SECONDSCREEN
Blackhat
Cert: 15A 2hrs13mins
The Wedding Ringer
Cert: 15A 1hr45mins
Project Almanac
Cert: 12A 1hr46mins
Michael Mann has made some terrific thrillers – Heat and The Insider chief among them. But he comes unstuck with Blackhat, which couldn’t be more topical but, sadly, also couldn’t be more disappointing.
The acting is dreadful, the writing poor and it’s criminally short of thrills. It’s an of-themoment story of cyber-hacking in which a Chinese nuclear power plant is brought close to meltdown before the mysterious hacker turns his malware onto the American commodities market. But it’s what he’s going to do next that has got the FBI and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army worried.
It’s a not unpromising premise but, from the moment Mann employs the sort of visual effects that could have come straight out of Tron (yes, the 1982 original), there’s a worrying sense that one of Hollywood’s finest may not truly be on his game.
And so it duly proves. A wooden Chris Hemsworth really couldn’t be any duller as Nick Hathaway, the hacker the FBI wants on its side, and his chemistry with his Chinese co-star, Tang Wei, is non-existent.
There’s a nice idea at the heart of The Wedding Ringer, too, as a successful but socially awkward young businessman discovers he has no friends willing to stand as best man at his forthcoming wedding. Indeed, poor Doug (Josh Gad) has no friends at all so, with his wedding to Gretchen (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting) looming, he turns to Jimmy Callahan (Kevin Hart), sole proprietor of Best Man Inc. What you make of this picture
depends on what you make of Hart’s relentless, inyour-face comedy style, which is brash and vulgar. But the movie it’s not quite a disaster, some of the slapstick raising a smile, and the film even managing to find a little heart in the final reel.
In Project Almanac, a geeky teenager – inevitably joined by his pretty younger sister and two similarly geeky friends – is filming an ‘intelligent’ drone that he’s made as part of his application for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But it’s what he finds when he and his sister discover an old camcorder in the attic that really sets things rolling. As he watches footage of his seventh birthday, David spots a familiar figure in the background. It’s him… but aged as he is now, 17. How is that possible? Director Dean Israelite shows that there’s life in the old, wobbly ‘recorded footage’ format yet, and pays good-natured homage to many time-travelling films that have gone before. But the film’s pace slows and its initial intelligence dims. Angie Errigo adds: As soon as
The Duke Of Burgundy (18) lingers on an extensive butterfly collection, we know we’re in for a lot of metaphor. Borgen’s Sidse Babett Knudsen and waifish Chiara D’Anna act out a strangely compelling relationship as a mean mistress and her meek maid. But they are not what they seem in writerdirector Peter Strickland’s surreally beautiful tale of love, domination and submission.
Set in a woodland village entirely populated by women who are insect-fanciers, it plays like a twisted fairy tale.
Its witty winks at arthouse fetishism and teasing with erotic thriller elements are subtly amusing.