Category Archives: Choose Life

Top Gun

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There are some films out there that seem to be universally adored, so much so that were someone to come along and start slagging them off they’d automatically be written off as hipsterring, pretending not to like something incredibly popular to appear cool or ironic. Now, I’m fairly sure I’m not a hipster, even though I ride a bike and own a scarf (that I very rarely wear, and even then when its freezing), but I just can’t get behind Top Gun, a film that as far as I can tell everyone else seems to generally love.
It does have some very enjoyable aspects, most notably the score, with Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone being a clear favourite, the script is full of zingers (“Your ego is writing cheques your body can’t cash.”) and a brilliant cast all on top form, but it can’t get around just how boring most of the film is. Now, this may have something to do with my opinion on aircraft. Every year for at least the past four years, Bournemouth (the town I live in) has held an air festival down on the beach. I live less than ten minutes walk away from said beach, yet I do not join the literally thousands of people who flock to this event on an annual basis. That doesn’t sound too surprising, until you discover that other patrons to this event include many of my close friends, colleagues, and of course my parents. This year was the second time I’ve actually headed away from the city during the long weekend, just to escape the planes and their incessant noise. I’m fine flying in planes, and generally find the flights to be one of the more enjoyable aspects of holidays (I get to sit and watch films for six hours straight!?!?!?!), but I really don’t care about watching planes fly, how they work, what model they are etc. And unfortunately, that plays a large part in Top Gun, a film about the top 1% of Navy pilots being trained to be the best that they can be.
It’s clear during the making of the film that two different markets were established – men and women – and a very broad sense of their tastes was estimated. Two different films were then thrown together to attempt to please both groups, and so it is that we have a film about jet fighter pilots in which half the time is spent on an insipid romance plot between Tom Cruise’s cocky pilot Lt. Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell and one of his civilian teachers, Kelly McGillis’ Charlie. It doesn’t really help that both halves of the film don’t fit together well, and are for the most part dull. The flying scenes, especially the training exercises, are devoid of either tension or excitement, and the romance is surprisingly more cheesey than the half-naked, oiled up volleyball scene set to Playing With The Boys. Each scene type goes on far too long as well. I can’t imagine the plane-heads remaining fully engaged through the love scenes, and likewise the romance junkies are unlikely to really care about the flying bits.

So why does it have such a reputation? Well, there’s enough to keep your attention on a Friday night post-pub outing, full of kebabs and an impending hangover, and of course there’s Tom Cruise. After sliding across the floor in a shirt and socks in Risky Business, this is probably the early defining movie for Cruise, and none more so than his seducing of Charlie by serenading her, with the help of an entire bar, to The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling. I’ve always questioned the choice of this song, as it’s supposed to be a song everyone in the bar knows the words to, yet I’ve never heard it outside of this film. Maybe it’s more popular in the States. This could also be the film that turned a lot of the public opinion against Cruise (not me personally, I’ve got no issues with the guy), as Maverick is an immensely arrogant, cocky dick, but he plays it so well. Anthony Edwards is also great as Maverick’s married-with-kids partner Goose (he’s married to Meg Ryan?!?), but the film is completely stolen by Val Kilmer, who manages to out-cockiness Cruise as rival pilot Iceman.

This is one of the few films that I think could be possibly improved with the use of 3D, normally something I’m deeply opposed to, but I think an added sense of depth perception could help clarify and enliven the aerial combat scenes, which otherwise feel flat and lifeless. I hate to say it, but this feels almost more like a Michael Bay film than a Tony Scott one, and if it wasn’t for the acting and the soundtrack, there’d be no reason to watch it whatsoever.

Choose life 5/10

Holy Smoke

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Hurrah, another Jane Campion film. I can’t say I was much of a fan of The Piano, so I wasn’t much looking forward to this, the next available film featuring Kate Winslet (Hideous Kinky and Faeries are as yet out of my reach).

