Mission Impossible 4

A-

It's soon clear why Tom Cruise and his multi-million-dollar production team entrusted the ageing star actor's very valuable franchise to Brad Bird.

***********************************************************

The subtitle of the fourth Mission Impossible would only interest movie geeks seeking a Trivial Pursuit triumph with Ghost Protocol. More geeks and most mainstrean movie buffs will probably remember that it was the first non-animated feature from director Brad Bird (whose Pixar hits included included Ratatouille and, most memorably, The Incredibles, which featured his own unforgettable super-shrieky voice-over for its bossy fashion dominatrix).

It's soon clear why Tom Cruise and his multi-million-dollar production team (including MI3's director JJ Abrams) entrusted the ageing star actor's very valuable franchise to Bird. Their action-adventure vehicle is virtually an animated CGI movie itself, employing a few competent humans to stare, fret, sweat and leap out of the stances stuntmen got them into. At that level of film-making, MI4 is almost as good and definitely less credible than The Incredibles.

Cruise has assembled an able new team. Paula (Deja Vu) Patton joins him for the first time as a gungho lite-black (Obama-style) fighting woman, along with Jeremy (Hurt Locker) Renner as an IMF analyst and new tough buddy role. Simon Pegg, the back-office comic IT boffin in MI3, returns as a field agent, a bumbling Brit smiler counterpointing his US partners' deadly seriousness.

What they are all doing, why and how is little explained. The scenario rushes from one of the setpieces of mega-bucks explosions and car crashes to one of the seconds-counting procedurals in which wires are spliced, magnets and robots teeter, and face masks are manipulated.

There is a stereotypical group of well-cast villains, spies, Russian henchmen and anti-terrorists pirouetted by the screenplay around a calmly mad Swedish nuclear mastermind. Their antics in Moscow are worth the location work around the exploded Kremlin. Similarly, Cruise's gecko-style climbing of Dubai's tallest tower is jolly scenic sensationalism, albeit with an unimpressive sandstorm. India gained a less admirable image for its tourism industry by allowing the team to create a lavish Bollywood ball in which Anil (Slumdog Millionaire) Kapoor had to squander himself as a Lothario billionaire buffoon with supposedly crucial codes to a satellite.

The really crucial plus factor for MI this time is its musical soundtrack. It was hard to imagine any further variations on Lilo Schifrin's mesmerising and ideally tense driving themes being created, let alone the addition of complementary new music which pounds a cineplex's walls and brilliantly underscores the fast-moving action and stunts. Composer Michael Giacchino (who worked on both The Incredibles and Ratatouille for Bird) should be nominated for an Oscar, alongside the sound crew.

(A personal thankyou will go to the first reviewer who explains, with citations from the screenplay, why Ethan Hunt's wife was, and then wasn't, killed and why she - Michele Monaghan - then appears in the movie's very jejune epilogue.)

The epilogue also suggests that Ving Rhames will be returning to the franchise as the MI5 team's boss (replacing the assassinated and uncredited Tom Wilkinson). Maybe Cruise realised that he needs to give himself a bit of female company if his Ethan Hunt is to measure up better beside Bond, Bourne and all the other ageing action stars.

X-men origins: wolverine

A+

It shows, a la Spiderman, that an action-fantasy can dare to have thoughtful conversational pauses.

***********************************************************

Two years after its release date (2009), X-Men Origins: Wolverine looked better than I'd thought it would. The director's name, Gavin Hood, deserved research, as he should have gone on to further glory on the block-buster scene. [*]

Hugh Jackman also gave himself an above-average supporting cast. Liev Schreiber was an ideal equally indestructible elder brother with murderous mutant skills and vicious extendable finger nails. Danny Huston yet again perfectly personified sweet-talking evil intent as the obsessed Dr Hyde of mutant research.

Fellow mutants were cameo roles played competently (including Ryan Reynolds in a breakthrough comic macho performance). Even the female interest, a First Nation Canadian schoolteacher, was well written and characterised (played by Texan Lynn Collins).

The SFX were handsomely explosive: it was clear why Jackman lost his cool when an un-effected print was stolen and widely spread on the internet.

The good and innocent victims were too good to be true, but they always must be in the graphic novella empire of Stan Lee and Marvel DC comic books.

This spin-off from the X-Men franchise did more than fill in Logan/Wolverine's background (originating two centuries earlier according to the comic-book military capers sequence in the brothers-at-war action prologue). It showed, a la Spiderman, that an action-fantasy can dare to have thoughtful conversational pauses.

[* South Africa-born Gavin Hood's career path stumbled. After the former lawyer and actor studied film at the Uni of California, he wrote, directed and took the lead role in the SA-set 1999 award-winning A Reasonable Man (co-starring Nigel Hawthorne). Replacing the sick director of a Polish film on location in South Africa (2001) and the follow-up TV mini-series, he stayed there to write and direct his breakthrough 2005 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner, Tsotsi, adapted from an Athol Fugard novel. That led to Hollywood giving him Rendition, a 2007 political thriller that flopped. Subsequently, he directed three TV series/dramas while preparing Ender's Game, his adaptation of a Mormon author's sci-fi fantasy, due for release in 2013.]

James and the giant peach

A

Director Henry Selick maintained the acerbic edge that was Dahl's distinctive edge as a children's writer.

***********************************************************

Tim Burton co-produced James and the Giant Peach and it sports similar styles to his live action fairy tales (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland) and his clay or other animation fantasies (Corpse Bride, The Nightmare Before Christmas). It's a UK-based 1996 production and a successful adaptation of yet another Roald Dahl comic horror fable for intelligent children.

Dahl's young heroes are always troubled by evil grown-ups; orphan James's are two spiteful spinster sisters (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margoyles) merrily sneering at the surreal scenery of their seaside hilltop.

James was a first-time boy actor, Paul Terry, who appeared in a few children's TV episodes, played in a band at uni and never returned to the entertainment industry. The only other major human being in the scene-setting intro is an elderly mystery man (Pete Postlethwaite) who gives the ill-used lonely lad a bag of crocodile tongues, one of which turns into the titular Giant Peach.

