MAD MAX: FURY ROAD: SPOILER-FREE FILM-REVIEW:

Holy sh*t what an amazing film. This is a film filled with so much beautifully rich red earth and twisted, rusted V8 metal that you could be forgiven for thinking that a junk yard f*cked a desert whilst high on crystal-meth and gave birth to Mad Max: Fury Road.... and believe me that is meant as a compliment.

Thirty years since George Miller gave us 'Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome' we now get the next installment of the franchise where drunken and occasionally anti-Semitic Mel Gibson has been swapped out for the rugged and brooding Tom Hardy, whose accent is kind of all over the place. The film finds an imprisoned Max Rockastansky caught in the middle of an insane escape plot involving a one-armed Charlize Theron and five abused wives to the one dictator who is using his army of rev-heads to chase them all across the stark desert landscape in some of the most inventive car stunts ever committed to celluloid.

Now Tom Hardy began working on this film immediately after ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ back in 2012 and since then he’s starred in five movies and a TV series, with two more films in the can before this had even been released - after seeing it you can understand why. The film is essentially a two hour chase sequence that hardly stops to take a breath - with almost all the stunts and sequences done in camera, sure there are some CGI enhancements here and there but this puts other films like the Fast and Furious franchise in their place. Because where those films go for the big bang, Miller has mastered and controlled the sound and vision in such a way that every shot looks like a work of art and all the sound design has very particular purpose. Your eyes and ears can be viscously assaulted during all the chaos, and then Miller pulls back and gives us silence just to remind us just how barren the landscape is and how all this destruction has little impact on the world these characters live in.  

Keep in mind that George Miller is in his seventies now and he is giving the young directors today not just a run for their money but showing them how it should be done. Visually the colours are lush and the camera uses layers and leading lines to give depth to just how many vehicles are involved in this chase. He does character development on the move and really pulls some great performances out of everyone in the film. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is in this film and her performance here will make you forgive her for her involvement in 'Transformers Dark of the Moon'. But on top of all the adrenaline fueled action, Miller is borrowing from the masters of cinema like Kurosawa and using movement and setting to enhance characters emotional states.

The film may be call Mad Max but the real star of the movie is Charlize Theron. She's just such a bad-ass action hero that she outdoes Hardy in the fight sequences and big heroic moments, looking at a film like this you could be forgiven for thinking it's just a male testosterone-fueled car chase but at the end of day is actually the women who it is real real heroes. All the female characters in the movie are the ballsiest and strongest characters in the film, leaving a lot of their male counterparts looking weak by comparison.

On top of this the design of the vehicles just need to be seen on the big screen to be believed and truly appreciated. Each car, truck or motorcycle just has its own unique look and they just take on a life of their own becoming another character in the film, or dare I say another creature in the film.

If you’re the kind of person who feels all blockbusters are the same today then this is the film for you. It may not break the box office like The Avengers or Star Wars but it will be the film of 2015 that will be remembered and respected the most - and deservingly so. Do yourself a favour and watch this in the cinema.

Mad Max: Fury Road gets Five out of Five Stars (or Eight out of Eight V8 meth-fueled nightmare cars of awesomeness!)

MAGGIE: SPOILER-FREE FILM-REVIEW:

Hey, did you know that Arnold Schwarzenegger is an actor now? Yeah that’s right, Mr. “Get to the Choppa”, “Let off some steam Bennet”, “Ice to see you”, “Don’t drink and bake” is an actor now in the new indie zombie film Maggie.

Maggie follows the story of a Midwest farmer (with a thick Austrian accent) caring for his recently infected teenage daughter who has been swept up in the middle of a worldwide zombie epidemic. Being an indie film, instead of focusing on the infection at large we see the outbreak from the perspective of one small family on their farm, this ends up being the films greatest strength but also its biggest weakness. The film is a slow-burn but probably too slow, as the gory and tense moments are too few and far between to feel like genuine pay-offs. 

