Mary Poppins Returns to bring us more of the same

It is more than a little disingenuous to pretend that Mary Poppins Returns is anything more than a thinly disguised remake of the original Mary Poppins (1964). At best you might get away with the modern tendency to describe it as a ‘re-imagining’; what it is not, however, despite the insistence of some of its stars, is a sequel.

Granted the film is set up as a sequel of sorts in that that magical nanny, now played by Emily Blunt, reappears again at a time of crisis for the Banks children. This time not for the little ones but the original children who are now full-grown; Michael (Ben Whishaw) is a widowed and penniless artist trying to care for his children while Jane (Emily Mortimer) is a social activist implicitly waiting for a man to rescue her.

Mary arrives with the trusty Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), a lamp lighter rather than Dick van Dyke’s chimney sweep, and – spit, spot – all is sorted as you knew it would be from the moment Chekhov’s share certificate made an appearance in the script.

It is a perfectly charming film but for me it lacks the courage of its own convictions in that it can never quite free itself from the shackles of the source material. Rather than carve out new narrative territory they seem content to thrash around in the undergrowth of the old.

They have gone to the trouble of hiring Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the men behind Hairspray, and they have written a score full of lively, jolly, and touching songs. However, none of them is as good as any of the originals and, bizarrely, they all seem deliberately designed to evoke the memory of the older, better, songs.

Can you Imagine That, Trip a Little Light Fantastic, and The Place Where Lost Things Go, are thin facsimiles of A Spoonful of Sugar, Step in Time, and Feed the Birds and can’t hold a candle to any of them. They’re decent songs, they’re just not classics.

This happens throughout the film where all the set-pieces, including the live-action/animation mix, seem intended to remind you of the first film. This is a shame because there is enough talent, imagination and energy here to have come with a memorable film all their own.

It’s just that they seem determined to insist that nothing has changed, or possibly will ever change, in Cherry Tree Lane so the film is a little narratively hamstrung.

Emily Blunt’s Mary is a little icier than Julie Andrews but the characterisation works, Miranda is a decent foil – even though Dick van Dyke now no longer has the worst mockney accent in the movies – and Michael and Jane have grown up just as you hoped they might as played by Whishaw and Mortimer.

Mary Poppins Returns is an entertaining film and not without its charms. What it lacks, I feel, is the passion and drive of someone like Walt Disney who, as we saw from Saving Mr Banks (2013), was determined to bring P.L.Travers stories to the screen. She wrote eight Mary Poppins novels, I believe, surely someone at the Disney organisation could have had the drive to take one of them and let Mary pick up her brolly and fly to a new adventure.

The Old Man & the Gun is an absolute delight

 In his inestimable book Adventures in the Screen Trade, the recently deceased screenwriter William Goldman recalls a studio executive dismissing Robert Redford as just another Hollywood blond. ‘Throw a stick at Malibu,’ he opined, ‘and you’ll hit six of him’.

The executive is, fortuitously, left nameless and the passage of time has proved him spectacularly wrong. But to some extent he may have had a point. In his early TV career Redford was competing against the last knockings of teen heartthrobs such as Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, and others.

Despite great early film performances in Inside Daisy Clover (1965), The Chase (1966), This Property is Condemned (1966) and Barefoot in the Park (1967), opposite Jane Fonda who was tarred with the distaff side of the same brush, it was easy to dismiss him as just another attractive face in the crowd.

It wasn’t until Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) that Redford achieved what we would now class as superstardom. Once he was in charge of his career and his choices he put together a resume that ranks with the best of his generation. Like his Butch Cassidy co-star and great friend Paul Newman, Redford had to grow out of his looks and into his talent to be taken seriously but it has been worth it.

He is one of those actors who has had the misfortune to appear in the occasional bad movie but also the good fortune to never himself be bad in any movie he was in. Indecent Proposal (1993) is an ideal example; it’s a terrible movie but Redford is the one decent thing in it. Along the way he has also put together an interesting career as a director and producer, not to mention setting up the Sundance Institute which became the foundation of the American indie movement in the Eighties.

All of which brings us to The Old Man & the Gun which Redford suggests may be his last film as an actor. If it is, and I earnestly hope that it isn’t, he is leaving us with one of his finest screen performances.

