The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Brendan Gleeson. Show all posts

Saturday, 15 February 2025

Movie Review: Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)

Genre: Action Thriller

Director: John Woo

Starring: Tom Cruise, Thandie Newton, Ving Rhames, Brendan Gleeson, Anthony Hopkins

Running Time: 124 minutes

Synopsis: Impossible Missions Force Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is tasked with locating rogue ex-agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott), who has stolen a priceless pharmaceutical product. Ethan teams up with professional thief and Sean's ex-girlfriend Nyah (Thandie Newton). They fall in love before locating Sean in Sydney, where he is arranging to profit from villainy.

What Works Well: A series of set-pieces in search of a purpose, the first sequel is an intentional exercise in excessive style subjugating any attempts at substance. Director John Woo prolongs every action scene towards inflated operatic grandeur, with dramatic slow-motion and hair-in-the-wind close-ups used as punctuation marks to add more for the sake of more. Car chases, motorcycle duels, hand-to-hand combat, and fierce firefights are all elevated to feats of death-defying mythology.

What Does Not Work As Well: When it's not convoluted, the plot is inane. Both the antagonists and the love interest are of the instantly forgettable plastic variety, not helped by an underpowered supporting cast. The self-deprecating wit and careful but faulty planning hallmarks of the series are notably absent in favour of unnecessarily serious James Bond derivations, and the face mask trick achieves tiresome irrelevance through overuse.

Key Quote:

Ethan Hunt: We just rolled up a snowball and tossed it into hell. Now lets see what chance it has.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Friday, 11 October 2024

Movie Review: The Grand Seduction (2013)

Genre: Comedy

Director: Don McKellar

Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Taylor Kitsch

Running Time: 115 minutes

Synopsis: The tiny harbour village of Tickle Head, Newfoundland, is suffering economic malaise due to the closure of cod fishing. Unemployed fisher Murray (Brendan Gleeson), his friend Simon, and banker Henry are desperate to attract a new petrochemical factory to the area, but the deal hinges on securing a resident doctor in the village. When Dr. Paul Lewis (Taylor Kitsch) arrives for a month, Murray mobilizes all the residents to embellish the realities of village life to convince Paul to stay permanently. Postmistress Kathleen (Liane Balaban) is the only local resident reluctant to play along.

What Works Well: This remake of a Quebec production benefits from a laid back attitude, rustic edge-of-the-continent scenery, and salt-of-the-earth characters. The comedy is underpinned by serious issues including the declining traditional fishing industry, erosion of dignity due to living on welfare, and families split apart in search of better fortunes. The running gags are strong, including the villagers pretending to like cricket (Paul's favourite sport), listening in on Paul's phone calls, planting money for him to stumble upon, and artificially elevating his hapless fishing skills.

What Does Not Work As Well: The fundamental premise is, of course, rickety (the factory can surely provide a doctor), and the portrayed process for selecting this village for an investment is amateurish. The longish running length is padded with some repetitive beats and unnecessary scenes, while the ending is both predictable and emotionally truncated.

Key Quote:

Simon (watching cricket on TV): It's like watching baseball, only longer.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Saturday, 4 March 2023

Movie Review: The Banshees Of Inisherin (2022)

Genre: Drama

Director: Martin McDonagh

Starring: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan

Running Time: 114 minutes

Synopsis: The setting is the small island of Inisherin off the Irish coast, in 1923. Pádraic (Colin Farrell), a dairy farmer, is stunned when his longtime drinking buddy Colm (Brenda Gleeson), a fiddler, suddenly ends their friendship. Colm now finds Pádraic incredibly dull and wants to focus on composing music. To fill the gap in his life Colm turns to his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) and the dim Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who is being abused by his father. But Pádraic also persists in pestering Colm, with grim consequences.

What Works Well: The rugged Irish scenery is suitably windswept, and the sense of community isolation on an inconsequential island runs deep. With dashes of subtle humour, writer and director Martin McDonagh toys with themes of loneliness, mental health, and men looking for a purpose. The sudden breakdown of a bond between allies echoes the ongoing Irish Civil War, and although confined within narrow ranges, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleason are dependable.

What Does Not Work As Well: The pacing is ponderous, exposing thin and repetitious narrative content. The escalation in violence is more bizarre than impactful, and predictably, an ultimately silly dispute between two none-too-bright bumpkins can only generate limited momentum.

Conclusion: The stellar scenery subjugates the slight story.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Sunday, 14 August 2022

Movie Review: 28 Days Later (2002)

A zombie apocalypse horror film, 28 Days Later is a creepy vision of societal collapse.

In England, animal liberation activists invade a lab to free captive chimpanzees and accidentally release a fast-spreading virus that causes rage, triggering an epidemic. 28 days later, bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma at an abandoned London hospital. Chased by zombie-like infected humans thirsty for flesh and blood, he is saved by the intervention of survivors Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark.

