Film Review of the Week


Drama

Creation Stories (15)




Review: A quarter of a century after Ewan McGregor pounded the streets of Edinburgh to the beat of Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life, the anarchic spirit of Trainspotting lives on in director Nick Moran’s kaleidoscopic biopic of Scottish music mogul Alan McGee. Danny Boyle, Trainspotting’s fearless director, is credited as an executive producer here while author Irving Welsh co-wrote the script with Dean Cavanagh, feeding a profanity-laden stream of voiceover consciousness to Ewen Bremner, so memorable 25 years ago as hapless Spud.

Even the opening image of a man flailing underwater seems to reference Renton’s fleetingly beautiful deep dive into a filthy toilet. Imitation flatters Moran’s picture because for all its energy and frenetic editing, Creation Stories lacks a strong narrative focus, flitting excitedly from one vignette to the next without sufficient time to allow emotional beats to land, including a funeral reception.

The haphazard screenplay affords more time to a chance encounter between McGee (Bremner) and Jimmy Savile (Alistair McGowan) at a Chequers party hosted with Cheshire Cat-grinning glee by Prime Minister Tony Blair (James Payton) than the impact of Primal Scream’s third album Screamadelica. An opening title card – “Most of this happened. Some of the names have been changed to protect the guilty” – establishes an irreverent tone which infuses McGee’s narration. Los Angeles is casually described as “land of the backstabbers, the vacuous and the soulless” while Glastonbury music festival is affectionately likened to “Burning Man… with rain and mud”.

An intentionally fractured chronology ricochets between a journalist (Suki Waterhouse) interviewing McGee about his meteoric rise and flashbacks to early years in Glasgow under the yoke of a bullying father John (Richard Jobson) when “Bowie was the new messiah”. The formation of Creation Records with pals Dick Green (Thomas Turgoose) and Joe Foster (Michael Socha) leads to Manchester where Alan is submerged in the waters of acid house and then to Glasgow, where he witnesses an impromptu 20-minute set at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut from brothers Liam (Leo Harvey-Elledge) and Noel Gallagher (James McClelland).

Creation Stories is less than the sum of its sporadically entertaining parts including a deliciously exaggerated performance from Jason Isaacs as a hedonistic, drug-snorting film producer whose latest pitch is “black Forrest Gump… with music”. Director Moran makes a memorable cameo as Malcolm McLaren and Steven Berkoff burns white hot as controversial occultist Aleister Crowley. Protracted scenes devoted to McGee’s involvement with New Labour under Alistair Campbell (Ed Byrne) and Peter Mandelson (Joseph Millson) suck the air out of the film’s wheezing second half. Cling with waning patience to the upbeat melody of D:ream’s party political anthem, Things Can Only Get Better.



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Thriller

Silk Road (15)




Review: Playfully billed as a “product of journalistic research and wild flights of fiction”, Silk Road dramatises the hunt for an authority-flouting entrepreneur, who established an illegal underground marketplace dubbed Amazon for drugs. David Kushner’s 2014 magazine article Dead End On Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s Big Fall gives writer-director Tiller Russell plentiful food for thought as he zig-zags between the twentysomething target, who claims to be using “the internet as an instrument of liberty”, and a morally flawed DEA agent on his trail.

This game of cat and mouse in the digital space has the makings of a gripping thriller and the opening scene of Silk Road – a covert operation to take down Ulbricht and seize his laptop – establishes a nerve-jangling, brisk pace. Unfortunately, those initial droplets of tension evaporate as Russell struggles to chart a clear, concise path through the twists and turns in the case, dividing time between hunter and naive prey. Love, Simon star Nick Robinson fails to scratch beneath the surface of “the first millennial gangster” who impulsively orders a hit to cover his tracks, unaware that the shadowy facilitator with screenname @nob is a cunning law enforcer.

