Movie Review: Hot Fuzz (2007)

Genre: Comedy Action  

Director: Edgar Wright  

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton  

Running Time: 121 minutes  

Synopsis: Overachieving Constable Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) of London's Metro Police is promoted to sergeant and shuffled off to the sleepy village of Sandford, Gloucestershire. He finds the local police service under Inspector Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent) happy to generally do nothing as long as Sandford is competing for the Best Village award. Nicholas partners with Constable Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), the Inspector's son, and meets local supermarket owner Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton) and other influential members of the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance. When a series of grisly "accidents" claim multiple lives, Nicholas is the only officer to believe a murderer is on the loose.

What Works Well: With Bad Boys II and Point Break as two favourite inspiration sources, this send-up of police action movies leverages all the cliches into over-the-top and mostly on-target comedy. Director Edgar Wright and his co-writer and star Simon Pegg deploy exaggerated violence and manic editing to also skewer traditional quaint English countryside attitudes. Pegg keeps a straight face as the way-too-serious cop who can never switch off, but humanity rises out of the carnage through the friendship he forges with Nick Frost's Danny Butterman. The supporting cast animates the pulse of a village with the darkest of underbellies.

What Does Not Work As Well: With focus meandering towards solving a slasher mystery, the running time drags on, and a couple of ultimately pointless chase scenes run out of breath. The all-guns-blazing final act leans more towards excessive action than wit, and is cluttered by a few too many barely defined side-characters.

Conclusion: Forget the gory deaths, find the missing swan.



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Movie Review: The Lion In Winter (1968)

An insufferable talk-fest, The Lion In Winter is one prolonged argument between distinctly unlikeable family members.

It's Christmas in 1183, and King Henry II (Peter O'Toole) is turning 50 and thinking about who should succeed him onto the throne. He convenes a family gathering consisting of his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn) and sons Richard (Anthony Hopkins), Geoffrey (John Castle) and John (Nigel Terry). Also at the gathering are Alais (Jane Merrow), who is Henry's mistress but promised in marriage to Richard, and the young King Philip II (Timothy Dalton) of France.

Henry and Eleanor are estranged and he keeps her imprisoned. She wants Richard, a warrior, to become the new king, while Henry favours the weakling John. Geoffrey is a schemer but no one considers him worthy of the throne. Meanwhile Alais and the French Aquatine lands controlled by the King become pawns in the fervent succession debates.

The Lion In Winter is a film where family members take turns seething at each other before turning to conspiratorial whispers, hugs, and expressions of intense but often insincere love-hate sentiment. Rage and shouting erupt as routine punctuation marks. Then everyone moves to the next room and starts over. James Golding adapted his own play, and director Anthony Harvey essentially points the cameras at the rampant theatrics and allows the acting talent to talk non-stop, voice volumes often targeting the back row of the top balcony.

The endless series of conversations circle the same topics of succession, conspiracy and marriage for an interminable 134 minutes. Not one of the seven characters is remotely likable or sympathetic. Six are power hungry, phony, and take great joy in undermining each other, while John is a plain dolt. As such, who scores petty points in every round of debate is of no consequence; they all deserve to suffer, and moreover, they all deserve each other. The dialogue is a lot less witty than it thinks it is, and the drama sinks under the self-imposed weight of horrible people plumbing new depths of contempt.

The single setting is a chateau in Chinon, and the successive interactions take place in various candle-lit rooms that essentially all look the same. The performances are on the blatantly melodramatic side of committed, but a modicum of joy is derived from Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn hamming it up. Undoubtedly willing, they anyway drown in the deluge of drudgerous dialogue.

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Movie Review: Licence To Kill (1989)

Timothy Dalton's second and final outing as James Bond sends the agent on a personal, violent mission. Without breaking much new ground, Licence To Kill is powered by a massive engine of action and fuelled by a growling sense of fury.

Bond (Dalton) is in Florida to attend the wedding of his buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison), now with the Drug Enforcement Agency, to fiancée Della (Priscilla Barnes). On the way to the ceremony, Leiter and Bond take an unexpected aerial detour to capture South American drug lord Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi), who has come out of hiding to reclaim girlfriend Lupe Lamora (Talisa Soto) from another lover. But it doesn't take long for Sanchez to bribe DEA agent Ed Killifer (Everett McGill) and make his escape, and he sends henchman Dario (Benicio del Toro) to extract revenge on his captors: Della is killed and Leiter is seriously hurt.

