The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies

Two years ago the first Hobbit movie turned out to be a crushing disappointment. No one expected Peter Jackson to deliver something so lukewarm and bloated, and it was clear that cramming in three movies was never going to be the best solution for quality control. The second movie was a minor improvement, because it cut down the running time and Smaug was truly a visual and aural spectacle. It still wasn’t overall a very good movie though. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the best of the three prequels, but that’s not saying much. And it probably feels like a better film mostly because the expectations from this movie were very low.

Five Armies picks up immediately where the previous movie left off – Smaug (once again voiced by Cumberbatch’s most excellent vocal cords), pissed off by the presence of Bilbo and the dwarves sets off to destroy Lake Town. Back in the Lonely Mountain Thorin, the leader of the group is seduced by the gigantic reserves of gold and the Arkenstone in Erebor.

It seems like the perfect setup for a huge finale – the problem is, it’s all very anti climactic. Smaug gets killed too fast. It’s quite frustrating, because we’ve been teased with Smaug’s buildup for two whole movies and he’s put down in a matter of ten minutes in this movie. The focus jarringly shifts to the Elves and the humans joining hands to attack Erebor, because Thorin refuses to give them their share of the gold. Thorin in retaliation calls a cousin and his whole army of dwarves to fight against the Elves and the men. Meanwhile Azog rounds up a huge army of his Orcs to attack everyone, making Erebor seem like a mixer grinder. It’s all supposed to be epic, and many of the ‘attack’ moments are quite rousing, but they all end in cringe inducingly limp ways. A few new creatures are briefly shown, and suddenly disappear. The Orcs organize an army of bats in various buildup scenes, and they’re taken care of off screen. It’s strange and it feels like Jackson had a lot of will power at the beginning and suddenly lost all interest in making the film.

The problems from the previous two films carry over to an even higher extent in the third film. None of those seven (or was it eight or nine) dwarves have any distinct personality, it’s impossible to distinguish who’s who, and when something bad happens to them you just can’t care. Combine that with a horrible love story between one of the dwarves and the Elf Tauriel and you have a melodramatic disaster on your hands. The trilogy’s core problem has always been the underwritten dwarves, and Jackson’s choice to constantly bring in characters, settings and the nostalgia from the previous trilogy than to make a new world here. LOTR worked because of its unforgettable characters, and it’s the opposite here. We knew in The Fellowship of the Ring itself that the dwarves ended up dead in the mines of Moria. Imagine how terrific this trilogy would have been had Jackson focused on the story of these dwarves rather than use them as placeholders to showcase the same people from the previous movies.

It’s also unclear as to whose eyes the Hobbit films are being told from. The film is called The Hobbit but it’s not about him. On one hand there’s Bilbo who is supposed to anchor the films but he’s shoved aside to bring in an LOTR element just when he gets interesting. The POV of the dwarves is nonexistent because they hardly matter. Plus there’s Gandalf doing his own thing, and the Elves too, and the humans as well, none of which is explored well enough to have any significant impact. They all just go through the motions in their green screen boxes, participating in the same narrative they did twelve years ago.

The only thing more frustrating than Jackson’s choice of telling a similar story again, is by telling it with a ton of fake looking CGI. It’s hands down, the biggest, most annoying element of these films. It’s been twelve years since the last LOTR movie and the visuals in those films look more real, more immersive than any of these films that have a threefold budget. What does work in this movie is the wonderful Martin Freeman, only because he’s the only one in the movie who seems to be in it for the story, not for the cash grab.

Gaffes aside, The Battle of the Five Armies is a harmless action movie. It’s fun in a few places and does a lot of fan service for those who’ve read the books. It’s just forgettable, but certainly unavoidable for those who’ve seen the previous five movies. Jackson treats this property as his precious, let’s just hope someone takes away the ring from him and he gets back in form with Tintin 2.    

(First published in Firstpost)

Movie Review: Unbroken

Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’ was a big surprise – set in the Bosnian war not only was it a far cry from the Hollywood movies she has appeared in, but also a subtly moving drama. In her new film ‘Unbroken’ Jolie takes the powerful punches a couple of notches further, but unfortunately adds a ton of Hollywood masala to offset the emotional impact.

