get lots more double-takes and reaction shots. Lots more.

Add another example: The Spy Who Loved Me contained a musical clip from Lawrence of Arabia; this one quotes the notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (heard THREE TIMES, just in case you didn’t notice!) and also contains the theme from The Magnificent Seven. Not to mention the Romantic Meadow Run that Jaws and his girlfriend get to do…

Oh, didn’t I mention? Jaws gets a girlfriend in this movie. Also, Bond wrestles a terribly fake-looking python (but it’s played straight, as if it’s meant to be genuinely threatening), and pigeons do double-takes, and the movie’s climax takes place IN SPAAAAACE.

“Bond goes into space” is usually cited as the biggest, most memorable thing that went wrong with Moonraker. But strangely, in principle I don’t have a problem with the idea of Bond (at least Roger Moore’s Bond) in space. Just as The Matrix Reloaded has more fundamental problems than the fact it concludes with that speech by the Architect, just as The Phantom Menace has more fundamental problems than the presence of Jar Jar Binks, I’m less annoyed by Moonraker‘s overblown space station climax than with most of the other problems earlier on in the movie. I wouldn’t have been bothered by a comic relief CGI Star Wars character if it had actually been amusing; similarly, I would have no objection to a wacky, campy, over the top, tongue-in-cheek Roger Moore Bond movie if only it had been funnier.

[002 out of 005]

That point turned out to be very true. We really do spend a very long time admiring the Enterprise, wormholes, and the movie’s Big Dumb Object, which tends to cause reviewers to use words like “interminable”. Now I’m someone who’s a big enough SF/SFX nerd to have watched all the raw model shot footage included on the Red Dwarf DVDs (and found it interesting!), but even I’ve gotta admit that as lovely as all these sequences look (and sound), they don’t half go on a bit. It felt to me as if the lesson Robert Wise took from watching 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Douglas Trumbull took from making it!) is that the key to making a science fiction movie seem Serious is to slow all your special effects down to a glacial pace!

They’re very good special effects, though – even given the fact that I watched the original version, and not the Director’s Cut with its CGI additions. I imagine that if the film was remade today, a lot of the special effects shots would look broadly similar, but would just be achieved using different methods. Sets and shot compositions are nice, too.

I’m all in favour of more science fiction movies about exploration of weird alien phenomena, rather than action-packed battles against conventional baddies. But here, the plot’s a fairly thin version of the Mysterious Alien Artefact Threatening Earth of countless sci-fi tales: trim down the special effects sequences, speed up the pacing, and the whole thing could quite comfortably be told within a 45 minute TV series episode. The film’s not as smart as you’d hope from something that includes Isaac Asimov’s name in the credits. However, towards the end of the film the true nature of said Big Dumb Alien Artefact is revealed, and I found it a fairly surprising and effective twist.

There’s lots of potential in the conflict between Kirk and Decker: the question of whether it really is in everyone’s best interests for Kirk to take charge of the Enterprise, or if he’s just nostalgic for the thrill of command. Unfortunately, not much is made of it: presumably it would’ve helped if the Decker character had been played more forcefully by a better actor. Like so much else, the idea of Kirk’s nostalgia for being a Captain rather than an Admiral was handled better in Wrath of Khan.

The film spends some time reuniting the crew. Athough I’ve only seen a very small proportion of the original series episodes and feature films, I am fond of these characters, and their rapport is good to watch, so there’s a genuine sense that something feels very wrong – a piece of the puzzle’s missing – when Spock turns up acting even more brusque and unemotional than usual. There’s a good line from McCoy (“Why is any object we don’t understand always called a ‘thing’?”), and the very first thing that the character of Ilia dues upon meeting Kirk is emphasise her oath of celibacy – which I took to be a self-referential joke about Kirk’s reputation as an alien ladies’ man!

Unfortunately, there’s not really enough of that sort of thing. Most of the scenes on the bridge consist of the crew standing around either watching special effects, or formally issuing and reacting to commands. DeForest Kelley in particular gets almost nothing to do; as Stephen Rowley put it*, “Bones always did hang around the bridge too much (probably because that was the only decent set), but this becomes particularly embarrassing here.” In its attempts to challenge 2001‘s claim to the title of “proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction movie“, Star Trek: The Motion Picture removes a lot of the fun ’60s-ness of the TV series.

Although this review sounded really negative, I did enjoy the movie: I was curious to know the answer to the central mystery of what V’Ger really was, there were plenty of likeable individual moments throughout the movie, and most of the sci-fi ideas were solid even if they were underexplored.

