Film reviews round-up: Coco, The Commuter, Lover for a Day, Attraction

Pixar’s latest, Liam Neeson doing the ‘Taken’ thing, an intimate French tale, and a Russian sci-fi

Slobbering street mutt Dante seems very dim-witted but protects Miguel at his most vulnerable moments

Coco (PG)

★★★★☆

Dirs Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, 105 mins, voiced by: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach

After the relative anti-climax of Cars 3, Coco is another triumph for Pixar, a film unlike any of its predecessors – one that deals with the unlikely subject of death in a wondrously inventive and life-affirming way.

Animated features haven’t ignored dying (everyone remembers what happened to Bambi’s mother, for example) but no previous film has foregrounded death in the way that it is here. The story unfolds during the “Day Of The Dead” celebrations in Mexico. Much of it takes place in the Land Of The Dead, with skeletons as the main characters. (As you’d predict, they can do very clever things with their bones and can twist and remove their skulls when they want selfies.)

The main protagonist is Miguel Rivera, a 12-year-old kid from a family of humble shoemakers who dreams of becoming a musician. For reasons that baffle him, his relatives go to extreme lengths to stop him pursuing his ambition.

They keep a photograph of his great-great-grandmother, her daughter and a mysterious man whose head has been cut out of the picture but who is holding a guitar. The daughter, Coco, is still alive but is now ancient. Her memory is fast fading.

Miguel has built himself a guitar in secret and has taught himself to play it. He plans to defy the family’s wishes and to compete in a talent contest held every year on the Day of the Dead. Miguel also has his own hidden shrine to legendary Mexican crooner and movie star, Ernesto de la Cruz, who died in 1942 when he was crushed by a giant bell, and whose best known hit was called “Remember Me”.

The conceit here is that humans die twice – the first time when they leave the Land of the Living and the second (and final time) when their friends and relatives forget about them.

All the elements coalesce perfectly. Directors Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina are telling the story of a boy with a sense of destiny “Music is not just in me. It is me,” Miguel proclaims early on, parroting the words from one of Ernesto’s best known films. They are also making a film about family and memory, one that celebrates Mexican culture, song and dance.

The plot comes with the predictable reversals – cases of mistaken identity, poisonings, plagiarism, theft, grudges and misunderstandings that have festered for generations. One of the main characters is old to the point of senility. Another has such a vicious hatred of music that she will resort to vandalism to stop Miguel playing.

In spite of the darkness of its themes, the film has the antic goofiness you expect from a kids’ cartoon. Much of the clowning comes courtesy of the slobbering street mutt, Dante, who seems very dim-witted but protects Miguel at his most vulnerable moments. The visual detail is often astounding. The Land Of The Dead has its own transport system, music venues and seething city streets. The dead, at least as shown here, are just as hedonistic as the living.

Given President Trump’s antipathy to all things Mexican, the jokes about the super strict border controls between the land of the living and that of the dead have an added edge. On the Day Of The Dead, deceased relatives are allowed back briefly to the land of the living, just as long as they are remembered. Cemeteries become the site for parties.

The humour is often as dry as the bones of the skeletal heroes. It’s only in the concluding part of the film that we begin to hear the familiar, maudlin Disney-like observations about nothing being more important than family. Coco, though, deals with death and memory in a way that is both graceful and profound.

The Commuter (15)

★★☆☆

Dir Jaume Collet-Serra, 104 mins, starring: Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Shazad Latif, Sam Neill, Elizabeth McGovern

The Commuter is a missed opportunity, a Liam Neeson thriller that starts from an intriguing premise but quickly shoots off the rails as the plot improbabilities and genre clichés pile up. Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra strikes the frenetic tempo we expect from his films but the special effects aren’t very convincing and the plot twists and red herrings become increasingly irritating.

Neeson is playing yet another version of his familiar ageing action-hero, similar to his equally gnarled and hard-bitten character in Collet-Serra’s earlier Non-Stop (set on a plane) or the vengeful father in the Taken films. As ever, he recites his hardboiled lines in lyrical tones which make them sound like commercials on behalf of the Irish Tourist Board.

Neeson is cast as Michael MacCauley, a life insurance salesmen living in the suburbs with his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) and teenage kids, and taking the same commuter train into New York every morning. It’s a Groundhog Day-like existence.

He’s a “good soldier” who works hard and “plays by the rules,” but even so, he is financially stretched, with mortgages and his son’s college fees to pay. He’s 60 years old, prospects of finding a new job are very slim, and he’s bitter at the bankers whose antics resulted in his savings vanishing during the 2008 downturn.

Ironically, given that this is an action movie, the best scenes here are those in which Neeson is portraying the stressed-out, middle-class businessman, trying to hold his life together. The guard on the train knows him. So do many of the other commuters, among them Walt (Jonathan Banks). Collet-Serra captures well the monotony and stress of a rush hour commute on a train with too few seats.

When Joanna (Vera Famiga), a femme fatale with two-tone shoes, turns up out of nowhere and makes Michael an unlikely business proposition, the film begins to unravel. She is a psychologist, although her background is deliberately left very vague. If Michael carries out the task she has set him before the train reaches the end of the line at Cold Spring, he will make a significant amount of money. Michael must track down one particular passenger who is using the alias “Prynne”.

The screenplay is a mish-mash of Agatha Christie-like elements thrown together with ideas from Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, Tony Scott films and runaway train movies. Michael is an ex-NYPD cop.

