Friday Film Reviews: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, It Follows, Focus and The Boy Next Door

This week: A star-studded cast return in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Will Smith plays an elite con man in Focus, Jennifer Lopez stars in the thriller The Boy Next Door, and a sexually transmitted spectre threatens teenagers in It Follows.

Friday Film Reviews: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, It Follows, Focus and The Boy Next Door

It Follows

In Wes Craven’s post-modern 1996 slasher Scream, a geeky cinephile played by Jamie Kennedy detailed the universally accepted rules for surviving a horror film.

“You can never have sex,” he explained. “Big no-no. Sex equals death.”

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell expands on this notion of fatal carnality in his impressive second feature: a skin-crawling jaunt into alcohol-fuelled teen angst that eschews the usual array of knife-wielding maniacs and masked bogeymen.

Instead, It Follows pits a group of unsuspecting teenage protagonists against the insidious threat of a sexually transmitted spectre that silently and mercilessly stalks each deflowered victim.

If the shape-shifting phantom catches and kills the terrified target, then the mark of death reverts to the previous carrier, and so on, back down the sexual daisy chain.

The only way to escape the malevolent force, which walks slowly towards victims and is invisible to the uninfected, is to pass it on.

Sex still equals death in Mitchell’s grim suburban nightmare but for the promiscuous, it’s also a temporary stay of execution.

It Follows turns the screw on the horror genre, sustaining tension as characters wrestle with a mind-blowing dilemma.

Maika Monroe is a sympathetic heroine, faced with a seemingly impossible moral conundrum: look over her shoulder for the rest of her life or pass on her fate.

Mitchell’s lean script ponders this agonising choice with a level head, compelling us to urgently scan the horizon of each scene for the incoming threat.

One sequence, shot in a busy school corridor using a slowly rotating static camera, is deliciously nail-biting.

You can run, but you cannot hide.

Star Rating: 4/5

RottenTomatoes.com Rating: 100%

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Towards the end of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a secret inspector is asked for an honest assessment of Jaipur’s luxury development for residents in their golden years.

The inspector concludes that behind the scenes, management of the hotel is shambolic but unerring affection for the staff makes it a four-star destination for “the elderly and beautiful”.

The same honest appraisal applies to John Madden’s entertaining sequel: Ol Parker’s script is haphazard and several plot strands are flimsy, but our emotional investment in the characters papers over the cracks.

Audiences who check in to this second chapter will be treated to the same pungent Jaipur backdrops and good-humoured service, with a fresh lick of dramatic paint courtesy of new arrivals, played with easy-going charm by Tamsin Greig and Richard Gere.

While the first film was lovingly adapted from Deborah Moggach’s novel These Foolish Things, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel tumbles straight out of the scriptwriter Parker’s imagination.

He struggles to provide each resident with a compelling narrative arc: some are surplus to requirements while others relish the trials and tribulations that test fledgling romances and fractious friendships to breaking point.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel delivers the same winning formula of laughter and tears, eliciting strong performances from Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith at her acid-tongued, indomitable best.

The course of true love, even in twilight years, never runs smooth and Parker composes variations on a theme of amour, while peppering his script with pithy one-liners.

“There is no present like the time,” professes one wise soul.

Madden’s film is certainly a gift: you get everything you expect but nothing more.

Star Rating:

RottenTomatoes.com Rating: 79%

Focus

The con men and women who bluff, distract and double-cross in Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s light-fingered drama, operate by clearly defined rules.

They perform hundreds of petty thefts rather than one major heist because there is safety in volume, they refuse to steal from the vulnerable, and they never allow sentiment to cloud their cold-hearted, cash-oriented judgement.

“Love will get you killed in this racket,” grizzles one veteran of the hustle.

It’s surprising then that Ficarra and Requa ignore their character’s pithy advice and stake heavily on a fraught romance between their anti-hero, a consummate con man, and his sassy sex-bomb protegee.

The writer-directors’ gamble might have paid off if lead actors Will Smith and Margot Robbie were gifted snappier dialogue.

As it is, the biggest con in Focus is not the climactic swindle, which strenuously tests the bonds of honour between thieves, but the sizzle of that central relationship, which supposedly pushes both characters to the edge of reason.

Focus is a familiar tale of old scoundrels performing new tricks, which lacks the erotic charge of the co-directors’ previous film, ‘Crazy, Stupid, Love’.

Robbie is luminous and makes Smith seem lifeless, confirming her ability to steal a film after eye-catching work opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf Of Wall Street.

