Three Films Make A Post: Party Like It’s 2022

Mandrake (2022): Sometimes, I really don’t know. Objectively, Lynne Davison’s clever mix of traditional British social drama and neo folk horror is a fine, perhaps even great film. The acting, particularly by Deirdre Mullins and Derbhie Crotty, is great and absolutely on point, Davison’s visual language is creepy without only ever going for the obvious effect, and the script clearly knows what it wants to be about as well as how to express it. In practice, I didn’t connect with it at all. Despite my love for clever variations on folk horror and good filmmaking this might as well have been Generic Blumhouse Horror Number 9855, for all I felt and thought. Which says very little about the film, obviously.

Beast (2022): To be fair to myself, for most of the time, I had the same reaction to Baltasar Kormákur’s animal attack movie in which Idris Elba needs to protect his family from lions. But here, it’s the proper reaction. As you might expect, the film milks the whole “a man needs to protect his little girls” so incessantly, you can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop and the movie to deconstruct this notion. To nobody’s surprise, the other shoe never does drop, and it’s just a case of very low effort character writing.

On the plus side, Elba is good even if he has very little to do, the young actresses playing his daughters deserved better as well, and Sharlto Copley does – as usual – a great portrayal of Sharlto Copley playing a likeable ranger. Too bad the film has no ambitions beyond being as generic as possible, wasting the talents of everyone involved on the kind of movie that’s simply there.

Barbarian (2022): Because I didn’t want to go into spoiler heavy territory with this one – let’s just say there’s a really clever, effective and actually meaningful structural thing or three that happen – I can end the post on a positive note.

For Zach Cregger’s Barbarian truly is as good as everyone says – apart from one bit I found somewhat too smugly on the righteous side of our times which would involve heavy spoilers to get into – using parts of today’s social conversation in intelligent ways to surprise. It’s the case where a movie has something to say, knows how to say it, and also how to make a pretty fantastic horror movie out of it. Add some really great performances by Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long, and you have something really rather special.

In short: The A-Team (2010)

I’m not sure this actually needs to be said, but Joe Carnahan is a weird director. Extremely talented and an able to turn his not inconsiderable budgets into true crowd pleasers (if for a very specific kind of crowd), most of what he does feels as individual and personal as any auteur-style movie you’d care to mention. Stylistically, he always uses state of the art and budget techniques of the Tony Scott school that’ll make many a critic automatically use the word “edgy”. I’d argue that, when Carnahan is on, he’s not “edgy” but a filmmaker whose films actually have an edge acquired by an uncommon mix of the ability to direct actors and use sometimes grating film techniques to often very intelligent effect. When he isn’t on, he’s making Boss Level instead of Narc.

This star-studded (Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Sharlto Copley and Patrick Wilson are certainly quite the 2010 cast list, and would still get quite a few behinds in seats ten years later) variation and prequel to many a nerd’s (including this writer’s) foundational action TV show is somewhere between the two. For my taste, the film’s at its best when it provides its cast with opportunities to play their characters outrageously larger than life or when it comes up with the silliest possible set-ups for action sequences (the thing with the flying tank wouldn’t cut realism muster in a Fast & Furious movie even today). It falters, whenever it tries to hitch the bigness or the silliness to moments of more traditional, semi-naturalistic character work, never really managing to connect the two modes properly. Which is a bit strange, since connecting the outrageous with proper, believable and serious character moments is often one of Carnahan’s biggest strengths.

Conceptually, The A-Team suffers a bit from its apparently unquenchable need to turn the strange innocence of the original series cynically violent. So this movie adaptation of a series where nobody ever died from being shot at with automatic weapons has a body count too large to calculate; in an even shittier move, it also feels the need to treat non-violence as something bad in a man that needs to be gotten rid of and disposed of while the score shits out triumphant music, turning the fun pretend violence surrounding it moment pretty sour for this viewer, and really not helping the film as a whole with its tonal difficulties.

Free Fire (2016)

It’s the late 70s. An arms deal between a group of IRA members (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley and others) and a South African arms dealer (Sharlto Copley, playing the part of the most horrifyingly annoying man alive) and his entourage, finagled by an American middle woman (Brie Larson) who really doesn’t have much fun with being a woman in late 70s macho land, goes very wrong indeed. Some, let’s call them “personal issues”, between some of the foot soldiers on both sides escalate into a drawn-out shoot-out and stand-off in a warehouse, and soon, very many characters are bleeding, shooting and cursing. Not always in this order, and quite a bit of dying is involved too..

Free Fire is the film that really decides it for me: Ben Wheatley (and his regular writing and editing partner Amy Jump) is a director that’ll stay with me for the next few decades, making one film that isn’t like the one he made before or the ones before that yet still retains a personal handwriting every year and keeping me happy with it, sometimes making a perfect movie like Kill List, sometimes an interesting effort, sometimes more, sometimes less.

For my tastes (and the Internet informs me not everyone shares my enthusiasm), Free Fire is nearly as good as Kill List, and is certainly the crowning achievement in the warehouse action comedy genre. Of course, if you’ve read that Free Fire is supposed to consist exclusively out of one long shoot-out, you might be disappointed by a film whose characters only start shooting at each other 25 minutes or so in, and which isn’t at all interested in the sort of non-stop, slow-motion gun fu you might expect on first hearing about it. Technically, there’s a one-hour gun battle here, but in practice, most of the characters are wounded more or less heavily early on, so instead of the expected extreme spectacle, this is actually a character piece that delights in having a fantastic cast (there are also Sam Riley, Armie Hammer, Enzo Cilenti, Babou Ceesay and other fine thespians involved) of actual actors playing around with their characters, bickering, cursing, making jokes, and bleeding.

There is still quite a bit of action going around here, though, it’s just that Wheatley makes his job purposefully difficult by staging action scenes between characters who are mostly only able to crawl, slither and sometime hop around for much of the film. That doesn’t just add a sense of the absurd (there’s always a bit of Beckett in a Wheatley film) to the film but also provides the director with the opportunity to come up with action set pieces that aren’t quite like the ones you’ll find in a John Wick movie, and which turn out pretty damn great to my eyes.


As does the temporal and local colour (warning to the overly sensitive: there’s a degree of racism and sexism involved but it is one of the characters and not of the film), the acting (obviously), the photography, the texture of the language and the structure of the editing. Given these standards, that the film we get isn’t quite the film most of us probably expect going in isn’t a bad thing to me. Free Fire, like all of Wheatley’s movies until now, is very much doing its own thing, not too interested in being the film an audience expects rather than the one it should and wants to be.

In short: Hardcore Henry (2015)

There’s really no need for even the tiniest plot synopsis here, for there is so little plot here, and what there is such a bunch of vacuous crap, it might as well not exist at all.

Who’d have thought that having as a film’s only feature the gimmick of it being shot exclusively in a First Person Shooter style POV vision created by strapping a cheap digital camera to a stunt man’s head is not enough to make a movie that’s actually interesting for more than the fifteen minutes or so it takes to gawk at said gimmick? Even king of the gimmick William Castle added an actual movie to his gimmicks! Unfortunately, director/”writer” Ilya Naishuller is no William Castle (shit, he isn’t even Neveldine-Taylor), so all we get here is a series of action set pieces that might have been interesting to look at if they weren’t exclusively shot through a jittery camera that has little to do with the far more stable view of one of the actual FPSs the movie pretends to be inspired by, and even less with the way the actual human eye presents the world. Unless, that is, everyone but me sees the world through a shaking fish eye that is screwed onto their heads.

Not surprisingly, the novelty of seeing action scenes in this way decreases quickly, leading first to annoyance at the awkward and un-cinematic manner the film presents what might be rather great stunt work, then to boredom caused by the visual sameness of it all, and then, worst of all, moments when you can’t help but start thinking about the film’s plot. Or rather, how stupid and irrelevant the plot is, and how its presentation is even worse than in the video games it is badly attempting to copy. This thing makes the yearly Call of Duty look like a narrative masterpiece, and Far Cry: Blood Dragon like clever satire – let’s not even speak about those shooters that actually have a few brain cells to rub together, or actual movies. Even Steven Seagal movies have better writing.

To add insult to injury, this is also one of those films that pretend the lazy, disinterested nonsense they call their writing is ironically bad, and therefore good, quite ignoring the fact that not giving a shit isn’t made any better by winking at the audience about one’s failure. Just watch Sharlto Copley in the most annoying “funny” multi-character role this side of Peter Sellers and still try to tell yourself that anything has ever been improved by being bad on purpose.

In short: Open Grave (2013)

This one is not treated to a full, detailed write-up with one or two mad theories about subtext (and stuff) of my own thrown in only because I don't want to risk spoiling the rather deliciously confusing/confused first thirty minutes that do that loathsome and tired "people without a memory meet at some place or other" shtick so good I quit complaining about it after about ten seconds for anyone. It's not so much about protecting the film's plot twist, for the audience will realize much earlier than the characters at least the shape of what's truly going on (well, at least a genre movie savvy audience will do), and the film seems to know and accept that. Rather, I don't want to spoil the shape in which the story develops which does make it impossible to discuss some rather interesting details.

Fortunately, there are no spoilers in suggesting that Open Grave features an excellent acting ensemble in the form of Sharlto Copley, Erin Richards, Josie Ho, Thomas Kretschmann - who seems to attempt to be in every movie right now like some kind of Udo Kier return’d –, Joseph Morgan and Max Wrottesley, that as an ensemble proves itself to be really great at doing the unsubtle stuff parts of the film ask for as well as things like subtly suggesting the way their characters remember parts of their relationships not as the visual way film by necessity understands memories, but like muscle memory and the faint echoes of things.

It's also not a spoiler, though will certainly come as a surprise to some, that director Gonzalo López-Gallego (him of the much hated Apollo 18 which I'm going to seek out post haste) turns out to be rather great at everything he attempts here, too. López-Gallego demonstrates a deft sense of pacing that pastes over all of the script's minor problems (like the lack of charade abilities for a certain character). He also understands how to build up a scene's nightmarish qualities without seeming to be trying too hard, among many other things great and small. The director also does the unthinkable and actually uses colour(s) in thematically appropriate ways. Why there's even daylight that looks like a more intense version of actual daylight (all the better for things in it to turn not quite so pleasant)!

So yeah, it's all good here. Really.

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