War Horse

I don't get the appeal of horses.  Maybe I'm just not an animal lover (scratch that --- I'm definitely not an animal lover), but I see horses as walking, pooping, glue factories.  As you might have surmised, I was not looking forward to seeing War Horse.  I assumed that it would be good --- I haven't seen a bad Spielberg movie yet --- but the commercials made it look like a dramatization of Charlotte's Web, from the human point of view: "That sure is some pig horse."

War Horse begins with the birth of Joey, who would one day become England's Secretary of War (Horse) is never actually called "war horse" by anyone important in the movie.  Joey's birth is witnessed by Albert (Jeremy Irvine), a nice local kid with more guts than smarts.  Albert immediately becomes infatuated by Joey, constantly trying to win his affection.  To be honest, young Albert's love of horses borders on the disturbing.

"Let's keep this between you and me"

Albert wins the bestiality lottery when his father gets drunk and bids far too much money for ownership of Joey.  Albert's family lives on a farm and needs a plow horse, not a thoroughbred like Joey, but the horse and Albert surprise everyone except the audience by plowing a difficult field.  This is the first "some horse" moment in the film, but certainly not the last. 

Joey's not running here, but carefully balancing

Eventually, circumstances dictate that Joey must be separated from Albert, thanks to World War I and its insatiable appetite for killing things.  The horse gets drafted, but Albert is too young; the war horse goes to war without his master.  From this point on, we see how Joey impacts the lives of several humans.  He serves with both the English and the German armies, befriends a young girl and her jam-making grandfather, and serves as the stimulus for a Christmas Truce-type scene in the trenches.  All the while, Albert is slowly growing old enough to join the army and, if he's lucky, rejoin his magnificent horse.

It's perfectly fine if you hum the "Theme to Rawhide" while watching this film

That plot breakdown may make it seem like I didn't enjoy War Horse, but I actually did.  The ensemble cast is solid, and the brutality of the war scenes is well-balanced by clever and cute civilian scenes.  This is a movie meant to tug on the heart strings, and tug it does.  So what's my problem, then?  I'll get to it in a bit, but I want to acknowledge what I liked first.

The acting in War Horse doesn't contain any amazing performances, but they were all pretty good.  Jeremy Irvine is likable as the main (human) character, which is essential to the success of the film.  There are far too many moments early in the film where his love of Joey could be construed as romantic, but I thought he was fine otherwise.

This analogue to the Sixteen Candles panty scene was a bit much, though

Ted Narracott was good as Irvine's drunk and gruff father, but Emily Watson was the best supporting actor in the film.  I thought her character grounded the story on the human side of things, adding some much-needed wry humor and solid dramatic chops.

...and glamor.  Don't forget the glamor!

David Thewlis sheds a bit of his fuzzy Harry Potter image by playing the local rich guy and being generally unlikable.  The most promising cast members were definitely the British soliders who don't have much screen time.  Up-and-comers Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston play the thankless role of soldiers who haven't realized that machine gun combat has made cavalry charges useless; neither man is terribly impressive here, but I've liked them quite a bit in other things, so I thought I'd call them out.

L-R: Sherlock Holmes, cannon fodder, and Loki

The rest of the cast was okay, but similarly unremarkable.  Young Celine Buckens gave a cute debut performance, David Kross was good in a surprisingly brief role, and frequent character actors Eddie Marsan and Liam Cunningham make brief appearances before the end.

Steven Spielberg directed War Horse, so you know it's going to look good.  The war scenes looked cool, but were not plentiful enough to change the focus of this movie from a boy and his horse to a war and its horse.  For the record, though, War Horse is probably the most dead horse-filled movie I have ever seen.  Spielberg's always had a good touch with light humor in his action films, and he maintains it here.  The cinematography is pretty, the lighting is noticeably interesting at points (especially the last scene), and the story is suitably emotional. 

And, for little girls, that emotion is "ridiculous horse-caused joy"

The style is awfully retro, though.  War Horse feels more like a John Ford movie than a Spielberg film.  This is the kind of semi-epic, ultra-earnest story that was all the rage in the 50s and 60s, but has fallen out of favor of late because it can seem a bit dated or corny.  And War Horse is kind of dated and corny, so that makes sense.  It's not just that the film is a tad predictable and old-fashioned, it takes itself pretty seriously.  Sure, there are some intentionally funny moments (many involving a goose, a sure sign of broad audience pandering), but there are also some unintentionally funny conceptual moments.  For instance, Joey has a companion horse during the war; that's right, the main character in this war movie inevitably finds a war buddy, and that buddy's character development mirrors that of most "best friend" characters in war movies. 

That horse is one week away from retirement

And then there is John Williams' overeager score; I love me some John Williams, but he lays it on a little thick at the very beginning of the movie, practically screaming at the audience that even the uneventful beginning of this film is epic.  And, of course, there are all the instances where immature jackasses like myself giggled when Albert's affection seemed a little less than chaste.

