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Rating 3¾
Directed by Joe Johnston
Written by Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor and Jim Strain, based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg
Starring Robin Williams (Alan Parrish), Kirsten Dunst (Judy Shepherd), Bradley Pierce (Peter Shepherd), Bonnie Hunt (Sarah Whittle), Bebe Neuwirth (Nora Shepherd), David Alan Grier (Carl Bentley), Jonathan Hyde (Van Pelt / Sam Parrish), Patricia Clarkson (Carol-Anne Parrish), Adam Hann-Byrd (Young Alan) and Laura Bell Bundy (Young Sarah)
12-year-old Alan Parrish is bullied by other boys because of his friendship with Sarah Whittle. His father is a cold and distant figure in his life who plans to send him away to boarding school. Alan finds a strange board game that had been buried a hundred years previously and is literally sucked into the game when he and Sarah start to play it. She flees from the house in terror, pursued by African bats, but nobody believes her story of what happened and Alan’s disappearance remains a mystery from that day on. Twenty-six years later Nora Shepherd moves into the house once occupied by the Parrish family with her young niece and nephew Judy and Peter. Their parents were killed in an automobile accident. The children find the board game in the attic and when they start to play it they release Alan, now a fully-grown man, but (with the help of Alan and Sarah) they must complete the game to save the local community from the chaos and destruction they have unwittingly unleashed.
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‘Jumanji’ is a 1995 family film based on a 1981 illustrated children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg, who also wrote ‘The Polar Express’. The film employed what were then state-of-the-art special affects and had a production budget of $65 million. It grossed just under $263 million at the box office. Reviews were mixed. 26 reviews are collected at Rotten Tomatoes and result in a 50% rating. At Metacritic the rating is 39% from 18 reviews. At Amazon the brief write-up by Jeff Shannon describes the films as, “A chaotic and misguided attempt at family entertainment, the movies does offer a few good laughs, and the effects are frequently impressive, if not entirely convincing to the eye.”
I certainly agree about the special effects, which are at once impressive (although slightly ragged looking fifteen years on) and yet strangely unconvincing. However, this is a film I like very much. I did not see the film at the cinema and I have never owned a copy on video or DVD, but I have now watched it about half-a-dozen times when it has been shown on television and I have enjoyed it immensely each time.
It’s a spirited romp with a touch of invention in the story and a perfect vehicle for the feverish mugging that is the stock-in-trade of Robin Williams. He is on good form here, but his over-the-top antics do not overwhelm the film and his odd combination of frenetic over-acting and mawkish sentimentality (a kind of mixture of the Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin) works impeccably. The film has a strong cast generally, including 13-year-old Kirsten Dunst, a year after ‘Interview with the Vampire’, and a blink and you might miss her appearance by Patricia Clarkson.
‘Jumanji’ is a contender for my all-time favourite family/children’s film. Great stuff.
Review posted 22 March 2010
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Rating 2½
Directed by Shawn Levy
Written by Thomas Lennon, from a story by Robert Ben Garant, based on the book by Milan Trenc
Starring Ben Stiller (Larry Daley), Amy Adams (Amelia Earhart), Owen Wilson (Jedediah Smith), Steve Coogan (Gaius Octavius), Hank Azaria (Kahmunrah, The Thinker and Abraham Lincoln), Christopher Guest (Ivan the Terrible), Alain Chabet (Napoleon Bonapart), Jon Bernthal (Al Capone), Bill Hader (General George Armstrong Custer), Jon Bernthal (Attila the Hun), Mizuo Peck (Sacagawea), Rami Malek (Ahkmenrah), Jake Cherry (Nicky Daley), the Jonas Brothers (the Cupids), Ricky Gervais (Dr McPhee) and Robin Williams (Theodore Roosevelt)
Three years have passed since Larry Daley was the night guard at the American Museum of Natural History. He now owns his own company that manufactures his inventions, including a glow-in-the-dark flashlight. When he visits the museum again he discovers that it is closed for renovation and most of the old exhibits are being permanently moved to storage in the Federal Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. Larry flies to Washington and is able to gain access into the archive where, when the suns sets, the exhibits come to life and he has to call on the help of Amelia Earhart and General George Armstrong Custer to help him to stop the Pharaoh Kahmunrah, who intends to unleash the army of the underworld.
