Right, no more messing. I've really got to try and move these reviews along, so here's three vastly different films all grouped together for one reason: their mediocrity. Guillermo del Toro has been involved in seventeen different films since 2008's Hellboy II. The problem is he hasn't directed a single one of them. Therefore you'll be unsurprised to hear that Pacific Rim has terrible dialogue and awful acting. Del Toro is revered for his intellect and for this film drew inspiration from (amongst other things) Goya's The Colossus and Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa. However, at the end of the day isn't this just a film about large robots beating the crap out of each other? Idris Elba just looks guilty for accepting the paycheck and Ron Perlman chews so much scenery he's probably still in hospital now having bits of wood removed from his stomach. Teenage boys need apply only. It's adults only though for Nicolas Winding Refn's follow up to his much acclaimed Drive. Personally, I didn't fully get all the praise that film received and in Only God Forgives Refn has taken the main facets of that film and pushed them to the limit. So here we have even less dialogue, Ryan Gosling looking even moodier and Refn disappearing even further up his own backside. Storyline wise its a revenge fable, but Refn's usual mix of glacial pacing interspersed with crunching violence mean thrills are in short supply. Speaking of the violence, this has had the left up in arms again (somewhat ironic considering this film has many of them lopped off) but this isn't any worse than Drive and there's certainly nothing here as stomach churning as the disemboweling in Refn's earlier Valhalla Rising. Still you can't deny Refn knows how to frame and shoot a picture as this looks gorgeous. It's just a shame the overall product is clouded by conceitedness. Smugness is also an accusation that Richard Curtis has been labelled with over the years due to his scripts and films portraying a comfortable middle class existence for the majority of his characters. This kind of reverse snobbery is utterly ludicrous. If you want to slam Curtis do it for the quality of whats on show. Unfortunately for him, About Time gives plenty of opportunity for pouring scorn. It's a British romantic comedy (natch) in which a young man (Domhnall Gleeson) uses time travel to fix the problems in his life. It has its funny moments, but Curtis completely misses the point as he tries to garner sympathy from the audience when Gleeson doesn't get the chance to use the time machine to undo the darker moments in his life. So, just like the layman, huh, Richard? There's some good chemistry between Gleeson and Rachel McAdams in the lead roles (which is ironic considering he's basically pretty deceitful to her throughout), but the rules behind the time travel which drive the plot get forgotten about as we move through Gleeson's life and we're left with so many unanswered questions that in the end the unique selling point of this film is the thing that kills it. Rating for all three films: 4/10.
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