The enormous deus ex machina has no personality per se. Instead it is home for a wrangling group of animated insects with a variety of powers and personalities: star-voiced by Simon Callow, Richard Dreyfuss, Jane (later Frasier TV regular) Leeves, Susan Sarandon and David Thewlis. When James flees his horrible aunts and enters the peach, he becomes a stop-motion animation figure too, as a charming accidental hero leading the peach and his new friends on their flight to NYC courtesy of spider web strings attached to a flock of seagulls.

Their trip is packed with fearsome adventures and several insect songs and dances (cue the ubiquitous Randy Newman). Infant viewers may gyrate, adults will ho-and-hum: the material is better than children's TV, but it isn't old-style hand-drawn Disney cartoon quality. It has a grittier less homely quality.

All ends well in NYC, except for the aunts; and director Henry Selick (Nightmare with Burton, and Coraline most recently) rightly maintained the acerbic edge that was Dahl's distinctive edge as a children's writer.

Cowboys & aliens

B

Painfully trying to be comic and cool, like geriatric Harrison Ford.

**********************************************************

There's a great satisfaction to be found in a commercial disaster when it's been engineered by Hollywood honchos high on hubris. As was Cowboys & Aliens.

His self-promotional Wikipedia entry indicates that a Scott Mitchell Rosenberg parlayed a profitable business from comic book rehashes and personnel poaching. His claim to movie business fame was his development of the Men in Black scifi action comedy (a claim IMDb does not appear to credit).

He then, self-reportedly, created the genre-bending concept of a Wild Western town in which a gang of cowboy bandits would be obliged to join forces with a cattle baron's gang, the sheriff's posse and the local Indian tribe to save scores of townsfolk abducted by giant alien bugs whose enormous spaceship is sucking gold out of the hills prior to their eventual destruction of Earth. But there's a hero to unite the anti-ETs: he's an amnesiac escapee from the spaceship and he's taken one of its death ray wrist bracelets.

The resultant screenplay for that indigestible brew of bizarre concepts was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who'd previously collaborated on TV series, The Island and Legend of Zorro (2005), Mission Impossible 3 (2006), Transformers 1 and 2 (2007/9) and the Star Trek reboot (2009): a track record of entertainment blockbusters to make Hollywood accountants salivate.

Yummy, salivated Steven Spielberg, I'll executive produce this sure-fire sucker! Let's spend about US$160 million. My old pal Harrison Ford can play the old rancher. He's very convincing playing old men a la Henry Fonda. We'll pay that Brit Bond Daniel Craig to be the macho antihero with a blank Eastwood-meets-Bronson face.

Somewhere in the Hollywood witches' brewing room, it was realised that the trademark Spielbergian potion of sentimentality was lacking. So the coven added a refugee woman from another planet, the macho man's dead wife, a boy and a dog, the rancher's whimpering bully boy son (Paul Dano) and loyal Indian sidekick - and a kindly preacher and a scared saloon keeper and his Latina wife. A black? No, even Hollywood witches know not to push their luck too far.

Finally, though, to make sure the film was totally incredible and could be seen painfully trying painfully to be comic and cool, like geriatric Harrison, Jon Favreau was given the director's megaphone and the SFX talents were let loose.

Characterless, constantly clanging with cliches, cant and cringe-worthy dialogue, this cornfield of movie-making managed to gross little more than its ludicrously over-ambitious budget. It's probably one of 2011's biggest net losers. Deservedly.

Kung fu panda 2

A+

More action-packed than the first, if less character-driven, a successful extension into the 3D dimension.

************************************************************

The most favourable comment on Kung Fu Panda 2 is that it looks (in 2D) as if it's an unusually effective if over-busy usage of 3D effects.

The original CGI cartoon movie's creatures reappear (with the same megastar voices). The colourings are lovely to look at, and one new creature (a China-threatening peacock) has a much more expressive face and character than the bland "Famous Five" heroes helping the obese and mildly comic panda anti-hero perform his predestined duties.

The peacock's finely boo-able voice is that of yet another Brit-accented gift to conniving cartoon-world villainy (Gary Oldman, channeling moments from Jeremy Irons et al). Jack Black is inoffensively easy to listen to as the bumbling hero. Dustin Hoffman self-effaces well as the divinely patient kung fu master. Less admirably, James Hong's characterisation of the panda's father figure, a noodle-shop-owning duck (Mr Ping), sounds almost racially offensive, depicting the obsequious creature as a whining maudlin Chinese hand-wringer.

Director Jennifer Yuh might claim that character is true to human life. She surely deserves great credit for her debut feature, having been promoted by Dreamworks from her leading artist role on the first Panda. For that she composed a bewitching sequence of Chinese-style shadow puppetry, which is utilised well again as the intro to the fast-paced CGI saga.

More action-packed than the first, if less character-driven, this is a successful franchise extension into the 3D dimension and good ocular entertainment. That's all, folks, and that's good enough.

Arietty

At the end of 2009, Studio Ghibli promoted one of its chief animators, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, into the director's chair for The Secret World of Arietty. Based on Mary Norton's classic (1952) English children's novel The Borrowers, the tale of the endangered species of tiny household spirits had already inspired many English-language film versions (most recently another BBC production, starring Stephen Fry, Christopher Eccleston and Victoria Wood).

Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki won the animation Oscar in 2002 for Spirited Away (the first foreign-language film to do so) and may hope to do the same when Disney distributes the latest film in North America in February 2012. It won't.

It suffers from the disadvantages of Miyazaki's dominant themes. When a story doesn't have enough action, interesting characters and pacing, the studio's customary motifs of ecological awareness, feminism, anti-capitalism, humanity and pacifism are pretty tedious.

The Borrrowers was a gentle, genteel saga, a pining for older days and ways, and it lent itself ideally to Miyazaki's ethos. The only child of a house's last couple of surviving Borrowers, 14-year-old Arietty, is introduced by her father to the frightening world of the huge humans, from which small essential supplies must be "borrowed". In scenes of miniaturisation akin to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Arietty is spied by the sickly boy of the house, who befriends her and helps her family escape from the clutches of a grumpy housekeeper.

The hand-drawn imagery of ivy, raindrops, hidden passageways and spring flowers is brilliantly imagined, manoeuvred and coloured. Such work is a world away from the traditions of Disney or Pixar, and the Japanese conventions of adorable big-eyed children, animals with conflicted characters and boo-able grouchy old ladies are maintained handsomely. There just aren't enough dramatic developments or side-attractions to grab a non-Japanese viewer's attention. The specially-commissioned music (by Cecile Corbel, the French-Bretonne singer and harpist whose sound resembles that of New Agers such as Ireland's Enya) has a similar languor.

