By Roger Moore
FILM: Prisoners
CAST: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello
DIRECTION: Denis Villeneuve
Prisoners is a mystery told with such skill that just when you think you’ve figured it out, it finds new blind alleys for us to visit. Well-cast and wonderfully acted, it’s a child kidnapping thriller with sorrow, intrigue, psychology and just enough urgency to suck us in. Then it almost outsmarts itself with a draggy, “let’s explain it all” third act that undercuts the big theme it wants us to ponder.
The grey skies of a Pennsylvania winter set the tone. The Dovers and the Birches are friends and neighbours. Remodelling contractor Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) is man’s man, something of a survivalist, teaching his son Ralph to hunt and “be ready” in case things get hairy and society starts to break down. With his wife, Grace (Maria Bello), he’s raising a teen (Dylan Minnette) and a tyke, Anna (Erin Gerasimovich), in their middle-class subdivison.
The Birches (Viola Davis, Terrence Howard) have the Dovers over for Thanksgiving, so that tiny Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons) can play with her best pal, Anna. The teens, Ralph and Eliza Birch (Zoe Borde), are in charge of the little girls, who are young and trusting and prone to not see the risks in playing on that strange, ratty old RV parked down the street.
The girls disappear, and as their mothers stumble into shock and the men, especially Keller, hurl themselves into a frantic search, a loner police detective (Jake Gyllenhaal) takes charge of the case.
Keller knows too many statistics about how long such abducted kids survive, the increasingly long odds facing them, to control his temper. Detective Loki, chewing on a matchstick, blinking hard every time he takes some fresh detail in, is sure to get under his skin.
They nab a suspect, and it’s easy to mark Alex Jones (Paul Dano) as the perpetrator. Creepy, uncommunicative, a veritable thick-glasses cliche of a pervert. Keller, a paragon of moral certitude, is sure of it. And when the cops can’t make a case, he takes matters into his own hands. That’s when Prisoners turns truly disturbing, grisly and morally ambiguous.
Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski give each major character moments of pain, grief and rage. Grace cracks up. Nancy (Davis), a veterinarian, shuts down. Franklin (Howard) feels helpless and Keller just lashes out.
The two girls are merely the first prisoners. Soon, everyone is trapped — parents, siblings, the cops, the suspect, the suspect’s aunt (Melissa Leo).
Prisoners is never less than engrossing. It’ll keep you guessing. — MCT
A moderate fairytale fantasy
FILM: Justin and the Knights of Valour (animation)
VOICE: Antonio Banderas, James Cosmo, Michael Culkin
DIRECTION: Manuel Sicilia
Sweet-natured Justin dreams of becoming a knight just like his legendary grandfather, Sir Roland. However knights have been banished from the kingdom by the queen and replaced by lawyers and their strict rules. But after an inspiring visit to his beloved gran, Justin’s mission becomes clear. He bids farewell to his sweetheart Lara and embarks on the ultimate quest: to train to become a knight.
Along the way he meets the beautiful, but feisty, Talia, a quirky wizard called Melquiades, the handsome, but misguided, Sir Clorex and upon reaching the Tower of Wisdom is mentored by three wise monks; Blucher, Legantir and Braulio.
However, Justin soon learns that banished knight Sir Heraclio is putting together an army, with his faithful sidekick Sota, to overthrow the queen and take the kingdom. Justin must quickly rise to the challenge and find the courage to become the knight he truly wishes to be. A moderate fairytale fantasy, Justin is heavily influenced by the Shrek films.
DVDs courtesy: Kings Electronics, Doha
Not explosive, but kind of fun
By Rene Rodriguez
FILM: Pompeii
CAST: Kit Harington, Emily Browning, Kiefer Sutherland
DIRECTION: Paul W S Anderson
Pompeii is half sword-and-sandal epic, half disaster movie and all guilty pleasure. Director Paul W S Anderson, taking a break from cranking out Resident Evil movies, has a strong command of CGI technology, and the movie is so grand in scale that you can’t help surrender to the spectacle, even if the stuff that’s going on with the people in the film is often close to risible.
In his first starring role since becoming famous as Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, Kit Harington proves he’s much better as an ensemble player than as a leading man. As Milo, a slave-turned-gladiator who saw his family butchered before his eyes when he was young, Harington is supposed to brood and smoulder and emanate inner turmoil, but he comes across as a really quiet dude who’s good with a sword.
