Posts Tagged ‘Topher Grace’

Flight Risk

Director: Mel Gibson

Cast: Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace, Mark Wahlberg, Maaz Ali, Paul Ben-Victor

Running Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

Film Rating: 6 out of 10

Actor turned director Mel Gibson won an Oscar for Best Director for Braveheart back in 1995 which was 30 years ago. Gibson’s time in the director chair has hit some highs including Hacksaw Ridge and some lows now with his new film Flight Risk.

Flight Risk is not a terrible film but it’s not brilliant. Jared Rosenberg’s script about three people being on a small plane together across snowbound Alaska is terrifying enough, claustrophobic at times and exhilarating. The three characters in question are British actress Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey, The Gentleman) as the hard as nails FBI agent Madolyn, Topher Grace (Traffic, Spiderman 3, BlacKkKlansman) as the mischievous and dodgy accountant Winston who is going to New York to testify against the mob and lastly the real villain of the show, the demented Daryl, a hired killer who starts off as the pilot of the small plane.

Similar in concept to the Steven Knight scripted 2013 film, Locke starring Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman and Ruth Wilson, all the action of Flight Risk takes place on the plane with the dramatic Alaskan mountains as landscape. Dockery’s character Madolyn has to reassure Winston that everything is going to be alright and that they will land in Anchorage safely. Of course that’s if the crazed Daryl expertly played with the right shade of psychopath by Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg (The Departed, The Fighter) doesn’t kill them first.

As in Locke in which the whole film just shows Tom Hardy’s character driving a car and all the threatening action happens via cell phone with the rest of the characters off screen, Flight Risk alludes to other characters including a friendly pilot Hassan played by Maaz Ali and Madolyn’s boss Coleridge played by Paul Ben-Victor, while the real action happens in a small plane in which Winston and Madolyn have to survive until they can land safely in Anchorage. The story is about the three characters on the plane and nothing else.

Flight Risk as a film needs a counterpoint to the claustrophobic action occurring on the plane and unfortunately Jared Rosenberg’s script is not as crisp or engaging as screenwriter Steven Knight.

Flight Risk starts off well but as the bumpy journey progresses the middle is boring and the ending is engaging but not clever. This flight lacks some real entertainment. Maybe if the plane was flying across a crowded city this film would be more interesting.

Exciting but not brilliant, Flight Risk gets a film rating of 6 out of 10 and is recommended viewing if you need to kill 90 minutes and love films with claustrophobic settings. From director Mel Gibson I did expect a far more superior thriller which this film isn’t.

Interstellar

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, John Lithgow, Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, Wes Bentley, Ellen Burstyn, David Oyelowo, Topher Grace, Timothee Chalamet

Memento meets Gravity in director Christopher Nolan’s epic space opera, Interstellar, a convoluted time travel astrophysical fantasy about a NASA astronaut who gets caught up in a mission to travel to an alternative Galaxy in a bid to save the remaining humanity on earth from a dwindling supply of oxygen.

Assembling an all star cast is what director Nolan does best at insuring that his films have credibility as a blockbuster and with a range of stars, yet unlike Inception or The Prestige, his earlier films which dealt with dreams and magic, Interstellar tends to emulate the great director Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece: 2001: A Space Odyssey, yet falls short of its celestial aspirations, by not being a touch more sinister.

In parts, Interstellar is brilliant and ambitious, wonderfully scored with atmospheric music by Hans Zimmer and incredibly shot with those signature spiralling shots that Nolan is so fond of. However, Interstellar suffers from two shortcomings, taking the films weighty significance too seriously and secondly a serious lack of editing. The first and last sections of Interstellar weighs down the brilliance and absolute clarity of the middle section.

With McConaughey fresh from his Oscar win on Dallas Buyers Club coupled with Hathaway fresh from her win in Les Miserables it seems like a perfect casting choice, but it’s flawed by its very contrivance. The part which does stand out so brilliantly is that of Murphy superbly played by the underrated Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain as Cooper’s grownup and embittered daughter who is hell bent in following in her father’s footsteps and traveling beyond the black hole to discover the reason for the earth’s imminent demise. Watch out for cameo appearances by Ellen Burstyn, Wes Bentley and David Oyelowo.

Fellow Oscar nominee Casey Affleck is also good as the stubborn yet stoical brother of Murphy in a part which is severely underwritten along with that of Oscar winner Michael Caine as Professor Brand who plays Hathaway’s enigmatic father, a scientist who masterminds the space exploration from the outset knowing that the intended consequences of such a doomed mission are dire and certainly revelatory at best.

Interstellar ‘s post-structural narrative gets more blurred, the further the astronauts travel through a celestial wormhole, around a vast system known as Gargantuan, soon realizing that their mission much like their own destiny is doomed to fail, resulting in a multitude of Lazarus missions.

The only subversive element is a rescued astronaut Mann, wonderfully played by Matt Damon, found on a frozen wasteland of a planet which seems to be the only alternative to the dust clad environment of a doomed earth, who is wily in his attempts to escape his icy predicament.

With a script by Jonathan Nolan, Interstellar suffers from too little said and not enough explained, while most of the narrative rests on some remarkably clever visual clues which only make sense in the last section of the film, which resembles a pastiche of Inception mixed with an unquantifiable mystical factor.

The cast with a threadbare script had little else to work on besides their own doomed destinies and the terrors of space. Thus there is loads of human anguish thrown in along with some stunning visuals, but at nearly three hours long Interstellar could have been expertly edited to make a more concise tale of 21^st century doomed space exploration. Besides Anne Hathaway just doesn’t cut it as an astronaut and should stick to period dramas, where at least the claustrophobia is explained by historical context and not subliminal infinity.

As an avid fan of Christopher Nolan films and trust me I loved The Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception, I personally found Interstellar fascinating yet an ultimately flawed and slightly contrived piece of cinema crippled by its unendurable length, without enough plot twists to generate sufficient audience excitement. Like Inception, Interstellar will certainly be open to discussion.