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I watched ‘Night at the Museum’ really wanting to like it and came away disappointed. It was, however, a major box office success and a sequel was inevitable. The second film, like its predecessor, was released to mixed reviews and has a 44% rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 155 reviews. The first film was also given a 44% rating from 126 reviews. The sequel did not quite manage to emulate the success of the first film at the box office, although it did gross a little over £412 million against a production budget of $150 million, placing it at No.7 in the worldwide grosses of 2009 according to Box Office Mojo.
‘Battle of the Smithsonian’ largely follows the format of the first film, just with a bigger setting and, one supposes, a bigger budget. This time around there is no necessity to introduce Larry Daley into the secret magical world and have him come to terms with the reality of exhibits that come to life at night when the museum is shut. Perhaps that is part of the reason why I enjoyed this second film a lot more than the first one. It shares many of the faults of the first film, but it doesn’t get bogged down in the stilted exposition of that film and we are also spared the presence of the decidedly less than amusing Dick Van Dyke (who I don’t dislike) and Mickey Rooney. However, a more likely reason for my preference for the sequel is Amy Adams. The film undoubtedly benefits from her screen presence, her likeability and her already well established acting skills. Her Amelia Earhart might not be a multi-layered character study in this setting, but she is perfectly cast in the role.
Review posted 1 November 2009
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Rating 2
Directed by Shawn Levy
Written by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, from the book by Milan Trenc
Starring Ben Stiller (Larry Daley), Carla Gugino (Rebecca), Dick Van Dyke (Cecil), Bill Cobbs (Reginald), Mickey Rooney (Gus), Jake Cherry (Nick Daley), Kim Raver (Erica Daley), Paul Rudd (Don), Robin Williams (Theodore Roosevelt), Owen Wilson (Jedediah), Steve Coogan (Octavius), Mizuo Peck (Sacajawea), Rami Malek (Ahkmenrah), Patruick Gallagher (Attila the Hun), Pierfrancesco Favino (Christopher Columbus) and Ricky Gervais (Dr McPhee)
Larry Daley is a dreamer whose fanciful ambitions have prevented him from finding steady employment. He is divorced and has a young son. When he faces eviction from his apartment in Brooklyn and talks about moving out to Queens, his ex-wife Erica threatens to take away his visiting rights, pointing out that their son Nick has already been let down too many times before. Larry reluctantly takes a job as a night guard at the American Museum of Natural History, employed as a cost-cutting exercise to replace three elderly guards, Cecil, Reginald and Gus, who have been there for more than fifty years, but are now to lose their jobs. On his first night, Larry discovers that all the exhibits come to life when the museum is shut.
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‘Night at the Museum’ is a 2006 film based on the 1993 children’s picture book ‘The Night at the Museum’ by the Croatian writer and illustrator Milan Trenc. In this original picture book it is only the dinosaurs that come to life, but in the film it is all the exhibits. An expanded novelisation of the original picture book, written by Leslie Goldman, was published in 2006 to tie-in with the release of the film.
The film received mixed reaction from critics and has a 44% rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 126 reviews. It had a production budget of $110 million and grossed in excess of $574 million at the box office worldwide. A sequel, ‘Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian’, with an even bigger budget, was released in 2009 and has so far grossed $293 million.
‘Night at the Museum’ is a family comedy action adventure film that relies heavily on special effects. It is very typical of its type and falls into the trap that ensnares most such films coming out of Hollywood, being smothered in lashings of cheesy schmaltz and succumbing to unsatisfactorily simple-minded moralising. However, this is no less commendable than the in-built cynicism that allows us to identify these faults in the first place and the film is moderately passable, up to a point. Unfortunately, there is something missing here and it is not only the disappointing absence of invention. The film is simply not as funny as it needs to be (in fact, it rarely raises a laugh at all) and, ultimately, it just lacks heart. The exhibits may come to life, but the film rarely does.
Robin Williams puts in a disappointingly flat performance as Theodore Roosevelt and his presence reminds us that ‘Night at the Museum’ is a pale shadow of Williams’ hugely enjoyable 1995 outing ‘Jumanji’, which possessed infinitely more verve and inventiveness than this rather spongy mess of a film, which I really wanted to like a lot more than I ended up doing.
Director Shawn Levy was previously responsible for two dire Steve Martin vehicles, ‘Cheaper by the Dozen’ and the 2006 remake of the ‘The Pink Panther’.
