Posts Tagged ‘Margot Robbie’

Barbie

Director: Greta Gerwig

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Emma Mackey, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Michael Cera, Will Ferrell, Helen Mirren, Rhea Pearlman, Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir

Running Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Toys as a consumer product are self reflexively explored with wit and sarcasm by Ladybird and Little Women director Greta Gerwig in the highly anticipated fantasy film Barbie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as the dolls Barbie and Ken, who combined have multiple blonde moments.

It all starts off beautifully in the valley of the dolls aka Barbieland where like Pleasantville everything is perfect until Ken tries to reach the end of the wave and hits a dead-end and when Barbie’s doll like features start diminishing quickly including her high heel step and thoughts of death start seeping into her consciousness.

On consultation with weird Barbie wonderfully portrayed by Kate McKinnon, Barbie ventures off Barbieland through a portal which connects her to Los Angeles specifically the headquarters of Mattel, the manufacturers of Barbie where she confronts corporate doublespeak and patriarchy masquerading as profit.

Once in Los Angeles, Barbie is lost and confused whereas Ken, on the other hand revels in the patriarchy and rushes back to Barbieland to plot a revolution with the other Ken dolls, notably starring a range of male actors from Kingsley Ben-Adir to Simu Liu. Ken even discovers a liking for trucks and horses while Barbie discovers a fearless corporate secretary Gloria superbly played by Ugly Betty star America Ferrara, who unlocks the secret of Barbie’s beautiful transformation.

Ryan Gosling is superb as Ken, carefully crafting a narrative arc for his character from naivety to tyranny and then back to nostalgia. Gosling deserves an Oscar nomination for his role as Ken, from the jiving dance numbers to the villainous revenge he plots against the Barbies played by numerous actresses including Emma Mackey (Eiffel, Emily, Death on the Nile) and Issa Rae.

Despite all the hype and publicity, Barbie is not a sweet children’s film for small little girls, but a scathing allegorical tale on the nature of capitalism and how the gender roles have been structured to suit profit over flexibility, often pushing women out of the workplace in favour of men. Writer and director Greta Gerwig does the full range of jibes against her male counterparts from toxic masculinity to man explaining and from suffrage to male preening, questioning specifically assigned gender roles. In this respect her casting of the hottest star in the world Ryan Gosling is spot on as Ken and his performance elevates Barbie from a vivacious almost perfect land to a treacherous battle of the sexes whereby both Barbie and Ken have to discover their own identities.

Barbie is a candy coloured condemnation of the social roles assigned to men and women and how little children are socialized into specific gender roles through toys manufactured by shady multi-million dollar corporations. While Margot Robbie looks like Barbie, it is really her supporting cast that does the heavy lifting particularly America Ferrera as a contemporary woman juggling a career and raising a difficult daughter.

Where Gerwig falters in Barbie is that a toy is a difficult subject matter to adapt into a big screen unlike a novel such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Her directorial faults include crass excess and some really silly scenes especially those with Will Ferrell.

Barbie is a fun enjoyable fantasy but it is a film that takes itself too seriously in parts and not seriously enough as a sustainable narrative. Fortunately Ryan Gosling is talented enough to make Barbie’s counterpart, vain and idiotic. However, Kenough is not sufficient to stop the Barbie force.

Barbie gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10 and is elevated by excellent supporting performances and fabulous kaleidoscopic costumes by double Oscar winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran (Little Women, Anna Karenina).

See it for the costumes, the dance moves and the music particularly the retro disco scene at the Barbie house party.

Asteroid City

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Hong Chau, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan, Jeff Goldblum, Grace Edwards, Sophia Lillis, Bob Balaban

Running Time: 1 hour and 44 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Celestial flirtations abound in director Wes Anderson’s latest fluorescent theatrical film, Asteroid City featuring a blossoming cast headlined by two excellent performances by Jason Schwartzman and Oscar nominee Scarlett Johansson (Jojo Rabbit, Marriage Story) as theatre actors Augie Steenbeck and the glamorous Midge Campbell who find themselves acting in the eccentric playwright Conrad Earp wonderfully played with deadpan flamboyance by Oscar nominee Edward Norton (Primal Fear, American History X, Birdman)’s new play Asteroid City set in a one horse town in Arizona in 1955 complete without a candy coloured diner and a nuclear testing site.

