Pixie: Movie Review

Cast: Olivia Cooke, Ben Hardy, Colm Meaney, Alec Baldwin, Daryl McCormack

Director: Barnaby Thompson

If your idea of perfect denouement for a film is a slow mo shot out between gun wielding priests and shotgun carrying nuns versus mobsters in a church, then Pixie is your dream in cinematic form.

This mash up of Father Ted, road trip and wannabe Tarantino really offers little else apart from an extremely charismatic lead in Olivia Cooke and a couple of cameos from the likes of Dylan Moran to make it memorable.

When a drug deal goes awry and dead bodies mount up, the local mob - headed up by Colm Meaney’s Nigella-watching bossman Dermot O'Brien - launch a search for the stolen MDMA and money. Unbeknownst to the family central to the crime is Cooke’s Pixie who’s managed to get two innocents Frank and Harland (Hardy and McCormack) caught in the web as well. All three end up on the run looking for a way to offload the drugs and start a new life.

Pixie is a fairly solid but relatively unmemorable slice of 90s Guy Ritchie styled gangster action.

With puerile edges and some questionable humour, the film feels dated at times, but offers enough of an escape from proceedings to pass its 90 minutes.

It helps that a wide-eyed Cooke delivers a standout performance to keep you engaged. Self-assured from the start, Cooke’s Pixie is the jolt the film needs to get it out of the mire it occasionally lands in.

Things are also enlivened by cameos from the likes of Dylan Moran as a fishmonger-based crime boss to Alec Baldwin as a pursed-lipped priest whose desire for vengeance flows as much as his cassock does.

Pixie may be slightly underwritten in parts but it manages a passable slice of film, even if there is a feeling of 90s déjà vu peppered through its DNA.

Wild Mountain Thyme: Film Review

Cast: Jamie Dornan, Emily Blunt, Christopher Walken, Jon Hamm

Director: John Patrick Shanley

Starting like an advert for the Irish Tourism Board with its tracking shots through rolling fields and along coastlines of the Emerald Isle, John Patrick Shanley's Wild Mountain Thyme feels like a film out of time.

It's a feeling further compounded by Christopher Walken's unmistakable New York twang given an Irish lilt as the voiceover to the film begins. There's a whimsy prevalent throughout, and while there is plenty of charm on show, the slight story is just enough to contain you for the 90 minutes run time - even if the deedle-dee-dee cliches are enough to set your teeth on end.

Anthony (Dornan, serious faced and furrowed brow) lives on the farm owned by his father (Walken) and next door to Emily Blunt's Rosemary, who's hopelessly in love with him - and has been for years. 

They are star crossed lovers of the most shallowly written kind.

But Anthony is oblivious to this - and yet matters come to a head when his father decides to sell the farm onto his American son (Hamm, in an entirely serious role) because he believes it's best for the future.

To say that not much happens in Wild Mountain Thyme is a major understatement.

While the film looks pleasant, and the actors are perfectly fine (aside from some crimes committed against accents and some truly unfathomable conflagrations of circumstance), there's a genuinely off-kilter mood that pervades much of the proceedings, as if the whole village has been coated in a kind of localised mania that only residents can be affected by.

It means that there are odd lines and declarations uttered by characters throughout, which make the film feel like it's either not taking itself seriously or has gone a little crazy on the narrative front. 

Either way, once you surrender to Shanley's adaptation of his own play, the rhythms make Wild Mountain Thyme an almost OTT surreal experience that's not been seen in cinemas for a while. And that's before the final revelation as to why Anthony has shied away from Rosemary's desperate desire for affection.

Whether that's a good thing or bad thing is entirely up to you.

All in all, Wild Mountain Thyme plays to some Irish stereotypes, but this romcom's surprising rhythms and solid execution make it a film whose lunacy is almost forgiveable - but sadly, it's also one whose accent crimes and narrative logic will live on in infamy.

The Marksman: Movie Review

The Marksman: Film Review

Cast: Liam Neeson, Jacob Perez, Teresa Ruiz
Director: Robert Lorenz

In truth, The Marksman isn't a sloppy film.

It's just that it's largely unremarkable, another entrant into Liam Neeson's desire to make action films before he claims to retire one more time.

In this latest though, there are signs that even Neeson's wearying in some of the action sequences as old age catches up to him.

Neeson plays Jim, a recently widowed Marine Force vet, who's behind on ranch payments and facing foreclosure. Every day is spent patrolling a nearby Arizona border fence with Mexico, and every day Jim's heartless enough to call in those trying to make their way across the border, but decent enough to give them water to stave off death.