Review posted 15 June 2009
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WARNING: Minor spoilers in the film description
Rating 3½
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Hillary Seitz, based on the film written by Nicolaj Frobenius and Erik Skjoldbjærg
Starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Martin Donovan, Maura Tierney, Pail Dooley, Fred Dugger, Jonathan Jackson, Crystal Lowe and Katharine Isabelle
Two homicide detectives from Los Angeles, Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan), are sent to a small fishing town in Alaska to assist with the investigation following the murder of a teenage girl, Kay Connell (Crystal Lowe). The underlying motivation for sending them is take them out of the line of fire during an internal affairs investigation of their department. They are met by local police officer Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), who has a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of the cases of Dormer, a veteran detective who is revered within the police force. Dormer is unable to sleep in the perpetual daylight of the Alaskan summer and his mood darkens when Eckhart tells him he plans to give evidence to Internal Affairs in exchange for immunity. When Dormer shoots his partner in the chest during a bungled attempt to capture the killer, he claims that the shooting was carried out by the murder suspect, local crime thriller writer Walter Finch (Robin Williams). However, Finch witnessed the shooting and a complex game of psychological cat and mouse now ensues between the two.
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This was Christopher Nolan’s follow-up film to the critically acclaimed ‘Momento’. The executive producers were George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh (the director of ‘sex, lies & videotape’, ‘Erin Brockovich’ and others). Released into cinemas in 2002, ‘Insomnia’ was a remake of a 1997 Norwegian film. Although the film has a 92% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 166 reviews, I clearly recall generally rather negative reviews at the time from British film critics. It was suggested that the film was heavy-handed and too routinely conventional, a disappointing follow-up to its left-of-centre predecessor. Undoubtedly this initial reaction was influenced by Nolan working within the mainstream Hollywood studio system with a big production budget – and probably because the film was a remake. By the time the film arrived on DVD, critical reaction to it had altered considerably, which simply attests to the subjective nature of such reviews.
I cannot compare the film to the original, which I have not as yet seen, but it is very effectively staged and put together. The setting is perfect, although when I first watched it at the time of its cinema release I could not stop myself from making the link to the quirky American television series ‘Northern Exposure’. The performances are excellent. Al Pacino, who was starting to become prone to Jack Nicholson-style barnstorming and scenery chewing during this period, gives one of his quieter performances – a blessed relief, having shouted his way through ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ just a few years earlier. Hilary Swank, three years on from her first Academy Award and two years away from her second one, is very good in a role that necessarily plays second-fiddle to the two male leads. The real star here, though, is Robin Williams, brilliantly playing against type, just as he would do again that same year in the excellent ‘One Hour Photo’.
Maura Tierney, who played Abby Lockhart for ten years in the long-running hospital drama ‘ER’, is amongst the supporting cast. The Canadian actress Katharine Isabelle plays Tanya Francke, the less-than-reliable best friend of the murder victim. Two years earlier, Isabelle was one of the co-leads in the terrific Canadian werewolf film ‘Ginger Snaps’. Her co-star from that film, Emily Perkins, has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it walk-on role here.
‘Insomnia’ is an effective thriller with an interesting slant on what would otherwise have been a mundane story. It makes good use of the icy setting in which the sun never sets and the internal conflicts that eat away at Dormer, a scrupulously honest cop gone bad with good intent, is nicely done. It is, though, best not to think too hard about the plot, because holes do soon start to appear it.
The film had a production budget of $46 million and grossed just under $114 million at the box office. The two films Christopher Nolan made prior to this, ‘Momento’ and ‘Following’, had production budgets of $9 million and $6,000 respectively.
Review posted 6 April 2009
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12-year-old Alan Parrish is bullied by other boys because of his friendship with Sarah Whittle. His father is a cold and distant figure in his life who plans to send him away to boarding school. Alan finds a strange board game that had been buried a hundred years previously and is literally sucked into the game when he and Sarah start to play it. She flees from the house in terror, pursued by African bats, but nobody believes her story of what happened and Alan’s disappearance remains a mystery from that day on. Twenty-six years later Nora Shepherd moves into the house once occupied by the Parrish family with her young niece and nephew Judy and Peter. Their parents were killed in an automobile accident. The children find the board game in the attic and when they start to play it they release Alan, now a fully-grown man, but (with the help of Alan and Sarah) they must complete the game to save the local community from the chaos and destruction they have unwittingly unleashed.
I certainly agree about the special effects, which are at once impressive (although slightly ragged looking fifteen years on) and yet strangely unconvincing. However, this is a film I like very much. I did not see the film at the cinema and I have never owned a copy on video or DVD, but I have now watched it about half-a-dozen times when it has been shown on television and I have enjoyed it immensely each time.
