Film Review: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (3/5)

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You can rest assured that Salmon Fishing in the Yemen isn’t completely about salmon fishing in the Yemen. In part, it’s a pretty okay romantic comedy starring Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt and a criminally underused Kristin Scott Thomas, and it combines fuddy-duddy Britishness with something that resembles a tight-knit storyline. It also features fish.

Doctor Alfred Jones (McGregor) is a fishing expert employed by the UK Government’s fisheries department in grey, dour London. He has a grey, dour life with a grey, dour wife and a grey, dour lifestyle made up of day-in, day-out monotony - and he’s also completely whipped by his wife, who jets off to all sorts of places without even bothering to let him know in advance. The film opens with Jones receiving a ludicrous email from the representative of a wealthy Yemen sheikh, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Blunt), asking about the feasability of introducing salmon fishing to the sheikh’s homeland and Jones, as the dour, grey type, has no interest in just how silly the idea is. Until he meets Ms. Chetwode-Talbot.

Whilst the two exchange doe eyes over lunches and make the acquaintance of the Sheikh himself (Amr Waked), there’s something of a B-story involving Kristin Scott Thomas’ government Press Officer. As it happens, the Middle East is generally a pretty hostile place if you’re a UK soldier and the Prime Minister’s office is looking for a story that doesn’t involve something dead-shaped - and hey, a loopy story about shipping ten thousand fish to the middle of the desert ought to do the trick. But her interaction with McGregor and Blunt is minimal, and yet her lines and temper make up some of the film’s funniest moments - that she is underused is something of a missed opportunity.

As a whole, the film works. McGregor and Blunt do a fine job of keeping the proceedings running along at a decent rate of knots, but there’s very little romance to this romantic comedy owing to the disappearance of Blunt’s soldier boyfriend in - of course - Afghanistan. That she holds out for him is cute and gives the film an air of realism, but it also creates an impression that the titular fish are really important - and as later scenes will allude, they’re really not. A quick CGI shot at the end of a miraculous fish doing an adorable little leap out of the water is about your lot when it comes to anything with gills, and the real focus is naturally on the back and forths of the dowdy office fisherman and his primp and proper love interest.

Whilst the gentle fawning over the lady on McGregor’s part is sweet, the film has moments where it chugs along rather than glides as a well-oiled machine, and the two parts - the love story and the public relations panic - don’t really gel together all that well. When they meet in the middle at the conclusion, the two barely interact either, and I was left scratching my head at why the B-story even existed, as it was of such little significance and influence that the film may as well have done away with the scenes as a whole and chopped half an hour off of the runtime.

It could have been better written, but there’s gentle humour to be found in between the cute hints of courting and the occasional shot of a gawp-mouthed fish. I also expect that the Yemen will find itself the subject of a tourist influx in the aftermath, becoming a prime hotspot for those wealthy enough to travel there, and that the jarring terrorist side-story is at odds with the film’s light-hearted tone. But none of that really matters when Ewan McGregor is making doe eyes at Emily Blunt and she makes the slightest of suggestions that she is making them back.

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Read more film reviews, including Marvel Avengers Assemble and Gone.

Film Review: Avengers Assemble (The Avengers) (4/5)

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So much could have gone wrong. Like do many of music’s greatest supergroups, The Avengers - I refuse to use Avengers Assemble, the UK’s namby-pamby alternative title - shouldn’t have worked. The build-up in the post-credit scenes of previous films was too drawn out, the hype too much; and yet Joss Whedon has written and directed an electric and devastatingly awesome movie which successfully avoids the pitfalls that the simultaneous assembly of so many Marvel franchises could have fallen victim to.

The regular gang are all here: Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans) and the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo, thoughtfully voiced in monster form by Lou Ferrigno), fresh from their own movies and braced for action. Sort of. Earth is under threat from Thor’s rogue brother (Tom Hiddleston), who essentially uses a neat backdoor conjured up by a mystical object to invade Earth and plan a huge invasion. That he turns up in the underground lair of SHIELD - think the FBI, but with more superheroes - is a gift, and sets off a major recruitment drive for the organisation’s head, all-round badass Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).

The problem, and it’s one that’s refreshing to see, is that the team who will become the Avengers don’t exactly play well together. There’s a lot of fighting early on between the group’s members, notably between Iron Man, Thor and Cap in a desolate night-time forest as they come to fists over whose responsibility the bad guy is, and it’s as hilarious at times as it is exciting. That the Hulk’s tender, exceedingly more human alter ego Bruce Banner is kept under wraps for a while is one of the film’s greatest assets, and his eventual unleashing is spectacular.