Starring Jack O’Connell who rendered 2014’s best acting performance in the terrific ‘Starred Up’, ‘Unbroken’ is a true story about Louis Zamperini, an American Olympian athlete who joins the air force in WW2, gets marooned at sea when his plane crashes, then becomes a prisoner of war in a Japanese torture camp. It really is an incredible journey, and it’s great that the story is accounted by the Coen brothers who co wrote the script. The film also looks very good, thanks to the great Roger Deakins behind the cameras. The performances from O’Connell and Domhnall Gleeson are also very good. The opening scene, where a fighter plane is deployed over the Japanese coast full of bombers is thrilling as hell. It’s got a lot going for it, and it’s a perfectly serviceable film. It’s just not very memorable and inspiring – two things it desperately wants to be but never once meets the target.

After the thrilling opening scene ‘Unbroken’ breaks off into a schmaltzy vibe. Every dramatic turn is compounded by dramatic ‘WW2 movie music’ – it doesn’t move you more, it just undoes the already powerful stuff happening on the screen. The storytelling is also kind of a mess – in the first half the film constantly cuts from interesting dramatic plot points to the past, thereby extinguishing any sense of tension and thrill. The men in the film are also ‘too handsome’ - while this might not be intentional but it does come across as jarring – lots of movies are derided for having the male gaze, so this one can be criticized for having the female gaze. Apart from O’Connell and Gleeson (who loses a ton of weight for the film), the whole cast looks like a bunch of male models pretending to be soldiers. And no amount of dirt, grime and production values make up for the clearly manipulative ending.

The most interesting aspect of the film is the psychological war between Zamperini and the brutal Japanese camp head ‘The Bird’ played by the Japanese singer Miyavi. Some of the exchanges between them are so over the top they seem manufactured for drama, so it’s quite unsettling to know that Zamperini actually went through all that torture and lived to tell the tale. This is a fairly decent movie, but Zamperini deserved a much better one.

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: The Woman in Black 2

The Woman in Black was one of the biggest surprises of 2012 – it was a refreshing take on the haunted house genre because it didn’t rely on jump scares. Rather, it engaged you with seriously creepy atmosphere and unbearable tension to keep you fidgeting in your seats. It also made one take Daniel Radcliffe seriously as an adult actor. Since that movie made a decent amount of money, Hollywood did what is expected of it – churning out a sequel to rake in some more from your pocket. And The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is exactly what it is expected to be – a disappointing and lazy cash grab. 

Directed by Tom Harper, The Woman in Black 2 does all the things that part one avoided – it resorts to very loud and very cheap jump scares, has a protagonist we just don’t care about, has a story that is laughably bad, side characters that exist only to be picked off by the evil entity, and a ghost that is evil just for the sake of being evil. It’s just a standard issue direct to DVD horror movie with very good production values that make you believe there’s something more to the movie than meets the eye. Sadly there is nothing beyond the surface level, and the filmmakers just make you wait for something interesting to happen but nothing does.

This time the film takes place forty years after the events of the first film – two women bring a bunch of kids to the haunted house on the derelict island, and discover a malevolent entity lurking within the walls, picking off the kids one by one. The lack of logic is baffling – it seems everyone forgot about what happened forty years ago, and there is no explanation as to why this creepy, and obviously haunted house is the only place for these two women to bring a dozen kids to. It’s a convenient plot vehicle to scare you by getting children in isolated places and killing them off. There’s also a strange side plot of a crazy blind man and a bunch of ghost children hanging out in the abandoned town near the island – it adds nothing except for some more cheap eardrum shattering jolts.

The only silver lining in this snoozefest is newcomer Phoebe Fox who is not only very pretty but is also a really good performer as she holds her ground in a film full of silliness. If only she weren’t offset by the character of Helen McCrory, who spends three fourths of the film denying the existence of ghosts with heavy handed philosophical ramblings, and then hilariously apologizes for the same when the woman in black shows up in her face.  

(First published in Mid Day)

Guardians of the Galaxy Blu Ray Review

It’s easy to be a fan of the Space Opera genre. After being exposed through childhood and adulthood with the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek one begins to wonder when the next Space Opera Adventure movie would arrive. One that isn't toned down for the kids or dumbed down for an easy cash grab. With the arrival of James Gunn’s terrific Guardians of the Galaxy, Space Opera fans have a gigantic reason to cheer.

