These housewives are not desperate, just dull
Mothers’ Instinct
Cert: 15A, 1hr 34mins ★★★★★ Godzilla X Kong:
The New Empire
Cert: 12A, 1hr 55mins ★★★★★ Kung Fu Panda 4
Cert: PG, 1hr 34mins ★★★★★ Drift
Cert: 15A, 1hr 33mins ★★★★★
At first glance, Mothers’ Instinct looks like a stylish 1960s prequel to the once hugely popular TV show Desperate Housewives. In fact, it’s a remake of a 2018 Belgian film, itself based on a 2012 novel by Barbara Abel. But as we watch Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain playing perfect suburban housewives, with their perfect homes, perfect husbands and perfect sons, it’s the desperate ladies of Wisteria Lane that come to mind. Because, as they showed us, no life is ever as perfect as it looks.
So it duly proves here, as a tragic accident brings the happy round of shared school runs, evening cocktails and surprise birthday parties to an end. One mother is grieving, the other nursing a sense of possibly undeserved guilt; one mother has a history of mental illness, the other is possibly heading that way.
There’s no doubt that Hathaway and Chastain as neighbours Celine and Alice are pretty much dream casting, and with hair, make-up and wardrobe making the most of the early 1960s setting, for a little while it looks like we might be in for the sort of sensitive exploration of grief and loss that Todd Haynes, director of both Far From Heaven and Carol, might have given us.
But slowly and with a slightly disappointing inevitability, we slip into the familiar and melodramatic territory of the psychological thriller. It’s still watchable but also a shame as, while Hathaway and Chastain are just okay here and will no doubt make better films in the future, the terrific performance of Eamon Patrick O’Connell as young Theo is somewhat wasted.
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is a sequel to the 2021 film
Godzilla Vs Kong, apparently making it the fifth film in the so-called MonsterVerse that began with Gareth Edwards’ reboot of Godzilla in 2014. This time around, the former foes – the huge hairy one who roars and the gigantic lizard with nuclear-powered breath – are on the same side. At least I think they are. Eventually…
But why, I hear you ask? Good question, but answering it is so difficult. Returning director Adam Wingard has clearly set out to go back to the B-movie aesthetic of Godzilla’s 1950s heyday. As a result, everything – cinematography, sound, visual effects – are all worse than most modern cinema-goers will be expecting. And you can say the same about the acting and screenplay. Monster movie buffs will probably love it, and anyone with a houseful of bloodthirsty youngsters to entertain will be grateful. But I was bored silly by a plot that seems to draw substantially on Jules Verne’s Journey To The Center Of The Earth and Arthur
Conan Doyle’s The Lost World without being half as good.
Accompanying parents be warned, the interminable second half features the longest monster battle you will ever, ever see.
There hasn’t been a Kung Fu Panda film for eight years, but now along comes Kung Fu Panda 4, just in time for Easter and feeling distinctly like Kung Fu Panda-lite.
Out go the entire Furious Five, saving voice fees for the likes of Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen and Jackie Chan, while in comes Awkwafina as Zhen, the crafty fox, and Viola Davis, as shape-shifting baddie of the day, The Chameleon.
But with Po, once again voiced by Jack Black, facing pressure to step down as Dragon Warrior and setting off on one last adventure, much of the humour and charm of the first two films has been lost.
In Drift, Cynthia Erivo, star of both Widows and Harriet, plays Jacqueline, who we slowly learn is a refugee from Liberia now sleeping rough on a Greek island. Flashbacks point to a long stay in a posh part of London and a privileged life as the daughter of a government minister in Liberia. Much is eventually explained but much is not, in an arthouse film where the pace is off-puttingly slow, the story underdeveloped and Erivo’s performance so low key as to almost disappear.