Gnome rangers short on magic
(Cert U, 86mins)
SEVEN years after skewering Shakespeare in Gnomeo & Juliet, those pun-crazy garden ornaments return with a spin on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Their human owners have just moved from Stratford-uponAvon to London. As the first film failed to end in a double suicide, star-crossed lovers Gnomeo (voiced by James McAvoy) and Juliet (Emily Blunt) emerge from the packing crate intact.
But their relationship hits a rocky patch when the leaders of the talking ornaments (Michael Caine and Maggie Smith) put them in charge of renovating their new garden home.
With great power comes great responsibility and Juliet has so many unruly gnomes to boss around that she has no time for Gnomeo’s romantic gestures.
Then a more pressing problem presents itself. The local news reports a wave of gnome disappearances across London.
A haughty ceramic detective called Sherlock (Johnny Depp) suspects this is the work of his arch enemy, a dastardly pie company mascot called Moriarty (Jamie Demetriou). But by the time he and his put-upon sidekick Watson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) arrive at our heroes’ new home, the only ornaments left in the garden are Gnomeo and Juliet, who missed the kidnapping due to a lovers’ tiff.
As they agree to team up to solve the crime, it becomes clear that cracks are also appearing in Sherlock and Watson’s partnership.
As a fuzzy moral story about friendship and respect develops, the film hits us with a string of slick action scenes. They are scored, slightly incongruously, to songs performed by Elton John, the film’s executive producer.
But the film’s biggest mistake is to ape recent screen versions of the famous detective rather than parody them. And this action-packed sequel is neither smart enough for parents nor silly enough for children.
Great family movies charm adults and children alike and Gnomeo & Juliet got there with cheeky irreverence. Grown-ups enjoyed seeing high culture brought low by chintzy lawn ornaments, while children enjoyed the slapstick characters.
But Sherlock Gnomes lacks crowd-pleasing appeal. (Cert 15, 93mins) LIKE the best zombie movies, this Irish film doesn’t just make your stomach churn, it makes your brain tick.
Writer-director David Freyne’s ingenious debut feature begins in Ireland shortly after a zombie outbreak has been contained.
A new serum has brought three-quarters of the undead back to the land of the living. The remaining zombies were resistant to the drug and have been locked up.
But even “the cured” are still haunted by vivid memories of their flesh-eating past.
And those who did not succumb to the outbreak but lost loved ones are in no mood to forgive. So when cured zombie Senan (an excellent Sam Keeley) leaves quarantine to live with his widowed American sister-in-law (Ellen Page), he finds himself a pariah in his old neighbourhood.
And when he learns of a government plan to cull “the resistant”, he falls in with a terrorist group led by “cured activist” Conor (Tom VaughanLawlor).
Tense, creepy and layered with historical parallels, this could be the horror film of the year. (Cert 12A, 107mins) IN 1976 the world was gripped by the hijacking of an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. The plane, containing 250 terrified passengers, was forced to land at Uganda’s Entebbe airport. As negotiations between the hijackers and the Israeli government stalled, it seemed the story would end in a daring rescue by special forces or the bloodbath promised by the hijackers.
This bizarre retelling begins by focusing on the architects of the hijacking, naive German revolutionaries Wilfried Bose (Daniel Brühl) and Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike).
They were forced to team up with battle-scarred Palestinian fighters and deal with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin so you’d think this would be more than enough material for a feature film.
But José Padilha, the director of Netflix series Narcos, undermines the tension by cutting to a cabinet room in
Israel where defence minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan sporting ludicrous fake eyebrows) and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) argue about whether to negotiate with the hijackers.
Even worse is his decision to stir in a pointless sub-plot involving an Israeli soldier and his dancer girlfriend. When the hijack situation heats up, he cuts between the gunmen and a theatre where an Israeli dance troupe thrash around on chairs.
If your twin passions are hijack thrillers and modern dance, this is the film for you. For everyone else, this often ludicrous film will frustrate and bewilder. (Cert 18, 108mins) PITCH-BLACK humour and a cunning feminist agenda give this French B-movie an unexpected kick.
Jen (Matilda Lutz) is an aspiring American actress who arrives at a remote house to have some fun with married French lover Richard (Kevin Janssens).
She is supposed to leave before his friends Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive for a hunting trip. But they turn up a day early and are transfixed by the sight of the exotic American.
French debut writer-director Coralie Fargeat uses her camera to put us in the position of the leering Frenchmen, a viewpoint that becomes deeply troubling when Jen is raped by Stan.
While Dimitri turns up the music to drown out her screams, Richard’s first instinct is to hide the crime from his wife. Jen is left for dead in the desert while the men embark on their trip.
The plot is formulaic and the characters are little more than archetypes. The men represent the rapist, the enabler and the serial abuser while the woman is the avenging angel. But the way Fargeat plays with these tropes gives her film an edge. (Cert 15, 100mins) IN near-future America, citizens’ lives are recorded on cameras embedded in their eyes and uploaded to a vast government network. When a series of murders is scrubbed from the system, Clive Owen’s hard-boiled detective sets out on the trail of Amanda Seyfried’s hacker.
With Owen’s hackneyed, tragic backstory and a limp twist, Anon ends up feeling like a cheerless retread of Minority Report. (Cert 12A, 92mins) IN his final big screen role, an adaptation of NJ Crisp’s 1996 stage play, Sir John Hurt delivers a brilliant performance.
Hurt plays Ralph Maitland, a terminally ill writer trying to makes amends with his long-suffering wife (Sofia Helin) and estranged son (Max Brown).
In less capable hands, the cruel Maitland would be unbearably unsympathetic but he gives glimpses of his suffering as he bullies his nearest and dearest. However, stagey dialogue and workmanlike direction go against him.