Taken (DVD)

Starring: Liam Neeson.

Rated: 18.

Story: Bryan Mills, an ex-spy, attempts to live a normal life and get to know his seventeen-year-old daughter (much of whose childhood he missed because he was too busy explosively fixing things in far-flung countries).

When she is kidnapped on a trip to Paris, he jets after her and finds himself caught between the French police and a human-trafficking ring.

He 'fixes' things.

Comments: There's a surprising amount of scene-setting in Taken. Getting on for half the film is filled with laying out the premise and establishing Mills' backstory and his relationships with his daughter and ex-wife. Thanks to Neeson's charisma, these elements are watchable enough but you can't help thinking it's all rather excessive for such a clichéd scenario.

Things only really get going once the dramatic (but somewhat unlikely) kidnapping occurs. Once he's in France, Mills utilises all his cunning and training to hunt down those responsible. There are some clever moments but events become rapidly unbelievable as the action ramps up. What starts as a tense investigation turns into manic car chases, ruthless brawls and the kind of gun battles where one determined dad with a pistol takes out a horde of bad guys dual-wielding Uzis. Unfortunately, the gung-ho action doesn't sit entirely comfortably with the sordid setting. Some of the scenes of human exploitation are quite depressing - turning the situation into Die Hard is unsettling for the wrong reasons.

Ultimately, Taken is rather unbalanced. It feels like the first and last episodes of 24: Season 1 slammed together with some extra implausibility and a protagonist who's slightly too old to be throwing himself off bridges.

Oh, and remember, if your teenage kids don't appreciate and respect you even though you're a nice guy and working really hard to make them happy, nothing fixes things better than saving their lives by going and wreaking havoc in a European capital...

Conclusion: Like someone held the script the wrong way up so most of the common sense fell out and all the action settled to the bottom.

Explosions: More like a couple of small fires.
Body count: Exponential.
Profound insights into parent-teenager relationships: Not many.
Bad guys capable of hitting a stationary man using an automatic weapon in a confined space: None.
Portrayal of France: They should sue.

Rating: 3/5.

Paycheck (DVD)

Starring: Ben Affleck, Aaron Eckhart and Uma Thurman.

Rated: 12.

Story: Michael Jennings (Affleck) is an electronics genius who secretly reverse engineers technology for big corporations. They lock him in a lab for months, he steals their competitors ideas and then they wipe his memory so no one finds out. In return, he gets a huge paycheck.

He decides to take one final job, only to wake up oblivious to the last three years and with nothing to show for it but an envelope of twenty everyday objects he can't remember why he mailed to himself. Then people start trying to kill him. It's like the office Christmas party worst-case scenario.

Mysteriously, the objects turn out to be exactly what he needs to MacGyver his way towards some answers as to what is going on...

Comments: Fed up with movies which start at the end and work backwards to hide the predictable nature of the events? Here's a film where they clearly wrote it backwards and then decided to show everything forwards.

Confused?

Well, to reveal anything more would be to give the game away but the plot of Paycheck is essentially a convenient excuse to make a frantic sequence of improbable escapes seem plausible. For once, surviving one-in-a-million scrapes is a feature and not a reason for scorn. The result is fast-paced and exciting. Ultimately, however, it's all perhaps a little too neat and relies too heavily on its central premise - characterisation is non-existent, there's no real backdrop to the story and everything depends on not just one, but two, unlikely technologies. Don't think about it very hard, though, and Paycheck is rather entertaining. (Maybe even because it skips over so many details.)

With plenty of running about and not much contemplation, Ben Affleck isn't stretched (luckily). The rest of the cast have to make do with characters pulled straight from other movies. There's the evil corporate guy, the efficient henchman, the scientist love interest, the comic sidekick - pretty much everyone you'd expect really apart from the ageing mentor only a few days away from retirement.

Conclusion: A great idea executed merely competently. A little more care (and a different cast) could have made it superb.

