Stranger Things

Hype. It can be a dangerous thing. When the media spins wild and wondrous about a new programme it doesn't automatically mean I will chime with the journalistic zeitgeist. When friends insist I will love said programme I tend to come to it with either too much anticipation or with a sense of resignation and advance sorrow that I am about to prove my compadres wrong.

I am late to this party. I quite like being late to parties sometimes although there is a deeper satisfaction to be had coming early, eating the best of the snacks, drinking some punch, smoking some fine ass weed and then leaving before too many assholes arrive. But it's not literally a party, I got tangled up in my own metaphor.

Late or not, I spent an entire day binge-watching to catch up with this series which was apparently somehow startlingly innovative and yet also evocative of some of the greatest science fiction creations television and cinema have ever spawned. When it comes to the latter it is undeniable that Spielberg looms large as does Lynch, various adaptations of Stephen King's work and maybe a little Ridley Scott. I also saw nods to Scooby Doo and Buffy The Vampire Slayer but you don't have to if you don't want to.

Innovation? Actually yes, the Duffer Brothers have achieved a gloomy newness of their own, not least because the investigations into kooky, spooky goings on in Hawkins, Indiana (a very authentic unreal American backwater town) are explored from the angle of several different groups. The dungeons and dragons loving kids whose buddy, Will's disappearance is the start and the heart of the piece, are brave, refreshing and strike completely genuine notes throughout despite the plot requiring them to face up to horrors most of us would soil our underwear over at their age.

Will's mother, Winona Ryder in surely her career best performance, is convinced even after a body is dragged from a nearby lake that her son is alive and communicating with her through the lights in her house. She also fears that some kind of monster is in the walls of her house. It should feel like schlock Hammer House stuff where walls drip blood and voices erupt out of static but it's too gripping and well directed to be so stale. She's eventually aided by an initially cynical cop who has his eyes prised wide open to the freakery in the county when he sticks his nose into things government folk would rather he did not.

Wills older brother teams up with one of the other kids' big sisters, much to the annoyance of her boyfriend, lending good old teen drama and sexual tension into the mix but, again, nothing is rote or just retread, the relationships are taut and real enough, the performances strong, emotional.

The aforementioned government folk are led by the Droopy The Dog features of Matthew Modine who, Winona aside, is the biggest name here. He clearly has unpleasant, weaponising intentions for his strange, psychokinetic prodigy, a twelve year old girl known as Eleven who teams up with the youngsters to find Will. She dominates the entire series, a mini-Sinead O'Connor in appearance and aloof weirdery, but vital to the final knitting together of all the disparate pieces of the puzzle and dealing with the very real monster lurking in the shadows.

To divulge more would be to spoil it for any who are coming to the party even later than I (just remember it's not a real party and there will be no vol au vents or dancing to The Human League). I can say that for once I agree with the hype and with the insistences of my friends: Stranger Things is a combination of satisfyingly familiar elements melded together in a unique and compelling way. The cinematography is atmospheric and impeccable throughout, the dialogue and action weave perfectly to keep the story rolling along at a pace which allows for true development of individual plot lines yet never lets things drag. And the performances, particularly Ryder's, are of such high quality that suspension of disbelief is easier than you might imagine when you are also admiring yourself for noticing the references to Stand By Me, Close Encounters, Gremlins, E.T., Alien, Hanna, and a whole bunch of other noteworthy cinematic moments.

Another series on the way, you say? They'll find it hard to match this one but I have every confidence they will try their very best to do just that.

John Hurt

Sometimes it is difficult to convey the scope or impact of an actor's career but there's no doubting the range and consistent cultural relevance of John Hurt's life and work. Just naming some of the many films and television productions he was involved in reveals the diversity and significance of his performances.

When your first major role is in the sixties big hitter A Man For All Seasons it's a safe bet that you will be able to hold your head high amongst the highest echelons of the profession thereafter. Which is exactly what Hurt did in a career spanning six decades. He first made a name for himself playing outsiders and idiosyncratic characters, many of them real life figures such as Quentin Crisp, John Merrick (The Elephant Man), Caligula and Bob Champion. Over the course of his life he also appeared in some of the biggest and most iconic franchises of his times: Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Alien, Hellboy and Doctor Who.

Almost forty years ago his death scene in the first Alien film became an instant classic, one parodied and emulated to this day. His portrayal of Winston Smith in the 1984 production of, er, Nineteen Eighty-Four, brought Orwell's revolutionary protagonist so perfectly to life that his depiction of the Fascist dictator Adam Sutler in 2005's V For Vendetta seems like a second betrayal of Winston's original intent to expose the totalitarian violence of Big Brother.

With his gravelly tones, Hurt possessed a voice most of us emulate when we're phoning work pretending to be unwell when in fact we want to stay home and watch daytime television in our pants. Having such a distinctive set of pipes never prevented him from taking on a cornucopia of different characters. If younger audiences will largely think of him as wand maker Olivander or the previously unseen 'War Doctor' in the BBC's greatest ever science fiction series he is unlikely to have cared too much nor demanded they investigate his more challenging work such as Krapp's Last Tape or his original portrayal of Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant.

The world has lost not just a consummate actor but also a dedicated professional and a disarmingly nice, normal human being, a rare instance indeed in a career often dominated by self-important show-offs. I bet he did know what Cup-a-Soup is.

Z For Zachariah

A thoughtful post-apocalyptic drama which marries the small-detail intensity of a stage play with grandiose scenery the likes of which only cinema can provide (New Zealand masquerading as somewhere in southern America).

Chitty Chitty Ejiofor stumbles into Margot Robbie's strangely uncontaminated farm valley home a year or so after a nuclear disaster that is discussed only in half-finished sentences and knowing looks but which was probably a result of war rather than mass power station meltdowns.

Or maybe it's not so strange that her little corner of the world is uncontaminated while the rest of the locale gets Geiger counters clicking like horny grasshoppers: she's the wide-eyed daughter of a preacher who built the nearby chapel as well as their home, presumably. Daddy's gone seeking survivors, Ann (Robbie's character) digs and sows and ploughs with a rustic determination seemingly from a bygone age.

John (Ejiofor) is suffering radiation sickness. Obviously he's going to survive with some tender nursing from Ann otherwise it's going to be a short film. Equally obvious is the likelihood they will bond on a deep enough level to consider making their relationship a more, ahem, biblical one.

Slight problem - John is not a religious fellow. Indeed, he's a scientist: practical to the core, which comes in handy in respect of advising Ann on how to hand pump gasoline from the local station to fuel her tractor. But when it comes to his notion of building a water wheel to replace a broken beyond repair generator he cannot quite understand her reluctance to use the wooden walls of the chapel. It's raw materials for him; sacrosanct to her.

Their relationship has not yet reached consummation when Chris Pine's Caleb turns up, adding extra muscle power to jobs around the farm but also much tension when it seems clear Ann finds him quite alluring. To further complicate things for John, Caleb shares Ann's faith although he agrees with using the wood from the chapel to make that wheel. His accurate but somewhat manipulative observation that it's what Ann brings to the building with her beliefs and her regular playing of the old church organ that make it holy.

