FILM | Reviews
PERIOD DRAMA GREAT EXPECTATIONS (12A) 128min ●●●●●
The challenges of bringing such a hefty literary work as Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations to the screen are no doubt great. Mike Newell’s adaptation sadly fails to overcome them, and despite an all-star cast is an overlong, limp re-working of the novel.
Many will know the tale well: Pip (Toby Irvine and later Jeremy Irvine) is an orphan living with his sister (Sally Hawkins) and her blacksmith husband Joe (Jason Flemyng). One day he’s invited to the derelict mansion of Miss Havisham (Helena Bonham Carter), who introduces him to her young daughter Estella (Helena Barlow and later Holliday Grainger) and where he becomes captivated with the idea of becoming a gentleman. His wish is later fulfilled when a mysterious benefactor pays for his move to London.
Sadly the source material doesn’t shine here. Helena
Bonham Carter is a reliable presence as Miss Havisham and Holliday Grainger plays a particularly beautiful Estella. But overall, despite the abundance of cobwebs and dust in the Havisham mansion, this adaption has a glossy, superficial feel to it. More grit, texture and emotion are what’s needed to really bring this story to life. (Gail Tolley) ■ General release from Fri 30 Nov.
DRAMA I, ANNA (15) 93min ●●●●●●
A sleek, sombre thriller that’s a little too tricksy for its own good, this debut by Barnaby Southcombe is chiefly notable for a fine lead performance from Charlotte Rampling, who also happens to be the director’s mother. (So it’s come to this for older actresses – in order to get a decent lead role you have to actually make your own director!)
Rampling is compelling as the eponymous Anna, a woman with a past who’s either in great danger, or rather dangerous herself. A hopeful late foray into the dating world brings her into contact with Byrne’s moody police detective, but his interest is more than carnal: he knows she’s got something to do with a nasty murder case he’s working on.
Southcombe has a fine sense of atmosphere and physical composition alike but the film’s determination to bamboozle us rather overmatches what it ultimately has up its sleeve. And as good as she is, Rampling takes up too much of the film. It’s sweet that the clearly talented Southcombe went to
such lengths to make his mum look good, but his film suffers slightly for his partiality. (Hannah McGill) ■ Selected release from Fri 7 Dec.
THRILLER END OF WATCH (15) 109min ●●●●●
Jake Gyllenhaal continues trying to prove something – who can say what? – with this swaggering police potboiler, in which he plays reckless, foulmouthed, macho LAPD officer Brian Taylor, and looks, as ever, like a big pretty kitten on its way to have its claws manicured. While you’ve got your disbelief suspended, you’ll want to also make space for the film’s ‘found footage’ gimmick, which asks us to buy that snappily-edited multi- camera scenes are all being picked up by a tiny camera concealed in one of Brian’s pecs (or something). It’s hard to see why director David Ayer – who wrote the similarly lurid but far superior Training Day – bothered with this presentational quirk, since it has no bearing on the plot and is pursued too half-heartedly to be remotely convincing. Presumably it’s just designed to fire the adrenal glands of kids hopped up on the phoney spontaneity of scripted reality shows and army recruitment videos.
Anyway, Brian and his love-you-like-a-brother-man partner, Mike (Michael Peña), ride around busting one another’s balls, having unimpeachable blue-collar integrity and endeavouring to clear the ‘scum’ (ie the poor black people with drug problems) off the South Central mean streets. Oh, and they have some saintly wives, who trot on to gawp at them adoringly now and again. (Who knows what drew Anna Kendrick to her role as Brian’s wife, but the fact that her cleavage is squeezed into most shots of her suggests that the filmmakers noticed how dull her onscreen presence was otherwise going to be.) Peña is the saving grace – he’s got a warmth that almost makes it past the film’s onslaught of self-righteous clichés – and the film has a kinetic energy that will please its target audience; but it ultimately says nothing, and says it all too loud. (Hannah McGill) ■ General release from Fri 23 Nov.
CRIME COMEDY GAMBIT (12A) 89mins ●●●●● A very loose remake of the 1966 film starring Michael Caine as a cat burglar, the most notable thing about this art scam caper movie is that it’s been written by Joel and Ethan Coen. Don’t get too excited, though. While it boasts the precision plotting of, say, Intolerable Cruelty and the odd Coen-like caricature, it lacks the plain weirdness that typifies their output. Instead, this infantile farce gets its smirks from fart jokes, a naked Alan Rickman and watching Colin Firth stroll through the Savoy Hotel without his trousers (don’t ask).
Firth plays Harry Deane, an art curator who plans to hoodwink his loathsome millionaire boss (Rickman) into buying a fake Monet with the help of his forger friend Major Wingate (Tom Courtenay) and a Texas rodeo queen, PJ Puznowski (Cameron Diaz). While the film begins with the first of several rug-pulls – as Harry envisages the perfect crime and we briefly believe he’s pulled it off – the humour comes from watching his plans go hugely awry. Diaz is convincing enough as the fish-out-of-water but Firth, despite the Harry Palmer-style glasses, lacks the roguish charm of Caine. Perhaps he should stick to playing monarchs. (James Mottram) ■ General release from Wed 21 Nov.
62 THE LIST 15 Nov–13 Dec 2012