SECOND SCREEN
Shane Black is still probably best known as the creator of the once hugely popular Lethal Weapon franchise. But the Los Angeles-based screenwriter and occasional director also loves a good noir-ish thriller, complete with missing dames, drunken private eyes and corrupt city officials. Sometimes he delivers them straight; sometimes for laughs.
Just over a decade ago it was one for laughs that helped revive the flagging film-acting career of Robert Downey Jr with the highly enjoyable Kiss Kiss Bang
Bang, which Black wrote and directed. Downey was so grateful that, eight years later, Black found himself directing and co-writing Iron Man 3.
Now, however, he returns to more familiar territory with The Nice Guys (15A) ★★★, a comedythriller stars Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe but a screenplay that certainly entertains, occasionally dazzles (it has a great opening) but never quite realises its considerable potential.
Set in the LA of the late Seventies – and yes, the soundtrack does have fun with the music of the day – it’s the slightly muddled story of a private investigator, Holland March (Gosling), who is hired to investigate the death of a porn star and to look for a missing girl, Amelia. But Amelia doesn’t want to be found and she’s hired her own PI, Jackson Healy (Crowe) – a man more at
home with a knuckleduster than a notebook – to make sure she isn’t.
When Amelia really goes missing, the pair join forces in a story that feels like a cross between Boogie Nights and LA Confidential (look out for Kim Basinger in a cameo role), with echoes of Mulholland Drive.
Crowe is better – and funnier – than he’s been for a long while but Gosling struggles to bring his character (a harddrinking single father) to life, while Black takes the easy comedy option too often. Still, I wouldn’t mind a sequel.
To some extent you can see Race (PG) ★★★★ as a pretty standard biopic, with few of the creative ambitions of comparable sports pictures such as
Chariots Of Fire. But it tells an important story – that of the four gold medals won by the black American sprinter Jesse Owens at the so-called Nazi Olympics of 1936 – really well.
Owens’s superficially feelgood story is one we all feel we know, of course: the triumph of Western liberal tolerance over brutal Nazi dogma. But what Stephen Hopkins’s film does such a good job of showing is how much more complicated than that it all was.
Among the many things we learn is that Owens faced as much prejudice and discrimination in the US as he did in Berlin. He was under massive pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People not to run, and the decision to send an American team to Berlin at all may well have been the wrong one.
Stephan James is excellent as Owens, as is Jason Sudeikis as Larry Snyder, the Ohio State University coach who didn’t mind what colour a man was as long as he could run fast. There’s good support from Jeremy Irons as the compromised US Olympic boss Avery Brundage, and from Game Of Thrones star Carice van Houten as Leni Riefenshtahl.
However, what really impressed me was the screenplay from husbandand-wife team Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, which is clear, well structured and keeps the truly shocking revelations coming right to the end.
We finish with two films aimed at younger audiences of assorted ages, both featuring portals between two worlds and, amazingly, characters that
look like be-tusked warthogs.
Despite the fact that it’s directed by David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones,
Warcraft (12A) ★★ will surely be of interest only to fans of the long-standing video game on which it is based. For everyone else it’s a long and tediously complex fantasy aimed at the Lord Of
The Rings/Games Of Thrones market. Much better, eventually, is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Out Of The
Shadows (12A) ★★★. Early on I didn’t care for the overt sexualisation of Megan Fox’s character TV reporter April O’Neil, in a children’s film, or for the violence. But it soon finds its stride as arch-enemy Shredder is sprung from jail and enters into a bizarre transdimensional, intergalactic pact that sets him on the path for world domination while April and the turtles – along with ice-puck-hurling new boy Casey Jones (yes, really), played by Stephen Amell – try to stop him. It’s derivative but funny and, yes, portals and warthogs are involved.