Here’s my ranking of all the new films I saw in 2022. Let me know in the comments below if I’ve missed out your favourite…
26. Thor: Love and Thunder. I was angered by how appalling this MCU sequel is. Two hours of smugness, pointless cameos, in-jokes and incessant undercutting of any drama. Nothing is treated seriously and patience wears thin almost immediately.
25. Morbius. Superhero drivel with a terrible plot, laughable dialogue, blank characters, cheesy CGI, illogical rules and a stuffy sense of self-importance – the latter typified by Jared Leto’s tedious lead performance.
24. Mad God. A 90-minute stop-motion horror film, made by special-effects genius Phil Tippett (Star Wars, Jurassic Park). The dystopian, dieselpunk modelwork is an old-school treat, but it *really* needs a proper storyline. Gets dull very quickly.
23. The Northman. This retelling of the ur-myth that inspired Hamlet features some impressive visuals and a bonkers cameo from Willem Defoe. But while it grasps for mythology and ritual, the film is drab and pretentious. Characters proclaim things, rather than talking to each other.
22. The Invitation. A lonely New York singleton learns she has a posh English cousin, so attends a family wedding at “New Carfax Abbey in Whitby”. The name and location should tip most viewers off where things are heading… A boring, rote, hollow horror where a handsome lord turns out to be Count Dracula and the lead character doesn’t run a mile when weird shit keeps happening. Forgettable nonsense.
21. Jurassic World Dominion. The return of original cast members Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum is fun as it goes, but everything else in this sequel is so lacklustre. The storytelling is really hackneyed, the cast is dotted with weak performances and the action is derivative.
20. Uncharted. One of those films where you start to forget the details while you’re still watching it, this is badly written, quest-based nonsense with a few laughs and some decent action. Tom Holland’s good fun as the hero, but no one else impresses. (Like in Morbius, the female lead is so cursory she’s not even needed for the final act.)
19. Amsterdam. A star-studded yet meandering conspiracy caper, set in the 1930s, about a doctor and a lawyer accused of murder. The arch, mannered tone is reminiscent of a Wes Anderson film, though it lacks either the zip or the heart that would make things sing. Christian Bale and Margot Robbie are watchable, and the score and cinematography are tremendous, but overall the film is significantly weaker than the sum of its parts.
18. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Engaging in parts but sloppy in others, this gonzo superhero flick was directed by Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead) and it’s a shame he wasn’t allowed to go full-blown horror – the flashes of creepiness and zombie stuff work well. But the OTT plot is a mess and you have to squint for recurring character Wanda’s storyline to make any sense.
17. Bullet Train. An action comedy with eccentric characters, lots of silliness, plenty of violence, some Family Guy-style cutaways, a few cameos, some oddball music choices and a general sense of glee. Not everything works, and at least one actor is poor, but it’s often funny. Brad Pitt is fantastic as the (relatively) normal centre of the chaos.
16. The Batman. Batman is now a myth that gets retold in various ways, like Dracula or Robin Hood, and this take has a *dark*, emo, grungy vibe, which pitches the superhero as a detective (honouring the source comics). There’s a terrifically expressionistic car chase in the rain and a sweeping sense of grandeur. However, Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne has no charm, and there’s a big sense of seen-it-all-before.
15. Catherine Called Birdy. Likeable medieval comedy about a smart, spirited teenager (played by that little girl who was better than you think she’s going to be in Game of Thrones). It’s refreshing to have a coming-of-age story from a female point of view (periods are part of the storytelling), but the plot is too episodic to justify 110 minutes and scenes are occasionally too frivolous.
14. Hellraiser. The 47th film in the horror series (approx) is a reboot, and like all good horror films it makes you care about characters – especially Odessa A’zion’s Riley, a recovering addict who stumbles across the familiar puzzle box. There are flashes of surrealism and expressionism alongside the usual sadism and gore, while the art direction is excellent.
13. Elvis. A breakneck-fast biopic summary of the King of Rock’n’roll – from fresh, young talent to Biff-from-Back-to-the-Future-Part-II decline – and especially his toxic relationship with manager Colonel Tom Parker (a superb Tom Hanks). The film zips through countless entertaining sequences, yet barely pausing for breath, so a varied pace would help.
12. X. As if Quentin Tarantino made a slasher movie, this low-budget horror is set in 1979 – a small film crew attempt to make a porn flick at a secluded rural house, but obviously things don’t go well and there are soon murders. A film where the characters really pop, this taps cleverly into the 70s/80s slasher boom while there’s also some sly metatextual mirroring of the porno with the movie you’re watching.
11. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Really enjoyed this one – it deals with the death of lead actor Chadwick Boseman very smartly and sensitivity, holds its (long) runtime fine, contains lots of shades-of-grey moral discussion, and has plenty of feels. Occasionally shoddy CGI, though, and sometimes lacks a sense of fun where one would help.
10. Death on the Nile. Better than Kenneth Branagh’s first go at playing Hercules Poirot – 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express – by virtue of having a livelier storyline and some nice new elements. The look of the film is an eclectic mix of gorgeous 70mm cinematography, exquisite period production design and, sadly, some naff greenscreens. A few casting choices fall flat, but this is one of Agatha Christie’s best plots and Branagh the director spins all the plates admirably.
9. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. With a sense of humour that flicks between parched-dry and outrageously absurd, this comedy about the 80s comedy pop star is a real treat. Yankovic’s career is used as a way of spoofing the entire genre of biopics: the rags-to-riches story is told with faux-Spielbergian wonder; there are celebrity cameos and implausible fudges of real history. The movie is consistently funny as well as gloriously bonkers, while Daniel Radcliffe is super as Yankovic.
8. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. This comedy murder-mystery sequel is a delightful puzzle box of misdirection, revelations, ingenuity and comedy. There are top performances too, especially from Daniel Craig, Janelle Monáe and Kate Hudson, as well as playful flashbacks and celebrity cameos. Not as tightly constructed as the original Knives Out, perhaps, but still enormously entertaining.
7. Prey. The best Predator film since Predator, this elegant action thriller is set in 18th-century North America. The theme of hunting (always key in this series) is used well for a story about a member of the Comanche who must take on an alien invader. Terrific cinematography and incidental music mixes with gnarly violence, moments of real tension and a lead character you care about.
6. Clerks III. Kevin Smith’s latest comedy certainly won’t be for everyone – but I was bowled over. A self-indulgent celebration of characters I’ve known for nearly 30 years (the original Clerks came out in 1994), but also a moving, melancholic study of middle-age concerns such as loss, regret, friendship and hope. Silly and superb in equal measure. (Quite why a comedy drama about men in their 40s who realise their better days are probably behind them hit home so hard with me is a TOTAL MYSTERY.)
5. See How They Run. With strong echoes of Clue and Knives Out, this murder-mystery satire/spoof/pastiche/celebration is enormous fun. Agatha Christie tropes, clichés and references swim about in a whirlpool of comedy, intrigue and meta awareness. Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan are extremely entertaining as the detectives investigating a death behind the scenes at The Mousetrap, while everything is lightly directed with real wit.
4. Downton Abbey: A New Era. The first Downton movie had been disappointing – muddled, undercooked, overstuffed, with a TV season’s worth of material squeezed into 120 minutes. The sequel is a vast improvement. Focusing on two parallel plots, the film makes sure that every character gets a chance to shine and is brimming with charm, comic energy, period detail, effecting emotion and an undimmable sense of joy. There’s a mystery involving the Dowager Countess’s past, which involves a sun-kissed sojourn to the South of France, while the house is overtaken by a 1920s film crew. Wonderful.
3. Top Gun: Maverick. *Immaculate* blockbuster filmmaking, full of heart and passion and popcorn thrills. The producers and star Tom Cruise delayed the film’s debut until after COVID had faded because they knew this widescreen epic had to be seen HUGE, and they were right to be patient. This sequel is wonderfully old-fashioned in its use of a high-concept plot, vivid characters, spectacularly ‘real’ special effects and a perfect balance of plot, emotion, humour and action. Imbued with wonder, a sense of humour, awareness of cliche and some of the most thrilling aerial sequences ever filmed, Top Gun: Maverick is pure cheese – but expensive, matured, cultured cheese. The best 80s film since the 80s.
2. Licorice Pizza. A magnificent romantic movie, set in 1973 LA. Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman (both making their film debuts) are *superb* as an aimless twenty-something woman and her charismatic teenage suitor, while secondary roles really pop (especially Bradley Cooper in a grandstanding cameo). Written with verve and featuring some wonderful uses of source music, this is Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film since Magnolia. Heart, attitude and whimsy abound.
1 Everything Everywhere All at Once. Dazzlingly inventive, gleefully surreal, outrageously hilarious and magnificently flamboyant, EEAAO is the kind of movie that reminds you why you love cinema. Michelle Yeoh stars as a middle-aged laundrette owner who’s undergoing a tax audit. But her life is up-ended when a version of her husband (Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) from an alternative universe arrives to tell her that only she can save the multiverse from destruction. That summary barely scratches the surface of a story that encompasses romance, comedy, action, genre spoofing, family drama, existential crises and people with hot dogs for fingers. To be seen to be believed.
Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.
A master criminal is causing terror in Gotham City, but can masked vigilante the Batman help the police defeat the macabre and deadly games of the Riddler?
For many genre fans the advent of another Batman movie results in two distinct but parallel feelings. On one Bat-wing, we’re excited to see how this version will tackle the well-known canon of characters and concepts. But on the other, a deep fear of seen-it-all-before-ness creeps in. So let’s take a detailed look at 2022’s The Batman, a reboot set apart from all the other Batman-related films of recent years, and consider the balance of old and new…
The context
We’ve been here before. Many times, of course. This list would be far greater if we included all the comic books, graphic novels, television shows, videogames and audio incarnations, but if we just count the *cinematic* versions of Batman we need to take a deep breath. There were movie serials for children in the 1940s, with the title role played by Lewis Wilson and Robert Lowery. The 1960s TV show with Adam West as the Caped Crusader was spun-off onto the big screen in 1966. Director Tim Burton launched an influential new continuity in 1989, which resulted in four films and three lead actors. A TV animated version of Batman was promoted to movie theatres in 1993. Halle Berry gave us a Catwoman origin story in 2004. A bold and incisive new trilogy by director Christopher Nolan started with 2005’s Batman Begins. Ben Affleck took over the role in a rebooted series from 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. In 2019, Joaquin Phoenix’s one-off Joker film was set in a brand-new timeline. Michael Keaton, who’d played the superhero for Burton, is set to reprise his version in 2023’s The Flash (and was also in a Batgirl movie that was controversially junked by HBO Max), while Batman has appeared repeatedly in the Lego animated series.
So why another Batman reboot? So soon? While Affleck’s incarnation is still technically a going concern? No one can claim that the world was crying out for 2022’s The Batman, which was directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, two Planets of the Apes sequels) and co-written by him and Peter Craig. But among movie intellectual properties, the character is as close as you get to a sure-fire hit. Most previous Bat-flicks have made serious money, while three of them – The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises and Joker – have topped a billion dollars at the box office.
There’s also the fact that Batman has become a *myth*.
The cultural commentator Sir Christopher Frayling has talked about how certain horror stories – Frankenstein, Dracula et al – are now told again and again. Successive generations have, he argues, ‘rewritten them – filling in the gaps, redirecting their purposes, making them easier to remember and more obviously dramatic – to “fit” the modern experience.’ The same thing applies to Batman. Like Count Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster or even a folkloric hero like Robin Hood, he has outgrown his source material and become a cultural icon; a collection of tropes that are replayed in different contexts and in different ways by different generations. Each new telling both looks to the past, by reusing characters and concepts and settings, and looks to the future by dealing with new concerns and adding new ideas. To use Frayling’s language, these tellings ‘have managed by a process of accretion to invent another, parallel, text – which has filled in the gaps and made it “make sense”. Or, rather, make a new sense which fits the audience’s expectation.’
So while many people sighed with cynicism at the news of *yet another* Batman cash-grab, they have perhaps missed an important point. This is not a standard story that gets retold in diminishing-return remakes: Gotham City’s defender has become something more elemental, something more interesting, more malleable. Each new movie reflects its era’s preoccupations and the creative team’s focus in fascinatingly different ways. Matt Reeves’s film actually mutated out of an aborted attempt to make a sequel to 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice starring Ben Affleck, who was originally also going to direct. But when Reeves came aboard, he reshaped the project as a standalone film with no narrative connection to the DC Extended Universe franchise – and this allowed him to fashion a new version of the character and of Gotham City, and to explore a different set of themes. As The Batman’s star Robert Pattinson has said, ‘The more people reinterpret [Batman], the space to reinvent it gets smaller – but actually I think it just gets more specific.’
The events
Bruce Wayne and his superhero alter ego were born in the pages of a comic book published by DC. That these initials stand for Detective Comics is our key to understanding the conception of Batman. Artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger looked to fictional detectives and avenging adventurers as their inspirations: echoes of Zorro (a masked vigilante created in 1919) and The Phantom (a comic-book crimefighter who had debuted in 1936) would have sounded for astute readers when Batman first appeared in 1939. As with any detective story, the impact of Sherlock Holmes was never far away either.
This has always set him apart from most comic-book superheroes. While Superman is an alien, Wonder Women a goddess and the X-Men mutants, Bruce Wayne is a human detective – he may have lots of money, guile and ingenuity, but he can’t fly or shoot laser beams out of his eyes. He’s therefore often placed in noir-ish, down-to-seedy-earth stories about criminals and gangs, rather than tasked with stopping the entire annihilation of the planet. The 2022 movie honours this perhaps more strongly than any previous Batman film: its plot is built on a foundation of crime and corruption.
We open with a masked killer stalking and murdering Gotham City’s mayor. As local billionaire Bruce Wayne investigates – under the cover of his masked alter ego, the Batman – he assists his friend in the police department, Lieutenant James Gordon. The killer, known as the Riddler, begins a reign of terror and leaves cryptic messages for the Batman, which lead the crimefighter into a venal underworld where almost everyone is morally compromised… A nightclub called the Iceberg Lounge is run by sleazy mob caporegime Oswald Cobblepot aka the Penguin… His boss is the Godfather-like Carmine Falcone… A young woman has been killed because of what she knows and a cat burglar is attempting to get her own justice… We soon learn about systemic dishonesty and dirty dealing within the police… And there’s even the revelation that Bruce’s sainted father, the late Thomas Wayne, had a dark past… The Riddler’s motives, as warped and dangerous as they are, are actually because he wants to purge Gotham of corruption. He sees himself as railing against a broken system.
