The Host Review - OR - Stephenie Meyer's Global P**s-Take

Plot

Earth has been invaded. An alien species has, over several years, systematically colonized almost every living person, turning them into avatars so that they may mend the mistakes of humanity. The planet has never known such prosperity, but packs of surviving humans threaten the invader’s peace. Hardy survivor Melanie (Saoirse Ronan) is trying to find her way to one such clan, kid brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury) and love-interest Jared (Max Irons) in tow, when she is accosted and eventually captured by a group of human hunters known as Seekers. After she has been colonized by a Soul called Wanderer (and later Wanda) head honcho The Seeker (Diane Kruger) plans to ultilise the memories of Melanie to find and capture the remaining humans. The plan doesn’t go smoothly however; with Melanie staying very much alive within Wanda’s consciousness their internal collision may very well trigger a real-life battle.

In size order of how likely you are to remember their name.

Review

The phenomenon of Young Adult fiction – first in literature and then in film – is showing no sign of slowing down. Stephenie Meyer’s Twlight series not only typified the genre, it veritably constructed it, mixing fantasy, romance (normally in triangles) and moody teenagers into a potent money making behemoth. Vampires, werewolves and now zombies (with Warm Bodies) have already been accounted for, but aliens are a fantasy trope as yet untested in YA waters. Fittingly then, Queen Meyer changed that with her Twilight follow up The Host.

Almost inevitably then, The Host has been flung on to the big screen, but does it belong there?

…no.

If there’s one thing to praise with The Host – and there is, sadly, just the one thing – it’s the concept. YA schmoozy adventures are fast becoming stale so the film’s split focus on both romance and sci-fi veneered discussions on consciousness, body and soul is refreshing. William Hurt as human leader Jeb is the one acting highlight too, possibly because his grouchy sweetheart routine is the only likeable character to be found…so yeah, that’s a thing.

Having said that however, it addresses each issue with all the delicateness of a train crash, immediately and clinically culling any and all nuance; despite the potential for a legitimately fascinating investigation on what it means to be human, it would much rather just abuse it’s protagonist.

You see what they did there? It's like there's two of her or something.

The Host went all kinds of wrong somewhere. It’s broken from top to toe – from writing to directing – to the extent that the production team didn’t seem to realise that shot after shot after shot of barren empty desert wasteland does not an engaging film make. The music is alright though, heaps and dollops of sappy strings. So maybe that’s two things to praise.

Andrew Niccol, the man of previous highlights such as The Truman Show, both wrote and directed this sham, so the buck plainly starts and finishes with him.

The Host also perpetuates Stephenie Meyer's apparent dislike of all things women. Wanda is beaten – and not just pushed or slapped but full on thumped in the face and strangled – by a conveyor belt of sweaty indistinguishable men who introduce themselves with a dose of physical violence. It’s unsettling but in the wrong way, making the film look gleefully misogynistic rather than a commentator on prejudice. Though the film clearly wants you to think of Melanie/Wanda as a ball-breaking survivor heroine, the fact remains that she is almost entirely helpless, often not even allowed to move unless led by the hand while blind-folded. Or she’s driven. Or she’s carried. In fact, one of the few instances of her trying to do something by herself results in her near death following a moronic trek into the desert.

Slamming car doors! HOO-HA EXCITEMENT!

Not only is she a helpless punching bag however, Melanie/Wanda also has the prestigious honour of being a passive sex object. Her supposed love interest introduces himself with a forced aggressive kiss and she spends the rest of the time being kissed by the male protagonists in a tennis match of tongues. She rarely has a say and, in a particularly egregious instance, stands by while hunk number 2 orders hunk number 1 to kiss her shortly after he’s taken one for himself. Again, the film tries to explain this away, this time with a playful love triangle motif (though it may be better described as ‘love square’) but it just doesn’t work. It’s mismanaged and awfully presented, as developed as Meyer is poor, and reeks of laziness.

Mismanagement is the word of the day with The Host. The ‘romance’ is laughable, a juvenile conflation of appalling writing, senseless pacing and a general impression of apathy from acting to directing. The character’s flippant declarations of love for one another are inadvertently hilarious, feeling hackneyed and forced in a film that spends more time cycling around and around nonexistent narrative issues rather than developing its characters beyond caricatures of YA tropes.

The Host is a cataclysm of unforgiveable, primitive errors. The aforementioned writing is comically, childishly bad. The directing is hopeless, aimless from start to finish, and seems to forget to include an actual story to tie proceedings together.