Winslet plays Ruth, a young Australian girl (with a distinctly English accent) who has travelled to India to find herself. As well as finding that, she discovers and becomes willingly entangled in a mass marriage/suicide cult, and her understandably concerned family would rather she just came home. After Ruth’s mother (Julie Hamilton) manages to persuade her daughter to come back to Sydney with her, utilising a fake illness for her father and a very real asthma attack for her mother, the family bring in P. J. Waters (Harvey Keitel), a professional ‘exit counsellor,’ an expert at convincing people to give up their new found cultish beliefs and return to their previous lives.
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Songs From The Second Floor

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I never knew there were quite so many films out there without plots, and how highly regarded some of them were. I’d heard of Bunuel’s surrealist so-called ‘masterpieces’, though I’m not a fan of them myself, and given their notoriety it was no surprise to find them on the List, but this cine-poem, based on the works of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo and directed by Swede Roy Andersson, is a film of which I’ve never heard, and finding it voted the 213th greatest film of all time by Empire readers came as something of a surprise.

Opening on an overweight businessman addressing a pair of feet with a hacking cough inside the iridescent electric blue light of a tanning bed, we are taken on a journey encountering opera-singing commuters, an endless, near-stationery traffic jam, crucifix salesmen, a moving building and a platoon of marching office drones casting telephone receivers like fishing lines.
The focal point is an obese fellow called Kalle (Lars Nordh). His oldest son is in the hospital, having gone insane from writing poetry, and Kalle cannot visit him without descending into a raving torrent against his offspring. Kalle has other problems – he burns down his business in an attempt to claim the insurance – and is being stalked by a man who killed himself, and still has the blood and cuts on his wrists to prove it. 

I’m not a fan of this kind of film. To me, the one essential ingredient required for a film is a plot, preferably a coherent and well-paced one, but here it’s more a collection of nonsensical scenes that happen to feature either Kalle, someone he knows or someone random. I understand that the purpose of such films is not to tell a story or to entertain, but to evoke a mood, and here I mainly felt despair and sadness. None of the characters are living anything close to a happy existence, many are overweight and all of them are either a sickly grey or deathly white in colour, covered in dust or ash, and becoming increasingly more pallid as the film progresses. The rooms and buildings are similarly shaded, with only the occasionally shock of colour – one man’s bright ginger hair or the aforementioned tanning bed light.

There were some scenes that were genuinely unpleasant to watch – a young girl, perhaps 8 years old, is blindfolded and led before a procession of dignitaries and up to a cliff, where she is left to wander blindly until she falls to her death, and the scream, thud and distant sobbing and crying were almost enough to make me turn the film off. Elsewhere, there was some uncomfortable humour in a man celebrating his 100th birthday by urinating in front of the men who have come to praise him, and by offering a Nazi salute and sending his best to Goerring, having become so far advanced in years he no longer sees the need to hide such tendencies.

So what does it all mean? Well, I’m sorry, but I haven’t a clue. Why are all the corpses walking around and following Kalle? Why was he stroking a golf club whilst a friend of his stared out a hotel window, naked from the waist down? And where was everyone heading at the end, with the endless row of vacant airport check-in desks awaiting the potential passengers and their skyscraping luggage trolleys? No idea, don’t care, didn’t enjoy it.

Choose life 3/10

Red Surf

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Well, we’re still in George Clooney’s pre-E.R. days, so even if this film has a few more recognisable faces in some of the main roles, the fact that a then-no-name Clooney headlines this film should be some clue of how terrible it is. There’s still a few films to go before I get to From Dusk Til Dawn, the first film on his list that I know I like, so my hopes aren’t high for the films inbetween, but hopefully they’ll be better than this one.

Clooney plays Remar, a surfer/drug smuggler who, along with his small gang of friends, including Doug Savant, attempt to set up one last deal before heading their separate ways and going clean. The problem is, Remar is getting too hooked on the drugs, and his girlfriend Rebecca (Dedee Pfeiffer, Michelle’s younger sister) is pregnant, and doesn’t want him to do anymore deals. Also, one of Remar’s cohorts, True Blue (Philip McKeon, I swear it’s really Stephen Baldwin) has got himself arrested for dealing, and gives the cops the details of the guys they’re doing the deal with, who understandably want Blue dead. 
This film is a mess. There is little to no explanation for most of what happens, characters appear and disappear within the same scene and we’re never really introduced to any of our characters or their lives. The opening sees Remar and Savant’s Attila (also, the names are stupid) involved in a prank that doesn’t really go anywhere, but requires their car to be launched off a cliff and ultimately destroyed, for no real purpose. The supply of cocaine that Remar and the gang sell from appears to be stored in a buoy in the middle of the ocean – though where it comes from we never know. Characters behave stupidly and irrationally, generally at their own risks and with no regard for either themselves or their friends. After his arrest, Blue willingly gives up the names of the dealers, despite knowing that anyone who crosses the guy they are dealing with usually gets fed to the pit of wolves he keeps under a trapdoor in his house.

