Destiny: the Taken King: Legendary Edition: PS4 Review

Destiny: The Taken King: PS4 Review

Platform: PS4
Released by Activision / Developer - Bungie

When Destiny erupted last year onto the scene, the feeling was very much that it had started something special.

With the alpha and the beta, we got glimpses into the worlds of the Guardians and the Ghosts and the peril facing the world that only you the player could stave off. But, it all worked and the game was embraced by millions, swept up in its western feel and space operatics, all mixed in with a severe case of the first person shoot-em-ups.

Taking place after events of the Dark Below, The Taken King focuses on a more story driven edge to proceedings (something the initial game and its expansions were criticised for) and a good old fashioned revenge plot.

When you took down the Crota baddie of the The Dark Below, you were actually unleashing the Taken King aka Oryx, a rather hefty beast determined to get vengeance for the slaying of his son. and he's not best pleased at what the Guardians have done, heading to this universe to take them down.

The Taken King works well, a side story that simmers with excitement and gloriously executed cut scenes. But it's the gameplay that feels fresher straight out of the box, with more loot, more baddies and more reason to spend your hours grinding away through the game. XP helps you level up quicker now and it's a blessing rather than a curse.

And as Destiny's Year 2 begins, Nolan North's replaced Peter Dinklage as the voice of the ghost - I'm hoping this was more because of scheduling than criticism because I've loved having Tyrion along for the ride (even after the infamous criticisms of the vocals of the first). North brings a kind of humour to the role which makes the dynamic more of a Buck Rogers / Twiki sort of deal and it's amusing - to a point.

The Taken themselves are an interesting bunch of bad guys and may be familiar to anyone who's already played the main campaign, given they're a mix of baddies from the original who've been corrupted by Oryx. And they're a bit more formidable than you'd expect and can't be dealt to simply by unloading clips of ammo in their direction. That's one of the ways this Destiny expansion excels by - it's a sign of the game that has listened to its community and its detractors to pull something together that makes you want to play, rather than feeling an obligation to grind through the levels and repeat.

And it feels smoother too. Destiny Year One was a solid affair, but was prone to moments of outages within the game - this latest patch and version makes the play a more exciting and consistent affair. Sure, there are the crucible matches, the PvP games and the side quests that come up during the fight against Oryx, but they're all solidly executed, given a platform to play out on that works well and clearly.

Drop rates are a big bonus for the Taken King. I've had to start missions with barely anything in my loot haul to simply ensure that I can collect everything I need to during the game - it's deeply rewarding that material flows as seamlessly as it does and it gives you the impetus to collect rather than the obligation to do so. An open world on the Dreadnought owned by Oryx adds much depth too - but you're best being spoiler free with that.

That's a big thing with Destiny: The Taken King - its reasons for playing for pleasure and for fun outweigh the obligations to do so - and as such this is a review in progress. There's so much to explore and so much to do with this expansion pack that it's impossible to list it all here currently.

Bundled with the Dark Below and the House of Wolves, The Taken King's Legendary Collection is an essential purchase and a sign that Year 2 of Destiny is well worth getting on board with. Simply put, this is a game now that's exceeding its ambitions. It's lofty, excellent and certainly a sign that Bungie intends to push this series as far as it can.

(Stay tuned, as there'll be more of this review to come over the coming weeks)

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San Andreas: Blu Ray Review

San Andreas: Blu Ray Review

Rating: M
Released by Roadshow Home Ent

It ain't over till the fat lady sings.

But in San Andreas' case, it ain't over till the American flag is unfurled amid the ruins of California and the words "We can rebuild" are uttered.

Channelling 1970s disaster flicks and eschewing any form of character depth, the director ofJourney 2: The Mysterious Island juggles CGI falling buildings and Dwayne Johnson's innate charm as Ray, a rescue helicopter pilot trying to save his daughter from a massive West Coast earthquake.

It's not just the seismic activity on the ground Ray has to deal with though - he's on shaky ground emotionally too, with his ex Emma (Carla Gugino) who's dealt him divorce papers and is facing the prospect of his daughter Blake (Daddario) moving to college. Throw in a past haunted by the fact he couldn't save his first daughter from drowning, and Ray's a troubled man when the earth opens up, threatening to swallow whole all he loves dearly.

