Film reviews round-up: Graduation, Free Fire, Man Down, Smurfs: The Lost Village

A Palme d'Or-nominated Romanian drama and the latest from acclaimed filmmaker Ben Wheatley

Free Fire (15)

★★☆☆☆

Dir: Ben Wheatley, 91 mins, starring: Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Jack Reynor, Michael Smiley

Ben Wheatley’s cartoonishly violent Free Fire begins with such zest that it is all the more dispiriting how quickly it loses its way. It’s a movie set almost entirely in a single location – in the disused Massachusetts factory where some Irish mobsters meet up to buy weapons from some very shady arms dealers.

The film has some of the same cheery nihilism as Andrew Dominik’s equally bloody, equally stylised, Killing Them Softly. The screenplay, by Wheatley and Amy Jump, is designed to bring together some colourful rogues and then to allow them to spend 90 minutes trying to blast each other into oblivion. The film is set in the 70s, which gives scope for plenty of facial hair and American Hustle-style costumes.

Wheatley has put together an excellent ensemble cast. The pleasure of the film early on, before the gun fire drowns everything else out, lies in the performances. Everybody is trying to upstage everybody else. The Irish contingent is led by the smooth talking Chris (Cillian Murphy) and the boorishly aggressive Frank (Michael Smiley.) They have two nincompoops for support, handsome young delinquent Stevo (Sam Riley), who is nursing black eyes as a result of being beaten up the night before, and the doped-up Bernie (Enzo Cilenti.) Also present, for reasons that aren’t at all clear, is an improbably glamorous American, Justine (Brie Larson), who is suspected of being an FBI agent.

Wheatley stages the meeting between the Irish hoodlums and the weapons dealers with all the elaborate formality and decorum of a high-level diplomatic encounter. There’s an intermediary, Ord (Armie Hammer), on hand to make sure no-one is carrying secret wires before they’re finally introduced to their very own lord of war, Vernon (Sharlto Copley) and his sidekick Martin (Babou Cissay.)

The two parties taunt and goad one another but they want to do business together. In these early scenes, South African actor Copley steals the film. He’s very dapper in his Savile Row suit; very camp, very cunning, and has a wonderfully florid and sarcastic way of expressing himself.

Free Fire quickly becomes as hemmed in as its own protagonists, who are stuck inside the factory shooting at each other, with no prospect of getting out. The dialogue is witty enough in its own sub-Tarantino, Seven Psychopaths-like way, but it’s hard to keep up the comic repartee when the bullets are flying and everyone is being shot to pieces. We realise quickly that none of the characters are going to be developed in any meaningful way. They’re all strictly one-dimensional stock types. We may laugh with and at them but it is very hard to care about them or to feel any sense of the jeopardy into which they have thrown themselves. The easy listening John Denver music heard at the most violent moments adds to the sense that the film is tongue in cheek.

Brie Larson won an Oscar for playing a mother held captive in Room (2015). Free Fire isn’t quite as claustrophobic (the setting is a factory, not a room.) Her performance here as the wisecracking action heroine is enjoyable enough but she isn't taxed in the slightest. (Even acting opposite King Kong placed more emotional demands on her.) The main challenge for her, as for the other actors, is the crawling. Every cast member here is either shot or stabbed or bludgeoned or slashed or burned or crushed. Like the proverbial cockroaches after nuclear holocaust, they're very hard to kill off. They're seen again and again, slithering through the grime, their bodies battered and bleeding. Whatever agonies they're enduring, they don't ever quite lose their capacity for sardonic wit either.

This is a film full of McGuffins and red herrings. There is a briefcase full of cash, a van full of ammo and a stridently ringing telephone that might provide salvation to the beleaguered heavies. These, though, are all just plot devices in a movie in which nothing really matters other than the banter and the gunplay. Who lives, who dies and who gets the money or the weapons is neither here nor there. That's why Free Fire seems so random and ultimately so frustrating to watch. There's the sense that the filmmakers are spraying bullets for the sake of it, with little idea of what they are actually aiming at.

Graduation (15)

★★★★☆

Dir: Cristian Mungiu, 128 mins, starring: Adrian Titieni, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Rares Andrici , Lia Bugnar, Malina Manovici,

It all starts with a brick through a window. Cristian Mungiu’s extraordinarily poignant and insightful new drama begins with a random act of vandalism. It tells the story of a father trying to do the best for his daughter. He wants her to have the chance to avoid the compromises and petty corruption that are part of his everyday life. The dilemma for him is that he may have to cheat to allow her to be able to live cleanly.

Mungiu shows brilliantly a society in which low-level venality and criminality are taken for granted. Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) and his wife Magda (Lia Bugnar) came back to Romania in the early '90s in the hope that society was changing in the post-communist era. It wasn’t. There’s now no way for them to escape but his daughter Eliza (Maria Drăguş) has the chance to study at a British university. All she needs is a decent score in her exams. Just as she is about to sit them, she is sexually assaulted on the streets and has to be rushed off to hospital. Her arm is injured and she’s in no fit condition to take the exams but if she postpones, everything her father has been working for on her behalf will crumble away.

Romeo’s response to the brick lobbed into his apartment during the opening moments of the film is instructive. He is so fatalistic that he seems half to expect malice and misfortune.