The dialogue is terrible (“You’re pregnant? That’s bitchin’!”) and the police behave in a manner completely unfitting to the situation, presumably in order to make them appear to be the bad guys over Clooney and his band of miscreants. There was a chuckle when the arresting officer told some criminals that they “have the right to do whatever I damn well tell you to do,” but it was only a small chuckle. I think most of the film’s budget went on skintight dressed (apparently, drugs and pretty girls go together, according to the script), sleeveless t-shirts, leather jackets and a seemingly endless supply of denim, as that’s all anyone wears in this film. Were loose leather waistcoats really ever in fashion? Also, for a film supposedly about surfers, there is only one, very short, scene featuring anyone even in the vicinity of a surfboard, and that’s not until 45 minutes in. 

Clooney has never been less likable than here, where is Remar is a selfish, pig-headed addict who wants to do right by his girl and unborn child, but in the worst way possible. He goes surfing instead of taking Rebecca to a doctor’s appointment, and he doesn’t really have any redeeming qualities, other than not wanting to kill the friend who got him into all this trouble in the first place. When he’s given a way out of this mess by his friends, with no risk and no responsibility put on him, he decides to go ahead and get himself in deep anyway.This results in one of the most poorly shot chases I’ve ever witnessed, involving a speedboat and jet skis in the middle of the night. It’s impossible to make anything or anyone out, and generally sees people spinning around in circles until someone explodes. 

The finale at the dealer’s house is clumsily staged and poorly choreographed, and his wolf pit seems to have magnetic powers, with people being drawn in despite being nowhere near it. If you really need a reason to seek this film out, it’s only passable blessing is that I’ve now seen Gene Simmons kill a man with his bare hands. There is literally no other reason to watch this film.

Choose life 2/10

Hamlet

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There are some films on the List that I’ve no idea when I’ll get to them. These films fall into three categories – the ones I absolutely adore but have no clue how I’ll even start writing about them, the ones I desperately do not want to watch (but am too much of an anal completist to ignore) and the really long ones. This four-hour-plus cut of Hamlet obviously falls into the latter, but fortunately for me, my girlfriend opted for Kate Winslet as her Film-Maker of choice, and seeing as I’ve reached that point in Winslet’s career in which she appeared in Hamlet as Ophelia, I can cross off Kenneth Branagh’s opus from the Empire 5-Star 500. As for the unspeakable films I don’t want to see, whenever LoveFilm drop Salo through my letterbox it shall not be a good day, though I could pull an In The Realm Of The Senses and bottle it when I’ve taken as much as I can stand.
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Return of the Killer Tomatoes

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There are some films where it’s impossible to go in with a completely open mind. Whether it’s because it’s a sequel to a film you’ve seen a hundred times, it’s the work of a director or actor you’re very familiar with or you’ve been bombarded with a relentless marketing campaign, there are many factors that can influence your opinion of a film before you go and see it. And, of course, there’s the title. The one inescapable truth about this film is that it’s called Return of the Killer Tomatoes, and is therefore not going to be anything even close to highbrow or arthouse, and might just about scrape the underbelly of being entertaining.


Now, unlike the last no-budget comedy-horror flick featuring George Clooney and starting with the word ‘Return,’ this one is actually a sequel, to 1978’s Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which I’m fairly sure doesn’t star anyone of note, so I’ve no intention of ever watching it. The 4.4/10 rating on IMDb doesn’t help either. Without doing any extra research (I’m on a deadline here, I need to go to sleep in an hour) I can tell from Return, in which they recap most of the plot and actually make a point of a viewer complaining about them recaping the original plot, that there was some kind of mysterious science plot in which monster tomatoes were created and vanquished using music. Something similar takes place in Return, but here the scientist (John Astin, I knew I recognised him, only just realised it’s from The Addams Family), Dr. Putrid T. Gangreen, is creating tomatoes that take on human form, any form, and he plans to take over the world by creating a tomato version of the president.

