In “The Space Between Us” Gardner Elliot (Asa Butterfield) is a regular kid with the usual litany of teen problems. Slightly nerdy and a tad socially awkward, he passes the time texting with Tulsa (Britt Robertson), a pretty girl he’s never actually met. You see, Gardner is a normal teen in all respects except one—he lives on Mars.
Raised by scientists on the Red Planet after his astronaut mother died in childbirth Gardner lives in a settlement called East Texas founded by scientist Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman). As the only human ever born on Mars he’s alone, save for an R2-D2 clone called Centaur, astronaut/guardian Kendra (Carla Gugino) and a team of scientists. He longs for information about his mother so when the chance to return to Earth comes up on his sixteenth birthday he jumps at it, eager to track down Tulsa and find his biological father.
On Earth he marvels at the colour of the sky, the feel of the ocean but worries that he’ll be sent back to Mars before he has the chance to really live. He escapes, on a quest to find Tulsa and daddy, a man he never met. The boy who fell to Earth finds Tulsa and together they go off in search of papa with Shepherd and Kendra hot on their tails.
Is “The Space Between Us” a sci-fi film? Ish! Is it a teen adventure? Almost! Is it a doomed teen movie? Sorta! A romance? Not really! A fish out of water flick? Kinda! Is it a road trip? Maybe! It’s all those things and more wrapped up in an underwhelming Young Adult story.
At the centre of it all is Butterfield whose wide eyes give him a slightly otherworldly look, perfectly suited to play Tulsa’s favourite Martian. Robertson is spunky and even if everything that happens doesn’t really make sense, the two leads are appealing.
They stand in stark contrast to Oldman chews the scenery with unusual gusto. He over does it all the way, emoting as if acting was going to be declared illegal the next day and he’d never have a chance to do it again.
“The Space Between Us” a.k.a. “The Loneliest Boy On Mars” has some good moments but in its attempt to be all things—see paragraph four of this review—clutters up a story that would have been better served by streamlining the story and tone.
The new Kevin Costner movie “Criminal” is crying out for a subtitle. “Criminal” is such a drab, nondescript name. It doesn’t tell you anything about the movie or grab the eye. How about “Criminal: How a Psychopath Found Redemption and Revenge.” It’s grabby and sums up everything you need to know about this deeply silly movie.
The movie begins with a cameo by everybody’s favourite Canadian Ryan Reynolds as Bill Pope, an undercover intelligence officer for the CIA. He alone knows the location of Jan Stroop, a computer whiz (Michael Pitt) who has hacked into the US’s military computers and now controls the world’s fate. The CIA desperately wants to find Pope and Stroop but unfortunately evil-doer and all round bad guy Hagbardaka Heimbahl (Jordi Mollà) got to Pope first. After some very unpleasant back-and-forth the steel jawed agent refuses to give up any information and is left for dead.
Here’s where it gets weird. CIA mucky-muck Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) finds the grievously wounded Pope and with a ‘never say die’ attitude keeps the man alive long enough so scientist Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones) can transplant the comatose CIA agent’s memories into the mind of another person. “Can you or can’t you transport memories from one live mammal to another?”
Here’s where it gets weirder. In their infinite wisdom the CIA chooses death-row psychopath Jericho Stewart (Costner) as the memory recipient. “He does not understand society or how people are supposed to behave,” says Wells. Perfect. What could go wrong? Jericho must come to grips with the two personalities swirling around his brain—“It’s like my skull is being crushed from the inside,” he says.—as he slowly develops emotions and enough awareness to help and not hinder law enforcement in their search for Stroop.
By the time Pope’s daughter (Lara Decaro) teaches Jericho to play Christmas carols on piano “Criminal’s” cheese factor needle is bouncing uncontrollably into the red.
