Owing a large debt to Hitchcock, Panic Room is a tight thriller set almost completely in one house. Its a basic idea that is successfully turned into a tense and enjoyable piece of entertainment. However thats where it stops, and thats not what you want from a David Fincher film. After Se7en, The Game and Fight Club you expect more for your money. I know its unfair to compare this to his earlier films, but Se7en for instance also had a very basic and hackneyed concept behind it, and he managed to turn it into a masterpiece, one of the best films to come out of the nineties. The problem with Panic Room is its immeasurable number of cliches. You always know whats going to happen next, the characters are over familiar and a couple of the set pieces are a bit laboured. He does try to keep us interested with some flashy use of effects to let the camera roam freely through keyholes, cables and walls, but this is possibly used a little too much, and its nothing we haven't seen before in Three Colours Red or Fight Club. All those problems aside, this is professionally done and certainly keeps you gripped throughout, but you leave craving a darker, more interesting film from such a talented filmmaker. 6/10
If the movies were our history books, we would be led to believe that Mel Gibson won most of the worlds major wars single-handedly. Yes, we're back in Braveheart territory. Only this time round its not as good. Its got great battle scenes like it's counterpart, again with healthy doses of gore, but where Braveheart managed to be often quite moving and powerful between the battle scenes, though a little corny, The Patriot is just plain corny between the battle scenes. There is enough sacharine and cheese in this to make you fell more sick than you do in the more graphic battle scenes. These terrible scenes are most often those involving Mel's enourmous 'straight off the back of the Walton's station wagon' family. Yes, we get to see his young daughter wailing "Papa, papa, please don't go" as Mel heads for the battle field, and we get to see a number of them killed or tormented by the evil British officers. This brings me to another problem The Patriot has; it's extreme xenophobia. We see the British as nasty bastards that do nothing but burn down churches and kill women and children. All in all, The Patriot is a bad, historically inacurrate war/action movie which looks very good, and is exciting at times, but ultimately lags in it's patriotism/jingoism and corn. 4/10
John Woo follows up the terrible Windtalkers with another dissapointment in Paycheck. His early Hong Kong films are tremendously over the top and immensely stylish, and since moving over to Hollywood his films have deteriorated into bland, unexciting drivel like this. A good initial concept (Afleck's character has two years of his memory erased for a top secret job) from the mind of Philip K Dick, is poorly cultivated and the film degenerates into a below-average action film. Ben Affleck, who's film choices seem to get worse and worse, makes for a dull hero, and he's infrequently aided by Paul Giamatti and Uma Thurman, who really shouldn't be making films like these after their strong performances in American Splendor and Kill Bill respectively. The underrated Aaron Eckhart is in it too for some reason as the villain of the film, yet doesn't seem to show much talent here. Even the action is poorly done, which shouldn't happen in a Woo film. The set-pieces are instantly forgettable and feature none of the visual pyrotechnics we're used to seeing in his films, let alone all of the immitators his previous works have spawned. To the films credit, the first few scenes where Affleck's character uses his envelope of random items to help him get out of sticky situations are quite good. All in all, I think that had this been a low budget b-movie it would be a midly entertaining surprise, but coming from an accomplished action director and featuring what should be a strong supporting cast, this is a big dissapointment. 3/10
Far from being a gritty or powerful war movie, Pearl Harbour is basically a hybrid remake of Titanic and Armagedon, with a flimsy love story taking presidence over the war background and the good old US of A being the absolute heroes. The battle scenes, as the trailers show, are amazing, but as the trailers don't show, the other two hours of the film are pretty rubbish. This is a below par love story with dodgy dialogue, dull performances and as usual for Michael Bay, ridiculously over the top use of filters and slow motion. That said, this is still reasonable entertainment though, but the problem is, should it be? Pearl Harbour must have been horrific for anyone there or anyone who's family members were killed during the attack, and this turns it into popcorn selling entertainment, which I also felt even almost glorified war itself, apart from a couple of hospital scenes which were toned down by a dodgy distorted lense anyway. Over all this film is outstanding when handling the conflict, but is far from being a top quality film, and felt a little disrespectful towards its subject matter. Plus, shouldn't the film have finished with Hiroshima, America's horrific reply to Pearl Harbour? 4/10
