The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Lea Seydoux. Show all posts

Sunday, 13 February 2022

Movie Review: No Time To Die (2021)

The 25th chapter in the James Bond franchise, No Time To Die enhances a rich story with human emotions and plenty of action, but balloons to a staggering 163 minutes.

In a pre-prologue, Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) avenges his family's murder by killing the wife of Spectre assassin Mr. White, but he spares the life of White's young daughter Madeleine.

In the prologue, Spectre's leader Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) has been captured and is being held by MI6. Retired agent James Bond (Daniel Craig) is vacationing in Italy with his lover Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), now a psychotherapist. Bond barely survives an assassination attempt and suspects Madeleine may have betrayed him. He breaks off their relationship.

Five years later in London, Dr. Obruchev is kidnapped along with files and vials related to Project Heracles, a secret initiative funded by MI6's head M (Ralph Fiennes) to develop DNA-targeting weaponry. The CIA's Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) prods Bond out of retirement to find Obruchev in Cuba. He tangles with Nomi (Lashana Lynch), the new Agent 007, but is helped by the CIA's agent Paloma (Ana de Armas). Bond has to dodge another assassination attempt as he uncovers Safin's destructive plot, with Madeleine re-entering his life under unexpected circumstances.

Daniel Craig's fifth and final outing as James Bond is an engrossing adventure, infused with soulful reflection whenever the action pauses. This is Bond in retirement, seeking a graceful exit and the longshot promise of a lasting love, licking his emotional wounds and forced back into free-lance service. He appears detached and far removed from events back at MI6, where M, Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), and Q (Ben Whishaw) now have a new 007 to support.

But loyalty runs deep, and with M facing a mess of his own making, director Cary Joji Fukunaga taps into the close ties between Moneypenny, Q, and Bond for the ex-agent to receive needed logistical support. The plot is relatively straightforward if well beyond the bounds of logic, Blofeld still dangerous from his prison cell but Safin consigning Spectre to the sidelines as he expands his quest for maniacal revenge to global proportions.

In pursuit of yet another infiltrate-and-destroy-the-fort climax, the script (worked on by a combination of Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Fukunaga, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge) starts to mix-up science and technology with old fashioned and seemingly absurd men in hazmat suits mixing a witch's broth of poison in underground lakes. Safin's motivations become murkier by the minute, Rami Malek sinking so deep into the role that his own poisonous flowers start to bend away in confusion, and Bond survives numerous un-survivable moments to set up the final showdown.

The action scenes are well-staged, crisply edited, and keep on coming. None are necessarily original, but good quality supports the overwhelming quantity. Nothing justifies the mammoth running time, but to its credit, the film is also never boring. Bond, Paloma, and Nomi gatecrashing then escaping a convention of Spectre assassins stands as the most memorable highlight.

Amidst all the bullets, explosions, and roaring engines, No Time To Die also keeps an eye on the people. A rare undercurrent of poignancy flows through Bond's connections to Felix and Madeleine, while one monumental character-driven twist succeeds in deepening Bond's legacy.

Now in his early fifties, Daniel Craig bows out at the right time. He is at his best in the more expressive scenes where a history of doling out death casts a long dark shadow. Bond may have no time to die, but he finally appreciates all the time in the world.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Tuesday, 21 September 2021

Movie Review: The Command (2018)

A drama about the Kursk submarine disaster, The Command (also known as Kursk and Kursk: The Last Mission) is a well-constructed and multi-faceted recreation of a tragedy at sea.

In 2000, Captain-Lieutenant Mikhail Averin (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his crew mates celebrate a colleague's wedding. They then depart on the submarine Kursk out of Vidyayevo port in Murmansk to participate in Russian Northern Fleet naval exercises in the Barents Sea. The crew members notice one of the torpedoes running hot, but their superiors ignore the warning. The faulty torpedo explodes, triggering a catastrophic secondary explosion of all other munitions. The Kursk sinks.

Mikhail leads a group of 23 survivors who take refuge in a sealed-off compartment. Admiral Andrey Grudzinsky (Peter Simonischek) leads the rescue efforts, but is hampered by inadequate and poorly maintained equipment. Back in Murmansk, Mikhail's pregnant wife Tanya (Léa Seydoux) and other relatives desperately seek information but are stonewalled by navy officials.

