Film reviews round-up: A Dog's Purpose, Unlocked, Sleepless, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

A soppy canine drama, Noomi Rapace's new thriller, Jamie Foxx in a race against time, and a surprisingly fascinating doc about town planning

A Dog’s Purpose (PG)

★★☆☆☆

Lasse Hallström, 100 mins, starring: Britt Robertson, Josh Gad (voice), Dennis Quaid, Peggy Lipton, K.J. Apa, Logan Miller

Come back, Lassie, come back, Rin Tin Tin: all is forgiven. A Dog’s Purpose is surely the soppiest, silliest, most slobbering canine drama in recent Hollywood history. Based on W. Bruce Cameron’s novel, it’s a dog story with metaphysical leanings.

If Terrence Malick was let loose in a kennel at Disney, A Dog’s Purpose is the kind of film he might have made. This isn’t just a yarn about some poor mutt devoted to its owner. It’s a film in which the hero (voiced by Josh Gad) is reincarnated again and again as different breeds and in different genders.

One moment, he’s a red retriever, the next he has turned into a German shepherd. He even endures a few scenes as a tiny-legged corgi. All the time, he is chewing on the bone of the fundamental question of what life is all about.

You have to give Lasse Hallström the credit for a certain technical mastery. The film allows us a dog eye perspective on the world. That means some of the close-ups of the human owners are rheumy and blurred (dogs aren’t renowned for their eyesight) and that we get to see a lot of ankles.

The screenplay also pays exhaustive attention to the dog’s olfactory perspective. The highest compliment he can pay a woman is that she smells like a biscuit. He is often found pondering such mysteries as why food tastes better when it has been in the trash or why young lovers have such a sweaty aroma.

In one of the stranger scenes, the dog swallows a rare coin, thinking perhaps that it is a chocolate drop, and his owner has to wait for him to poop it out. He has a distinctive way of chasing his own tail.

A Dog’s Purpose spans half a century. Its main section deals with the years in which the hero is a red retriever. He is found as a puppy almost dead of thirst abandoned in a car on a baking day by a woman and her eight-year-old son.

Ethan (Bryce Gheisar), the son, is eventually allowed to adopt the mutt and names him Bailey. The story is set in early 1960s suburban America. At first, life seems idyllic for the boy and his new pet. They grow up together, and become inseparable.

The dog’s voiceover is disconcerting. He seems both to be innocent and experienced. He uses language like a human but certain concepts confuse him. (For example, he calls Ethan’s school bus “a yellow box with wheels” and can’t work out why it takes him away every morning).

When Ethan turns into a strapping young man and starts playing for the high school football team, Bailey helps him in his courtship of the beautiful Hannah (Britt Robertson). He sniffs at her and slavers over her in such an enthusiastic way that the reserve between the young lovers is quickly broken. Ethan is the “leader of the pack’, an alpha male, and his pet dog happily trots along behind him wherever he goes.

There’s a bizarre Buddhist undertow to the storytelling here. Whenever the dog grows old and dies, he is promptly reborn as a different dog. His memory is always left intact.

The film feels choppy and episodic. Dramatic tension is in short supply. The filmmakers throw in a house fire – a staple of doggy movies from Rescued By Rover to The Artist. There is also an absurd interlude in which the hero, by now in the guise of a German Shepherd and working as a police dog, rescues drowning children and disarms hardened criminals.

The only scenes with any real conviction, though, are the ones featuring Ethan, clearly the love of the mutt's life (whatever breed or shape he or she is). We see Ethan both as a young boy and (played by Dennis Quaid) as a battered and emotionally bruised man in late middle age.

This feels like a film thrown together on a whim, to appeal to an audience of undiscriminating dog lovers while gently asking what dogs might think of humans. (“They’re complicated,” is the basic answer to that).

The anthropomorphism is unrelenting and yet the film always tries to be accurate in its depiction of dogs and their relationships with their two legged owners. It’s a bizarre endeavour, a rambling tale whose purpose, in spite of its title, is very hard to work out.

Unlocked (15)

★★★☆☆

Michael Apted, 98 mins, starring: Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, John Malkovich, Toni Collette, Michael Douglas, Akshay Kumar

Michael Apted’s new thriller Unlocked is an oldfashioned ripping yarn in the guise of a movie about spycraft, Jihadists and the war on terror. It’s very creaky at times but also enjoyable in its own souped-up B-movie fashion.

Noomi Rapace stars as Alice Racine, a character not so far removed from her Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. She’s a top secret service interrogator, still haunted by the events in Paris in 2012, when she “broke” a terrorist plot too late to stop a massacre on a bridge.

