Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I have to be careful about this one; it's clearly a quality piece, and has gained rave reviews, but personally, I haven't much positive to say about it sadly.

The story is quite straightforward in many ways. There has been a little coup at MI6, and Control (John Hurt) and his right hand man George Smiley (Gary Oldman) have been forced out, in the wake of some of his subordinates having done an end run around him and set up an immensely valuable intelligence source, despite his reservations and suspicions.

However, it comes to light later on, after Control's death, that one of the top men at the Circus (MI6 HQ), is a mole, one of the very men, perhaps, responsible for running this new source. Hence, the Ministry bring Smiley out of retirement, and set him to smoking the mole out.

The film plays out as a sequence of short, often silent vignettes of Smiley entering a room whose significance isn't immediately obvious, sighing, looking pensive, and then cut to the next bit, where someone else does likewise. Information about what's going on dribbles out at a miserly rate, until we finally have enough to piece together what's going on. And this is what defied my best efforts to engage with the film. It's not just that there's scenes where nothing much happens. It's that there's lots of very short scenes in a row, apparently nonsequiturs, in which nothing much happens. Maybe it's because I was tired, but I just couldn't get into the flow of the film, and I think it was entirely down to the directorial and editing style.

Which is not to say I didn't get anything out of it; the whole British acting community turns up, in order to prove that there's life after Harry Potter, and it's like gladitorial combat of powerful but quietly understated performances. And the betrayals are so numerous, and the reasons so obscure, that there's much to be gained from thinking about what happened after the event. Actually watching the film, however, felt like a chore at times.

Fright Night

Simple, simple stuff. Vampire moves in next door to kid, nobody believes kid, people go missing, kid recruits occult expert to help him fight vampire, kid fights vampire. The film is an absolute straight-line-from-A-to-B, three-act fantasy thriller. It's not a horror movie, unless for some reason Colin Farrell with Big Teef scares you; horror is about the terrible things that cannot be faced, whereas a monster movie like this is all about using a bit of ingenuity to stand up to the bully.

So that's what it is; is it any good? Yes it is. I mean, it's not The Lost Boys, but it's in the same ballpark. Anton Yelchin is good as the high school kid with way too much on his plate, and Colin Farell all but steals the film off him as your old-school charming, remorseless killing machine vampire. No fucking shiny vampires in this film, and in fact, they take the piss out of Twilight a few times.

Problems? One major one. David Tennant. What? Heresy? David Tennant's brilliant isn't he? Yes. That's the problem. David Tennant's character is the older guy, the mentor. The Obi Wan to Anton Yelchin's Luke. Only that's not all he is, his character, Peter Vincent, is a leather clad, hard drinking, womanising, quipping stage magician. He's not just Obi Wan, he's Han Solo too. And he's also, let's not be coy about this, The Doctor. Which is not just to say that David Tennant owned the role of The Doctor for four years, and you can't look at him without remembering that, it's also that Peter Vincent is the flaky genius who knows everything and flaps about the place in a really good coat. So yes, he's absolutely great, but in many ways, he leaves Anton Yelchin in the dust, as far as being the hero is concerned. It's like Pirates of the Caribbean; good film, but nobody left that film doing an Orlando Bloom impression. Star Wars got round the fact that Han Solo is awesome by splitting him and Luke up after the first movie. PotC basically didn't solve the problem, and increasingly sidelined Orlando Bloom to the point of him disappearing.

The latter is increasingly likely in this film; once he arrives, David Tennant doesn't take over the film, but you do want him to. I kind of found myself resenting the fact that the script inevitably sidelines him. So in that sense, the film fails to be satisfying, because really, the wrong character is featured front and centre.

The Guard

Brendan Gleeson is a police sergeant in the west of Ireland. He's one man covering a wide area, and is effectively a law unto himself, which is the way he likes it. In fact, he revels in it, being corrupt in the sense that he has the power to do as he likes and as he sees fit, with nobody to tell him otherwise.

However, into this scenario arrive some flies in his ointment. First, a young policeman from Dublin is assigned there, who he has to take charge of, which is effort. Second, it seems that there's a bunch of drug smugglers in the area, looking to find a place to land cocaine in Ireland, with a view to moving it into the UK. Third, an FBI guy (Don Cheadle) turns up looking for assistance in tracking the above smugglers, and generally expecting the local constabulary to do their jobs.

From there, the situation gets rapidly out of control, as general misunderstanding causes the smugglers to get in Gleeson's way. If they'd just quietly smuggled their drugs through his patch, he probably wouldn't have given a toss, but what with them murdering one of the few people he gives a toss about, he gradually gets about to feeling like he ought to do something about it.

It's a great, hilarious, deeply dark film. The core of it is Gleeson's performance as a wilfully self-contradictory man who's simultaneously a disgrace to the uniform and seeming the last honest man in Ireland - he may take drugs he takes off suspects, and spend his vacation time in hotels with prostitutes, but he's totally up front with that.

The whole thing comes to a head in what is simultaneously a spoof and spot-on homage to John Wayne westerns, as the lone sheriff finally has to do what a man's got to do, and leaves us on a suitably ambiguous ending, allowing us to choose between the legend and the reality of the man.

Pretty much note perfect throughout, it's a bright spot in what's pretty much been a murky few months of cinema.

Colombiana

It's Colombia, it's twenty or so years ago, and a Colombian drug cartel is having a bit of an internal squabble. The squabble ends with the head of the cartel sending a hit squad after one of the higher up guys in the cartel; he and his wife are killed in front of their young daughter, who flees and under her father's instructions seeks help from the US consulate in Bogota, trading some information (on a suspiciously modern looking memory card) for a US passport. She then finds her uncle in Chicago, who takes her in.

Twenty years later, she's Zoe Saldana, and has become an assassin working for her uncle, with a hidden agenda; leaving a calling card on her victims, trying to send a message to the now-deep-underground cartel boss who killed her family, in the hopes that he will break cover looking for her, and she'll be able to find him and kill him.

There's very much a sense that this film is a derivative offshoot of Leon. In that there's a young girl whose family is murdered in front of her; however, in this case, the Leon character is missing, and she's taken in by the guy who arranges the hits, so she has to train and become the unbeatable assassin for herself. And in a twisted way, that's kind of an empowering message; don't have a man do it for you, women can be just as lethal all by themselves. And Zoe Saldana puts in a pretty great turn as the calculating assassin. She's not Jean Reno, but then who is?*

Unfortunately, Jean Reno is not the only person glaringly missing from the film. Gary Oldman is also missing. This is a bigger problem, because they've not really got a decent replacement in for him. Lennie James is good as the FBI guy tracking her movements, but it's a decent, human performance. There's no great villainous antagonist here; there *is* the cartel enforcer who killed her family, who's in that role, played by Jordi Molla, but it's nowhere near as awesome a part as Gary Oldman. In short, nothing as awesome as this line happens.

So, really, that's the review in a nutshell. It's a assassination revenge thriller that's a bit like Leon, but a good 40% less awesome all around.


* Answer: Jean Reno is.