SYOPSIS: in “How to Train Your Dragon,” a new live-action remake of the 2010 animated film of the same name, a young Viking boy named Hiccup goes against his village’s traditional belief that dragons are “the unholy offspring of lightning and death itself,” when he befriends a Night Fury dragon named Toothless. “Dad, I can’t kill dragons,” Hiccup admits to his father, Stoick the Vast.
CAST: Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Nick Frost, Julian Dennison, Gabriel Howell, Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn, Ruth Codd, Peter Serafinowicz, Murray McArthur, Gerard Butler. Written and directed by Dean DeBlois.
REVIEW: At the movies, it seems that everything old is new again.
Even if it’s not that old.
It was just 15 years ago that the animated “How to Train Your Dragon,” based on the 2003 novel by Cressida Cowell, earned two Oscar nominations and launched a franchise that includes sequels, short films, a television series, a video game and an arena show adaptation featuring 24 animatronic dragons.
This weekend it gets a live-action treatment that includes all the familiar characters, situations plus 27 brand new minutes of story.
It’s new, but it isn’t necessarily improved.
On the plus side Canadian director and writer Dean DeBlois, who has been involved with the franchise as a director since the first film, brings a darker tone to the story. It’s still family friendly (although the finale with the Queen Dragon may haunt younger viewers) but the live action brings with it more exciting aerial action scenes, even if the CGI is sometimes murky in the big sequences.
It also adds complexity to the characters, particularly in the relationship between Hiccup (a terrific Mason Thames) and his father (Gerard Butler, who returns from the animated films).
Also welcome is the return of the emotional core of the original. The animated film’s allegory to 9/11 feels even more poignant today as a message of tolerance. As Hiccup cuts through his father’s Viking jingoism with kindness and compassion, the movie reverberates with the franchise’s humanistic themes.
The heart of the film, the relationship between the boy and his dragon, beats loudly. Thames is up against it, reinterpreting Jay Baruchel’s classic voice work, but he brings an earnestness to the character that works.
Toothless the friendly dragon is lovingly rendered in photorealistic CGI, and even with no dialogue, expresses himself as easily as any of the real-life actors.
On the downside, it feels been-there-done-that. Several scenes are shot-for-shot from the original, which, depending on your level of fandom, will either be an homage or a display of a lack of originality.
“How to Train Your Dragon” will likely entertain original fans, and may win over some new ones, but I missed the snappier pacing of the original. The extra 27 minutes brings with it some impressive look-at-me moments—particularly in the final battle scene—but I found it less charming than it animated counterpart.
SYNOPSIS: In “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” a new action movie starring Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr., and now playing in theatres, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Detective Nick “Big Nick” O’Brien’s search for bartender-turned-criminal Donnie Wilson leads him to the dangerous world of diamond thieves and the infamous Panther mafia, as they partner to plot a massive heist of the world’s largest diamond exchange. “I’m broke,” says O’Brien, “and I want in on the action.”
CAST: Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Evin Ahmad, Salvatore Esposito, Meadow Williams, Swen Temmel. Directed by Christian Gudegast.
REVIEW: Seven years after the first “Den of Thieves” movie debuted comes the sequel, a hard-boiled heist movie that spends most of its time on simmer.
When we first see “Big Nick” O’Brien (Gerard Butkler), he’s a little worse for wear. He tosses his divorce papers, along with his wedding ring, into a bathroom bin, before crawling into the bottom of a bottle. When he learns of a heist in Antwerp (based on the real life 2003 Antwerp diamond heist) he instinctively knows it bears the fingerprints of his old adversary Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.).
Working with the police in Europe, he tracks down Wilson, who is planning an 850 million Euro heist at the World Diamond Center, one of the most secure facilities in the world. Catching a glimpse of the kind of cash involved the broke cop tells Wilson, “You’re gonna rob that place and I’m going to work with you.” But there’s a catch. “I can haul you in anytime I want,” he says. “Depends on my mood. Right now, I’m in a good mood.”