The hero
Bruce Wayne, meanwhile, sees himself as the guardian of good and virtue. His first line of dialogue comes when a petty thug encounters Batman in a train station and asks who this masked, battle-suited freak is. ‘I’m vengeance,’ croaks Batman. (The choice of line is a deliberate move away from the standard ‘I’m Batman’ heard in previous films. The writers took the quote from a comic book.) But for all his powerful intent, ability to beat up criminals and high-tech gadgets, this hero is broken and flawed. We learn that he’s been established as a vigilante for a few years and built up a working relationship with the solitary cop he can trust, but this Batman is far from in control.
Cast in the role was British actor Robert Pattinson (below). With his emo eyeliner (to hide his eyes while wearing the Batman mask) and lank hair, this Bruce comes off as a younger take on the character than any previous holder of the role. In fact, Pattinson was 34 when filming began – older than Adam West, Val Kilmer and Christian Bale when they took over the cowl, younger than Michael Keaton, George Clooney and Ben Affleck. Deeply troubled by his past – murdered parents, as per with these movies – 2022’s Bruce is a loner and remorselessly humourless. (‘Why so serious?’ a previous Batman villain might say.) We hardly ever see him outside of his Batman persona, and when we do Bruce Wayne is moody, uncommunicative, sullen. There are certainly no scenes of him playing up as a rich dilettante for appearance’s sake, like the iterations in the 1989 and 2005 movies.
Pattinson is a curious rather than a compelling choice. His slow, measured performance fits with the sombre, self-important mood of the film in general, though he struggles to punch through with any deep understanding of Bruce’s psychology – and he lacks *any* kind of charm. The casting does, however, bring a whole new bag of references to the table. Pattinson will probably always be best known for his breakout role as vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight series of movies. From a vampire to the Batman: it’s a logical step.
Many people have equated the character of Batman to a vampire – partly because of the halfway link of vampire bats. (The creatures do not exist in Europe, the home of the folkloric vampire. Their name was first coined by Cortez when he encountered them in Mexico.) When Batman was devised by Kane and Finger in the 1930s, an illustration of a flying device by Leonardo da Vinci gave them the idea of a bat-shaped silhouette, and many early readers will have subconsciously made an association. A dark, caped character who is almost always seen at night will have made them think of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula movie of 1931, which had established Bram Stoker’s vampire as a rich guy in a cape who enjoys nocturnal secrets. Very Batman. In fact, as Dracula scholars Raymond T McNally and Radu Florescu wrote in 1973, ‘The vampire possesses powers which are similar to those belonging to certain 20th-century comic-book characters. During the day he is helpless and vulnerable like Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne. At night, just as the mild-mannered Clark Kent becomes Superman and the effete Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, so the vampire acquires great powers and springs into flight.’
Speaking of Dracula, there have been several fictional crossovers between the Caped Crusader and the most famous vampire of them all. The two icons have met in various comic books, the 1964 Andy Warhol film Batman Dracula, a 1967 Filipino movie called Batman Fights Dracula, and an animated special from 2005 called The Batman Vs Dracula. Were Kane and Fingers thinking of Count Dracula when creating their superhero? This is uncertain, but the similarities are striking… aside from the obvious fact that Bruce Wayne is attempting to defeat evil, not spread it.
The allies
Like a lot of myths, the intrinsic elements of the Batman canon have built up gradually. Batman first appeared in a comic book in 1939. His ally in the local police force, James Gordon, cropped up later that same year, while his loyal butler, Alfred, debuted in 1943. The three most famous guest characters of the Reeves movie – Catwoman, the Penguin and the Riddler – made their bows in, respectively, 1940, 1941 and 1948. But these early characterisations have undergone massive redevelopment down the decades, both in the pages of DC comics and on screen – each restatement of the essential myth is remoulded and reshaped. (There’s no Robin in this 2022 film, incidentally. The sidekick has often been ignored in cinematic Batmans. The more grown-up the storytelling, the less likely Robin is to appear.)
Gordon (above) is played by Jeffrey Wright, who has form for assaying world-weary allies of totemic heroes after his three-film stint as CIA agent Felix Leiter in the James Bond series. The Batman’s take on James Gordon owes a great debt to a 1987 comic-book run written by Frank Miller; wearing a moustache and rarely approaching a smile, this Gordon is a lowly lieutenant with the GCPD rather than the powerful commissioner seen in the 1960s TV show or the 1989-97 film run. He must battle office politics and departmental rivalries as much as hunt for bad guys, but manages to retain a moral authority – Wright has called his character an ‘overwhelmed everyman’ – and has formed a trusting bond with Batman. As usual, Wright is a very watchable presence and implies dignity in every line.
Bruce’s other confidant, Alfred Pennyworth (above), is the only person who knows he’s Batman. For this role, Reeves went to an actor he’d worked with before. Andy Serkis’s motion-capture performances in the director’s Planet of the Apes films helped redefine a technology as an art form. As he had previously done with Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series and the titular ape in 2005’s King Kong, Serkis’s soul and humanity had shone through even when playing CGI-realised creatures; there had even been a campaign to get him a Best Actor nod at the Oscars. Here, his tougher-than-usual Alfred follows a lead started by Michael Caine in the Christopher Nolan movies and then embellished in the TV shows Gotham and Pennyworth. This Alfred has a working-class accent and you sense he would handle himself in a brawl. We’re a long way from the avuncular, retirement-age patricians of the 1960s TV show or the 80s/90s film series. Sadly, Serkis doesn’t get too much screentime and the home-life angle to Batman’s story is neglected.
Bruce Wayne’s major ally in the story is Selina Kyle (above), played by Zoë Kravitz (who had voiced a different version of the same character in 2017 animation The Lego Batman Movie). Previous filmic Catwomen – Lee Meriwether (1966), Michelle Pfieffer (1992), Anne Hathaway (2012) – all tended to emphasise the character’s sexiness, dressing in slinky, kinky, fetish gear and adopting a sultry, flirty manner. Kravitz’s playing, befitting the low-gear mood of this movie, is more pragmatic and iconoclastic. She also has her own agency in the plot: Batman stumbles across Selina when both are independently investigating a woman with links to the mayor. Selina is using her job as a waitress to get close to those she holds responsible for the woman – her flatmate Annika – going missing. We soon realise that this is a focussed women on a focussed quest. Focussed to the point of humourless, in fact, but Kravitz carries her storyline to such a degree that the film’s real emotional weight often lands with her, not Batman.
The foes
Annika’s fate is revealed to be tied up with the Iceberg Lounge nightclub (one of those movie nightclubs that’s housed in an industrial space, is always jam-packed full, and has endlessly flashing lights and poundingly loud dance music). The Iceberg is owned by mob overlord Carmine Falcone (below), a character introduced into the comic-book series during the 1987 rethink of the Batman mythos. He’s played here by John Turturro, who doesn’t exactly push against the crime-boss cliche: faux politeness, aloof manner, American-Italian heritage, sharp suits, high-end sunglasses always in place, goons on standby. But, again, this representation ties neatly into established lore. The world of Batman was cooked up in the 1930s, a decade that saw a peak in quality and quantity for Hollywood gangster movies – Angels With Dirty Faces, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties, Scarface – as well as the real-world arrest and imprisonment of Al Capone. Mobsters were hot news, so they understandably became a central Batman trope. The first season of TV show Gotham was built on Falcone’s power games with his underworld rivals, while the character is also a key factor in Batman Begins.
Speaking of Scarface, The Batman’s interpretation of heritage villain the Penguin (below) was partly modelled on the lead character from the 1980s remake of that classic; there’s even been talk of a spin-off showing a murky, Tony Montana-style rise to power. This Penguin – played by Colin Farrell under such heavy prosthetics and fat-padding that many viewers failed to recognise him – is far less urbane than Burgess Meredith’s cigar-chomping cad of the 1960s film, less theatrically grotesque than Danny DeVito had been in the 1990s, less deviously manipulative than Robin Lord Taylor in TV gem Gotham. Instead, he’s a rawly dangerous thug in a leather longcoat who knows he’s underestimated by those around him. Part buffoon, part bluster, part serious-as-a-heart-attack threat, this Oswald Cobblepot adds some skuzzy, slimy energy to what can otherwise be a cold and clinical film. In some ways, it’s a shame the plot ultimately focuses on his boss, Falcone, because Farrell’s Penguin deserves to be the lead villain. He’s also involved in the movie’s greatest sequence…
After realising that Batman has been secretly watching a drugs deal, Penguin makes an attempt to kill the vigilante – but then flees in his muscular motor, a Maserati Quattroporte. Batman gives chase in the Batmobile, which for this film has been redesigned as a Mad Max-style horsepower machine styled on a 1960s Dodge Charger. Production designer James Chinlund has said the vehicle was ‘meant to intimidate, it has to be like a monster,’ and he achieved his aim. The resulting chase scene elevates The Batman into something purely cinematic, something expressionistic, with two cars that feel less Fast & Furious and more like mythical creatures going battle in a fantasy world. Rain pounds down incessantly, Michael Giacchino’s score thunders away building dread and drive in every moment, and the night-time cinematography excels at creating a mood of horror-film danger. The sequence is not Marvel-clean or Spielberg-precise; instead there’s a chaotic, kinetic energy as we catch glimpses of action beats and squint to see events in smudged rear-view mirrors.
But the driving force of destruction in The Batman is Paul Dano’s Riddler, a serial killer in combats who murders the mayor and leaves childish-cryptic questions for Batman at crime scenes. (‘A thumb… drive,’ Bruce realises when a severed digit leads to some hidden digital files.) Previous representations of Gotham bad guy the Riddler have pushed towards a Harlequin-style madman, a loopy yet intelligent tricker who giggles with glee as he taunts the superhero. The 1960s saw Frank Gorshin in a tight green onesie and bowler hat, while in the 1990s Jim Carrey used all his elasticated facial expressions to ham up the character almost as a cartoon creation come to life. Dano’s version – real name Edward Nashton – is far less frivolous. His first scene, for example, as he silently stalks the mayor, brings to mind the unstoppable, savage power of Michael Myers from the Halloween slasher films. To paraphrase another killing machine from a different genre film, the Riddler can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with; he doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and he absolutely will not stop, ever, until his quest is complete.
The actor is well known for his attention to detail – for this role, he experimented with dozens of different spectacles before finding the right character-specific pair. (The effort was worth it: the Riddler’s clear-framed glasses add a brilliant off-kilter touch, telling us immediately that this agent provocateur is a few steps out of sync with fashion and the mainstream.) Dano’s detailed work also involved keeping copious notes and creating swathes of backstory for the Riddler – so much so that, after filming, he wrote them up into a six-issue comic book called Riddler: Year One. But – and here’s a problem that’s emblematic of the entire movie – this Riddler fails to feel fresh or different. In fact, for Batman fans, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons with Heath Ledger’s extraordinary portrayal of the Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight. Both are arch, singular reimaginings of age-old characters, rethought as personifications of violent chaos who have aims to confront and reshape a diseased Gotham City. But whereas Ledger’s Joker was threatening, unpredictable and awe-inspiring, The Batman’s Riddler (below) is closer to an incel; he even has online followers, all presumably pathetic, disillusioned young men. More topical, perhaps, but not as thrilling as a movie villain.
The visuals
‘Words are an impure medium,’ the polymath Virginia Woolf wrote in 1934. ‘Better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint.’ This is a tenet that will chime with director Matt Reeves and his collaborators, who produced a movie positively defined by its visuals. The dialogue in The Batman rarely pops as poetry or lands as insightful; the film’s power instead comes from the unified look of the production design – the sets, the costumes, the locations, the props, the vehicles – and the cinematography by DOP Greig Fraser (Rogue One, 2021’s Dune).
This Gotham City is a dark world, heavily influenced by the film-noir stylings of 1930s cinema – a genre that has been a Batmanian touchstone for decades, both in print and on screen. This is a place of shadows and contrasts and shades of grey, a perfect setting for its story about corruption, antiheroes and flawed avengers. The movie’s photography is not black and white, however (though that undoubtedly would have been an interesting choice). Rather, the central colour palette scheme is look-into-the-abyss black… and oranges that range from cigarette-stained to sunburst, a two-tone palette that makes you subconsciously think of the city as a form of Hell. Fraser’s darkly beautiful cinematography also echoes the just-off sensation of a graphic novel – tantalisingly close to looking like the real world, but not quite. It’s grungier, seedier, more decaying, more faded.
For the filming, Gotham City was achieved via a combination of methods. Huge sets were built at Leavesden Studios near Watford. The crew shot in some very smartly chosen sections of Liverpool, showing off the city’s grand Victorian architecture. And certain scenes were played out in a Volume rig, an interior space where computer-manipulated backgrounds can be projected onto an enormous screen behind the actors with eerily convincing results. The result is a grimy, industrial and relentlessly rain-sodden setting.
An obvious precedent is the LA of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner, an urban sprawl where it’s almost always night and almost always raining. The ghost of 1995 movie Seven (above) haunts The Batman too – in fact, this film could virtually be retconning David Fincher’s serial-killer thriller as taking place in the same Gotham. (In Seven, we never learn the name of the city.) Both films feature film-noir cops in twisted version of the modern day, buckets of rain trying feebly to cleanse the streets, and a psychotic murderer disgusted by what he sees as rapacious sins. (Also, a key character in both movies keeps scrawled, handwritten diaries of rambling thoughts: the killer in Seven, the hero in The Batman.) In terms of previous dramatisations of Gotham, 2022’s city most closely resembles the look created by Tim Burton and his production designer Anton Furst in 1989, though with the dapper, Modernist polish rusted off by corruption. The lavish interior of Wayne Manor – too fussily designed compared to the lived-in feel elsewhere – is like a Gothic cathedral; civic buildings have Victorian grandeur; costumes tend towards the mid 20th century. But there’s always a sense of order falling apart at every seam; that a reckoning is coming. By the third act of the story, this antebellum attitude is so toxic that The Batman’s detective story bleeds into a disaster movie. The Riddler engineers a massive, cataclysmic flood that threatens to purge the entire city. ‘Batman had to go through a baptismal transformation,’ Reeves has said.
