SECOND SCREEN

‘The film’s makers set back the cause by about five decades’

The latest instalment of the seemingly endless Smurfs franchise is a fully animated, colour saturated woodland universe that is one part Tinker Bell and one part 2016’s surprise hit, Trolls. It’s here in Smurfs: The Lost

Village (G) that the film’s makers HHH manage to set the feminist cause back about five decades.

The only girl Smurf is the people-pleasing Smurfette, voiced by actress and singer Demi Lovato, who’s not even a real Smurf girl; she was created by the evil wizard Gargamel (Rainn Wilson) from a lump of clay.

Thanks to a clever spell cast by Papa Smurf, she’s now pretty, kind and blonde, but the boy Smurfs don’t know what to make of her as she teeters around in her frock and high heels. Honestly, I’m not making this up. Thank heavens even a fake but inevitably feisty clay-girl gets the chance of redemption in a story that also takes in glow-in-the-dark rabbits, a forbidden forest and an entire village of Smurf girls wearing sensible flats.

It’s strange as can be but slightly more fun than it sounds.

There may be a few out there who thought the notoriously violent warehouse scenes in Reservoir Dogs didn’t go on long enough. In which case, Free Fire (18) HH, by cult director Ben Wheatley, really is the film for you.

It takes place almost entirely in a derelict warehouse and consists – almost completely – of one very long and eventually very violent shoot-out.

With a screenplay full of witty, well-polished lines, a soundtrack that sees John Denver’s Annie’s Song taking over from Stealers Wheel’s

Stuck In The Middle With You, and a wardrobe of crazy Seventies fashion, it’s a giant homage to Quentin Tarantino, with – thanks to a story of a gang of Irish terrorists in America to buy guns – a dollop of the McDonagh brothers.

The best thing on display here is the cast, which includes Cork’s Cillian Murphy, Armie Hammer, Sharlto Copley and Brie Larson. But despite their best efforts, Wheatley is hamstrung by his love of gore and general excess.