Comedy
Is This Thing On? (15)
Review: The personal life of Liverpudlian comedian John Bishop provides loose inspiration for a thorny relationship comedy drama co-written by director Bradley Cooper, lead actor Will Arnett and Mark Chappell, which professes the most honest and relatable humour is mined from the deepest heartache.
Alex Novak (Arnett) and wife Tess (Laura Dern) are in the early stages of separation, sensitively navigating the end of their marriage while caring for the mental wellbeing of their young sons, Felix (Blake Kane) and Jude (Calvin Knegten). “Nobody cheated,” Alex explains to his father Jan (Ciaran Hinds) during a heart-to-heart in the backyard as they repair an old miniature house. “It’s complicated….” he adds, stating the obvious to his old man, who has seen and heard it all before. His mother Marilyn (Christine Ebersole) provides emotional support as Alex and Tess work out the logistics of living separately and sharing custody of the boys.
The couple’s coterie of close friends, including Alex’s best friend Balls (Bradley Cooper) as his wife Christine (Andra Day) and Stephen (Sean Hayes) and his husband Geoffrey (Scott Icenogle) try to maintain some semblance of normality rather than add to the emotional upheaval. Unable to afford the cover charge at his local drinking den, Alex impetuously puts his name down to perform at the Comedy Cellar’s open mic night emceed by Kemp (Amy Sedaris). Off the cuff, he talks about his failed marriage and the audience responds warmly. As he builds in confidence and performs more regularly, Alex gravitates back towards Tess, who has a new beau (Peyton Manning).
Is This Thing On? is a gently humorous study of a marriage falling apart and slowly piecing itself back together, powered by a self-deprecating performance from Arnett as a father and husband, who begins to self-reflect and acknowledge his failings when he’s stood in the spotlight. He catalyses winning screen chemistry with Dern – we believe wholeheartedly in Alex and Tess as a couple – but some of the most tender and touching scenes unfold between Arnett and young co-stars Kane and Knegten.
When Felix and Jude stumble upon their father’s ‘joke book’, full of anecdotes and deeply personal thoughts about their fractured family, Alex explains his comedy material blends real people and situations with imagined scenarios. “I’m making up stories, because a lot of stuff is changing,” he tells the tykes. Cooper collaborates with cinematographer Matthew Libatique to invest protracted comedy club sequences with nervous, kinetic energy, mirroring Alex’s adrenaline rush as he seeks laughter and acceptance from his audience. The film repeatedly wins approval by wearing its heart on a sleeve.
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Comedy
Kangaroo (PG)
Review: It’s never too late to grow up and find yourself in an overly sentimental fish-out-of-water comedy directed by Kate Woods, which trades unabashedly on the cuteness of one of Australia’s indigenous creatures. Based on the true story of Chris ‘Brolga’ Barns and his wife Tahnee, who have nursed over 1,000 orphaned joeys with the help of volunteer wildlife carers, Kangaroo bounds excitedly from one predictable story beat to the next but should enthral family audiences hungry for wholesome and heart-warming fare.
Channel 6 weatherman Chris Masterman (Ryan Corr) dreams of promotion on the award-winning breakfast show, Rise And Shine Australia. To impress his producer Liz (Brooke Satchwell) and station chief Ted (Rob Carlton), Chris plays the hero on camera to ‘rescue’ a stranded baby dolphin in the waters off Bondi Beach but his viral moment takes an unexpectedly tragic twist. He loses his job and drives from Sydney to Broome in a classic red corvette for a new role in front of the camera. Passing through the town of Silver Gum outside Alice Springs (Mparntwe), Chris is distracted from watching the road and hits a kangaroo, unintentionally orphaning a baby joey nestled in the mother’s pouch. “For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast/And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed,” poetically laments Silver Gum resident Murray (Roy Billing), quoting Lord Byron, when he learns about Chris killing more innocent wildlife.
Twelve-year-old Indigenous Australian girl Charlie (Lily Whiteley), who loves to care for stricken kangaroos against the wishes of her mother (Deborah Mailman), takes advantage of the situation. She offers to help Chris care for the joey, christened Roger, while the weatherman takes up temporary residence in her grandparents’ so-called guest house. Stripped of home comforts, Chris slowly learns to care for someone other than himself and his unlikely friendship with Charlie helps the girl come to terms with the loss of her father and solidify new friendships in Silver Gum.
Shot on location in the Outback, Kangaroo is a quintessentially Australian adventure, which mines earthy humour from repeated clashes between Chris’s big city expectations (requesting Icelandic sparkling to quench his thirst) and the unpretentious, homespun hospitality of Silver Gum’s close-knit community. To quote a dearly departed soap opera’s theme tune, good neighbours become good friends in Harry Cripps’ screenplay and the tugging of heartstrings is apparent.
Corr is a likable hero, in desperate need of a personality overhaul, and co-star Whiteley knows how to plumb the sadness swimming behind her character’s eyes. Real rescue joeys from the Barns’ sanctuary bring unpredictable energy to their scenes while a digitally augmented larger incarnation of Roger bounds into view on cue in a cliche-peppered and dewy-eyed final act.