Using God to get into a woman's pants is a pretty low tactic but ultimately it works. John tries to take it on the chin but by this point knows he is in love with Ann. Godless he might be but he's seemed reasonably moral to this point. So when he and Caleb set off to put the completed water wheel in place but only he returns, claiming the other guy has moved on in search of a possibly mythical citadel further towards the coast, do we believe him?

Do we fuck and it's doubtful Ann does either but he keeps in her good books by dragging the organ into the farm barn, saving it from exposure to the elements now that the chapel has been dismantled. Cue musical finale, not in the sense of a song and dance number but back to poignant shared looks while she plays and he listens intently.

A simple tale, splendidly told. Ejiofor appears to have stolen Denzel Washington's vocal styling for the role but hey, he's an Englisher and thus doing a grand job. Robbie's an Aussie so equally admirable for her southern twang. Pine couldn't be more all-American if he tried but his performance here is a great reminder of his genuine acting abilities for anyone who thinks the cartoonish requirements of portraying Captain James T. Kirk are the extent of his range.

While the storyline itself is no great cerebral challenge the performances ensure the film stays in the memory and the characters lodge themselves into the viewer's heart. More expert scripture-readers than I will be able to tell you what the significance of the title actually is.

Gor

You enjoy wasting your time and energy on misogynistic, dreadfully scripted, terribly acted, low budget bullshit 80s films, don't you? You don't? Then don't watch Gor. Consider that I've watched it for you as some kind of punishment for metaphysical crimes I don't even know I've committed, and because I've put myself through the torture of the lowest low of all the many lows of Oliver Reed's frequently pointless career, you will never have to do the same

Reed isn't even the star, that dubious honour belongs to some oiled up Heston-alike who is apparently dubbed throughout due to an inability to shake off any traces of his native Italian accent. He's pulled out of our world into a leather fetishist's seed-spilling dream where men are men, women are good only for ogling even when they can fight as well as men, where dwarves are dwarves and the budget was presumably all spent on Reed's alcohol intake leading to all props and interior scenery looking worse than the Blue Peter sponge, bottle tops and green paint Tracey Island.

Ah Sarah Greene, how enthusiastically you tried to convince pre-pubescent children that making shit models of television landscapes was meaningful and even fun.

Yes I digressed. It's the only way to survive this movie without emasculating yourself with a rusty pen. Or cutting off your breasts with sponge, bottle tops and green paint.

Let's see now, can I even be bothered to work out if the alleged plot is worth dissecting any further? Not really. It's one of those shonky epic journey things that is just about accurate when it comes to depicting a journey but lies and lies again in claiming to be in the slightest bit epic.

Gor was not a stand alone piece of moronic garbage at the time, though. Fantasy movies were all the rage: Colon The Barbarian; The Never Ending Search For Story; Labyrinthitis - these rare box office and critical successes unfortunately spawned hundreds of puerile imitations, each more tatty and shit-smeared than the last. Perhaps the only positive thing to be said about all of them is none were quite as awful as Gor.

Rhymes with bore.

Winterwatch

Winkywatch. It's when Chris Packham puts hidden cameras in people's y-fronts and him and Michaela Strachan try to disrupt each other as they read an autocue.

Wintourwatch. It's when Packham and Strachan put hidden cameras inside the boss of Vogue and try to disrupt each other as they read an autocue.

Winterwatch. It's when...oh you know how this sentence ends.

Except this is the real one. Our nature lovers rock up at a Dorset reserve and tell us all sorts of interesting things about animal poop, the splendid ways predators find to kill their prey and how to read an autocue. Oh and there's that other bloke with the flyaway hair too.

It's been said that the large viewing figures for the various seasonal 'watch' programmes is a result of the British becoming increasingly alienated from rural affairs due to urbanisation. Could be some truth in the theory but I'm in a small city not so far from a highly varied natural landscape and I still find the shows fascinating. I am a country boy, though, and as such am allowed to find voles attractive. Them and my own sister.

Modern technology, whether it be motion sensitive cameras, infra-red equipment or tiny, surgical style in-the-nest camera type things, affords audiences unprecedented access to the animal kingdom. Add in slo-mo and the behavioural revelations scooped from electronic tagging and we seem to be in a golden age of possibilities for understanding and preserving the country's wildlife. Which, given how intent humans often seem on wiping out all other life unless we can farm it for food, is more important now than it has ever been.

So if you don't watch these shows you hate animals. You know that, don't you? You're a critter hater. I hope an eagle eats your face off.

Paycheck

Ben Asslick, I mean Affleck, doesn't know what's going on. His character, that is. It's unproven whether Ben himself is all a bit simple. And anyway the character isn't simple, he's a technical clever bastard who reverse engineers people's technological breakthroughs then has his memory wiped in order to protect himself and his employer from prosecution. Have you worked out this is based on a Philip K. Dick story yet?

Uma Furface is his lovely love interest who is a doctor of plants and weather or something. She is utterly under-used and could just as well be a plant pot. Or an icicle.

Aaron Eccles Cake is the naughty bad employer bastard mean naughty horrid ooh he's such a bad guy.

Am I laying it on a bit thick here? Well maybe but that's nothing to the heavy hand with which John Woo (what's that Tom Cruise, he's 'the Woo'?) directs. Far too many close-ups on Affuck's expressionless face, way too few well written or delivered lines of dialogue, an excess of explosions and motorbike bullshit, a repeated cutaway of a slo-mo bullet spinning towards its target. In the future.

It's all about designing a machine to predict the future then, if you're Benbo, realising this is a terrible thing, almost like removing hope from Pandora's box and letting Cassandra dictate all world policy forever (yes, I've read some Greek mythology, why do you ask?). So Ben, knowing his memory will be wanked away leaves himself clues and items to help him work out what he wants to tell himself post memory wipe so he can kill the machine and stop Aaron Ecky Thump from ruining the world.

Pah! Kill them all, I say. Especially if John Woo can somehow be all killed in the process. Or, if not all killed then killed enough in the mind tank to make him forget he's a film director. Perhaps he could take up fishmongery? I don't really care what career he pursues, just trying to pretend I don't wish the people behind terrible films dead. Even though I often do.

Quite why Thurman or Paul Giamatti should have chosen to associate themselves with this shit escapes reason. Did Woo sell it as a futuristic Memento? If he did he lied. Fishmongery's loss is also cinema's loss.

Exodus: Gods And Kings

Ridley 'Diddley' Scott does epic. Like proper Biblical epic like he's eaten the ghost of Cecil B. DeMille or something. But why the subtitle? Given that Judaic scripture forms part of most of the major religions of the world to some extent or other does the story of Exodus need subtitling? Are we likely to expect it to be a biopic of Bob Marley without the addendum 'Gods and Kings'?

The soundtrack is entirely lacking in skanking guitars but replete with often solitary violins propping up Christian Bale's strange accent whenever we might be in danger of wondering why a Welshman has been cast to play a Middle Eastern man. Or when Egyptians mingled with Australians to cast Pharoahs.

