Aaaarmageddon Time

It says something about the priorities of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise that before I sat down to watch the third instalment, At World's End, I tried to recall where the story had left off and came up empty. Having sat through it, I am none the wiser about what the hell is going on but the pins and needles in my backside and the throbbing pain behind my eyes speak volumes for this bloated, self-indulgent leviathan; a fitfully entertaining but absolutely incomprehensible triumph of special effects over storytelling.

There is a tale in here, somewhere, but it would be almost impossible to extract it and relate it with any degree of certainty, so the following is more of a series of impressions than a synopsis. The movie opens on a low note, with a long sequence set in Bridgetown, where the evil Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) has rounded up the great unwashed and is hanging them in groups from a long scaffold, to smoke out his enemies, led by his nemesis, Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Sparrow is trapped in “the world beyond this world”, the sandy desert of Davy Jones’ Locker, and has gone mad. At the same time, Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightly) and the dread pirate Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) have arrived in Singapore to borrow a map to the end of the world from the powerful Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat), which will guide them to Sparrow’s rescue.

Trying to stop them in this endeavour is the sinister East India Company, Beckett’s private fleet, who have joined forces with Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), and his crew of mutant marines aboard the Flying Dutchman. After a bewildering sequence of crosses and double-crosses, it falls on young lovers, Swann and the brave Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) to gather the pirate forces, including Jamaican sorceress Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris) and effect a rescue at the End of the World. Only Sparrow and his ship, the Black Pearl can save the brotherhood of the Nine Pirate Lords from the nasty British and their fleet of clean and tidy frigates closing in on their base in Shipwreck Cove.

That tangled shambles is just one of about a dozen different storylines that collide in a heap during the movie’s extravagant 169 minute running time. There are umpteen complications messily threaded through the plot; Will must save his father Barnacle Bill (Stellan Skarsgård) from his watery fate while attempting to seduce the estranged Swann, Tia Dalma must work her magic to release Calypso, the Goddess of the Ocean, from her mysterious prison, Davy Jones must attempt to recover his still-beating heart from Beckett’s heavily-guarded strongbox and so on, and on, and on. After a particularly daring escape by Cap’n Sparrow, Lord Beckett stands amid the wreckage of his ship. “Do you think he plans it all out,” he says, “or does he just make it up as he goes along?” He is talking to us, the audience.

Depp (whose entrance is delayed until almost 40 minutes into proceedings), has made the character of Cap’n Jack into a cult icon and continues his elegantly wasted prancing and preening, benefiting this time from an emphasis on verbal rather than physical comedy. The scenes where he plays against multiple clones of himself are a standout, as is the short cameo from his equally bedraggled father, played by a guitar-strumming Keith Richards. Witty Jack, as he is known, gets the lions share of the jokes, and Depp delivers another fine performance. The same cannot be said for his floundering co-stars. Knightly looks tanned and healthy, but her gaped pout and knitted brow have lost whatever appeal they had. Beside her, Bloom is an outright dud, with the two together showing no trace of chemistry. Most puzzlingly, Rush (almost absent from the second film) struggles to impress with his duplicitous Barbossa, mangling almost all of his dialogue into a blur of ooh-arrrs and rolling eyeballs. His monkey bests him in every scene. From the secondary cast, again it is Bill Nighy as the tortured, octopus-faced Jones that shines, a tender-hearted monster desperate to regain his human form and his broken heart.

The series is rightly renowned for its innovative special effects but even these start to pall when presented in such a carelessly elaborate manner. Although the large-scale digital work is flawlessly rendered, the film is at its best when the trilogy’s director Gore Verbinski keeps his frame clean and simple; like the bleached-out hell of Davy Jones’ Locker or an eerie sequence when the bodies of those who have died at sea float past the Black Pearl. The complicated stuff, and that is most of it, looks momentarily impressive, but there is just too much of it to be properly awed. The final confrontation, where two huge ships do battle in the middle of an enormous whirlpool, should be enough to satisfy any appetite for destruction, but Verbinski follows it with another, equally elaborate and lengthy clash, to unavoidably diminishing returns. Pirates of the Caribbean: At Wits End is at times both spectacular and jaw-dropping, but even marvels lose their lustre.

