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.