Last Minute Reviews From 2013: Hummingbird, Jack the Giant Slayer, Bling Ring, Bernie, Trance

Jason Statham has made a name for himself by taking on mostly action movies. His first big central movie role was in "Snatch" where he played the character of Turkish. In the movie "Snatch" Statham acted alongside Stephen Graham who went on to become rather more sought-after because of his performance as the racist ex-con Combo in "This Is England" (and Graham has since taken on the role of Al Capone in the series "Boardwalk Empire"). Both Statham and Graham have been playing mostly tough guys since that earlier outing in "Snatch", but for Statham this was becoming a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, playing ultra-tough guys has made him a household name. On the other hand, we're now snowed-under with so many Statham action flicks that he's at risk of being associated more with disposable entertainment than genuinely entertaining films. More of a Van Damme rather than Schwarzenegger? (Not sure everyone will find that characterisation of the problem works for them, but you get the idea.)

Hummingbird seems to be an attempt to get back to the more vulnerable Statham, but it's still a 'hard man' role. Statham is not playing a man somewhat out of his depth in the way he did with Turkish in the movie "Snatch". Instead he's playing the same highly capable and violent tough guy, but suffering from PTSD after a stint in Afghanistan. After a short introductory section, we find Statham living on the streets. But this is a character with a heart, so when he sees scumbags robbing from the other homeless on that street he feels the need to stand up for them.

Early on it's easy to get the impression that "Hummingbird" is a revenge flick. While there's a kind of element of revenge involved, that's not the main focus. Much more important, however, is the personal connection which Statham makes with the nun Cristina who runs a local soup kitchen. Her nunnery are known as the "Sisters of Redemption" and it is from here, rather than any genuine themes in the film, that the title of "Redemption" ended up being substituted on American release.

The really interesting thing about "Hummingbird" is the sense that Statham's character of Joey and the nun Cristina are somehow living in a world outside of the typical one. In their own different ways they are rebels who nevertheless somewhat regret their rebellion and are really seeking a kind of order. There's a deep sense of religious guilt from both characters.

I have an issue, however, with the way Statham's prior stint in Afghanistan is handled. It's not always clear what the point is supposed to be in relation to those elements. There's often a sense that there must be some kind of political point being made about Statham's time as a soldier, but actually I think the only really point there is simply that his time in Afghanistan looms over him in the form of PTSD. It's something he can never leave behind. This is demonstrated through the theme of drones watching over him, even in London. It's not a theme that works well, but I can see what the director was trying to do all the same.

Still, the main interaction between Statham's protagonist Joey and the nun Cristina makes for a very compelling film. We also get to see the actor Benedict Wong here as part of the Chinese mafia. Wong is often brilliant. I first saw him in the tv series "State of Play". He's generally pretty understated in his performances, but my favourite performance from him may actually be his appearance on the comedy show "The IT Crowd" as 'Prime' the leader of an underground group formed from winners of the tv quiz show 'Countdown'. Here we see him in possibly his best serious role yet. There's a real gravitas to his performance and it's great to see him being given a role which really allows him to shine, while also taking full advantage of his more understated approach.

"Hummingbird" is perhaps a bit inconsistent in pace and tone and the significance of Statham's character's past in Afghanistan often feels a little enigmatic. However, the central characters are well-developed and this is a really intriguing little story. Perhaps not really trailblazing into new territory, but a highly accomplished piece of work all the same. Jason Statham gets the opportunity to be a rather more 3-dimensional tough guy than normal here and makes the most of it.

This here is my main reason for scepticism when "X Men: Days Of Future Past" comes out next year. I'd heard that this wasn't great, but I hadn't expected "Jack The Giant Slayer" to be this bad. After being disappointed with Nicolas Hoult's other film this year, "Warm Bodies", I was hoping this would at least feature another great performance from him. Sadly, while Hoult is still clearly a great actor, he comes off as a pretty bland protagonist here. And he's not the only one coming off worse than expected.

I haven't seen Eleanor Tomlinson in anything else, but she was a pretty bland love interest. Ewan McGregor, who was so wonderful in "The Impossible" this year, is doing his ill-fated posh English accent again and feels horribly miscast as a Royal Knight. Stanley Tucci is actively awful here as a treacherous and sinister figure. Ewen Bremner (Spud from "Trainspotting") does rather better, however, as Tucci's semi-comic relief second-in-command.

