22 Things I Learned From 'The Book of Eli'

1. It’s okay to kill a hairless cat.

2. Thirty years after the end of the world it’s still worth checking the taps for running water.

3. Jeopardising a mission to save mankind by sidetracking to charge your iPod is not the action we expect of a stoic protagonist.

4. KFC, Motorola and General Motors will survive the apocalypse, their marketing departments remarkably intact.

5. Once you go black, you go Christian.

6. The hero always enters the town in slow motion.

7. The hero always enters the bar in slow motion.

8. Gary Oldman is at his most entertaining when he is channelling the ghost of Jack Lemmon.

9. You don’t need a seatbelt if you’re pretty.

10. There’s always a quirky, fidgety guy who’s good with electrical appliances (preferably to be played by Tom Waits).

11. End-of-the-world settlements will be ruled over by a faux-intellectual despot and populated by a bunch of illiterate thugs (see also The Postman, 28 Days Later).

12. There may not be any water or food in this world but there is plenty of petrol.

13. Having a character whistle Ennio Morricone does not a clever Western pastiche make.

14. Two fight scenes and two exploding cars does not an action film make.

15. Ponderously dull and literal scripting does not an art film make.

16. Casting the woman who voices Meg Griffin in Family Guy as the love interest somewhat undermines whatever credibility your listless production may have initially had.

17. Shooting Denzel Washington in the chest only makes him stronger (see also Man On Fire).

18. It is possible to make an entire film about the bible without understanding one word of it.

19. Malcolm McDowell is making a career out of being the last straw.

20. Endings which sacrifice logic, characterisation and the moral lessons of all that has gone before at the altar of “looking cool” are somewhat frustrating.

21. If you couldn’t get enough of the trash-punk vehicles, windswept desert vistas and imperative-free plotting on offer in Terminator Salvation, this should certainly be for you.

22. For everyone else, you’re better off reading a book.

Through The Motions: A Review of Episode 6 of ‘Luther’

Having disgraced himself in the eyes of his fellow soldiers, and in doing so undone all his previous heroism and also put his family at risk, Ajax announces that he will journey to the beach of Troy for solitude. It is at this point that Sophocles has the soldier speak of the capriciousness of alliances and identity:

‘I have learnt this-

hate an enemy knowing he may be a friend

love a friend knowing he may be an enemy.

Men are tricky things.’

(translation by Robert Cannon)

Not as tricky as endings, perhaps, judging by the final episode of the first (only?) series of Luther, the London-set detective drama broadcast on the BBC this summer. The more-than-two-millennia old play Ajax begins after an act of extreme violence, and presents the dissolution of a hero renowned for his concrete fortitude. Those Ajax relied upon for support – the goddess Athena – are revealed as at best uncaring towards him, while those he considered sworn enemies – the crafty Odysseus – go to great lengths to restore the shamed man’s honour. So too Luther’s own world is flipped upside down, a state of affairs perhaps intriguing but inevitably fumbled.

(Viewers still in need of catching-up using iPlayer be warned, to fully explicate the sweeping ridiculousness of this sixth episode of Luther it will be necessary to describe the plotting in detail up to and including the final minutes.)

For those who have stuck with the increasingly absurd series, the nadir was surely reached when Luther’s former best mate gunned down Luther’s ex-wife in a scene that could not have been more forced had the actors literally re-positioned themselves according to explicit floor-sketched markers. Perhaps this was intentional – an indication of the hand of fate, the inescapability of tragic circumstance. This is no weak spirit for a drama to mix with: the superlative American cop-show The Shield structured the entire final three seasons (of seven) around a claustrophobic vice of incident, connecting events pregnant with consequence stretching back to the pilot episode with offhand moments throughout the show to create a perfect storm of dread and finality.

The key is in that final word, and the satisfaction it brings. Resolutions can be the male and female protagonists at long last getting together. For our pop-nihilist mainstream though, better to have an arrest, a beating, or best still a murder. (The Shield, in its last episode, managed to trump all of these in its own inimitable way, and if you have not seen the show I urge you to seek it out). We all know the Greeks called it catharsis – the exhausting but welcome purgation of emotion. As those who have kept track of the mainstream response to the Robert Pattinson vehicle Remember Me will be aware, it is always appreciated if the conclusion of a drama is just that – a conclusive rendering of themes, storylines and characters that have been previously established, rather than random occurrences. Luther’s creator and writer Neil Cross goes to great lengths to stack the deck in his favour on this front, and the result – four principle characters converging in a bloody and faux-moralistic confrontation on an abandoned train platform – fails to satisfy on almost every level.