None of that makes War Horse a bad movie.  While I thought the film was sentimental and nostalgic, I certainly teared up on a few occasions.  This is a well-made movie that hits all the right notes, but just isn't very interesting to me.  On the other hand, I think it is a little funny that, in the same year J.J. Abrams made a movie that waxed nostalgic for Close Encounters, Spielberg wound up making an homage to the emotional epics of yesteryear.  This is a quality picture, just not necessarily as great as it wants to be.

Centurion

In the days between Boadicea's revolt and the building of Hadrian's Wall, the expanding Roman empire and the natives of Great Britain were at a stalemate.  The expansion had effectively stopped, but the two sides would frequently skirmish.  Sometime in the 110s or 120s, the Roman Ninth Legion, who were assigned to the Roman-Briton frontier, disappeared from Roman records, which is strange, since they were fairly meticulous with their official paperwork.  Were they simply disbanded, with the men being assigned to other military groups?  Perhaps they fought and died in Germania?  Both are fairly reasonable possibilities, but since the last known location of the Ninth is in York, some believe that they met their fate in Northern England or Scotland.  Why the history lesson?  Centurion is one of two recent films to speculate on the fate of the Ninth Legion (the other being the Channing Tatum vehicle, The Eagle).  While this film does not claim to be factual, a little context helps put things in perspective.

Sexual fetish or prisoner of war?  Context makes a difference.

The Picts, a Scottish clan, have been using guerrilla warfare against the invading Romans for a while.  One night, they launch an attack on a Roman garrison, killing all but Quintus (Michael Fassbender), and only because he cursed them in their own language.  Why that matters when so many Picts in this movie speak English, I don't know, but Quintus is deemed "important" and is captured instead of being killed.  Meanwhile, the Ninth Legion is dispatched to kill some Picts for the glory of Rome; they are given a mute Pict tracker, Etain (Olga Kurylenko), to hunt down the rebellious Picts.  You may be wondering why a Pict would hunt her own people, and that's a good question.  The answer given is because she is loyal to Rome.  Obviously.  Quintus manages to escape his captors and accidentally runs into the Ninth.

He had them right where he wanted them

They kill the Picts chasing him, and Quintus agrees to accompany the Ninth to the Pict base.  Remember when you asked why the Romans trust a Pict guide?  Well, it turns out that the provided answer was not the correct one; she was guiding them into a trap.  The Ninth is massacred, with only a handful of soldiers surviving through luck or cowardice; the Picts also captured the general of the Legion, Titus (Dominic West) and brought him to their base camp.  As the ranking officer, Quintus is now in charge of the group.  What should they do?  They are depressingly far behind enemy lines, and Etain has shown a mad-on for hunting down Romans in general and this group of Romans in particular.  Can this centurion lead his men home to safety?

Not if Etain has nothing to say about it.  You know, because she's mute.

This is the second film I have seen and reviewed from director Neil Marshall, and I think I'm beginning to identify his strengths.  Centurion is a bloody and gory movie, which is exactly what any film about a Roman rebellion should be; if dozens of characters are supposed to be dying by sword and hatchet wounds, there damn well better be some severed body parts and blood.  The action scenes are good, and some of the death scenes were totally awesome.  My favorite example of the awesomeness comes from a character who has been speared, but then pushes the spear through his body to stab and kill his enemy.  It's probably harder than it looks.  Aside from the totally respectable violence, Marshall captured the natural beauty of Scotland in long-shot after long-shot of the group running for their lives.

Marshall doesn't do much with the characters, though.  The performances are all fine.  Michael Fassbender is suitably heroic and he is only marginally less of a tough guy than he was in 300.  Former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko was convincing in her action scenes and...well, she was mute, so she didn't talk much.  The rest of the cast was capable with their parts; Dominic West was almost likable as the general, JJ Feild was kind of scummy, Liam Cunningham was decent as an old soldier, and Imogen Poots was okay as the curiously clean local witch.  Nobody gave a bad performance, but there was no depth to these characters.  I could care less about who lived and who died.  Thanks to this lack of likable characters, the adventure in the film lost any sense of urgency it might have had. 

"Not likable?  Perhaps you missed my smoldering stare...?"

The key to a good movie about soldiers is to make the audience give a crap about them as people.  Centurion doesn't even try to do this.  The film looks gorgeous at times and the action is fun to watch, which is especially impressive given the low budget, but the story never takes off because you never care what happens next. 

Death scene or sex scene?  You won't care which.

On the one hand, Centurion encourages me to watch another Neil Marshall movie because this one was a visual treat.  On the other hand, I can't imagine that Doomsday has a better story than this.  After the brutality of the initial battle, I had high hopes.  Centurion just doesn't live up to them.

Harry Brown

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for stories about bad-asses that have given up their violent ways, only to have circumstances back them into a corner where they have to murder defeat a hell of a lot of people.  That's the basic plot to almost every good martial arts film, let alone the Rambo series and countless other action movies.  But what how long can a bad-ass retire from bad-assery and still have what it takes to get the job done?