Explosions: A couple of big ones.
Ben Affleck running away: Lots.
Uma Thurman looking attractive: Surprisingly little.
Technical plausibility: On a par with cold fusion.
Entirely new uses for a paperclip: One.

Rating: 4/5.

The Kingdom (DVD)

Starring: Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner & Jason Bateman.

Rated: 15.

Story: A small team of FBI agents goes to Saudi Arabia to investigate a terrorist attack on US citizens. They have to deal with unfamiliar customs and politics. After a while, they befriend a local police official and get a couple of leads. Suddenly, every other person they meet has a rocket launcher.

Comments: This is actually a lot more intelligent than it sounds. The film starts with a whistle-stop history lesson of Saudi Arabia and goes out of its way to paint all the major characters not as Arabs or Westerners but as people.

Then again, the movie's not quite as clever as it likes to think. Near the beginning, lots of peripheral characters are introduced in quick succession, their names and important-sounding job titles flashing up at the bottom of the screen. The captions vanish almost immediately, giving the impression it's all fast-moving and complicated. Really, it's a case of lots of high up people not wanting any boats rocked. As events proceed, the whole thing moves into 24 mode and then full-blown action film territory.

Still, no one's motivation is entirely pure and the movie never descends into a simplistic tale of good versus evil. It's compulsive viewing throughout.

Conclusion: Slick and tense.

Explosions: Some.
Angry, vengeful people: Assorted.
Killer marbles: Buckets.
Violations of the Prime Directive: Several.
Unlikely car chases though the streets of Riyadh: One.

Rating: 4/5.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Season 1 (DVD)

Starring: Lena Headey, Thomas Dekker & Summer Glau.

Rated: 15.

Story: Forget Terminator 3 ever happened. A few years after Terminator 2, Sarah Connor (Headey) and her teenage son, John (Dekker), take a jump through time to the present day. They're fugitives from the law and hunted by murderous cyborgs from the future who are intent on killing John before he grows up to lead resistance against Skynet - the computer system still destined to obliterate humanity with nuclear weapons.

Aided by Cameron, a re-programmed cyborg (Glau), Sarah and John attempt to prevent Skynet being created. This tends to involve moral dilemmas and explosives...

Comments: You're not going to get far with this if you haven't seen the first couple of Terminator movies. That said, if you haven't seen the first couple of Terminator movies, why not? Cyborgs, big fights, time travel and Linda Hamilton - the only thing missing is ninjas. Go watch them now.

The TV series is obviously working on a smaller budget, so involves fewer big fights and more tense situations and sneaking about. Thanks to some excellent editing and pacing this works well. Some of the attempts at lightening the mood aren't so great, though, with too many of the jokes centred around cyborgs not understanding human idioms and behaviour.

It would have been easy for The Sarah Connor Chronicles to follow a 'Terminator of the Week' formula but, thankfully, this is avoided. Each episode concentrates on a new lead in stopping Skynet, with the hunt for Sarah and John forming a backdrop to the whole series. The episodes are more self-contained than in Heroes but not as much as in Battlestar Galactica. Unfortunately, this is sometimes unsatisfying, providing neither closure nor much overall plot advancement. Despite there only being nine episodes, they quickly blend together. There aren't any duffers but, then again, none really stand out.

All in all, this first season is definitely worth watching if you enjoyed the films. Whether there's enough going on for the show to maintain momentum through a full second season is another question.

Oh, and Lena Headey with an American accent is just wrong.

Conclusion: Good but is it going anywhere?

Explosions: Regular.
Tension: High.
Slightly clunky humour: Occasional.
Psycho cyborgs who just won't die: Frequent.
Ninjas: Not enough.

Rating: 4/5.

War (DVD)

Starring: Jason Statham & Jet Li.

Rated: 18.

Story: An FBI agent (Statham) hunts a rogue CIA assassin (Li) who murdered his partner. They both end up in the middle of a gang war between Triads and Yakuza in San Francisco.

