Friday's Film Reviews: Blackhat, Cake, The Wedding Ringer and Project Almanac
The embittered protagonist of Cake has been so deeply scarred – physically and emotionally – by her pain that she is toxic to everyone who orbits her.
In Daniel Barnz’ film, this font of bile and foul-mouthed misery is portrayed with bedraggled hair and make-up disfigurements by Jennifer Aniston.
It’s a compelling dramatic performance, stripped bare of vanity, which reminds us that the Los Angeles-born actress is much more than the romcom girl next door.
Unfortunately, Aniston’s eye-catching work is the glistening cherry on top of a half-baked drama that proves increasingly hard to swallow.
If scriptwriter Patrick Tobin had treated his mix of misfit characters with more care and sieved out some of the implausible dramatic detours, Aniston would probably have secured her first Oscar nomination as Best Actress.
Cake is an uneven bake, distinguished by Aniston’s committed performance and a warm, empathetic supporting turn from Barraza.
Even when the rest of Barnz’ film crumbles, which it does frequently, their sisterly solidarity holds our interest.
Throwaway interludes with a hunky gardener (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and a man from the past (William H Macy) sit awkwardly with scriptwriter Tobin’s efforts to insert Nina’s ghost into proceedings.
Kendrick has fun as this spectral voice of waspish reason, berating Aniston’s short-tempered, selfish harridan, who is acutely aware of the role she plays in her miserable fairy-tale existence.
3/5
50%
Following the attack on the computer systems of Sony Pictures in November 2014 and subsequent leak of emails, the insidious threat posed by cybercriminals is fresh in everyone’s mind.
Director Michael Mann’s polished yet soulless action thriller is perfectly timed to tap into this mood of pixellated paranoia, convening a global task force to unmask a madman who wreaks havoc from his computer keyboard.
Aided by digital trickery, Mann visualises the hack attack as a quick zoom into a computer monitor, careening along wires and circuitry as the flickering white pixels of incoming malware pollutes a blue sea of good coding.
The sequence is so neat and effective, the four times Oscar-nominated filmmaker uses it twice.
While the film’s hardware – direction, cinematography, action sequences – is robust, the software – characterisation, interpersonal relationships, dialogue - desperately needs an upgrade.
We don’t believe the heartfelt declarations of love between Thor hunk Chris Hemsworth and Chinese actress Tang Wei for a second.
Taking its title from a hacker who invades systems for personal gain, Blackhat struggles to compute a gripping thriller from invisible 21st-century warfare.
Hemsworth appears to have strutted straight off the set of The Avengers, sporting a ridiculously perfect physique for someone who is now consigned to a prison cell and denied excellent nutrition and access to a gym.
Wei is a non-descript love interest while Viola Davis has only one decent scene of feisty banter to justify her heavyweight casting.
Mann’s camera is fixated on the twinkling lights of city locations that provide a pristine backdrop to co-operation between Chinese and American governments.
East meets west, but his film goes south.
2½
33%
It is supposed to be the happiest day of a couple’s life, but a wedding is seldom the stress-free parade of well-behaved children, appropriate jokes and family harmony promised by glossy bridal magazines.
The Wedding Ringer is a sweet-natured yet highly improbable buddy comedy of errors, which walks down the aisle with one hapless groom, who enlists professional help to ensure he gets the best best man for his beautiful blushing bride.
Written in broad strokes by director Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender, The Wedding Ringer raises one glass to male bonding and another to mawkish sentiment, sloshing contrivances in every direction.
The unlikely central pairing of Kevin Hart and Josh Gad, who voiced Olaf the self-deluded snowman in Frozen, occasionally sparkles.
Hart dials down his manic showmanship a notch or two and Gad oozes natural likeability as a loner who can’t believe he has landed the girl of his dreams.
The script neatly jilts one garish stereotype at the altar, but Garelick’s film is amicably divorced from reality and evidently lost custody of the three-dimensional characters.
For better or worse, The Wedding Ringer falls short of matrimonial bliss.
2½
31%
Time waits for no man but it loops at dizzying speed for five enterprising teenagers in Project Almanac.
Dean Israelite’s found footage sci-fi thriller ponders the repercussions for a group of high school students, who build a time machine and exploit its power to rewrite history with a swipe of a smartphone screen.
“You have to kill Hitler – that’s, like, time travel 101,” quips one lad.
“Why don’t we sell this thing to Richard Branson for like a zillion dollars?” he adds with a wolfish, capitalist grin.
Both excellent suggestions but Israelite’s film focuses instead on the selfish dreams of the fresh-faced time travellers, anchoring a frenzied final act on the shaky assumption that a sensitive, practical 17-year-old would jeopardise dozens of lives for the most cloying, irrational desire.
There is a palpable lack of sympathy for any of the good-looking and intelligent characters, and dialogue repeatedly questions why a handheld camera would be constantly rolling and capturing all of the vital footage.
Project Almanac is strikingly reminiscent of Josh Trank’s superior 2012 fantasy Chronicle, employing the same first-person perspective and equally slick special effects.
The script nods and winks to forerunners of the genre including Back To The Future, Looper and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s finest hour, Timecop, including a cute verbal reference to a stalwart of British television.
“You enter the time here and boom! You’re Doctor Who,” goofs Adam as he demonstrates the device’s controls.
Israelite’s direction maintains a brisk pace and doesn’t tarry on the science behind the predictable adolescent wish fulfilment.
Because that would be a waste of everyone’s time: past, present and future.
2½
36%
Based on a short story by pioneering science fiction author Robert A Heinlein, Predestination is a futuristic thriller about a time-travelling cop in pursuit of the one criminal who has always eluded him.
An agent from the Temporal Bureau (Ethan Hawke), which sends operatives through time to prevent major crimes, is seriously injured in his pursuit of a terrorist known as the Fizzle Bomber.
The agent recuperates in 1992 until he learns that the bomber has struck again, killing thousands in 1975 New York City.
Freshly healed, the agent ventures back to the Big Apple of the era and poses as a bartender in the hope of gathering vital intelligence on his prey.
A customer called Jane (Sarah Snook) confides in the bartender over a drink and inadvertently gives the agent vital evidence to apprehend the bomber.
Using his Coordinate Transformer Field Kit, concealed in a violin case, the agent careens through time to avert disaster and apprehend the Fizzle Bomber.
82%
David Zellner’s quirky comedy attests to the power of the moving image to blur boundaries between fact and fiction.
Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) is a lonely Japanese woman, who watches the Coen brothers’ black comedy Fargo and is convinced that the money buried by Steve Buscemi towards the end of the film is real.
Armed with a credit card stolen from her place of employment and unsuitable clothing for the icy chill of north America, Kumiko leaves behind her native Japan and heads for foreign climes, where she intends to find the buried treasure using a crude hand-drawn map.
As Kumiko heads across the frozen wilderness of Minnesota, she encounters various characters, who are perplexed and charmed by her outlandish odyssey.
90%
A twisted romance, far more intense and kinky that the softcore histrionics in Fifty Shades Of Grey, underpins this stylish drama from British writer-director Peter Strickland.
Imperious butterfly and moth collector Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) lectures at a local institute, where she is held in high esteem.
Behind the closed doors of her modest home, Cynthia terrorises her pretty maid Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), forcing her skivvy to wash her underwear by hand, pick up her discarded sweet wrappers and other indignities.
It transpires that this kinky relationship of domination and submission is masterminded by Evelyn, who stokes her lesbian lover’s fantasies and constantly pushes the boundaries of their mutual depravity.
With each passing day, emotions churn and intensify, forcing the two women to find new ways to achieve mutual satisfaction.
95%
