Recent Rentals

As promised, just took me a while.

Fast & Furious 5

The fifth installment in the Fast and Furious franchise is the first one I've seen. I haven't bothered with any of the others as I'm not even close to being what you would call a car enthusiast, plus Vin Diesel is a bit of a tool. I had no plans to see this one either, however after reading good reviews and hearing that they had shifted the foucs of the film from car racing to instead being a heist film I decided to check it out.

The story seems to sort of follow from the previous films, not that I would know, with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker's characters on the run from the law for some reason. They end up in Brazil and decide to do "one last job" or someother such cliced nonsense and rip off this rich business guy. The business due is completely evil and corrupt though, so it's ok. This then leads to them recruiting a team, and at this point you pretty much know what kind of movie you've got. You know, one of those "We're putting a team togeather to achieve such and such a goal, you in?" If these shennanigans weren't enough, they also have The Rock AKA Dwayne Johnso relentless cop character on their tail.

Despite this movie being nothing new it was actually pretty enjoyable. The characters were all adequetly fleshed out, the action set pieces were suitablly over the top and exciting and The Rock's performance as a bad arse never say die cop was great. Looks like they'll probably be a sequel, so as long as they keep going in the same vain as this film we could be looking at a successful re-boot of sorts taking the franchise in a new direction.

***1/2 out of *****

Green Lantern

I skipped this one when it was at the cinemas as I thought it was going to be a bit of a disaster. Not being familar with the comics I only had the trailer to guide my expectations, and that made it look like a kids movie set in a bizarre world of green and purple aliens, and the special effects didn't do much to win me over either. Upon viewing the film these inital concerns were confirmed, and the film also sufferes from sub par script and a romantic subplot involving Blake Lively that had about as much life to it as a crematorium. Despite this, Ryan Reynolds brings his usual charasima to the titular superhero character which helps keep the film from sinking, and there are enough action scenes to keep us entertained. I also enjoyed the story of a regular everyday guy suddenly finding himself completely out of his depth and in a position of immense importance, but I think I'm a bit of a sucker for those kind of storylines. In summary, it was better than I thought it would be.

*** out of *****

Sleeping Beauty

No, not the Disney animated classic, but rather an Australian arthouse film that screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year. In fact, I'd be horrified if the former movie's target audidence saw even a moment of this film, which focuses on a young lady in need of money and the lengths she will go to get it.

Sleeping Beauty takes the "less is more" approach to storytelling, which if done correctly can make for a very natural and satisfying expierence, however here it makes for a dull and completely pointless one. It appears the director doesn't understand the difference between subtle character development and revealing absolutely nothing so we can't connect to and care about the events unfoding at all. The two main elements that the film appears to be trying to explore are the aforementioned lengths a person will go to for money and the hidden sexual desires that men keep buried well beneath the surface, yet it does it in such a cold and detached manner that they left no impact whatsoever.

While I admired the cinematorgragy and apprecited the fact that the film was offering something original, it was ultimately a boring, pretentious and soulless mess. Don't bother with this epic waste of time.

* out of *****

Battle: Los Angeles

Aliens are invading and the army has to stop them. That's all you need to about Battle: Los Angeles as that's all there is to it. Doesn't sound very satisfying? That's probably because it's not. So how could this festering turd pile actually have worked?

Well perhaps give the lead character some sort of story arc. Perhaps he has a son that he's trying to get home to. Maybe this could be his last mission before going home to his son for good. Maybe then he finds out that the government had known about the possibility of aliens attacking for ages but kept it so top secret that nothing was done about it, which makes him super angry Our hero could even have a strained relationship with his son, and he ends up sacrificing himself to save the day, which earns his son's eternal love and respect after a tearful good bye. You could even throw some social commentary about the aliens being no worse than humans when they've invaded or colonised countires etc. If it sounds familar that's because it's the same storyline always used for these sort of films, and usually it works. It wouldn't have been a great movie but lets face it, this wasn never going to be. It would have at least been passable. What did we get instead?

Introduce a few stock standard characters who all seem to be a carbon copy of each other for about 20 minutes, followed by "We've got some meteores coming." "What, they're aliens?" BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG "Generic war speech" BANG BANG BANG BANG "I don't know if this guy has what it takes" BANG BANG BANG BANG - THE END. Ugh. Even if they had delivered the action in carefully choreographed set pieces rather than just endless chaos the lack of any soild storytelling could be excused. Some of the special effects and action scenes are OKAY but that's it. A simply awful example of flim making.

1/2* out of *****