Superhero sunk in a sea of confusion
AQUAMAN
(12A, 143 mins)
James Wan
Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman
Director: Stars: SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE
(PG, 117 mins)
Peter Ramsey and Bob Persichetti Shameik Moore, Nicholas Cage, Hailee Steinfeld, Jake Johnson
Directors: Stars: MORTAL ENGINES
(12A, 128 mins)
Christian Rivers
Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving
Director: Stars: LIZZIE
(15, 103 mins)
Craig William Macneill Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Stewart
Director: Stars:
IT’S CHRISTMAS time and there are plenty of reasons for older cinemagoers to be afraid. This is the weekend when Hollywood decks the screens with blockbusters in time for the school holidays. So grown-ups will have to take refuge in their nearest art house cinema while the kids pack the multiplexes to gorge on superhero movies and over-priced vats of fizzy pop.
The biggest release is the first solo adventure for Jason Momoa’s hulking man from Atlantis who surfaces at a pivotal time in DC Comics’ troubled “extended universe”. After their last film Justice League proved to be box office kryptonite, Ben Affleck’s depressed Batman and Henry Cavill’s dour Superman were finally put out of their misery.
In a bid to buoy a sinking ship, DC have taken a page out of Marvel’s book and tried to lighten up with comedy. “Permission to come aboard?” asks Aquaman as he storms a hijacked submarine in the film’s opening sequence.
It seems DC’s would-be saviour is a bit of a card. Sadly, horror director James Wan’s sense of humour isn’t quite so obvious. When Aquaman proceeds to duff up the pirates, he keeps cutting to slow-motion sequences of Momoa tossing his hair like he’s in a hairspray commercial. Is this deliberately naff or just naff? And how should we take a film that uses Toto’s cheesy 1982 hit Africa as a musical cue for a trip to the Sahara desert? If you’re asking these questions, you’re probably not laughing.
Thankfully, the plot is lot more straightforward. We see Aquaman born of a human lighthouse keeper (Temuera Morrison) and a mermaid queen (Nicole Kidman), become the piratefighting superhero from Justice League then head to the underwater kingdom of Atlantis to claim his throne.
The film’s punishing running
PRISONER: Chloë Sevigny as the infamous axe murderer Lizzie Aquaman,
time is split roughly equally between sea and land. The underwater scenes are a colossal waste of money. There are so many characters plonked on so many computergenerated backgrounds that it feels like you’re watching scenes from a video game.
The scenes on land are a bit better. Here Aquaman heads to Africa to retrieve a magical trident and engage in some salty back and forth with Amber Heard’s Atlantean princess.
The pairing just about works, even if they are several thousand leagues away from Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.
Marvel movies don’t usually go head-tohead with films from their rivals at DC. But such is their dominance, they’ve picked this weekend for the release
a new animated adventure for their web-slinging hero.
The contrast between the two comic book outfits couldn’t be starker. Here the jokes are sharp, the script has real emotional heft and the animation is wildly inventive. As this film is made by Sony, who recently lent their Spider-Man rights to Disney for the
Avengers series, this doesn’t tie in with Tom Holland’s live action Peter Parker. Instead producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have used a very different hero from Marvel’s 2011 comic series.
Teenager Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) has his close encounter with a funny-looking arachnid while spraying graffiti on the New York subway. And when he witnesses Spider-Man being killed and Peter Parker unmasked in front of an inter-dimensional portal, he decides to take up his mantle.
Soon five more Spideys appear. We get an older and decidedly paunchier Peter Parker (Jake Johnson), a film noir Spider-Man (Nicolas Cage), a Japanese anime SpiderGirl (Kimiko Glenn), a Spider-Woman
(Hailee Steinfeld) and, weirdest of all, a Looney Tunes pig called Spider-Ham (John Mulaney).
Each of them is animated in a different style and obeys very different rules. Older Peter is hamstrung by his beer belly but the pig can pluck a giant mallet out of his pocket.
Amid all the meta-comedy and visual experiments, the writers craft a touching coming-of-age drama about a boy finding his feet and learning to respect his father.
The race for the Best
The Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: Into
Animation Oscar has just got a lot more interesting.
As is customary when discussing dystopian teen sci-fi, I’ll begin my brief review of by listing older and better movies. Here Star Wars meets Mad Max, flirts with The Matrix and has a fling with The Terminator.
While that sounds great on paper, it makes for a surprisingly dull night out. The setting is a post-apocalyptic London which has become the Death Star on wheels. It’s 1,000 years after an event called The Sixty Second War and cities are mounted on vast caterpillar tracks and battling each other for resources.
London is under the iron rule of Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving) who is secretly building a super-weapon in the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. A gang of thinly written rebels rise up to stop him including naive historian Tom (Robert Sheehan), masked orphan Hester (Hera Hilmar) and Han Solo stand-in Anna Fang (Jihae) who is dressed as at least three different Matrix characters.
Will these plucky outlaws find a way to nobble Valentine’s ray gun before he takes over the world? It’s almost impossible to care.
To call a lesbian axe killer thriller would do a huge disservice to this finely acted art house drama. This weekend’s best film for grown-ups is based on the 1892 trial of Lizzie Borden for the brutal murder of her parents. The film begins with the glimpse of a bloodied body in the bedroom of a New England mansion before we jump back in time six months for a slow-burning game of Cluedo.
The wonderful Chloë Sevigny is Lizzie, a wilful 32-year-old spinster who is a virtual prisoner of her controlling, parsimonious father (Jamey Sheridan). When her sinister uncle (Denis O’Hare) offers to assume responsibility for Lizzie and her unmarried sister in the event of her father’s death, we wonder if he is behind a series of threatening letters.
Then Lizzie meets new maid Bridget (Kristen Stewart) who like all Irish servants is instantly renamed Maggie by her employers. Lizzie calls her by her real name and passion begins to bubble up.
The pace flags a little in the middle but Sevigny and Stewart keep us watching.
Bridget and Lizzie’s relationship is defined by stolen glances and secret smiles imbued with palpable feelings of forbidden desire and silent rage.
Mortal Engines Lizzie