Animation
The Amazing Maurice (PG)
Review: Two of nature’s sworn enemies – the cat and the rat – become willing accomplices in low-level crime in a computer-animated adventure based on Terry Pratchett’s book The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents. Directed by Toby Genkel and co-directed by Florian Westermann, The Amazing Maurice merrily exploits storytelling convention to spin an entertaining yarn that preaches self-empowerment using a tongue-in-cheek framing device. “It’s a story that wraps around the main story like a warm blanket around a baby,” handily explains the female narrator.
A potentially upsetting rat-coursing sequence is punctuated with comic book violence and the blood-crazed humans who wager money on a dog mauling vermin are shown on screen to suffer the bruising consequences of a callous disregard for precious life. Pratchett’s humour is woven into Terry Rossio’s gently paced script like when the title character asserts that deception is hard-wired into the human condition. “They are so keen on tricking each other they elect governments to do it for them,” he quips. Hugh Laurie’s vocals as the feline confidence trickster slink appealingly between smug and sympathetic, complementing detailed visuals and energetic supporting performances, notably Emilia Clarke as a loner who believes fantastical tales from her bookshelf can spill into everyday life.
A platoon of rats, who magically developed the ability to talk after foraging the rubbish of wizards from the Unseen University of Ankh-Morpork, join forces with con-cat Maurice (Laurie) and orphaned boy Keith (Himesh Patel) to make money from humankind’s hatred of vermin. The rodents infest an unsuspecting town then pretend to be enslaved to music played by Keith on his pipe. Relieved residents happily dip into their pockets, glad to be rid of the threat of plague.
The rats believe they are raising money for boats to transport them to an island paradise described in their literary bible, the children’s picture book Mr Bunnsy Has An Adventure. In truth, the ill-gotten gains are a nest egg for Maurice’s retirement. The tricksters breach a town in the grip of a devastating famine and join forces with bookworm Malicia (Clarke), daughter of the beleaguered Mayor (Hugh Bonneville), to solve the perplexing mystery of the missing food. A secret mission to infiltrate The Ratcatchers’ Guild uncovers tantalising clues that lead to a shadowy Boss Man (David Thewlis) and the bona fide Pied Piper (Rob Brydon).
The Amazing Maurice doesn’t quite live up to the superlative of its title but this gently effervescent caper will feed families hungry for entertainment over the festive season. With a 93-minute running time, narrative fat has been neatly trimmed along with some deeper characterisation of peripheral players beyond obvious quirks. The cat is out of the bag: Genkel and Westermann’s picture is a fine pedigree.
Find The Amazing Maurice in the cinemas
Action
Avatar: The Way Of Water (12A)
Review: At the end of his 1998 Academy Awards acceptance speech as Best Director of Titanic, James Cameron famously screamed: “I’m the king of the world!” He has fulfilled that boast by reclaiming the title of highest-grossing film of all time from Avengers: Endgame with a recent re-release of the 2009 blockbuster Avatar. Like Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay, Cameron is passionately dedicated to the adrenaline rush of the big screen experience and films don’t come much bigger – or more expensive – than Avatar: The Way Of Water.
In this opening salvo of four sequels, he expands digitally rendered horizons from Pandora’s bioluminescent forests to the moon’s teeming oceans and resplendent atolls, providing audiences with a compelling reason to immerse fully in eye-popping 3D and IMAX. It’s a dizzying sensory overload that can’t be replicated at home or on a streaming service; a jaw-dropping, photorealistic spectacle that harnesses new software and technology to enable performance capture underwater for the first time. Every rock, leaf and minuscule element of background detail feels exquisitely real and when characters venture beneath waves, Cameron and cinematographer Russell Carpenter play beautifully with shimmering light including a bombastic action set piece that revisits the swirling, water-logged terror of Titanic.
Like its predecessor, Avatar: The Way Of Water springs a few leaks in terms of plot and dialogue (one father-son dynamic is noticeably undernourished). However, the script, co-written by Cameron, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, is more emotionally rich than the initial foray into Pandora. I cried three times and was too engrossed to be troubled by a 192-minute running time, almost half an hour longer than the original.
Marine veteran Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) permanently inhabits his Na’vi body to proudly serve as Toruk Makto, fierce protector of the Omatikaya clan on Pandora. Peace has been restored after the battle royale with the Resources Development Administration (RDA) for control of the precious mineral unobtainium. Jake is settled with his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), their three biological children Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Tuktirey (Trinity Bliss) and adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver). Orphaned human child Spider (Jack Champion) remained on Pandora in the aftermath of war with scientist Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore) and is a close ally of the Sully brood.
The heavily armed RDA returns under the command of General Francis Ardmore (Edie Falco) to prepare the moon for human colonisation. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is charged with leading an elite team to capture Jake and extinguish the insurgency. The Sully clan abandon the Hallelujah Mountains where banshees roost and invoke the Na’vi tradition of Uturu, which grants them safe harbour in a reef village of the Metkayina tribe led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet). In this idyllic island outpost, the refugees learn valuable diving skills from Tonowari and Ronal’s children Tsireya (Bailey Bass) and Aonung (Filip Geljo), forge spiritual bonds to sentient whale-like creatures called the tulkun, and prepare for the next battle with avaricious human invaders.
Avatar: The Way Of Water is an unabashedly splashy and bombastic survival thriller that lives up to the cacophonous hype and surpasses the original, delivering a more satisfying experience for the heart to match bountiful delights for the ears and eyes. Cameron revisits Aliens and The Abyss alongside Titanic in breathless set-pieces while Worthington, Saldana and Winslet exercise performance-captured dramatic muscles in fraught scenes of intergenerational conflict that remind us every war has casualties. Even the young. The director’s reputation emerges from this skirmish unscathed.
Find Avatar: The Way Of Water in the cinemas
