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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 06 March 2018

During my 25 years as a critic, I’ve been lucky to see so many great fictional tales that fit into the genres of comedy, drama, action, horror, romance, thriller and/or sci-fi.  All of that said, one genre that seldom needs to delve into worlds of fiction is war.  That’s because there are countless stories of real life heroes that need to be heard and appreciated.  In the past 5 years alone, we’ve been treated to Dunkirk, Hacksaw Ridge, Land of Mine, Unbroken, American Sniper, Lone Survivor and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.

12 Strong continues in the same vein.  Based on the non-fiction book penned by Doug Stanton, the film takes to Afghanistan in the weeks following the terrorist attack that took place in the United States on September 11, 2001.  We follow a group of young soldiers who have teamed up with Afghan allies and are trying to reclaim critical cities and towns that have been claimed by the Taliban.

The U.S. side is led by Mitch Nelson (Hemsworth) – a confident but inexperienced Captain with limited experience in the field.  I’ll be blunt.  Part of me things he’s a courageous hero and another part thinks he’s a lucky fool.  He continually puts himself in harm’s way to complete the complex mission and protect his fellow soldiers.  Notable actors forming part of the ensemble include Michael Shannon, Michael Peña and Trevante Rhodes.

The most interesting part of the film is its exploration of the tactics adopted by the American military in Afghanistan.  They were outnumbered by the Taliban and had very limited knowledge of the terrain.  It may sound like a hopeless task but they had two key advantages over their enemies.  Firstly, they forged an alliance with General Dostum (Negahban), a respected leader in Afghanistan who had put together his own army to fight the Taliban.  Secondly, they had a number of American fighter planes at their disposal that could help bomb key targets once properly identified.

I don’t want to sound too disrespectful given this is actual events but screenwriters Ted Tally (The Silence of the Lambs) and Peter Craig (The Town) have diminished the material by using unnecessary clichés and plot devices.  There’s an early scene before Mitch heads to Afghanistan where he makes the firm promise to his wife that he’ll come home alive.  The film doubles down on that theme several times including a clunky scene where he refuses to write a letter to his family, despite other soldiers doing the same, before going into battle.  It’s borderline cringe-worthy.

The direction of Danish-born Nicolai Fuglsig is also rough around the edges.  He’s used a lot of different camera angles in crafting the key action sequences but editor Lisa Lassek has struggled to weave them into something suspenseful.  Shots from high above are mixed with shots from down low but it’s often hard to work out what’s going on and who’s attacking who.  Oh, and did we really need the footage of the stressed Taliban leader gazing across the battlefield and trying to look as villainous as possible?  It looks awfully fake.

12 Strong is a story worth telling but I’d have preferred that it ditched the clichés and replaced it with better dialogue.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 22 February 2018

In doing a little background reading before seeing Winchester, I was fascinated by the true story on which it is based.  Oliver Winchester lived in Baltimore during the mid-1800s and created the Winchester Repeating Arms Company – an extremely profitable business that sold lever-action rifles.  Oliver died in 1880 at the age of 70 and then one year later, his only son, William, passed away due to the effects of Tuberculosis.  As a result, William’s wife, Sarah, inherited roughly $20 million as well as a 50% stake in the company. 

Three years later, Sarah moved to San Jose, California and bought an unfinished house along with 161 acres of farmland.  Using her immense wealth, she commissioned a series of renovations and extensions to her new home.  It’s at this point where things start to get rather strange.  The renovations continued for 38 years with Sarah seemingly never satisfied with the work performed.  At the time of her death, there were roughly 160 rooms including 40 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, 47 fireplaces, and 17 chimneys.

It gets weirder.  Because the house had been built in such a haphazard manner with no formal plan, there were design features that made no logical sense.  Stairs went nowhere, doors opened up into blank walls, and windows overlooked other rooms.  Sarah also had an obsession with the number 13.  An expensive chandelier had room for 13 lit candles, clothes hooks were always placed together in groups of 13, and the drains in the sink contained 13 holes.  If you believe the rumours, this was all because that Sarah Winchester believed the house was haunted by the ghosts of those killed by firearms purchased from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

What excites me most of all is that the house still stands today.  If you’re ever visiting San Jose and have $39 USD to spare, you can get an hour-long tour that takes you inside 110 of the 160 rooms.  It has attracted more than 12 million visitors and it’s a place I’d love to visit myself one day.  It’s certainly a “truth is stranger than fiction” kind of tale.

