Without wanting to be judgemental, anyone who enjoyed The Amazing Spider Man 2 is a bad human being, and any critic who thought it was okay needs to resign from their profession in shame. The film desecrates cinema, insults the audience with its rampant stupidity, and urinates on the concept of adequate story-telling.
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I can’t keep up with the proliferation of reboots and prequels and retirement fund cinema (I’m looking at you, Sylvester Stallone) going around these days, but here’s another one for you. It’s just about the worst of the lot. Worse than anything Stallone has done, even – at least he doesn’t pretend he isn’t flipping cinematic poop burgers for a paycheque.
The story – which you’ve already seen multiple times already (but hey – why write something new or original when we can cannibalise something we’ve already used four times?) involves Spider Man fighting the Green Goblin again, and having confected relationship problems with his girlfriend (played by Emma Stone) again. There’s other baddies too, Jamie Foxx as a large battery, there’s an evil corporation, and an unintelligible Paul Giamatti with a tattoo on his head.
The general approach to storytelling used by the creators of The Amazing Spider Man 2 is to assume that the audience is as gormless and unsophisticated as they clearly are. The film is a cobbling together of clichéd dialogue and sound-and-fury action sequences desperate to distract the audience from the abomination they are watching.
The emotion in the movie is disjointed, never quite sure whether it wants to make the audience laugh or cry. The film bizarrely tries slapstick humour and unfunny quips from Spider Man as he’s swinging through the streets and fighting bad guys. After a while I was expecting to hear a slide-whistle sound effect à la Funniest Home Videos as Spider Man downed one of his adversaries.
The lead (Andrew Garfield) is a milquetoast embarrassment to the acting profession. He makes the actors on the twilight saga look animated and passionate. His limp performance felt about as super-heroic as a French soldier in World War II. Garfield gets some admiral help from Emma Stone and Jamie Foxx – two very competent actors – but their efforts to revive this desiccated corpse of a movie are in vain.
There is limited internal logic to The Amazing Spider Man 2. It merely shifts from one nonsensical premise to the next to keep the plot moving – for example, Harry Osborn, son of the Green Goblin, has been fired from the company he owns (which in itself makes no sense). He is sick, possibly dying, yet manages – with nothing more than a Taser – to break into a top-secret, high-security facility and claim his Green Goblin suit.
The movie then – completely unnecessarily – kills off a key character, and then conjures probably the worst ending I’ve seen to a movie in the last ten years.
Verdict: Do not watch this film. Every time a new set of eyes views this travesty, Vladimir Putin kills a puppy, then invades another eastern European country.
The Amazing Spider Man 2 embodies the death-spiral of endless focus groups and market-driven movie making. The creators hate you, the audience. They would laugh at anyone who argued for the transformational potential of cinema.
This is how cinema ends, not with a bang, but with a rebooted Spider Man sequel.
No stars (out of five) // Bechdel Test: Fail.
You may have read reviews calling Under the Skin ‘haunting’ and ‘mesmerising.’ They’d be right. This movie stays with you. Days later, powerful images from the film will pop into your head, unbidden, refusing to pass away into the 
dusk of memory. This is a film unable to be forgotten.
However, I’m not entirely convinced it is a particularly good film.
The premise is this: Scarlett Johansson (Laura) is an alien who drives a white van around Scotland, picking up random men off the street. She takes them to her house to seduce them, gets them to disrobe, and as they follow her into an impressionistic limitless 
black room, they sink into black quicksand. Then they get skinned and their meat put on a man-meat conveyer belt. Got that?
The film by Jonathan Glazer is based on the novel of the same name by Michel Faber, which was apparently darkly satirical. The film version has forgone satire and any exposition whatsoever, and has instead gone for a dense, art-house and philosophical.
Under the Skin opens powerfully, with discordant music and visuals reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. More generally, the most powerful aspect of the movie is the extent to which it alienates the viewer – it effaces beauty, ugliness, revulsion or attraction for the human form. You see Scarlet Johansson – one of the most physically beautiful people in the world – completely naked and remarkably, feel nothing. You see a man with serious facial deformities – not prosthetic make-up either, but a local from the area where the film was shot – and also feel nothing.
