Film reviews

THE SMASHING MACHINE

(15) 123 min

★★★☆☆

3

WHEN big stars take parts that require them to alter their face with prosthetics it’s often a sign they want to be taken more seriously.

Think Steve Carell in Foxcatcher and Bradley Cooper in Maestro.

In The Smashing Machine — director Benny Safdie’s biopic of UFC heavyweight champion Mark Kerr — it’s Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s turn to sit in the make-up artist’s chair.

Signalling a departure from the typical action hero roles he is best known for, Johnson’s nose, lips, eyebrows and hairline are transformed to play the fighter.

He’s not totally unrecognisable, though.

A professional wrestler himself, The Rock already had the fighter’s hulking physique.

Acting muscles

And he’s in familiar territory being on screen with his trademark biceps on display.

But here he proves he absolutely can flex his acting muscles too.

American amateur wrestling champion Kerr became one of the pioneers of MMA at the turn of the millennium, well before the sport became the worldwide phenomenon it is today.

We meet him as an unbeaten man, skilled at then-permitted, wincingly violent moves like eye gouges, who lives to win, and who can’t comprehend the thought of losing.

But as painkiller addiction takes hold and Kerr succumbs to his first ever defeat, he returns home a human wrecking ball, tearing his house apart in sheer frustration.

Johnson depicts this rage-fuelled tantrum with real proficiency so we can understand it as a loss of control underpinned by a deep vulnerability.

Emily Blunt, excellent as his girlfriend Dawn, can only look on as the “big man who she loves” demolishes their kitchen with his bare hands.

The real Kerr eventually acknowledged and overcame his narcotic reliance, returning from rehab to the ring.

As a sporting tale, this is in familiar triumph-over-tragedy territory, with no surprises.

While the performances are gripping, the script lacks nuance.

Is this brutal watch a knockout? No, not completely.

But will the prosthetics pay off for Johnson come awards season?

They just might.

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

(15) 112mins

★★★★★

3

KATHRYN BIGELOW has done it again, this time turning the camera on the nightmare we all pretend that we can ignore – a nuclear strike.

The director’s tense, claustrophobic, brilliantly staged film grips you from the very first frame.

The story is simple and terrifying – an 18-minute window between a rogue missile launch in the Pacific and its projected strike on Chicago, seen from multiple perspectives.

Every decision, every glance at a screen, every phone call carries huge weight. Uncertainty is the enemy here, and Bigelow wrings every ounce of drama from it.

The cast is flawless. Idris Elba is compelling as a President caught between disbelief and duty, while Rebecca Ferguson delivers a career best as security specialist Captain Olivia Walker.

Elsewhere, Jared Harris, Gabriel Basso, Jonah Hauer-King and Anthony Ramos bring depth as they try to hold a crumbling chain of command together.

It isn’t just a thriller, it’s a heart-stopping meditation on human fragility. If you want cinema that makes you feel the weight of the world in real time, this is the one.

LINDA MARRIC

HIM

(18) 96mins

★☆☆☆☆

3

HORROR film Him feels like it has been stitched together from a dozen better movies, without ever finding a soul of its own.

In short, this is a mess.

The story follows Cameron (Tyriq Withers), a hotshot quarterback whose bright future is thrown off course after a brutal injury.

When retired legend Isaiah (Marlon Wayans) invites him to a secluded training camp, it feels like a chance to rebuild, stronger and faster than before.

But the deeper Cameron steps into Isaiah’s world, the more unsettling it becomes.

Produced by Get Out, Us and Nope director Jordan Peele, Him’s fatal flaw is its emptiness. For long stretches, nothing happens.

Characters drift around muttering ominous nonsense, occasionally raising their eyebrows at the weirdos around them, before going right back to ignoring the obvious.

Withers and Wayans put in respectable perform-ances but the dialogue is clunky, the pacing is dead on arrival and the supposedly shocking reveal is anything but. Even the stylistic additions feel less like art and more like padding for a story that never gets to the point.

Bleak, boring and painfully pretentious, Him isn’t just a bad horror film, it’s the kind of bad movie that thinks it’s being very clever.

