'Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues' review by Captain Raptor

'Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues' review by Captain Raptor

Almost ten years ago, a simple, lighthearted and idiosyncratic film about a dumb newsreader ascended the steps leading to cult comedy status. It launched several careers and its seemingly inexhaustible supply of quotable lines must have kept about a thousand t-shirt companies in business. I'm in a conglomerate of many when I say that Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is one of 21st century Hollywood's greatest comedies, but was a belated comeback such a good idea?

Well, despite how long the gang have been away, they are for the most part still on-form. Steve Carell is absolutely fantastic once again as the impossibly stupid weatherman Brick; he's the opposite of deadpan, mugging and screaming at regular intervals as well as blurting out with the hilariously nonsensical quips for which his characters is known. He stands head and shoulders above the rest of the cast, although David Koechner has managed to improve his delivery. Unfortunately, Will Ferrell's performance has turned a little overbearing and weaker over the years, but he's still got the spark that originally ignited Anchorman's flame. The old elements work just about as well as they used to - the group dynamic is as strong as ever and the exclamations and one-liners are still gleefully daft and unpredictable - but most of the sequel's new ingredients simply don't work. There's no comedy to be garnered from James Marsden's slick antagonist or from a brief, almost entirely needless Harrison Ford cameo, and there is one truly awful scene which essentially just consists of Ron being inadvertently racist for a grueling five minutes. There is one brand new addition that works, and that is Kristen Wiig as a female equivalent and love interest of Brick, because it is very hard for anything pertaining to Brick to be anything less than side-splitting.

There are some fantastic new lines ("chickens of the cave" is a phrase destined to be parroted on forums and t-shirts for a good few years) but there are no scenes of laugh-out-loud hilarity, and a couple of jokes have been transplanted from the original into the sequel. It's a hit-and-miss affair, more a sequence of loosely related scenes than a fully-fledged film, and a lot of the components (a blindingly unsubtle satirisation of Rupert Murdoch and sensationalization in the media, an abundance of jokes about hair, the aforementioned race relations debacle) just fall flat on their face. Maybe it was deliberate or maybe Ferrell and Adam McKay just ran out of ideas, but by the end things have descended into total chaos, and the final twenty minutes feature numerous explosions, cameos by a veritable pantheon of celebrities from Liam Neeson to Kanye West, and Ron going blind in a lighthouse whilst trying to raise a shark as his own. Some of these parts are funny, but the incoherence of it all does not escape unnoticed, and the lines between enjoyably daft flight of fancy and plain stupidity through overkill become incredibly blurred.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues could have been absolutely terrible, and maybe it's an impressive enough feat that it wasn't. It's a fully watchable and genuinely very funny movie, but it can't match up to its predecessor and a lot of the material is quite simply just bad. It's still good enough to not be disappointing and if you liked the first film then I suspect that you'll like this one too. Maybe it couldn't equal the brilliance of what came before it, but it's entertaining and worth a watch. Looks like Ron Burgundy stayed classy after all.

'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug' review by Captain Raptor

'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug' review by Captain Raptor

An Unexpected Journey was good enough to make my top ten of the year by the skin of its teeth (although by this point, having seen more films released in 2012 on DVD, it's probably somewhere around 14th) but still left a lot to be desired. However, this film was to contain most of my favourite moments from the book, had extra Benedict Cumberbatch and my favourite films from franchises tend to be second one (Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Christopher Nolan's Batman, Pirates of the Caribbean... the list goes on), so expectations were still high.

For the first forty minutes or so, the film totally delivered. Bilbo and his dwarfish entourage are still entertaining, and two equally great but contrasting setpieces - a mostly silent and thoroughly atmospheric interlude with giant spiders, and a brilliantly fun and fast-paced piece of what can only be described as barrel warfare - marked a strong step in the right direction. These scenes weren't done perfectly; it's still hard to care about all of the dwarves when about 5 of them have don't any resemblance of character, and the spider scene, my personal favourite segment from the original book, is done far too briefly, but they're the still the strongest parts of the prequels thus far. Also good is Tolkien newcomer Evangeline Lilly as elven warrior Tauriel, who kicks ass like she's being paid in direct proportion to how much orc blood she can spill. However, whether the film ran out of steam or I just ran out of patience, eventually everything just became dull. The main cause of this is Luke Evans, who fails to display much more than a drop of either charisma or pathos in his role as Bard, which while he may be an important character, is not worth spending an hour with when said hour could feature more dwarves, wizards, goddamn giant spiders or, y'know, fantasy. Lee Pace is adequate but still uninspiring in a role that could have been cut almost entirely and is similarly dull to Evans'.