The fallout
Sometimes feeling more like an art-house film than a blockbuster superhero flick, The Batman has slow, bleary-eyed pacing. Picking up his lead character’s investigator origins, director Matt Reeves has cited 1976’s All the President’s Men as an influence, especially in the way that film focuses on dogged journalists acting as detectives and hunting through myriad clues to get to the truth. However, while The Batman features a clue-based quest to uncover the corruption, it fatally misses the high-stakes buzz and sheer, giddy *dash* of Alan J Pakula’s Watergate masterpiece. Scenes that would typically be dialogue-heavy in a conventional thriller are played and edited slowly and deliberately, with gaping vacuums where personal relationships, dramatic tension and psychological struggles should be. Frankly, despite its host of postmodern associations and often gorgeous imagery, the film often teeters on the edge of boredom.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how The Batman deals so thoroughly with modern-day concerns such as corruption (especially within politics and law enforcement), misogyny and the very real threat of society breaking down. (How could it ignore such things? The Batman was written and filmed within the presidency of Donald Trump.) These certainly hit home on an intellectual, academic, think-about-it-for-a-blog level. But with a cast of characters so grim, dour and singularly lacking in charisma, the ideas sit in isolation rather than driving stories we can engage with. Compare with Batman Begins, to pick an example, which takes its Bruce Wayne on an arch journey of discovery, growth and defeating self-doubt; or the 1989 Batman film, which is so full of gleeful energy, wit and *oomph* that we instantly care about the comic-book characters come to life.
Another prominent theme in The Batman, which is evident in many superhero stories, is people hiding behind masks – both literal and figurative. Several characters in this film use aliases, conceal their true identity, attempt to reinvent themselves. Bruce Wayne prowls the city with his face obscured by a mask, as do Selina and the Riddler. The latter’s whole motivation is to *unmask* what he sees as Gotham City’s cancerous corruption. Carmine Falcone is forever hiding behind sunglasses (actor John Turturro: ‘I thought, “I need a mask,” because a lot of those guys did wear dark glasses when they testified’). Colin Farrell’s mask is metatextual – extensive movie make-up to hide an actor who’s much slimmer and more handsome than his character.
This motif extended beyond the fiction too. While The Batman was being shot, all the crew standing off-camera were often wearing masks – Covid face masks. Production began in January 2020, paused in March due to the onset of the pandemic, then restarted after a six-month gap in September with social-distance protocols in place. It seems that the movie’s biggest achievement was getting made at all. But that’s one of the things about myths: they keep on finding a way to survive.
An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…
These reviews reveal plot twists.
Setting: This low-budget comedy-horror flick, made for television, largely takes place in Los Angeles in the late 1990s. It’s an LA of seedy alleys, kinky nightclubs and empty hotels.
Faithful to the novel? No, this is an original story which uses two of Stoker’s biggest characters. When twentysomething-looking vampire Dallas (Casper Van Dien) visits LA to see his old cohorts Ulrike (Kim Cattrall), Richard (Craig Ferguson), Vincent (Udo Kier) and Panthia (Natalya Andreychenko), he knows he’s in trouble. Count Dracula (Robert Pastorelli), the local overlord of the vamps, holds a grudge. Dallas has often bitten and turned people without the Count’s permission, including a troubled young woman called Nico (Natasha Gregson Wagner) who now risks exposing vampires to the public because she has become a serial killer known as the Hollywood Slasher. Meanwhile, a vampire hunter called Dr Frederick Van Helsing (Rod Steiger) is on Dallas’s trail – he blames him for the death of his son, Hans, 20 years earlier…
Best performance: Someone with a career as impressive as Rod Steiger’s is clearly slumming it in a picture like this. Steiger, a pioneer of the Method school and an actor capable of both heart and heft, starred in many important and/or successful films: On the Waterfront, Oklahoma!, The Longest Day, Doctor Zhivago, In the Heat of the Night, Waterloo, Duck You Sucker!, The Amityville Horror and many more. By the 1980s, however, health issues kept him off many Hollywood casting directors’ Rolodexes and he resorted to parts in B-movies. In Modern Vampires, he trots out a wandering European accent but at least brings a bit of soul to proceedings.
Elsewhere, the cast is notable for actors with Dracula and vampire connections: Natasha Gregson Wagner, the daughter of starlet Natalie Wood, had a small role in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie and later starred in 2002 schlock sequel Vampires: Los Muertos; Natasha Lyonne (who appears here as Nico’s human friend Rachel and went on to star in TV show Orange Is the New Black) was in Blade: Trinity; both Casper Van Dien and Udo Kier later starred in sci-fi nonsense Dracula 3000: Infinite Darkness. In fact, Kier has numerous credentials in this regard. As well as supporting roles in Modern Vampires and Dracula 3000, the German was in the 2005 vampire film BloodRayne, has been Count Dracula twice (in 1974 movie Blood for Dracula aka Andy Warhol’s Dracula and 2009 short film Memories of a Young Pianist) and also played Albin Grau, the producer and production designer of 1922 Dracula film Nosferatu, in the 2000 drama Shadow of the Vampire.
Best bit: Needing help to hunt down and kill Dallas, Van Helsing takes the perplexing step of putting an advert in the newspaper. The ad is answered by a Crips member called Time Bomb (Gabriel Casseus), who’s introduced by a burst of hip-hop music. Time Bomb doesn’t believe in vampires but this doesn’t dampen his willingness to work: ‘As long as you’re writing the cheques I’ll fuck up anyone you say.’ This irreverent gag is what the whole movie is reaching for – a tone of ironic aloofness, not taking itself or the genre too seriously. Sadly the humour rarely bites, as it were.
Review: Also sometimes known as Revenant, Modern Vampires is an odd film. Light-hearted without being funny; featuring blood spurts and graphic decapitations without ever being shocking. It’s low-energy camp, essentially – a form highlighted by incidental music that tries to meld spooky horror flavours with synthy beats and cabaret-night chintz. (Famed movie composer Danny Elfman contributed. His brother directed the movie.) The script does the barest work imaginable to introduce or develop its characters, which means the resulting 90 minutes soon begins to drag, while the whole endeavour is directed with a tin ear for dialogue or drama. There’s also a pungent whiff of misogyny: Nico is rehabilitated from her time as a ferocious, feral serial killer… by getting a haircut and going clothes shopping; a rape scene is played for laughs. Modern Vampires’ Count Dracula, meanwhile, is one of the least compelling ever put on film. Not every Dracula has to be a copy of Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee, of course, but you always hope the use of the name will engender some new take or fresh approach. This Count, however, is first seen holding court in his nightclub like a drugs kingpin, torturing people for fun. He sounds like he’s not used to talking through his fangs and is a racist moron. The character has nothing to do with Bram Stoker’s creation, either as a homage to or a reaction against.
An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…
These reviews reveal plot twists.
Faithful to the novel? Rather than an example of Dracula drama, this time we’re focusing on a chaotic, loud and untamed children’s game show – one episode of which featured a comedic appearance by the famous vampire. The British version of Runaround was modelled on a US format of the same name, and 103 episodes were churned out between 1975 and 1981 by Southern Television for the ITV network. The best-remembered and longest-running host was comedian Mike Reid, who later played a regular role in soap opera EastEnders, though Leslie Crowther and Stan Boardman also presented episodes. Dressed in a Slazenger T-shirt and barking his questions in his trademark east-London growl, Reid oversees the Horror Special we’re reviewing here like a supply teacher who went out on the lash the night before.
Broadcast on 25 February 1981 (so either four months late or eight months early, depending on your view), this Halloween-themed episode features the standard middle-class children as contestants. They run out onto the set in monster masks and are introduced by Reid, who reveals what hobbies they enjoy – stamp-collecting, rugby, horror movies – then sets a series of multiple-choice questions.
Best bit: The reason we’re reviewing this piece of archive telly is a pre-scripted comic interlude. The games pause and a hearse is pulled into the studio by some horses. The coffin lid then opens to reveal… Count Dracula, played by Carry On star Charles Hawtrey. ‘Ooh, hello,’ he says – the actor’s well-known catchphrase. Hawtrey and Reid then engage in some underrehearsed banter before a topical question is put to the contestants: ‘Where does Dracula come from? Transitania, Transylvania or Pennsylvania?’
Born in 1914, Charles Hawtrey had copied his stage name from a successful stage actor of a previous generation in the hope that people would infer a familial link. After working in music hall, revue and many films, he landed the most significant role of his life in 1958 when he was cast in ensemble comedy Carry On Sergeant. Hawtrey went on to appear in 23 of the first 26 movies in the Carry On series, always playing characters with his trademark persona: an effete, meek, mummy’s boy in NHS specs. But by the early 1970s, alcoholism, unreliability and an ill-advised attempt to secure top billing had blotted his copybook with the producers. He was dropped from the series after Carry On Abroad, and filled the remainder of his diminishing career with panto appearances. That’s essentially what his Count Dracula is in Runaround: a kid-friendly vampire who tells a few jokes.
Review: Not many of Runaround’s 103 episodes have survived, and in fact this Horror Special was missing from the archives for many years. Perhaps it was lost on purpose due to the noticeably inappropriate content used by the production team. Not many game shows aimed squarely at children begin with a title sequence that shows the host being guillotined and then holding his (still alive) head under his own arm. Elsewhere, the episode is peppered with horror references, with tame jokes about garlic sitting alongside more adult-orientated stuff. One question is based around a clip from 1974 film Young Frankenstein (‘Cost four bob to make that,’ quips Mike Reid, missing the subtly of Mel Brooks’s superior pastiche), while one of the prizes on offer is an LP of the soundtrack music from The Shining. The format of the game-show element, meanwhile, is bafflingly simplistic. As kids run around the studio like they’re on a sugar rush, there are presumably rules to be obeyed and points to be given out. But no one seems that keen on following or explaining them.
Five film projectors (for those private viewings of all your favourite super-scary movies) out of 10
Spoiler warning: a few minor plot points are revealed below
For nearly 30 years, American writer/director Kevin Smith has ploughed an idiosyncratic furrow. From his indie-classic debut, Clerks, right through to its 2022 sequel, Smith does not toe a line or clip his own wings to fit in. Whether it be potty-mouthed comedies, near-the-edge horrors or self-celebratory mash-up movies that reprise old characters, his work could not be mistaken for someone else – his fingerprints are smudged over every frame.
Not all his movies have been successful. Some have flopped financially, while many have bewildered and frustrated critics. But he’s acquired a large and dedicated fanbase, who he regularly connects with directly through numerous podcasts and blogs, and he has built himself into a brand: a film director who essentially moonlights as a stand-up comedian. Smith is clearly an extremely smart and savvy guy, very aware of the movie industry’s pitfalls and able to huckster his way through three decades of funding and releases.
If anything, he sometimes seems too self-aware for his own good. Watch just a few random interviews and you soon think that Kevin Smith hangs off every word ever written about him – by a critic, by a colleague or by a fan in a tweet. But if you keep watching those interviews and reading those blogs and listening to his many podcasts and DVD commentaries – and I have done recently – you can’t help but like him. With his working-class chumminess (he loves setting films in his beloved New Jersey; he has a habit of calling friends by their surnames), and his clear love of actors (having got their breaks in Kevin Smith films, stars Ben Affleck and Jason Lee keep showing up for small roles), Smith comes off as fun to hang around with – in person or via his movies.
He’s also a classic underdog. Not as cinematically talented as his peers Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, nor as insightful as his hero Richard Linklater, Smith has nevertheless carved a stellar career by most people’s standards. Fourteen films in 28 years is an astonishing record, even if – as we’ll see below – quite a few are misfires.