Alice speaks multiple languages, kickboxes like Ronda Rousey, is lethal with a gun and is almost always the smartest one in the room. That’s why her failure in Paris rankles so much. Bizarrely, given her multiple accomplishments, Alice is first encountered as a case worker dealing with immigrants’ problems in the local London benefits office.

One of the pleasures here is the OTT character acting. The film is full of big names in smallish parts, each trying to outdo the others in the sheer eccentricity of their performances. John Malkovich camps it up outrageously as a fey, lisping American spy boss who is world weary and sardonic in the extreme.

He takes it as a personal insult that terrorists are trying to launch an attack at the very time he is planning to celebrate his wedding anniversary. As the close-cropped MI5 boss, Toni Collette looks disconcertingly like Annie Lennox from the Eurythmics.

She has a knack of keeping calm even in the most stressful moments, for example when she is called upon to use a machine gun. Michael Douglas is on hand as Alice’s American mentor, a smooth talking and seemingly sympathetic figure who knows everyone in the intelligence world.

Orlando Bloom seems to be trying to get in touch with his inner Danny Dyer as a burglar/ex-special forces soldier. He’s a diamond geezer type with an earring who wisecracks away even at the most fraught moments.

Alice is called in from the cold to interrogate a terrorist suspect but isn't sure quite who her bosses are. The suspect is the messenger who will lead the intelligence agencies to the imam who will give the veiled instruction for the terrorist attack to be launched.

This is one of the stories like The 39 Steps in which the protagonist is both the hunter and the hunted. Alice ricochets around London with a blonde-haired, hardened killer who looks like Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love on her tail.

She is forever running down fire escapes, leaping out of windows, breaking in and out of apartments or clinging to precipices. Every so often, she’ll put in a call to Toni Collette to keep her in the loop as to whether the day can be saved in time or not.

Apted once directed a Bond movie (The World Is Not Enough) and has made several thrillers (Enigma, Extreme Measures) in the course of his immensely long and distinguished career. He knows how to stage chases and gunfights. Unlocked rattles along at a brisk pace and is full of action set pieces.

There are shoot-outs in hotel rooms, fights with rottweilers in lifts, a little bit of underwater mayhem, lots of assassinations and several scenes of an evil scientist cooking up noxious viruses in underground labs.

The film makes inventive use of London locations which range from Wembley to Tower Bridge, from the East End to swanky West End apartments. Peter O’Brien’s screenplay is on the overcooked side. It throws in elements of everything from John Le Carré-like espionage stories about spy craft to explosive Jack Ryan-style thrillers.

It goes without saying that there’s a mole on the inside, compromising the American and British spy operations. The one element the film doesn’t find time for is romance. Bloom’s character flirts in half-hearted fashion with Rapace but, with a city to be saved from biological attack, there is little time for the frivolity of first dates.

Rapace’s Alice may be a ruthless, kickass heroine but she is one without a trace of humour. The film is a caper but it is one told in an earnest fashion. A postscript set in the Czech Republic hints that there may be plans for Alice to return, possibly to head up her own franchise. Hopefully, if she does make a comeback, she may lighten up just a little.

Sleepless (15)

★★☆☆☆

Baran bo Odar, 95 mins, starring: Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney, Scoot McNairy, Gabrielle Union, Octavius J. Johnson

Sleepless is a frenetic thriller in which every character is supremely stressed – and in which the filmmakers themselves are so on edge that they can barely hold the camera still. The story unfolds over a single day and night in Las Vegas.

Jamie Foxx plays Vincent Downs, a cop who together with his partner, after the shoot-out that opens the movie, ends up with 25 kilos of cocaine that was intended for the mob. Internal Affairs, in the shape of officer Jennifer Byrant (Michelle Monaghan) is already snooping around, looking for evidence of police corruption. (This isn’t hard to find).

Foxx’s character isn’t just badly wounded near the beginning of the movie. He is being browbeaten by his ex-wife and is in trouble with her for neglecting his teenage son. The super sleek casino owner Stanley Rubino (Dermot Mulroney) is agitated because he is supposed to be providing the cocaine for psychopathic mobster Rob Novak (Scott McNairy.)

Rob, in his turn, is tearing what remains of his hair out because he is terrified of his even more psychopathic father (an unseen but menacing presence whose potential return to town fills everyone with dread.)

Just in case anybody even thinks about relaxing, the director fills the film with pounding and oppressive music. This is a story of desperate people whose interests are all interlinked. To keep his family safe, Vincent has to return the drugs to Rubino who will give them to Novak who will in turn pass them on to his father.

