Bastille Day
Last week, Criminal had Americans romping around London, all guns blazing. This week, it's the turn of the Parisians in Bastille Day. Richard Madden stars as an American pickpocket who is falsely accused of setting off a bomb in Paris and is tracked down by an expat CIA officer, played by Idris Elba. Soon working together to uncover the real culprits, Madden and Elba rampage through Paris in this fairly enjoyable throwaway film.
It says something that given Paris' recent tragedies, Bastille Day is light enough in touch not to get a little too close to the bone. The film has moments of violence and grit, but knows how to balance those with humour, ultimately aiming for the old-fashioned James Bond demographic rather than the overtly aggressive Insert Name Here Has Fallen franchise. It's not exactly an authentic view of Paris, with our leads as Americans (on top of that, both played by English actors) and this doesn't really pull any new tricks for an action movie but it knows what it needs to do and its functionality, it confidently ticks the boxes. Perhaps in a parallel universe there's a gritty French street-crime/action movie named Bastille Day starring Omar Sy and it would probably be much better, but if this Idris' audition tape for a future as James Bond, he's played it well. Charlotte Le Bon also features. (This Week's Hot Ticket)
Friend Request
About a year ago now, the world was given Unfriended (2015), a horror movie in the found footage tradition using the world of social media as its backdrop. Sure, it was gimmicky but the film's fairly decent execution did mean it was better than expectations had been pushed to believe. Friend Request is forever doomed to live in that shadow of temporarily raised expectations.
The film is from the viewpoint of Laura, who befriends a stranger named Malinda. Malinda seems a little unusual and when she's stood up for a party, she commits suicide and before long more deaths seem to follow with the videos of her victims demises being uploaded Laura's account. Aside from a couple of promising animated sequences, Friend Request is a profoundly flat film. Even by the horror genre's notoriously low standards for character development (and I say this even as a horror movie fan) the gaggle of teen leads are bland and devoid of personality, leaving you longing for the dear departed John Hughes whilst the film's "antagonist" is actually more relatable to a significant chunk of the audience.
Horror movies can often get away with being inconsequential. They're mostly meant to be devoured as a bit of a laugh and a cheap thrill, especially horror on the mainstream but tacking onto a Facebook gimmick (and this is about as close as you can get to using Facebook without lawyers being called in) really calls into question if this film will be relevant in a few years. Of course, with its one-trick-pony approach to jump scares, horror's answer to a fart joke, banal writing and completely careless approach to production, this film will probably lose relevance the moment your eyes leave the screen.
Jane Got A Gun
One of a large number of films whose screenplays have been plucked out of development hell, Jane Got A Gun has had a troublesome production history, with its original director dripping out after the first day of filming. Ordinarily, such a notoriously troubled shoot makes for a bad film and whilst calling Jane Got A Gun a travesty is overstepping the mark, the problems are clear.
Natalie Portman stars as Jane, a woman living on the Old West frontier who is driven to protect herself when a former acquaintance (played by Ewan McGregor) comes to right where he feels he has been wronged. You get a feeling that Jane Got A Gun is trying to claim a radical position. A guns blazing Western with a female lead but it's far from anything new and such a film almost feels more like a Western at home in the revisionist days of the 1960's. Heck, even the title lends itself to a Jane Fonda vehicle of some sort and with premise being drained of its potential power, you're left with an unremarkable effort. Its haphazard production leaves the entire film feeling un-cohesive even with its fairly straight-forward plot and the sepia-tinted cinematography, whilst a nice idea, becomes a little bit of a strain on the eyes.
If you like Westerns, Jane Got A Gun is not going to offend your tastes. The atmosphere that comes with the genre and the sweeping desert vistas are still there and Natalie Portman actually puts in a game performance but this production ultimately suffers from a lack of certainty on whether it wants to be a female-lead barnstormer or something more traditional. That, and the film's unfortunate run of bad luck, has created something a little less than the sum of its parts and really just okay when it could've been great. Also features Joel Edgerton.
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