The film is classified, and has been advertised, as a zombie movie and to be fair it has a few zombie movie elements but it has forgotten to do some of the key things that make a zombie movie a good zombie movie. Firstly, the rules about killing zombies is not entirely clear, you can destroy the brain or just break their neck apparently. Secondly, for a world infested with zombies, people don’t seem to be working all that hard at defending themselves or protecting their properties. And even though the world of the film is structured so that victims with the virus can stay at home until they turn, there doesn’t seem to be very much regulation or enforcement on this rule - I mean geez just look at what happens when flu season hits - it just doesn’t seem plausible. 

However, it’s because of this set up that we get this sometimes good slow-burn drama leading towards what can only end in a messy, messy way. The performances are great, with Abigail Breslin bringing some real heartache to the role as a teenager struggling with the fact that she is dying, but also dealing with being an outcast in her own home and community. Her one supporter, whose love never waivers, is the surprise casting choice of 68 year old Arnold Schwarzenegger as her father, who really plays to his strengths here. He only has about 12 lines in the film but it’s just seeing such an aged and weathered icon looking broken, it’s a side of him I haven’t seen before and it does keep you engaged for the most part.

Now don’t get me wrong, I would have killed to see a zombie-movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.... back in 1993, and to his credit he does really well in this role and avoids falling into any of the normal “Arnie-isms” that you’d expect to see in one of his films. I can’t help but think that if he’d done a few more roles like this earlier in his career then maybe people would have been more excited to see him return to cinema after all those years in office.

Overall, Maggie is set-up to be a naval-gazing indie-drama about one man and his dying daughter that just happens to feature zombies. But it really falls short on maintaining your interest due to the long gaps between dramatic scenes. It does have a sweetly tense ending but feels a lot longer than its 95 minute running time - and not in a good way.

Maggie gets Two out Five Stars (or poetic metaphors for teenage venereal diseases)

AVENGERS AGE OF ULTRON: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

So you produced one of the biggest films of all time. A film so big that it broke every conceivable record there was to break, earned over $1 and half billion worldwide, and suddenly made that guy who created Buffy a relevant name again. So where do you go from there, especially when the studio you work for, Marvel, have become almost a law unto themselves? You go bigger, darker, and explodier, but does that make a better film?

Avengers Age Of Ultron is the 11th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a franchise so big a powerful it has topped Bond, Potter, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in earnings and all the the span of seven years. Coming off the success of the first film that truly felt like a comic book come to life and in the aftermath of the brilliant Captain America The Winter Soldier we find the Avengers in a world without S.H.I.E.L.D. and with an ever increasing need to be everywhere and save everybody. Billionaire, playboy and let’s face it, narcissistic sociopath Tony Stark awakens a long dormant project that was intended to save the world, but unfortunately creates an eight foot tall robot with the voice of James Spader and a severe Pinocchio-complex who has decided to destroy the world because, well the script demanded it.

So let’s start off with the good: One of my favourite things about the film is how much time is devoted to Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye. His absence from Phase 2 and limited runtime in the first Avengers is more than made up for in Age of Ultron, sure he’s just a guy with a bow and arrow amongst Gods, super-soldiers and roided-up rage monsters, but he’s still a bad-ass. The reveal of Paul Bettany’s Vision is a thing of beauty, it’s eerie and hypnotic at the same time. The other great thing about this film is that it’s funny, really really funny. That’s not really been highlighted in the promotion of the film but the quips come thick and fast consistently throughout. There are some jokes might go over people’s head, for example, Tony Stark makes references to a playwright born in the 1800’s, but the majority of jokes do hit. The film is filled with “Whedonisms” and depending on whether that’s your thing you will either be in nerd-heaven, or groaning and rolling your eyes more than once.

The film is structured fairly well, but when compared to the first Avengers movie, or The Winter Soldier, there are one or two scenes that feel a little sluggish. Then there are some points throughout the film where it feels like we’ve missed a chunk of the film, like there are one or two scenes where you stop and think, did I miss something? This might have been to cut down the runtime but it’s only a little jarring. However Whedon has done a great job of balancing such a large story with so many characters. One character in particular, Ultron, is good thanks to James Spader’s buttery delivery, but I honestly don’t feel he’s great as a villain, especially when compared to the likes of Loki. 

