Movie Review: Enola Holmes (2020)

Genre: Mystery Action  

Director: Harry Bradbeer  

Starring: Millie Bobby Brown, Sam Claflin, Henry Cavill, Helena Bonham Carter  

Running Time: 123 minutes  

Synopsis: It's England in the 1880s, and parliament is debating expansion of voting rights. 16-year-old Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) was raised as an independent thinker by her mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter), after her older brothers Sherlock and Mycroft (Henry Cavill and Sam Claflin) left home. Now Eudoria disappears, and Enola is unwillingly thrust into the care of the traditionalist Mycroft. She runs away and encounters Tewksbury (Louis Partridge), a young aristocrat also running from his family. Using clues left by her mother, Enola has to find Eudoria, help Tewksbury, and evade capture.

What Works Well: The target audience of 12 to 15-year-old girls will enjoy Millie Bobby Brown's spunky performance and the can-do message of girl power. England of the 1880s is recreated with beautiful settings, including the lavish Holmes estate and the muddy bustling chaos of London.

What Does Not Work As Well: As the jumbled and overstuffed action shifts from Eudoria's disappearance to Enola's escape then Tewksbury's barely explained sub-plot, Enola breaks the fourth wall with annoying frequency. Meanwhile, the anachronistic militant feminist message (with a generous side-dish of anti-male contempt) is delivered with sledgehammer subtlety, while the caught-in-the-middle Sherlock Holmes has never been less effective. In the rush to lecture and hector, the script fails to properly discuss neither the politics nor the threat of violence that supposedly propel the plot.

Key Quote:

Tewksbury: I'm a man.

Enola: You're a man when I tell you you're a man.

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Movie Review: The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)

Genre: War Action  

Director: Guy Ritchie  

Starring: Henry Cavill, Eiza González, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Cary Elwes, Henry Golding  

Running Time: 122 minutes  

Synopsis: In 1941, Nazi Germany's U-boats control the Atlantic Ocean and the United Kingdom stands alone in Europe. Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear) authorizes a secret commando raid to blow up an Italian U-boat supply ship anchored off the East African coast. Hardened criminal Gus March-Phillipps (Henry Cavill) and Denmark's Anders Lassen (Alan Ritchson) lead the mission, approaching their target by sea. Meanwhile, intelligence agents Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González) and Richard Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) are tasked with distracting the on-shore Nazi commander Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger).

What Works Well: Loosely based on the actual World War Two Operation Postmaster, this jovial romp is part throwback to mission-focused war movies, and part just-kill-all-the-Nazis video game style nonsense. Humour is never far from the surface, with the best laughs generated by insatiable killing machine Lassen. The quite brilliant Christopher Benstead music score is a most respectful salute to Ennio Morricone.

What Does Not Work As Well: The mindless entertainment sails dangerously close to a tick-box exercise, with most scenes soullessly borrowed from other movies. The characterizations are thin enough to disappear into the ocean, too much of the muddled action takes place at night, and the plot twists are simultaneously sketched-in and over-complicated. The sequences featuring Marjorie Stewart's seduction of Heinrich Luhr are a bad combination of prolonged and unconvincing.

Key Quote:

Anders Lassen: I'm not leaving until I have a barrel full of Nazi hearts.



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Movie Review: Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

A thrill-a-minute action movie, Mission: Impossible - Fallout delivers expertly constructed and exhilitaring set-pieces with astounding stunt work, but tilts towards over-the-top extremes.

Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) accepts an assignment to retrieve missing plutonium before it falls into the hands of an anarchist terrorist group led by the mysterious John Lark, who filled the void created when Ethan apprehended mastermind Solomon Lane (Sean Harris).

Working with his support members Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), Ethan finds but loses the plutonium in a botched transaction in Berlin. This failure prompts the CIA's Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) to insist her agent Walker (Henry Cavill) accompany Ethan, over the objections of IMF's Secretary Hunley (Alec Baldwin). 

Using information extracted from a rogue Norwegian nuclear scientist, Ethan's team heads to Paris to disrupt a meeting between Lark and black market dealer White Widow (Vanessa Kirby). After reuniting with MI6's agent Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), Ethan is forced to improvise by adopting a terrorist persona, and learns that Lane's release is part of a maniacal revenge and mass murder plot, with Ethan's ex-wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) in imminent danger.

