Christopher Nolan’s remake / reimagining / stolen title of Leslie Norman’s 1958 Ealing production about the largest wartime evacuation in history is a soulless affair. It’s very difficult to make an uplifting film about defeat. Despite one of the surviving soldiers reading a newspaper report of Winston Churchill’s momentous ‘Fight them on the Beaches’ speech, there is precious little to instil the idea of triumph against adversity in Nolan’s script. Basically, with the exception of Kenneth Branagh’s reserved navy Commander, a few Spitfire pilots and Mark Rylance’s pleasure cruiser skipper, the cast is crippled by having to portray cowardice to the umpteenth degree. This is, of course, exactly what Dunkirk was like. Men were scared, inexperienced, young, witnessing horrors they never expected; worst of all they were shown up to be ill-prepared and inadequate as a fighting force. The withdrawal of the Expeditionary Force is one of the most significant moments in British imperial history as it provided the first genuine evidence the Victorian / Edwardian / Georgian Empire, which then sat at its largest, was in terminal decline. No longer would Britannia rule the waves, or whole straths of continents. So, Nolan does a fair job of presenting these ineffective, frightened, reactive human beings, but the exercise is hopelessly over balanced. Even the heroism feels worthless – a young schoolboy dies needlessly; a daring RAF pilot is captured; for every saved life, another is lost. Nolan as script writer doesn’t provide any background to his characters, so we don’t care about them. The troops are a bitter bunch to a man. The officers maintain not so much a stiff-upper lip as a solid one. The civilians are ciphers for an everyman who never existed. No one displays urgency. There’s hardly an angry voice, just one or two incidents perhaps where tempers fray, and these the result of misinformation and miscommunication. The film is remarkably flat. It lacks emotion and it lacks suspense. The editing is all over the shop. One moment we are spiralling through the air with a RAF patrol, next we are at Weymouth pier, next we are on a sand dune, back in the air, on a hospital ship. We see every action sequence at least twice: ships capsize, Spitfires dogfight with German Messerschmitts, men peer at the sky as sirens whistle, Stukas dive bomb the beaches. The nadir is when two scenes of drowning men are intercut, not so much building tension as burying it, us and them inside their sinking vessels. Even the time frame is the hacked about. Night scenes are intercut with days. Time stands still or expands when necessary to feed the story. At one point Mark Rylance’s boat is on its own, then its surrounded by other civilian craft. The whole landscape of the action is a mess of intermingled, ill-described stories, many of which I assume are genuine and condensed to allow a workable narrative frame, except Nolan – renowned for his cross-cutting – hasn’t made this one work. Additionally, the beach scenes are hopelessly under manned. While it is documented that the troops were remarkably stoic in defeat, forming orderly queues, singing, etc, and Nolan recreates this well, there simply doesn’t seem to be enough of them in this telling and the sheer chaos of the beachheads, the destruction of the army’s hardware, the bombing of Dunkirk, the battle to preserve the little wing-ding of salvation, isn’t touched on at all. There was a BBC documentary from 2010 shown after the film and the veterans gave a much more visceral interpretation of what really occurred through the power of speech and first-hand knowledge. Nolan seems to miss the empathetic understanding some of the directors of the fifties and sixties leant to their interpretations. Movies such as The Longest Day, Is Paris Burning and, yes, the original Dunkirk have a inherent reality which some of these modern CGI influenced blockbusters don’t. Curiously, given the success of the director’s psychologically challenged characters of the Batman cycle, you wonder where all the personal insight has vanished to. On the plus side Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography is superb. Hans Zimmer’s score is an understated masterpiece. Overall, overrated, I feel.
I think the structure of the plot is very good in Dunkirk. There are many aspects of the movie I like - Nolan and his crew are highly skilled. But Dunkirk is the only recent movie I think should have had more and not less CGI. There should have been more planes in the air and much more troops on the beach.
On the whole I like Dunkirk. I find the interwoven time sequences, the cross cutting and seeing the same event from different perspectives intriguing and entertaining - but the thing that holds it back from greatness for me is the lack of scale displayed on screen. As Number24 suggested, the film is crying out for some digital crowds on the beach - plus a lot more smoke, equipment, wreckage, aircraft overhead etc. The town of Dunkirk itself looks like a pristine ghost town, not a bomb-scarred battleground. I appreciate Nolan's determination to shoot in the real location, doing everything 'in camera' etc but it does rather let the film down as a historical recreation. The 1958 Dunkirk, 2007's Atonement, and even the 1969 Italian movie Eagles Over London do a much better job of recreating the historical setting.
Hitchcock' directorial debut. The story of two showgirls and their complicated love lives. The saintly showgirl helps the down-on-her-luck showgirl get a job in the chorus line and shares her apartment. Down-on-her-luck showgirl rapidly becomes a big star, dumps her hardworking fiancee for a Prince, and repays the saintly showgirl by treating her as a commoner. Saintly showgirl marries her roommates fiancees friend, who turns out to be a rogue and moves to Africa where he has a local mistress. Final scenes in Africa are actually a bit thrillerish, with violence against women, gunplay, and a drowning! One prototypical Hitchcock signature element is a voyeuristic PoV sequence with opera glasses ogling the showgirls' legs as they dance. One day he'd make a whole film about voyeurism!
Hitchcock followed this with The Mountain Eagle, 1926, now completely lost, then The Lodger, 1926, which the director himself considers the first real Hitchcock film. The Pleasure Garden received a wider rerelease when The Lodger was a success. But his next several films were not proper thrillers either, despite his obvious skill in that genre. A boxing film, various romances, family dramas and stories of class divides. Blackmail, 1929, his first sound film, is the next true Hitchcock thriller and is absolutely essential. (I have reported on Blackmail elsewhere) Even then he was still being assigned films that did not take advantage of his obvious strengths.
Two films after Blackmail comes the other early Hitchcock I just watched...
Murder!, 1930
From its one word high concept title you'd think this should be another prototypical thriller. There is a murder in the opening shot, but otherwise this a conventional mystery story structure which Hitchcock typically did not do: he was more interested in characters experiencing the threat of violence than other characters talking about it after it was done. The victim and suspect are both stage actresses lodging in a poor London neighbourhood, where all their neighbours seem to work for the same local theatre. There is a dark satirical jury scene, where we see just how fallible is the jury system to loudtalking jurors bullying dissenters into changing their verdict to go along with the majority. One of those dissenters is Sir John, a wealthy respectable stage actor himself who takes it upon himself to find the real killer.
