Blade II (2002)

 "Lock up your daughters, boys and girls. The dark knight returns."

This film is bloody good, possibly better than the first. Partly it's the direction- Guillermo del Toro in Hollywood superhero blockbuster mode, as in Hellboy as well as here, is almost a sub-genre within his own oevre, given the very strong sense of visual and narraive style between the Blade and Hellboy films.Partly it's the strong cast. And partly it's the strong script by David S. Goyer.

What's odd here, perhaps, is that the large gang of rather cool characters as compared to the previous film may make one assume the film takes a lot from the comics- yet the only Marvel character here is Blade himself, although I understand the original plan was to use Morbius, who would have to wait a decade or two. Everyone else is a new character, and even the vampire mythology (a virus rather than mystical) seems to owe very little to my possibly dated understanding of Marvel lore.

What can't be doubted is that Wesley Snipes is again charismatic and effective, if not necessarily subtle, while Kris Kristofferson is extraordinary and Norman Reedus is fun. It's particularly good, though, as a Red Dwarf fan, for me to see Danny John Jules in a fairly meaty serious role.

The film is shot superbly, as you'd expect, and is essentially a series of extremely well-done set pieces in the "house" style. Yet the plot, with its series of double crosses and opaque agendas, is also strong. A quietly impressive Marvel blockbuster.

Valkyrie (2008)

“We have to show the world that not all of us are like him.”

This is an extremely exciting, entertaining and dramatic film full of tension and suspense as (in spite of inevitably knowing that the plot doesn’t succeed) we follow through the workings of the plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 by Count Claus Von Stauffenberg, Ludwig Beck and various other members of the German (in many cases Prussian) conservative establishment who feel that Hitler and Nazism have gone too far.

And the result is gripping. This is a film that had me on the edge of the seat. In a sense it could hardly have been otherwise, as the historical events are pretty bloody cinematic in the first place. But the whole thing is well executed. Yes, Tom Cruise is pretty wooden, but there’s a magnificent cast of mainly British character actors, with Bill Nighy standing out in particular, but we also get Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard in a straight role, Danny Webb, Ian McNiece, Tom Hollander and more. As a Hollywood war film with loads of suspense the film certainly succeeds.

And yet... does the film not whitewash Von Stauffenberg, Beck and the other members of the plot? Historians seem to disagree on Von Stauffenberg’s views- was he an anti-Semite but one who felt that the Holocsust was going too far? He was certainly no liberal, or democrat; he believed in German dominance over Poland; and he wanted a Germany with its 1914 borders plus Germany and the Sudetenland. This is, perhaps, the best we could have expected given where the Overton window was in Nazi Germany, but it’s a shame these shades of grey were washed over and the plotters were portrayed simply as heroes. They deserve respect and remembrance for what they did, but they fought for Nazi Germany. I think I shall let Roger Bartlett from The Great Escape have the last word here:

“Look, sir, you talk about the High Command and the Luftwaffe, and then you talk about the Gestapo and the SS. To me, they're the same! We're fighting the bloody lot! There's only one way to put it, sir: they are the common enemies of everyone who believes in freedom. If the High Command didn't approve of Hitler, then why didn't they throw him out?”

The July 1944 plot was too little, too late.

Wanted (2008)

"This is me. Taking back control."

Grr. Don't talk to me about "taking back control". I'll be glad to see the back of 2016.

I watched this film at the suggestion of Mrs Llamastrangler as she hates it and wanted me to administer a good spanking in my blog. The things we do for love, eh? This is the most awful film I've seen since The Black Knight, and that's saying something.

Actually I suspect that the original comic book (which I haven't read) is likely to have been quite good; there's nothing wrong with the intrinsic concept of a beaten down, cuckolded office drone finding out that he's connected to a rather cool secret society of assassins and at last gets to be cool. The twist is pretty effective, too, and, in fact, I don't think the script is the problem at all here.

No; it's the awful direction from the enfant terrible of Central Asia, a man who comes with a certain reputation and from whom I expected better. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with an ever-moving camera or even with the things that happen with bullets in this film, but here it's just style over substance. The curved trajectories of the bullets (er, yes) and the  over-use of the same CGI tricks give an impression of style over substance, of a strongly emphasised visual style which doesn't actually mean anything and gets in the way of both the characters and the story. The visual style isn't just annoying; it's actually a barrier.

Also, it's noticeable that Angelina Jolie's character, Fox, is there only to look cool and spout exposition rather than have a character as such or, indeed, a first name, which is a shame. Still, at least we get Nine Inch Nails on the soundtrack and the performances are good. It's just st that the direction has to spoil everything and turn a film that could have been something into... this.

Hostel Part III (2011)

"He's alive!"

This is a rather puzzling film; Eli Roth seemingly has no involvement, and it isn't set in Europe. At last we have a film in this franchise which is free of the slightly disturbing "Europe is Godless, immoral and evil" subtext that has existed thus far. Indeed, there are two Ukrainians who are kidnapped and taken to Las Vegas for the usual evil purposes, and the scene introducing them is able to show a nice bit of misdirection.

This isn't as good as either of its two predecessors in that it doesn't really develop the premise, although the room in which the paying customers sit to bet on the carnage is a nice touch in that it strongly evokes the tackiness of television game shows. Our three identification figures, blokes on a stag do, suffer the usual shenanigans with the twist that one of them is a baddie. None of them are likeable, though, with their liking for horrible, sweaty clubs with awful, awful music and their disturbingly rapey attitudes to women.

The actual gore is... well, yeah, uncomfortable. The bloke getting his face cut off and used as a mask is rather unpleasant viewing, and this sort of thing is rather more disturbing when divorced from the cleverness we saw in the first two films. Here it's just gore for gore's sake. The scene with cockroaches is even worse, and we get glimpses of similar horrors going on in side rooms.

The ending has a couple of nice twists, I suppose, but this film is pretty empty and all about the gore.