Remember the face-transplant surgery movie “Face/Off”? It was a silly movie, but at least it made sense in its own oddball way. Unlike the face swap film, however, “Criminal” has no internal logic. Things happen simply because the story requires them to happen and not because they make sense. The leaps of faith required to buy into “Criminal’s” story would give Evel Knievel vertigo. Suspension of disbelief is fine, and a time-honoured way of enjoying a movie, but you have to care about the story and characters in order to go along for the ride. Unfortunately not even this group of old pros can elevate this material.
When Jericho appears to develop feelings for Pope’s wife Jill (Gal “Wonder Women” Gadot) he expresses himself with the most unintentionally funny line of the year. “I know what that ‘love’ word is supposed to mean but…” It’s straight out of a b-movie, a b-movie that should be called “Criminal: How a Psychopath Found Redemption and Revenge.”
Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death has more in common with its predecessor, the 2012 chiller Woman in Black, than just a title and source material.
The first film starred Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself, in the lead role. The spooky new movie about the strange goings-on at a haunted house during World War II co-stars Potter alum Helen McCrory and Adrian Rawlins.
McCrory, who plays Angel of Death’s uptight schoolmarm, was pregnant when Potter producers offered her the role of pure-blood witch Bellatrix Lestrange in Order of the Phoenix. She passed and the part went to Helena Bonham Carter but two years later she jumped at the chance to play Narcissa, Bellatrix’s sister and the mother of Draco Malfoy, in The Half-Blood Prince.
Co-star Rawlins is the shadowy Dr. Rhodes in Angel of Death, but is best known as the father of Harry in seven Potter movies. Years before playing James Potter the actor starred in the original Woman in Black TV adaptation as Arthur, the role Radcliffe played in the recent remake.
Over the ten years they were in production it seems like the Potter films employed almost all of the British Actors’ Equity Association. Everyone from Ralph Fiennes, Richard Harris and Gary Oldman to Maggie Smith, Imelda Staunton and Emma Thompson appeared in the series. When Bill Nighy was cast in The Deathly Hallows he said. “I am no longer the only English actor not to be in Harry Potter and I am very pleased.”
Less well known than the British superstars that peppered the Potter cast are some of the supporting players, many of which have gone on to breakout success without Harry.
Tom Felton will likely always be associated with cowardly bully Draco Malfoy, so it’s not surprising he played the spineless bad guy utters the famous “damn dirty ape” line,” in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Before he starred opposite Rachel McAdams in the time travel romance About Time Domhnall Gleeson was Curse-Breaker Bill Weasley in The Deathly Hallows. The son of actor Brendan Gleeson is on his way to household name status with a role as an Imperial officer who defects to the Republic in J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
The biggest breakout Potter alum has to be Robert Pattinson. He’s best known as sparkling vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise but he first appeared as Cedric Diggory in The Goblet of Fire. “The day before [the movie came out] I was just sitting in Leicester Square,” he said, “happily being ignored by everyone. Then suddenly strangers are screaming your name. Amazing.”
Giant labyrinthine puzzles are almost as old as mankind: Prehistoric mazes were built as traps for malevolent spirits, while in medieval times the labyrinth represented a path to God. But recently, the idea of people struggling through a complicated network of paths has made for some striking visuals in movies.
This weekend, The Maze Runner sets much of its action inside a gigantic maze where frightening mechanical monsters called Grievers wander, tormenting Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) as he navigates the maze to pick up clues that help him piece together memories of his past. The sci-fi story is just the latest to feature a maze as a major plot point, but just as Labyrinth’s Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is warned, “nothing is as it seems” in these movie puzzles.
Remember Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? Like Thomas in The Maze Runner, the boy wizard has to make it through a maze (in this instance to find the Triwizard Cup), but instead of fighting magical creatures, this hedge maze is magical; shape shifting to make the journey extra difficult. The 1972 horror film Tales from the Crypt contained an even more sinister maze.