David Lowery’s film is based on the true story of Forrest Tucker – the bank robber not the character actor. Forrest broke out of San Quentin at the age of 70 and embarked on one of the most improbable crime sprees in American criminal history. Using not much more than charm and a smile – the titular gun is never fired – Forrest and his ‘gang’ (Danny Glover and Tom Waits) cut a larcenous swathe across the American Midwest.

Forrest is a perfect Redford character. Not an outright maverick but someone who is blessed with a gift for seeing the world not as it is but as how he would like it to be. If Redford has an acting style it’s one of studied curiosity; there’s a slightly pragmatic edge to his dreams. In that sense he is perfectly cast here. This film, which he also produced, is Redford’s contemplation of his career, just as Clint Eastwood reflected on his in Unforgiven (1992) and Gran Torino (2008).

Lowery’s ‘mostly true story’ – a nod perhaps to Butch Cassidy’s ‘Most of what follows is true’ – unwinds at a leisurely pace. The story is embellished slightly by the addition of a significant love interest in the shape of Sissy Spacek’s elderly widow, Jewel.

The scenes between Redford and Spacek are utterly charming. There are none of the facial tics or emotional indication of many contemporary stars. Here you have two of the best in the business giving it their all in an atmosphere of mutual respect. It doesn’t seem like acting at all, it feels rather as though we have been allowed to eavesdrop on a conversation. Their naturalistic underplaying makes both characters utterly convincing and Jewel humanises Forrest for the audience to make the ending all the more poignant.

The Old Man & the Gun may look odd to contemporary audiences but Lowery has gone out of his way to create an aesthetic that resembles the period in which it is set. The grain of the film, for example, is forced to look like a Seventies movie, the camera movement is restricted, and even the title is in the same archaic font as that of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

If this is indeed Redford’s swan song then it is a glorious send off. But it also marks the emergence of David Lowery as a major directing talent which redresses the balance somewhat.

Into the Spider-Verse is an amazing experience

Although the comic book movie is undoubtedly the most popular contemporary movie genre it has never quite captured the sheer thrill of a well-written comic book. All the CGI in the world cannot replicate the smell, the feel, and the immersive delight of these four-colour fables.

The best of the MCU or the DCU never actually feel like comic books; for all their delights they exist somewhat at arm’s length. With their intergalactic armadas and levitating cities they provide spectacle but it is fundamentally empty. There is no movie equivalent of the well-crafted single panel in a nine-panel page that provides key character detail.  The only recent comic book movie that has come close, for me, is Spider-Man 2 (2004) which Sam Raimi cleverly imbued with a sense of freewheeling fun and a classic comic-book villain.

All of that changes with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse which is, by a distance, the best Marvel Comics movie made so far. It really feels like running your eye over the pages of a comic book, or indeed more than sixty years of comic books since it encompasses all of the styles and visual hallmarks of just about every Spider-Man iteration since 1962.

It is, to all intents and purposes, not so much a comic book movie as a moving comic book. Co-director Bob Persichetti says they were trying to recapture the feeling of flipping through a comic so it’s no surprise that physical comic books feature so prominently in the narrative. He and his fellow directors, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, had to come up with a brand-new technique which marries hand-drawn animation with the latest in computer-generated technology. The results are startling.

Into the Spider-Verse is a fusion of comic, video game and movie formats featuring multi-panel storytelling, thought bubbles, text boxes, and neon bright colours. It is a sensory onslaught and it works superbly.

To begin with we have a ‘new’ Spider-Man.  Miles Morales was introduced in 2011, by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sarah Pichelli, to provide more diversity in the Marvel Universe. He is a young black kid who gets bitten by a genetically modified spider and starts to develop powers he’s not quite sure of. Miles lives in a world where Peter Parker is Spider-Man, but in trying to come to terms with his new powers he not only witnesses the death of Spider-Man but also discovers something else he shouldn’t.

There is more than one dimension out there and each one has its own version of Spider-Man. These include ‘our’ Spider-Man who also appears with a noir version, a teenage Spider-Gwen Stacy, an anime Spider-robot, and the magnificent Peter Porker, Spider-Ham – a talking cartoon pig.

They have all been transported to Miles’s world by the machinations of The Kingpin and it falls to Miles to counter the threat to his world and return the heroes to their own worlds before they die.

The story leaps off the screen. The writing-producing team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the men behind The Lego Movie are the driving force here with exactly the right balance of humour and pathos.  It’s not so much about great power begetting great responsibility, instead this is Spidey as a metaphor for adolescence. Spider-Man gets knocked down but always gets back up; a recurring theme in the life of ‘our’ Spider-Man who is seen here, out of shape, separated from the love of his life, and on the brink of an existential crisis.

Into the Spider-Verse is very funny, whip-smart but also very dark. Apart from Peter Parker’s mid-life crisis, there are several deaths which are fundamental to the story. Perhaps not for the kids, unless they’re genned up on quantum physics and the theory of multiple realities.

The script is extremely well acted with a great voice cast which includes Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Mahershala Ali, Hailee Steinfeld, Live Schreiber, Lily Tomlin and Nicolas Cage amongst others.

That said, it’s the visuals that are most important – it’s a completely immersive experience. It will make your head spin but at the same time it’s the only thing that captures the sheer exhilaration of reading those magnificent Stan Lee and Steve Ditko stories in the Sixties. Given that we have lost both men in the past few months the timing of the release is quite poignant but the tributes to Lee and Ditko here are entirely appropriate and genuinely heartfelt.

The only downside for me was that I could have done with seeing more of Peter Porker, Spider-Ham but even so this is such a rich visual experience, jam-packed with Easter eggs, I’m going to have to watch it several times to get the full benefit.

Anna's apocalypse is a fun-filled festive frolic

Let’s start with full disclosure. The director of this film, John McPhail, was one of my students. He generously credits me with teaching him some of what he knows. That said, he did put the hard yards in himself. He still, I believe watches a film every day including Escape from New York (1981) once a week. It takes all sorts, I suppose.

I mention this for context because, in the best traditions of Alan Hansen and Manchester United’s kids, I believe I may have told him more than once there was no future in zombie movies. Colour me embarrassed – and also rather proud of his accomplishment with a film that breaks new ground for the Scottish film industry.

Anna and the Apocalypse could be a game changer for the local sector. This is not Scottish miserabilism, this is a Scottish version of High School Musical (2006) with a big dollop of Night of the Living Dead (1968). It presents all of the expected zombie movie tropes, but does it in song and with an unbridled enthusiasm that defies you to dislike it.

The plot is standard Romero. The small town of Little Haven – actually Port Glasgow – has been hit by a zombie apocalypse at Christmas. Anna (Ella Hunt) and her friends take refuge first in a bowling alley but then they have to battle across town to her high school to be reunited with her father (Mark Benton).

It’s an inspired idea and the film comes joyously to life thanks to the energy of the performances and a superb set of songs from Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly. In the best traditions of the genre Anna is oblivious to what’s going on and her big number Turning My Life Around, sung while the apocalypse is going on full swing around her (above), is one of the best scenes in any Scottish movie, ever.

Let’s be clear, the film is far from perfect. They don’t have a lot of money and they do a lot with what they’ve got, even so it does rather run out of steam towards the end in a slightly problematic third act.

On the plus side it has unbridled energy, passion and enthusiasm and with Ella Hunt as Anna they have a potential star in the making. The great songs and lively performances are handled by a director whose passion for this film can be seen in every frame.

Anna and the Apocalypse is one of those movies that reminds you that, before they discovered the art, cinema was meant to entertain, which this does splendidly. But then, I might be biased.

The Girl in the Spider's Web is dull stuff

I am not a fan of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Maybe they suffered in translation but I found the novels stylistically ugly, narratively dull, and emotionally rather unpleasant. That said I didn’t mind the Swedish-made film trilogy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who played with Fire, and The Girl who kicked the Hornet’s Nest (all 2009).

They weren’t great films but they were smartly made, efficient thrillers with the bonus of a terrific central character. Lisbeth Salander, as portrayed by Noomi Rapace, seemed to be a genuine action hero for the new millennium. Salander was deliberately fluid, exhibiting male or female traits as it suited her. In many ways she defied description or categorisation, she was neither hunter nor prey, and lived by her own code of conduct.

It was this defiance of convention and Rapace’s flinty, uncompromising performance which provided a compelling core for this Scandi-action trilogy. Remaking the first one in 2011 with Rooney Mara in the title role and David Fincher behind the camera was a bad idea which resulted in a bad movie. However it’s like Citizen Kane compared to the latest film in the series.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web could not be more naked in its intentions. Based on a book commissioned by Larsson’s estate to keep the franchise going after his untimely death, it is completely lacking in anything other than a desire to make as much money as possible.