Despite being established in their own films, the homework of watching them isn’t necessarily required. A couple of made-up proper nouns are tossed about - Tesseract, Chitauri - but the basic gists of what each of these things are, and how everything works, aren’t hard to grasp. The already-established characters, it is worth noting, are kept somewhat distant from Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) - her outfits jarring with the non-sexuality of the rest of the cast - and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner); the two are given their own slightly thin scenes in which to gently fawn over one another without very much actually happening, and their establishment is swift and somewhat two-dimensional.

The establishment of the Avengers unit itself is, it must be said, a little on the slow side, but the pacing is redeemed when the action picks up and a whole bunch of warring alien bandits are unleashed on an unsuspecting New York City. The catastrophic destruction of the city will, without a doubt, blow several minds, and set fanboys’ mouths foaming with frantic delight. There’s an excellent, CG-fuelled pan across a city block showing the six heroes kicking their own unique type of ass in a few split-second sweeps, and it had my inner kidult punching towards, and directly through, the ceiling thirty feet above my head. But there is a sense that, outside of this shot, the heroes were really sparring off of one-another for screentime, and it’s the Nordic-inspired Thor who ends up having the most interest invested in him, owing to his relationship with the film’s villain, whom Hiddleston plays with a brilliant edge verging on camp. But any potential family drama is averted through ostentatious use of explosions and fisticuffs, to detract from any risk of our heroes softening up at the wrong moment.

The script is sharp, the timing of the surprisingly frequent comedy perfection, and the conclusion and mid-credits scene (stick around for a couple of minutes) sure to set tongues waggling. But whilst The Avengers works, there’s something two-dimensional about some of the characters, as if Whedon crammed just that little bit too much in, causing a couple of loose cracks. And there’s still that issue with the pacing of the first hour or so - and this is a long film. Yet for all of the little shortcomings, the fact that a film of this long a build-up and of its galactic level of hype has formed something other than a car crash of the most horrendous level is to be commended, and that Whedon by and large kept a lid on the whole thing without it imploding in on itself is surely a feat as heroic as anything the film’s characters have to offer.

I went to see The Avengers in 3D and, save for some squinting during some nightime scenes, it did the job of adding some entertaining value, but only because the post-converted 3D jarred so badly with the genuinely 3D CGI - as ironic as that statement may be. The combination of “real” 3D with cardboard-cutout live action lifted the on-screen action up to a level of more believable falsity, like a Ray Harryhausen special effect, perhaps actually increasing my enjoyment of the film because of how plainly obvious and yet spectacular the false images became.

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Film Review: Gone (1/5)

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Gone is one of those rare films in which everything that can go wrong does. Jill Conway (Amanda Seyfried) is a woman convinced that she was abducted and left to die in a hole a year previously, but the police and her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) are sceptical, owing to her time spent in a mental institution. Then Molly disappears, and Jill’s appeals for help fall on deaf ears - so she turns private eye and essentially falls at every hurdle in her attempt to track down the kidnapper.

But the storyline of Gone is not the biggest issue at hand. It’s tedious, generic, as grey as the landscapes of Portland it depicts, and a better third act is sandwiched between the wanting quality of everything that came before and a poorly thought-out ending. The title is, I’d hope, a reference to the audience after the first ten minutes.

The meat of the tale involves Jill’s pursuit of her nameless, faceless killer after the police send her on her way, save for the new kid (Wes Bentley) who offers to help her out. He’s played out as a shifty type, like he might be suspicious, but like many things in the film he is misrepresented and poorly constructed, and it turns out he doesn’t really add anything to the film save for a few minutes of vacant stares. Much of the film is like this, but Jill’s private detective work is painfully ill-conceived.

From a run-down locksmith store to a hardware vendor and beyond, all whilst evading the law after pulling a gun in public, Seyfried plays Jill as a wide-eyed moron who wildly flails about and squeals like an irritated child. There’s nothing to like, nothing to root for, and the connections she makes are constructed with the laziest of links. There’s too many convenient things for her to pick up on - a discarded receipt, a shop assistant who knows that little bit too much about a random stranger - and the red herrings bore rather than surprise, as you can bet your bottom dollar that somebody will show up with an all-too-handy hint showing where to go next.

When the action turns from a hunt into a direct pursuit, there’s actually a little masterstroke of tension to be found. The latter scenes take Jill down a darkened forest path with just the headlights of a 4x4 and the voice of a potential abductor on speakerphone for company, and there’s slight relief when things reach a conclusion. But the sequence and the ending that follows are both so mind-numbingly bad, and badly scripted, that any plaudits which came before evaporate into the ether, replaced by frustration at director Heitor Dhalia for messing up so much.

Gone joins the ranks of films such as The Devil Inside in that it was not screened for critics. That distributor Summit Entertainment saw fit to blank reviewers speaks volumes about their confidence in the film and in Dhalia. I keep my fingers crossed in the hope that he isn’t given any work for a while.

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Read more film reviews, including The Cabin In The Woods and Battleship.