Since the first film’s plot, a whole new generation has grown up without knowing the glories of tomatoes, as they were outlawed by the government. There is a fairly healthy tomato racket on the black (or red) market, but the pizzeria in which our hero Chad Finletter (Anthony Starke) works makes pizzas by substituting the tomato sauce with raspberry jam or boysenberry, and accompany it with toppings ranging from gummy bears and peanut butter to something called the famous deep fried fish pizza, which sounds disgusting. Chad works as the delivery boy, and has the hots for Tara, the beautiful assistant/lover of Dr. Gangreen, but has never really been able to strike up the courage to talk to her. Also, she’s a tomato. That’s pretty clear from the start, seeing as she’s been created as the ‘perfect woman’ in every respect, apart from she hates music and bathes in fertiliser. Chad’s uncle Wilbur (J. Stephen Peace) owns the pizzeria (he’s the hero of the first film), and Chad’s room mate Matt (George Clooney) works there too, inbetween scams to have sex with every woman he comes across. 

In case you haven’t guessed, this film is pretty ridiculous. The plot is insane, the production value is non-existent and the acting equally scarce. There’s a creature called F. T. (which stands for either Furry Tomato or Freak Tomato) who is quite clearly a cuddly toy being wiggled by a stick or strings. But this all adds to the home-made feel, and in fact attention is brought to how terrible the film is by more meta than I can really handle. The film even begins by being shown in someone’s lounge (they initially start showing a film called Big Breasted Girls Go To The Beach And Take Their Tops Off, but thankfully this is stopped early on), and there are phone calls from viewers peppered through the film, and halfway through the camera pans out to find the director telling everyone they have to stop filming because they’ve run out of money. Ridiculously, there’s two more films in the Killer Tomatoes franchise; Killer Tomatoes Strike Back and Killer Tomatoes Eat France, both also directed by John de Bello and who appears as himself in at least Return, but I can safely say I won’t be seeing either of those films ever.

There were quite a few moments in the film that I can recommend though. Gangreen assistant, Igor (Steve Lundquist) is an aspiring news anchor who keeps on turning to the screen and saying things like “We’ll be right back, after this…” which I found to be consistently ridiculous enough to be entertaining, and the script contains such straight-faced gems as “I thought you were ketchup!” and “The girl of my dreams is a vegetable!” (at no point is the tomato correctly identified as a fruit). Some bits go a bit far into the stupid though – when Wilbur comes to the rescue, it’s dressed as a paratrooper with a deployed parachute that drags along the ground, along with a man permanently dressed in scuba gear who communicates with title cards even over the phone, and a severely overweight man in a Lone Ranger costume. 

It’s a very immature film that I would have doubtlessly enjoyed 10-15 years ago, but I’m proud to say I’m now too mature for it (when sober, at least). On a drunken Friday night with a group of mates it might be worth a punt, but seeing as I watched it at 7:00 am on Saturday morning it didn’t really hit the spot.

Choose life 4/10

Never So Few

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A Steve McQueen film set during World War 2 where at one point he talks about brewing his own alcohol? No, sadly I’ve not yet reached The Great Escape (one of my consistently top 5 films of all time), I’m onto Never So Few, the Frank Sinatra-starring final obstacle before I get to watch The Magnificent Seven again, when I’ll actually start to enjoy going through all of Steve McQueen’s films.

Never So Few sees Sinatra as Captain Tom Reynolds in North Burma during the Second World War. He and his band of highly trained men, including Peter Lawford’s be-monocled Captain Grey Travis and Charles Bronson’s Seargeant Danforth, are training the native Kachins to defend their land against their attackers, but the hardships of jungle warfare and the difficulties posed by his commanding officers – particularly the lack of an assigned doctor in his troop – begin to weigh on Reynolds.

Whilst on a short trip back to headquarters, followed by a two week adjourn for the two captains, Reynolds falls in love with Carla (Gina Lollobrigida), a voluptuously alluring partner to a foreign dignitary, and he also uncovers the beginnings of a plot that may or may not involve his superiors being in cahoots with their Chinese enemies. They also meet Bill Ringa (Steve McQueen), the resourceful driver for their Colonel, and soon recruit him to join their squad.

