Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010)

Iñárritu's fourth feature moves from the spliced-up multiple-story patchworks that constituted Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel to zero in on a single dad grifting and scrabbling to stay above water in Barcelona. Iñárritu still can't resist a framing device for the main story that only loses its opacity in the coda, but it doesn't appear forced this time, and comes rather as a gratification, unlike a good chunk of the channel-surfing of Babel in particular. And sticking to a single location pays off too: the weight of the drowning man's burden is made all the more solid with an inability to flee from a fixed round of preset haunts. The one time there is a diversion, with a phantasmagorical nightclub scene, it's only to underline the character's brief escape from reality.
It is almost unrelentingly bleak, with the protagonist battered by a succession of blows, not least his terminal cancer, and one real criticism that can be levelled against the film is Iñárritu's apparent determination to keep kicking the man when he's already down just so the audience fully gets how grim some people's lives are. Without the frankly stupendous Javier Bardem in the role, infusing a lost everyman with a desperate spirituality in a quest to put his house in order, the director probably wouldn't have pulled it off. With him in it, the centre holds.

7/10

Soldier (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1998)

In a standard-issue future dystopia, emotionless purpose-bred supersoldiers are sent out to do a fascistically bent state's dirty work until one falls out of favour, suffering angsty flashbacks of his denied humanity, and becomes the new prey of the rank-and-file.
In other words, Anderson and screenwriter David Webb Peoples had a nerve making this, even with the excuse that they'd be able to improve on Universal Soldier. This they do marginally, with a broodier atmosphere and less execrable dialogue, but it's hardly a Nobel-prize winning achievement from the director of Event Horizon and writer of Blade Runner. Ok, the middling former was undoubtedly the Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil culprit Anderson's career highlight, but Peoples should have resisted the urge of the wads offered to churn out what he claims is a 'sidequel' to his own highlight script. And surely do more than just chuck in nerdy references to everything sci-fi, starting of course with alternatingly constipated and weepy lead Kurt Russell's film career, but even getting round to a The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy one tucked in the corner of a computer screen, FFS.

3/10