[The DVD version watched had an unfortunate typo in otherwise excellent subtitles: the Borrowers' neighbours are called "human beans".]

Beaver

As a director and actress, former child star Jodie Foster works well with stories about children. She's also been a surprisingly strong counter-balance to aggressive male screen figures, and The Beaver may have seemed an interesting challenge to her.

A toy company chief executive (Mel Gibson), sinking further into depression, is eventually rejected by his wife (Foster) and elder son (Anton Yelchin). After failed suicide attempts, he puts himself into the care of a domineering glove puppet reject (the title role beaver). It takes control of his left arm and his voice, which now proclaims dangerously cute rough love of him in the tones of Michael Caine.

His infant son is enchanted, his wife is won over, but the son remains aloof. So did I. The son's a class genius, completing papers for fellow students for a fee. A top-graded girl (Jennifer Lawrence) needs a speech, and she'll pay up to a thousand dollars for it, believe it or not. I didn't.

She had a brother who ODed, and she casts aside her expensive honeyed phrases to tell her class about everyone simply needing love, which inspires her speech-writing lover to rush and embrace a father who'd cut off his left arm to free himself from the puppet. That's the plot and it's hard to imagine why Foster thought she could fashion such a pig's ear into cinematic silk.

Harvey and Walter Mitty meet Lars and evil blood-thirsty puppet stereotypes (Chucky, Puppet Master, Gremlins and Child's Play franchises) on the way to an Ordinary Family? Writer Kyle Killen, a new hack on the Hollywood block, sold his concept to Foster and her producers. They lost most of their $20-30 million investment; at least Gibson got a chance to show that he's a charismatic middle-aged actor who's willing to look and act his age.

Air doll

In 2007, Lars and the Real Girl enabled Ryan Gosling to have an actor's ball partnering an inflatable lover. Two years later, innovative Japanese director Hirokasu Koreeda played well with the same concept in Air Doll, his screen adaptation of a manga written the same year by Yoshiie Gouda (entitled, self-mockingly, perhaps, "Gouda's Philosophical Discourse: The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl").

Nozomi, the life-size plastic doll dressed as a maid (with optional costume changes), is the pampered companion of a lonely middle-aged waiter (Arata, whose movie debut in 1998 was in Hirokasu's After Life). He chats with her during dinner, takes her out for wheelchair rides, has sex with her and meticulously washes her detachable lower part. One day, the doll lurches to life, acquiring puppet-like cold-skinned movement, a heart and soul, abilities to sketch, hold memories and mimic human words, and lands a job in a video store, where she falls in love. Played with po-faced big-eyed mystified innocence by Donna (The Ring Virus, Host, Linda x 3) Bae, Nozomi is an enchanting fantasy character.

At its original 125-minute running length, the movie was dismissed by many critics as an over-long fable. Eight or more minutes were cut out for foreign markets; the effects are frustrating at the end of the movie, when Nozomi inexplicably enters and changes the lives of local lonely characters she'd met on her wandering. Her expanding role, growing heart and inevitable death become a series of fairly silly tableaux, and may have been more credible and meaningful within an extended narrative context. For the first hour, though, the switches from wry reality to magical realism are very acceptable logical nonsense.

I guess Japan's movie-goers (even more than those in the USA) require a movie to last at least two hours, to justify high ticket prices. That could explain the lengths that film producers need to go to, often working with slender plots. One side benefit of that is the necessity to employ directors who can fill time with rich details, artful lighting and exquisitely composed scenes; Hirakasu achieves all that, creating an intriguing visual essay on urban loneliness, human frailty and love's and life's substitutes. "Pretty basic philosophy" sounds dismissive, but isn't meant to be.

Chocolate

Muay Thai (kick boxing) martial arts movies, akin to Hong Kong's kung fu spectacles, gained wider international attention in 2003 through Ong-Bak, The Thai Warrior, co-written and directed by Prachya Pinkaew, starring Tony Jaa. The two men went to Australia for The Protector (2005), whose lead writer was the single-named Napalee. A sequel of it is in production by them, after Jaa had worked with Panna Rittikrai on two Ong-Bak sequels. Panna, who'd also co-written the original story, and is an experienced stuntman, became Jaa's co-director.

In the meantime, Prachya groomed a young female taekwondo fighter to learn kick-boxing moves for the lead role in a 2008 feature, Chocolate. It was co-written by Napalee and director Chukiat (The Love of Siam) Sakveerakul. Their ingenue lead actress, Yanin Vismitananda (now aka JeeJa), was made to look good by the film's action choreographer - who was Panna, not too surprisingly in the close-knit world of Thai action movies.

JeeJa is certainly prettier to look at than Jacky Chan, but the movie's stunts are not as complex as his, nor as much gory fun as Kill Bill's. In order, probably, to minimise novice JeeJa's acting weaknesses, her character is the autistic daughter of a Thai gangster's moll, who left him to marry a Bangkok-based Yakusa chieftain (workaholic ex-model Hiroshi Abe). Faced with death threats from the mobster, she tells the Japanese to leave the country for ever and later discovers she's pregnant.

Several years later, a bullied chubby young boy is given a home by the moll, who works as a cashier for a Japanese restaurant. That key plot development takes only a few seconds of unexplained screen time, whose meaning is left to a movie-goer's instinctive understanding that such a character must emerge in the genre. So must the gangster's bevy of lady-boy hitmen, inspirational kick-boxers on B&W TV and an adjacent school, and an epileptic be-spectacled spindly teenage boy who must eventually challenge the autistic girl. And let's not ignore a gaggle of female boxers and gang of sword-wielding hoodlums who appear from nowhere in the final multi-sequenced battle. It pitches the girl and her terminally ill mum and badly-wounded Japanese dad against the minions of a mortally-wounded Thai villain who takes a very long time, and lots of falls, before dying.

Scores of stuntmen also appear in order to be foot-kicked, tossed and tumbled into cringing submission or grisly death in neatly-choreographed set-pieces fought single-handedly by the girl, abetted meekly by her chubby pal. They had decided to collect money owed to the mother from her gangster days, in order to pay for her worsening cancer's treatment, leading them to wage martial justice in the photogenic settings of an ice factory, candy depot, Japanese-style mansion, and, most memorably, on the wall and neon signs of a four-storey building facing a sky-train elevated railway in the finale. Yep, there's not much time for character development in this genre.

