Friday reviews: 25 August 2023

Retribution, A Great Friend, Sound of Freedom and The First Slam Dunk are in theatres now and The Monkey King is streaming on Netflix

Two busi­ness titans exper­i­ence life alter­ing crises in films this week: will these ‘mas­ters of the uni­verse’ become bet­ter people as a result?

In Retribution, Liam Neeson gruffs his way through a high-concept action drama as Matt Turner, a suc­cess­ful fund man­ager liv­ing in Berlin, strug­gling through a mar­ket down­turn, los­ing touch with his wife (Embeth Davidtz) and fight­ing with his kids (Jack Champion and Lilly Aspell).

Obliged one morn­ing to do the school run, and obli­vi­ous of what seems like a ter­ror­ist attack in his own city, Turner takes a call from a strange cell­phone planted in the arm­rest of his high-end Mercedes. A heav­ily dis­guised voice tells him there’s a bomb under his seat and that get­ting out of the car will release a pres­sure trig­ger and blow them all to smithereens.

And so begins a Speed-like chase around Berlin as Neeson and his kids are trapped in the car, try­ing to deliv­er on the stranger’s demands and not get blown up in the process.

Despite what you might think, this is a depar­ture from recent Neeson. Almost all his scenes are stuck in the driver’s seat sav­ing him that energy that would nor­mally go into fist­icuffs to instead be dir­ec­ted at his eye­brows and scowl.

I’m rel­at­ively fond of late-period Neeson’s vari­ations on a theme called ‘man under pres­sure on a mis­sion’ – The Commuter is a great example – but this is weak. A slender story, an eas­ily spot­ted twist, annoy­ing whiny sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, and plot holes you could drive a lux­ury SUV through.

Even the title is mean­ing­less in the con­text of the film. There is no retri­bu­tion here. It’s just a word.

Back from the recent French Film Festival, A Great Friend (aka Les choses simples) is yet anoth­er vari­ation on the French theme of ‘bour­geois city-dweller dis­cov­ers the mean­ing of life and true French-ness through the simple homespun wis­dom and authen­ti­city of a genu­ine salt-of-the-earth Frenchman’. But this one does offer some­thing of a twist, I’ll grant you.

Probably best-known to English lan­guage audi­ences as the mys­ter­i­ous Meringovian in the Matrix pic­tures, Lambert Wilson steps into a rare lead role as Vincent, a suc­cess­ful tech titan with a pan­ic attack problem.

When his vin­tage sports car breaks down in the moun­tains, tacit­urn Pierre (Grégory Gadebois from the food­ie flick Délicieux which was also dir­ec­ted by Eric Bernard) appears to fix the car and fix him lunch.

Enjoying the isol­a­tion, Vincent decides to drop off the radar for a bit and stay in Pierre’s guest house. His attempts to engage Pierre in con­ver­sa­tion are mostly rebuffed but even­tu­ally he (sort of) comes around.

I said there was a twist, and this one is decent, but the pleas­ures of the film are watch­ing these two older act­ors play out the almost imper­cept­ible moments of grow­ing male friend­ship. The land­scape is also spectacular.

Sound of Freedom arrives in cinemas weighed down by polit­ic­al bag­gage. How much impact should a review­er give to all that extra noise? Is it important?

Well, no, not really. Context is often import­ant but Sound of Freedom – ter­rible title and an awfully clunky moment in the film when that phrase is coined – was made well before it was co-opted by vari­ous groups in order to push all their barrows.

Shot in 2018 for inten­ded dis­tri­bu­tion by a Latin American sub­si­di­ary of 20^th Century Fox, it became a cas­u­alty of the Fox/Disney mer­ger and was shelved. Then along came a bunch of con­spir­acy the­or­ies and a fun­drais­ing cam­paign to buy the film back and release it independently.

Conservative celebrit­ies like Tony Robbins and Mel Gibson got behind it – Gibson’s Icon Distribution is releas­ing the film in Aotearoa – and now this fic­tion­al­ised story of anti child-trafficking cam­paign­er and cop Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel) has gained a notori­ety that it barely deserves.

The film itself is heart­felt, earn­est and sin­cere – all of those things to a fault at times – but does not push the the­or­ies claimed for it. Instead, it keeps the focus tightly on Ballard’s mis­sion: the res­cue of third-world chil­dren, traf­ficked into sex slavery by a cap­it­al­ist sys­tem that sees all of us as fod­der to be exploited.

Yes, most chil­dren are at great­er risk in their own homes. Yes, even those under the ‘pro­tec­tion’ of the Catholic Church. But this film does not try and tell those stor­ies, it has a nar­row­er gaze and you can see that it also tries to avoid fall­ing into the trap of exploit­ing those children’s stor­ies once again for our entertainment.

Can you ima­gine if a maraud­ing Liam Neeson was play­ing Ballard in a film on this top­ic? Instead, we get a very good, very quiet, Caviezel emot­ing his socks off on our behalf. There’s very little action or viol­ence, just pas­sion­ate police work in the face of an inter­na­tion­al sys­tem not set up for these kinds of crimes. 

Finally, two new Asian anim­a­tions. The First Slam Dunk uses a big high school bas­ket­ball game as a frame for a story about grief, loneli­ness and learn­ing who you are and dis­cov­er­ing the joy of being in a team – win, lose or draw.

Ryota’s older broth­er was a top bas­ket­ball con­tender before he died in an acci­dent. Ryota attempts to fol­low in his foot­steps but that path just brings pain for him, his sis­ter and his dev­ast­ated mother.

His school team goes up against the top team in Japan and every­one expects a thrash­ing but over the match – played in what feels like real-time on screen – he and his team­mates find hid­den strengths. Maybe the impossible is … possible?

All the play­ers get their own flash­back back story so we learn how all of them have arrived at this moment. The anim­a­tion is tre­mend­ous, includ­ing plenty of angles inspired by bas­ket­ball video games. It’s much more excit­ing than I was expecting.

I’m not sure how many inter­pret­a­tions of the Chinese legend of The Monkey King we now have – or need – but this is the second ver­sion that Netflix has paid for sug­gest­ing that dif­fer­ent depart­ments at the giant stream­er aren’t always talk­ing to each other.

The dif­fer­ence here, I sup­pose, is that the story is told via flash-as CGI anim­a­tion rather than act­ors in fake side­burns but all the whiz­bang in the world can’t save a fam­ily enter­tain­ment with no jokes for the adults and too much fight­ing for the kids.

The Monkey King’s sound and fury sig­ni­fy­ing no decent sense of humour has promp­ted me to go back and look at some of the best examples of the genre so I can recom­mend them in the daily “Something to watch tonight” news­let­ters, so look out for them.

Besides, we can all do with a laugh these days. Me as much as anyone.