The bad-guy buddy movie—“Cop goes gangsta,” says Wilson—spends the rest of its runtime (a tad over two hours) in twisty-turny-more-is-less-mode. Elaborate plans are made, flirtations are had, alliances are tested, and diamonds prove to be harder to hang on to than originally thought. It feels cluttered, even when there isn’t much actually happening, which is a lot of the time.
“Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” has all the ingredients of a fun thriller. There’s exotic locations—and the prerequisite drone shots to announce each of them—some fancy cars and stern-faced baddies. What it doesn’t have is the excitement to tie it all together.
Gerard Butler is no stranger to action. On film he’s battled more terrorists than you can shake a stick at, and he once even took on a network of powerful of satellites gone amok.
His latest, “Mission Kandahar” (titled simply “Kandahar” in the United States), now playing in theatres, brings the action earthbound in a story based on the true experiences of screenwriter and former military intelligence officer, Mitchell LaFortune in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks.
Butler is Tom Harris, a divorced MI5 military intelligence officer working undercover in Afghanistan circa 2021. He is a “total chameleon,” a man who disappears into the job as he poses as technician hired by their government to lay internet cable in the desert, all the while while gathering intelligence on the Taliban.
Just as he is about to end his mission, and head home to England to visit his daughter, an intelligence leak reveals his identity, location and mission goals. “Our cover is blown,” he says. “We leave in fifteen minutes.”
Exposed and in danger, he and his loyal Afghan interpreter and fixer (Navid Negahban) are trapped in hostile territory.
“No one is coming to rescue us,” Harris says, as he takes matters into his own hands to get the two of them across the 640 kilometers to an extraction point at an old CIA base in Kandahar Province before elite enemy forces can stop them. “The distance is not the main issue. It’s what’s in between.”
Butler, like Liam Neeson, makes very specific kinds of action films. With “Mission Kandahar” he filters the very real issue of securing safety for the Afghan citizens who worked alongside U.S. and NATO personnel for twenty years, through the lens of a Butler Action Flick. That means some defying-all-odds action, a loved one waiting at home for him to return, stereotypical baddies and lots of things that go boom. And, of course, there’s The Presence, the bulky Butler leading the action.
Often entertaining—see “Plane”—Butler’s movies exist in a world mostly untouched by reality, as though the golden era of direct-to-DVD action flicks never went away.
For better and for worse, “Mission Kandahar” fits that mold. The story’s real-life backdrop provides a canvas, but melodrama and action are the movie’s reality.
As if flying in real life wasn’t bad enough these days, along comes “Plane,” a new Gerard Butler resourceful hero movie, that brings the experience of a terrible flight to your local theatre.
The story begins on New Year’s Eve aboard the half empty Trailblazer flight 119. Butler is Brodie Torrance, a widowed pilot with a far-a-way look in his eye and a daughter in Hawaii he doesn’t see often enough.
In the cabin are the usual assortment of b-movie types, the hot-headed American, giggling teens posting on social media, the brash Brit, and, of course, Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter), an accused murderer being extradited to face trial.
When a lightning strike forces a crash landing on Jolo, a remote Philippine island run by heavily armed anti-government militias, Torrance must pull out all the stops to save his passengers.Meanwhile, at Trailblazer’s New York headquarters, a crisis management team lead by the tough-as-nails David Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn), manages the situation from afar.
As action movies go, even with the relatively low expectations that come from an action film with Butler’s name above the title, “Plane” is about as bland as airline food. From its blunt, one word title and one dimensional characters, to its clumsy action scenes and Ed Wood style “toy airplane in flight” sequences, the Jean-François Richet-directed, so-called thriller fails to take flight.
Butler does what he can, grimacing and, occasionally flashing the charisma that made him a star in the first place, while spitting out trademarked action movie dialogue.
“That’s your plan?” asks one of the passengers after Torrance details a risky move. “Do you have a better one?” he replies, echoing a thousand action stars that came before him.
