THE WALK
Given that Man On Wire —James Marsh’s documentary re: French highwire-artist Philippe Petit, who walked on a wire between the two towers of World Trade Center in 1974— only came out in 2008, the notion that Robert frickin’ Zemeckis has decided to turn it into a narrative movie is hardly inspiring. And for its first half, his adaptation, The Walk, is genuinely lamentable; giving us, for some reason, Joseph Gordon-Levitt bad-wiggin’ and frog-accentin’ his way through a lead turn depicting Petit as a Benigni-esque Clown With A Dream.
This introductory half is filled with endless iterations of JGL saying, with Clouseau-esque élan, “This is my dream! Everyone thinks I’m crazy!” Inevitably, he cobbles together a collection of ‘accomplices’, though screenwriter Christopher Browne doesn’t bother to turn any of them into actual characters. They’re the supporting players in this Single-Male-Hero tale, which soon becomes a standard-issue heist movie: a plan made, a training montage staged, disguises donned, and security eluded.
But, finally, for its final act, Gordon-Levitt ends up on the roof of one tower, and steps onto the wire him and his crew has suspended between the two. And, finally, you see what Zemeckis was thinking, and The Walk justifies its existence. Throughout, the director uses the 3D format to put audiences in the shoes of its hero. Like, literally: the lens so often staring at his feet as they tread along various wires. And, eventually, when Gordon-Levitt is scampering upon a wire 110 storeys above the ground, Zemeckis uses this now-familiar perspective to make viewers the Man On Wire, walking through the clouds, sure death looming at the ground’s long-way-down.
Zemeckis’s camera dances around the towers, its wire-walker; creating a sense of scale that not only justifies the film’s existence, but its use of 3D. This makes The Walk a film that, when seen in IMAX 3D, has a culminating spectacle that’s plenty to recommend it by. Even if you have to wait 90 cheesy minutes to get there.
BURNT
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If Aloha didn’t give you enough Bradley-Cooper-Plays-A-Smug-Tom-Cruise-Esque-Cockhole-Who-Gets-A-Second-Chance-(For-Love!), then here comes Burnt, FKA Adam Jones, FKA Chef, STBKA: Fuck Off, Already. For all those who love the clichés of chefs as foul-mouthed, booze-guzzling, hard-living, dick-swinging, hyper-macho blowhards, Cooper’s Adam Jones fits the bill. But with three years of sobriety behind him, he’s come to London to have another crack at Michelin Star’d immortality.
And, so, he gets the gang back together, a top-shelf European cast —Daniel Brühl, Sienna Miller, Riccardo Scamarcio, Omar Sy, Sam Keeley— brought on board for a shiny new reno’d restaurant erected for the glorification of Cooper’s massive ego. With Matthew Rhys as his old rival, and Emma Thompson, Uma Thurman, Lily James, and 2015’s everywhere-woman Alicia Vikander in Cooper-orbiting bit-roles, the ensemble is loaded. And John Wells, last seen directing the abhorrent August: Osage County, delivers all the shots of immaculate platings and food-prep montages that food-on-screen films demand.
But both cast and director are stuck with a script (by Steven Knight) that totally misjudges the audience’s assumed sympathies towards its redemption-seeking anti-hero. Cooper once played a semi-fictionalised take on Anthony Bourdain in the already-forgotten alt-sitcom Kitchen Confidential, but here, I guess, he’s supposed to be more Gordon Ramsay: screaming, belittling, and bullying his suffering underlings. In Whiplash, the dude who did this was painted as a sadistic villain; in Burnt, he’s just a Man With A Dream.
Eventually —through kissing Miller, being beaten by goons, falling of the wagon (at the end of the second act!), and having Rhys admit that Cooper’s actually the greatest chef in the world— our motorcycle-riding, sunglasses-and-leather-jacket-wearing, rakishly-stubbled and oh-so-troubled male learns to be less of a detestable cunt; learns what it means to not treat everyone around you like shit; and gets all that he desires. And for that we’re supposed to be truly thankful.
LEGEND
Wait, Legend? Seriously? Has the world no respect for disastrous mid-’80s Ridley Scott/Tom Cruise/Mia Sara/unicorn fantasy joints? What makes the already-claimed title of Brian Helgeland’s Legend so uninspired is that it has no resonance with what the film actually is.
This Legend is set in the Mythical Kingdom known as Swingin’-’60s London: a mixed-bag mixture of row-houses, vintage cars, and CGI skylines. Around its pre-gentrified East End struts Tom Hardy, twice over. Pulling double-duty, Hardy is playing both halves of twin gangsters the Kray brothers; each offering him the opportunity of looking great in a suit. Hardy 1 is the hand-shaking, palm-greasing, nightclub-owning, debonair ladies-man. Hardy 2 is the “loose cannon”, fresh from a psychiatrically-monitored stay in the clink, and liable to Go Crazy at the drop of a fedora.
