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BESPOKE SUITS AND GANGSTA ROBOTS
Apr. 2nd, 2015 09:54 amMeanwhile, at the cinemas:
Chappie
Neil Blomkamp returns with his tale of a damaged police robot upgraded with experimental artificial intelligence who ends up raised as a South African gangsta.
No, really!
It’s a twisted mishmash of Short Circuit, Robocop and gangsta rap videos set in near-future Johannesburg, with naïve robots, extreme office politics, and numbskulled gangbangers. It’s the sort of thing Luc Besson might come up with if he decided to do a robot film.
Critics have been harsh with this film, and for the life of me I can’t see why. The film does have its share of flaws – namely some plot holes in the form of bad security practices on the part of Tetravaal (the company that makes the robots) and advanced technology that gets more questionable as the film goes along. But it all more or less works within the parameters that Blomkamp sets for the film. And he manages to make Chappie a sympathetic character (thanks in no small part to Sharlto Copley’s motion-capture performance).
Honestly I have more of a problem with Blomkamp casting Die Antwoord as basically themselves (only they’re criminals instead of rappers). It’s not that they're bad, it just odd enough to be a bit of a distraction (unless you have no idea who Die Antwoord is, in which case maybe not). All up, it’s not quite up there with District 9, but it’s far better than Blomkamp’s previous film Elysium (which critics liked a lot more than this – and so much for film critics, eh?).
Kingsman: The Secret Service
Mathew Vaughn and Mark Millar reunite with this pastiche of Bond films and the “gentleman spy” genre. Everything is here – bespoke suits, gadgets, the flamboyant villain, the uniquely-and-improbably-armed henchperson, the insane plot to destroy the world – except it’s not so much a tribute or even a spoof of the genre so much as a middle-finger mockery of it.
Or so it seemed to me. The storyline of young chav Eggsy being recruited into the service (on account of his father died saving Colin Firth) is as clichéd as it gets, and most of the rest of the film takes the cheesiest elements of the Bond films and jacks the volume up to 11 – especially the violence, which is at the level you’d expect from a script with Millar’s name on it (brutal and gratuitous) but more disturbing than entertaining. Which would be okay if the film was at least smarter or more original or less predictable. For the most part, it’s not really any of those. The satirical elements rely heavily on stereotypes and are as subtle as a shot to the head. Even Samuel L. Jackson’s villainous plot is ludicrous even by Bond-villain standards.
It’s not completely terrible – Kingsman has some nice gimmicks going for it, to include Firth acting suave, and Jackson acting with a lisp. But it’s not especially clever – unless you think “Extreme James Bond” is clever, then okay, maybe.
The spy who kicked my ass,
This is dF
Chappie
Neil Blomkamp returns with his tale of a damaged police robot upgraded with experimental artificial intelligence who ends up raised as a South African gangsta.
No, really!
It’s a twisted mishmash of Short Circuit, Robocop and gangsta rap videos set in near-future Johannesburg, with naïve robots, extreme office politics, and numbskulled gangbangers. It’s the sort of thing Luc Besson might come up with if he decided to do a robot film.
Critics have been harsh with this film, and for the life of me I can’t see why. The film does have its share of flaws – namely some plot holes in the form of bad security practices on the part of Tetravaal (the company that makes the robots) and advanced technology that gets more questionable as the film goes along. But it all more or less works within the parameters that Blomkamp sets for the film. And he manages to make Chappie a sympathetic character (thanks in no small part to Sharlto Copley’s motion-capture performance).
Honestly I have more of a problem with Blomkamp casting Die Antwoord as basically themselves (only they’re criminals instead of rappers). It’s not that they're bad, it just odd enough to be a bit of a distraction (unless you have no idea who Die Antwoord is, in which case maybe not). All up, it’s not quite up there with District 9, but it’s far better than Blomkamp’s previous film Elysium (which critics liked a lot more than this – and so much for film critics, eh?).
Kingsman: The Secret Service
Mathew Vaughn and Mark Millar reunite with this pastiche of Bond films and the “gentleman spy” genre. Everything is here – bespoke suits, gadgets, the flamboyant villain, the uniquely-and-improbably-armed henchperson, the insane plot to destroy the world – except it’s not so much a tribute or even a spoof of the genre so much as a middle-finger mockery of it.
Or so it seemed to me. The storyline of young chav Eggsy being recruited into the service (on account of his father died saving Colin Firth) is as clichéd as it gets, and most of the rest of the film takes the cheesiest elements of the Bond films and jacks the volume up to 11 – especially the violence, which is at the level you’d expect from a script with Millar’s name on it (brutal and gratuitous) but more disturbing than entertaining. Which would be okay if the film was at least smarter or more original or less predictable. For the most part, it’s not really any of those. The satirical elements rely heavily on stereotypes and are as subtle as a shot to the head. Even Samuel L. Jackson’s villainous plot is ludicrous even by Bond-villain standards.
It’s not completely terrible – Kingsman has some nice gimmicks going for it, to include Firth acting suave, and Jackson acting with a lisp. But it’s not especially clever – unless you think “Extreme James Bond” is clever, then okay, maybe.
The spy who kicked my ass,
This is dF