What are these levels? Firstly, and most obviously, there is characterisation. DCI Ian Reed began as just another cop in the office, and Luther’s “best mate”, but without warning or reason he becomes in the last episode and a half a desperate murderer. The extent to which he has covered up his crimes and tried to frame his friend is ludicrous; more damagingly, it undermines any involvement as once again realism is ditched in favour of Drama with a capital D. “But it’s just escapist entertainment” you might cry. However, Reed’s killing of Zoe, and subsequent arrangement of the scene (in minutes, it seems) to implicate Luther is the act of a man far more composed and calculating than the harried wobble that actor Steven Mackintosh grants the character. Escapism is fine; a gaping dissonance between the portrayal of a character and their actions is not. Beyond these accusations, the final scene itself commits further sins of capriciousness, as Reed begs Luther to kill him then, when the tables are turned, fights desperately to save himself. Perhaps a sense of the pitiable wretchedness of his personality would have saved such fluctuations, but as it was not on display we shall never know.

Secondly, and perhaps less noticeably awkward, is the staging itself. The logistics boggle the mind: Zoe’s civilian boyfriend Mark North has, unchallenged, stolen personal property from a police station (property itself left over from the previous episode, and in no serious way remarked upon or given dramatic significance) which implicates Reed. The detective then makes a phone call and asks for North, who is on foot, to be ‘tracked’. North’s position then appears on Reed’s sat-nav and a pursuit begins. Quite what technology is being employed here I do not know, but I suspect it is somewhat outside even the wildest dreams of the Met. North leads Reed to what appears to be an abandoned platform at Waterloo station, at which point there is much yelling, and even gunfire. No police arrive and no civilians interrupt, despite the clear indication that this is an easily accessible space.

Finally, and most offensive, is the deployment of Luther’s dead lover. Any respect for her character has already been shredded by the positioning of her murder as an instigator of Luther’s fugitive-status, rather than an event in its own right. In a move as narcissistic as the shows title, Zoe’s death functions solely as a way of changing Luther’s living conditions. Any hope that this will be rectified is swiftly banished when North, Zoe’s boyfriend who believes Luther to be her killer, is convinced otherwise offscreen! Never has a jump cut been applied so callously to cover up so calamitous a gulf in narrative logic. The final scene brings the final insult – Reed tries to incite Luther to violence by claiming to have slept with Zoe, using previously unheard sexual terms like ‘coming’ and ‘orgasm’. Zoe, originally depicted as a character with strength enough to depart from Luther’s sphere of influence, throughout the series begins sleeping with him again, dies because of a plot that in no way involves her, and is ultimately humiliated. (Humiliated twice over in point of fact: these sexual incitements are meaningful only because they attack Luther’s masculinity.)

In up-turning the world of Ajax, Sophocles might be making a statement (about the fallibility of alliance, the generosity of men, answers on a tweet-feed please), but crucially he is providing a basis for his play using reversal and irony, solid rhetorical traits. The play is assembled using dramatic elements that fit into a meaningful and satisfying formal scheme. The villain in Luther becomes another cop, while the murderess from episode one and the jealous new boyfriend of the ex-wife become allies.

These inversions are meaningless, though, when they fail to force Luther to see his world in a new light. In a show that has been unremittingly singular in its focus, it fails to provide a new insight for the character. Episode one began with a Luther who had let a bad person die and is now psychologically tortured for it. After six hours packed with incident, betrayal and death, Luther is in a situation similar enough to be conventional, but not exactly replicated enough to be understood as an echo, or theme. We end where we began in a tangled hierarchy which works better when there is an awareness of its deployment (as in the Bourne series, which begins and ends with the drowning protagonist). Neil Cross reverts to this device not to create meaning, but because he understands that it is the correct way for exciting stories to end.

I was perilously close to falling asleep during the last twenty minutes of the second episode of Luther. It was clear that the show was going to be content week-in-week-out to feature a swathe of destruction which only the bearish Luther could prevent, while in the background other characters remained shackled to their roles as prescribed more by scriptwriter templates than realism or psychological depth. Then, during a confrontation between them, the murderess Alice called Luther her friend, and – after initially resisting – Luther stated “well, one coffee doesn’t make us friends,” and they stroll off together.