Commodore David Russell (Colin Firth) of the British Navy is monitoring the disaster and offers to help, but the Russian bureaucracy represented by Admiral Petrenko (Max von Sydow) refuses foreign assistance. Meanwhile the survivors face cold, wet and cramped conditions, and dwindling oxygen supplies.

Directed by Denmark's Thomas Vinterberg, The Command adapts the book A Time To Die by Robert Moore with grim realism. The Kursk tragedy resulted in 118 deaths, and the film approaches the drama with a clear-eyed objective to trace events and decisions above and below the waves. Once the calamity strikes the mood is almost uniformly grim, and the sense of impending doom only tightens as rescue efforts flounder.

The Robert Rodat screenplay invests plenty of time on-board the stricken vessel as the explosion survivors struggle to stay alive. These scenes explore the limits of human endurance, acts of heroism and camaraderie coming together to solve problems, momentarily raise spirits, and expand the survival window.

But events on the surface are not shortchanged. The perspective of the families is expressed through Tanya's ordeal, the inept response of the bumbling Russian command is painfully exposed, and the British Navy's readiness to assist represents the international community's willingness to set politics aside and attempt to save lives.

The multiple viewpoints provide relief from on-board claustrophobia, and ensure the two hours of running time never drag. The cameras of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle capture the cramped and crumbled conditions on the stricken submarine, the grey aesthetic of Tanya's environment, and some impressive flotilla landscapes.

Matthias Schoenaerts leaves an impression as an even-tempered leader maintaining his wits to focus on the immediacy of the crisis. But while The Command salutes individual moments of courage, this is a story about the damage caused by the immense failure of big machinery.

All Ace Black Movie Blog Reviews are here.

Wednesday, 18 April 2018

Movie Review: Spectre (2015)

The twenty-fourth installment in the James Bond franchise, Spectre is tired, bloated and devoid of ideas and enthusiasm.

On a rogue mission in Mexico City, Bond (Daniel Craig) destroys a city block but eliminates terrorist leader Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona). With the entirety of the 007 program threatened with closure due to the bureaucratic careerism of the Joint Intelligence Service head C (Andrew Scott), M (Ralph Fiennes) grounds Bond. But he anyway gets assistance from Q (Ben Whishaw) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) to continue his investigation.

In Rome Bond seduces Sciarra's widow Lucia (Monica Bellucci), and infiltrates a meeting of a secret terrorist organization chaired by mastermind Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), who was thought dead and knows Bond since childhood. Bond tracks down Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), who broke away from Oberhauser, and then White's daughter Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). She reveals that Oberhauser is the head of Spectre, a consortium of criminals looking to control the world through terrorist acts and the massive harvesting of information from all the world's leading intelligence agencies.

The second outing for Sam Mendes as Bond director, Spectre finds the series sinking to another unfortunate low point. Despite the usual location hopping and well-staged action set-pieces, the film never kicks into gear, and ambles along with a long yawn. At the heart of the many problems is Daniel Craig exuding stony faced boredom and contributing to an emotionless core. But Spectre's troubles extend well beyond a disinterested star.

The running time of 148 minutes is inexcusable. There simply is nowhere near enough plot to justify two and half hours of screen time, and the bloat is painfully obvious from the first pre-credit scene. Bond's tussle with Sciarra on board a helicopter takes forever, the two men punching it out for long minutes, sucking the energy out of the sequence. The pattern continues throughout, every chase and every fight prolonged to conceal the scarcity of meaningful content.

Worse still is the lack of any tension, drama or sense of genuine urgency. The worst that the bad guys come up with is sitting around a dark table discussing data breaches. Terrorist explosions take place on background television screens, while Christoph Waltz, first revealed as Oberhauser and then Blofeld, is a toothless bystander under both incarnations, his elaborate base in the desert used for...what, exactly? The shared history of Oberhauser and Bond is a muddled backstory, Mendes committing the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing what is supposed to be the emotional apex of the film.

Monica Belluci is wasted in a couple of scenes, while the sparkling Léa Seydoux emerges as one of the film's few sources of energy, almost overcoming the 18 year age difference between her and Craig. The Sam Smith moany and falsetto-hampered theme song Writing's on the Wall is one of the worst in the history of the franchise.

What remains is Bond on an unsanctioned mission to chase down information, his next destination and target barely explained as the film jettisons basic narrative exposition in favour of snazzy visuals. With the evil British intelligence desk jockeys angling to kill the 007 program, Spectre appears to give them a good reason to do so.