If you ever smile at someone in the rain, you are definitely in love with them.

The fact of the matter remains that the aliens seem like far more pleasant company than the humans and not once are they explicitly proven to be bad. The senselessness of the human’s dogged aversion to alien occupation is matched only by the idiocy of the alien’s pursuit of the humans. At least the human lot arguably want to keep control of their bodies – fair enough – but the aliens pursuit of their remaining adversaries is bewildering. The film itself states that they are outnumbered by ‘a million to one’ but, once again, feels as though that is enough. It’s addressed the issue – as in pointed at it – and that’s good enough, time to move on, forgetting that it still needs to work as a movie; to make sense.

Ultimately, the major narrative crux – a supposed war between the aliens and the humans – never once threatens to actually formulate; if this is a war then so is trying to untie your shoe-laces. And if the film itself never bothers to take itself, or its audience, any kind of seriously then there is no onus for a viewer to do so either.

Bottom line, The Host is insulting. It patronises it’s own target audience and lies to everyone else. Clinging desperately to the romantic coattails of Twilight, it assumes that just arbitrarily forcing characters to kiss and confess completely unfounded love for each other is enough to keep the fans happy. As for the lie: the trailer promises ‘war’ and vehicular action (got to give those boyfriends something right?) but is actually an amalgamation of the film’s two full minutes of visceral interest. Action amounts to a needless suicide, an incredibly OTT car-crash and few gun shots here and there to stop you from dozing off. Now this isn’t to say that a film needsaction to be good – nothing could be further from the truth – but The Host’s pure disingenuity, from it’s trailer to the credit roll, deserves nothing less than utter abasement. 

At least the cars get objectified with lingering camara pans every now and then to give the women a break.

After knocking her out, he didn't really have a choice.

Verdict

The Host is a film that even manages to make the immensely talented Soairse Ronan look bad. That’s all that really needs to be said. A woefully incompetent, juvenile cash-in.

1/5

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Jack the Giant Slayer Review - OR - OMFG B.U.Gs

Plot

Jack (Nicholas Hoult) is a lowly farmboy desperate for adventure. On a fateful trip to the city of Cloister, he acquires a satchel of beans in a mixed up exchange for his horse, unknowing that they are the fabled magic MacGuffins that once led to war between humans and giants from a mythological sky continent. During a storm, runaway princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) finds herself holed up at Jack’s shack as a bean is triggered by the rainfall, erupting into a monstrous beanstalk that whisks her off to the land of the giants. Risking life and limb (literally), Jack and a squad of the king’s finest men set off to rescue the princess and hopefully avert a second war.

A night out in Wales.

Review

Another week, another jazzed up fairytale. Bigger, brighter and sexier: Jack the Giant Slayer is the newest offering squeezed from Hollywood's favourite cash cow: the contemporary fable. 


It's difficult to not feel thoroughly cynical when reviewing a film like Jack; it's an entirely disingenuous production, its $195 million dollar budget purposed solely and entirely for making money. Not surprising in a money-minded industry perhaps, but when so many near carbon copy films are released in a conveyor belt of the mundane – Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Huntsman, Hansel & Gretel and so ad nauseum – the soullessness of it all becomes sapping.

Bizarrely then, the budget barely seems to have made a difference to a film that feels all kinds of broken for far too long.

Jack flirts dangerously with total failure. The unforgiveable graphical failings of its CGI (where did all that money go??) capitulate the character and narrative failings of the film as a whole. An early animated sequence detailing the history behind the human world and the giant's world – religious loons get magic beans to climb to heaven but unwittingly find themselves in a Big Unfriendly World, cue violent war and the eventual dominion of men via a magic crown that controls the giants for some reason – looks like something pulled from an early morning children's cartoon. It looks appalling, unforgivably so, and sets a morose tone for the first hour or so of drudgery.

'Ha ha! Ohh, I was in Star Wars once...'

Fortunately, when the giants eventually show up the whole thing gets a vital boot up the jacksie both narratively and graphically (though the lumbering beasties are hardly bench setting, instead looking actively outdated), injecting a sense of fun and, y’know, adventure to this action adventure film. It culminates in a third act that is all kinds of epic, wherein the opposing teams of little and large clash in an imaginative no-holds-barred battle to the death. It’s a master class in action and pure cinematic entertainment and pulls Jack back from the maws of defeat.

