Movie Reviews

“HOW do you explain this frivolous spending during a recession?” demands one of the characters of our eponymous hero early in Arthur (12A), in a bid to deflect audience resentment at the sight of Russell Brand playing a playboy billionaire who wastes thousands of dollars at every hand’s turn.

The trouble with Arthur is not that its hero is a whinging, feckless spendthrift; it’s that all the characters, Arthur’s nanny Hobson (Helen Mirren) excepted, are either dislikeable or dispensable, as Arthur struggles to decide whether he loves free-spirited author Naomi (Greta Gertwig) more than he loves his debauchery.

The original Arthur (1981) was a lightweight comedy that played to Dudley Moore’s strengths, and particularly his ability to make for a convincingly happy drunk, but this version is interesting for the extent to which it exposes Russell Brand’s limits as a leading man. Charismatic and diverting in supporting roles, Brand’s patented brand of outrageous narcissism is here constrained by the rom-com formula, so that Arthur’s supposedly freewheeling iconoclasm manifests itself as brattish self-indulgence. Mirren’s turn as a surrogate mother is by turns humorous and touching, and Brand is laugh-out-loud funny in places, but Luiz Guzman, Jennifer Garner and Nick Nolte are all wasted by director Jason Winer.

FEW movies live up to their titles as enthusiastically as The Fast and The Furious 5 (12A), in which career criminal Dom (Vin Diesel), his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) and her boyfriend Brian (Paul Walker) go on the run in Rio, only to be tracked down by their nemesis, federal agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), when a one-last-heist robbery goes wrong. Naturally, the heist involves many high-powered cars performing manoeuvres that don’t strictly adhere to the laws of physics, and an early extended sequence in which Dom’s crew boosts muscle cars from a moving train is inventively filmed, and sets the tone for what follows. The Fast and Furious franchise has always been as heavy on the cheese as it is high on testosterone, and director Justin Lin, a veteran of the series at this point, is more than happy to crank up the ludicrous nature of the characters’ dilemmas, creating scenarios that allow the actors, and a resolutely deadpan Johnson in particular, to ham it up to the heavens. As always, however, the trouble with the Fast and Furious movies is that it can become difficult to differentiate between the roaring, snarling cars and their roaring, snarling human co-stars. If you’re prepared to leave your brain idling in neutral, or better still park it outside the door, this is dumb fun writ large and loud.

THE Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc Sec (12A) opens in sprightly fashion, as a pterodactyl terrorises Paris in 1911, while the intrepid Adele (Louise Bourgoin) extricates herself from a potentially lethal situation deep inside a pharaoh’s tomb in Egypt. The movie’s origins in the comic books of Jacques Tardi are evident throughout, but writer-director Luc Besson can’t maintain the effervescent energy of his opening gambit when the tale settles down in Paris. Bourgoin makes for a likeably offbeat heroine, and she gets strong support from Matheiu Almaric, but the quirky charms of this comedy-caper homage wear thin.

SET on a barren island inside the Russian Arctic circle, How I Ended This Summer (15s) charts the poisonous rise in hostilities between meteorologists, college graduate Pavel (Grigory Dobrygin) and veteran Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis).

Aleksei Popogrebsky’s film deftly creates a claustrophobic atmosphere of mutual suspicion, despite the wide-open spaces in which the men work, although the funereal pace and long, static shots may prove frustrating for those who prefer their psychological thrillers to provide more action than tension. The film turns on a decision made by young Pavel, when he decides to defer giving Sergei some bad news, but despite convincing performances from both men, seasoned thriller fans may question the plausibility of the motives that bring hostilities to a head.