Where's the "Chocolate"? My instincts led me to guess that the girl's passion for Smartie-like chocolate-coated candy balls is somehow fundamental to the story, but there was no clear, or even sly, sign that the sweets gave the supergirl the necessary sugar rush or brain buzz to overcome her autism and standard stilted movements. I suspected instead that there were various deleted scenes that provided a fuller chocolate-filled narrative, and they were cut so that audiences could be rushed through the childhood period and into the action scenes.

Source code

With a track record comprising two Species video features and one scifi TV movie, Ben Ripley needed to show Hollywood that he could also write a classy screenplay. Most important, he needed producers who'd back it. They were Vendome (whose only other product so far is Larry Crowne, suggesting it's probably a Tom Hanks venture) and Mark Gordon (best known for Criminal Minds and other TV series). They bought Ripley's concept of a scifi disaster-thriller, Source Code, in which a near-dead pilot's brain is returned to an exploded train's dead passenger's body, in repeated eight-minute sessions, on a mission to discover the bomber who's planning to annihilate Chicago.

Keeping the budget low, the production hired one minor star name for the lead role (Swedish-Ashkenazi Jake Gyllenhaal, recently panned for the Prince of Persia Disney/Bruckheimer epic bore), and a sophomore Brit director (son-of-David Bowie David Jones, freshly successful with Moon). Ex-model Michelle Monaghan (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Eagle Eye) smiles well as the sudden love interest aboard the train, while Ukrainian-American Vera (Up in the Air) Farmiga and Jeffrey (Angels in America) Wright fret attractively as the pilot's military mind controllers. Location filming in Montreal also kept the costs down, and everyone concerned boosted their reputations (including the rousing old-fashioned title-music composer and slick technical teams).

Director Jones, needing to work at a much faster pace than for Moon, and in a world of railway sounds and effects, sped the plot along appropriately, adding just a few presumably deliberate WTF moments in the far-fetched tale of "time reassignment". One scene in a washroom with the pilot and one of his chief suspects is repeated, out of sequence and then three times, in a possible tribute to Christopher Nolan's maddening Memory. If so, it was irritatingly pointless.

After the movie, the biggest non-sequitors remain unexplained. The pilot does re-write history, which the storyline said he wouldn't be able to, and he's apparently stolen a previously-living man's mind, body and girlfriend, which he shouldn't have. But he does so in order to die at peace with himself and his estranged father, so that's all right folks, schmaltzy Hollywood-style.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

One of the teasers for next year's Oscar nominations may be the handling of Andy Serkis. The Armenian-English master of "motion capture" acting gave LOTR a star turn as Gollum, and also worked wonders for director Peter Jackson in the title role of King Kong. He has now assured the success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes through his representation of Caesar, the apes' leader. Will it earn him a Best Supporting Actor nomination? Or will New Zealand's WETA (LOTR, King Kong and Avatar) CGI technicians, who transformed his movements and facial expressions into convincing pixels, win all the glory?

Serkis, who provided the motions "captured" by the technicians, will probably have to wait for any Oscar reward until the reboot of the franchise ends. In any case, John Lithgow is a surer bet this time as an Oscar nominee (it would be his third) for his finely-gauged cameo as a retired piano teacher afflicted by Alzheimer's Disease.

His son, a medical researcher (James Franco, nicely under-acting), discovers a virus that repairs brain cells, and secretly improves his father's. His authorised test victim is a female chimpanzee, who runs riot and is shot before her secret day-old baby boy is discovered. The fact that none of the preceding sentence's script aroused instant disbelief and chuckles in the cinema audience is a tribute to sophomore Brit director Duncan Wyatt. His breakneck pace, quick cuts and smooth editing flattered the story, ably driven forward too by brash old-fashioned symphonic music composed by Scotsman Patrick (Bridget Jones' Diary, Gosford Park) Doyle, most-awarded recently for the Goblet of Fire instalment of HP.

Other supporting cameos, with deliberately understated nastiness, show ape-abusers who are heartless (Scot Brian Cox), vicious (Tom Felton, best known so far as HP's Draco Malfoy) and exploitative (UK TV actor English-Nigerian David Oyelowo). Niceness is served luke-warm by Bombay-born Frieda Slumdog Millionaire Pinto as Franco's characterless love interest, and Canadian Tyler Labine as his agonised research pal. The key focal point, literally in terms of close-ups on his highly expressive frowns and green-tinted eyes, is Caesar, the orphaned chimp nurtured secretly by Franco and Pinto for eight years (another totally implausible plot detail). He gains superhuman intelligence and potential world dominion (to come in the next episode, hinted at during the end credits, via NYC).

Caesar's new-found simian allies are a mixed bunch, almost laughably so for an over-jowled ludicrously dreadlocked lump (Maurice), a "circus orangutan" who understands sign language (like Caesar), and is a CGI creation based on an actress's captured motions. She and most other human-simian models clearly don't have the expertise and fluent body and skin linguistics of Serkis. His Caesar is a marvel to behold, amazingly moving and masterful, while the CGI experts have a field day with the army of apes using brute force to attack San Francisco.

The DVD's deleted scenes or commentary may reveal what happened in up to 10 minutes of screen time cut from the original reported length. One loose end that slips past shows Caesar reacting to the sight of a dead female ape referred to previously by humans; if the original screenplay had included an aborted love interest for Caesar, its deletion was wise.

Maybe the commentary will also note and explain the decisions to cast a black actor as the profit-driven boss of the medical research company, call him Dr Jacobs and have him ceremonially killed by a facially-deformed bonobo he'd experimented on. The non-pc aspects of the storyline were probably camouflaged by casting an English actor as Jacobs.

The original 1963 novel (La Planete des singes) by Frenchman Pierre Boulle had been first adapted for Hollywood in 1968, starring Charlton Heston. Four sequels followed, as did an inconsequential Tim Burton version in 2001. Remarkably, this reboot's writer-producers (Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) had no significant track record, and top dogs at the Dune and Fox production companies must be tickled pink (richly) by the success of their risky investment of almost US$100 million in the project, together with the equally risky choice of young outsider Duncan Wyatt as the director.

