Jenny’s a Railway Granny now – and just about gets this sequel to stay on track
Well, the good news is that Jenny Agutter is a nostalgic joy in The Railway Children Return, looking gorgeous, sounding delicious and generally being everything you might hope the famously petticoatwaving, teenage Bobbie might have become now she’s a distinctly glamorous grandmother.
The less good news is that Agutter isn’t actually in it a lot and can’t save this much anticipated sequel from having a slightly opportunistic, made-for-television air about it. With a screenplay that doesn’t always convince and cinematography and editing more at home on the small screen than the big, it’s difficult not to come to the conclusion that Lionel Jeffries’ beloved 1970 original deserved better.
What it gets is a 1944 wartime setting and the story of three Manchester children – Lily (Beau Gadsdon), Pattie (Eden Hamilton) and Ted (Zac Cudby) – evacuated to Yorkshire as Britain’s cities come under renewed German bombing. There, they are taken in by the local headmistress (Sheridan Smith), daughter of the famous Bobbie and mother of young Thomas.
It is Thomas (Austin Haynes) who soon takes the streetwise trio under his friendly wing. Let some clumsyfeeling comedy and railway-based adventure duly begin.
Director Morgan Matthews, who made the excellent X+Y, certainly pays homage to the original: fathers materialise from clouds of steam, a teenage boy injures his leg and the coal bunkers that Peter once stole from now provide a hiding place.
But the clearly well researched main story – essentially about the violent treatment meted out to black GIs serving in Britain by white US military police – feels as if it belongs in a different film, and certainly not in a sequel to something originally written by E. Nesbit.
It’s getting a slightly generous three stars from me, partly because the young cast give it their all and, of course, for Agutter.
I think we can safely say that just about any film with an opening scene that involves Ryan Gosling and Billy Bob Thornton immediately has our attention. But mine certainly faded over the following hour as it became clear just how closely The Gray Man – so titled because the shadowy character
Gosling plays operates ‘in the gray’ – follows the already much replicated template laid down by the Bourne films.
Yes, Court Gentry (Gosling) is a CIA hitman, but top management at the agency has changed and now it’s the hitmen who are being hunted down by private contractors who don’t always play by the rules. Sound familiar? Think Mission: Impossible and Daniel Craig’s Bond and you get the general crash-bangwallop, car-chasing, plane-crashing, big shoot-out idea.
With Anthony and Joe Russo at the helm and Chris Evans – yes, Captain America himself – playing the main baddie, this hugely expensive Netflix production is getting a deserved cinema run before it’s available to stream from Friday, although it has to be said the visual effects don’t always hold up on the big screen.
Two documentaries arrive, both made with the active participation of their subjects. The strikingly styled McEnroe sees the great man himself moodily stalking the dark streets of night-time New York and exploring the demons that made him the bad boy of late-1970s and
1980s tennis and, to be fair, coming up with some interesting answers, helped by the likes of Billie Jean King and Bjorn Borg.
Having never entirely warmed to the adventurer Ranulph Fiennes, I didn’t expect to get much from Matthew Dyas’s Explorer, but what emerges from this somewhat overlong film is a surprisingly moving portrait as much about love, grief and ageing as it is about polar expeditions, circumnavigating the globe and conquering Mount Everest.