Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011)

Bucking the prevailing trend for Marvel/DC superhero adaptations, Green Lantern went resoundingly arse-over-tit not just with the critics as is commonplace but even at the box office. This is gratifying, as by any criterion it's a feeble effort. The comic book source is an inexplicably enduring one considering the lameness of the concept, i.e. that there's a corps of guardians of the universe who have magic rings that they can use to make all manner of gadgets materialise from their imaginations, provided they're all green. Oh, and they can fly at the speed of light and anything yellow is evil.
This might have produced a bearable film adaptation if it were purely played for The Mask-style hijinks, but it still seems to want to say something Star Trekky about overcoming your fears and just how neat the plucky humans are with their maverick individualism even if they might not be as old or smart as all those older civilisations. Yes, once again it's how Americans like to see themselves and I suppose hence having Ryan Reynolds as the titular hero fits in nicely with this, leading the charge as a blandly beefy and earnest lunkhead of a quarterback. It's incredibly boring, probably even for 10-year-olds.

3/10

Solomon Kane (Michael J. Bassett, 2009)

James Purefoy dons the stubble and tortured mean mofo attitude of his lookalike Hugh Jackman, as Wolverine/Van Helsing, as a 17th century mercenary who roams the land having renounced violence in exchange for a temporary reprieve from eternal damnation. Naturally, like his homonymous namesake Caine in Kung Fu, the forces of evil won't leave the man of peace alone and the slaughter of a pious family by unsavoury hordes soon has him back to limb-chopping like he'd never stopped.
It's complete action twaddle by numbers, of course, but given enough of a gloss by a decent stab at historical design and some rather lovely snowbound landscape photography that it'll do to while away the hours.

5/10

White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)

The title refers to the residue left behind by departing colonials, in terms of both infrastructure and cultural baggage. Here it's in an unspecified African country, and the director's choice of leaving it open is a double-edged sword: it may make statements about the repercussions of the fall of the colonial system more universal, but at the same time divorced of real context.
Isabelle Huppert and Christophe Lambert play plantation owners under pressure to leave the country and their possessions with the impending approach of rebel forces. Lambert's moderated character is a surprising inclusion considering his OTT portfolio, but he's strictly second fiddle to Huppert's in any case, as she grows increasingly unstable in her frenzy to cling on to what she considers her birthright.
It's a deconstructed narrative, presumably for the purpose of creating disorientation. Huppert, as usual, fills the centre of the film with a performance of quiet but feverish intensity. However, the problem is that that's all you expect of a Huppert character, and her character's illogical intransigence does not surprise as a result, particularly as she already played the same character in the same set-up, even if in Cambodia, in Rithy Panh's more affecting The Sea Wall, just the year before. Meanwhile, the Liberia-set Johnny Mad Dog was more effective at conveying the horror at what had come to pass.
It's hence a very mixed bag, with the child rebels also feeling like little more than ciphers, with the focus as usual on the Europeans, despite what the Africa-raised director's intentions might have been. What probably got the critics raving and what, after all's said, deserves credit is Denis's uniquely poetic eye, full of telling details, and the absolute refusal to give in to simplification of the issues.

6/10

The Mechanic (Simon West, 2011)

A Jason Statham film that's perfunctory and generic even by the standards of his body of work, the remake of the forgotten Charles Bronson-led The Mechanic has The Stat as an elite hitman who finds himself emotionally compromised by his latest job and ending up training a young hothead to fill his shoes. The presence of Donald Sutherland alongside at the start may raise hopes of something more interesting occurring, but these days he only crops up to get himself out of the house for a bit and it's no different here.
Statham's character is of course endowed with a sense of ethics about his choice of targets, gets it on with a woman in the first ten women just so we know it's not kinky when he starts getting his shirt off at any old excuse, and demonstrates depth with the stock device of first choice, i.e. listening to classical music after each hit. The only things that elevate it above a Steven Seagal vehicle are superior production values and the star's honestly workmanlike approach to the pointlessness of it all.

4/10

Somers Town (Shane Meadows, 2008)

Meadows's featurette is the first one he didn't have a hand in writing, the first set outside his Midlands home turf, and furthermore, disconcertingly for a director synonymous with independent and community-centred British film, financed wholly by Eurostar.
There was no need to worry about any of this. His backers have wisely given him free rein to make the kind of low-key drama he's always made, with little apparent requirement to big up their product or tart up the grimy area around their rail terminal, the combination of Paul Fraser's script and improv by the two teenage leads works a treat and Meadows proves to be as at ease at finding little nuggets of pathos from London estates as from Nottingham ones. The two boys who become friends, Thomas Turgoose (from Meadows's This Is England) as a cheeky urchin who's run away to London, and Piotr Jagiello as the shy Polish boy who gives him a place to stay, put in unaffected performances and some lovely moments of unforced humour crop up through their harmless shenanigans.
All the same, it is a very slight creation, and not only because of its 71-minute running time, ending with a vague fizzle before anything of consequence has actually transpired. If Meadows had realised from the off that he had all the parts required for an urban drama of substance at his disposal instead of just setting out to slap together an organic short, who knows how good it could have been?

6/10

True Grit (the Coen brothers, 2010)

Is this the way it's going to be with the Coens from now on, alternating original work with the scripts of others to keep up their a feature a year output? True Grit is a class apart from their hammed-up The Ladykillers remake, and indeed element-by-element superior in almost every way to the John Wayne original, not least Jeff Bridges having just a tad more control over his delivery than The Duke did, but it's still a shame to get something which is only a technical refinement and not wholly new.
That said, the virtuoso regular Coen photographer Roger Deakins gets to show how he's effectively claimed ownership of the sombre beige-wash palette for the revisionist Western since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with some images of quite remarkable tonality. The shift of emphasis away from the gruff drunkard marshal to the determined teenage girl who hires him to find her father's killer allows other characters to breathe too, including Matt Damon's sniffily precious Texas Ranger who wants in on the manhunt, and the outlaws they chase. As entertaining as the 1969 original was, it was far too much in thrall to the Wayne mythology to accommodate the complexity or elegiac darkness of this retelling.
This being a Coen film, the spot-on casting is no surprise, not least the self-assured Hailee Steinfeld as the young avenger, and the dialogue is as quickfire and ornate as usual while also fitting the Bible-encumbered culture of the 1870s frontier. It's just hard, despite all the craft, to blank out how often we've been here before, at the death of the old west.

7/10

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010)

The subject of the women machinists' 1968 strike at Ford's Dagenham plant would seem tailor-made for Ken Loach, having been a defining moment in the history of gender equality, with the women's stand against wage discrimination leading shortly after to a permanent change in legislation. If Loach did choose to sidestep it, it's understandable: even activists have to take a breather sometimes. So we get Cole as the helm instead, who brings pretty much the same bag of ingredients to this as he did with Calendar Girls, with a cast of mutually supportive women from all parts of the age and class spectrums united in a common cause.
It's all very chest-swellingly feelgood and full of comic-tinged turns designed to gratify, from Miranda Richardson's ballsy Barbara Castle to Bob Hoskins as a token male old Trot thrilled at the women's politicisation. On the other hand, as the leader of the protesters and focal point, Sally Hawkins is required to carry the scenes of human interest drama too, and unfortunately has to get by on a lot of squeaking bravely when the script lets her down. Still, you'd have to have a heart of stone to remain unstirred by the message.

6/10