22 Things I Learned From 'The Next Three Days'

1. Having identified the prime suspect of a murder minutes after the crime has taken place, the police will sleep on it and arrest the suspect the following morning.

2. Prison doctors exhibit undue commitment to their felonious patients, and sound as though they were educated at Oxford.

3. Accepting a lift across state lines from a kindly stranger makes you an accessory after the fact.

4. You can break into a van using a tennis ball.

5. You can pick a lock using a filed down key.

6. Suicide attempts should under no circumstances be taken seriously.

7. Don’t trust a sleazy, drug-dealer-recommended low-life to make you a fake passport.

8. Do trust a motorcycle riding deaf stranger to make you a fake passport.

9. Russell Crowe ate all the pies.

10. Male detectives are intense, psychic, and insanely committed to their jobs.

11. Female detectives bitch a lot.

12. It takes heavily built criminal lackeys, armed with shotguns, an age to kick (not shoot, apparently) open a locked wooden door.  Only faced with the threat of imminent immolation is the required effort put in.

13. You don’t need psychological depth when you have criminal instruction videos.

14. Given the choice between a possibly sociopathic Elizabeth Banks and a kindly, flirty, willing-to-babysit Olivia Wilde, some men would choose the former.  Fools.

15. There’s always a group of sports fans to blend in with.

16. The professor always delivers a lecture which is spookily appropriate to his own situation (here, on Don Quixote and escapism).

17. Writer-Director Paul Haggis cannot write a scene, or frame a shot to save his life.

18. The centre of every American city can be locked down within fifteen minutes.

19. The murder of drug dealers will be investigated with all the manpower and forensics that the Pittsburgh police department can muster.

20. The murder of a well-paid company executive will not.

21. Sponsored items required for a jailbreak include, but are not limited to, an iPhone, a satnav, a North Face coat, a digital camera (with face recognition), and a Prius.  Access to youtube, google and amazon are also musts.

22. Willing suspension of disbelief is fine.  Three days worth of unbelievable, badly plotted, poorly judged nonsense is not.

22 Things I Learned From 'Robin Hood'

1. We have Robin Hood to thank for the Magna Carta.

2. It takes a band of men less than a week to sack a dozen towns from York to Peterborough.

3. All English monarchs are idle, self-involved and idiotic. French monarchs are strategically minded, cunning, and intelligent.

4. ‘The Odyssey’ is a strange, but welcome, inspiration for the second act of a movie with this subject matter.

5. Robin Hood is a ‘Big Society’ Tory.

6. Women may command troops in battle, but only if their troops consist of children, and their presence is in no way vital or commented upon.

7. The repeated use of day-for-night filming techniques in the twenty-first century smacks first of genius, then of weirdness, and finally of boredom.

8. French rapists prefer cunnilingus.

9. Director Ridley Scott can do ‘historical epic’ in his sleep, but ‘cheeky family fun’ is not his forte.

10. Historical accuracy be damned: Cate Blanchett demands foundation and she demands it by the ton.

11. Convoluted scripts aren’t necessarily good scripts.

12. Innuendo-laced comments about Little John are funny.

13. Mark Addy’s boisterous portrayal of Friar Tuck is most avowedly not funny.

14. Protagonists in Hollywood fare must find meaning and purpose only through a new understanding of what a great man their father was (see also ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘Star Trek’)

15. When the hero rides towards battle a subordinate must throw him a sword.

16. Even when creeping political correctness demands an absurdly re-imagined Maid Marian, it is still acceptable to vilify both the Church and the French.

17. If you’re going to feature a beach-based swords-and-arrows battle as your climax, why not go ahead and make a movie about the Battle of Marathon instead?

18. There was more twelfth century ambience in thirty seconds of the recent ‘Valhalla Rising’ than there is in all 140 long minutes of this.

19. Peter Jackson should sue for royalties.

20. Robin Hood spent more time launching military campaigns on the seashore than he did as an outlaw in the woods.

21. When the animated closing credits of your film are more ingenious – and bloodier – than what has come before, there’s something amiss.

22. If this is the best this creative team can come up with then the inevitable sequels are going to be very hard work.

Nobody Politic: A Review of ‘Body of Lies’

Like the son I never really had an opinion one way or the other about: the script by William Monahan for Body of Lies depicts yet another post-Oedipal, woman-free zone of masculine friendships and apathy.

Shortly before departing the house for what turned out to be a private viewing of Body of Lies (evidently even Peckhamplex’s “bargain Tuesdays” have failed to beat the credit crunch, or indeed the lacklustre reviews), I saw the opening segment of the December 1st Daily Show: in it, Jon Stewart and John Oliver discussed the recent terrorist attacks in India, and concluded that the perpetrators were “motherfucking motherfuckers”. This alternative news show, normally quite willing to dig deeper and more acutely than major US news networks, responded emotionally and crudely to the tragedy. Ridley Scott, director of this new but by no means fresh geopolitical thriller, fails to engage either emotionally or intellectually with the subject, and concludes much the same as these pseudo-journalists, only without the slight hint of grace required to illicit laughs in light of a massacre.

It is difficult to in the film down, it spins away in so many lacklustre directions. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA operative in Iraq who is frequently mis-handled by Russell Crowe’s overweight strategist back in Langley. Between them they manage to balls up seemingly every operation they come into contact with, preferably utilising missile-laden helicopters. It turns out that, while this sort of thing is permissible in the war zone around Baghdad, it doesn’t fly so well in Amman, where DiCaprio’s Ferris initiates a hesitant yet doomed friendship with the self styled king of Jordanian intel. As the script later spells out, trust is the overriding factor in cross-cultural co-operation involving Arab nations and organisations, and Uncle Sam seems inherently unable to show all his cards.

With the casual detail and atmospherics that come as standard with a Scott production (from either brother, for that matter), it is at first a pleasure to watch an Iraq depicted as a real place, rather than the dramatic borderland of DePalma’s Redacted, or the bomb-stricken dysfunctional state viewed nightly on BBC news. However, the more destinations the film visits, the more they each feel the same, as though every Middle Eastern country had the same roads, architecture, bakeries, and slums. For all the absurdity of James Bond’s latest sojourn around the globe, at least every place he visited felt alive with its own customs, weather, people, and even introductory font. The people moving in front of this background don’t liven it up much either: protagonist Ferris orchestrates his existence as if he is writing the screenplay of the film himself, while Crowe’s Analyst Ed Hoffman serves little purpose than to provide a counter-image of America: the packaged sushi-eating bad father to DiCaprio’s do-gooding cultural nomad (although, if he loves the Middle East so much and has worked there so long, why does he make such rookie mistakes as offering a new inamoratas his hand to shake while being watched by so many purist locals?).

Amongst the anonymous score by Marc Streitenfeld and unremarkable Pietro Scalia editing, one of the few pleasures to be had is Mark Strong’s performance as Jordanian intelligence chief Hani. Walking a fine line between several cliché characterisations, all of them a million miles away from each other, he lends dramatic weight and intellectual curiosity (if not believability) to all scenes in which the character features. William Monahan’s script fails to provide the same taste and refinement for the other characters, while the narrative he crafts follows a similar sons-impressing-their-father’s trajectory as his work on Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed, but is tellingly free from the bracingly unique statements of personality and individual identity that made those so sly and rewarding.

The film is watchable enough, and were it a movie of the week imported to this country from HBO, it would be little more than an uninteresting diversion. However, with the calibre of much of the talent, and the indication from many of those involved from previous projects that they have an interest and sensitivity towards a more compelling and progressive depiction of geopolitics than one finds in the latest Bruckheimer production, Body of Lies is a sore and unwarranted disappointment.