STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

It's the movie based on the meme that's been flooding you Facebook feed for weeks. You know the one, it started out funny, then became irritating, now you're saying "Jesus Christ! I don't care what you're 'Straight Outta...'" So the big question is, does the movie live up to the meme?

Straight Outta Compton is the biopic that focuses on the formation of N.W.A. which led to the formation of Ruthless Records, Death Records, Snoop Dogg’s career, Tupac’s career, Beats By Dre and Ice Cubes recurring role on Law & Order S.V.U. Tracing the events of the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s where N.W.A. was formed by Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Dj Yella, MC Ren and Ice Cube under the guidance of Paul Giamatti’s Jerry Heller, who took his 20% (and if you know your N.W.A. history a whole lot more.) We see the band get together, the band break up and the band tries to get back together all against the backdrop of racial tensions between the mean streets and the police.

As far as biopics go, this is definitely a step above many of the other recent biopics of the last decade because it chooses to forgo many of the stock-standard plot beats. For once we are spared the flashback to a traumatic childhood event or the artist ready to play their biggest gig only to go backwards in the narrative and work our way back to that point. The film runs chronologically and really sets the tone from the beginning with a look at Eazy-E’s drug-dealing days. The cinematography really builds a sense of place as the camera moves effortlessly through locations that establish the streets of Compton, the L.A. Riots and stages where they performed. The editing adds to the energy as we move through the progression of an album’s creation and the tours which is all threaded together with a great soundtrack.

The casting is strong throughout especially with the key cast of Dre, Eazy-E and Ice Cube with Ice Cube’s own son, O’Shea Jackson Jnr playing the main-man himself. The likeness is amazing and this is one case where nepotism hasn’t been a complete train wreck *cough-cough* Jaden Smith *cough-cough* because O’Shea really brings that intensity that Ice Cube had back in the day. Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell play Dre and Eazy-E respectively and they play them well, but it’s also the casting of the smaller, but more famous roles of Snoop Dogg and Tupac are so well done that you’re questioning whether they’re the real deal or not. The film also stars a lot of brand placement with Adidas, Nike and Raiders taking center stage in almost every scene and we even get Beats By Dre rubbed in our faces before the end credits start rolling.      

Like any biopic there is always the question of how accurate and true the film is. All biopics will add additional drama to make the story more engaging but in a case where dealing with a group of people as opposed to a single artist such as Ray Charles, Jeff Buckley or Johnny Cash then there are bound to be disagreements as to the accuracy of how events played out. Even Ice Cube himself admitted that there could have been five different versions of this film so getting a definitive point of view was never going to happen. Omissions can and do happen when making a film based on a true story and when you have a film produced by the artists the movies based on then the omissions could be even more heavily scrutinised. We gloss over a lot of the past indiscretions of almost all involved but hey, if the Academy was willing to overlook this for the Stephen Hawking biopic then I’m sure we could have a few nominations come award season.

Overall, with great casting, excellent cinematography, a good soundtrack along with choosing to actively avoid many of the tired cliches of biopics, you are willing to forgive the glossing over of some of the more interesting elements of N.W.A.

Straight Outta Compton gets Four out of Five Stars (or Four out of Five really annoying memes)

SOUTHPAW: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

Fun fact: Did you know that Eminen was originally supposed to play the role of Billy “The Great” Hope? Southpaw was supposed to be his follow up to 8 Mile, but production on this film took so long that he eventually dropped out and the role went to Jake Gyllenhaal. Thank God. Otherwise we would have had a boxer with only two emotions and one facial expression, kind of like if they’d cast Kristen Stewart as a boxer.

Southpaw tells the story of a champion orphan boxer from Hell’s Kitchen who doesn’t grow up to be Daredevil but grows up to be Jake Gyllenhaal, who is just in beast-mode the whole film. When his wife is shot and killed at a charity event, Gyllenhaal’s character makes a series of grief-stricken poor choices that lead to him losing his title, his boxing license, his home and his daughter. His downward spiral is quick and sudden and at his lowest point turns to the one trainer who is capable setting him straight. It’s a tale of redemption which is pretty stock-standard for the boxing genre.

Now this film has a lot of parts that should really work for it: It’s written by Kurt Sutter, creator of Sons of Anarchy, so you know it’s going to be a gritty script. It’s directed by Antoine Fuqua, who brought us The Equalizer and Olympus Has Fallen, so you can expect gritty direction and it stars Jake Gyllenhaal, fresh off last year’s Nightcrawler looking grittier than ever. As a matter of fact, this film is so gritty that it should be compared to extra-course masonry sandpaper mixed with barbed-wire and broken glass fixed to a petrol-powered angle-grinder. But unfortunately, the film falls a little flat.

