Movie Reviews
The team’s skills are stretched to breaking point when the evil peacock Shen (Gary Oldman) devises a world-shattering weapon, and sets out to rule all of China. Jennifer Yuh, making her feature-length debut, has the unenviable task of recreating the box office success of the original Kung Fu Panda, but does so with some aplomb, blending humour and vibrantly-drawn action sequences to create a tale that fairly hums along in terms of pace and character development. Significantly, Kung Fu Panda 2 offers an added dimension: Po’s backstory as an adopted panda is explored in flashback and incorporates the slaughter of his family by the ruthless Shen, a development that not only gives the story real emotional heft but allows the makers to explore a tangent in which the Furious Five discover that their strength in depth is derived from their fragility as much as their kung fu skills. It’s a movie with plenty to offer to young and old alike.
A DELICIOUSLY nasty piece of work, Mother’s Day (18s) is a home invasion thriller in which a group of friends, attending a party hosted by Beth (Jaime King) and Daniel (Frank Grillo), are terrorised by a vicious family of bank robbers, who are led, perversely enough, by their mother, Natalie Koffin (Rebecca De Mornay). In a twisting, morally challenging tale, the Koffin crew are in search of money they’ve been sending to their old home, which Beth and Daniel have recently bought. Written by Scott Millam and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, the film blends fraught tension with explosive bouts of violence as the sadists put the group of friends through the hoops in a story reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), challenging the group to betray one another emotionally and physically in a terrifying and frequently lethal game of Darwinian survival. The plot is overcooked at times, but a chilling performance from De Mornay, and the philosophical conundrums that force the audience to answer some very difficult questions about their own human instincts, dovetail neatly with the tautly-executed action sequences.
THE Runway (PG) is (very) loosely based on the true story of the pilot who crash-landed near Mallow in 1983, and who found himself airborne again when what seemed like the entire town turned out to build him a runway. Here, fatherless young Paco (Jamie Kerins) bonds with a Colombian pilot, Ernesto (Demián Bechir), who finds himself marooned in rural Ireland when his plane comes down on a remote hillside. Ian Power, who writes and directs, crafts a whimsical black comedy from the efforts of the locals to generate as much publicity as possible from the tourism potential of Ernesto’s plight, as the economically depressed village pulls itself up by its bootstraps to get the plane aloft again. The story is underpinned with intrigue (is Ernesto as innocent as he claims to be?) and Paco’s poignant attempts to identify with a reluctant father figure, but the overall effect, and strong performances from Bechir, Kerins and John Carpenter as Paco’s Traveller friend Frogs, is undermined by a reliance on Oirish stereotypes and a quality of gombeenism that feels hopelessly dated. This year has already proven itself very good one for Irish film, but The Runway feels like a step backwards in time in more ways than one.
GREGG ARAKI’S latest offering, Kaboom (16s), is a self-consciously knowing sci-fi conspiracy tale laced with ironic dialogue and lashings of gay and straight sex, in which college student Smith (Thomas Dekker) unwittingly uncovers some spooky happenings on campus that appear to revolve around an alien invasion conducted by men in animal masks. Aided and abetted by his lesbian friend Stella (Hayley Bennett), Smith stumbles from one crisis to another, while Araki invites us to laugh along with a preposterous storyline. Showing at the IFI and selected outlets.
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