When Miguel (Perez, largely unchallenged and unchallenging throughout) and his mother flee from the Mexican cartel, disaster strikes. Orphaned Miguel's dying mother makes  Jim promise he'll look after the boy - along with a sack full of cash.

With the Mexican cartel chasing after Miguel and desperate for revenge against Jim, the pair must hightail it from Arizona to Miguel's US-based family before it's too late...

Solid, but unspectacular, The Marksman offers formulaic rote thrills for the genre.

As previously mentioned, Neeson looks wearied and almost exhausted at points of this film, and the growling gruff dialogue afforded him does little to elevate the film beyond its trappings.

Director Lorenz puts together a fairly cohesive film that's relly lacking in the script department as the duo hotfoots it away from by-the-numbers-Mexican villains.

It's depressing in parts to feel like Neeson is simply phoning in the latter parts of his career with an unending stream of variations on his Taken character, but the Marksman does little to alleviate such feelings, and sacrifices character for caricature instead.

Full marks go to the English mechanic whom Neeson's character crosses later on, and whose willingness to simply dismiss Jim's desire for an urgent repair to a shot up vehicle solicited mirth where there shouldn't have been.

Worthy only for an interesting argument over gun ownerships and laws, The Marksman's failings fall squarely on the script's shoulders. It misses the mark way too often and while it's packaged together in a reasonable manner, this made for late night TV movie is a relatively soulless and unemotive slog that really deserves little place in Neeson's catalogue of diminishing returns.

Another Round: Movie Review

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, Lars Ranthe

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

The re-teaming of star Mikkelsen with his The Hunt director Vinterberg produces somewhat more demure results than the tension of the 2012 film.

Druk (to give it its proper title) concerns itself with four teachers who're in the middle of their lives and the middle of a crisis. Chiefly, there's Mikkelsen's Martin, a teacher whose class is rife with indifference to his educations and whose home life is being wrecked by his nighttime working wife and sons who barely have their noses out of their phones.

When a colleague tells him of the Finn Skarderud thesis of drinking, which claims humans were born with a blood alcohol count of 0.05% lower than it should be, the four posit an experiment - to boost that limit up during daytime hours and see how effective their lives could be...

What follows is perhaps inevitable but nonetheless more pathos-filled as Martin and his friends become fuelled by alcohol and by a new joie de vivre.

There will be many a male who's affected by this tale of a loss of self-confidence and joy in mid-life and anchored as it is by Mikkelsen, the film becomes a tragic look at the seductiveness of alcoholism. 

From his saddened eyes delivering the truth of his life at a restaurant early on to the impish charm on display while he's drinking at school, Mikkelsen's subtle work pays off, where Vinterberg's film doesn't.

Outside of the four central characters, Vinterberg is loathe to sketch out more details of the supporting players - Martin's wife is fairly distant, leading to some feeling his actions are justified; and one of the other's wives who's discussed initially as perfect is turned into a shrew, nagging at her husband for supplies while she looks after their young children.

But in fairness, it's Martin's mundane life that Vinterberg's script is more interested in and the brutality of the reality of a binge-drinking culture that soaks up children and Denmark's ethos from the get go. 

The problem is that despite showing the seductiveness of the low level buzz and opening with scenes of youths swayed by binge drinking and taking part in a school competition, Another Round never really condemns the culture, nor promotes it. 

Its inability to state a position on day drinking does make it hard to see what the overall point is, other than to say stability is bad, and alcohol can help but don't overdo it and wrap it all up in a weirdly life-affirming take on existential crisis. 

These are not compelling messages, nor are they new, but were it not for a truly compelling Mikkelsen at the centre of all of this, Another Round wouldn't be the unusually watchable fare it is.

Win a double pass to see PIXIE at the cinemas

To celebrate the release of Pixie at the cinemas from January 28, thanks to Paramount Pictures New Zealand you can win yourself a double pass!

About Pixie

PIXIE is an Irish Black Comedy starring Olivia Cooke (Ready Player One, Life Itself, Me Earl & the Dying Girl); Ben Hardy (Bohemian Rhapsody, X-Men: Apocalypse) and Daryl McCormack (Peaky Blinders). 

Written by Preston Thompson and directed by Barnaby Thompson and set in modern day Ireland, PIXIE  follows Pixie O’Brien as she masterminds a heist to avenge her mother’s death, but must flee across Ireland from gangsters, take on the patriarchy, and choose her own destiny.