The sixth installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Fallout is stacked with exactly what the series promises: a succession of hair-raising chases, impossible yet possible stunts, and dazzling oh no! moments. Every plan is well thought-out but nothing ever goes according to plan, on-the-fly innovation is a core ingredient, and every twist is followed by a turn to throw doubt on everything and everyone. And in the hands of star/co-producer Tom Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, quality and confidence ooze from every scene.

But yet signs of flab creep in. At 147 minutes this is a really long haul. Many of the chases should have been more sharply edited, and one or two of the pursuits could have been dispensed with altogether. In a subversion of real-time tension, the final 15 minutes (featuring the de rigeur countdown to the small matter of multiple nuclear bomb explosions) seem to take twice as long to tick by. And the humour starts to creep towards Roger Moore-era Bond shenanigans, sharp wit replaced by eye-rolls.

As for the plot, this is classic MacGuffin territory. The plutonium balls are an excuse for agile hops to snazzy locations in Berlin, Paris and London, ending with a trip to a rustic medical camp in Kashmir. The neck-snapping double and triple-crosses between all the assembled agents border on incomprehensible, but McQuarrie takes care to always explain what is going on and why (whether it makes sense or not), and particularly excels in rational, non-nausea-inducing editing of the chase and hand-to-hand combat scenes.

And Cruise continues to astound by performing all his own stunts, and some are truly jaw-dropping. The breathless motorcycle, car, and foot chases are here augmented by extraordinary fun with helicopters (inside and out), and Cruise earns enormous respect by placing his body on the line for some of the most impressive stunts captured on film.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout succumbs to some excess, but still delivers a blast.



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Movie Review: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

A lighthearted yet effective spy thriller, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is zippy, action-packed, and playfully funny.

It's the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War. The CIA's suave agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) extracts mechanic Gabriella "Gaby" Teller (Alicia Vikander) from East Berlin under the nose of the KGB's Ilya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer). But Solo and Kuryakin are then forced by their bosses to work together on a dangerous mission to track down Gaby's father, nuclear scientist Dr. Udo Teller (Christian Berkel), who has disappeared.

The superpowers suspect that wealthy industrialists and Nazi sympathizers Alexander and Victoria Vinciguerra (Luca Calvani and Elizabeth Debecki) have abducted Teller and are forcing him to develop a technique to mass manufacture nuclear bombs. Solo, Kuryakin and Gaby travel to Rome where Gaby's uncle Rudi (Sylvester Groth) works for the Vinciguerras. The spies have to infiltrate the network of evildoers, find Teller and guard against each other, while Gaby has her own agenda.

An attempted rebirth for the 1960s television series starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, the big screen return of U.N.C.L.E. combines action, humour and a good dose of personal rivalry. Directed and co-written by Guy Ritchie, the film stays true to the spirit of the original series. The story does not take itself too seriously, Solo and Kuyakin are both really good at what they do but also never quite friends, and the overall vibe of the sixties among the jet set is irresistible.

Ritchie conjures up several brilliantly kinetic set-pieces, always laced with a mean streak of humour. The frantic yet elegant opening escape from Berlin sets the stage and introduces Solo's ingenuity and coolness under pressure as well as Kuryakin's uncompromising persistence. Later a motorboat chase is elevated to sublime character-driven artistry, Kuryakin increasingly desperate on the water, Solo in a truck listening to romantic music while munching a sandwich, the two men apart but about to become professionally inseparable. An electric chair "glitch" is also a masterful display of background humour.

If one thing limits U.N.C.L.E., it's a lack of overall originality. The television series was always riffing on the James Bond tune, and the film, while undoubtedly polished to a modern shine, is obviously playing with a very old deck. From the foreign settings to the seduction of exotic women to the McGuffin of a disk at the heart of the chase, all the elements are overly familiar. Ritchie does his best to infuse style, including busy editing to play with micro level scene sequencing, but little that is new can be wrung out of the sophisticated spy sub-genre.

The performances are both slick and predictable, Cavill perhaps pitching for future consideration as Bond, while Vikander has the most fun with Gaby, the one character holding more cards that she initially lets on. Hugh Grant gets a small role as a master spy handler.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. may lack substantive innovation, but the film anyway has fun revisiting past glories.

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