Made up of five stories, the film culminated with the tale of a labyrinth told with razor-sharp wit. Set in a home for the blind, the patients get even with the institute’s cruel director by placing him in the centre of a maze of narrow corridors lined with razor blades. It’s a cutting edge story, that, according to besthorrormovies.com “rivals the ‘death traps’ of Saw and ‘tortures’ of Hostel while only showing a single small cut of the flesh.”
In The Shining, the axe-wielding father Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) chases his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) through the Overlook Hotel’s hedge maze. The quick-thinking boy escapes by retracing his steps, confusing his maniacal dad. The documentary Room 237 offers up a number of interpretations of what the maze and Danny’s escape represents. One theory suggests it reflects Greek hero Theseus’ slaying of the Minotaur and escape from the labyrinth, while another speculates it’s a metaphor for conquering repression. Whatever the subtext, it remains one of director Stanley Kubrick’s most tense scenes.
And finally, Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula sees Lucy (Sadie Frost) sleepwalking through a garden maze, chased by Dracula (Gary Oldman) in wolfman form while Pan’s Labyrinth features a maze as a place of safety for Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to evade her attacker.
“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” is a different kind of blockbuster. It has all the elements of the usual summer fare— it’s a sequel, things blow up and, if that wasn’t enough, also features an ape on horseback —but it takes more risks than Optimus Prime could shake Michael Bay at. About half of it is done in ape sign language (with subtitles) and it’s not chock-a-block with action. Instead it takes time building characters and motivations so when the wild ape-on-human action begins it feels earned and it feels epic.
Set ten years after Rise of the Planet of the Apes saw Caesar (Andy Serkis) break free from a San Fransisco primate sanctuary and start an ape uprising, the middle-aged chimpanzee is the leader of a large population of genetically evolved apes. Most of humankind was wiped out by a pandemic of ALZ-113—a “simian flu” virus that speeds up the rebuilding of brain cells in apes but is deadly to humans—but when a small band of humans scout a water source near the ape camp a monkey wrench is thrown into the fragile peace between homo sapiens and simians is threatened. “Apes do not want war,” says Caesar, but a battle—gorilla warfare?—for control is inevitable.
To riff off of the old Superman tagline, “You will believe an ape can speak.” The special effects are amazing, but beyond the pixel manipulation that brings Caesar and company to vivid life, there are remarkable performances that, for lack of a better phrase, humanize the apes. These aren’t the erudite apes of the Roddy McDowell era, with vocabularies that would impress even Conrad Black, but simian characters that behave somewhere midway between pure instinct and higher intelligence.
Gary Oldman, as a human protectionist, Jason Clarke as the human who reaches out to Caesar in the spirit of friendship and cooperation and Keri Russell as his resourceful wife are all terrific, but I went bananas for these apes.
Beyond the flashy special effects and Serkis’s understated but powerful performance—this is the kind of performance that could convince the Academy to consider “motion capture” acting for inclusion in the Oscar acting categories—is a smart movie about race, gun usage and xenophobia. Its masked in allegory and, well, a story about talking apes, but it doesn’t shy away from big ideas and that is the thing that transforms it from a run-of-the-mill air conditioner flick to a thought provoking night and exciting at the movies.
If the original RoboCop movie is any indication, sometimes life does imitate art.
The 1987 film shows a crime-ridden and financially ruined Detroit turning to a part-human, part-robot cop to police the streets. As far as I know, no cyborgs have ever patrolled the neighbourhoods of Motor City, but 27 years after the movie hit theatres, Michigan’s most populous city declared Chapter Nine, becoming the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.
Prescient? Perhaps.
Fosterwealth.com wrote, “With Detroit’s bankruptcy, we’ve seen much of RoboCop come to pass,” while screenwriter Ed Neumeier remembers a note written in the margin of his copy of the script, “The future left Detroit behind.”
The writer also told CNN, “We are now living in the world that I was proposing in RoboCop.”
The original Peter Weller movie lived at the centre of popular culture when it came out, spawning two sequels, a television series, two animated shows, a mini-series, video games and several comic books.