I don't even want to talk about Smaug. Someone has clearly put in a lot of effort in the wrong direction, because I cannot fathom how one could make a dragon with the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch feel boring. There are numerous other disappointments too, but really they all stem from one problem: trying to recreate Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is fundamentally a lighter, sillier and (arguably most importantly) shorter story, but this goes by the wayside. Legolas is needlessly brought back, and it's not even that much fun because the canon necessitates him being an asshole. Smaug is stripped of any and all distinctive traits and the talents of Benedict Cumberbatch buried beneath voice modification in order that he might a far more simplistic villain, like Sauron. Rather than concentrating on the fun, light-hearted idiosyncratic tale and set of characters it has at hand, The Desolation of Smaug instead focuses on attempts at moodiness and epicness, and despite the outstanding visuals and thrilling action that it possesses by the bucketful, the end result is somewhat half-baked.

It's such an abundant criticism that it hardly feels worth mentioning, but The Hobbit films are just too long for their own good. There's a 90 minute film that's highly above average somewhere within The Desolation of Smaug, buried under stuff that could have or arguably should have been more heavily edited.  The most interesting parts of the film (yes, I'm still annoyed about the giant spider thing) are whizzed past whereas the duller parts (namely almost everything that happens in Laketown) seem to stretch on for countless minutes, yet despite all that there's enough charm and fun to keep you entertained for the majority of the film's duration. The review doesn't really sound like I enjoyed the film (I did) but that's because it was so easy to see where it could have been better, if only Peter Jackson (who I instantly feel awful for criticising) could maybe, just maybe, learn when enough is enough.

'Scrooged' review by Captain Raptor

'Scrooged' review by Captain Raptor

I expect a few of you are already sick and tired of the ubiquity of Christmas on the internet at the moment, so in that respect I'm sorry for the subsequent festive review. Counter-productive as it might be, this next review is dedicated to you - those called Scrooge and Grinch on a daily basis, who roll their eyes at the inundation of Christmas jumpers and who will most definitely be receiving a stocking full of coal. Not only shall I assess Scrooge's quality, but I'll assess its appeal to your misanthropic sensibilities.

What better antidote could there be for over-earnestness than Bill Murray, man of a thousand smirks?  Updating the classic Charles Dickens parable to the modern day doesn't really sound like the most amusing of concepts (because it isn't), but I'm willing to give anything with Bill Murray a try. He does his usual schtick with the customary charm, but that's pretty much all the film's got going for it. The script is mostly just dull attempts at wit, only improved by Murray's delivery, and the gaps are filled in either by pop culture references - which normally I'm in favour of but given that they're from 1988 it went more than a little bit over my head - or lazy slapstick. Scrooged is funny in parts, but it feels dragged down by an overly sentimental concept and a desire to balance snark and sweetness that wasn't effectively carried out. On the plus side, this keeps the film from being overly saccharine and the cornier parts are closer to pleasant than irritating. On the negative side, the lack of conviction leads to a boring film that's neither charmingly cheesy nor subversively dark.

It's not a simple case of writing bad, Murray good. The lead actor does almost totally carry the film, but it's not a particularly energetic performance and he's made more of lesser roles before. The film has a few engaging, if not particularly entertaining, side characters, and the final scene in which our modern day Scrooge learns his lesson and speaks on the true meaning of Christmas is actually quite well done. The supporting cast isn't spectacular, and although there's nobody that actually gives a poor performance, maybe the film wouldn't drag on so much if Murray had some above-adequate back-up.

So, Scrooged isn't particularly good, but nor is it overwhelmingly poor. It's entertaining enough to be passable but you shouldn't expect too much from it. Now, for our less than enthusiastic about Christmas viewers, this film is far from being as nauseatingly sweet or as unabashedly stupid as some Christmas films can be, but it's still pretty focused on tidings of comfort and joy. It's inoffensive and enjoyable to a degree, but it's not a film worthy of much praise.

'The Great White Hype' review by Captain Raptor

'The Great White Hype' review by Captain Raptor

For the benefit of those of you who haven't heard of it (namely everybody), The Great White Hype is a comedy about a dishonest boxing promoter, played by Samuel L Jackson, attempting to drum up interest in the undefeated champion by pretending that an untrained amateur is a legitimate contender. The reason I decided to watch it starts and ends with the fact that it stars Samuel L Jackson, and no amount of critical apathy could put me off. Which is good, because there was a lot of it.