This film has some serious tone issues. Director John Sturges, yes of The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, cannot seem to decide whether he is making a war film – as I initially expected – a romance or a political thriller, as all three elements share roughly equal screen time, and the transition from one to another is often jarring. Styles change when Reynolds walks into a room, leaving the government corruption plot as the music swells to a bad daytime soap opera sweeping score as Carla rushes into his arms for a longing embrace. The three different elements seem only loosely tied together too – it could be justified as to having the war and conspiracy themes, as the subjects are at least related, but the romance could quite easily be lifted without affecting the other two, so tacked on is the feel. This was clearly added just to try and entice female viewers – or possibly more men with Lollobrigida’s Jessica Rabbit-like curves – but it always feels awkward and out of place with the rest of the film, just like Carla’s Spock-like eyebrows.

Speaking of tagged on, McQueen’s character is fairly superfluous too, other than adding someone engaging to watch and a mildly interesting character – plus a somewhat inventive fighting technique early on. I got the feeling that Sturges wanted to include McQueen in the film somewhere, and who can blame him? By this point McQueen had perfected the art of ‘doing something in the background’ when he wasn’t overly important in a scene, hence why he always managed to retain your focus by swatting a mosquito on his neck or playing with his gun, regardless of whether you should be looking at him or not. Sinatra’s Reynolds also has an amusing if distracting penchant for pithy one-liners that don’t necessarily make much sense (“He speaks English like he hates it.” “Inside my mouth tastes like the outside of a crocodile.”) or bizarrely successful seduction techniques in which he discusses the correct use of the word ‘hanker’. Some of the lines are great (“I’ll miss you; where I’m going nobody smells of soap”) whereas others raised a chuckle but would be worthy of a slap in real life (“I’ll be back; learn to cook.”). He also wears a cowboy hat whilst parachuting, which is only something Slim Pickens is allowed to do.

I loved Charles Bronson in the film, though his role is far too short. When his gun runs out of bullets during a Chinese attack on the camp, without hesitating he picks up a table and takes out three men with that instead. Genius. Look out for a young George Takei as a head-bandaged hospital patient complaining about the food and James Hong as a diplomat fairly late on. You may be as astounded as me to learn that Hong currently has 371 acting credits to his name, as diverse as Blade Runner to Kung Fu Panda, Airplane! to Chinatown. The guy’s been in everything.

The plot involves far too many talky scenes for a war film, with not enough actual fighting, despite a not-bad mid-film set piece involving the attack of a Chinese air base using hundreds on cans of gasoline, and a third act counterattack over the Chinese border. In spite of these, the film comes off as boring and overlong – 125 minutes – and the actual backbone of the conspiracy plot is almost impossible to fully comprehend. I’m still not entirely sure what was going on for most of it.

Choose life 5/10

Battle Royale

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There are some films where you hear about the concept and think “Yes, this will be a truly amazing film.” Battle Royale is such a film, with the premise being a class of 42 schoolkids are kidnapped, dropped onto an island and given weaponry and basic provisions. They are told that they have three days to kill all of their fellow classmates until only one survives, and if they fail, they’ll all be killed. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Well that’s what I thought the first time I watched it too, about 5 years ago, and since then I’d kind of forgotten a lot of it, and thought to myself that surely that film but have been amazing, because how can you go wrong with a concept like that? There’s endless possibility for inventive deaths and character drama, what with these kids now having to kill their best friends or even their boyfriends and girlfriends, but unfortunately there were perhaps some reasons as to why I’d forgotten it.