When MI6 refuses to approve Bond going after Sanchez, he splits from the agency, and embarks on an unsanctioned mission. Bond teams up with Leiter's friend Sharkey (Frank McRae) and tracks down Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe), a marine biologist using his fake seaborne research activities as cover for importing Sanchez' drugs. Bond then joins forces with pilot and former agent Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), and they travel to Isthmus City to try and infiltrate Sanchez' operation. But the drug lord owns the town, including the bank and the casino, and even with the surreptitious help of Q (Desmond Llewelyn) it will not be easy for Bond to take down a complex drug manufacturing and exporting business, which Sanchez is about to expand to Asia.

In his fifth and final outing as Bond director, John Glen veers the series towards a darker, more violent place. While not new to the action genre, introducing more brutal elements to Bond gives Licence To Kill an interesting edge. One man dies by exploding on-screen due to sudden depressurization, another is devoured by a shark, and a third is crunched up by a giant shredder. There is plenty of visible blood and gore compared to the usual sanitized Bond adventure, as both Glen and Dalton grit their teeth and leave their final bloody marks on the series. The result is a more serious tone, consistent with Dalton's rather humourless persona.

Licence To Kill is also distinguished by being one of the few missions in which Bond is the driving force, prompted into action by the need to impart personal revenge. He decides to go after the empire of Sanchez to seek frontier justice on behalf of Felix and Della, breaking with direct orders from M, without the usual "two weeks time off" wink and a nudge approval. Far fetched as it is, Bond's seething anger creates a different emotional resonance to the movie.

The climax is also relatively unique, Bond attempting to stop four large tanker trucks filled with a cocaine and gasoline mixture as they hurtle down winding roads in a free-wheeling high speed escape.

Talisa Soto as Lupe Lamora and Carey Lowell as Pam Bouvier provide Bond with a brunette and a blonde to cavort with. Both are reasonably resourceful, and the usually flippant Bond finds himself in a bit of a curious lust triangle.

Despite the points of interest in the movie, Licence To Kill also struggles against several weaknesses. Dalton is generally unengaging, going through the movie with a single set expression on his face, whether he is angry or jubilant. The fall-out with M and MI6 is pushed to ridiculous levels, Bond immediately engaged in a shooting match with his former employers. And there is a superfluous fake televangelist, Professor Joe Butcher (Wayne Newton), needlessly worked into the Sanchez operation, the Bond franchise taking cheap shots at an all too easy target.

Even on a personal mission Bond will always have his Licence To Kill, and here he puts it to use with a grim determination to display the disturbing violence that can accompany killing with extreme prejudice.

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Movie Review: The Living Daylights (1987)

The launch of the post-Roger Moore era of James Bond adventures is well-intentioned, but nevertheless results in a painful debacle. Timothy Dalton's turn as a more intense and darker Bond is hopelessly undermined by one of the worst plots in the series.

In Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, Soviet General Georgi Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé) arranges a defection to the west, facilitated by British agents Bond (Dalton) and Saunders (Thomas Wheatley). Bond's assignment is to neutralize KGB sniper Kara Milovy (Maryam d'Abo), a classical cellist, but he senses that she is a rank amateur in the sniper game and spares her life. During his debriefing with British intelligence Koskov reveals that the KGB's General Leonid Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies) is intent in starting a tit-for-tat assassination duel with the west, and prods the British to eliminate Pushkin first. Assisted by henchman Necros (Andreas Wisniewski), Koskov then arranges his escape from England.

Bond suspects that Koskov is behind the plot to force the British and Soviet intelligence services into an unnecessary war to eliminate Pushkin. Bond tracks down Kara, who turns out to be Koskov's girlfriend, and then goes after Koskov, who is in cahoots with Tangier-based American arms trader Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker) to profit from the sale of advanced weaponry to the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Koskov also wants to profit from a large opium deal, paid for by diamonds, with the Afghan Mujahideen. Bond and Kara team up with guerrilla leader Kamran Shah (Art Malik) to thwart the plan.

