Film reviews: The Raid | 2 Days in New York | Even the Rain | A Gang Story

The Raid (18)

Directed by: Gareth Evans

Starring: Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian

*****

There have been so many attempts to make irony- drenched throwbacks to the idealised glory days of 1970s and 1980s B-movie action cinema that the arrival of a genuinely scuzzy, down-and-dirty fight flick like The Raid can’t help but feel more authentically vital than all the showboating pretenders.

With its streamlined plot (police Swat team fights its way out of drug lord-ruled high-rise, kill-crazy chaos ensues), and its determination to define characters through ruthless action and little else, Welsh director Gareth Evans’ low-budget, Indonesian produced thriller may not pretend to be anything other than a fast-and-furious martial arts film, but it’s a breathlessly orchestrated, intensely realised and inventively made martial arts film.

With Indonesia very much the punky upstarts in the Asian action arena, Evans makes a virtue of the budget limitations and lack of production values and puts all the energy on screen via a series of incrementally more violent and brutal action set-pieces that he puts together with just enough narrative momentum to keep us involved in the plight of his virtuous rookie cop hero (played by Iko Uwais). The result is a film that works like a great horror, with every cracked head, snapped limb and ripped jugular greeted with involuntary “Oofs”, “Ows” and cathartic laughter.

2 Days in New York (15)

Directed by: Julie Delpy Starring: Julie Delpy, Chris Rock

*** JULIE Delpy’s charming 2007 directorial debut 2 Days in Paris was very much a breezier, fluffier flipside to the melancholic romanticism of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. It should come as no surprise then that this follow-up attempts to be similarly kooky and irreverent.

Set five years on, it catches us up with Parisian photographer Marion (Delpy) in her adoptive city of New York. Though no longer together with Jack (sadly, Adam Goldberg doesn’t feature), Marion does have a child with him, whom she’s raising with the help of current long-term beau Mingus (Chris Rock), an Obama-obsessed talk radio host. As before, the film focuses on the culture clash that erupts when Marion’s partner is forced to confront her crazy family; this time, though, the onus is on Mingus to welcome them into his home for a couple of days as they arrive in New York for Marion’s new art exhibition.

Alas, where the original came alive thanks to amusing observations on modern coupledom and an insider’s view of its titular city, 2 Days in New York feels messier and less focused.

Delpy is still fairly adorable, but the humour is too broad and the relationship insights too generic to inspire any great love for it.

Even the Rain (15)

Directed by: Icíar Bollaín

Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Luis Tosar, Juan Carlos Aduviri

THE ethics of epic filmmaking in Third World countries is put under the spotlight in Even the Rain, a film tracking the impact of a Terrence Malik/Werner Herzog-style film about Christopher Columbus on the dirt-poor Bolivian locals hired as extras.

Set against the backdrop of the real-life uprising caused by the Bolivian government’s price-hiking attempt to privatise the water industry in 2000, it stars Gael Garcia Bernal as Sebastian, the film-within-the-film’s idealistic and visionary young director whose determination to shatter myths and expose the imperialistic tendencies of Columbus and the Conquistadors blinds him somewhat to the real life struggles going on all around him.

His pragmatic, penny-pinching producer Costa (Luis Tosar) is more acutely aware of the ironies, however, so it’s a little odd that Even the Rain’s director Icíar Bollaín and her screenwriter, frequent Ken Loach collaborator Paul Laverty, are not. Presenting the exploitation parallels with well-meaning if overly schematic bluntness, the hectoring tone they deploy undermines a film that chastises the movie industry for kowtowing to commercial demands while itself focusing on how exposure to real-life oppression mainly affects characters that can be played by world cinema box-office draws such as Bernal and Tosar.

A Gang Story (15)

Directed by: Olivier Marchal

Starring: Gérard Lanvin, Tchéky Karyo, Daniel Duval

** FRENCH cop-turned-director Olivier Marchal (the man behind 36 and Mr 73) has a tendency to make clunky action pictures that play like plodding homages to the greats of modern American crime cinema – and so it proves with his latest film, A Gang Story.

Loosely based on the memoirs of Edmond “Mamon” Vidal, it’s another flash-back heavy, rise-and-fall tale of violence and betrayal, one that traces Vidal’s time as a daring leader of a crew of bank robbers in the 1970s and his efforts to remain loyal to his best friend and right-hand-man (Tchéky Karyo) as he becomes a liability.

Marchal doesn’t have the dramatic chops to subvert such Mean Streets/Godfather-riffing clichés to make them interesting (voice-over reflections kill any momentum almost before the film has a chance to get going). Nor does he have enough cinematic flair to make the boringly excessive violence – scored, of course, to well-known pop hits of the period – feel like anything more than padding.

And to top it off, Vidal is so drearily written that, despite the best efforts of Gérard Lanvin, he’s not even a charismatic bad guy. In the wake of dynamic French crime cinema such as A Prophet and Mesrine, this is retrograde, irrelevant stuff.

Iron Sky (15)

Directed by: Timo Vuorensola

Starring: Julia Dietze, Christopher Kirby, Peta Sergeanta, Udo Kier

LIKE Machete before it, this much-hyped Nazis-on-the-Moon exploitation flick remains better as a gonzo idea for a movie than an actual movie.

Set in the not-too-distant future, it revolves around a group of Nazis who, having colonised the dark side of the Moon in 1945, decide that the time is right to return to Earth after a sabotaged American lunar expedition furnishes them with the technology – a smart phone – to make it feasible.

The gag, such as it is, is that in the interim period, a new generation of Nazis, ignorant of the full extent of their predecessor’s Earth-bound atrocities, have been raised to believe that they’re genuinely good while in 21st century America, things have become so extreme (the president is clearly meant to be Sarah Palin) that a returning delegate of evil space Nazis (headed by Udo Kier) actually fits right in.

Finnish fanboy filmmaker Timo Vuorensola is no comic genius, though, and Iron Sky plays more like a dull cross between Allo ‘Allo! and Star Trek than a subversive, Starship Troopers-esque satire on fascism.

In its favour, some of the production design is actually quite impressive given the crowd-sourced budget, but it’s not so impressive that it can distract from a one-joke script that’s been badly executed.

Film reviews: The Raid | 2 Days in New York | Even the Rain | A Gang Story | Iron Sky