Jim insists on visiting his parents' home, then he and Selena connect with fellow survivor Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah. They pick up a radio transmission promising safety at an army checkpoint near Manchester, and head out in Frank's cab. After several close escapes they connect with Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) and his small group of soldiers, but Jim and Selena's troubles are far from over.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland revitalize the zombie genre (although the term is never used) with a sparse, character-driven journey into a collapsed civil structure. 28 Days Later delivers a haunting vision of evacuated cities beset by marauding infected victims seeking fresh blood, with pockets of survivors left to fend on their own. Whether surviving another day to live in this nightmare is even worth the effort is a question posed early, Jim's parents finding a peaceful ending when all hope seems lost.

The zombies move quickly, and while the violence is often shocking, Boyle's jerky hand-held cameras and dark environs imply more than what they show. Not satisfied with revealing street-level horrors, Garland takes the story towards the essence of the human condition. The second half shifts gears a couple of times. First Major West and his men appear to provide refuge, but a twist awaits, initially outrageous but upon reflection most plausible in the context of men reverting to the laws of the jungle. The ability to kill in the name of living becomes a pressing reality.

The tangle with the military men adds thematic spice, but does create a movie-within-a-movie and takes the intense focus away from the core apocalypse story. The star-free cast helps to maintain dour concentration within the changing nature of the challenge, Cillian Murphy as Jim navigating the transition from courier to adept survivor with help from Naomie Harris' unyielding determination to do what it takes.

As the rules of chaos take hold, the abstract happenstance of who lives and who dies is a random variable. One drop of blood landing in exactly the wrong place is as much a cause for a machete attack as hordes of chomping zombies. With the virus easily representing the spread of any condition that corrodes social fundamentals and triggers anarchy, 28 Days Later is disturbingly cogent.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Monday, 28 December 2020

Movie Review: Hampstead (2017)

A romantic drama with traces of humour, Hampstead is a bland love story lacking both passion and the quirkiness it desperately strives for.

In London, Emily Walters (Diane Keaton) is a widow struggling with loneliness and mounting financial problems. She lives across the street from a derelict abandoned hospital site slated for redevelopment. Emily spots Donald Horner (Brendan Gleeson), a gruff tramp-like man living off the land in a ramshackle compound on the hospital grounds. He is facing eviction, but Emily first befriends him then convinces him to fight the eviction in court. Their friendship turns serious as he becomes a cause célèbre.

Inspired by the true story of Harry Hallowes, Hampstead enjoys idyllic London locations around the Hampstead Heath neighbourhood, and little else. Imprudently following in the footsteps of the equally flat The Lady In The Van, writer Robert Festinger and director Joel Hopkins aim for a celebration of British eccentricity with a dash of Hollywood but miss the mark entirely.

The Donald Horner character is immediately scrubbed clean and revealed to be a decent and tender man simply comfortable living alone. Absent any genuine rough edges, Hampstead is just a chemistry-free attempted romance between a Diane Keaton retread characters and a recluse. Predictable moments of tension are derived from overbearing neighbour Fiona (Lesley Manville), while the spots of humour arrive courtesy of accountant James (Jason Watkins) attempting to straighten Emily's finances with the real intentions of ruffling her bed sheets.

Hampstead bumbles along quaint pathways searching for content, never overcoming the nagging suspicion that the buried corpses in the manicured cemetery may well be having more fun.

All Ace Black Movie Blog Reviews are here.

Wednesday, 15 March 2017

Movie Review: Edge Of Tomorrow (2014)

A science fiction military action film, Edge Of Tomorrow (also marketed as Live. Die. Repeat.) makes the most out of a gritty time loop battlefield premise.

In the near future, Earth has been invaded by a destructive and seemingly unstoppable alien species known as the Mimics. With Europe largely occupied, a human army is assembled in England to prepare a massive counterattack, emboldened by a new exoskeleton weapons system. General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) presses Public Affairs Officer Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) into covering the front line, despite Cage's lack of combat training. Very much against his will, Cage joins J Squad under the command of Master Sergeant Farell (Bill Paxton) as they prepare for the invasion on the next day.

The human army is ambushed on the beaches by massive Mimic forces, and Cage duly dies, but not before spotting the famous Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) in the midst of combat. During the battle Cage is splattered by the blood of a rare alien command species, giving him special powers to loop back in time, and he awakes on the previous day back in the clutches of Farell and J Squad. He repeatedly relives the massacre on the beach, trying to learn from each day's experience to influence the outcome of battle. He finally connects with Vrataski on the day before the invasion, and together they have to figure out a way to destroy the main brain behind the Mimics before Earth is annihilated.