Typical Hitchcock elements: finale in a circus tent in front of paying audience. Even more interesting, during the jury scene one of the dissenters argues the suspect was experiencing a "psychic fugue", meaning she was not responsible for her actions, and goes on to define the term. This is the sort of authentic psychological exposition Hitchcock would return to in Spellbound, Psycho, Marnie and more!
It would be another four years and six not-so-thrillerish films before Hitchcock would get to The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Regardless of whether either film is a thriller, one thing that unites these two films and makes them a valid double feature: both take place entirely within the world of show-folk, exposing and satirising a lifestyle most of us would not know, and using the device of the show-within-the-show to add layers to the narrative.
This comedy thriller would have left me slightly disappointed had I seen it at movie theatres when it came out but with hardly any trips to the cinema of late, it's a big thrill to catch it on TV. Ryan Reynolds is the bodyguard and Samuel L Jackson the hitman under Interpol protection so he can testify against war crimes committed by the evil Belarus president (bit far-sighted that) played in Air Force One style by Gary Oldman - why he wastes his time with stuff like Darkest Hour when he can be doing stuff like this I'll never know.
This is not a serious thriller and not meant to be, it riffs on the idea that this kind of movie is pretty much done and there's fun to be had here. The humour does owe something to Family Guy etc, that kind of thing - Clive Owen's Shoot 'Em Up too.
It also riffs on Shrek - Jackson is basically Donkey to Reynolds disappointed and anti-social Shrek, berating him for his life choices and ragging him. It is great fun if a bit obvious. Other movie nods include Pulp Fiction and Bond fans will find a couple of things in there too. It's odd - this is a comedy but the violence is full on and intense. Jackson is not playing this as an old guy.
What is odd is that bar flashbacks none of it is filmed in the US though it's a US film. The opener is in London, then it moves to Manchester and much of the movie is spent there before going to Amsterdam. Shots made to glamourise London sort of work but they're filming it like it is the US and it rather conjure up episodes of The Apprentice or the inserts in old episodes of the sitcom Not Going Out. This raises a problem I've long thought - American generic action films sort of work in America because the street furniture and everything is cinematic in a way that you don't get elsewhere. If the two leads are American, could it not work with British stars or thereabouts? Colin Farrell (okay he's Irish) or Jason Stratham - or could he only work it abroad? Could we have a British film industry doing this stuff or would that not work?
I recall a recent Anthony Hopkins film where he plays a psychic - it's standard stuff, well done and set in America, Chicago if I recall. Very enjoyable because it just has the genre down pat. There is nothing in the plot to say it can't be filmed in England. But it wouldn't be the same. If they did the film in the 70s with say Richard Burton, we know how it would be - it would sort of look down at heel and wretched. America doesn't always look like these big, bustling chrome movie sets of course. But while parts of London do look like that, it's not quite the same to just shoot it like it's New York or Chicago and hope for the best. Each nation needs to find its own cinematic brand without making it all Richard Curtis all the time. James Bond aside, I'm not sure the UK has the knack of knocking out reliable action films. The US has the genre down pat, though let's not forget it did have to reinvent itself in the mid to late 80s and is constantly honing it.
The film is a good laugh, not up there with Deadpool or the sequel in particular. Is there a sequel to this? I don't even know, I think one came out recently didn't it?
Oh, yeah - The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard. Very variable reviews - the 'huge belly laughs, 10/10 reviews' that might not be studio plants and those who decry it as a waste of their life, it does have a whiff of Ocean's 12 about it. I'm not risking Covid for it, let's put it that way.
Dwayne Johnson stars in this highly formulaic Die Hard/Towering Inferno retread, though it's spectacular enough. As my review of 'Last Bond Film' points out, most of these films benefit from a subtext or second narrative to distract from the fact that the main story isn't always that interesting even with all the bells and whistles. It's Die Hard without the jokes really. One super villain - a young woman with a super haircut who takes glee from killing - she's Onatopp really, there's even a GoldenEye shooting spree - is criminally underused. You look forward to her comeuppance but...
Superbly directed by Sam Peckinpah, this was not received very well by the majority of critics, but I found it excellent in 1974 and even more so on recent viewing. Starring the underrated Warren Oates as Bennie, a drunken whorehouse piano player, who gets wind of a reward offered for the head of Alfredo Garcia, who has impregnated a Mexican crime lord’s daughter. He knows that Garcia is already dead and goes to dig up the body for the head and claim the reward with his hooker girlfriend in tow.
As the film progresses they meet a rapist biker played by Kris Kristofferson and two gay hitmen played by Gig Young and Robert Webber. What follows is a lot of slow motion violence when his girlfriend is killed and Bennie slowly loses the plot and begins to talk to the head.
It’s not a pretty film but it’s absorbing and beautifully played by all concerned as they portray the lowlifes of society with greed their only salvation.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
All my night duty over time has given me the opportunity to watch many of the films I have collected. One of them being the magnificent seven. Although I enjoyed it I thought it was a bit too long. But I did see Horst Buckholst in another film on TV called 'Tiger Bay' where he was a murderer on the run. I recommend that to everyone if you haven't seen it. (I have just checked and the film is on you tube.)
Although I have seen it before I also watched 'Hell Drivers'. Sean Connery had a small part in this. Again I recommend it (again the film is available on you tube)
One of a series, this has many Bond alumni in the cast: Douglas Wilmer (OP), Tsai Chin (YOLT and CR06), Burt Kwouk (Assorted), Joseph Furst (DAF) and... oh yes, Sir Christopher Lee (you don't need me to tell you which Bond film he's in) as the title character (no, not the brides).
There used to be a trope in movies of casting a well-known Caucasian horror actor as an Oriental (Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi, and of course Lee) which thankfully has finished. This film, and the others in the series, does therefore give us a hint of what Lee would have been like as Dr No if that casting had worked out. As a fan of Sir Christopher, I am glad he ended up as Scaramanga.
The plot involves Fu Manchu kidnapping the daughters of prominent politicians as part of his (inevitable) plan to gain world domination. It's full of holes and laughable, so I thoroughly enjoyed it.
