Why'd it have to be snakes?

Some things I enjoy now were acquired tastes. Horror, for example, I mostly disliked throughout my formative years. But I've loved globe-trotting adventures since I was little. I grew up reading Verne, Stevenson, May and Haggard, even though I didn't realise the horrid colonial subtext at the time. So when I first watched the Indiana Jones films - late: around the time the retroactively reviled Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out - I enjoyed them tremendously.

So I was pretty delighted when the local semi-arthouse cinema did a one-off screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The first of the Lucas-Spielberg films involving Harrison Ford's adventurer archaeologist had been the one I enjoyed least (except for that belated fourth film, which nobody seems to count): I knew it was good, but the earlier incarnation of the franchise couldn't quite match the finely honed machine of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). So I watched it again, had an enormous amount of fun and left with a furrowed brow over all the problematic stuff in it.

Set in 1936, the film opens as Dr Henry 'Indiana' Jones (Harrison Ford) is exploring an ancient site somewhere in South America. Improvising his way around wicked traps, Indy manages to snag a golden idol despite the treachery of a local hired hand (Alfred Molina). He promptly finds himself relieved of his prize by his rival, the ruthless French archaeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman), barely escaping with his life. Back in the States, Indy is given a new mission by the secret service. It seems that the Nazis are digging in Egypt, having tasked Belloq with finding the Ark of the Covenant. To reveal its exact location, though, they need the Staff of Ra, which is in the possession of Indy's old patron Abner Ravenwood, last known location...

... Nepal, where after Abner's death his daughter Marion (Karen Allen) keeps the headpiece of the staff. The problem: Marion is none too keen on Indy after he broke her heart ten years previously. Fighting for their lives against goons led by giggling Nazi sadist Major Toht (Ronald Lacey), though, does something to repair the lost trust, and the pair make it to Egypt with the staff. There, they link up with local digger Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) to infiltrate the Nazi excavation, and hopefully locate the Ark before the Führer's men do.

What struck me as a tiresome flaw during a recent viewing of Star Trek Into Darkness is a virtue here: Raiders of the Lost Ark is gloriously propulsive, barely letting up from start to finish. Even exposition tends to be loaded with background action: take the dinner at Sallah's, where Spielberg and Lucas throw poisoned dates into an already fun dialogue scene. After the US-bound table-setting the film does not slow down until the dénouement, although Lawrence Kasdan - he of The Empire Strikes Back - is a smart enough writer that by the time the relentless action scenes finally get a little wearying, he switches to a lower gear so that the film's climax is heavy on tension but light on fisticuffs.

The film's idea of appropriate race relations.

The cast is uniformly great. Harrison's perpetually exasperated adventurer archaeologist is of course iconic, played here perhaps with a little more meanness than in subsequent offerings; Denholm Elliott's Marcus Brody is such a delight that it's no surprise Last Crusade expanded his role. I must admit I have a massive fictional-character crush on Allen's Marion, and I hope my judgment is not too terribly clouded by that, but: what a fantastic character! When introduced, at least: Marion drinking a local under the table, then holding her own in a battle against Toht's henchmen is pretty awesome. Unfortunately, Kasdan's screenplay proceeds to defang her. Being put into dresses, in fact, becomes a plot point, and she's an increasingly distressed damsel relying on Indy for rescue and basic common sense.

That's the real problem with Raiders of the Lost Ark: based on 1930s adventure serials, the film somehow sees fit to just bring in all the racism and misogyny of that period instead of challenging it. Marion's demotion is the least of it, alas. The film's racism is ugly and pervasive. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom takes a lot of flak for racism, and deservedly so; but its predecessor is no better by any real yardstick. Its non-white people, to be sure, are not crazed murdering cultists: they are mostly childlike innocents requiring the kind guidance of the white man. A narrative in which white people are masters and Egyptians mere labourers is never seriously challenged (see the image above). Worse, the ambiguous South Americans are treacherous, lazy and cowardly and, in the case of the indigenous warriors Belloq has allied himself with, primitive and superstitious. It's totally unnecessary and leaves a terrible aftertaste.

Despite that, too, being mostly associated with its immediate successor, Raiders is pretty brutal, featuring multiple unpleasant deaths, mostly bloodless though they may be (and in one infamous scene involving a Nazi bare-knuckle boxer and an aeroplane propeller, it's decidedly not bloodless). There's violence against animals as well, including a whole mess of snakes being doused with petrol and set on fire, and an unfortunate monkey. It's better than an Italian cannibal film inasmuch as it's not real, I suppose, but far from pleasant or called for. Like Tintin in the Congo, Raiders presents the killing of animals is harmless entertainment, and the thought that it might be something else never crosses the film's mind.

If that doesn't sour your appreciation, though, Raiders of the Lost Ark is overflowing with joys. Norman Reynolds's production design is just wonderful: the Ark marries an ancient feel with art-déco chic in just the right way, while the South American temple is a laundry list of wonderfully executed tropes. (Who doesn't love ancient traps?) More than anything, it shows what the people involved were best at: Spielberg, at being the greatest blockbuster director of his generation; Kasdan, at marrying drama and action-comedy; and Lucas, at taking a step back and using his genius for production without directing himself, a lesson he sadly did not heed in later years (see also: Jackson, Peter).

It's such a delightful film that its less savoury aspects are a whole lot easier to overlook than they might be. With the double-whammy of Empire and Raiders, Kasdan clearly had a winning streak in the first half of the eighties (even Return of the Jedi, weighed down by merchandise-friendly teddy bears and material rehashed from Star Wars, is ultimately well-written, devastatingly so in some scenes). Raiders of the Lost Ark is tremendously good fun: populist but not stupid, hilarious without being tasteless, and action-packed without directing that violence at the audience in the manner of twenty-first-century action films.

Cleaning out MI-6's closet

Sam Mendes was obviously keen on Bond. After the release of Quantum of Solace, the Reading-born director was tapped to helm the then-nameless next film in the franchise. Mendes stood by the film faithfully even after MGM's bankruptcy cast it into development hell. Bond 23, soon titled Skyfall, finally saw the light of day - albeit on a reduced budget - , sparing people like me the horrid prospect of having to grow up.

For all that Mendes wasn't an obvious choice to direct a Bond film. After all, he earned his spurs with character dramas (Revolutionary Road, backlash victim American Beauty) and dramas-in-disguise (Road to Perdition, Jarhead). So if you said 'I bet Skyfall will have excellent character moments but be lacking in the action department', I salute you: for it does and is.

The film opens, sans gun barrel (which annoyed me far more than it should), with James Bond (Daniel Craig) chasing a man named Patrice (Ola Rapace) through the streets of Istanbul to recover a stolen hard drive. Bond manages to follow Patrice onto the roof of a moving train and into the sniper-rifle crosshairs of his backup Eve (Naomie Harris). Eve can't be sure of hitting the right man, but after being given the go-ahead by M (Judi Dench) she fires, hitting Bond in the chest and sending him hurtling off a bridge and into a river while Patrice escapes.

The image of a wounded, bleeding Bond sinking segues into Daniel Kleinman's sixth stab at a Bond title sequence since GoldenEye. And a good sequence it is, continuing Kleinman's latter-day trend (since Die Another Day) of foregoing nude women dancing in favour of working Bond himself in. Here he fights his own shadow and stops by silhouettes that will become meaningful later, in a black-and-turquoise colour scheme. Meanwhile, Adele's 'Skyfall' is a rousing earworm that loses points for being too tasteful and failing to go over the top in the Jonesian manner I demand of my Bond themes.

Months later. Bond has been declared dead but is (surprise!) actually hiding out somewhere in the tropics, frequenting the sort of bar where one's manly valour is proved by doing shots with a scorpion on one's hand. Meanwhile we learn that the hard drive Bond failed to recover contained the details of every NATO agent embedded in terrorist organisations around the world, and as those agents begin to be exposed M is in pretty big trouble even before somebody hacks into the MI-6 headquarters and blows them to smithereens. Bond returns and is sent back into the field by M, who does not tell him he's failed his evaluation.

Bond's first stop is Shanghai, where he follows Patrice up a skyscraper and watches him assassinate a man in the building opposite. Bond kills Patrice before being able to find out who hired him, but a casino chip in the dead man's possessions leads him to Macau, where he trades the chip in for a suitcase containing four million euros. Here he meets Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe), a sex slave who promises to lead him to the man he is looking for if Bond will promise to kill him. They sail to an island off the coast of China, the headquarters of Silva (Javier Bardem), who kills Sévérine before Bond manages to apprehend him and bring him back to London.

That brings us to the film's halfway mark and a pretty severe shift in tone. After Silva is revealed to be a former agent hellbent on revenge against M, who abandoned him in enemy hands, the film turns to inspecting the skeletons in the closets of MI-6 and Bond's own past. The screenwriters may be plagiarising their own back catalogue - Neal Purvis and Robert Wade wrote The World Is Not Enough, another film that features a bomb in MI-6 headquarters and a villain seeking revenge against M for making a tough decision - but they take the story different places. Places full of plot holes acquired by stealing from The Dark Knight, to be sure, but interesting new pastures all the same.

It's far and away the franchise's most thorough and morose exploration of what it means to 'work for the British government' when the empire has shrivelled into a septic adjunct of the United States. Hence the scenes of M being interrogated by a parliamentary committee, the Union flag draped over coffins, and discussions about goals and methods between M and her superior (Ralph Fiennes). It's a whole lot more navel-gazing than one would expect after the already-introspective Casino Royale, but it also moves all the pieces into place for the probably more conventional Bond adventures of the next two films Craig has signed up for.

The second half is worthy, but the early Shanghai and Macau scenes are some of the most purely escapist spy action since the Roger Moore years: an admittedly Orientalist confection of dazzling colours, lifestyle porn, glamorous dames, a real sense of danger and far and away the film's two best action scenes - one of which features a timely intervention by a CGI Komodo dragon as awesome as any 'wild animal eats henchman' scene in the franchise.

Mendes, as I said, is no great shakes as an action director - he bungles the film's pre-title sequence with shots that contain no information at all - but he's largely smart enough to let his director of photography do the heavy lifting. The great Roger Deakins (who's worked with Mendes before, but is best known for his collaborations with the Coen Brothers) delivers some of the most stunning images this year: the skyscraper scene in Shanghai, all silhouettes surrounded by blue light, is my favourite, but the red-and-gold casino comes a close second. It's old-fashioned and all-round terrific.

Craig continues to be a great Bond. Now in his mid-forties he's grumpier and more irascible than the already violent version of the character he played in Casino Royale, and he portrays a weakened Bond clawing his way back from near death convincingly. In the supporting roles, Judi Dench is reliable as ever while Javier Bardem is good, although I can't quite muster the same enthusiasm for Silva as I did for Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. Naomie Harris and Ben Whishaw, who are taking up the mantle of pretty distinguished predecessors, are an absolute delight and look to be a real asset to the franchise. Bérénice Marlohe, meanwhile, is brilliant in an all-too-brief appearance that will hopefully result in more attention for her from the Anglosphere. 

Skyfall is a breath of fresh air after the disappointment of Quantum of Solace: far from flawless, but a sign we're headed in the right direction. I just hope Eon are finally done digging their way out of the hole into which the latter Brosnan films plunged the franchise, and go back to the preposterous spy adventures we know and love.

Gaze into the fist of Dredd

Dredd is the best comic book adaptation of the year. Where The Avengers was a crowd-pleasing something-for-everyone effort and The Dark Knight Rises fumbled its lofty ambitions, Dredd goes its own hyper-authoritarian, gore-soaked way. It's a film that doesn't beg the audience to love it. So far it's grossed just over $19 million worldwide, a pittance next to fellow post-apocalyptic actioner Resident Evil: Retribution's $139 million. That isn't surprising since much of the filmgoing public still associates Judge Dredd with the reviled Sylvester Stallone adaptation, but it's depressing nonetheless.

In the future, war has reduced most of the US to an irradiated wasteland. In Mega-City One, 800 million survivors are crammed into a single urban sprawl stretching from New England to Washington, D.C. As scarcity and the collapse of previous governments have caused a massive crime wave, the city is ruled in an authoritarian fashion and policed by Judges, lawmen entitled to use lethal force and act as judge, jury and executioner.

Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) is assigned a recruit, Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby). Anderson has failed her exams, but she may be valuable to the Hall of Justice for another reason: as a mutant, she has psychic powers.When the two investigate a seemingly routine triple homicide in a two-hundred-storey apartment block called Peach Trees, they stumble upon the empire of drug kingpin Ma-Ma (Lena Headey). After Ma-Ma shuts down the building to prevent their escape, the Judges must battle their way to the top against hundreds of gangbangers and desperate armed residents.

That's pretty much it. Where lesser comic book films stretch their material to pseudo-epic scope whether it fits the source material or not, there's a lot to be admired in Dredd's single-minded commitment to straightforwardness. Screenwriter Alex Garland (Sunshine) trims all the fat off the story for a lean ninenty-five minute running time. His script does not aspire to do more than chronicle a day's work for Dredd, the equivalent of a four-issue arc in the early 2000AD days, and that simplicity is the film's great strength.

Not that it lacks for strengths. Dredd is a masterclass in distilling the spirit of the comic book without taking on many of its details. The broad characters, physically deformed mutants, robots, laser guns, supernatural creatures and alien planets of the comic books are replaced by a deliberately basic, gritty future world. Technology barely exceeds present-day levels. Ordinary cars and weapons are used by everyone but the better-equipped Judges (and in the course of the film, even Anderson begins carrying an MP-5). The Judges' armour is far simpler and more practical-looking than its comic-book incarnation.

As for the character's heart and soul, Dredd does not attempt to sugarcoat the grimness of the source material. The comic books often overplayed their insanely dark future world for comic effect, but this was lost on quite a few readers. ('To my surprise, and even alarm', Pat Mills muses, 'a psycho character with no feelings would regularly win out any day over a hero who had some humanity or vulnerability.') By contrast, Dredd plays the Dirty-Harry-up-to-eleven concept straight, for a film that pleases everyone's inner authoritarian but troubles the soul. (That is, if satire is not as intrinsic to the concept as I think it is.)

The film is bolstered by three strong central performances. Urban, not allowed to take off his helmet, works his mouth and chin for all they're worth and affects a vocal chord-shredding growl. It sounds silly, but it works. Headey makes the most of the opportunity to exchange her restrained evil of Game of Thrones for unhinged villainy. Thirlby, meanwhile, shoulders the task of audience surrogate and standard 'newbie with a steep learning curve' character, communicating both doubt and increasingly strength effectively.

It's a jolly handsome film that should be seen in 3D. Slo-mo, Ma-Ma's drug that slows time down for the user, is exploited for numerous gorgeous shots of water droplets, explosions - and viciousness. Dredd's many gunfights delight in slow-motion shots of faces torn apart by bullets and other forms of unsavoury violence. Like its titular character, Dredd is single-minded, brutal, and singularly compelling.

Product Recall

Total Recall is one of those remakes that just are. There was no real reason to dust off Paul Verhoeven's 1990 semi-classic. And yet we have a new Total Recall, apparently inspired by little more than a dim realisation there was money to be made. In that sense the new film, which has proved something of a box office bomb in North America - taking $57.6m to date on a budget of $125m - deserves its fate.

Beyond the fact of its mercenary nature, though, the new Total Recall is about as good as could be expected: uninspired, to be sure, but made with solid craftsmanship. That's thanks mostly to the production design of long-time Roland Emmerich collaborator and Underworld franchise veteran Patrick Tatopoulos, who knows to steal from the best. Its terrific used-future look gives Total Recall the spice the film's bland direction, acting and plotting lack.

Towards the end of the twenty-first century, an opening infodump informs us (I'd say that's a particularly modern sin, but I do believe Escape from New York commits the same transgression, with as little justification), the earth has become largely uninhabitable with the exception of two regions: the United Federation of Britain (UFB), comprising north-western Europe, and Australia, now known as the Colony. In a society where his compatriots are treated as second-class human beings, Colony citizen Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) undertakes a daily commute to his assembly-line job by using 'The Fall', a lift that goes straight through the earth's core.