Conclusively then, Bryan Singer’s direction is equal parts hit and miss in a film that – all elements considered - coasts merrily down the path of ‘alright.’ Action scenes are – fittingly enough – massive bombastic affairs, bursting through walls, worlds and perspectives in a frenetic and visceral assault on the senses. Elsewhere however, characters and narrative are firmly entrenched within ‘blockbuster’ territory: stilted and uninteresting.

It doesn’t bode well for a film when it’s leading man seems thoroughly bored by the entire affair. Nicholas Hoult barely seems to try in an endlessly insipid performance, his acting mounting to little more than widening his eyes a bit when something happens, for example a herd of stampeding murderous giants thundering towards you.

Behold! To act, one must merely look a tad constipated.

The supporting cast, thankfully, compose themselves with far more vigour, though this only to further detriment in the case of giggling goofball Wicke (Ewen Bremner). McGregor, as knight leader Elmont, has fun in a role reminiscent of a more shouty – and feudal – Obi Wan-Kenobi and lifts the film no end, stealing scenes like a classier Robin Hood. Stanly Tucci also stands out – as the imperious Stanly Tucci is want to do - oozing a slimy detestability as the betrothed King’s Advisor Roderick. Much of the rest of the cast, however, are almost entirely too fleeting to truly register; Jack surprisingly revels in the archetypal gruesome death, beheadings and dismemberments are common fair and treated with all the gravitas of a clown’s birthday party. And those who aren’t brutally slaughtered, Warwick Davies’s performer Old Hamm for example, are simply removed from the equation before they dare to become engaging.

‘If you think you know the story, you don’t Jack’ one of the film’s taglines flatulently states and, to it’s credit, Jackdoes a commendable job of addressing those ‘it isn’t like the tale!’ squawks, concluding with an interesting if not goofy sequence that pulls us up to the modern day. It’s a shame then that, despite the sturdy narrative foundations, Jack does itself little credit: plot points are signposted with flashing neon lights and coincidences are thrown around with a smutty flippancy.

Inconsistency is a hairy issue too: the Princess wants independence and yet crumbles instantaneously under the slightest provocation; the giant’s size and prowess changes from scene to scene to best compliment whatever is going on, unable to win a tug-o-war with a bunch of puny humans one minute while being able to tear a windmill to lego bricks in another; tone alternates from slapstick humour to gruesome (but always family friendly) death in a heartbeat and back again. None of it is deal breaking but it culminates to create a sense of incompletion, like the production team thought ‘hey, you know what would be awesome? A crazy-ass explody Jack and the Beanstalk remake’ and then doggedly went nowhere with it.

Dem textures. This is what happens with video games get too real

Verdict

It isn’t hard to see why Jack the Giant Slayer flopped in the States: it does absolutely nothing new and instead clings to the coattails of its fairytale predecessors, albeit with less able guidance.  Having said that, it’s still a (largely) competent production saved from the mire with a climax taken straight out of the top draw. Have no doubt, if not for the ending, Jack would resolutely be one to avoid. As it stands however, it is the epitome of popcorn fodder, an easy-going 100 minutes or so if ever a spare evening shows up.

3/5

You see his face there? Yeah, you can expect a fairly similar feeling:

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Welcome To The Punch Review - OR - Blue Cool Twists: Tip-Tops Evolved

Plot

Three years after being crippled in an attempt to arrest bank-robbing extraordinaire Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong), policeman Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy) finds himself without purpose or drive despite the support of good friend/kinda-sorta maybe-a-little-bit love interest Sarah (Andrea Riseborough). After his son is found with a mysterious gunshot wound to the stomach however, Sternwood returns to London to seek vengeance, prompting Lewinsky into action once more in a spiraling conflict that will consume everything from the police force to national politics.

So long as you've got a gun, you can rock any beard.

Review

Classy, stylish, frenetic: if you could use only three words to describe Welcome to the Punch then you couldn’t do much better. That’s not to say it’s a vapid experience, however. It’s a beautifully shot, breathless action film, escalating from set-piece to set-piece, shoot-out to shoot-out in a ruthless assault on the senses.

London has never looked so crisp; washed in a near bioluminescent blue it feels more like another world than the capital city. Colours are saturated and bright, sounds are crisp and cutting; the film plays like a heavy substance trip from car chase start to docklands shoot out finish. This is a production that screams effective simplicity,  the abundance of black and empty space brilliantly partnering the explosive action to create a film that contrasts simply by being.

