Renny Harlin directs Zi Yang, Richie Jen and Nick Cheung in this Hong Kong action thriller where morgue workers are held hostage by villains at Christmas.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder. Cliffhanger. The Long Kiss Goodnight. Harlin had a decent 90s Hollywood career of producing top end mayhem. This Asian career revival is smaller scale but actually works well. The narrative is a hard pump of chases, stand-offs, twists and opportune interruptions. There’s enough carnage and kinetics to sate the nostalgic action fan. It promises Die Hard in a morgue, it delivers Cliffhanger across a two storey building. The baddies want a bullet from a corpse. The hostages do everything they can to undermine and frustrate their armed transgressors. Nick Cheung makes for a nerdy reluctant hero, more Poirot than Jack Traven. Zi Yang is spunkily capable as his plucky assistant. Both end up with the ending you want for them. It just zips along pleasingly… loyal to what you’d expect from its director’s back catalogue, hitting the note you want from a HK gun flick. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel and it carries the crushed baggage of a production of its type. It is all a little too polished (especially the unlived-in setting), the humour is very dated, the smaller characters are one note and histrionic (a delivery driver turns up who you’d swear is a Sacha Baron Cohen creation if he were only a foot taller) and there are two too many subplots that are tied up way too neatly with little cumulative significance. But all in, all out… this is a Friday Night throwback that even when it wobbles, wobbles in a way familiar to the sub-genre it apes. Watched at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

7

Alan J. Pakula directs Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt and Rubén Blades in this thriller where a decent NYC beat cop discovers his pretty lodger is an IRA gunrunner.

Underwhelming but not the utter disaster it was tagged as on release. It is a film that painstakingly sets up its two protagonists for either a cat-and-mouse action finale or a more character based drama… then pigheadedly achieves neither. Pitt gets lost in the mix, Ford does a lot with weak material. It is hard for Ford to make a bad film, he just is utterly compelling on screen, even in watery broth like this. Pitt was quoted as saying this was “the most irresponsible piece of filmmaking” he’d ever seen. You can understand why… his part is diminished, the politics iffy, the reshoots adding very little to an uncertain mix. Yet it idles along glossily and there’s rarely a scene that couldn’t work well in a more lively film. Average, unspectacular, old fashioned.

5

My Top 10 Harrison Ford Movies

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe directs Terry Gilliam, Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort in this documentary following Gilliam’s thwarted attempt to adapt Don Quixote that suffered budget cuts, flash floods, inappropriate locations and sick leads.

When this ‘unmaking of’ was first released, we all viewed it as a humorous shambles. The series of bad luck occurrences that compounded to derail a Gilliam movie. He’d been there before with Brazil and Baron Munchausen… classics were finally born from those troubled production. This time we got an aborted project… we learnt what a gamble movie making is outside of the studio system. A few compromises and you no longer have any flexibility in your shooting schedule, a few acts of god and you no longer have a film. 15 years down the line and a version of his The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has finally been made, different cast, smaller scale… inaccessible currently to the average UK film fan. But on rewatching the first stumbling try, you realise the true tragedy unfolding is not that one story Gilliam attempted to tell was shuttered but that it was his reputation was destroyed. The Python animator had been one of the key visualist of my childhood. From Holy Grail to Fear & Loathing he produced grand, ornate, grotesque mega budget celluloid cornucopias. Since Jean Rochefort’s hernia, he has muddled about in lower budget messes and defanged studio projects. The appetite to fund his visions disappeared over those ten chaotic, uncontrollable days of non-shooting. The trust in him to deliver another 12 Monkeys or a Fisher King or Time Bandits by the money men vanished. His movies no longer make bank, his movies no longer had the resources to align his unique visual sense with a mainstream audiences’ quality control. We didn’t know it then but Lost in La Mancha isn’t about one movie not completed, but the genius permanently crippled.

6

Richard Marquand directs Donald Sutherland, Kate Nelligan and Christopher Cazenove in this wartime thriller where a knife happy Nazi spy finds himself shipwrecked on remote Scottish island with an unhappy couple for company.

A movie that has a shifting nature. Starting out as a manhunt chase where an icy Donald Sutherland stabs anyone who crosses into his path through 1940’s London. This is slick stuff, there to emphasise the sociopath’s isolation among his enemy and humanity in general. It reminds me of the great 1939 thriller novel Rogue Male, where a sniper is left psychologically abandoned while outfoxing facist pursuers. Sutherland is the dark mirror of Geoffrey Household’s literary protagonist, capable yet hounded… on the wrong side of history. This alone would mark Eye of the Needle out as a decent potboiler but at the midway point, the focus changes. On the run, Sutherland’s cad washes up on Storm Island. There’s a young family reside; frustrated cripple husband, untouched wife, precious toddler son. A drive away there is only a drunken lighthouse keeper and a few sheep. They drag Sutherland from the waves. The wheelchair bound husband suspects he’s a wrong un… the wife discovers a kindred spirit. Another yearning soul who has made a bad life decision and by living with the consequences has cut themselves off from society. A tweedy, rainy, steamy gothic romance ensues – part Daphne Du Maurier, a whole hunk of a Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Ken Follet, the author whose airport novel the film is based on, sure knows how to steal from the best. Kate Nelligan is given a rich complex role, Sutherland as her inappropriate lover becomes a more rounded creation. Then night falls and we are back in action and suspense for a rousing finale. This is a film that constantly improves from a rather stock starting point… and then carries on lingering in your mind a good week after watching. Well worth hunting down… Whatever happened to Kate Nelligan?

