FIST FIGHT: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

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I know that some people’s dream would be to punch actor Charlie Day in the face, however because the Make A Wish Foundation don’t have that as an option, the next best thing might be to get Ice Cube to do it for you in the new movie about teachers with poor inter-relationship skills, Fist Fight. 

Set on the last day of the school year in a run-down middle-American high school where resources are as low as the morale, the ethics of some of the teachers and counsellors is questionable to say the very least, students seem to look about twenty-six for some reason and staff are being fired left, right and centre; we find Andy Campbell, played by Always Sunny’s Charlie Day put in a position where he has to rat on man with a permanent scowl on his face Ice Cube which ultimately leads to a fight after school which has the whole community abuzz. Of course in between all of this, Andy needs to reapply for his job, make it to his daughter’s dance recital, make it home to his pregnant wife who’s ready to drop any moment now and somehow manage to get out of the inevitable ass-whooping that’s a-coming. 

At ninety-one minutes in length, the film is mercifully short when compared to the normal run times of comedies nowadays but still manages to pack in a lot into its’ relatively thin premise and this is mostly due to the supporting cast. Yes you have Charlie Day playing a very Charlie Day kind of character and Ice Cube is scary as f*ck which is par the course for all of his roles; you have Jillian Bell of Workaholics and 22 Jump Street fame playing, essentially the same character she plays in both those series, and you have a Tracy Morgan who appears to have just wandered onto set and has been allowed to just do Tracy Morgan-things. This cast ad-libs and provides the usual random crudeness which is certainly funny if not a little repetitive of, well, every friggin’ American comedy for the last decade and a half. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of all the cast, but they all seem to be in cruise-control mode when it comes to the characters they play - it would just be good to see these actors mix it up a little with their characters.

The fight itself pulls a lot of inspiration from other famous fight scenes such as Clint Eastwood’s Any Which Way But Loose and the forever awesome fight between the late, great Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live however the fight itself easily succumbs to cliche just like every other aspect of the film. As mentioned before, without spoiling how any moment ends, you have a job interview, a dance recital, an impending birth along with the promised fist fight and without seeing any of the film, you already know how each scene is going to end. The same can be said for many of the visual gags in the film, you just know that two boys pushing around lawnmowers on a football field during end of year prank day is going to lead to only one thing.  

Once again, the cast are good and I am a big fan of Charlie Day, I think he’s got that manic energy that makes him a modern day Bobcat Goldthwait however all his time on Always Sunny In Philadelphia has probably ruined people’s expectations for his film work. When you have a show like Always Sunny, where the characters can be really dark and f*cked up and pretty much anything goes, the characters on the big screen just feel like a step back from that because it all feels too safe. 

Now I’m not wanting to labor on the actors in character cruise-control complaint too much, but I really feel that that is what keeps this film from being truly memorable, each actor plays the same character they always play and their comedy and choices stay very in-line with their U.S.P. - a very risk averse approach. Just for example, the film features Christina Hendricks and is completely under-utilised as a French teacher who is more than a little disturbed, however you can remove her small scenes from the film and it would have no impact on the story. If she had instead played the role of Jillian Bell’s freaky meth-smoking guidance counsellor who’s more interested in getting some “teenus” than actually helping any of the kids, then this might have made for some more memorable performances. 

Overall, the film has it’s charms. The cast carry the light-weight premise as far as they can without really straying too far from their respective lanes whilst the majority of your enjoyment does rest on your own tolerance of Charlie Day. As I said, I like him a lot and the film certainly gave me a lot of laughs, even if many of those laughs felt very familiar and I could see them coming from a mile away. As a teacher myself, I will say I did like that the film did try to tackle the world of teaching today, but I still feel that it didn’t quite hit the mark. If you just need to switch off and have a harmless laugh, then Fist Fight is the movie for you this week in the cinemas. 

Fist Fight gets Two and a Half out of Five Stars (or Two and a Half out of Five meth-smoking guidance counsellors giving really bad advice. 

