Flight; Wreck-It Ralph; The Liability; I Give It a Year
From the moment an upturned aeroplane clips the steeple of a church as it plummets Icarus-like towards Earth, it's clear that Flight (2012, Paramount, 15) is more interested in cod metaphysics than spectacular aerodynamics. Opening with sozzled jumbo-jet pilot Whip Whitaker knee-deep in the sins of the flesh (drugs, booze, lust), this moves us briskly to the cockpit from whence he will attempt to save the lives of his passengers with a head full of cocaine and vodka and an oxygen-mask chaser on the side.
The question is: does Whip manage to do something miraculous despite being as high as a kite or because of it?
As the conflicted anti-hero at the centre of the drama, Denzel Washington does a bang-up job of juggling the charismatic and the bedraggled in a manner that effectively captures the spirit of a soul in torment. Good, too, to see director Robert Zemeckis emerging from the motion-capture world in which he has been trapped of late (The Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol) and returning to the land of the living that was once his forte. Having combined live action and CGI so expertly in Forrest Gump, Zemeckis is perfectly placed to balance the technical and thespian elements of the rip-roaring first act. Something of a shame, then, that the rest of the movie becomes increasingly generic as Whip walks the purgatorial road from damnation to redemption via trial by fire and an inevitable moment of revelation. As he progresses, the reluctant pilgrim encounters characters ranging from the caricatured (John Goodman's gregarious provider) to the contrived (Kelly Reilly's unfeasibly glamorous recovering addict), with Bruce Greenwood and Don Cheadle serving as dramatic bulk to keep things balanced during flight. The result is a strange mish-mash of the arresting and predictable, maintaining a familiar holding pattern once the key co-ordinates have been set and ultimately coming in for a safer landing than was suggested on take-off.
When it finally arrived in UK theatres a full three months after its American opening, Wreck-It Ralph (2012, Disney, PG) was feted with reviews which suggested that it was up there with the Toy Story trilogy in terms of family-friendly animated perfection. It isn't (but then what is?), although the Oscar-winning supporting feature Paperman was alone worth the price of admission. As for the main feature, despite losing out to Brave at the Academy awards, this remains a terrifically enjoyable romp that takes a smartly nostalgic idea and runs with it in winning fashion.
John C Reilly provides the titular voiceover as the villain of an old-fashioned arcade game, Fix-It Felix, who decides after 30 years on the job that there must be more to life than breaking things. Escaping from his own world, Ralph ventures into territories new, narrowly escaping death in a modern first-person shooter sci-fi bug hunt ("When did video games become so violent and scary?!") before winding up in a candy-coloured racing game that makes the luminous hues of Speed Racer seem positively understated. Here he meets Sarah Silverman's Vanellope, a girl with a glitch with whom he must join forces to help her win a race and earn him a coveted medal. Nodding thematically toward such die-hard favourites as Tron and The Last Starfighter, which draw the audience into the fantasy world of video games, this Disney offering also tips its hat towards Pixar's matchless Monsters Inc., with the relationship between Ralph and Vanellope faintly echoing that between Sulley and Boo. The action sequences are nicely overcranked, the interpersonal dynamics cleanly drawn, and the script witty and often touching – the bittersweet affirmation of villains support group Bad-Anon reads heartbreakingly: "I'm bad and that's good, I will never be good, and that's not bad… "
An oddball British thriller-cum-black-comedy, The Liability (2012, Metrodome, 15) sends Jack O'Connell's mouthy bad lad on a lengthy road trip with Tim Roth's taciturn hitman, the latter on his last hurrah, the former seeking a new direction. Pulling in several directions at once (director Craig Viveiros has talked of substantially rewriting John Wrathall's original script and cites John Baeder and Richard Estes as inspirations), this reminds us just how hard it is to pull off the gallows humour of Shallow Grave or Miller's Crossing, both of which are evoked, perhaps unintentionally. At times the cast appear to be in separate movies, with Peter Mullan convincingly nasty as the sex-trafficking paterfamilias, Roth comically shambolic with rolling gait and hangdog face, and Talulah Riley apparently parachuted in from some altogether more generic thriller.
Still, at least it's unpredictable, which is more than can be said for I Give It a Year (2013, StudioCanal, 15), described as an "anti-rom-com… from Working Title Films the producers of Bridget Jones's Diary and Love Actually and the writer of Borat". Passingly funny in its individual set pieces (Olivia Colman as a shrieking marriage guidance counsellor, Stephen Merchant as the best friend from hell), this has nothing of the emotional engagement of the Richard Curtis scripts to which its publicity alludes and which hang in the background like Banquo's ghost as we watch vicars stumbling over wedding vows and best men delivering excruciating speeches. Although writer-director Dan Mazer knows how to time a gag, he's less accomplished at making us believe in or care about his characters, an underlying problem. A few laughs, then, but no love, actually.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jun/02/flight-wreck-ralph-liability-dvd
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