Also, my interest in movie special effects meant that I found it interesting to look at examples of 1979′s state of the art optical techniques, even when they seemed to be done for the sake of it, rather than because they served the story. Judging by this film, my tolerance for interminable FX sequences is very high!

[3 out of 5]

–

* His review of this film and quite a few others seem to have been removed from the current version of his site.

Unfortunately, the film has always been pretty hard to come by in the UK – at least to someone who doesn’t pirate movies! I’ve never seen it on TV (even though there was a period between the releases of Shanghai Noon and Knights when things like Who Am I?, Rumble in the Bronx and Police Story were broadcast quite often on terrestrial TV channels), and I’m not even sure if it ever got a UK DVD release prior to the current Blu-Ray release (which only came out in April 2012, according to the online shops I checked).

Still, over the years I’ve resisted the urge to watch YouTubed versions of the fight scenes in the hope that one day I’d be able to watch the whole film properly from start to finish.

So I was delighted to see that LoveFilm had put a streaming version online (under the title of Legend of A Drunken Master and with its predecessor’s DVD blurb, for some reason). But before watching it, I went and rewatched the first Drunken Master. In that review, I described how the movie’s main appeal was its off-balance drunken boxing, which was utterly spectacular to watch:

The effect of wine on characters who have mastered the secrets of the Eight Drunken Gods is rather like the effect that spinach has on Popeye the Sailor. It’s incredible to watch the characters staggering around, constantly looking like they’re teetering on the edge of falling over, but actually in complete control of their balance. Their off-kilter motions give an absolutely unique look to the fight scenes, making them fascinating to watch – so it’s a shame that the titular fighting style is introduced pretty late in the movie, only after we’ve seen several fairly standard kung fu fights.

DM2 has much less in common with DM1 than I thought it would. Again Jackie Chan plays Wong Fei-hung, who again displeases his father (again a martial arts school owner), again some of the fight scenes involve drunken boxing, and again the final bad guy is a kicking specialist – but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. It has a very different feel to the original, due to the urban rather than rural setting (with more crowded scenes, and settings like trains and factories), the lack of training sequences, the fact Wong Fei-hung is older and less of a rebellious joker, the much heavier emphasis on props and weapons in the combat, and the more modern shooting style (none of those DRAMATIC CRASH ZOOM STINGS here!)

However, one thing that did carry across to the sequel was my disappointment at how late in the film the drunken boxing is first introduced. According to the film’s IMDb trivia page (ah, those benchmarks of reliability!), Jackie Chan wanted Drunken Master II to emphasise inebriated combat (like I did!), but the film’s director Chia-Liang Liu wanted it to have a heavier focus on normal kung fu styles. Hence there are only a few fight scenes when the drunken boxing is fully on display. Early on in the film, Jackie announces he’s about to use that fighting style, but it’s not really obvious in the short ensuing fight.

So it’s only midway through the film that we properly get to watch the off-balance intoxicated antics we all came to see, in an outstanding fight against several opponents. It’s probably the funniest of the film’s fight scenes, and it also includes the funniest “alchohol as Popeye’s spinach” moment: “What does it mean when there’s a picture of a skull?”…”GOOD STUFF!”

That’s not to say that the sober fights in the film are poor, though! The opening fight is set underneath a train, which makes for an interesting setting for combat. Late in the film we see Jackie and his ally defend themselves against an onslaught of axe-wielding attackers; Jackie’s weapon is a shaft of bamboo, which gradually deteriorates as the fight goes on, until eventually it looks and handles more like a cat o’ nine tails. In some places, the use of props is almost up there with the stepladder fight from Jackie Chan’s First Strike. It goes without saying that they’re all very well choreographed and directed – if some action didn’t register properly, it’s not due to problems with editing, composition or camera motion, but simply because of the amazing speed at which the actors performed the action.

And then we come to that famous final duel. Roger Ebert’s “it may not be possible to film a better fight scene” assertion was extremely bold, but the sequence comes impressively close to living up to it! Jackie Chan’s most spectacular stunts are the ones involving ridiculous heights – there aren’t any of those in this movie, but in this fight he gets to have his clothes set alight, dodge falling weights that slam into the ground, and scurry across burning coals. In the film City Hunter Jackie Chan got to play Chun Li from Street Fighter (it’s true!), but at one point in this DM2 fight he gets to do E. Honda’s flying headbutt move! But again, it’s the teetering-on-the-edge feel of the drunken boxing that really makes it brilliant.