Plagued by dissatisfaction with his life as well as recurrent nightmares, Quaid goes to Rekall, a company that specialises in implanting real-seeming memories. Just as he's being strapped to the chair, though, the place is raided by special forces; Quaid, suddenly using combat skills he never knew he had, makes short work of the intruders. Gradually realising his memory of being an operative of the resistance led by Matthias (Bill Nighy) was wiped, Quaid flees from UFB goons led by his wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale).

This Total Recall's plot is no more ludicrous than the Verhoeven film's: and yet nonsense set on Mars somehow seems more believable than same happening right here on earth. That said, the transition from space to a terrestrial setting is generally handled well and gives Tatopoulos room to shine. He does so by more or less plagiarising the look of Blade Runner: dark megacities, Oriental cultural artifacts, and a heck of a lot of rain. The sight of English landmarks in a futuristic setting is thoroughly satisfying even as the technology level is disappointing for a film set a century in the future. Unfortunately Total Recall suffers from that bane of recent films, not-quite-there CGI. At times Wiseman's film reaches the plastic unreality of Sucker Punch.

The story beats are more or less the same, excepting an expanded role for Lori, whose presence throughout the film is surely explained more by the fact that Beckinsale is married to the director than by any narrative reason. If anything, Total Recall is hurt by this move, since Beckinsale's character is given no narrative arc whatsoever, leaving the actress stranded with little to do but snarl wickedly and be badass. Which she does with panache, of course. Jessica Biel is saddled with an equally slight character, while Farrell gives the film's most effective performance. His Quaid is far more relatable than Schwarzenegger's ludicrous superman, which is nothing but good in a film in which an ordinary man is thrust into events he cannot understand.

What remains is a sense of weirdness as a slick twenty-first century sci-fi aesthetic delivered by generically beautiful people is grafted onto the gnarled skeleton of a Paul Verhoeven film. Say what you will about Verhoeven, but he was no hack; even in failure his brand of satire, exploitation and gore between the silly and the disturbing was distinctively his own. The result is a film whose 1980s blockbuster subconscious keeps disrupting its modern garb.

The Bourne Hilarity

I don't remember much of the previous Bourne films. 2002's The Bourne Identity has managed to stick in my mind because it came first, and because like any good German I find the presence of my compatriots in Hollywood films inherently exciting and memorable. The Paul Greengrass-helmed Supremacy and Ultimatum have mostly flowed together, joining the Lethean mush of fuzzy franchise memories where Jason Voorhees murders and Rocky Balboa punches in a realm of abstraction at once ill-defined and Platonically pure.

So I can't weigh in on the controversy surrounding The Bourne Legacy: did writer-director Tony Gilroy retroactively ruin the first three films out of spite after falling out with Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass? What I can tell you is that once Gilroy is done ponderously explaining the series' plot, Legacy turns into breezy, brainless fun. This may be due to incompetence, to be sure; but either way it's a step in the right direction for a series that shed all artistic ambitions once studio necromancers decided they could milk the brand forever.

This time round we learn that with Jason Bourne still on the loose and Pamela Landy testifying before a congressional committee, Col. Eric Byer (Edward Norton) has decided to shut operations down for good lest the rot spread. That means, of course, eliminating all existing agents. Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), training in the Alaskan wilderness, escapes a drone attack meant for him by sheer luck. Meanwhile, in Maryland Treadstone virologist Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz) survives a killing spree by a sleeper agent colleague. Once Cross rescues her from the mopping-up death squad, the two team up for a trip to Manila, where Cross hopes to find more of the special drugs that turned him into a super-soldier.

In structure, then, Legacy mirrors Identity: our hero flees from the guys trying to kill him with a tag-along woman, the challenge being to stay alive. But where Identity was about Jason Bourne finding out who he really was, Legacy offers no such startling revelations, let alone the drama of Bourne turning the tables on his former handlers in Supremacy and Ultimatum. Instead, we have low stakes: a bloke who really wants his super-serum, and Rachel Weisz following him around because she has no choice.

That wouldn't be such a problem if Legacy did not have a slow and overlong first act. Before anything happens, we must first say hello to a bunch of new characters and suffer long scenes of Renner walking through Alaskan forests, having pointless conversations with another operative (Oscar Isaac) and tussling with wolves in the vein of The Grey, less that film's pervasive nihilism. The Bourne Legacy's excessive 135 minute running time could be quite easily shortened by a good half-hour.

Once Legacy kicks into high gear, though, it's surprisingly good fun. The scene in which Renner and Weisz face off against four operatives at Dr. Shearing's house is a marvel of suspense mixed with hard-hitting action. The Manila scenes are not half so realistic, but they are ridiculously entertaining, particularly once Louis Ozawa Changchien's cartoonish villain is thrown into the mix. Weisz is always a welcome presence and does well in a thankless role, while Renner proves an acceptable substitute for Matt Damon. Palatable popcorn entertainment is several rungs below the glory days of the franchise, but considering the depths to which zombie franchises can sink we should be grateful for Legacy's general adequateness.

With a little help from my friends

The works of Joss Whedon have always been about people thrown together by circumstances forming unlikely families. Watching The Avengers, it's obvious why Whedon was chosen. The film's vibe is similar to Whedon's television shows, its banter-and-camaraderie among superpowered beings especially reminiscent of Angel's final season. The Avengers may not be the man's best film - it can't hold a candle to the conceptually similar insurgent sci-fi adventure Serenity, for example - but he does the difficult job he was handed so well that the effort never shows.

At a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility Thor's adopted brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) steals the Tesseract, a potentially infinite energy source, and brainwashes Agent Clint 'Hawkeye' Barton (Jeremy Renner) and Dr Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) into becoming his minions. In response, Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) decides to reopen the Avengers Initiative and gradually recruits Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Dr Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to his cause with the help of Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg). It soon transpires that Loki has made a pact with the alien race of the Chitauri, who will help him conquer Earth.

The Iron Man films, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger established their respective characters well enough for Whedon to not have to worry about them, which must have been a relief in an ensemble piece. Three challenges remained, I think: the Incredible Hulk, left on shaky ground by two underwhelming previous films; Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, little more than window-dressing in Iron Man 2; and Hawkeye, likewise little known among the general public. That it works so well isn't just to Whedon's credit. Mark Ruffalo is a terrific Bruce Banner, finally giving us, at least in embryo, the Hulk film we were waiting for; Renner's natural charisma carries off a somewhat bland hero; and Black Widow is so much better written than the femme fatale routine Justin Theroux put her through that she hardly seems like the same character.

Compared to the intense character work on these three the other Avengers cruise along, and why shouldn't they? Obvious pitfalls are avoided: the film is remarkably light on jokes regarding Captain America's disconnect with the modern world, for example, and treats Cap as an emblem of old-fashioned virtue above all. If we can fault the way The Avengers handles character, it's only in its distressingly keen sense of their respective popularity. At times, the film turns into Iron Man & Friends, but favouritism never overwhelms balance entirely, and the thoroughly pleasant surprise of the love lavished upon minor characters makes up for whatever focus on Robert Downey Jr.'s increasingly tired shtick there might be.

'Balance', in fact, describes The Avengers rather well. It is an extraordinarily polished, carefully weighed film, almost entirely free of rough edges; but where it never plummets, it hardly soars either. Whedon is a better director of narrative than director per se, and in consequence there are a number of extraordinarily effective shots going from character to character, with nary a memorable image to be seen. In truth, I entered terminal superhero fatigue roughly two years ago, and The Avengers did not lift me out of that. But I spent two and a half entirely agreeable hours at the cinema, and for an ensemble film of this size to even work on that level is an unlikely success in itself.

Theseus war

Like it or not, 300 changed everything.* After hubris and audience fatigue had caused the ancient epic of the early 2000s to collapse, Zack Snyder's 2007 debut transformed the sword-and-sandal film into its present form. The subgenre of hyper-masculine, deliberately artificial-looking mid-budget pictures is still not dead, despite the fact that it has yet to produce an actual good film apart from its progenitor.

Immortals, alas, isn't the yearned-for exception to the rule. Whatever the intentions of the people behind it, the finished product is a rip-off of 300 by way of Clash of the Titans. Whatever other merits 300, a film I liked, might claim, it was hardly the womb of ideas; and if you're copying a remake, well... Suffice it to say that Immortals follows previous sword-and-sandal films so slavishly that it ends up with no identity of its own to speak of.

Anyway, the film is the story of Theseus (Henry Cavill), though considering the indifference with which the script treats Greek mythology I don't know why they bothered. Theseus is raised in a nameless village by his mother (Anne Day-Jones) and High Chancellor Sutler (John Hurt). When the evil king Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) sends out his armies in search of the fabled Epirus Bow, Theseus is enslaved, but he soon escapes with a ragtag bunch of misfits including the thief Stavros (Stephen Dorff) and the virgin oracle Phaedra (Freida Pinto).

Meanwhile the Olympians, led by Zeus (Luke Evans, who played Apollo in Clash of the Titans), fear that Hyperion may use the Epirus Bow to release the imprisoned Titans, but will not interfere with the affairs of mankind. Theseus finds the bow in a rock, and they take the weapon to Mount (!) Tartarus, where a Hellenic army has gathered to protect the Titans' prison from Hyperion's fanatical hordes. Along the way, they of course manage to lose the bow to Hyperion, setting the scene for an ugly showdown.

The script is quite simply boring as hell, and no-one could blame the actors for failing to breathe any life into it. Considering they use a literal deus ex machina more than once when the heroes find themselves in a pickle, writers Charley and and Vlas Parlapanides were presumably not taking their job too seriously. The story is padded to twice the necessary length, while still being something of a skeleton to hang an actual plot on: there isn't the slightest suggestion of geography or ethnography, real or fictional. One presumes the film is set in some fictionalised version of a country the script refers to as 'Hellenes', presumably because 'Greece' is too vulgar and 'Hellas' is too correct. The one good idea - the fight against the Minotaur, who is a large, brutish human wearing a wire bull's mask here - seems shoehorned in and is lost in a sea of awfulness.

The visuals don't help at all. Sure, the film's notion of Olympus - here, a darkish set populated by gods wearing silly hats - is better than the tinfoil-and-eyeliner extravaganza Clash of the Titans tried to sell us. Director Tarsem Singh conjures up some striking images, but it's all thoroughly ruined by the colour scheme, the very same mix of dark brown and gold with occasional dashes of colour that 300 should by all rights have killed off. That a very narrow aesthetic should dominate a subgenre would be merely irritating; but it really undoes Immortals, for what better way to declare yourself a 300 clone than to ape every detail of that film's look? Let's hope the upcoming Wrath of the Titans at last puts a stake through the heart of the sword-and-sandal film so that one day there'll be worthwhile films about the ancient world.

*Pathfinder, released a month after 300, may be safely ignored, since unlike the Spartan massacre it sank like a stone at the box office.

Grim up north

Liam Neeson is a force of nature. His transformation from historical dramas and kindly-mentor roles to action stardom is the most stunningly successful Hollywood rebranding of recent years. It's not just Neeson's 6'4'' frame and steely blue eyes that help the makeover click. Rough around the edges in middle age, the Irishman is not your average slick action star: he portrays men who have lost someone. That made the otherwise simple Taken, and it goes a long way to explain the success of The Grey.

John Ottway (Neeson) is a hunter tasked with keeping wolves away from an oil drilling site in the Alaskan wilderness. When the operation winds up, the men (mostly) look forward to returning to civilisation, but their plane crashes in the middle of nowhere leaving most dead, with just half a dozen survivors. When grey wolves attack, they decide to make a run for the treeline. The rest of the film is essentially a long chase in which the men are picked off one by one, fighting back with very limited success.

Remember how in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, Adama pretends he knows the way to the Promised Land to give the remnant of humanity hope in a hopeless situation? The Grey doesn't even have that. Ottway - whom we first meet about to blow his head off - doesn't know where they are; he's perfectly aware the group is unlikely to survive, and doesn't pretend otherwise. He makes mistakes that get men killed. There is no destination, no safety for the survivors: there's only running and fighting for as long as they possibly can, not going gentle into that good night.

The advertising would have you believe The Grey is mostly Liam Neeson punching wolves, but not so: it's a philosophical film, all about meaning and fate or the lack thereof. As Diaz (Frank Grillo) points out, the fact that several men survived the plane crash only to be killed by wolves does not bode well for any traditional notion of destiny, while a late-film scene in which Ottway screams defiance mixed with pleading at an empty sky suggests that the filmmakers don't believe in an interventionist God. Even so it's more existentialist than nihilistic as the men find new meanings in their interactions and in the fight itself.

The wolves are created using a mixture of real animals (for close-ups), animatronics and CGI. The latter two look rather poor, in all honesty, so we should be grateful the wolves are rarely shown in detail. Their behaviour is in any case more archetypical than realistic, a physical and philosophical foil to the humans rather than 'real' animals. It's a well-acted, well-shot film: nothing in the career of Joe Carnahan would have led you to suspect he had such a taut thriller in him, but there you have it. Mean, lean and ferocious, The Grey may be more depressing than entertaining, but it makes for a good time at the cinema.

Hyborian twilight

Like its predecessor, Conan the Destroyer didn't set cinema on fire. But in an industry of marginal profits, the film's considerable success at the box office made a third film set in the world of Robert E. Howard all but inevitable. That film, Conan the Conqueror - the long-promised story that shall also be told, of how Conan became a king in his own hand -, never left development hell; and for that we can thank the ignominious failure of the series spin-off Red Sonja.

Red Sonja's production was rushed compared to the two-year gap between the Conan films. I've remarked on the breakneck pace the Italian film industry was capable of in its glory days, and if Richard Fleischer did not quite match Mario Bava's feat of releasing two of his films twelve days apart, it's still worth noting that Conan the Destroyer left cinemas in August 1984 and principal photography for Red Sonja took place that same November, for a summer 1985 release. That sort of pace may be common in low-budget horror, but it's quite something for sword and sorcery, which calls for massive sets, landscape photography and epic battles.

Those three months during the autumn of 1984, however, saw the release of The Terminator. That film's massive success - a worldwide gross of $78 million, comparable to the Conan films but nothing to sniff at considering it had only a third of the sword-and-sorcery films' budget - suggested to Schwarzenegger that he had a legitimate, loincloth-free career ahead of him. When Red Sonja bombed, taking in less than $7m on a $17.9m budget, he abandoned the barbarian genre and became the action/comedy star - and eventually the politician and philanderer - we know and possibly still love today.

When Red Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen) rejects the lesbian advances of the evil queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman), Gedren has her family murdered while Sonja is raped by her soldiers and left for dead before being revived by a spirit voice. (It's never revealed who this spirit - who speaks to Sonja only twice in the course of the film, never in a plot-relevant function - is, which strikes me as one of the tell-tale signs of a script that was butchered and stitched together again by some literary Leatherface.)

Later, somewhere else, a group of priestesses tries to destroy a dangerous talisman, but they're attacked and killed by the goons of Gedren, who wants the power of the talisman for herself to rule the world. Sonja's sister Varna (Janet Agren) manages to flee, but is shot in the back before being rescued by random hero-lord 'Kalidor' (Arnold Schwarzenegger). It remains one of the film's mysteries why it was felt necessary to create a character who is clearly Conan with the serial numbers filed off: legal reasons, perhaps. Anyway, Kalidor messily kills several of Gedren's goons (Red Sonja cranks up the gore to Conan the Barbarian levels again, after the tamer Destroyer) and carries the dying Varna off to Sonja, who has been trained as a mighty warrior by a vaguely Oriental sword-master (Tad Horino).

