Sequel to the 2007 shocker, this second film picks up minutes later, as an armed SWAT team is sent in with a medical officer to find out what exactly is going on in the quarantined apartment building.
Rec was a brilliant exercise in first person terror, playing with the limits of a single perspective to create an unnerving action/horror with a genuinely unsettling finale. The sequel ramps up the pace from the very beginning and changes the rules by sending in our heroes armed to the teeth and forewarned about some of the dangers inside. It's a welcome change, ensuring that Rec 2 isn't a typical horror sequel with the same scares in a different location.
But it also robs the film of some of its tension, forcing the directors to fabricate reasons to make the response team vulnerable. Some work, like a moment when one squad member is isolated in a duct and pursued by a shadowy form, but several other contrivances just make this elite team of killers seem like imbeciles. And don't get me started on the idiotic trio of kids who improbably sneak into the building in a parallel story clearly introduced to pad out the running time. The creeping dread is also lessened by endless scenes of exposition made necessary by the new supernatural, pseudo-religious explanation for the horrors taking place. These elements did make an appearance in the first film but when Rec 2 briefly decides to turn into The Exorcist, it threatens to lose its audience.
Happily, there's still a ferocious energy to the proceedings, and directing team Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza clearly had a much bigger budget to play with this time. Squibs explode everywhere, deaths are impressively gory (particularly some underage headshots) and there are several impressively staged first-person moments, courtesy of the SWAT teams helmet cams. But they also overstretch their abilities, particularly as the film draws to a close and nightvision becomes essential to driving the story forward. It's a great concept but, layered on top of so much extraneous narrative and technical feats, it overcomplicates what should be an exercise in pure terror.
Watchable and technically impressive, Rec 2 is so busy trying to impress its audience that it forgets it's supposed to scare them too.
When adopted Prince Dastan leads his father’s army in a successful attack on an enemy stronghold, he earns the acclaim of the people. But when his father his assassinated and Dastan framed for the murder, he goes on the run with the cities Princess and a seemingly innocuous dagger in tow. Little does he know that together they have the power to erase the terrible recent events, or destroy the world.
Based in part on the 2003 video game and featuring one of the genres most revered characters, Prince of Persia is as close as you can get to video game royalty. After our chat last month with creator and co-writer Jordan Mechner we were confident that The Sands of Time would be a step above the average, video game adaptation.
And it certainly is – arguably marking the first time that a proper narrative film has been successfully inspired by game material, bolstered by some stunning visuals, a massive production budget and a top drawer cast.
It’s a progression for the sub-genre then, no doubt helped by steering clear of the plot of the games, instead focussing on creating a vivid adventure, complete with its own mythologies and supernatural items. Chief among them is the Dagger of Time – in the games it allowed the Prince to steal back a precious few temporal seconds in the event of imminent death. In the film it becomes a doomsday device, protected for centuries by a clan of guardians, with Gemma Arterton’s Tamina the latest in the line. The Dagger is the crux of the film; in the wrong hands it could unleash the sands from the Hourglass of the Gods and destroy the world or rewrite history.
The problem here is that the mythology is opaque and unfamiliar, leaving the audience adrift. The powers of the Dagger themselves are limited, ill-defined and a little pointless. The time-reversing sequences in the film are attractive to look at but nothing more – we aren’t given time to linger on the awesomeness of being able to manipulate time. And the power is rarely used to compliment the action – more often by accident or to prove a point. Apart from one decent moment with a snake attack, it misses the appeal completely of knowing that you have a lifeline, of being able to make an incredible leap of faith without the possibility of death.
Naturally enough, the film looks dazzling, with massive sets and decent CG that is a little cartoonish but makes up for it with the scale of the Persian cities it recreates. But too little use is made of these massive sets and locations and the Parkour-inspired running and vaulting of the games is almost entirely absent, despite its obvious appeal to an action/adventure film. The Prince is too often saddled with a whinging side-kick and further hampered by Gyllenhaal’s minimal physical prowess. He may be newly buff and acquits himself reasonably well in the swordplay but he’s too bulky for the copious acrobatics, forcing the film to resort to judicious editing to make his actions seem fluid. Apart from an opening fortress assault, there are few memorable set pieces and a focus in the final act on remarkably dull one-on-one fights. It’s not helped by the sudden introduction of a band of comically villainous Hassansin warriors who appear to have magical powers just because they can.
When he’s not flailing around like a reject from Cirque Du Soleil, Jake Gyllenhaal is almost brilliant as Dastan. His faintly Cockney accent rarely slips and despite looking decidedly un-Persian he’s an easy-going lead with some decent comic timing. It’s just a shame he shares most of his quip-heavy scenes with the increasingly dull Arterton, who presents all her dialogue without a hint of inflection, irony or humour. Most of the time she stands there looking like a fake-tanned, anorexic guppy while Gyllenhaal tries his best to wring some bitchy rapport from the proceedings. Toby Kebbell and Richard Coyle (that Welsh one from ‘Coupling’) are decent as Dastan’s brothers and Ben Kingsley seems lost as their uncle. The only consistently entertaining performance comes from Alfred Molina’s Sheik Amar, who rails against taxes and conjures up massive conspiracy theories. It may be anachronistic but at least he has some token personality.
