Friday new releases: 5 April 2024

Monkey Man, Love Lies Bleeding, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Kung Fu Panda 4 and The Mountain are all in cinemas

This has eas­ily been the most viol­ent week of cinema I have ever exper­i­enced. Monkey Man and Love Lies Bleeding have some abso­lutely bru­tal and bloody set-pieces, Godzilla x Kong is just one giant punch-up after anoth­er and even Kung Fu Panda is mostly fighting.

The dif­fer­ence between Monkey Man and all the oth­ers, though, is that all that viol­ence is fuelled by a jus­ti­fied rage, rather than a desire to shock (or a lack of any oth­er way to close out a story).

Dev Patel’s revenge fantasy is yet anoth­er work of art about India’s cul­tur­al tend­ency towards dehu­man­isa­tion of large seg­ments of its pop­u­la­tion and the dam­age that is being done in the race to become a cap­it­al­ist showpiece and glob­al superpower.

Patel him­self plays a char­ac­ter known in the cred­its as “Kid” but who takes on sev­er­al per­so­nas on his way to tak­ing down the cor­rupt cop who des­troyed his vil­lage and his future.

When we meet him he is being paid to lose under­ground barek­nuckle fights but there is a meth­od to his mas­ochist­ic mad­ness. All around him are the poor, the des­ti­tute, the hungry (and those who prey on them), while the rich live gil­ded lives at high end VIP clubs like Kings.

Kid insinu­ates him­self into the upstairs/downstairs world, his even­tu­al shot at his nemes­is (Sikander Kher) is a pain­ful fail­ure but the res­cue and love he receives from an even more mar­gin­al­ised com­munity than his, spurs him back into action.

There’s a pas­sion­ate polit­ic­al con­text to this film which gives it con­sid­er­able urgency. A pro-Hindu polit­ic­al party is on the verge of tak­ing power and the spectre of reli­gious author­it­ari­an­ism and cor­rup­tion haunts the story.

It’s a bru­tally hon­est depic­tion of present day Indian reli­gious and cul­tur­al intol­er­ance, so it’s prob­ably no sur­prise that it couldn’t be filmed there. Indonesia, in fact, plays a lightly-fictionalised ver­sion of one of India’s mega­cit­ies and lots of exper­i­enced East Asian mar­tial artists and stunt­men are on hand to provide fod­der for the Kid’s single-minded quest for justice.

Monkey Man is a stag­ger­ingly viol­ent watch but it’s also an emo­tion­al one, the Kid’s fists of right­eous fury are powered by sor­row at the dir­ec­tion that India is tak­ing. A mag­ni­fi­cent achievement.

There are plenty of yucky moments in Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding – I sat next to anoth­er crit­ic and we both found ourselves avert­ing our eyes at some of the grot­esquer­ies on offer in a small-town goth­ic noir that might have been a Coen Brothers film in their early days.

It’s 1989 (because cell­phones would render the story moot) and Kristen Stewart is Lou, man­aging a gym in a dead-end New Mexico town. A stranger arrives, Jackie (played by Katy O’Brian), passing through town on her way to com­pete in a body­build­ing show in Las Vegas.

Romantic sparks fly between them, but when Jackie’s ’roid rage causes a dis­aster, we dis­cov­er that Lou (and the fam­ily she pre­tends to dis­avow) are up to their necks in some very bad stuff.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

How to keep their love alive when neither of them are think­ing straight – and they are besieged by very bad people – becomes the big problem.

This is the kind of film that act­ors love – bad hair, bad teeth, unfor­give­able beha­viour – but that can turn audi­ences off. It’s extremely well put togeth­er, though, and the ‘urk’ moments cer­tainly pop (for want of a bet­ter word), but I couldn’t help feel­ing that I would care more for the film if I cared a teeny bit more for the characters.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the latest in the long-running Monarch-Monster-Verse fran­chise that was designed to wrap some kind of (any kind of) story around a col­lec­tion of dis­par­ate and valu­able clas­sic characters.

The lead-up to this film was mainly in the form of the AppleTV+ series Monarch which provided a bunch of back­story and which we enjoyed in this house, largely because it used the mon­sters spar­ingly in favour of some character-driven drama.

Blockbuster fea­ture films don’t have that lux­ury, how­ever, so in GxK we are treated to exten­ded and exhaust­ing battles between vari­ous com­bin­a­tions of King Kong, Godzilla, Mothra, Tiamat, Skar King, and oth­ers. (Thank good­ness for Wikipedia, I wouldn’t have kept up otherwise.)

By the end, my atten­tion had drif­ted away from the wan­ton destruc­tion of Rio de Janeiro and towards the Kiwi DNA of the pic­ture: cine­ma­to­graph­er Ben Seresin was born here, act­or Rachel House (see below) has a sig­ni­fic­ant role, Wētā Digital are respons­ible for a good pro­por­tion of the amaz­ing effects, Wellington act­or Allan Henry does a remark­able job once again on (uncred­ited) per­form­ance cap­ture duty as Kong, and the indi­gen­ous people whose know­ledge becomes cru­cial to peace even­tu­ally break­ing out are called the Iwi.

Looking through my archives, I can see that I enjoyed the ori­gin­al Kung Fu Panda (“resembles an eight-year-old’s bed­room while they are throw­ing all their toys around” I said in 2008) and the 2011 second edi­tion was an improve­ment (“I feel cer­tain that even the great Tex Avery would be proud of some of the action”) but some­how num­ber three (2016) passed me by.

Whatever pleas­ures there to be gleaned from Kung Fu Panda 4 are now pretty much third-hand. It feels like a script from a Saturday morn­ing car­toon giv­en some amaz­ing anim­a­tion, but that anim­a­tion is now heav­ily recycled.

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Po (Jack Black) is told by his mas­ter Shifu (Dustin Hoffman at 86) that it is time to pack in being the Dragon Warrior and become the spir­itu­al lead­er of the Valley of Peace. No one likes change, how­ever, so Po res­ists and chooses to go and battle the Chameleon (Viola Davis) along­side new best friend, the fox Zhen (Awkwafina).

Lessons will be learned, the inev­it­ab­il­ity of change will be accep­ted, friends will tem­por­ar­ily become enemies and enemies will become friends. And so on and so forth. Which I see now is also how I ended my review of the first one.

Rachel House’s Kiwi fam­ily movie The Mountain/Te Mounga is uneven but ends up pack­ing a pretty decent punch.

Eleven-year-old Sam (Elizabeth Atkinson) escapes from the can­cer ward in order to climb the moun­tain (her tīpuna or ancest­or) who she believes will give her the strength to fight off a recur­rence of the disease.

She is joined on her quest by two oth­er mis­fits who have their own reas­ons for mak­ing the jour­ney. Mallory (Reuben Francis) is the new kid in town (Inglewood, Taranaki) who has moved there after the death of his moth­er. Bronco (Terence Daniel) also has some par­ent­al issues – his dad (Troy Kingi) is the town’s over­worked new cop and doesn’t have enough time for him.

What I liked best about The Mountain is that the script (and House’s dir­ec­tion) allows these char­ac­ters to be the weird little kids that almost all eleven-year-olds are, before adoles­cence and adults carve off all those odd little edges that they have.

It’s also a good intro­duc­tion to tik­anga (Māori pro­tocol and cul­ture) for young people, and it will drive some of New Zealand’s more reac­tion­ary polit­ic­al voices mad. Worth it just for that.