To celebrate the fascinating CV of Kevin Smith, I set myself the challenge of watching his films and recording my thoughts. I’d seen about half of them before (I was a huge fan of Clerks and Mallrats at the time, then drifted away after being disappointed by Dogma), but others were new to me…
Clerks (1994)
Kevin Smith’s debut film is a low-fi gem – a vividly written comedy drama with an am-dram cast, set on one day in mostly one location, made in black-and-white on a über-indie budget of $27,000. (Smith raised the dough by selling his comic-book collection and maxing out several credit cards.) The crew was tiny, production corners were cut, some actors are pretty poor, and cinematographer Dave Klein has since admitted he didn’t know what he was doing. But while Clerks lacks professional polish, the rough-and-tumble aesthetic perfectly suits its drifting-through-life characters. The story takes place in a working-class convenience store. Stuck-in-a-rut twenty-something Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran, nicely sympathetic) has been coerced into doing a shift at short notice (‘I’m not even supposed to be here today!’ becomes his mantra). His slacker buddy Randal (Jeff Anderson, incredibly watchable) nominally runs the video shop next door but spends most of his time hanging out with Dante – and the rest deliberately insulting customers. Dante is also juggling a love triangle with current girlfriend Marilyn (Veronica Loughran) and ex Caitlin (Lisa Spoonauer), while a pair of dopeheads (played by Smith and his sometimes-drunk-on-camera pal Jason Mewes) loiter outside selling drugs. The film brims with comic energy, electric dialogue, ramshackle charisma and angry wit, even if some gags have dated badly (especially a bad-taste incident with a dead body). It’s easy to see why this film was such a critical darling and financial hit – and why Kevin Smith was soon being courted by Hollywood players Miramax. Nine Death Star contractors out of 10
Mallrats (1995)
For Smith’s follow-up to Clerks the studio asked for a ‘smart Porkies’ – on the basis that there was a gap in the market for risqué teen comedies – but what they ended up with is more like a ‘childish John Hughes film’. As with Clerks this is a comedy set on one day, and sees friends TS (Jeremy London) and Brodie (a star-making turn from My Name Is Earl’s Jason Lee) hanging out in their local shopping mall. The loosely woven plot has several threads: both boys have problems in their love life and become involved in a scheme to sabotage a game show, Brodie gets into a feud with a bully played by Ben Affleck (in his first of many Kevin Smith roles), comic-book legend Stan Lee cameos as himself, the comedic drug-dealers Jay and Silent Bob return from Clerks, a Magic Eye picture causes confusion and a schoolgirl keeps a diary of her sex experiences with grown men. (Jay and Silent Bob’s role in the story establishes Mallrats and Clerks as part of a shared universe – the ‘View Askewniverse’, named after Kevin Smith’s production company. Mallrats is actually a prequel, taking place the day before Dante was called into work.) The film’s silliness grates a few times, especially as we follow Jay and Silent Bob’s slapstick subplot, while the naive misogyny on show is risible. The movie is also photographed appallingly at times – static cameras, ugly angles, bad pacing. (Smith has often been criticised for a lack of visual style: his early films are typified by a plonk-the-camera-down-anywhere vibe.) But Mallrats still has much going for it – the dialogue is terrific and reeled off at a clip, the humour has bite, while the Generation-X mood from Clerks is given a pump of immature enthusiasm that’s hard to dislike. Eight schooners out of 10
Chasing Amy (1997)
Smith’s third movie – a romcom – is the first that feels like a proper Hollywood effort. Here, the leads have star quality, the camera moves, actors are well lit, the cutting is in sync with the storytelling, and scenes have dramatic beats – things that were previously in short supply. Ben Affleck and Jason Lee return from Mallrats, this time playing comic-book artists Holden McNeil and Banky Edwards. When Holden falls for a women he meets at a convention, he’s perplexed to realise that she’s gay. Despite this, Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams, who was dating Kevin Smith at the time) finds herself drawn to him anyway, while Banky suffers from jealousy as his friend’s attention drifts away from their partnership… The movie was criticised at the time for being an example of the ‘straight man turns a sexy lesbian’ cliché, but it actually plays better now in an era where fluid identities are more accepted; the drama concerns characters who are struggling with society’s idea of who they should be, whether that be an alpha male or a lesbian. Having said that, some of the sexual politics have aged very badly – or, rather, were already stale in 1997. Is it really plausible that a grown man wouldn’t know what lesbian sex involves? Overall Chasing Amy is decent, watchable and engaging. It also helps that Jay and Silent Bob – by now prerequisites in a Kevin Smith movie – are wisely restricted to just one key scene, in which they act as a sounding board for Holden as well as a burst of comic relief. Seven figments of your fucking imagination out of 10
Dogma (1999)
Dogma starts with an on-screen disclaimer, imploring viewers to remember that it’s a comedy. The text was added to offset some controversy generated by the religious subject matter, but it turned out to be a wise move – because you’d never tell otherwise. Laughs are virtually nonexistent… Following several characters in a storyline about two fallen angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) attempting to get back into heaven, Dogma is a disjointed and jittery work, seemingly made by people with short attention spans. Ideas and jokes are introduced, bounced around erratically, and often dropped. The dialogue, so strong in Smith’s earlier scripts, is lumpen, leaden and largely made up of exposition (Chris Rock seems to do little but explain and make fun of Christian mythology). And the religious satire itself – which somehow managed to raise the hackles of a few thin-skinned believers – feels like it’s been written by sixth-formers who think they’re the first people to ever spot that Christianity contains some contradictions. The movie’s de facto lead character is played by Linda Fiorentino, who flounders as a terribly written character who is either angry or blasé depending on what the scene needs. (Actress and director clashed, and at times weren’t speaking to each other during filming.) Affleck and Damon, meanwhile, who were cast here soon after their Oscar-winning time with Good Will Hunting, come off as complacently smug. Jay and Silent Bob are involved again for no real reason, Salma Hayek pops up as a pointless character, Janeane Garofalo is wasted in a one-scene part and Alanis Morissette cameos (mutely) as God. No one can save the film: things are so tawdry that even the great Alan Rickman, who plays a bitter, sarcastic angel, is annoying. Three consequences schmonsequences out of 10
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)
Both Chasing Amy and Dogma had been very profitable for Miramax, who then gave Smith more or less free rein on his next picture. Sadly, the result was an abject lesson of what happens when a director with no willpower is allowed to just amuse himself and his mates. Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back, which puts the stoner sidekicks front and centre, is ninety minutes of self-indulgent in-jokes, pop-culture references, appearances by characters from previous Kevin Smith films, actors playing multiple roles and nonsensical storytelling, all propped up by gross-out, misogynistic and ‘gay is funny’ humour. When the druggie double act realise that a Hollywood movie is being made about them – an idea spun off a detail in Chasing Amy – they begin a cross-country trip to stop the production… and get entangled in any number of tiresome diversions. The comedy often aims for the goofiness of Austin Powers but fatally lacks that movie’s self-deprecation, so ends up closer in tone to one of those latter-day National Lampoon films that desperately wants to be American Pie. Given by far the biggest role of his career, Jason Mewes (Jay) almost gets by on chutzpah alone – you *can* see why Smith has always been so enamoured with his troubled pal – but the rest of the cast is a hotchpotch of good actors dropping down a division (Ben Affleck, Eliza Dushku, Jason Lee), celebrities demeaning themselves in small roles (Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Will Ferrell, Judd Nelson, George Carlin, many more) and Smith’s rep company being wheeled out (Jeff Anderson and Brian O’Halloran have pointless cameos). A kind, sympathetic view of this movie would be think of it as the flamboyant celebration of a film director’s personality, a one-man Avengers Assemble that collects elements and characters from his first decade of moviemaking for a blow-out party. In the cold light of 20 years later, though, it’s just a ghastly, hubristic experience. Two communication tools used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another out of 10
Jersey Girl (2004)
The slump continues. After Kevin Smith’s slide into more and more self-indulgence with the previous two films, Jersey Girl was supposed to be his mainstream breakout – a large-budget Hollywood romcom with bankable stars. Sadly, by toning down his inherent Smithism and stepping away from his View Askewniverse continuity (in part because he didn’t want to work with his muse Mewes until the latter dealt with his addiction issues), the writer/director ended up making a mawkish and moribund flop. The script features characters photocopied from a thousand other films: a sad, lonely but matinee-idol-handsome man (Ben Affleck), who’s widowed after the death of his angelic wife (Jennifer Lopez); their cutesy, cheeky young daughter (Raquel Castro); a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Liv Tyler) who comes into his life and gives him a new happiness; and his frustrated but kindly father (George Carlin). Before release, the movie was adversely affected by poor test screenings, studio interference, and the negative publicity generated by Affleck and Lopez’s previous film, the lambasted Gigli. But none of that explains away the factory-line plotting, bland characters and rote acting (Liv Tyler does nothing with her blank character). Smith later more or less disowned the movie, even adding an apologetic gag in his credits of his next film, thanking Jersey Girl ‘for taking it so hard in the ass and never complaining.’ Five boobies out of 10
Clerks II (2006)
Dante and Randal, the two friends at the centre of Kevin Smith’s first film, have been a recurring presence in the director’s career. This is not surprising, given that they were inspired by his pre-fame days working in a convenience store. He even planned on playing Randal himself, before he realised how busy he’d be directing. The pair made a brief appearance in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, while actors Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson had various other roles in Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma. But in 2006, Smith made a full-blown Clerks sequel which shone a new spotlight on Dante and Randal – and the result was one of his very best movies. It actually took some cajoling to get Anderson to return. Clearly someone with no time for celebrity bullshit, the actor has seemed to struggle with the legacy of Clerks and at one point fell out with Smith over money. But having enjoyed reminiscing with the old gang while working on a Clerks DVD box set, he agreed to Clerks II on the strength of the script… As we catch up with Randal and Dante a decade after that chaotic day at the Quick Stop, they’re now working at a fast-food joint with Rosario Dawson’s branch manager Becky and Trevor Fehrman’s dopey burger-flipper Elias. The four bicker and discuss life, talk to eccentric customers, and get involved in an extreme and illegal piece of live theatre. O’Halloran and Anderson are terrific, instantly reigniting their old chemistry and perfectly capturing how their characters would be 10 years later. Dawson is absolutely *radiant* – she oozes smarts, sex appeal and star quality – while Fehrman is both endearingly sweet and very funny. Just like in the first movie, the humour is near-the-knuckle and adolescent, but often hits home. More importantly, there’s now genuine emotion that drives several character stories – will Dante turn his back on the boring middle-class life ahead of him? Will he admit that he’s in love with Becky? What will Randal do if his best pal leaves him behind? One reviewer said Clerks II has a ‘dirty mouth but a pure heart’ and that’s spot on. We also get the best cinematography yet in a Kevin Smith film, shot in colour unlike the 1994 original. Returning DOP Dave Klein (who’d missed the previous three Smith films for backstage political reasons) makes Clerks II simultaneously movie-beautiful and yet real; heightened and yet still connected to the makeshift Clerks. A theatrically staged musical sequence set to The Jackson 5’s ABC is also an infectious expression of pure joy. A wonderful film. Nine donkey shows out of 10
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)
When twenty-something housemates Miri (Elizabeth Banks) and Zack (Seth Rogan) can’t make ends meet, they decide to, um, make their own ends meet by starring in a self-made porn film – the theory being that all their former school pals will pay top dollar to watch them screw. The idea then mushrooms, with adult-industry actors hired and sexy spoofs of Star Wars planned. After the brief return with Clerks II, Smith again eschewed the View Askewniverse and instead attempted to tag himself into the then-current fad for frat-pack comedies about childish adults struggling with the real world. This genre, led by writer/director Judd Apatow and stars such as Seth Rogan, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, had been partly influenced by Clerks and Mallrats, of course, so in theory the move should have worked. But while the puerile sex gags in earlier Smith films hit home because they came from characters who were essentially teenagers (whatever their actual age), Zack and Miri are grown-ups with bills to pay and who attend a high-school reunion. The humour therefore tends towards crude and passé; then when actual sex is involved it’s relatively tame or played for embarrassed laughs. (Well, aside from one scatological gag that caused protracted aggro with the censors.) The romcom subplot, meanwhile, feels limp, while too much Apatow-esque improv has been allowed – Smith is usually renowned for insisting on actors sticking to the script – meaning that several scenes slide away into nothing. Poor. Five all-male casts (like Glengarry Glen Ross? Like that?) out of 10
Cop Out (2010)
Smith’s only gig as a director for hire, working with someone else’s script, is a dispiritingly empty comedy thriller. It’s like if Lethal Weapon were remade by a particularly poor Saturday Night Live line-up: the staples are there – the sarcastic cops who bend the rules, the outlandish humour, the absurd violence – but everything feels like it’s been thrown together with barely a thought. There’s no class, no finesse, no wit, no oomph. The leads are actors with good track records – Bruce Willis, who is obviously (and at one point explicitly) trading on his Die Hard persona, and Tracy Morgan, who was then one of the stars of sitcom 30 Rock. A few years earlier, Kevin Smith had made two approaches to Willis when he wanted him for a cameo in Jersey Girl – and Willis had ignored him both times. Yet after the pair enjoyed working together on Die Hard 4.0, in which Smith took an acting role, a collaboration on Cop Out seemed a good idea. Things did not go well. Willis was unhappy about Smith’s habit of smoking pot on set and Smith later publicly harangued the star for being difficult and moody. (To his credit, Smith apologised years later when Willis revealed he was suffering from dementia.) But whatever the backstage ructions, on screen Willis is lazy, lethargic and boring, showing none of that stellar spark that lit up his best movies. Tracy Morgan tries gamely to make the scenes between lead cops Monroe and Hodges fly, though he’s got nothing to work with; Rashida Jones and Smith regular Jason Lee are also half-decent in secondary roles. But this is an horrifically flippant and charmless movie – there’s no heart or pizzazz at all. Three knock-knock jokes out of 10
Red State (2011)
Smith’s career was now in a drift, his reputation damaged by a box-office bombs and bad reviews. Loyal fans remained, but the wider world was starting to define him as the guy who never topped Clerks. He needed a radical about-turn – and the welcome jolt came from this enjoyably grimy, grungy, grindhouse-flavoured horror film. It feels like a director flexing muscles he’d previously ignored. As with a lot of American horror, Red State is wrapped up with sexuality – the plot is kicked off when three horny teenage boys seek out a MILF they’ve seen advertised online. Their quest into the backwoods, however, leads to them being captured by an extreme Christian cult who punish them for their seedy urges. The cult is led by Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks, absolutely mesmerising), a Westboro Baptist Church-inspired hate preacher, and this isolated, family-based community are violently homophobic and puritanically regressive. But Red State is also, as Smith once said, a ‘weird parlour trick of a movie’: the story then evolves into a shooty-shooty action thriller when a Waco-style siege begins. Using lots of handheld and shaky camerawork to keep everyone on edge – and an absence of any Hollywood glamour – Smith creates a terrific tone and maintains it throughout. The director is less surefooted when experienced actors such as John Goodman, Kevin Pollak and Stephen Root need attention as law-enforcement officers and he can’t find a satisfying ending, resorting instead to oddball humour. But for good or bad, this is a film with drive and energy and an authorial voice, which certainly couldn’t be said about Cop Out. Six single-note trumpet blasts they pulled off the Internet out of 10
Tusk (2014)