All of it sounds like a great idea for a movie which is where Peter and Michael Spierig enter the frame.  They were born in Germany but moved to Australia with their parents at the age of 4.  They few up in Brisbane, went to the Queensland College of Art, and have made some worthy thrillers including Undead, Daybreakers and Predestination (a personal favourite of mine).  In putting together the cast for Winchester, they enlisted Oscar-winner Helen Mirren (The Queen) along with a bunch of fellow Aussies delivering their best American accents – Jason Clarke (Everest), Sarah Snook (The Dressmaker) and Angus Sampson (The Mule).

In terms of the narrative, it revolves around a doctor (Clarke) who has been recruited by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to perform a medical assessment of Sarah Winchester (Mirren).  Given the bizarre house and the stories circulating about ghosts and spirits, the Board of the company don’t believe Sarah is of sound mind and body.  They assume the doctor will come back with a negative evaluation and this can be used to sever her involvement with the company.

What follows is a formulaic, ho-hum horror-thriller.  The doctor goes through the whole routine of denying the existence of ghosts but changes his tune when strange things start happening in the house.  Things get more extreme with each passing scene and we end up at a point where we’ve got possessed children, objects mysteriously being flung across the room, creepy noises, and equally creepy ghouls.  We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again.

Given the way it is shot and the way the story plays out, it never feels scary and never makes the most of the intriguing setting.  The house is more interesting than any individual – and even it gets a bit boring after the opening hour.  It’s the same sort of thing from scene-to-scene with Helen Mirren trying to act mysterious, Jason Clarke searching for a personality, and a bunch of dull supporting players grasping for attention.  This is a cool idea for a movie but it’s not well executed.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 28 February 2018

Red Sparrow marks the fourth time that Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook) has worked with director Francis Lawrence (no relation) but it’s the first time that they’ve collaborated outside of the successful Hunger Games franchise.  It’s clear from the outset this is a different film and a different genre.  It’s based on a fictional spy novel written in 2013 by Jason Matthews, a former CIA operative himself.

While the film is set largely in Russian, the characters all speak English with heavy Eastern European accents.  It’s a compromise filmmakers often reach so as to create a believable setting but not alienate those who hate subtitles.  In the lead role, Lawrence plays Dominika – a successful ballet dancer who saw her career cut short after a sickening on-stage accident.

It’s at this point where we stumble to Bourne Identity type territory.  Desperate for work to care for her ailing mother, Dominika is guided by her powerful uncle (Schoenaerts) and enlists in a secretive spy school.  She is given a new identity and told by her emotionless teacher (Rampling) that she must forget her past and all her personal details.

The school trains its cadets to become “Red Sparrows”.  They aren’t trained to be ruthless assassins.  Rather, they have been selected for their beauty as much as their strength.  Their job is to seduce people, exploit their weaknesses and extract valuable information that can be used by the state.  Dominika aptly refers to it as “Whore School” but the big wigs who govern the school believe it will help Russia back on top when it comes to global espionage.

She seems rather underdone in terms of training but Dominika is soon given her first assignment.  An American CIA agent (Edgerton) has been working in the country and is known to the Russians.  That itself is not a huge issue.  The problem is that he’s receiving obtaining government secrets from a mole inside the Russian military.  Dominika’s job is to gain the trust of the CIA agent and get him to spill the beans.

Clocking in at a lengthy 2 hours and 20 minutes, Red Sparrow is pitching itself as a slick spy thriller where the audience isn’t quite sure who can be trusted.  It’s an intriguing screenplay with a few subplots lurking in the background but it never quite fulfils its promise.  Dominika’s character is the hardest to reconcile.  There are moments where she has a sixth sense and an IQ of 200 but other moments where she lacks the knowhow of a teenager.

The graphic nature of the material might also catch a few in the audience off guard.  The film snuck through with an MA rating here in Australia despite having “strong themes, violence, sexual violence, sex scenes and coarse language.”  I’ve no issue with the nudity but some scenes are particularly violent.  Francis Lawrence doesn’t let us off with soft camera angles or fast paced edits.  These characters dish out a very strong brand of “justice”.

There are parts of the storyline to be admired such as the early interaction between Dominika and the CIA agent.  Both are using each other but can it be a win-win situation for them both?  The unusual training school also gets you thinking about the many ways in which spies can infiltrate their targets.  I guess it’s worth a look for fans of the genre.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 20 February 2018

I work with a bunch of people who get to the movies once every month or so but wouldn’t consider themselves film buffs.  Talking to them about the premise of Game Night (which they hadn’t heard of before), there was certainly a heightened level of intrigue.  Even I have to admit that it sounds like a cool idea for a movie on paper.

Written by Mark Perez (The Country Bears, Herbie Fully Loaded), we begin with a cute introduction as to how the film’s two key protagonists first me.  Max (Bateman) and Annie (McAdams) were on opposing teams at a pub trivia night but they quickly realised they had something in common – a mutual attraction and an intensely competitive nature.  Such is their love for games, Max actually popped the question during a game a charades.  I’d have expected nothing less from these two.

