New-ish releases: Fuze, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Michael, Exit 8 and Greenland 2: Migration

Editor’s note

Apologies for the lack of recent posting.

Two reas­ons come to mind. The work­flow from WordPress to Buttondown does what I wanted but is nowhere near as smooth as Substack used to be. Friction in oth­er words.

Secondly, I have been asked by my three-days-a-week employ­er to add an extra day. This is very flat­ter­ing, espe­cially when you include the very nice things they said about me when they asked. Obviously, in this eco­nomy, I’d be a fool to myself and danger to oth­ers if I turned that offer down, but it does mean fit­ting these posts in to the work­ing week is even more difficult.

Funnily enough, there’s still plenty of time for the watch­ing of the films and tele­vi­sion¹, just not so much for the think­ing and the writ­ing. I’ll work some­thing out.

But this is an oppor­tun­ity to remind you all that there’s no pay­wall any longer and I won’t hold it against you if you decide to can­cel the paid part of your sub­scrip­tion. You can do that via Buttondown.

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The third part in David Mackenzie’s unof­fi­cial Robin Hood tri­logy², Fuze is an enter­tain­ing but ridicu­lous ride. An unex­ploded WWII bomb is dis­covered in a cent­ral London build­ing site and grizzled Afghan war vet­er­an Aaron Taylor-Johnson is called in with his squad to make it safe. We soon learn that the bomb is a cov­er for an auda­cious dia­mond heist, tak­ing advant­age of the plod’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with pub­lic safety and the ensu­ing multi-block evacuation.

The ques­tion is, how much does Taylor-Johnson know about the plot but it takes a tight 90 minutes and sev­er­al twists before we find out. Films like this are all about the twists so you can nev­er have too many in my book but Fuze even pushed me to my limit.

Made for the UK Sky chan­nel, Fuze is let down by TV’s assump­tion that you won’t be con­cen­trat­ing whole­heartedly on the screen. Frustratingly long parts of it are essen­tially nar­rated via updates between Taylor-Johnson’s squad and the Metropolitan Police.

The best bit of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is the word “sar­co­phag­us” but the dis­ap­point­ment is that it’s only used twice. Irish horror-auteur Lee Cronin gets his name on the film in case we were temp­ted to think it was in the Fraser/Weitz or Tom Cruise Mummy uni­verses. It’s not nearly as much fun as either of those.

Cheerful child Katie Cannon (Emily Mitchell) is kid­napped from the garden of the Cairo house her American par­ents are liv­ing in while dad (Jack Reynor) is a for­eign cor­res­pond­ent and mum (Laia Costa) is a nurse. Seven years later, with the remains of the fam­ily back in New Mexico, Katie is recovered inside a mys­ter­i­ous and ancient sar­co­phag­us. Turns out she has­n’t just been held host­age, she’s been inhab­ited by a demon­ic force (Natalie Grace) that – inter­est­ingly – is set on des­troy­ing happy families.

The oppos­ite of fun, this Mummy was only inter­est­ing because New Mexico is por­trayed by Ireland and Egypt by Spain and the demon by some impress­ive but gross prac­tic­al makeup effects by Arjen Tuiten (Wolf Man).

I’ve been won­der­ing since I saw it on Saturday wheth­er there is, in fact, any hid­den sub­text to Antoine Fuqua’s fantasy/biography of Michael Jackson’s first 29 years, Michael. The second shot of the film lingers on the star’s groin (after an open­ing shot of his feet). Maybe that’s as subtle as it gets?

Utterly ines­sen­tial – indeed, dis­hon­est – on any artist­ic or dra­mat­ic level, Michael is as sloppy a pro­duc­tion as Jackson’s own shows were tight. Back in 2009, I reviewed the doc­u­ment­ary This Is It for this very web­site and said:

This behind-the-scenes doc­u­ment­ary, made up of foot­age inten­ded for “Making of” extras on an even­tu­al DVD plus han­dic­am foot­age for Jackson’s own per­son­al archive, shows a ded­ic­ated bunch of ser­i­ously tal­en­ted people pre­par­ing a huge stage show for an audi­ence of demand­ing fans. However, no one involved is more demand­ing than the star of the show MJ himself.

But Michael’s screen­writer, John Logan (Skyfall), seems to have been more focused on the paycheque than elev­at­ing his film above the level of cliché. At one point, a Motown tal­ent exec­ut­ive watch­ing the Jackson 5 from the wings, approaches the pan­to­mime vil­lain of the story Colman Domingo (as father/manager Joseph Jackson). She hands him a busi­ness card and says, “I’ll be in touch.” But how?! She’s giv­en him a card and he has­n’t told her any­thing about how to get hold of him?