Salander here is played, in a bizarre piece of casting, by Claire Foy but the character has been stripped of everything that made her interesting. She is a super hacker and avenger of wronged women and there is no trap or peril from which she cannot escape. She’s like a Goth James Bond as she charges hither and yon across the icy landscape pursued by a bunch of cack-handed sadists.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a piece of software which will enable the user to control pretty much all of the world’s nuclear weapons. The inventor (Stephen Merchant) commissions Salander to steal it but there are all sorts of vested interests who are determined to get their hands on it. I was going to say they will stop at nothing but plainly they drew the line at a decent script. There’s no story to speak of and the plot it just a bunch of improbably convenient coincidental stuff that happens in front of the camera.

The kindest thing you can say about the direction by Fede Alvarez is that it is functional. The action scenes are competently staged but there is no tension or excitement. Like the Fincher version too there is a nastiness to a lot of the violence which is just unpleasant.

Even allowing for that, I didn’t really care about anyone in this film, not even the small child caught up in it all. Salander herself is a soulless void and since she has been established as such an unbeatable character, I was never once concerned about whether she would survive or not. I knew she would make it through to the end, which is more than I could say about me.

Outlaw King - sound and fury signifying nothing

David Mackenzie’s latest film Outlaw King never tires of letting you know what it wants to be. This story of Robert the Bruce aspires to be a widescreen epic – with a capital ‘W’ and a capital ‘E’. Which makes it all the more disappointing that, funded by Netflix, its target audience is going to see it, at best on a big telly and at worst on a mobile phone.

Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography is by some distance the best thing about this otherwise unremarkable film. There are some very impressive drone shots, a handsomely-mounted night-time ambush, and some glorious tracking sequences, all of which are crying out to be seen on as big a screen as possible. But for all this visual splendour, this remains for me an uninvolving and unengaging film which is nice to look at but lacks any sense of drama or excitement.

Even the tracking shots become wearing. After a while it feels like you are watching a Visit Scotland promo or a car commercial.

Outlaw King is essentially a year in the life of Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine); the year in question being 1305 - 1306 in which Bruce presses his claim for the Scottish throne. Bruce has seized the throne by force and now wages a guerrilla campaign against Edward I (Stephen Dillane). The king sends his son, The Prince of Wales (Billy Howle) to put down the rebellion; the young prince raises the Dragon Banner meaning the rules of chivalry no longer apply, priming both sides for wholesale slaughter.

In the midst of this Bruce gets married to Elizabeth de Burgh (Florence Pugh), loses several close family members, and is generally hunted from pillar to post without showing so much as a flicker of emotion. Playing the hero as the strong, silent type may work for those brooding Pine close-ups of which Mackenzie is fond, but it does nothing to demonstrate any kind of emotional depth in the character.

None of the main characters is remotely engaging and none has any emotional arc or depth. Florence Pugh’s Elizabeth starts improbably spiky and there is the hope that she may be a strong, independent, female character but she quickly fades from the scene to the point where she spends the final third of the film suspended over a castle wall.

To be fair it’s hard really to judge how good or bad this film is. The version we see on Netflix is apparently 20 minutes shorter than the one which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival where the reviews were, to be kind, mixed. Even with 20 minutes taken out the film has serious pacing issues; it takes ages to get going and when it finally does it’s a fairly stop-start affair to the end.

Certainly the film feels poorly written with large bits of expository dialogue and no real character insights; although again we have no way of knowing what has been removed. Generally the film feels inauthentic. There is a very clever nine-minute tracking shot to open the film and, while this is technically superb, I wonder what narrative purpose it was supposed to achieve. It’s a very contemporary technique and for me it works against a 14^th century narrative.

Much will be made of the battle sequences which are brutal and bloody but relentlessly so. There’s no sense of ebb and flow in the fighting, it’s like watching the same fight four times. Also, it’s a brave director who tries to do this sort of thing in the light of Game of Thrones episodes such as Blackwater or Battle of the Bastards which set new standards for this sort of filming. There is very much a ‘been there, done that’ feel to the action here.

I have always liked the intimacy of Mackenzie’s earlier films such as Asylum (2005), Hallam Foe (2007), or even Starred Up (2013). There is a real focus on character in these films which is lacking here where instead he seems to be concentrating on some fairly pointless action.