The film begins with a whole computer animated section which feels rather dated now that we have wholly computer animated movies of far higher quality. Guillermo Del Toro had an animated section for background information in "Hellboy II" but while he used distinctive stop-motion puppetry, Bryan Singer appears to have chosen fairly uninspiring CG effects that would look pretty unimpressive in a cut-scene from a five year old video game.

Unlike the far superior "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters" which followed on from an existing fairytale, "Jack The Giant Slayer" actually alters the background of the original story. Jack grows up hearing a story about magical beans, as well a magical crown which controls the giants. In fact, it feels like the film might have done better without a connection to the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story at all. The connection is so flimsy and secondary to the main story that it feels a little forced.

In the end, "Jack The Giant Slayer" is a generic, predictable children's blockbuster film with bland flat characters and mostly uninspiring action sequences. I was pretty bored during this one.

Sophia Coppola is an odd sort of director. Her first film "Lost In Translation" benefitted from some very funny improvised lines. However, the film as a whole wasn't a comedy at all and unfolded very slowly. Perspectives on the film as a whole vary from either "beautiful and moving" to "boring as hell". I'm inclined towards the latter camp. However, I was much more impressed by "Marie Antoinette" which used modern music in the beautifully shot costume drama to show us the bizarre paradise in which Marie Antoinette lived. However, it is now becoming clear that Coppola is a filmmaker who has more interest in the visuals and tone of her movies than in a compelling narrative.

"The Bling Ring" once again is beautifully filmed. We get a clear impression of the passions of this small group of vain teenagers who are obsessed with fashion and celebrity. While they are somewhat obnoxious, we are immersed into their world and get to see the appeal. The only problem is that being immersed into their world is a rather repetitive experience overall.

The story of "Bling Ring" is of a set of older teenagers who idolise celebrities like Paris Hilton. I found myself struck by the fact that I was often being shown images of celebrities who I had never even heard of. Most of these teenagers are girls, but one is a boy. It's never openly stated that the boy is gay, but it's fairly clearly implied. He's entirely uninterested in romantic opportunities with any of his female friends and his style of dress also doesn't strike me as emulating typical heterosexual male celebrities.

These teenagers all go to loud clubs and drink together, seemingly allowed in and unquestioned because the girls are attractive and therefore good for business there. (Some of them might well be 18, but none appear to be any older than that. In some states that may mean they can legally drink so long as someone else buys the alcohol for them, but in any case the venue looks like one where you'd normally expect them to be simply booted out.)

When they decide to find the location of Paris Hilton's house, easily make their way inside and even walk off with Paris Hilton's belongings, they begin doing so at many other celebrities homes too. Paris Hilton's home is actually used to film many scenes in the film, so we get to see just how extravagant the home they discovered really was. (Paris actually has her own face on the cusions.) While the protagonists are expressing how amazingly beautiful Paris' home is, I was personally remarking on how amazingly garish the place appeared to me.

It feels fairly unsurprising to see that some of the girls are home-schooled with a very airy-fairy philosophy. What was rather more surprising was that not only their home-schooling, but even their local Church apparently took many cues from Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret". "The Secret" is a self-help book which promotes a concept which is best described as "cosmic ordering". The idea is that if you want something enough, you will get it. It hardly seems surprising that this kind of philosophy would lead to an attitude characterised by the character Faith in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as: "Want. Take. Have." The idea seemed to be that if you want something enough you will receive it. The home-schooling even uses celebrities as inspiration for the children.

While it's amazing to see the audacity of these teenagers in stealing from celebrities and then wearing and selling the items they steal and even inviting friends along to the celebrity houses, the film could really have done with rather more happening. It's actually quite interesting to see what happens when some of them are finally caught, but it actually felt like a more interesting film was about to start right when the film wraps up. The consequences of these crimes don't work out quite how you'd expect.

Emma Watson is great in the lead role and in fact all the actors do a great job here, however way too much of what we see here is filler. There's a great story to be told here and this film barely seems to get started telling it. This is beautifully filmed and sets up a clear tone, but I didn't really feel like I was told a story.

