Mr. Holmes” stars Sir Ian McKellen as the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, but the game that’s afoot isn’t so much a mystery as it is a revelation. “It is my business to know what other people don’t know,” Holmes said in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” Here, he discovers something many people know, but was unknown to him.
Set in May, 1947 Holmes is a lion in winter. The once great detective is 93 years old, retired for many decades after a case went awry and drove him out of the business. He’s in self imposed exile, living in the country far from 221B Baker Street, accompanied only by his stern housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and her young son Roger (Milo Parker).
As his memory fades he tries to piece together the true story of his last case, not the embellished version made popular by his former associate Dr. John Watson. “I told Watson if I ever write a story myself it will be correct the million misconceptions created by his writing.”
Told in flashbacks between the present and a recent trip to Japan—to collect some Prickly Ash, a rumoured remedy for senility—coupled with the fragmented memories of his last case in 1919, Holmes comes to the startling realization that human nature is not a mystery that logic alone can unravel.
There are no hounds, very few deerstalker hats and his signature pipe is nowhere to be seen. Arthur Conan Doyle’s character, the way we’re used to seeing him, is gone save for a glint in McKellen’s eye. “Mr. Holmes” is a contemplative movie about aging, friendship and human frailty.
As the title would suggest, this is a character study and McKellen makes the most of the opportunity to play the man at various times in his life. From the sharp edged Holmes in the flashbacks to the diminished detective in Japan to the reflective, frustrated and struggling man in later years, he fits them together like pieces of a jigsaw to form a whole. It’s a tour de force performance—actually three—that provides the fireworks in what is otherwise a deliberately paced story.
Director Bill Condon, reteaming with McKellen for a second time after “Gods and Monsters,” once again presents a radically rethought story of a man’s life. While a bit more drama would have been welcome, there is not mystery why the reflective nature of the material and McKellen’s graceful work are so appealing.
“X-Men: Days of Future Past” offers up two for the price of one.
Merging the young versions of Magneto and Professor X with their older counterparts is a cool idea, and certainly gives the movie a boost in the marquee department, but I felt the old timers were left with their own heightened sense of drama and not much else. It seems a shame to have McKellen and Stewart, the Martin and Lewis of mutants, on screen together and not give them much to do.
Based on a 1981 two-issue special of the X-Men comic series the new film begins in a post-apocalyptic future. “A dark and desolate world,” according to the narration. “A world of war, suffering and loss on both sides—mutants and the humans who tried to help them.”
The causing all the trouble are indestructible robot warriors called Sentinels. Able to adapt to any mutant power they’ve created chaos for the mutant race, bringing them to the edge of extinction.
In an effort to “change their fate” long time enemies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) team up with Storm (Halle Berry), Blink (Fan Bingbing), Bishop (Omar Sy) and use Kitty Pryde’s (Ellen Page) teleportation ability to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to change history and prevent the creation of the murderous automations. His first task is to convince the 1973 versions of Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and young Professor X (James McAvoy) that they are stronger together than apart.
The only things larger than the movie’s lengthy list of stars are the big ideas contained within. Wrapped around a simple time travel story—the kind of thing “Family Guy” does once or twice a season—are timeless ideas about racism, tolerance, war and rebellion. Not usually the stuff of summer blockbusters, but the X-Men franchise has always been a bit brainier than most. At times it’s a bit too ponderous, but I’ll take that over the flash-and-trash of most CGI epics.
Not that it’s a total head trip. It’s a movie about time travel, mutants and serious actors like Michael Fassbender saying lines like, “We received a message from the future,” so, of course, it’s a little preposterous. That’s part of the fun. It plays with the conventions of big time summer entertainment—check out the spectacular time-shredding sequence featuring the lightening-fast mutant Quicksilver (Evan Peters) that’s both eye-popping and cheeky—but tempers the bombastic stuff with thought provoking notions.
In fact, it could be argued that the ideas are the stars of the film. Jennifer Lawrence is the a-listiest actress in Hollywood right now, but in her second outing as Mystique she almost gets cut adrift in a sea of characters. Ditto Peter Dinklage as the closest thing the film has to a villain.
They’re all good, but Magneto, Professor and Wolverine are complex, cool characters that bring the film’s themes to life; all the rest is set dressing, except for the Quicksilver scene. That was like The Matrix without Keanu’s hangdog expression.
If the title “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” immediately conjures up images of hairy footed hobbits and fearsome dwarves battling a fire breathing dragon, then this movie is for you. It beautifully captures and continues the world Peter Jackson began with the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and followed up with “The Hobbit” films.
If it doesn’t mean anything to you then maybe you’ll want to brush up on your J. R. R. Tolkien before shelling out for a ticket. It took a lot of backstory to get to the fifth film based on Middle Earth and its inhabitants and you don’t want to go without knowing your Shire from your Sauron or your Skin Changers.
Picking up where “An Unexpected Journey” left off, hobbit-burglar Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) join with Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and his army of twelve fearsome dwarves. Their goal is to traverse Mirkwood, Esgaroth and Dale to locate and battle the fire-breathing dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch in fine serpentine voice) who hoards the wealth of the Lonely Mountain. On the way they battle giant spiders (a sequence that will certainly make arachnophobes grin), make a deal with Bard the bowman (Luke Evans), the descendant of the original Lord of Dale, and some helpful and not-so-helpful elves (including a good lookin’ and deadly She-Elf played by Evangeline Lilly).
