Film reviews: Dinner For Schmucks | The Last Exorcism | Black Dynamite | 22 Bullets | Bonded By Blood

Published on Thursday 2 September 2010 21:02

Friday's releases

Dinner For Schmucks (PG)

Directed by: Jay Roach

Starring: Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Zack Galifianakis, Jemaine Clement

**

Proving you can have too much of a good thing, Dinner for Schmucks serves up a veritable smorgasbord of comic talent (and David Walliams) to little effect in this conflicted morality tale about betraying your better instincts to get ahead. Paul Rudd stars as Tim, an over-extended financial analyst who discovers his new promotion is dependent on his participation in a cruel monthly ritual, in which the company's top execs get together to mock the socially afflicted. If he wants the job, he has to bring along a suitable guest to the titular dinner.

Enter Barry (Steve Carell), a maladroit tax inspector and amateur taxidermist, whom Tim invites after hitting him with his car, little realising Barry will insinuate himself into his life in creepier and more destructive ways than he can possibly imagine. Sadly, aside from the odd flash of surreal humour from supporting players Zack Galifianakis and Jemaine Clement, the gags mostly fall flat, while Carrel is too deranged and Rudd too sympathetic for the premise to really work.

The Last Exorcism (15)

Directed by: Daniel Stamm

Starring: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Louis HerthUm

***

PITCHED squarely at Paranormal Activity fans, The Last Exorcism uses the ubiquitous found-footage mock-doc device to deliver its moderately entertaining scares before running out of ideas and descending into the usual shaky-cam blur of occult rituals and bloodshed. That's too bad, because things start off reasonably well thanks to a plot that hinges on a cynical Baptist preacher (Patrick Fabian) determined to expose the religious ritual for the smoke-and-mirrors sham that it is.

Inviting a film crew to document him while he performs a fake exorcism on the daughter of a God-fearing family convinced she's been possessed by the devil, his plan is to show the ritual up as nothing more than an elaborate placebo designed to keep the devout in the grip of their faith. Naturally, things don't go exactly to plan and for a while director Daniel Stamm ratchets up the tension, with a creepy air of ambiguity surrounding the family's motives for hiring our hero. Sadly, this ends up seeming more accidental than planned as the film betrays its limited ambitions by cribbing the final act from a myriad sources.

Black Dynamite (15)

Directed by: Scott Sanders

Starring: Michael Jai White, Arsenio Hall

***

THIS blaxploitation parody is a bit of a curio – a riff on a genre more than three decades old that's already been parodied and homaged to death. On the plus side, Scott Sanders' loving tribute to the jive-ass cinema of the 1970s certainly scores points for attention to detail – the collars, cuffs, the flares, the hair and the wah-wah soundtrack are all dead-on. He also gets the best out of limited resources: the tongue-in-cheek cornball karate action is surprisingly tight and Sanders makes an entertaining virtue out of some of the so-bad-its-good incompetence of his inspirations. But the joke soon wears thin.

Unlike Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's unfairly maligned Grindhouse, there's no attempt here to reclaim the genre and do something interesting with it. The tongue-in-cheek script relies a bit too heavily on our knowledge of its forebears without supplying enough top-drawer gags of its own, though the eponymous hero (played by Michael Jai White) is certainly fun for a while. A CIA-trained martial arts master out for vengeance following the murder of his brother, he affords the film plenty of opportunities to shaft Shaft with gags about his lady-killing prowess and ability to see in everything an elaborate conspiracy by The Man to keep the "brothers" down.

22 Bullets (18)

Directed by: Richard BERRY

Starring: Jean Reno

**

LUC Besson's former whipping-boy Jean Reno returns to the world of mobsters and assassins as a blood-on-his-hands member of the Marseilles mafia whose attempt to atone for his past by becoming a family man is thwarted by an assassination attempt that leaves him with the titular ammunition cache in his body.

Though based on a true story (Reno's character, Charly, is inspired by Marseilles mob kingpin Jacky Le Mat), this is run-of-the mill disposable mainstream action film-making, with few surprises, but plenty of bang-for-your buck as Reno's old-school mobster clich (he listens to classical music, adheres to a code of honour, loves his kids) unleashes hell to avenge his shooting.

Token attempts to add depth come in the form of discussions about the morality of murder, which Charly has with both his nemesis (Zad Merad) and the line-crossing cop (Marina Fos) looking to settle scores of her own by helping him in his revenge. Reno is reliably charismatic, if not memorable, a fact reinforced by writer/director Richard Berry's generic shooting style.

Bonded by Blood (18)

Directed by: Sacha Bennet

Starring: Tamer Hassan, Vincent Regan, Dave Legeno, Terry Stone

*

AFTER more than a decade of dismal British gangster films, the genre shows no signs of improvement with Bonded by Blood, a film based on the true story of the 1995 Rettendon murders, in which three London drug lords were found shot to death in a Range Rover. The story has been fictionalised twice before in the 2000 film Essex Boys and the despicable 2007 effort Rise of the Footsoldier, but the new film still has none of the dramatic weight, insight or artistry required to make this (debatably) more authentic version a more sophisticated and valid movie experience.

Instead it runs through the same third-rate Goodfellas shtick beloved of the genre with a gaggle of third-tier British actors – Tamer Hassan, Vincent Regan, Terry Stone – relishing the opportunity to let rip in big scenes that require them to pop veins in their necks while liberally deploying the c-word and being abusive to any scantily clad women in their vicinity.

Told in flashback, the film pores over the ins and outs of their criminal enterprise with pathetic attempts to make wider sociological points about the legacy of Thatcher. It's all fantastically boring stuff.