Monday new releases: 2 September 2024

Midas Man, The Crow and The Three Musketeers: Milady are all in cinemas

There are only two things wrong with Midas Man, Joe Stephenson’s bio­graphy of the Beatles man­ager Brian Epstein.

The first is what’s in it and the second is what isn’t in it.

Epstein died in 1967 at the age of only 32. He was a closeted homo­sexu­al who gave no reveal­ing inter­views in his life­time, not did he have time to write a tell-all auto­bi­o­graphy. So in order to flesh his story out to fea­ture length the script (writ­ten by Brigit Grant and Jonathan Wakeham) has to make some edu­cated guesses – with fin­gers crossed that their spec­u­la­tion will suc­cess­fully add some psy­cho­lo­gic­al weight.

The epis­odes in the film that actu­ally did hap­pen are so famil­i­ar in terms of the Beatles story that they don’t illu­min­ate them or Epstein. The Decca exec­ut­ive turn­ing the group down – “groups with gui­tars are on the way out” – “rattle your jew­ellery” and George Harrison’s “I don’t like your tie” to George Martin dur­ing the first ses­sion at Abbey Road.

What the film doesn’t have is any actu­al Beatles music or Apple IP. There’s no logo on the bass drum and the actor/musicians play­ing the Fab Four (who do decent imper­son­a­tions on and off stage, to be fair) have to resort to lame cov­ers like “My Bonnie Lies Over the Water” and “Bésame Mucho” rather than any­thing that can prove to the audi­ence that Epstein’s instincts were right.

There’s an argu­ment that includ­ing actu­al Lennon & McCartney songs in a film where they aren’t the main attrac­tion might be a dis­trac­tion, but the film knows that we’ll be bored pretty quickly without some music and that we haven’t come out to see Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas.

Add to that, the clunky fourth-wall break­ing nar­ra­tion from Jacob Fortune-Lloyd and we get a film that knows its sub­ject mat­ter is pain­fully thin and is pre­pared to try any­thing to keep us interested.

Gosh but The Crow was an unpleas­ant exper­i­ence. I have nev­er seen any of the pre­vi­ous incarn­a­tions of the goth­ic com­ic book char­ac­ter (espe­cially not the tra­gic Brandon Lee ver­sion) so went in with noth­ing to lose but the bleak­ness com­bined with the relent­less charm­less viol­ence did noth­ing for me.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Underneath it all there’s some­thing inter­est­ing I think: two trau­mat­ised young people fall in love and hope – for the briefest of moments – that they can have some hope for the future. But their pasts soon catch up with them and the only solu­tion is to respond to the abuses they have suffered with equi­val­ent (repug­nant) nihilism.

It’s joy­less and tur­gid and some­how I think that’s exactly what dir­ect­or Rupert Sanders (Ghost in the Shell) was intending.

If you enjoyed the first part of the epic French Three Musketeers adapt­a­tion, D’Artagnan, you will be pleased to know that the second part, Milady, has arrived hot on its heels, before the trail goes too cold.

Eva Green is the mys­ter­i­ous super spy, Milady de Winter, work­ing for Cardinal Richelieu (Eric Ruf) whose own inten­tions regard­ing King Luis XIII (Louis Garrel) are opaque – like just about every­one in the film who isn’t a musketeer.

There’s a lot of plot in these two films and every­one appears to be cap­able of double-crossing every­one else. There are also some decent swash­buck­ling set-pieces.

As you might expect from a film full of France’s top-tier tal­ent, char­ac­ter work is also good, but that’s not the top pri­or­ity. Action is, and there is an abund­ance of it.