Whitewashing is, of course, a Hollywood tradition. Just ask Scarlett Johannson. And Al Jolson.

Anyhoop, the casting is the least of this film's problems. When an atheist willingly directs a movie depicting one of the seminal tales from the Old Testament then takes liberties with the original text it's a safe bet that large numbers of the potential audience will find fault with the result. As will non-religious viewers who were hoping for something less creaky with better dialogue and fewer holes in the plot.

Marauding crocodiles gets the best of the action, all scenes with chariot in them smack of desperately trying not to evoke Ben Hur, there is actually only one god represented - contrary to the superfluous subtitle - and he's portrayed as a somewhat stroppy pre-adolescent whom only Moses can see. It's hardly in the same league as Blade Runner, is it Ridley?

I do hope nobody decides to butcher the story of Noah in this cavalier fashion just to make cinema seem deep and meaningful. Oh wait, Aronofsky already has.

Seven Psychopaths

How to follow the surprise hit In Bruges? Stick with gun play and nutjobs. Increase the nutjobs, in fact, and get a cast Tarantino would envy to play them.

Writer/director Martin McDonagh also stuck with the all-conquering eyebrows of Colin Farrell but not as one of the psychopaths. Instead he is a screenwriter dragged further and further into an all too factual distortion of his fictional indulgences as the film progresses. Largely because the craziest psycho of the lot is his best bud, played without trademark ticks but subtle genius by Sam Rockwell.

The plot actually matters less than those of post-Snatch Guy Ritchie movies as the piece is more a commentary on contemporary gangster films than a genuine example of the genre in and of itself. In literature this kind of postmodern larking about is called 'meta fiction'. Doesn't quite work as 'meta movie' apart from a pleasing alliteration, but the concept is the same: not exactly absurdist theatre but intriguing pastiche.

And with figures such as Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, Olga Kurylenko and an uncredited Joaquin Phoenix lending weight to the quality of the ensemble, Seven Psychopaths is elevated up into such exalted company as the work of the Coen Brothers and Charlie Kaufman.

Everyone appears to relish the splendid silliness of their respective roles and the knowing winks to camera delivered within the script rather than directorial instruction. Then again, McDonagh IS the writer and director so perhaps it matters neither where the in-jokes originate nor how they are presented, only that they poke gentle, accurate fun at the rules of the game. Which they do. Both jobs done, Mr M.

As a self-contained story In Bruges is the stronger work and will no doubt be the one that lasts the test of time more effectively but if you're looking for a thoroughly entertaining and mildly bloody way to spend an evening's viewing with occasional uses of the word 'cunt' thrown in, you can do a lot worse than Seven Psychopaths. Plus you get the bonus of trying to work out whether Farrell's eyebrows have already achieved sentience in their own right.

The Zero Theorem

Ah, the auteur director. So very few of them left and even fewer whose work attracts A-list stars and audiences. Which is a little strange when you think about it. So much of Hollywood's output conforms to readily identifiable tropes and structures that you might imagine actors and viewers alike would long for visual and narratological deviance. I'll work on a theory about this at some point but first I have to stand in this field all year round and eat grass.

Apparently Terry Gilliam, the modern era's auteuriest director, isn't keen on The Zero Theorem being considered the third in a thirty-five year trilogy that started with Brazil and notched up Twelve Monkeys before 2013 saw the release of this, possibly the oddest of the three. So is it lazy journalism to point to the continuity of perspective, of dystopian aura and of a search for individual meaning within culturally trivialised lives? Maybe. I said it anyway.

Although visually Christoph Waltz appears to be auditioning for a future casting as Uncle Fester, his character, Qohen, is a theoretical cleverclogs tasked with solving the titular theorem whilst simultaneously being distracted by the initially unwelcome companionship of a PVC-clad Melanie Thierry (loved her work at Arsenal) and an arrogant neo-genius who calls everyone Bob because it's easier to remember his own name than learn other people's. It could be argued, then, that his search for meaning takes in a slow but genuine acceptance of a disjointed form of nuclear family with Thierry as love interest and Bob boy as surrogate child. Aww, connection and human affection equates to meaning. Excuse me while I fill this small bag with vomit.

No, I'm not that cynical. Love is a splendoured thing and comes in many forms. Gilliam knows this but is never so crass as to simply toss off a quirky family values fable for the money. Not even if the money is super big. Probably. And hey, if he has done exactly that with The Zero Theorem at least he's coaxed David Thewliss into his best performance since that cameo in The Big Lebowski.

None of Terry Gilliam's films are fully comprehensible on a single viewing; they are the cinematic equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, lurid, garish and groaning with sumptuous detail in every corner of every frame, requiring repeated scrutiny. Are they also moralistic? Yes, if you acknowledge that few of his movies hold back on criticism of the cultural values we are daily served up as ethical and habitual normalities within Western societies. Despite the broad palette of his oeuvre one of the unifying messages in his work is that notwithstanding the depersonalisation and alienation inherent to our world, human connection continues to occur in the unlikeliest of circumstances, lending authentic meaning to everyday mundanity.

Or you can replace the dialogue of every one of his movies with The Doors' 'People Are Strange' without doing too much damage to their impact. This patch of grass is lovely. I could quite happily eat it and eat it until such time as I am slaughtered and served up as somebody's supper.

The Amazing Spiderman 2

Reboots. They happen all the time now. Why this year there will be yet another reboot of Spiderpants, er man. Because this second outing for Andrew Garfield as the webby one didn't really do so well with critics or audiences. 

Garfield was a rebooted Spidey himself. After diminishing returns from Toby ‘I Hunch’ Maguire in three movies, Spiderplant came back as Garfield. Not an orange cat, you idiot, Andrew Garfield. I thought I’d already made this clear? Pay attention will you?

Or don’t. Not to the movie anyhow. There’s too much crammed into the film and with little genuine plotting to make it work. Electro Boy looks really different from his time with The Mighty Boosh. The Green Goblin is arch and camp and a terrible disappointment. Gwen Stacey is Emma Stone, the new darling of tap-dance, sing-song Hollywood musical revivals. Her eyes are big. Her impact on the movie small, despite some decent lines and a bit of the action.

Nobody impacts on the movie, they’ve got nothing to work with. Swing and prevent crime, Spidey. Just like the cartoons. Only with fewer dimensions to your character. Be a ghostly presence haunting Peter Parker, Dennis Leary. Like you spirited away Bill Hicks’ material all those years ago and pretended it was your own. Look translucent and sparky blue, Jamie Foxx, and try to forget you're an Academy Award winner slumming it here. 

Superheroes are bad for those they care about. We knew this. It’s peppered through every 21st century Marvel movie to provide moral fibre for the otherwise diarrhetic orgy of making the most of having amazing powers. You hear that, Amazing Spiderman? Stop having girlfriends or they and/or those close to them will die. Not so heroic now, are you, you creepy insect boy?

Bet the rebooted rebooted still peddles this cliche, though, don't you?

