LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

'Plastic' (2014) directed by Julian Gilbey

Wednesday, April 23, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Plastic is not a very good movie.  The dialogue is laughable, the performances are iffy, it's directed with as much verve as an insurance infomercial and plotwise it's about on par with an average episode of Hustle.  But it at least has the decency to be relatively quick and breezy and, at bare minimum, is enjoyable as trash.

Our heroes are four students making their way through uni with a combination of credit card fraud and low-level fencing. They are; Sam (Ed Speleers), the brainy one; Fordy (Will Poulter), the trustworthy one; Yatesey (Alfie Allen), the dickhead one; and Rafa (Sebastian De Souza), the gullible one.  Between them they run a pretty tight operation, working in tandem to clone cards, steal PINs, commit identity fraud, but online goods and sell them off to other students.  But then it all goes tits up. They piss off a German gangster (Thomas Kretschmann), who threatens to kill them unless they can get £2 million for him in just two weeks.  The film then takes a slight left turn from the dreary, overcast skies of the outskirts of London to Miami, where the gang, now with a blonde girl in tow, begin to plan a diamond heist to end all diamond heists.

For about the first third of the film my stomach was gradually sinking into the cushioned cinema seat.  These characters are eminently hateable, the film's efforts to get us to sympathise with them by having them moan about their post-university employment prospects falling utterly flat. Further mitigation is attempted by showing them ripping off rude, rich people, I guess in an attempt to view them as brave Robin Hood types.  Nope, they just seem a gaggle of arsehole-cheeky-joker-lads-banter archetypes who, let's face it, probably deserve that shallow grave in the woods they're being threatened with.

Those are child bearing lips.

The peripheral characters aren't much better. There's Frankie (Emma Rigby), who depressingly functions entirely as eye-candy for the guys to clash cocks over. She has next to zero involvement in the central plot, can't act worth a damn and is primarily there to walk around in a bikini behind a pair of pouty pneumatic lips - a panacea for the Zoo Magazine crowd the film is clearly targeted at.  The villains don't fare much better either; a collection of swarthy ethnic stereotypes that barely approach two dimensions, let alone three.

All that said, when the central heist plotline kicks into gear, the film settles into a groove that while familiar and rote, is at least competently executed.  Again, this is nothing you won't have seen before, but Gilbey does a decent job of laying out the plan, the marks and the stakes.  Then in classic heist film style it all goes tits up and everyone freaks out in a blur of double-crossing, flashing blue lights and gunfire.  Perhaps the main reason why the latter half of the film actually works is the presence of Graham McTavish as a gullible jewel merchant.  Performance-wise he's light-years ahead of everyone else in the film, and after all the painful 'banta' from the lads that sinks like a stone, it's nice to see someone actually being funny.

Alfie Allan is actually pretty good as a total arsehole.

Things also pick up when the guns come out of their holsters.  Gilbey may have skimped on the script, casting, soundtrack and well, damn near everything else in the film, but he's spared no expense when it comes to the squibs.  When people get shot in this film they explode in a stickily goopy shower of crimson, the impacts looking like someone is exploding jam doughnuts under the character's shirts.  These are the kind of effects that you usually only see in the finest 1980s VHS video nasties, big explosions of corn syrup blood rendered in exquisite, quasi-pornographic slow-motion.  A back to basics straightforward gun fight like this can go a long way towards redeeming the film.  Yeah, it's a shitty movie, but at least it has a good time rolling around in its shit.

Though the good things in the film are nowhere near enough compensation for all the bad, they go just far enough to make Plastic a difficult film to actually dislike. Honestly, I actually kind of appreciate it for only taking up 90 minutes of my time given the recent spate of 2 and a half hour stinkers clogging up multiplexes.  

Plastic's future has been pre-ordained: a short, unmemorable cinema run followed by it finding its true home, the end of aisle discount DVD bin in Asda, the actors faces on the DVD cover unceremoniously obscured by a neon yellow sticker: "Only £2.99!!!!".  Here the film will come into its own.  Nestled next to myriad other low-budget/no brains straight-to-DVD detritus, Plastic will wind up looking pretty good by comparison.  Not a hidden gem by any means, but as cinematic trash goes at least it's vaguely competent trash.

