RICH PICKINGS
Geoffrey Macnab is charmed by a kitsch hymn to the high life performed with plenty of brio by a trailblazing all-Asian cast. Plus the best of the rest of this week’s new releases
Crazy Rich Asians
★★★★☆
Dir Jon M Chu, 121 mins, starring: Constance Wu, Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding, Gemma Chan, Awkwafina, Ken Jeong
Already a box office phenomenon, Crazy Rich Asians is an expertly crafted melodrama along Cinderella lines. Shamelessly kitsch but funny and affecting enough to get away with its own excesses and many toecurling moments, this trailblazing film has extra significance as one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to feature an all-Asian cast. Given its success, many more are now likely to follow.
British audiences may well groan at the grossly caricatured opening scene in which a wealthy Chinese family turn up out of the rain at a top London hotel sometime in the mid-1990s. The openly racist concierge and reception clerks try to send them on their way to Chinatown, saying there is no room for them in the hotel. What relevance the scene has to the rest of the story is hard to ascertain.
Constance Wu stars as the heroine, Rachel Chu, a beautiful young New York university economics professor who doesn’t realise that her boyfriend Nick Young (played by The Travel Show presenter Henry Golding) is a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the whole of Asia. (“These people aren’t just rich,” we are told, “they are crazy rich”).
When she agrees to accompany Nick back to Singapore for the wedding of his oldest friend, the emotional fireworks begin. She is regarded as a gold digger by most of Nick’s relatives and friends. Nick’s mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), is especially frosty towards her. In adapting Kevin Kwan’s novel, the filmmakers follow a formula which is as old as Hollywood itself. Countless other romances and screwball comedies have been made about scullery maids turning into princesses or poor little rich types going in search of true love
Most, though, don’t celebrate wealth and consumption quite as flagrantly as Crazy Rich Asians. Rachel finds herself in a world where women at hen parties almost pass out in ecstasy at the prospect of an “all paid shopping spree at the fashion boutique” and where the locals feel that $1.2m is a very small price to pay for a decent pair of diamond earrings from Antwerp.
We know exactly how the story will resolve itself but the filmmakers still show wit and invention in the way they handle the cliches
In its more pedestrian moments, the film risks seeming like one of those travel documentaries that Golding presents for the BBC. His character will tell us that Singapore is the only country in the world where the street food vendors are awarded Michelin stars as we are taken on a tour of local tourist spots.
Thankfully, the film has tremendous energy. Director Jon M Chu keeps the plot racing along as Rachel is introduced to a small army of her boyfriend’s relatives and friends. Like all good fairy tales, the film has a nasty streak. Rachel has to cope with jealous locals who try to belittle her and sabotage her relationship with Nick at every opportunity. Michelle Yeoh’s stern matriarch is as fierce and forbidding as any wicked stepmother.
The filmmakers can’t always work out whether they’re satirising their filthy rich protagonists or admiring them for their bling. We hear snatches of Asian covers of songs like “Money Money Money” and “Material Girl” and see plenty of very venal behaviour. On the evidence here, snobbery is rife in Singaporean society.
Those at the top of society don’t just discriminate on the basis of wealth and class. They are very disdainful, too, of anyone who has grown up in the US. Rachel is scorned as a “banana,” that’s to say she is yellow on the outside and white on the inside. Not that Crazy Rich Asians wants to lecture us or to spend too long exposing the hypocrisy of most of its protagonists. It’s a glossy, escapist romcom, after all. The film may be set in Singapore but its characters and themes will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has attended a fractious family wedding anywhere.
We know exactly how the story will resolve itself but the filmmakers still show wit and invention in the way they handle the cliches and take us towards the inevitable (and predictably very soppy) finale. Wu
makes a likeable and resourceful heroine, one prepared to use game theory or talk about micro-loans in the developing world if it will help keep her relationship with Nick alive.
Like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Crazy Rich Asians has come from nowhere and hit the box office bull’seye. Sequels are bound to follow – and will almost certainly be anticlimactic in the extreme. The original, though, is just as much fun as all the advance hype has suggested.
Elegiac, tender-hearted Western
The Rider
★★★★☆
Dir Chloé Zhao, 103 mins, starring: Brady Jandreau (above), Tim Jandreau, Lilly Jandreau, Cat Clifford, Terri Dawn Pourier, Lane Scott
Steve McQueen famously played an over-the-hill rodeo rider in Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner. Chloé Zhao’s remarkable new feature is the equal of the Peckinpah film, albeit in a much quieter and more mournful groove.
