Film Review of the Week

Comedy

Marching Powder (18)

Review: Danny Dyer is ever so naughty but somewhat nice as he reunites with Nick Love, director of The Football Factory and The Business, for a bruising comedy drama about a passionate fan of the beautiful game who pledges to turn his life around for the sake of his family. This year’s big Oscar winner, Anora, proved rapid-fire swearing can be deftly woven into a script and feel meaningful and authentic (Sean Baker’s picture drops more than 400 f-bombs in 139 minutes). Love’s script works to a similar expletives-per-minute quota, unleashing a blitzkrieg of c-bombs as commas and full stops to saucy repartee between characters as they poke fun at each other, vent frustrations or, in Dyer’s case, repeatedly break the fourth wall to candidly share inner thoughts directly to camera.

Those of a nervous disposition about crude language, political incorrectness and excessive on-screen drug use should avoid taking a hit of Marching Powder because it’s full-on from the testosterone-soaked opening frames that bring bloodshed and snarling barbarity to the mean streets of… Lincolnshire. Dyer continues to polish his cheeky chappy persona and catalyses pleasantly simmering chemistry with screen wife Stephanie Leonidas. His real-life 11-year-old son, Arty, is cast as his character’s only child and delivers some of the film’s most challenging dialogue.

Jack Jones (Danny Dyer) is a 45-year-old football hooligan who belongs to a hardcore firm alongside his three best mates (Bailey Patrick, Dean Harrison, Joe Jackson). On match days, Jack abandons his long-suffering wife Dani (Leonidas) and young son JJ (Arty Dyer) to join other committed troublemakers, high on cocaine, adrenaline and each other’s cheeky banter, for fisticuffs with rival squads.

Dani’s menacing father (Geoff Bell) has never thought Jack is good enough and he is waiting for his son-in-law to prove him right. He might get his wish when police arrest Jack during an away game in Grimsby and the judge threatens to impose a custodial sentence unless Jack can show evidence of rehabilitation over the next six weeks. To resist the gravitational pull of his gang, Jack agrees to act as caretaker to his 25-year-old brother-in-law, Kenny Boy (Calum MacNab), who has just been released from a psychiatric hospital. Unfortunately, exceedingly bad habits are hard to break.

Marching Powder gleefully stomps through similar territory to Love’s previous films, forcibly inserting rom-com tropes into a chaotic world of football tribalism gone haywire. Fight sequences are confidently staged, including wince-inducing kicks and punches to unprotected heads. Dyer’s natural charm endears his self-destructive and directionless rapscallion, who feels increasingly irrelevant in a society that prefers to trade blows over social media than in person. Leonidas’s strong support urges us to care about Jack and Dani in the hope they can stop scoring own goals in their fractured marriage.

Sci-Fi

Mickey 17 (15)

Review: Two Robert Pattinsons are marginally better than one in writer-director Bong Joon Ho’s madcap sci-fi fantasy adapted from the novel Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton. Set in a deranged, dystopian future when human lab rats can be printed in around 20 hours and uploaded with a donor’s core memories, Mickey 17 poses discomfiting and timely questions about the widening gulf between society’s haves and have-nots. This bleak mid-21st century fable unfolds under the aegis of a showboating fanatic played with scenery-chewing fervour by Mark Ruffalo, whose mannerisms and speech pattern strongly intimate a current resident of The White House. It’s heavy-handed mimicry that feels like an unnecessarily cheap shot at the current US administration.

Pattinson’s performances as myriad incarnations of hapless hero Mickey are beautifully calibrated. Digital trickery seamlessly unites these dumbfounded doppelgangers on screen, leading to some breathlessly staged and outlandish sequences including a snow-bound showdown with curiously cute woodlouse-like creatures dubbed “creepers”. Flashes of moribund humour such as one badly injured Mickey being tossed into an incinerator when he is still (barely) alive enliven long stretches that reduce pacing to a pedestrian crawl. The 137-minute running time is overly ambitious.