When Sonja finds out what's going on, she decides to stop Gedren, initally leaving Kalidor who nonetheless, as Tim Brayton puts it, 'just pops in like a wacky neighbor on a sitcom' during the film's first half. She fights and kills the warlord Brytag (Pat Roach) for no discernible reason and encounters Tarn (Ernie Reyes Jr.) and Falkon (Paul Smith), a child prince and his manservant who have lost their kingdom to Gedren's newly powerful forces. Eventually, the four make it through the wilderness, encountering exactly no people, and square off against Gedren and her magic tricks.

Though undeniably very bad - if Schwarzenegger's jest about punishing his progeny by subjecting them to this film were true, it would constitute child abuse - Red Sonja is at least as 'good' as Conan the Destroyer, and feels a lot better by mercifully coming in under ninety minutes. Written by two Britons, Clive Exter (who later wrote no fewer than twenty-three episodes of Jeeves and Wooster, if you can believe it) and George MacDonald Fraser (who co-wrote Octopussy), Red Sonja's plot is as unsteady and aimless as that of the preceding films, but it's a whole lot less padded, avoiding the cosmic tedium of Destroyer's sleepy second half. The worst thing you can say about is that it introduces that shopworn trope, the Annoying Kid; but at least Tarn turns heroic fairly early on.

At the same time, the casting departments must have been mad as a hatter convention, for the sheer number of series veterans re-cast in totally different roles makes viewing a profoundly baffling experience. Besides Schwarzenegger - who, as the film's most bankable star, is billed above the then unknown Nielsen - there's Bergman, who played Conan's true, sadly nameless love in Barbarian, rendered less recognisable by a mask covering half her face, a fairly terrible black wig, and a deliciously hammy performance. The casting of Pat Roach, who played the illusionist Toth-Amon in Destroyer, as the villainous Brytag is less justifiable, especially since his cameo is mere padding. Danish bodybuilder Sven-Ole Thorsen, however, takes the cake, with his third character in as many films.

Schwarzenegger's performance is, well, vintage Arnie: no-one could make a line like 'She's dead. [Pause.] And the living have work to do' sound quite so earnest yet hilarious. But let's consider Brigitte Nielsen for a moment. Twenty-one years old, with no real acting experience, her uninflected, wooden performance is truly horrendous in exactly that oddly fitting Schwarzeneggerian mould, and they're perfectly matched on set. But where the Austrian reached superstardom, Nielsen briefly became Mrs Sylvester Stallone, met Ronald Reagan, appeared in Playboy a couple of times and has lived out the rest of her career on reality television. Just a few weeks ago, Nielsen won the German version of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!.

Richard Fleischer, returning to the director's chair after Conan the Destroyer, largely keeps it steady. At some point, though, he must have decided to prove that a leopard can change its spots and also why it shouldn't, by serving up a couple of absolutely nonsensical first-person shots during sword-fighting scenes. It's in the special effects department that Red Sonja is a real let-down, however. Whether it was time or money, the film resorts to mattes - gorgeously painted mattes, I grant - where John Milius in his Barbarian days would probably have built a full set. Contrast the visuals of Conan the Barbarian with the pretty but totally artificial look of Red Sonja:

The costumes and sets, alas, are the series' weakest by far, preposterous without once looking striking. In one battle scene - I'm not making this up, I swear - one mook wears blue jeans, which I'm fairly sure were not invented in the Hyborian Age. And speaking of battles, the swordfighting - choreographed by stunt coordinator Sergio Mioni, I presume - is noticeably worse than in either of the earlier films. Saddled with a leaden script, poor effects and an extraordinarily lazy Ennio Morricone score, Red Sonja cannot help being terrible; but while not as rousing as the first film, it is at least less infuriating than Conan the Destroyer.

In this series: Conan the Barbarian (1982) | Conan the Destroyer (1984) | Red Sonja (1985) | Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Conan: the LARP years

Films don't have to be spectacular box office successes to inspire legions of knock-offs. Conan the Barbarian doubled its $20 million budget domestically, grossed almost $69 million worldwide and turned Dino de Laurentiis's flagging fortunes around for a few years, but it was by no means an international smash. What attracted the vultures, instead, was Conan's readily replicable formula: wizards, leather-clad strongmen, and fanservice in furs.

In the 1980s, Conan copies like The Beastmaster and the Ator films multiplied on both sides of the Atlantic. The great Italian rip-off machine, no stranger to casting bodybuilders in garish adventures since the 1950s, was particularly reinvigorated by the Styrian's signature role, but Conan's influence was widespread and long-lasting. From Hercules: The Legendary Journeys to - just maybe - The Lord of the Rings, John Milius's film changed history.

It was inevitable that there should be a sequel. 1984's Conan the Destroyer enjoyed healthy box office takings, a fact that directly led Schwarzenegger to team up with Dino de Laurentiis for the following year's ill-fated Red Sonja. It was, however, widely disliked upon release - and rightly so, for Conan the Destroyer is a very bad film. It feels in every way like a made-for-TV knock-off rather than a sequel to Conan the Barbarian.

An unspecified amount of time after the events of the first film, Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his new sidekick Malak (Tracey Walter) are ambushed by goons who try to capture them in nets. After some slaughter, Conan is approached by the enemies' leader, Queen Taramis of Shadizar (Sarah Douglas), with a proposition: he is to escort her niece, Princess Jehnna (Olivia d'Abo), on a mission to retrieve the horn of the sleeping god Dagoth. Learning that this will involve confronting the wizard Toth-Amon, Conan initially refuses: 'What good is a sword against sorcery?' (That's a question which I thought the ending of Conan the Barbarian answered sufficiently, but whatever.) He relents, however, when Taramis promises that she will resurrect Conan's dead love interest Valeria. (In one of the oddities of continuity, Valeria is never named in Conan the Barbarian but regularly name-checked in the sequel.)

Conan accepts, and sets off on his quest - without having sex with Taramis, which I suppose counts as character development - accompanied by Jehnna, Malak, and the captain of Taramis's guard, Bombaata (Wilt Chamberlain). On their way to the evil sorcerer's castle, they pick up the wizard Akiro (Mako) of the first film, as well as the warrior woman Zula (Grace Jones). The party thus complete, they confront the illusionist Toth-Amon, defeat him, and retrieve the jewel that will allow access to Dagoth's jewelled horn.

This is about forty minutes in, and there's enough material left for perhaps fifteen minutes. Bombaata's real task is to kill Conan and abduct Jehnna so she can be sacrificed to Dagoth, but instead of getting on with it the padding kicks in: now our heroes have to travel to a temple where Dagoth's horn is kept, and this gives the filmmakers time to put us through long, gruelling dialogue and 'comic relief' regarding Jehnna's crush on Conan. That slack second half is in precise contrast to Conan the Barbarian, which accomplished its bumbling early on and then gained steam.

Conan the Destroyer feels less like the 1982 film than its knock-offs because, of course, it was penned by knock-off writers. No, not screenwriter Stanley Mann of Damien: Omen II, Firestarter and little else, but the duo who developed the story, Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, who'd previously churned out the animated sword-and-sandal picture Fire and Ice and, in Thomas's case, worked on the television series Thundarr the Barbarian. Their work is inferior to that of John Milius and Oliver Stone in the original film in every respect, but let's start with the villains. Conan the Barbarian had Thulsa Doom, a terrific baddie played to perfection by James Earl Jones. In Destroyer, our heroes are menaced by this guy:

He turns into this when he wants to be extra-terrifying:

Need I say more?

Did Thomas & Conway - or anyone else, for that matter - really leave Conan the Barbarian thinking, 'This was pretty cool, but I wish Conan talked more/had a bunch of sidekicks/made more jokes?' Dino de Laurentiis apparently thought the first film's box office take had been hurt by its R rating, and subsequently worked hard to make Destroyer PG-13 by removing the nudity and gore of the original, but that's not where the problem lies. That would be sticking Conan into a tedious, padded story with limited personal stakes (no real effort is made to convince us of Conan's desire to bring Valeria back), and the sidekicks.

Ah yes! For this film replaces the mostly silent trio of the original (Conan, Subotai, Valeria) with, well, a party. It really does feel like a particularly unimaginative role-playing campaign, although at least they don't all meet in an inn. There are scenes that feel particularly Dungeons & Dragons: the ape-man at Toth-Amon's castle, for example, who can only be defeated by smashing all the mirrors in the room.

Mako as the wizard Akiro is a welcome presence, as is Wilt Chamberlain's Bombaata. I'm on the fence about Grace Jones as Zula: she's awesome, but her archetype - the savage warrior woman - is pretty racist, especially when contrasted with the exceedingly Aryan princess Jehnna. Malak, however, is perhaps the most wretched comic relief character before Jar Jar Binks. Tracey Walter, who's since carved out a very respectable career on television, is visibly miserable and unconvinced by the role. No-one could blame him: it isn't easy for actors to find work. Blame, instead, falls once more to Thomas & Conway, who should have remembered that comic relief is generally intended to be funny (hence 'comic').

Undone by an awful, meandering script, Conan the Destroyer holds up pretty well in other departments. Richard Fleischer, director of The Vikings and other sword-and-sandal pictures of the 1950s and 1960s, does his best to make the film no more boring than it has to be, and he's helped by the director of photography, fellow Vikings alumnus Jack Cardiff (who also shot the 1951 Bogart-Hepburn classic The African Queen). There is, in fact, a whiff of a last hurrah for the old guard surrounding Conan the Destroyer: the sword-and-sandal film of a previous generation going down in a blaze of sleepy non-glory. But in any case, they go down with some honestly pretty pictures:

Conan the Destroyer's budget was less than Barbarian's, and it seems more than once that being unable to afford something like the first film's majestic Mountain of Power they settled for a bunch of people bumbling around cheap-looking sets. But again, it's the fault of the writers who decreed that there must be crystal castles and temples covered in runes. In truth, Pier Luigi Basile's production design is good, great in the case of Queen Taramis's impressive throne room; and the same goes for the costumes, although there are some unconvincing wigs.

The single most disappointing aspect of the whole affair is that composer Basil Poledouris apparently zoned out. Poledouris's score for Conan the Barbarian has become a classic in its own right, but his work on the sequel is just tired. When he isn't plagiarising himself - the music from Barbarian's human soup scene is recycled for Destroyer's offering to Dagoth - it's just decidedly less exciting. Where Barbarian's music screamed epic!, the Destroyer score mutters, 'I was made for Saturday afternoon reruns'.

It's as if they went out of their way to remind the audience that Barbarian was a better film. When Malak says, and I'm quoting from memory here, 'LOOK, CONAN, IT'S A CAMEL, JUST LIKE THE ONE YOU PUNCHED IN THE FACE IN CONAN THE BARBARIAN' it would just be a clunky continuity nod - were it not for the fact that, being kicked off by a character not present in the original film, the scene suggests Conan boasts of his ignoble history of animal abuse to his companions.

If ever the title of a film improved upon Conan the Barbarian, surely it was Conan the Destroyer; but alas, reality proves otherwise. Not only does the promised destruction fail to ensue, we still don't learn how Conan became a king by his own hand, let alone what manner of crown he wore upon a troubled brow. The film's thorough failure is perhaps best summed up when Queen Taramis says,'What is there, Conan? Think!', and her suggestion does not strike us as self-evidently ridiculous. As for Thomas & Conway: fine writers you are - go back to juggling apples.

In this series: Conan the Barbarian (1982) | Conan the Destroyer (1984) | Red Sonja (1985) | Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure

Thirty years on, 1982 self-evidently appears as a peak of genre cinema. What other year, after all, saw a slate that included the likes of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, Blade Runner, First Blood and The Thing? As in any age, few of these masterpieces were recognised as such at the time: not every film could rake in the cash and critical accolades like E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.

None of those films would affect the world quite the way a certain sword-and-sorcery picture would, though. Conan the Barbarian put an Austrian bodybuilder on the road to running the world's eighth largest economy and being the only voice of reason in the Republican Party, and it did so by putting him into a leather loincloth. It's not just Schwarzenegger that got a career boost out of Conan, though; for while it's an exaggeration to say the film put Oliver Stone on the map, there might well have been no Platoon without it.

In the interests of full disclosure I must admit that Conan the Barbarian is one of my favourite films in the world, its heady mix of great and bafflingly awful unmatched in cinema otherwise. What other film aspires to such lofty excellence in some aspects while plumbing the depths of incompetence in others? It was for this reason that I found the 2011 remake so dispiriting. It was just bad, but in none of the gonzo inspired ways of its hallowed predecessor.

Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger as an adult, Jorge Sanz as a boy) is raised by a tribe of Cimmerians who worship Crom, the god of steel. One day, his village is overrun by the forces of sinister warlord Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), who murder his parents (William Smith and Nadiuska, an Italian softcore actress). The tribe's children are put to slave labour pushing a giant wheel in the middle of nowhere. Over time the other children die from starvation and hard labour, and Conan alone grows into ridiculously muscular adulthood.

Eventually, he is trained to fight as a gladiator and becomes a champion in the arena. After being set free by his owner, Conan begins to search for Thulsa Doom. He's pointed in the right direction by a witch (Cassandra Gaviola) who subsequently transforms into a monster and attacks him during sex. Conan teams up with the thief Subotai (Gerry Lopez) and the warrior woman Valeria (Sandahl Bergman), and they're hired by King Osric (Max von Sydow) to retrieve his daughter, who has fallen in with a doomsday cult led by Doom.

The first half of the script is littered with plot holes and baffling non-sequiturs. Why did Thulsa Doom attack Conan's village? What purpose does the massy wheel of toil serve? Why was Conan freed? What's up with the witch? In several instances the voiceover narrator openly confesses his ignorance ('Who knows what they came for?'). Before growing tauter in the second half - when Conan and his crew infiltrate Thulsa Doom's cult at his Mountain of Power -, the story consists of no more than a succession of bizarre and hilarious incidents (Conan finds a sword after stumbling and falling into a cave! Conan punches a camel! Conan exclaims 'Crom!' at random intervals for no discernible reason!)

There's just a lot of weirdness in Conan the Barbarian, things that are not so much bad as totally puzzling. It's compulsively watchable in a so-bad-it's-good way. Take the odd scene in which Conan and Subotai earnestly discuss fictional theology by a campfire, or the mere fact that our hero does not speak at all until twenty-four minutes into the film. Perhaps the intention is to avoid drawing undue attention to Schwarzenegger's thick Teutonic accent, but it doesn't work too well. This, for example, is how Conan and Valeria first meet, while breaking into one of Doom's temples:

CONAN: You are not a guard.
VALERIA: Neither are you. [...] Do you know what horrors lie beyond that wall?
CONAN: No.

This is how Conan meets his one true love (although, tellingly, Valeria isn't named until the credits). More or less all human interactions are howlingly incompetent. Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast in his total inability to act, giving us the sort of convincing performance as a barbarian Jason Momoa never could. He does get a couple of good lines: 'What do you see?', he is asked while peering into a fountain disguised as a priest, and he replies, 'Er... infinity'. Max von Sydow also makes the most of his cameo by chewing on the terrific line 'What daring! What outrageousness! What insolence! What arrogance!... I salute you.'

James Earl Jones seems to be in a different film altogether. His portrayal of a warlord turned charismatic cult leader is absolutely compelling, and the scene in which he demonstrates to Conan that 'flesh' (owning hearts and minds) is more powerful than steel is easily the film's best in an unironic way. Jones's amazing performance leads us straight into the plus column, and to the film's most important asset: it looks great.

 

Yes, Conan the Barbarian had one heck of a budget, and director John Milius splashes every last penny on the screen. The production design is lush, with pretty great costumes - even though Doom's Viking henchmen look oddly like early-eighties metal musicians, with Thorgrim in particular a dead ringer for Iron Maiden's Dave Murray. Duke Callaghan's landscape photography is terrific and atmospheric: heroic is the word I'm looking for, and the same goes for Basil Poledouris's rousing score.