Harry Brown (Michael Caine) lives in a bad neighborhood in South London; he lives in a housing estate, which is the British version of a low-income housing development.  There is a lot of graffiti, youth gangs openly deal drugs and regularly assault people without provocation.  It's a generally scummy place.  Harry visits his comatose wife in the hospital daily, and then goes to the pub to have a few pints with his best friend, Leonard (David Bradley), over some chess.  Even there, though, social decay can be seen; the pub's owner, Sid (Liam Cunningham), gets kickbacks from drug dealers/stolen merchandise vendors.  To be honest, it's not a particularly sunny look on old age.

If time flies when you're having fun, I bet the clock hasn't moved in years.

A pair of unrelated tragedies shake Harry up.  First, Harry receives a phone call from the hospital, urging him to rush over for his wife's final moments; he leaves the house, but opts not to take the gang member-filled underpass that would save him time (assuming he doesn't get robbed, beaten, or killed) and winds up just missing her death.  Almost immediately after, Leonard tells Harry that he can't handle living in constant fear any more, and he has taken to carrying an old bayonet tip for protection.  The very next day, Detective Inspector Frampton (Emily Mortimer) and Detective Sergeant Hicock (Charlie Creed-Miles) arrive at Harry's door with the news of Leonard's death.  Local gang members are suspected, but no charges are made.  With nothing left to lose, Harry (consciously or subconsciously at first) prepares to take out his frustrations on the scumbags that caused them.

You can't to the "That's not a knife..." bit if the other guy is senile

As luck would have it, Harry Brown used to be a Royal Marine who had fought in the urban areas of Northern Ireland forty years ago.  What can an elderly marine do against a youth culture that is starting to resemble the ultra-violence of A Clockwork Orange?  If nothing else, he can prove that an out-of-practice bad-ass almost always has the edge over hot-headed idiots. 

He may look grandfatherly, but he's not here to tuck you in

While I wouldn't say that the acting in Harry Brown is fantastic, there were no bad performances in the bunch.  Michael Caine can be awfully hit-and-miss due to his mercenary attitude toward taking roles, but he's good here.  His portrayal of Harry is a depressing one, and he is fueled less by rage and revenge (as is common in this type of film) and more by despair.  His gang member counterpart is played by Ben Drew, AKA British musician Plan B.  I thought he was pretty good as a thuggish nogoodnik, although his character wasn't particularly complex.  Emily Mortimer was fine as the only cop that actually figures out what is happening in the film, and she has more than her share of good small moments.  Her character's motivations seemed to be more than just doing her job, but no insight was ever really given to her character; I think that was a missed opportunity. This was the first time I had ever seen David Bradley outside of a Harry Potter film, and he was okay in his small part.  The only other actor that stood out to me was Iain Glen as an insincere and mildly incompetent superior police officer.  There were a number of small character roles for street thugs, but none of them were terribly developed.

Kids, don't do drugs

Harry Brown is Daniel Barber's first feature film, although it is worth noting that he received an Oscar nomination for his only other credit, a short film.  Barber did a good job with the cast, getting realistic performances out of a story that could have occasionally been over the top.  I liked the action in the film --- it looked good and painful, and none of the characters appeared to be accomplishing anything unrealistic.  I was surprised that my biggest take-away from the film did not involve Michael Caine's performance.  Instead, I was impressed by how frightening the youth gang members were.  The opening scenes, featuring a gang initiation and some random violence set the tone for the movie.

The only real problem I have with Harry Brown is that it is retreading familiar ground.  The obvious comparison is to Death Wish (the first one, not the ridiculous sequels), where a good man takes steps to fix what the law cannot (or will not) fix.  Harry Brown isn't as focused on its action sequences or the brutality of the hero (as in Man on Fire, Taken, Law Abiding Citizen, or Edge of Darkness).  Instead it focuses on the despair of the main character, kind of like Death Sentence.  Of course, this movie also features an elderly man killing a number of younger men on his path to vengeance, which is awfully similar to The Limey.

I've seen this scene before.  I bet the sleazy arms-n-drug dealer lives.

I'm totally okay with Harry Brown being just another revenge movie.  What I didn't like was the conscious effort to make this movie sad.  Harry's situation is hopeless and there is no real happy ending for an old man who is alone in the world, since he's unlikely to start over somewhere new.  Seriously, this feels less like a revenge movie and more like suicide-by-gang-member.  This isn't a movie that glamorizes or glorifies violence, either.  It's a fairly realistic look at the probable effects of vigilantism in a crime-heavy area.  While this makes Harry Brown unique, it also makes it one of the more depressing revenge movies out there.  It was well-made, but is kind of a downer.

When I discovered that the main thug in the movie was a British pop star, I checked his credits and found a music video from the Harry Brown soundtrack.  This is Chase & Status ft. Plan B - End Credits.  It's not my cup of tea, but it is very British.