Next, Smith surprised cinema fans by making another horror film – although Tusk has a much more absurdist slant than Red State. The idea for the movie was improvised by Smith and his long-time friend and producer Scott Mosier during an episode of their podcast. They had been tickled by a British newspaper advert offering a room to let for free if the tenant was willing to periodically dress up as a walrus. (The ad was later revealed to be a prank.) Enthused by the Blue Velvet-ish perversion, Smith quickly wrote the notion up into a twisted horror script and was filming within six months. Justin Long plays a mean-spirited podcaster, Wallace, who heads off to track down a Canadian nerd who accidentally sliced off his own leg with a Kill Bill sword. Getting sidetracked, Wallace then meets an old sailor (Red State’s Michael Parks bringing his unique brand of studied lugubriousness to another Kevin Smith flick) who has a treasure chest of spooky stories to spill. But the old man soon reveals a macabre and terrifying plan… With Wallace missing, his girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) and pal Teddy (Haley Joel Osment) fly up to Canada to look for him. So far, so good – we won’t specify it here, but what’s happening to Wallace is gleefully surreal, while Parks and Long commit to their scenes brilliantly. Then, sadly, after an hour, Johnny Depp crops up as a French Canadian detective on a serial killer’s trail… His desultory, self-centred, sketch-show performance – dodgy accent, wig and beret – is so out of step with the established tone that he almost completely derails the movie. (The role was written for Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino, a pal of Smith’s, but he got confused and thought he was being offered Long’s part so turned the project down.) Away from Depp, Tusk – with its central plot like something from a kooky episode of The X Files – is an entertainingly weird body-horror flick, and the bizarre storyline is played with admirable conviction. The movie is also a world away from the point-the-camera-at-the-actors cinematography of Smith’s early films. Tusk tells its story via visuals, blocking, edits and music (yes, the titular Fleetwood Mac song does appear) just as much as dialogue. Good fun. Apart from Johnny Depp. Seven eons of oceanic adventure out of 10
Yoga Hosers (2016)
While technically a spin-off from Tusk, watching this film is closer to sitting through a stranger’s home movie of a family Christmas – you get the sense that the people involved all had a marvellous time, but why the rest of us should be interested is a mystery. Two minor, unlikeable characters in Tusk were a pair of 15-year-olds working in a convenience store. Both were called Colleen, and they were played by Harley Quinn Smith and Lily-Rose Depp, respectively the daughters of Kevin Smith and Johnny Depp. Precisely no one outside the Smith household was asking for an entire movie to built around them, yet here we are… The setting obviously echoes Clerks (Colleen McKenzie even quotes Clerks’ Dante at one point: ‘I’m not even supposed to be here today!’) but rather than nihilist Gen-X-ers, these characters are Generation Zs who spend half their time on their phones and the other half rehearsing their earnestly awful music group. Along the way, there are fragments of a plot about Canadian Nazis, Satanists, sausage monsters and the joys of hating critics, but none of it lands. Neither does any of the intended comedy, which largely consists of mocking Canadian accents. (Characters saying ‘aboot’ rather than ‘about’ is the level.) Alongside the Colleens, Johnny Depp returns as his Tusk character, mispronouncing random words like he’s Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther film and being just as intensely irritating as before. A few other Tusk alumni return in new roles (Justin Long, Genesis Rodriguez, Haley Joel Osment), while future Elvis star Austin Butler and Lily-Rose Depp’s mother, Vanessa Paradis, appear too. Kevin Smith presumably meant Yoga Hosers to be a showcase for his daughter and her best friend – who, admittedly, have some chemistry – but the film is instead a phenomenally underwhelming, tediously undisciplined and wholly pointless endeavour. The most embarrassing and deplorable entry on Smith’s CV. One douche out of 10
Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)
Kevin Smith’s health was never the best. Weight came and went – he fluctuated up to 28 stone at one point – and he was a smoker until 2008. Then in February 2018, at the age of 47, the director suffered a heart attack after performing a stand-up comedy show. The news sent a shiver through those of us old enough to have loved Clerks first time round. Thankfully, Smith recovered and, now on a vegan diet, lost a vast amount of weight. The incident also gave him a desire to revisit his past. It had been more than a decade since his last View Askewniverse picture, more than a decade since he and pal Jason Mewes had played Jay and Silent Bob… More or less a remake of 2001’s Jay and Silent Strike Back, this film follows the characters as they head across country to stop a movie based on them being completed. But this intensely vague plot gets forgotten about for long stretches in favour of “comedic” diversions. Everything is just as idiotic and navel-gazing as in Strike Back, though now there are also facile jokes about the intellectual vacuity of reboots. The meta-twaddle even extends to Kevin Smith playing himself (the guy who made “that walrus shit”) because in this story he’s directing the new movie about Jay and Silent Bob. As their usual characters, Smith and Mewes gurn and eye-pop their way through a succession of laugh-free scenes, while there’s a conveyor belt of View Askewniverse characters, View Askewniverse actors playing new characters, View Askewniverse actors playing themselves (the film’s best gag: the cast of Clerks appear in black and white), Justin Long reprising his Zack and Miri character (retroactively defining that film as part of the View Askewniverse), Matt Damon back as his Dogma character (who jokingly claims he’s really Jason Bourne), Ben Affleck referencing lots of his own films, and Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn as Jay’s daughter Millennium ‘Milly’ Faulken, who like her dad is a gobby prick with a mute mate. Yet, despite the film’s relentless lack of hilarity, Reboot actually betters Strike Back. The first film had been utterly charmless, vain and smug. But this remake has a nostalgic bent that is at least understandable, while every now and again an actual emotion peeks through the foggy haze of weed jokes. Five multi-movie universes that breed brand-loyal customers from cradle to grave out of 10
Clerks III (2022)
And we end where we began, with a visit to the Quick Stop convenience store and clerks Dante and Randal. The way in which Kevin Smith has periodically dropped in on this pair has been unquestionably the highlight of his filmography; the characters have been his ‘control’, the heart around which all the other chaos can swirl. Over nearly 30 years Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson’s creations have become modern-day versions of Vladimir and Estragon, but rather than waiting for Godot, these guys are killing time while they wait for their lives to get going… Tragedy has struck since 2006’s Clerks II, while both men are still working in the same shop as in 1994. Jay and Silent Bob have taken over the old video store next door and now run a legal marijuana business, while old colleague Elias is dabbling in NFTs. But all their lives are shaken when Randal – who’s approaching 50 – suffers a heart attack. (The storyline was obviously inspired by Smith’s experiences.) Realising that he needs to seize the day, a recovering Randal then decides to make a movie about his life. Dante feels pressured into helping his best friend, while Silent Bob takes on the task of being a one-man film crew. Of course, you soon realise that the script Randal has written is essentially the original Clerks. We therefore (again) enter some *very* metatextual material as classic scenes are restaged shot for shot and self-aware jokes are cracked about the virtues of using black-and-white film stock. But do you know what? Despite being roughly the 17th movie in which Kevin Smith has recycled his own career, Clerks III handles all this in an endearing and character-specific way. The storyline makes perfect sense, speaking to that strain of nostalgia and the yearning for youthful happiness that strikes many men in their 40s. After the young-adult ennui seen in film one, and the existential panic of hitting your 30s that powered the first sequel, Clerks III is a midlife-crisis movie – and specifically a male midlife-crisis movie. Dante and Randal are looking back to former glories because they don’t see many new ones on the horizon, and that’s a deeply affecting basis for a comedy drama. As a celebration of characters I’ve known for 30 years, as well as a moving, melancholic study of middle-age concerns – loss, regret, friendship, hope – Clerks III might very well be Smith’s best work yet. Ten kites out of 10
Agree with these scores? Disagree? Let me know in the comments below…
Of all the unlikely musical reunions there have been over recent years, ABBA was perhaps the most unlikely. The group had parted ways in 1983 after a triumphant decade of joyful music, successful albums and global tours, leaving an indelible and classy legacy. The four members remained on good terms personally; the two songwriters collaborated on various projects; and they all benefitted financially from a smash-hit stage show and movie based on their music. Yet while outrageous sums of money were offered for tours and new recordings – more than $1 billion has been cited – Benny Anderson, Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Frid ‘Frida’ Lyngstad and Björn Ulvaeus seemed content to leave ABBA in the past.
However, in June 2016, the four sang and played together at a private gala in Stockholm held to mark the 50th anniversary of Benny and Björn’s friendship. Frida and Agnetha began to sing the 1980 song Me and I, then the lads joined in – ABBA’s first performance in 33 years. ‘It was absolutely amazing,’ said Frida afterwards. ‘A lot of emotions. We’ve made this journey throughout our history. Benny and Björn in particular. It’s been very nostalgic.’
The feeling began to grow that the quartet could – maybe, should – do something again… Over the next few months Benny and Björn assembled some material and then recording sessions were carried out in secret, while plans were also made for a reunion TV special. When the world was initially informed of the developments, in April 2018, we were told of just two new songs. Soon after, the TV special was ditched in favour of an elaborate stage show featuring digitally created avatars of the band. News started to filter out about more tracks, but the innovative ‘ABBA-tars’ project was hit by Covid delays. Then, in September 2021, the official word came of a brand-new album to be released in November and a stage show from May 2022…
Cover: The solar eclipse on the album’s artwork suggests a new dawn – or maybe even a celestial visit from an all-powerful deity, sent to brighten and enrich our lives. As well as being a natty piece of design intended to attract listeners on streaming services like Spotify, the moody, autumnal, one-colour-and-black palette ties in with the iconography of ABBA’s 2022 stage show. ABBA Voyage, which features CGI recreations of Benny, Agnetha, Frida and Björn wearing Tron-like jumpsuits, is still running at a purpose-built venue in London’s Olympic Park.
Best song: Don’t Shut Me Down stands alongside the very best of ABBA’s music. This energetic, polished and thoroughly infectious banger was the first new material to be publicly released from the LP – as a double-A-side single with I Still Have Faith in You, dropped on the day of the album’s announcement – and instantly became one of the greatest songs of the 2020s. A gorgeous production is full of compelling chord progressions, subtle strings and a groovy bottom end. Agnetha’s immaculate lead vocal, meanwhile, is the latest in her series of powerful, characterful performances where an entire life beyond the lyric is implied through acting and emotion (see also SOS, The Winner Takes It All, The Day Before You Came). Don’t Shut Me Down is a dramatic tale of both newfound self-confidence (‘And now you see another me, I’ve been reloaded, yeah/I’m fired up, don’t shut me down’) peppered with themes of regret, guilt, reconciliation and poignant hope. There are also three key changes. Sensational stuff.
Honourable mentions:
* The subdued album opener is I Still Have Faith in You, one of several tracks on Voyage that sound like they come from the world of musical theatre. (After ABBA’s 1980s break-up, Benny and Björn had dabbled in the genre – most notably with Chess, their Cold War-themed collaboration with lyricist Tim Rice.) The song was recorded early in this new phase of ABBA-tivity (in June 2017), though parts of the melody were recycled by Benny from an instrumental he wrote for the 2015 Swedish film The Circle. When he showed the rough idea to Björn, his writing partner knew instantly that the song was about the band’s reunion. Frida sings the uncomplicated lyric of quiet defiance, then in the second half the track becomes rousing and the vocals become multilayered, which saves things just as they start to drift towards boring.
* When You Danced With Me has a faux-folksy mood – emphasised by a lyric about a country girl left behind when her fella goes to the big city, with mentions of the Irish town of Kilkenny, village fairs and the simple joys of dancing. In less-talented hands, the track would be a disaster. As it is, the band’s charm is still there.
* Just a Notion, which features elements of rock’n’roll and boogie-woogie, was another single, issued soon before the album in October 2021. It’s actually a reheated track that was worked on during the sessions for Voulez-Vous in 1978 then discarded – Agnetha and Frida’s original vocals were retained, but they’re now complemented by new backing music. The result is an up-tempo tune difficult to dislike – and a cute way of short-circuiting ABBA’s career, linking this 21st-century coda with the main canon.
* There’s a sci-fi edge to the enjoyable Keep an Eye on Dan, as ABBA dial up the electro-pop for an icy-cold song about a mother dropping her son off at his dad’s. Synthesiser beats, pulses and noodles provide a base for Agnetha’s emotion-soaked vocals, while the top melody is occasionally picked out by what sounds like a stylophone.
* Frida takes the lead on the high-energy and catchy No Doubt About It. Another ABBA lyric about relationship regrets (‘Hissing like a wild cat when I should have been purring’), the words tumble through the choruses while the backing track is densely packed.
Worst song: The final single released from the album, Little Things, is a schmaltzy and hollow Christmas song with twinkly production, backing vocals from a Stockholm children’s choir and the mood of a snowy singalong from a kids’ TV show. In another hint that Benny and Björn’s inspiration perhaps wasn’t striking enough for a fully original album, the outro is partly based on Godnattvisa, an instrumental track recorded by Benny’s sideline project, Benny Anderssons Orkester, in 2007.
Best video: The release of I Still Have Faith in You was accompanied by a montage promo. Celebrating the group’s original run of success, we see backstage footage, shots of the group with adoring fans, clips from classic videos and candid photos, all cleverly cut together as if they’re moving images on a noticeboard. Then, towards the end, the ABBA-tars take over – the uncanny-valley digital recreations of the foursome that fans would see for a full performance once the spin-off stage show began. Presumably ABBA Voyage will be the first of many instances of technology de-ageing (or even resurrecting) music stars for new live shows. How long until we can go and see Elvis at Wembley Stadium?
Review: Released 40 years to the month since the band’s previous ‘final’ album, Voyage became an instant smash hit – topping charts, shifting units, receiving warm reviews. A huge part of this success was probably due to some people being curious about a great band reuniting after so long and others being so excited they were always going to like the new music. But there were two other factors at play.
One was timing. Initiated before Covid-19 struck, the Voyage album was partly recorded during the face-mask era and then released 18 months into a global pandemic. As well as the countless deaths and the unprecedented upheaval in society caused by coronavirus, the world was facing tragedy and disaster from other sources too – the repellant Donald Trump had dominated world news for several years, the UK was dogged by Brexit and Boris Johnson and freak weather, Afghanistan had fallen to the Taliban, several entertainment figures were being found guilty of reprehensible crimes… The return of ABBA and their music – and all the associated positivity and joy – was, for many, a bright spot just when bright spots seemed depressingly rare.
And the other reason for Voyage’s high sales/streams and good critical reaction was that the music itself is so strikingly *ABBA*. Stylistically, Voyage fits into the group’s established discography perfectly – perhaps better than any other instance of a reunion album after a lengthy break. A guest super-producer like Mark Ronson might have felt the need to update, tweak, evolve, spice up or ‘make relevant’; essentially use the songwriting and voices of ABBA in a new aural context. But Benny, Agnetha, Frida, Björn and their team did not reinvent their brand; they revived it wholesale. So while we can swoon over classic-sounding new ABBA tracks like Don’t Shut Me Down, we must also concede that – like on most ABBA albums – Voyage has its share of unmemorable filler too.
Seven bittersweet songs in the memories we share out of 10
Needing to shoot a key sequence in the 1992 thriller Patriot Games, director Phillip Noyce and his team faced a problem. The scene takes place in central London, yet features a terrorist assassination attempt, plenty of gunfire and an exploding taxi. They would need several days to film this complex action, and closing down an area of the city for that long was a tall order.
The solution came when the production team did a deal to use a site in Greenwich in south-east London, which not only features some stunning 17th-century architecture but at the time was owned by the Royal Navy. The Old Royal Naval College, as it’s now known, was originally the Royal Hospital for Seamen and was built between 1696 and 1713 by the great architect Sir Christopher Wren. After the hospital (in this context the word means a convalescence home for injured and retired sailors rather than an emergency facility) closed in 1869, the Royal Navy took over and used the buildings as a training college until moving out in 1998. The site is now partly a university campus, partly a free-to-enter tourist attraction.
Close to a hundred films and dozens of TV shows have used the Old Royal Naval College as a filming location, as detailed in the site’s visitor centre. Filmmakers have been attracted by the architectural beauty and the riverside views, as well as the ability to completely control the environment and close it to through traffic.
