By Roger Moore
FILM: The Last Days on Mars
CAST: Liev Schreiber, Olivia Williams, Romola Garai, Elias Koteas
DIRECTION: Ruairi Robinson
For about 30 minutes, The Last Days on Mars hides its sci-fi antecedents well enough. The desert-scapes of Jordan make for a passable Red Planet, the production designed space suits, space habitats (rocket fuselages) and six-wheeled rovers are convincing enough.
Then a scientist who thinks he’s found life turns out to be right. Only he gets infected. And “Alien” breaks through and Mars turns into a zombie movie with a better-than-its-pay-grade cast.
Liev Schreiber is Vincent, a pessimistic astronaut, one of eight just finishing up an exploratory tour. Olivia Williams is very good as the brittle, irritable scientist hell bent on “not going back empty-handed”. Elias Koteas is the commander trying to keep the peace and Romola Garai is the one scientist who seems to know that Vincent has a reason for being all glass-half-empty about everything. They’re about to leave. Their relief ship is hours away. But Vincent grumps about “a six-month commute on a floating coffin”.
Then there’s an accident in the middle of a discovery. And the commander has no sooner asked “You’re not going to do anything stupid?” when someone does something stupid.
That’s when the makeup people and gore-wranglers take over and this sharp-looking but flat-footed thriller lurches off on overly familiar ground.
Williams, in an egomaniacal fury, is the best thing in it. But you can see why Schreiber was drawn to his role, too. Every decision is conflicted. Vincent expects the worst at every turn and is never disappointed. He’s not some grizzled space vet who’s seen it all. He’s a guy who is scared, who has nightmares and flashbacks to something that happened earlier. Garai and Koteas never let us see the fear. Which is a mistake.
The rest of the cast is merely “Who buys the Martian farm next?” fodder, and since director Ruairi Robinson hasn’t the film score or editing wherewithal to ratchet up the tension, we’re treated to strobing lights, bloody attacks and The Living Dead in space suits.
Though it rarely looks as malnourished as, say, Europa Report or Moon, Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is. It’s a shame they wasted this cast on Dawn of the Alien Dead.- MCT
Not a stirring sendoff for Paul Walker
FILM: Hours
CAST: Paul Walker, Genesis Rodriguez
DIRECTION: Eric Heisserer
The late Paul Walker felt the need to remind us that, in between Fast & Furious movies, he didn’t have to play second banana to the likes of Vin Diesel.
So sure, he did the occasional offbeat ensemble picture (Pawn Shop Chronicles). But he was more drawn to film where he shared the screen with pretty much no one.
Vehicle 19 had him dashing through South Africa in the wrong rental car. And Hours, a film that opened less than two weeks after Walker’s tragic death on November 30 last year, is just Walker and a big, empty New Orleans hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s a slackly-paced thriller about a father struggling to keep the ventilator his newborn baby is in powered up until they can be rescued or she can breathe on her own.
Wife Abigail (Genesis Rodriguez) goes into labour early, just as Katrina is about to hit New Orleans and St Mary’s Hospital.
The staff is unhurried and unworried. Even as the winds blow out the windows in the waiting room, there is no chaos, no huge influx of patients and no panic. That’s a nearly fatal flaw in writer-director Eric Heisserer’s handling of this can’t-miss situation. There’s no urgency to it.
As the winds howl and the lights flicker, the doctor (Yohance Myles) ineptly breaks the news to Nolan (Walker) that a) he has a little girl and b) by the way, we lost your wife.
This may be the worst-written scene in an American movie in the last few months. No pathos, no guilt, no worry about a lawsuit that this bungling will do nothing to discourage.
Nolan staggers into grief and shock. And slowly, VERY slowly, he discovers purpose. He’s lost his wife. He can’t lose their baby.
As the waters rise, and the TV news reports document the REAL catastrophe of Katrina, the hospital evacuates. But there’s no way to move the baby, and Nolan has to stay and see to it that her ventilator keeps working. The next 48 hours are critical.
