Sequel has its moments but it’s Green who steals the show
300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE (R16) Directed by Noam Murro ✪✪✪ Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
IT’S never a good sign when you find yourself missing Gerard Butler. Butler, barring a good showing in Coriolanus, has been peddling the same Liam-Neeson-after-alobotomy schtick for years now, in a succession of unremittingly lousy films.
But Butler did have exactly the right mix of brawn and bellicosity to make an hysterical load of old wallop like 300 work just fine, and this frankly unexpected sequel needs him sorely.
Actually, sequel isn’t the right word. It turns out that while the battle of Thermopylae was raging, there was a separate campaign playing out at sea. Without a shirt between them, but fetchingly kitted out in their matching leather battle-panties, the Greek navy must pit their flotilla against the fearsome Persian warships. This is the scrap that forms the backbone of 300: Rise of an Empire.
300 director Zack Snyder has handed over the reins to Israeli commercials whiz-kid Noam Murro, but has clearly written in Murro’s contract ‘‘just do what I did’’. Despite seven years having passed, and the original having been mercilessly ripped-off and parodied, Murro must rely on the same bag of visual gimmickry. The fast-slow-fast ramping is tiresome now, and the comic-book colour grade is old hat. Add to that the needlessly talky and convoluted script, and the unavoidable absence of Butler, and you might think that this film would be a huge letdown eh?
And you would be wrong. 300: Rise of an Empire has got one truly excellent thing going for it, and that thing is the work of Eva Green.
Green, playing the warrioress Artemisia, grabs this film by its severed head, gives it a snog, and simply marches away with it. Not since Angelina Jolie was channelling the entire cast of The Rocky Horror Show as Alexander the Great’s mum have you seen one woman go so deliriously batdung mad in a faux historical epic. Green spits, snarls, slices, dices, and shags her way through this film. She holds it together, and then she burns it to the waterline.
300: Rise of an Empire isn’t a good film by any stretch, but – like its predecessor – it has moments in which it achieves a cock-eyed likeability.
3 MILE LIMIT (M) Directed by Craig Newland ✪✪✪ Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
THE story of how Radio Hauraki came to be is a truly great one. A gang of misfits, an old ship, an intransigent government scared of the influence that longhaired rock’n’roll might have on the youth of New Zealand.
There are epic characters, storms at sea, romance, tragedy, and lashings of good music.
In the hands of one of our many good script writers, and with one of our better TV drama directors at the helm, the Radio Hauraki story could have been a truly excellent Sunday night drama, that could have stacked up well against any of the recent series.
But in the hands of first time feature writer and director Craig Newland, it just doesn’t work.
Much as I try to support the local industry, and praise what I can, 3 Mile Limit can only be called a wasted opportunity.
The actors, especially Matt Whelan and Belinda Crawley, give it their all.
But without credible dialogue, better drawn characters, and a bit more confidence and swagger in the director’s chair, it was never going to be enough.
THE ROCKET (M) Directed by Kim Mordaunt ✪✪✪✪✪ Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
EVERY year there’s a couple of films that make me want to blockade the multiplex, and shout at the queues to forget about whatever over-produced, under-souled rubbish they’re about to pay for, and go see a complete gem instead. A few years ago it was Beasts of the Southern Wild, last year it was The Act of Killing and Rust and Bone. This year that film is The Rocket.
The Rocket is set in Laos, in the present day, amid a broken family forced to move across a country still bruised and scarred by war. The youngest son forms a plan of the most perfect insouciance: He will enter a legendarily dangerous local competition, and he will somehow redeem himself and his family by building a firework powerful enough to blow a hole in the sky.
This one’s got everything; music, minefields, James Brown, stunning kids, sentiment, tragedy, and emotion by the bucketload. You’ll love it. Just go, please.
STORIES WE TELL (PG) Directed by Sarah Polley ✪✪✪✪✪ Reviewed by James Croot
HAVING touchingly and hauntingly captured the human frailties of others in Away From Her and Take This Waltz, Canadian actress turned director Sarah Polley turns her gaze and lens on her own family in this surprisingly confessional and deeply compelling documentary.
What starts out as a desire to know more about her mother, actress and casting director Dianne, who died when Polley was just 11, eventually turns into a true voyage of self-discovery for Polley herself.
Through conversations with her family and her parents’ friends and fellow actors, she learns how they met, how different they really were and how she came so close to not existing at all (pregnant at age 42, Dianne was worried about complications and was on her way to the abortion clinic when she changed her mind), as well as one revelation that will truly change her life.
While this makes it sound like a big screen version of an episode of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are, Stories We Tell has a raw intimacy and endearingly shoddy production values the Beeb would never allow. Sound booms are deliberately left in shot, Polley records conversations on an 8mm camera before and between the more formal setups, and she and her brothers and sisters regularly take the mickey out of one another (apparently the young Sarah thought her mother was Lucille Ball), leavening what could have been a maudlin, navelgazing project.
During the documentary, Polley admits she had one rule while making Stories – that everyone’s point of view would be told, no matter how contradictory. The result is a story of great sadness, great joy and great entertainment.