Monday new releases: 16 December 2024

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.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

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?