Most of the action takes place in Rubino’s casino. The drugs are never where anyone expects them to be. They’re hidden in ventilation shafts or in lockers in the women’s spa. Vincent has them, Bryant takes them. All the while, Novak and Rubino are becoming more and more strung out.

Andrea Berloff’s screenplay at least tries to root the characters’ behaviour in their circumstances. If Novak strings a relative upside down and shoots him with baseballs or cuts off someone’s tongue and puts it in a jewellery box, that’s not (just) because he’s demented sadist. He is terrified himself. So is everyone else in the movie. When someone threatens them, they pass the threat on.

The problem here is that all the situations are familiar from other, generally better gangster thrillers. The brutal fight in the hotel kitchen, using pots, pans and knives, would be more arresting if we hadn’t seen such a scene so many times before.

It’s not very original, either, for Jamie Foxx to steal a guest’s dry cleaning or for Novak to use golf clubs as assault weapons. In its portrayal of cops on the take, Sleepless often resembles an episode of TV’s The Shield.

Underground car parks in films like this are always turned into battlefields. Even the plot twists – the revelations about who is really corrupt and who isn’t – are telegraphed in an obvious and clumsy way. This is also sometimes a frustrating film to watch.

You can’t understand why characters loiter on staircases when killers are only a few yards behind them and you begin to wonder just how Foxx is managing to stay upright after being stabbed, shot at and bludgeoned quite so often.

Bizarrely, Sleepless isn’t just about police corruption and mobster violence. It’s also a family story. Foxx has to take his son to play in a football game and get him back to his mother in time for bed. As the bullets fly and the hunt for the missing cocaine grows ever more desperate, he never forgets his responsibilities as a dad.

His teenage son seemingly regards being kidnapped and chased by murderous hoodlums as a perfect father-son bonding exercise and joins in the carnage with adolescent enthusiasm. At least, the tempo here doesn’t drop. If it did, we would realise just how contrived and derivative the movie really was.

Citizen Jane: Battle For The City (PG)

★★★★☆

Matt Tyrnauer, 93 mins, featuring: Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses

On the face of it, a feature documentary on the subject of town planning in New York doesn’t seem an alluring proposition at all. However, Matt Tyrnauer’s Citizen Jane is a fascinating and surprisingly dramatic and topical affair. Tyrnauer is looking at a fundamental clash in philosophies about cities.

On the one hand, there is the point of view of powerbroker and “master builder” Robert Moses, a brute modernist whose vision of improving cities centred round freeways, skyscrapers and parks. Moses was like the architect Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

He likened impoverished neighbourhoods to cancerous growths that needed to be cut out and spoke of a war on the slums. He also believed in the supremacy of the car. In his pursuit of progress, Moses didn't stop to consider the communities his schemes destroyed or the fact that the self enclosed high rise apartments he advocated building could quickly turn into ghettos themselves.

On the other hand, pitted against Moses was the journalist Jane Jacobs, whose 1960 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities stood as a rebuke to Moses. Jacobs’ approach was determinedly local and community-based.

She believed the city was not about buildings but was about people. Jacobs celebrated the seething, chaotic and contradictory nature of city life. One of her key arguments was that a perfect and beautiful city was a “dying city”. For her, cities were always works in progress. Their citizens themselves negotiated how best to use them. Solutions imposed from above, Moses-style, didn’t work.

Moses dismissed her in chauvinistic fashion as a “housewife” and sneered at the protests against his grand schemes that she helped orchestrate. Nonetheless, her grass roots campaigns stymied some of his grander plans and eventually helped topple him from power.

Some of her observations were simple commonsense. For example, she realised that busy streets tended to be far safer than deserted ones. If you keep a community alive and everyone, regardless of their background, class or religion, shares the same facilities, a city is likely to function far better than if you simply put motorways through it, Moses-style.

Tyrnauer’s film managed to be informative without being didactic. It uses archive footage in highly inventive fashion, throwing in footage of New York street life at its most dynamic and colourful and contrasting this with the cold formalism of Moses’ blueprints.

The film also puts the arguments about urban planning in context, explaining how ideas that emerged in Europe with Le Corbusier mutated and became corrupted as they crossed the Atlantic. They became the pretext for urban planning that made property developers very rich indeed.

The final part of the documentary is a little chilling. Tyrnauer’s interviewers suggest that China is repeating the same mistakes that Moses made in the US a generation ago, throwing up skyscrapers and creating big new cities with no concern for the communities who actually live in them. Top-down solutions didn’t work before and there is no reason why they should work now.