New Release Review: White House Down

''Oh my god, that's the President! He has a rocket launcher!''

It's because of that line, and that alone, that I watched Roland Emmerich's White House Down. It's a line that says 'Yes, what we're making is silly, now stop worrying about plot, character and logic, and just enjoy.' And I tried. I really tried.

It opens well enough, getting everyone in the right place at the right time, quickly introducing Channing Tatum's US Capitol police officer, Jamie Foxx's US President (a strange bit of casting that mostly works), and Maggie Gyllenhaal's Special Agent, all of whom are fairly likeable. In previous Emmerich films the plot mechanics required to get the story going have been so head slappingly stupid that a concussion is an ever present danger. Here it's all kept nice and simple. No plot somersaults required. Bad people have taken over the White House and one man (Tatum), a mostly ordinary man (except for his marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat skills, and his ability to induce shaky-gun-hand-syndrome in the baddies), must keep them from seeing through their nefarious plan to... Take over the government? Destroy America? Destroy everything but America? The actual plan turns out to be convoluted, counterintuitive and nonsensical. Which is fine because it really doesn't matter, it's just a means to an end - and that end consists of giving the President a rocket launcher. It's just a shame how long it takes to get there.

After the table setting of the opening act the film ought to have been one absurd set piece after another, interspersed with barbed (but just about respectful) bickering between Tatum's cop and Foxx's President. Instead the film pauses to move its pieces around again. For no real reason. Moving Gyllenhall over here, the baddies over there, and a bunch of other people (various heads of the Pentagon) over yonder. During which time the principals, Tatum and Foxx, sit in an elevator shaft doing nothing. No bickering, no arguing. Instead they just repeat what they see, just in case the audience can't work out what's passing before their eyes. The dynamic between Tatum and Foxx is non-existent. There's the occasional one liner, and a three stooges-type exchange when Foxx knocks Tatum over the head with a rocket launcher, but it doesn't add up to much in a film who's concept is good for about 80-minutes of screen time, but somehow goes on for 131-minutes. (You'll feel each and every one of them.)

I knew the film was going to be stupid, and I was ready to embrace that, but it actually needed to be stupider still. Too often it's trying to play it straight, aspiring to the lofty heights of Die Hard. Instead it should have revelled in its innate absurdity and taken a note out of Crank (or most any film with Jason Statham). Two decades back it would have been considered passable fare; it would sit neatly alongside the many thoroughly mediocre action films of the mid 90s (Executive Decision, Air Force One, Speed 2, The Siege, Mercury Rising, and many many others). Its villains certainly come from that era - one has the title 'King of Hackers' and couldn't look more out of place in this decade. (He can hack the Pentagon in minutes, with barely the press of a button, but he's somehow baffled by sprinklers. A plot point that also feels like it belongs in a different era.)

I'm sure Emmerich has the capacity to make a stupider film, since he already has (2012), what I'm less sure of is whether he can still make a fun one.

Overall: 3/10

New Release Review: 'Rush'

I'd completely forgotten Ron Howard made Frost/Nixon. In fact after the barrage of mediocrity that was The Dilemma, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons I think I must have retroactively convinced myself that someone else made it and his other career high: Apollo 13. It's like he's two different directors, both unashamedly populist, but one is a journeyman, only interested in getting the job done, whilst the other believes in the material, heart and soul, and can make films as visceral and thrilling as the best of them. It's just a shame the latter version turns out so rarely. Fortunately that's the director we get in Rush, the true story of Niki Lauda and James Hunt's rivalry, two of Formula One's greatest ever drivers. 

If you're knowledge of Formula One matches my own - I know nothing, times nothing, carry the nothing - fear not: Peter Morgan's script deftly guides us through the strange world of going round and round in circles in a fast car. Morgan follows the usual movie arc of 'rise and fall, and rise again', but does such a good job of tapping into what makes the central duo tic that you forget you're watching a sports movie, with all the sports movie cliches that go with it. The bloody minded focus with which Lauda (played by Daniel Brühl) and Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) approached racing, in a sport where when someone gets in a car there's a 20% chance they won't be getting out again - at least not in one piece - is astonishing, commendable, and also a tiny bit insane. Hunt is passionate, hot-headed and prepared to take any opening, even at the risk of death. Lauda is smart, calculating and indefatigable. The dichotomy between the two sounds like a Hollwoodisation, conjured for convenience, but by all accounts it's true. What's great about the script, and Brühl and Hemsworth's performances, is that we're not made to see anyone as the villain. There's no obvious character to cheer for. Lauda and Hunt are two flawed men who need to leave a mark, and driving is the only way they know how. 