“Come, doctor, don’t tell me you live on your salary,” one of Romeo’s contacts says to him without any hint of irony. He’s caught in a world which works on the basis of favours owed and favours returned. The doctor who wants his daughter’s exam upgraded can call on someone in authority who’ll fix it. The doctor will then be asked to help out the next in the chain - perhaps to arrange it so that a dangerously ill politician be bumped up the list for the liver transplant he needs.

Romeo is a decent man: a respected doctor continually obliged to act against his own instincts. Every relationship he has is contaminated. He is having an affair with a younger woman – but she wants something from him. His daughter, for whom he is ready to sacrifice so much, isn’t honest with him. She has a boyfriend as keen that she stays in Romania as he is that she has the chance to leave.

British viewers may be startled by Romeo’s idealised vision of the UK. He tells his daughter that once she is in Kensington with “the squirrels chasing her,” the backbiting and double dealing of Romania will be long behind her.

As in the neo-realist films that Mungiu so admires, everyday problems take on an epic quality. Romeo is the antithesis of the typical movie hero. He’s a harassed, overweight, disillusioned, middle-aged man. Nonetheless, we can’t help but root for him. He’s behaving in a rational manner but is sinking deeper into the mire as he does so, risking becoming as tarnished as the government officials, teachers, politicians and cops who are always ready to bend the rules to their own short-term benefit. Titieni plays him in a wonderfully careworn way that rekindles memories of Bob Hoskins in some of his more long-suffering roles.

Just occasionally, when he’s listening to classical music, Romeo seems at ease. Generally, he lives in a state of perpetual harassment and near-humiliation as he tries to negotiate his way through the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of his homeland. Ironies abound. He is plotting for his daughter to cheat in an exam which, in normal circumstances, she would expect to get top marks in anyway. He is opening up an escape route for her which she may not want to take. He is sacrificing his own integrity so that she can live decently.

Graduation is utterly compelling in spite of a seemingly downbeat story. Mungiu is dealing with life-transforming moments for Romeo, who is putting his marriage, family, career and reputation at risk. We can understand exactly why but the question, which the film deliberately leaves very open-ended, is whether we should admire or deplore him for doing so.

Man Down

★★☆☆☆

Dir: Dito Montiel, 88 mins, starring: Shia LaBeouf, Jai Courtney, Gary Oldman, Kate Mara, Tory Kittles, Clifton Collins

Arriving in UK cinemas close two years after it was completed, Dito Montiel’s Man Down is a well-meaning but very confused drama exploring post-traumatic stress and the plight of US soldiers “coming home”. (20 veterans commit suicide each day, the end credits tell us.) Shia LaBeouf gives an intense, heartfelt Method-style performance as the tormented hero but is let down by a muddled and jarring screenplay that lurches between different locations, time frames and storytelling styles.

LaBeouf plays Gabriel Drummer, a happily married US Marine with a devoted wife (Mara) and doe-eyed young son (Charlie Shotwell.) When he goes off to war in Afghanistan, his life unravels. The title ‘Man Down’ is the secret phrase he and his son use to say they love one another when they’re within earshot of the school bullies. Given the amount of killing that Gabriel witnesses and participates in, the phrase takes on an altogether more sinister resonance.

The cumbersome narrative structure features flashbacks within flashbacks - and strange fantasy interludes in which LaBeouf is adrift in a post-apocalyptic America.

Gary Oldman, in George Smiley mode as the army therapist in big spectacles, interviews LaBeouf on the day he leaves the service – which triggers many of the flashbacks. This is a buddy movie as well as a war film; a story of intense friendship and of betrayal and loss. The pal with whom Gabriel often seems closer than with his own wife is Devin (Jai Courtney.)

The sepia-tinted Afghan sections are the most powerful. The sequence during a routine street patrol that goes disastrously wrong has a real kick. By contrast, the later scenes back home in the US sink under the weight of their own bathos and sentimentality. The filmmakers are trying to reflect Gabriel’s tormented state of mind but their stream of consciousness approach is more baffling than it is enlightening.

Smurfs: The Lost Village (U)

★★☆☆☆

Dir: Kelly Asbury, 90 mins, voiced: Ariel Winter, Julia Roberts, Ellie Kemper

“Vile blue rats,” the evil-ish wizard Gargamel calls the Smurfs midway through this animated kids’ movie. That’s very harsh. The latest adventure featuring the mini cobalt-coloured creatures should prove perfectly palatable fare for younger audiences over the Easter Holidays. It’s the story of a “Smurfette” (that’s to say, a female Smurf) who, together with Brainy, Clumsy and Hefty, ventures deep into the forbidden forest on a mission to save another tribe of Smurfs (this one female) from Gargamel. (He is planning to “drain them” of their magic.) During their fantastic journey, they encounter glow bunnies and survive treacherous rapids. They also learn the usual heartwarming lessons about respect, tolerance and love. The trick for the filmmakers is to put the Smurfs in enough danger to make the story exciting without terrifying the pre-school viewers.

The storytelling style here is far less zany and irreverent than in the typical Pixar film or Lego Movie. The voice cast is intriguing enough (Julia Roberts is Smurf Willow while chef Gordon Ramsay is heard as Baker Smurf) but a certain soppy blandness comes with the territory. Smurfette’s relentless cheerfulness begins to grate after a while. The gap-toothed and incompetent Gargamel gets most of the best moments, scolding his cat, double-crossing the Smurfs who save him from drowning and cooking up his elaborate potions.