For you see, Battle Royale is nowhere near as much fun as it should be. No, wait, that’s an unfair statement. The premise is excellent, far better than most other films, and it is handled well, but it fails to deliver on the promise of a gruesome kill-fest that I’d not necessarily been hoping for, but had at least thought I’d be delivered. So basically my problem is that though I didn’t want an incredibly gory film, I thought I was going to get one, but didn’t. I think the problem here may well lie within me, and not the film. Oh, and don’t expect many comparisons to The Hunger Games – a film with a similar yet far from identical conceit – as I’ve neither seen the film nor read the book.
The film’s scope is very ambitious, especially when you consider there are essentially 44 ‘main’ characters – the 42 school children (including two ‘exchange students’ – we’ll get to them later), their teacher and the man in charge of running the program. Obviously, quite a few of these people don’t make it very far into the film, and even fewer are left at the end, but even so I felt there was possibly too much going on than could be comfortably contained within a 2-hour film. I understand that the book goes into far more detail – as books tend to do – so I’ve added it to my Amazon wishlist, and if someone were to get it for me for Christmas, that would be fine. I felt that an adaptation may have been better suited to a television series, or by cutting down the cast considerably – as I understand it, The Hunger Games only has 24 participants – as that would have allowed far greater depth for most of the characters. As it stands, only a handful are given much in the way of any history, and only perhaps three or four could have something generously described as a character.The film is peppered with flashbacks to the kids’ lives before being selected for the battle, but rarely did this add very much, especially when said flashback consists almost entirely of a slow motion basketball game, presumably the only time when all of the characters were ever in the same room, considering the amount of truancy apparently on display. The only person who benefits from a little history is Mitsuko (Ko Shibasaki), a ruthless, determined killer whose hatred for people – and a certain area of men in particular – pays off in a particularly brutal and wince-inducing scene late on.Too many subplots with great potential fizzled out without really going anywhere, in particular those regarding the tech-nerds attempting to bring the system down, the inclusion of never-used death zones and the motivation behind one of the ‘exchange students’, the deranged, suit-wearing Kazuo (Masanobu Ando). Kazuo appears to be something of an interesting character – I don’t think he utters a word throughout the film – yet no reasons are provided for even why he volunteered to take part. I can understand this though, as he is one of the three predominant ‘bad guys’ (along with Mitsuko and Kitano (Takeshi Kitano), the former teacher running the game), and sometimes not providing an antagonist’s back story can make them a more powerful presence in a film. For example, Hannibal Lecter was far more imposing when his past was only hinted at in The Silence of the Lambs etc, but less so after everything was more or less explained in Hannibal Rising.

The ending felt in parts rushed and glossed over – some areas aren’t really explained – and drawn out in others. There’s also a moment of farce and ridiculousness when a character just gets up and walks around after being shot which is never even partially explained, and as to the reasoning behind the inclusion of several flashback sequences after the film has ended, most of which had already been seen anyway, is beyond me. The two main leads, Shuya and Noriko (Tatsuya Fujiwara and Aki Maeda) felt bland and underdeveloped, especially in the case of Noriko, who doesn’t really get to do anything in the film other than be protected by those around her.

There were some great moments, especially the lighthouse scene, showing the real consequences of friends turning on one another in an environment of complete guilt and paranoia, and the initial briefing scene, in which the over enthusiastic instructional video offers some brilliant comedy, but overall this felt far too rushed, which is a real shame, as this could have been truly amazing.

Choose life 6/10

Jude

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I had a discussion with my girlfriend recently about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, instigated by my viewing of the unimpressive trailer for the new remake (in 3D, of course). When I explained the basic premise – a group of kids run into a family of skin-wearing cannibals – she was appalled at A) why someone would watch such a film, B) why someone would make it, and C) what kind of depraved soul would own such a monstrosity. I then answered questions A and C (she wouldn’t have cared that Tobe Hooper made it) by pointing to the copy of the film on my DVD shelf. Why do I bring this up? Well, though I’m not a massive fan of horror (I haven’t seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre since I bought it), I will occasionally watch a film for the same reasons I go on rollercoasters; they add a certain element of thrill and excitement – and terror – otherwise missing from my humdrum existence on this Earth. My question is, who would watch, make or own a film like Jude?
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

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Seeing as the cover of the next edition of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die has been announced (the book is due to be released next month), I thought it’d be a good time to review the film on said cover, as it’s a certainty to become a member of the hallowed list in the imminent future. So, without further ado, I present Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a film that I was very surprised to see on the cover, as personally I don’t think I’d have included it in the book at all, giving the cover space instead to probably The Artist, even if the Tinker Tailor poster is better.


It’s only fitting that such a muddled up film should have a relatively incoherent review, so I’m going to jump in randomly and start with the cast. It’s pretty goddamn incredible that such a stellar cast, comprising of some of the best British actors from varying generations working today, could be assembled for one film. You’ve got the likes of John Hurt amongst the more senior players, Toby Jones, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Ciarin Hinds and Kathy Burke as the seasoned actors as well as up-and-comers like Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy, not to mention bit roles for Stephen Graham, Roger Lloyd-Pack and Christian McKay. And, of course, Gary Oldman. It just goes to show the strength of the source material that such a great cast, and director Tomas Alfredson, straight from his similarly bravura Let The Right One In, would flock to it. Even Colin Firth was willing to take what is essentially a tangential role after just having won a Best Acting Oscar for The King’s Speech.