Plenty of other directors have tried to get across why watching cars going fast, in circles, can get the adrenaline going. One of Howard's most effective tools here is the sound design: the pulsating engines have a bass rumble so deep I could feel it in my ribcage. The sound was so hypnotic and energising that it wasn't till the end credits that I realised Hans 'Never-Known-For-Being-Restrained' Zimmer had done the score. Making Formula One either the perfect avenue for his thrumming (and of late rather blaring) soundtracks, or the worst. I'll let you know after I've seen it again.

It's only during the last act that the film loses its way a little. The driving sequences are just as thrilling, but Morgan suddenly forgets how to write exposition. The commentators, who up until that point had been well used to gives us an idea of who/what/why/where, begin to point out things that are clear to anyone with the power of sight. Which is annoying, but bearable. What's less forgivable is how they start telling us what the characters are thinking, when Howard has already made it absolutely clear what Hunt and Lauda are going through. But it's only a slight hiccup in what is easily the best film Ron Howard has ever made.

Go see it, and be amazed at how you'll care about one car going faster than another car.

Overall: 8.5/10 

New Release Review: 'About Time'

Richard Curtis’s latest isn’t terribly surprising. Actually it's never surprising. It’s affable and charming - even if it does stumble and bumble in the fashion of most of Curtis’s lead actors - and it's often well observed, with numerous little moments that make the world feel satisfyingly lived in; but surprise never numbers among its achievements.

There might be a warped argument for the film's pervasive feeling of stolid sameness in that Domhnall Gleeson (whose name I have misspelt three different ways thus far), who plays the awkward, self deprecating bundle of energy that is our hero, is rarely caught unawares, or at least not for long, since he can live each day or moment as many times as he likes, having inherited his family's 'gift', passed down from father to son: the ability to travel to any point in his past and, if he sees fit, alter it for (he hopes) the better. His principal aim? Getting a girlfriend and... Well... Actually that's it. He does ask his father (played by a surprisingly reigned in Bill Nighy) about using the ability to get money and power, but the suggestion is waved off; that path does not lead to happiness, and that's the last we hear of that possible plot avenue. It's one of the few moments when the film does things in short hand. After that it's all long hand. If a scene could be done and dusted in three terse lines, in About Time it's likely to play out for fifteen halting ones. Fortunately no one writes semi-incoherent stuttering like Curtis, and few have ever delivered it so well as the almost excessively likeable Gleeson.

The rest of the cast are no less likeable: Nighy is better than he's been in years; Lindsay Duncan, as Gleeson's mother, has barely a dozen lines but imbues each one with a spiky, distant, yet somehow affectionate tone which leaves a more lasting impression than you'd imagine; Tom Hollander is brilliantly antagonistic as Curtis's staple screwball character; and Rachel McAdams, as the object of Gleeson's affections, continues to be effective at playing Rachel McAdams.

Curtis wisely sidesteps Groundhog Day comparisons by having Gleeson only tweak his past to line up moments rather than to perfect them. Gleeson is already a decent sort, he doesn't need to change or orchestrate things to make himself look better. (Not that he doesn't do that, but it's kept to a minimum. If he rewound time whenever he misspoke then it'd be days before we got out of the first act.) What he needs to do is stop fretting about the little things and wake up to the world around him. That's the main idea at play here, which is fine, but it doesn't need a 123-minute running time to get it across. The flip side is that if Curtis streamlined the film then it's unlikely that it'd worked half as well as it does. Part of its charm is in its meandering aimless manner, making it feel like a slice of life.

There's little that's surprising about where the story eventually goes and what Gleeson eventually learns, but it just about gets away with it because Curtis believes in it to his core and Gleeson completely sells us on his own journey to these little discoveries about life.

Overall: 7/10