Jason Clarke suffers a similar fate as the old school DEA agent with compromised integrity, who is reassigned to the bright young things of cyber crime when he barely understands the basics of email or the internet. “I may be old and slow but I ain’t stupid,” Rick Bowden tells his 26-year-old supervisor (Will Ropp) as he acclimatises to high-tech new surroundings. Following a visit to one of his informants (Darrell Britt-Gibson), Bowden begins gathering evidence on Silk Road, which is generating 1.2 million US dollars a day through the anonymous sale of narcotics.

Site owner Ross Ulbricht (Robinson) ignores the dire warnings of girlfriend Julia (Alexandra Shipp) and best friend Max (Daniel David Stewart) to obsessively expand his empire with the help of one of his most trusted vendors (Paul Walter Hauser). Alas, Ross makes a series of fatal missteps in pursuit of idealism and he predicts his own downfall: “Sooner or later someone’s gonna come knocking.” Meanwhile, agent Bowden neglects his wife Sandy (Katie Aselton) and young daughter (Lexi Rabe) to doggedly hunt Ross and prove that justice operates most effectively on the ground, not in front of a computer screen.

Silk Road distils Bowden’s involvement in Ulbricht’s downfall to a pedestrian plod starved of nail-biting thrills. Russell’s script offers scant insight to the complex, gnarled psyches of either man and provides few signposts to guide the uninitiated through the murky world of the dark web and cryptocurrency. Clarke and Robinson look suitably haunted as their adversaries fall victim to paranoia and hubris and pay excessively for their crimes.



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Comedy

The War With Grandpa (PG)




Review: Battle lines are drawn between feuding generations in director Tim Hill’s slapdash family-oriented comedy. Based on Robert Kimmel Smith’s children’s book, The War With Grandpa contrives a ridiculous conflict between a petulant six grader and the oldest member of the clan, who agree to resolve differences with Home Alone-style booby traps and pranks that predictably spiral out of control. Tom J Astle and Matt Ember’s simplistic script conceals a couple of decent chuckles between swathes of broad slapstick, which includes an airborne Santa Claus and a barely-running gag involving a traffic cop who is repeatedly in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two-time Oscar winner Robert De Niro dusts off his intimidating patriarch from Meet The Fockers and is squandered as the crotchety old coot at the centre of the conflict. Co-stars Christopher Walken, Cheech Marin and Jane Seymour should feel equally aggrieved, sidelined for long stretches then forced to sacrifice their dignity in a preposterous set-piece game of dodgeball at a trampoline park that will supposedly draw a line under hostilities. Generous drizzles of sticky sentiment sweeten a predictable second half. Make familial love not war.

After an unfortunate first date with a self-checkout till at a grocery store, cantankerous widower Ed Marino (De Niro) faces pressure from his daughter Sally (Uma Thurman) to accept he can no longer take care of himself. She tries to persuade him to move in with her architect husband Arthur (Rob Riggle) and their three children, Peter (Oakes Fegley), Mia (Laura Marano) and Jenny (Poppy Gagnon), but Ed is resistant. “Fish and relatives stink after three days,” he mithers. Eventually Ed relents and he moves into grandson’s Peter’s bedroom, which relegates the disgruntled pre-teen to the attic.

Peter deeply resents the hasty relocation to “the creepy place full of spiders and mice” and he declares war on his grandfather. The old man warns Peter about the consequences – “Even if you win, everybody gets hurt” – but the youngster persists and Ed draws up two rules of engagement: no collateral damage to civilians or their property and no telling. Flanked by good friends Danny (Marin) and Jerry (Walken) and new acquaintance Diane (Seymour), Ed teaches his scheming grandson long overdue lessons in tolerance and understanding.

The War With Grandpa groans and creaks almost as much as Peter’s furniture after Ed removes the screws from his desk and bed. Fegley has natural likeability but he milks only fitful trickles of compassion for a displaced hero, who behaves like a spoilt brat at every turn. Thurman is wasted, like so many of the cast, but gamely flings herself into the melee. Thankfully it only takes around 90 minutes for director Hill to call a ceasefire.



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