Tag: Karen Gillan

Categories
Movie Reviews

Thor: Love and Thunder

Marvel Studios, 2022

After embarking on a series of adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy, a battle-weary Thor (Chris Hemsworth) prepares to seek out a life of peace before a distressing message from an old friend warns him of the threat of Gorr (Christian Bale) – a cursed being on a personal mission to end the existence of gods. When Gorr sets his sights on Earth and Thor’s ex-girlfriend turned super-hero Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), Thor and Jane embark on a journey across the universe in search of a way to defeat Gorr and find meaning in their lives again.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan & Russell Crowe

Watch it now in cinemas

Marvel Studios, 2022

Love and Thunder is a Taika Waititi movie through and through, for better and for worse. 2017’s Ragnarok signalled a reinvigoration of the uptight Norse god – infusing Thor with a bro-ish charm and dim sense of humour and surrounding him with a colourful cast of characters – in a move that was unexpected but welcomed, packing all the action and emotional character beats that Marvel fans expected into an exciting new world. The sequel is Waititi fully let loose and in doing so, Love and Thunder loses itself in the incessant improvisational comedy Waititi so clearly enjoys. It’s not that it doesn’t work sometimes, but when the characters and story are sacrificed and you’re exhausted rather than elated at the end of it all, something isn’t working.

As a character, Thor has undergone a lot of reinvention throughout his many appearances in the MCU, and the start of Love and Thunder finds him in an interesting contemplative place. Pairing the God of Thunder with the Guardians of the Galaxy seems like the obvious next step in this reinvention, a natural segue into comedic hijinks that can exist on a smaller scale than infinity stone-seeking titans and Asgard-ending colossuses. Thor has been through so much, and it is natural that he should feel some fatigue. Waititi’s solution, then, is to shift this fatigue onto the viewer, completely undercutting any exploration of Thor’s mental state with joke after joke – rarely soliciting anything beyond than a chuckle – to the point where even the Guardians get so sick of it they leave.

Marvel Studios, 2022

Marvel movies have always leaned into comedy, with a quick quip often underpinning dramatic moments so as not to let things get too serious, but Taika takes Love and Thunder into full-blown comedy territory. The problem is quantity over quality. The Waititi schtick – off-kilter, improvisational one-liners interjected at awkward times – is so tired at this point, after films like Free Guy, Lightyear and Jojo Rabbit in the intervening years, that two hours of nothing else is simply interminable. Very few of the jokes here break from the formula, and those that do are rarely given more than a second to breathe before a handful more are thrown at you. This endless stream of gags wreaks havoc on the main storyline’s pacing, creating a hollow emptiness that often means you completely tune out until a serious dramatic moment is suddenly thrown into the mix and shocks you into paying attention again.

It’s a shame given Waititi’s track record. His films have always proudly worn their hearts on their sleeves and leaned into really dramatically resonant emotions, and those moments are buried here underneath all the comedy. Jane and Thor’s goofy reunion is underpinned by a heart-wrenching reality check that always threatens to boil over and create a genuinely moving scene, but the theme is never given a substantial amount of screen time to turn the tide against the onslaught. Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher could have provided a moving counterpoint to Thor and Jane’s journey of loss, and Bale is giving an incredibly fun performance here, but is tossed aside and seems to only be brought back into the fold whenever a studio executive has told Waititi that joke time is over and it’s time to get back to business.

Marvel Studios, 2022

Ultimately what saves Love and Thunder from approaching The Dark World territory is Hemsworth’s utter commitment to the role. Thor is as much a part of him now as Harry Potter is to Daniel Radcliffe and the film is carried by Hemsworth’s bumbling swagger and charm. There’s an ease about him, as someone so supremely confident in this character, that you as an audience feel a certain level of confidence in letting him take Thor in new directions knowing he truly cares. The comedy may fall flat a shocking amount of the time, but it certainly isn’t Hemsworth’s fault, and a lot of the jokes that work, only do because of him. The same sadly can’t be said for Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, who is saddled with some of the worst material in the film and given an incredibly rushed arc that doesn’t allow her to really stretch as an actor, outside of the impressive physicality she displays once powered up.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a truly disappointing sequel in the MCU but Thor: Love and Thunder is unfortunately just that. With a returning Taika Waititi that refuses to tone down his idiosyncratic humour and take the time to sit with his characters, the first fourth outing for a Marvel hero is a disappointingly exhausting one, despite Chris Hemsworth’s best efforts to imbue renewed vigour into a character audiences have loved for over a decade now. There isn’t much to love, but a few sparks here and there suggest the thunder could be brought back in the future, it just might be time that Taika took a step back.

