Monday new releases: 5 August 2024

Trap and The Edge of the Blade are in cinemas, Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare are both on Prime Video

M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is a film about a man whose obses­sions pre­vent him from being fully present for his chil­dren. To that end, Shyamalan cast­ing his own musi­cian and song­writer daugh­ter Saleka as the pop star at the centre of his arena concert-set thrill­er isn’t nepot­ism or favour­it­ism – at least not just nepot­ism. It’s kind of what the film is about.

Josh Hartnett plays a Philadelphia fire­fight­er tak­ing his 12-year-old daugh­ter (per­fect Ariel Donoghue) to a Lady Raven con­cert as a reward for her high marks at school. He’s dis­trac­ted by what seems to be an unusu­al amount of police and secur­ity. Middle-aged white men like him are being pulled out of the crowd by cops.

It turns out that he actu­ally is the one they are after and has to find a way out of the ven­ue – with his unsus­pect­ing daugh­ter – before the net closes in.

The con­cert isn’t just a trap set for Hartnett’s char­ac­ter, the appear­ance of Shyamalan him­self in a cameo as one of Lady Raven’s con­cert team con­firms that it’s also a par­ent trap. And if that wasn’t clear enough for you, Shyamalan cast­ing The Parent Trap’s Hayley Mills as the FBI pro­filer lead­ing the hunt con­firms it.

The con­triv­ances here – and there are many – are part of the pleas­ure of a film that also show­cases Hartnett in a way we have nev­er seen before. If this was a more ser­i­ous pic­ture, we’d be talk­ing about an awards conversation.

He’s mer­cur­i­al, mov­ing from hyper-focus on his imme­di­ate pre­dic­a­ment to dot­ing dad, show­ing the struggle he has to keep his two worlds both apart and together.

There’s one (or two) too many twists because he simply can’t help him­self but I do always leave a Shyamalan film feel­ing extra-attentive to my sur­round­ings, as if everything is a poten­tial clue.

Sword fights have been a staple of cinema since the begin­ning. There’s some­thing about the way the blades catch the light and glint as they swish and crash togeth­er that’s really cinematic.

With The Edge of the Blade (known in France as Une affaire d’honneur), Vincent Perez – with the col­lab­or­a­tion of ace stunt and fight co-ordinator Michel Carliez – has taken this know­ledge and built a reward­ing drama around some excit­ing and well-constructed set-pieces.

Paris, 1887. Duels to settle dis­putes and slights remain all the rage, even though they are illeg­al. Traumatised vet­er­ans of the Franco-Prussian War use them to seek the adren­aline rush they have been missing.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Master swords­man – and one of those vet­er­ans – Clément Lacaze (Roschdy Zem) is enlis­ted to train a young woman (Doria Tillier) who has called for a duel of hon­our after she is ridiculed in a news­pa­per for her proto-feminist cam­paign for female equality.

Lacaze, him­self, has a beef with Colonel Berchère (played by dir­ect­or Perez), a bully who killed Lacaze’s neph­ew in a stu­pid and unne­ces­sary duel and these two strands are destined to converge.

Satisfying.

I don’t often watch movie ‘mak­ing of’ doc­u­ment­ar­ies but I will always be drawn to live per­form­ance behind-the-scenes films. One of my favour­ites is Wagner’s Dream, about Canadian dir­ect­or Robert Lepage’s mam­moth effort to stage new, tech­nic­ally dar­ing, pro­duc­tions of the Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010.

What is it about French-Canadians and their ambi­tion to cre­ate jaw-dropping the­at­ric­al spec­tac­u­lars? At the begin­ning of 2020, Cirque du Soleil were the biggest the­at­ric­al pro­du­cers in the world with over a dozen pro­duc­tions in their rep­er­toire and bil­lions of dol­lars of box office revenue.

Within a couple of months, the Covid pan­dem­ic meant that all the shows had to close and the com­pany laid off 3,400 people – 97 per­cent of their staff.

Without a Net fol­lows the 2021 efforts to rebuild the show O, which had been res­id­ent at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas for 18 years. After the pan­dem­ic dis­persed many of the cast and crew to the four winds, they have only eight weeks to remount one of the biggest and most com­plex (water-based) shows you will ever see.

One of the things about work­ing in show­busi­ness is that the craft is all about mak­ing dif­fi­cult (or even impossible) things look easy. The res­ult is that audi­ences get to take the incred­ible for gran­ted but the effort, the prac­tice, the skill, the tal­ent – and the tech­nic­al and design vis­ion – on dis­play is some­thing to behold.

Anyone who tells you that theatre isn’t a real job should watch this.

Finally, a film that is bet­ter described as The Ministry of Musclebound Heroes.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare takes a real secret World War II oper­a­tion – known as Operation Postmaster – and then car­toons it up into an action com­edy that actu­ally does a dis­ser­vice to the real people concerned.

A Dirty Dozen-like group of ragtag off-the-books char­ac­ters are asked by the least con­vin­cing Churchill I have ever seen (Rory Kinnear) to sink the sup­ply ship that keeps the German U‑Boat fleet oper­at­ing in the Atlantic.

Many, many people are then shot (bul­lets and arrows) and blown up to achieve this goal. But they are all Nazis, so we celebrate.

Henry Cavill as the lead­er, Gus March-Phillipps, con­firms his lack of impact on me but this is now the second time that I have seen the man-mountain Alan Ritchson (play­ing a Dane) steal every scene he is in. Maybe I need to watch that Reacher show after all.

I real­ise that over time I have con­flated Guy Ritchie in my mind with the guy from Coldplay, to the extent that I think of them as the same per­son and feel just as little about both their music and their films.