Okay, look, I know Jack Black is acting his heart out here. This is, admittedly, the closest I've ever seen him to playing a different character from normal. However, I still think his acting is rather limited in scope. Still, the real problem here is that this is a film trying to pose itself as a comedy and yet almost entirely lacking in jokes. As it turns out at the end, this was based on a true story, but for most of the runtime this appears to be treated as a secret, but the story would have been a great deal more interesting if I'd known it wasn't simply made up by a scriptwriter.

There's a bizarre choice by director Richard Linklater to set this up in a faux documentary style, so half the time is spent hearing various figures from the town in which the film is set gossip away. Most of these characters being interviewed are given very little to do within the actual film.

Matthew McConaughey actually seems to be the best at balancing the tone here, but he doesn't really seem terribly important until the final act of the film. In fact, nothing seems to be very important until the final act of the film. If they were going to make this into a faux documentary, it might have made sense to centre the entire film around the court case towards the end, but that simply isn't the film we're presented with here.

The premise of "Bernie" is actively advertised as being about a funeral director who kills a woman. Now this murder doesn't happen until a seriously long way through the film. The point is that Bernie is a character who practically everyone in the town seems to love, while the person he ends up killing is someone who most people in the town did not want anything to do with. I can see how this scenario might be ripe for black comedy, but this film simply wasn't funny and that's all there is to it.

I won't say I wasn't entertained. It wasn't so much that I was bored, but that this was a fairly unimpressive drama that seemed to expect me to think of it as a comedy.

Earlier this year I was seized with the desire to watch everything from writer/director Joe Ahearne. He worked on a tv series back in the 90s about vampires with Jack Davenport and Idris Elba called "Ultraviolet" and a rather interesting tv series about exorcisms starring Martin Shaw in the early 2000s called "Apparitions". Both are well worth your time.

In between those two Ahearne released a tv movie called "Trance". Danny Boyle had apparently been quite interested in possibly making this at the time, but in the end it didn't happen and Ahearne ended up making it himself. Boyle decision to return to this project and give it a go seemed to be accompanied with an acknowledgement that his early films still represent his best work. He accepts that there is something grittier about "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" to which he'd like to return, so "Trance" was apparently his opportunity to get back to that. Having now seen Boyle's remake of "Trance", I feel it was a bit of a vain hope.

"Trance" explores the process of hypnotism and the functioning of the mind. Themes such as trust and power are vital to this story. The problem with the original film was that the ending felt a little convoluted, but overall I didn't feel like this was an enormous problem. Here in Boyle's movie however, I actually think it feels more convoluted. Boyle is clearly attempting to make things tie up better, but while on the one hand that means that the surprises don't come out of nowhere, it also makes them a great deal less surprising too. The main shocking moment towards the climax of the original tv movie just falls entirely flat here, partly because of changes to the plot and partly because the implications are too foreshadowed to leave any kind of surprise.

The original movie "Trance" featured an inside job by the main character to steal a painting. Unfortunately during the heist our protagonist receives a blow to the head and the trauma means that he forgets where he put the painting. The painting isn't where it is supposed to be by the end. When it becomes clear that the protagonist is not faking it and genuinely cannot remember, the leader of the group decides they should try hypnotherapy. However, it becomes difficult to let the hypnotherapist work without telling her what she is helping with. So when the hypnotherapist realises what is going on she asks for a cut.

In the original movie the explanation for why the heist didn't go to plan was, to my mind, very well handled indeed. There's another side of the plot to do with how characters relate to one another which went a bit convoluted, but I didn't feel it was a problem. In Boyle's remake, the issue with how characters relate to one another was a little clearer, but the main explanation for why the heist didn't go as planned was much less satisfying. Also the use of pubic hair as a memory trigger was very bizarre indeed.

In the end though, the biggest problem here is the way characters are handled. Boyle introduces a lot of fancy imagery, so a lot of the intesting dialogue and character development is lost here. Some of the lines are taken straight from the original script, but because of the change in context they just aren't as effective as they were the first time around.

Boyle had a great cast at his disposal here, along with a tried and tested script. I have no idea why he made some of the more outlandish changes to the script (why pubic hair? Why?) and I also have no idea why Vincent Cassell, who I know can play extremely charming characters, seems to have absolutely no chemistry with Rosario Dawson here. This not only fails to be better than the original, but ends up turning a silk purse into a sow's ear. This film is utter rubbish. Watch the original instead.