As for other aspects of the film…

I doubt there are many people who watch Jackie Chan movies for the bits in between the fight scenes, but in this one, they really do feel like quite tedious padding. Most of the non-physical comedy in DM2 fell flat for me – although some works, and fortunately the humour always stays relatively high-brow(!) compared to the broadest moments from the first film!

It should go without saying that there’s not much to the storyline, although hilariously, Wikipedia contributors have somehow managed to stretch its plot synopsis out to 1600 words. One interesting thing about the story is that it’s very clearly set during the period of British colonialism in Hong Kong, and prefigures Rush Hour in depicting the theft of Chinese artefacts by a corrupt English ambassador. Everyone knows that we Brits make the best movie villains, and here we’re represented by a cigar-chomping Consul who looks a bit like Charles Dance in Last Action Hero (now there’s a good baddie comparison for a movie to have, but unfortunately the comparison only extends as far as his looks, and the guy is not a fighter and therefore doesn’t get much screen time). I’m not asking for the film to turn into an in-depth examination of Hong Kong under British rule, but I would have liked the film to make more of the colonial aspects of its setting, and the potentially-interesting plot about the smuggling of a country’s national treasures; but instead, time is spent on subplots like the money problems of Wong Fei-hung’s family.

What plot is there isn’t conveyed very clearly (in particular the switcheroo between the ginseng and the valuable artifact) – perhaps that was just an issue with the dubbed version I watched, and I might have preferred a subtitle track using a literal translation? (Speaking of dubbing: while watching the credits, one voice actor’s name stood out. Is that the Bryan Cranston, and I wonder which character he dubbed…?)

So, is this the best Jackie Chan film?

Maybe, but there are a few I’d have to rewatch and lots I’d have to watch for the first time in order to say for sure. The fights scenes in Drunken Master II are unquestionably better than those of things like Who Am I?, Police Story and Shanghai Noon, but as I recall, those films felt more complete and well-rounded as a whole due to the bits between the stunts and fights standing up better.

But you don’t really care about those bits. You come for the fight scenes – in particular the drunken fight scenes. And boy, the drunken fight scenes are incredible.

4 out of – Hic! – 5

Make no mistake – the comedy in this film is broad. Very broad. So broad, it makes the eighth series of Red Dwarf look like PG Wodehouse. Now I’ve nothing against slapstick pratfalls (I wouldn’t be watching a Jackie Chan movie if I did), but there are lots of lowest common denominator gags that make me roll my eyes and question why in the world I’m watching it at all. Fortunately, those bits are balanced out by plenty of humour that works: it’s impossible to resist the scene where cartoonish bumps appear when one character gets bonked on the noggin, and I’m oddly fascinated by another character’s exaggerated teeth – but best of all, the smash cut to the “PAY OR DIE!” sign is brilliant!

The film improves as it progresses: the scenes where Jackie Chan’s character plays pranks at his father’s school are a bit tedious, but the movie really picks up when the elderly Beggar Su turns up and begins training him. This martial arts master is played by Yuen Siu-tien, the father of the film’s director/choreographer Yuen “The Matrix” Woo-ping. The training scenes are great; any fan of the Pai Mei training scenes in Kill Bill vol 2 should watch Drunken Master to understand the sort of thing that Quentin Tarantino was aiming for.

Some time after the first training sequences, the drunken fighting style itself is introduced, which is everyone’s real main reason for watching the movie!

The effect of wine on characters who have mastered the secrets of the Eight Drunken Gods is rather like the effect that spinach has on Popeye the Sailor. It’s incredible to watch the characters staggering around, constantly looking like they’re teetering on the edge of falling over, but actually in complete control of their balance. Their off-kilter motions give an absolutely unique look to the fight scenes, making them fascinating to watch – so it’s a shame that the titular fighting style is introduced pretty late in the movie, only after we’ve seen several fairly standard kung fu fights.

Finally, late in the film that drunken kung-fu is put into practice in two excellent fight scenes: first against the “King of Sticks”, and then against our evil baddie, taekwondo expert “Thunderleg” (Hwang Jang Lee). These two fight scenes are among the best “straight” fights (as opposed to those making heavy use of stunts and props) of any Jackie Chan film – right up there with the one that concludes his 1999 film Gorgeous.

