Friday's Film Reviews: Into The Woods, Taken 3 and Foxcatcher
Traditionally in fairytales, the bedraggled heroine wins her dashing prince, evil stepmothers get their comeuppance and abducted children escape the clutches of a witch by pushing the treacherous hag into her oven.
Into The Woods keeps turning the pages on these archetypal characters, imagining what might happen as they come to terms with their actions and - in most cases - suffer the repercussions.
Light comedy and heartrending tragedy skip hand in hand in James Lapine?s screenplay and Stephen Sondheim?s music and lyrics, which are ambrosia for director Rob Marshall, who propelled the 2002 film version of Chicago to Oscar glory.
This has nearly as much razzle dazzle including gorgeous costumes, picturesque sets and digitally enhanced magical effects.
Thankfully, Marshall tones down the swirling camerawork and snappy editing here, adopting a gentler rhythm, which is less exhausting on our eyes over two hours.
Into The Woods establishes its mood with a dazzling overture, I Wish, elegantly introducing the characters before their fates intersect.
Meryl Streep is typically spellbinding. Her voice soars and our hearts break in her solo to motherhood, Stay With Me.
James Corden and Emily Blunt add to the film's emotional heft while Chris Pine and Billy Magnusson are hysterical as regal brothers in their chest-beating, thigh-slapping duet Agony atop a cascading waterfall.
With such a large cast to juggle, the script occasionally feels disjointed and some gear changes from broad pantomime to heartbreaking grief are jarring.
But Marshall doesn't shy away from delivering bitter pills in the final act courtesy of a marauding giant (Frances de la Tour).
Everything has a price, especially your heart's desire, so be careful what you wish for.
3?
71%
Vast wealth can buy you freedom from the shackles of debt, luxury goods, an aura of power, begrudging respect and thinly veiled jealousy from the people around you.
However, it cannot buy you undying love, unerring loyalty or mastery of Lady Luck and your mortality.
In the 1980s, philanthropist John Eleuthere du Pont attempted to buy sporting glory for America by using his vast fortune to establish a world class wrestling facility at his sprawling Foxcatcher Farm on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
He recruited Olympic champion David Schultz to his stable, which included David?s younger brother and fellow Olympic gold medallist Mark, who lived on the estate to ensure the focus was always on the wrestling.
Bennett Miller, who was deservedly Oscar nominated for Capote, directs this dramatisation of du Pont's fraught relationship with the Schultz brothers and his steady descent into madness.
The film is distinguished by a superb ensemble cast including a creepily dramatic performance from Steve Carell, replete with facial prosthetics, as the eccentric millionaire who lost everything with the pull of a trigger.
He's heavily tipped for an Oscar nomination as Best Actor because this marks such a striking departure from lovable, goofball roles in Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Evan Almighty.
Foxcatcher is a dark and unsettling character study, in which the American dream turns rancid and a mentally unstable man with money becomes a wrecking ball in the lives of unsuspecting bystanders.
Carell is impressive but arguably the more compelling performances come from Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo as the siblings corrupted by a millionaire?s insidious influence.
The homoerotic undertow of Du Pont's fascination with Mark is subtly addressed in a script that doesn't quite make sense of the complex emotions churning beneath the surface.
Too much is left unsaid and with a running time of 134 minutes, Bennett leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions.
3?
86%
History repeats with predictably calamitous consequences in Olivier Megaton's high-octane thriller Taken 3.
In previous films, former Special Forces operative Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) single-handedly brought down an Albanian human trafficking ring and its underworld offshoots.
He left devastation and an impressive double-digit body count in his wake.
Surely, the east European criminal fraternity would have learnt that Mills and his family are off-limits.
Alas, the Russians haven't received that memo because they foolishly try their luck against the hulking avenger in this frenetically edited instalment.
Scriptwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen attempt to convince us that the third film is different from its predecessors by engineering a murderous twist that transforms good guy Bryan from righteous hunter into wanted fugitive.
However, once the turbo-charged car chases and bruising fisticuffs begin in earnest, Taken 3 eases back into a familiar bloodthirsty groove.
Taken 3 delivers a cacophonous conclusion to the franchise that has reinvented Neeson as a big-screen action star.
Megaton orchestrates the set pieces with brio, sacrificing plausibility at the altar of increasingly outlandish thrills and spills.
Forest Whitaker lends gravitas to his underwritten role as the canny cop, who begins to doubt Bryan's guilt, while Neeson barks his perfunctory dialogue with aplomb.
"How did I escape?" he growls at one juncture, cueing a cheeky flashback that explains his miraculous survival of a flaming car wreck.
The leading man's ability to evade certain death becomes a delicious and unintentional running joke.
On this evidence, nothing short of a direct hit from a nuclear warhead could stop him.
Taken 4 A Ride is surely just a matter of time.
2?
29%
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