★★

Plastic is on general release from April 30th.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

'Need for Speed' (2014) directed by Scott Waugh

Thursday, March 13, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Cars are boring, complicated and dangerous death-machines. But on screen they become something more. The automobile and cinema have grown up alongside each other, and when a little petrol gets mixed in with your celluloid the results are often thrilling. I'm thinking of the classics, Bullitt, Two-Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point or modern greats like Drive and Rush  - lean and muscular cinema made by people with oil-stained fingers. Need for Speed wants to hearken back to this golden age; ditching the CG of the Fast and the Furious series and showing us real cars rumbling around real cities, driven by real people. 

So there's a good, working class car driver and an evil rich car driver.  The evil car driver cheats, kills the good car driver's friend and then frames him.  Now that he's out of prison the good car driver must avenge this crime the only way he knows how: by driving cars.  This is less a story and more an excuse to have a lot of driving.  It's to the film's credit that most of the film's run-time is spent behind the wheel, as we watch the drivers race to the race, then race the race.

The lead of a car film shares many traits with the kung-fu hero; both are in possession of an innate talent that needs to be honed through discipline and trials.  Essentially, to win the big race/fight the big baddie the hero must prove their worth by overcoming their self-doubt. This is standard Campbellian stuff but the car genre has it's unique wrinkles; some of which Need for Speed 'gets' and some it blithely ignores.

They picked the weirdest press promo stills for this film. Here's a blue car I guess.

Prime among these is a straight up spiritual connection between man and machine. A car movie hero is only complete when sitting behind the wheel of his car - which becomes an extension of his mind and body. While he's sat in that driver's seat, the boundaries of the character extend outwards to the hubcaps and bumper.  As his heart beats, so the engine throbs, the deep bass boom of his engine (the hero always has the coolest sounding engine) signifying the car hero's spiritual superiority over his rivals.  Ideally he will have built the car himself and we'll have seen him slathered in swarfega as if he's just delivered a bouncing automotive baby.

On paper Need for Speed does this.  The hero is well-regarded as a top mechanic; though we only briefly see him working on a car - and notably not his car.  The hero car of the film is a modified blue and white sports car of some kind (I think it's referred to as a 'mustang') that's enormously fetishised by all that encounter it. It's this car that the hero seems to have some kind of spiritual connection with; able to make it reach speeds and execute maneuvers that no other driver can.  But we never actually see him build it, the film squandering the chance for that crucial montage in a disarming cut from car as chassis to gleaming and finished end product.

Despite this early missed opportunity the relationship between man and car does develop as they rocket across the USA on their way the big race.  Both car and man get a few dings, prove their mettle in tough scrapes and get nicely grimed up - then just as the car has developed a personality and bonded to its driver it's unceremoniously disposed of!  In the last race the hero doesn't only drive a new car - he drives the villain's car!

Another great still from the press kit.  I can't even tell what colour this car is.

Dammit Need for Speed, this isn't how the genre works.  You can't just plop the hero in a car coded as murderously evil and expect us to get emotionally invested in this final race.  It's like Luke Skywalker showing up for the big Death Star brou-ha-ha in a TIE Fighter!  It's like Batman infiltrating the Joker's hideout while dressed as a clown!  It's like James Bond spending an entire film stroking a white fluffy cat!  It's just not on!

All that said, it's doubtful that Need for Speed could ever have worked with Aaron Paul cast as the lead. He's just awful; looking disarmingly like Dec from Ant and Dec and speaking in the kind of deep 'gargles with gravel' voice that you usually only hear from people trying to take the piss out of action heroes.  Though he's obviously worked out quite a bit for the role, he doesn't have a chin at all.  Given that by necessity the car hero will be shot in profile from the passenger's seat, this is a critical flaw.  The pinnacle of this catastrophe is the scene where he sees his friend in a burning wreck; Paul marching into straight into Pythonesque over-acting, yelling "Nooooooo!" over and over again.  I think at one point he may even have sunk to his knees and waved his fist at the sky!  

Nobody really comes out this smelling of roses, though Imogen Poots at least seems to recognise this dialogue as utterly ridiculous.  Michael Keaton, who it's always nice to see,  even in trash like this, comes out similarly unscathed - though largely because his character never interacts with anyone and is confined to one room.  

I guess there's some worth in the car action, at bare minimum there's a palpable physical sensation of motion and speed - but without the emotional and spiritual underpinning that's critical for a successful car film it's all so much antiseptic. If you're into this stuff you may as well just watch Top Gear or something, or preferably a better, purer and more sincere car movie.

★★

Need for Speed is on general release now.