Asteroid City has a population of 69.

Visually and aesthetically, Asteroid City is beautiful to watch as a film, like a trippy popup book with fabulous colours and eccentric characters from singing cowboys and random socialites, from military personnel to perilous children who comprise the space cadets of the town.

At a random event celebrating the arrival of an asteroid in a desert, the entire town is gathered and listening to an articulate speech by General Grif Gibson played by Jeffrey Wright (No Time To Die) when out of nowhere a cheeky alien arrives in a garish green UFO and unexpectedly steals the asteroid while the town looks on in horror and curiosity.

Luckily Augie who is a reluctant father of four children, a son named Woodrow wonderfully played by Jake Ryan and triplet daughters known collectively by their grandfather as The Witches, managed to photograph the alien. Then the military step in and quarantine the town, a suitable jibe by screenwriter Wes Anderson at the weird lockdown restrictions imposed by Governments across the world during the Covid19 pandemic in 2020.

Despite the ensemble cast, it is really Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson’s film as they both shine in a complex self-reflexive narrative which takes inspiration from American playwright Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Jason Schwartzman who played King Louis XVI opposite Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and is soon to star in his uncle Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis, really shines as a talented stage actor and part time homosexual Augie Steenbeck in a role which is equally quirky and subversive.

Asteroid City is a highly theatrical comically absurd film serving as a dazzling critique on the bizarre nature of events in 2020 and cleverly presents the concept of The West as a construct to be interchanged and taken down again, much like a cardboard city. Notable turns in the film go to Tom Hanks as Grandfather Stanley Zak, Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) as Dr Hickenlooper and Oscar nominee Bryan Cranston (Trumbo) as The Host.

Take yourself on a journey and see the visually splendid Asteroid City, which is not perfect as a film, but it is enchanting in a celestial way and will find a cult following everywhere much like the Space Cadets that follow the Milky Way. With impressive set designs, Asteroid City should win an Oscar for Production Design in the 2024 Academy Awards.

Not as brilliant as The Grand Budapest Hotel, but Asteroid City gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10, a quirky self-reflexive play about a city that doesn’t exist and an alien that possibly does.

Wes Anderson outdoes himself with a script and a bizarre film which received a 6 minute standing ovation at the film’s glittering premiere at the 2023 Festival de Cannes.

Babylon

Director: Damien Chazelle

Cast: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Jean Smart, Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo, Lukas Haas, Tobey Maguire, Samara Weaving, Katherine Waterston, Eric Roberts, Max Minghella, Li Jun Li

Running Time: 3 hours and 9 minutes

Film Rating: 8 out of 10

Warning: This film is extremely explicit featuring graphic violence, nudity, drug use and scenes that will upset sensitive viewers.

Set between 1926 and 1932, as Hollywood was transitioning between the silent film era into talkies or films with sound, Whiplash and La La Land director Damien Chazelle makes his boldest, bravest film yet: Babylon.

The lavish Babylon is a Feliniesque epic set in Hollywood in the early days during this fascinating transition whereby Chazelle chooses to shock his audience with the absolutely debauched and decadent party scene in the opening sequence, introducing his three main characters, silent screen stars Jack Conrad, Nellie LaRoy and producer Manny Torres played respectively by Oscar winner Brad Pitt (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Oscar nominee Margot Robbie (I, Tonya, Bombshell) and the impressive newcomer Mexican actor Diego Calva amidst a drunken orgy featuring elephants, dead starlets and absolute chaos.

The eye-catching opening of Babylon is followed by some amazing set pieces of directors and actors trying to make silent films including an expansive medieval battle sequence which goes horribly wrong. Massive crowd sequences are cleverly orchestrated to the brilliant jazzy musical score of Oscar winner and frequent collaborator Justin Hurwitz (La La Land) who should win again for his inventive score.

Behind the lavish parties and the crazy antics involving rattlesnakes in the desert is Damien Chazelle’s love and hate relationship with Hollywood in which he does not hold back in showing the extremely dark and violent underbelly of the City of Angels in a very bizarre scene featuring Tobey Maguire involving a dungeon, an alligator and some SM dwarves.