A classic of its kind in its day, Frank Borzage’s overly short adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s overly long novel, dispenses with almost all the powerful telling of war and the detestability of it in favour of the love story between Frederic Henry, an ambulance driver in the Italian campaigns of World War One, and Catherine Berkley, a nurse. The ending is also altered into something resembling a trope towards peace. Hemingway’s bitter conclusion is diluted. Indeed, the whole war is virtually excised. It’s there, barely, but Borzage, or more accurately, screenwriters Benjamin Glazer and Oliver Garrett remove everything but a montage sequence of some might showing Henry’s struggles as he deserts his service to pursue true love. Had a few more scenes of this kind been utilised, A Farewell to Arms may have stood the test of time as a first-rate war film of tenderness and power. As it is, the one and a quarter hours passes fast and fresh and by the time you’re attached to the protagonists, they’ve gone. Adolphe Menjou is more than adequate as Henry’s superior Major Rinaldi, but he’s not really got enough screen time to properly gnash his teeth on. Ditto the leads: Gary Cooper, very good – Hemingway begged him to star in it – and Helen Hayes, simpering at best. She’s hopelessly miscast and it shows.
Borzage was one of Hollywood’s top directors at the time. He’d won a couple of Oscars and proves very innovative here. Two sequences stand out. When Henry is injured and enters a military hospital, the action is shown from his POV, including views of the chapel ceiling – predestining his death, perhaps? – and a superb close-up of Helen Hayes as she bends to kiss him, the screen filling slightly out-of-focus with just her eye socket. The second sequence comes later as Hayes recites a letter she’s written describing her gorgeous apartment; as she does so, the camera arcs around the actual, desolate, raggedy room. Charles Lang was a talented black and white photographer, which helps. Some scenes are played almost like a silent movie, the sentences of dialogue secondary to the action. This is true particularly of the aforementioned montage where incidents happen to music, not with words.
Hemingway hated the film and I can see why, as the human interest of the novel was much broader than simply the romance, crossing into the realms of morality, of the impact of killing, suffering and death and its potential impact on the destruction of human civilisation. A money spinner in its day; a but undercooked for 2021.
Earlier this week I watched my first John Wick movie ever. How is this possible, you may ask. Back when the first movie in the series was new I read that it was a about a man going om a bloody rampage to avenge his dog. His dog! 😲
Not his wife, daughter, brother or father. His dog. I figured I needed to draw a line in the sand. I've seen a few American action/disaster movies where all the survivors with speaking parts risk everyone's life to save the family dog, but this was the last straw to me. Many years have passed and sequels have been made. It has dawned on me that this is a series of well-made and very successful movies, som I decided to watch the first one.
The dog issue was solved as well as it possibly could have been, but it's still plenty silly. I accept it because the movie is high quality and the action is very well done. I wished the fight scenes in future Bond movies will be this good. Keanu Reeves is a fine action lead and he has obviously worked very hard to do those fight scenes om camera, and we can see clearly what's going on. Imagine if QoS was made like this -it could have been a fan favorite! The water plot is after all less silly than the dog.
The "avenging his dog" story line was, like I store, solved in the best possible way. I still think all that voilence because a dog was killed is a bit bizzare.
I should have mentioned the hitman subculture because it was the best non-action aspect of the movie.
you know the only part I ever saw was the scenes with the dog! it was a very nice dog, a beagle pup, my favourite kind of dog.
Once the dog disappeared from the story I switched to something else because I don't like Keanu Reeves.
Now... if the bad guys killed Keanu Reeves after the first scene and the rest of the movie was about that cute beagle fighting to avenge him, then that'd be a film I'd watch.
Yesterday I took in THE GREEN KNIGHT, based on the classic poem "Sir Gawain and the. . ." most English majors have read at some time or other. It's that rare breed: a special effects-laden summer film that is also deliberately paced and contemplative, forcing you to think about the moral situation Gawain (Dev Patel) is in. Literary geeks like me will be happy that the source poem is more or less represented in the screenplay, and there are moments from Spenser and even Ambrose Bierce. Give it a shot!
The Doolittle Raid of 1942, as told on film two years after the actual event. I’m always slightly nervous when watching a war film made within the duration of the conflict. Will it be a full on propaganda piece? Or will it be a film that stands up after the event? I think this film falls into the latter category. I don’t claim to be a well read historian, especially in connection to the raid in question, but the film does a good job of telling the events as I know them. The film boasts a good cast including Van Johnson, Spencer Tracy, Roberts Walker and Mitchum. However, like a number of other old war movies it includes a dull domestic subplot involving one of the pilots and his wife. As tedious as this can be, the flying scenes are nicely shot featuring genuine period aircraft and some decent model work. At 140 minutes it’s a bit overlong - Cutting some of the soapie bits would have helped. In the last 2 decades we’ve had retellings of the Doolittle Raid from Michael Bay (rubbish) and Roland Emmerich (much better). I enjoyed seeing an account made during the time period of the actual events. Recommended for WWII movie fans.
Dino De Laurentiis's entry into the mid60s spyspoof craze
stars Michael Connors from Mannix as a completely forgettable CIA agent investigating a case in Rio de Janeiro. Film opens with a spectacular chase scene inside and on top of the giant sized Christ the Redeemer statue. Like the ending of Hitchcock's Saboteur. Not so slick maybe as the cable car scene in Moonraker but more dangerous looking, Mannix even did his own stuntwork because the real stuntman said "wuddaya think I'm crazy? I'm not doing that!"
Mannix is investigating a typical charming Latin playboy character with dozens of stunningly beautiful ladyfriends who keep disappearing. Latest ladyfriend is played by Dorothy Provine (Milton Berle's wife from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and more relevantly Rip Torn's wife from The Man from UNCLE: One Spy Too Many). Turns out she's a British agent, and she plays it precisely like Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds. She is by far the best part of this film. She rides around in the back seat of a Rolls Royce driven by her chauffeur, played by Terry-Thomas. also from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He also is a far more memorable character than Mannix.
When the American and British spies finally recognise each other, there is a scene were Lady Penelope pulls a variety of girlish accoutrements from her dainty purse and they are all deadly gadgets, that's how Mannix ID's her as British Intelligence. sound familiar?
The Rolls itself is full of endless gadgets, and when cornered in a chase across the mountain switchbacks, camouflages itself as an advertising billboard. Yes there is a prominently placed advertising billboard along a mountain road outside of Rio. sound familiar? Sorry I didn't take notice what product was being placed.
as for the villains diabolical plot...
