A trio of tales tells the story. They feature a badass DEA agent (Armie Hammer) who is on the hunt to bring down a Canadian drug lord Mother (Guy Nadon). A recovering addict (Evangeline Lilly) who suffers a personal loss that triggers a revenge plot, and Gary Oldman, a Doctor that gets put under pressure to follow a Big Pharma party line in regards to testing on a new drug. Oldman was also a producer on the project.

The three provide the bedrock to the film with varying degrees of success. Hammer in stock police procedural mode gets to be the renegade rebel with the heart of gold as he struggles to bring down the bad guy and keep his substance abuse sister alive. His storyline dovetails with that of Lilly’s as she mirrors his attempt to bring down the Kingpin, Mother. Oldman’s Doctor role exists outside of the street and is set in the world of academia and unfortunately misses the chance to make a bigger impact in the film’s narrative.

The opioid catastrophe has become a horrible scourge in North American and other parts of the world and it deserves a film that ignites a great sense of outrage and works to instill a strong desire to get involved in its banishment, unfortunately, Crisis isn’t completely up to the task. It is entertaining but ultimately lacks the gravitas that the situation deserves.

Rob Hudson
www.facebook.com/UniversalPicturesAU

Now revisiting Robocop in 2014 is a plan fraught with risks and Brazilian born director/documentarian José Padilha hasn’t really helped matters by choosing some elements within the first version to revisit while casting aside others. His more moralistic take is interesting while his almost complete discarding of some of the eighties version’s most humorous elements (mainly the hilarious TV ads) have taken a lot of the fun out. Original director Paul Verhoeven’s biting social satire is sadly missing.

For those familiar with the first version, a spot the differences approach has its charms, while newbie’s are left with a somewhat familiar dynamic. One where big business and its leaders are corrupt and the plucky young upstarts are not. Most of the gray in this story line however is washed out. There are some arresting visual moments and some action scene that filmmakers in the eighties could only have dreamed about but they are used rather predictably here.

What we are left with is a film that looks of its time with current state of the art computer generated graphics instead of dodgy but endearing stop motion animation and a seriousness that drains a lot of the enjoyment out of the ride. It’s still worth seeing as the overriding story arc is one of interest but its chances of being remembered fondly in the decades to come are slim.

Rob Hudson
www.facebook.com/SonyPicturesAUS

Following a similar narrative structure to Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar winning Traffic, three stories about the world of opioids collide: a drug trafficker arranges a multi-cartel Fentanyl smuggling operation between Canada and the U.S., an architect recovering from an OxyContin addiction tracks down the truth behind her son’s involvement with narcotics, and a university professor battles unexpected revelations about his research employer, a drug company with deep government influence bringing a new “non-addictive” painkiller to market.

Crisis will be released in Australian cinemas March 18!

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Jackson as the hitman tries his best to drop more F bombs than any of his other films and Reynolds delivers a Deadpool lite performance that shows how well he has a handle on comic timing. Salma Hayek, who has little screen time but nonetheless gives Jackson a run for his money in the profane stakes, plays the incarcerated wife of the hitman.

The story simplified to its core element is just a soon to be buddies road movie and almost all the characters are comic book deep, old school comic book. The main action sequences happen mostly in Amsterdam and seeing a film based in that waterlogged location reminds you of how unique the scenery there is.

As long as your expectations revolve around enjoying yourself and giving your critical mind the night off, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is good fun. Look any deeper than that and you will look right through it.

Rob Hudson
www.facebook.com/roadshow

The story revolves around a high-tech American submarine and its principled Captain, Joe Glass, played with his usual swagger by Gerard Butler. He is the ultimate stand up guy and when he and his crew rescue a fellow Russian sub captain from the bottom of the sea, they become immersed in coup to oust the current government in Russia.

American patriotism is down played slightly as the action on screen becomes more about doing the right thing regardless of national ideology. It plays out in some very unbelievable action but is held just on the border of believable (or slightly outside it) by some amazing military technology.

With your suspension of disbelief cranked up to eleven, Hunter Killer is a surprisingly fun romp through some crazy military action. Its view of heroism is rather one sided but the action comes thick and fast to make up for the lack of depth.

Rob Hudson
www.facebook.com/roadshow

Churchill is also one of the most discussed and over examined people of the twentieth century. Many of his idiosyncrasies have also become as famous as him, so the fact that Gary Oldman is so riveting and cliche free as the British Bulldog is testament to the amazing level of craft and acting skill he brings to the role. Ben Mendelsohn is also fantastic as King George VI

The film focuses on the period when he was first selected as PM and one of his first tasks was getting the British soldiers home from Dunkirk. Focusing on just that time period really ramps up the tension even though by now the results are well known.

Referring to Darkest Hour as a just a war film does it a grand disservice as it forms a behind the scenes view that is fascinating. In many ways this film could be part of a fantastic trifecta of British war films that includes Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech.
www.darkesthourmovie.com.au

Jackson as the hitman tries his best to drop more F bombs than any of his other films and Reynolds delivers a Deadpool lite performance that shows how well he has a handle on comic timing. Salma Hayek, who has little screen time but nonetheless gives Jackson a run for his money in the profane stakes, plays the incarcerated wife of the hitman.