Ficarra and Requa engineer a dramatic crescendo at the end of the first hour against the backdrop of an American football game.

The second act in Argentina is an anti-climax by comparison that plays its winning hand far too early.

In the absence of jeopardy, we lose everything, especially interest.

Star Rating:

RottenTomatoes.com Rating: 60%

The Boy Next Door

The Boy Next Door harks back to a bygone era of jeopardy thrillers when Michael Douglas’ unfaithful husband met his match in Glenn Close’s bunny-boiler.

Alas, Rob Cohen’s hokey yarn is more Facile than Fatal Attraction, courtesy of a clumsy, cliché-riddled script by Barbara Curry that fails to generate suspense.

It doesn’t help her cause that 27-year-old leading man Ryan Guzman, who flaunted his abs in the most recent Step Up films, has to pass muster as a high school senior.

“I’m almost 20,” explains his character, inciting hoots of derision that become commonplace as the plot goes through predictable motions.

Co-star Jennifer Lopez fares just as badly, but with her additional credit as producer, she is granted carte blanche to look fierce and fabulous as an English literature teacher, who espouses Greek classics in figure-hugging skirts and heels.

Her lips are flawlessly glossed, her hair impeccably tousled, even when she is in the throes of a sex scene.

With a touch of tongue-in-cheek, The Boy Next Door might have achieved cult status like Basic Instinct and Showgirls.

Regrettably, Cohen’s film is deadly serious apart from Kristin Chenoweth’s fleeting comic relief.

Lopez doesn’t convince as an educator of hormone-addled teenage minds.

Guzman gamely keeps a straight face as he woos Claire with Homer and whispers “a woman like you should be cherished” as he exfoliates her hands with his rippling six-pack during their beautifully lit tumble.

If there’s one compliment you can begrudgingly pay The Boy Next Door - it’s that their on-screen coupling is far steamier than any of the slap and tickle of Fifty Shades Of Grey.

Star Rating: 2/5

RottenTomatoes.com Rating: 13%

Backstreet Boys: Show ’Em What You’re Made Of

In 1995, fickle teenage hearts shattered and support helplines went into meltdown when Robbie Williams announced his departure from chart-topping boy band Take That.

Out of the pop gloom, came five-strong American vocal group Backstreet Boys.

Formed in Orlando in 1993, the good-looking quintet of Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell, AJ McLean and Kevin Richardson turned shattered dreams into deafening screams as they stormed Europe with their self-titled debut album and the singles We’ve Got It Goin’ On and I’ll Never Break Your Heart.

Success in America followed soon after, where rivals NSYNC, led by a fresh-faced Justin Timberlake, failed to usurp the Backstreet crew’s music thrones.

Carter, Dorough, Littrell, McLean and Richardson collectively became one of the biggest boy bands in history with more than 130 million album sales plus numerous awards and several Grammy nominations.

In 2012, the original line-up reunited for the first time in six years in the media spotlight to announce a 20th anniversary relaunch and a new studio album.

Documentary filmmaker Stephen Kijak, director of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, was granted exclusive access to the band during this emotional period, following the five members as they addressed old tensions, reappraised lifelong friendships and took stock of everything they had achieved together.

His film Backstreet Boys: Show ’Em What You’re Made Of is a portrait of tainted celebrity that falls somewhere between a traditional anodyne pop promo and a revealing warts ’n’ all expose.

Carter, Dorough, Littrell, McLean and Richardson appear to lay themselves emotionally bare in front of the camera, reliving betrayals and ambitions that ultimately tore them apart.

There are moving sequences of the men returning to childhood homes and the film touches upon their relationship with their svengali Lou Pearlman, McLean’s drug and alcohol addiction as well as Littrell’s health – he famously delayed open-heart surgery to go on tour with the band.

For all of the tear-stained cheeks and flashbacks to happier days, there’s no escaping the fact that this is an advertisement for the band.

They produced the film so director Kijak is duty-bound to intercut the soul-searching and remembrance with footage of a comeback concert in Toronto, lingering on a sell-out crowd of now grown-up Backstreet fans lost to the heady whiff of nostalgia.

“What do you do when you’re a full-grown man in a boy band?” McLean wonders aloud at one point.

You promote yourselves with an entertaining film like this.

Following nationwide gala screenings on February 26, there will be a special performance from the band, live on stage at the Dominion Theatre in London, which will be broadcast via satellite to hundreds of cinemas across Ireland and the UK.

Backstreet’s back and that’s all right.

Star Rating: 3/5

RottenTomatoes.com Rating: 58%

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