Film Reviews – by Adam Vaughan
Film of the week:
Other reviews:
Rating key – ◊ Total turkey | ♥ Drooping hotdog | ♥♥ Pick n Mix | ♥♥♥ Bit of fizz | ♥♥♥♥ Popcorn-tastic | ♥♥♥♥♥ Not to be missed
The Lucky One (12A) ♥♥♥
Zac Efron’s charisma elevates The Lucky One above sweet-natured, by-the-numbers sop-fest, by lending it some sincere emotional nuance.
Based on the Nicholas Sparks novel – scribe of The Notebook, Dear John, plus others – The Lucky One could have been, on the face of it, a syrupy and predictable romance. Don’t get me wrong; it is both syrupy and predictable but also engaging and sweet enough while it lasts.
Taylor Schilling and Zac Efron romance in The Lucky One
Efron plays Logan, a US marine who has endured three tours in Iraq. He is a capable soldier, but also introverted and sensitive. In classic Hollywood shorthand, we know this because he reads philosophy and loves animals, especially his pet German Shepherd Zeus who follows his owner everywhere.
We are introduced to Logan first while involved in a night raid. His platoon is ambushed and there are fatalities. The next morning, he and his squadron contemplate the night’s events. All of a sudden, Logan is distracted by something in the rubble. Going over to investigate, he finds a photograph of a woman with “keep safe” written on the reverse.
In a twist of fate (an overt theme in the film), a bomb explodes behind Logan, where he was just standing. From that moment on, he pledges to find out who the girl in the photo is and thank her.
He makes it out of the war and goes about tracking her down. His search leads him to the swamps of New Orleans and the kennels where Beth (Taylor Schilling) – the woman in the photograph – lives and works with her son and Grandmother (played by Blythe Danner).
He gets a job at the kennels and begins to grow closer to Beth, never finding the words to tell her his reason for being there. However, her ex-husband Keith (Mad Men‘s Jay R. Ferguson) wants to put an end to their romance.
You can probably guess what happens in the end and it is a rather schmaltzy affair with director Scott Hicks bathing most of the action in sepia twilight. However, The Lucky One is decent enough, helped by Efron who is a likeable and increasingly capable screen presence. Don’t expect this to be around for long though.
American Pie: Reunion (15) ♥♥
The tagline for the latest – and presumably final – American Pie is ‘save the best piece for last’. But with the humour feeling awkward, tired and rather outdated, American Pie: Reunion is hard to swallow.
Jim (Jason Biggs), Oz (Chris Klein), Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) and Stiffler (Seann William Scott) return for East Great Falls Class of 1999 high school reunion to find things have changed a lot since then.
Jim and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are now parents and have a non-existent sex life. Oz is a sports presenter with a model girlfriend he doesn’t really love. Kevin’s marriage revolves around watching ‘Real Housewives of Orange County’. Finch looks to have turned biker rebel. And Stiffler temps for an investment firm, but wants to keep the party going.
The characters might have changed, but the awkward sex jokes haven’t. Watching you can’t help but feel they should all know better by now. The odd chuckle is provided by Jim’s Dad (Eugene Levy) and Stiffler’s Mom (Jennifer Coolidge) though; a post-credits cinema rendezvous between the two is funnier than most of the film.
Silent House (15) ♥♥
In this horror remake of a Uruguayan film, Elisabeth Olsen gets locked in a rundown old house she, her Father and Uncle are renovating. Hearing strange noises and sensing a malevolent force is trapped with her, she must confront the dark past the home conceals.
It’s an effective, albeit clichéd, horror set up; the house windows are all boarded up meaning a lack of natural light. The characters roam the house with electric lamps and torches and there’s a lot of running into darkened rooms and locking doors. The film’s unique selling point, however, is that it professes to be shot in one take. Whether it is or not (I counted at least three occasions where a cut could have occurred) the problem with Silent House is that its novelty soon wears off.
This isn’t even a particularly original exercise. Hitchcock’s Rope (which actually consists of ten takes due to the restricted length the use of film dictated in 1948) tried the same. Silent House is also similar to one-location thriller Buried and Ray Milland-starring The Thief, which chose not to use any dialogue in its espionage tale. The difference with these examples however, is that they used a cinematic quirk that aided the telling of a compelling narrative.
Olsen does her best as the typical horror heroine and there are some decent chills with shades of The Shining. However, when the twist arrives, it feels somewhat contrived; Silent House is an experiment that doesn’t completely work.
Safe (15) ♥♥
Jason Statham kicks and punches himself into a blur in this Beautiful Mind-meets-Leon actioner. Yes; it’s as silly as that sounds.
Elbow-dropping baddies through tables, frisbeeing dinner plates at people’s heads and smashing through windows onto assassins; all in a day’s work for Jason Statham in Safe, a film not so interested in plot as how to add to the body count.
New York is the site of a blood feud between the Russians and Chinese. The Feds are just as corrupt and they’re all after a set of codes known by Chinese whiz kid Mei (Catherine Chan). Statham plays disgraced cop, Luke Wright. A lone gun and outsider himself, he sees Mei’s plight and goes about helping her.
You’ve got to admire Jason Statham. He knows his acting limit and rarely goes beyond it, and this entry is, as its title suggests, rather unremarkable. Transporter remains the high watermark for Statham’s burly exploits; Safe is nothing more, nothing less than just that.