And today RoboCop is still a going concern.
Later this year a 10-foot-tall tribute statue will be unveiled in Detroit and this week a remake will become the first RoboCop movie to be released in IMAX.
The new RoboCop is an all-star affair, with Swedish star Joel Kinnaman as the title character and appearances from Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson and Jay Baruchel. Just don’t expect a straight-up copy. “I’m not trying to remake RoboCop,” says director José Padilha, “because I don’t think RoboCop is remake-able.”
Instead, Kinnaman says, the new film will be “realistic,” and “will have a satirical quality… It’s going to have that wink in the eye, but we’re not looking to replicate the [original director Paul] Verhoeven tone.”
The one thing the two films have in common for sure is that while both are set in Detroit, neither used the city as the principal shooting location. Verhoeven filmed his movie in Pennsylvania and Texas whereas the new movie was lensed mainly in Toronto and Vancouver.
Even criminals love RoboCop
Another incident illustrates how the film aided real life law enforcement… at least once.
A robbery suspect/movie fan in Sacramento, Calif., tried to elude police by hiding out in a movie theatre showing RoboCop. He became so immersed in the film he didn’t notice the cops evacuating the audience, leaving him alone and busted when the lights came on.
“Kung Fu Panda 2’s” all star mix of action, slapstick and furry fists of fury makes for a mighty kid friendly martial arts movie.
The story begins with a fable about Shen (Gary Oldman), a peacock hungry for revenge after being kicked out of his kingdom by his parents. Unless he and his fire breathing weapon are stopped it could mean the end of Kung Fu, but how can Kung Fu stop a weapon that can stop Kung Fu? That is the question Po (Jack Black) and the rest of the Furious Five (Angelina Jolie as Tigress, Jackie Chan as Monkey, Lucy Liu as Viper, Seth Rogen as Mantis and David Cross as Crane) must ponder as they try and save China and their sacred martial art.
“Kung Fu Panda 2” doesn’t exactly improve on the original, a surprise hit from 2008, but it maintains status quo. The new film is a little sketchier with the story—there is a subplot about Po’s real parents that only appears to have been included to add some heart to the mostly action storyline and to set up a threequel—which seems to take a backseat to the frenetic, but kid friendly, action scenes, but it’s buoyed by some high kicking animation and good voice work from the leads, particularly Jack Black and Oldman, as Shen, the silky voiced villain.
The 3D doesn’t get in the way of the beautiful animation, and actually adds a layer of excitement to the action scenes. The animation, both in the present day scenes and Po’s vibrant anime inspired sequences, is a cut above any other non-Pixar work out there.
The film, like all good martial arts films is heavy on the action scenes, but the best stuff isn’t the big set pieces but the smaller set pieces. When Po, disguised as a parade dragon eats a baddie and then digests him and… excretes him out the back end of the costume it’s imaginative and kid-tastic fun. The wilder scenes are nicely put together but the smaller intimate scenes have more punch.
“Kung Fu Panda 2” is just one of 27 sequels hitting theatres this year, but so far it’s one of the better ones.
The word espionage is most commonly used in relation to spy stories. It conjures up images of James Bond, exotic locations and wild action scenes. But in many movies espionage has little to do with shaken not stirred martinis and Bond girls, and more to do with corporate secrets and intrigue.
This weekend, Paranoia explores the world of big business espionage as Adam Cassidy (Liam Hemsworth) finds himself doing dangerous double duty in the billion dollar world of high tech.
As an entry level employee, his boss Nicholas Wyatt (Gary Oldman) promises him a corner office, among other things, if he will spy on rival tech giant Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford).
That movie is set in the world of bits and bytes but corporate espionage comes in as many styles as that ergonomically designed chair in the CEO’s office.