Worse than that, Richet and screenwriters Charles Cumming and J. P. Davis, don’t trust the audience. It’s not enough to show the lightning strike and the havoc it creates. We must also be told that the plane was hit with “enough juice to light a city.” We know. We just saw it. How about giving us new information, or, failing that, interesting dialogue?
If there were still DVD delete bins at the local video store, “Plane” would be gathering dust at the bottom of the barrel.
“Plane” feels like being stuck in the middle seat on a long flight.
Director Joe Carnahan’s films are usually high octane, ultraviolent affairs that don’t spare the blood or the bullets. His latest, “Copshop,” now playing in theatres, walks a similar path but doesn’t forget to bring the fun along for the journey.
Set in Nevada, much of the action takes place at the sleepy Gun Creek Police Department. Earlier in the evening con artist Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo) was arrested after he sucker punched Officer Valerie Young (Alexis Louder) outside a casino. He’s a bad guy who should be avoiding the police but circumstances forced his hand because an even worse guy, hitman Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler), had tracked him down.
The quick-thinking con man figures Viddick won’t go near him if he’s in jail.
He figured wrong.
Turning the tables on Murretto, Viddick manages to get himself brought in on a bogus drunk driving charge. The hunter and the hunter are now just one cell apart. Young knows something nefarious is going on, and is determined to get to the bottom of it, even if Murretto warns her to keep her nose of his business.
“This is way beyond anything you want to get involved in lady,” he says. “You don’t understand.”
“No,” she replies, “you don’t understand how incredibly bored I am.”
“Copshop” has echoes of “Assault on Precinct 13.” Like the 1976 drama, most of the action happens inside the station and the cops and baddies must work together to find safety. The barebones storytelling builds quiet tension before Toby Huss shows up as sadistic killer Anthony Lamb. He’s quick with a bullet and a one-liner. Eyeing Teddy’s tight manbun he jokes, “You look just like Tom Cruise in that samurai movie nobody watched.”
Huss chews the scenery, breathing life into a man who brings death. He’s a hoot, simultaneously menacing and just a bit ridiculous.
Grillo and Butler are perfectly matched adversaries. They are the source of the cat-and-mouse plot; character actors laying the groundwork for the events that are the movie’s engine. Just as impressive is Louder as the no-nonsense Young. She’s at the center of the movie, the one character everyone will root for.
“Copshop” is a simple b-action movie that feels like a holdover from the 1970s. There are some generic elements, like side characters who seem to have walked straight out of Central Casting, but Carnahan makes up for that with energy, suspense and a dark sense of humour.
If action movies are the heavy-metal of the film world then “Angel Has Fallen,” starring Gerard Butler in his third turn as Secret Service Agent Mike Banning, is the Ywengie Malsteen of the genre. It’s too loud, too frenetic with too many notes.
After years on the job Banning is starting to feel the wear and tear of protecting the president. Concussions have given him with migraines and insomnia. Getting knocked around by bad guys has left him with painful compressed discs, and his doctor is not hopeful. “You’re a disaster waiting to happen.”
Things aren’t much better at work. According to President Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) the White House is, “leakier than a submarine with a screen door,” with top level info somehow making its way into the hands of nosy reporters. “I don’t know who to trust anymore,” says Trumbull. Of course, he trusts Banning, so much so he chooses him to head the massive security team accompanying him on a fishing trip. Out on the water it’s chilly, but idyllic until the hundreds of drones swoop in, wiping out the entire POTUS security detail except for Banning.
Later, in the hospital Banning is grilled by an FBI agent. “The president is in a coma and your whole team is dead. Tell me how that happened.”
Trouble is, he doesn’t remember and the FBI, who have discovered his DNA on launch controls, encrypted folders and a $10 million in an offshore bank, look at him as the sole suspect. “President Trumbull’s top guardian angel has fallen tonight,” screams a news report.
