Film of the Week: King Frankie is a tale of hard times and lessons learned
Peter Coonan stars in King Frankie
Heavy is the head that wears the crown. King Frankie (15A) stars Peter Coonan as Frankie, a taxi-driver in a small Irish town who manages a modest fleet of cabs but has ambitions to expand the business and establish a legacy for his children.Â
Which would be no small feat, given that Frankie is slowly crawling back from a devastating bankruptcy.
First, however, Frankie needs to bury his father, Aidan (Owen Roe), whose sage counsel Frankie ignored a decade previously when Frankie was riding high, flashing the cash and juggling a host of impossible debts as he tried to persuade big spenders to invest in the property development scheme he’d hatched with his best friend Peter (Alan Mahon).
Debutant writer-director Dermot Malone splits his drama into two distinct parts: the day of Aidan’s removal, and a day 10 years previously when Frankie hosted a lavish birthday party for his young daughter, spending funds he didn’t have to impress potential investors.
Peter Coonan is effectively playing two different Frankies here: the younger man is a brash, fast-talking wheeler-dealer who perceives himself as Ireland’s answer to Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe, while the older Frankie is wiser and more generous (the film opens with Frankie making a taxi-run on the morning of Aidan’s removal so that Grainne (Claudia Beatty), who has Down syndrome, won’t be upset by a change in her routine) but also a man racked with guilt and regret for the way in which his bid to ascend to the throne ruined so many lives.
It’s a terrific performance from Coonan as the character of Frankie flits back and forth between the self-absorbed gambler and the Zen-like penitent, and he gets strong support from Olivia Caffrey, playing Frankie’s long-suffering wife Jenny, and the great Owen Roe as a well-meaning father who is baffled at what his son has become.
Dermot Malone’s script is a little predictable once the sharp contrast between the younger and older Frankie is established, but his unfussy direction delivers a lean and emotionally engaging tale of unlikely redemption.
Horror fans of a certain vintage will fondly remember the 1979 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s vampire classic, starring David Soul and James Mason, but they’ll be less impressed by this latest retelling of Salem’s Lot (15A).
The story opens with author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) returning to the town of his childhood to research the creepy old Marsten House, previously the site of a Satan-worshipping cult but now home to a rather ominous coffin that has been shipped all the way from Europe by antiques dealer Straker (Pilou Asbaek), whose predatorial pursuit of young children gradually devastates the entire community.
Director Gary Dauberman is a veteran of ‘The Conjuring’ series of horror flicks, but this vampire yarn is ploddingly conventional as it cycles through some old-fashioned tropes — garlic, glowing crucifixes, wooden stakes — in what feels like a well-intentioned but pointless homage to the original.
A prequel to the Transformers franchise, Transformers One (PG) is an animated film that opens on the planet Cybertron with robots Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) labouring in the mines to generate a vital supply of the dangerously unstable ‘energon’ for the Transformer ruling class led by Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm).
But is Sentinel Prime really the benevolent dictator he wants the worker-robots to believe he is? And is Orion Pax entitled to wish himself the equal of his Transformer overlords?
Top-heavy with star talent (Laurence Fishburne, Scarlett Johansson, and Steve Buscemi also lend their voices) and aimed squarely at a young audience, Transformers One investigates what it takes to be a real leader in a solid but unspectacular account of the birth of Optimus Prime that further explains how the Autobots and Decepticons came to be such bitter enemies.