Don’t get me wrong, the performances are great. Gyllenhaal gives it his all, Forest Whitaker makes for a seasoned trainer and one of the strongest casting choices is young Oona Laurence, who plays Gyllenhaal’s daughter. She has a real emotional intelligence and strength that makes far more interesting as a character than the usual child-casting choices you’d expect. From a narrative perspective though, this film falls apart. There are many moments that feel like they’ve been omitted and other moments that, although they have a very specific emotional core, there is no way these scenes would play out that way in real life. For example, there is no way people would stand around doing nothing in the middle of a busy hotel when someone is dying and there is no way that a child would be left home alone after the death of her mother.

The rest of the cast are rounded off pretty well. We have Rachel McAdams at her most sexiest in years playing the role of Hope's wife. She is gorgeous throughout the film but not at the expense of just being cinematic eye-candy, and a real testament to her impact on the film is the fact that her presence can still be felt long after death at the start of the film. We also have Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson who plays Gyllenhaal's boxing promoter, credit where credit is due, it's a good performance for what it is and thankfully does not make continual nods and winks to the audience. The rest of the supporting cast have a very grounded real-world appeal which is easily the one-two combination of Fuqua and Sutter's influence.

Going back to Eminen, even though he never got to do his big follow-up to 8 Mile that still hasn't stopped him to contributing to the film in some way. He provides two songs for the film that serve as the centerpiece and the exit music for the film. Now I would never claim to be a fan of Eminen but when he does a good song, he does a good song, just think of One Shot from 8 Mile and you get some idea of what his contributions to this film are. Both songs are undeniably catchy and really serve to drive the film forward and leave you feeling pumped up as you leave the cinema.  

The boxing in the film is really well done. Antoine Fuqua trained alongside Gyllenhaal throughout the lead up to the film and you can see in the filming and editing of the fight scenes how that training must have paid off for him as a director. Gyllenhaal has some real emotive moments throughout the film which could easily be seen as Oscar pandering and, to be fair, he could receive a nomination to make up for last year’s snub, but that is all that it would be. Once again, when discussing the narrative, there are some key moments that have been left out of this film that would have allowed Gyllenhaal to show some real range for his character and I think that is what ultimately will hurt his chance of an Oscar nod at this stage. He has certainly devoted himself to the boxing lifestyle, much like DeNiro did all those years ago, but unfortunately there’s not enough there on the page to raise him up to the standards set by Jake La Motta. 

With some great talent involved both behind and in front of the camera, you are kind of hopeful that this film would transcend many of the other boxing movies and take its place amongst Raging Bull, but it still succumbs to many of the cliches and tropes of your tired and tested boxing movies. It aims for an emotional ending, and succeeds in someways, but it’s still only the original Rocky film that can move me to tears.

Southpaw gets Three out of Five Stars (or Three out of Five aggressively scary hybrid angle-grinders)

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

Henry Cavill should really be playing a live-action version of Archer, but with the voice of H. Jon Benjamin. Now bear with me on this Archer idea: you have Cavill perform but H. Jon Benjamin overdubs for the character, then you have H. Jon Benjamin play the villain like a Dr. Evil-Style bad guy but he's voiced by Henry Cavill! The action would be great, it would be very meta and most importantly, it would be awesome! Why am I focusing so much on this idea of a live-action Archer you ask? Well, mostly because this idea is far more interesting than the new movie The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Now where's my agent so that I can patent this idea...

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is the latest movie based on a long dormant TV series and considering the only way to make these types of movies successful, by calling it Mission Impossible, then you better lower your expectations. But then raise your expectations because this is a TV series adaptation being directed by the kinetic Guy Ritchie with the new Superman, The Winklevoss Twins (even though that's actually just one guy) and the chick who wowed everyone in Ex Machina as the leads. Then Lower your expectations again because it's good, but it has its issues. It's fun, but a dull kind of fun.

Set in the sixties during the Cold War Era, we find Cavill's American Super-Secret Agent being forced to team up with a KGB man-mountain played by Armie Hammer in order to stop some wealthy aristocrats from building and detonating an nuclear bomb. Along the way they collect Gaby, a Russian car mechanic played by Alicia Vikander, who is mostly an unlikable character which is unfortunate considering she’s such a great actress.

Now I'm a big fan of Cavill and if I'm being honest, he frequents a lot of unexplainable homo-erotic bare-chested Cavill dreams, but unfortunately he's just too bland in this role. Don't get me wrong, he's handsome, he knows how to rock a suit, he looks the part, but, and it kills me to say this, in this role, he really is a charisma-vacuum. Mostly this is down to how he chooses to deliver his lines, it's all very stilted and wooden. I don’t necessarily think it’s his fault, sometimes paying homage to the era can be a downfall to your performance. Admittedly, Armie Hammer is funny, intimidating and probably the best asset the film has. In hindsight, he would have been a much better lead when compared with Mr. Charisma-Vacuum.