7

Billy Wilder directs Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Susan Sarandon in this adaptation of the play His Girl Friday was based on.

Solid yet slower than the Howard Hawks’ cinematic classic. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a straight adaptation, and you certainly cannot deny the pedigree of those involved, but you do end up ticking off the minor variations rather than enjoying it as its own thing.

6

My Top 10 Billy Wilder Movies

Andrew Fleming directs Steve Coogan, Paul Rudd and Jack Gore in this romantic comedy where a flamboyant gay couple find themselves unexpectedly raising a grandson.

Colourful and bawdy but blunt rather than witty. Coogan and Rudd work well off each other and it is inoffensive enough even when straying into hard R rated jokes. A sweet way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

6

Sam Raimi directs Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss and Betsy Baker in this supernatural horror where a group of kids head to a cabin in the woods, only to discover pure evil has been unleashed around it.

There are multiple ways to approach the imperfect but iconic The Evil Dead.

1. You can see it as the first baby steps of a beloved franchise. Knowing this is a zero budget debut feature, figuring its shit out. 90 minutes of showing your workings that gifted us the more vividly cartoonish, comedically confident Evil Dead 2 and then every joyous thing with Ashley Williams and the Deadites that followed. The jokes are less in your face. The rules of the Necronomicon haven’t been fully fleshed out. Ash isn’t really the Ash we know, he lacks that cult inspiring Bruce Campbell bluster and rockerbilly tomcat allure. Hell, The Chin That Kills changes his haircut and outlook three times in one night… he’s just not “groovy” yet.

2. A marvel of DIY ingenuity. Raimi and Campbell hit up relations and dentists to find their minimal investment. And with that pocket money they got inventive over a year of weekends. Can’t afford The Shining‘s groundbreaking steadycam… then running about the swamp with a camera nailed to a plank creates its own ethereal, flowing, pursuing threat shots. SHAKY-CAM IS BORN! Happy to bombard your players with plasticine, plaster-cast and red corn syrup. The splatter never convinces but it is relentless and charmingly ad hoc. A feast of cheap horror thrills, rather than slithers of gourmet FX. The Evil Dead is inspiring, and not just in that it proved anyone can make a film. If you go at it hell for leather and stay unapologetically true to your ambitious and shocking vision, then rough finish and snagging cheapness will be overwhelmed by the sheer energy.

3. A “What the fuck am I watching?” trip. The Evil Dead is a celluloid nightmare. Intense, disturbing, unpredictable. A woman gets raped by a tree, heads are lopped off, the terror is inescapable. I’ve watched it half a dozen times and still don’t know how exactly certain key characters die and how Ash doesn’t. Waves after wave of weird nasty disrupt any sensible plotting. Not all of it makes sense but you are so deep in the maelstrom of blood and pessimism and Lovecraftian insurmountable doom… clear cut storytelling has to take a back seat, the spook train goes into overdrive.

7

Kyle Newacheck directs Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston and Gemma Arterton in this comedy where a beat cop and his detective novel loving wife find their European vacation taken over by a high society conspiracy.

So so Eighties, that it even has a red sports car demolition derby chase! This was undemanding fun, a solid example of the Sandler factory product that gives the usual generous equal spotlight to his female co-star. They riff nicely together here as they did in Just Go With It. This was Netflix’s most globally watched debut so far. 30 million homes streamed it on the weekend of its release. I’m not surprised… while it is far from the streaming services best ‘original’ release, Murder Mystery is the first we would have gone to the multiplex to see on opening week. A Silver Streak or European Vacation for our times.

6

Damián Szifron directs Ricardo Darín, Érica Rivas and Oscar Martínez in this anthology of extreme behaviour set in Argentina.

Some good unconnected short stories in the Roald Dahl tradition… they very rarely escalate to a point where they outpace the viewers expectations and they lack the knowing playfulness of say, Inside No.9. It zips along nicely and is a solid example of a portmanteau.

6

Josef Von Sternberg directs Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich and Kurt Gerron in this tragedy where a stuffy professor becomes enthralled by a nightclub singer, risking his reputation to be with her.

What starts as mild farce slowly descends into a torturous passion play. The slight comedy gives way to a finale that is genuinely unpredictable and gripping. Emil Janning’s pitiful professor has the mirror held up to how low his lusts have dragged him down; will he murder, suicide or snap out of his madness? All while clucking like a chicken for his hometown crowd. The film is famous as the break-out performance of Dietrich… she’s absolutely gorgeous in it, remaining an unfathomable enigma and a siren on which men will believably wreck themselves.

7