The story simplified to its core element is just a soon to be buddies road movie and almost all the characters are comic book deep, old school comic book. The main action sequences happen mostly in Amsterdam and seeing a film based in that waterlogged location reminds you of how unique the scenery there is.

As long as your expectations revolve around enjoying yourself and giving your critical mind the night off, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is good fun. Look any deeper than that and you will look right through it.

Rob Hudson
www.facebook.com/hitmansbodyguard

As the unstoppable Nazi forces roll across Western Europe and the threat of invasion is imminent, and with an unprepared public, a skeptical King, and his own party plotting against him, Churchill must withstand his darkest hour, rally a nation, and attempt to change the course of world history.

Staring Gary Oldman, Kristen Scott Thomas, Lily James, Stephen Dillane, Ronald Pickup and Ben Mendelsohn, Darkest Hour is in Cinemas January 11 2018!

The plague created by Will Rodman’s Alzheimer’s ‘cure’ has spread throughout the globe and decimated the human population and, presumably, empowered ape populations worldwide. Caesar’s simian refugees build a growing community in the redwood forest while a splinter group of human survivors eke out an existence within the ruins of San Francisco. The diminishing fuel supply the human’s require for electricity generation inevitably bring them into contact with Caesar’s community who presides over a derelict hydroelectric facility.

This loose remake of Battle for the Planet of the Apes (the final film in the original franchise) betters its already excellent predecessor in most respects with more frequent action, intriguing plot and admirably balanced political themes. It’s a grown up film which accepts the complicated reality that good guys and bad guys are not divided along social, racial or indeed special lines; that, despite the best intentions of our heroes for peace, there is an inevitability of conflict in the world and an, albeit reluctant, place for violence within it.

We all know this, of course, but in movie land we like to believe that all issues are in simple black and white. At least that’s what the money men behind the movies tend to think. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is here to show us that audiences are indeed capable of, and will happily digest, complicated real world issues as forms of high end entertainment and that it can be done to a high degree of quality.

Quality films require quality performances and the key roles deliver here. It’s nice to see Jason Clarke in a hero role and be effective in it. Andy Serkis is, as always, amazing with the physicality of his performance as Caesar and, as usual, you would never know it was him were his name not in the credits. Gary Oldman is sleep walking through this but even a slumberous Oldman is rarely worth complaining about. No mention of the performances would be complete without commenting on the apes in the film which are amazingly realistic. Whether they be real, make-up or CGI (likely a mixture of all three, I suspect), the effect is phenomenally convincing.

The film does fall down a tad in its overblown climactic battle which is incommensurate with the intelligent plotting and action within the film thus far. But despite this tendency towards Transformers in the final act, the film remains, on the whole, a highly entertaining blockbuster with an intelligent social commentary.

Stuart Jamieson
www.dawnoftheplanetoftheapes.com.au

The Dark Knight Rises sees Ra’s al Ghul’s League of Shadows try yet again to wipe Gotham City off the map with yet another device developed by Wayne Enterprises. The problem is, we’ve been here before. The films plot amounts to a rehash of ideas from Batman Begins, even the leader of the bad guys is (again) not who he appears to be.

While the ‘Ra’s al Ghul’ storyline was an interesting one in the context of Batman’s origin, it made for a relatively weak finale to Batman Begins and Nolan seeks to take this finale and reimagine it as the entire plot of The Dark Knight Rises. Sure it nicely brings the story full circle and it smartly references contemporary themes of terrorism, economic decline and the destruction of capitalism, but the story is no more interesting the second time around. The simple fact is that Ra’s al Ghul is not as interesting a character as, say, the Scarecrow or the Joker or even Harvey Dent, so it does the film no favours to re-introduce him albeit in another guise.

The film is also hindered by the fact that much of the dialogue is indecipherable. Bane, in particular, is a problem, his voice being muffled by his mask, but any time an action set-piece is underway it’s difficult to hear the dialogue above the din. It is difficult to say, admittedly, if this is a product of the audio mix or the acoustics of my local cinema but it poses a significant problem in following the plot’s finer points.

Thankfully, the strength of all Nolan’s Batman films have been the quality of his characters and The Dark knight Rises is no exception. Indeed, it is the characterisations and the performances of the cast that maintains the superior status of The Dark Knight Rises above the previous (non-Nolan) Batman movies.

Anne Hathaway is a very welcome addition as the unuttered Catwoman, all slinky and beautiful and devious; is there a better looking and more talented actress in Hollywood at the moment? And Joseph Gordon-Levitt is also excellent as Commissioner Gordon’s understudy. Even if his character arc is a tad predictable, we warm to him for the same reasons we warmed to Bruce Wayne. The usual suspects – Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman – deliver brilliant performances so predictably, they barely rate a mention anymore.

The weak link is, of course, Bane (Tom Hardy); not because Hardy isn’t any good but because his character is uninteresting and one dimensional. He looks, sounds and has the emotional depth of Humungus from Mad Max 2.

The Dark Knight Rises is directed by Christopher Nolan so naturally, it’s an extremely competent effort that is entertaining if a little overlong; it’s just a pity that all this brilliantly orchestrated action and engaging character development isn’t taking place within the context of a more engaging and original story.
Stuart Jamieson
www.thedarkknightrises.com