The Trouble with Robots - CHAPPiE and The Avengers: Age of Ultron

A movie update, while we're all waiting for Star Wars to turn up in December. This time it's all about robots and their relationship with their creators (without Mary Shelley, where would the film industry be?).

First up, CHAPPiE from District 9 and Elysium director Neill Blomkamp. To cope with the increasing crime rate in Johannesburg, the police turn to Tetravaal and their latest robot invention, created by Deon Wilson (Dev Patel), while Deon has a bright idea...

With a workable, if rather slow, story and decent enough effects, with a few A-List names to pull in the punters (Sigourney Weaver as Deon's boss and Hugh Jackman as his rival), this is a pretty good pizza movie IF you can stomach the idea of Afrikaaner Punks, which is where it falls down for me. And, for South Africa, surprisingly few black people.

Continuing the theme, I watched the latest Marvel release (Antman hasn't come out on DVD yet). After a successful raid by the Avengers on a Hydra fortress, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) experiments with what appears to be a new form of intelligence.

With lots of bangs and crashes we've become accustomed to by now, the plot is reasonable and tries to include a softer side, with the unlikely romance between Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and Hawkeye's (Jeremy Renner) domesticity. James Spader provides the wit as the voice of Ultron, and I liked Iron Man's Hulk Smasher suit, but this felt to me like a mash-up of previous films, a film between other films. Plus this looks just awesome in comparison!

True(ish) Stories: American Hustle and Dallas Buyers Club

On the upside of a disruptive and chaotic Christmas/New Year (welcome to 2015, everybody), I watched a few films from my Amazon subscription. First up, two con artists (Christian Bale and Amy Adams) are blackmailed into an FBI sting operation:

On paper, this looks like it could be a really great movie, with a top notch cast and a true(ish) story, but the direction is poor and the casting laughable. Bale couldn't sell a lifebelt to a drowning man and generates no sympathy or empathy as the lead. Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams, as his wife and girlfriend respectively, do better, but, like Bale, are too young for the roles. Jeremy Renner is also good, but Bradley Cooper is just embarrassing. It's just simply not their kind of film. However, you do get a glimpse of what might have been when Robert De Niro turns up for 5 minutes and steals not just the scene but the movie.

Next is the Dallas Buyers Club. Ron Woodruff (Matthew McConaughey), after contracting HIV and developing AIDS, decides to treat himself and others using non-FDA approved drugs after the approved treatment fails.

The acting in the film is top notch, as you'd expect, with McConaughey ably supported by Jennifer Garner as his doctor and Jared Leto as his business partner, and the story is handled well. However, as with the previous film, I've always felt that true stories don't fit particularly well into film because a life cannot be told in 90-120 minutes. I always have a feeling that the truth is more complex and you're just getting half the story. Still, it's not a bad film and worth the watch.

Mission Impossible 4 - Ghost Protocol

Continuing the Summer of Cinema, via my LoveFilm subscription, I watched the latest IMF offering. Ethan Hunt and his IMF team, implicated in bombing the Kremlin, chase after the culprits to prevent nuclear war between Russia and America.

A superior pizza movie, and exciting enough, although Simon Pegg doesn't look the part (he does get to shoot somebody, though) and his humour grates a little, making the film feel like a kind of "Carry On Mission Impossible" at times.

The set pieces are great including Tom Cruise hanging off the worlds tallest building, breaking into The Kremlin (using a sort of portable Ames room: very clever) and a chase in a car storage building in Mumbai. The supporting cast is good as well, including Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton. Michael Nyqvist isn't bad as the villain, but it required someone to chew the scenery a little more, and Léa Seydoux, as an assassin for hire, was grossly underused. Recommended, however.

The Bourne Legacy - Thriller in Manila

Another from my LoveFilm subscription, in the wake of the exposure of the CIA assassin programs Treadstone and Blackbriar through Jason Bourne, another program is being shut down...

A sort-of remake of the original movie, with Jeremy Renner as the genetically enhanced assassin and Rachel Weisz as the doctor caught up in the fallout. It's got some really good action sequences, and such a good car/motorbike chase it ought to have been called Drive. The supporting cast is good, lead by Edward Norton, but despite being a reasonable pizza movie, there's always a comparison with the original, so much so that there are references to events from the Bourne Ultimatum going on in the background. It's as if to say, "you're watching this, but there's a much better movie going on over there."