Outlandish fake defections, amateur sniper girlfriends, arms trading, illicit diamonds, adversaries conducting opium deals, agent assassinations, and the Afghanistan war: The Living Daylights is all over the place in a plot that grows more incoherent and less relevant by the minute. And in Koskov and Whitaker, the screenplay stumbles upon two bland and buffoonish villains, neither of them remotely intimidating. A sapless title song by one hit wonder Norwegian group a-Ha does not help.

However, in the central role Dalton is a marked improvement over Moore's final few outings. He brings a welcome serious determination to Bond, his personality more brooding, the interactions with M more abrupt and grim. Dalton is also physically much more believable as Bond, and performs many of his stunts to reclaim a sense of personal danger and realism.

But when it comes to actual acting and demonstrating romance, he is stiff and uncomfortable, director John Glen unable to liberate any natural sophistication from his new Bond. The scenes with Dalton and d'Abo stumbling across Europe are excruciatingly uncomfortable, Dalton's attempts at acting suave landing with a thud, and d'Abo coming across like a giddy teenager swept into a school trip with no defined purpose.

The Living Daylights is unique in depriving Bond of any on-screen intimate moments, the sexual coupling at best implied and more than likely awkward. Dalton's dourness and abject lack of charm do not earn the pleasures of a partner in a luxurious king-sized bed.

The action scenes are prolonged way beyond their content and materiality. Bond and Kara escape across the snowy mountains by sledding on her cello case in an interminable chase, while a sort of a climactic battle at a Soviet airbase goes on forever, Bond inexplicably taking off in a cargo plane rigged to explode, only to be followed by an equally tedious fight to the death between Bond and Necros.

Despite getting younger and fitter, The Living Daylights commits an unforgivable Bond sin: it is resoundingly unmemorable.

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Movie Review: Agatha (1979)

A stylish thriller filling a mysterious gap in Agatha Christie's life with a fictional tale inspired by her devious writing, Agatha blossoms into an engaging story of unlikely love emerging from the desolation of depression.

It's 1926, and the marriage of famous author Agatha Christie (Vanessa Redgrave) is falling apart.  Her husband Colonel Archibald Christie (Timothy Dalton) is having an almost open affair with his secretary Nancy Neele (Celia Gregory), and demands a divorce. Upon learning that Neele is spending a few days at a posh countryside health spa in Harrogate, Agatha checks into the same spa under an assumed identity and without leaving a trace as to her whereabouts.

Chasing after Agatha is London-based American reporter Wally Stanton (Dustin Hoffman), and through clever sleuthing he is able to track her down. The two begin a tentative relationship, and Stanton suspects that behind the obvious sadness Agatha is up to something nefarious: she displays a keen interest in the electronic equipment used to power a therapeutic chair at the spa. Despite Agatha and Stanton falling in love, her personal demons drive her towards an act of desperate destruction involving Ms. Neele.

The real Agatha Christie did disappear for eleven days in 1926 following the collapse of her marriage, and evidence suggests she did check into a Harrogate spa under a fake name. From there, screenwriters Kathleen Tynan and Arthur Hopcraft take over and construct an elaborate puzzle to fill in the gaps, adding a twist in the tail worthy of Christie's thrillers.

Redgrave portrays Agatha as utterly haunted by the failure of her personal life, rendering her professional success meaningless. Redgrave effectively conveys a mixture of detachment, despair and manipulation, Agatha allowing her mind to construct a solution to her personal problems using the methods of her fictional thrillers.

In a turning of the tables, Hoffman slightly overplays the role of the suave American reporter, neither the nationality nor the profession being particularly well known for the height of sophistication. Nevertheless, Hoffman remains steely eyed in his determination to find Christie and then win her heart, and he demonstrates a deft touch with the ever-present cigarette, and more impressively, cigarette smoke.

The height difference between Hoffman (5' 5") and Redgrave (5' 11" plus heels) is unfortunately awkward. She towers over him in a few scenes, stripping away some of the authority that Stanton is supposed to project.

Director Michael Apted is in his element confidently steering a character-driven mystery to its conclusion, the efficient running length of under 100 minutes ensuring a welcome nimbleness of execution. Apted and cinematographer Vittoro Storaro bathe Agatha in luxurious pale greys, browns and blues, creating the impression of a gracefully aged sepia toned picture befitting the exuberant 1920s setting.

Agatha is engaging without being completely immersive, the movie a good metaphor for Christie's books: clever and entertaining, but perhaps just lacking the necessary depth to brush perfection.

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