'Avengers: Age Of Ultron' review by Captain Raptor

'Avengers: Age Of Ultron' review by Jake Boyle

The shoes to fill have never been bigger. Record-breakingly profitable, internationally adored and lauded by critics and fans alike. But enough about me. The first Avengers film was an unadulterated triumph, matching exhilarating action with charismatic humour and showing just how amazing the end  result can be when four years are spent putting all the pieces together. Three years on from that and the universe has grown even more, and new additions looking to be added - all dependant on the success of this film.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Age Of Ultron is how immensely scaled up everything is, yet still able to remain cohesive and unrushed. For a film with over a dozen key characters, everybody gets enough time to shine, and the CGI destruction reaches truly insane levels at times, but never feels overwhelming in a bad way or incomprehensible. The action is jaw-dropping both in its enormity and in its seamless choreography - especially the group shots when we see Earth's Mightiest Heroes kicking ass in unison. The returning actors uniformly give performances of the incredibly high calibre they have been doing throughout the franchise, but the enjoyability of some characters is marred by the occasionally wonky characterisation. However, even when that does occur, the day is saved (as always) by Joss Whedon's inimitable flair for witty, inventive dialogue, be it through excellent running jokes, monologues, comebacks and one-liners. T-shirt manufactures can rest assured that there's another fifty or so quotes for them to print (even if they are going to keep excluding Natasha).

However, despite the brilliance of the dialogue, there are a small number of touching moments done quietly and silently - an impressive move for big-budget Hollywood fare. Mostly this works (Jeremy Renner is finally given the opportunity to give Hawkeye more depth, and Robert Downey Jr continues to nail the downplayed confliction he exhibited in Iron Man 3); however there's a romantic sideplot that does contains some sweet moments, but ultimately still feels awkwardly shoehorned in. It does still kind of work, however, and that hiccup is the biggest flaw the film has. The other new inclusions are all solid: Aaron Taylor-Johnson is charming, the introduction of Vision is gripping and James Spader is suitably menacing as the titular villain, and delivers the comedic lines sharply. The real joy, however, is in seeing the extended universe culminate in one place - small appearances from Anthony Mackie, Hayley Atwell and a criminally underused Idris Elba should delight anybody who's been following the whole Marvel story, and the last few moments before the credits tease of some truly spectacular things to come.

The pressing question for any sequel is always 'was it as good as the first film?'. And no, it must be said, Age of Ultron does not quite match up to the Avengers' first team outing, be that a slightly worse script, weaker uses of fantastic characters or simply the law of diminishing returns. However, being slightly worse than The Avengers is still a pretty difficult level of quality to obtain, and Age of Ultron certainly contains all the dazzling action and razor-sharp humour that you could possibly hope for. In no way is it a disappointment; quite the contrary - it's an invigorating, captivating, quick-witted thrill ride. Absolutely everything we were hoping for.

'John Wick' review by Captain Raptor

'John Wick' review by Jake Boyle

The role of John Wick could hardly be any more suited to Keanu Reeves unless it turned out the character's middle name was '...dude'. A man of few words, understated emotion and forever decked out from head to toe in black - casting must have been a no-brainer. It's been a while since Keanu had a foray into mainstream box office fare (and even longer since he had a good one), but this particular post-Taken action thriller seems to have put everybody's favourite expressionless hero back on the map.

As well it should. John Wick is a well-oiled, tightly engineered machine, establishing character and motivation within the opening 15 minutes and then letting the film's plethora of goons and assassins just get on with it. The expertise of stunt actors turned directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski is evident; every blow resonates, every gunshot excites. The action comes thick and furious, and barring a laughably machismo final showdown, it's all very well-paced, engrossing and at a level of brutality that's neither overkill or underwhelming. The ideas behind the film fall on an indeterminable location between interesting and cheesy (a man's desire for bloody vengeance fueled by the loss of his dog, a hotel that exclusively caters for a secret society of assassins), and the whole 'dead wife' backstory is becoming teeth-gratingly tiresome with every 'new' iteration, but John Wick knows what kind of film it is and smartly chooses to focus on its claustrophobic fighting environments, bloody headshots and minimal dialogue. 