The film could do with being a bit shorter: as I said, I would have liked some trimming from the first half’s standard kung fu fights so that the much more interesting drunken style could have been introduced earlier. Also, there’s a good scene where Jackie Chan’s character is humiliated by the villain, but then as soon as it’s over he thinks back to what happened and we see what he remembers – causing the whole scene to be immediately repeated almost identically, pretty much in full! Sure, it conveys Jackie’s humiliation effectively enough – but the film has great editing in the fight scenes, so it’s a shame that that tedious bit couldn’t have been trimmed down a little as well.

So in conclusion, the film’s length and the broadest, stupidest bits of lowbrow comedy are really the only reason I’ve limited my rating to three stars. If you can look past those moments, there are three very good reasons to watch Drunken Master: the training scenes, the bits of physical comedy that do hit the target, and the incredible choreography of the drunken kung fu fight scenes.

Actually, make that four good reasons: no ’70s martial arts movie is truly complete without a few crash zooms into characters’ faces, accompanied by DRAMATIC audio stings, and you certainly get your money’s worth of those here!

[3 out of 5]

The Dark Knight Rises continues the trend of third films in movie trilogies tending to look back to the first film in the series for inspiration, rather than the second. For example:

Return of the Jedi – After a second film set in entirely new locations, the third film returns to the setting (Tatooine) and threat (Death Star) of the first film.

Back to the Future Part III – After a second film featuring the characters undertaking lots of easy time-travel hops, the third film is like the first in that it’s mainly set in a single past time period, and the characters face a big challenge in getting back home.

Toy Story 3 – The film opens with a scene from the first movie, presented in a different way.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – After a second film with a completely different villain, the third film returns to Nazis hunting a Christian relic (and they’re defeated when their faces melt or crumble).

Superman Returns (which I’m classing as a sequel to Superman II!) – After a second film with a completely different villain, the third film returns to Lex Luthor with a land grab scheme.

Die Hard With a Vengeance – After a second film with a completely different villain, the main baddie in the third film is is the brother of the villain killed in the first film.

Spider-Man 3 – After a second film with a completely different villain, one of the baddies in the third film is is the son of the villain killed in the first film.

The Dark Knight Rises – After a second film with a completely different villain, the main baddie in the third film is the daughter of the villain killed in the first film (and her allies belong to his organisation).

Of course, there are exceptions to this trend. Apart from the opening scene mentioned above, Toy Story 3 follows on from the second film more than the first. The Bourne Ultimatum does the same (partly due to the fact they are the pair that share a director – although having said that, it does look back to a certain line of dialogue from the first movie). The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions are also more tightly linked to each other than they are to The Matrix.

On the subject of The Dark Knight Rises and links between films: in the comments thread of Film Crit Hulk’s article on the film, someone linked to this piece pointing out a connection between the endings of most of Christopher Nolan’s films (except Following and Insomnia).

Spoilers below.

HARLEY QUINN: Ahhh, shaddap, ya big green piece of punctuation! I gotta say, even though there’s no-one in this movie that lights up the screen the way my Puddin’ Mistah Jay did last time, there are times when this gal Selina comes pretty close! It’s always fun ta see her runnin’ rings round everyone – ‘specially early on in the film.

CLAYFACE: I know a lot of people hate the way Bane speaks, but I really like his performance. I could never predict exactly how he was gonna deliver the next line.

POISON IVY: I thought the moments that were intended to be triumphant and uplifting – Batman’s reappearances after his absences; Bruce’s escape from the well – were as effective as they were intended to be. Of course that might just be the intense music doing a good job of fooling me…

SCARFACE: Hey, has it gotta be left to me to say what you bozos are really thinkin’?

VENTRILOQUIST: B-b-be careful, these people m-m-might not want to hear th-thi–

SCARFACE: Quiet, you! This damn movie had so many freakin’ plot holes, inconsistencies, and missed opportunities.

RIDDLER: Precisely! The storytelling was often muddled, and the film just raises so many frustrating questions. How in the world is Alfred aware of Bane’s origin story? How does passing through a tunnel instantly change the city from dusk to pitch-black nighttime? Couldn’t those police officers have come up with something more tactical than a kamikaze charge against Bane’s armed men? At the end, why in the world do our heroes spend ages listening to a villain’s death speech when every second counts toward stopping that time bomb? And how exactly does Bruce Wayne get back to Gotham from wherever the Pit is?

FRANK MILLER: What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Never mind how he got back to Gotham, he’s the Goddamn Batman, THAT’S HOW HE DID IT.

