If you’re not familiar with the Falcon by now, may I recommend my three previous collections of reviews, in which I covered the first 10 films of RKO’s detective series.
This is, unsurprisingly, the fourth compendium. Below you can find my reviews of the final three films to star Tom Conway as the eponymous investigator.
After eight adventures with the Saint and 13 with the Falcon, you might think I’d be getting sick of them… but now that they’re done, I rather miss them. Suggestions for similar — and similarly good — series are always welcome.
The final Falcon film to star Tom Conway (three more were made a few years later, but there seems to be debate about whether that was the same character) sees our avian-monikered detective planning to take a fishing holiday… until he can’t resist saving a damsel in distress and gets dragged in to a plot involving kidnap, theft, and murder. I think I saw someone jaywalking too, so it’s a veritable hotbed of criminality.
The Falcon’s Adventure is a terribly generic title for a film that isn’t the series’ very best, but is a solid upper-end instalment. They’re mostly quite formulaic films, naturally, but Adventure gets the mix right with some good sequences and gags. As the last film it doesn’t represent much of a conclusion, but then they didn’t really go in for big “series finales” back then, did they. 
Once again smitten by a pretty lady, the Falcon finds himself co-opted into guarding a wealthy woman’s jewellery. But when said jewels are promptly stolen, and murders ensue, our charming hero is implicated. Who would do such a dastardly thing? And what’s going on with the DJ in the roof of the hotel?
Among the rest of the cast, Vince Barnett becomes the fourth actor to play the Falcon’s sidekick, Goldie; and Jean Brooks and Rita Corday each appear in their fifth Falcon films! Brooks was previously in 
The Falcon is often dragged into adventures by beautiful women he can’t resist, but here it’s a female of a different kind — a little girl. After her nanny is murdered on the train to San Francisco, the Falcon offers to take her safely home… only to get arrested for his troubles, and then be picked up by a mysterious woman and her heavies and given a good beating. What the blazes?!
At least there’s some comic relief thanks to the return of the Falcon’s sidekick Goldie, who’s been absent since 
The victor of Sight & Sound’s inaugural “greatest film” poll (though it’s slipped down the rankings ever since), this is the simple story of a man hunting for his stolen bicycle, which is vital for his job, hard-won in a time of unemployment and poverty.
The year 1600: British ship’s captain Solomon Kane is not a nice man, a mite too fond of pillagin’ and killin’ and quite possibly other not-nice things ending in —in’. That is until he has a run in with the Devil’s Reaper. Hell has claimed his soul, and its time to collect. Solomon does not plan on being collected, renouncing his former life and trying to hide at a monastery in England. But as a gang of possessed men lay waste to the countryside, burning its towns and enslaving its people, will Solomon be able to stick to his newfound pacifism? Yeah, we all know the answer to that…
but also a more-than-requisite amount of swordfighting and the like — all told, Kane is more period action-adventure (with demons) than period horror.
In support there’s the likes of Pete Postlethwaite, Alice Krige and Max von Sydow, all of whom bring instant heft to roles that need it. I don’t mean to say the screenplay doesn’t contain it, but the shorthand the actors bring with them certainly does favours. Cameo-sized appearances by Mackenzie Crook and Jason Flemyng are also effective, and watch out for a pre-
My praise also extends to those responsible for the film’s location shooting. Shot in the Czech Republic, for once that genuinely looks like Britain. OK, the style of some buildings give the game away occasionally (in particular the monastery), but until I read different, I just assumed the fields, forest and coastline had been found in our real South West, on the moors or what have you.
At the end of the day, Solomon Kane is a period fantasy action-adventure, something which doesn’t seem to be everyone’s taste — it has relatively weak scores on the likes of IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes (though, in the context of how this kind of movie often performs in those arenas, they’re far from awful). For my money, however, it’s a great little film. It looks beautiful, it renders the tone of pulp fantasy brilliantly, its action sequences are exciting (so many swordfights! Heaven!) and its creepy bits unnerving. It may not be ‘trash’ elevated to art — it’s not a Tarantino movie — but it is pulp fiction treated with due reverence.
#25 
#29 The Sweeney (2012)
One of my all-time favourite movies. It should be laughably awful, really — not least the accents — and I’m sure to some people it is; but I think it’s immensely fun, and you can tell the setup is a good’un thanks to its legs: four sequels, a six-season TV series, a spin-off series, an animated series, an anime movie, and 
Top Gun
Little Shop of Horrors
For some people, whether Alien or Aliens is the better film is a huge debate. For others, there’s no question which is superior — and those people can be divided into those who think it’s Alien and those who think it’s Aliens. I lean more towards Ridley Scott’s original, but James Cameron’s sequel has its own merits — not least the fact that, instead of dully repeating the original, it shifts the franchise into a wholly different genre.
Crocodile Dundee
There’s a good handful of well-regarded films from 1986 that I’ve never seen (also, Howard the Duck), but this is the highest I’ve not seen on 
The director of Disney’s woeful 
The writer-director of 
What a nice tribute to his supportive parents and their devotion to one another, eh? At the start, perhaps, but by the end of the film you may be wondering what the writer-director’s subconscious wants to do to his ma and pa…
What could function well as an indie-level thriller is further undermined by abundant, therefore costly, CGI. Whether that’s Langella’s facial disfigurement (what could’ve been make-up is actually a complex array of tracking dots, green face-paint, motion-control cameras, and so on; all used merely to place him in simple dialogue scenes), or wide shots of ’70s Virginia, with a computer-adjusted skyline, computer-animated cars, and computer-painted snow. It’s not that the effects work is poor (though don’t look too closely at those cars), but that it screams “this must be special effects!” when you don’t want such distractions.
The Box should have been a film we all discussed for years to come, its “what would you do”-ness providing an 
The Desolation of Smowg-not-Smorg begins in the same way 
It’s my understanding that the originally-planned (and shot) two-part version of Jackson’s Hobbit adaptation was transformed into a trilogy by, essentially, taking what was to be film #2 and splitting it in half. That might explain why individual sections are allowed to go on so long here: to bulk up the running time to the kind of epic proportions audiences expect from a Middle-earth movie. Anything less than two-and-a-half hours isn’t going to cut it. But when your climax is a battle between a giant dragon (cool!) and a small army of dwarves (kick ass!) around a deserted underground city (hell yeah!), but my main thought afterwards is, “God that went on a bit”, then you’ve failed at something.
Meanwhile, Luke Evans’ Bard is as Welsh as the actor’s name suggests, which is a little bit of a surprise. But then the dwarves’ accents have all the rest of the UK covered, so why not. Benedict Cumberbatch sounds like Benedict Cumberbatch playing ‘big’ as Smowg-not-Smorg. It feels like this should be an iconic villain performance but, while good, I found it somehow lacking. Expectation may be scuppering him; maybe I’ll warm to it on future viewings.
I haven’t picked apart everything that’s wrong with the film (what purpose is there switching from one made-up-for-the-film orc general to another?!), but then nor have I praised everything that works (there are some quality actors in amongst all that crashing and banging). It seems a fair few people liked this Hobbit instalment more than the first; the best explanation I can find is, “because it’s got more action”. Far be it from me to accuse other film viewers of being shallow, but… really? I genuinely enjoyed An Unexpected Journey as a return to the beloved realms and peoples of Middle-earth. The Desolation of Smowg-not-Smaug has some of that, and the charm of introducing us to new parts of the world too, but it’s drowned out by so much aimless noise. Here’s hoping it improves with repeat viewings and/or the inevitable extended edition, because this time I nearly slipped down to a lowly 3 stars.
100Films.co.uk 