Lawrence fearless in muscular, engrossing thriller
METAL Gear Survive is nothing short of a gross miscalculation on behalf of Konami.
Gone is the expansive drama and intrigue of previous Metal Gear games, only to be replaced with a ham-fisted attempt at emulating the currently-in-vogue survival mechanics of more popular titles and the inexplicable decision to include zombies as a “novel” gameplay feature.
Metal Gear Survive is so utterly devoid of the personality and grandeur that defined previous games in the series, you have to wonder how much longer the hallowed series can survive Konami’s gradual assassination.
Survive begins immediately after the events of Ground Zeroes, casting you as one of the military grunts left behind in the wake of Big Boss’ escape.
For some reason or another, a wormhole opens above the smouldering embers of Mother Base, transporting you to another dimension.
If you are going to hit the audience with a McGuffin in the form of a dimension-altering wormhole, surely you would see this as an opportunity to take artistic and creative liberties with the game world but alas, this alternate dimension is simply a barren desert littered with rubble, wrecked cars and abandoned outposts.
The four-player co-op centered around base defence is also quite fun, but these moments of few and far between in this murky quagmire of a game devoid of personality and rife with busywork and tedium.
Metal Gear Survive strikes me as a sign of a series that is systematically having its charm chipped away for reasons beyond the scope of this review.
A definite one to avoid, unless you are particularly prone to masochism. DURING a moving exchange in Francis Lawrence’s white-knuckle espionage thriller, a sickly mother embraces her daughter, who has been conscripted into an elite Russian spy programme under the auspices of patriotism.
‘Hold something back. Don’t give them all of you. That’s how you survive,’ tearfully whispers the matriarch.
Jennifer Lawrence gives all of herself – physically and emotionally – to the demanding title role of this high-stakes game of post- Cold War cats and mice, torn from the pages of Jason Matthews’s award-winning novel.
The Oscar winner exposes every inch of her body in scenes of masterful seduction and sickening subjugation, including multiple sexual assaults and stomach-churning bouts of torture.
It’s certainly not a film for the squeamish – the camera lingers on the aftermath of snapped bones and one sadistic sequence involving a skin grafting device is the stuff of nightmares.
Lawrence weathers these bone-crunching blows, then shatters her character’s soul to smithereens when she thinks no one is looking, in the service of a tightly woven narrative, threaded with betrayal and daring double-crosses.
Crucially, it’s predominantly women who decide grim fates, employing guile and intelligence to outwit men in suits and military uniforms, who have grown fat and complacent on the illusion that they wield power.
Dominika Egorova (Lawrence) is a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Theatre, who pirouettes to finance the medical care of her mother (Joely Richardson).
The dancer suffers a horrendous injury on stage and three months later, as she hobbles through recovery, Dominika receives an unwelcome visit from her uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts), deputy director of the Russian Intelligence Service.
He press-gangs his niece into the top-secret Sparrow project, which moulds attractive recruits into weaponised assets to strike at the heart of Western governments. Before Dominika can complete her training, she is despatched to Budapest to dupe seasoned CIA operative Nathaniel Nash (Joel Edgerton), the only person who knows the identity of a mole codenamed Marble within the Kremlin.
Nash is wise to the Russian plan and believes he can turn Dominika against her motherland.
Plot mechanics are welloiled thanks to Matthews’s source material – the author was a clandestine operations officer for the CIA Consequently, screenwriter Justin Haythe concentrates on visualising mind games and daring power plays that leave us in the dark about characters’ ulterior motives.