It takes a brilliant actor to not only attempt to replace the likes of Alec Guinness, James Mason and Dunholm Elliot – all of whom have played the character of George Smiley before – but to in fact outshine them as arguably the definitive screen version of Smiley. Oldman is magnificent in a pared down, stripped back performance almost entirely devoid of movement, yet the cogs behind his eyes are just about audibly whirring away as he sits and watched, drinking everything in and analysing the situation. Smiley rarely utters a word or makes an extraneous movement – his first utterance is a good 16 minutes in, after having appeared in several scenes already. He shines even beneath the massive glasses and dour overcoat that would envelop a lesser actor.

Remarkably, Tinker Tailor marks Oldman’s first ever Oscar nomination, for Best Actor, naturally, which he justifiably lost to Jean Dujardin for the aforementioned The Artist, but I believe Oldman came a close second. I myself was shocked to find he’s never even be nominated, but when you look back through his body of work there aren’t many roles that you could argue he should have been awarded for. Perhaps Sid and Nancy, but that wasn’t terribly well received I think, and doesn’t really fit in with the kinds of films that the Oscar board tend to take notice of, and in everything else he’s either been the bad guy – rarely awarded by the academy (at least until The Dark Knight) – or performs well in a small role, lost amongst an ensemble cast of similar abilities to himself – see True Romance, Harry Potter and Batman. You’ve also got to take into account some of the more questionable roles in his career – playing a dwarf in Tiptoes anyone? So it’s nice to think that, with so many outlandish, extravagant roles under his belt – The Fifth Element, Leon – it is Oldman’s most quiet, restrained and subdued performance that earned him the Oscar nod.

 I’m not even going to try and explain the plot of this film as, after having watched it and read John Le Carre’s book upon which it is rigidly based I could still only pin point the major issues. Basically, Smiley has been brought back into The Circus – the nickname for the British Intelligence – to try and find a mole from within a small group of higher ups – a group that used to contain him. His boss is/was John Hurt’s Control, and the suspects are the shifty Toby Estergase (David Dencik, a Swedish actor I’ve not come across before, but who played different roles in the two versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and is suitably engaging here), the suave, womanising Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), “poison dwarf” head honcho Percy Alleline (Toby Jones) and his right-hand man Roy Bland (Ciarin Hinds). We are also shown, in parallel, the story of field agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong, in a rare and disorientating non-bad-guy role), whose shooting on assignment may have caused the suspicion back at headquarters. Assisting Smiley is Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), a trustworthy up-and-comer with a way with the ladies, and Tom Hardy plays Ricki Tarr, the unreliable young firebrand whom Smiley introduced to the industry, and who may hold the key to the mystery.

Everyone is perfectly cast, and there isn’t a weak link amongst them. Similarly, the mood of the film is spot-on, and there is never so much as a red or a green on screen at any point, everything is in varying shades of grey, brown and taupe, from the sky to the clothes, the walls to the cars. The entire thing may as well have been shot in sepia, as it’s apparently been set in a time before colour was invented. The many conversations throughout mostly take places in dusty, dingy rooms yellowing with tobacco. It’s unusual for a film that some of the flashback sequences are actually more vibrant and brightly lit than those set in the film’s present, which could be read as an indication that perhaps those sunnier days were better for everyone involved, with less conspiracies and deception. Or at least, less in the current direction.

So, why did I have such a problem with this film? Well, mainly it’s because it’s so damn confusing. I understand that that’s entirely the point, and that some elements of the plot – when which bits are set in relation to others – are only roughly clarified towards the end to aide this sense of confuddlement, but even having read the book I still couldn’t tell what everyone was doing and why. This could also be because I didn’t really care. None of the characters are particularly likable, with the possible exception of Guillam and Prideaux at times, and even knowing who the final reveals didn’t help me very much. That’s something to praise, I suppose, that knowing the ending doesn’t lessen my appreciation for the film, but that’s a little bit of damning with faint praise if you ask me.

The most fun thing I found about this film is playing ‘Spot the Harry Potter Actor’ during it (Can anyone beat my six?). Though the performances are all impeccable and the atmosphere is both what was aimed for and what it should be, I cannot recommend this film on the basis that I didn’t enjoy it, and I’m still not sure what it was about – yet I don’t really mind.

Choose life 8/10