...he is deriving a poisonous gas from orchids that causes sterility. He is about to launch a rocket that will release the gas into the atmosphere and sterilize the entire planet. Except somehow for himself, and the dozens of missing beautiful women who he has kept cryogenically frozen...
...final scenes take place in a rather impressive villains headquarters, complete with countdown til doomsday...
... though the important bit where Lady Penelope escapes the rocket and her chauffeur sabotages it are not shown, just exposited about afterwards...
...That's kinda weird, like a missing reel, yet the dialog acknowledges the crucial scenes are absent.
A while back I watched a cheapie EuroSpy film (008: Operation Exterminate) with scenes in Cairo that seemed prototypical of the first half of the Spy Who Loved Me. EON couldn't actually used the contents of Fleming's book so had to look for plot ideas elsewhere, fair enough. But that similarity was minor and probably coincidental compared to this. Moonraker on the other hand was a perfectly good thriller novel that EON had the full rights to, I wonder why they threw out so much of Fleming's plot just to replace it with so much of this? Did anybody notice at the time, or was this film already completely forgotten by 1979?
I'm sure this subject has come up in another thread which I remember contributing to, but I can't remember the details. I do remember seeing "Kiss The Girls..." in the cinema and enjoying it, though!
@caractacus potts thanks for that review. I've wanted to watch Kiss the Girls... for some time. You've rather whetted my appetite. I think you're right in that a lot of the Euro-Spy movies were forgotten- some almost as soon as they were made ! But perhaps not by Christopher Wood...
Sidney Pollack's multi-Oscar winning movie is just as good as remembered it. The characters are layered and interesting, the acting very good, the story is moving and the locations exotic and breath-taking. I didn't notice Robert Redford's accent when I watched it at the cinema, but an American accent simply sounds wrong from enyone named Denis Finch-Hatton 😂
The director now regrets not making the movie in widescreen, but other than that the movie seems flawless.
There are connections to Bond. Of cource there's the beautiful score by John Berry. Klaus-Maria got nominated to an Oscar for his role as Karen Blixen's husband, but we also ser Michael Kitchen as Finch-Hatton's friend.
Zis mofie iz brilliant und I order yoo all to go zee it!
This movie is about the ten year old boy Jojo who's in the Hitler Youth and has Hitler as his imaginary friend. Scarlett Johansson plays his single mother does what she can in a crazy world, Sam Rockwell is the flamboyant war veteran Hitler Youth leder and Taika Waititi (What we do in the shadows, The hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor: Ragnarok) both directs and plays imaginary Hitler. One day Jojo discovers his mother is hiding a teenager Jewish girl (Thomasin Mackenzie) in the attic. I saw the young actress in "Leave no trace" earlier. She's an up-and-coming star. Jojo is a fanatical nazi, but he can't tell the Gestapo because they'll take his mother if he does. The tone of the movie is bizzare and comical, but it also has pathos and bite when needed. There is a lot more to be said about Jojo Rabbit, but basically it's a big mistanke not to watch it.
In this 1950s psychological chiller, a stalker infiltrates the wedding of his former wife and - by way of Southern charm - sets about sabotaging it by ingratiating himself with her family - casting aspersions and insinuations, and carrying out a subtle, gaslighting character assassination of his first wife. First insulting her to her face, then conjuring up memories of happier times by offering a sick wedding present consisting of the yacht on which they honeymooned. It is a chilling masterclass in coercive control, with the humiliation of the groom-to-be as a callous afterthought.
The final scene, in which the narcissist walks the bride into the church to re-marry her - watched by the unsuspecting friends and family of the groom - is possibly the most sadistic and disturbing end to a film, on a par with the church finale in Cruel Intentions.
The films was remade as simply Society in the 1980s, though the ending was made very different - though equally disturbing.
At 2am I remembered I'd missed out the way the blue-eyed Southern sociopath plies the bride to be with alcohol all the better to frame her so she thinks she slept with somebody but didn't.
My last film watched... COME AND SEE (1985 - Elem Klimov)
This is a film that I've been eager to watch for quite a while. It has the distinction of having the second highest average user rating on Letterboxd. It is also a World War II film, which is one of my favourite subjects in film. Made in Soviet Union in mid-80s, it depicts a teenage boy's experiences in Belarus during the latter stages of the war.
Sometimes anticipating that a film is going to be great can be detrimental to the experience and I was a little concerned that would be the case here. For the first 90 minutes or so I was enjoying the film, but not as much as I'd hoped. But then the last 45 minutes or so blew me away with both the brutality of the events depicted, as well as the filmmaking technique. It is an extraordinary film, not just in the sense of being very good, but also in that it is not quite like anything I've ever seen before. I particularly enjoyed some of the subtle camera movement, the use of the old-fashioned 'academy' aspect ratio and the repeated use of close-up portraits of the characters which are particularly striking in the nearly square shaped frame. Also in the latter stages some split-diopter cinematography gives certain compositions a particularly unique look. The central performance by the young teenager Aleksei Kravchenko is also quite striking, his face vividly displaying the horror of war as he transforms from a fresh-faced child at the beginning of the film to a worn and haggard looking figure by the end.
It's a film that was hard to digest on first viewing and no doubt I will go back and rewatch it in the future, but it is certainly a film that will linger in my mind for a good long while.
THE SUICIDE SQUAD. Note the THE. This is not SUICIDE SQUAD, the godawful mess from five years ago--the director of which has since disowned and suggested that Warner Bros. did to him what they did to Zack Snyder and JUSTICE LEAGUE--this is a sequel/reboot/apology that is an absolute blast from start to finish. Margot Robbie (IMHO the best actress--if I can still use that term--working today) as Harley Quinn is the one member of the original squad who returns for this outing (Jai Courtney only cameos as Captain Boomerang, and Joel Kinneman and Viola Davis are back as the squad's controllers), but she's only one delight here. Fast, funny, foul-mouthed and gleefully violent--if you like your superhero movies, you'll like this.
Comments
As we're talking Nolan...