T2 TRAINSPOTTING: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

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The original Trainspotting was the little film that could, shot over seven weeks for a minuscule three and a half million pounds, it changed the shape of British cinema. It was a cultural phenomenon, it’s one of the most quotable British films to this day, with a soundtrack that has become intimately linked to scenes they’re featured in - I mean seriously, try to listen to Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” and not think of Ewan McGregor running down the street. It’s the film that launched the careers of a lot of great British talent: we got ourselves a Jedi, a Bond villain, a Sherlock and a… and a… well Ewen Bremner has had a steady career. We got one of the most consistently inventive and energetic directors who continues to delight with each film. So with so many good things going in it’s favour, the big question is, why the f*ck would you make a sequel to what is essentially lightning in a bottle? 

Now it’s fair to be skeptical, very rarely do you find long-delayed sequels that actually pay-off, let alone a sequel with a twenty year gap. The last time we had a sequel with that big a gap that included the original key cast and original directors, we got Dumb and Dumber To. Thankfully Trainspotting 2 is the antithesis of the crappy sequel curse. 

Set twenty years after Ewan McGregor’s Renton up and skipped town with the Skagboys’ money, he returns to Edinburgh and is compelled to reconnect with childhood pals Sick Boy and Spud, whilst avoiding the walking sociopath with a moustache Begbie. Ewen Bermner’s Spud is still a heroine addict, whilst Johnny Lee Miller’s Sick Boy snorts cocaine like it’s an Olympic Winter Sport and the ever terrifying Robert Carlyle’s Begbie is an escaped convict robbing houses and trying to achieve an erection. To tell you anymore would be spoiling this really well crafted tale of reconnection and redemption. 

The one thing I will tell you though is that if you’ve read the original book that served as the sequel to Trainspotting then this film is so far removed from the book that it’s almost unrecognisable. The film does not include the character of Nikki, there’s no scam involving producing a hard-core porn film and Spud is not writing a detailed account on the history of Leith. Sick Boy still runs his aunty’s pub, Renton spent time in Amsterdam and the film is peppered with lines and references to moments from the book throughout, but very little else to connect this film to the book. Personally, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the book, so I’m really glad the film went in the direction that it did, it feels like a more natural and logical progression for these characters than what occurred in the 2002 novel. 

Despite the differences to the novel, fans of the book should get a lot out of this film. The characters are the same as ever, if just twenty years older and only slightly wiser. The same pop-culture references are infused in the DNA of the film but with a more social media conscious tweak that also acknowledges the gentrification of the changing face of Edinburgh. Of course whether you’re a fan of the film or books, one thing everyone should love is how well they have integrated footage from the original into this film - be it young actors posing as the original cast or projecting scenes onto bare walls behind the cast or just simple cuts to those scenes; one thing that really needs to be acknowledged is how well the original footage has been restored. Even though it is clearly scenes from the original film, it looks like it was shot with the rest of the footage.   

The biggest driving force behind this choice has to be director Danny Boyle. It’s amazing to think that after kicking off a career in film back in 1994 with Shallow Grave, Boyle has continued to produce challenging films that are creative, stylised and energetic. He just has a way with composing shots that work for maximum impact - whether it be using shadows to add another layer to the story, or the constant shifting of the camera’s point of view to increase the intensity of a moment, or just simply slicing out the occasional frame of a shot to add to the skittish nature of the characters; Boyle has never compromised on his vision for a film and as an audience, we are all the better for it. With a larger budget and more seasoned talent, Boyle and the cast really let go and give us a really visceral story where every inch of the frame is dripping with visual cues and emotive metaphors.    

So look, if you love these characters then you’re bound to love this film because the characters just live and breath the streets of Edinburgh in equal parts funny, scary, touching and tragic. One minute you can despise a character and then the next you are genuinely hurting for that same guy you were wanting to punch in the face a second ago. Twenty years might seem a long time to wait, but T2 Trainspotting is definitely worth the wait. 