Sherlock: The Final Problem

When Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and the other guy reinvented Sherlock Holmes for the digital generation they struck television gold. Benny The Cumblepatch was perfect casting as the great detective, Martin from The Office an excellent Watson, Rupert Posh splendid as Lestrade, and Una Stubbs' tears great too.

Writing things up on the screen to allow viewers to see how astonishingly swift Holmes can operate his grey cells was clever enough to have been invented by Sherlock himself. The bromance between the two main characters was kept just shy enough of overkill to make their bond effective and emotionally compelling.

Best of all the scripts and the cases were, for the most part, of such high standard that audiences rode a switchback of tension, excitement and satisfaction made all the more fulfilling by cinematic camera work and production values.

For the most part.

In this, probably the last ever Bumblyman and Freedent instalment in detecting and adventuring, Moffat and Gatiss appear to have foregone many of the qualities that made their show such a success, apparently more interested in one-upping themselves, Conan-Doyle and possibly even John Logie Baird in an attempt to create the single greatest piece of televisual excellence ever. And failing.

Sentimentally cloying rather than genuinely touching, the emotional impact of this episode aggravates the gag reflexes rather than the frontal lobes. The plot is unnecessarily complicated, way more unbelievable than that whole business with the surviving a fall from a rooftop and extremely badly resolved.

To distract us from these cold, hard facts we are presented with the psychotic younger sibling of the Holmes brothers while the pre-recorded ghost of Jim Moriaty is dangled in front of our reddened eyes like we're two year olds unable to contain our excitement when we see a jack-in-the-box. The pre-recorded message thing is a really annoying motif of this series, what with Mary Watson's appearances in the second and third eps being largely restricted to maybe we don't miss her as much as we thought we might DVD cameos. Moffat and Gatiss may very well have taped their own contributions to the script meetings rather than sitting down and formulating a truly effective conclusion to their otherwise genius offering.

If the BBC persuades them to do more I for one will anticipate Sherlock's return less enthusiastically than I have done previously. One episode too many, run out of ideas, lacking in true drama aside from the Molly Hooper phone call. The word I've been avoiding so far is 'boring'. Sorry Sherl, for once it all left me cold and a long way from the edge of my seat. Can we have Luther back now please?

Wanted

It's unclear who or what is the subject of the title of this film. Is James McAvoy wanted or the king assassin he's been recruited into a weird fraternity of killers to shoot to pieces? Is Angelica Jolie wanted by McAvoy or is it the exciting, no-holds-barred lifestyle she represents? Perhaps a more meaningful title is wanted?

A trifling quibble. If you want bullets bending through space in ways that would make Einstein shit his underpants, you've got them. If you want way, way better vehicular spills and craziness than any FastFurious movie, you've got them too. Exploding rats, yeah you can have them. Stabby, stabby big knives scares; punchy, punchy violence; Chris 'What A' Pratt being smashed in the face with a computer keyboard; Morgan Freeman's join the dots mole face and velveteen voice; spectacular train crash...

Take it from me, there is a truck load of action. Action, action, action. That's probably what the director shouted in triplicate at the start of every single take. And after the film was wrapped the entire cast and crew had coronaries. Or didn't, but could have done. It's a big enough strain on the heart and adrenal glands just watching, let alone taking part in all this frantic action, action, action. In a good way.

Weird fact about Jolie: she does look quite a lot like her father, Jon Voigt, yet it's a look that suits her while it makes his face look like a misshapen lump of blurgh. He's not in this film, that would be confusing, just like it is in that Tomb Raider one.

Whether we buy into the assassin's creed formed in an old cotton mill or not is irrelevant. Whether the finer details of the plot make actual sense or not doesn't matter either. It's a high octane, ball tightener of a spectacle and sometimes that's sufficient to make the nipples harden like croutons in a bowl of sex soup. Terrible simile. Forget I used it. But don't forget to watch this film.

Olympus Has Fallen

Weren't they shooting this and White House Down at the same time? They could have shared costs by using the same fake government buildings. And by not making White House Down.

Those who like their leading men to be eye candy will prefer Channing Tatumoneal in the other one. Those who prefer protagonists to look and sound convincing when they deliver gruesome one-liners and stab bad guys in the brain will opt for Gerard 'I Hate You' Butler.

This one's got Koreans kidnapping the president. Koreans were the naughty villains of choice for a while, like in the remake of Red Dawn. Hollywood not allowed to admit all the time that rogue terrorists with no allegiance to specific countries are the real problem to global security nowadays.

So, remember London Has Fallen? Well don't. It's not been made. This is the first movie and it's Olympus that falls. Olympus being the code name for the President. Not grandiose in the slightest, eh, referencing the home of Greek gods when you come up with a code name for your President.

Diamond Face bad guy from a Bond film is Non Diamond Face villain masterminding evil antics in the bunker below the White House after a completely unfeasible attack on Washington's favourite monuments and symbols. Aaron Eckhart is the Prez because he's got a jaw made from granite. Or is it marble? Something super strong.

And Gerry Butty runs about in the darkened, blowdy uppedy corridors of power, democracy's last chance, strangling, stabbing, shooting and swearing his fucking way to hero-dom. That's not a sexual fetish, by the way, hero-dom, it's a clumsy way of saying he's the hero despite having been unable to prevent the death of the President's wife at the beginning of the film.

I reckon he spends enough time in confined spaces to know what a TV dinner feels like. I reckon they'll make a sequel. Oh they have.

The World Is Not Enough

Remember when Bond movies were camp, creaky festivals of explosions, humping and neo-pantomime villainous henchmen? Bond was humping a succession of women half his age, by the way, not the henchmen. We knew no better: Roger Eyebrows had set the template after taking over from Sean Toupee, Timothy Welsh had failed to shift the franchise into the 80s, Pierced Brosnan settled for somewhere between Eyebrows and Toupee with added grunting whenever he got hurt.

The biggest innovation of the Brosnan years was Judi Dench as M. The worst notion was John Cleese as replacement for Desmond Llewelyn's Q. And the invisible car but that's the next film. This one has Sophie Marceau as an Eastern European with a French voice, Robert Carlyle as an Eastern European with a little bit too much of a Scottish voice, Denise Richards with an unnaturally large chest and Robbie Coltrane with the same problem as Carlyle.

Oil, nuclear material, submarines, skiing, shagging, betrayal, caviar, destroyed cars, the Millennium Dome, shagging, grunting, far too many repetitions of the line 'Bond, James Bond', innuendo with Moneypenny, M in danger, gambling, shagging...yup, it's a pre-Craig Bond film.

And it's ok. Just ok. It's not Goldfinger; it's not even Goldeneye. Garbage recorded the theme tune but the real garbage would come with Brosnan's next and final outing as 007, Die Another Day. When the writers resort to invisible cars and the peak of the special effects is a dreadfully obvious CGI sequence of tsunami surfing it's time for things to change. Thankfully they did and Daniel Craig stepped in to drag Bond properly into the new century.