HUGO STRANGE: His big triumph is escaping from the prison. That’s the part the audience needs to believe in; compared to that, getting back to Gotham is not important.

ORACLE: That explanation works to an extent, and half the questions on that list that Riddler linked to are pretty facetious. But in a trilogy of movies that have emphasised plausibility as one of the major aspects of their interpretation of Batman, some of us want something a little more specific. If that means we come across as spoiling the fun with our nit-picking, so be it…

MR FREEZE: I assumed that he found a phone and contacted and reconciled with Alfred, who helped him fly back to the US. However, if that was the case I wish that we had been shown their reunion; emotionally, it seemed the right place in the movie for their reconciliation to occur. But that does not explain how Wayne managed to cross the frozen river.

RA’S AL GHUL: That part is not a problem; we know from his training with me that he’s good at minding his surroundings on thin ice.

MAD HATTER: I rather like the non-specificity of the Pit’s location. It means the prison comes across as a symbolic, metaphorical place, which lends those scenes a quite surreal flavour, almost like venturing into Wonderland – or Arkham Asylum as depicted by Grant Morrison.

CALENDAR MAN: The movie takes place over a period of many months. The logistics of keeping the police resistance movement going that long strain plausibility.

ANARKY: Yes, something of a contradiction in the way that Bane has the city locked down, and yet it feels like Commissioner Gordon and his allies are largely unhindered in their ability to go around tagging Bane’s vehicles as they please.

PENGUIN: And the cops emerge from months underground with their uniforms only slightly ruffled! It almost felt less devastating to the city than what happened to just the Narrows in Begins.

CLOCK KING: It is one hundred and sixty four minutes and twenty-seven seconds long, and could have been better-paced. Or better-structured: there are two periods in the movie where Wayne has to Rise and return to being Batman (eight years as a recluse, six months in the prison), so surely the former is redundant?

HARLEY QUINN: I guess the film don’t really stand up ta close scrutiny. The Dark Knight didn’t either, if ya looked at it close enough, but that at least had Mistah Jay around ta help disguise its cracks!

DR KIRK LANGSTROM: But those gaps and pacing/structural problems mostly didn’t bother me while I was watching it…

*He transforms*

MAN-BAT: …they only bothered me afterwards.

EGGHEAD: But aren’t we all missing the point by nit-picking minor little individual issues like plot holes? Doesn’t the movie have broader, more fundamental problems than that, and aren’t thematic analyses and political readings and film technique breakdowns like this and this a more interesting kind of criticism?

ME, THE REVIEWER: Yeah, but I’m not good enough a critic to be able to analyse that sort of thing in much detail.

CARMINE FALCONE: The whole movie feels closer to Batman Begins than The Dark Knight. Begins is great, but its flaws are clearest after I disappear from it – when the scale of the peril increases towards the end, in the Gotham Narrows sequence. The Dark Knight Rises is on that scale of ambition and peril for ages, in terms of both on-screen time and in-movie time.

KILLER CROC: Me, I just liked the action! It’s a helluva lot clearer to tell what’s goin’ on than before. And it’s damn spectacular: looked like that chase scene had more cars than The Blues Brothers. I’m just happy when there’s lotsa stuff goin’ BOOM.

VICTOR ZSASZ: The mid-film fight between Bane and Batman is powerful, too – but there wasn’t enough stabbing for me!

ROBIN: Nice cuboid-themed Batcave design in this movie: rising platforms – get it?

RANDOM DISPOSABLE MOOK #21: That montage of Batman and Selina taking out my buddies on the way to face Bane was pretty cool, with a cute little nod back to the “Where are you?”-”Here” bit from Begins. Jeez, I’m glad that never happened to m–

BATMAN: Yoink!

RANDOM DISPOSABLE MOOK #21: *Decaying scream*

SCARECROW: This might be a case of “reviewing the film in your head”, but I wish I was in this movie a bit more. My cameo was fan-pleasing but in the end it was a bit pointless. I wanted to run round spraying fear gas at people!

JOKER: Ah, if only I could’ve been in this at all. Bane breaking Batsy would’ve really ticked me off because it would’ve spoilt all the fun I could’ve had playing my eternal game against him (as I told him before, “You and I are destined to do this forever”). No doubt I would’ve taken my frustrations out on Bane in some hilarious way! HAHA!

HARLEY QUINN: Ya sure got that right, Puddin‘!

