The Herald - The Herald Magazine
ALSO SHOWING DVDs of the week
him and Lisbeth famous, but he is still writing for the title and keen to help.
So unfolds a game of cat and mice, with Lisbeth plunged into peril just as an aspect of her troubled past rears its head once more.
Alvarez, one of a team of three writing the screenplay alongside Steven Knight of Peaky Blinders fame, crams in the action, with a motorcycle chase one of the standout sequences. As the film goes on, the twists in the tale become more audacious and ridiculous. Over and over, Lisbeth is placed in the tightest of corners, from which escape seems impossible, only for something to come along. But if she can do anything,
ROBIN HOOD (12A)
Dir: Otto Bathurst
With: Taron Egerton, Jamie Foxx, Eve Hewson Runtime: 116 minutes
THE men are far from merry in director Otto Bathurst’s action adventure. “Forget what you think you know. This is no bedtime story,” booms a superfluous voiceover which accompanies the derring-do. Action setpieces are reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed video games, employing slow-motion to excess as leading man Taron Egerton (Kingsman) performs bone-crunching somersaults while firing arrows with his trusty bow. Unlike its dashing hero, Bathurst’s film doesn’t hit all of its intended targets but it comes close enough to entertain. Eve Hewson is squandered as Marian, the sole female character with a voice.
ASSASSINATION NATION (18)**
Dir: Sam Levinson
With: Odessa Young, Hari Nef, Bill Skarsgard Runtime: 108 minutes
WELCOME to Salem, a town that goes crazy after a series of computer hacks exposes the private texts and emails of its residents. Assassination Nation has the seed of a good idea at its core, but as a satire on social media and Donald Trump’s intolerant America it is about as subtle as a laptop falling on your head from a great height. Hailing from a well-connected cast and crew that includes writer director Sam Levinson (son of Barry “Rain Man” Levinson), Maude Apatow, daughter of Judd and Leslie Mann, and Bill Skarsgard, son of Stellan, it has a few smart moments but on the whole it’s a self-indulgent mess.
if nothing can hold her back, why should the audience worry about her?
Foy makes a fine Lisbeth, as impressive a Swedish hacker as she was a young British monarch. There is little new in her styling – it’s black, black and more black – but she has attitude to burn and the Swedish accent is flawless.
It is Foy who draws the viewer back into the story after the umpteenth time of being wrenched out, either by Merchant’s clotted cream accent or another head-scratching development.
There is little to nothing about Foy or the film that is different enough, however, to make The Girl in the Spider’s Web stand out. Both Foy and Rooney Mara, who took on the role in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with David Fincher directing, have tried hard to make the heroine their own but no one, for this critic’s money, has ever done it better than Noomi Rapace in the original Swedish films.
Directed by Niels Arden Oplev, these were authentically bleak and hard-hitting, European films to their core. Subsequent versions have never been as thrilling as the books and Rapace. Folk in Hollywood, and elsewhere, need to accept that there are some things old Europe really does do better.
MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN (PG) £9.99
Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried) nervously prepares for the grand opening of Hotel Bella Donna, aided by suave manager Fernando Cienfuegos (Andy Garcia) and her architect father Sam (Pierce Brosnan). Her husband Sky (Dominic Cooper) will miss the festivities because he is working in New York and her two remaining fathers, Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), are stuck in Tokyo and Stockholm respectively. Thankfully her mother’s best friends Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters) are on hand to allay Sophie’s nerves. They encourage her to look to the past for courage. Cue flashbacks to the young Donna (Lily James) embarking on her lusty Mediterranean odyssey with the young Sam, Harry and Bill via Paris. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again lays all of its Abba love on us with platform heels, tongue-in-cheek humour and joy-infused musical performances choreographed to perfection by Anthony Van Laast. Fragmented chronology hampers dramatic momentum but viewers who loved the first film won’t care. They will be gleefully chanting I do, I do, I do, I do, I do to writer-director Ol Parker’s sequel.
The addition of Cher as Meryl Streep’s impeccably coiffed mother is a masterstroke. From the moment we hear the thrum of the chart-topping diva’s private helicopter, Parker’s film cranks up the volume on our pleasure to 11 and blows the roof off the taverna with her rapturous interpretation of Fernando. The final 15-20 minutes, when the full cast is reunited on the island idyll, are bang on the Money, Money, Money.
HOTEL ARTEMIS (15) £9.99
It’s 2028 and Los Angeles is a tinderbox of incendiary emotions. A shadowy corporation has turned off the city’s water supply, sparking days of riots. While baton-wielding police keep the angry horde at bay, Sherman (Sterling K Brown) and brother Lev (Brian Tyree Henry) orchestrate a bank heist, culminating in a gunfight with armed officers. Lev takes a potentially fatal bullet and Sherman rushes his sibling to a secret membership-only hospital for the criminal fraternity called Hotel Artemis run by the Nurse (Jodie Foster). Other rooms are occupied by an acrobatic, blade-wielding assassin and an arrogant, sexism-spewing arms dealer. When sadistic underworld boss The Wolf King (Jeff Goldblum) is taken to the hospital, other patients make a hasty recovery. Hotel Artemis is an intriguing dystopian thriller in which style confidently trumps substance. Expertly choreographed fight sequences are complemented by pithy one-liners, as when the Nurse sums up her ex-husband’s grim future. “He lives in Florida, life took him out already”. Foster delivers a mesmerising lead performance as the agoraphobic clinician, who has spent 22 years in the hospital and self-medicates to numb the pain of her loss.