The Force is strong in this one

To be clear from the outset, there are a lot of things that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not. It’s not the best film ever, it’s not even the best Star Wars film, and it is certainly not the best film of the year. It is also not the film that will cure all of the ills of modern blockbuster film making, although it is a step in the right direction.

Equally there are a lot of things that this film is. It is the most enjoyable action movie of the year, it will be the most successful film of the year, and it is a welcome return to its roots for a series that had lost its way with its last self-indulgent trilogy. It is also a flat-out, superbly constructed, rip-roaring adventure movie in the Hollywood tradition.

Partly that is due to the pragmatism of George Lucas who took Disney’s money, handed the property over, and then stayed well clear. It’s a bit like seeing your kids off to school, if you can imagine doing that while trousering 4 billion dollars. The property is now in the hands of J.J. Abrams, living proof that the geeks shall inherit the earth, or at least that part of it responsible for the film industry.

Although Lucas lived with the ideas behind Star Wars, Abrams grew up with them and they informed his childhood. As a result, he probably knows this property better than its creator, and at times it shows. There are moments when Abrams is freed from the shackles of creating a saga and just gives himself over to the sheer joy of having the greatest train set any boy could want; the moment when the X-wings ride to the rescue, for example, is one of several gee whiz moments in the film.

The story itself is very simple. Set thirty years after Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker has disappeared. The Republic still holds sway but the defeated Empire has been replaced by the First Order, like the Nazis but with more rallies. We are at a tipping point in galactic history and the side that finds Luke, the last of the Jedi, may emerge triumphant. Not a treaty or a trade delegation in sight, an old-fashioned quest movie. Just like the first one.

The Force Awakens is nicely constructed around a series of entrances; the old cast such as Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Leia each get a moment – even the Millennium Falcon gets an entrance. Similarly, new characters like Stormtrooper with a heart Finn, mysterious desert scavenger girl Rey, and dashing pilot Poe Dameron are introduced to do most of the narrative heavy lifting for this and subsequent films. The one false note in the new cast for me is BB-8, a new robot who is overly anthropomorphic and presumably has his eyes on his own cartoon spin-off.

One of the reasons this film moves along so well and so crisply for me is the presence of Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter who was the unsung hero of the original trilogy. With him and Abrams working together we get a film that manages to look back and look forward in equal measure. There are some scenes which are effectively re-imaginings of key moments in Star Wars: A New Hope – let’s face it, it’s almost 40 years old – while there are other scenes that encourage the belief that the saga will be enriched by this and the other two films.

There are a couple of rough edges around the script. I know there are a lot of keyboard warriors out there who’ve glanced at McKee or Sid Field and are tearing into its lack of narrative arc or its characters without back stories. They should just close their laptops and keep their counsel. Because here’s the thing; it doesn’t need a satisfying narrative arc, it’s only the first act. The first Star Wars movie didn’t have much in the way of narrative arcs and back stories and it turned out okay, so I have confidence in this one.

More than anything else for me The Force Awakens is refreshingly old school. There are moments that are classic Hollywood; the appearance of the X-wings, for example, is straight out of Stagecoach and the final third of the movie is The Guns of Navarone with a touch of Red River.

The craft skills are excellent. Dan Mindel’s cinematography is lovely, the occasional diagonal wipes are a nice nod to Lucas, and the physical effects are a vast improvement on the wholesale CGI of the Marvel universe. It means that The Force Awakens appears to have weight and substance in almost every sense and for one will cheerfully await the next installment.

Whatever happened to Johnny Depp?

This blog is prompted by a curious conflation of events. The other night I was at the cinema to see the new Hunger Games movie – overlong and a bit dull, since you ask – when I caught a trailer for something called Dirty Grandpa which allegedly stars Robert De Niro.

That Robert De Niro. The man we all thought was the greatest actor of his generation, playing an elderly perv on a road trip with Zac Efron; and there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. Then the following day I was watching Black Mass with Johnny Depp, another contender for The Greatest Actor of His Generation (TGAOHG). And I wondered, whatever happened to Johnny Depp?

Apart from De Niro, others saddled with the TGAOHG tag have not done well. Laurence Olivier for example with his trousers round his ankles getting jiggy with a parlour maid in The Betsy, Anthony Hopkins chewing the scenery as an old exorcist in The Rite, or Jack Nicholson having to take cues from Adam Sandler in Anger Management. And now Johnny Depp seems set to join that unhappy band.

Depp was a genuine contender as one of the greatest screen actors ever. He was a minimalist whose work illuminated films like Edward Scissorhands, Benny and Joon, and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. What was also so charming about him then was the way that all he cared about was the work; he seemed genuinely interested in being an actor rather than a star. But here he is in Black Mass, TGAOHG hiding behind some oversized contact lenses and a bald wig, pretty much phoning it in.

The tragedy is that, even in phoning it in, it’s the closest thing he’s given to a real performance since Finding Neverland more than ten years ago. Depp has come down with a bad case of star fever, which struck him in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie and reached crisis point in The Lone Ranger. He became a parody and was playing Jack Sparrow even when he wasn’t in a Pirates movie.

I was delighted to see him sign on for Black Mass, the true story of how Boston gangster Whitey Bulger conned the FBI into making him the effective king of the city’s underworld. Perhaps he had left the mugging and the special effects behind. Early trailers looked good, which is what they are supposed to do after all, but the finished film is a disappointment. It never comes across as any more than Goodfellas-lite.

Actually if you are a director aspiring to make a decades-spanning American gangster movie you should pretty well avoid seedy barroom scenes and a period soundtrack. It just reminds people of how good a film Goodfellas is. To be honest, though I loved his first two pictures, director Scott Cooper seems a little out of his depth here. The project is maybe too big and he never puts his stamp on it.

TGAOHG in particular seems not be directed at all; unless of course the direction was ‘Johnny, in this scene you’re phoning it in – again.’ For an actor who formerly lit up characters from within, it is disappointing to see him resort to props, make-up and the occasional grimace. At the end of the film we know little about Whitey Bulger that we couldn’t have Googled.

Depp gives no sense of the man; it’s like he’s forgotten how to act. Bulger suffers two great tragedies and the narration – the film is told in flashback – tells us it changed him radically but there is no sign of it in his performance. He is the same unpleasant man at the end of the film as he is at the start, only with a few more prosthetics.

The big thing about Bulger was that his brother – Benedict Cumberbatch picking up another nice pay cheque for doing not much – was a local politician, a state senator. That’s an interesting story and if you want to see it check out the series Brotherhood starring Jason Isaacs as the Whitey character and Jason Clarke as his politico brother. It’s way better than this.