LINDA MARRIC

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

(15) 162mins

★★★★★

WHAT time is it? It is a question Leonardo DiCaprio’s stressed-out fugitive Bob Ferguson is asked over and over again in this black comedy.

Wearing a dressing gown and bad shades, Bob doesn’t have the answer because he’s too stoned to remember the code he was given by a left-wing terror group called the French 75.

But I can tell you that the time is absolutely right for One Battle After Another.

This is a political satire that skewers both the extreme right and the extreme left at a moment when both sides are to the fore in the real world in the United States.

The time is also well overdue for this piece of cinematic dynamite that will have you on the edge of your seat — from laughter or the high-octane action.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, it is a work of genius that fuses the best elements of his films There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights.

It begins 16 years ago with Bob helping to free refugees at a US border crossing.

During the raid his girlfriend, the wonderfully named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), orders Sean Penn’s military officer ­Steven J Lockjaw to “get up” his private parts.

The French 75’s increasingly reckless terrorism ends in a thrilling chase and Bob needing to go into hiding with the baby daughter he shares with Perfidia.

Most of the story is set in the current time, with Lockjaw coming after Bob and his daughter Willa.

As things get wilder, the audience is introduced to a bunch of incredible characters, including members of the white supremecist Christmas Adventurers Club, gun-toting nuns and Benecio Del Toro’s always-cool martial arts instructor Sergio.

The serene Del Toro is a perfect comic foil for the frantic DiCaprio who spends a lot of time running around shouting “f, f, f***.”

In one of the standout screwball moments, Sergio keeps repeating “four” as Bob is reluctant to jump out of his moving car like “Tom Cruise”. It is just one of many quotable lines.

But the most memorable scene brings the movie’s various plots to a perfect, heart-racing conclusion.

All of the cast are outstanding, with DiCaprio and newcomer Chase Infiniti as Willa most likely to be nominated for awards.

If there is any justice this film will get one Oscar after another.

GRANT ROLLINGS

3

THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 2

(15) 96mins

★★☆☆☆

3

DIRRECTED by Renny Harlin, this second instalment in the Strangers trilogy is a bafflingly incoherent mess.

It picks up right after the events of Chapter 1, but instead of expanding on Bryan Bertino’s original 2008 home-invasion nightmare, it devolves into a clumsy blend of ­borrowed horror tropes held together by a barely coherent backstory.

Chapter 2 follows the survivor, Maya (Madelaine Petsch), as she is relentlessly pursued by masked killers in a sleepy American town.

Despite her injuries, Maya must find the strength to stay alive and tell the tale.

Petsch is committed to the physical demands of the role, fighting a CGI boar in a bafflingly out-of-place sequence.

However, the film’s drawn-out and repetitive cat-and-mouse chases become truly unbearable.

Narratively, the film is all over the place lurching from home-invasion suspense to slasher to survival horror.

The only thing that prevents it becoming a total farce is Harlin’s occasional use of a few inspired jump scares.

As a middle chapter, this feels like a placeholder for the next film.

LINDA MARRIC

DEAD OF WINTER

(15) 98mins

★★★☆☆

3

IF you were casting for a Ramboesque heroine, Emma Thompson would not be the first name to spring to mind.

But in this rescue of a kidnap victim from a remote cabin thriller, it is the Love Actually actress displaying ingenious ways to survive.

Set in northern Minnesota in the US, Thompson’s Barb heads out in a snow storm to a lake that had a sentimental value to her recently deceased husband.

There she comes across a man who has tied up a young woman in his cellar.

Unable to go to get help, Barb vows to save the girl herself.

But the man is not her main concern, because it is a gun-toting woman played by Judy Greer who is the one with the least to lose by fighting to the bitter end.

Thompson is remarkably good when Barb is stitching up a bullet wound in her arm with fishing wire, and the attention to detail in the sets also impresses.

But choosing her isn’t enough to make this last- person-standing drama feel particularly original.

Like the tracks that Barb leaves in the snow, you know where most of the plot turns lead.

GRANT ROLLINGS