Pixie is in cinemas from January 28

Dawn Raid: Film Review

Director: Oscar Kightley

Dawn Raid is the exuberant bust of energy that cinema in 2021 needs.

Director Oscar Kightley delves deep into a bountiful archive to bring to life the story of Dawn Raid Entertainment, the music empire that was born on the streets of South Auckland.

Helmed by a friendship forged on the streets and in a local college of Brotha D and Andy Murnane, Kightley's doco tells the story of the rise and eventual fall of the empire, but also fashions a time capsule of how the local music scene was changed forever by the foresight of the duo.

Starting off selling T-shirts at the local market after US rap invaded these shores, D and Murnane realised local voices weren't being heard and decided to change that - giving rise to the likes of Aardhna, Deceptikonz, Adeaze, Savage and Mareko.

What emerges from this well-fashioned piece that uses archive footage to deftly weave a story is something about New Zealand's desire to seize on an idea and take it as far as they could.  There will be few who won't leave Dawn Raid feeling their ideas of entrepreneurship and creativity can't grow because of these two's dreams and business acumen.

There are plenty of vignettes thrown in here, and both Andy and D make such good bedfellows that there's one heck of a story here to be told, and a pair of narrators to do it.

But frustratingly, Kightley occasionally appears to be a little too much in the story's thrall, teasing out moments of conflict within the story and hinting at problems rather than expanding them and getting all the viewpoints. (Though given media coverage of the area and perceptions usually mean South Auckland is handed a bad name, it's perhaps understandable to see why).

A throwaway line from Murnane early on talks about how he should have kept family out of business, but Kightley doesn't follow that up; equally the inevitable tax issues faced by Dawn Raid and their artists feeling lied to is glossed over. 

There's a little too much of a one-sided narrative being told here, and no matter how entertaining that is, it's behoven of the documentary maker to explore all sides.

Dawn Raid may be an oral history and one of New Zealand pluck and enterprise, but there are holes which should have been plugged - the fact Aaradhna was the only female artist in their repertoire is never questioned is just one, but there feels like there could have been a deeper documentary to have been had with just a little more digging.

That said, what Kightley's committed to the screen is an enjoyable 90 minute ride - the highs of realising the dream easily outweigh the lows of the failure and the seismic changes of fortune. Maybe it's deliberately life-affirming and was never intended to be otherwise; at its core, Dawn Raid is a story of heart and told with heart. 

And for that, it can't be faulted.

Greenland: Blu Ray Review

Wisely eschewing the whole big budget bloat-fest of the usual disaster movies, Ric Roman Waugh's Greenland is a decidedly more low-key affair with flashes of CGI brutality.

Butler is John Garrity, who's estranged from his wife Allison (Firefly's Baccarin) following an argument too many. As Garrity tries to get back in his family's good books, the world faces the arrival of a comet called Clarke that is on a collision course with Earth.

As fragments begin to reign down, scientists, who initially believed the arrival would only be minor, discover the comet will actually cause an extinction level event, destroying civilisation as we know it.

Racing against time, the Garrity family try to outrun the end of the world...

Greenland is the kind of disaster film that's rarely seen in these days of B-grade blockbuster spectacle, where the FX outshine the human cast and the story.

While it may be a little overlong in its 2 hour run time, and while the script does occasionally overplay the whole end-of-the-world element in a promise of hype that's never quite met amid some final third padding, the film's strength is its focus on the human side.

Never shying away from the Garritys and their domestic problems, as well as the idea of overcoming personal adversity in the face of disaster, Greenland uses its sense of growing dread to focus on the parental problems and the issue of dealing with others misbehaving as societal unrest grows.

Butler and Baccarin make a plausible pair, and the script doesn't demand too much out of them as it plays out. But they make the disaster relatable, and a script that delivers moments of emotion such as when others are left behind, pleading for their lives, certainly does leave a lasting impression and emotional toll on the audience.

Waugh, who directed Butler in Angel Has Fallen, delivers the chaos in an orchestrated and calm fashion, which works in Greenland's favour - as the sense of dread grows as time starts to run out.

Sure, there are a few set pieces and explosions, the majority of which would have been seen in the trailer, but this is not really where Greenland is directing its energy - instead, Greenland is a rare beast of a disaster movie that uses the global crisis to deliver a personal story that has Miracle Mile edges and a highly watchable central core of characters that you end up caring about, despite the broad character strokes and the familiarity of the story.