Things are generally going well for Max but there’s one sore point that’s making him anxious – his brother.  Brooks (Chandler) is a successful venture capitalist who lives in nice houses, travels around the world, and drives expensive cars.  Their levels of success are summed up best when Brooks is described as Mark Wahlberg and the underappreciated Max is described as Donnie Wahlberg.  It’s clear that max is tired of living in his brother’s shadow.

Agreeing to host a game night for the first time, Brooks once again tries to show off in front of Max, Annie and four of their good friends.  Rather than organise a simple game of Monopoly, Scrabble or Cluedo, he goes all out and orchestrates a fictitious crime.  He says that someone at the game night will be kidnapped and it’ll be up to everyone else to put together the clues and solve the mystery.  A substantial prize awaits the winner.

If you’ve seen the trailer or any adverts, you’ll know what happens next.  An actual crime is committed but the problem is that the participants at the game night are none the wiser.  They see Brooks being gagged and carried away by two hired goons without having any idea that it’s actually real.  What follows is a series of humorous, chaotic events as the game night participants try to locate Brooks without realising just how dangerous the situation is.

Leave your brain at the door with this one.  The more you think about it, the less sense it makes.... but that’s not to say that you can’t have fun watching it.  The story doesn’t flow particularly well but there are some great individual scenes that make it worth the price of admission.  A great example is a sequence where Max and Annie argue outside a convenience store while she tries to extract a bullet from his arm using a craft knife, a bottle of chardonnay, and instructions from Google.  It’s farcical but it’s funny.

The bickering between the characters also wins humour points.  Kevin (Morris) and Michelle (Bunbury) are two game night participants who lose focus after she admits she slept with a Hollywood celebrity several years ago (but won’t reveal who it is).  Ryan (Magnussen) is a not-so-bright friend who has brought along a first date (Horgan) for unknown reasons.  He gets limited screen time but Jesse Plemons is the MVP of the cast with his portrayal as a creepy, game-loving next-door neighbour with zero friends.

With some of the best jokes requiring a long set up (e.g. the scenes with Danny Huston), Game Night is fun, silly and trashy.  Make sure you stay until the very end of the credits for one final joke.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 26 February 2018

When asked about my favourite films of all time, one I always include is Billy Elliot.  Released in 2000, it was the story of an 11-year-old boy from England who, against his father’s wishes, takes ballet classes instead of boxing classes.  Infused with a narrative about the famous coal miners’ strike in the mid-1980s, it was beautifully written by Lee Hall and perfectly directed by Stephen Daldry.  Both earned Academy Award nominations for their impressive work.

The reason the movie springs to mind is that Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool marks the first time since Billy Elliot that Jamie Bell and Julie Walters, who both won BAFTA Awards for the earlier film, have appeared together on screen.  This is a very different film with very different characters but I still had a smile on my face watching them interact during one of the opening scenes.

Directed by Scotland-born Paul McGuigan (Wicker Park, The Wrong Man), Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is based on the memoir of Peter Turner and chronicles his interactions with American film star Gloria Grahame during the final two years of her life between 1979 and 1981.  For those unfamiliar with Grahame, she was a Hollywood starlet who appeared in a number of big films in the 1950s including Sudden Fear, Human Desire and Oklahoma!  The high point of her career came in 1952 when, as a budding 29-year-old, she won an Oscar for her performance alongside Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful.

The years that followed weren’t as successful.  She struggled to land good roles on screen and on the stage.  McGuigan’s film picks things up in the late 1970s.  Grahame (Bening) is now in her mid-50s, living alone in London, and furiously searching for any kind of paying role in the theatre.  She’s recognised from time-to-time but it’s clear that the name Gloria Grahame has been all but forgotten.

It’s at her apartment building where she first meets Paul Turner (Bell), a young man who has lofty dreams himself of becoming an actor.  He knows very little of Grahame’s past but the two form a friendship which develops into something a little deeper.  Those close to them have differing views about the noticeable age gap between the pair.  His mother (Walters) offers loving support but her mother (Redgrave) is inherently sceptical.

The fact this is based on a true story creates an added layer of interest than what we’d normally expected from a romantic drama.  I knew nothing of these individuals beforehand and so it serves as an eye-opener and a fitting tribute.  Having done some subsequent research and looked at a few Gloria Grahame clips on YouTube, I have a stronger appreciation for Annette Bening’s superb leading performance.  Jamie Bell is also great in the subtler, less-showy role.

My attention waned ever so slightly during the middle stages but Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is a warm, heartfelt drama about the dreams we chase and the people who shape them along the way.