ALSO SHOWING
Fast and Furious 9 (12A)
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It took the Bond franchise 11 movies to send its hero into space. The Friday the 13th franchise did it in ten, but Fast & Furious one-ups them both by blasting some of its characters into orbit in nine.
Given how spectacularly this series jumped the shark somewhere around the fourth or fifth (or maybe it was the sixth) instalment, it’s actually a wonder it’s taken this long for the now 20-year-old franchise to send vehicles into the cosmos, but there it is in Fast & Furious 9: a rocket-powered muscle car circling the Earth without anyone really batting an eyelid.
Which is another way of saying that staging a high-speed car chase around Edinburgh’s notoriously driver-unfriendly Old Town isn’t even the most ridiculous thing in the film.
Having recently served as a backdrop for assorted Marvel characters to trash some gothic architecture in Avengers: Infinity War, the Scottish capital (or “Harry Potter-land” as one character calls it) sees the arrival of Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto and his makeshift “family” as part of a globe-trotting plot to stop Dominic’s evil brother (franchise newcomer John Cena) from making off with a hi-tech Mcguffin with the power to control the world’s nuclear arsenal.
One half of said Mcguffin is buried in the Vaults beneath St Giles’ Cathedral, although most of the action takes place above ground, with outlandish high-points including an electromagnetic truck being flipped through a building, Cena’s Jakob death-sliding his way across the rooftops of the Royal Mile and Chamber Street, and Deisel hopping through Edinburgh traffic atop moving vans and open-top tourist busses like a steroidal Frogger.
It’s a lot of fun, but coming midway through a two-and-a-half-hour film that’s already had an explosionheavy car chase through a Central American minefield and a diamond robbery in London involving Helen
Mirren, the Edinburgh sequence also serves as something of a peak for the film’s barmy blend of highoctane action and narrative silliness. By the time the film leaves itself with nowhere to go but space, the last thing this action spectacular feels is out of this world.
Supernova
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(15)
Spotlighting the cruel way dementia forces a couple to mourn the encroaching loss of the life they’ve shared together, British actorturned-director Harry Macqueen’s second film stars Colin Firth as a concert pianist, Sam, who is only just holding it together as he embarks on a road trip with his ailing partner Tusker (Stanley Tucci) through some meaningful countryside haunts en route to a recital near Sam’s childhood home.
As it builds towards its big emotional showdown, we get flashes of the toll early onset Alzheimer’s is starting to take on both men, with Firth and Tucci’s warm, lived-in performances transcending some of the more melodramatic flourishes of the script.
And yet Macqueen’s decision to make the film about a gay couple also gives it poignant political edge, with a passing reference to Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of Section 28 a reminder of the governmental acts of erasure that have historically tried to do to gay culture what dementia is doing to Tasker and Sam’s relationship.
Sweat (15)
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A social media influencer begins disassembling after sharing a rare moment of honesty with her followers in this unsettling Polish drama about the duress of living in our narcissistic digital age. Magdalena Kolesnik is brilliant as the inscrutable lead and writerdirector Magnus von Horn captures that uneasy, unpredictable tension of living your life online.