The first half of the movie is strongly reminiscent of Russell Crowe’s Gladiator, as Milo and fellow slave-fighter Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) grow from mortal enemies into unlikely allies, plotting to take down the sneering Roman senator Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland). Milo also makes cow eyes from the arena floor at the beautiful Cassia (Emily Browning), who shares his attraction but has already been promised by her parents to marry Corvus.
Pompeii delves just enough into history to give you a sense of how politics worked in the era (Jared Harris plays a Pompeii entrepreneur who has great plans for the city), and the battle scenes are well-staged and exciting, if noticeably bloodless. Then that pesky Mount Vesuvius starts belching, a tsunami plows into the region and an earthquake splits the ground, all at the same time (talk about worst day ever).
From here, Pompeii becomes a Roland Emmerich picture, perhaps a little more refined in sensibility and ambition but still silly enough to have characters running toward flowing lava. — The Miami Herald/MCT
War-movie era revisited
By Cary Darling
FILM: The Monuments Men
CAST: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett
DIRECTION: George Clooney
They don’t make ’em like The Monuments Men anymore.
For those of a certain age — or who simply have a deep interest in American war films — this George Clooney-directed WWII drama recalls the kind of stout-hearted combat movie that seemed to be so popular from the 1950s through the early ’70s.
In fact, the plot — a group of older art experts recruited to sneak into Europe and rescue priceless works before the Germans or the Russians can get them — recalls the likes of The Dirty Dozen or Kelly’s Heroes, in which a small band of men must infiltrate Nazi lines.
Based on a true story and the book of the same name by Robert M Edsel and Bret Witter, The Monuments Men rarely gets the viewer invested enough to really care what happens to them. And that’s unfortunate, because it really is a fascinating footnote in history.
Clooney is Frank Stokes, an art historian who at the beginning of the film is begging president Franklin Roosevelt to send a team to Europe to salvage much of the West’s cultural heritage. The president is intrigued but tasks Stokes with putting together a team of fellow art professionals to do it himself.
So Stokes calls museum curator James Granger (Matt Damon) and other professionals in the field, including historian Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban), sculptor Walter Garfield (John Goodman), architect Richard Campbell (Bill Murray), art dealer Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin) and Englishman Hugh Bonneville (Donald Jeffries), whose art credentials remain nebulous.
Once in Europe, Granger has to track down Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett), an informal double agent who works for the Nazi bureau in charge of taking art to Germany, where Hitler wants to open a sprawling Fuehrer Museum. However, she really has ties with the Resistance and is keeping tabs on where the art is going. — Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT
Car chases and epic shoot-outs
FILM: 3 Days to Kill
CAST: Kevin Costner, Amber Heard, Hailee Steinfeld, Connie Nielsen
DIRECTION: McG
Kevin Costner and the director McG are plunged into the madcap mayhem of Monsieur Luc Besson in 3 Days to Kill, a serio-comic thriller about mortality, murder for hire and fatherhood.
This being a Besson script and production, it’s also about car chases and epic shoot-outs, torture played for sadistic laughs, Paris locations and Peugeot product placement.
Besson, who morphed into a producer after The Professional and before The Transporter, gives Costner the full Liam-Neeson-in-Taken treatment, cashing in on a career of cool in a movie that moves almost fast enough to keep us from noticing how scruffy, discomfiting and absurdly over-the-top the whole thing is.
Costner is Ethan, a veteran CIA agent diagnosed with cancer. But his new control agent, a vamp named ViVi and played to the stiletto-heeled hilt by Amber Heard, wants him to finish one last massacre — taking out a nuclear arms dealer and his associates in the City of Light.
The carrot? She has an experimental drug that might give Ethan longer to live. And that could mean more time with his estranged wife (Connie Nielsen) and the daughter he barely knows, played by True Grit teen Hailee Steinfeld. They live in Paris. The girl doesn’t know what Dad does for a living, or that he’s dying. She’s a teen. She probably wouldn’t care.
McG (Charlie’s Angels, We are Marshall) stamps his signature on Besson’s Euro-action vision with running gags.
Heard, all lipstick and lingerie, long eyelashes and leatherwear - has little to do here, something of a waste.
Ethan’s illness is forgotten for long stretches, but Costner, a hacking, weathered study in wrinkles and violence, never lets on that the whole affair is more of a lark than Taken ever was.
Daft and sloppy as it is, 3 Days rarely fails to entertain. By Roger Moore— MCT
DVDs courtesy: Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha