Hitting the target

THE Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit (US/15A/109 mins) deserves to be judged against the very best the western genre has to offer, and not just the 1969 version starring John Wayne, although the Coens’ version offers a markedly more scuzzy take on the Old West.

Both movies are faithful to the source material, Charles Portis’ novel of the same name, in which 14-year-old farm girl Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) commissions booze-sodden Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track down outlaw Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), who has murdered her father.

Issues of jurisdiction are confused by the fact that Chaney has escaped into the Indian Territory, and are further complicated by the appearance of Texas Ranger LaBeouf (Matt Damon), who is determined to drag Chaney back to Texas to stand trial for a previous murder.

A trio of superb performances make the most of three memorable characters, as Bridges revels in Cogburn’s immoral lawman, regaling all and sundry with slurred anecdotes from his colourful past and shooting virtually everything that moves. Damon, by contrast, is hilarious as the self-absorbed braggart with high-falutin’ notions of Texas justice, although it’s Steinfeld, playing a Bible-quoting child whose idea of justice is an eye-for-an-eye assassination, who steals the show.

The Coens’ decision to deglamourise the Wild West means that the film lacks the epic sweep of John Ford’s finest westerns, for example, but there’s a pleasing contrast in their gritty realism and the offbeat allusions to Charles Laughton’s occasionally surreal masterpiece The Night of the Hunter (1955). By turns violent, poignant and blackly comic, True Grit is the latest western to deconstruct the mythologised Old West, and is the best of the genre since Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992).

EDUCATED in the bucolic environs of Hailsham boarding school, three schoolchildren are devastated to learn that their apparently idyllic lives are destined to end in tragedy when a disaffected teacher informs her class that they are all being reared for no other purpose than to become organ donors.

Mark Romanek’s bleak sci-fi tale Never Let Me Go (UK/15A/102 mins), which is adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of the same name, follows the three ‘all but human’ children over the course of three decades, as a love triangle develops between Ruth (Kiera Knightley), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Kathy (Carey Mulligan). The poignancy of the trio’s love and loss is sharpened by their foreshortened lives, in theory at least, but Romanek has constructed a curiously muted story, perhaps believing that the spectre of premature death hanging over the characters is sufficient to provide the film with the necessary narrative momentum.

Mulligan is excellent in her role as ‘carer’ to both Ruth and Tommy, but Knightley and Garfield are oddly stilted, with Knightley in particular unconvincing as she contemplates her extinction. The result is a thoughtful meditation on mortality that exercises the mind but fails to penetrate the heart.

JUST Go With It (US/12A/116 mins) is an unlikely prospect, a French farce starring that broadest of comedians, Adam Sandler. He plays Danny, a plastic surgeon who convinces young women to sleep with him by pretending that he’s unhappily married. When Palmer (Brooklyn Decker) calls his bluff, Danny persuades his assistant, Katherine (Jennifer Aniston) to pretend to be his wife, a lie that quickly spirals out of control and finds all the major players on holiday together in Hawaii.

Depending on slapstick and Sandler’s snide asides for its almost non-existent comedy, Dennis Dugan’s rom-com is more successful as a romance, a success that’s due almost entirely to a surprisingly mature performance from Aniston as Danny’s long-suffering enabler. Deftly capable of holding her own despite Sandler’s stream of inane witticisms, Aniston owns the screen with a sparky, thoughtful turn that upstages even Nicole Kidman’s oddball cameo as Katherine’s old college roommate during their grass-skirted ‘hula-off’. Aniston’s performance aside, however, Just Go With It is eminently missable.

ALL the world’s a garden, and each gnome must play his part. Gnomeo and Juliet (UK/G/83 mins) is an animated tale loosely based on Shakespeare’s tragic romance, with Gnomeo (voiced by James McAvoy) and Juliet (Emily Blunt) as the star-crossed lovers trapped in the gardens of the warring Blueberrys and Redbricks. Pitched at a very young audience, the tale is a charmingly lively romp that bumbles along at a pleasing pace to its Elton John-dominated soundtrack. Adults, however, might find it all a little too cute and saccharine sweet.

ANOTHER offering pitched at the very young is Yogi Bear (US/G/80 mins), a live action film with Yogi (voiced by Dan Akroyd) and his sidekick Boo Boo (Justin Timberlake) rendered in animation. The pair join forces with their erstwhile nemesis Ranger Smith (Tom Kavanagh) when the evil mayor plots to close down Jellystone Park in order to redevelop it, as the trio work along with filmmaker Rachel (Anna Faris) to come up with the money required to keep the park open.

Likeable performances from Kavanagh, Faris and Timberlake off-set Akroyd’s excessively shouty Yogi, but the film as a whole is nowhere near as smart as the average bear.