As the title would suggest, the movie Duplicity is ripe with lies and underhanded dealings. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen are former government spies now working in the private sector. Despite being intimately involved, they work for rival shampoo companies. It’s a romantic comedy about undercover activities. Imagine if Rock Hudson and Doris Day had starred in Mission Impossible and you get the idea.
Genetics is the currency in New Rose Hotel, a 1999 Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe film based on a short story by William Gibson. They play corporate moles hired to influence a Japanese bio-engineering expert to defect from one corporation to another. To seduce Dr. Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano) they hire a prostitute (Asia Argento) to win his affections. The plan doesn’t work, and neither does the movie, really, but it’s worth a look for the flamboyant performances from Walken and Dafoe.
Finally, back in the world of high tech espionage, the Ben Affleck thriller Paycheck is a good little movie released at the wrong time. Wedged between Gigli and Jersey Girl, it came out at the height of Bennifer and the nadir of audience interest in Affleck as an actor.
Based on a Philip K Dick short story, Affleck plays Jennings, a genius programmer hired by corporations to reverse engineer new products, recreating them anew. His work is so secretive that after he’s done, his memory is wiped clean. The chicanery really begins when his employer (Aaron Eckhart) pulls a double cross, leaving Jennings with no money, no memory and a world of trouble.
Eli (Denzel Washington) is a regular post apocalyptic man. He walks the Earth, heading west, stopping only occasionally to read his book, dine on a meal of hairless cat, try on some dead man’s shoes and reign bloody carnage down on anyone who tries to stop him from enjoying his simple pleasures.
Like “The Road,” another film about a man making his way through a dystopian world, in “The Book of Eli,” we never find out how the world ended. We’re told it’s been thirty years since “the flash” and since then everything has pretty much fallen apart. Rogue gangs roam the desolate landscape, cannibalism is rampant—you can tell the cannibals because their hands shake from eating too much human flesh—and there are only small pockets of life left. One such pocket is a town run by Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a despot desperate to lay his hands on Eli’s prize possession—a book.
As the title would suggest “The Book of Eli” is V-E-R-Y Old Testament. Call it Neo Christian Post Apocalyptic if you like, but like the good book that lies at the center of the story, the movie is full of prophets, morals and righteous smiting. This is a metaphysical story with a few action scenes (but only a few, the trailer implies this is an all-out action flick and that is simply not the case) about the power of religion to both inspire and control people’s hearts.
Eli uses the book (SPOILER: it’s the last copy of the bible) as comfort and a reason to stay alive. Perhaps he’s a prophet, perhaps not, but he is the keeper of the book and it is a responsibility he takes very seriously even if he doesn’t realize why.
Carnegie, on the other hand, understands the power of the book’s words to, as he says, strike fear into the “heart of the weak and desperate.” For him it is the key to the complete control of the citizens of his town. He is, very likely, a Republican.
Bringing this world to, well, if not exactly vivid life—it is shot with a color palette that includes grey and various other shades of grey—is Washington and Oldman. Denzel is a bit too subdued to really sell the idea that he is a coiled spring of righteous power but that’s OK because Gary Oldman keeps things lively, chewing the scenery every time he is on screen. He’s a Jim Jones character, equal parts charisma and menace and the film benefits from his presence.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the female leads. As mother and daughter Jennifer Beals and Mila Kunis are the film’s acting Achilles heel. Kunis, in particular is miscast. Despite providing some visual interest, she is out of her depth here and brings little of the charm or magnetism she displayed in last year’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshal.”
Better is Tom Waits in an awesome cameo as a shop keeper who trades in contraband, like KFC wetnaps and old Zippo lighters. These items take on an increased value in this bleak world and Waits, with his craggily face and scorched vocal chords, brings increased value to his brief scenes.
“The Book of Eli” is a strange movie. It’s being sold as an actioner, but is actually a timely movie about how religion can be used for both good and evil. It may have been more effective with a bit more action and a tad less philosophy and without its series of false endings and while it may be filled with thought provoking ideas it doesn’t feel well enough thought out to work as a whole.