Banning has saved cities, rescued presidents but can he save himself? Cue the explosions and a rather memorable cameo from Nick Nolte as, what else, a grizzled old man.
“Angel Has Fallen” plays its hand at every turn, telegraphing the obvious, making sure the audience, who likely aren’t paying attention to the dialogue in anticipation of more explosions, get every detail. That means no suspense, just loud noises. Lots of them. Former stuntman-turned-director Ric Roman Waugh loves to blow things up, filling the screen with flames and your ears with booms. It’s the stuff of action movies, but when coupled with dialogue that sounds like it was run through the Cliché-O-Matic—”I’m not going to stop until I prove you really did this!”—the action is more of a distraction from the story than a compliment to it.
The film has under currents of social commentary. A bad guy bets on “making America strong again” and Danny Houston’s character, a war dog named Wade Jennings, ushers in a conversation on private soldiers, but neither are explored in any depth.
“Angel Has Fallen” has its pleasures. Nolte is a gas and fans of pyrotechnics will be satisfied but it feels more like a direct to steaming actioner than a big screen experience.
If there was ever more proof need to put Pablo Picasso’s remark, “good artists borrow, great artists steal,” to bed it’s the new Gerard Butler film. “Hunter Killer” borrows and out right steals elements from any number of movies, “The Hunt for Red October” chief among them, but is neither good nor great.
“Hunter Killer” takes place on land, on sea and on the phone. Based on the 2012 novel “Firing Point” by Don Keith and George Wallace “Hunter Killer” sees Butler as an unconventional US submarine Commander Joe Glass. He’s on a mission to find and rescue a missing U.S. sub when he stumbles across a popular 1990s plot twist—a Russian coup that threatens to demolish world order.
Stealthily cruising through enemy waters he becomes part of a three-pronged mission to rescue the Russian president, being held hostage in Russia by rogue Defence Minister Dmitri Durov (Mikhail Gorevoy). At sea level are Navy Seals led by Bill Beaman (Toby Stephens), National Security Agency analyst Jayne Norquist (Linda Cardellini), Rear Admiral John Fisk (Common), and, back home in America, Admiral Charles Donnegan (Gary Oldman in post-Oscar pay cheque mode) who barks orders at minions and into phones. It’s American-Russian collusion that could change the course of history!
Throw in a craggy-faced Russian submarine captain, Sergei Andropov (the late Michael Nyqvist)—we’re not enemies, we’re brothers—and you have a run-of-the-mill World War III scenario that was better the first few times we saw it. “It’s not about your side or my side,” Glass says to Andropov, “it’s about the future.”
“Hunter Killer” is so cheesy it should come with a side of saltines. Much of the dialogue sounds cribbed from the “Tough Guy ‘R Us” manual circa 1986—“He’s gonna play the hand he was dealt!”—spoken by characters so wooden they could easily double as buoys in the above water scenes.
At almost two hours ”Hunter Killer” is a waterlogged thriller, a sopping wet excuse for Butler to grunt his way through another film that is beneath his talent.
A new film tells us Los Angeles is the bank robbery capital of the world. “Den of Thieves,” a new crime drama starring Gerard Butler, shows us an elaborate heist, the bad guys who steal and the even badder guys who try to stop them.
Butler is Nick Flanagan, major case squad cop and wild card. We know he’s a tough guy because he keeps telling us—“You’re not the bad guys,” he growls at a suspect, “we are.”—and because he smokes indoors. When he arrives, hungover, at a crime scene where several police officers have been shot and an armoured truck stolen, he and his team begin tracking the most sophisticated robbers in LA, the Merriman Gang. Named for its leader (Pablo Schreiber), the gang, Bas (Max Holloway), Bosco (Evan Jones), Levi Enson (50 Cent) and getaway driver Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), will stop at nothing when it comes to relieving banks of their cash. With Flanagan on their trail they plan their most audacious robbery yet, a $30 million takedown of the bank of banks, the Los Angeles Bank of the Federal Reserve.