DUNKIRK (2017)
Christopher Nolan’s remake / reimagining / stolen title of Leslie Norman’s 1958 Ealing production about the largest wartime evacuation in history is a soulless affair. It’s very difficult to make an uplifting film about defeat. Despite one of the surviving soldiers reading a newspaper report of Winston Churchill’s momentous ‘Fight them on the Beaches’ speech, there is precious little to instil the idea of triumph against adversity in Nolan’s script. Basically, with the exception of Kenneth Branagh’s reserved navy Commander, a few Spitfire pilots and Mark Rylance’s pleasure cruiser skipper, the cast is crippled by having to portray cowardice to the umpteenth degree. This is, of course, exactly what Dunkirk was like. Men were scared, inexperienced, young, witnessing horrors they never expected; worst of all they were shown up to be ill-prepared and inadequate as a fighting force. The withdrawal of the Expeditionary Force is one of the most significant moments in British imperial history as it provided the first genuine evidence the Victorian / Edwardian / Georgian Empire, which then sat at its largest, was in terminal decline. No longer would Britannia rule the waves, or whole straths of continents. So, Nolan does a fair job of presenting these ineffective, frightened, reactive human beings, but the exercise is hopelessly over balanced. Even the heroism feels worthless – a young schoolboy dies needlessly; a daring RAF pilot is captured; for every saved life, another is lost. Nolan as script writer doesn’t provide any background to his characters, so we don’t care about them. The troops are a bitter bunch to a man. The officers maintain not so much a stiff-upper lip as a solid one. The civilians are ciphers for an everyman who never existed. No one displays urgency. There’s hardly an angry voice, just one or two incidents perhaps where tempers fray, and these the result of misinformation and miscommunication. The film is remarkably flat. It lacks emotion and it lacks suspense. The editing is all over the shop. One moment we are spiralling through the air with a RAF patrol, next we are at Weymouth pier, next we are on a sand dune, back in the air, on a hospital ship. We see every action sequence at least twice: ships capsize, Spitfires dogfight with German Messerschmitts, men peer at the sky as sirens whistle, Stukas dive bomb the beaches. The nadir is when two scenes of drowning men are intercut, not so much building tension as burying it, us and them inside their sinking vessels. Even the time frame is the hacked about. Night scenes are intercut with days. Time stands still or expands when necessary to feed the story. At one point Mark Rylance’s boat is on its own, then its surrounded by other civilian craft. The whole landscape of the action is a mess of intermingled, ill-described stories, many of which I assume are genuine and condensed to allow a workable narrative frame, except Nolan – renowned for his cross-cutting – hasn’t made this one work. Additionally, the beach scenes are hopelessly under manned. While it is documented that the troops were remarkably stoic in defeat, forming orderly queues, singing, etc, and Nolan recreates this well, there simply doesn’t seem to be enough of them in this telling and the sheer chaos of the beachheads, the destruction of the army’s hardware, the bombing of Dunkirk, the battle to preserve the little wing-ding of salvation, isn’t touched on at all. There was a BBC documentary from 2010 shown after the film and the veterans gave a much more visceral interpretation of what really occurred through the power of speech and first-hand knowledge. Nolan seems to miss the empathetic understanding some of the directors of the fifties and sixties leant to their interpretations. Movies such as The Longest Day, Is Paris Burning and, yes, the original Dunkirk have a inherent reality which some of these modern CGI influenced blockbusters don’t. Curiously, given the success of the director’s psychologically challenged characters of the Batman cycle, you wonder where all the personal insight has vanished to. On the plus side Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography is superb. Hans Zimmer’s score is an understated masterpiece. Overall, overrated, I feel.
Spot on review Chris. Dunkirk misses the mark for me too and you sum up well why.
I think the structure of the plot is very good in Dunkirk. There are many aspects of the movie I like - Nolan and his crew are highly skilled. But Dunkirk is the only recent movie I think should have had more and not less CGI. There should have been more planes in the air and much more troops on the beach.
On the whole I like Dunkirk. I find the interwoven time sequences, the cross cutting and seeing the same event from different perspectives intriguing and entertaining - but the thing that holds it back from greatness for me is the lack of scale displayed on screen. As Number24 suggested, the film is crying out for some digital crowds on the beach - plus a lot more smoke, equipment, wreckage, aircraft overhead etc. The town of Dunkirk itself looks like a pristine ghost town, not a bomb-scarred battleground. I appreciate Nolan's determination to shoot in the real location, doing everything 'in camera' etc but it does rather let the film down as a historical recreation. The 1958 Dunkirk, 2007's Atonement, and even the 1969 Italian movie Eagles Over London do a much better job of recreating the historical setting.
a pair of very early Hitchcocks
The Pleasure Garden, 1925
Hitchcock' directorial debut. The story of two showgirls and their complicated love lives. The saintly showgirl helps the down-on-her-luck showgirl get a job in the chorus line and shares her apartment. Down-on-her-luck showgirl rapidly becomes a big star, dumps her hardworking fiancee for a Prince, and repays the saintly showgirl by treating her as a commoner. Saintly showgirl marries her roommates fiancees friend, who turns out to be a rogue and moves to Africa where he has a local mistress. Final scenes in Africa are actually a bit thrillerish, with violence against women, gunplay, and a drowning! One prototypical Hitchcock signature element is a voyeuristic PoV sequence with opera glasses ogling the showgirls' legs as they dance. One day he'd make a whole film about voyeurism!
Hitchcock followed this with The Mountain Eagle, 1926, now completely lost, then The Lodger, 1926, which the director himself considers the first real Hitchcock film. The Pleasure Garden received a wider rerelease when The Lodger was a success. But his next several films were not proper thrillers either, despite his obvious skill in that genre. A boxing film, various romances, family dramas and stories of class divides. Blackmail, 1929, his first sound film, is the next true Hitchcock thriller and is absolutely essential. (I have reported on Blackmail elsewhere) Even then he was still being assigned films that did not take advantage of his obvious strengths.
Two films after Blackmail comes the other early Hitchcock I just watched...
Murder!, 1930
From its one word high concept title you'd think this should be another prototypical thriller. There is a murder in the opening shot, but otherwise this a conventional mystery story structure which Hitchcock typically did not do: he was more interested in characters experiencing the threat of violence than other characters talking about it after it was done. The victim and suspect are both stage actresses lodging in a poor London neighbourhood, where all their neighbours seem to work for the same local theatre. There is a dark satirical jury scene, where we see just how fallible is the jury system to loudtalking jurors bullying dissenters into changing their verdict to go along with the majority. One of those dissenters is Sir John, a wealthy respectable stage actor himself who takes it upon himself to find the real killer.