From 1958’s romantic comedy Indiscreet, through Octopussy, The Madness of King George, Four Weddings and Funeral, The Golden Compass, The Dark Knight Rises, Skyfall, Les Miserables, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Thor: The Dark World and many, many more, right up to recent streaming hits like Cruella and Enola Holmes, the buildings and layout of the ORNC are recognisable again and again.
Patriot Games wasn’t the first to film here, but it used the location excellently as a stand-in for central London. So to celebrate that movie’s 30th anniversary, I set off to photograph the locations as they appear today…
The sequence shot here involves a group of rogue IRA terrorists, including Sean Bean’s Sean Miller, who ambush a member of the Royal Family. Their aim is to assassinate Lord Holmes (James Fox), so force his chauffeur-driven car to pull over and then plant a bomb underneath. The attempt is foiled, however, because of a passerby – the American espionage analyst Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford), who just happens to be on the scene. He uses his former US Marines training to intervene and kill one of the terrorists…
The superb sequence can be viewed here:
Before the terrorists strike, the scene is set. Jack is in London because he has just delivered a lecture at a Royal Navy headquarters building (making it apt the filmmakers used what was then a naval college), and is on his way to meet his wife, Kathy (Anne Archer), and their young daughter, Sally (Thora Birch). We see Kathy and Sally killing time before Jack arrives and Sally is fascinated by a uniformed guard at what is meant to be the entrance to an unspecified royal residence. In fact, the scene was shot the ORNC’s East Gate.
We also see the pair walking towards their rendezvous with Jack, which was filmed over on the other side of the complex to the west of the King William Court block.
Mother and daughter also stroll past the eastern edge of Queen Mary’s Court, which – thanks to the magic of movie editing – is a completely illogical route.
Jack, meanwhile, arrives at the meeting spot, which is atop some wide steps in the centre of the complex – steps which, sit between the ORNC’s chapel with its world-famous Painted Hall. These steps can be seen in a whole host of Hollywood and British films, usually redressed as period London – see Robert Downey Jr’s take on Sherlock Holmes, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Cruella and so many more instances that this blog would be twice the length if we listed them all.
The distinctive colonnades visible behind Jack crop up in many movies too: in The Dark Knight Rises, for example, Bruce Wayne eats at a cafe supposedly in Florence, while Keira Knightley and Eddie Redmayne filmed scenes here for, respectively, The Duchess and The Aeronauts.
These colonnades are part of King William Court, which houses the aforementioned Painted Hall – very possibly the UK’s most beautiful room. Once planned as a refectory, the vast hall was given an elaborately painted ceiling by Sir James Thornhill – so elaborate, in fact, that when finished the room was deemed too grand for the hospital’s residents. It’s since been used for state dinners, as an art gallery and, since the 1950s, as a filming location. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman danced here in Indiscreet, Johnny Depp was dragged through the space (standing in for a Buckingham Palace corridor) in a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, and Olivia Colman gave us her Queen Elizabeth in TV show The Crown.
Patriot Games, however, didn’t venture inside. The production team had an explosion to film…
Lord Holmes’ car is ambushed in the central open area of the Old Royal Naval College, with those iconic steps just off to the left in these images and the river to the right. In fact, if we turn right to look out across the Thames, you see in the distance the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf – a markedly different view from when Patriot Games filmed here. In the early 1990s, just one solitary tall building – One Canada Square – was visible on the horizon.
When it comes in the film, the explosion of the Holmeses’ limo is a spectacular set piece, and the decision to mount it in Greenwich was a masterstroke from director Phillip Noyce and his colleagues. The Naval College site, with its stunning and authentic architecture, sells the idea that this is busy, bustling central London – which makes the idea of an IRA attack more daring, more edgy, more dangerous. Patriot Games is a glossy, classy action thriller, and its location work – not just here, but also in Maryland and California – adds a huge amount of both production value and verisimilitude. (Just imagine if they’d cut corners and filmed on a dreary backlot set in Hollywood, the kind of fake street-grid of bland buildings you see in things like NCIS and studio sitcoms.)
I first visited the Old Royal Naval College in around 2010, specifically to see the filming locations from Patriot Games (a film I’ve always been very fond of). I’ve lived within walking distance for 20 years and now return virtually weekly for one reason or another. So, in order to research this blog post, I went very early one Sunday in summer; the ground had only just opened and there was no one around. The sun was already bright and warm, and everything was peaceful and serene as I walked around and took my photographs and imagined how Noyce and co used this space for their blockbuster. There was no sign of Harrison Ford or Sean Bean or terrorists ambushing a dignitary and attempting an assassination. All was calm.
An occasional series where I write about works inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula…
These reviews reveal plot twists.
Setting: This BBC Radio production, produced by BBC Northern Ireland and aired on Radio 4 in late 2003, is a heavily abridged reading of the book. We therefore hit the major locations from Stoker’s original: near the Borgo Pass in Transylvania; Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast of England; Purfleet in Essex; and various parts of London. As in the novel, the events take place from 3 May until 6 November in an unspecified year (probably 1893).
Faithful to the novel? Yes, the script is Stoker’s text, although a *huge* amount of material has been excised by writer Daragh Carville in order to fit the format – 10 episodes, roughly 13 minutes each. (By comparison, an unabridged reading of Dracula I reviewed in 2020 ran for 15 and a half hours.) While Stoker was undoubtedly a writer who banged on a bit – Dracula contains many passages that test the patience, especially when Van Helsing is giving neverending speeches – listeners familiar with the 1897 novel will find some cuts jarring. Vastly reducing the role of eccentric Whitby local Mr Swales, an old duffer who spooks Mina and Lucy with macabre stories about suicide, doesn’t hurt the storytelling. Barely mentioning Lucy’s American suitor, Quincey P Morris, who is often dropped from film and TV adaptations, is also a wise choice. But Lucy herself – Dracula’s first victim – is a shadowy presence until she becomes a vampire. She doesn’t even get to speak in her own voice: all 5,000 words of her letters and diaries have been removed.
Best performance: There are just four performers, each reading their characters’ diary entries, letters and telegrams. (Stoker’s full text features 16 narrators, though most are minor characters who are easily removed.) Michael Fassbender plays Jonathan Harker, who travels to Castle Dracula in the opening episodes, encounters the vampire Count Dracula and kickstarts the plot. Later the star of numerous Hollywood movies, including multiple entries in the X-Men series, Fassbender conveys Harker’s plight well. Elsewhere, Gillian Kearney (Brookside, Emmerdale) reads the material from Mina’s point of view; James D’Arcy (Agent Carter, Broadchurch) is Dr Seward; and James Greene (who later appeared in a 2006 TV version of Dracula) is Van Helsing.
Review: Some clever editing disguises how much original material has been jettisoned, and Bram Stoker’s story rattles along enjoyably enough and without losing too much substance. None of the actors generates much energy, however, while music and sound effects are sparse.
Spoiler warning: these reviews reveal plot twists.
Amazonian warrior Diana Prince is living undercover as a museum administrator in Washington, DC, but must defeat a businessman who has taken possession of an artefact that grants wishes…
After her modern-day debut and her First World War origin story, this film finds Diana Prince – aka the never-ageing superhero Wonder Woman – in the 1980s. Younger readers may find this hard to believe, but the 1980s used to be unfashionable. Once we all moved on to the postmodern, self-reflective 90s, the ‘greed decade’ became a punchline of clashing colours, soulless pop music and commercial artifice. When the sitcom Friends showed us some flashbacks to its characters in the 80s, everything was mocked – look at Chandler’s dorky haircut, listen to the irritating theme tune from Beverly Hills Cop, see how naive they all were.
Then time passed and, crucially, people who had been young and happy in the 1980s started to write, produce and direct TV shows and movies. The 80s-set TV drama Stranger Things, with its overt echoing of films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestial and The Goonies, has been hugely successful in making the decade cool again. But similar work had been done earlier by JJ Abrams’s film Super 8, the US spy drama The Americans, the British cop show Ashes to Ashes and many other fictions that affectionately traded on the 1980s’ idiosyncrasies and charms.
So setting this latest Wonder Woman film in 1984 (after a largely pointless prologue featuring a 10-year-old Diana cheating at a game of Total Wipeout) seemed a decent idea. As well as developing the character’s backstory and showing us her life before she hooked up with Superman and the rest the Justice League, the movie could have some nostalgic fun with the outdated styles and politics of a previous era…
Now fully assimilated to life in America, and hiding the fact she never grows any older, Diana (Gal Gadot) has a high-level job at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. But she’s privately sad and lonely because she’s still mourning her love interest from an earlier movie, First World War fighter pilot Steve Trevor. As the story kicks off, Diana meets a new colleague, Barbara (Kristen Wiig), who is initially presented as a glasses-wearing klutz who can’t walk in high heels. And on Barbara’s first day, an ancient artefact is donated to the museum. It’s actually a mystical wish-giver, capable of making any desire come true, and before you can say ‘plot development’ both Barbara and Diana have unknowingly wished for things…
Barbara wants to become like her new pal Diana – ie, a strong, confident, sexy woman with 20/20 vision – so soon casts aside her glasses, gets a nicer hairdo and starts walking in heels no problem. (That’s right, folks: this film flat-out equates a woman’s worth with her appearance.) This transformation… somehow… eventually leads Barbara to becoming a maniacal super-villain with a chip on her shoulder who looks like a humanoid cheetah. (Don’t ask. The scriptwriters didn’t.)
Meanwhile, Diana herself wishes that her dead love, Steve, would return to life… so return he does! But for baffling reasons he does this by taking over the body of a randomly selected nearby man of a similar age and build. Why the MacGuffin gives Diana her desire in this way, rather than Steve just magically appearing, or his 70-year-old corpse being reanimated, is just one of many questions the film sidesteps. In order for star Chris Pine to play the role, we viewers (and Diana) see the man as if he were Steve. When he looks in a mirror, however, he sees the poor guy whose life has been put on hold against his will. Rather shockingly in this day and age, neither Diana nor Steve (nor the film) has any moral issues with using a stranger’s body for a few days, even for sex at one point.
Anyway, the pair reacquaint themselves with each other, and Steve gets to know the 1980s. At one point, in a fun gender-reversal of the cliche, there’s a montage scene where he tries on a variety of garish clothes – Miami Vice jacket, tracksuit, scarf – with Diana disapproving of the bad choices. Diana also shows him the subway (ooo!) and a space shuttle at the museum (wow!). But all this lovey-dovey stuff can’t last forever, as Diana and Steve have a villain to stop.
The Smithsonian’s new benefactor, oil baron Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), is in reality a conman who’s been running a Ponzi scheme to raise funds. (Lord’s a fraud!) He wants the wish-granting device for himself, and when he tricks Barbara into giving him access, he wishes for the same abilities as the device itself. So from this point on, he’s able to make other people’s desires comes true – and of course he uses this to trick people into wishing for things that are advantageous for him. Cue superhero-movie action scenes and chases and cursory detective work for the lead characters…
An early sequence in Wonder Woman 1984 is set in the kind of chintzy shopping mall seen in 80s comedies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Weird Science (and which was recently homaged in a season of Stranger Things). As a pair of hapless crooks attempt to rob a jewellers, and Wonder Woman swoops in to save the day, the filmmaking aims for the zippy elan of the Christopher Reeve Superman films, which had also been a clear touchstone for Wonder Woman’s 2017 origin story. Action mixes with light comedy, all seasoned with a sense of optimism and style. However, the longer the film goes on, and the less sense *any* of the storytelling makes, this optimism curdles into boredom.
We’re used to superhero films with action scenes that look cartoony fake, and WW84 has a wodge of greenscreen howlers. Maybe it’s not a big deal for Diana Prince to have no real character arc – other than sad-happy-sad again – because this is her fourth movie and it’s a prequel. But less forgivable is a script stocked full of clunky beats, head-stratchingly bizarre plot developments, contradictory rules, underwritten characters, laughable coincidences and the breathless oh-and-then-this-ness that suggests multiple filmmaking voices chipped in with ideas that couldn’t be vetoed. The ending is then so badly thought-out it beggars belief. In order to end a global crisis of Maxwell Lord’s making, every human being on the planet has to recant a wish they’ve just made – including presumably those who wished to be cured of cancer or for their starving family to be fed. Surely even bombastic, CG-heavy superhero films need *some* plausibility?!
Of the main cast, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig and Pedro Pascal do the best they can; they’re good actors, able to add some charm and depth to their characters. But Gal Gadot continues to be awful. A lead actor needs more than the three gears (aloof, mildly amused and sad) she manages to find in this story. WW84 features a topical theme about unwanted male attention, with several morons coming on to Diana or Barbara and reacting badly when they’re spurned. But Gadot can make nothing of this, show us none of Diana’s emotional reaction, and leaves the subplot as just an obvious piece of pointing out the obvious. Elsewhere, Pine is left to do almost all the heavy lifting in the central romance.
But for all these failings and frustrations, perhaps the biggest letdown of Wonder Woman 1984 is how little it uses its time period. Frankly, the film could be set in any era of the last century or so; there’s nothing intrinsic in the story or the characters that speaks to, or about, the 1980s. True, we get a kaleidoscopic conveyor belt of flashy cars, keep-fit fanatics, shopping malls, colour-clashing fashions and questionable haircuts. And yet all these things feel like cursory set dressing; they lack the authenticity of Stranger Things and the like, which delve beneath the surface to say something about how society evolves. Characters here may have rolled-up sleeves and TV sets might be square, but none of the film’s politics, attitudes or spirit has anything to do with the 1980s specifically. Diana herself never looks or acts or speaks like anything other than a 21st-century woman, despite actually being an immortal goddess from Amazonia. A thoroughly out-dated mess of a movie.
Film director Tony Scott, who died on 19 August 2012, loved pace and momentum and movement. His 16 feature films are not quiet or sober, slow or mediative – they’re in-your-face and unashamedly hyperactive and veer away from anything that might be boring. These movies celebrate cinema as pure, uncomplicated entertainment, rather than having a political or subtextual purpose. Scott was also a believer in ‘freshness’ rather than originality. He once said that originality is a myth – everything’s already been done – so instead he emphasised carefree pleasures such as action and comedy and energy and movie stars.
Born and raised in the north-east of England, his first toe was dipped into the filmmaking waters in 1962, when he was 18. His older brother, Ridley, was making a semi-autobiographical short called Boy and Bicycle, and hired Tony as both the lead actor and a general behind-the-scenes gofer. ‘It was two brothers together all day for six weeks, and you could see it sinking in,’ Ridley said later. ‘It was an education for Tony. Suddenly, he had a direction in life.’ A few years later, Tony followed his brother into the world of commercials: both men directed thousands of TV ads, built up good reputations and made a lot of money.
