By Roger Moore

 

 

FILM: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

CAST: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L Jackson, Robert Redford,

DIRECTION: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo

 

The superhuman efforts director Joe Johnston made to persuade Chris Evans to re-enlist in the comic book movie universe as Captain America pays more dividends in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Evans, that perfect specimen of American manhood, really sells the earnestness, the dry wit, the sense of duty and righteousness of the icon of American values that he represents in this sequel, even if Johnston isn’t around to direct it. And it’s great that The Winter Soldier is actually about something, a comic book spin on privacy and civil liberties issues straight out of today’s data mining headlines. It’s a freedom vs fear movie, liberty vs “order”.

There are clever ways the story folds back into the first Captain America film’s world, great effects and a retro-future tech that is fascinating. But The Winter Soldier lacks that lump-in-the-throat heart that Evans, Johnston and company brought to the first Captain America.

The co-directors of You, Me and Dupree, Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, serve up a pretty generic sequel, with inconsequential villains and predictable flourishes, an epic whose epic effects lack grandeur. From its quasi-fascist logo and overly-imposing DC headquarters to the Stalinesque uniform that Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) sports, S.H.I.E.L.D. (“Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate” in the comics) is plainly a multi-national agency that’s reaching beyond its “fight evil, protect Earth” mandate. Robert Redford plays Alexander Pierce, the fellow who lords over the directorate of this ever-burgeoning security empire.

Nick Fury barely has time to fret over the idea that “to build a really better world, sometimes that means you have to tear the old one down”, when he’s attacked. The Captain, Steve Rogers (Evans), and Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) set out to unravel this mystery, who the new menace is and what the enemy’s masked Winter Soldier super-warrior has in his bag of tricks.

Johansson, who has no hint of a Russian accent this time (not a bad move, considering how Russians are regarded this spring), makes an apt, super-sexy sparring partner for the Captain. She’s constantly suggesting he get back on the dating scene — in between epic brawls with legions of foes. Not that the Captain doesn’t notice women — his nurse-neighbour, for instance (Emily VanCamp).

The fights are spectacular combinations of digitally augmented stunt-work. The directors and screenwriters find all manner of new ways for the Captain’s shield to pay off, and Evans and Johansson make these shooting, strangling punch-outs cool.

Anthony Mackie shows up as a potential new sidekick, which only calls attention to the question, “Hey, where are Captain America’s OTHER Avenger pals in this hour of crisis?”

The best new effect is a holographic teleconference involving Redford (fairly bland in this part) and the other governing execs of SHIELD. Worst cameo is Garry Shandling, as a senator who apparently has been using Kim Novak’s botox team.

And that message — that we’re more likely to give up our freedoms by consent than by force — is not a bad one to hammer home.

But The Winter Soldier has long, talky, dead stretches. It’s emotionally flat, a lot closer to Evans’ Fantastic Four films or the Thor sequel than it is to Captain America: The First Avenger, or The Avengers. — MCT

 

A slow and uneven drama

 

 

FILM: The Railway Man

CAST: Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Stellan Skarsgard, Jeremy Irvine, Sam Reid, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tanroh Ishida

DIRECTION: Jonathan Teplitzky, written Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson.

 

In Hollywood parlance, they “meet cute” – he stumbles into her first class seat on the train to Edinburgh. She (Nicole Kidman) is a bit taken aback, but only for a moment. She offers, way too soon, that she’s “newly single”. He is bookish, awkward, slow to pick up on that. His encyclopaedic knowledge of rail schedules gives away that he’s really into trains.

His small talk is pattering on about the history of every village, hamlet and landmark they pass by. “Lancaster - known as the hanging town.”

He is smitten, she in intrigued. So it’s not really a coincidence when he runs into on her homebound train some days later. Thus begins an adorable love affair and marriage. But Eric has night terrors, paralysing seizures of fear set off by a phrase, a song on the radio. Patti, who loves him, needs answers.

The Railway Man is about the horrors the people who lived through the “Keep calm and carry on” era didn’t talk about. This slow, uneven drama is a different sort of British prisoner of war movie. And even if it stumbles on its way to its fairly obvious, politically correct conclusion, it’s still worthwhile as a closer read on history than the decades of WWII movies that preceded it.

Because it’s good to remember that the construction of the bridge over the River Kwai wasn’t all British stiff upper lips, jolly-good-sport-playing head games with the Japanese, whistling the “Colonel Bogey March”.

For those who lived through it — prisoners of war worked to death as slave labour under inhuman conditions in the jungles of Thailand — it was a fetid, living hell.

Patti Lomax has to pry information out of Eric’s peers, the men who meet to not talk about what they went through together building that Thai-Burma Railway. Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard) is dismissive, but eventually he fills her in on what they all have been living with for 40 years (the movie is set in 1980).

In a long flashback, we see the shameful, seemingly premature surrender of Singapore, which Churchill called “the worst disaster” in British military history. The young radio operators, Eric and Finlay (played as young men by Jeremy Irvine and Sam Reid), pocket vacuum tubes and other radio parts as they line up to march into captivity. But once there, they see the awful consequences of getting caught doing that. They may be needed to keep the few machines the Japanese are using to build this rail line going. But beatings, torture and summary executions are a constant threat.

Director Jonathan Teplitzky cast emaciated men to play many of the prisoners, and took care to get the Japanese right, too, historically. These weren’t the best and the brightest. They were small men, physically, mentally and spiritually, raised on a diet of rice and racism. And they behaved barbarically.

The Railway Man vividly, if unevenly, recreates that horrific past. And then Teplitzky and the screenwriters very clumsily document the way the real Eric Lomax came to terms with it and his chief tormentor, a secret police interpreter/interrogator, played by Tanroh Ishida in the war scenes and Hiroyuki Sanada in the 1980 “present”. Those scenes, whatever their moral rectitude, ring hollow and false. The actors bring no conviction to them.— By Roger Moore /MCT

Desert setting

 

FILM: Swelter

CAST: Alfred Molina, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Grant Bowler, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Josh Henderson, Lennie James

DIRECTION: Keith Parmer

 

Swelter, set in the Californian desert, is a return to villainous territory for Jean-Claude Van Damme, which a hint of anti-hero in there. After a Vegas casino robbery 10 years ago, Stillman’s (Van Damme) criminal gang loses their bag man, Bishop (Lennie James), who also loses his memory due to amnesia.  He took $10,000,000 with him.

Bishop settles in a small desert town, leading a completely different life but also unaware that he stashed the loot somewhere in the town.  Eventually, Stillman and his crew track Bishop down and set out to retrieve their money.  The first thing you notice about Swelter is that it’s not a typical Van Damme movie.  

The setting really does give it a shot in the arm.  The director makes use of the Californian desert: there are plenty of deep focus shots with the actors in the foreground. It’s nice to see this type of landscape used in an artistic way. The film is violent when it needs to be which compliments the gang’s demeanour.

But the film refuses to lift above-average grade, with the story not really gaining any traction throughout. After establishing the premise and the gang members arrive in town, it starts to drag its feet and there’s quite a bit of melodrama.  

Van Damme’s role is by no means a cameo but it is not  a full role either.  It’s a supporting role and a weak one at that.  The movie picks up towards the end, as things come to a head, but only after a truckload of half-baked ideas.

 

DVDs courtesy:

Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha