Category: REVIEWS

“So help me god, this is the last one.” These lines, spoken by Clint Eastwood in the trailer for The Mule, feel very ominous. At age 88, when the film was released, the film’s director and star may have been feeling that the time had finally come to bring his sixty-year career to a close.

Indeed, The Mule is the kind of late-career film we’ve seen from plenty of directors before. It’s gentle, full of life lessons and follows a flawed central character on a journey of awakening and redemption. While it does fall into stereotype and is self-indulgent at times (there are two threesome scenes), it’s agreeable and earnest throughout, as well as compelling in key moments.

Though Eastwood’s less-than progressive politics have put him out of favour in the current climate, it’s undeniable that few people still active the industry have a greater living legacy than him.

He is a synonymous icon of the western genre and his filmography is packed with quality titles, from Dirty Harry to Letters from Iwo Jima. Even in his later years, instead of resting back on mythology, he continues to experiment and explore new ideas and genres (admittedly with varying results).

Crucially, his films almost always have no agenda. Behind the camera he puts the real world to one side and focuses on what’s on screen – and his impact and longevity have really earned him the right for audiences to do the same.

The Mule sees Eastwood back in front of the camera a decade after supposedly bid farewell to his screen persona in Gran Torino (At the time he said it would be his last film as an actor.) We can only guess what it was that made him want to come out of retirement to take on the role of Earl Stone, who is based on former White House gardener Leo Sharp, but it’s a role he seems to inhabit with ease.

The film opens with the workaholic Stone passing on his daughter’s wedding in favour of a trade show – an act that later sees him estranged from both his daughter and wife. Many years later rift in the family is still wide, even with his granddaughter (American Horror Story’s Taissa Farmiga) wanting to cool the bad blood, with little success.

Now out of business, broke and with nowhere to go, a chance encounter connects the octogenarian with a group who pay him big money to transport packages from Illinois across the Mexican border. While at first he is unsure of the reality of what’s actually happening, he soon realises he is transporting drugs for a cartel, who find his unassuming nature makes him the perfect mule.

His opposition to what is short lived, as he enjoys the journeys he makes and the people he meets, while the money he gets in return gives him the means to make things better for his friends and family – the thing he had never been able to do and made him most feel like a failure.

However, word of this new, unknown mule reaches the DEA, and given the task of tracking him down is agent Colin Bates, played by Bradley Cooper in his second collaboration with Eastwood after American Sniper. It’s not long before the heat start closing in on him.

Whether or not The Mule actually is a swan song, there’s a lot in the film that feels personal to Eastwood. He casts his real-life daughter Alison as his daughter in the film, whom Stone reconciles with after having missed out on so much with her. This is something we’re used to seeing in films of this type, but exchanges between this real life father and daughter adds another level to these moments.

Also of note is a scene set in a waffle house, where he gives life advice to Bradley Cooper – like Clint in real life, a leading man turned successful American director. This exchange, which is recalled later on in the film, feels almost like he is anointing his successor.

As with all Eastwood films, though, self-reference takes a back seat to story. While The Mule does not innovate or break any new ground, it is a solid drama, affecting and absorbing with well-written characters. Also in its favour is that it is free of tricks to try and manipulate, instead relying on the acting and the script to get us to warm to the action.

It has its rough patches, but it gets past those thanks to its genial tone and good nature, which Eastwood equals in his performance. While this isn’t his best work either as actor or director – as a drama it doesn’t have the emotional resonance of something like Unforgiven or Gran Torino – but it’s an easygoing film that everyone can take something away from.

The third film in Legendary Pictures’ Monarch Cinematic Universe (after Gareth Edward’s 2014 Godzilla and Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island), Godzilla: King of the Monsters course-corrects the lack of the titular beast in the first movie but also expands on the elements that weren’t so popular. There’s a glut of unnecessary, dull, dumb, human characters and while the monster fights are frequent, they often look murky and lack visual dynamism.

Unfortunately, this movie misses the gorgeous cinematography of Guillermo Navarro, who conjured the awesome aesthetic of Pacific Rim or Larry Fong’s striking visual palette in Kong: Skull Island. Watching both Godzilla’s I’m left wondering if we’ll ever see the king titan clash under clear skies. The excitement of seeing this beastly royalty on screen is dampened by the restrictive storm of dusty, smoky, greys and browns. It’s a visual dirge that made me ache for the breath-taking HALO jump from the 2014 movie or practically any monster shot from Skull Island (honestly… check my earlier review. I took a lot of flak for unashamedly loving that movie).

Seeing the sheer number of iconic beasts and the loving fan-service, liberally slathered on screen should have been a joyous thing but sadly, they’re competing for screen-time with a phalanx of hollow, grating human characters. It’s bad enough director Michael Dougherty squanders the scenery-chewing Charles Dance, we also have to endure the human slice of dry white, crustless bread that is Kyle Chandler.

Vera Farmiga’s character motivations are astoundingly stupid and cliched, Bradley Whitford delivers naff quips, Zhang Ziyi espouses vaguely Asian mysticism and Ken Watanabe returns to intone super-seriously. Millie Bobby Brown gets a little more to do than most but the family dynamic between her character, Chandler and Farmiga’s is ill-defined and has no satisfactory resolution. Oh… and there’s an utterly wasted Sally Hawkins, Thomas Middleditch, Aisha Hinds, avid Stathairn, Joe Morton, Anthony Ramos and O’Shea Jackson Jr. to name a few.

There’s simply too many human characters that whenever we lose sight of the titans the movie becomes a trudge. In that regard, Godzilla: King of the Monsters suffers from the same issue the Transformers movies had, where the spend way too much time with an inordinate number of unlikeable characters, delivering terrible dialogue and doing idiotic things. What could have been a lean, mean clash of creatures ends up a monotonous meander between muddy-looking, incomprehensible battles.

That aside, the Bear McCreary score is aces and there’s a couple of unintentionally hilarious moments that helped me through this overstuffed, undercooked pretender to the crown. If you’re a fan of the 2014 movie you may enjoy King of the Monsters at face-value. There are plenty of call-backs to the rich history of Godzilla and the promise of more gargantuan tussles in future but as a casual fan I was bored. Here’s hoping Adam Wingard can right the ship with next year’s beastly battle royale!

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is unleashed in cinemas this week.

Godzilla Vs King Kong hits cinemas March 2020.

GAME GIRLS (Alina Skrzeszewska) follows Teri Rogers, a woman on a mission for a better life. With a non-judgmental camera lens and a frank portrayal of life on Skid Row, GAME GIRLS shows dreams, dissolution and desire. 

It opens a window in to the systemic problem of life on the streets – this is where these people, Teri and her fiancé Tiahna Vince, have learned their lifestyle, trades, behaviours. A fly on the wall style appraisal follows as she contemplates her relationship, her life, her goals. Teri wants more, but everyone around her seems to think it could never happen.

It’s a demonstration of the yearning we all feel for a better life – to leave behind one set of problems for another, as Teri puts it; her particular situation of being a black, poor, mentally ill American woman in downtown Los Angeles does come with it’s particular set of historical constraints, touched on throughout the portrayal of her personal experience. 

The microcosm of her finance’s therapy sessions, expressing deeply personal stories, flow out in to the macro scenes of the doc showing life on the streets and real time observation of interactions between black, poor, American people. The personal becomes the collective – the stories don’t necessarily blend but they hold up together a greater narrative of the communal issues within this society. 

Skid Row seems like a harsh place – there are constraints that seem impossible to get out of. Teri’s vigilant rigour to go by the system is a sometimes painfully frustrating watch – the city workers couldn’t be nicer, but they can’t help her. She’s not poor enough, or sick enough, or homeless enough. It’s an endless cycle of qualification and bureaucracy, a country’s attempt to handle the problem and the people on the front lines dealing with it.

There’s rays of hope due to Terri’s tenacity – she goes through all the tribulations of normal adult life such as marrying, finding a place to live, and her perseverance is so admirable. When she puts a fresh paint of coat on her home and looks out to the street, it’s as beautiful a sunset you’ll ever see complete with abandoned shopping trolleys and all. 

In the end, it’s not clean cut. It’s messy escaping from previous problems, a previous life. The passion to succeed wills out and runs deep in within all of us – Teri is trying, and sometimes succeeding; in her eyes that beats not t

By Fergus Henderson. Wade in the Water, directed by Mark Wilson and written by Chris Retts, is like a 21^st century Taxi Driver, examining all the pain and rage and emotional mayhem that leads to self-righteous vigilantism, then taking the examination several steps further. 

Whereas vigilante revenge films typically let the cathartic violence serve as sufficient evidence of spiritual corruption, served explosively at the film’s climax, Wade in the Water instead deploys its violence early, where it caps off an acerbically funny first third. 

In this first third you might mistake our schlubby protagonist ‘Our Man’ (played with wounded restraint by Tom E. Nicholson) for some new Falling Down-style angry man. Our Man is so put upon and beaten down by his miserable life that getting the wrong burger sets him off. He lives on his filthy sofa where he works, watches old Westerns, and masturbates. 

Soon, however, he is in therapy, where he hints at childhood abuse that has never left him.

Our Man finds what seems to be the perfect target for his deep-seated anger after receiving a parcel meant for someone else that contains a disc of horrible images of abuse. Except once his rage has truly manifested the film switches gears hard. For its remainder it becomes both pensively redemptive yet emphatic in its judgement that the cycle of inherited violence takes real will to break.

Without giving anything away, Our Man finds himself making an uneasy, unlikely bond with his mark’s daughter Tilly (a magnetically intense Danika Golombek). They’re both coming to terms with the sins of their fathers, in their own ways. Golombek’s performance is a real feat, covering a wide, ambiguous, tricky emotional terrain that delivers judgement and forgiveness at the same time.

This film tells a heavy story, undercut by oddly sympathetic streaks of mordant humour. Our Man listens to gospel music because he believes that their religious expression (religious hypocrisy emerging as a strong theme) conveys ultimate pain. Pain is all Our Man has known. Wade in the Water uses its sly, offbeat humour and truly unique character arc to show us that pain can be transformed into forgiveness and acceptance.