Sam Spruell

It's been 20 years since French filmmaker Luc Besson shook up the sci-fi genre with his inventive adventure The Fifth Element, and now he's back at at again with this adaptation of the popular comics by Pierre Cristin and Jean-Claude Mezieres. The film is a blast of visual animation, with a wildly over-complicated story involving time and space. It's all rather messy, but there's plenty of comedy and adventure to hold the interest, plus some offbeat romance and a hint of present-day politics.

It's set in the 28th century, when the human-created mega-city Alpha has travelled across the universe and is now home to beings from a thousand worlds. Valerian (Dane DeHaan) is a security officer working with his bickering partner Laureline (Cara Delevingne) to retrieve illegal contraband. After a mission on a desert planet with parallel dimension issues, they return to Alpha with haunting information about a lost civilisation, which seems to be at the centre of a secret war Alpha's Commander (Clive Owen) is waging. Amid a complex power struggle, Valerian and Laureline head into a no-go sector of Alpha to find out what's going on, getting help from a chatty pimp (Ethan Hawke), a submarine pirate (Alain Chabat) and a shape-shifting pole-dancer (Rihanna).

Besson fills the nearly two and a half hour running time with outlandishly colourful effects, lively action and lots of verbal banter, but not so much character development. Only Valerian and Laureline emerge as fully formed people, even as they conform rather oddly to gender expectations that are old fashioned today, let alone 700 years in the future. So their tetchy romance is enjoyable but rather aimless. Meanwhile, Rihanna has some strong moments once she stops dancing and changing costumes like she's in a music video. And Sam Spruell and Kris Wu make a solid double act as Alpha officials trying to work out what's going on.

Continue reading: Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets Review

Utterly bonkers, this movie confounds any attempt to categorise it, blending comedy, romance, horror and drama to become a true one-off. And it maintains such a darkly playful tone that it's impossible not to smile even as things turn rather hideously nasty. Against all odds, these contradicting moods come together into something surprisingly involving, thanks to skilled director Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and clever writer Michael R. Perry. Their approach is so inventive that it's impossible to guess what might happen next.

Set in a small industrial town, the story centres on Jerry (Ryan Reynolds), who was set up with a job in a bathtub factory after his release from a psychiatric institute. Overseen by therapist (Jacki Weaver), Jerry is settling in nicely. He has a crush on Fiona (Gemma Arterton) in accounting, even though it's actually her office colleague Lisa (Anna Kendrick) who likes him. But no one realises that he has gone off his meds and is starting to listen to advice coming from his lovable dog Bosco and his evil cat Mr Whiskers. What they tell him to do is pretty horrific, but he thinks that this is the only way to get his life back on track.

Where the plot goes is seriously grisly, but it's played out by the cast and filmmakers in a blackly comical way that's highly stylised, seeing everything through Jerry's warped perspective. The question is whether he's a serial killer, an insane criminal or an emotionally tormented young man. Whatever, the film is a remarkably internalised exploration of mental illness, because the tone refuses to let us off the hook. And because all of the performances are riotously funny, bridging the gaps between the humour, romance and violence.

Continue reading: The Voices Review

As with the first two films in this dumb but bombastically watchable franchise, writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen seemingly put no effort into writing a script that can even remotely hold water. This is such a boneheaded story that it boggles the mind, eliciting laughter every time it tries to show some emotion or menace. But watching Liam Neeson charge around on a personal mission, cleaning up the criminal underworld in the process, is still rather good fun.

Back home in Los Angeles, former super-spy Bryan (Neeson) is trying to re-bond with his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) while waiting for his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) to leave her sweaty but wealthy husband Stuart (Dougray Scott) and come back to him. But this dream is cut short in a twisted act of violence that leaves Bryan as the prime suspect. With Inspector Franck (Forest Whitaker) on his tail, Bryan traverses the city trying to unknot the mystery and find out who the real villain is, so he can clear his name and protect his family. With the help of an old pal (Leland Orser), Bryan manages to taunt and elude the cops at every turn while tracking down the nasty Russian mafioso Malankov (Sam Spruell). But something is clearly not right here.

Instead of centring on one far-fetched kidnapping, pretty much every character in the story gets "taken" at some point in the movie. The film benefits from this break in the formula, creating a relentless pursuit that runs right through the story. So even if the details never remotely ring true, and even if most scenes feel badly contrived, it's thoroughly entertaining to watch Neeson's stand-in stuntman leap across backyard fences or drive like a maniac on the freeway, causing mass carnage in his wake. Sadly, director Olivier Megaton directs and edits the film by chopping scenes into splinters, then reassembling them so they make no sense at all. It's loud and fast and incomprehensible.

Continue reading: Taken 3 Review