Ridley then shifted into making movies such as Alien and Blade Runner. Tony soon bagged a Hollywood career too, which kicked off in the 1980s. He found his groove directing gleeful, showy films that were often huge box-office hits… even if they disappointed sniffy critics. His canon is typified by crafted visuals – Scott loved his backlighting, long lenses, smoky interiors and sunsets – which create a massive impact on a cinema screen. But there is always heart underneath the razzmatazz. As much as he focussed on ‘surface’, Scott prided himself on his research into any given story or situation. He often found real-life equivalents of his major characters – ‘role models’, he called them – so he and his actors could ask them about small details and add layers of verisimilitude.
Scott took detours into the horror and sci-fi genres, but the backbone of his career was thrillers. And he returned to some subject matters more than once: the US navy (Top Gun, Revenge, Crimson Tide), sports (Days of Thunder, The Last Boy Scout, The Fan), the CIA (Enemy of the State, Spy Game), trains (The Taking of Pelham 123, Unstoppable), surveillance technology (Enemy of the State, Déjà Vu)…
The director also hired several stars multiple times – most notably his muse Denzel Washington, but also Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, Christopher Walken and others. As that list demonstrates, his films were undoubtedly male-dominated, with only two (The Hunger and Domino) having women as lead characters. But in the plus column the director worked with POC actors with a frequency that shamed many of his peers: he gave starring roles to Washington, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Halle Berry, Damon Wayans, Paula Patton, Wesley Snipes, Rosario Dawson…
To celebrate the incredible CV of Tony Scott – a populist, a showman, someone who’s long been one of my favourite filmmakers – I set myself the challenge of rewatching his 16 feature films, and coming up with a personal ranking…
16. Days of Thunder (1990)
Tony Scott made four films for the Hollywood producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson between 1986 and 1995; he did as much as anyone to define their signature mode of flashy popcorn movie. But this third effort, a motor-racing story starring Tom Cruise, was a troubled endeavour from lights out to chequered flag. Director and producers argued incessantly on set, causing huge delays to filming; writer Robert Towne was forced into hasty script changes; and the editing process was rushed to meet a release date. All this messiness is very evident in the finished film, which is the only truly bad movie of Tony Scott’s career. Cruise stars as an up-and-coming driver who blags a seat on the top-level NASCAR circuit. Robert Duvall is his grouchy team boss, while Nicole Kidman, Cruise’s then-girlfriend, plays a cursory love interest. Some of the races are shot excitingly enough, and the grease-and-garage world of the sport is captured well, but the soap-opera storyline never grabs your attention.
15. Revenge (1990)
For its first hour, this is a low-energy, bland drama about retired pilot Jay Cochran who moves to Mexico to hang out with his wealthy friend Tibey Mendez. Jay falls in love with Mendez’s young wife, Miryea, and they begin an affair – but this is an unwise move, given that Mendez is a powerful crime kingpin. Then, halfway through, there’s a scene of brutal violence. This takes the story into unsettlingly dark areas, and the film becomes terser and tougher, more like a cheap exploitation flick… Anthony Quinn is appropriately menacing as Mendez, while Madeleine Stowe, who coincidentally later starred in an unrelated TV show called Revenge, is decent too as Miryea. But Kevin Costner – who stars as Jay, was one of the producers and even considered directing the movie himself – is miscast. With his carefree, Hollywood swagger, we never quite understand why this Top Gun-style fighter pilot hooks up with a man who’s clearly a dangerous criminal. Tony Scott would retell a similar story 14 years later with Man on Fire, which coincidentally is also set in Mexico, and sell the emotional undercurrents much more strongly than here.
14. Domino (2005)
In 2004, Scott was hired to make a short film for Amazon.com. Agent Orange was about two lost souls connecting at a train station, and it gave the director the freedom to experiment with form. So he shot his footage with hand-cranked cameras, which produced jerky, unpredictable images of varied frame rates, and he added double exposures to create a trippy, dreamy effect. These techniques… and *so much more*… then fed into 2005 feature Domino, a based-on-real-life tale of an Englishwoman working as a bounty hunter in modern-day LA. The whole film is a panic attack of cinematic excess; a pill-popping fever dream of manipulated footage, hyperactive editing, jump cuts, crazy camerawork, montages, a sickly green colour palette, on-screen captions, needle-drops, flashbacks, cross-cutting, brutal violence and even a Jerry Springer cameo. Keira Knightley plays Domino Harvey with tomboy coolness as she escapes her boring rich-girl life to chase after criminals for a living, while Lucy Liu, Christopher Walken, Delroy Lindo, Mena Suvari and Mickey Rourke have supporting roles. In truth, the aggressive directing style swamps a needlessly complicated storyline, the characters are little more than mannequins being moved around the shop window, and on a first viewing the film will simply be too irritating for most people. But you’ve got to admire the balls in using Hollywood money to make something so fucking *weird*.
13. Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
The original Beverly Hills Cop, directed by Martin Brest and released in 1984, was such a monster hit that a sequel was inevitable – so producers Simpson and Bruckheimer turned to Tony Scott, who’d just made them a fortune with Top Gun. Like the first film, this follow-up is ostensibly a crime thriller. A storyline about a gang pulling off elaborate heists is played out with R-rated violence and colourful language in a familiar format. However, all this is window dressing. Really the film is a delivery system for the comic energy of star Eddie Murphy, who reprises his role as Detroit detective Axel Foley. It’s easy to forget now, after 30 years of kids films and flops, but Murphy was a huge box-office draw in the 1980s, hitting big with 48 Hrs, Trading Places and Coming to America. And he is this movie’s star attraction. The crime story never convinces, the emotion is hackneyed and the new characters are all very dull. (Brigitte Nielsen’s Karla Fry, a statuesque baddie who shoots a police chief and wears a succession of sci-fi sunglasses, is at least memorable. But it’s a dreadful performance.) The fun instead comes from Murphy’s episodic improvs – Foley blagging his way into a country club by pretending to carry nuclear weapons; Foley tricking some builders into letting him live in a mansion; Foley taking his cop friends from the first film, Judge Reinhold’s Detective Billy Rosewood and John Ashton’s Sergeant John Taggart, to a nightclub and telling everyone that the latter is really President Gerald Ford. All in all, it’s nonsense. But an amiable, inoffensive 90 minutes of nonsense.
12. The Fan (1996)
Gil Renard (Robert De Niro) is a down-on-his-luck salesman whose biggest passion in life is baseball – specifically the San Francisco Giants, who have just signed a new star player called Bobby Rayburn. But when Rayburn’s season fails to ignite, Gil believes he can step in to help the batter… A splashy, flashy, energetic film, The Fan more or less passed people by in 1996. The box office was poor, as were reviews. But viewed now, a quarter of a century later, it works well as both a whip-fast thriller and a commentary on insidious male obsession. At first Gil seems like an everyman who takes baseball a bit too seriously, the way many men treat sport, but increasingly we come to realise that he’s a man-child living in a delusion. As he focuses his stalker-like gaze on Rayburn (an impressive Wesley Snipes), who is simultaneously going through his own personal issues, Gil neglects his son and his job and takes drastic actions… A character teetering on the edge of intense behaviour is, of course, prime Robert De Niro territory and we sense something of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle and Cape Fear’s Max Cady in this character. The script – based on a 1995 novel and written by former Cheers staffer Phoef Sutton – does a good job of balancing the dark subject matter with moments of dry humour, but Tony Scott’s pyrotechnical camerawork maybe gets in the way of any genuine understanding of Gil’s psychology. The final sequence also tips over into outlandish.
11. The Hunger (1983)
Scott’s first feature film was this art-house horror with few characters and little action – very atypical when compared to the rest of his filmography. In 1980s New York, a 3,000-year-old vampire played by Catherine Deneuve (‘untouchable and surreal’ said Scott of her performance; Charlotte Rampling turned the role down) fears being lonely after her long-time consort (David Bowie) begins to rapidly age, so she ensnares a new lover (Susan Sarandon, who later joked that the lesbian subplot changed her fanbase somewhat). The Hunger is certainly a beautiful piece of work, often looking like a high-end rock video. There’s an ethereal quality, stately music, dark sexuality, monochromatic visuals, lots of billowing curtains and even an appearance by Goth band Bauhaus, but the story lacks an emotional punch. Scott was influenced by Stanley Kubrick, especially his candle-lit period film Barry Lyndon, and The Hunger has some of that same icy detachment. There are also echoes of Blade Runner, recently made by Tony’s brother Ridley, especially in the use of film-noir Venetian blinds, Art Deco locations and smoky rooms. Slow, languid and overtly stylish, The Hunger’s hypnotic, esoteric power builds with repeated viewings.
10. Spy Game (2001)
We’re in 1991. Rogue CIA operative Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) is captured while attempting to lift a prisoner from a Chinese jail. Back in Washington, his former mentor, Nathan Muir (Robert Redford), is about to retire when he’s called into a meeting. Should the CIA help their man, who will be executed the following day? Or should they appease the Chinese and let him die? As the bigwigs discuss the dilemma, Muir explains how he met, recruited and trained Bishop, so there are lengthy flashbacks set in war-torn Vietnam, Cold War Berlin and bomb-shelled Beirut – each one shot with a different colour palette. All this results in a bizarre concept for an action thriller: a race-against-time story where most of the characters spend *hours* sitting around talking. But for those paying attention, the script seeds plenty of information that will be important during the third-act rescue plan – sometimes smartly, sometimes not – and the movie zips along with real drive. Tony Scott took over this project after another director was deemed too inexperienced, so his lead actors were on board before he was – and initially Robert Redford was unsure of Scott’s kinetic shooting style. Redford is typically watchable, though, while the cat-and-mouse intrigue keeps the attention and the ending socks home emotionally.
9. Top Gun (1986)
In the four years since the financial failure of The Hunger, Scott had gone back to making adverts – and more or less given up on the idea of being a features director. However, an ad campaign he shot with a Saab car racing a jet fighter caught the attentions of Bruckheimer and Simpson when they were prepping an aviation action film… Scott initially wanted to make a darker, murkier movie. He described his first pitch to the producers as ‘Apocalypse Now on an aircraft carrier’. But when pushed towards a more commercial tone he decided to treat the script’s hotshot Navy pilots as if they were rock’n’roll stars. The resulting film is a none-more-80s roller-coaster ride – dazzling charisma from lead actor Tom Cruise, era-defining music, outrageous flying stunts, sun-kissed cinematography, alpha-male posturing, a volleyball scene filmed like it’s from a soft-porn flick, big hair, sunglasses, bomber jackets, motorbikes, sweaty faces and endearingly corny dialogue. It ain’t subtle, and viewers wanting decent female characters will be very disappointed, but it’s huge escapist fun. Scott later spent many years trying to get a sequel off the runway, but the project hadn’t become airborne by the time he died. When the superb Top Gun: Maverick came along a whopping 36 years after its predecessor, Scott was acknowledged with a dedication title card.
8. The Last Boy Scout
There were notorious arguments on set during the production of this attitude-driven neo-noir – director Tony Scott, producer Joel Silver and the two lead actors all squared off in macho power games. Unlike the troubles behind the scenes of Days of Thunder, however, this acrimony was well hidden. The resulting film sings with panache and feels like it was made by a team in complete simpatico. Updating a Maltese Falcon-style story for the brash 1990s, The Last Boy Scout stars Bruce Willis, who is perfect casting as a grizzled gumshoe. The actor takes his wisecracking persona from Moonlighting and Die Hard but significantly turns down the joy – PI Joe Hallenbeck is a dishevelled man with a languid cigarette in his mouth, who sleeps in his car and has a marriage in the toilet, but is also perceptive and smart and tough. After rumbling his wife having an affair, he’s given a case that seems straightforward. A waitress/dancer (Halle Berry) needs protection after being threatened. But when she’s killed on his watch, Hallenbeck starts to uncover a conspiracy in the world of professional sports. American football’s top league – due to rights issues the term NFL is never used – is on the decline, with falling attendances and poor TV ratings, and a betting syndicate is blackmailing players to fix matches. Aiding Hallenbeck in his investigation is Corey’s boyfriend, Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans), who was a star quarterback but has been suspended on gambling charges. The pair make for a classic odd-couple double act – they hate each other (as the actors did, it seems) but work well as a team and eventually form a friendship. Like all classic noirs, this plot is both seedy and intricate, and keeps opening up new avenues of interest. But there’s also the kind of wildness that the best films written by Shane Black always have: caustic humour, plot twists, reversals of fortune, lots of exploding cars, and subversive shocks such as a sports star who murders an opponent during a televised game. (Black would go full throttle with spoofing genre conventions two years later with Last Action Hero.) The project was a perfect fit for Tony Scott, who was able to let loose with his visual flamboyance while always retaining an awareness of the film’s inherent silliness.