The climax of the film does suffer from the usual issues that have plagued Marvel movies for a while now, and that is the fact that there is no real drama or peril with the characters, mostly because we know they all have at least three more films in their contracts, but also they swat the supposedly highly dangerous Ultronbots away like small rabid chihuahuas and throw quips at each other like this is just another random Tuesday. Sure a character dies, but it lacks impact due to the character that bites the big one. Even though it sounds like I’m complaining a lot, the film more than makes up for any of these short comings with some amazing action sequences and just jaw-dropping moments. If you think the trailer spoiled all the action from the Hulkbuster fight, trust me, you haven’t seen half of it. There’s some surprise cameos, the return of fan-favourite Marvel “things” (to say anymore would be spoiling it) and the set up for the future Marvel movies gave me chills in the best way possible.

Overall, this is just a fun film that will entertain the general audience but really satisfy the comic fans with lots of great moments. The Russo Brothers shall be helming the next set of Avengers films and to be honest, I’m looking forward to that, but if this is going to be Whedon’s last Avengers film, then he’s going out on a high note.

Avengers Age of Ultron gets Four out of Five Hulkbusting fingers to the face!  

Netflix Daredevil: Spoiler-Free Review:

In twelve years time, Charlie Cox is going to make a fantastic Batman. If Ben Affleck's Daredevil is the cinematic equivalent of Batman and Robin then Netflix Daredevil, the first in a series of Marvel and Netflix joint ventures, is the television equivalent of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins with that gorgeous cinematic sheen.

Charile Cox plays Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer by day and a vigilante by night, who uses his other four enhanced senses to make himself a nightmare for the criminals of Hell’s Kitchen and an absolute migraine for the Kingpin of the crime world, Wilson Fisk, played by veteran actor Vincent D’Onofrio. Darker than anything   has done before with the bloody and bone-breaking fight scenes, but it still keeps the comedic beats and rhythm of the cinematic universe with banter you’ve come to expect from Marvel coming thick and fast from the key cast.

Charlie Cox is the perfect balance of Matt Murdock's charm and Daredevil's raw aggression whilst Vincent D'Ofrino is channelling Marlon Brando as he brings a subtext of anger in every line that leaves his mouth. He has the ability to show the tenderness of Tony Soprano but also show that uncontrollable rage that made James Gandolfini’s character so memorable and this brutally is clearly shown through the slamming of a car door in episode four - truly inspired casting for the two leads. The show does well to show the dichotomy between the two characters as both want to save the city but have different views on how this should be done.

A show with the grit of The Wire, the intensity of The Sopranos, pinches of Law and Order but a personality unlike any of the other superhero TV shows. Agents of SHIELD, Arrow and The Flash are good for TV shows but Daredevil transcends TV standards and hits that cinematic standard with confident cinematography, complex fight choreography and brooding lighting and colour palettes that are only enhanced by the character development that can only be achieved in the time allowed in a TV series. The sound design really works for this series - they use heartbeats to present a characters state of mind and often use ambient sound to transition from one scene into the next.

Each episode stands on its own, the pacing is solid throughout with smaller story arcs threaded throughout that keep the whole story interesting without slowing down the momentum of the overall series.

For me, this is the definitive take on Daredevil and throughout the series I was trying to find fault and could not. Of course that doesn’t mean that faults won’t be there for others, but hopefully this is just nitpicking from hardcore fans. I can just hear them now saying things like:
“The Kingpin isn’t big enough, why doesn’t The Owl have a costume? Where’s Elektra? It’s too much like Batman! That character doesn’t die in the comics! There’s too much origin story! Why is it not exactly like the Frank Miller story? It’s not enough like Batman! Why doesn’t Tony Stark show up? Why isn’t Daredevil in the red costume from the beginning? There’s not enough origin story!"

Nagging from any hardcore fans aside, this is a great series with moments that will make you recoil in your seat because this is bloodier than any other Marvel venture. The fights pull no punches with the cracking sounds and blood splatters taking center stage. Daredevil gets Five out of Five stars (which is Four and a half more stars than Ben Affleck’s version originally got)

FAST & FURIOUS 7: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

It’s car-porn in its most unashamed form.