Despite all the debauchery, there are some superb scenes particularly between the frenetic, tough as nails Nellie LaRoy and the passionate Manny Torres and between the suave Jack Conrad and Hollywood gossip columnist Elinor St John played by Jean Smart.

There are repeated scenes of the main characters buying movie tickets and going into a packed cinema which is an allegory of how scriptwriter and director Chazelle feels about the next seismic shift in film entertainment, streaming which is threatening the viability of cinemas as a palace of enjoyment, as a collective experience of an audience watching their favourite stars onscreen.

Damien Chazelle wants the cinema ritual to continue even though he repels and delights his audience simultaneously in this shocking and brave allegorical epic about the changes in the entertainment industry brought about recently by streaming services.

Set almost 100 years ago, Babylon is a cinephile’s film, a tribute to cinema goers and film enthusiasts but unlike Steven Spielberg’s glossy The Fabelmans, Babylon is a Ken Russell inspired orgy of a film featuring brilliant performances by Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt and Diego Calva. There are lots of cinematic gems in this film, which you can look for in between the chaos, the predators and the debauchery.

The production and costume design is stunning and Babylon despite its length should get acknowledged for this effort.

This epic 1920’s film is a sensuous simulacrum of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Love it or loathe it, Babylon is an exceptionally daring homage to cinema and gets a film rating of 8 out of 10. See it for the visual spectacle.

The Suicide Squad

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Viola Davis, Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, Sylvester Stallone, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Pete Davidson, Flula Borg, Jai Courtney, Nathan Fillion, Michael Rooker, Alice Braga, Peter Capaldi, Juan Diego Botto, Taika Waititi, David Dastmalchian

Film Rating: 5.5 out of 10

How did Warner Brothers go from the brilliant Oscar winning Joker in the DC superhero universe to this bizarre concoction of the 2021 reboot of Suicide Squad, unimaginably entitled The Suicide Squad?

Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn clearly drew on a lot of inspiration from the films of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro specifically the Oscar winning Pan’s Labyrinth and more recently 2018’s The Shape of Water. Clearly, del Toro’s brilliance as a film maker did not shine off on director James Gunn as he delivers a bloated hot mess of a superhero film The Suicide Squad, featuring too many characters, glorified violence and a plot as bizarre as a Kafka novel with drug induced input from William S. Boroughs author of The Naked Lunch.

2021’s The Suicide Squad is so crazy, so unbelievably off the wall, that even the brilliant moments are overshadowed by some truly ridiculous moments which involved a whole new gang of The Suicide Squad attacking a fictional crackpot Hispanic island in which a crazed glorified dictator is harbouring an alien lifeform in the shape of a giant starfish.

Not even Oscar winner Viola Davis (Fences) could steady this crazy ship of fools, nor could Oscar nominee Margot Robbie (I, Tonya, Bombshell) as she dutifully reprises her role of the psychotic Harley Quinn, alongside Joel Kinnaman as Rick Flag, newcomer Idris Elba as Bloodsport and John Cena, seen frequently in white underpants as Peacemaker.

There are an abundance of sidekicks including David Dastmalchian as the mother obsessed Polka Dot Man, Sylvester Stallone as the talking shark King Shark, beautiful German actor Flula Borg as the gorgeous Javelin and a briefly seen Jai Courtenay as Captain Boomerang.

The scriptwriters killed their darlings in the opening credits of The Suicide Squad, making way for a convoluted plot involving alien life forms, a vain Hispanic dictator on a remote Caribbean island and a giant starfish which eventually attacks a city the size of Haiti. With such a confluence of confusing characters not one of them stood out as remarkably noticeable, although both Idris Elba and Margot Robbie tried their best to steady this sinking ship of wrecked and psychotic superheroes.

The only bright moment in The Suicide Squad, was the brief cameo appearance of Oscar winning screen writer of Jojo Rabbit Taika Waititi on a rooftop in Lisbon, Portugal, appearing as Ratcatcher. 

Despite the creative production design, The Suicide Squad is deeply disturbing, a film that glorifies death and violence without ever being responsible about its moral implications for the viewers who watch it. Where Joker was intricate and careful about its psychological makeup, The Suicide Squad is unbelievable careless about their characterizations.

The Suicide Squad gets a film rating of 5.5 out of 10, outlandish and cluttered with dazzling images, psychotic superheroes and zombies. Do not watch this film if you are stressed or taking hallucinogenic drugs.

Birds of Prey

Director: Cathy Yan

Cast: Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rosie Perez, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Ewan McGregor, Chris Messina, Ella Jay Basco

Oscar nominee Margot Robbie (I, Tonya; Bombshell) reprises her role as Harley Quinn the now ex-girlfriend of Joker whose character was first introduced in 2016’s Suicide Squad in a new standalone film called Birds of Prey which doesn’t unfortunately pack the same gender affirming punch as director Patty Jenkin’s groundbreaking film Wonder Woman.

Although both Birds of Prey, Suicide Squad and the Oscar winning Joker all fall under the Warner Brothers DC Comics franchise, Birds of Prey is not as brilliant as Wonder Woman but rather resorts to being too much of a garish man-hating super-hero film which doesn’t link back to Suicide Squad or even Justice League.

Birds of Prey features a suitably evil villain Roman Sionis devilishly played with camp enthusiasm by Scottish actor Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting, Moulin Rouge) along with his equally psychotic blonde haired side kick Victor Zsasz superbly played by Chris Messina (Argo, Live By Night)  who both go after Harley Quinn with a vengeance.

The crazy Harley Quinn soon teams up with a range of butt-kicking awesome females showing off Gotham’s Girl Power including hard drinking disgraced cop Renee Montaya wonderfully played by Oscar nominee Rosie Perez (Fearless), The Huntress played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Gemini Man, Kill the Messenger) whose alter ego is Helena Bartinelli who is the daughter of one of Gotham’s famed mob families and Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Dinah Lance aka Black Canary who betrays Roman after watching his misogynist treatment of women in his zany nightclub.

This gang of Gotham girls aim to protect a local thief Cassandra Cain played by Ella Jay Basco who purposefully swallowed a sought after diamond wanted by the mob.

Not evolving beyond being a garish fantasy piece without a solid storyline and inadequately directed by Cathy Yan, Birds of Prey aims to confuse the viewer more than actually help them identify with Harley Quinn as a crazy but lovable blonde villain.

Problematically, Birds of Prey was released in cinemas too soon after the absolutely brilliant Todd Phillips film Joker in which Joaquin Phoenix has just won his first Oscar award for Best Actor.

With an ultra-saturated Gotham, Birds of Prey should have spent more time in post-production or with some decent script rewrites especially considering that the main theme of the film seems to be that it’s alright for violent girls to kill boys or even vice versa. The action was tasteless and the setting was confusing.

Birds of Prey gets a film rating of 6.5 out of 10 and Margot Robbie should have known better than to do a questionable film version of Harley Quinn without a decent director and brilliant script on board. Even if there is a pet Hyena thrown in! Watch Birds of Prey at your own risk but it doesn’t touch the brilliance of Joker.

Bombshell

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, Connie Britton, Malcolm McDowell, Josh Lawson, Ben Lawson, Kate McKinnon, Liv Hewson, Rob Delany, Mark Duplass, Stephen Root, Mark Moses, Amy Landecker

Trumbo director Jay Roach tackles the Fox News sexual harassment scandal of 2016 in his latest film Bombshell when blonde TV anchor woman Gretchen Carlson played by Oscar winner Nicole Kidman (The Hours) sues Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes wonderfully played with a creepy sense of self-denial by Oscar nominee John Lithgow (The World According to Garp, Terms of Endearment) for sexual harassment.

Now for viewers that don’t follow American politics or media scandals then do not see Bombshell, this film has a very limited appeal outside of the United States.

The real revelation of Bombshell is the fantastic transformation of another Oscar winner South Africa’s very own Charlize Theron (Monster) as she plays Fox News primetime anchor woman Megyn Kelly thanks to the brilliant work of prosthetic makeup designer Kazu Hiro who won an Oscar for transforming Oscar winner Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.

Charlize Theron is absolutely brilliant as Megyn Kelly as she navigates her way through a thoroughly conservative and toxic media environment at Fox News as she attempts to cover the controversial presidential campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump who inevitably became the next President of the United States.

Add to the mix of beautiful blondes that work at Fox News, is the newcomer Kayla Prospisil played by Oscar nominee Margot Robbie (I,Tonya) who experiences sexual harassment first hand when she has a private meeting with Roger Ailes in a cringe worthy scene in which the media executive keeps asking Kayla to lift her skirt higher and higher.

