Forget Top Gun. This really took my breath away
The great Ron Howard himself – director of Apollo 13 and the Formula 1 drama Rush – introduced my special screening of his latest film, Thirteen Lives, and got it absolutely spot-on. You’ll think you know this story, he said, but what you probably won’t know is the detail.
He’s right. Most of us think we do know the story of how, back in the summer of 2018, a young Thai football team and their coach were trapped deep underground by rising flood waters, only to be rescued – after 18 days – by an international team of cave-divers led by two plucky Brits.
What we don’t know, unless we have watched the excellent documentary, The Rescue, is the detail. We don’t know what it felt like to be there, what it feels like to dive underwater when you’re also in the dark and deep underground, or what it must have felt like when the two British divers – Rick Stanton and John Volanthen – finally found the boys after nine agonisingly long days.
I can pay Howard no higher compliment than to say, we do now.
This is a dramatisation that succeeds on just about every level: it’s intelligent, culturally sensitive and thrillingly, brilliantly paced. With a screenplay by William Nicholson of Gladiator and Shadowlands fame, it confidently jumps ahead when it needs to but has the good sense to linger at key moments too. The result is the most gripping and exciting big-screen thriller since Top Gun: Maverick.
Even things that shouldn’t work – like casting an American and an Irishman as the two Brits – do. Viggo Mortensen, who with his head shaved looks increasingly like Ed Harris, somehow becomes the epitome of British blokey bolshiness as Stanton, while an almost unrecognisable Colin Farrell, underplaying for possibly the first time in his career, is quietly perfect as Volanthen.
Joel Edgerton is good too, and introduces a spot of welcome humour when he joins the action as the Australian cave-diver Harry Harris, who also happens to be a hospital anaesthetist.
Above ground, Blade Runnerstyle rain turns the hastily constructed rescue camp into a muddy quagmire and local villagers work around the clock to divert floodwater away from the caves.
But as anxious parents wait and politicians squabble, Howard’s main triumphs inevitably come underground.
The underwater photography is truly exceptional, plunging you straight into the heart of this dark, claustrophobic story, and has to be the main reason why, despite the film being available on Amazon Prime from Friday, you ought to grab the brief opportunity to see it on the biggest cinema screen you can. It won’t disappoint.
DC League Of Super-Pets doesn’t disappoint either, albeit only in the sense that, at least as far as accompanying adults are concerned, it’s not nearly as painful as they’re expecting. In fact, this nicely animated children’s cartoon – based on the enjoyably silly idea that when the infant Superman was evacuated from the planet Krypton, his adorable puppy, er, Krypto, came along too – is good fun.
Yes, it’s ‘you’ll believe a dog can fly’ time. And talk, come to that.
What happens? Well, Krypto feels threatened by the arrival of Lois Lane in Superman’s life, a group of abandoned pets escapes from an animal shelter having gained superpowers courtesy of a lump of orange
kryptonite, and, oh yes, a bald guinea pig that once belonged to Lex Luthor is set on world domination.
A top voice cast led by Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Kate McKinnon and Keanu Reeves – voicing Batman – add to the slightly scary summertime jollity.
In Joyride, a sweary 12-year-old Irish lad who has lost his mum to cancer and is running away from his unscrupulous father, steals a taxi… only to find there’s a mother and her baby in the back seat.
There’s a further catch – the mother, Joy (Olivia Colman), is in a highly emotional state because she’s about to give her baby away. Mully (Charlie Reid), as the boy turns out to be called, is not impressed.
But he’s a resourceful lad, as skilled in the dark art of swapping stolen cars to keep one step ahead of the police as he is in the gentle coaxing of an inexperienced and reluctant mother to breastfeed. Already, we have an idea of what Mully might be able to do for Joy, but what can Joy do for Mully, particularly now the boy’s angry father is in pursuit?
What ensues as the pair race around County Kerry and beyond is contrived, sweetly sentimental and eventually a little overwrought. But it’s well acted, has its heart in the right place and is worth a look.