Comments: Looking through some old reviews, I chanced upon my comments on Running Scared. Remember that one? Nope, I'm not surprised, I didn't really either. It's a by-the-numbers crime thriller with an ending so stupid I had to wipe it from my mind.

Then I watched War.

Woh, deja vu. (Though thankfully it wasn't Deja Vu deja vu. That would have been even worse.)

Yep, the film is OK but many of the elements feel included simply for the sake of it. In particular, there's a dull and superfluous car chase somewhere in the middle that's completely pointless. Nonetheless, War would be decent enough if the makers hadn't felt compelled to round it off with some unlikely revelations.

Imagine a world where at the end of Aliens the queen learns to tap-dance, where Love Actually culminates in a shoot out with vampires or where the final fight in The Matrix involves animated penguins.

Fortunately, War doesn't come from that world. It does come from somewhere fairly close by, however. To quote my Running Scared review, "There's a plot twist ten minutes from the end which is so sharp it dislocates the plot entirely. It essentially re-writes everything which has gone before, causing it to make much less sense. The resulting conclusion feels like it was stolen from a generic action movie." Since War is a pretty generic action movie to begin with, this isn't such a disaster but it doesn't exactly help matters.

Statham and Li make it all passable but even the added presence of Robert Downey Jr, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock wouldn't make it great.

Conclusion: Shoot, hit, hack, drive, boom... forget.

Explosions: Two (because you can't have an action film without multiple explosions).
Car chases: One (because you can't have an action film without a car chase either, apparently).
Meetings in a strip club: One (because... well, take a guess...)
Cool, exciting plot twists you don't see coming: Two. (That's double the statutory requirement!)
Reasons you don't see them coming: One's rubbish and the other's insane.

Rating: 3/5.

Vantage Point (DVD)

Starring: Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver and an escapee from Lost.

Rated: 12.

Story: It turns out that there's someone less lucky than Jack Bauer. On his first day back at work after taking a bullet for the President, a Secret Service agent (Quaid) finds himself slap bang in the middle of another assassination attempt.

Comments: Vantage Point endeavours to show different perspectives in a terrorist attack by playing the main event over and over from the point of view of various characters. Unfortunately, all this really means is that the action rewinds twenty minutes every time things start to get interesting.

The terrorists' motivations are never explored and nothing much seems to be gained from all the different angles. On top of that, the ending involves too much coincidence and the whole thing winds up feeling as plausible and enlightening as a couple of episodes of 24.

Conclusion: A simple story told in a very complicated way. Slick but nowhere near as clever as it wants to be.

Explosions: Two every fifteen minutes (but that's mostly the same two).
Dubious motivations: Several.
Implausible moments: Plenty.
Obvious but unlikely plot twists: One.
Life lesson: Don't 'rescue' lost children by taking them away from where their mum last saw them and then leave them next to a busy road. You may mean well, but it's just not helpful...

Rating: 3/5.

Running Scared (DVD)

Starring: Paul Walker and the kid from Ultraviolet.

Rated: 18.

Story: A small-time gangster is tasked with disposing of a gun by his mafia boss. He keeps it for insurance but it goes missing. He has to race round town following leads in a desperate race to get it back before anyone finds out and he's used as a hockey puck by his colleagues. This puts his family in danger.

Meanwhile, a neighbour's child gets caught up in events and stumbles into almost every bad situation conceivable, thanks to his startling ability to find psychopaths wherever he goes.

Comments: A great ending can't save a poor movie but a poor ending can destroy a great movie. Imagine a Shawshank Redemption where the warden is revealed to be an alien, or a musical finale to Schlindler's List, or if at the conclusion of the Star Wars trilogy Luke joined the Dark Side and Princess Leia turned out to be a man. The consequences are unthinkable...