That, then, is the enigma of Conan the Barbarian: it is one part so-bad-it's-good, a laughably acted random events plot; and a second part - the thrilling fight scenes, the production values, the music, James Earl Jones - genuinely great. These halves cannot be separated: they exist together in every scene of the film, and in John Milius's earnest vision they belong together. Conan's idea of a good time is 'to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women', and that is what Milius genuinely believed. If that ideology is wrongheaded, even contemptible, it nonetheless led to a maddening, baffling, and oddly endearing film.

In this series: Conan the Barbarian (1982) | Conan the Destroyer (1984) | Red Sonja (1985) | Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Just Roman around

The ancient epic revived by Gladiator collapsed under its own weight after Alexander, Troy and Kingdom of Heaven bored, bothered and bewildered audiences in 2004-5. It's no coincidence that semi-legendary director Ridley Scott should have been the genre's father as well as its gravedigger: at its height it attracted talent and money of a kind otherwise only seen in comic-book adaptations.

To all appearances the ancient epic was dead, but green shoots soon appeared. 300 proved that classical antiquity could still sell tickets, and the film's basic ingredients - a middling budget, a relatively junior director, over-the-top masculinity - became the building blocks of the revived revived classical picture. No longer epics but mid-range action-adventure flicks, films like Pathfinder, Clash of the Titans and Conan the Barbarian have not yet stopped making money.

Excepting 300, there hasn't yet been a single good film in the subgenre. Sadly Centurion proves no exception to this rule, but the film's thorough failure is especially frustrating considering its potential. Let's quickly run through the factors that ought to make Centurion utterly awesome. It was directed by Neil Marshall, he of The Descent (which, to my enduring shame, I haven't seen); it stars a post-Hunger Michael Fassbender, one of the greatest actors on this earth, as well as Dominic West of The Wire; it's set along the spectacular Caledonian frontier of Roman Britain; and oh yeah, there's the little matter of Olga Kurylenko wearing warpaint. But instead of being great or even diverting, Centurion just flails around wasting its potential for an hour and a half, and then ends.

We open with credits, and what ugly credits they are! As we're treated to a long aerial shot of Scottish mountains (beautiful in themselves), the credits woosh towards us in the most aggressive way possible; and if you like hideous fonts you're in luck, because the monstrosity in which everyone's name is presented will later double as subtitles for the Picts' barbarian tongue. My jaw dropped at the sheer atonal artlessness of this sequence: it looks like a computer game trailer from 1996, and I first assumed Centurion must be designed to be viewed in 3D like those early 80s films in which the credits seem out to stab you in the eye. But no, it's all two dimensions.

Anyway, we now get a shot of a half-naked man running through the snow-covered Caledonian wilderness, hunted by barbarians; in voiceover, he introduces himself as Quintus Dias, a Roman centurion. And with that we're back to sometime earlier, when Dias's fort is overrun in a Pictish surprise attack, all the soldiers are killed and Dias himself is captured and brought before the Pictish king Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen). Some heated words are exchanged, and then Dias escapes offscreen. Got all that? Don't worry if not: everything I've just told you is irrelevant, and any information contained therein will shortly be repeated.

Anyway, Marshall cuts away to York, where General Titus Flavius Virilus (Dominic West) is ordered to take his Ninth Legion north of the border and defeat Gorlacon. He's assigned the mute British scout Etain (Olga Kurylenko) to guide him north of the border. During the expedition, Virilus saves the still-fleeing Dias from the Picts. The cheerful camaraderie does not last long, for like you and I Neil Marshall saw The Last of the Mohicans, wherefore Etain leads the Romans into an ambush where they're slaughtered by the Huron Picts. (On the plus side, West gets to shout 'It's a trap!'.)

All, that is, except for Dias himself and a ragtag bunch of misfit soldiers including Brick (Liam Cunningham). Dias leads these survivors to save their captured general, but their rescue operation is a fiasco: not only do they fail to rescue Virilus, but one of the Roman soldiers kills Gorlacon's son, leading the enraged Pict to swear blood vengeance on the fleeing legionaries. Before long, they're pursued across the harsh mountains of Caledonia by a posse led by the wrathful Etain.

Centurion's most crippling flaw is the absolutely wretched script, penned by Marshall himself. Let's not dwell for too long on the fact that it's relentlessly derivative, playing like a wacky mash-up of The Last of the Mohicans, Apocalypto, and Cold Mountain; nor will it do much good to groan at the plot holes, or the awkward way in which the mysterious disapperance of the Ninth is shoehorned in at the end. (And by 'mysterious disappearance', we of course mean 'failure to appear in the very patchy extant documents we have, although many of its officers do turn up in various places').

No, let's focus on the stuff that leaves the actors stranded. Fassbender's character, for example, has a backstory (his father was a gladiator) that's referred to exactly once and never impacts the plot; most other characters are not granted even that luxury. (Kurylenko gets an origin that opens the film's largest, most amusing plot hole.) As a result, Marshall is guilty of criminal negligence in wasting a very capable cast: I hesitate to use a phrase like 'career-worst performances all round', but anyone who's seen that already legendary dialogue scene between Fassbender and Cunningham in Hunger can only weep.

Surprisingly, Marshall's direction isn't much better than his script. He's so keen on Dutch angles one might think he was filming a Bizarro-World prequel to Battlefield Earth. His action scenes are best described as uninspired (they're shot and edited in the same choppy, disorienting way we see everywhere now). There is a stunningly tasteless zoom shot of Kurylenko screaming that lovingly shows off her tongueless mouth, too; and while this is a low point, it's not alone in this film.

The historical inaccuracies I complain about, but I can live with: I liked Gladiator, after all. I like the fact that the Picts are speaking Scottish Gaelic (although Arianne, played by Imogen Poots, goes for broad Scottish-accented English instead). Sure, it's not quite right: no-one knows for certain whether the Picts spoke a Celtic language, and if they did it was probably more closely related to the Brythonic languages of southern Britain rather than the Goidelic languages of Ireland and Dal Riada - from which Scottish Gaelic is descended - but I appreciate the effort.

That Roman soldiers in films forever use their gladii to slash away at their opponents, rather than viciously stab them in the gut as they should, is by now expected; that the Roman soldiers carry the wrong spears - hastae, thrusting spears used both in the early Republic and in the late Empire, rather than pila, heavy javelins - surprised me a little, but I'll take it as a bold attempt to draw attention to the fact that Roman equipment was not uniform throughout the empire. And I rather adore the film's earthy tone and the use of English regional accents to represent Vulgar Latin.

My tone has, I think, been somewhat harsher than Centurion really deserves: it's not totally incompetent. As a dully entertaining genre flick, it mostly works. The problem is that it's such a disappointment: filmed in the absolutely gorgeous outdoors of Scotland and northern England, the film should look amazing, but cinematographer Sam McCurdy can't hack it. Instead, its wintry landscapes quote the visual vocabulary of King Arthur, surely the most dire film ever made on similar subject matter. Its other flaws - strange fade cuts, the gruff growling that seems to be mandatory for male actors in these films - are forgivable; what makes Centurion especially appalling is the sheer sad, ruinous waste of talent and opportunity it presents.

Hanna; or, Life in the Woods

Goldarn, but it's shiny. Hanna is the ultimate argument for style over substance, and it's a compelling argument indeed. Joe Wright's fourth feature may well be the best-shot film of 2011 not directed by Terence Malick, and its score - given the same level of prominence as Wright on the poster to your left - is used in ways that boggle and delight the mind in equal measure.

If Hanna's successes all lie in gorgeous images and sounds, and not in an engaging story - well, what of it? Any argument based on the admitted flimsiness of the film's narrative risks becoming anti-cinematic if it doesn't acknowledge that meaning is communicated by visuals as much as it is by conventional storytelling. It's clear from Wright's directorial choices, though, that Hanna is not some bold formal experiment. It's just a little underwritten, and that's a darn shame.

Sixteen-year-old Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) lives in the wilderness of northern Finland with her father, Erik Heller (Eric Bana), a spy gone rogue. Having never seen civilisation, she's been raised to hunt, fight, and survive, and Erik has drilled her in languages and elaborate fake backstories. One day, Hanna realises she's 'ready', and Erik, with a heavy heart, allows her to press the big red button that will alert the CIA, from whom they've been hiding all these years, to their presence.