Typical Hitchcock elements: finale in a circus tent in front of paying audience. Even more interesting, during the jury scene one of the dissenters argues the suspect was experiencing a "psychic fugue", meaning she was not responsible for her actions, and goes on to define the term. This is the sort of authentic psychological exposition Hitchcock would return to in Spellbound, Psycho, Marnie and more!
It would be another four years and six not-so-thrillerish films before Hitchcock would get to The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Regardless of whether either film is a thriller, one thing that unites these two films and makes them a valid double feature: both take place entirely within the world of show-folk, exposing and satirising a lifestyle most of us would not know, and using the device of the show-within-the-show to add layers to the narrative.
The Hitman's Bodyguard
This comedy thriller would have left me slightly disappointed had I seen it at movie theatres when it came out but with hardly any trips to the cinema of late, it's a big thrill to catch it on TV. Ryan Reynolds is the bodyguard and Samuel L Jackson the hitman under Interpol protection so he can testify against war crimes committed by the evil Belarus president (bit far-sighted that) played in Air Force One style by Gary Oldman - why he wastes his time with stuff like Darkest Hour when he can be doing stuff like this I'll never know.
This is not a serious thriller and not meant to be, it riffs on the idea that this kind of movie is pretty much done and there's fun to be had here. The humour does owe something to Family Guy etc, that kind of thing - Clive Owen's Shoot 'Em Up too.
It also riffs on Shrek - Jackson is basically Donkey to Reynolds disappointed and anti-social Shrek, berating him for his life choices and ragging him. It is great fun if a bit obvious. Other movie nods include Pulp Fiction and Bond fans will find a couple of things in there too. It's odd - this is a comedy but the violence is full on and intense. Jackson is not playing this as an old guy.
What is odd is that bar flashbacks none of it is filmed in the US though it's a US film. The opener is in London, then it moves to Manchester and much of the movie is spent there before going to Amsterdam. Shots made to glamourise London sort of work but they're filming it like it is the US and it rather conjure up episodes of The Apprentice or the inserts in old episodes of the sitcom Not Going Out. This raises a problem I've long thought - American generic action films sort of work in America because the street furniture and everything is cinematic in a way that you don't get elsewhere. If the two leads are American, could it not work with British stars or thereabouts? Colin Farrell (okay he's Irish) or Jason Stratham - or could he only work it abroad? Could we have a British film industry doing this stuff or would that not work?
I recall a recent Anthony Hopkins film where he plays a psychic - it's standard stuff, well done and set in America, Chicago if I recall. Very enjoyable because it just has the genre down pat. There is nothing in the plot to say it can't be filmed in England. But it wouldn't be the same. If they did the film in the 70s with say Richard Burton, we know how it would be - it would sort of look down at heel and wretched. America doesn't always look like these big, bustling chrome movie sets of course. But while parts of London do look like that, it's not quite the same to just shoot it like it's New York or Chicago and hope for the best. Each nation needs to find its own cinematic brand without making it all Richard Curtis all the time. James Bond aside, I'm not sure the UK has the knack of knocking out reliable action films. The US has the genre down pat, though let's not forget it did have to reinvent itself in the mid to late 80s and is constantly honing it.
The film is a good laugh, not up there with Deadpool or the sequel in particular. Is there a sequel to this? I don't even know, I think one came out recently didn't it?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Oh, yeah - The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard. Very variable reviews - the 'huge belly laughs, 10/10 reviews' that might not be studio plants and those who decry it as a waste of their life, it does have a whiff of Ocean's 12 about it. I'm not risking Covid for it, let's put it that way.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Skyscraper
Dwayne Johnson stars in this highly formulaic Die Hard/Towering Inferno retread, though it's spectacular enough. As my review of 'Last Bond Film' points out, most of these films benefit from a subtext or second narrative to distract from the fact that the main story isn't always that interesting even with all the bells and whistles. It's Die Hard without the jokes really. One super villain - a young woman with a super haircut who takes glee from killing - she's Onatopp really, there's even a GoldenEye shooting spree - is criminally underused. You look forward to her comeuppance but...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)
Superbly directed by Sam Peckinpah, this was not received very well by the majority of critics, but I found it excellent in 1974 and even more so on recent viewing. Starring the underrated Warren Oates as Bennie, a drunken whorehouse piano player, who gets wind of a reward offered for the head of Alfredo Garcia, who has impregnated a Mexican crime lord’s daughter. He knows that Garcia is already dead and goes to dig up the body for the head and claim the reward with his hooker girlfriend in tow.
As the film progresses they meet a rapist biker played by Kris Kristofferson and two gay hitmen played by Gig Young and Robert Webber. What follows is a lot of slow motion violence when his girlfriend is killed and Bennie slowly loses the plot and begins to talk to the head.
It’s not a pretty film but it’s absorbing and beautifully played by all concerned as they portray the lowlifes of society with greed their only salvation.
All my night duty over time has given me the opportunity to watch many of the films I have collected. One of them being the magnificent seven. Although I enjoyed it I thought it was a bit too long. But I did see Horst Buckholst in another film on TV called 'Tiger Bay' where he was a murderer on the run. I recommend that to everyone if you haven't seen it. (I have just checked and the film is on you tube.)
Although I have seen it before I also watched 'Hell Drivers'. Sean Connery had a small part in this. Again I recommend it (again the film is available on you tube)
Here are the trailers for the films.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsrBfES_LBo
BRIDES OF FU MANCHU (1966)
One of a series, this has many Bond alumni in the cast: Douglas Wilmer (OP), Tsai Chin (YOLT and CR06), Burt Kwouk (Assorted), Joseph Furst (DAF) and... oh yes, Sir Christopher Lee (you don't need me to tell you which Bond film he's in) as the title character (no, not the brides).
There used to be a trope in movies of casting a well-known Caucasian horror actor as an Oriental (Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi, and of course Lee) which thankfully has finished. This film, and the others in the series, does therefore give us a hint of what Lee would have been like as Dr No if that casting had worked out. As a fan of Sir Christopher, I am glad he ended up as Scaramanga.
The plot involves Fu Manchu kidnapping the daughters of prominent politicians as part of his (inevitable) plan to gain world domination. It's full of holes and laughable, so I thoroughly enjoyed it.