In 2054, down-on-his-luck small-time criminal Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) signs up to be an ‘expendable’ – a worker who agrees to be reprinted every time he perishes – to avoid a fatal beating at the hands of a violent loan shark. He flees Earth with friend and accomplice Timo (Steven Yeun) on an interstellar mission to the remote colony of Niflheim masterminded by Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo) and his sauce-obsessed wife Ylfa (Toni Collette).

Earlier incarnations of Mickey are guinea pigs in scientific experiments to observe the effects of exposure to radiation, deadly airborne pathogens and early incarnations of a vaccine that causes Mickey to cough up blood. The only glimmer of light in each Mickey’s bleak (and brief) existence is a love affair with Niflheim security officer Nasha (Naomi Ackie).

The 17th iteration of Mickey is presumed dead after a close encounter with otherworldly creatures on the planet’s surface. In fact, creepers save Mickey from a grim fate and when he arrives back at base, he comes face-to-face with his reprinted self. The 18th Mickey is determined to enjoy his brief existence with Nasha and declares war on his predecessor as an ice storm gathers outside the colony’s base.

Mickey 17 lacks the consistent satirical bite and subtleties of Joon Ho’s previous film, the deliciously cruel Oscar-winning comedy Parasite, and harks back to his monster-mashing escapades in Okja and The Host. Production design is wondrous and death becomes Pattinson but Ruffalo and Collette are poorly served by a script that juxtaposes moments of brilliance with patience-sapping longueurs. In space, everyone will hear a sporadic stifled yawn.

Comedy

One Of Them Days (15)

Review: If life was always fair, mithering and moaning would be lost forever from the rich tapestry of British and Irish culture. Those fleeting moments of misfortune and misery remind us to be present, show gratitude and demonstrate sympathy when someone else experiences “one of them days”. Two Los Angeles roommates are repeatedly dealt losing hands in a raucous and foul-mouthed comedy directed by Lawrence Lamont, which follows the resourceful pair over an unpredictable day as they face eviction from a crumbling apartment complex.

Screenwriter Syreeta Singleton gift-wraps filthy-minded one-liners for lead duo Keke Palmer and SZA, such as when the latter colourfully describes the impressive endowment of her no-good boyfriend (“He can make it wave at me!”) The film stages an amusingly overblown sequence inside the office of a payday lender, which offers cash with an eye-watering 1,900% APR under the threatening advertising slogan, “We gotcha and we’ll getcha!” Wackier diversions strain credibility. The characters’ impromptu visit to a blood bank casually ignores life-threatening consequences in search of a ghoulish giggle that never materialises. Palmer and SZA’s sparkling rapport energises these instances when tumbleweave skitters across the screen.

Dreux (Palmer) works long hours in Norm’s 24-hour diner, where she treats customers like family. She has an important interview at 4pm to be appointed franchise manager, which would mean more responsibility and money. A few hours of precious sleep before the interview are interrupted by officious and unsympathetic landlord Uche (Rizi Timane) banging on the front door, angrily demanding the monthly rent of 1,500 US dollars which Dreux splits with aspiring artist roommate Alyssa (SZA).

It transpires that Alyssa’s boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua Neal) has absconded with the cash and if the money owed is not forthcoming by 6pm, the two women will be forcibly removed from their home and deposited on the kerb with their worldly possessions. With nine hours until the deadline, an infuriated Dreux and Alyssa hunt down Keshawn, who has a new woman (Aziza Scott) to pander to his needs. Alas, he has invested the cash in a get-poor-quick scheme so the desperate roommates conceive ingenious ways to raise a four-figure sum before the sun sets, leading to run-ins with a neighbourhood thug (Amin Joseph), a vintage basketball footwear collector (Lil Rel Howery) and a hunky ex-con with the curious nickname of Maniac (Patrick Cage).

One Of Them Days harnesses the same freewheeling energy as the glorious 2017 comedy Girls Trip with a similar emphasis on the power of sisterly solidarity but markedly fewer laughs. Palmer and SZA’s sparky double act is a source of wisecracking delight and heartwarming sentiment. Singleton’s script performs screeching U-turns to propel the lead duo towards a feelgood resolution with minimal dramatic outlay. It’s one of them films.