5 / 10

Categories
Movie Reviews

The Bubble

Netflix, 2022

The latest instalment in the Jurassic World franchise, Dominion, has had an extremely rocky road to release. As one of the few films to strive forward with filming during the initial stages of the pandemic, the production faced a seemingly never-ending slew of COVID-related struggles and when comedy directing icon Judd Apatow heard about it, well, he decided to make his own movie about that movie’s making. Confused? Don’t worry, watching The Bubble you’ll never be confused as to what is going on, just to why so little of it is actually funny. Apatow’s latest should be a scathing satire of the Hollywood production’s hubris and the larger-than-life figures that populated it; in reality it is a lukewarm series of disjointed, overly long jokes that don’t come together in any cohesive way to say much at all about anything.

With production for Cliff Beasts 6 forging on ahead in spite of the ongoing COVID pandemic, former franchise star Carol Cobb (Karen Gillan) is forced to reunite with her old cast-mates after a failed side-project almost derailed her entire career. As the cast and crew hole up in a palatial English estate it appears that old grudges are forgotten as the group – including the film’s stars Lauren Van Chance (Leslie Mann), Dieter Bravo (Pedro Pascal), Sean Knox (Keegan-Michael Key), Dustin Murray (David Duchovny) and director Darren Eigen (Fred Armisen) – party together and look forward to having another hit film on their resumés. When the realities of pandemic-era filmmaking settle in however – frequent PCR tests, sudden isolations, social distancing – the group begin to turn on each other and long for escape from their high-class prison. It is up to the film’s producer Gavin (Peter Serafinowicz) and his team of COVID-protocol staff to ensure that a film gets made and his actor’s survive the process.

Netflix, 2022

The Bubble feels like a drastic departure for Apatow, whose style usually leans towards a mixture of witty, reference-heavy comedy and real-life situations and stakes. Here the absurdity of the whole situation is dialled up to eleven, in a clear attempt at satirising our collective human reactions to the pandemic and the quirks that come with it. There are flashes of relatable, hilarious observations – a montage of whacky responses to invasive PCR tests – but these are few and far between amongst the otherwise long, drawn-out sequences of actors bickering over poor scripts or going to insane lengths to survive their isolations.

One such sequence involves a cast member projectile vomiting on another cast member after vehemently denying being sick. It’s a shocking, viscerally disgusting moment that merits a laugh, but Apatow beats a dead horse by having more and more actors vomit for what feels like an eternity. This over-commitment to the bit happens in each and every big scene, to the point where the film feels more like a series of sketches sewn roughly together than a fully fledged movie with a central narrative. The only through-line here belongs to COVID and besides immediately dating the film as a product of this moment in time, Apatow forgets to write characters that are anything more than hollow caricatures of the spoiled Hollywood actor.

Netflix, 2022

You could argue that Apatow is attempting to poke fun at that stereotypical rich, whiny actor but doesn’t have anything to say other than unfunny, mean-spirited jabs. Without characters that we can sympathise with, an actual story-line or decent jokes, the only thing the audience is left to be is bored; a fact that isn’t helped by Apatow’s usual overstuffed runtime. Still, the entire all-star cast commendably commits to even the silliest bits, making for some laughs in the ridiculousness of seeing Pedro Pascal and David Duchovny pulling off TikTok dances. Newcomer Harry Tevaldwyn deserves mention too; excellent as the film’s quiet but sharp-witted COVID officer, it is a shame he doesn’t have a better overall package to make his debut in.

The Bubble is a total misfire for Apatow, who proves with this film that his strengths lie in the grounded comedy-dramas of Knocked Up and This is 40 rather than this absurdist look at the pandemic. While his intentions are admirable and the concept is rife with comedic potential, the end-result is a painfully bloated and unfunny series of gags that fail to provide any new perspective on the pandemic that hasn’t already been beaten to death in the past two years through twitter jokes and memes. Like the virus itself, this is one pandemic-era product that should be left in the past, sorry to burst your bubble Judd.

Netflix, 2022

The Bubble stars Karen Gillan, Pedro Pascal, Iris Apatow, Leslie Mann, Fred Armisen, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate McKinnon, Guy Khan, Peter Serafinowicz, Maria Bakalova & David Duchovny – Streaming on Netflix now.

Rating: 3 out of 10.