Rather than embrace this staggering mutual need, the show relegated it, and Alice’s complete inefficacy in the last hour – when she should have come into her own as a temptress pulling Luther further down the path of self-justified violent action – was one of the final nails in Luther’s coffin (by my count, the most important contribution she made was making Luther a cup of tea).

In sacrificing logic, character and originality at the altar of the wilful need to entertain, the show undermined even its own minor pleasures. The resolution it offered was nothing more than stock – like gravy without a meal to go with it. Of all the things it was trying to prove – that the BBC can make primetime television as good as America, that lead Idris Elba is star enough to carry a show, etc. – Luther succeeded only in showing that drama without investment is so cheap as to not be worth bothering with.

Big Nowhere: A Review of 'The Killer Inside Me'

The question of whether the depiction of violence is morally justifiable has been cropping up a lot in discussions of Michael Winterbottom’s new work ‘The Killer Inside Me’. The issue is certainly one worth exploring, but gives the impression that the film itself is an ‘8mm’ style investigation into the intersection of realism and fakery, violence and pornography, titillation and culpability. It is none of these things, instead settling for a slick, shallow-feeling noir with some seriously upsetting sequences, which utilises ambiguity a lot more than its occasional upfront brutality would suggest.

Casey Affleck plays small-town cop Lou Ford, an aw-shucks simpleton with a pretty fiancé and a penchant for stovetop coffee and classical music. Or at least that is what Lou himself thinks the rest of the town take him for, when in truth he carries the sickness – a compulsion to murder women, boys, and anyone else he can convince himself is an impediment to his half-baked schemes. Or at least, sickness (always italics) is what it is termed in the original 1952 novel by dime-store noir master Jim Thompson. The film itself suggests a Freudian web of troubling childhood episodes, Winterbottom calls it schizophrenia in interviews, while Affleck’s own performance suggests a self-deluded sociopathy.

This grey indeterminacy at the heart of the drama is what both makes it a hollow and unconvincing experience as well as a compelling and tense one. The reconcilement of such opposites is reminiscent of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Béte Humaine, in which various steamy affairs and murderous impulses are all simmered together in an overpoweringly gothic stew which makes nods towards social relevance, but only ever satirically so.

‘The Killer Inside Me’ flirts with the gothic in the dark impulses of the characters, but retains a blandly art deco façade. It is this matter-of-factness that makes the killings so vicious and potentially offensive, not just the calm way they are filmed or the bizarre continued devotion that everyone seems to still feel for Lou even when he is beating their face to a pulp. This disassociation from the protagonist and the film-makers intentions (the narrative has such a recycled clean-break-gone-wrong framework as to be almost invisible) threatens to estrange the audience; the sustained depiction of it pulls us back, forces us to re-associate with what we are witnessing in a way that Lou does not. These are ideas Quentin Tarantino has been playing around with for a decade now; unsurprisingly, Winterbottom’s clear-eyed commitment to them is more rewarding.

These killings, which stand so proud and vital within both the film and discussions about it, threaten to overshadow the rest of ‘The Killer Inside Me’. If they are not allowed to do so then the weaknesses surrounding them begin to reveal themselves: the ambling plotting, the disconnected final reel, the often sub-par musical choices, the plainness of the filming which seems ill-at-ease with what Winterbottom states is intended to be such a subjective experience of a killer’s own mindset. Such analysis reveals further how the film plays with violence as a structuring device, a marketing ploy, a (non)pleasure to be focussed upon at the expense of all else. Kathryn Bigelow does much the same in her cinema, and lays herself open to the same accusations of relying upon the very conventions she exposes.

The entertainment to be found in ‘The Killer Inside Me’ is not of the visceral variety, nor the generic. These pleasures are offered, but critiqued and disregarded to the extent that to come away from the film praising the shooting, or the cleverness of the plot, would be somewhat perverse. Lou, it turns out, is unaware that he has not quite pulled the wool over the eyes of those around him as successfully as he thought, and this revelation further complicates the interaction between the film and the spectator. Like Lou, we aren’t sure quite whether we are as secure in our received narrative as we seem, and like those around him we don’t understand what the motives for the crimes we witness are. These misgivings, and not the fierceness of the violence, are what offer ‘The Killer Inside Me’ its power.