Add into the mix a geologist (Paul Giamatti) whose growing penchant for looking aghast, horrified and providing exposition is maximised as the number and severity of the quakes intensifies despite his warnings, and you've pretty much got all the tenets of a B movie disaster flick which used to rock our world back in the 70s like the Towering Inferno, Earthquake and The Poseidon Adventure. (Even the Hollywood sign is not immune to being torn asunder as we get ready to rubble)

Sure, depth of character is non-existent; sure, the women exist solely to be rescued (a fact that feels wasted given efforts to build Blake up early on as more than just eye candy) and sure, Emma's new partner (Forever star Grufudd) is nothing more than a slimeball when the chips are down and sure Blake's Brit love interest is a horrendous Hugh Grant stereotype initially, but you don't go to films like San Andreas for dense soliloquies and in-depth character development - you go to see carnage and to get ready to rumble.

And, for the most part, Peyton works the crumbling land masses and tall buildings assuredly (though one questions how some may feel about the film's sensitivity given recent quakes here and in Nepal) as we negotiate our ripped apart protagonists through one potential disaster to the next before reuniting them for one last perilous situation.

San Andreas is committed to its own short-comings, and it knows when to pile the patriotic cheese on. 

When Johnson tells one potential victim to "get up against something sturdy", we know what his subtext is - and when he parachutes himself and his ex into a baseball field proclaiming it's "been a while since I got you to second base", there's corn aplenty. But thanks to his easy going charisma and the fact he's our go to guy in such situations, we're just about willing to commit to this cornball flick.

The seeds of a sequel are sown, thanks to Giamatti's scientist gasping that this could happen globally at any time, but as an over-bearing FX fest that tears up the screen and the West Coast of America around it, San Andreas may have its faults, but as a blockbuster, it delivers what it sets out to - nothing more and nothing less.

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London Road: Film Review

London Road: Film Review

Cast: Olivia Colman, Tom Hardy, Anita Dobson
Director: Rufus Norris

You wouldn't have thought that England's worst serial killer would have been fertile ground for a musical.

But then to be frank, London Road is not like anything you've ever seen before.

Mixing archive interviews, as performed by its acting talent and set to music, it's a slightly uneasy and weird movie experience that almost defies convention and explanation. It's the story of the residents of London Road in Ipswich in 2006, whose lives were changed when working girls started on their streets.

Unhappy at the prostitutes, the residents were even more perturbed to hear that five of them were killed and terrified to learn that the killer was one Steven Wright, who lived in London Road.

London Road was a successful musical, written by Alecky Blythe and directed by Rufus Norris, who's taken on this production and is probably the best person to have done so, being as au fait as he is with the verbatim theatre.

It's a clever device to take hooks and comments from interviews with the residents and turn them into lyrics with their speech patterns mimicked in the performance of the actors. But the slight issue with it on the big screen is that while the gimmick is clever, smart and original, it soon wears thin as it continues to play out.

Usually musicals work best when they hook into a few fully formed characters, giving the audience an insight and an opening into what the character's feeling. Unfortunately, London Road doesn't quite manage the same hook, with most of the residents emerging as an amorphous blob hard to differentiate from the others. But, in turning these residents into a Greek Chorus aimed at driving the exposition, the play is tremendously successful and admittedly, provides some surprise efforts at earworms. The way the music turns news bulletins, news reporters and expressions of fear and paranoia into onscreen ditties is wildly deft and comes out of nowhere.

Colman is perhaps the biggest name here to foreign audiences - with Tom Hardy getting a cameo as a cab driver singing in a falsetto and protesting that just because he knows about serial killers doesn't necessarily make him one.

If anything, London Road is to be applauded for its inventiveness - but its transition to the big screen represents something that's not quite worked or harnessed the livewire nature of a show. As the credits roll, the replaying of the actual interview soundbites is an unnecessary touch, a tacit moment of bragging which is unwarranted and destroys some of the cleverness of what's lyrically transpired.

Chalk London Road up to an interesting experiment; its story may not be enough to drive you along, but its surprising route to its final destination is a challenge to traditional musicals.

Banksy Does New York: DVD Review

Banksy Does New York: DVD Review

Rating: M
Released by Madman Home Entertainment

Exit Through The Gift Shop gave the notorious street artist Banksy another outlet for his work a couple of years back at the New Zealand International Film Festival.

This latest has no involvement from the enigmatic Banksy or his team but instead is from a doco team wanting to focus on the one month residency that Banksy launched in New York back in October 2013.

Every day for that month, Banksy, without prompt and only via clues on his website would launch a new work every day - the resulting scavenger hunt was a social media frenzy and also sparked the very best and very worst in New Yorkers.

Director Chris Moukarbel charts the highs of the Banksy hunters and the lows of those trying to cash in on the frenzy, but he does it with such entertaining aplomb that the underlying issues in this bubblegum doco are somewhat sidelined in among the hordes of people clamouring to enjoy the art.

In some cases, the art's cleaned off before it's even been there for a few hours; in others, it's vandalised by street artists throughout NYC desperate to leave their mark; some protect the art with altruistic motives, while others charge for people to see them. It's a fascinating dichotomy of greed, debate and delirium which hits the streets all around NYC.

The most fascinating parts of this breezy and entertaining doco though are when the film raises the question of who owns the art and why others capitalise on it; is the interaction of these pieces the true reason for their success is another interesting alleyway that's wandered down, but unfortunately Moukarbel isn't really interested in fully exploring these questions, which is an occasional source of frustration.

Especially when one of those who chooses to cash in on Banksy's art is the owner of a business slated for demolition in part of the projects and for whom it could make a massive difference.

Ultimately, there are a fair few questions in Banksy Does New York and the social provocateur from Bristol in England's done it again; the issues of art ownership in the public space, the continuing art snobbery, questions over brand and the disposably breezy nature of this doco paint one hell of a compelling bubblegum picture on the big screen. 

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Kidnapping Mr Heineken: DVD Review

Kidnapping Mr Heineken: DVD Review

Rating: M

This story of the true life kidnapping of Freddy Heineken is the second telling of the same tale.

The Swedish director Alfredson (best known for his entrants into the Millennium trilogy) brings together the story of five friends who were financially down on their luck but determined to change things around.

After the recession hit and the group lost money, cash was becoming scarce for Cor Van Hout (Sturgess) and his pals (in among their number is True Blood star Ryan Kwanten and Avatar's Sam Worthington). With a successful robbery in the bag, the boys turn their swagger and attention to someone bigger and kidnap the heir to the Heineken brewery Freddy (a rather muted Hopkins) and decide to hold him ransom.

But time passes and the boys don't quite get the reception they want to their demands....and with the pressure mounting internally, their breaking point rapidly approaches.

Slick and flashy the first portion of Kidnapping Mr Heineken feels like a heist movie made in Hollywood, replete with car chases in Amsterdam and shots being sprayed left right and centre.

But it's here that some of the problems of Kidnapping Mr Heineken emerge; very little is done to set up the main characters in the group with really only Sturgess and Worthington getting the deeper treatment (perhaps that's unsurprising given that it's based on von Hout's book) - all have a range of accents too, with Worthington's Aussie twang being the chief offender which does little to set the tone of the piece or the inept group themselves.

Hopkins channels some of the calm psychosis that he had as Hannibal Lecter during his captivity as Mr Heineken, with hints of a deeper psychological game being played with the kidnappers (another thread that's under-developed), but these scenes skate along with hardly any back and forth for you to latch onto.

It's left to the overly bombastic OST to help set the mood and the group's subsequent demise (which comes out of left-field) and that does little to push Kidnapping Mr Heineken into taut thrilling territory.

While Sturgess and Worthington are solid players and Hopkins does brilliantly with his few scenes, there's little more at stake than just a once-over-lightly approach to the story and blatant exposition.

All in all Kidnapping Mr Heineken does little to fully capture your attention; a little more depth here and there would have worked wonders and left this brew with a stronger after-taste rather than the slightly sour and bitter one that you're left with when the lights go up.

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Macbeth: Film Review

Macbeth: Film Review

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, Sean Harris, David Thewlis
Director: Justin Kurzel

The infamous Scottish play gets a bloody 2015 revamp at the hands of Snowtown's director, Justin Kurzel, with Michael Fassbender taking the lead and Marion Cottilard as his bride.

Setting the play and its prosaic text to the battlefields of Scotland, where mist readily rolls in and envelops all in its path, Kurzel's drenched this adaptation in doom and gloom. The film begins with an extension of a line uttered within the movie that's been expanded out (perhaps which will annoy purists) depicting both MacBeths laying a child to rest. It's a brave move to add to the text, but one which grounds the film's protagonists in a degree of motivation as this tale of ambition and its consequences plays out.

From its slow-mo battlefield scenes to its final orange-hued showdown between Sean Harris' wounded MacDuff and Fassbender's on the edge MacBeth, this version of the film tends to favour style and grit over everything else. And for the large part, its grit and doom-laden moodiness is incredibly evocative in terms of scene-setting. But Shakespeare's play has always been about the central protagonists and their ascent to the heights of ambition and the descent of their insanity.