I adore this plot point beyond words. The fact that our heroes have been waiting all these years until they felt ready to start the plot with the push of a button gives the film something deliberate, makes us realise that while we like Hanna and Erik, they're nonetheless skilled and dangerous professionals. At this point, recall, we don't know what it is that they're choosing to unleash.

We soon find out, though. Erik's former handler, Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), sends out her goons, and they nab Hanna without finding Erik. In custody at an underground base, Hanna, underestimated by her captors, kills Marissa's body double (Michelle Dockery) and flees the base in a sequence that (a) is thrilling and exciting and (b) will induce epilepsy, if you're in an at-risk group. On the surface she realises she's in Morocco and must find her way to Berlin, where she's hoping to meet her father.

The score by the Chemical Brothers was heavily advertised, and it deserves the hype. Their neo-psychedelic electronica is pretty much perfect, propulsive while being eerie enough to be more than standard action music; Edvard Grieg's 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' is also used to great effect. It's not just the 'what', though, it's the 'how'. Not since Koyaanisqatsi - an experimental feature without narration, dialogue, or what you'd conventionally call plot - have I seen a film in which the beats of the scenes are dictated by music to such an extent. The action seems to serve the score, not the other way around.

We have Paul Tothill, a longtime Joe Wright collaborator, to thank for that: in his hands, Hanna is a wondrously taut, well-edited film, lapsing into manic rushes at just the right times and achieving serenity in others (the terrific scene in which Hanna, who's never experienced music before watches a Spanish dancer comes to mind). Wright himself is not as self-consciously ambitious as he was in 2007's Atonement, and that's a good thing: he's learnt to resist the temptation of flashiness.

Hanna is a visual wonder thanks to cinematographer Alwin Küchler's, who also shot the equally gorgeous Sunshine (2007). Unlike his earlier work, though, Küchler uses a much more subdued palette here, preferring blues and greens (there is, you'll be unsurprised to hear, a lot of turquoise). He emphasises Ronan's paleness and blue eyes through desaturation and lighting: the girl's almost-white face transports both vulnerability and, at the right times, menace.

You'll recall that around the same time Hanna was released Sucker Punch, another attempt to do substance by style, fell painfully flat. That Hanna does not suffer the same fate we can credit to Ronan, a young actress who really should be a much bigger star. Despite a distracting Teutonic accent she creates Hanna as a full human being - more importantly, a teenage girl. While the 'Hanna doesn't know how to interact socially' scenes are among the least successful, the same stretch of the film sees her reaching out to another girl her age, Sophie (Jessica Barden). The tender ambiguity of their relationship brings out the human longing for intimacy that underlies both friendship and romance in a character that, having grown up alone, has not had the social experience to distinguish the two.

Even as it falls flat in the story department (a final-act twist is both implausible and kind of lame) and suffers from Cate Blanchett's worst performance since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, then, Hanna absolutely succeeds as a character study thanks to Ronan. Its cinematography and use of music are quite unlike anything you'll have seen before: and thus, while by no means flawless, Hanna is one of the most arresting and intriguing films of the year.

The little exploitation gorefest that could

Well, you can't claim they lied.

Well, it's the end of the line: the last of the Grindhouse franchise.* Hobo with a Shotgun is quite a different beast from Grindhouse (2007) and Machete (2010). Where the earlier two films were designed to look like low-budget films, Hobo with a Shotgun is the real deal: shot in Nova Scotia on a budget of $3m (compare Machete's $10.5m), it might as well have been made in 1975. So it's tremendously easy to root for Hobo with a Shotgun, and it helps that the film is good - the weakest of the Grindhouse films, but good nonetheless.

The film begins with the titular nameless hobo (Rutger Hauer) riding into Hope Town, somewhere in Canada, on a freight train. Within minutes he's seen an innocent theatrically murdered by psychotic criminal Drake (Brian Downey) and his sons Ivan (Nick Bateman) and Slick (Gregory Smith).** He at first decides to keep his head down and stay alive in a city run by the vilest criminal scum ever conceived, but gives Slick a no-holds-barred beatdown when the latter attempts to rape Abby (Molly Dunsworth), a pure-hearted streetwalker.

Finding the local police hopelessly corrupt, the hobo decides to fight back, choosing to forego his dream of buying a lawn mower as the first step to his own landscaping business in favour of purchasing a (single-barrel pump-action) shotgun. Now he delivers justice one shell at a time!, dispatching paedophiles, robbers and Drake's agents. Eventually Drake puts out a bounty for hobos, leading to mobs of citizens hunting down the homeless, and - after the hobo and Abby survive an attack by Ivan and Slick - he summons an unspeakable ancient evil to deal with his shotgun-wielding nemesis...

Hobo with a Shotgun the trailer was a one-note joke, relying entirely on its title - and what a title! When I learned there would be a film called Hobo with a Shotgun, I immediately wanted to see it. I was consumed with anticipation for months, then, learning to my distress that no cinema in Nottingham would show Hobo with a Shotgun, had to wait until I could catch it on video. When there's a film called Hobo with a Shotgun, not watching it is not an option. The one thing the filmmakers had to deliver was a homeless man dispensing vigilante justice with his trusty smoothbore, and they come through - even if, like Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun is otherwise bedevilled by a serious shortage of plot.

It's a shortage I won't complain of: after all, The Hills Have Eyes (1977) has about five minutes' worth of plot. Hobo with a Shotgun is not about that, but it is about recreating a particular look and feel. The entire thing is almost bizzarely seventies: take, for example, the film's obsession with urban decay and crime, straight out of Dirty Harry and countless other vigilante films, which feels comical now but was serious business at a time when anxieties about race, gender and social relations were channelled into square-jawed men shooting transgressors on sight. The whole thing even looks like the cheap film stock of 1970s exploitation cinema, courtesy of Karim Hussain's mad cinematographic skills.

And while we're on the subject of 1970s homage: yes, Hobo with a Shotgun is ludicrously gory. More so than Grindhouse, more than Piranha 3D (2010), which seriously tested the limits of my endurance. Hobo with a Shotgun is, I believe, the goriest and possibly the most vulgar film I have ever seen. There are beheadings, disembowellings, heads crushed between bumper cars and, of course, countless loving shots of people torn up by shotgun blasts. In the climax, a character uses their shredded forearm bone as a piercing weapon, all shown in lingering detail. It's hard to take at times, but the gore effects are solidly, deliberately old-timey: there are viscera aplenty, but none that look like the real thing. (Although my knowledge of such matters derives almost entirely from films...)

This excess of bloodletting is accompanied by the most over-the-top villainous performances you're likely to see this year: these people are evil, even if they're theatrically, gleefully so, and they deserve all the shotgunning they get. That's the supporting actors, anyway: Hauer's performances is bafflingly earnest, even subtle. His hobo is an increasingly confused old man heavingly implied to be suffering from dementia of some kind, who avenges the humiliations he suffers by lashing out with his twelve-gauge. ('You can't solve all the world's problems with a shotgun', Abby says. 'It's all I know', the hobo replies.) Is it too much to take Hauer's layered turn as a shotgun-wielding tramp as a comment on a great actor's career playing villains in B-movies?

The quote above is typical of a fantastic script. Beside badass evil lines ('When life gives you razor blades, you make a baseball bat... with razor blades') and laugh-out loud comedic ones (among policemen: 'At least he's only killing the dirty cops.' - 'We're all dirty cops!') there are plenty of deliberate misfires: the hobo tells Abby a rambling, mostly nonsensical parable about bears, while Abby later attempts to rally the crowd with a speech that is frankly incoherent. A special shout-out goes to the hobo's great final line to the villain, which it would be a crime to spoil. He should have remembered not to mess with a hobo... with a shotgun.

*Unless they make Werewolf Women of the SS into a real film, as they should.
**Incidentally, both sons dress a lot like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. It's weird.

In this series: Grindhouse (2007) | Machete (2010) | Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)