Movie Review: Don't be Afraid of the Dark

Comic book artist Troy Nixey’s debut feature Don’t be Afraid of the Dark boasts the writing credit of Guillermo del Toro, but the film is undermined by a nonstop barrage of flimsy characters and gigantic plot holes. While such drawbacks are not entirely unexpected in horror films, they are ill matched to the unfrightening little CGI monsters in the film, who appear to have been added in an effort to broaden the film’s audience.  

It is a pity, because Don’t be Afraid of the Dark begins on a tense, brooding note about unspeakable horrors lurking beneath the earth’s surface, with a chillingly grotesque reference to human teeth and a murder. Nixey’s film is the exact opposite of the one he probably proceeded to make – it has characters about whom we never care, plot points that never excite, and zero moments of shock or unsettling horror to even cause minimal effect of the viewer’s pulse.

Based on a 1973 TV movie of the same name that inspired del Toro, Don’t be Afraid of the Dark stars Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes as a couple who invest their life savings into fixing a creaky old mansion that had been unoccupied ever since its owners vanished. The husband is so obsessed with the renovation that he forgets that his sad, neglected young daughter Sally (Bailee Madison) had been sent to him by his ex-wife. Sally begins seeing creatures in the new home, who not only don’t appear playful, but are also looking for some sort of human sacrifice. This is all very entertaining, no doubt, for those who are new to spooky stories but is very clichéd for those of us who have been watching horror films for years. If the idea was to attract the Pan’s Labyrinth enthusiasts then it proved to be fatally flawed, because Don’t be Afraid of the Dark is neither as well constructed and layered as that film, nor does it have any semblance of a scary or wondrous moment. 

The production design is impeccable, and the sets do a great job of creating atmosphere, that is, until we see the creatures. Once the mystery is known, the film ceases to scare or fascinate. To make things worse, the whole thing ends on a frustratingly implausible note, as if the lives of everyone involved in the film depended on the presence of deux ex machina. 

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

It seems Hollywood’s appetite for a humongous cast of the finest British actors is insatiable. In The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel you’ll see Bill Nighy, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson and more, but there is nothing in the film other than a hazy air of self-importance and a minor escapade for big fans of the actors. 

John Madden’s films have seldom veered away from saccharine, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an odd mixture of sappy storytelling and pretentious filmmaking. Based on the book ‘The Foolish Things’, the film is a rom-com revolving around a pack of Brit old timers looking to get away to an exotic place and keep their worries aside. An ultra-cheap hotel in Jaipur becomes an unlikely host to Evelyn Greenslade (Judi Dench), a widow dealing with her late husband’s debt, ex-civil servant Douglas (Bill Nighy) and his demanding wife Jean (Penelope Wilton), the player Norman (Ronald Pickup), a saucy broad (Celia Imrie) who is on the lookout to getting hitched to a rich man, a rich former judge (Tom Wilkinson) who has returned to India, and the snappy ex-housekeeper Muriel (Maggie Smith) uptight about her hip replacement surgery.

We get the expected chuckles from the sixty-plus year old characters, wrought with a tinge of mischief and light on drama, and it is all delivered with ease by the cast of actors who are clearly very friendly off camera. The problem is that there is no indication that the film will play out in anything other than the most clichéd, predictable manner. Madden doesn't bother to throw in any new or interesting colors on the actors, and even proceeds to hammer us with the stereotyped Indian characters found in most books and movies. There’s the hotel manager Sonny (Dev Patel) whose romance with a telephone receptionist Sunaina (Tena Desae) is opposed by the brother and the mother. Instead of doing anything new Madden slums with plenty of hackneyed themes like old age pension, long lost love, crumbling marriage, and the eyeroll inducing superficial emphasis on ‘old’ and the ‘new India’, and the white men discovering how charming the culture in this country is. 

The acting overall is naturally a big plus, and the Brit veterans are as unforced as always. Dev Patel who was cast presumably for name-recognition value sticks out like a zit, unfortunately, with his confused hammy parlance. The lovely Tena Desae doesn’t have much of a role and Lilette Dubey seems as if she is counting the moments until she can leave the set. The climax is as forced as it is ridiculously feel-good, and if that’s the sort of fluffy cinema you don’t mind, then by all means watch it.

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: The Raid Redemption

When you walk out of a theater with a huge grin plastered from ear to ear, you know you’ve had a good time at the movies. Prepare yourselves for 100 minutes of non-stop cyclonic mayhem, because director Gareth Evans and star Iko Uwais don’t just blow your mind – they crack your skull open, place a kilo of TNT in it and drop kick the lever. 

The Raid: Redemption is not one of the better action films of the past few years, it is one of the best action movies ever made. Between the bat-guano insane martial arts on display and the incredible soundtrack by Mike Shinoda, you barely realize that your jaw has detached itself from your face and fallen on the floor.  The film makes you feel like you’re tied with ropes to the roof of a bullet train going at full speed, with your lips attached to a straw that leads to a bottle of your favourite fizzy drink. The plot kicks you in the nuts, the fight choreography punches you in the rear, the camerawork lands a swift elbow in your teeth – and you’ll love every second of it. 

