Kraven the Hunter, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim and Evil Does Not Exist are in cinemas, Fly Me to the Moon is on Apple TV+ and Carry-On is on Netflix
Apologies for the late delivery of today’s update. I was just about to go to sleep last night when I realised that I hadn’t seen Kraven the Hunter this weekend and that would leave an intolerable gap in my coverage.
It’s hard to imagine that there could be a film so conceptually unmemorable that I forget about it entirely, but here we are. Making the trip out to the multiplex has put a dent in my day but at least I can say I’ve seen it.
Is it the worst film of 2024? Hardly. It has turns by some of my favourite character actors – Russell Crowe, Alessandro Nivola and Christopher Abbott – all due a comic book pay cheque and all given freedom to snarl after their own fashion. Even a younger actor with character potential (Fred Hechinger from Thelma and Gladiator II) has some moments.
The problems are at conception. Why does this film need to exist and why does it need to star Aaron Taylor-Johnson? The other day, when Emile Donovan and I were talking about ‘what makes a movie star’, I found myself thinking about Taylor-Johnson and how he keeps getting these lead roles despite the fact that most audiences would have trouble picking him out of a police lineup.
He’s a decent actor – and has clearly done the gym work here – but he has never had the kind of likeability that allows him to carry a film by himself. He’s no Channing Tatum*, am I right? And Kraven the Hunter is a comic book movie at the grimmer end of the scale to begin with.
Crowe plays Nikolai Kravinoff, a gangster oligarch. He lives in an English country house. Nivola plays Aleksei Systevich, an oligarch gangster. You can tell he’s an oligarch first because outside his office windows are the industrial landscape of smokestacks and chimneys.
Kravinoff is a bully who had driven his wife into madness and is attempting through sheer thuggery to turn his two sensitive sons into the kind of man he already is. Strength is on everybody’s mind in this film, often confusing physical strength with strength of character.
After being mauled by a lion he could not shoot, Sergei (the older boy), is revived by a magic potion that gives him the power of that lion, the potion administered by another teenager named Calypso. 16 years later, Sergei (now played by the buff Mr. Taylor-Johnson) has left the family – and his brother (Mr. Hechinger) to bear the brutality of their father alone – to become a source of extra-judicial vengeance upon men like his father, although crucially not his father himself.
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When Kraven the Hunter gets interesting it’s because we are watching the macho posturing of these desperately insecure men – Nivola has paid someone called Miles Warren to genetically adjust him so he can have a physical strength that he cannot even control. This was the kind of territory that director J.C. Chandor explored in the great Wall Street thriller Margin Call in 2011.
Where the film is much less interesting is where it tries to deliver what it advertises. The action is lacklustre – and R‑rated – and the visual effects are unconvincing, except for the one that makes the younger Crowe skinny. I’d like that one to be used on me, please.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a brave attempt at keeping a franchise alive by going in an unexpected direction – the production model and aesthetic of animé. I loved the look of it and enjoyed being back among the portentous voices of Middle Earth. I liked the fact that it focused on a woman as a central character for a change and that she yearns for independence rather than power. Before Héra (Gaia Wise) can achieve that freedom, she must step in to win a war started by prideful men.
It’s a sideshow compared with the epic trilogies that we have become used to, and I found it departed my consciousness as soon as it arrived, but it was fun while it lasted.
Much more longer lasting – if only because it ends on a note so perplexing that you have no option but to keep turning it over in your mind – is Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist. I wouldn’t have know this was in cinemas because my colleague, Graeme Tuckett, mentioned that it was playing in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin and not Wellington.
Hamaguchi is best known here for Drive My Car which won the Best International Film Oscar in 2022. Evil Does Not Exist is set in a modest mountain village a couple of hours out of Tokyo and is centred on a local widower Takumi (played by non-actor Hitoshi Omika) and his daughter (Red Nishikawa). It’s relatively unspoiled country and Takumi spends his days chopping firewood, gathering water from the spring for the town’s Udon restaurant and teaching Rei about the trees and wildlife.
A Tokyo talent agency wants to grab some of that sweet government Covid recovery money and build a glamping site in the neighbourhood but they aren’t paying attention to the damage even this form of tourism will do to the delicate balance of the local ecosystem. That balance is already in jeopardy however, from hunting, and the film gently builds to a devastating but also baffling climax and ends on the same shot of sunlight through tree branches (komorebi in Japanese) that it started with.
Including Fly Me to the Moon as a new release is a little bit of a cheat as it had a run in cinemas earlier on this year but I didn’t get to it. Now streaming on Apple TV+, it should be an easy choice for perfect Saturday night movie but it only managed to ruin ours.
Somehow managing not to locate any chemistry between two of our most reliable movie stars, Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, it is also a misguided attempt to create a faked moon landings comedy that manages to insult everybody concerned with the real thing.
Mr. Tatum is a launch controller at NASA working on the Apollo 11 mission that will finally land astronauts on the surface of the moon, still haunted by the Apollo 1 disaster a few years previously. Ms. Johansson is a Madison Avenue advertising executive (or PR expert, the film isn’t clear about the difference) given the task of winning the public over to the programme and to create a cinematic version of the landing in case of disaster.
All wrong, just all wrong, from beginning to end. This is the kind of misfire that will prompt Apple to get out of the feature film game.
A much better Saturday night option is Jaume Collet-Serra’s Carry-On, a battle of wits between an unambitious TSA agent discovering his power (Taron Egerton) and a ruthless terrorist mastermind (Jason Bateman).
Bateman’s character needs a suitcase to board a plane from LAX but the contents would fail a normal X‑Ray scan. Therefore, he has to threaten, cajole, persuade and bully Mr. Egerton’s character into letting it slide on through his machine. Oh, did I mention that it is Christmas Eve? The busiest airport day of the year.
The workplace politics of the hardworking security guys feels authentic so it can balance out the growing ridiculousness of the rest of the plot. Egerton is too much a blank slate to really carry this so Bateman pulls out all the stops to compensate.
When you fly, those security people have a huge responsibility – not just the bomb detecting safety one, but also to ease the way for a stressed-out traveller. My experience in LA was that the TSA did just that – a combination of rapper and stand-up comic at the head of the line keeping things light and moving, a character that appears in the film, straight out of life.
In Melbourne, the security scanners are grumpy and obstructive, making the experience as unpleasant as possible. The Victorians are private contractors but at LAX they work for the government. I think there’s something in that for all of us, don’t you?