At the times of the Roger Ailes scandal, the conservative Television broadcaster Fox News was owned by the Australian media conglomerate Newscorp which comprised of Rupert Murdoch played in Bombshell by A Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell and managed by his two sons Lachlan and James Murdoch played in the film by Australian brothers Ben and Josh Lawson.

Director Jay Roach does not make a brilliant film and Bombshell appears to be extremely confusing for those viewers that are not familiar with this particular conservative American media scandal which occurred in the summer of 2016.

What Bombshell does do is highlight the extent to which women were sexually harassed in the American work place and this happened a year before the Harvey Weinstein scandal shocked Hollywood in 2017 and gave birth to the vociferous and extremely relevant MeToo movement which aims to end sexual harassment in the highly contested American media industry and beyond.

For those interested in American media scandals, Bombshell is recommended viewing and gets a film rating of 7 out of 10.

For a flawed film, Bombshell is saved by two phenomenal performances by Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Leonardo di Caprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Dakota Fanning, Maya Hawke, Timothy Olyphant, Austin Butler, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Margaret Qualley, Damon Herriman

Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay for Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, writer and director Quentin Tarantino returns to the big screen with his 9^th feature film the brilliantly titled Once Upon a Time in Hollywood starring Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant) and Brad Pitt as buddies actor Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth in a fictional tale set in Los Angeles in 1969.

1969 was the year that the real life film director Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by the followers of the Charles Manson cult which shocked the American film industry to its rotten core. Charles Manson is played in the film by Australian actor Damon Herriman.

Firstly two disclaimers: this is an extremely long film and secondly it’s really only aimed at serious movie buffs and serves as Tarantino’s ode to the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age before the film making industry got taken over by corporations, sequels, digitization and streaming.

Tarantino artfully pays homage to the act of buying a ticket and going to the cinema in a rather poignant scene when the young actress Sharon Tate superbly played by Oscar nominee Margot Robbie (I, Tonya) actually pays to watch a film she is starring in at a Westwood cinema.

The rest of this marvelously meandering film belongs to the two major stars, DiCaprio who is superb as the washed up TV actor Rick Dalton who is desperately trying to make a Big Screen comeback but lands up starring in a string of Spaghetti Westerns in Rome.

Oscar nominee Brad Pitt (12 Monkeys) is phenomenal as the stunt double past his prime Cliff Booth in one of his best onscreen performances yet especially the gorgeous scene when he takes his shirt off on the roof of Dalton’s Hollywood Hills mansion in the scorching Californian sun to fix the TV aerial.

Booth also inadvertently stumbles across the hippie cult followers of Charles Manson in an abandoned studio lot in Chatsworth, California featuring some great cameos by Dakota Fanning (Ocean’s 8, War of the Worlds) as Squeaky Fromme , Oscar nominee Bruce Dern (Nebraska) as George Spahn and Margaret Qualley (The Nice Guys) as the seductive hippie hitchhiker Pussycat.

Tarantino expertly captures the zeitgeist of Los Angeles in 1969 at the peak of the counter-culture movement with lurid production design by Barbara Ling and costumes by Oscar nominated costume designer Arianne Phillips (Walk the Line, A Single Man, Nocturnal Animals, W. E.).

With some expertly placed cameos including Oscar winner Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman) as hot shot producer Marvin Schwarz and Damian Lewis as real life star Steve McQueen.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is slowing moving in the first two acts of the film, while the third act is phenomenal especially the hippie flame throwing sequence.

Tarantino could have quickened the film’s pace in the beginning to actively propel the narrative forward but he is a notorious auteur and not interested in packaging films to please audience expectations.

Unbelievably, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood did get a standing ovation at its glittering film premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival so Tarantino did something right.

This film gets a rating of 8 out of 10 and accurately portrays acting as artifice.

This is not Tarantino’s best work but written and directed in the vein of his crime thriller Jackie Brown, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood is strictly recommended for Tarantino fans and those that enjoyed Pulp Fiction, Django Unchanged and Inglourious Basterds.