Hocus Pocus

The team behind the cult Channel 4 sit-com Peep Show make the transition to the big screen in Magicians; a very average comedy about a pair of squabbling stage conjurers who fall out over an affair of the heart, spend years apart and are eventually reunited when they enter a low-rent magic competition. The odd couple pairing of porky, elbow-faced Tory David Mitchell and smirking wide-boy Robert Webb, which works so well on television, fails to generate much of anything new when transported into the intentionally artificial, artfully camp setting of stage magic. They play Harry and Karl, who we first meet when they are performing an elaborate routine with Harry’s wife Shelly (Rosie Fellner) as their lovely assistant. In the interval, Harry discovers the two in a compromising clinch, a shocking betrayal that causes him to lose his concentration during their next trick, a guillotine illusion, with disastrous results.

Betrayed, bereaved and suddenly bereft of gainful employment, Harry finds himself broke and alone, his reputation in tatters. Karl, meanwhile, has transformed himself into a mind-reading psychic, The Mind Monger, with the help of his greedy, grasping manager Otto (Darren Boyd). As the years pass, neither magician has been able to shake off the scandal or regain their former, er, prestige. When Harry is told about an international magic competition, that has a ten grand cash prize, he attempts a reconciliation with Karl to bring the old act back together as a last resort. Harry also pulls a romance out of the hat, having recruited Linda, a new lovely assistant played with gusto (and the lion's share of the one-liners), by Jessica Stevenson (from Spaced), and Karl being trailed by a smitten television researcher, played by Andrea Riseborough.

Given the pomp and artifice of stage magic, the lack of solid jokes and original situations in Magicians is puzzling. The main players are difficult to remove from their television roles, with neither Mitchell or Webb offering much in the way of performance while suffering through a feather-weight script with characteristic awkwardness but few comic results. Unable to sustain itself across ninety minutes, the story takes random, usually unsuccessful, swerves into jumpy sub-plots. The foul-mouthed, sleazy illusionist Tony White (Steve Edge) is given plenty of screen-time but is simply desperately unfunny. Likewise Peter Capaldi as a bitter Master of Ceremonies, whose self-importance and greasy charm is well played but doesn’t translate into laughs. Far better are Stevenson and Riseborough as the female foils, injecting the farce with much needed wit and a natural physicality. Debut director Andrew O’ Connor (who has produced Derren Brown television specials) knows this world intimately but is unable to connect the high-points in his script with any authority, resulting in some decidedly shaky staging and long gaps between laughs.

Letters To The Editor

Based on the true-crime book by Robert Graysmith, David Fincher’s absorbing Zodiac revisits one of America’s most notorious and sinister unsolved series of murders, which terrified San Francisco in the 60s and 70s. Although no one was ever arrested for the multiple killings, and the case is now classified as ‘inactive’, the Zodiac murders still hold a grim fascination. For the first hour, the film unfolds along three parallel paths. We witness the Zodiac killings, recreated from police files and survivor testimony. We ride along with the police investigation, led by detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) as they attempt to piece together the physical evidence, and the cryptic, taunting messages sent by the killer to the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle. There, we follow the efforts of journalist Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) to figure out the ciphers and attempts to communicate with the killer, desperate for recognition and attention. Despite these written clues, and the reams of physical evidence he leaves behind at the scene, half way though the anonymous killer fades into the background. Instead, we focus on Graysmith’s growing obsession with the case, working with the occasionally reluctant Detective Toschi to find answers even after the Zodiac appears to have stopped killing or has died himself.

Playing the author of the book on which the film is based, Gyllenhaal centres the film’s complex plotting and information-packed dialogue with understated aplomb, his initial curiosity shifting into an all-encompassing fixation, which damages his career and destroys his relationship with his wife (played from the sidelines by an underused Chloe Sevigny). Beside him, for the first half at least, Robert Downey Jr gives a riveting performance as the dandified, drug-addled reporter, surrendering himself to the insolubility of the Zodiac and his own malign appetites in a finely judged descent. The film misses him when his arm of the story concludes. As the cop who was the basis for Dirty Harry (based on the case and smartly referenced) Ruffalo plays a crumpled, commonsense professional investigator whose inability to connect the dots doesn’t stop him from trying to draw straight lines through the mystery alongside his by-the-book partner. This leads to a breathlessly tense interrogation of his, and Fincher’s, prime suspect (John Carrol Lynch), damned by circumstantial evidence and an arrogant smirk.