DOCTOR OCTOPUS: Wasn’t the threat against the city a bit like Spider-Man 2? And at a stretch, Alfred’s revelation to Bruce about burning Rachel’s letter brought up bad memories of that bit in Spider-Man 3 where Harry Osborn’s butler similarly revealed something that he’d inexplicably chosen to keep to himself…

TONY STARK: And didn’t another superhero film this year have a villainous modification of a clean energy source as a major plot point…?

ALL: Shut up! You two don’t get a say in this ‘cos we’re your Distinguished Competition.

ADAM WEST: Come to think of it… the ending was a bit like that time I just couldn’t get rid of that bomb…

BURT WARD: Holy reused tropes, Batman!

MAD HATTER: The final scene was a little reminiscent of Inception, too – though that was ambiguous, whereas I think this is meant to be taken literally.

RIDDLER: So, my fellow puzzlers, what’s our final verdict?

TWO-FACE: Heads it’s a gloriously satisfying conclusion to the saga, with enough spectacle and fantastic individual moments to paper over niggling storytelling annoyances. Tails, the film is utterly spoiled by too many times when it overstretches itself with the scale of its ambition. Might as well flip a coin, because I really can’t decide.

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ME AGAIN: It’s true. I really am not sure exactly what to make of the film. It was always interesting and exciting and entertaining and enjoyable, but there are still lots of problems that bothered me – how much they bother me, I’m not yet sure.

Earlier this year, I was concerned that The Avengers would not live up to expectations. When that was as brilliant as it was… oh, it was such a relief! I was buzzing about that film for days! Compared to that, my hype for The Dark Knight Rises was quite subdued. My enthusiasm was reduced even further as it became clear that reactions to the film were pretty mixed, and I encountered vague, non-spoilery comments about its issues. Those comments gave me preconceptions that I took into the film, so that I was on the lookout for potential problems as I watched it – I was vaguely aware of what flaws I should be looking out for, and it was disappointing to see them confirmed as the movie went along. I wonder if they would have bothered me at all if I’d known nothing about the film in advance? Did The Avengers have just as many flaws, but I was forgiving of them, whereas I let Rises’ problems bother me?

But on the other hand, my disappointment was reduced thanks to the way I’d diminished my expectations in advance! So there were two contradictory effects going on, which meant my reaction to the film was mixed, and I’m still not completely sure how I feel about it.

Although I’ve sounded very negative, I have to emphasise that it is remarkable what Christopher and Jonathan Nolan and their collaborators have achieved with these three Batman films: a set of movies that largely succeeded in impressing comics fans, casual audiences and film critics, with a tone that is completely unique among comic book movies. There are progressions over the course of the three films that have been fascinating to watch. The trilogy has not ended up as consistent as Bourne or Toy Story or Back to the Future, but it’s still by far the best connected trio of superhero movies we have seen so far. And if they didn’t exactly “transcend the limitations of the genre” as some of TDK’s more extreme advocates have claimed, then at least they’ve all aimed for a level of ambition that’s atypical of blockbuster movies, which should be applauded.

So: always exciting and enjoyable, and it delivers on the spectacle and the triumphant moments, and there are some aspects of it that work extraordinarily well. But, on first viewing, it’s definitely the weakest of Nolan’s Bat-Movies.

And there are still lots of things I haven’t even got round to mentioning: “Robin”, for example…

Rating: somewhere between 3/5 and 4/5. I dunno yet.

Incidentally, the gimmicky presentation of this review was mainly just an excuse to write some Harley Quinn dialogue (and also partially inspired by this). I don’t pretend to have even attempted to hit most of the other characters’ voices….

The first time I saw most of the Bond films was when ITV showed all of them over consecutive weeks in 1999, in the run up to the release if The World is Not Enough. However, even though I videotaped OHMSS at that time, it went unwatched for several years. I really regretted that, because when it was finally viewed, it turned out to be one of my favourite of all the 007 movies.

If there are three things that most people remember about OHMSS, it’s that it was George Lazenby’s one and only portrayal of James Bond, that it features one of the only instances of fourth wall-breaking in the entire series (“This never happened to the other fellow!”), and that it concludes with THAT ending. However, the movie has a lot more to recommend it than just those three things.