His first full-length directorial feature had been back in the UK: The Escapist (2008), which he co-wrote. Its cast included Brian Cox (who'd also appeared in the second of Wyatt's previous two short films). It needs to be sought out, to see what qualities in it prompted Hollywood to give the young Brit such a pricey responsibility. He succeeded, brilliantly in commercial terms and very credibly in technical terms; his film and the re-born franchise deliver pleasing big-screen cinema, a live-action cartoon whose illogic doesn't diminish its entertainment value.

Captain America

It's a summertime delight to note that Hollywood can still deliver good old-fashioned action-adventure blockbusters. Happily, "good" is a fair adjective to apply to the newest Marvel Comics movie franchise, Captain America: The First Avenger.

All concerned with the production must be chuffed that one of the first choices for director, Jon Favreau, backed out of the project. This enabled a veteran talent to step in: Joe Johnston, whose first feature was the 1989 hit, Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Since then, he's only made six full-length film features. They're an impressive line-up of above-average mainstream entertainment: The Rocketeer, Jumanji, October Sky, Jurassic Park III, Hidalgo and The Wolfman.

He'd already won an Oscar, in 1981, for Best Visual effects in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and his latest feature further demonstrates his SFX and design mastery. He employed a phenomenal 13 specialist FX companies, whose hundreds of credit names take up many minutes at the end of the movie.

Johnston puts production funds where they count, also hiring top-rate actors to boost the lightweight script. Chris (Fantastic Four) Evans has classic Hollywood pairings of good looks and twinkling eyes, all-American heroics and good-mannered modesty. His Captain America, a weedy lad transformed Atlas-like into a supermanic hunk, is a live cartoon that's very humanly animated. The role of his similarly-engineered arch foe, Red Skull, was entrusted to an actor whose voice and strut grandly inhabit a nonstriking physique: Australian Hugo Weaving, who's segued remarkably from The Adventures of Priscilla to The Matrix and the LOTR series, while adding off-screen timbre to Rex in Babe and Megatron for Transformers.

The Captain's military commander is a gruff ally, played with similar panache to Rambo's (Richard Crenna) by Tommy Lee Jones. The love interest, an English WW2 intelligence agent, is a token role smartly posed by Hayley (Pillars of the Earth) Atwell. There are various well-acted buddies; Stanley Tucci delivers a classy cameo as the obligatory anti-Nazi German emigre boffin.

It will be interesting to compare this beguiling blockbuster with the one that Jon (Iron Man) Favreau made instead, Cowboys & Aliens. It'll be even more astonishing to see how Marvel copes with putting a clutch of its extra-large comic-book eggs (and egos) in one basket when Joss Wheldon's The Avengers appears in 2012, teaming up Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye under the command of Nick Fury.

Wu xia

Four years after The Warlords (2007) earned him Golden Horse awards (best film and director), Peter Chan has new grounds for being seen as one of Hong Kong's grandest movie-makers. His Wu Xia is an intriguing martial-arts period (1917) piece blending the concepts of David Cronenberg's The History of Violence, US TV's CSI franchise, Tsui Hark's Detective Dee, Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes and Kitano anti-heroes.

A seemingly humble paper miller (Donnie Ip Man Yen) becomes a rural community's unexpected hero when he tackles a pair of notorious bandits and is "lucky" enough to kill each of them by accident (in the first of three action scenes directed by Yen). The magistrate (ubiquitous Takeshi Kaneshiro) inspecting the case suspects that skilled martial artistry accounted for the luck, and is shown, through slow-motion replays and imaginary in-body fast tracks, proving his forensic conjectures.

Yen's humble character eventually admits that he's the son of the maniacal leader of an evil gangster sect. He'd left his father, finding peace with a young woman (enchanting Wei Lust, Caution Tang) whose husband vanished leaving her with one son. The couple's own son is sought out by the vicious grandfather, leading to the son's self-amputation of an arm and a final stand in which the scientific mind of the detective and the swordsmanship of the miller prevail.

Unlike recent Chan movies, this one doesn't flaunt a cast of thousands and epic scenes. Musical interludes do pop up like Greek chorus routines, sung/declaimed in dialect, and there are the expected showcases for Yen's martial choreography, but the film is mostly a character study and real drama. Much credit (and many awards, surely) must go to screenwriter Aubrey Lam (Chan's frequent associate).

The cinematography by Yiu-fai (Confession of Pain, 2046) Lai and Jake (Yang Yang, Monga) Pollock would also be noteworthy if it hadn't used film that looks like a suitable case for re-mastering. Too often, scenes were murky, their dullness contrasting badly with vivid sound effects and lively acting.

Multi-lingual Japanese-Taiwanese Kaneshiro yet again rules the acting roost, with a restrained Depp-style individuality. Yen performs the necessary acrobatics well (finely utilising a trio of veteran character/kungfu actors whose facial acting pushes bland-faced Yen out of an audience's focus), but his character's non-stop niceness is not credible given the past evils and despicable parentage shown on the screen.

Once again, Hollywood's Weinstein team quickly identified a possible winner and also bought the re-write rights for the US market. Understandably, they've abandoned the literal translation (Swordsman) and opted for a snappier title that has nothing to do with the story (Dragon). Although that sounds like counter-productive product marketing, the Weinsteins usually know their markets well. Maybe they'll add a suitable subheading, CSI China 1917, if Bruckheimer would let them. No way he will; he'd probably commandeer the concept himself.

Tempest

It hasn't been a happy decade for Julie Taymor, the acclaimed American theatre and opera director whose Frida (2002) earned six Oscar nominations (and two wins, for make-up and for original music by her spouse Elliott Goldenthal).

Her triumphant Lion King stage show (1997), for which she designed more than 100 costumes and collected Tony Awards for them and for direction, was followed a decade later by her disastrous disaster-prone direction of, and sacking from, Broadway's Spider-Man musical in 2011.

In film, her adaptation and direction of Shakespeare's Titus [Andronicus] (1999), starring Anthony Hopkins, was critically respected but lost big money (a gross revenue of only 10 per cent of its US$20 million budget). Undeterred, in 2010 she then released her re-working of The Tempest. Its budget was similar, the critics howled, and its gross ticket sales were less than $350,000.

