Arts & Leisure Film
STEVEN Soderbergh has announced that SIDE EFFECTS will be his last movie; if he can really truncate a wonderful career, his versatility and, paradoxically, his inconsistency will be sorely missed.
Although far from his best work, this valedictory offering appears to be a clever, sobering attack on the pharmaceutical industry, but this is only half of the story. Emily (Rooney Mara) is depressed and suicidal; Martin (Channing Tatum), her husband, had gone to jail for insider trading and his return had hardly been joyous.
Under treatment by Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), a psychiatrist, Emily exhibits dislocation and detachment until he prescribes Ablixa, a new antidepressant whose manufacturers are prepared to pay him for recommending their product. Circumstances change and the doctor finds himself a person of interest to the police, his notoriety costing him dearly as he sets about proving his innocence, solving a crime, and saving his marriage and his practice.
To achieve these ends, Banks consults Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Emily’s former therapist, who gives advice that is not strictly in line with professional courtesy.
The prescription drug at the heart of this cautionary tale is fictitious, as is its website (ablixa.com), a parody of the type of advertising that offers reassuring cures for mental problems.
Disturbing and misdirecting in equal parts, Side Effects is an effective psychological thriller split in two, with the first half rather more credible than the second yet, together, they provide mystery, intrigue and redemption.
THE gripping SHADOW DANCER is set in Northern Ireland during two different yet connected periods in the history of that province’s sectarian strife. It opens in 1973, when a young girl bribes her little brother so that he undertakes one of her chores; the trip to the shops ends tragically and has a lasting effect on Collette (Andrea Riseborough) who, 20 years of guilt later, is caught trying to plant a bomb in London.
Her interrogation is conducted by Mac (Clive Owen), a British intelligence antiterrorist officer, who offers a cruel choice: either spy for him or go to jail, leaving her son at the mercy of social services.
The difficulties and dangers of the course she chooses are compounded by the fact that Gerry (Aidan Gillen), her brother, is now participating in attacks on the British and their sympathisers.
As in most of his portrayals, Owen is required to be grumpy and careworn, his reason for extra concern being Kate (Gillian Anderson), his superior officer, who has her own agenda. Riseborough gives a strong performance as the conflicted, nervous mother forced into betraying a cause she might otherwise have supported.
Audiences are presumed to be aware of the prevailing political tensions so the focus is more on the psyches of Mac and Collette, their opposing views and the imbalance of their relationship; in these respects, Shadow Dancer provides compelling drama, fine acting and a suitably bleak insight into the conflict between nationalists and those they consider biased occupiers.
THE HANGOVER PART III ignores the basic premise of its predecessors in that there is no morning-after amnesia; instead, it relies on a hair-of-a-shaggy-dog kind of resolution.
At times, it seems that Todd Phillips, who directed the raunchy, rowdy first and second episodes, found a lame script for a crime movie, fashioned it and inserted his characters without too much regard for what had gone so entertainingly before. The so-called Wolf Pack — Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms) and Doug (Justin Bartha) — decide the immature Alan (Zach Galifianakis) needs a year or a decade in a distant facility where he might be mentally rehabilitated but, as in any road trip, incidents happen.
Mr Chow (Ken Jeong), their old nemesis, had double-crossed Marshall (Jack Goodman), who takes Doug hostage to ensure the others track Chow down and deliver him and the stolen property. Thus begins a series of misadventures, all of which fail to raise even a fraction of the laughs generated by the first two parts and that might have been in the third.
The original scriptwriters are gone and the antic, frantic spirit of their inventive humour, based mainly on crude, rude drunken shenanigans, went with them.