The story, though gleefully permeating video game boundaries is ridiculously plausible. An Indonesian SWAT team is on a mission to quietly raid a building in Jakarta and take down a crime lord. Among the team is rookie Rama (Iko Uwais), who has a baby on the way and knows that there’s something iffy about the mission. As expected, the mission goes awry, cover is blown, defecation hits the oscillation and the heavily outnumbered cops plough through the building to the backdrop of raining bullets and knives. Naturally, the setup is but an excuse to put a bunch of good guys in a box full of baddies so that they kick the crap out of each other. But The Raid: Redemption rises over the genre’s dreck because it’s hard to recall the last time a movie celebrated bodily destruction with such originality and panache.  Director Evans grits his teeth and irons out all the kinks of his previous (and also criminally underrated) film Merantau and comes out guns blazing, delivering more thrills than those found in decades of Hollywood. 

Indonesian star Iko Uwais, using his bare hands slices, dices, stabs, jackhammers through scores and scores of ruffians with the ease of a ballet dancer - not since the inception of Tony Jaa back in 2003 has an action hero so gracefully delivered a resounding fist against the action genre’s cheek. Uwais, who was also in Merantau has the endearing looks of the hero you root, cheer and clap for, and one can’t help but wish for a big budget action movie starring Uwais and Jaa, preferably pit against each other. 

The Raid slows down only in the few bits of dialogue, but the tension never recedes, ensuring you constantly remain short of breath. One such squirmy scene involves our hero hiding behind a plastic wall as a baddie repeatedly stabs the wall with a two foot long machete. And by the time the villain’s right hand man Mad Dog comes along and blasts off into a two-against-one fight, you’re left slobbering in your seat in a cathartic state, screaming for more. Moreover, the entire film takes place in real time, so whatever it lacks in storytelling, it makes up for in sheer gut-busting cinematic pizzazz.

One of the biggest achievements of The Raid is that Evans pulls the camera back, and lets you watch the action instead of resorting to cheap tricks like editing. This is the real stuff – long, uncut, unadulterated shots of people inflicting some extraordinary damage upon each other in dazzling ways – it’s pure guilty pleasure, and it makes the most badass Hollywood and even Donnie Yen action films look like romantic comedies. Watch it on the biggest screen possible.

(First published in MiD Day)

Movie Review: Dark Shadows

It was probably inevitable – an old Gothic series, a genius filmmaker who specializes in Goth, an extremely talented writer with a penchant for edgy humor, and a cast that can make or break a genre flick. And guess what – Dark Shadows begins as a deliciously pulpy throwback to horror comedy, and ends as a monster movie of stunning disappointment.  All one is left to do is file Dark Shadows and Alice in Wonderland in the mediocre Tim Burton adaptation drawer. 

Based on the 60’s soap opera about a family of supernatural weirdos, Dark Shadows feels like just the thing that Burton should make. The film tries to emulate the unintentional hilarity and whacky nature of the series, but the problem is that it isn’t silly and goofy enough. A film can survive bad acting with a good story or terrible writing with great acting, but Dark Shadows has neither advantage. Burton’s film loses its way an hour in, once the ancient-vampire-in-the-modern-world plot turns into sappy rom-com. Somewhere between Burton’s film and the screenplay by Seth Grahame Smith, both character and intent went to the dogs, leaving a smudge of oversentimental vampire schlock that plays like a dignified version of Twilight.  

The story and characters are passably serviceable, but have too little ingenuity to have any impact. Here we have a huge mansion occupied by the famous Collins family circa 1972 – the matron Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), her teen daughter (Chloe Moretz), her smarmy brother (Jonny Lee Miller), his son (Gulliver McGrath), a family doctor (Helena Bonham Carter) and a governess (Bella Heathcote). Along comes Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp), a vampire who had been cursed by a spurned witch (Eva Green) and imprisoned in a grave for over two hundred years. Barnabas decides to restore the family’s tarnished name, but things don’t exactly go according to plan when the witch shows up as well. Burton walks the fine line between homage and crazy fanboyism, but fails to keep things interesting. Add to that the tone that keeps shifting from campy to saccharine to pulpy, leading up to a clumsy CGI-filled climax with the tease of a sequel.

There are a couple of laugh out loud moments, one of which involves a hilarious sex scene between Barnabas and the witch. The production design and Bruno Debonell’s cinematography are incredible as expected – nearly every frame is a work of art. But it’s hard to swallow the fact that so many talented people can make a mess of things, because the few moments of the quirky humor aside, there's very little of real entertainment worth recalling. Depp delivers a strangely insipid performance as the tragic vampire who apologizes before sucking humans dry; Eva Green seems lobotomized and not evil or feisty enough – Charlize Theron would’ve truly killed in this role; Michelle Pfeffer proves once and for all that she has lost all traces of likability, Helena Bonham Carter (saddled with an awful wig) manages a few mild chuckles before her dispatch.  Moretz and Jackie Earle Haley are wasted in their minuscule parts, while Heathcote is the template Burton heroine with very wide eyes and an eggshell face. 

Dark Shadows is proof enough that there's never an entertainment guarantee whenever Depp and Burton collaborate. The film won’t rank among the worst of the year - slick visuals and a few laughs do count for something - but it’d most certainly crop up in the year end lists of most disappointing movies. 

(First published in MiD Day)