The viewer sees the world from the perspective of Laura, alienated completely from human emotion or empathy. Insofar as she conveys this perfectly, Scarlett Johansson is brilliant. She manages to invest in her character, with hardly any dialogue, the sense of the alien, the strange, and the outsider. Laura is curious, cold, and relentless
Her performance, though brilliant, is not enough to save this movie.
Under the Skin moves from engrossing at the start, to dull and repetitive by the halfway mark. The movie spends too much time with Laura cruising the streets for men, wherein almost zero character development occurs (or plot development, or anything). Yes, the purpose of this repetition is meant to induce numbness in the viewer, but if I want to be rendered numb I’ll take some head cold medication and watch reality television.
Laura begins to change only after she looks into a mirror and sees herself for the first time (the logic of this moment isn’t clear – dying babies apparently don’t move her, but passing a scratched mirror apparently does). Perhaps it is meant to signify the moment she realises she possesses something (the skin) that her victims possess, and therefore can begin to empathise. If so, the the director could have figured a more convincing means to portray this.
I should digress at this point and note that there are far too many erect penises in this film for my liking. My limit is zero erect penises a film, this one has at least three.
The shocking, brutal ending evokes the blurred duality of our surface appearance and what lies underneath. The skin we are sheathed in lives, as much as our spirit does. If we wear the skin of another – even a completely alien race – we connect to that form, we become joined. Under the Skin is disturbing, memorable, but ultimately disappointing science fiction-horror.
Verdict: 3 stars // Bechdel Test: Fail (though given the only named character is a woman giving an extraordinary performance, this can be overlooked).
The Purge: Anarchy isn’t terrible. In fact, while the premise at first feels silly, it ends up going where good science fiction should – forcing the viewer to think about parallels to the world we live in now.
The Purge: Anarchy is a kind-of sequel to 2013’s The Purge starring Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey. I’m something of 
a fan of Ethan Hawke, but The Purge was a pretty ordinary outing. Nonetheless, it made quite a lot of money, which is why we are getting a sequel so hot on the heels of the first. The good news is the sequel is better than the original; the bad news is that we’re starting from a pretty low base.
The premise of film is an annual ‘purge’ – a twelve hour period where any and all crime, including murder, is allowed. The purge is the mechanism by which the New Founding Fathers control society – the reasoning being that one night of violence unleashes the worst of human nature, and the rest of the year the populace will be more docile and obedient. It’s a pretty thin premise that would more likely result in full-scale, long-lasting civil war rather than a contained 12-hour explosion of anarchy, but let’s put that to one side.
We follow our protagonist, Sergeant – played very capably by Frank Grillo – as he seeks revenge for an unidentified but kind of obvious wrong in his past. He reluctantly saves a mother and daughter pair (Eva and Liz) and then a husband-and-wife whose marriage is on the rocks (Shane and Cali). This all acts to rather bluntly inform the audience that Sergeant is a Good Man driven to do a Bad Thing.
The premise of the purge is interesting, insofar as the poor inevitably suffer worse than the rich. They cannot defend themselves – or lack the sophisticated protective devices wealthier homeowners use to turn their dwellings into fortresses. As the movie progresses it becomes clear that the purge is not just about control, but also about ‘culling’ the less desirable in society – the homeless, the poor, the weak, and the criminal class. It also shows how the rich can enjoy the purge with complete safety, having poor or homeless individuals delivered to them to be chopped up, hunted, or otherwise done with as they please.
The idea resonates. One can exchange any number of political or cultural or environmental effects with the purge – climate change, for example – that falls disproportionally on the poor.
So the potential for the idea behind The Purge: Anarchy, like any good science fiction, is one that can elucidate the world we live in today. Unfortunately, the concept is not pursued with any coherency or subtlety as the movie moves from one set-piece shootout to the next.
The script for movie is occasionally very weak: the increasingly preposterous lengths the writers go to have the mother and daughter follow the main character to his denouement are simply not believable. There are too many minor characters and subplots for a 100-minute thriller, and the film feels cluttered. The ending of The Purge: Anarchy was written by Captain Obvious, with some assistance from Professor Exposition.
Still, the movie is salvaged by the performance of Frank Grillo, who is surprisingly good given the quality of the material he is working with, and by an interesting, if underplayed, core idea.
Verdict: 2.5 stars // Bechdel Test: Pass
Oh – and I watched Divergent as well at some point over the past few weeks. It was shit.
Verdict: 1 star // Bechdel Test: Pass