She draws an immensely moving and subtle performance from her star, real-life South Dakota cowboy Brady Jandreau, whose character, Brady Blackburn, is partly based on himself. Zhao may overdo the magic hour shots – all those lovingly filmed sequences of Brady on the prairie with his horse at dawn or sunset – but this is a movie that combines lyricism, emotion and a brutal realism in an utterly beguiling way.
At the start of the film, Brady is recovering from a horrific rodeo injury which has left a gash on his head. He is a young man living in impoverished circumstances with his father and autistic sister in a trailer. Now, with a metal plate in his skull, it looks as if he will have to give up his dream of winning fame and fortune on the rodeo circuit. His best friend Lane is already in a wheelchair thanks to his misadventures as a rider.
What is most startling here is the sensitivity with which Zhao tackles such a downbeat tale. We see Brady briefly carousing around the campfire with his cowboy friends, drinking in bars and gambling at the slot machines. Generally, though, he is on his own. He is a quietly spoken, solitary figure who just happens to have a genius around horses. If anyone wants a wild colt tamed, they always turn to Brady.
Zhao includes several scenes in which we see Brady doing his horse whispering. She films these scenes without editing. Brady’s expertise isn’t feigned. The film has an authenticity that you don’t find in even the biggest-budgeted, most exhaustively-researched westerns. It is also surprisingly moving – an unlikely tearjerker.
Brady knows that if he keeps on riding in rodeos and sustains another injury, he could kill himself. However, giving up means sacrificing the one part of his life that has meaning. “We have to play the cards we are dealt,” his father (needless to say, played by his real-life dad) tells him. “Sometimes, dreams aren’t meant to be”. This is advice that Brady simply can’t accept. He sees the way his father’s life has unravelled since he stopped riding and since the death of Brady’s mother.
Just as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer wrote non-fiction novels, Zhao has made a film that blurs lines completely between what is fact-based and what is fictional storytelling. Occasionally, The Rider risks becoming a little manipulative and melodramatic. Brady can’t help but compare himself to the horses which, when they are hurt, are quickly shot. He half wishes the same could happen to him but (as he tells his sister) he is a person. That means he has to live, like it or not.
Brady holds the film together. A youthful figure with hardly a wrinkle on his face, he looks very callow by comparison with the hard-bitten cowboys played by the likes of McQueen or John Wayne but shares their stubborn streak and their very laconic style of speaking. The Rider is a modern-day western in which the machismo is secondary. It’s an elegiac affair but one that portrays its troubled main character with extraordinary tenderness and insight.
Hatton Garden heist played straight
King of Thieves
★★★☆☆
Dir James Marsh, 108 mins, starring: Michael Caine (above left), Charlie Cox, Michael Gambon, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone (above right)
Don’t come to King of Thieves expecting an Ealing-style comedy about a gang of lovable old rogues. James Marsh’s film tells the story of the ageing criminals behind the Hatton Garden heist in 2015 – and the robbers here are a very unpleasant bunch indeed. One of the most refreshing aspects of the film is that they are all shown in their full greed and malevolence.
They’re being played by some of Britain’s best-loved and most familiar screen actors (Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone, Paul Whitehouse and Michael Gambon) but Marsh and his screenwriter Joe Penhall rarely go in search of easy laughs or indulge in false nostalgia.
Britain has always loved and romanticised its gangsters, whether it’s the Krays (the subject of a successful film from King of Thieves producers Working Title) or “Mad” Frankie Fraser. Here, though, the villains are very short on glamour. When you’re relying on hearing aids and social security, it’s hard to pretend that you’re Al Capone.
As a thriller, the film is on the rickety side. Like its protagonists with their type 2 diabetes, bad knees and replacement hips, it struggles to build up much momentum or suspense. Marsh resorts again and again to music-driven montage sequences to try to make the heist itself seem exciting.
Even so, he can’t squeeze dramatic juice out of scenes of desiccated old men in a north London vault over an Easter bank holiday weekend, struggling to drill a hole through a wall as their lookout snoozes in a building opposite. This is a character piece, not an action movie. Its richness lies in the exceptional performances and the very frank and perceptive way in which these small-time crooks’ machinations and backstabbing are laid bare.
