Giant flying sea turtles from space? Really? This is the film that is raking in all the cash; the film that has fan boys drooling over their flabby, donut-enhanced bellies - a film with flying sea turtles from space in it?!?

I know this is hard to do, everyone, but sit back objectively and think about the last forty minutes of this film. Is this giant clusterfuck of shit really quality entertainment? Do you really enjoy watching enormous marine reptiles flying across Manhattan while being ridden by poorly rendered skeletal space monkeys? It’s like Transformers ate The Phantom Menace and exploded this sequence out of its distended rectum.

My hopes were minimal before the release of The Avengers but they rose significantly when every man and his dog (and sometimes his cat) told me how great the film was. However, my rising hopes deflated pretty quickly when the film began. Wait a minute, there’s an alien talking incomprehensible gobbledygook. And he looks like Skeletor! Oh, I know what’s happened. They’ve accidentally hooked up Masters of the Universe to the projector. Dolph Lundgren will turn up in a second in his furry loincloth and then we can fix this horrible, horrible mistake.

But Dolph Lundgren never appeared. You mean this is the correct film? Oh fuck me in the head with a pitbull; this is going to be a long evening!

Perhaps I’m being a little severe. The Avengers is most definitely not a horrible film. It’s just a crushingly mediocre one that has inexplicably been lavished with praise. I’m sorry but a half a dozen decent quips doesn’t make for a great movie.

Following the Skeletor nonsense, the film continues on shaky legs. Some eggheads gather around the film’s MacGuffin (some cube thing that can be used for cheap energy and which can create portals through space) and then everything gets a bit Stargate. The film’s bad guy, Loki, suddenly appears through a portal and proceeds to either kill or ‘turn’ people to his side. The way that he enslaves people is by prodding them with his gnarly space sceptre of convincement. One touch and they’re his drones. It’s all a bit rushed and doesn’t set the stage particularly well.

Thankfully the film improves significantly after this. Once Loki is out in the wild, doing his thing (being a colossal dick is what he does best), Nick Fury gets to assemble The Avengers. Where the film succeeds is in the inter-personal relationships between the heroes. The action scenes are a colossal disappointment and amongst some of the most boring stuff I’ve seen in recent years, but the friction between the protagonists and some of the humour that ensues is really well done.

There’s also some nice moral ambiguity. At the beginning it seems like Nick Fury’s espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D. is working entirely for the good of man. There’s this crazy guy loose in the world and they want to bring him down. But then we find out that S.H.I.E.L.D. is using the MacGuffin to develop super powerful weaponry against an alien invasion. One can see both sides of the coin. The negative: once you build these weapons, you can’t undo it; they’re always going to be there and they can cause your destruction. The positive: you want to protect yourself from hostile forces; you don’t want to be powerless. So like the atomic bomb; it might have saved us from an even longer war but it also opened Pandora’s Box.

There’s also a thread of hero worship that runs through the film. Agent Coulson (one of Nick Fury’s closest colleagues) is a huge Captain America fan and boasts of having valuable Captain America trading cards. After Coulson gets killed by Loki, Nick Fury shows the bloody Captain America trading cards that Coulson was apparently carrying on his person. This revelation lights a fire under everyone and allows Captain America and Tony Stark to get over their differences and work together as team. We then find out that the cards were never in Coulson’s pocket and that Fury used this as a way of motivating the team. It’s a pretty despicable act but one that is done for the greater good - this lie binds everyone together and allows them to finally act as a team.

I also enjoyed the film’s sense of humour. There are several parts that stand out. The clueless Captain America finally getting a reference because it relates to The Wizard of Oz (Captain America has been frozen in ice and so every modern pop culture reference goes over his head), Tony Stark making a quip about Shakespeare in the park as he, Thor and Captain America battle it out in the middle of a forest, and best of all, The Hulk beating the shit out of Loki.

This last scene was surprisingly hilarious. The rather pompous Loki tells the Hulk that he’s a god and that he won’t be bullied by such a dull creature. The Hulk then grabs Loki like a rag doll and smashes him repeatedly into the ground, calling him a ‘puny god’. The timing and the animation are magnificent.

Sadly this moment of comic relief occurs in the huge clusterfuck at the end of the movie. Towards the end, I really just didn’t care anymore. I just wanted the film over. Whedon tries to inject a bit of pathos by trying to convince us that Tony Stark might die but we all know that he’ll be fine. So therefore we have to endure about forty minutes of poorly designed pixels flinging themselves around. A bit of restraint can be a wonderful thing.

And I have to roll my eyes if I hear another person say that this is the definitive interpretation of the Hulk. Sorry, but as maligned as it is, I still love Ang Lee’s Hulk. As far as comic book movies go, only Nolan’s Batman movies can light a candle to it.

But the people have spoken and the cash registers are bulging. I’m sure there’ll be plenty more Avengers to come, but I doubt I’ll be there.

Why do I keep allowing Woody Allen to do this to me? Time after time I allow myself to get suckered by good reviews and loose talk of a return to form. It’s like I never learnt anything from Match Point. Woody isn’t a complete spent force (I enjoyed some of Melinda and Melinda and Whatever Works raised a few simple chuckles), but you can’t compare any of his recent work to the likes of Manhattan and Crimes and Misdemeanors. And the fact that Midnight in Paris got nominated for Best Picture is pure insanity. Apparently some directors just have to take a crap on the screen to get nominated while others can produce the best work of their life and get silently shafted.

You could argue that the beginning of Midnight in Paris, with a couple of minutes of shots of the spectacular French capital, is a companion piece to the beginning of Manhattan. It’s almost something of a love note. But while Manhattan had a breathless beginning, full of wit and poetry and spectacular photography, this is just a tourist’s view of the city. There’s no real insight. It’s merely an uninspired visual roll call of Paris’ most famous spots.

This tourist’s eye view of a major European city is something that plagued Match Point. You never really felt that Woody knew London. It felt completely at odds with his insider view of New York. And this feeling stretches to Paris. I don’t doubt that he’s visited the city a great many times, but the whole film is a bland kind of touristy wish-fulfillment. Beneath the central conceit of the movie (Owen Wilson, after midnight, can go back in time), there isn’t a thought deeper than, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to go back in time and hang out with Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald for a while...’

Call me crazy, but I expect something with a bit more substance than that when it comes to Best Picture nominees. And most criminal of all, for an Allen comedy, it’s not even that funny. Owen Wilson just lumbers around, doing a sub-par Woody Allen impression.

The only time that the film came close to making me laugh was during the scenes with Michael Sheen. Drunk with his own bullshit, Sheen plays a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual twit who undermines Gil (Wilson) at every turn. He’s so casually rude and tactless that he’s borderline sociopathic. Yet for some reason Gil’s fiance adores this nincompoop.

You know that Gil’s fiance is worthless because everything she wears has some sort of denim. Here she is in Paris, one of the most beautiful, chic cities in the world and she’s wearing a denim dress. How pathetically American of her. Oh, and she has neo-conservative parents.

I can see why Allen makes everyone so risible. He wants us to fall in line and stick rigidly behind Gil. But the characters are so overwhelmingly cartoonish that I couldn’t believe in them.

Firstly, I can’t believe that such conservative parents would want to spend any time in Paris, even if it was just for some business. Surely, given all the ridiculous hatred towards the French (hand me some Freedom Fries!), this should be the last place they would want to be. Secondly, what is Gil doing with such a wretched woman? His fiance talks down to him, she dismisses him at every turn and she’s clearly having an affair with Michael Sheen. The fact that Gil would stay with this woman, and consider marrying her, reflects very poorly on him. He’s an idiot for associating with these people.

But of course, the fact that his present day life is so dismal is meant to make the trip back in time all that much sweeter. It’s part of the whole ‘golden age thinking’ theory that’s presented. Almost everyone is disappointed with the present. Most people think that everything was better at a certain point in the past. It’s the one interesting thought that the film has.

Being even more of a slave to golden age thinking than most, Gil is delighted to be whisked away to a Paris where Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Picasso are roaming the streets. But the character is such a fanboy, and has so little to say, that all of his encounters are nothing more than a painfully shallow fawning. There’s so little meat in this film, it’s incredible. It’s like Allen never managed to get beyond the concept.

One of the few things that I could connect to was Gil’s love of city life. He argues that no writer or painter or musician is ever going to create something that’s going to compete with a great city - each corner and each street is its own special art form. And I kind of agree. No film, no book and no piece of music can compete with my beloved London. They just can’t get close.

Eventually Gil recognises the flaw in his thinking and decides to return to the present forever. But this is only because Adriana (Marion Cotillard), the object of his affection, finds a portal to yet another part of Paris’s past. She wants to live in the Belle Epoque. Aghast that she wants to live in a time without penicillin, they go their separate ways.

With this disappointment, Gil finally realises the futility of nostalgia. Yes the present might be painful and unsatisfactory, but such is life. No matter where we are, most of us are destined to want more. It’s human nature. But any depth or melancholy is eschewed for a standard Hollywood ending. Gil breaks up with his horrible fiance and then bumps into a girl he met earlier - a girl who sells antiques at a local market. Of course, the girl is incredibly young and very attractive and they both remark upon how they love Paris in the rain. They then walk off, presumably to enjoy Paris as a couple. The triteness and neatness of this is the final nail in the coffin of a horribly mediocre film. I might go and watch Deconstructing Harry to get rid of the stench.

I still have nightmarish flashbacks to my last X-Men experience. I was unemployed and I decided to run some errands. In my foolish enthusiasm to get out of the house, I slammed the door shut without checking to see if I had my keys. I didn’t.

In order to kill time before my wife came home, I decided to go and see X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Fuck me, it was a horrible experience. It was like some deranged monkey had been put in charge of the production and had spent $150 million throwing fecal matter at the screen. I vowed never to watch another X-Men film.

Not that I thought another film would come any time soon. I thought that Wolverine hadn’t made any money and that X-Men would be left alone for a while. But apparently lots of sad, lonely husbands also got locked out of their apartments during that time and went to see that colossal skidmark.

X-Men: First Class didn’t really appear on my radar. When the film came out, I could only think of my cat dragging his dirty bum across the tile floor in the kitchen. The insolent look of disobedience; the furry backside dragging mournfully across the surface with the hind legs terrifyingly immobile; the horrible brown streak circling the dinner table - 20th Century Fox were going to push this on us no matter what; even if the poo on Hugh Jackman’s face hadn’t had time to dry yet.

One of my wife’s little quirks is that she wishes she could deport me and marry James McAvoy instead. With this in mind, there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to get away with not watching First Class.

The first thing that struck me when watching the film: it’s actually quite good. Sure it’s a little odd to hear Kevin Bacon speaking pretty good German, but it had a strong start.

The movie begins with a young Erik (who’ll later become Magneto) being separated from his parents in a Nazi concentration camp. Distraught, he manages to bend some metal gates with the power of his mind. Seizing on this, Dr Schmidt (Bacon), later to be called Sebastian Shaw, tries to get the kid to move a coin for him. The kid tries and tries, but he’s unable to move it - the coin stays stubbornly motionless. Feeling that the kid perhaps needs a little more motivation, he brings the child’s mother into the room. Schmidt says that the boy has until the count of three to move the coin or he’ll shoot the boy’s mother. Erik tries even harder but he still can’t do it. True to his word, upon the count of three, Schmidt shoots Erik’s mother dead. Finally the boy is able to move the coin - his powers are fuelled by his rage.

What surprised me about this scene is just how grim it is. There’s an incredible amount of tension and the violence is shockingly strong for a PG-13. It’s nice to see a comic book movie that doesn’t hold back.

Better is yet to come. Erik, now grown up and played by the omnipresent Michael Fassbender, decides to track down Dr Schmidt so that he can avenge the death of his mother. Here the film becomes something of a Bond movie. Erik slowly draws closer to Schmidt/Shaw and assassinates anyone who gets in the way. There’s a fabulous scene where Erik uses his powers to kill a couple of ex Nazis who are hiding in Argentina. At one point he uses his magnetic powers to pin a man’s hand to a table with a knife. He doesn’t even have to touch the blade.

What makes this even more enjoyable is the over-the-top music that plays. When Erik’s in 007 mode, he has this brilliant piece of theme music that accompanies him. It’s kind of like a mixture of the James Bond theme and the rattling guitar piece from Once Upon a Time in the West. It gives the character a level of cool that far exceeds anything in the previous X-Men movies.

Once Erik meets up with Charles Xavier (James MacAvoy) the movie becomes a little less fun. It’s still leagues ahead of anything else in the X-Men franchise, but the movie can’t quite maintain the heights of the opening thirty minutes.

One of First Class’s major problems is that the supporting characters are universally dull. The mutant kids that Xavier tracks down are fairly appalling and every time they’re on the screen, the film drags. None of the kids have got any serious acting chops and all of their special skills are underwhelming. There’s a kid who can fire raw bolts of energy, another has wings like a fairy, another can scream at such a pitch that he can fly at supersonic speeds and there’s even a boffin with prehensile feet. There’s also a kid called Darwin, who can adapt to any situation - at one point he sticks his head in a tank of water and develops gills. But the character’s only purpose in the film is to die. He’s the sacrificial lamb to prove how ruthless Sebastian Shaw is - Shaw fires raw energy into the kid’s mouth and the kid croaks.

What makes this scene so risible, though, is that Darwin is one of the only black characters (the other is a stripper). At one point Shaw even makes a speech about slavery and the camera stops right on the black kid. Subtle, no? But of course, the kid is black and therefore he must die.

The most ridiculous part of the film occurs in the final battle between the X-Men and Sebastian Shaw’s Hellfire Club. A large portion of the battle is given to a fight between the evil fairy stripper and the kid who can go supersonic by screaming. The fairy can apparently shoot stuff out of her mouth, which frequently gives us the completely idiotic image of a stripper fairy shooting crap out of her mouth as a spotty kid with flying squirrel wings screams in order to reach supersonic speeds. It’s the worst action scene I’ve seen in years - it’s completely risible.

Thankfully, cut into this nonsense, is the final confrontation between Magneto and Sebastian Shaw. If the film had focused on this entirely, it would have had a much stronger final act. I particularly liked the cold, methodical way that Magneto kills Shaw - with Shaw paralysed by Professor X’s mind control, Magneto, using his powers, slowly moves a coin towards his head. It’s the same coin that Shaw tried to get a young Erik to move when he killed his mother. The coin slowly floats towards Shaw’s head and then enters it, eventually passing through the other side. The younger Erik would have had this coin go through Shaw like a bullet, but the older, wiser and more ruthless Erik takes his time so that he can enjoy Shaw’s death.

One strange thing about the ending of the film is that Michael Fassbender, having now become Magneto, starts talking in a thick Irish accent. Throughout the rest of the film his accent is fairly neutral. Was this the first day of shooting or is he unable to shout in anything but his native brogue?

And the final shot ensures that the film ends with a damp squib. We finally see Magneto in his full costume. Only the costume looks like he knocked it up at home and his helmet has silly little horns on it. After such a strong beginning and such a shaky final section, First Class was begging for a strong ending. Sadly it doesn’t get it. I couldn’t help but feel they dropped the ball with this one.

Super 8 poses as an homage to the Spielberg films of the 70s and 80s. It’s based in a small town, focuses on a group of precocious children and the military are bogeymen not to be trusted. But in the end, the film goes its own way.

There was always a clarity about those early Spielberg films. We knew who the heroes and villains were. But Super 8 is a little bit muddier. And not in a complex, thought-provoking way. Sometimes it’s just needlessly violent and cruel.

The main problem is the alien life form at the center of the film. Tortured and abused by the military, it turns homicidal in its attempt to return home. Very rarely do we actually see any bloodletting but innocent people get thrown around like rag dolls and at one point someone gets eaten. Despite this, we’re still meant to sympathise with this being.

Yes it must be horrible to be incarcerated and to be tortured and to be prevented from returning home, like so much Guantanamo Bay, but that doesn’t mean you should go around collecting people to eat. This shows that you’re an intergalatic dick.

Because of this, the ending to the film falls completely flat. Our hero, Joe, is about to be munched on by this massive alien but the child establishes a telepathic connection with the creature and talks it out of killing him or harming any other people. The boy says that you can still live on after painful events. Wise words, but horribly executed by J.J. Abrams. The alien in this film is seen so seldom and has so little personality or complexity that I didn’t give a damn about his fate. Seriously, after having it lurk in the shadows for the entire running time and have it behave like a psychopath, you’re going to try and invest it with some feeling in the last few minutes? Too little, too late.

It doesn’t help that the creature looks like warmed up leftovers from Cloverfield. How am I meant to feel for a gigantic space spider? Oh, I know how. Right at the last second Abrams’ will suddenly give the creature big, round human-like eyes. Sorry J.J., your creature is still a poorly conceived, barely-adequately-rendered jerk.

With the alien being such a bust, it’s a shame that the rest of Super 8 is pretty good. The relationships between the child characters have a lot of warmth and colour, and the movie is impressively shot.

Super 8 deliberately steals a lot of its visuals from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The lens flares, the colours and the compositions are very reminiscent of Spielberg’s film.

Some of the action is also lifted from Spielberg. The scene where an electrician gets snatched by the alien feels like something out of Jurassic Park. But even though it feels like an homage, it’s still well executed.

A much more fanciful sequence is the train crash near the beginning of the film. The accident seems to last for several minutes and the CGI isn’t always convincing. Plus there’s some supreme silliness at the end when a man in a truck - a man who drove headfirst into the massive train - survives the crash. Only the back of the truck is destroyed and the man is still well enough to wave a gun around. In a film that has a massive spider alien, this is the element that stretches credibility the furthest.

The only reason that the film recovers from this nonsense is that it has genuine affection for its human characters. The kids have great chemistry and there’s that feeling of innocence and playfulness that you got from those old Spielberg movies. It seems like something special might happen. But then the alien story kicks in and everything unravels. It seemed to me that Abrams didn’t know how to tie everything together. He has the skill to create a wonderful looking film and he has the skill to create likeable characters, but he can’t knit it into one piece.

Later in the film, the violence seems incredibly brutal for what is essentially a family film. Our young heroes get to witness an alien violently ripping military men to shreds. Is the fact that the military men are murderers enough to justify the verocity of the scene? Supposedly it is, but if this were real life, I’m sure these kids would be scarred for decades.

But it’s just strange that such violence co-exists in a film which is essentially about children slowly shedding their innocence. One could argue that the violence is real life creeping in and turning these young people into adults, but some of it is pretty extreme for a PG-13.

I also hated the way that the lead character lets go of his necklace at the end. The necklace contains a locket with a picture of himself as a baby with his dead mother (she dies in an industrial accident when the film begins). It’s meant to symbolise the boy letting go of the past but it didn’t work for me. We shouldn’t let the past rule our lives but at the same time we should honour the memory of those we love. The boy letting the bracelet go made it seem like he’d gotten over his mother’s death too easily. It almost felt uncaring. This is certainly not how the scene was intended, but there was no arc to the boy’s grief. He was sad and then he got over it - there was no progression. If it were me in the same situation, the picture would have to be ripped from my hands, even if I’d had it for decades.

And this is why the movie failed. It didn’t earn the sentiment. Spielberg earned it, but Abrams most certainly didn’t.

Ever wondered what a British arthouse action film would feel like? Wait no more, for we have Hanna, possibly one of the most peculiar action films ever made.

There’s nothing particularly original in this movie. Thrown in some Bourne Identity, add some La Femme Nikita and sprinkle with everything from Leon to A Clockwork Orange to Mission: Impossible to Batman Begins to the James Bond movies to Grimms’ fairytales. This is a film with lots of influences.

Sadly, Hanna doesn’t rise beyond its ambitions. It desperately wants to be an arthouse actioner. It wants to shake the genre up and defy its tired conventions by making a quasi fairytale thriller. But although its beautiful to look at and although its reasonably well acted, it’s also a messy, shallow, cold, sterile, mean-spirited film. I’ve seen a great many movies that are more hard-edged than this but few have felt so grubby.

Violence in films rarely bothers me but here it’s particularly manipulative and pointless. It doesn’t advance the story and it doesn’t really tell us anything about the characters. People are tortured and stabbed and shot just to keep us on our toes and to show that the characters committing the acts are badasses that aren’t to be messed with. Cate Blanchett shoots a defenceless old lady, Tom Hollander stabs an Arab in the neck, Eric Bana kills a couple of cops etc. etc.

The scene with the old lady is particularly baffling. You see, Hanna was part of a CIA plan to create genetically altered super soldiers. The plan was a failure and everyone involved was killed. The only people to escape were Hanna and her surrogate father, Erik, played by Eric Bana. Turns out that the old lady is Hanna’s grandmother and she knows all about the secret plan. Quite why she wasn’t rubbed out beforehand, I’m not sure. But killing her now seems particularly stupid. Keep her under surveillance and she might unwittingly lead you to the girl. But no, she’s shot in the head to give the audience a jolt.

Part of the reason that everything is so broad and over the top is that it obviously wants to be a modern day fairytale. Marissa (Cate Blanchett) is the wicked witch/big bad wolf while Hanna is a demented Snow White/Red Riding Hood, living relatively peacefully in her ridiculously idyllic cabin in the woods. But there are no layers to this film. I never really felt that Hanna grew as a character. She started off as a functional psychopath and ended the film slightly less psycho. Indeed, it’s actually annoying that when she eventually says that she no longer wants to kill people - it’s when Cate Blanchett is pointing a gun at her. Now is not the time to find the peace and love in you.

The mid-section of Hanna certainly doesn’t help the film. Hanna gets taken in by a hippie family that seem more dysfunctional than Hanna and her surrogate father (note: Hanna and her father randomly fight in the middle of night to test Hanna’s combat readiness). These hippies argue and twitter on about a load of nonsense. Joe Wright is trying to make them seem like a believably complex family unit, but they come over as cliches. These are the type of people that you would cross the street to avoid if you were holidaying in Europe. And the family’s daughter is repellent. She’s a spoilt little princess who loves to discuss fake boobs and designer bags. Of course there’s meant to be more to her than this - she’s meant to have hidden depths - but I didn’t want Hanna to learn anything from her; I think she’s better off remaining as the Fuhrer’s wet dream (a blonde, Germanic, genetically-enhanced assassin).

And this kills the heart of the film. Through experience and exposure to the beauties of the outside world, Hanna is meant to find her humanity. But what’s out there? Squabbling hippies and posh chavs? Get back to that cabin, Hanna!

I was also disappointed at the failure to flesh out Eric Bana’s character. Effectively, he’s training Hanna to exert revenge on Marissa - Marissa attempted to kill Erik and successfully killed Hanna’s mother. But the character is two dimensional. Plus he’s a key part in two of the film’s hokiest moments.

Hokey Moment Number One: As Hanna’s psycho-Yoda trainer/protector, he decides that the girl is ‘ready’. He then brings out a great big transmitter that will alert the world to their presence. This is really the best way of doing things? Rather than just track down Marissa and quietly rub her out, you’re going to send your ‘daughter’ into the lion’s den? And is it really wise to keep a big transmitter like that lying around? Say you accidentally sat on it in the middle of the night, or Hanna found it and pressed it, or one of your wolf cubs set it off?

Hokey Moment Number Two: Erik is being tracked by government agents. They confront him in a subway station. It’s only Erik against four people. Rather than shoot him in the kneecaps with a silenced pistol or just outright shoot him in the head, they decide to take him on in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, even though these guys are well trained, he manages to kill all of them. Idiots.

On the flipside of this, I really enjoyed the flashback where we see Marissa try and assassinate Erik and Hanna’s mother. It has a weird, dreamlike quality to it. It also shows how inept Blanchett’s character is. She tries to stop a car with a Walther PPK! By some miracle she manages to do this and she shoots Hanna’s mum in the head. But even though it’s slightly ridiculous, it works. You get the feeling that this a woman out of her depth but ruthlessly committed to what she’s doing. There’s purpose behind it, which is the polar opposite of the scene with the grandmother.

But although Blanchett is excellent in this scene, she’s pretty lacklustre in the movie as a whole. She chews the scenery like crazy, obviously enjoying the opportunity to play the part of the wicked witch. But there’s nothing subtle about it. There’s even one bit, towards the end, where we see her scowling through the window like she’s literally the Big Bad Wolf. And her American accent is terrible.

However, one detail about Blanchett’s character that I liked: at one point we see a row of dental equipment and then we see Marissa manically cleaning her teeth. She’s cleaning them so hard that her teeth are bleeding. She’s fighting hard to keep her exterior perfect and clean while the inside of her is diseased and rotten. She must remain the fairest of them all, no matter what.

All the Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel with guns nonsense concludes with Hanna, an expert assassin, being chased through through a fairytale land by an inept Scary Witch. Really, Hanna should be able to kill her in two seconds, but this would be an anti-climax, so we have a ridiculous face-off where Hanna and Marissa shoot each other (although, to try and make things more creative, Hanna somehow shoots an arrow out of her elbow like she’s MacGuyver). The film ends with a massive whimper.

The one bright spot in this massive folly is Tom Hollander. He’s wonderfully creepy as Isaac, a German killer who has the hair and clothes (although not stature) of a deranged Ken doll. Yes the script doesn’t give his character any depth or complexity, but at least it affords Hollander the chance to show another side of himself. He’s the one positive note in a movie that rings completely hollow.

A cheesy, synth-heavy song plays over the credits at the end of Drive. With dreamy, hushed sincerity, it proclaims that the central character of the film has proved himself to be a ‘real human being’ and a ‘real hero’. This after we’ve seen him smash heads to smithereens, slap women across the face and blow people away with firearms. He’s neither of these things.

I’m not sure whether the director is taking the piss with this song or whether he’s sincere. Either way it doesn’t really affect my opinion of the film. Whether its a sincere revenge thriller or a snarky, tongue in cheek shoot-’em-up, Drive is gloriously entertaining.

Who’d have thought that a hipster could make such a ruthless killing machine? Because, yes, that’s what Ryan Gosling’s character is. With his vacant eyes, a smile that barely registers on his lips and a toothpick in his mouth, he seems too cool for school. It’s hard to believe that he could muster up enthusiasm for anything. But eventually a few cracks appear.

Robot-hipster Gosling’s world of detached brooding is infiltrated by a pretty neighbour in his apartment building. She has a young son and Gosling immediately takes to them. Pretty soon he’s hanging out in their flat and fixing their car (Gosling plays a mechanic who moonlights as a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals). He even manages to produce a smile that shows a couple of teeth.

What I found pleasing about the beginning of the film is that it takes its time. While the atmosphere of the movie is very 80s, the pace in the opening half is very 70s. For a film about driving, no one is in a rush - this movie is going to take the scenic route and try and develop the characters a little bit. Not that there’s really any amazing dialogue in this movie. This is a film more about looks, gestures and atmosphere. Quite often it’s the music that does the talking. And this suits me fine.

What works for me, though, doesn’t work for everyone. In the row ahead of me, I could sense impatience. Indeed, there was even outright mockery. By the time Gosling had coyly grinned for the thirty second time, I could hear sniggers. But then when the second half of the film hit and all hell broke loose, those people quickly shut the fuck up.

But let’s wind back to the beginning of the film. The opening is amazing. Gosling’s character is hired as the getaway driver for an armed robbery. He sets out his terms and then we see him in action. You kind of expect a regular car chase, full of frenzied action. Instead you have a wonderfully tense game of cat and mouse. Gosling doesn’t just hit the accelerator and try and outrun the cops, he uses other cars and underpasses to hide out and he uses his smarts to avoid getting caught. One of the best moments is when he’s face to face with some cops at a traffic light. He has a radio receiver and he knows that he’s been identified. But the cops don’t know that he knows. So Gosling doesn’t crack and only speeds away once the light turns green. It’s really amazing how tense and how thrilling such a minimalist sequence can be.

The only other car chase is more traditional. It’s flat out with screeching tires and twisted metal. But before it can really develop, it’s violently over. It’s a good sequence but it pales beside the opener.

Let’s get back to what it was that shocked people so much. First of all, there was the fact that Christina Hendricks gets shot at point blank range by a shotgun. But the scene that produced audible gasps was the one where Gosling smashes a crook’s hand with a hammer and then threatens to hammer a bullet into his head. At this point all the muttering and snickering was gone. ‘But I thought he was a harmless, borderline retarded hipster!’ you could almost hear them think.

It’s quite an amazing U-turn that the film makes. The film transforms from a sappy indie flick into extreme grindhouse. I mean, in the opening half you’re watching Ryan Gosling seducing Carey Mulligan by driving through storm drains as retro music plays and the sun flares on the camera lens. We’re in 80s romantic movie territory. And then thirty or forty minutes later you’re watching Ryan Gosling literally smashing someone’s head to pieces.

This scene is the most extreme in the movie. But it’s preceded by a long, drippy kiss. You see, some mob guys are after Gosling and one of them gets into the same elevator as Gosling and Mulligan. As a distraction, Gosling kisses Mulligan. The kiss, in slow-motion naturally, goes on for ages. But then when its over, Gosling beats the heavy to death and smashes his face in. By the time he’s stamped on the guy’s head for the tenth time, you think he’s being more than a bit excessive. But then he continues doing it...while his girl backs into the corner. It’s like Dirty Dancing turns into Irreversible. And it’s probably the one scene that doesn’t really work. I kept on thinking that this was a stupid distraction. The mob guy should have just shot him in the back of the head as he was playing tonsil hockey with his wee delicate flower. And what about poor Mulligan? The most romantic moment of her life turns into a horror scene. It’s one thing for a man to protect his woman, but something else to turn a man’s head into pate. You’re going to think twice before you go out on twinkly afternoon drives with autistic hipsters, aren’t you?

But again, it’s hard to know how to take the scene. Is it being played straight or does it have another intent? Is Gosling being portrayed as a real human being and a real hero, or is he being portrayed as a stone cold psycho? I like the fact that you don’t really know for sure.

A more successful sequence is the hit that Gosling makes on Ron Perlman’s small time crime boss. Perlman has been trying to take Gosling out, so Gosling exacts revenge. Bizarrely scored to an operatic ballad, Perlman parties in his crappy pizzeria with some fellow crooks. Through the glass in the door you see Gosling approach...wearing a rubber mask - the type of mask that stunt drivers wear to look more like the actor they’re doubling for and which also (I think) protect them from fire. It’s a weird, eerie image (he looks like part Octavio the clown in Scarface and part Michael Myers) and I immediately thought that Gosling was going to torch the building with all the crooks in it. Colour me slightly disappointed then when he doesn’t do this.

But then, still wearing the mask, Gosling follows Perlman’s car. He rams into it and then disappears from the scene. Perlman is angry and confused but before he can do anything, Gosling comes back and rams the car off the side of an embankment. Somehow Perlman survives the crash and staggers towards a beach. We then have the eerie image of the masked driver stalking his prey and silently drowning him. It’s like something out of a horror film and it works magnificently.

Have I mentioned yet that the main villain is played by Albert Brooks? This piece of casting works tremendously as you’re certainly not expecting him to stab people to death with forks or bleed people dry with cutthroat razors. But Brooks causes carnage and creates a villain you’re eager to see become the victim of hipstercide. Gosling accommodates him on this point but not before he takes a knife to the gut.

One of the final images of the film is the shadow of the two men stabbing one another. Gosling is perhaps the righteous reflection of this psychopath? This may or may not be true, as both men are almost equally nuts, but the final song certainly wants to point out Gosling’s heroism. ‘You’ve proved yourself to be a real human being and a real hero.’

The end is almost like something out of the TV series of The Incredible Hulk. Carey Mulligan’s world has been turned upside down by a man with no name and then he leaves town to continue his nomadic existence. However, Gosling is too cool to thumb a lift as tearful piano music plays. Instead he roams the lonely highways as some obscure band does a Giorgio Moroder impression. Whose town and whose life will he turn upside down next?

PS - The film deserves extra points for the coolest aerial shots of LA’s skyline and highways since The Rock’s entrance video at No Way Out. (Fuck me, I’m a nerd.)

Last year my wife and I were supposed to see a film called Mysteries of Lisbon at the New York Film Festival. At just over four hours, it’s not surprising that we didn’t make it. A film of this length is a heavy commitment to say the least, especially when you’re surrounded by jumped-up festival goers.

[Cut to a couple of weeks ago]

My wife and I are in Fnac in Portugal. For a while I peruse the CDs and then I decide to look at the movies. Being the stunning intellectual that I am, I decide to try and see what strange titles English-language films have acquired in Portuguese. At the same time, my wife and her cousin are looking at some native films. They stumble upon Mysteries of Lisbon.


[Cut to our living room, a week or so later]

Your Fabulous Author respires gently on the living room sofa. It’s only 10pm, and only twenty minutes of the film have elapsed, but already his lifeforce is seeping from him.


Let me put a question to you first. How would you feel if you spent over four hours watching a film and it turned out to be dream or a confused, delirious, untrustworthy remembrance that someone has on the brink of death? Ordinarily, you might have the right to be pissed off, as this is usually one of the least satisfying ways to wrap up a story, but here it actually works. The film is so confused, so incoherent and so self-indulgent that it only makes sense as a dream. If it had ended any other way, I might have hunted down Raul Ruiz so that I could slap him in the face with some bacalhau.

Your Fabulous Author here is talking complete bullshit. He wouldn’t hunt down a 70-year-old cancer survivor so that he could slap him in the face with some bacalhau. He’s not heartless. Besides, he doesn’t have the money for the air fare...

I can think of another four hour plus film, though, that possibly ends with a dream - Once Upon a Time in America. But the difference between the two films is night and day. One of them is a multi-layered, breathtaking meditation on love and time and the other is, well... Mysteries of Lisbon tries hard to be that but it doesn’t succeed.

Ruiz here weaves a tale that goes off in many strange tangents and directions. Stories open within stories and soon this initially simplistic tale leads us into a murky labyrinth. But while it’s an excellent idea (the concept of unravelling the web that leads to a person’s existence), none of the intrigues are especially interesting. A lot of the time the film feels like an expensive soap opera, what with the overwrought emotions, the laughable twists and turns, and the penchant for characters to slap on horribly fake facial hair. Mysteries of Lisbon might have the veneer of an important film, but scratch beneath the surface and there’s not much there.

Your Fabulous Author is watching Mysteries of Lisbon. The second half of the film has just begun. He’s hoping that it’ll be an improvement on the first half - that the film will establish a confident rhythm. Father Dinis is talking to a monk. They chat a little about food and alcohol and...the Monk interrupts the scene to tell his story, marking the umpteenth time that this has happened; that a character has shifted the course of the movie to tell his or her tale.

Your Fabulous Author tugs on his beard and puffs his cheeks, realising that he still has two and a half hours of this nonsense left to go.

One of the most disappointing things about Mysteries of Lisbon is how overwhelmingly bland it is. For a film that is full of so many elegant costumes and sumptuous palaces you never get a real feel for the time or place. This is perhaps partly because all the exteriors feel like they were filmed in one or two places. There’s one piece of forest that I swear is used every time there’s a horse drawn carriage. It becomes almost like Hanna-Barbera - you’re seeing the same tree over and over again. This ends up making such an epic film feel much smaller than it should - it ends up betraying the movie’s TV-mini-series roots.

Again, this wouldn’t really matter if the human drama were up to scratch, but it most certainly isn’t. Whether it’s Father Dinis fighting for Napoleon, or the orphan at the centre of the film finally meeting his mother, or the reemergence of Knife Eater as a wealthy nobleman, it feels contrived and artificial. It’s a movie that’s meant to engage on an intellectual level rather than an emotional one, but it fails in this respect because it just ends up feeling like an art-house version of EastEnders. I mean, a gypsy with really unconvincing facial shrubbery reinvents himself as a priest? Oh, and another geezer with really bad facial hair reinvents himself as a nobleman? There are all kinds of shifting identities in the film but it doesn’t add to the movie in any way - at best it feels like a soap opera; at worst it’s just confusing.

Your Fabulous Author, tired and weary, stretches as the end titles crawl along the screen.


[One week later]

Your Fabulous Author opens ‘Entertainment Weekly’ and sees that Mysteries of Lisbon receives a ‘A’ grade.


Your Fabulous Author takes a look at ‘Slant’ and sees a rave.


Your Fabulous Author takes a look at ‘The New York Times’ and sees a glowing review.


Fearing that this is going to be another Russian Ark, a film that everyone seems to jizz themselves over except him, Your Fabulous Author crawls into bed.