And it’s that personality which is missing most from The Sands of Time, particularly if Bruckheimer expect this series to be the new Pirates of the Caribbean. But there’s none of the latter films’ quirkiness here, no bizarre but accessible characters and none of its self-aware charm. But crucially Gyllenhaal, though a fine actor, is no Johnny Depp and the lack of a compelling central character is the biggest barrier to the film’s success.
As a blockbuster summer adventure movie, The Sands of Time is only intermittently successful. While I was watching, I couldn’t help seeing it as a symptom of the increasingly strained relationship between the audience and the viewer, of films that cost so much money to make that they strive to appeal to every possible demographic and end up satisfying no one.
Take, for example, the need to make things complicated. This is fundamentally a kid’s film and yet the filmmakers feel the need for conspiracies and plot twists. The villain changes no less than three times, despite it being obvious from the start that Kingsley will be the eventual evil-supremo – he spends so much time wearing eyeliner and looking arch that it’s almost a relief when he finally reveals his nefarious plans. But it’s supposed to be a family adventure, with clearly defined good and evil. We don’t even get a band of heroes to cheer for until the closing minutes and their eventual demise is edited down to nothing; a better film would have milked a late-on sacrifice to tear-jerking climax but director Mike Newell is too busy rocketing towards the CG overload of the finale.
It would be easy to give The Sands of Time a pass as a mostly competent action adventure which raises the bar for game adaptations but is that really all we can hope for from our summer blockbusters? That they aren’t as bad as we were expecting? The action is pedestrian and edited into rarely coherent shreds and the central conceit of the film, the accursed dagger, actively negates any peril by leaving us assured that even death can be reversed. The heartstrings barely ripple as we see characters fall by the wayside, safe in the knowledge that they’ll return. Oh and the score blatantly rips off better themes from Pirates... and The Mummy.
Betrayed by their government and presumed dead, The Losers drop off the radar to try to escape from their past. But when the opportunity arises to strike back at the man who tried to kill them, they head home to steal back their lives.
Maybe I was foolish to look forward to The Losers. The polished trailer promised slick pyrotechnics and a some action-packed wit, while a browse of issue 1 of Andy Diggle’s comic promised a gritty revenge thriller with a fantastic array of hard-bitten characters.
The film starts well, despite feeling a pointless need to give us comic book panel versions of the leads, as our five man team waits in the jungle, guiding an air-strike in on the camp of an evil drug-lord. The one note code of honour as they break ranks to rescue a bunch of kids was fine, as was the escape through the jungle in a clapped out school bus and the resulting explosion. It was the cloying sentimentality as the kids are led to a rescue chopper that first weakened my resolve, while the event which directly followed shattered it completely with its vulgarity, leaving me reeling for all the wrong reasons.
And that just the first few missteps by the filmmakers. One minute, the leads will be beating the crap out of eachother as a sublimation of camaraderie or sex while the next Jason Patric will be launching people off buildings and shooting them in the face for laughs. The cast are appearing in wildly different films – Idris Elba thinks he’s in a dark drama, Patric’s in a Naked Gun film while Chris Evans is the comic relief in a competent action film. And Jeffrey Dean Morgan, so effective as The Comedian in Watchmen, is still in his trailer learning his lines while watching reruns of his better performance in ‘Greys Anatomy’.
It’s a shame because when The Losers is knee deep in a halfway decent set piece (admittedly all borrowed from the comic) and the ensemble cast are bouncing one-liners off each other it can be a lot of fun. But even then it too often shoots itself in the foot – first by choosing to go the PG-13 route (some violence and bad language would have least given it a little personality) and secondly due to the barely TV-worthy staging. Apart from the haphazard, freeze-frame heavy editing, each encounter is set up with a minimum of style and shoddy effects work, particularly in a last minute plane crash, further lessens the impact. Stomp the Yard director White simply doesn’t have the experience to wrangle this large cast and deliver a flippant actioner at the same time – instead opting to do neither.
The Losers had great potential as an early summer slice of mindless action. The cast is brilliant (though we would have swapped Elba with Morgan), it’s nice to see Saldana has some range and Chris Evans regains his mantle of a budget-range Ryan Reynolds. But Patric’s take on the supposed evil genius Max is insufferable and the film is scrappily directed. Maybe if co-writer Peter Berg had taken the reins we might have had another guilty pleasure like his underrated 2003 effort Welcome to the Jungle.
If you’ve got a problem, if no one else can help... stick with The A-Team.
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