Got it?
Wait! There’s more, something to do with the White Council and the Necromancer but I’m still reeling from plot overload from actually watching the movie let alone trying to unfurl the complicated story in print.
But despite the sense of mild confusion I felt as I tried to piece the story together, I really enjoyed “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.” Peter Jackson has crafted a great action adventure movie that fits in perfectly with the preceding films. There’s a remarkable consistency of tone, style and spirit that runs through the “LOTR” and “Hobbit” movies. They feel like story shards chipped off the same block.
There’s a Richard Attenborough old school epicness about them. They are about good and evil without troubling nuance or antiheroes. Perhaps because Englishman Tolkien penned these action adventure stories during the Second World War when evil was clear-cut, his books are ripe with allegory but straightforward in their approach to morality and good vs. evil.
And luckily the films work because they fully embrace Tolkien’s vision. There’s no shortage of story threads, of hard to remember names but Jackson weaves it all together seamlessly—with some “Walking Dead” style battle scenes… lots of arrows in the head—and has made a big handsome movie to get lost in.
For the first time ever Aardman Animations, who gave us Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run, have put their clay figures into storage and taken a step into the 21st century, making a film that looks a great deal like one of their homemade stop-motion extravaganzas, but is actually computer animated. Flushed Away, the story of an upper class pet mouse flushed down the loo by a bullying rat, features great animation, an all star British voice cast and something that all kids love—toilet humor.
For the “No Clay! No Way!” purists out there it should be noted that the good folks at Aardman chose to go with computer animation for Flushed Away because of the number of scenes involving water, which is nearly impossible to portray convincingly in stop motion. To lend a handmade patina to the film they used software that reproduces the ‘imperfections’ found in claymation like thumb prints and dropped frames.
Flushed Away does not take place in the under water world of Finding Nemo or SpongeBob. No, most of this movie happens in the London sewer, a dark and dank Ratropolis occupied by rodent citizens who are threatened with extinction by a Toad King (Ian McKellen) who resembles a froggy Jabba the Hutt and his scheming rat henchmen. Dropped into this locality is Roddy St. James (Hugh Jackman), a snobby pet mouse from the Royal neighborhood of Kensington, who is used to the finer things in life.
Despite the best efforts of the evil Toad and his French Amphibian Ninjas to do Roddy in, he manages, with the help of an enterprising scavenger named Rita (Kate Winslet) to uncover the Toad’s nefarious plot to destroy Ratropolis and discovers that home is where the heart is, not just where all your stuff is. It’s sort of a rodent Upstairs Downstairs with Hollywood action.
Flushed Away lacks some of the cheerful charm of good old Wallace and Gromit, but what it lacks in charm it makes up for in sheer inventiveness in its action-packed story. It swirls along at quite a clip, effortlessly mixing literate verbal and visual jokes—we glimpse a cockroach reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis—with potty humor that’ll appeal to the kids. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find themes of urban loneliness, the reciprocated condescension between Brits and the French and the class system that still exists in Britain.
Worth the price of admission alone is the hilarious Greek Chorus of slugs who provide musical accompaniment for many of the scenes.
There was a ripple of fear in movieland when Bryan Singer, who directed the first two installments of the X-Men franchise, stepped down and was replaced by Brett Ratner. Why? Because Ratner is a hack. He makes bad movies and probably even plays hacky sack with his friends on the weekends. The high points on his CV were the Rush Hour movies, a dreadful—but profitable—duo of films starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.
Happily I can report that the fear was mostly unfounded, and at best should be downgraded to a feeling of only slight discomfort. Ratner has made his best movie yet with X-Men: The Last Stand, but has taken an idea, involving a mutant cure, which could have been the best X-Men story arc so far and turned it into a conventional, but entertaining summer blockbuster.
For the uninitiated, the X-Men movies are set in a world where mutants, genetically gifted beings who a variety of powers, struggle to find a place in a society that, for the most part, rejects them. A school, run by an enigmatic mutant named Professor Xavier—who looks a great deal like Patrick Stewart—is a safe haven for young mutants. They live there and are trained to use their powers for good. The school is also home to the X-Men, a band of superheroes who fight against mutant injustice.
In the new film it is announced that humans have discovered a cure for mutancy. A simple injection that will turn mutants into homo sapiens, taking away whatever their natural power is. Of course this drives the most radical of the mutant, the ex-X-Man Magneto, played by Ian McKellen to stage The Last Stand, a face off between mutants and homo sapiens.
The movie shuns anything more than the most cursory comment on the ethics of the right of people to choose how they want to live or the effects of governmental control vs. freedom of choice. The allusions to Nazi Germany are obvious, but history is rich with examples of oppression that could have been mined here, but Ratner seems to be saying, “Social comment! Leave that for the eggheads.” He is more content to make your eyeballs dance with elaborate special effects and crazy visuals. It’s a shame that the chance to deepen the material by placing it in some sort of social context was ignored. The movie, which could have been memorable, is now merely a good summer blockbuster.
A word of advice to X-Men fanatics: sit through the end credits for a little hint of what is to come in future X-Men installments.
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