By BRUCE DENNILL
Mortal Engines / Directed by Christian Rivers / PG13
Gifted / Directed by Marc Webb / PG13
Tomb Raider / Directed by Roar Uthaug / 13V
Finders Keepers / Directed by Maynard Kraak / 16DLV
SWAT Under Siege / Directed by Tony Giglio / 16LV
The House With A Clock In Its Walls / Directed by Eli Roth / 13HLV
The opening scene of Mortal Engines sets the stage – with a concept, special effects, and am implied vision for the film as a whole – for an epic that never really develops. In a post-apocalyptic future, cities move and ingest whatever gets in their way, and the largest of these, including the predatory London, are terrifying juggernauts, made more menacing when they’re run by the likes of Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving). Two young heroes with initially divergent agendas have to thwart a generic evil genius plan – to build a giant weapon – and they do so in ever-intricate surroundings that show immense imagination on the part of the filmmakers, but which are also in stark contrast to the relative blandness of the unconvincing plot. Lovely to look at, but somewhat vapid.
The notion of “family” provides rich inspiration for storytellers and filmmakers. Often, that involves stretching the definition of the word in many ways, often involving dysfunction of some sort. The family in Gifted is hardly a “normal” one – a man (Chris Evans) raising his prodigiously intelligent niece (Mckenna Grace) with plenty of positive input from his landlady (Octavia Spencer), who then finds the child’s wellbeing threatened, in his opinion, by his mother (Lindsay Duncan). The script asks pertinent questions about happiness versus meeting expectations and the relative value of each, without ever feeling too worthy and serious. Everyone involved puts in excellent shifts – Evans showing his versatility outside of the action films in which he is more usually seen; Spencer and Duncan providing superb support and Grace being charming, charismatic and unflustered by the responsibility of being the film’s focal point. A well-made, moving drama.
Make a film based on a video game, then follow that up with a sequel – that’s already stretching some unsophisticated source material pretty thin. To then, 15 years later, reboot the franchise confirms the notion of filmmaking being more about marketing than it is about storytelling. There are certain core strengths in Tomb Raider, though: Alicia Vikander is an excellent actress and shows herself both willing and able to take on the responsibilities of an action star; and the plot involves the sort of blustering, propulsive set-pieces that keep your ears and heart-rate engaged, if not your intellect. At that level, there’s not too much wrong with this film, but as is often the case with big-concept pieces, the wall-to-wall CGI soon starts to wear down any willingness to really engage with the story.
Set in Cape Town, this crime comedy involves a sweet-hearted janitor (Dalin Oliver) and a heavy-drinking gambler (Neels Van Jaarsveld), who work at and frequent – respectively – a strip club that’s also popular with a bunch of Russian gangsters. This bumbling pair find some valuables that belong to the bad guys and decide to try and hold on to them. It’s a cliché-ridden set-up made worse by writing that takes what could have been at least tense and punchy to puerile (gross-out nonsense about bodily functions) and predictable. Likeable performers aren’t given much to work with and, with the bizarre addition of a CGI fish (a “lucky fish”; possibly just so there could be an extra South Africanism in the script) that adds little or nothing to the narrative, the fate of Finders Keepers is sealed. If you neither find nor keep it, you’ll be ok.
SWAT Under Siege is a film that should be a lot worse than it is. It has a fairly cliched script and some paint-by-numbers plot development and, other than Michael Jai White, no “name” actors to really speak of. But it works, because it keeps things simple. The central characters are special forces police, the bad guy has a lot of friends with big guns, and the central premise is that the guys you can usually rely on in the toughest situations are now under attack and facing odds that seem insurmountable. There is loads of shooting, punch-ups aplenty and generally non-stop action. More satisfying, though, are the credible twists and solid acting, and though the project lacks some of the big-budget polish of some of its better-known genre companions, it is, as a tense cops-and-robbers piece, a success.
There’s a lot to like in the early stages of this adaptation of John Bellair’s 1973 novel of the same name. Jack Black as a hammy warlock and Cate Blanchett as an elegant neighbourhood witch inhabit the sort of richly detailed childhood fantasy that any kid would want to explore – and the magic of which ten-year-old Lewis (Owen Vaccaro) begins to unpack when he arrives to stay. It’s all a bit live action Hotel Transylvania, with the associated goofiness front and centre, rather than the potential terror that might come with inhabiting a house where things move for no reason and chairs, well, bark at you. But The House With A Clock In Its Walls meanders in search of a firm plot or focus point, and ironically, once it stumbles across one, most of the enjoyment involved evaporates as the script gets simplistic and stupid – vomit and fart jokes and the unnecessarily like. There was budget here, certainly, and perhaps vision. But the former can’t paint over the cracks in the project and the latter remains unrealised.
