A Simple Favour
MICHAEL Caine leads a veteran cast in a muddled caper about the 2015 Hatton Garden heist. POSH frocks and fancy gaffs are the main attractions in rom-com about a girl falling for a billionaire. THE worst film in the franchise sees aliens battling Oliva Munn’s biologist and mentally ill veterans.
ANDY’S RATING: ★★★ In cinemas on Friday
DIRECTOR Paul Feig is best known for female-led comedies Bridesmaids and Spy, so he seemed an odd choice for an adaptation of Darcey Bell’s twisty airport novel.
Was this Feig embracing his dark side with a Gone Girl-style thriller? It turns out this isn’t too much of a departure. If you’re a fan of those made-for-TV movies shown on Channel 5 in the daytime, the plot may be familiar.
But Feig fans will recognise the sharp lines and winking sense of irony.
Anna Kendrick is perfectly cast as Stephanie Smothers, a goody-two-shoes single mum who meets Blake Lively’s sultry femme fatale Emily as she strides up to the school gates in slow motion.
Their sons have made friends and want a “play date”, so Emily invites them back to her huge house where she and Stephanie bond over cocktails.
They seem like complete opposites. Stephanie is a nerdy perfectionist who stars in a cutesy, video blog about cooking and craftwork.
Emily is a hard-drinking, high-powered fashion executive with a handsome novelist husband (Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding) and a mysterious past.
But is her life just too good to be true? That’s just one of the questions posed when Emily goes missing after tasking Stephanie with picking up her son.
Feig effortlessly weaves together the mystery and comedy before it all falls apart in the final 10 minutes.
OVER the past five years, Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg have established a reliable brand as purveyors of gritty, ripped-from-theheadlines action films.
So the Hollywood duo – whose work includes Lone Survivor, Boston Marathon bomb movie Patriots Day and oil rig disaster flick Deepwater Horizon – must have realised this is an unfortunate time to release a film about Russian spies.
Mile 22 is very much a pre-Salisbury attack espionage movie.
Here, no Russian spy strolls under a procession of a CCTV cameras, offs the wrong person or uses a cover story that combines an all-consuming love of Gothic architecture with a pathological fear of slush.
We open at a Russian safe house in the US that is surrounded by a crack team of off-the-books special forces soldiers called Overwatch.
As the Yanks storm the building, it’s like we’re watching badly lit, badly shot footage from the team’s body cameras.