Not only is Guardians one of the year's most exciting and entertaining movies, but is indeed the Star Wars for this generation. Director Gunn must be one hell of a Marvel fan and comic book geek. He has followed up the half a dozen Avengers universe films and delivered a relatively unknown property with such gloriously fantastic style. A typical hack job by, say, Michael Bay, is a hollow two-hour light show pretending to be a summer blockbuster. Guardians of the Galaxy is considerably more than that. Gunn’s film is candy for hardcore Marvel fanboys, while still managing to keep the newcomers glued to their seats.

There are dozens of action sequences, all of which are kinetic and thrilling. A new creature or beautiful otherworldly space landscape is offered every five minutes, and each one is more impressive than the previous one. When the film isn't bowling you over with its awesome visuals, it serves a barrage of laughs via its extremely fun characters. Gunn had deconstructed the superhero genre in his dark comedy Super and he takes it a notch further in this film. In this day of CGI tech and glut of superhero films it's not enough to simply destroy a city at the end of the movie as a grand finale. Gunn seems fully aware of this and he treats characters more importantly than the numerous big money shots.

The combination of sincere emotion, huge spectacle and a real sense of wonder and adventure is what makes Guardians so much more than a superhero movie. We have Star Lord - a goofy but heroic human sucked into an intergalactic war; Gamora – an alien orphan assassin; Drax – a hulking badass who laughs manically; Rocket Racoon – a mean snarky raccoon with a love for firing rockets at people who piss him off; and Groot – a lovable tree like humanoid who can kick some copious amounts of ass with his branch-limbs. They’re all bizarre, completely mismatched characters, and the film milks their mismatched-ness to hilarious levels. They bicker, they fight, they punch each other in the face, but ultimately they realize that they need to stick together if they want to save their respective worlds.

The big ‘assemble’ in The Avengers was one epic scene. But in Guardians the assembly is fleshed out over the course of the movie, the conflicts between the characters timed and woven around to perfection. That gives you a chance to dive into the characters, to understand them and ultimately fall in love with them. And yet, there’s the other bonus effect of the film – The Avengers took four previous origin films to culminate into one giant spectacle, and the effect was glorious. In Guardians the starting point is on the scale of The Avengers, so good luck dousing your goosebumps. It helps that the folks playing the heroes are so cool. Chris Pratt welds together the heroic suaveness of Indiana Jones and the goofiness of Andy Dwyer. Bradley Cooper spits sarcasm in his Rocket Raccoon – he’s pretty much the meanest superhero we’ve seen. Gamora and Drax are ruthless in their own ways. It’s so great to see these people trample over the perceived notion of superheroes having to be broody and kind hearted and overtly nice to everyone. They might be the Guardians of the Galaxy, but these guys don’t give a shit if they don’t want to. And it’s great that Marvel chose to be brave about this and offer heroes who, to quote Peter Serafinowicz in the film, are a bunch of a-holes.

The villains are equally cool - Ronan (played by Lee Pace) is pretty scary to look at, Nebula (Karen Gilan) is pure evil, and Thanos (voiced by Josh Brolin) also makes an appearance. The minor characters like John Reily as a corspman, Michael Rooker as a bandit and Benocio Del Toro as The Collector are all fun as well, and they’ll no doubt have bigger roles to play in the sequels. With this huge array of characters and landscapes the universe created in Guardians is vast. Marvel continues to close the gap between the Avengers and the Guardians, and it’s insane to think of what we’ll get in the future. It’s not often that we get adrenaline, heart and humor rolled into one cohesive, iconic epic. And once the film is over, you’ll know the fun has really just begun.

The bonus features in the Blu Ray include an exclusive look at Avengers: Age of Ultron – bursting with action, and including the newest members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. There are a few deleted scenes, most of which are on Youtube. Other goodies include Guide To The Galaxy with James Gunn, a look at the impressive VFX of the film where we get to know how Rocket and Groot went from blue screen to big screen. The Blu Ray transfer is pristine, and pretty much a must have for anyone who loved the film in theaters.