George Lazenby has come in for a lot of stick for his Bond performance, although both he and the film as a whole seem to be better-regarded now than when it was first released, when there was no-one but Connery to compare him to. I don’t claim to be the world’s best judge of good and bad acting, so I won’t call him “flat” – I’d say “deadpan”, I suppose. I like him in the role – particularly in his scene with Miss Moneypenny, and also in the movie’s final scene. I think that at least part of the negative reaction to him is that he spends a good proportion of the movie dubbed, which is extremely distracting and means that for that period of the film we can’t tell how Lazenby himself is delivering the lines.

There are two elements of the movie which take a backward look at all the Bond movies so far: the hourglass-themed title credits, and a scene in which Bond (in his office at MI6!!!) browses through mementos of previous cases (with accompanying musical stings). They prefigure the nostalgia-fest of Die Another Day, and seem to be included to say to viewers: “We know you don’t like losing Sean, but this guy’s still the same character – honest!” There are Bond fans who absolutely hate that cute souvenir scene, but I quite enjoy it.

Even if Lazenby himself didn’t re-invigorate the series, the screenplay (one of the closest to Fleming’s original novels) and the direction certainly did. The film is home to some of the 007 films’ best action sequences, several of which (as well as Bond’s run-in with a polar bear!) are shot in an unusual way for the series: lots of quick close-up shots of flailing limbs, each of which zoom into even closer close-ups. It’s a distinctive, energetic and exciting approach to fight scenes, even if it’s not the clearest for seeing exactly what’s going on. In addition, the climactic bobsleigh action scene is excellent, with rear-projection shots that look much less silly than the ridiculous speeded-up hydrofoil scene at the end of Thunderball.

Ski chases are a recurring breed of action sequence in the Bond series, and in this film we get not one, but two of them, both of which are brilliant. In the second of them, Blofeld brings down a flippin’ avalanche on not just our fleeing heroes, but three of his disposable underlings as well! Speaking of villains: although Irma Bunt comes across as Rosa Klebb-lite, Telly Savalas is probably the best of the Blofelds (or at least the best of the fully-seen ones; I have to admit that my primary image of the character is still that of the unseen, Dr Claw-esque, cat stroking SPECTRE Number One).

The scheme that Blofeld uses to hold the world to ransom is reminscent of the use of hypnosis in The Ipcress File, and is a lot more creative than a standard “hijacked nuke” or “space-based weapon” plot. The fact that Bond has been on the trail of Blofeld ever since the previous movie’s events, and yet Blofeld does not recognise Bond upon their meeting here, is a good example of the Bond series’ fast and loose approach to continuity – and is also a relic of the reversed order of OHMSS and YOLT when compared to the novels.

One of the unusual things about this Bond movie is that it’s the only one other than Dr No to feature an instrumental theme tune. It’s a fantastic track – good enough to be rearranged by the Propellerheads and then used by Pixar in their teaser for The Incredibles. As an action accompaniment, it’s at least as exciting as “The James Bond Theme” itself or John Barry’s “007″ theme. (However, I always find it a shame that in these early Bond movies, the original recording of “The James Bond Theme” is simply overlayed onto the action. I would have liked to have heard more of John Barry incorporating tweaked rearrangements of the theme into new, bespoke scores for each action scene, as subsequent composers did.) The film also has a second theme song: Louis Armstrong’s classic “We Have All the Time in the World” was written for this movie.

And then of course, we have the tragic, inevitable ending. It’s extremely effective (especially thanks to the preceding scene, which includes some great little moments from Q, M and Moneypenny), and is easily Lazenby’s most noteworthy moment; he plays Bond’s devastated reaction well. Unfortunately I can’t help but feel that the sombre tone is undermined by that triumphant blast of the Bond theme over the “JAMES BOND WILL RETURN” message.

There are some mis-steps – the aforementioned dubbing, a couple of the one-liners (like the one Lazenby dubs in after the bobsleigh fight with Blofeld), and several plot holes (which are analysed to death here, if you don’t mind a bit of excessive bold and italics usage).

But for the most part the movie is excellent fun that occupies a solid position near the very top of my Bond rankings. Incidentally, when it comes to Christmas action movies, I’d say that this one is second only to Die Hard! (Do you know how Christmas trees are grown?)

[4.5 out of 5]

This Bond film is remembered as The One With The Jetpack And The Health Clinic And Lots (And Lots) Of Underwater Scenes.

You see, there really is an awful lot of underwater stuff. And despite being very pretty, underwater scenes suffer from a major inherent problem: they slow everything down, and are rather limited in the sort of action they can contain. There are only so many ways you can see someone get stabbed underwater, or harpooned underwater, or eaten by a shark underwater, or have their oxygen line cut underwater before it all starts to get a mite repetitive. That’s not to say that no entertaining action takes place in those underwater scenes – just not enough to justify spending so long on them.