Caine is cast as Brian Reader, the “king” of the thieves… until his nerve goes (or he loses his “arsehole” as his colleagues inelegantly put it when Reader begins to have doubts about the job). He has been on the fiddle all his life. His criminal career started when he stole a tin of peaches aged 13 and has escalated from there.
Caine plays him beautifully. Reader is an old and distinguished looking man, getting over the loss of his wife. He loves his jazz. His criminal past seems far behind him. Unlike his other OAP accomplices, he seems affluent enough but thieving is a compulsion for him. As Caine shows, Reader can switch in an instant from geniality to snarling malice. He is cunning, vain and high-handed. When pushed into a corner, he can be very unpleasant indeed.
Late on in the film, we see one of his henchmen, John Kenny Collins (Tom Courtenay) at the swimming baths with Billy “the fish” (Michael Gambon). Collins and Billy are conspiring together when Collins, who is hard of hearing, suddenly farts in the water. “Better out than in,” he tells Billy. This isn’t the kind of moment you ever find in a Michael Mann heist movie. You don’t expect Al Pacino or Robert De Niro to break wind but the British thieves here have as much of a struggle against their bodily functions and decaying faculties as they do against the police.
Courtenay brings a beatific, Stan Laurel-like innocence to his role. His friendly outward demeanour doesn’t hide his treacherous nature. Even more startling is Jim Broadbent as Terry Perkins, a grandfatherly type with a mean and sadistic streak. We are so used to seeing Broadbent playing the genial everyman that his aggression here comes as a shock.
Ray Winstone’s Danny is (as Reader calls him) a “shagger”. Women like him. He stands on his head and performs stunts to get people to pay attention to him but we are left in no doubt that he is a vicious thug with a huge chip on his shoulder. Winstone gets one of the best and most chilling moments in the film.
When the gang finally make it through the hole in the wall to the safety deposit boxes, he lets out a huge, primal, I’m-the-daddy-now style roar. Arguably the most sympathetic of the motley crew is the hapless Carl Wood (Paul Whitehouse), who would far rather be tending his allotment than committing robbery. Once he’s drawn in, he can’t get away.
The old-timers are relentlessly patronising towards their young accomplice, Basil (Charlie Cox). They mock him in homophobic language because he takes the care to wear a disguise. They try to bully him and to muscle him out of his share of the loot but he is a shadowy figure who, it is implied, may have been manipulating the old geezers all along.
Throughout the film, Marsh throws in subliminal references to the swinging Sixties and to the illustrious pasts of actors like Caine and Courtenay. On one level, this is another film about the dying of the light. The crooks are staging their robbery not just because several of them are in dire financial straits but because they can’t bear the idea of their own increasing irrelevance.
The filmmakers can’t resist a few comic asides. These have to do with the thieves’ deafness, their struggle to crawl through small holes or their inability to come to terms with the internet. The police, who initially
think they are dealing with a gang of hardened Albanians, very quickly discover that the robbers are proudly British – and as inept as they are cunning.
Some audiences may be disappointed that King of Thieves isn’t more of a lark along the lines of The Lavender Hill Mob. (The film is based on a magazine article called “The Over The Hill Mob.”) Marsh, though, should be congratulated for doing his ancient protagonists the favour of taking them at least semi-seriously and for showing that OAPs can be scumbags too.
Confused reboot for alien hunter franchise
The Predator
★★☆☆☆
Dir Shane Black, 107 mins, starring: Boyd Holbrook, Jacob Tremblay, Olivia Munn, Sterling K Brown, Keegan-Michael Key
“Ain’t nobody gonna believe this one”, someone observes early on in Shane Black’s very tongue-in-cheek new sci-fi extravaganza. The film serves up a few chuckles along the way. It offers plenty of gore and slimy green goo too, but is neither funny nor horrific enough overall to justify the rebooting of the franchise.
Boyd Holbrook, the laid back DEA Agent from Netflix drama Narcos, plays the hero Quinn – a retired special forces army ranger now working as a mercenary. He first encounters the alien creature when a spaceship crashes in the Mexican wilderness just at the moment he is about to shoot some drug dealer/kidnapper-type in the head.
Unlike almost everybody else in the vicinity, Quinn escapes being bitten in half or trussed upside down from a tree as his guts spill out. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he swallows a silver bauble that can make him invisible and then posts some of the alien’s armour to his autistic son back home in the US.