Fitting then, considering the hardy juxtaposition of the central rivals, Sternwood and Lewinsky.

Max, is that a gun in your pocket or...

Punch is unashamedly narrative-driven, focused to the point of suffocation, with one eye primed for action and another for social commentary. It’s tight and meticulously organized, hitting story beats with ruthless accuracy throughout its well-packaged 99 minutes run-time.

It’s remarkable that it manages to hit any other level of meaning at all; in a film that languishes grandiloquently in bullet-time slow-mo and meaty reload sound effects, it is bizarrely progressive. The opposing men – one part unmovable object, other part unstoppable force – lay either side of an intriguing moral dichotomy that’s all kinds of contemporary. Addressing the ever more pertinent issue of gun crime and its influence on youth culture, Punchnever preaches, instead offering a balanced account of the issue, representing different viewpoints in a ‘what do you think’ kind of way rather than: ‘it must be like this.’

Sarah, pls.

Strong’s bank robber may, ostensibly at least, quite clearly stand in the villain’s role, but he’s just as – if not more so – sympathetic a character as McAvoy’s Lewinsky. Ultimately the film asks: to what extent can we lambast a person as criminal and evil, when the machinations (and operators) of society at large are equally condemnable?

It’s something of a shame then that, despite their involvement in an intriguing (if not ultimately insubstantial) moralistic sub-plot, the characters remain static and largely unchanging, as stoic as their physical prowess suggests. This doesn’t mean that they’re disappointing or poorly realised however. Far from it.

While McAvoy may seem a strange fit for hardy copper Lewinsky - his boyish looks and somewhat diminutive stature wilting under the dark physical oppressiveness of Strong’s Sternwood – he performs admirably, helming the heavy narrative demands of the film in a way that’s equal parts believable and approachable. Elsewhere, a quality ensemble cast entrench Punch firmly within the London diegesis, the highlight of which being Johnny Harris’ ex-soldier Dean Warns who oozes a viscous sense of sinister malevolence.

In any great narrative driven film, the characters exist to keep the film in line, like bumpers on a pinball table keeping the ball in play, and, with doubtlessly meticulous direction, Eran Creevey has mastered this art.

Picture taken moments before going Super Saiyan.

The directing is, unsurprisingly, top notch - equal parts cool and engrossing – which unfortunately serves to highlight the sporadic pacing issues. Loud frenetic action scenes – shoot out in a club, shoot out in a living room, shoot out in a hotel…many, many shoot outs – are frequently followed by slightly overlong periods of exposition; there are far too many shots of McAvoy’s bearded confused face, however handsome, for any one film to stand. While narrative explanation isn’t necessarily a bad thing – and is actually handled well in a film that desperately requires it; double crossing is the word of the day in Punch– the finer points of the revenge plots are often glazed over, addressed and dealt with with militaristic efficiency, rather than woven more organically into the narrative as a whole.

Talking of sub-plots, Punch often treats them with toolight a touch. The relationships between Sternwood and his son, as well as Lewinsky and Sarah, are intriguing and developed with a beautifully subtle way, particularly with the latter pair. However, it’s all a little too intangible to really hit home – handled with too deft a touch – for their significance to truly hit home. The impression of the importance of these characters to the leading men is undeniable, but with more emphasis on who they are the film as a whole would have felt far more substantial.

However, it feels almost pointless to talk about slight character failings in a film that, from technical minutiae to over-arching construction, radiates quality. The music, equal parts techno contemporary and classical strings, compliments and contrasts in uniform brilliance, jumping from one to the other in a way that could easily have been jarring if it wasn’t just so damn cool. The action scenes too - seemingly throwing Bond, Bourne and Gareth Evans in a blender – all feel fresh, sufficiently different from each other to have their own identities while working together as a collective. Motorbikes in an underground car park, a chase through a hospital, a raid on an Icelandic cabin: Punch a sightseeing tour of the crème de la crème of action.

When his head started glowing that was it, Max was positive he was an alien.

Verdict

Ultimately, though certain sub-plots disappointingly fail to materialize into anything more than fleeting fancies, Welcome to the Punch is a superlative production; an old-school, thoroughly British, action movie that puts its flashier Hollywood cousins to shame with superior acting, pacing and sheer-faced cool.

4/5

Feast your eyes on the cool:

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