The performances from Pine, Pugh, and Dillane seem almost perfunctory. Aaron Taylor- Johnson as Black Douglas, and Billy Howle as Edward II  on the other hand are so over the top that you wonder if they thought they were doing Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Outlaw King may find an audience on Netflix, and I hope it does, but the commercial logic of doing such a cinematic film for such a limiting platform eludes me.

An uninteresting film about an interesting man

The cartoon which gives this film its title is as close as you can get to an insight into its subject. The single-panel features a cowboy posse staring down at an overturned wheelchair in the desert with the sheriff uttering the line of dialogue that has been co-opted here as the title of this John Callahan biography.

It makes you laugh and then feel bad for laughing. As such it’s a perfect example of the dark, often shocking, humour of John Callahan, a quadriplegic alcoholic whose rage and bitterness poured out onto the page in his crudely eloquent work. Sadly none of this comes out in a film which plays like a Hallmark TV movie about someone bravely overcoming a physical challenge.

This story was a long-cherished project by the late Robin Williams who was a huge fan of Callahan and had teamed with director Gus Van Sant to try to get this off the ground in the Nineties. Williams would surely have brought some of his own mania to the part; instead we have an insipid performance from Joaquin Phoenix and directing from Van Sant who just seems grateful to be making the film at all.

Much of the story is told in a non-linear fashion as we hear Callahan’s story from a series of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He became a drunk as a teenager and then, at the age of 21, he was almost completely paralysed in a car crash. The accident happened after a two-day bender – Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) wasn’t driving but his fellow bar-hopper Dexter (Jack Black) was. Dexter walked away with barely a scratch; Callahan became a quadriplegic.

The film charts Callahan’s story using the AA twelve-step programme as a framework. This tends to suck the drama out of the story and while there are some decent individual moments there is a general failure to cohere into a sustainable narrative. There are a range of fellow recoverees but they are cookie cutter characters spouting predictable homilies. His therapist/girlfriend (Rooney Mara) is particularly risible.

Some of the better scenes involve an almost unrecognisable Jonah Hill (top right) as his sponsor and one of the few people to challenge Callahan. Hill is the best thing in the movie but there is a sort of doomed certainty to the whole thing.

Callahan’s lived experience must have been dramatic but there is no sense of that here. His epiphany on the road to sobriety is very low-key and his emergence as a cartoonist seems to be incidental. It’s visually interesting, as you would expect from a director of Gus Van Sant’s calibre, but it’s hard to be engaged by it.

Phoenix seems determined to be liked, as Van Sant seems determined that Callahan be likable, and at times it’s a very indulgent process. By all account Callahan, who died in 2010 just short of his 50th birthday, was a difficult man but there is very little sense of that here.

If the film had just a fraction of the emotion and intensity of Callahan’s work it would be a much more satisfying watch.

Halloween is a shocker....in a good way

It’s axiomatic that horror movies tend to reflect our contemporary societal insecurities and there is certainly a reading of recent ‘domestic horror’ successes, such as the Insidious franchise or A Quiet Place (2018), along those lines. Namely that our secure domestic societies are being shaken up by outside forces over which we have minimal control.

That being the case there is something very satisfying about a good, old-fashioned horror movie which is what we have in this incarnation of Halloween. This is a return to the old style slasher movie; it’s very much a throwback to the Seventies and it works well in those terms.

The 1978 version of Halloween, directed by John Carpenter, is of course the film that kicked off the slasher genre. One of the interesting things about this version, directed by David Gordon Green of whom more later, is that it resets the continuity. The Carpenter version spawned a ten-movie franchise, including an ill-judged Rob Zombie grindhouse trilogy, but all of that has been swept away by this film.

There is the 1978 film then there is this real-time sequel in that it takes place 40 years after the first one. Michael Myers is back, Laurie Strode has been the woman who cried wolf for four decades, now she has been proved right. All of her faintly paranoid survival techniques are finally going to pay off as three generations of women are locked in a house with a totemic serial killer. This is a slasher movie for the Me Too movement.

I remember seeing the original in the Odeon in Renfield Street in Glasgow when it was released. It was a sensation, you had to see it or you had nothing to talk about; it became part of the national conversation and my memory is of it playing to packed houses every night.

We had never seen anything like Halloween. It was the first and still the best of its genre and it established all of the themes that are now standard; the ‘have sex and die’ plot points, for example, and of course the narrative trope of the ‘last girl’.