I’ll give cred­it where cred­it is due – debutant Juliano Valdi is ter­rif­ic as the young Michael and I hope who­ever is look­ing after him is aware of the real story behind Michael’s career and is there to pro­tect him from exploit­a­tion and mis­treat­ment. Jackson’s neph­ew, Jaafar, is more than cred­it­able as the super­star but Jackson trib­ute acts have been ten a penny for dec­ades and doing that right is really just baseline. Impersonating Jackson is one thing – the real achieve­ment was invent­ing him­self in the first place, some­how fus­ing James Brown, Sammy Davis, Jr., Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse and turn­ing all that into some­thing that electrifying.

But it’s the com­plex­ity of Jackson that’s miss­ing. All of it. Any of it. Maybe that’s how he would have wanted things, but he – and the unfor­tu­nate young people who came into his orbit – actu­ally deserve much more.

I was delighted to be com­mis­sioned by RNZ to write a review for Exit 8 for the web­site, mainly because those oppor­tun­it­ies are few and far between these days. I’d like you to read the whole thing because I’m quite proud of it and, you know, the met­rics matter:

On hol­i­day in Tokyo a few years ago I saw a salary­man tumble down an escal­at­or to the train plat­form at the bot­tom. Another man stood above him, as if he might have been respons­ible. Was there a dis­pute? Did they even know each oth­er? The man in a heap looked up and made eye con­tact with me as if to say, ‘there’s noth­ing to see here’ and then dozens (hun­dreds?) of fel­low com­muters walked around or stepped over him on their way to the next des­tin­a­tion of their own lives.

In the nor­mally well-ordered world of Japanese pub­lic trans­port you could call the incid­ent “an anom­aly” – some­thing that clearly happened but was paid no atten­tion to.

Anomalies like that are the driv­ing force of Genki Kawamura’s fas­cin­at­ing video game adapt­a­tion, Exit 8. A com­muter on his way to a temp job exits his train at an unfa­mil­i­ar sta­tion. As he heads to the exit, the same four sec­tions of sub­way repeat in a loop and he learns that his only way out is to solve a puzzle that requires his close attention.

I liked Exit 8 a lot and it deserves to be seen without distractions.

There are good/good films; there are bad/good films; there are also good/bad films and clearly there are bad/bad films. And then there is whatever the hell Greenland 2: Migration is.

The ori­gin­al Greenland dis­aster movie came out dur­ing early Covid and maybe it met the mood of the times because it even got me to change my mind about Gerard Butler, at least for a minute or two. From memory, a comet strikes the Earth, caus­ing an elec­tro­mag­net­ic pulse that knocks out all our tech­no­logy and gruff man of the people Butler has to get his fam­ily to safety at a bunker in, you guessed it, Greenland.

In the new film, it’s five years on and frag­ments of the comet con­tin­ue to rain down on every­one and nuc­le­ar storms make it impossible to spend any time out­side without pro­tect­ive gear. The Greenland bunker is no longer safe but there are rumours that the ini­tial crater some­where in Western Europe has cos­mic prop­er­ties and may be able to sus­tain life.

So off they go again on an adven­ture that is far, far stu­pider than any­thing else I am likely to see this year. Not one thing about this dis­aster of a pic­ture makes a lick of sense. It’s stream­ing on Prime which I should have guessed because who­ever makes the com­mis­sion­ing decisions for their fea­ture pro­gram­ming has clearly nev­er seen a film – nev­er even sat next to any­one who has seen a film – but has seen spread­sheets about films.

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Further listening

I reviewed Fuze for RNZ Nights two Fridays ago and Exit 8 last Friday night. As usu­al, the con­ver­sa­tion was pretty wide-ranging so you’ll find me also talk­ing about play­back sing­er Asha Bhosle, loc­al indie thrill­er Blind Panic and Tom Hanks on Apple TV.

On Sunday I appeared on RNZ Culture 101 and provided a sneak pre­view of my Michael review as well as The Time Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens and ANZAC doc­u­ment­ary Sgt. Haane. Those last two are in cinemas (offi­cially) this week and I’ll write up my thoughts here when that happens.

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1. Television is a lovely word, isn’t it? We don’t use it enough. ↩︎
2. Hell or High Water and Relay are also about crooks with ulteri­or motives, a heart of gold, or both. ↩︎