Guardians Of The Galaxy

Ronan Keating has tired of being a former boyband pretty boy and wants to destroy planets with a powerful gem thing. Big faced Chris Pratt, code named Chocolate Starfish, or something, is one of the few pink skinned people trying to stop him. The rest are all guilty of blue/red/green face crimes that I thought were frowned upon in the twenty first century. Zoe Saldana does look rather fetching as a green person, it must be said, but she won't dance, simply won't.

Music happens a lot. Lots of it, all retro stuff. Mix tape made by Starburst's dying mom so he could learn to love Motown and early seventies rock even after she was gone. Which was just before he was kidnapped by a bunch of space pirates in a flashback opening scene.

There's a violent walking tree too - best acting of Vin Diesel's entire career - and a rodent thing with smarts but an attitude problem. And a hulking great muscleman who never uses one word when fifteen will take up a few more seconds screen time. Basically it's a typical Marvel ensemble of misfits without the spandex.

And it's explosive. Super explosive. Interstellar explosive. And not exactly complex in terms of plot but who cares when such a magnificent cast turn up, sometimes to perform rather brief roles. Glenn Close, John C Reilly, Karen Gillan (who knew she'd look so cool and mean with a crew cut?), John Travolta, Fred Astaire, Dame Margot Fonteyn...I may have made these last three up.

Not once does anyone sing a Boyzone song, which might be adding to Ronan's rage. Instead they blow him to fuckery, in the end. No easy feat but why should I tell you how they do it? Why haven't you watched this movie already, you gimboid? It's great. Go on, watch it. I can't talk to you until you do. Or I will talk to you but I will only say "I am Groot" which will annoy the living shit out of you because you won't know what I mean.

Mission Impossible 2

Person in slow motion sliding across the floor sideways whilst firing two handguns. Check. Antagonist and protagonist hurtling towards one another on motorbikes like medieval knights charging their steeds in a joust. Check. Explosions in contained spaces. Check. A billion bullets flying about a small room without ever actually hitting anyone. Check. This must be a John Woo movie.

It is. If you watch it on DVD, somewhere in the extras Tom Cruise offers a fascinating insight into the directorial philosophy of the master of the hard-boiled action movie when he reveals that "He's the Woo!" Thanks Tom, I feel enlightened.

Dougray Scott is an MI agent gone rogue. Thandie Newton is gorgeousness in various dresses and handy with some nifty driving and thieving. A manufactured super virus is up for sale to the highest bidder and Ethan Hunt must ignore the possibility of his name being used as rhyming slang and destroy the samples before Scott gets his hand on them.

Whoops, not quite all destroyed. There is one left when the bullets begin to really fly. So Thandie injects it into herself. Silly woman, she's got twenty hours left to live, no antidote as that is in the hands of the prospective buyer, and Cruise hasn't killed Scott yet.

Helicopters, flash bombs, masks to pretend to be somebody else, the motorbike stuff, exploding cars, trucks crashing into things, massive martial arts flavoured fist fight on the beach. It's all here, but becomes just an endless parade of implausible spectacle making the end credits something of a relief. As is the fact that Cruise gets the antidote to Newton in time. Sort of. Might have been a darkly shocking ending if she'd just died.

Yeah, yeah, it's all beautifully filmed, the panoramic shots and the tightly controlled fight scenes contrasting almost too perfectly as though Woo wanted to provide a how to do actions movies guide for student directors. One that Roland Emmerich would benefit from, granted, but isn't especially necessary otherwise.

Soon Hollywood would discover Bourne and this kind of film would never be quite the same again. Don't believe me, then watch Daniel Craig's last two outings as Bond and Cruise's last two appearances as Hunt. Better ways of spending your afternoon than watching this misfiring but stylish curate's egg of a movie.

Crack In The World

Thank god it's only a motion picture! So claimed the original poster for this 1965 piece of bunkum.

Good word, bunkum, very old fashioned, just like the patriarchal bullshit prevalent throughout the motion picture. Janette Scott is a better actor than either of the main males, Dana Andrews' grumpy scientist and Kieron Moore's slightly less grumpy scientist, who spend their time arguing over her, protecting her from concerns and dangers she might well be equipped to deal with herself, and effectively blowing a dirty great hole in the Earth.

And, just like When Worlds Collide, the science is bunkum too. Sourcing 'limitless' energy by harnessing the magma flow at the earth's core. Except in a few billion years time the magma will have finally cooled and led to planet death. Not so limitless. And the crust that forms on the top of the huuuuuuuge hole they've blown with their nuclear weaponry (it was perfectly safe, they all had sunglasses on when the explosion happened) makes it safe, allegedly.

Which means the one of the men who is a volcanologist doesn't know shit: when a volcano top becomes encrusted the force of rising magma eventually explodes it open again or channels itself elsewhere to create other volcanoes.

Oh, they get an education in that sort of stuff when the fissure created by their stupid shenanigans spreads and spreads and kills and kills and spreads and kills and spreads. Which is decent enough science but the whole bit about the magma erupting so forcefully and in such volume that a new moon will be squirted out into the atmosphere but not disrupt gravity and spin the planet out of orbit, killing the rest of the people left alive, well that's just a big pile of cock.

Instead of planetary disaster the grumpiest scientist dies of the cancer he apparently had right from the start, just to make some of the tragedy personal as well as global. And the other one lives and presumably cops off with Janette Scott. She's Thora Hird's daughter you know. Well, you wouldn't know here because not once does she use a Stannah Stairlift or regale people with anecdotes about evenings in with Alan Bennett drinking strong tea and eating pontefract cakes.

Would have made the movie more interesting. Crack in the world? Crack of your ass, more like.

Whiplash

Miles. It's a suitably jazzy name. Miles Teller. Yup, it works, you dig. Sounds like a real hepcat. Except that's the actor's name and we're not talking the golden age of bebop but a contemporary tale of a kid trying to make a name for himself at the Schafer Music Conservatory. Andrew. The kid is called Andrew. That's not very jazzy.

His hero on the drums (insert prejudiced jokes about drummers being people who hang around with musicians if you must) is Buddy Rich, the Miles Davis of the skins, the Charlie Parker of percussion, the Buddy Rich of Buddy Richness.

He likes a girl and tells her so. He gets picked to worked with the most awesome and terrifyingly demanding tutor, Terrence Fletcher, played with unreadable genius by J.K. Simmonds. He begins to realise that the greats become great by paying in blood, sweat, toil and tears. Like literally. What with the blisters on his hands constantly splurging blood everywhere and Fletcher screaming at him, throwing chairs around and even slapping him in the face, the relationship between master and prodigy is as dark and destructive as that seen in Black Swan.

Writer and director Damien Chazelle clearly knows his music (and has just swept all before him with record breaking Golden Globes wins for his follow-up, La La Land). The language of the practise room and the references to jazz icons are authentic down to the finest details. It's not necessary for the audience to understand the lingo or know about the lives of the icons but Chazelle wants it known he can geek out on this stuff all day.

The abusive treatment Fletcher metes out to Andrew and the other members of the band leads inevitably to his downfall. Andrew flips his wig during a live performance and physically attacks the tutor. He's expelled and winds up working in a deli. Fletcher doesn't last much longer either as, with the help of Andrew's testimony, the parents of a previous student who hung himself as a result of anxiety and depression quite probably caused by Fletcher's methods, bring a lawsuit to prevent anyone else having to go through the same personal hell.

Some months later Andrew and Fletcher meet again, in a dark and dingy jazz bar, and make some kind of reconciliation with one another. Fletcher admits he drove his students hard but does not regret it, arguing that great musicians always use such brickbats to improve to the point of true greatness. He asks Andrew to drum for his new band who are performing for a prestigious audience in a few days. The set list is all from the racks Andrew sweated and strained over at Schafer.

Except one of them isn't. Come the night, in front of the crowd, Fletcher wants to humiliate Andrew whom he knows testified against him. He introduces a song Andrew's never played and the band fall apart around the scrambled drumming. The kid walks out, only to come back again (greats don't quit, right?) and take over the band, leading them in the tracks they were supposed to be playing, and driving them with the best playing of his young life. At the end of the first number he solos Buddy Rich style, eventually winning Fletcher back over - the mentor begins conducting the solo as though it had been the performance plan all along.

In your face bastard tutor. Up yours inferiority complex. Boom crash bang paradiddle wild kick drum a wop bop a loo bop...hmm, this last is rock and roll, sorry.

Pretty much a two hander, like a tightly-scripted stage play, Whiplash is as emotionally taut as a snare drum, as brutal as the pounding of a double bass pedal. Simmonds and Teller are note perfect in their performances, the supporting cast are subtle and smart enough not to get in the way of those performances.

Basically me likey, man. I'm solid gone.

Sherlock: The Lying Detective

How do you solve a problem like John Watson not wanting to have anything to do with Sherlock Holmes any more because of that business with Watson's wife taking a bullet for the detective and being all dead afterwards? Apparently you solve it by going back on hardcore drugs, if you're Sherlock. Apparently.

Many things are revealed in this episode. Mrs Hudson has a smoking hot car and can drive like a madwoman. Mycroft Holmes might even stoop into human behaviour enough to consider illicit liaisons now and then. Watson talks to the visible apparition of his dead wife. This last is a plot device. It's not something he did when she was alive, obviously. It's a way of enabling the audience to keep up with nuances of the storyline even in the absence of the traditional conversations where Watson is perplexed and Holmes shows off by explaining how incredibly boring it is that no one else understands what he does.

Watson isn't perplexed. He's angry. Holmes isn't showing off. He's stoned out of his fucking mind. And taking to Twitter to accuse Toby Jones of being a serial killer. Jones plays a character not entirely unlike Jimmy Savile in some respects - creepy, philanthropic, fingers in many pies, high profile public figure, up to no good and some people know about it - but he's also the Dream Lord from Matt Smith's first season as Doctor Who. And Dobby's voice. And a detectorist. Only he's none of those other things in this, he's just some greasy millionaire businessman Sherlock wants to take down. Despite being stoned out of his fucking mind.

It all gets a bit out of hand. Watson and Holmes are reunited and hang out with Dobby, I mean Mr Smith (not Matt Smith, Toby Jones's character with a posh, implausible first name) but it's not a very comfortable time, what with Sherlock being all 'you're a serial killer' in Smith's grill and Smith being all "bitch I'm not" and Watson being all "Sherlock you're stoned out of your fucking mind" and punching him a lot. A real heck of a lot.

Which means Sherlock is in this odd hospital that Smith has fingers in (now that's very Savile, eh?) being treated for drug addledness and the results of punchings. And this is where Smith wants him as he can now try to kill him. Because guess what bitches, he IS a serial killer. And Sherlock records his confession with a walking stick. Honest, he does. And John saves him because he's now seen the same DVD of Mary telling Sherlock to save John from himself that ended last week's episode and realises Holmes was trying to make the Doctor save him to save himself. Confused? You won't be. I wasn't.

Loose ends. The bus woman from last week. Turns out that John didn't do the wild thing with her, just texted her and thought about doing the wild thing with her. Which he confesses to the not actually there apparition of Mary in front of Sherlock. Like you do. And then he goes back to his new therapist who turns out to be various other people from both episodes. Oh and Mycroft and Sherlock's sister. Then she shoots John in the face. And credits happen so we don't know if he's dead and have to watch next week. Clever that.

When Worlds Collide

Fifties science fiction films are where Hollywood (and occasionally Elstree) began erotically fantasising about the destruction of the human species, fantasies which are now full-blown wet dreams rendered all the more pornographic with the aid of spectacular digital effects. What hasn't really changed is that the alleged science underpinning the fiction is always utter tosh.

In this instance a new planet and its star are on a collision course with the Earth. I'm sorry, what? An unknown planet appears and is somehow hurtling towards us at speeds impossible within the laws of nature? It will collide with the Earth in eight months, preceded by the passing of its star which will devastate our planet? The star? The star will pass into and then beyond our orbit? Would you like to make a case for this even being possible within that timescale which doesn't make a complete mockery of physics as defined by both Newton and Einstein? You can't. And nobody could in the fifties but we didn't have the Discovery Channel then so nobody but actual scientists knew the science was bollocks.

There is also a whacking great loophole in the plot even if you do accept that somehow a rogue planet and an even more rogue star can bundle themselves towards Earth at such velocity. The clever folks who first spotted the problem proceed to build a rocket (boys: they are early Elbow fans) in which a handful of humans can escape to the other planet. Um. But it's going to collide with Earth. Collide with it. Destroying the Earth. And itself, surely. It's not a giant planet, it's not made of diamond, it's therefore no more impervious to the destructive forces of interstellar impact than is Earth. Escape to nowhere.

Which makes the entire movie pointless. And this review. So I won't continue.

Iron Man 3

Iron Man is dead. Again. Officially. Because of that bloke from Neighbours who was in Memento. And that woman who played Lynne Frederick in Frost/Nixon. Her botanical shenanigans and his evil nemesis master skills combine to create a loopy, loopy scenario in which the disabled can grow back amputated limbs. It's not all fun, they also sort of become human bombs.

To cover for the early mistakes in research and the explodey consequences that bloke from Neighbours creates a phantom terrorist overlord, using that British guy who played Gandhi who in this film isn't playing Gandhi, he's a slobby actor.

Tony Stark isn't dead. Obviously. Because of his brilliant Iron Man suit. Suits. Plural. Oh, he was already doing that in Two. Anyway. He is miles from his now blown up home and his brilliant Iron Man suit needs serious repair work. He sneaks into a kid's barn, grooms the kid and is arrested by the authorities. No, hang on, that's Jim'll Man 3. He sneaks into the barn, befriends the kid and together they learn stuff. Like the stuff I've already told you about the blowy uppy tendencies of the new limb gang.

Oops, that bloke from Neighbours has kidnapped Pepper Potts. Ha ha. It's a joke name. Get it? Well if you haven't got it after forty odd years of graphic novels and three movies then you're not much of a giggler, are you? He also kills the Lynne Frederick woman and wants to do another murdery thing to the chap playing the President (character names aren't all jokes so I'm not bothered about them that much). To prove his evilness. Again. As if we didn't know. We knew, didn't we? We bloody knew.

And it all kicks off at the end with many Iron Man suits plus War Machine (or the neutering rename, Iron Patriot), plus Tony, and eventually plus an almost explodey Pepper combining to beat the living fuckery out of Neighbours bloke. Couldn't happen to a more horrid bloke from Neighbours. Although he was actually quite nice in Neighbours. Remember? And he didn't release a cash-in pop single which is another reason to love him. Except when he's in Iron Man 3. Loathe him and be glad he's dead.

As ever the Stark character is tailor-made for Robert Downey Jr. Sardonic, laconic, a lush, a little louche, and yet someone who always wins through in the end. I get confused with the Marvel universe chronology; was Captain America: Civil War after this film? This one seems like a swan song for Downey but if he's donned the suit again for purposes of Avengering then he could continue clanking across our screens for some time to come. No argument from me. Even though this movie is more percussive than substantial.

Red Dawn

"I think at some point every bloke in this office has been up at the crack of Red Dawn," says David Brent early on.

Of course he doesn't. He's not even in the 2013 remake, let alone the original from 1984. Ricky Gervais was too busy looking like an Islington rent boy at the time so they cast Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen as two young brothers who lead a troupe of resistance fighters against an occupying communist force (Russians, Cubans, Nicaraguans).

Yes, I'm ploughing through guerrilla survivalist movies at the moment. They may provide handy tips for when capitalism dies somewhere during the Trump presidency.

Isn't it funny how if the guerrillas are Americans then they are heroes? The non-heroic guerrillas these days are the likes of IS but Red Dawn took its inspiration from the Afghan rebels battling against Soviet invaders. Ironic, given that those rebels would have been Mujahideen, literally jihadists.

Swayze's gang do not yell that God is great when they gun down enemy soldiers but they do shout "Wolverines!" the name of the high school football team now re-appropriated as a name for their fighting unit. It's not all boys, though. Jennifer Grey, like Swayze and Sheen, would use this movie as a springboard to even bigger starring roles in iconic 80s films.

We get some insight into the human side of one of the invading commanders, a Nicaraguan I believe,  whose past experiences as a freedom fighter in his own country allow him a more sympathetic opinion of the troublesome Wolverines than his Russian overseers.

A small band of kids against the might of combined communist forces isn't likely to get you great odds in a betting office and slowly their numbers dwindle as raids, the occasional betrayal and sometimes just youthful inexperience begin to pick them off. It's left to the two brothers to make one final assault into their occupied home town to exact as much vengeance as they can while the two other survivors head for 'Free America' to spread the news that guerrilla warfare is having some effect down south.

When it was released smack bang in the middle of the paranoid Reagan era, Red Dawn stirred and shocked audiences. It doesn't stand up quite so well in the early twenty-first century when small cells of attackers gun down civilians in city centres across Europe in the name of a distorted vision of religion. And America itself probably has more issues with white supremacists and crazed loners than coordinated terrorists, something successive governments since Reagan's time have been reluctant to acknowledge.

As a testament to the early promise of Patrick Swayze and as proof that Sheen never developed deeper aspects to his acting skills, Red Dawn is an interesting document of a more politically naive if just as polarised time.

The Darkest Hour

Urban survival, guerrilla style. This sort of movie traditionally focused on war stories and, in the form of Daniel Craig's non-Bond excursion Defiance, occasionally still does. But the trend now is for the enemy to be zombies, aliens or some kind of mutant distortion of humankind created when foolish scientists muck about with the human genome (which is in itself a development of Mary Shelley's nineteenth century ideas).

The Darkest Hour sees young American internet entrepreneurs Emile Hirsch and Max Minghella team up with Judge Anderson, I mean, Olivia Thirlby, and her Aussie pal plus an ever changing (regularly dying) gang of tourists and locals to survive alien invasion in Moscow. So far so Skyline, only in Moscow.

The aliens are invisible, like they're on a slightly different frequency of light or something. I dunno, it's not very well explained but has to do with microwaves. Fire other microwaves at them and they become visible and their armour cracks, meaning they might be vulnerable to earthly guns. Quite why the aliens are here isn't fully understood until close to the end of the film - asset-stripping? - but what is clear is that the young groovy folk and their pals are darned well going to fight back.

They learn that a Faraday cage set-up and mirrors or reflective glass can mask the presence of humans from the aliens, knowledge that along with a passing scientist's microwave gun allows them to scrape their way through several tense scenarios on their way to a nuclear submarine (an underwater Faraday cage) which becomes the promised land. Or a suitable destination to head for in order to successfully conclude such a movie.

And they get there. Except Max Minghella who doesn't. Emile and Olivia get there. They're the prettiest, of course they do. They find a young Russian lass along the way. She's quite pretty. She gets there too. That's how these things work, isn't it? The less pretty characters are for comic relief and cannon fodder.

Despite destroying Moscow the film still acts as quite a tourist lure. I'm certainly more interested in seeing the Parisian style boulevards and buildings. Not if there really has been an alien invasion, of course, but I'm thinking there hasn't. Our lizard overlords from deep under the ground wouldn't stand for it.

Eagle Eye

Once I'd got over the disappointment of realising Shia Leboeuf isn't playing an Action Man (G.I. Joe to you Americans) with gripping hands, posable limbs and swivel-eyes, I settled down to watch him and Michelle Moynehoyneything being manipulated by a voice on the phone to do all sorts of crazy shit.

Shia is Jerry whose identical twin brother has just died in a road accident. Michelle is Rachel, who isn't a twin. But she's a mother. A combination of threats to their loved ones and spooky coincidences that just can't be coincidences persuades them to follow their increasingly dangerous instructions and we begin to piece together the possibility that it all has something to do with a new form of sonically activated high yield crystal explosive.

Meanwhile, Rosario Dawson is investigating the death of Jerry's brother for the Air Force and Billy Bob Thornton is investigating the trail of carnage left in the wake of the now fugitive Jerry and Rachel. Billy is a police officer. With teeth that don't look like his own. Does Billy always have weird teeth? It's very distracting. But he won't be distracted by his own teeth or by the seemingly random havoc being wreaked upon Illinois and then Washington. That's DC. Where the big stuff happens. The big Presidential, Capitol Hill stuff.

Halfway through the action we discover that the female voice down the line, the person who has controlled traffic signals, electronic billboards, sprinkler systems and all manner of other malarkey, isn't a person at all: she's software. A vasty system of Pentagon software, codenamed Eagle Eye, which is programmed to predict terrorist threat levels and suggest optimum responses. Only she's a bit sentient and a lot mental.

A prior botched attempt to take out a Middle Eastern terrorist sponsor/organiser when the Eagle Eye predictions were only fifty percent certain, has somewhat miffed the sentient software. The Prez himself had overruled Michael Chiklis who was on the insane computer's side in wanting to abort the drone strike. Chiklis didn't know she was sentient or insane, just that his own instinct was that a fifty percent chance of a successful outcome wasn't an acceptable risk. He has no idea this means the software now views him as superior presidential material and intends to activate a protocol allowing her to eliminate the current POTUS, the Veep and the entire chain of command around them.

Which is why she needs Jerry. His brother worked on the Eagle Eye project and had vocally locked out her access to that protocol. Jerry's biological signature and voice are suitably twinny for him to reinstate her access. Rachel's part is to kill Jerry when he's unlocked the protocol and then get all dressed up with a LBD and a lovely looking crystal necklace and go to the State of the Union address where her son just so happens to be trumpeting with his school orchestra. She doesn't kill Jerry.

Sonically activated explosive, remember? Oh lovely, the maniacal machine mind is going to explode the crystal around the mother's neck using a trigger in the son's trumpet. Once a certain note is hit in the National Anthem (what else?) caboom goes a football pitch sized portion of Washington DC along with the boy, his mom, the President, the Vice-President, and that whole chain of command.

Not if Billy Bob and Shia have anything to do with it. Rachel can't kill Jerry who is captured by the cops but our friendly officer with the strange teeth has worked out that Jerry is one of the good guys, not one of the suspected terrorist guys. Rosario Dawson has worked this out too and is trying to take Eagle Eye offline at source.

Tense, nervous finale as Thornton sacrifices himself to free up LeBoeuf to be heroic, Dawson does shut down the computer programme but doesn't know the crystal explosive and the trigger are armed and in place. LeBoeuf knows and poses as a cop to get into the building, runs towards the Prez then shoots at the ceiling like he's reenacting a scene from Point Break in an urban setting. The fatal note goes unplayed, everyone is safe, Jerry is a hero, Rachel is a relieved mom.

It's I Robot without the future. It's Enemy Of The State without Will Smith and Karl Marden's buttocky nose. It's not the best couple of hours of cinema by a long, long chalk. But it's also not the worst. POTUS. Tee hee. Silly sounding acronym.

Sherlock: The Six Thatchers

Do you like Sherlock? Do you like spoilers? Then you'll love this review of The Six Thatchers. Unless you don't like sarcasm. Or curse words.

Episode One, Season Four and the Watsons have a baby. That's usually what happens when someone is pregnant, after a while they stop being pregnant and a baby appears. Slight hint of the good doctor being a bit of a bad doctor and having a fling with some random bus woman but who cares? Sherlock has been reprieved because of the Moriaty conundrum. Nobody calls it that but they should. It would be a great title for an episode. I'm great at pretend episode titles. I'm still waiting for the BBC to take me up on Doctor Who And The Spacey Bastards.

Sherlock's approach to working out what Little Jim's malevolent legacy might be is to act as though nothing has changed, except for the Watsons having a baby. Post aborted suicide mission to Eastern Europe is painless, it takes on many cases, one of which is about somebody smashing busts of Margaret Thatcher. Bad, bad liberal political bias from the BBC. Except it's not a political act, it's a mysterious stranger trying to retrieve an item hidden inside one of the busts. They know it's there because they put it there. Six years ago. After nasty antics alongside Mary Watson in a betrayed undercover mission in Tbilisi.

Keeping up? Well don't. Let it all unfold. You're supposed to think it's all about Moriaty, possibly connected to some stupid old pearl. And then you're shocked when it isn't and we realise Mary's former colleague wants to murder her to death because he thinks she betrayed him. But she didn't. Someone else did. Not Moriaty. Someone female. Not Lady Whatsername from the last proper episode (we're ignoring the drug hallucinations of last year's special). But someone. Ooh who can it be? I bet she's a right shithead: betraying people is what shitheads do.

Mary pretends to be some other people to flee the country and keep John and the baby (yes it has a name but no lines so I'm not telling you) safe. But Sherlock is cleverer than her. And her former colleague is clever too and they have a bit of a shooty moment in which we realise that the someone female who did the betraying isn't Mary. Well, we already knew that, right, because we like her. But it is now confirmed. Yay! She's my favourite Watson. And John is too.

Oh dear. Things and stuff and stuff and things happen and all of a sudden the Watsons are a trio no longer. No, John hasn't moved in his fancy woman for some farcically saucy seventies style Bohemianism. Mary's been killed to death. Taking a bullet for Sherlock. See what they did there? Debt paid. Former undercover operative with cleverness and skill set that steals focus from the title character removed from series.

Cue John blaming Sherlock and shunning his company. Cue pre-recorded posthumous message from Mary to Sherl asking him to save John. From himself. From his grief. Cue a window into the detective's own grief and guilt in those big old Cumblebum eyes. Why doesn't he just bend space and time and use mystical forces to revive Mary? Oh, because he isn't Doctor Strange in this one. Bollocks! He is good. Acting wise. Good acting from the Cumblyman.

And from Amanda Abbington, really going out on a virtuoso performance. Martin Freeman is almost an extra until the end when John's absence from Sherlock's life flavours a powerful but not overtly sentimental denouement. Still, he looks good with a daisy in his hair. And on buses.

Two episodes to come. How do our boys sort out their issues and bond yet again? Perhaps one of them could fake their own death and then come back disguised as a waiter.

Oh, and none of this was to do with Moriaty. Unless it later turns out that it was. Oh and the betrayer was a Whitehall secretary.

London Has Fallen

You know the basic premise of Die Hard: one gritty man defeats countless nasty terrorists? Multiply that by a billion and you have London Has Fallen. Sequel to Olympus Has Fallen but slightly less sweary. Unless I've got used to the swearing and don't even fucking notice it when it fucking happens.

Gerard Butler does not at any point say "Yippee kai ay!". Nor does he repeat the best swearing motif from the first film: "Let's play a game of Fuck Off; you go first." Which is a disappointment and ensured I spent a lot of the film waiting for it and probably missing the violent deaths of ten percent of the bad guys.

The plot? Ludicrous. More ludicrous than a big jar of Superludicrous which has been dipped in ludicrous sauce. Death of British Prime Minister brings world leaders to London for state funeral which is in fact an elaborate trap set by a vengeful Middle Eastern type who wasn't properly killed by American drones a few years previously.

The assassination of several of the leaders of major countries is mostly irrelevant because this is Hollywood and the only target that matters is the President. That's Mister President to you. Aaron Eckhart to his friends. Or Aar. Maybe. I don't really know him that well. Luckily Aar has Gerard on hand to shoot and stab and curse them through bullets, stinger missiles that bring down their helicopter, London tap water, Charlotte Riley's ever so slightly misaligned eyes, and a great big machete which is meant to be the instrument of the President's execution live on that Internet.

Phew, what a thrill ride. A ludicrous, sweary thrill ride. Only less sweary than the last one. I fucking think. Some of the swearing was from English people and I'm trained not to hear that. Unless it's about my relatives and then I get cross.

And come the end, what have we learned? We've learned that Hollywood executives will throw money at explosions if at least one bankable star is involved. And that Butler's American accent has not improved that much since the last one. And that we don't believe a fucking moment of it but it was kind of fun anyway.