However, this film should come with a warning that says “you must be this brain-dead to enjoy this film" 

... but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The film kicks off the blockbuster season of 2015 and it kicks it off in a big way. The previous movies have riffed on Ocean’s Eleven, spy-films and now they’re going full-blown Avengers with some of the biggest and most creative stunts seen on film. With a growing cast of characters including some more interchangeable tough-girl actors, we find the gang being hunted down by the bigger, badder big brother of Luke Evans character from the last film, and he’s an unstoppable Terminator-like character.

Jason Statham is an excellent addition to the series but just seems to show up without any real explanation other than to serve as additional drama to any given situation. The thing is he looks like an angry constipated potato the whole film, whilst Vin Diesel looks like a sagging potato and The Rock looks like a genetically enhanced oiled-up potato. The veteran actor getting in the middle of this potato-salad is Kurt Russell as super secret agent Nick Fury... I mean Mr. Nobody (seriously, that’s what he’s credited as) and he helps round up the Vin Diesel crew in a S.H.I.E.L.D. like super-team.

The elephant in the room, Paul Walker’s death, is handled very well. It is not laboured throughout the film but the ending is a very touching and incredibly fitting send off both to the character and Paul Walker.   

There’s the normal things you expect to see in this series: the party sequences look like a Pitbull video clip, the illegal street-racing is ridiculously well organised and looks more like an extended Red Bull racing commercial and Corona, lots and lots of Corona.

Ultimately this is a fun film with expertly executed action sequences thanks to Saw director James Wan and you’ll really enjoy yourself, as long as you don’t think about.... ANYTHING! Seriously, just watch the action and don’t think about little things like physics, body trauma from vehicular accidents, civilian casualties from all the destruction, how people can know the sex of their unborn child before the 14th week of pregnancy, how people survive car crashes, explosions, five story falls with almost no injuries - literally most people just walk away from head-on crashes that seem to not include airbags (because let’s face it - airbags are for pussies) without a scratch, they just crack their necks and keep on fighting. However, definitely, definitely do not think about how when CPR fails you can just talk a person back to life with some kind words.

This is not my type of film, but I’m not the target audience. The target audience though will get everything they ever wanted from the movie and if you’re happy to switch your brain off then you’re really going to enjoy yourself.

Fast & Furious 7 gets Four out of Five oiled-up indestructible potatoes.

WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, or my preferred title: Bogan of the Dead is an Australian Zombie flick that’s actually quite entertaining; if only the trailer hadn’t spoilt the whole film for you.

It’s Mad Max with zombie-brains on the windshield and a V8 engine of action-packed sequences that puts it heads and shoulders above all the other Australian Zombie Films. When Barry, Benny and Frankie find each other in the middle of a zombie apocalypse they begin a suicide mission thru the Australian bushland to rescue Barry’s sister Brooke using a zombie-fueled 4WD. 

The film really has an Australian-flavour which infects every scene. There’s maybe one scene that’s a little cringe-worthy with regards to paying tribute to Australia, but even a blatant Ned Kelly reference can’t stop you from enjoying this film if you’re a true zombie-fan. The film is incredibly Ocker-Aussie and it’s great to see a good Aboriginal actor, Leon Burchill, playing a key supporting role. Now there are some cliche moments in Wyrmwood but it more than makes up for it by providing some really decent emotional moments in the middle of all the chaos, something that even the big budget zombie films of Hollywood fail to do (cough-cough World War Z cough-cough)

The film glosses over some important details in the narrative that might have helped the audience make sense of some of the weirder characters and their motivations; however there are some good twists, great sequences and violence that would make a young Peter Jackson proud.