Fincher’s recreation of California of the time is typically meticulous and immersive. The costuming, production design (including some clever computer generated imagery) and props are all perfectly presented. Special attention is paid to the soundtrack, which features a tapestry of classic rock seamlessly cut with excerpts from the scores of The Conversation and All The President’s Men and snatches of period radio and television adverts. Shot on ultra-modern digital cameras by Harris Savides, the film has a deliberately delicate look, mixing factual documentary with sweeping set-pieces but with little of the visual trickery Fincher has previously employed. A horrifyingly creepy and brilliantly staged confrontation in a basement between Graysmith and a movie-obsessed suspect is a standout, as is a computerised recreation of the construction of the landmark San Franciscan Transamerica building, poetically communicating the passage of time. The Se7en director shows a lighter touch throughout, finding room for some disarming gallows humour between the bloodshed and the brow-furrowing.

Zodiac is an impeccable procedural thriller, picking over the bones of a mystifying real-life story and presented in a gripping, intuitive manner that expertly draws the viewer in. It showcases some of the best American actors on the top of their form with a script that never loses pace or fluency despite a lengthy running time. It fails to resolve itself, understandably for an unsolved case, although this slowly darkening mood of incomprehension and obsession is marginally overplayed in the run in, which hints at conclusions but never offers narrative satisfaction. No definitive answers then, but a litany of fascinating questions posed by equally remarkable characters.

The Brains Trust

Having given new life to the zombie movie back in 2002 with 28 Days Later, Sunshine director Danny Boyle and original screenwriter Alex Garland take the executive producer back seats on this spirited, gruesome sequel that brings the story along with a satisfying continuity and a genre-mandated all-new cast. While this iteration matches the original for dreadful tension and jumpy shocks it doesn’t manage to transcend its B-Movie roots in the same way, to become something utterly new and utterly compelling.

It’s pretty good stuff though, all the same. Set six months on from the accidental release of the genetically mutated monkey ‘rage’ virus, an accident that wiped out the population of Britain by turning them into flesh-craving zombie – all red eyes and slavering jaws but possessed of animal strength and speed. In the opening scene, a few survivors are barricaded inside a rural cottage, including Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack). They’re living off tinned food and adrenaline, waiting for a rescue that might never come and hoping their children, on a school trip to Spain since before the outbreak, are safe. One night, dinner is interrupted by the arrival of a terrified child, trailed by the undead. The house is overrun, and Don and Alice flee. Don makes it out, Alice apparently does not.

In what can only be seen as a grim irony, the US army has occupied Britain to remove the threat and reconstruct the country, setting up a safe-zone on the Isle of Dogs patrolled by tanks and rooftop snipers. Don arrives in London as a refugee and is put in charge of a military-controlled housing block, where he waits for the return of his children, teenager Tammy (Imogen Poots) and eleven year old Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton). On arrival, the children are met by army medic Scarlet (Rose Byrne), whose commanding officer, sweatily scanning the CCTV monitors, is keeping a fatal secret. The virus is still active, and is getting stronger. Don, tortured by survivors guilt and abandoning his wife, doesn’t notice when the children leave the safe zone (with commendable ingenuity) and return to their old home for mementos. What they find there is the trigger for the next hour of mayhem, as the security of the army compound is breached and the zombies return.

Spanish director Fresnadillo (who made a formidable debut with Intacto) matches the mobile, hand-held look and apocalyptic atmosphere of the first film and brings his own stylish flourishes with some poetic imagery and sharp editing. His sequel is just as frightening and relentless, taking full advantage of the increase in pace and tension the now-instantaneous virus allows. Victims now change from human to inhuman in seconds, with Fresnadillo returning again and again to that simple, effective moment of transformation for scares. There is a fine sense of the true horror of zombie cinema; the collective mob psychology, in claustrophobic scenes of panic and slaughter that take place in near pitch darkness. Sound plays an important part, in communicating the crunch and splatter of the special effects and the finely-captured silence that comes from a near-dead city. The contemporary military theme allows for an increase in violence with the bigger, louder ordinance making satisfyingly wet, red puddles from the horde of revenants. The climax of the film’s ever-ratcheting bloodlust comes when army pilot Flynn (Harold Perrineau) tilts his helicopter forward and ploughs through a field full of zombies in a richly realised scene of headless abandon.

The unexpected success of Boyle’s film mandated a sequel but for all it’s inevitability and lack of originality, 28 Weeks Later proves itself worthy of the fan’s five year wait and is, in its own right, a noble addition to the bloody canon of zombie cinema.

A Tangled Web

What a tangled web the third SpiderMan movie weaves. An extravagant, exhausting continuation of the blockbuster franchise, this time the web-slinging crime-fighter battles a parade of villains, a litany of personal revelations and his own darkened nature alongside a jam-packed script and a luxurious running time. As the Green Goblin once put it, “the one thing people love more than their hero, is to see their hero fail”.

After a catch-up opening credits sequence, we find that things are going well for Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire). He’s thriving in his studies at NYU, he’s preparing to propose marriage to his girlfriend MJ (Kirsten Dunst) and crucially, his alter-ego SpiderMan has been embraced by a grateful, crime-free New York. The first hint of trouble comes when Peter and his Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) are told that an escaped convict, Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), was responsible for the death of Uncle Ben. Marko becomes an even bigger threat when he falls into a particle physics experiment and he becomes atomically bonded to tiny particles of sand. As the Sandman, he is virtually unstoppable. The next newcomer is Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), Peter’s competitive rival for a job as a photojournalist on the Daily Bugle, who is transformed into Venom after being consumed by black space goo that falls from the sky in a meteorite. All of this is in addition to a rekindling of Peter’s friendship with his nemesis Harry Osborn (James Franco) and the gradual disintegration of his relationship with girlfriend MJ, whose career as a Broadway star stalls just as SpiderMan has captured the public’s hearts.

If it turns out that Sam Raimi goes on to other things (he’s been linked with the adaptation of The Hobbit), he can depart SpiderMan satisfied he has left nothing undone. That compulsion to exhaust the character is a bit of a shame, actually. This installment has a good twenty minutes on the previous films, and it feels even longer. Raimi struggles to control every element of his behemoth of a script, with more attention paid to Peter’s transformation and his battles with the Sandman and only fleeting moments given over to establishing the monstrous Venom or the complicated jealousies that arise when Gwen (Bryce Dallas Howard) comes on the scene. Dunst struggles with a whiny, defeated character while the beautiful Howard is grievously miscast and underutilized. Haden Church’s tortured ex-con Marko is never satisfactorily fleshed out, although the actor does deliver an excellent performance before the special effects take over. While Grace’s mirror-image adversary turned genetic clone is a far less complicated character, he arrives too late to make the best of his unique advantages. The result is a story that is nowhere near as cleanly or cleverly executed as it should be, with confusion mounting to the point where the outstandingly realised final battle is packed with visceral thrills but lacks any emotional punch.

There are odd choices made throughout the film. A pivotal scene between MJ and Harry takes place as they fling half-cooked omelettes at one another. Later, the wide-eyed, cow-licked nerd Peter is transformed into a floppy-fringed, eyeliner-wearing bad boy, but the effect is more like the second row of a My Chemical Romance concert than the intended semi-demonic Lothario. Bad Peter’s lengthy and misjudged song and dance number during a nightclub confrontation with MJ follows a frivolous Saturday Night Fever homage in piling on the impatience. Although it is always good to see superhero filmmakers giving their character space to explore, there is a sense that the saga has run out of steam, straining to reinvent a winning formula and trundling through torturous plot devices in order to delay the inevitable genre standoffs and confrontations.

The good stuff is almost all in these fight scenes and there are enough to provide an excuse to see the film; from SpiderMan’s initial battle among the skyscrapers with a re-equipped Green Goblin Jr to his subsequent encounters with the Sandman and Venom setting new standards in conception and execution. Even if the effects at times lack subtlety, the flights between the buildings are dizzyingly vertiginous with a breath-taking sense of three-dimensional space and a few energizing bravado moments. It’s the hackneyed emotional stuff in between that drags. Thankfully, there are a couple of funny comic sequences scattered throughout to lighten the mood, with JK Simmons returning as loudmouthed editor J Jonah Jameson for a brilliantly timed stand-out scene and Bruce Campbell clowning around in the background as a Pythonesqe maître d’.

But more is not always better. The first third of SpiderMan 3 is preposterously busy, with additional villains, a new woman, new emotional crises and identity issues making for a tangle of subplots that offer only fleeting dramatic satisfaction and struggle to form an engaging story over the subsequent two acts. There is a limit to the number of messages about redemption, commitment and forgiveness that one summer epic can comfortably hold. Parker was always the most accessible super-human, but the story is too complicated and self-indulgent to allow Maguire to re-tap that wellspring of ordinariness.

Wrestling this bloated summer titan is often a bewildering, irritating experience, but it still offers much-loved characters perhaps their last chance to deliver SpiderMan's uniquely hyperkinetic thrills.