“Den of Thieves” is more concerned with its own mythology and troubled cop clichés than the story. Butler is a walking, talking cliché, a cop with a bad marriage and even worse attitude. Over the course of a too-long 2 hour and sixteen minute running time he reaffirms his badass bone fides again and again, whether it is eating a donut from a blood spattered box at a crime scene, throwing back the booze or threatening a prisoner. “Do we look like the types who will arrest you? Put you in handcuffs and drag you to the station? No will just shoot you. Less paperwork.” He’s the “original gangsta cop,” and we’ve seen that all before and we’ve seen it better.
“Den of Thieves” attempts to get mileage from the old chestnut that good and evil—in this case Flanagan and Merriman—are mirror images of one another. It’s a classic push-and-pull but isn’t given much new life here apart from some flashy editing that visually ties the character together.
The been-there-done-that feel to “Den of Thieves” wouldn’t matter as much if director Christian Gudegast had kept the pace up. Instead he draws scenes out, pads an already overlong movie with family drama subplots that go nowhere—the only female characters are kids, wives and hookers who make brief appearances—and stages what must be one of the longest and most reckless shoot outs in cinema history. It’s one thing for the bad guys to shoot one another, but when cops place dozens of innocent people in the middle of an automatic gun battle it feels gratuitous even for a movie like this.
Last week as I fought traffic en route to a London Has Fallen screening, I tweeted from the back of a cab, “Out of my way people! I’m running late for a Gerard Butler movie!” It was a silly little joke, a comment to kill time as we idled in the morning rush hour.
The first response came in right away: “said no one, ever,” followed by a torrent of unexpected Butler hate.
One person called him a “bouncer actor,” whatever that means.
Another questioned his ability to effectively disguise his native Scottish accent and many people offered me their condolences.
Why the Butler bashing?
It’s true he is a frustrating movie star. He shares the usual leading man traits that have made Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio superstars.
He’s handsome, talented and built like an action star but he’s been done in time after time by poor choices.
Pitt makes Fight Club, Butler makes Law Abiding Citizen. Leo stars in The Departed, Gerard does Machine Gun Preacher. Years ago the website Gawker placed Butler on movie star probation, calling him a “professional bad decision maker” alongside notable career fritterers Cuba Gooding Jr. and John Travolta. A look at his IMDB page suggests they were on to something.
He’s a utility player, comfortable switching genres the way most of us change our socks. One minute he’s a romantic comedy star, the next he’s choking out bad guys on screen. He’s flirted with Shakespeare and provided voices for cartoons. He’s done sci-fi flicks, musicals and even a rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf.
It’s not like he hasn’t enjoyed some very big hits. In 300 he (and his meticulously crafted six-pack) played King Leonidas, a Spartan who led 300 soldiers against the might of the Persian army. It’s the film equivalent of a heavy metal concert — loud, brutal and completely uncompromising — and it made him an action hero.
People have a soft spot for Dear Frankie, his breakout film and the one that turned him into a heartthrob with serious dramatic chops. The four-hankie U.K. tear-jerker about a single mother who resorts to trickery to keep the memory of her late husband alive in her son’s mind put Butler on the world stage.
Other box office bonanzas include playing a charming mobster in the violent Guy Ritchie flick RocknRolla and voicing Viking Stoick the Vast in How to Train Your Dragon.
It’s the other stuff that seems to rub people the wrong way. As a movie reviewer I can attest there are few English language words more terrifying than “New Gerard Butler Romantic Comedy” and I think it is those films that turned my Twitter followers against him.
He’s a good actor but his track record in the rom-com department is particularly grim. Critics hate these movies, calling the handsome Scottish actor’s attempts at mixing love and comedy, “instantly grating,” and “embarrassingly limited.”
But I come to praise Butler, not to bury him. Let’s give him another chance.
I made it to the London Has Fallen screening and can tell you it’s a pretty good action movie. Perhaps even good enough to erase the memory of The Ugly Truth or Playing for Keeps from our collective memories.
