Tag: Stanley Tucci

Night Hunter

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Here’s a script with so many ideas going off at different tangents that the resultant film struggles to do justice to any single one of them. It’s scarcely aided by a by-the-numbers score which robs most of the better scenes of any impact they might otherwise have had, turning the whole thing into homogenised Hollywood fodder. Perhaps it would have been better as a television mini-series or a novel, both of which formats might have allowed for less linear plot and exploration of several different ideas.

Marshall (a wooden Henry Cavill) lives apart from his wife, scarcely seen, and their daughter Faye (Emma Tremblay). The reason for their separation is, he can’t reconcile with family life his job as a detective hunting sex killers. If you’re wondering about the UK title, at one point he says that he hunts people who live in the dark whereas his daughter represents the light. Meanwhile, Cooper (Ben Kingsley) uses the teenage Lara (Eliana Jones) as bait to castrate pedophiles thus preventing their re-offending. When a car accident lands Cooper in police custody, his tracking device on Lara leads the police to capture serial sex killer and multiple personality Simon Stulls (Brendan Fletcher). However, that doesn’t stop further atrocities being committed…

To boil the film down to the essence described above, a lot’s been left out. For a start, much onscreen time is given to Marshall’s several police colleagues, notably psychological profiler Rachel (Alexandra Daddario) who is the second lead. She performs many interviews with the arrested Simon in a police interview room and even becomes his kidnap victim towards the end. There’s the merest hint that she and Marshall have had some sort of personal history together, but this is never really developed.

Marshall’s other colleagues include his superior Commissioner Harper (the ever-charismatic Stanley Tucci who consistently lights up the screen whenever he appears). Then there’s the fact that as well as his internal multiple personalities (spoiler alert) Simon the killer also has a real life, identical twin brother (Brendan Fletcher again). And Rachel unearths archive videotape footage of the brothers’ suicidal, rape victim mother Amy (Carlyn Burchell).

Frequent (attempted) emotional crisis is coupled with scenes of Marshall with Faye or Cooper with Lara to suggest treacly family values. Which seems a weird value to affirm given this is a cynical action movie about cops and vigilantes hunting sex murderers. Who exactly did the director or producers (of whom more shortly) think their audience was? Elsewhere, the film tips the viewing audience off about a car bomb about a minute before it happens for reasons of ineptitude rather than suspense. A woodlands hunt / shoot out / fight scene near a frozen lake towards the end threatens to be truly gripping until the clichéd music score kicks in and destroys the tense atmosphere. And so on.

In other words, this is a mish-mash, mostly no-good movie. You’ll get little idea of how all over the place it is from the promising-looking trailer. Solid camerawork plus halfway decent acting by Tucci, Kingsley and others can’t save it. No surprise that it has 34 listed producers of one sort or another (over 20 of them executive producers) – it feels like numerous different films vying for space rather than any single, unified vision.

Night Hunter is out in the UK in cinemas and on digital HD on Friday, September 13th. Its original title in the US was Nomis. It’s on VoD in April. Watch the film trailer below:

Final Portrait

Posted on by victorfraga

How do you capture and fossilise the most innate elements of the human being onto a portrait? Swiss-Italian painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti (played by Geoffrey Rush) attempts to rescue the essence of American art critic and biographer James Lord (the heartthrob Armie Hammer), but he is never satisfied with the outcome, to the despair of his patient subject.

What was originally intended to last two to three hours ends up lasting for weeks, and James suddenly realises it may never come to an end. He’s forced to change his flight back to New York several times in order to pose for an artist who strives for perfection while also recognising that such accomplishment is impossible. As a result, both artist and subject are caught up in a painful and perpetual artistic cycle.

Rush delivers a vibrant performance as the neurotic, and self-deprecating artist. He describes the dandy and polite American as a “brute” and a “degenerate”, and hazards a guess that he will end up either in prison or in an asylum. These hidden qualities – which noone else but the artist sees – are precisely the elements he wants to show in his painting, and he becomes increasingly frustrated at his inability to achieve this. He destroys painting after painting and starts afresh as many times as you can imagine. He will work almost invariably with a cigarette attached to his mouth, while hurling “fuck” and “putain” several times. James is in for a rough and yet entertaining ride.

The cultural shock between Americans and Europeans is also a centrepiece of the movie, in a way very similar to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003). Giacometti has a wife and a stable affair with a prostitute. His wife also has a lover, and the polygamy seems extremely natural to them and yet very awkward to the eyes of the American visitor.

The movie, which takes place in Paris, recreates a very specific period of Giacometti’s life, seen from the eyes or James Lord – it was based on the latter’s biography ‘A Giacometti Potrait’. It will not give you any insight into the artist’s history. It’s a delightful, gentle and warm piece with elements of comedy, supported by a couple of jolly French chansons. It’s likely to please art lovers or anyone fascinated by the incongruities, paradoxes and impossibilities of the artistic creative process.

Final Portrait was presented at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It is out in cinemas across the UK on August 18th.