A true story with lots of Hollywood touches

By Roger Moore

FILM: Lone Survivor

CAST: Mark Wahlberg, Ben Foster, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana

DIRECTION: Peter Berg

A grim chapter in Navy SEAL’s history earns a heroic, no-punches-pulled accounting in Lone Survivor, an above-average action outing for Mark Wahlberg & Co. Based on the true story of the ill-fated SEAL Team 10 and a mission that went messy in 2005, it is still very much a movie.

A few scenes, a few sentiments and the tone seem inspired by the John Wayne flag-waver The Green Berets, another film about another battle in another war (Vietnam), but also one where victory is spun out of something that looked nothing like victory at the time.

Wahlberg, Ben Foster, Taylor Kitsch and Emile Hirsch are SEALs dropped off in Afghanistan to kill a Taliban leader. “Rules of engagement” are debated and are blamed for things going wrong. It’s the mountains, so communications are poor. And one bad thing leads to another as this intrepid team tries to shoot its way through every AK-47 toting Taliban between there and rescue.

Writer-director Peter Berg, recovering from Battleship, frames his film within the culture of these fighting men, opening with real scenes of the brutal training (and wash-out rituals) of the SEALs. Their code is in the clipped, hard language exchanged between officers (Eric Bana is in charge of the mission) and the men who do the dirty work.

The “helluva big gunfight” that breaks out as their mission unravels is shot in extreme close-ups, bursts of blood squirting up through the dust, gurgling, sucking wounds and the ringing, temporary deafness of a round that explodes too close to your head. Much of this stuff is excruciatingly real.

If nothing else, Berg forces us to appreciate the code these men live by and the toughness that is beaten into them, toughness that keeps them going as the wounds pile up even as they dole out kill-shots by the score on their numberless foes.

But the saga takes many a melodramatic turn as team is whittled down and rescue becomes more remote as a possibility. The third act where the film’s “true story” origins start to beggar belief in the worst John Wayne movie fashion. Fact-based or not, events turn cinematically familiar and far-fetched. Lone Survivor — yeah, the title gives too much away — contains some of the most brutally vivid combat footage ever filmed. — MCT

DVD courtesy:

Kings Electronics, Doha

A blast for children and adults alike

By Troy Ribeiro 

FILM: The Lego Movie

CAST: Chris Pratt, Will Ferrell, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman

DIRECTION: Christopher Miller and Phil Lord

elcome to the Lego Universe, where “everything is awesome!”

Jam-packed with motivational lessons, wacky dialogues and crazy impertinence, The Lego Movie is a blast for children and adults alike.

Initially, it feels strange to be transported to the Lego Universe where everything is endlessly complex, yet elementary, clunky and crude, just like the Lego toys themselves. But once you are in you get hooked, line and sinker.

The plot revolves around the Lego philosophy, “learning through play and creativity”. The narration starts off with Lego Land being ruled by a control freak President Business (Will Ferrell) with world domination on his mind. With a constant disregard for creative people, he spouts: “We need ideas so dumb and bad, that people will not think them to be useful.”

His dictatorial biddings are carried out by the split-personality Cop (Liam Neeson) who swings from being Good Cop Bad Cop.

On the other end, a lone construction worker Emmet (Chris Pratt) lives life by the book. Being a builder he always makes the sets exactly as they are supposed to be, demolishing those which do not conform to the instructions. He doesn’t seem to make much of an impression on anyone else around him, although he scrupulously follows the instructions about how to make friends too.

His life turns topsy-turvy when one night he follows a trespasser, the enigmatic and charmingly beautiful Wildstyle (Elizabeth Banks). He ends up falling into a construction excavation pit and stumbles across the mysterious red block “Piece of Resistance” and, in the process, is earmarked as The Chosen One, the one prophesied to reunite the great Master Builders and remove Lord Business from power before he destroys their world.

He immediately becomes a target of the police and during a brief period of capture, he learns that the seemingly benevolent President Business intends to destroy the world in a couple of days, by unleashing a super-secret weapon known as the Kragle.

Breaking out with Wildstyle’s help, Emmet soon discovers many Lego worlds beyond his own, and finds his way to thwart the evil plan. — IANS

A comedy-crime caper

FILM: Gambit

CAST: Cameron Diaz, Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci

DIRECTION: Michael Hoffman

 remake of a 1966 movie starring Shirley Maclaine and Michael Caine, Gambit does not offer anything exceptional to the original premise.

The film, a comedy-crime caper, begins somewhere in Texas where a harassed art appraiser, Harry Deane (Colin Firth) is making plans to dupe his abusive boss, the multi-millionaire media Moghul and art collector Lord Lionel Shahbandar (Alan Rickman).

Harry teams up with an artist and “forger of fine art” Major (Tom Courtenay) to forge a Monet painting - Haystacks at Dusk, which is thought to be lost sometime during the World War II. Harry then ropes in a Texas Cow Girl, PJ Puznowski (Cameron Diaz) in order to create a backstory that would convince Shahbandar to pay millions for the rare image. But then PJ Puznowski turns out to be eccentric and unpredictable, thereby jeopardising Harry’s plans. The entire drama evolves on how Harry tries to outdo Shahbandar and eventually cons him. A classic case of style over narrative, the screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen indulges in goofy slapstick and situational comedy instead of an intelligible plot.

Director Michael Hoffman dishes off a rather average bland film.—  By Troy Ribeiro/IANS

A fast-moving action-thriller

FILM: In the Blood

CAST: Gina Carano, Danny Trejo, Cam Gigandet

DIRECTION: John Stockwell

ou know your Caribbean honeymoon is in trouble when, while on the dance floor with your husband at a back-alley nightspot, Danny Trejo from the Machete movies is trying to horn in on your alone time.

That’s just the beginning of the problems facing Ava (Gina Carano), a woman looking to start her life over with her new hubby, Derek (Cam Gigandet), after a hard-knock upbringing with her tough-love dad (Stephen Lang), who taught her a thing or two about self-defence.

And she’s going to need every bit of that knowledge over the course of In the Blood, a surprisingly entertaining and suspenseful action-thriller that, unfortunately, panders to every non-Spanish-speaking American tourist’s fear of travelling to Latin America. The day after the encounter in the club, in which Ava laid low all of the henchmen of Big Biz (Trejo), Derek mysteriously disappears after falling while zip lining across a particularly rugged part of the island. He was supposedly transferred to the local hospital but never arrived. An enraged Ava takes it upon herself to shake down and shake up every corrupt cop and local crime king until she gets some answers — preferably in English — about what’s happened to Derek.

Directed by John Stockwell (Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden) from a script by James Robert Johnston and Bennett Yellin, In the Blood moves with the speed of one of those Miami Vice cigarette boats, so there’s not a lot of down time to worry about plot holes and implausibility.

Carano, a former mixed-martial artist, won’t be vying for an Oscar anytime soon, but she can more than hold her own as an action star. She deserves a bigger canvas on which to show off her skills. — By Cary Darling/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT

DVDs courtesy:  

Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha