Films Catch Up 3

Still catching up on films I've seen this year.

1. Spy Kids 2: The Island Of Lost Dreams

Following the events of Spy Kids, the Cortez parents are working as spies for the OSS and the kids, Carmen and Juni, and working for OSS Junior. Sent on a mission to rescue the president’s daughter they find themselves upstaged by Gary and Gerti Giggles, their rivals for being the top OSS Junior agents.

At an awards ceremony Donnagan Giggles, the Giggles father, is promoted to director of the OSS after someone hacks the President’s teleprompter. Juni dances with the President’s daughter though they only know ballet. Then they are attacked by magnetic men in weird hats and a flying saucer, seeking the Transmooker, a device belonging to the president that can stop electronic devices working. In the fight Juni gets hold of it, but when Gary tries to take it he drops it and the bad guys get away with it. Gary blames Juni and he’s fired.

The whole film is like this. They get new gadgets (Gary, with even brand newer ones says that it’s the gadgets that make the agent) and of course the titular island doesn’t allow gadgets to work (because of the transmooker). There’s some grandparents who are disappointed that Gregorio, spy father, didn’t get the promotion. There are weird monsters on the island, controlled by mini-monsters on a model island, or maybe just showing where they are? Look, it’s all very confusing.

Watch This: More wild kid adventures with gadgets and monsters and traps and things
Don’t Watch This: It’s very silly; I can’t say the personal rivalries and problems detract from the main plots and crimes because they’re just as nonsensical

2. Around The World In 80 Days (2004)

Hey we’re back with another version of Around The World In 80 Days, one that I missed when it came out. Steve Coogan is Phileas Fogg, here imagined as an eccentric inventor. His opponent is Lord Kelvin (Jim Broadbent), the minister of science. During a discussion at the Royal Society about how quickly the thief who stole a Jade Buddha from the Bank Of England could reach China they make a bet that Fogg can go around the world in 80 days. At stake is Kelvin’s role as minister and Fogg’s as a scientist and inventor.

Jackie Chan plays Lau Xing, the thief. Escaping, he takes refuge in Fogg’s house at the very moment his previous valet leaves due to too much experimenting. Taking on the role and inventing the name “Passepartout” in a fairly unfunny sequence about how Fogg only has French valets, he manipulates events so that they leave on the trip so he can get home.

Lord Kelvin has made a deal with General Fang, the Jade Buddha for British troops to take over some of China? All of China? Not sure. Anyway Kelvin hires the corrupt Inspector Fix to stop Fogg, while Fang and her troops go after Passepartout. They catch up in Paris where the two meet artist Monique La Roche (Cécile de France) who joins them* as they escape by hot air balloon.

So we get some moderately entertaining Jackie Chan stunts, some steampunk shenanigans and Fogg getting upset when he learns that he’s been fooled into going with the others. They have various setpieces and cameo appearances in the stops along the way, including Arnold Schwarzengger as an Ottoman Prince (?) who wants to keep Monique for his harem (?). The first climax comes when they arrive in Lau Xing’s village and there’s a lot of kung fu. Fogg leaves the others and they have to go after him. Things drag a bit after that, trying a bit of inventive sense of wonder, actual drama and legal claims, and the jokes aren’t quite as good. The reveal of the ending is stupider than the original.

Watch This: A zany, family friendly steampunk kung fu adventure
Don’t Watch This: There are better versions of Around The World In 80 Days

* In the book the pair encounter the third, female, member of their party (and love interest) in India. Modern adaptions prefer to introduce their version of this character earlier.

3. Beyond White Space

Tien Lung, a space dragon, guards white space, a mysterious white hole that leads to somewhere that will cure all ills. Or so the legend goes. Twenty five years ago the deep space fishing vessel Acushnet* encountered Tien Lung. Now two sons of the captain of the Acushnet are out in the deep space fishing vessel Essex** looking for it. But secretly.

(Deep space fishing? Don’t worry about it.)

A woman also tracking Tien Lung notices that the Acushnet has been following sightings, gets herself aboard as a fishery inspection official. She has ulterior motives! Then pirates come.

There’s a mystical element, an attempt to make the quest for white space partly spiritual, the misfits who have chosen the live of deep space fishing looking for something. There’s a thriller element as everyone on board the Essex has some sort of secret. There’s space action as there’s deep space harpooning and pirate fighting. Does it come together? Not really!

Watch This: A cool, Moby Dick inflected space opera
Don’t Watch This: It reaches for profundity and misses, the references are too heavy handed and fail to inform the plot

* A whaler that Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, crewed on was the Acushnet out of New Bedford

** The Essex was a whaling ship famously attacked and sunk by a whale, inspiring many stories including Moby Dick

4. The Misfits

Richard Pace (Pierce Brosnan) is a master thief. He escapes from prison one day early to steal a fabulous watch (he’s a watch guy). He also escapes one day early to avoid Schultz (Tim Roth) an international private prison mogul, also money launderer and banker to terrorists. Pace apparently cuckolded Schultz, possibly as part of a scam. The backstory is not very clear, a problem this film keeps ignoring.

Pace is picked up by the Misfits, Ringo (a thief who tells us about safety deposit boxes), Violet (hitter), Wick (hacker) and The Prince (money man, mastermind, other things). They want him to do a job for them. They fly out to the Middle East where he says no thanks and goes off to try and steal a guy’s watch.

He’s interrupted by his daughter, Hope (sigh). She’s out there working for a refugee organisation. This turns Pace back to the Misfits to hear them out. It seems that Schultz is using his state-of-the-art maximum security prison in neighbouring Jazeristan to store gold for terrorists. They want to steal it to avoid it being used to finance terrorism, and also one in the eye for Schultz.

It's a big heist! Until now the film has been wandering around not bothering to get us invested in the characters, throwing out a few vague stereotypes and shots of Abu Dhabi in place of a plot. Now we're on track. They have to break into a prison, then get the gold out. A tricky job.

Here, as various scams, plans, and wheels within wheels start revolving is where it actually works. Schultz, one step behind, can’t catch up because all his lackeys are three steps behind so he’s having to deal with the Misfits last bit of chaos while a new one is boiling over.

Unfortunately the film’s dedication to fooling us, the audience, makes the various reveals into nonsense. I don’t think the timeline works! The Prince pulls a reveal from nowhere! The bad guys mix up Violet (Asian-American Jamie Chung) and Hope (White British Hermione Corfield)! Is it a superior silly heist film or a failure of a clever crime thriller? I guess the answer to that will reflect your enjoyment.

Watch This: A superior silly heist film
Don’t Watch This: A failure of a clever crime thriller

5. Forbidden Kingdom (aka Viy) (2014)

Jonathan Green is thrown out of his lover’s bed by her father. He vows to make himself worthy of her and sets off in a carriage of his own design to do some cartography. He crashes in a mysterious village in the Ukraine. (It turned out that Iron Mask was a sequel to this, which I did not know when I watched it, only later learning about this earlier film).

The village has many old customs. The lord’s daughter died a year ago and the church, on top of an outcrop in the forest, has been abandoned due to a haunting ever since. The priest is accusing people of witchcraft. There’s a strange creature down by the river. And there were three seminary students involved, one of whom has vanished, along with the 1000 gold pieces the lord paid for standing vigil over the daughter.

If this sounds a bit confused, then that’s because the film is a bit confused, hiding the truth behind spectacular CGI-ed flashbacks. Green, needing repairs to his carriage, is hired by the lord to make a map of the area. But this is a pretext, he’s hoping an outsider can explain and clear up what’s actually happened.

Watch This: A dark, pacy, entertaining fantasy adventure film
Don’t Watch This: It circles around, hiding and revealing and failing to make clear what is going on in an unentertaining way
Apparently: It’s based on the 19^th century story Vij by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol

6. The Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires

Professor van Helsing (here an anthropologist for some reason, played by Peter Cushing) is in China in 1904, trying to learn about local vampires, repeating an old story about the 7 Golden Vampires. At Chongqing university the Chinese academics dismiss him, saying that these are just peasant legends. Hsi Ching then goes to him to tell him that he is in fact the grandson of the survivor of the story.

Meanwhile van Helsing’s son Leyland has been at a fancy reception, where he met the adventurous widow Vanessa Buren. The local tong (gangster) boss takes a shine to her, but Leyland intervenes. On their way home they are attacked, and rescued by mysterious kung fu adepts; these are brothers of Hsi Ching. He’s got six brothers and a sister, each with a signature weapon.

Buren will fund the expedition to the village to try and put down the vampires, combining the kung fu with van Helsing’s knowledge, but she insists on coming against the men’s protests. They’re attacked again by the tong, and make their way to the village for a final confrontation. There it’s revealed (though not to us who saw the prologue) that the golden vampires had been resurrected by van Helsing’s nemesis, Dracula. A long, bloody and violent finale breaks out.

A co-production between the Hong Kong Shaw Brothers and British Hammer films, it’s a mash up of Kung Fu films and the period horror that Hammer are best known for. With the flaws and virtues of both, and a failure to make them mesh.

Watch This: For a Chinese flavoured Hammer Horror, or indeed a Hammer Horror spiced with kung fu
Don’t Watch This: The only thing worse than vampires is energetic kung fu fights
While They Were Out In Hong Kong: Hammer and the Shaw Brothers got Peter Cushing in to make kung fu spy thriller Shatter

7. A Night In Casablanca

Three managers of the Hotel Casablanca have died under suspicious circumstances. It being under government control they bring in Ronald Kornblow (Groucho Marx). As the candidate of last resort he takes full advantage of the facilities, also attempting to romance Beatrice Reiner. Corbaccio (Chico Marx), knowing that things are going wrong at the hotel, appoints himself Korblow’s bodyguard.

It turns out that during the war a plane carrying a treasure trove from Paris crashed here. The juvenile leads* are the pilot, forced to fly the mission but now under suspicion, and his girlfriend, who works at the hotel. The pilot needs the treasure to clear his name. Also in the hotel are some Nazi spies looking for the treasure, including Count Pfefferman. Pfefferman is in disguise as he is wanted war criminal Heinrich Steubel, and he wants to be made manager so he can search the hotel. He also has an incompetent mute valet, Rusty (Harpo Marx) who is not part of the plan.

This is a Marx Brothers comedy, and a late one (they had intended retiring after their previous film). Is it, if not tired, at the very least familiar? Perhaps so, having created their characters and their best comic scenes they are now making variations on a theme. Still, if not their best, there’s still some energy to the setpieces, in particular when Steubel is trying to pack and the three brothers hiding in his wardrobe, travelling wardrobe, trunk, chest of drawers, under the table, inside a suit etc. continually thwarting his attempts to get things packed.

Watch This: A fast paced, silly comedy combining puns, one liners, slapstick and general ridiculousness
Don’t Watch This: There are better examples of the Marx Brothers films (A Night At The Opera, Duck Soup) and maybe you don’t want one at all

* A technical term for the good-looking male and female actors that play out the mandatory wholesome romance in a comedy.

8. The Adventures Of Jane

Previously I watched Jane And The Lost City a 1980s film based on comic strip character Jane Gay from Jane’s Journal: Diary Of A Bright Young Thing. It was very popular in WW2, mostly because Jane would accidently lose her clothes. It turns out there was a previous film made in 1949, with Christabel Leighton-Porter as Jane. Leighton-Porter was the second of two models for Jane, and had toured during the war as Jane, in a burlesque show.

In this film Jane is met by an admirer in her dressing room after a show, who gives her a diamond bracelet. She meets her old friend Tom who tells her they’re paste (costume jewellery); he knows because he’s on the trail of diamond smugglers on the south coast.  She then catches the train down to Brighton to judge a beauty contest; her skirt gets caught in the door of the train leaving her in her pants. (Perhaps notably you see almost exactly as much of her legs as in her stage costume). She’s met by Captain Cleaver, who invites her onto his yacht, making Tom jealous.

There follows some business in the hotel, several minutes of good-looking young women parading in their swimming costumes for the beauty contest, also the number on Jane’s room changes from 66 to 69 when the second number comes loose and a drunk wanders in. Eventually the plot emerges. On Captain Cleaver’s yacht he replaces the false diamond with a real one, then fakes a break down so they are rescued by the channel packet ship. She takes it through customs (though not without having to be stripped and photographed off-screen; the prurient customs man seems surprised when he gets an X-Ray). The gang try to get the diamond bracelet back (this would have been a good time for the room number/drunk gag, but apparently not) fail, and kidnap Jane, and also her dog Fritz who has been here all along and will finally get to effect the plot. There are chases and confusion and in the final scene Jane loses her skirt again.

Watch This: A curiosity that moves swiftly with one or two amusing scenes
Don’t Watch This: The plot is completely incoherent, the villains even more stupid that the heroes and the set-piece signature clothing malfunctions even less inspired than the 1980s version
Available Online: And less than an hour long if you’re interested

9. The Living Daylights

After previously having a Scottish Bond, an Australian Bond and an English Bond, the James Bond franchise gets around to Welsh Bond with Timothy Dalton. The double-o section parachute into Gibraltar for an exercise, only to be attacked by real assassins. Two of them are killed with Bond the only survivor; there’s a clue, the note Smiert Spionam, Russian for Death To Spies.

They send Bond into Czechoslovakia to assist in the defection of KGB General Koskov at a concert; Koskov has requested Bond making it a little odd that if he's known to the KGB he can just travel across the border. A woman sniper is watching; against orders Bond shoots the rifle from her hands*, intuiting she’s not a real KGB agent, perhaps because she was the cellist in the orchestra.

Back in England Koskov reveals what Smiert Spionam is: a secret plan by his former boss KGB General Pushkin, to kill British spies wherever they find them. Koskov says he’s defected because he’s concerned that this might get out of hand; spies killing spies, agents killing agents until it blow up into a shooting war. Shortly after this debriefing the safe house is attacked and Koskov kidnapped, being taken in a medical helicopter**.

M (Bond’s boss played by Robert Brown***) decides to nip Smiert Spionam in the bud, ordering Bond to kill Pushkin when he appears at a trade conference is Tangiers. Bond is put onto a different lead by Moneypenny (Caroline Bliss in the Dalton Bond films); unable to find the woman on the list of KGB snipers, she finds her on the lists of Cellists. Bond goes back to Bratislava and discovers she’s actually Koskov’s girlfriend. He spends some time seducing her, sneaking her across the border where a fellow agent is killed; again Smiert Spionam.

Things get complicated; Bond confronts Pushkin who claims to know nothing of this. Koskov has put in an order for advanced weaponry with an arms dealer; Pushkin is demanding the money back. Bond is captured and taken to Afghanistan, at that time occupied by Soviet troops, where a money for diamonds for heroin for weapons deal is going on, and has to stop it.

This was a turn away from the silliness of the Moore years, though in retrospect it’s not that much of a turn. It’s more that we’ve not seen Dalton mugging at the camera and oleaginously smarm after inefficiently killing someone in the way that Moore did for so many years, so we can see the harder edge. And for that matter the outlines of the character; this Bond goes by instinct rather than follow the rules. More than that, he explicitly follows his own leads rather than the Moore and Connery years of wandering about near where they’ve been sent until someone tries to feed them to their shark or snake or whatever.

Watch This: A Bond film from the last moments of the Cold War
Don’t Watch This: Hilariously, humorously dated to its exact moment in history

* Scaring “the living daylights” out of her.

** A civilian air ambulance was something of a novelty in the green fields of an English country home, part of the tension between Bond, an old school spy, being caught up in modernity

*** Bernard Lee, who played M (Admiral Sir Myles Messervy) until his death, was replaced by Brown from 1983’s Octopussy. Brown had previously played Admiral Hargreaves in The Spy Who Loved Me. The films do not make it clear if this is the same M played by a different actor, or a different M, perhaps Hargreaves taking the role. 

10. Resident Evil: Vendetta

A CGI animated film set, I think, in the continuity of the games (as opposed to the film series or the re-booted film (which may yet get a sequel)). Chris Redfield, an agent in some sort of anti-bio-weapon unit, is on the trail of a bio-weapon-dealer, Arias. Arias wants revenge for the drone strike on his wedding (presumably he was already a bio-weapon-dealer, but not an apocalyptically deranged one). Raiding his mansion they are ambushed by zombies and other weird creatures, leaving Redfield as the last survivor. Somehow Arias has managed to get the zombies to follow orders or at least not attack some people (himself).

Later Rebecca Chambers is analysing the virus and discovers that it has three components. First the one that turns you into a zombie, secondly the trigger that activates the first and third another that makes it possible to give orders. Even as she has the lab producing a vaccine they are attacked by an aerosol virus. She manages to vaccinate herself and fight off the zombies. Then she teams up with Chris and they figure out who’s behind it (Arias, the apocalyptically deranged bio-weapon dealer).

They go to recruit Leon Kennedy, who is on leave and doesn’t want to be involved. He has some part of the puzzle but I had lost track to be honest. They do a very bad job of convincing him. At one point Rebecca draws a vial of her blood from her arm so there will be a chance to make more vaccine. Maybe they should have done that before going to find Leon? Anyway they’re attacked, Rebecca is kidnapped by Arias and his goons and Leon and Chris realise he’s going to attack New York City, setting up the long, exciting and slightly incoherent final action sequence.

It's an action packed side-story to a video-game series I am only peripherally familiar with. Some of the characters and others bits I know are from the games, some probably aren’t. Some of the things that make no sense are probably explained in the games, or maybe lost in the translation from the original Japanese.

Watch This: Fun and violent cartoon zombie bio-weapon thriller
Don’t Watch This: You hate being dropped in the middle of an incoherent story