And perhaps in some of the key moments, it doesn't quite nail the beats of the play (though one could argue that an understanding of the text from the study I had to do as a child may mean I have a deeper insight into its execution). Particularly Fassbender who unfortunately doesn't hit the requisite beats of the Bard's verse in the well known parts. While his dagger before me speech is nicely executed with a ghostly apparition, his king's transformation and descent into insanity as he spies the barely recognisable ghost of the slaughtered Banquo (Considine in a blink and miss it performance) doesn't ring true. And while Fassbender's softer delivery of these speeches is spiked with a series of exclamations, it feels like an odd mix, mainly due in parts to Kurzel's handheld camera style and shakiness.

Thankfully, Cotillard's tortured siloloquy as she wrestles with that damned spot is more intimate and devastating, her ghostly white visage draped in the dawning horror of what she and her husband have executed. If anything, Lady MacBeth appears more as a well-rounded character than the text, a less black and white nag who picks at her husband to vault her dizzying ambitions of power.

But while there are psychological moments that don't quite hit the required heights, there are stylish touches that demonstrate Kurzel is willing to update the text into something that can chime with youth studying it and with those whose thirst for blood is today satiated with George R R Martin's prose and its subsequent televisual execution. (Right down to a stake-burning that seems all so familiar)

Nowhere is this more evident in his thrilling reinvention of how the Birnam woods make their way to Dunsinane as part of the prophecy, a final battle that has equal moments of desperation and despair and a clever execution of hordes warning Macbeth to beware MacDuff.

It's for these moments and Cotillard's performance that Macbeth almost succeeds in vaulting its own lofty ambitions - but it doesn't quite reach the peaks of its own desire, falling at the last summit.

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Pan: Film Review

Pan: Film Review

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara,
Director: Joe Wright

Joe "Atonement / Anna Karenina" Wright's Pan is rarely as good as its opening sequence.

It's one which puts the stuff of childhood playtimes and active little boys' imaginations into the world of reality / fantasy with pirate ships soaring through the skies as they are attacked by British planes in a bizarre dogfight.

But once the film heads to Neverland, it's almost as if some of the vivid imagination is ironically lost, even if the visual flair isn't.

The film's a prequel and as such deals with the abandonment of Peter (Levi Miller, all cockney kid fresh out of Mary Poppins school of character writing) and his dream of escaping the orphanage run with grisly gusto by Kathy Burke's evil nun. Convinced the boys are being taken in the night, Peter waits up one evening only to find his suspicions given form. Swept up in the theft and onto Blackbeard's pirate ships, Peter finds himself in a new world and facing ever more peril.

Mainly in the shape of a prophecy and a pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman in pantomimey form) who believes that Peter will try to overthrow him...However, with the native princess Tigerlily (Mara) and the rogueish Hook (Hedlund), Peter finds he has friends that he never expected in this battle.

Pan is a mix of so many other influences of film that it occasionally struggles to garner an identity of its own.

Hedlund's Hook is a melange of characters and by definition, not one of his own. Even though you know ultimately how it will turn out for him. By turns Indiana Jones style explorer / 30s B-movie pastiche and Han Solo / Leia romantic interaction with Mara's doe-eyed Tigerlily, Hedlund overplays his part and ends up being one of the memorable people in the cast for all the wrong reasons.

Likewise, Miller's plucky luv-a-duck youngster grates, giving this Pan the type of character you want to slap as much as you grimace when he comes out with lines like "Holy pudding!", as if lifted from the Dick van Dyke school of writing.

There's some depth to Jackman's Blackbeard and his first appearance with all the lost boys singing Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit adding to the oddness on show. But parts of his character are left without answer either, with one shot introducing a rejuvenator to keep him young and then ditching it with no explanation in favour of his Nazi-esque determination to wipe out the pixie race.

If anything, Wright's prequel will be justly remembered for its Irwin Allen-esque visuals as it creates the tribal territories land, filling them with the kind of wonder of a Sunday afternoon TV jaunt that fired the imagination.  In fact, it's the FX which help this film soar in the minds of kids, and the 3D brings much depth, as well as the obligatory duck from cannon-balls being fired toward you.

Mixing in Star Wars, Superman-esque flying in a fairy covered fortress of solitude, and some utterly bonkers ideas, this prequel will more likely fire with the kids than the adults. It becomes a sensory and silly overload that will keep many of them enthralled and will see them leaving with the biggest cinematic sugary hit ever. A little more work on the characters and this Pan prequel really could have flown as high as Peter believes he could.

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