7. Crimson Tide (1995)
Another film based on the US Navy and produced by Simpson and Bruckheimer, Crimson Tide is a very different beast from the extrovert, immature Top Gun. Whereas that had been big and silly and flamboyant, this is a taut, machine-tooled thriller – slick, sharp and focused. When his first officer is taken sick, nuclear-submarine captain Frank Ramsey (Gene Hackman) hires a replacement in the form of the cool, calm Lieutenant Commander Ron Hunter (Denzel Washington in his first film for Tony Scott). With a despotic Russian leader threatening world peace (just imagine…), Ramsey’s ballistic missile submarine, the USS Alabama, is sent into the Pacific. However, confusion reigns when two messages are sent from fleet HQ – Ramsey thinks the orders say to launch a nuclear strike against Russia, but Hunter has his doubts and wants to double-check… The foundation of the whole film is this clash between captain and second-in-command. At first a relationship of guarded civility and rote-respect, the two men begin to disagree and butt heads even before the fever-pitch argument about the orders – and seeing heavyweight film actors Hackman and Washington slug it out verbally is an absolute joy. These masters know how to make every moment feel alive and important and full of telling details. Quentin Tarantino did some uncredited work on the dialogue and his contribution is usually assumed to be the addition of some pop-culture references (previous submarine movies, comic books), but perhaps he helped punch up the central relationship too. And the stage for the theatrics is excellently set by Tony Scott and his team: the Alabama is all claustrophobic corridors, smoky stairwells and sweaty faces lit with coloured spotlights like they’re in a Dario Argento horror film. Those faces are played by actors who know how to make secondary characters vivid and memorable – Viggo Mortensen, James Gandolfini, Rocky Carroll, George Dzundza and others – while the anamorphic cinematography is terrific, enhancing drama and danger all the time. Fantastic entertainment. (A side note: as some of the images in this blog post suggest, Tony Scott had a fondness for baseball caps. He took to wearing them himself once baldness struck in early middle age, and a notable number of his actors use them too: see Hackman and Washington in Crimson Tide, Robert Duvall in Days of Thunder, Brad Pitt in Spy Game, Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, multiple characters in baseball drama The Fan…)
6. Déjà Vu (2006)
Tony Scott’s only science-fiction flick is set in a post-9/11, post-Katrina New Orleans, and sees Denzel Washington play ATF agent Doug Carlin. Soon after a bomb rips through a ferry, killing hundreds, Doug is introduced to a radical new technology by Val Kilmer’s FBI boss. This machine allows them to look into the past – but only on a strict four-day time delay – and watch anyone in the city. Can Doug solve the crime before it happens, and possibly even save a key victim called Claire (Paula Patton)? We’re in the kind of surveillance genre Scott had used in Enemy of the State (see below), but the process now also becomes a twisted satire of filmmaking as Doug orders up different angles and close-ups and assembles his bad guy’s narrative. This is a wildly inventive time-travel idea and opens up plenty of fascinating questions for both us and Doug. Repeated viewings of the film reveal subtle details which suggest a circular storyline has been playing out countless times, with cause and effect churned up in a blender, but we still invest in *our* version of Doug and his chances of stopping the explosion. ‘You can be wrong a million times, you only have to be right once,’ he says. This intricately plotted movie was written by Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio, who had issues with some of the changes Scott made. One amendment was a new car-chase sequence with Doug driving in the present… and the bad guy driving in the past. (Doug has goggles that allows him to see, in real time, what was on the road 100 hours previously.) Scott argued, a bit dubiously, that he was moving the film’s concepts from science fiction to science fact – but either way the scene is a brilliantly bonkers piece of cinema. Elsewhere, alongside all the Star Trek tech, the film has a downbeat mood. Doug isn’t a dour man – that devilish Denzel charisma is often dialled up – but he’s still a film-noir loner detective, and he also takes part in one of the oddest romances in cinema. Doug first meets victim Claire after the explosion – when she’s dead on the coroner’s slab. He holds her hand, looks into her blank eyes and comments on how she was beautiful. He then becomes fascinated with her as he spies on her in the past (even watching her shower at one point), hoping that she will lead him to the bomber. A director with a more ghoulish or macabre intent might have twisted this into a form of cinematic necrophilia, but Tony Scott goes for the noble and the sincere – and we therefore care about both characters. Enormous fun.
5. Man on Fire (2004)
Tony Scott had tried to get an adaptation of the novel Man on Fire made in the early 80s, but ultimately he wasn’t involved with a version released in 1987. So when time came for a remake, he attacked the material with blood-and-guts intensity. This is essentially the kind of vigilante plot that Charles Bronson would have once starred in. But what lifts 2004’s Man on Fire above such tawdry fare is a combination of Denzel Washington’s soulful presence and Tony Scott’s visual brilliance… John Creasy (Washington) is an alcoholic loner with a shady past in the US special forces – ‘Do you think God will forgive us for what we’ve done?’ he asks a friend in an early scene. He’s looking for work in Mexico, where kidnapping people for the ransom money is rife, and soon bags a job as a bodyguard for a rich couple’s young daughter – the wise-beyond-her-years Pita (Dakota Fanning, fantastic). At first Creasy finds it difficult to spend time with a child – he finds her irritating and tiresome. But slowly, of course, a strong bond forms between the two. Creasy becomes as much a father figure as a security expert, coaching Pita to swim and teaching her some espionage tricks. There’s a genuine, believable warmth between the characters – all the better for setting up the plot development that’s coming with dreaded predictability. When Pita is snatched off the street by a gang, Scott films the sequence with thrilling innovation. Hand-cranked cameras and ramped editing emphasise the danger and create an expressionistic mood; the world is off-kilter and chaotic, Creasy’s distress is savagely dramatised. After recovering from a gunshot wound, Creasy then goes after the gang and what follows are scenes of brutal retribution that anticipate Washington’s Equalizer films by a decade. But the groundwork done in the movie’s opening 50 minutes saves all this from being gratuitous torture porn; we understand Creasy’s obsession. Man on Fire was Washington’s first film for Tony Scott in nine years (Robert De Niro had turned the part down) and he brings a monumental weight to the role. Creasy is a stock character – the suicidal loner with personal demons – and he’s involved in a stock relationship: the cynical, damaged man softened by an idealistic child. But in the hands of Scott, Washington and writer Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential), Creasy is so much more. Whether he’s quoting the Bible with a sadness in his eyes or buying a Linda Ronstadt CD to cheer himself up, we often infer a painful backstory and feel for Creasy straightaway… All this missed the mark for some viewers, however. The film was not a critical success, with American reviewer AO Scott – another ‘Anthony Scott’, coincidentally – saying some especially egregious things about his namesake. Others took against the film’s vigilantist politics or its unflattering portrayal of Mexico City. But while often labelled as a movie about revenge, Man on Fire is actually a mythical story of redemption. It absolutely *soars*.
4. The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
This film was originally going to be called simply Pelham 123, to distinguish it from the 1974 adaptation of John Godey’s novel. As in the 1970s movie, a group of terrorists seize a New York City subway train and hold the passengers ransom for a huge amount of money (Scott’s version ups the fee from $1 million to $10 million). Leading the bad guys this time is John Travolta, snarling his way Pacino-like through the role of Ryder – an aggressive man with a prison tat, a Fu Manchu moustache and a fondness for theatrical speechmaking. Meanwhile, the transit coordinator attempting to talk him down is Denzel Washington’s calm, personable Walter Garber, who just happens to be on duty when the incident takes place. Tony Scott had to work hard to convince Washington to take the role, eventually succeeding by pitching the character as ‘Mr Everyman’ – a contrast from the powerful military and law-enforcement men of their previous collaborations. Not that the movie is down-to-earth or mundane. Knowing that his action thriller is built around a phone call between two men who stay sat in their seats, Scott compensates by amping up the energy at every opportunity. We get hyper-quick cutting, more use of variable frame-rates, and – for scenes in the head offices of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority – an almost permanently moving camera, which arcs and spins dizzyingly around Garber’s desk. The result is an exciting popcorn movie with no fat on the bone. (These days, however, there is a sad subtext to The Taking of Pelham 123. The story’s climax is set on the Manhattan Bridge and features a character pleading for someone to end his life. Just three years after the film’s release, Tony Scott jumped to his death from a bridge in Los Angeles. At the time, rumours circulated that he was overwhelmed by a bad cancer diagnosis – perhaps a terminal one. The family soon denied this, as did the official coroner’s report, though Ridley Scott later talked of his brother dealing with a long-term cancer battle. Tony Scott was 68.)
3. Unstoppable (2010)
An example of pure cinema, this exhilarating disaster movie is built around a single, 90-minute action sequence. The plot begins when a moving freight train is allowed to leave a depot with no driver aboard – a potential disaster because it’s pulling explosive cargo. (The idea was gleamed from a real-life incident in 2001.) This one small mistake soon snowballs into a 100mph epic, as various plans are attempted to stop the ever-accelerating train before it careers through populated areas… Our leads are two bickering railroad workers who realise they are best placed to solve the crisis. Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) is an old stager about to lose his job; Will Colson (Chris Pine) is a young buck whose heart isn’t in it; but they must work together to stop the runaway train. There’s just enough drama – Frank’s grief/loneliness, Will’s legal problems with his wife – to flesh out the muscles and make us care about these popcorn characters caught in the maelstrom of danger and action. Elsewhere, the cast is filled with actors able to make instant impressions, whether it be Lew Temple’s cowboy-ish railway worker or Rosario Dawson’s yardmaster Connie Hooper, both of whom deserve their own spin-offs. These people are deliberately unglamorous and blue-collar, because Tony Scott knew that all the ‘Hollywood’ is in the intensity and thrill of the high-speed chase. Making his final film before taking his own life in 2012, Scott shows a *masterful* control of visual storytelling. He knows exactly how to create, sustain and ratchet up tension – from a sedate start to a fever-pitch finale – while the physical movement of characters and vehicles always has the kind of clarity that’s often missing from CG-heavy blockbusters. This is a film of visceral physicality, with enormous stunts and crashes and near-misses done for real. Scenes in the train cabs, meanwhile, are sometimes shot in real moving trains, sometimes faked in a studio, but never feel anything less than vibrant and vital. Stripped down and unpretentious, Unstoppable is a cinematic masterpiece of dynamic movement, pulsating speed and widescreen panache. Both Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan have raved about this film. There are also echoes of Spielberg’s Duel in the way that huge, hulking, heavy vehicles are shot like they’re mythical creatures – massive dragons thundering through the Pennsylvania countryside.
The complex genesis of True Romance started with a script written by Quentin Tarantino‘s pal Roger Avery in the mid 1980s. Tarantino redrafted the idea, cutting out a significant B-plot that later became the basis for the movie Natural Born Killers, and intended to direct the movie himself. However, he then met Tony Scott through a mutual friend at Scott’s birthday party. Tarantino was an avowed fan – he’d loved Revenge, for example, and later affectionately mocked Top Gun in a cameo acting role in 1994 film Sleep with Me – so gave his blessing to Scott taking over the True Romance project. The result is a scintillating marriage of the two men’s energies. Christian Slater stars as Clarence, an optimistic slacker who likes comic books, obscure movies and Elvis Presley. After hooker-with-a-heart Alabama (a terrific Patricia Arquette) falls for him, they accidentally end up with a suitcase full of cocaine and head to LA to sell it. However, while they negotiate with a maniacal movie producer, the mob who own the drugs are on their tail… In some ways, the movie is a series of set-pieces, such as the opening 17 minutes in which Clarence and Alabama meet, fall in love and get married; Clarence’s tough-guy impression when he visits (and kills) her despicable pimp; the deliciously OTT gunfight in a hotel suite that climaxes the film; and most famously a confrontation between Clarence’s father and a gangster, which is an extraordinary, 10-minute scene of brutality, one-upmanship and acidic dialogue played with grit and guts by Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken. But to focus on these individually is to miss the film’s overall sweep, which is constantly imbued with whimsy, sincerity and hope. This film is a wish-fulfilment writ large, packing in sex and drugs and violence and melancholic music and cool quips and the thirst for a better life. Clarence is essentially an urban superhero; Alabama is a wet dream come to life. But that’s the point: this film is a *fantasy*; everything is naively romantic rather than boringly realistic. The hugely impressive cast is stacked full of class and talent – Slater, Arquette, Hopper, Walken, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt, Bronson Pinchot, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Rapaport, Saul Rubinek, Conchata Ferrell, James Gandolfini, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Ed Lauter – and Tony Scott shows an astonishing command of his plot and his characters, directing everything with so much pace and panache. Unlike the acrimony when Oliver Stone made a butchered version of Natural Born Killers, Tarantino enjoyed what Scott did with his material, which is semi-autobiographical and his most personal script to date. The story was inspired by his time working at VHS rental shop Video Archives, a mythologised part of Quentin’s pre-fame narrative, with the lead character’s workplace shifted to a comic-book store. ‘I didn’t get a suitcase full of cocaine, and I didn’t know any gangsters,’ Tarantino has said. ‘But even though all that stuff was movie shit, the people at Video Archives felt like it was this big-budget, Tony Scott-directed version of their childhood memories. It captured our aesthetic. It captured our je ne sais quoi.’
1. Enemy of the State (1998)
Enemy of the State is a 1,000-horsepower muscle car. When the accelerator is pushed and the engine revs, the road is eaten up and corners are taken at speed… The story is the kind of ‘innocent man caught up in a conspiracy he doesn’t understand’ plot that Alfred Hitchcock once revelled in, but updated for the ostentatious, energetic 1990s. Will Smith, deploying his major-league star quality, plays labour lawyer Robert Dean, who unwittingly acquires the videotape of a murder. When the killer, a corrupt spymaster played by Jon Voight, comes after him, Robert’s life is upturned. His house is ransacked, his wife doubts his innocence, and he loses his job. With the help of a shadowy ally called Brill (Gene Hackman), Robert must find out why he’s been targeted… Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Identity) both worked on the script, which harkens back to 70s paranoia thrillers like The Conversation, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men with its tale of unchecked, state-sanctioned surveillance and the corrupting power of American politics. (In fact, Enemy of the State positions itself as a spiritual sequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation by using a photograph of Gene Hackman from that earlier movie.) The tightly packed plot sees a thematic use of videos and camera and technology – the murder of an anti-surveillance politician is accidentally caught on a trap camera; Robert’s day job involves a conflict with the Mob over a videotape; the bad guys can call on CCTV feeds and live satellite imagery to hunt down fugitives (including some fantasy “zoom and enhance” that puts Blade Runner to shame). This Big Brother-riffing motif is just as topical now as it was in 1998, and means the movie hasn’t dated in any significant way. As for the cast, Smith, Voight and Hackman are the highlights but the film is populated with talented, watchable actors in supporting roles: Regina King as Robert’s wife; Lisa Bonet as his fixer and former girlfriend; Ian Hart, Jake Busey, Barry Pepper and Scott Caan as covert agents; Jason Lee as the geek who accidentally films the murder; Gabriel Byrne in a showy, two-scene cameo; Jack Black and Seth Green as tech boffins; Stuart Wilson as a politician; Tom Sizemore as a mob boss; Philip Baker Hall as Robert’s boss; and Jason Roberts as the congressman who’s assassinated because he won’t allow some fascist legislation to pass… Tony Scott, meanwhile, marshals all aspects of his filmmaking craft – cinematography, editing, mise en scene, music, choice of locations – to create a fluid yet pulsating beat that powers the 120 minutes of runtime. Extensive use of long lenses keeps every scene feeling claustrophobic and intense, even if staged on a grand scale, while the main plot is embellished with comedy asides and flamboyant action. This film is fast but never feels rushed; funny but never silly; compelling and exciting and gripping. The textbook example of the techno-thriller genre.
Agree with this ranking? Disagree? Let me know in the comments section below…
Ian Farrington 