Suicide Squad

Director: David Ayer

Cast: Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Viola Davis, Joel Kinnaman, Jai Courtney, Jay Hernandez, Jared Leto, Cara Delevigne, Common, David Harbour, Scott Eastwood, Ezra Miller

After David Ayer’s impressively realistic war film, Fury, it was announced that he would be directing the highly anticipated and edgy superhero film, Suicide Squad.

Assembling an international cast would be easy. Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman and Oscar nominee Viola Davis were all on board but the real casting coup was having Oscar winner Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club) play the Joker.

Big crazy shoes to fill for Leto considering Oscar winner Heath Ledger did such a sterling job of playing The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s visually impressive The Dark Knight in 2008. And then there was Oscar winner Jack Nicolson’s wacky portrayal of Gotham’s most deranged villain in Tim Burton’s Batman back in the 1989.

So Suicide Squad is finally released with huge expectations including a brilliant trailer but is this new superhero film that mind-blowing? If viewers watch this film as a precursor for Warner Bros’s DC Comics expanding their cinematic universe following Batman versus Superman and the highly anticipated The Justice League to be released in 2017, then Suicide Squad will satisfy fanboys globally.

What saves Suicide Squad is Margot Robbie’s exuberant performance as the psychopathic killer Harley Quinn who also happens to be The Joker’s deranged girlfriend.

Equally good in Suicide Squad is Oscar nominee Viola Davis (The Help, Doubt) who plays a hard-nosed and ruthless head of a covert government organization and the brainchild behind assembling such a crazy bunch of humans and meta-humans to save Midway City, where the only bond tying the psycho killers together are a shared lunacy and the prospect of continued incarceration.

What works against Suicide Squad is having such a young villain, model turned actress Cara Delevigne as the evil Enchantress whilst Leto’s crazy Joker has diminished screen time, but then again Leto is returning in The Justice League, so we shall see.

Suicide Squad does lose the plot slightly, but as a superhero film especially with David Ayer at the helm, it could have been far edgier and definitely much sexier. This is where Deadpool got it right. If you are going to subvert the superhero genre do it properly especially with such a deranged cast of characters. The use of continued flashbacks in the narrative also detracts somewhat from the primary storyline.

Despite the steam punk production design, Suicide Squad is not a brilliant film and certainly does not live up to its hype, but will be savoured by all superhero fanboys and if one views the film as a precursor to great things to come then it is outrageously entertaining. Audiences should definitely stay seated beyond the final credits.

Unfortunately Will Smith and Joel Kinnaman seem to fumble in the film but that is primarily because they do not have sufficiently grittier and bloodier material to work with, a style which director David Ayer is more accustomed to.

See Fury to appreciate where Ayer’s real talent lies.

The Legend of Tarzan

Director: David Yates

Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson, Djimon Hounsou, Ben Chaplin, Jim Broadbent, Osy Ikhile, Antony Acheampong

British director David Yates who was responsible for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows returns to the director’s chair headlining a re-imagining of the mythical Tarzan, in the new visually astounding film, The Legend of Tarzan, featuring Swedish hunk Alexander Skarsgard in the titular role.

Tarzan, also known as Lord Greystoke, John Clayton is accompanied by his beautiful and vivacious wife Jane, wonderfully played by Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot) and an American emissary George Washington Williams played against type by Oscar nominee Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction, Kingsman: Secret Service). The villain in Legend of Tarzan is played by none other than Austrian Oscar winner Christoph Waltz (Spectre, Django Unchained) who portrays the evil and repugnant Leon Rom. The year is 1884 and the colonization of Africa by European powers is gaining rapid and unparalleled momentum.

Set in the beautiful and vast Belgian Congo, when King Leopold was rapaciously raping the Congo of its mineral wealth, particularly diamonds using slave labour and devious means including turning warring local tribes against each other. One such tribe headed by Chief Mbonga muscularly played by Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond) wants Tarzan’s head on a plate and makes an unlikely pact with the unscrupulous Rom, who will stop at nothing to complete his reigning monarch’s ambitious colonial plans.

John and Jane Clayton are persuaded to leave the comforts of late Victorian England behind and head for the exotic and wild plains of the Belgian Congo, where they soon confront the evil Leon Rom and his multitude of force publique officers who are out to enslave and enforce the will of the Belgian monarch upon the unsuspecting locals.

