JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, 2008)

File under curio: a number of people will watch this just for B-action-movie star Van Damme skirt an uncomfortably close line to how they might see his real life panning out, especially since J-C gets a weepy monologue in the middle to detail his actual life with its failings.
He arrives in Brussels, in the middle of a custody suit for his daughter, and gets sucked into a bank heist where his celebrity status puts him centre-stage, as spokesman for the captors, and then has to start agonising as to whether he can actually do anything resembling all his other personae. None of this will mean much to the casual viewer who hasn't gone through all the set-piece kickboxing moves from Timecop et al. It's also a partial shock to realise that, worldwide, he's still Belgium's biggest star (forget Audrey Hepburn; she was appropriated by others too early on). It's as if Dolph Lundgren was Sweden's.
A neat enough idea is wasted: Van Damme is actually very good at playing the saddo version of his own life, but there's endless wind-and-rewind with a small plot idea that probably fancies itself as Rashomon crossed with Dog Day Afternoon. Not disgraceful, but too big for its post-modern boots.

5/10

Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Uli Edel, 2008)

Edel's telling of the story of the Red Army Faction, anti-imperialist terrorists in '60s and '70s Germany, crams virtually every recognisable face from voguish recent German historical cinema, and while it avoids the trap of making a postulating egotist like the group's leader Andreas Baader anything other than an obnoxious arschloch despite the risky casting of the usually likeable Moritz Bleibtreu, it does end up creaking under the weight of the sheer number of passengers. The story of the would-be revolutionaries is narrated with a fair degree of punch and even-handedness, but in insisting on grinding out the full historical course of events, ends up rather dramatically directionless, particularly after the premature death of Martina Gedeck's Ulrike Meinhof. After that, we're left with a succession of court cases and increasingly flat acts of petty terror: Edel has simply stuck too closely to Stefan Aust's original book, and forgotten to adapt it to another medium. By no means a disaster, it nevertheless ends up leaving far too little aftertaste for an episode so sour.

5/10

Suxxess (Peter Schildt, 2002)

A Swedish IT company gets a new boss, who swiftly turns out to be a soulless hatchet man in Schildt's dark satire on the evils of the corporate world. He's opposed by Daniel, one of his employees, and eventually comes crashing down, impaled on his own hubris. So Daniel gets given the poisoned chalice of leadership in his place, just to end up as amoral and platitudinous as the man and values he initially stood up against. Power corrupts: the message is as old as the hills.

But it's carried out here with some real brio, featuring a set of effectively unctuous leads and some scenes of stark inhumanity that, combined with an icily plangent soundtrack, occasionally really pull the rug out from under your feet. Creepy fun, as long as you don't work in one of these offices.

6/10

Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008)

Strictly one for superhero aficionados, Hancock starts out with an amusing enough idea: Superman as an out-of-control alcoholic slob, causing property damage wantonly wherever he goes. Since he's also Will Smith, however, this state of affairs will clearly not last. And the change to a force for good comes far too soon, as he's coached by a PR man with principles, who inevitably also has a cute kid who soon puts a spark of sentiment back into the hero's jaded eye. Still, it's amiable enough with a few decent gags that go some way to compensate for the cheese, until a fairly pointless attempt in the second half to introduce a meaningful backstory for the character and thereby somehow try to reangle the whole enterprise as a romantic tragedy.

4/10

Comme une image (Agnès Jaoui, 2004)

This was titled Look at Me for the English audience, which neatly missed the point of the title already telling you the central premise of like father, like daughter. It's populated with a self-centred closed circle of literary and arty middle-class couples, with the main attention on the overweight ignored daughter of a novelist who can't see beyond his next review. They, equally self-regarding, form what there is of a dramatic hub.

Both Jaoui and her partner Bacri, reprising much of his warmer draft on emotional unawareness from Le goût des autres, are on less solid ground here. But, all said, it's really not bad. What will always save writing of this quality, even when lacking focus, is the truthfulness of its characterisations. You go away unfilled but not displeased, which doesn't necessarily apply to all pieces of this ilk.

6/10