A lot like the other dissapointing blockbusters this year (ie. M:I2, The Patriot and Titan AE), The Perfect Storm has a couple of great bits, but in between these, the film is awful. Whenever the film takes to the seas it is good looking and exhilarating, but whenever we hit land it turns into over-sentimental, badly acted, badly written pap. One of the main reasons I think why most of the non-action bits fail is because the film is based on a true story, where some of the people involved in the real-life story portrayed in the film are still alive, and remember it well, so the film-makers have had to make all of the characters in the film absolutely perfect nice guys. This is one of the films major problems, as the characters then become sickeningly sweet and flat, which stops you from caring about what happens to them. As I said though, when the film is out on the ocean, it is fantastic. The computer generated ocean is flawless, and when you're fully caught up in the storm you can't help but be astounded. However, the rest of the film (which is most of it) is so poor and cliched (there is even an old, wise fisherman that lives in the local bar dishing out warnings and advice) that I'm going to have to give it... 3/10
Phone Booth is an enjoyable if slight case of style over substance. Being almost entriely set around one phone booth, the film does well in keeping the audience on the edge of their seat, and its very short running time helps too. This is nothing Hitchcock didn't do numerous times to much greater effect over 40 years ago though. Its simple concept is very light on plot and ideas, but its execution is good enough to let you ignore this. Even though the idea is reasonably original, a lot of the other details are very cliched, and do grate at times, but Colin Farrel, although unlikeable at the beginning of the film (purposefully so) pulls in a riveting performance which keeps you caught up in what's going on. Its such a simple film there isn't a huge amount more to say about it. With all of its faults, it is still enjoyable, and is worth watching, but contains enough fluff to make you forget about it after a short while. I wasn't too sure about the end either, I don't know if what they were trying to get at was very ethical, but I won't give it away. Catch it now if you've got nothing better to watch, but I'd wait for the video release - fun, but nothing special. 6/10
What started life as one of the worst film concepts ever imagined ("I know, lets make a film out of a dull Disneyland ride!") has surprisingly ended up being one of the best blockbusters of this summer (yes I am including Matrix Reloaded, which in my opinion was good but fairly dissapointing). This film harks back to the more innocent, fun blockbusters that didn't take themselves too seriously and didn't completely rely on special effects to keep people watching. OK, so the effects here are great and there are quite a lot used, but they aren't what make this film enjoyable. Instead, a lot of fun is had through the performances (especially the crazed rock-star turn from Johnny Depp and the deliciously hammy Geofrey Rush), good pacing (although the film on a whole was a little long at over two hours), plenty of humour and some cracking physical (i.e. non-CGI) action. It has its flaws - its length as I mentioned earlier, although I never got bored, there are also some slight plot holes and the overly large number of 'good-guys' spoils the impact of the ending a little, but on the whole it was hugely entertaining. After the curse (sorry) most pirate films have been under over the last ten or twenty years, its a refreshing surprise to be presented with a truly swashbuckling extravaganza like this. I would recommend anyone to go and see it, you're guaranteed to walk out with a big smile on your face. 8/10
After reading good things about Pitch Black, I was quite looking forward to it. I was however, a bit dissapointed. I had heard that it was in a B-movie style, so I was expecting maybe some dodgy lines and some hammy acting, but the script was just a little too bad, and the acting a little too poor to be enjoyable. Most of the characters were annoying, so you didn't mind if any of them died, Vin Diesel was the only notable exception. Okay, so he's hardly Brando, but he did dominate the screen whenever he appeared. Although the film was quite stylish in parts, and a couple of shots are quite menacing (the majority of which are on the trailer), the film never really comes together as it should. A film this one should have looked to should have been something like Tremors, where its cheap and cheesy, but its still great fun. Pitch Black takes itself a little too seriously at times, and contains some very odd ethics (Vin Diesel's murderer is forgiven for all his sins and becomes the hero). Above its faults, Pitch Black is still a reasonably entertaining film, but there are better out there. 5/10
I'm usually a big fan of Tim Burton's films, but this is, in my opinion, probably his worst. It lacks the style and humour of his earlier works. Its not all terrible though, the apes are great. Their make up is quite impressive, but most impressive is the way they act. They move like apes, screach like apes, and have various ape-like tics which have obviously been meticulously researched and rehearsed. However, this is where the interest and effort stops. The rest of the film is very basic, not nearly as dark or as intriguing as it could have been, and suffers from a ridiculous ending that is obviously a poor attempt to better that of the orginal film. The humans, other than Mark Whalberg, do nothing in the film, just run about, with the very attractive, but pointless Estelle Warren acting mearly as something to look at when the blokes in the audience get bored. This really could have been better, but too much time was spent on getting the apes right, rather than focusing on the film itself. 5/10