T2 Trainspotting gets Four and a Quarter out of Five Stars (or Four and a Quarter Iggy Pop vinyl sessions in your childhood room) 

FIFTY SHADES DARKER: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

How many actual shades of grey are there? I mean, it’s a really good question, because, if you’ve already got fifty shades of grey and then you add another fifty shades of even darker greys, how long before you run out of greys? After a cursory glance at the internet I discovered that there’s over 500 shades of grey and I’m like oh f*ck they could just keep making these films forever! 

Yep, it’s the sequel to the film that’s based on the book that was based on Twilight fan-fiction that made a world full of horny middle-aged women feel really flustered under the collar and resulted in a whole bunch of meek husbands having to walk into adult stores and embarrassingly ask for the list of items their wives had left on the fridge under the heading “date night”. So look it’s been two years since Fifty Shades Of Grey hit cinemas and actually made a decent amount of cash, however with a change of director, scripting issues between the studio and the original books writer, rumours of the key cast just plain not liking each other, along with the general belief among book readers that the second book didn’t live up to the first, the big question is: are people still smouldering for a glimpse of CGI rendered pubes? 

The erotic melodrama sees Christian Grey, the billionaire-shirtless-horse-whipping-enthusiastic trying to win back Anastasia Steel, a vanilla women who’s very busy doing important business things to really consider a relationship with abs-man. Although as the film progresses, the two begin to do their thing again and then that thing is complicated by the inclusion of the other women in Christian’s life. Needless to say, jealousy ensues along with a range of other stuff that was really distracting me from looking at my watch throughout the 115 minute runtime. 

Now look, I know I’m not the target audience for this film and as absurd as I might find the dialogue and situations the film has on offer, I’m sure that people who aren’t fans of superhero films view them in the same way with their dialogue, costumes and sequences. So, even though the film isn’t for me, I can see it’s appeal for it’s target audience, you know, women who haven't yet discovered that you can get free porn on the internet: you have a male model billionaire who falls hopelessly in love with you and will do anything to get you, although let’s overlook the creeper, stalker-y, overly-possessive, psychologically abusive aspects of his personality because he looks good with his shirt off and he can buy pretty much anything he wants. 

Truth be told, I didn’t mind the original too much - it was a little fun, it was a little kinky and it was some simple escapism catered to an audience who don’t often get the lion’s share of the theatre-time. However, by comparison, the film is about fifty shades tamer than it’s predecessor: the scenes are a lot less kinky, the dialogue is not as sexually charged, and missionary seems to be the only position the film is interested in featuring. I’m sure I remember the first film taking some more risks; this one is definitely Fifty Shades of Vanilla. 

On top of this, the film features a series of just random moments that don’t seem to have much consequence, which is just strange from a story-telling perspective. Characters come in and out of the story and there are potential set-ups with potential pay-offs however there is no pay off at least within this film. Characters get suddenly removed from the story and then are never spoken of again, they might show up briefly doing something that looks important but once again nothing happens. I was constantly asking the wife, “does he come back?”, “was that important?”, “did that happen on purpose?”, “is that setting up for the third film?” and the answer was often, “no, I don’t remember them returning in the book”, and I don’t know, for me, that’s just poor story-telling. Missed opportunities and false set-ups only leave you feeling that a story could have been better, and that’s not really the feeling you want coming out of the cinema. 

Overall, this film series has its’ dedicated following and they will certainly be happy none the less. If you’re on Team Fifty Shades, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, but maybe not as much as the first film. If you are not on Team Fifty Shades and you are being dragged to see it anyway, just try and view it as an unintentional comedy and you’re bound to gain some enjoyment from the film.       

Fifty Shades Darker gets Twenty out of Fifty Shades of Vanilla (or if you’re looking at it as an unintentional comedy, Thirty Five out of Fifty Shades of Comedy Gold)     

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