A HAMMY HORROR
James McAvoy overacts and Daniel Radcliffe just can’t act. This re-creation of Frankenstein is monstrous!
Victor Frankenstein (12A)
Verdict: Frightful ★★✩✩✩
Sunset Song (15)
Verdict: Evocative and beautiful ★★★✩✩
Daniel Radcliffe has worked commendably hard to throw an invisibility cloak over the boy wizard who made him rich and famous.
among many diverse acting challenges since the last Harry Potter film, he has appeared naked on stage (in equus), been terrified out of his wits (in The Woman in Black), had gay sex (in Kill Your darlings), and here he is in Victor frankenstein as a Victorian hunchback.
alas, the cumulative effect of all this serves mainly to remind us, however grounded and charming he might be on the chat-show sofa, that he’s actually a distinctly limited actor. There is no full-frontal or humped back that can conceal the fact.
The surprise in this film, though, is that the really hammy turn comes from the usually excellent James Mcavoy. in the title role as a mad but brilliant surgeon who thinks the secret of immortality is just a crackle of electrical current away, he delivers a performance so eye-poppingly, gurningly over the top that you’ll see more restrained pantomime dames this christmas.
The film opens with Radcliffe’s unnamed hunchback being abused, as only whiskery Victorians in bad films know how, by the owners of a circus, where he doubles as freak-show attraction and clown.
in clear echoes of The elephant Man, however, the grotesque hunchback is a sensitive soul, who has quietly taught himself how the human body works. When the trapeze artist he secretly loves (Jessica Brown findlay) has a life-threatening fall, he bonds with the watching dr frankenstein by knowing just what to do to get her breathing again.
So,naTuRallY, dr f then engineers his escape from the circus, takes him back to his home, and there sucks the pus out of the offending hump. Which is the first time i’ve ever written those last eight words, and i fervently hope, the last.
Pus duly sucked, the doctor bestows the name igor Strausman on the newly straightened ex-hunchback, and together they use their medical ingenuity to develop frankenstein’s crazy scheme, first electrifying to life a scary hybrid of animal body parts, and then a human being, of sorts.
But their efforts do not go unobstructed, mainly from a zealously religious police inspector (andrew Scott), who is offended by the notion of someone trying to play God.
Max landis’s mostly chaotic screenplay riffs on Mary Shelley’s original story with some semi-interesting ideas about creationism vs. Science, and Paul McGuigan (who also directed episodes of the TV drama Sherlock) orchestrates a few stirring action scenes.
But this is not nearly enough to redeem a film that achieves only one striking piece of alchemy: turning a good actor, Mcavoy, into a roaring ham.
also, though it’s not exactly their fault, Mcavoy and Radcliffe are so young-looking and frankly, without wanting to be at all sizeist, so little, that there are times when Victor frankenstein generates the whiff of a sixth-form production.
charles dance pops up briefly as Victor’s overbearing father and he brings a welcome maturity — and height — to proceedings. at last, someone who can really carry off a top hat.
SUNSET SONG is an adaptation of another novel, lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic book of the same name, published in 1932. it is written and directed
by Terence Davies, one of the great stylists of British cinema, who by all accounts has nurtured this project for many years.
It was a labour of love, and actually you can tell; it is a truly beautiful film to look at, to the extent that almost every frame could be a painting. Davies, and his cinematographer Michael McDonough, use shafts of sunlight and flickers of firelight on celluloid rather like Vermeer did on canvas.
The other really notable thing about this film is the performance of Agyness Deyn (pictured right) in the lead role. It is Cara Delevingne who keeps getting all the attention as a model- turnedactress, but Deyn has been going about the same transformation more quietly, yet more excitingly.
In a powerful story of emotional hardship and endurance, she is hauntingly good as Chris Guthrie, the young woman who first survives a tough childhood on a remote stretch of Scottish coast, then marries a nice local farmer and watches him march off to join World War I.
She gets first-class support, too, from Peter Mullan as her tyrannical, religious nut of a father, and from Daniela Nardini as her mother (so vibrant and sexy when we first set eyes on her in the TV drama This Life all those years ago, and here so desperately downtrodden). It’s a long film, well over two hours, and heavy going at times. And there is one seriously discordant note; when Chris’s husband ewan ( Kevin Guthrie) comes back from the trenches, he is surely meant to have been brutalised, not to have had a complete personality transplant. I didn’ t buy it, I’m afraid.
Nonetheless, to one of the great novels of Scottish literature, Davies has very nearly done full justice.