ROCKNROLLA (15) ***
Director: Guy Ritchie
Running time: 114 minutesIF TELEVISION'S Top Gear was to make a movie, it would probably be something like RocknRolla, and I don't think this observation would pain Guy Ritchie, o
r indeed Top Gear. Both parties adore geezers, over-designed gewgaws and tuff-talking voiceovers; and both go all fidgety around anything that seems a bit gay.
After the kicking administered to both Revolver and Swept Away, Ritchie has opted for a return to his "alright lads" criminal ways in a film with a massive cast of characters, each of whom are allowed one distinctive feature. There's Tom Wilkinson's Lenny, a balding old guard London kingpin, who is owed a serious amount of money by hunky One Two (Gerard Butler), and is negotiating a major deal with a football-club-owning billionaire (Karel Roden). He's called Obomavich by the way, and I'm afraid the satire doesn't get any more subtle – junkie pop star Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell), for instance, is first seen wearing a jaunty hat, a bit like junkie pop star Pete Doherty.
This is Ritchie hoping that we may confuse this clutter for cleverness. Quid is managed by a couple of American club owners (Jeremy Piven and rapper Ludacris), who add nothing to the story except bloat, while One Two has a couple of sidekicks that include Tom Hardy, the source of the gay subplot that makes his mates go "eeew".
I'd like to put in an honourable mention for Mark Strong as Lenny's solid right hand man, but I think we're all getting a bit tired of names now, so let's wrap this up with Thandie Newton, who brings her extraordinary beauty to the most thankless part in a Ritchie movie; a woman. As a hard-boiled crooked accountant who uses Butler's dumber small-time crook to rob her client, she's up to her neck in cheekbones and up to her cheekbones in deception. Newton brings the part some attitude, but not the scintillating one-liners needed to back up this identity. "I like your shoes," calls out One Two at the end of another successful meeting. "By next week you'll be able to buy a pair of your own," she retorts. They're like a remedial school Bogart and Bacall.
RocknRolla is filmed with an over-caffeinated flash that is close to adrenalised camp, with everything art-directed to the point of insanity. If there's a secret meeting to be had, it'll be in a big echoey art space, where people three blocks away can hear your secret plan. And if you have a druggie rocker who lives in a twilight world, you can bet he'll hole up in a place where shafts of light will locate the impressively ripped torso that every dissolute junkie can build up despite the distinct absence of a gym card.
Some day I really do hope that someone will let Guy Ritchie make Bond movies or a new Ocean's picture, so that we can properly enjoy his punchy inventiveness without fretting that we're watching an big, daft adult cartoon. Ritchie's exchanges are never clever enough, and energy alone can't drive a film when it's loaded down with too many characters and locations.
The film's best work is in the editing room, where Ritchie can turn his stiff genre riffs into kinetic quips. Otherwise, it's all a bit of a derivative Mock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, dutifully covering the same territory of guns and chicks in a propulsive though morally suspect gangster world. It doesn't stop the film being fun, but it does underline that Ritchie is a stylist rather than a thinker. His grasp of London's property scene seems especially shonky, although it may be just Ritchie's bad luck that a film predicated on spiralling development profits has been released just as house prices are nose-diving. I'm also unconvinced by Lenny's chosen method of disposing of unwanted obstacles; namely, feeding them to the crayfish. Wisely, we're never shown these crayfish in action. I may be wrong, but I'm thinking erosion is probably a quicker ending than death by crayfish.
On general release from Friday
PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (15) **
Director: David Gordon Green
Running time: 111 minutes BE PREPARED to revisit many of the most recognisable House of Judd Apatow obsessions previously exhibited in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Don't Mess With The Zohan, Knocked Up and Superbad – such as young men who display all the smarts of a bear with its head stuck in a honey pot, inventive swearing, the romantic disparity between a chunky, committed couch potato and some hyper, sharp-featured, middle-class beauty, and a film running time that could easily lose 20 minutes.
True to form, the heroes of Pineapple Express are not one but two men who live to smoke pot and not do much of anything else. Exhibit one is Dale (Seth Rogan), who spends his days delivering subpoenas to unsuspecting members of the public, or visiting his 18-year-old girlfriend during breaks in her classes. She's more mature than he is, and since he's 25, he knows this is probably inappropriate. When he isn't stoned. So he keeps this unease at bay by regularly visiting his best friend and pot dealer Saul (James Franco), who one day offers him some of the most exclusive marijuana in the world, Pineapple Express, a variety so famously rare that smoking it is "like killing a unicorn".