Laurie Strode was the ultimate last girl and it is very pleasing to see Jamie Lee Curtis, the original screen queen, returning in her most famous role. In 1978 she was a resourceful babysitter, now she’s a shotgun-toting grandma who has waited forty years to finish the job she thought she had accomplished in the first film. It’s a character that rather neatly parallels her contemporary Ellen Ripley who was introduced only a few months later in Alien (1979)

Curtis is very good as a woman who is sufficiently self-aware to know that Michael may not have killed her, but he did kill off her chance of a successful and well-adjusted family life. She is estranged from her daughter (Judy Greer), has a strained relationship with her granddaughter (Andi Matichak), and the whole town thinks she’s crazy. She has sacrificed a lot but she has always believed it would be worth it and tonight’s the night.

The film pays a good deal of attention to Carpenter’s version – he, and Curtis are listed as executive producers – but it also has something to say for itself. The first act is a little clunky having a sly dig about the current hipster obsession with murder. Two smug podcasters basically clue us in on everyone’s back story, and even though they are intensely irritating we are consoled in the belief that they won’t be around for very long once they have finished their recapping duties.

The film finds its feet once Michael returns to Haddonfield and resumes his murderous rampage. Again there is an old-fashioned quality to his killing spree. There’s no torture porn here; some of the killings happen off-screen, some are only heard, and some are simply seen as consequences after the event.

The look of the film very closely resembles the original with David Gordon Green’s frame perhaps a little more restless than Carpenter’s. Michael is often on the edge of the frame or just a little out of focus. The effect is to make the audience ever vigilant to his presence and that makes him much more of a threat.

David Gordon Green has had a curious career. He began with well-regarded indies such as George Washington (2000) and Undertow (2004) and then switched to low comedy with Pineapple Express (2008) and Your Highness (2011). But as a viewer he was a product of the VHS generation and, while this is his best film in a while, it also reflects his 70s influences with a very close homage to the original, including 70s pacing. This film feels slower than ‘modern’ horror movies but is none the worse for it but whether that appeals to modern tastes remains to be seen.

Halloween deals in suspense and shock more than gore and is refreshingly free from torture porn. Of course you know what’s coming but the impact comes from the cleverness of the execution and the result is a good old fashioned shocker

Operation Finale could be an awards contender

Since his breakthrough role five years ago in the Coen Brothers Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) Oscar Isaac has emerged as one of the most interesting actors around. Partly I think that is due to his willingness to take chances; his roles since 2013 include films as diverse as Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and The Promise (2016).

Now with Operation Finale he stretches himself again, not as an actor but as a producer. This is a challenging topic; the story of the hunt for Adolf Eichmann is the sort of film that Hollywood studios find it increasingly difficult to finance so in Netflix it has found a perfect fit.

As the ‘architect of the Holocaust’ Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) was top of the most wanted Nazis list after the post-war trials at Nuremberg. When the Israeli secret service, Mossad, gets a tip in 1960 that he is now in Argentina there is pressure to go and kill him, as they did with so many other Nazis. However there is also a feeling that taking him alive and putting him on trial would make an important point about the status of the fledgling state of Israel and send a message to its enemies.

The decision is taken. Eichmann will be smuggled out of Argentina and brought back to Israel. The plan is conceived by Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac), a disgraced Mossad agent who has much to prove. It is audacious and as Mike Tyson said ‘Everyone has a plan until I punch them in the mouth’.

In this scenario the punch in the mouth is a combination of diplomatic nicety and commercial cold feet which means that Malkin and his team have to hide in plain sight, with Eichmann, in Argentina. Meanwhile the nascent nationalist movement in the country, for whom Eichmann and his coevals are a potent symbol, are hunting them down.

Director Chris Weitz has constructed a tense and suspenseful ticking clock scenario which, in terms of recent movies, resembles Argo (2012). But much more interesting is the debate between Eichmann and his captors which takes place in the foreground while the clock ticks down in the background.

This is an essay in evil, specifically in the banality of evil. Eichmann, whose notorious defence was that he was only following orders, at first sees the Holocaust as a matter of scale. It’s a logical problem for him, and one that has to be solved efficiently to manufacture murder on an industrial scale.

Malkin, who in common with everyone on the team has lost family in the Holocaust, has to get him to sign a confession. The trick, as he realises quickly, is to play to his ego which is almost as monstrous as his actions.