I’m going to be honest, the only real problem I have with this film has nothing to do with the actual film itself: it’s the marketing. The people who promoted this film and edited the trailer should be f*cking shot! If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the film. The trailer tells you all the key story points within it’s four minute and three second run time (which is too damn long for any trailer nowadays.) The trailer will show you an obstacle the characters face in the film and then seconds later shows you how said obstacle is solved. They do this multiple times, from using zombies as petrol, to using mind control to gather more zombies, to even spoiling the outcome of an attempted suicide of one of the main characters. This is just poor trailer-making in every sense of the word; if you want people to see your film, don’t show them the whole film in the trailer.

Despite poor marketing, Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead is definitely worth your time if you’re a zombie fan and it gets Four out of Five zombie-brains splattered all over your freshly cleaned windscreen.

50 SHADES OF GREY: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

Anticipation. It’s a big thing. And it doesn’t get much bigger than 50 Shades of Grey. With over 100 millions copies of the book sold worldwide, at one point there were 2 copies being sold every second somewhere in the world, and with over 250 million hits of the trailer, it’s fair to say that the film will make a big splash - but will it meet the fans expectations?

Based on a relationship between a billionaire and a girl who works in a hardware store, the film explores romance from the perspective of BDSM, something that you don’t normally see in the romance genre, certainly not in the mainstream romantic genre. Throughout the films runtime there is a power-play between the two main characters as they try to establish exactly how the whole dominant and submissive thing is actually going to work.

Firstly, being a mainstream film being aimed at the wider audience this is certainly the most raunchiest film that’s been made in the last 20 to 25 years. There’s a lot of nudity, a lot of sex and a lot of pubes... like a hell of a lot... like pubes for days. It certainly pushes the boundaries visually of what we would see in a sex scene nowadays, especially since ratings boards have become so sensitive towards things of a sexual nature however I don’t think it has the sweatiness and rawness of other sexual adventure films of the past like ‘Two Moon Junction’, ‘Nine and a Half Weeks‘ and ‘Last Tango in Paris.‘

You certainly can’t argue that the film is beautifully shot. Every scene looks like a high end commercial for cologne or suits or cars or even coffee. I’m pretty sure you could cut the dialogue out of this film and edit together the footage with some fancy music and it would just feel like one long extended commercial for Chanel. This is easily in part because of the inclusion of Jamie Dornan, the model turned actor, who does give an intense smolder whenever he is on screen - he knows how to wear a suit, he knows how to look good driving a car and he knows how to whip the living bejesus out of a bare-ass and make it look like it’s all been done on a cat-walk.

Dakota Johnson is incredibly brave to do so much full-frontal nudity in this film, but based on the audience I saw this with, you know the target audience, I’m pretty sure she was not the one they wanted to see full-frontal. She does her lip-biting best in the role and she displays that vulnerability very well throughout the whole 125 minutes of the film, but I just don’t buy why a billionaire uber-confident business man control freak who always gets what he wants would go to such great lengths to pursue her. It’s nothing that Johnson has done with the character it is just the the character is underwritten in the film and doesn’t quite deliver that “you’re everything I never realised I wanted” that Christian Grey so desires.

There’s one great scene which is best described as the contract negotiation. The character’s play this scene so straight and deliver lots of blush-inducing sexual-verbal content that it would normally feel more at place in a Seth Rogen movie.

There’s obviously a lot of sexual politics to discuss within this movie: is it feminist or anti-feminist? Is it romantic or is it domestic violence? I think they are valid questions and I think everyone is going to have their own interpretation come the end of the film. I guess for me, looking at the whole dominant and submissive roles being played up in the film, I don’t think that either role stays true it’s definition. For a man intent on being the Dominant, he gives up to his submissive’s demands a lot, often in the same scene - she’ll demand something, he’ll say no, pause and then says ok. For a billionaire used to getting his way it’s seems strange that he so quickly gives up his ground at every turn based on the version of Anastasia Steele presented in this film.      

Overall the film has struck a balance to show the raunch to a mainstream audience without  being run out of town with pitchforks, and mostly because some of the more risqué scenes from the book were removed. For the most part it is very faithful to the book, but for a film all about climaxing, the ending feels very anti-climatic.

Fifty Shades of Grey gets Three pubes, and Two erect nipples out of Five.