A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1932)
A classic of its kind in its day, Frank Borzage’s overly short adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s overly long novel, dispenses with almost all the powerful telling of war and the detestability of it in favour of the love story between Frederic Henry, an ambulance driver in the Italian campaigns of World War One, and Catherine Berkley, a nurse. The ending is also altered into something resembling a trope towards peace. Hemingway’s bitter conclusion is diluted. Indeed, the whole war is virtually excised. It’s there, barely, but Borzage, or more accurately, screenwriters Benjamin Glazer and Oliver Garrett remove everything but a montage sequence of some might showing Henry’s struggles as he deserts his service to pursue true love. Had a few more scenes of this kind been utilised, A Farewell to Arms may have stood the test of time as a first-rate war film of tenderness and power. As it is, the one and a quarter hours passes fast and fresh and by the time you’re attached to the protagonists, they’ve gone. Adolphe Menjou is more than adequate as Henry’s superior Major Rinaldi, but he’s not really got enough screen time to properly gnash his teeth on. Ditto the leads: Gary Cooper, very good – Hemingway begged him to star in it – and Helen Hayes, simpering at best. She’s hopelessly miscast and it shows.
Borzage was one of Hollywood’s top directors at the time. He’d won a couple of Oscars and proves very innovative here. Two sequences stand out. When Henry is injured and enters a military hospital, the action is shown from his POV, including views of the chapel ceiling – predestining his death, perhaps? – and a superb close-up of Helen Hayes as she bends to kiss him, the screen filling slightly out-of-focus with just her eye socket. The second sequence comes later as Hayes recites a letter she’s written describing her gorgeous apartment; as she does so, the camera arcs around the actual, desolate, raggedy room. Charles Lang was a talented black and white photographer, which helps. Some scenes are played almost like a silent movie, the sentences of dialogue secondary to the action. This is true particularly of the aforementioned montage where incidents happen to music, not with words.
Hemingway hated the film and I can see why, as the human interest of the novel was much broader than simply the romance, crossing into the realms of morality, of the impact of killing, suffering and death and its potential impact on the destruction of human civilisation. A money spinner in its day; a but undercooked for 2021.
John Wick (2014)
Earlier this week I watched my first John Wick movie ever. How is this possible, you may ask. Back when the first movie in the series was new I read that it was a about a man going om a bloody rampage to avenge his dog. His dog! 😲
Not his wife, daughter, brother or father. His dog. I figured I needed to draw a line in the sand. I've seen a few American action/disaster movies where all the survivors with speaking parts risk everyone's life to save the family dog, but this was the last straw to me. Many years have passed and sequels have been made. It has dawned on me that this is a series of well-made and very successful movies, som I decided to watch the first one.
The dog issue was solved as well as it possibly could have been, but it's still plenty silly. I accept it because the movie is high quality and the action is very well done. I wished the fight scenes in future Bond movies will be this good. Keanu Reeves is a fine action lead and he has obviously worked very hard to do those fight scenes om camera, and we can see clearly what's going on. Imagine if QoS was made like this -it could have been a fan favorite! The water plot is after all less silly than the dog.
The "avenging his dog" story line was, like I store, solved in the best possible way. I still think all that voilence because a dog was killed is a bit bizzare.
I should have mentioned the hitman subculture because it was the best non-action aspect of the movie.
you know the only part I ever saw was the scenes with the dog! it was a very nice dog, a beagle pup, my favourite kind of dog.
Once the dog disappeared from the story I switched to something else because I don't like Keanu Reeves.
Now... if the bad guys killed Keanu Reeves after the first scene and the rest of the movie was about that cute beagle fighting to avenge him, then that'd be a film I'd watch.
Me too! 🤣
Yesterday I took in THE GREEN KNIGHT, based on the classic poem "Sir Gawain and the. . ." most English majors have read at some time or other. It's that rare breed: a special effects-laden summer film that is also deliberately paced and contemplative, forcing you to think about the moral situation Gawain (Dev Patel) is in. Literary geeks like me will be happy that the source poem is more or less represented in the screenplay, and there are moments from Spenser and even Ambrose Bierce. Give it a shot!
THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO (1944)
The Doolittle Raid of 1942, as told on film two years after the actual event. I’m always slightly nervous when watching a war film made within the duration of the conflict. Will it be a full on propaganda piece? Or will it be a film that stands up after the event? I think this film falls into the latter category. I don’t claim to be a well read historian, especially in connection to the raid in question, but the film does a good job of telling the events as I know them. The film boasts a good cast including Van Johnson, Spencer Tracy, Roberts Walker and Mitchum. However, like a number of other old war movies it includes a dull domestic subplot involving one of the pilots and his wife. As tedious as this can be, the flying scenes are nicely shot featuring genuine period aircraft and some decent model work. At 140 minutes it’s a bit overlong - Cutting some of the soapie bits would have helped. In the last 2 decades we’ve had retellings of the Doolittle Raid from Michael Bay (rubbish) and Roland Emmerich (much better). I enjoyed seeing an account made during the time period of the actual events. Recommended for WWII movie fans.
Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, 1966
Dino De Laurentiis's entry into the mid60s spyspoof craze
stars Michael Connors from Mannix as a completely forgettable CIA agent investigating a case in Rio de Janeiro. Film opens with a spectacular chase scene inside and on top of the giant sized Christ the Redeemer statue. Like the ending of Hitchcock's Saboteur. Not so slick maybe as the cable car scene in Moonraker but more dangerous looking, Mannix even did his own stuntwork because the real stuntman said "wuddaya think I'm crazy? I'm not doing that!"
Mannix is investigating a typical charming Latin playboy character with dozens of stunningly beautiful ladyfriends who keep disappearing. Latest ladyfriend is played by Dorothy Provine (Milton Berle's wife from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and more relevantly Rip Torn's wife from The Man from UNCLE: One Spy Too Many). Turns out she's a British agent, and she plays it precisely like Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds. She is by far the best part of this film. She rides around in the back seat of a Rolls Royce driven by her chauffeur, played by Terry-Thomas. also from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He also is a far more memorable character than Mannix.
When the American and British spies finally recognise each other, there is a scene were Lady Penelope pulls a variety of girlish accoutrements from her dainty purse and they are all deadly gadgets, that's how Mannix ID's her as British Intelligence. sound familiar?
The Rolls itself is full of endless gadgets, and when cornered in a chase across the mountain switchbacks, camouflages itself as an advertising billboard. Yes there is a prominently placed advertising billboard along a mountain road outside of Rio. sound familiar? Sorry I didn't take notice what product was being placed.
as for the villains diabolical plot...