There’s not a lot of suspense until the film’s third act, when the pace picks up and the number of obstacles to their success rise. — By Roger Moore, MCT
DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha
A promising foundation
By Connie Ogle
FILM: Paranoia
CAST: Liam Hemsworth, Amber Heard, Gary Oldman, Harrison Ford
DIRECTION: Robert Luketic
Based on the novel by Joseph Finder, Paranoia has a promising foundation — betrayal, danger and corporate espionage are solid building blocks of suspense. But the movie turns out to be more exasperating than exciting. There are warning signs.
Director Robert Luketic is responsible for some frightening missteps — Killers with Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl; The Ugly Truth with Gerard Butler and Heigl; Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! with Topher Grace and somebody who wasn’t Katherine Heigl. Paranoia isn’t quite so misguided, but there’s too much here that doesn’t ring true or make any sense beyond script convenience.
Liam Hemsworth plays Adam Cassidy, who lives with his ailing father (Richard Dreyfuss). Adam toils in obscurity at a tech company with his friends.
And then one day, Adam’s crafty boss Nicolas Wyatt (Gary Oldman) forces him into going undercover at a rival tech firm run by his old mentor (Harrison Ford) to steal a prototype for a revolutionary new product.
The plot takes a few nice twists, but would anyone genuinely believe doe-eyed Adam could pull off this heist in a security-obsessed building? Even though he’s using the company’s marketing director (Amber Heard) and sneaking access to her computer files? Fortunately, she’s careless with her passwords, which is exactly the sort of dumb, cheap shortcut Paranoia’s script relies on one too many times. — The Miami Herald/MCT
Charming message
FILM: Niko 2 Little Brother, Big Trouble
CAST: Kari Hietalahti, Jaakko Saariluoma, Jukka Rasila
DIRECTORS: Kari Juusonen, Jorgen Lerdam
A Finnish-Irish computer animated comedy/adventure film, Niko 2 is the sequel to The Flight Before Christmas and is written by Hannu Tuomainen and Marteinn Thorisson and directed by Kari Juusonen and Jorgen Lerdam. The sequel takes places a couple of months after the events of the first film, and follows the story of Niko, who must deal with his mother Oona getting re-married and thus, he gains a stepbrother named Jonni, whom Niko hates at first.
However, when Jonni gets kidnapped by eagles, Niko flies off to rescue him. During his journey in saving his little stepbrother, Niko is joined by an old, near-blind reindeer named Tobias, who is revealed to be the former leader of Santa’s Flying Forces. However, standing in Niko’s way is also White Wolf, Black Wolf’s younger sister, who is the leader of the eagles and wants revenge on Niko for her brother’s death.
Now, Niko and the rest of the team must come up with a plan to save Jonni, defeat White Wolf and return home. This is a charming movie. But most important it helps children understand about a changing family.
Race against time
FILM: Dino Time
VOICE: Jane Lynch, Melanie Griffith, Rob Schneider, Stephen Baldwin, William Baldwin
DIRECTION: Choi Yoon-suk, John Kafka
Three mischievous kids travel back to the time of dinosaurs, where they’re adopted by a nurturing mother T-rex as they search for the missing piece of the time machine that will take them back home in this animated fantasy adventure for the entire family.
When Ernie isn’t hanging out with his best friend Max, he can usually be found blasting around town on his rocket powered skateboard. One day, as Ernie and Max are marvelling at the new egg-shaped time machine recently completed by Max’s father, Ernie’s troublemaking sister Julia surprises the pair, and before they know it all three are standing face-to-face with a real life T-rex named Tyra (voice of Melanie Griffith).
Having just crash landed in Tyra’s nest, the trio quickly realise they’ve just become the newest members of a happy Theropod family. Along with Tyra’s hyperactive son Dodger (voice of Rob Schneider), Ernie, Max, and Julia embark on the ultimate Mesozoic adventure. But somewhere along the way, they lost the power key to their time machine, and without it they’ll never get home.
Meanwhile, a pair of scheming dinosaurs (voices of William and Stephen Baldwin) plot to lure Tyra into their cave by stealing her precious “egg”. Now, the time travelling trio must race to find the key and outsmart the diabolical dinosaur duo if hold out any hope of making it back home before getting into a heap of trouble.
DVD courtesy: Kings Electronics, Doha