Its lead actor, Helen Mirren as gender-changed Prospera, was award-nominated, and its costumier, Sandy Powell, earned her ninth Oscar nomination. No one else in the star-studded production boosted their CV, and the, ahem, role-call of flat performances includes David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alfred Molina, Alan Cumming, Tom Conti and Djimon Hounsou (Caliban, almost nude, naturally, sporting clownish make-up and middle-aged spreads). Russell Brand is atrociously unfunny as Trinculo, but at least he's playing at his standard level.

Even promising youngsters sound jaded and move wearily: Felicity Jones, as Miranda, and Reeve (Snow Falling on Cedars) Carney as Prince Ferdinand. Sadly for talented Ben Whishaw (Perfume, Criminal Justice), Taymor envisaged Ariel as a genitalia-free nude will'o'the'wisp with ugly make-up.

The film stock used seems to have been salvaged from pre-War vaults. The locations chosen in lava-strewn or wooded Hawaii were not picked for their cinematogenic quality. Most wrongly, Taymor paced out her production in stagy, theatrical terms. Compounding the tragedy of errors, she obtained sub-standard SFX and commissioned tedious or trifling music from her spouse. One small consolation for Shakespeare buffs: the DVD's English subtitles only omit or mis-write a few spoken word. A bigger one is the ten minutes or so cut from the film's official length before it went to DVD.

Is there a word for a movie that lacks depth, vision and visual flair? In the age of 3D, this is a failed 2D movie, so perhaps it can be best categorised as 1D. To be seen only for Mirren's eyes.

Adjustment bureau

Prolific novelist and short-story writer Phillip K. Dick created concepts that have inspired more than a dozen scifi, fantasy and mystery movies, including such blockbusters as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. He died from a heart attack at the age of 53 in 1982, after five divorces, substance abuse and a visit from God (he claimed). His work, full of cinematically ideal mysteries and chases, continues to be adapted, as in The Adjustment Bureau (2011).

Fellow-American George Nolfi, a philosophy and political science graduate who switched to writing screenplays, crafted the storyline from Dick's Adjustment Team short story. He'd already successfully adapted Michael Crichton's Timeline for a UK-produced science thriller, one of his own screenplays as the basis for the Oceans Twelve sequel, another writer's novel for his co-production of Michael Douglas's Sentinel, and joined the team adapting The Bourne Ultimatum.

Having worked twice with Matt Damon, Nolfi was able to sign up the star actor, enabling him to raise production funds and secure Emily Blunt, the very busy Brit actress (Young Victoria, Devil Wears Prada) as his lead actress. He was ready for his debut producer-director-writer feature.

The storyline visualised the typical Dick scifi mystery well. Damon plays a NY congressman running for a senate seat. He meets a contemporary dancer (Blunt) by chance, in a men's toilet. They banter, chat and kiss, and the chemistry between the two, and the snappy dialogue, shows them falling in love at first sight, credibly. So much so that audiences root for them once their romance seems doomed and Damon must combat the forces of an invisible Chairman (ie God) and his earthly agents (angels visible only to Damon due to a time-warp slip-up one of them makes).

Damon's politician is destined to be a US president; Blunt's ballerina to become a world-famed choreographer. Their lives are recorded in four-dimensional books administered by the Chairman's bureaucracy, displaying very human irritations and frustrations with their tasks.

Damon must outrun and outwit them, and change their plans, if his love for Blunt is to live. The storyline doesn't tell us why Fate hadn't contrived to give a potential US president a suitable mate, or fully clarify why a previous plan for the couple's romance (explaining their instant attraction to each other) had been changed. Other red herrings and loose ends also don't matter at the time because Nolfi's fast-paced screenplay sprints charmingly to its inevitable happy ending.

En route, a good supporting cast includes Anthony (Hurt Locker) Mackie as a sympathetic black angel, Michael (Criminal Minds) Kelly as Damon's best pal, and Terence Stamp as the menacing divine enforcer of heavenly planning. Adding cameos of "reality", playing themselves, are various famous faces (Jon Stewart twice, James Carville and Mary Matalin, Madeline Albright, Michael Bloomberg and other NY personalities).

Nolfi created an acclaimed and profitable relatively "low-budget" (US$50 million) small-scale version of Nolan's Inception, jumping merrily through time warps, false illusions and four dimensions. He owes a lot to his lead actors, and Dick, but he can claim a lot of credit for himself in Hollywood.

Paul

For more than a decade, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have worked together in various British TV and movie comedies (from Spaced through Shaun of the Dead to Hot Fuzz) that displayed their lower-middle-class Everyman personas. Sweeter than Ricky Gervais's snide cynic, and less bumbling than Richard Curtis characters, they form a happy comic duo of smiling shortness and bashful fattiness. Their first co-written movie, Paul, has been a worthy winner critically and at the North American box-office (which knows Pegg better from the Star Trek re-boot).

Their concept was a delightfully comic, complex send-up of sci-fi movies. A comic-book writer and his illustrator pal go to the Comic-Con trade show in the USA and then set off on a road trip to sight-see desolate spots renowned for UFO sightings. They are forced to give refuge in their RV to Paul, a pointy-headed alien with a dirty mouth, "spaceman balls" and attitude problems.

He's escaped from a government secret programme headed by an off-screen alpha female (Sigourney Weaver deploying her distinctive vocal menace), and is pursued by her laconic lieutenant (Jason Bateman on good dead-pan form) and his pair of gormless henchmen. Driving Paul to the destination where a spaceship can rescue him, the naif Brits collect en route the one-eyed daughter (Kristen Wiig) of a rabid Christian backwoodsman.

An elderly woman (Blythe Danner), who'd helped Paul after his crash-landing on Earth sixty years before, has to be taken on board too, before they and their pursuers reach a mountain whose shape recalls a movie about close encounters (whose director, among others, is shown to have used Paul with official approval as a creative consultant).

The quick-moving action comedy incorporates many other references to the sci-fi genre, and is directed with snappy panache by Greg (Superbad) Mottola, who wrote and directed the multi-award-winning The Daytrippers in 1996 and had less success with Adventureland in 2009.

The producers seem to have decided that the screenplay's Creationism-defying atheistic Darwinian tone and bug-eyed anti-hero (voiced with suitable comic bile by Seth Rogen) would never gain loving laughs in America's Bible Belt. So they also made him a smoker leading others astray while prompting them to lard their dialogue with coatings of four-letter words. These are so profuse (especially in the "Unrated" DVD version) that the well-cast cast act embarrassed by their professional duty to appeal to smutty teens in multiplex audiences. They did; the movie's shown a profit on box-office receipts alone.

