Film Review: John Carter

Certificate: 12A (intense sequences of violence and action)
Directed By: Andrew Stanton
Cast: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Mark Strong, Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, Thomas Haden Church, Ciarán Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy, Polly Walker, Bryan Cranston
Budget: $250 million
Runtime: 132 minutes
Trailer: Watch

John Carter (Kitsch) is a world-weary civil war veteran who goes looking for gold in the Apache territories. Upon stumbling into a cave he finds a mysterious amulet which whooshes him off to Mars - or as the natives call it, Barsoom. There Carter quickly discovers he has super strength and can leap a hundred feet into the air. He is taken in by rather primitive green martians called 'Tharks' who are caught in the middle of two warring, red-tinged humanoid factions. These are the tyrannical Zodangans and those of the last free city of Helium. When he saves the beautiful Heliumite Princess Dejah (Collins), pacifist Carter finds himself sucked into the conflict.

This is of course a shamelessly overt parallel to the 1880s Earth from which Carter just arrived, neatly summed up by the Thark leader Tars Tarkas (Dafoe) who says "let red men kill red men until only Tharks remain". The analogy is clear; the Tharks represent the Native Americans while the Zodangans and Heliumites are the Confederate and Union sides of America's civil war. But that's about as deep as this gets. The Tharks aren't being pushed out of their lands and subject to extinction by the red man, rather they're left quite to their own devices. Certainly John Carter's allegory isn't quite as poignant as the one in Cowboys & Aliens, even if it was sanitised for American audiences. While this all sounds pretty simplistic, Andrew Stanton's adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's novel does much to confuse its audience. There's Therns, Tharks, ninth rays and everything else therein which doesn't bode well for artistic coherence. Just what the hell is a ninth ray isolate? Who are these Therns which resemble 'the observers' from Fringe? What is their role in all this? Well, John Carter certainly won't pretend to give you the answers.

Convoluted plots aren't the only problem with John Carter. For starters some of the dialogue is pure cringe. In an appeal to Carter's emotions, Dejah emphatically begs "Will you stay and fight - for Helium?!". Later, rallying his troops, Carter cries "If Helium falls, so does Barsoom!". One can't help but wince. The battle scenes, although pretty, nonetheless feel somewhat lacklustre. They are short and to the point, but not as epic as you might expect from a film this grandiose in ambition and budget. This is particularly the case with the final showdown where one really doesn't get the impression it is the battle to decide the fate of the planet. More so, it looks and plays out like an abridged version of what went down at the end of Flash Gordon. In fact, everything in John Carter seems compressed, which is strange given its punishing runtime. This is overly long without reason, and doesn't make adequate use of the time to develop its plot strands. The result is that it remains desultory, bland and difficult to follow, emitting a peculiarly heavy feeling for a Disney action film. This isn't helped by a script which shies away from wit and lacks the fun of other Disney titles in the same bracket, namely Pirates of the Caribbean.

Indeed, most surprising of all is how extraordinarily violent this is for a Disney movie. You see, I was brought up on a diet of Aladdin and the Lion King where the clear distinction between good and evil was drawn. By the end of the movie, peace and love would always triumph and the few deaths which did happen were portrayed tactfully for their younger audiences. Here, hacking and slashing is common place in a world where there is no pussyfooting around death. In one scene after a tumultuous battle we see the victors piling corpses in a neat little stack. Is this the Disney I remember from childhood? More importantly, is this fitting for a 12A rating? While I still get a warm fuzzy feeling and an invigorated sense of hope and optimism whenever I watch a Disney film from my childhood, it is a wonder if this 'new direction' for the company is going to result in a generation desensitised to violence and shrouded in moral ambiguity.

Perhaps most disappointingly however are the film's two lead roles. Kitsch is pretty impassive for an action hero and borders on vapid. The only emotion you'll get out of him is if you attempt to restrict this man's liberty. Pray you don't, else you'll see a fully grown man morph into a toddler who literally kicks and screams until he gets his way. Despite her sexy muscular thighs, Collins isn't much more enlivening. Princess Dejah is just straight up confused. One moment a brilliant scientist, the next a fearsome warrior heroin not afraid to go balls deep, only to become your traditional ditzy damsel in distress. Unfortunately you can't be all of them, love, and it is this which makes her character unsympathetic altogether. More incredulous is the two's budding romance where within a mere five minutes the two are madly in love. It's a difficult one to swallow, especially as the two are shown to be constantly wary, tiptoeing around one another for fear of intruding on the other's space.

