FILMS .... with Tim Milfull
The A-Team (M)
Writer/director: Joe Carnahan
Stars: Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton Jackson
Rating: 3/5
100-minutes, screening from June 10
I’ll confess a guilty pleasure for low-brow 80s television action shows like Knightrider and The Dukes of Hazzard, and I loved George Peppard in The A-Team.
A big-screen version of Logan’s Run is on its way, but has anyone considered adapting Man from Atlantis? Apparently Hollywood hasn’t quite reached the bottom of the television barrel in terms of mining “successes” of the past, but as far as I’m concerned The A-Team is a long way from the dregs.
In the re-jigged version, writer-director, Joe Carnahan offers a little bit of background to the boys’ origins. At the start of the film, Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith (Liam Neeson), and Lieutenant Templeton “Faceman” Peck (Bradley Cooper) are US Army Ranger operatives hunting down a rogue Mexican general, and ex-Ranger, Sergeant Bosco “B.A.” Baracus (Quinton Jackson) and the clinically-insane chopper pilot, Captain “Howling Mad” Murdock (District 9’s Shartlo Copley) are “drafted” in to help them out of a sticky situation.
Almost a decade later, “The A-Team” has formed a formidable reputation as operatives who achieve what others can’t, but their final assignment as the US-occupation of Baghdad draws to a close, ends in the death of a general, the disappearance of a billion dollars, and Wanted posters being slapped up for the boys.
What else to do than find the money, avenge their mate, and clear their names? This is good, relatively clean, ridiculously improbable fun; for those looking for an antidote to other, more dodgy adaptations like Daredevil and The Losers, The A-Team might have the answers.
Faults with this flick are legiondary
Legion (M)
Writer/director: Scott Stewart
Stars: Paul Bettnay, Dennis Quaid
Rating: 1/5
100-minutes, now screening
Sometimes it’s a worry when audiences start laughing early in a film, especially when it’s telling the story of the end of the world. Legion is the debut feature of writer-director Scott Stewart, and dear, oh, dear, does it show.
Stewart has a fairly solid background in visual effects, and that’s probably how he sold this script to producers, but this glossy mess looks like a pretty expensive, slightly scorched white elephant.
Apparently God has the shits with humanity, and has decided to call it quits by fast-tracking the Apocalypse. But one of his right-hand men – Paul Bettany’s Archangel Michael – thinks his boss might be a little short-tempered, and sets out to rescue the soon-to-be born Messiah, whose mother, Charlie (Adrianne Palicki) is an ordinary waitress in a remote roadhouse somewhere in Bumf**k, Who Cares.
Charlie’s boss, Bob (Dennis Quaid) realises that life has passed him by, and is desperate to stop the same thing happening to his mouth-breathing son, Jeep (Lucas Black), who is obsessed with Charlie.
When an innocuous granny tears a chunk out of the throat of one of their diners and tries doing the same to Charlie, the roadhouse crew realise something is amiss, especially when the hulking Michael roars up to the roadhouse in a stolen police car filled with weapons. Cue the plagues of flies, armies of zombies, and a very cranky Archangel Gabriel (Kevin Durand).
Legion is just plain laugh-out-loud stupid – don’t waste your money.
THE BINGE
Mother (MA15+)
Street of Shame & Her Mother’s Profession (M)
Noodle (PG)
Of Time and the City (M)
All now available from Madman
The Korean drama Mother (above) is the much-anticipated latest film from Bong Joon-ho, who made the amazing monster flick The Host in 2009. Rather than lurching mutants, this time round, Bong takes on some more conventional territory, if you regard transgressive Korean cinema as conventional.
After her son has been accused of a vicious murder, Mother (Kim Hye-ja) sets out to clear his name, and really, that’s about it for the story but, oh, what a journey! Kim Hye-ja puts in an extraordinary, award-winning performance in this amazing film.
Adding to their extensive range of classic art-house film, Madman has released two feminist films from Japanese master, Kenji Mizoguchi. Streets of Shame (1956) and Her Mother’s Profession (1954) offer a stark impression of the desperate measures women took in post-war Japan to provide for their family, and both films offer tragic stories set amid amazing real locales around Tokyo.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Israeli director, Ayelet Menahemi’s film Noodle (2007), but the story of an El Al flight attendant suddenly lumbered with the responsibility of a four-year-old Chinese boy is really quite sweet.
This skilfully layered film features excellent performances from Mili Avital as Miri the psychologically numb flight attendant, and BaoQi Chen as the eponymous Noodle.
And finally, in Of Time and the City, veteran documentary-maker, Terence Davies returns to his hometown of Liverpool to tell the story of the story of his childhood and the city that he came to love and hate. This astonishingly beautiful film is more a work of art than a traditional documentary, as Davies narrates his own, and Liverpool’s history with archival footage and new imagery, and nary a mention of The Beatles.