For most of its length, Running Scared is a passable, violent thriller with some nail-biting moments. The tension is increased by the frequent combination of children and loaded guns in close proximity. Sadly, there's a plot twist ten minutes from the end which is so sharp it dislocates the plot entirely. It essentially re-writes everything which has gone before, causing it to make much less sense. The resulting conclusion feels like it was stolen from a generic action movie (probably involving Wesley Snipes). As the film isn't exceptional to start with, the disappointment isn't on a par with Frodo waking up to discover it was all a dream but I haven't felt so short-changed since Lucky Number Slevin. Grrr.

Perhaps what's really gone wrong is that the movie is trying too hard. It's the kind of film where a meeting gets held in a strip club just because, everyone swears for the sake of it and the final shoot-out takes place somewhere dramatic but daft. Given these elements, the makers probably felt a 'shock' twist was a legal requirement.

Yeah, I know, I was going to avoid films with Paul Walker in after the disasters of The Fast and the Furious and Into the Blue, but I latched onto the phrases 'family man' and 'action thriller' in the synopsis and thought this was worth a shot. In general, it is. Walker actually does a good job and the rest of the cast is excellent. It's simply a shame the plot relies so heavily on coincidence and then makes a nonsense of itself in an effort to wrap things up.

Conclusion: Comes within a quarter of an hour of being rather good.

Explosions: One.
People doing stupid things: Plenty.
Nutters with guns: Loads.
Psychos with arcade machines: Two.
Unlikely, cop-out, happy endings: One.

Rating: 3/5.

In Bruges

Starring: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes & Fleur from Harry Potter.

Rated: 18.

Story: After a bungled job in London, two hitmen (Farrell & Gleeson) are sent to lie low for a while in Bruges. (It's in Belgium!) One of them hates the place, the other quite likes it. They sightsee, they go to the pub and they try not to get into trouble.

They get into trouble.

Their boss (Fiennes) turns up to sort things out. Violence ensues.

Comments: Yes, we went to the cinema and saw something that didn't involve cute, animated creatures or a boy wizard! We got to go straight in without having to apply for a second mortgage to buy some pick'n'mix or having to frog-march a posse of children to the toilet before the film started. It was fantastic! Then again, we did have to cough up full price for our tickets rather than the pound or two we normally pay for the kid's movie on a Saturday morning. The pick'n'mix might have been cheaper...

In Bruges is never going to be the Saturday morning kid's movie, however. It's full of swearing, gory death, drug use and talk of suicide. The characters are often racist, xenophobic and heightist. It's very funny in places but grim and distressing in others. I can't really see Pixar remaking it with rabbits.

I imagine the writer (Martin McDonagh) came up with the idea after a series of unfortunate events left him stranded in Bruges. Picture the scene: Doomed to several days of canal trips, Medieval churches and swans, he goes to the cinema and watches Mr & Mrs Smith to cheer himself up. This doesn't help. He has some beers. This does help... until he gets the bill and realises he's been ripped off. He decides to get even with Bruges and Hollywood in one fell swoop. He decides to write a film about hitmen that isn't all amoral action and excitement but explores the motivation and guilt... while poking fun at Belgium. Excellent.

The cast does a good job, managing to keep things going even in the few uncomfortable moments when the script shifts suddenly from witty banter to disturbing soul-searching. The whole film is bizarre and unlikely but if you've been to Bruges, you'll be too busy laughing and muttering, 'Hey! That's the bridge along from where we stayed!' to notice.

Since there are plenty of lovely shots of Bruges in the film but much of the humour comes from taking the rip out of the city, it's hard to know what the Belgian Tourist Board makes of it all. I think they may be gambling that if you haven't been to Bruges, you won't get the joke and will just think that it looks like a nice place to visit. They may be right.

Conclusion: Like a trip to Bruges with more laughs, added hitmen and less expense.

Explosions: None.
Political correctness: None.
Swing parks: One. (We went there; it's great.)
Swans: Loads. (We saw them; they didn't bite.)
Clock towers: One very tall one. (We didn't go up there; it was too much like effort.)
Cute, fluffy animated rabbits: None.

Rating: 4/5 if you've been to Bruges, else 3/5.