Johannes Weiland & Uwe Heidschötter | 26 mins | TV | 16:9 | UK / English | U
Shown on BBC One over Christmas, this animated adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s The Gruffalo’s Child is the sequel to the Oscar-nominated adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s The Gruffalo (of course). For my money, it’s every bit as good as the first film.
Indeed, you could re-read my review of the first film and apply the same comments here. The pace is still considered — or, to be less polite, slow; but beautifully so. Though this time they’ve thrown some action sequences into the mix (yes, action sequences) to help round out the short picture book to a full half-hour film. Perhaps surprisingly, they work. The voice cast are the same, with the addition of Shirley Henderson as the titular girl-beast, and she fits in perfectly.
The CG animation retains the original’s “is it claymation?” feel, though the wintry setting allows the animators to really show off with some truly stunning snow. Most of the film goes for an appropriately cartoony style, but the various types of frozen water on display could pass for the real thing.
Lovely stuff, then, and thankfully every bit the equal of the first (which, in my opinion, the book isn’t). There was no nomination forthcoming at this year’s Oscars, but then with their complicatedly specific eligibility rules maybe it wasn’t released soon enough to qualify. Maybe next year.
Apparently MySpace had some hand in the creation of this movie. Remember MySpace? It’s what there was before Facebook. It was always rubbish, it just took a lot of people a long time to realise that. Anyway, some reviews seem to dwell on its involvement in the production of this movie — 
Most of the cast is drawn from the pool marked “British character actors” — you may or may not know the names, but you’ll probably know most of the faces. The lead is Eddie Marsan (Lestrade in 
RED here stands for “Retired, Extremely Dangerous”, a description bestowed by the CIA on a group of former agents who, for reasons I won’t go into — because, quite frankly, I can’t remember — fight back against the Agency when someone starts trying to kill them.
Naturally, considering the theme, the cast is made up of older actors — a neat twist on the usual action movie format of making people younger and younger. Expect this to spread, especially as anyone that could still just about be dubbed a movie star is ageing, replaced only by flash-in-the-pan teen idols. They’re all great because they’re all great actors. Well, Bruce Willis isn’t a Great Actor like Helen Mirren or Morgan Freeman, but he can do an action movie and he can do humour well enough. John Malkovich is as barmy as he always is, but here it works. Sometimes things just line up like that. Karl Urban also gives another solid supporting turn. I’m sure he’s had a few lead roles at this point, but maybe this autumn’s 
Winnie the Pooh, as many reviews on its release were keen to point out, is for small children. It doesn’t have the attempts to placate adults with their own jokes that elevate/plague most American animation; it’s only an attention-span-friendly hour long; and it has a lovely, genial, friendly tone, with brightly coloured characters, plinky-plonky songs and heartwarming moral messages.
The majority of the film’s other elements click into place nicely too. The traditional animation is gorgeously executed, the voices are the ones we surely all know from growing up alongside Disney’s Pooh output, particularly Jim Cummings pulling double time as both Pooh and Tigger, as he has for decades. The exception I’d make is Bud Luckey’s Eeyore. I don’t know if he’s always sounded like that and I’d forgotten, but his voice didn’t work for me. It’s not the only problem: the songs can be a bit insipid; equally, a couple transcend that to work beautifully; and there’s no denying that it is a bit short; but then it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and hey, 
I liked Ip Man, but as we know from experience there are times when I find myself with little to say about a film, or I fail to make any notes, and this was an example of both. So I’ve decided to try something a little different.
Though that’s an amusing thought, the film’s not quite that simplistic:
Indeed, fighting is still what the film does best:
On the other hand, as that “sinister Japanese general”:
“This year’s 
I, however, thought it was rather good. I can see what turned some people off though. It’s a thriller, but it moves leisurely, especially early on. It’s also quite elliptical at times, not so much requiring you to pay attention as put the pieces together yourself. Plus it lacks a grand finale in which the hero triumphs, or at least loses in dramatic style — it’s quieter than that. Yet I liked the ending, finding it triumphant in a whole other way. But I won’t go spoiling that here.
What’s better in a thriller than not actually knowing what will come? There should be twists in this genre — genuine twists when possible, not a stock array of “small character played by famous actor turns out to be vitally important” or ” good guy is actually bad guy” or what have you — and Glorious 39, with its balanced uncertainty, pulls some of those off.
Part coincidence (in that I happened to notice it), part forced appropriateness (in that I then chose to post it now), 2000 AD was originally released in Hong Kong 12 years ago yesterday, tying in to Chinese New Year the last time it was (as it is now) the year of the Dragon.
All that’s established in these parts could be done much more economically, which would result in far less viewer thumb-twiddling.