The film does look good, but the cinematography lacks the frenetic visual style and the editing flare that Ritchie often employs and this feels incredibly restrained by comparison to previous efforts. This guy works best on smaller budget films like the classics Lock, Stock, Snatch and more recently Rock n’ Rolla but even in the Sherlock Holmes series you could still feel the energy he can pump into a film. This movie unfortunately lacks a lot of the pace that you normally get with a Guy Ritchie picture. You will find yourself looking at your watch more than once despite the filmmakers best efforts and just when you think the film is about to end, there's still another 15 minutes to go...

Another frustrating element of the movie is that a lot of the action chooses to cut away and leave it to your imagination, which would be fine normally but you know that Guy Ritchie has a better imagination than you when it comes to things like this so you can't help but feel short changed. The film can be enjoyable, but knowing that it's a Guy Ritchie movie you can't help but feel like you are getting something less than you deserve. This film could have really benefited from some of the energy that Mathew Vaughn brought earlier this year to Kingsman: The Secret Service.

Ultimately one of the biggest issues is that the film is attempting to use nostalgia for a show that's target audience probably don't go to the movies nowadays and the current movie going public don't know of the shows existence in the first place. So it’s a hard sell, especially when other movies have done the Spy genre better in more recent years. So going back to my original point, you might enjoy this film if you forget that it’s a Guy Ritchie film and if you keep your expectations low. I mean really low, like in your socks low.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. gets Two and a Half Stars (or Two and a Half confusing homo-erotic bare-chested Henry Cavill dreams...)

FANTASTIC FOUR: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

 
If they didn’t call this film Fantastic Four then this might have been viewed as a passable semi-original Science-Fiction film, but they didn’t, so it’s not.

Fantastic Four is a reboot of the cartoony original movies from 2005 and 2007. And much like The Amazing Spider-Man reboot, we get an unnecessary origin story that could easily been compressed into the first ten minutes of the film, only to spend a full 45 minutes getting to the point where our characters gain their powers to then very quickly rush through a whole bunch of other material towards a very unsatisfying climax. Featuring the stretchy-guy, the disappearing woman, the walking fire-hazard and a walking, talking piece of Hot ’n Spicy KFC you can’t help but feel that the film is almost embarrassed to be a super-hero movie, let alone a Fantastic Four film.

The cast itself is very good, we have the guy from Whiplash, the girl from House of Cards, the guy from Fruitvale Station and Billy Elliot himself. We have a very talented group of people playing our heroes and the key villain Doctor Doom, the only problem is that the characters have very little material to work with when on screen. Once again, if this wasn’t called The Fantastic Four, these actors would have been a great super-powered team, but they are The Fantastic Four, so that makes them heavily miscast in many respects. Jamie Bell is a great actor, but with little screen time and a voice that doesn’t seem to match his rocky exterior you almost feel the desire to have Michael Chiklis back. Toby Kebbell is a great villain, just not a memorable or suitable Doctor Doom, better than Julian McMahon, but not by much. 

Look, Fantastic Four has all the markings of a hot mess: The production only went ahead in order to maintain the rights, there are rumours of major issues on set with the director (so much so that it cost him his follow-up job on a Star Wars spin-off movie), reportedly there were extensive re-shoots, the trailers have failed to sway many people and if you've been paying attention to the TV spots it seems even they don't know how to market this film. They don't know whether it's dark and brooding, or a comedy, it's either about them being weapons, or friends or family, or heroes, they're not quite sure. If it thinks it's a comedy then it's selling the whole film by flogging one really unfunny joke throughout all the promotional material.

Much like World War Z this film has everything you loved about the title, and very little else. As a matter of fact World War Z is a really good comparison for this film: with the troubled shoot, re-shoots and dramatic changes to the source material World War Z was still a relatively serviceable blockbuster - just not a film for fans of the book. Fantastic Four works as a blockbuster, just not as a Fantastic Four movie - this could easily have been a generic superhero film with a different name and would have probably been greeted with less resistance.

Now I'm not bothered by the change of The Human Torch's race like many comic book fans seem to be, I'm more concerned, as a comic book fan, of the filmmakers believing that they are smarter than the source material. Even though Fantastic Four has never been the most popular comic, the things that work in the series work for a reason - changing for the sake of changing only goes to alienate the one fan base you could rely upon to see the movie.