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Horror
Primate (18)
Review: Cambridge-born director Johannes Roberts trades underwater thrills and spills with voracious sharks in 47 Meters Down and its sequel for an uncomfortably close encounter with humans’ closest living relative. Set in a remote part of sun-kissed Hawaii, this gore-slathered horror invites the full monty of primate puns: Family pet goes ape. Chimpanzee goes bananas. Rabid companion goes nuts.
College student Lucy Pinborough (Johnny Sequoyah) flies home to paradise with best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) but the reverie is short-lived when Lucy discovers Kate has invited rival Hannah (Jessica Alexander) to join them at the Pinboroughs’ swanky cliffside house. Tension heightens when Kate’s brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng), who has been Lucy’s secret crush for years, shows more interest in Hannah. Lucy’s father Adam (Troy Kotsur) is a celebrated deaf author, who is going to be away for a book tour, leaving Lucy in charge of her younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and the household’s other resident: Ben (Miguel Torres Umba).
The highly intelligent chimpanzee was taught to communicate by Adam’s late wife, a linguistic professor who believed that apes can be educated to verbalise emotions using a soundboard. Ben is considered a part of the family but lives in an outdoor enclosure. Shortly before Lucy’s arrival, a mongoose carrying rabies access the enclosure and bites Ben. By the time Adam leaves to honour literary commitments, the animal is crazed and when local veterinarian Dr Doug Lambert (Rob Delaney) enters Ben’s enclosure to give the chimpanzee an injection, all hell breaks loose.
Primate is a slickly orchestrated battle of man versus nature that doesn’t skimp on the stomach-churning practical effects and prosthetics including, most prominently, a chief antagonist realised using Umba’s physical performance and sophisticated creature heads with eyebrow and nostril movements controlled by puppeteers. The grim and grisly tone is established in a doom-saturated opening sequence that elicits the first audible gasp of disgust. Audience interaction gets increasingly louder as Roberts and co-writer Ernest Riera invite Ben to bludgeon, pound and dismember any human interloper to his cliffside hunting ground. The monkey business is wince-inducingly graphic and entirely gratuitous, fully justifying content warnings about strong and gory violence. The film could have been just as nerve-racking without us having to watch characters surrender parts of their face to Ben’s frenzied paws.
Sequoyah is a sympathetic and likable heroine and a solid supporting performance from Oscar winner Kotsur allows Roberts to conduct one harrowing sequence in chilling silence from the perspective of someone who cannot hear bloodcurdling screams and carnage unfolding around them. He hears no evil but we definitely see it, in nauseating, icky close-up.
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Action
Shelter (15)
Review: Jason Statham flexes his muscles for stuntman-turned-filmmaker Ric Roman Waugh in a high-stakes espionage thriller written by Ward Parry, which models its clandestine asset handling, propulsive car chases and bone-crunching hand-to-hand fisticuffs on Jason Bourne’s gung-ho escapades. Michael Mason (Statham) is an ex-special forces soldier, who was once wielded as a “precision instrument” by the British government to carry out covert operations as part of an elite hit squad known as the Black Kites.
He now lives off the grid in a lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides where he can avoid retina-scanning CCTV cameras and other surveillance. His current location is unknown to Prime Minister Fordham (Harriet Walter) and her inner circle. On his island, Michael’s sole companion is his trusty dog and every week, an orphaned girl named Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and her uncle (Michael Schaeffer) travel by boat to drop off supplies. When a storm strands Jessie on Michael’s windswept sanctuary, he is forced to venture to the mainland for medical supplies and his face is caught on camera, triggering a top priority alert to the country’s newly installed MI6 chief, Roberta Frost (Naomi Ackie).
She is blissfully unaware of Michael’s role in the Black Kites and the culpability of her Machiavellian predecessor, Steven Manafort (Bill Nighy). He activates ruthless assassin-for-hire Workman (Bryan Vigier) to erase Michael and Jessie and avoid scrutiny of his actions. Bullets fly, tempers flare and Michael turns to one of the few people he knows he can trust, MI6 contact Arthur Booth (Daniel Mays), to secure safe passage to London to unravel the conspiracy.
Shelter is a slick, propulsive action thriller distinguished by touching rapport between Statham’s glowering brute and Breathnach’s spunky tyke, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. The teenage actor recently portrayed William Shakespeare’s eldest daughter Susannah in Hamnet and she possesses a fragility and wide-eyed innocence that contrasts sharply with Statham’s brute force delivery of lines and body blows. Similarities to the Bourne files are striking: an assassin program codenamed Black Kites not Blackbriar; a veteran British actor as a puppet master toying with agents’ lives; dizzying, close quarters hand-to-hand combat using improvised props; and a rival killer reminiscent of Karl Urban’s Kirill in the Bourne Supremacy, who employs similarly bullish tactics behind the wheel.
Drawing on his experience as a stuntman, Waugh understands how to choreograph action sequences for maximum impact. One protracted fight between Statham and Vigier pauses for breath between flurries of bone-crunching kicks, jabs and punches to heighten tension. A different and more satisfying resolution is in the film’s grasp but screenwriter Parry takes shelter on the path most travelled.
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