That might be being picky. The action feels slight at the time because it’s a good while coming, but in retrospect, considered on their own merits, there’s a lot of good stuff. There’s a good car chase, a couple of shoot-outs that err towards realism rather than balleticism (both have their merits, but something that feels realistically punchy is rarer), and a couple of solid punch-ups that play fairly nicely on the idea that our hero isn’t a martial arts expert. That concept isn’t mentioned in the film as much as it is in the DVD extras, but his style has a sort of scrambly feel that’s less honed than your usual kung fu bout; plus, as director Gordon Chan explains in the commentary, his apparent competency is how all kids fight in Hong Kong, because they’ve copied it from the movies!
Talking of the action — it’s an 18? I know the BBFC used to be harsher, and particularly so on things featuring martial arts and whatnot, but I still don’t see how this makes an 18. A bit of swearing, a bit of blood — it’s a 15 surely? I watched this just days after 
As with any film heavily based in the realm of technology, certain things have dated. Two things work in its favour: one, as noted, it’s not actually got much to do with technology anyway; and two, it comes from the slightly later time when home computers were more commonplace, so it’s not as bad as those ’90s tech thrillers where computers could do pretty much anything a writer dreamed up. But there’s floppy discs, flight sims with flat graphics, and Magical Hacking Software that can Destroy Everything. An opening spiel about the future of warfare being cyber-attacks doesn’t feel like its quite come to pass (yet?), but then the film doesn’t wholly build on that. The computer software they’re chasing is as MacGuffiny a MacGuffin as they come — it may as well be a bomb or a file of information for all that would change the story.
In the DVD’s special features, Chan notes that 2000 AD was an attempt to make an American-style action movie, to show there’s more to Hong Kong cinema than kung fu. Maybe that’s why it’s compromised at times — it’s an emulation of something else. It’s successful in places, but certainly not entirely. My score was awarded almost immediately after watching the film, but after looking back on it through the DVD extras I find I may have liked it a bit more. Am I being too harsh? Perhaps. But still, perhaps not.
In medieval times, a group of filmmakers set out to prove you can make a Hollywood-quality historical action epic with independent funding in Britain, while in the present day a ragtag group of seven samurai— sorry, gunslingers— sorry, warriors, defend a small town— sorry, castle, from evil bandits— sorry, an evil king.
Anyway, it seems to me its use of facts are probably strong enough to support it as an entertainment. So some of the story structure may be reminiscent of 
I’ve seen some complain about the level of graphic detail in this regard, but this is medieval times, they didn’t just bump each other about a bit; and you don’t think a giant axe swung down on someone’s shoulder with all a man’s weight is going to just leave a scratch, do you? Director Jonathan English doesn’t linger on detail as if this were a horror movie. There’s cleaved bodies, severed limbs, squirts of blood and more, and it all feels gruesomely realistic, but individually each moment passes quickly.
I imagine it also makes some of those fight scenes even more disorientating, which is a pity. Nothing will help the sometimes-too-obvious use of digital video though, which looks as nasty as ever.
The unfamiliar true story also gives it the added edge of not knowing who lives or dies, or whether our heroes even succeed. If the ultimate end feels guessable, I think it’s only in retrospect. Of course, that doesn’t mean any of it’s historically accurate anyway.
Battle Los Angeles (on screen; Battle: Los Angeles on posters — c’mon, let’s have some consistency with punctuation! Punctuation matters) seemed to come in for a wall of criticism when it hit cinemas way back whenever. For my money, though, it wasn’t that bad.
This kind of gung-ho militarism is laid on too thick. It seems fine for much of the film, but then as it heads into the second half and, especially, the third act, we have to suffer all manner of speeches and Emotional Moments that lack weight due to characterisation issues. The latter is badly handled for all kinds of reasons. All of the marines are entirely clichéd; so too are their story arcs; too much time is wasted trying to make us care about them — there are too many and they’re too shallowly drawn; things are worsened when a couple of civilians are added to the mix, who suffer from all the same problems… except they’re perhaps under- rather than over-developed. As we reach the third act, anything approaching plausible characterisation is jettisoned. Like the small-scale focus, what begins as naturalistic ends up with Big Speeches and all manner of Emotional Moments.
evoking the likes of the aforementioned as well as Black Hawk Down and 
They may take a little while to get to, but they’re relatively worth the wait.
It never seems to have been fashionable to admit to liking 
being set in medieval/dark ages times, this has a very different, more traditional feel than the urban original film… albeit with lashings of CGI.
In the director’s chair for the first (and, to date, last) time is special effects whizz Patrick Tatopoulos, who does a fine job of producing an action-fantasy film. There’s nothing remarkable about it but it largely works, though it’s a little bit on the dark side at times. I don’t know why so many films do this, incidentally — we’ve reached an era where people are mostly watching films in cinemas where the bulbs are under-lit to save money, or at home in probably less-than-ideal conditions, with various lights on and a screen left on factory settings. I wouldn’t mind if these dark movies looked fine once you were properly calibrated, but most of them are still ever so dark. Why do they think this is a good idea? Especially when you flick into 3D (which, fortunately, this film was just ahead of.)
100Films.co.uk 