This is all carried not so much by Reeves' angsty stoicism (although his performance is perfectly fine) but by a plethora of supporting characters who do most of the emotional and expository heavy lifting, as much as there is any. Ranging from acclaimed character actors like David Patrick Kelly and Willem Dafoe to fresh-faced TV stars like Alfie Allen and Adrianne Palicki, it's these people who craft the dark and forboding atmosphere with solid performances all around, mostly based on how absolutely terrified they all are of John. Helping to shape the mood is focused cinematography courtesy of Jonathan Sela, who frames the setpieces wonderfully and tracks the movement and flow with a sharp eye for the most enthralling angles. It's a wisely compacted film, so some of the more eye-rolling moments don't have the breathing room to become truly annoying, and the occasional more consciously stylistic moments are suggestive of a film that's making a genuine effort with its visuals and technique.

John Wick's action (and the features that work to enhance that such as camerawork and lighting) are excellent. The acting and the story are good enough. Leitch and Stahelski have crafted a memorable and invigorating massacre of a film (although perhaps an overly serious one), that pulls no punches and only rarely strays into the territory of the exaggeratedly ridiculous. The upcoming sequel is needless and sounds like a bad idea, but that's to no detriment of this movie, which wears its heart on its sleeve and pulls it off extremely well. 

'The Drop' review by Captain Raptor

'The Drop' review by Jake Boyle

As casting choices go, Tom Hardy as a timid, mumbling New Yorker isn't the most obvious of decisions. But, armed with a thick Bronx accent and a less superhuman-looking physique, last year he waded into The Drop, Michaël R Roskam's tale of ordinary people doing their best not to get (too) involved in the Mafia's business. It also marks the last film appearance of James Gandolfini, and a role as a bitter, resentful failed criminal allowed for a final showcase of the man's talent for lacing every word with acid.

If The Drop had to be summed up in one word, it would be murky. Murky lighting, murky locales, murky morality. It creates an authentically grim experience, and the forlornness of the atmosphere makes it never seem questionable that the characters would allow such awful goings on around them. While Hardy is absolutely brilliant (more on that soon), it's only made possible because of realistic performances of everybody surrounding him - while Gandolfini's swansong might not be the most challenging role he's ever taken on, he plays the part to a T; John Ortiz imbues a little more depth into a fairly standard-issue character, and Noomi Rapace conveys all the unspoken emotions that need to be seen below the surface. This all sets Hardy up for a stalwart, tour de force of a performance, full of subtle little mannerisms and complexities that allow him both a sense of weakness and of great frustration.

The narrative is nothing spectacularly different but it's strongly told, starting off incredibly stark and getting more and more loaded until one climactic turning point. The lead-up to this excels at creating the necessary tension - the formerly plain cinematography becomes rapidly fluid and stylistic, violins start to swell in the background and Hardy gradually becomes less nervous and more angry. The whole event is really a dollar store Scorsese, but its engagingly told and if you're going to be strongly influenced by somebody, Marty's a hell of a good choice. The film's got a perfectly balanced tone: dark and serious enough to portray the stifling, uncomfortable standard of life, but there are enough offsetting beats of lighter stuff (a genuinely interesting story about an adopted dog, amusingly petty discussions about etymology) that it never veers into brooding territory.

Good from the beginning and fantastic by the end, The Drop is a film that manages to make a little from a lot. The theft of an umbrella will make your hair stand on end. A two minute monologue completely turns the entire film and the characters within it on their head. Hardy staring at his shoes and muttering is some of the most compelling acting of last year. While its themes and characters are hardly unique there are few films that present them with as much conviction and seriousness as Roskam's English language debut. Gandolfini might not have been stretching himself, but viewed as a whole it's a great film to leave your audience with. 

'Still Alice' review by Captain Raptor

'Still Alice' review by Jake Boyle

During the filming of Troy, Brad Pitt tore his Achilles tendon while playing the very character that the tissue was named after. Most instances of life imitating art are mildly amusing anecdotes like that, but occasionally they're a little more painful. While co-writing and co-directing a movie about Alzheimer's with his husband, Richard Glatzer contracted a degenerative disease of his own. His final movie talks deeply about the effects that conditions like this have on the individual and their loved ones, a sadly fitting departure from a man no longer with us.

Out of tragedy, however, comes triumph. Still Alice takes a delicate, understated approach to its subject matter and very rarely (if ever) makes attempts at overtly melancholic moments, and the tenderness of the disease's presentation feels deeply personal. While perhaps skimming over some of the realities of the problem, this does allow for incredible moments of drama from very small touches. At one point, Alice knocks over a stack of papers and its a genuinely nerve-racking moment of tension. The occasional appearance of lines such as "my brain is fucking dying" and "I wish I had cancer" feel like punches to the stomach, and they work fantastically, but drama is mainly created through a very slow-burning process. The worsening of Alice's condition is made very clear without being transparent about it, and Glatzer and Westmoreland use dramatic irony very effectively in the early scenes to make the audience wince. The pacing in general is incredible; Alice becomes practically unreconcilable to her former self but at no step along the way does the transition feel rushed, and neither is too long spent on one phase of her decline.