These scenes are absolutely fascinating. Isaac is very restrained and focused while Kingsley, who for so long seems to have been phoning it in, gives a performance that reminds you how good an actor he can be. He is by turns witty, cajoling, devious, wheedling, and conciliatory until finally Malkin gets under his skin and he is revealed for what he is.

From the opening credits Weitz gives the film a very old-fashioned look. The story is set in the early sixties and the film looks like it was made not long afterwards but this only adds to the impact of a powerful film with a couple of excellent performances at its centre.

A star is bored

The film business is a high stakes game and the stakes are getting higher all the time. There was a time when a film like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) could grow gently by word of mouth to become a colossal hit. Not any longer. The days of the sleeper hit are far behind us. In the modern movie business films have in theory a single weekend to prove themselves at the box office. In practice, sophisticated computer modelling means they have really only a few hours.

In this climate the marketing of the movie is crucial, a new audience has to be bought for every movie and that elusive ‘want see’ commodity has to be created. Hats off then to the marketing department behind this version of A Star is Born. They have created such an enormous amount of hype around this film that I even paid my own money to see it.

To be honest I cannot recall a recent film that has been more overpraised – not even La La Land (2016). Newspaper ads are full of four and – remarkably – even five-star reviews for a film which, to me, is at best workmanlike and at worst unbelievably dull. It’s a bore for the most part.

The appeal of the film to the studio is obvious, A Star is Born has been a hit three times already with Janet Gaynor (1937), Judy Garland (1954), and Barbra Streisand (1976) so in these risk averse times green lighting it seems like a no brainer. And yet this film seems especially  pointless.

The plot is well worn. It’s a story of the love between an established star and a wannabe in which the Svengali-like influence of the superstar will mould and shape the talented ingenue. The twist is that the established star’s career is on a downward trajectory, although he may not know it, and is about to be eclipsed by the rising newcomer. There is, as there has been in all three previous versions, a fateful conclusion and triumphant resolution.

This time round the star is Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper), a country-rock star of inexplicable global popularity and the newcomer is Ally Campana (Lady Gaga), a waitress who wants to be a songwriter but lacks confidence. It’s simple stuff but very heavy going. The first half is light enough despite Gaga, of which more later, but the second half is a bit of a slog as we find ourselves wading through very predictable treacle.

Part of the problem is a very poor script for which Cooper is partially credited along with Will Fetters and Eric Roth. This is a script that leaves nothing to the imagination, it has no sense of subtext. Every point is hammered home and we are left in no doubt about the back story of every character because they cannot be prevented from narrating it at every opportunity. The first clash between Jackson and his older brother Bobby (Sam Elliott) is an especially egregious example of information dumping. There are no characters, just talking plot points.

Cooper is by some distance the best thing in the film. He is an attractive actor in every sense of the world and the film never lets you forget that. Gaga may have top billing but he’s the director, so he gets all the close-ups.

Lady Gaga on the other hand is extremely problematic. As Ally she has no presence at all, she’s no actor. I suspect this might be down to a consistent inability to find her lens, so she doesn’t have the impact she should have. It is nonetheless a passionless performance which only comes to life when she becomes, effectively Lady Gaga. Ally, as she is now singularly named, is Lady Gaga to all intents and purposes and performatively she provides a much-needed shot in the arm. There is however no explanation for how the soulful Suzanne Vega type songwriter turns into this overhyped creature.

Jackson meanwhile is going from bad to worse with a season ticket for the rehab facility. Unlike other versions of the story, the focus here is on the male lead rather than the female. It’s his story not hers and much less interesting for it; so much for #metoo. Whether or not Gaga could have lifted that dramatic weight is mercifully untested.

As a director Cooper deserves some credit for his choice of subject but that’s about it. Unlike other actors making a directing debut he has not chosen to do some vanity indie piece of emo navel-gazing. This is a big film with big budgets and big issues to deal with.

He deals with them competently and in a workmanlike way. The film’s visual trick is to put you on stage with the performers – previous versions gave us largely the audience perspective - but this is just a product of new technology. Cooper, to be fair, does his own singing and playing; it’s pleasant enough but not something you’d pay money to hear.

As a filmmaker there is very little flair or imagination in Cooper’s direction; he does not strike you as a director with something to say or an interesting way of saying it. He does deserve credit for getting through his first picture, but there’s nothing here to suggest that I’d be in any hurry to see his second one.