The alien wants the equipment back and seemingly has an affinity with the kid. (Autistic children, we are told, are the next step on the evolutionary chain). Writer-director Black quickly sketches in Quinn’s family details. We learn that he is a lousy husband (now separated from his long-suffering wife) but a “damned good soldier”, even if he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
In somewhat haphazard fashion, he is thrown together with the “loonies”, a collection of fellow misfits and military rejects who turn out to be almost as selfless and heroic as he is. He is also joined by the glamorous biologist Dr Casey Brackett (Olivia Munn).
The scientists have ascertained, to their evident amazement, that there is human DNA in the makeup of the monsters. The main creature is looking forward to some old-fashioned bloodsport. Once it has upgraded itself and learnt to talk in Dalek-like English, it tells the humans they have “time
advantage” – in other words, a few minutes of a head start, before it comes to devour them.
As he has shown in his screenplays for everything from Lethal Weapon to The Last Boy Scout and The Nice Guys, Shane Black has few peers when it comes to writing mainstream movies with a self-mocking, ironic wit about them. The problem with The Predator (which Black co-scripted with Fred Dekker) is that we are watching three separate films, joined together like unwieldy pieces of Lego.
One is a Hogan’s Heroes-like action-comedy in which every event, however violent or unfortunate, is a source of immense, joshing mirth. Another is a full-blown horror picture, with its fair share of entrails dangling from corpses, blood and general havoc. The third is a Spielberg-like fable in which a kid communicates with another world. Black struggles to combine the different elements. It remains to be seen if audiences still have the appetite for such random, back to the Eighties-style hocus pocus.
Gaudy, shallow remake of Blaxploitation classic
Superfly
★★☆☆☆
Dir Director X, 116 mins, starring: Trevor Jackson (above left), Jason Mitchell, Lex Scott Davis (above right), Michael Kenneth Williams, Jennifer Morrison, Kaalan Walker, Esai Morales, Brian Durkin
Superfly is a remake of an old blaxploitation classic from the 1970s. It is a cheerily amoral affair in which sex, money, violence and designer watches are to the fore. The early scenes are so full of bling and macho posturing that you half suspect the film must be intended as a spoof.
Sadly the director, who goes under the moniker “Director X”, isn’t Mel Brooks in disguise. He turns out to be in deadly earnest.
The film reaches its absolute nadir in the slow-motion-threesome-in-the-shower scene but there are plenty of other almost equally absurd moments. Our hero is Priest (Trevor Jackson), a remarkably laid back Atlanta drug dealer who, in spite of his ostentatious shopping habits and love of fast cars, has stayed under the radar as far as the dimwitted local police are concerned.
He is the type who likes to wrestle, Mixed Martial Arts style, with his business associates when discussing new deals. Apparently, he wants to quit the criminal life but he doesn’t give any indication of what he might do instead. Priest, who has come up from the streets, isn’t exactly admirable. If Mexican narcos offer him the chance to distribute their merchandise, he will betray his oldest mentor at the drop of a hat.
At least, he isn’t as reckless as trigger-happy lieutenant, Eddie, who starts a civil war with rival gang, the Snow Patrol (so-called because all its members dress in white). There is already bad blood between Juju, a young Snow Patrol member, and Priest after a shootout at a nightclub in which a passerby was almost
killed in the crossfire.
Predictable mayhem follows. Priest is put through the wringer – shot at, almost thrown out of a plane, blackmailed by corrupt cops and chased around town. He even falls out with Eddie at one stage. Nothing that happens, though, comes close to putting his immaculately coiffed hair out of place.
The sexual politics here are on the prehistoric side. Women tend to strippers, pole dancers or gangsters – and sometimes they are all three at once. The Mexican kingpin’s sweet-natured mother turns out to be an ogre, ready to incinerate her own children if they betray her. Superfly suffers from the complete absence of any positive figures. Everybody is a villain here. Priest is just a bit sleeker and cleverer than his adversaries.
Alex Tse’s simple-minded screenplay borrows ideas from Brian De Palma’s Scarface as well as from blaxploitation pictures but doesn’t dig beneath the surface in its treatment of any of its themes or characters. The result is a film that is cartoonish, gaudy, silly, with a ridiculous “crime pays” storyline, but without any emotional traction whatsoever.
These reviews appeared in yesterday’s Independent Daily Edition