In the end credits, Jane Lynch, seen in an early cameo as a diner waitress, re-appears to do her scripted bit for lesbian rights; Pegg and Frost had already tossed in a few gay male confusions. A sequel to be made (to be called, they joke, Pauls). If they really want to piss off, cock-suck, fuck up, and fart in the face of, the God-fearing, they could call it St Paul's Balls ?

Harry Potter 7-2

All good things must come to an end. That even felt desirable after the dreary cinematography, tired acting and muddled plotting of the seventh Harry Potter movie. It's hard to believe that the eighth and final instalment was made at the same time, with the same director (Peter Yates) this time achieving a level of imposing block-busting action-adventure almost as award-worthy as Peter Jackson's final TLOR spectacular. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 is a fitting conclusion to cinema's all-time best-selling franchise.

Yates shouldn't get an Oscar nomination, however. Far too many times, he pauses the action and the narrative flow for a ponderous rear view of Potter thinking or nothing happening. If the resultant static frame contained eye-catching designs or 3D effects, fine. When they didn't, they were like soft flicks from a towel dotted with masonry images.

The lead trio remained a constant reminder of the crucial initial success of the franchise's first director, Chris Columbus, to oversee the assembly of the appropriate mood, cast and visual style (all of which were deliberately designed for the long haul rather than short-term spectacle). For a decade, Radcliffe, Grint and Watson gave many months of their young lives to the franchise. They've earned good money, satisfied Potter fans and may manage to create new cinema personas.

The likeliest non-technical Oscar nominees could be Best Supporting Actors Alan Rickman (his Snape a commandingly complex character for a decade) and Ralph Fiennes (an increasingly mesmerising evil presence as Voldemort). Compared to them, or the roles Rowling created and they personified so well, other fine British actors have just been having fun, playing cameos for laughs or titters.

Above all, though, the most deserving Oscar nominee is screen-playwright American Steve Kloves, one of the few non-Brits to be accepted into JK Rowling's circle of trusted interpreters of her words into big-screen validity. An Oscar and BAFTA nominee (for his acclaimed adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys in 2000), his only other previous award-nominated work was his original screenplay for The Fabulous Baker Boys back in 1989. His adaptations of the Potter series have steeped surely, albeit stodgily at times, through Rowling's fantastic blend of children's fiction, ancient myths, sorcery and teenage angst. Inevitably, he couldn't adjust any of her less skillful plotting, such as Voldemort's unbelievable belief that Potter had died or the Malfoy family's last-minute changes of hearts or Snape's willingness to simulate loyalty, kill Dumbledore and sacrifice himself.

Has 3D added strength to HP 7-II? It's worth finding out; the 2D version was good cinema, and it is nice to imagine that it might be even more thrilling.

Rango

Why do audiences gleefully accept ugly heroes in animated films? Perhaps because handsome or beautiful cartoon figures look bland and unamusing? The Shrek series has ended, but the ogre and Fiona (and Donkey) have a worthy successor in Nickelodeon's Rango.

All the movie's characters are grotesquely, brilliantly and lovably spotty, peculiar or deformed, starting with the pet chameleon who's the anti-hero, Rango. For his first animated movie, director Gore Verbinski wisely worked with the actor who'd made his tongue-in-cheeky Pirates of the Caribbean such an exceptional action-adventure loving parody, Johnny Depp. This time, Depp weaves a dozen different tones into his enchanting vocal fireworks display.

Lost on a highway in the Mojave desert, he meets a nearly-halved, wise old armadillo, Roadkill (Alfred Molina) who leads him to his quest for himself. Near the Wild Westerly frontier town of Grit, Rango encounters a bug-eyed iguana, zanily-abrupt Beans (fine vocal work from Isla Fisher, Scottish-Australian comedy actress wife of Sacha Baron Cohen). The town's humanoid desert creatures and their water supply are manipulated by sly tortoise Mayor John (Ned Beatty) abetted by outlaw gila monster Bad Bill (Ray Winstone) and Rattlesnake Jake, a huge and vicious diamondback (Bill Nighy).

Pretending to be a valiant hero to save his skin, succeeding by accident, Rango is appointed sheriff by the Mayor who's buying up the surrounding land and is thwarted only by Beans. The Spirit of the West, a shadowy human, appears to Rango in the desert in the shape of a Clint Eastwood look- and sound-alike Man with No Name (Timothy Olyphant). Haggard thirsty walking cacti join the anti-hero's search for water (evoking Tolkien Ents), and well-characterised odd-shaped, scaly-skinned, warty extras enrich the intricate sets and brain-tickling verbose screenplay, including a cheerfully morbid quartet of Mexican owl guitarists acting as a recurring chorus of woe.

They all populate a movie that's unusually entertaining for eyes and ears. For a movie buff's memory cells too, especially when the animation team (George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, making their first animated feature) create scenes of aerial thrills a la Star Wars.

German-born Hans (Lion King, Gladiator) Zimmer adds aptly spectacular music, and major kudos is earned by first-billed writer and story creator John Logan, a playwright (RED) with an impressive screenwriting portfolio (including Any Given Sunday and RKO 281 in 1999, Gladiator, the Last Samurai, The Aviator, Coriolanus). Verbinski (who also voices four minor characters) is the second credited writer; the third is James Ward Byrkit, the key storyboard artist and credited creative consultant for Verbinski's three Pirates movies.

Verbinski and his team, including British producer Graham (Aviator, Tourist) King and the director's ever-present Australian editor, Craig Wood, could triumph in animation industry awards, and win the Oscar and Golden Globe races this year. Luckily for them, Pixar released its first ho-hum critically-assaulted feature (Cars 2).

A friend said he hadn't left a cinema in such an ebullient mood for a very long time, and that was my feeling: Rango is a top-rated movie experience worth seeing at least once more to catch and admire more of its references and in-jokes.

Transformers 3

It's a perverse pleasure to watch an atrocious blockbuster. Sadly, Dark Side of the Moon, the third Transformers travesty from producer-director Michael Bay, is not bad enough to be a cult hoot. It's merely a compendium of many of the worst features of Hollywood commercialism, of which Bay is a shining example of wanton wastefulness of massive funds and mighty technical skills.