Of course, this complete transformation of character is only made possible through Julianne Moore's utterly remarkable performance. Her excellence in this role is the most widely known thing about Still Alice, and rightly so - the conveying of so much intensity and emotion whilst outwardly being downplayed and restrained is testament to Moore's impeccable confidence and skill. More subdued commendations are also in order for the supporting cast; Alec Baldwin is entirely convincing and provides strong support, and while Kristen Stewart's gestures occasionally slide into the robotic, unnatural style of body language she's oh so frequently accused of having, for the most part she gives a well-delivered and stirring performance. However, it's Moore's show front and centre, both because of how excellently she acts and because the rest of the characters really only exist to show us things about Alice. The film's tackling of Alzheimer's is nuanced and moving (although much more the latter than the former), but aside from one or two side dalliances about her daughter's acting career, there's no secondary plotlines or asides throughout the film.

Really, the only negative thing there is to say about Still Alice is that it isn't excellent. Overall it's a pretty great film that does everything to a very high standard, but as good as it is, there's nothing here that's exemplary or especially innovative. That's a fairly weak criticism, however, and not changing the entire landscape of film is obviously not a damnation. The praise piled upon Moore is entirely deserved, but what I found more captivating was not the portrayal Alice herself but the portrayal of Alice's disease. It's done intelligently, subtly, realistically yet still creates an optimum sense of regret and trepidation. The underplayed, relatively undramatic conclusion (which comes indirectly after two more climactic, heightened scenes that would be more obvious final scenes, but trite ways to end a narrative) best exemplifies this film's qualities - quiet, simple yet incredibly upsetting.

'Life After Beth' review by Captain Raptor

'Life After Beth' review by Jake Boyle

Zombies are the ultimate example of having too much of a good thing. More often than not it feels like they're being used as the sole ingredient of entertainment, a sort of Get Out Of Boredom Free card. It's remarkable that in the ten-and-a-half years since Shaun Of The Dead, supplanting zombies into more mundane situations has moved from an exciting new take to utterly uninspired. For every Death Valley, it feels like there's a dozen versions of the BBC's woeful I Survived A Zombie Apocalypse. 

Life After Beth moves around this by not really featuring much actual zombie-ing until over halfway through. It doesn't move it to anywhere funny, though, and eventually the whole charade just gets boring. The film is distinguished by this habit of making interesting albeit ultimately ineffective choices: the aura of creepiness from Dane DeHaan's protagonist is a nice departure from slacker everymen, but it's never really used to enhance the proceedings and only serves to make him significantly less likeable. The tone severely wavers between darkness and silliness, without ever really embracing either aspect for long enough to make something of it. There's probably good jokes to be made about burning corpses, and equally good ones about zombies liking smooth jazz, but the concepts are just brought up and left alone with no real attempts at constructing humour out of them. Aubrey Plaza's deadpan delivery can be phenomenally funny when paired with the right script, but when heard here it just sounds like she's as uninterested as the audience.

Life After Beth's most redeeming feature is Matthew Gray Gubler, mostly because his character's humour is derived from the ever-reliable 'being an asshole' variety of comedy, but his performance does seem a little more spirited than the others. By not asking us to feel much sympathy for him, he immediately becomes the most entertaining character, because everybody else in this movie is both so bland and so morally grey (and not in a complex way) that there's no real urge to give a damn about any of their dilemmas. Certain elements seem irrelevant altogether; delighted as I am to see Anna Kendrick in anything, her character adds absolutely nothing to proceedings, and one closing moment featuring her character threatens to completely overturn any dwindling sense of inventiveness and emotion that the film had clung on to. It's a scene that attempts to be sweet and optimistic but feels utterly forced, completely pointless and devalues any of the investment someone might have (hypothetically) had in the main characters. 

Save for a few amusing moments and some encouraging but fruitless methods of presenting characters, this is just a poor movie. A weak script, unsure direction and a basic lack of comedy are major problems that can't really be overcome by any film, let alone one with as many other flaws as Life After Beth. It's analogous to a zombie itself; lifeless, grey and limp, but still just about crawling along. There are worse films out there (and equally bad ones that are much longer), but this is something that should only really be watched in circumstances of extreme boredom. Hard to believe it may be, but quite seriously, one of the funniest things about this comedy is that stupid title.