At least John Carter is very visually impressive. This might be expected given that Stanton, the man involved with Pixar greats such as Toy Story and Wall▪E, is at the helm. There's motion-captured Tharks, airships which resembles dragonflies and arresting vistas of a sparkling Helium. If anything else, this is stunning to look at. And it may as well be given its obscene budget of $250million, which exceeds even that of Marvel's The Avengers. However, for all its visual splendour it is everything else which lets John Carter down, which is shown in losses of $200million (£126million) due to poor box-office results. Granted, it hardly has the most awe-inspiring titles but what's more puzzling however is that for all its CGI magnificence it's difficult to tell where else this absurd amount of money has been spent on what is a very niche adaptation, even for the nerd community. John Carter stars names which skirt the periphery of Hollywood, mostly British actors who are notoriously hired based on their relative 'cheapness' vis-a-vis their American colleagues. Indeed, they are hardly paying a cohort of Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies here.

Despite Disney ploughing enough money into John Carter to solve world hunger, the end result falls way short of expectations. At best it might be considered a passable action adventure, but a convoluted storyline, made more confusing by a bunch of absurd names do much to undermine what is otherwise an aesthetically pleasing film.

Film Review: Johnny English Reborn

After a serious transgression in Mozambique former MI7 agent Johnny English (Atkinson) is stripped of his knighthood and booted out the service, taking refuge in a Tibetan monastery. When British intelligence (now sponsored by Toshiba) gets wind of a plot to assassinate the Chinese premier, the source won't talk to anyone but English. Consequently head spy 'Pegasus' (Anderson) reluctantly pulls the blundering agent out of exile, sending English on a mission which soon unearths a conspiracy involving interlocking keys, mind-control drugs and rogue elements in the CIA, KGB and MI7 itself. Cue a series of monumental mishaps, inadvertent triumphs and general farcical ongoings as Mr Bean meets James Bond.

Was this sequel really needed? Probably not, although after the reasonably effusive and somewhat charming original it was never really in doubt. Despite being incredibly formulaic to the point where you could see the jokes a mile off, the first effort actually did quite well, pulling in $160million worldwide. The problem with Johnny English Reborn however is that it hasn't really moved on from those times, in fact regressing into something far more trite than before. And, like with most sequels, this is far inferior to the original which spawned it. Yet there's no reason to suggest it won't appeal to similar numbers of undiscerning Anglophiles.

This is your classic SNAFU (Situation Normal: All Fucked Up) scenario. But what's surprising here is that the plot takes a far more serious tone than in the first where John Malkovich tried to usurp the throne and turn Britain into a giant Alcatraz. In Reborn something far more austere is at stake in the assassination of the Chinese premier, although the motive for this remains unclear throughout. Allusions to real world black-ops projects such as MK-ULTRA and winks to the Manchurian Candidate scenario ground this more than it should have. While there's never any doubt that this is a comedy an enduring stiffness surrounding the subject matter permeates proceedings. This serves to diffuse Atkinson's buffoonery in many ways, whilst simultaneously managing to make the plot far more incredulous than it already is.

When the gags do come you will find them largely prosaic. From a chase sequence involving an electric wheelchair to a running joke of mistaken identity and granny bashing which is already overplayed the first time round, there is a lacking of freshness. In fact the funniest moment can be found in the film's trailer as English fails to get to grips with his hydraulic office chair. Further, there are logic loops abound. In one sequence for example English picks up his car from a London sink estate only to arrive in Switzerland in what the film eschews as a mere couple of hours later. Now I've seen some fantastical spy cars in movies before, but instantaneous transportation across Europe seems a bit much. Admittedly it would be unfair to blame the film's shortcomings on Atkinson, a man whose comic timing and physical comedy a proven quality over the years. Moreover Reborn's problems stem from a dull structure and horrible pacing, factors which serve to inhibit Atkinson's talents.

The rest of Reborn's characters don't seem to fit in much either. Suave super spy Ambrose (West), there to make English look even more ridiculous, remains seldom effective at his task while sidekick agent Tucker (Kaluuya) borderlines on believability. Likewise Rosamund Pike, who played a love interest in similar Bond parody Die Another Day (ok, not a parody, but it may as well have been), is uneasy at best in this one. The only character that is truly spot on is that of the British Prime Minister (Moore), a David Cameron figure who displays the same qualities of a charismaless, ductile Eton boy with a floppy haircut like something out a nineties boy band.

Above all this is not a particularly ambitious film, displaying no desire to improve upon its predecessor. As such Johnny English Reborn feels lazy. Perhaps it's time to live and let die on this franchise. Certainly it would be mission impossible to try and resuscitate it for a third outing.