Even if he has been working as a white collar businessman, he’s every bit as resourceful as we expect him to be, using his detective skills to work out which passengers are going as far as Cold Spring and showing he still knows how to give and take a punch during the inevitable fight sequences. Every so often, generally on a borrowed phone, he will receive a call from Joanna, threatening him and his family with the direst consequences if he doesn’t complete the assignment.

Understandably, the other passengers get restless and suspicious at the sight of Liam Neeson prowling up and down the carriages. Naturally enough, he is very suspicious of the arrogant and obnoxious Wall Street type who treats him with such disdain when he tries to strike up a conversation. “Hey, Goldman Sachs, on behalf of the American middle class: f**k you!” Neeson responds, giving this creep the finger.

For no particular reason, the film is full of literary references. Neeson’s character and Famiga play their own game of one-upmanship, taunting each other as to who knows more about John Steinbeck or 19th-century French literature. Neeson is able to discuss William Golding’s The Lord Of The Flies in exhaustive detail with his son.

There are even references to The Scarlet Letter – although why hardened criminals would be so keen on the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne is never explained. We are in a world of corrupt cops and FBI agents. When the plotting becomes too embroiled to follow, Collet-Serra simply lets off the brakes and allows the train to hurtle towards what will be oblivion unless Neeson can work out how to slow matters down.

The disappointment here is that the film so quickly shunts towards a dead end. The plotting is nothing like as taut as in Collet-Serra’s admirably pared-down recent shark movie, The Shallows. Neeson is a phenomenon, a 65-year-old action star who puts across the corniest lines with complete conviction and who is always ready to roll with the punches. One thing the indestructible actor can’t do is patch up the holes in the screenplay.

Lover for a Day (15)

★★★☆☆

Dir Philippe Garrel, 76 mins, starring: Éric Caravaca, Esther Garrel, Louise Chevillotte

It’s refreshing that 50 years after the heyday of French Nouvelle Vague and long after Truffaut and Rohmer have died, French filmmakers are still making the same intimate and embroiled dramas about young love. Philippe Garrel’s Lover for a Day may be set in the present day but its black and white cinematography and complete lack of contemporary references (no laptops, no social media), gives it the feel of one of those erotic moral tales from early 1960s.

The director’s daughter Esther Garrel plays Jeanne, a young woman distraught, even suicidal, after splitting up from her boyfriend. (Garrel seems to specialise in these roles, having also played Timothée Chalamet’s spurned lover in recent awards contender, Call Me By Your Name.) With nowhere to live, she seeks refuge in her father’s apartment.

The father, Gilles (Eric Caravaca), is a crumpled but charismatic philosophy professor who has recently taken up with a much younger lover of his own, the hedonistic and voluptuous Ariane (Louise Chevillotte), who, of course, is precisely the same age as his own daughter. The two young women, initially suspicious of one another, soon form a strong bond.

Director Garrel probes away at such subjects as romantic longing and sexual jealousy in a playful way. A wry female voiceover suggests that we shouldn’t take the lovers’ predicaments too seriously, even if Jeanne is so consumed with grief and self-pity that she almost throws herself out of a window at one stage.

Garrel, working from a screenplay co-written by the celebrated Jean-Claude Carrière (who scripted much of Bunuel’s work), keeps matters light and tells the story of his three protagonists’ ever more complicated and contradictory love lives with gentle and beguiling humour.

Attraction (12A)

★★☆☆

Dir Fedor Bondarchuck, 117 mins, starring: Irina Starshenbaum, Alexander Petrov, Rinal Mukhametov, Oleg Menshikov, Sergey Garmash, Vilen Babichev

If you’re an alien crash landing on earth, Moscow probably isn’t the best place to make your arrival. Fedor Bondarchuk’s sci-fi film doesn’t portray the Russians as being hospitable at all. When a space ship comes down beside a Moscow housing estate, the army and the local people are equally hostile.

The aliens, who may just be in search of water, aren’t that different from the humans once their outer armour is removed. They bleed like humans, they look like humans, they even have powers of empathy. All they lack is human aggression.

Attraction has intermittently impressive special effects (especially when the eye-shaped spaceship is careering down on the Moscow suburbs, splitting buildings apart). Its storyline, though, is on the jolting side. The film is as much about disaffected young Muscovites as it is about the aliens.

The films starts as if it is going to offer yet another variation on War Of The Worlds but then turns into an unlikely Brother From Another Planet-style love story. The young heroine Yulia (Irina Starshenbaum) is very attracted to the alien, Hijken (Rinal Mukhametov), who has epicene good looks, perfect manners and a sensitive, dreamy demeanour.

He really does come in friendship. That is more than can be said for Yulia’s intensely jealous boyfriend Artyom (Alexander Petrov) and his pals on the Moscow estates, who regard the spaceship’s arrival as the excuse for rioting, larceny and violence.

Yulia’s father is the military commander Lebdev (played by veteran Russian actor Oleg Menshikov, star of Oscar-winner Burnt by the Sun). Somehow, amid all the destruction and chaos, the film finds time to tell us about their fraught relationship. Since Yulia’s mother died, he doesn’t listen to her.

The family melodrama, teen drama and sci-fi elements don’t sit comfortably together. There are some nice moments here – Hijken’s bafflement at the way humans treat their pets, the scenes of him wandering around with a fur hat on his head and being treated just as if he is another young punk. Overall, this is clunky fare which tries unconvincingly to combine Hollywood disaster movie spectacle with a gritty depiction of rebellious Russian youth.