'Chappie' review by Captain Raptor

'Chappie' review by Jake Boyle

Neill Blomkamp is, on aggregate, a good filmmaker, having created one modern classic and one waste of time. District 9's genius was so great that it made the flaws of similarly aspiring Elysium all the more obvious, so taking things in a different, lighter direction for a third film makes sense - although perhaps at the same time a little disheartening, Blomkamp being one of the few directors in science-fiction who still retains the genre's original socio-political colouring. 

Chappie is handicapped by an error so colossal that I can't be sure that anything else wrong with the film isn't just a ripple effect. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided it would be funny to have the unbelievably appalling rap duo Die Antwoord play themselves as two of the main characters. To fully discuss how disastrous, woeful, awful, deplorable and misjudged this is would require a review longer than War & Peace. They show as meagre a capability for acting as they do for music and basic human decency, and anything coming out of their mouths doesn't even have the semblance of any real human being, let alone a modicum of emotion. Further dragging down the tone is a script packed with dialogue very overtly explaining things that were painfully obvious, often because they'd already been said three or four times. The concept itself is interesting but it's significantly marred by the constant reiteration of basic information and things that really go without saying.

It's a shame that so much went wrong because Chappie himself is an absolute delight. His inhuman naivety makes him an appealing cute character, and the few jokes of the film that stick exploit this to the max, contrasting his good-natured enthusiasm with the street crime he gets tricked into committing.  The design and seamless CGI nicely brings the character to life, and the always brilliant Sharlto Copley perfectly embodies the character even while mostly restricted to posture and inflections. The rest of the characters aren't developed enough to really provide the other actors with much opportunity, but Dev Patel is convincing and likable in his role as the nebbish engineer/father figure, and Hugh Jackman seems to relish the opportunity to play such an obnoxious character, even if his level of evil seems to ricochet up and down as the plot demands it. 

'Lucy' review by Captain Raptor

'Lucy' review by Jake Boyle

Lucy received a fairly hostile reception upon its initial release, mostly based upon its portrayal of Asians and the now widely known to be bullshit 'you only use 10% of your brain' factoid. While the former of these criticisms makes perfect sense, in a world of superhero films that bear as much resemblance to scientific reality as climate change deniers, quite why this particular film's erroneous logic was a sticking point isn't clear to me, but we'll bypass that.

It's an easily forgiveable error because it's indicative of the genuine effort that's been made to make Lucy more intuitive and dramatic than its competitors. This particular example, aiming to achieve those qualities by grounding the film in a sense of authenticity, failed pretty miserably, but decisions made by Luc Besson such as splicing in footage of animals as (very blatant) symbolism do give the overall experience an edge of smarter drama and even thoughtfulness. I particularly enjoyed the film's steady descent into madness; starting off with some very tense scenes where 90% of the dialogue is unsubtitled Mandarin that makes the audience feel Lucy's bewilderment and trepidation, the film then journeys through superpowered beat 'em up and into existential thrillseeking before an ending that's so gloriously insane it defies description. It's all nonsense, obviously, but a refreshingly ambitious brand of nonsense. 

Scarlett Johansson's game performance anchors the film, and she comfortably does whatever's needed of her. Julian Rhind-Tutt's single scene is a particular treat, delightfully chewing the scenery as a villainous character far more entertaining than the primary antagonist. These characters are fun because they possess the silliness and energy that drives the film, something that the other characters sorely lack: Morgan Freeman appears in yet another film where nobody asks him to act and instead just spouts rhetoric about Besson's chosen themes, and Amr Waked's lifeless cop only exists so that Lucy has a reason to explain what's going on to the audience via proxy. Once the initial plot's served its purpose and the action sequences begin, the film quickly encounters the Superman problem wherein there's never any real sense of threat or danger because Lucy's newfound abilities are so overpowering. The obvious inferiority of her enemies is played nicely a few times for comic effect, but it quickly loses any impact to see her so easily overwhelm generic henchmen.

Lucy isn't by any measure a spectacular or eye-opening affair, but it's a highly fun, diverting piece of cinema. It's leaner and wiser than the average modern action movie, wisely sticking to a compact running time and injecting little doses of exploratory sci-fi or out-of-the-box thinking that don't make the film much smarter or adventurous but do give it just a little bit of extra flavour. It's definitely a flawed piece of cinema, but not to the extent that viewing it wasn't enjoyable, and the film is strong enough to stand up under the weight of its own absurdity.