It's an apathy that I share. Samuel L Jackson is all smiles and smirks in a performance that completely charms, but is let down by a script that can't supply the dialogue to match his combined menace and charisma. The concept combined with the film's talented cast (Jeff Goldblum, Jamie Foxx and John Rhys-Davies, amongst others) is basically enough to carry it, but the film doesn't really manage to marry these two concepts. There's such a wide range of characters all attempting to be played with some degree of likeability that the film spends too long introducing them all that they barely get any opportunity to be funny, and some of them are just dropped from the film. The performances are all good enough, apart from Damon Wayans, who seems completely opposed to putting any sort of energy into his act. There's a lot of components and a lot of them had some great potential - Samuel L Jackson as a roguish, over-the-top fight promoter, the attempts at a satirisation of boxing culture ("He's white. In boxing, that means he's Irish"), the Coen-esque feel of' 'get a strong cast and outlandish characters trying to double-cross each other' - but it ultimately comes to no avail.

The set-up and early scenes of the film, while not particularly amusing in and of themselves, gave a promise of something madcap and comical that was yet to come. Really, the most impressive thing about the film was that I never felt bored or frustrated. The complete misfiring of all the film's promising elements should really make for an incredibly jarring experience, which was not the case, although that might be more related to the sub-90 minute runtime. It's not funny. The more astute of my readers might recognise this as a major flaw in a comedy film, and what do you know, they'd be right. I laughed maybe a total of four or five times throughout the whole film, mostly at the outbursts of John Rhys-Davies' absurdly racist boxing coach, which is a very cheap and easy way to get laughs. The most enthusiastic I ever got about the film was in the final fight scene where I noticed that both Method Man and Peter Dinklage reared their heads, and if the best thing about your film is a chance to notice some of your favourite cult icons in the background, then something has gone horribly wrong somewhere.

Watching The Great White Hype was not a bad experience. At no point was I actively bored. It technically qualifies as entertaining and it was probably more fun then doing nothing. So, yeah, it wasn't bad, but it's not a great indication of quality that those are the most positive things I have to say about the film. This is also taking into account that I am predisposed to enjoy something with Samuel L Jackson in about 50% more than I otherwise would have. I definitely wouldn't suggest that you go out of your way to see it, and it's not a film that's worth actively avoiding either. It's a brief, unexciting exercise in distraction. Let the good times keep on coming.

'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire' review by Captain Raptor

'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire' review by Captain Raptor

If you've been reading these rambling scrawls I portend to be 'reviews' for a while, you'll have noticed by now that I have a thing for dystopias, teen dramas, and action. So, obviously, I thoroughly enjoyed the first Hunger Games movie, and it ended up being one of my favourite films of the year. The second instalment had quite a high bar set for it, but on the whole it's a been a good year for blockbuster sequels. 

The hardest thing about writing this review is trying to praise all the deserving performances with any degree of brevity. I want to write paragraphs and paragraphs about the sublime way that Elizabeth Banks blends subtlety and exaggeration, about how Woody Harrelson delivers every line with a confidence that transcends mortal bounds, and most of all about Jennifer Lawrence. I don't even know if there's any point going into detail, it's practically a universally accepted fact that she's amazing. The first film was more emotionally restrained, especially when it came to Katniss, but the reigns have been loosened this time around and Lawrence gets to give an excellent demonstration as to why she's one of the biggest and best stars around. Bad guys Donald Sutherland and Philip Seymour Hoffman are really quite bland, despite being the most experienced and acclaimed performers involved in the film, and I still don't really get the fuss about Liam Hemsworth, but apart from that it's top-notch performances across the board, even from people with less than ten seconds of screen time. There's less focus on Katniss and more attention to detail, which serves the fantastic dual purposes of making the film's created world feel bigger and more realised and allowing Lawrence to shine even more when the focus actually is on her.

The tension and the inventiveness of the Hunger Games themselves are just as good as they were before, perhaps slightly less interesting now that we're more familiar with the concept. The plot's increased concentration on socio-political issues is cleverly done, and provides some great contrast with the brutality of later scenes. The only area I can really think of that could have been improved to any great degree was dialogue - it wasn't a major issue, and there were some clever lines worked in at various places, but a lot of the dialogue just seems to exist to fill space. There were some great moments of silence, where it was recognised that nothing needed to be said or explained and the audience could just concentrate on the immediate emotion of a situation, but maybe Catching Fire could have been a little bolder with how often it played this trick.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is subtle, tense and intelligent without sacrificing on entertainment or spectacle, and there's very little else you could want from a blockbuster. It would have been enough of a success for it to have merely equalled the first film, but in most ways the sequel has surpassed it (although not by a huge degree). It's dark and it's moody, so don't go in for popcorn flick, but other than I think that not only is this is a great film, but one that will appeal to most cinemagoers.