It also kick-starts a radical change to their direction-free lives. While sitting in his car enjoying his purchase, Dale witnesses a murder by a top drug lord (Gary Cole) and a corrupt female cop (Rosie Perez) and accidentally drops the remains of his joint. Since Dale and Saul can both be traced through the rarity of the blend, they go on the run and are forced to forge a real relationship while trying to avoid being killed in the process.
The warm and lazy 'bromance' that develops between the two leads is probably the only part of the film that holds focus, and the movie is shrewd enough to sketch out a point about the depth or shallowness of the cordial relationship between a dingbat dealer and his clients.
Franco is perhaps best known from the Spiderman movies, as a rich former friend with a brooding grudge against Peter Parker, but he's almost unrecognisable here, radiating a double-glazed bonhomie that renders some of the film's lamer conceits at least likeable, even though you may still have a small intake of breath at Dale and Saul's desperate adventures selling dope to 13-year-olds. Rogen is best known for his breakout performance in Knocked Up and has somehow parlayed boorishness into charisma. The wrapping helps. He may talk like a navvy but he's built like the big friendly one from the Hair Bear Bunch, and makes it easy to accept that an 18-year-old might fall for a guy like that, even if that girl would probably/definitely not be you.
"Pot makes bad movies better," says the leading man of this shambolic, not-quite-finished-and-nobody-cares movie, and while I stayed clean and sober throughout Pineapple Express, maybe it wouldn't hurt when the movie before you has such a stoned sensibility. Like many a pot story it also gets a bit messy before the end too. Who knows why the film decides to subvert its own mellow vibe with a queasy comedown where half the cast ends up bleeding from an inordinate number of bullet wounds? It certainly adds a new element in the Judd Apatow to-do list, but watching someone getting shot in the back of the head is enough to kill anyone's buzz.
On general release from Friday
ANGEL (15) ***
It is easy to caricature movie costume dramas, either as a nostalgic nirvana of crime-free streets, domestic bliss, innocence and prosperity, or as a time of prudery and prejudice. Ultra-hip François Ozon's Angel gives the turn-of-the-century England the full florid Douglas Sirk treatment in his melodrama about a selfish novelist (Atonement's Romola Garai), who lives a life that makes Scarlett O'Hara look like a model of chaste modesty. War, betrayal, injury, childbirth and several other prickly emotive trimmings all fail to impact on Angel – or the viewer – despite the film's hyperventilating emotional tone.
On release from Friday
BOY IN STRIPED PYJAMAS (12A) **
Set during the Second World War, the young son of a concentration camp prisoner meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own. Odd that Auschwitz security is so laid back that a child prisoner could make a weekly date with the commandant's son, above, without anyone noticing, but that's only one of the problems in this sincere but clumsily fashioned film.
On general release from Friday
EDEN LAKE (18) ***
Eden Lake is a horror film with a moral: no matter how vile the murderers, the moviemaker calling the shots is worse. In this case, James Watkins shapes a British hoodie horror where Kelly Reilly and Michael Fassbender are a couple whose romantic lakeside camping mini-break is disrupted by feral youths, including Thomas Turgoose (Somerstown and This Is England). Where Eden Lake goes next is meant to be relevant, shocking or infuriating – or at the very least really entertaining. The editing is spare, and the plotting is clever and suspenseful, but after The Strangers, The Ruins and Donkey Punch in the past four weeks, we know these people are just bait, and the film has no choice but to become another survival-of-the-fittest exercise.
On general release from Friday
JAR CITY (15) ***
Sombre Icelandic police blockbuster by the gifted actor-writer-director Baltasar Kormákur (The Sea) which could be a chillier, more cerebral Taggart, although solving a murder on an island of 300,000 might seem less onerous than the burden placed on Maryhill's finest. The pleasures here lie chiefly with homicide detective Erlendur (Ingvar E Sigurdsson), and his fondness for what appears to be traditional Icelandic cuisine. "The usual?" asks his fast-food assistant, and hands him a plate with a sheep's head.
On release from Friday
BANGKOK DANGEROUS (18) **
The original Thai language version of Bangkok Dangerous was about a deaf-mute hitman and consequently low on chat and punchlines. In the remake, the killer, Joe, can hear and speak, presumably because the character is now Nicolas Cage, left, who loves to bend lines like Uri Gellar. He still doesn't say much though, as an assassin who has to rethink his way of life when he is hired to take on a job in Bangkok, falls in love with a local woman and bonds with his errand boy. A bit like the opening scene of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, except with more killing and the ongoing distracting question of what on earth Cage is putting on his hair nowadays.
On general release
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