Smart and sexy, but a romcom? Definitely not...
Time was when you met someone you liked and found attractive, you summoned up the courage to ask for their phone number – a landline, obviously – summoned up even more courage to ring them up and then – normally stammering a little – politely asked if they’d like to go and see a film with you, or maybe have a drink. If that first date went well, it was generally accepted more would follow.
Well, no longer. In this new age of dating apps, social media and instant messaging, relationships have a whole new and potentially dangerous dynamic, where the unwary or over-enthusiastic can find themselves exchanging flirty texts and revealing photographs with someone they barely know.
It’s this murky world that Cat Person, based on a short story by Kristen Roupenian that first appeared in The New Yorker in 2017 and subsequently went viral online, so impressively explores. And for those of us still missing Succession, there’s the added bonus of finding out what the Gregster – aka actor Nicholas Braun – did next.
When Margot, played by CODA star Emilia Jones, first lays eyes on Robert (Braun) she’s manning the popcorn stall at her local cinema and bored. In her eyes, her new customer is tall, dark and handsome, maybe five years older than she is and looks like he’d play the best friend in one of her favourite films. So she gently flirts with him but, strangely, he doesn’t flirt back. The misunderstandings and false assumptions have already begun.
It’s only on a second visit that he clumsily asks for her phone number and the mildly flirtatious texting begins. At this point, Cat Person is smart, sexy and funny, reminding us that talented film-maker Susanna Fogel co-wrote the excellent Booksmart and directed the thematically similar Life Partners, too. This is territory Fogel knows, and it shows.
But just when we think we might be heading into clever romcom territory, the mood changes drastically. Some may find the abrupt change too dramatic but it remained all too plausible to me and, thanks to fine performances from Jones and Braun, and Fogel’s well-judged pacing, it’s powerfully watchable, too.
Some big directorial choices have been made with The Killer – not least to have much of the story told via a deep, dark and monotonously extended voiceover from its star, Michael Fassbender, and a highly stylised soundtrack from the Oscarwinning combo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. But big statements are what you expect when you hire a director of the calibre of David Fincher, whose past successes include Seven, Zodiac and The Social Network.
This time around, however, Fincher’s choices just don’t quite work, and are not helped by a screenplay that feels predictable and flat.
Fassbender, alas, is almost too successful in his portrayal of the sort of assassin who disappears in plain sight by being entirely unremarkable and dull. So when a big job in Paris goes wrong and he and his girlfriend in the Dominican Republic suddenly find themselves the targets, I couldn’t find myself rooting for them at all. Tilda Swinton does briefly cheer the whole thing up but, honestly, if this is your sort of violent thing, you’re better off rewatching John Wick.
Slightly more effective, despite obviously borrowing the basic plot of Speed, is Retribution, which sees Liam Neeson employing his very particular set of skills to play Matt Turner, a Berlin-based hedge-fund executive. Matt seems to have it all – beautiful apartment, beautiful wife (Embeth Davidtz), two fairly beautiful children, despite one of them being a truculent teenager.
But what he also has, as he quickly discovers when he has to drive his children to school one morning, is a bomb under the seat of his top-ofthe-range SUV. If he or his children get out of the car or fail to do exactly what they are told, the bomb will be detonated, a heavily disguised voice on the phone tells him. And just to prove it, said voice promptly blows up one of Matt’s colleagues right in front of them. What ensues is formulaic and derivative but reasonably watchable, too.
In Doctor Jekyll, Eddie Izzard is unexpectedly restrained and rather good, in fact, as the reclusive pharmaceutical magnate Nina Jekyll. But the country-house setting, a wordy screenplay and an annoyingly mannered performance from Scott Chambers as Jekyll’s new carer, Rob Stevenson (clever, huh), mean that his efforts are in vain.
Unfortunately, the best thing about Typist Artist Pirate King is its title. It’s what the artist Audrey Amiss, a woman who battled serious mental illness her entire adult life, put down under ‘profession’ in her passport.
Audrey (Monica Dolan) and her psychiatric nurse (Kelly Macdonald) may be on a road trip to Sunderland in a bright yellow electric car but, sadly, they forget to take us along for the ride.