At least all those dialogue-free underwater scenes give us lots of opportunities to listen to John Barry’s music. Speaking of which, Tom Jones provides one of my favourite theme songs of the series. (Also, Thunderball was the movie in which Maurice Binder finally nailed down the look of Bond opening credits, after Dr No‘s abstract dots and two versions of credits projected onto bodies.)

If the underwater scenes are oh-so-slow, then there are two occasions in which the film attempts to make up for it by speeding up the action, but ends up overshooting too far and simply looking ridiculous. The first is the rack scene in the health clinic; the second is the hydrofoil climax, spoiled by lots of speeded-up back-projected stock footage. The fight during that scene also contains several continuity errors (at one point Largo instantly switches from piloting the ship to facing the opposite direction in order to punch Bond) – it’s nowhere near the standard of the incredible train fight from From Russia With Love. As for some of the other action scenes: the jetpack escape is memorable, but pretty tame by today’s standards, while I didn’t find the Mardi Gras chase very exciting at all.

The story – SPECTRE using stolen atomic bombs to hold the world to ransom – is pretty much the epitome of a Bond movie plot. Nothing wrong with that; it’s nice and straightforward! The problem is that it’s not really enough to sustain the first 007 film to break the two hour mark: it takes a long time to get going, with a pre-credits sequence unrelated to the main story, followed by the health spa scenes which take a while for Bond to uncover his leads.

Things only really start to pick up in the scenes showing how the bad guys executed their theft of the nukes, which are some of my favourite in the film. The movie also gives us one of the series’ best SPECTRE meetings, complete with Blofeld (at this point still only identified as “Number One”) doing that You Have Failed Me For The Last Time thing to one of his underlings. Great stuff, on a great Ken Adam set! Sadly, Largo isn’t a villain who makes much of an impression – he wouldn’t be at all memorable without his eyepatch. The villain/henchman pairings in this movie aren’t exactly Rosa Klebb/Red Grant or Goldfinger/Oddjob.

The storytelling might not be up to much, but the script contains some of the cuter quips in the Bond series: “Mind if my friend sits this one out? She’s just dead!” Really fun Q scene, as well.

[3 out of 5]

It’s easy to split the history of superhero films into two eras: “Before Batman & Robin”, and “After Batman & Robin”. Broadly speaking, after the excellent first Superman movie there was a gradual decline through successive Superman and Batman sequels, until Joel Schumacher hit the absolute nadir that was his second Bat-Film. (You might say he deconstructed the genre, ha ha.) After that, the Modern Superhero Film began to rebuild itself. First, it sheepishly tried to distance itself from its origins with things like X-Men (“What would you prefer, yellow spandex?”), but then, as it became the decade’s dominant action film genre, it gradually learned to embrace and take pride in its own comic bookiness, until we hit The Avengers fourteen years later.

The starting point of that revival was 1998′s Blade.

Watching it for the first time now, it’s an OK action film. A few memorable images (such as the blood shower scene at the start), some decent action sequences (nice payoff with Blade’s booby-trapped sword), some dated special effects, lots of gratuitous swearing and gory executions (“See,” it tries to say, “this isn’t your average funny-book movie!”) and lots of bog-standard exposition. It’s also far too long.

Blade himself isn’t a particularly appealing character – the way his plight is portrayed here isn’t much more nuanced than it was when the character appeared in the ’90s Spider-Man cartoon series. N’Bushe Wright’s haematologist is a far more sympathetic protagonist.

I think I’ve been spoilt by the likes of Buffy/Angel and Being Human, because the “vampire factions in-fighting and talking about how people are cattle” in this movie didn’t interest me in the slightest.

There are lots of dated flashy speed-ramping editing tricks throughout. Unfortunately, although Wesley Snipes can no doubt handle the martial arts perfectly well, he’s let down by some ridiculous undercranking in several of the action scenes (even more obvious than the sparring scene in Equilibrium).

The movie’s climax, involving blood from a sacrifice running along stone channels into a giant circular room in order to resurrect an apocalyptic demon, reminded me of the first Hellboy movie. (Which was, of course, directed by Guillermo del Toro, the director of Blade 2.) It would have had even more in common with Hellboy’s climax if, instead of concluding with martial arts combat, it had gone with the “Lovecraftian monster” battle that was originally shot for the film.

2.5/5