A fusion of Groundhog Day and wicked Aliens-on-Earth engaged in an existential Saving Private Ryan scale battle, Edge Of Tomorrow is an adaptation of the Hiroshi Sakurazaka book All You Need Is Kill. Directed by Doug Liman, the film contains enough human interaction between the charismatic Cage and the jaded Vrataski to infuse the action scenes with meaningful emotion. The combat setting, on the beaches of France and then pushing into the continent, is intended to bring echoes of World War Two to life, the fight against evil this time not so much about ideology but rather human survival.

Edge Of Tomorrow recreates the video game experience of frequent dying, re-spawning and trying again, every attempt intended to improve forward progress by small margins. Death is no longer final, just a momentary frustration that comes with the aggravation of having to replay the familiar in order to venture a few more steps into the new. Ironically, this is the feature stripped out of game-to-movie adaptations, here embraced in a non-adaptation that capitalizes on the value of learning what does not work in order to find what does.

For Vrataski, every day is new. For Cage, it will take a multitude of attempts to save Earth. He cannot succeed without failing, and his frustration and evolution into an efficient killing machine go hand in hand. In depicting this procress, Liman cleverly holds his cards close to his chest: once the premise is set, the film is often intentionally unclear until late in a scene whether events are depicting Cage's first attempt at navigating new terrain, or the umpteenth time.

Less successful are the CGI-dominated action scenes. Most of the Mimics are a swirl of tentacles, and the combat scenes are frantic and fuzzy rather than fearsome.

Tom Cruise is in his element as the roguish public affairs officer dealing with a new and unwelcome reality, Cruise's comfort with the more cerebral elements of action serving the film well. Emily Blunt is intense and bordering on dour, but carries the flag for feminine fighters acquiescing to no one.

Edge Of Tomorrow is a breath of original air, and a breathless exercise in racing against time -- repeatedly.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Sunday, 6 March 2016

Movie Review: In Bruges (2008)

An ingenuous character study, In Bruges follows two hit men as they hide out in the sleepy Belgian city awaiting their next orders. What follows is a delightfully unpredictable study of the human condition.

Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are two Irish hit men ordered to lay low in Bruges by their excitable foul-mouthed boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes). With the Christmas tourist season at its peak, the two are forced to share a room at a small hotel operated by the pregnant Marie (Thekla Reuten). Ray is young, restless, and tortured by a recent mission-gone-bad. Ken is older, wiser, calmer, and more experienced. Ray is immediately bored in Bruges, completely oblivious to the city's charming culture and sense of history. Ken is entranced, and keen to take in all that Bruges has to offer.

Ray finds ways to get himself into trouble. He meets Chloë (Clémence Poésy), who may be a drug dealer pretending to be a film crew assistant. She may also be a specialist in seducing and mugging tourists, along with her skinhead ex-boyfriend Eirik (Jérémie Renier). Ray also meets Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), a drug-addicted, prostitute-chasing dwarf actor filming a surreal homage to Don't Look Now. When Harry finally makes contact with Ken to issue his next set of orders, a volatile situation ignites.

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh, In Bruges is a cerebral gem. Unfolding in layers to reveal secrets, agonies and deeply-respected codes of honour, the film marches to its own tune, taking every unexpected turn, avoiding the routine in favour of the quirky, and working its way to original territory where death is a punishment, an escape and a sacrifice. The film is a low-key exploration of two men at opposite ends of their careers, approaching the next chapter with a recent crisis in the rear view mirror and a lot worse to come.

Ray and Ken are compelling enough, but McDonagh first adds the city of Bruges itself as a stellar co-star, and then Harry makes a personal appearance in the final third to pour fuel on an already simmering fire. Bruges is a captivating locale, and used as a device to underline the contrast between the two assassins. Ray is traumatized well beyond caring which city he is in, while Ken relishes the opportunity to take time off and immerse himself in the culture. The men continuously clash over their daily agenda, with a delicious irony to be revealed only when Harry's reasoning behind the choice of city is revealed.

Colin Farrell has rarely been better. He presents Ray as a man undergoing a quiet catastrophe, looking for ways to distract himself that don't involve boring sight seeing. Brendan Gleeson is also at his best in one of his most prominent roles, Ken a quiet, loyal soldier who will always do what is necessary until confronted with a sublime situation where the act of killing simply can't win.

The supporting characters further enrich the film. Hotel owner Marie, seductress Chloë, her violent boyfriend Eirik, the American dwarf actor Jimmy, plus illegal gun dealer Yuri (Eric Godon) all initially appear to be incidental to Ray and Ken's break from the job of killing. Once Harry wades into the sleepy city everyone who has come into contact with the hit men will have a role to play in defining their future.

The life of assassins is not for the faint of heart or the error prone, but that does not mean it can't be frequently funny. The laughs are sharp, the set-pieces often hilarious, and on many occasions quite politically incorrect. In Bruges, death holds hands with dark humour and together they saunter down alleyways steeped in history, filled with echoes of plans gone horribly wrong.