What really makes The Legend of Tarzan worth seeing is the brilliant incorporation of superb visual effects using performance capture technology for a vivid portrayal of the wildlife featured in the film, mainly the gorillas, lions and hordes of wildebeest. The brilliantly featured gorillas are a highlight. These creatures of the wild, raised baby Tarzan as one of their own, teaching him the laws of the jungle and how important it is to respect the hierarchy of the Animal Kingdom.

Whilst Skarsgard’s performance of the iconic Tarzan is not perfect, he certainly has the muscular and gorgeous body to pull off this particularly physical role. After all the success of casting a male actor as Tarzan depends entirely on his physique. The well chiselled Skarsgard is naturally born for this role.

Margot Robbie breathes new life into Jane, as a feisty independent American woman who has attitude and her best scenes ironically shine through when played opposite the scheming villain Rom. In terms of dialogue, the best scene is between Robbie and Waltz as they dine precariously together on a steamer travelling down the Congo River, in a visual reference to The Heart of Darkness.

The Legend of Tarzan is better than anticipated, with magnificent visual effects elevating the film out of cinematic parody. It’s a well plotted, action filled and entertaining film, a worthwhile trip to the cinema where audiences can delve into a real adventure story which features the exotic and the brave.

In this version, the shirtless Tarzan swinging in the proverbial jungle should keep many swooning for years to come.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Directed by: Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

Cast: Tina Fey, Margot Robbie, Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Christopher Abbott, Alfred Molina, Stephen Peacocke, Cherry Jones, Josh Charles

From the directing team that brought audiences, I Love You Philip Morris and Focus, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa bring the Afghan war drama Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which is military jargon for WTF!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot focuses on the experiences of journalist Kim Baker who swops the tedious life of a New York media office for the dangerous life of a war correspondent in Afghanistan, from 2004 onwards based on her own novel, “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

30 Rock TV star and veteran comedian Tina Fey takes the title role and impressively turns in a nuanced, vaguely dramatic performance as Kim Baker ably assisted by a superb ensemble cast including Margot Robbie as a hard drinking cut-throat journalist Tanya van der Poel, Martin Freeman as a snarky Scottish reporter Iain McKelpie and best of all Oscar winner Billy Bob Thornton as the no-nonsense American general Hollanek.

Tina Fey who to date has largely appeared in comic roles alongside Amy Poehler is brilliant as Kim Baker and gives audience a chance to witness her dramatic side. As the emotional and physical strain of remaining in Afghanistan takes its toll, along with media colleagues who double cross her, Baker manages to resist the temptations of falling for her own hunky security detail, the gorgeous Nic, wonderfully played by Stephen Peacocke (Hercules) whilst forming a bond with her Afghani translator and guide, Fahim Ahmadzai brilliantly played by American actor Christopher Abbott last seen in J. C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year.

Character actor Alfred Molina also makes a hilarious turn as a Westernized Afghani government official Ali Massoud Sadiq who becomes besotted with Tina Fey’s hardnosed journalist.

Besides the decadent partying which occurs in the Ka-Bubble, as the foreigners nickname Kabul, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot highlights with dashes of humour, the difficulties invading Western forces face when dealing with a foreign country and culture so alien to their own, in this case Afghanistan.

What could be gleaned from Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, besides the atrocities involved, is that war is almost like a decadent excursion into a completely different world. The scene in the film where Baker discovers the real reason a watering well is constantly being blown up in an Afghani village points to the larger gender inequalities inherent in war especially when the country being invaded is deeply patriarchal. War itself is demonstrated to be a man’s game and what makes the women in the film so fascinating especially Baker and Van der poel is their fleeting exotic beauty in a country in which the women are entirely covered up, a point so brilliantly made in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Whilst Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is not going to win any awards cinematically, it is nevertheless a humourous and mostly farcical take on the absurdities of war, in the vein of Robert Altman’s classic film M. A. S. H. and Mike Nichol’s 1970 film Catch 22 based upon the Joseph Heller novel. What is notable is the media stance on war, whereby despite the annihilation around them, they refuse to take sides but merely show a mirror up to the brutal horrors of this contemporary man-made conflict in a hostile environment characterized by ample vice and little virtue or trust.

Recommended viewing for those that enjoyed Zero Dark Thirty and David O. Russell’s Three Kings.