Stephen Spielberg's association with the Hasbro toymaker's mindless franchise, as its lead producer (through Dreamworks), demeans a director who used to have creative skills and artistry as well as money-making ambitions.

Any franchise that features an actor as stunted in physique and talent as Shia LaBeouf to portray its lead human character is obviously designed to be a live-action cartoon. LaBeouf, who once again shouts, screeches and kvetches tediously, has the charisma of a half-defrosted chicken corpse.

His adolescent unattractiveness was partly excusable the first time round (in 2007) when his parents were introduced. They are a stereotypical pair of hicks presumably intended to appeal to male movie-going US teenagers' hatred of loud-mouthed, pushy and stupid parents. The third time round, when they and LaBeouf are still pretending that he's teen-aged, their fake affability and crude jokes are as funny as suppurating warts. It is not surprising that LaBeouf never thinks about them after shooing them out of Chicago before the bad machine aliens invade it.

Bay has never treated women characters with delicacy either. Megan Fox's derriere and luscious lips have been replaced by an English model's ultra-long legs and lips that may be puff pieces for Botox. She is an inadequate actress, starring (like a plastic lamp might) in her first movie because she'd previously worked with Bay on his advertising films for Victoria's Secret, which employed her as its lead model. Other models have made acceptable transitions to film sets, but this woman's facial resemblance to Cameron Diaz was no guarantee that she could match that super-model's acting ability and charisma. She can't even disguise her English accent.

It's amazing that Sino-Americans have not yet mounted street demos protesting the portrayal of a bespectacled, nerdish, cliche-ridden Chinese rocket scientist as a despicably risible lavatorial idiot. There is also a ludicrous Germanic character, with a lousy accent, camp gestures and vacant expression.

A handful of normally good actors must have been paid good money to squander their talents as other cardboard figures propping up pathetic storylines. John Malkovich, John Turturro (masochistically returning to the franchise) and Frances McDormand might have provided light comic relief if they had been given dialogue and antics worthy of raising a smile, even a simper.

Which leads us to the principal cause of the movie's awfulness: the one credited writer, Ehren Kruger. He shared a Razzie for Worst Writing with the two co-contributors of the second (2009) Transformers screenplay, and can look forward to winning it all by himself for his latest effort. His movie career began in 1999 with the screenplay for Arlington Road, and has gone downhill ever since (most disappointingly for what he single-handedly wrote for Terry Gilliam's dire The Brothers Grimm).

It's troubling to ponder how talents as mediocre as his and Bay's get employed by Hollywood power-brokers. Bay made his mark as a director of fast-paced commercials and music videos, learned some dark arts of Hollywood with mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and is clearly now an experienced impresario of sound and visual effects. Some critics claim that his usage of 3D cameras for this film is as skilled as James Cameron's pioneering work with them on Avatar. That's a small justification for churning out clunking cinematic garbage in which automotive monsters are indistinguishable CGI cartoon figures, humans are characterless caricatures, and overloud surroundsound comprises grossly irrelevant song tracks, funereal choruses, mechanical drumming and mind-numbing explosions.

Bad enough to despise, not good enough to guffaw at, it's a movie that insults its audiences and helps to perpetuate their belief that Hollywood is sick at heart and in its communal brain.

X-men: first class

It will be no tragedy if X-Men: First Class doesn't make enough bucks to spawn the expected next two parts of a second trilogy. The major plus factor for failure would be the release from multi-year franchise servitude of four good actors and a director with great potential.

If a franchise extension does occur, it will in large part be the result of their efforts. When a block-buster action-adventure fantasy employs such top talents, it does improve its chances. The original trilogy gained much from using a pair of top-rank English thespians as its father-figure-superpower lead actors, Patrick Stewart (wheelchair-bound smiling goody Professor Xavier) and Ian McKellen (evil-minded metallic Magneto); former mutant buddies who were leaders of opposing mutant forces.

They've been replaced in the prequel by two younger British star talents, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. Their major breakthrough roles were, respectively, the fawn in the first Narnia movie, and an Irish revolutionary in Hunger. Since then, both have been busy at home and in Hollywood, McAvoy as a thinking man's Hugh Grant and Fassbender as a likely candidate to be the next James Bond. If they aren't stuck with spells in X-Men biannualquels, they could be making a few more films that better utilise their strong talents. They may need to grow into their roles. McAvoy, looking too youthful to be an alpha leader, channels Stewart's supercilious smile (without the repressed menace); Fassbender looks too much older and doesn't yet have McKellen's tone of impish nastiness.

It's also regrettable to foresee constraints on movie-making time for another fast-developing English actor, Nicholas Hoult. Outstanding as a child actor (About the Boy), teenage TV star (Skins) and Hollywood import (A Single Man), he'll be trapped for a few years in the guise of hairy Beast, just as Hugh Jackman lost time (and gained big money) as Wolverine. Sadly for the American film industry, one star talent who'll also lose chances to be cast in meatier roles is Jennifer Lawrence. Her lead role in Winter's Bone brought her more than 30 award nominations (including Oscar and Golden Globe); she's now wasted as the blue-toned Raven (aka Mystique) on Magneto's team.

Developing a well-known brand-name with an above-average track record at the box-office, the producers could afford to take risks by using such actors little-known in the US market. They saved money too by employing Michael Vaughan, a British director whose only previous major feature was Kick-Ass, a comic fantasy featuring super-powered kids. He maintains a steady pace while assembling and balancing plot contrivances that introduce the many characters, through flashbacks recording how and why the opposing forces gathered (side-stepping to eliminate uncredited Jackman's Wolverine pseudo-comically). The stage has been set, competently, for the next franchise instalments.

The sole major American player is Kevin Bacon, happily emoting as the Nazi medical experimentalist who engineered the young Magneto's inborn mutant flair for controlling metal masses. Bacon's good, but this franchise has never rivalled the ability of others to create joyfully complex villains that are Hollywood gifts to actors like Dafoe and Molina (in Spiderman) and Hackman (Superman).

Disappointingly, the movie's special effects were not too special, particularly a laughable levitated submarine and a final beach scene that looked like a flimsy tribute to Lost. There are better curtsies to cinematic cliches from Cold War and Holocaust genres to Star Trek and James Bond.

After watching the clumsy inter-mingling of X-Men fiction and actual newsreel from the Cuba missile crisis, many younger viewers may believe that mutants did save the world from nuclear disaster then.