3/10

Categories
Movie Reviews

Gunpowder Milkshake

StudioCanal, 2021

There’s a point in Gunpowder Milkshake where everything clicks and the film begins to live up to the craziness of its title, branching away from becoming another run of the mill John Wick impersonator. A hallway skirmish with a twist: our hero has been dosed with a muscle relaxant ahead of her fight with a trio of beaten-up wheelchair-bound and crutch-dependent goons. It’s where a unique sense of levity and absolute insanity takes form like a shot of adrenaline, propelling the film towards an absolute bloodbath of a finale. The characters and general plot might not be anything new, but you’ve never seen girls kick ass like this before.

Abandoned as a child by her mother and infamous assassin Scarlet (Lena Headey), Sam (Karen Gillan) has turned to a life of crime herself, following in her mother’s footsteps as a one-woman cleanup crew for The Firm, a mysterious group of men with their fingers in all the pies of the underworld. When a mission goes awry and Sam is forced to exact a bloody massacre – including the murder of crime lord Jim McAlister’s (Ralph Ineson) son – a target is placed on her head, prompting her handler at the Firm, Nathan (Paul Giamatti) to send her on a new mission to recover lost funds while he can soothe McAlister. When this run-of-the-mill mission takes a turn and Sam finds herself a babysitter to recently orphaned Emily (Chloe Coleman) and on the run from McAlister, she must turn to Madeleine (Carla Gugino), Florence (Michelle Yeoh) and Anna May (Angela Bassett) of the sisterhood of assassins that raised her for help clearing her name.

StudioCanal, 2021

Style is the name of the game here for director Navot Papushado, but not at the expense of substance, centering the emotional core around Sam’s abandonment issues with her mother and the maternal role she takes on for the freshly orphaned Emily. The film takes a while to get to this point, taking its time setting up the world of the Firm and the Diner, a location that acts in the same way as the Continental hotel from John Wick – a gun-free meeting place for underworld figures. This introduction skews closely to the model of Keanu’s franchise, but stands out with a hyper-stylised flair; with rich neon lights filling the screen and endlessly badass and over-the-top introductions to all the key players.

StudioCanal, 2021

Gillan proves she can easily lead her own action-intensive franchise having graduated from Marvel, channelling her character of Nebula from that franchise into Sam; her low, matter-of-factly menacing tone delivering statements of warning before preceding to kick ass. It’s almost impossible not to compare her to Wick and in that sense the characters are set up in much the same way: vague, mysterious individuals that endear the audience through their actions and the unfortunate situations they are put in rather than through their boisterous personalities.

We care about Sam because she is constantly put in the thick of things and scraps her way out, fighting to stick with Emily like her mother never did with her. All the supporting players around her – Coleman, Gugino, Basset and Yeoh – are great; each with their own distinct personalities and styles that make them a ton of fun to watch in combat, but Headey is the standout; effortlessly cool slaughtering dozens of men but completely inept at actually communicating and making amends with her daughter. Similarly, again to Wick, is Ineson’s villain; a means to an end to allow for all sorts of bloody shenanigans as Sam and her friends mercilessly plow through his men in gloriously violent fashion.

StudioCanal, 2021

Where the style meets that substance so well is in the action. It’s exquisitely shot and the stunning fight choreography is always given the chance to shine, with slow, long pans allowing the audience to see every punch thrown and kick delivered – no shaky cam here. The muscle relaxant fight is easily the highlight, with so many inventive and darkly comical moments that would be out of place in other, more serious films, but feel right at home in this strange mish-mash of tones. The characters are all deadly serious but the action is so fervently ridiculous and insane that it is impossible not to get caught up in the macabre fun of it all. The grand finale is a huge explosion of more brilliantly choreographed chaos – worthy of a film with Gunpowder in the title – but it doesn’t quite live up to the earlier bout in terms of inventiveness.

Gunpowder Milkshake is a colourful, chaotic blend of highly stylised action, engaging leads with a genuinely compelling emotional arc and a stellar female supporting cast, much like the beverage it is named after. While it apes John Wick for a brief time to set things up, it soon explodes into its own weird and wonderful cocktail of colour and carnage, moving from one outstanding action sequence to the next. If action films are intent to follow in the footsteps of Keanu’s opus, Gunpowder Milkshake has all the right ingredients to stand out from the crowd – and it slaps a bright red cherry on top.

StudioCanal, 2021

Gunpowder Milkshake stars Karen Gillan, Lena Headey, Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett, Chloe Coleman, Ralph Ineson, Michael Smiley & Paul Giamatti – In Australian cinemas now and streaming on Netflix in the US.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

7/10