The climax of the film really sneaks up on you and the most unfortunate thing is that the special effects in these scenes is almost as laughable as the dialogue. It seriously feels like the writer’s had a stroke in the middle of writing (or rewriting) the climax because the dialogue is so incredibly cringe-worthy.

With a film that is desperate for a sequel and claims to be existing in the same world as Bryan Singer’s X-men movies The Fantastic Four makes no reference to the latter and a sequel doesn’t feel like it will be clamoured for once the credits roll. In a world where Comic Book movies rule the box-office, Fantastic Four struggles to meet the high standards set by many of its contemporaries, and unfortunately, that is it’s greatest weakness.

As a semi-original Science-Fiction, Fantastic Four gets Two and a Half Stars. As a Fantastic Four movie, it gets One and a Quarter Stars. The film easily could have gained an additional Three Stars if it had included the new Deadpool trailer at the front. Ahhh, God-bless the internet. 

TRAINWRECK: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

Amy Schumer is f*&king funny! If you haven’t watched Inside Amy Schumer or seen any of her stand-up then you’re missing out. She is easily one of the funniest comedians working today, and I’m not going to insult her by adding the preface of “female” comedian because she is that damn funny. So what happens when the funniest comedian working today works with comedic director Judd Apatow, who to be fair has been a little hit and miss lately, does Amy stack up on the big screen?

Due to some pretty poor parenting advice from her father as a child, Amy has become a commitment-phobic woman who has a great career, like everyone does in Apatow films, and essentially only believes in one-night stands. But when she meets a surgeon to sports stars, played by Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader, she becomes conflicted about her long held beliefs about what “monogamy” really means.

Look, let’s not beat about the bush, this is a Romantic Comedy, but a Romantic Comedy written by Amy Schumer and directed by the guy who gave us the 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, so it’s fair to say that it subverts many of the common cliches and tropes of the genre. Schumer essentially has the traits of the male role reserved for Rom-Coms whereas Hader takes on the more feminine elements found in these types of movies, thus the film is refreshing. But even more so it’s the raunchy comedy that pulls this out of the more cringe-worthy parts of the genre that drives most men into glazed over sacks that are just waiting for the end credits.

The supporting cast around Schumer is magnificent. LeBron James is a real highlight of the film. Surprisingly, for a current sporting personality he provides a version of himself that is self-deprecating, needy and extremely funny. What's most amazing is that he doesn't make cheesy or eye-rolling references to his career, I could never see Dennis Rodman doing this in his acting career (or when people gave a sh*t about Dennis Rodman - if people ever did.) You also get a great comedic turn from Mark Wahlberg, sorry I mean John Cena, who looks like Mark Wahlberg ate Mark Wahlberg, he and Amy’s sex scene is hilariously awkward. Bill Hader is a great leading man, very much in the same vain as Paul Rudd, he has the charm and the humour which makes for the perfect pairing for Amy Schumer. The other great casting is Tilda Swinton who is, much like in the movie Snowpiercer, completely unrecognisable as a downright despicable editor of a magazine called Snuff - she's so shallow and dismissive based on such purely superficial reasons that you don't know whether to punch her in the face or take a shower.

It would have been incredibly easy for this film to just become a series of stand-up jokes delivered directly to the audience, however Apatow manages to blend much of Amy Schumer’s stand-up material effortlessly into the story. In the hands of a lesser director, we would be getting lots of short unrelated comedy clips like we did in Ted 2 or A Million Ways To Die In The West, so this is not only great for Amy Schumer’s debut but for us as an audience.

The comedy can be on the nose at times, it can get a little dirty, well really dirty, like you might need a shower afterwards kind of dirty, but a lot of it comes off very relatable. It may get a little awkward at times when you’re wife, girlfriend and partner starts laughing harder than you and starts saying between snorts “so true, so true…” Yeah, depending on the scene that could be an awkward conversation afterwards. Like many Apatow films there is always a strong desire to bring the serious moments into the really serious territory where it often hits a little too close to home and uncomfortable. Much like in the other Apatow films it doesn't really fit with the flow of the rest of the laugh out loud comedy. This is most likely due to Apatow's personal push for comedies to receive the coveted Oscar-nod via their own category of "Best Comedy" which is fine, but it shouldn't be at the expense of a comedy being a comedy.

The film is clearly aiming to be an "Anti-Rom-Com" and it does succeed with this on many levels thanks to the raw realism of the modern dating scene and how we view sexual relationships, but the film does fall into stock-standard “Rom-Com” at times, particularly at the end. Thankfully, the film is far too enjoyable to hold that against it.

Trainwreck gets Four and a Half out of Five Stars (or Four and a Half really awkward conversations with your partner about your sexual history)