...he is deriving a poisonous gas from orchids that causes sterility. He is about to launch a rocket that will release the gas into the atmosphere and sterilize the entire planet. Except somehow for himself, and the dozens of missing beautiful women who he has kept cryogenically frozen...
...final scenes take place in a rather impressive villains headquarters, complete with countdown til doomsday...
... though the important bit where Lady Penelope escapes the rocket and her chauffeur sabotages it are not shown, just exposited about afterwards...
...That's kinda weird, like a missing reel, yet the dialog acknowledges the crucial scenes are absent.
A while back I watched a cheapie EuroSpy film (008: Operation Exterminate) with scenes in Cairo that seemed prototypical of the first half of the Spy Who Loved Me. EON couldn't actually used the contents of Fleming's book so had to look for plot ideas elsewhere, fair enough. But that similarity was minor and probably coincidental compared to this. Moonraker on the other hand was a perfectly good thriller novel that EON had the full rights to, I wonder why they threw out so much of Fleming's plot just to replace it with so much of this? Did anybody notice at the time, or was this film already completely forgotten by 1979?
This old thread may be of interest- 'A View To A Kill' - ripped off? — ajb007
I'm sure this subject has come up in another thread which I remember contributing to, but I can't remember the details. I do remember seeing "Kiss The Girls..." in the cinema and enjoying it, though!
@caractacus potts thanks for that review. I've wanted to watch Kiss the Girls... for some time. You've rather whetted my appetite. I think you're right in that a lot of the Euro-Spy movies were forgotten- some almost as soon as they were made ! But perhaps not by Christopher Wood...
Out of Africa (1985)
Sidney Pollack's multi-Oscar winning movie is just as good as remembered it. The characters are layered and interesting, the acting very good, the story is moving and the locations exotic and breath-taking. I didn't notice Robert Redford's accent when I watched it at the cinema, but an American accent simply sounds wrong from enyone named Denis Finch-Hatton 😂
The director now regrets not making the movie in widescreen, but other than that the movie seems flawless.
There are connections to Bond. Of cource there's the beautiful score by John Berry. Klaus-Maria got nominated to an Oscar for his role as Karen Blixen's husband, but we also ser Michael Kitchen as Finch-Hatton's friend.
Jojo Rabbit (2019)
Zis mofie iz brilliant und I order yoo all to go zee it!
This movie is about the ten year old boy Jojo who's in the Hitler Youth and has Hitler as his imaginary friend. Scarlett Johansson plays his single mother does what she can in a crazy world, Sam Rockwell is the flamboyant war veteran Hitler Youth leder and Taika Waititi (What we do in the shadows, The hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor: Ragnarok) both directs and plays imaginary Hitler. One day Jojo discovers his mother is hiding a teenager Jewish girl (Thomasin Mackenzie) in the attic. I saw the young actress in "Leave no trace" earlier. She's an up-and-coming star. Jojo is a fanatical nazi, but he can't tell the Gestapo because they'll take his mother if he does. The tone of the movie is bizzare and comical, but it also has pathos and bite when needed. There is a lot more to be said about Jojo Rabbit, but basically it's a big mistanke not to watch it.
High Society
In this 1950s psychological chiller, a stalker infiltrates the wedding of his former wife and - by way of Southern charm - sets about sabotaging it by ingratiating himself with her family - casting aspersions and insinuations, and carrying out a subtle, gaslighting character assassination of his first wife. First insulting her to her face, then conjuring up memories of happier times by offering a sick wedding present consisting of the yacht on which they honeymooned. It is a chilling masterclass in coercive control, with the humiliation of the groom-to-be as a callous afterthought.
The final scene, in which the narcissist walks the bride into the church to re-marry her - watched by the unsuspecting friends and family of the groom - is possibly the most sadistic and disturbing end to a film, on a par with the church finale in Cruel Intentions.
The films was remade as simply Society in the 1980s, though the ending was made very different - though equally disturbing.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Napoleon, that was hilarious! 😀😀😀😀
At 2am I remembered I'd missed out the way the blue-eyed Southern sociopath plies the bride to be with alcohol all the better to frame her so she thinks she slept with somebody but didn't.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
My last film watched... COME AND SEE (1985 - Elem Klimov)
This is a film that I've been eager to watch for quite a while. It has the distinction of having the second highest average user rating on Letterboxd. It is also a World War II film, which is one of my favourite subjects in film. Made in Soviet Union in mid-80s, it depicts a teenage boy's experiences in Belarus during the latter stages of the war.
Sometimes anticipating that a film is going to be great can be detrimental to the experience and I was a little concerned that would be the case here. For the first 90 minutes or so I was enjoying the film, but not as much as I'd hoped. But then the last 45 minutes or so blew me away with both the brutality of the events depicted, as well as the filmmaking technique. It is an extraordinary film, not just in the sense of being very good, but also in that it is not quite like anything I've ever seen before. I particularly enjoyed some of the subtle camera movement, the use of the old-fashioned 'academy' aspect ratio and the repeated use of close-up portraits of the characters which are particularly striking in the nearly square shaped frame. Also in the latter stages some split-diopter cinematography gives certain compositions a particularly unique look. The central performance by the young teenager Aleksei Kravchenko is also quite striking, his face vividly displaying the horror of war as he transforms from a fresh-faced child at the beginning of the film to a worn and haggard looking figure by the end.
It's a film that was hard to digest on first viewing and no doubt I will go back and rewatch it in the future, but it is certainly a film that will linger in my mind for a good long while.
THE SUICIDE SQUAD. Note the THE. This is not SUICIDE SQUAD, the godawful mess from five years ago--the director of which has since disowned and suggested that Warner Bros. did to him what they did to Zack Snyder and JUSTICE LEAGUE--this is a sequel/reboot/apology that is an absolute blast from start to finish. Margot Robbie (IMHO the best actress--if I can still use that term--working today) as Harley Quinn is the one member of the original squad who returns for this outing (Jai Courtney only cameos as Captain Boomerang, and Joel Kinneman and Viola Davis are back as the squad's controllers), but she's only one delight here. Fast, funny, foul-mouthed and gleefully violent--if you like your superhero movies, you'll like this.
Hi HB, thanks for recommending Cruella a few months back - that was a blast.
Would I need to see Suicide Squad before The Suicide Squad? Would it benefit me in any way? I haven't seen either.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
There is nothing good about Suicide Squad ...
I remember each Squad member got two introduction sequences before the "plot" even started 😂