Hardy 2, with a lower-teeth denture in place and saliva flying each time he yells, enters the official ‘Tom Hardy And His Hilarious Accents’ canon. It ain’t Locke’s Connery sing-song, but, gladly, there’s times in which all his Actorly affect —the facial-positioning, the false-teeth, the jaw-clenching— means that his garbles get almost Baney.
Unless you find the concept of gangsters sitting down for tea with their mums hilarious, Legend can only be recommended for those who love Hardy; those, indeed, who love Tom Hardy And His Hilarious Accents. His dual-role star-turn seems the only reason the film exists; and certainly the only one that has it playing in local cinemas. Promo may boast that the film has “the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of L.A. Confidential” behind it, but that’s a, shall we say, very selective reading of Helgeland’s history; which also involves The Postman, The Order, the Russell Crowe Robin Hood, etc.
Here, Helgeland fails to corral the contrary impulses —gangster-movie, zany comedy, tragic love-story— written into his restless script. Attempting to stitch them together, he has Eltham’s Own Emily Browning, as Hardy 1’s wife-to-be, narrating the film from just beyond the fourth-wall. This might be an interesting approach if her narration weren’t so riddled with clichés, or, moreso, if her character was interesting at all. Instead, Browning’s stuck playing another handwringin’ housewife who, when wooed by the charismatic crim, goes from footloose and frocked-up to pill-poppin’ and pestering, always nagging Hardy 1 to stand up to Hardy 2, to Go Straight.
When not trying to give the film ‘heart’, Helgeland is most smitten with depicting horrifying hand-to-hand ultraviolence as a form of absurdist comedy. With a kind of puppy-dog-ish enthusiasm, director and cast chart noggins bonked, heads butted, geezers glassed, ears bitten, balls squeezed, and prisoners tortured; the giddy energy and rapid editing having a boy-ish quality, as if delighted with its own sense of transgression. This comedy crests when Hardy turns on Hardy; star chewing the furniture, twice-over, as their fisticuffs trash everything and everyone in sight. This fight is both painted as both funny —brothers being brothers!— and tragic; the twins destined to drag each other down to their deaths, the fate of each Hardy sealed long before their True Story was brought to screen.
CRIMSON PEAK
Where Guillermo del Toro’s amazing opening-sequence to yet another Simpsons Halloween special showed, once again, how deep his genre fandom goes, the Mexican director’s ninth feature, Crimson Peak, is no homage to horror-movies. Instead, it’s a shrine to literature: to the Gothic novel, its tragic romance and ghostly horror; the spectre of Daphne Du Maurier lingering over this haunted-house ghost story.
In an early-20th-century of industrious men in hats and gossipy women in frocks, Mia Wasikowska plays an ill-fated American lass —part headstrong heroine, part Pollyanna— who falls in thrall to handsome Tom Hiddleston’s down-on-his-luck English gentleman; a gentleman who seems quite, shall we say, attached to his glowering, piano-playing sister Jessica Chastian. When Wasikowska’s bearded father dies in Mysterious Circumstances, she gets hitched and hauls ass to a Gothic Manor on the moors, where underfoot the clay soil is a blood red. And, with the house sinking, how this blood red seeps up through the floors, whilst snow falls through the broken roof...
Crimson Peak proceeds as a work of flouncy production design, colourised-looking colour-grading, haunted-house tropes (so many creaks and groans!), and on-the-nose symbolism. Chastain, in an early piece of potted foreshadowing, talks about how, back home, Black Moths feed on yellow butterflies, and before long we’re back home, villainess in all black, Wasikowska in a bright yellow frock, verily fluttering about. There’s also a bit of cod-self-reflexivity where Wasikowska is, therein, a would-be novelist, saying things like “characters talk to you, they make choices, they transform!” right when Hiddleston’s commitment to being the Evil Rake is wavering.
Both the Look-Symbolism! writing and the hyper-stylisation look to draw attention to del Toro’s own sense of accomplishment. But, even if you think it’s an accomplished piece of entertainment-construction, it’s a hard film to actually recommend. Especially given that you can’t quite imagine who the film is for.
There’s not enough winking nods and gruesome gore to play to aging genre nerds; nor does it hold any appeal —nor, indeed, any for-real ‘scares’— for the horror film’s natural audience, the teenager (even if del Toro tries to convince you that the wax cylinder was the audio-selfie of 100 years yore). In the end, Crimson Peak feels like a period-piece doused in a lurid colour palette; the few terrible-looking CGI ghosts and gruesome stabbings less interesting than its collection of dresses.
