By Roger Moore

 

 

FILM: Transcendence

CAST: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Morgan Freeman

DIRECTION: Wally Pfister

 

For years, the rumour about Johnny Depp was that he wouldn’t take a role that required him to get a haircut. Chocolat, Pirates of the Caribbean, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Sleepy Hollow — mop-topped coincidences or a career vanity?

With Transcendence, he’s got a part that requires a shaved head in some scenes. And acting. He needs to suggest a brilliant scientist, the first to crack “the singularity”, a very smart man transferring his mind to a machine and thus achieving “Transcendence” - immortality.

He cuts it off, but he doesn’t pull it off.

This thoughtful but windy and winded sci-fi thriller plays shortchanges the science — understandably — and the thrills. The directing debut of Dark Knight cinematographer Wally Pfister is a mopey affair with indifferent performances, heartless romance and dull action. It transcends nothing.

Depp is Dr Will Caster, a mathematician, computer genius and artificial intelligence theorist who, with the help of his brilliant wife (Rebecca Hall), is close to a computer that might “overcome the limits of biology”. It will think.

That troubles his equally brilliant neuro-scientist/ethicist pal, Max (Paul Bettany) who doesn’t give voice to fears of a machine that wants to jump from tic-tac-toe to “Global Thermonuclear War”, SkyNET and HAL not opening the pod bay door. But you know he’s thinking it.

And since this tale is told by Max in flashback, from a desolate, off-the-electrical-grid San Francisco five years in the future, we figure Max knows what he’s talking about.

Terrorists have decided that this project is a threat and try to blow it up and kill Dr Caster. They almost succeed, sentencing the not-so-mad scientist to a lingering death. That gives his friends the chance to try and skip a few steps in their research. They’ll load the electrical and chemical contents of his brilliant mind — his thoughts, memories, ethics — into a vast machine and save his life.

In a manner of speaking.

And since we’ve seen a San Francisco where keyboards are only useful as door stops and mobile phones are just so much worthless litter, we know this is where the trouble starts.

Kate Mara suggests nothing fanatical, clever or fearsome as the leader of the RIFT revolutionaries who tried to kill Caster and who then kidnap Max. Depp and Hall are supposed to have this Ghost-level love, a romance of longing that drives her actions to save him, in spite of Will’s warnings to her.

They don’t set off sparks.

Morgan Freeman shows up as a grandfatherly sceptic scientist, Cole Hauser as a military man brought in to deal with the growing problem that happens when Will’s insatiable brain gets on the Internet, manipulates Wall Street and starts to plan a technological revolution.

The script suggests the miracles that bio-tech has in store for us — repairing injuries and infirmities with nano-technology 3-D laser printers and the like. The lame will walk and the blind will see.

But there will be a cost, a cost common to sci-fi stories about “the singularity” and the unlimited power it promises.

Depp is a bland presence as a disembodied face on a computer screen. Hall seems to wish she had a flesh-and-blood actor to emote to and Bettany spends far too much time with Mara, who has never been worse in a movie.- MCT

Good director makes a mediocre movie

 

 

 

FILM: Sabotage

CAST: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington, Josh Holloway, Terrence Howard

DIRECTION: David Ayer

 

Director David Ayer has made two of the best films about the tough lives of cops — Training Day and End of Watch — but his streak ends with the very violent and interestingly cast but forgettable Sabotage.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, still on his post-gubernatorial Hollywood comeback trail, is John “Breacher” Wharton, the leader of a tough-as-titanium, renegade undercover DEA team that includes guys with names like Monster (Sam Worthington), Grinder (Joe Manganiello), Neck (Josh Holloway), Sugar (Terrence Howard) and Pyro (Max Martini), as well as a woman, Lizzy (Mireille Enos), who’s just as brutish.

Their lives take a turn for the worse when, after skimming $10mn from a raid on a cartel, they start being picked off one by one, horror-movie style. To add insult to fatal injury, they don’t even have the money anymore. When they went back to where it was hidden, someone had beaten them to it. So they’re broke and in the crosshairs. Not a good place to be.

Enter Caroline (Olivia Williams) and Jackson (Harold Perrineau), two local homicide cops investigating who would want to kill Breacher’s buddies. Meanwhile, Breacher and his diminishing crew are on their own mission to find out who’s doing it.

Ayer creates an appealingly gritty style and there are some nice touches. A car chase through the streets of Atlanta is impressive, Enos displays a fiery intensity and Worthington — head shaved, braided goatee — is nearly unrecognisable.

But, unlike his past films in which it was easy to identify with the policemen’s travails, Ayer doesn’t come up with characters to really care about. They’re all burly bravado with little depth or detail. Plus, it’s getting harder to believe Schwarzenegger, the 66-year-old former-bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-politician-turned-actor again, as a steely, invincible figure. Increasingly, he seems out of place with this persona.

Let’s hope this misstep doesn’t mean Ayer has no more compelling cop stories to tell. — Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT

 

DVDs courtesy:

Kings Electronics, Doha

Not enough comic punch

 

 

 

FILM: The Love Punch

CAST: Emma Thompson, Pierce Brosnan, Timothy Spall, Celia Imrie, Marisa Berenson

DIRECTION: Joel Hopkins.

The Love Punch is an empty-headed nothing of a caper comedy, a movie whose moves are so obvious and obviously absurd that even a moment’s scrutiny lets the gas right out of the balloon.

But darned if those high-mileage troupers Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan don’t play the heck out of a flimsy plot. And even less-than-witty banter sings when they’re flinging it at one another.

“You get me, Kate,” Richard (Brosnan) purrs to his ex (Thompson). “Or at least, you used to.”

“That’s because I’m a trained child psychologist.”

They’re divorced, but oh so cute together.

“Come ooonnnn,” old pal Jerry (Timothy Spall) pleads. “Get back together!”

But split they are, amicably or not. They pack their daughter off to college, and then the bottom falls out of their happy divorce. Richard’s company is looted by a French takeover fiend. And since Kate’s retirement was swiped as well, they’re in a pickle.

“How’s your French?”

“Non,” she says, seeing where this is going. “Non non non.”

But Richard knows how to get to “oui”, and next thing they know, they’re confronting the fiend (Laurent Lafitte, too soft to play the heavy). And then they’re plotting to crash the guy’s wedding to a supermodel (Louise Bourgoin), steal the $10mn diamond necklace he’s bought her and thus save the retirement of everybody they know.

As if.

Writer-director Joel Hopkins, who never has lived up to the promise of his Jump Tomorrow, ineptly stages car chases in a tiny Citroen through Paris, a scene set to Free’s All Right Now as chase music. That’s so obviously a compromise choice for a chase tune that you’ll grimace. The tempo is all wrong.

Hopkins has his heroes and heroines — they enlist Jerry and his wife, Penelope (Celia Imrie) — get a fake version of the diamond fabricated, snorkel in scuba suits, clamber up a cliff, pose as Texans invited to the wedding and attempt a daring caper. None of which this bunch could possibly pull off.

But here’s what works — the running gags. Everybody wants Kate and Richard to get back together, even the innkeeper (Marisa Berenson) at the pension where they check in to plot their heist

Thompson and Brosnan have chemistry. And Spall is a delight playing goofy Jerry as a man with a past.

“When I was in the Legion,” he explains. Wait, the French Foreign Legion? “Back when I was in the Merchant Marine ... When I was in Saigon in ‘64.” Or, “Back when I was in Guam.” Imrie’s reaction to every new revelation is a giggle.

They’re in an undercooked and under-plotted caper comedy, but you’d never know it from these four. Perhaps they were just happy to be shooting on the Riviera. They help The Love Punch land just enough blows to the funny bone to be worth it. —MCT Search

for justice

FILM: Rage

CAST: Nicolas Cage, Rachel Nichols, Peter Stormare, Danny Glover, Max Ryan

DIRECTION: Paco Cabezas

 

Nicolas Cage plays Paul Maguire, a former gangster, now a respectable family man with a construction business. Everything is going well with him and his daughter Caitlin (Aubrey Peeples) is the apple of his eyes.

But his whole world comes crashing down when Caitlin goes missing after a mysterious home invasion, which occurs while Paul and his wife were out hobnobbing with politicians and millionaires at a fancy event.

Paul rounds up his old crew to help him find her by any means necessary. His search for justice leads Paul down a dark and bloody path of revenge, betrayal and long-buried secrets.

The film has all the requisite helpings of torture and garish violence. It has knife fights, foot chases, car chases and point-blank shotgun blasts. Cage, still an agile and inventive performer, isn’t well served by the solemn, bludgeoning tone of the proceedings; his occasional outbursts and the movie’s title aside, the actor actually seems somewhat straitjacketed here.

 

DVDs courtesy:

Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha

 

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