Material girl: Dakota Johnson as a New York matchmaker in ‘Materialists’.
MATERIALISTS *** (117 minutes) M
The age-old conflict between love and money gets a pretty good working over in Materialists, a sure-footed romantic drama set in the perilous world of upscale dating in contemporary New York.
A step beyond her 50 Shades adventures, Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a high-end matchmaker who is drawn into a dalliance with Harry (Pedro Pascal), whose untold wealth makes him far more attractive than her ex-fiance John (Chris Evans), a waiter/actor who she dumped because he was broke.
Written and directed by Celine Song (Past Lives), the film faces the place money can occupy in a relationship with considerable candour, some quietly drawn and raw dialogue acknowledging how, for women at least, it can matter a great deal.
The film does shy away from the topic just when it starts heating up, and though it isn’t the romantic comedy it is often described as, it does ultimately give in to the beats of a standard rom-com for its all-too-neat resolution.
Still, before it tapers off, Materialists offers a largely satisfying romantic triangle in which a woman needs to decide what matters most in a life she dearly wishes was uncomplicated by matters of the heart.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON ** (125 minutes) PG
Look, the “live-action” remake of How to Bore Your Dragon…sorry…How to Train Your Boredom…damn.
Start again.
Look, the “live-action” remake of 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon is fine.
It’ll play superbly to kids and those adults who warmed to the fantasy tale of a kid who helps a wounded dragon convalesce then comes to understand that the flying fire-breathing lizards that regularly terrorize his island village are just misunderstood monsters.
Closely following the narrative template of the franchise’s first film (spawned from the 2003 book by Cressida Cowell) you don’t have to be Nostradamus to foresee that the film is going to pack out multiplexes and be a big, fat hit. The bods at Dreamworks might as well start making the sequel now, which is already scheduled (the presumptuous bastards).
That said, to these jaded old eyes one word properly sums up the film – same. If forced to use two words, they would be – same same.
Pop culture has been stuck on repeat for decades with all the remakes and reboots and re-imaginings and sequels and prequels and so forth. And let’s be clear: when they’re done with spark and imagination, no probs.
What we have here, however, is just a cinematic retread resulting in tedium born of overwhelming sameness.
There’s absolutely nothing new here and no amount of money or digital wizardry can paper over the fact that – hurts to say – dragons have lost their novelty.
The dragons and reptilian monsters criss-crossing the frame here look like all the dragons and reptilian monsters we’ve seen criss-crossing the frame in Harry Potter, Games of Thrones, Jurassic Park, Avatar and so forth. (Even Bugs Bunny cartoons had dragons.) They look like they were all purchased from the same breeding nursery.
Even the giant Mother Dragon that emerges from the nest in the film’s finale puts one in mind of new-recipe Godzilla and The Kraken.
On top of faithfully reciting the story of the original, the film’s visuals are bland, the VFX work simply mediocre. Proves again how no amount of money thrown up at the screen can paper over the overwhelming ordinariness of visuals that strive for mere adequacy.
The film is also way long – like so many films these days it feels stretched by 20-30 minutes.
The young cast is fine (Mason Thames; Nico Parker; Julian Dennison); Nick Frost is fun but Gerard Butler, playing the village leader he voiced in the original, is sometimes tough to comprehend, what with all that growling and grumbling and shouting from beneath all those tufts of facial hair.
DANGEROUS ANIMALS 1/2 (98 minutes) MA
It shouldn’t ever happen but it keeps on happening – again and again.
You sit through some godawful Australian film and think how local cinema can’t possibly get any worse.
Then a few months later you see another godawful Australian film and realize, with a great sinking of the heart, that it can.
Dangerous Animals is a horror film set in Queensland about a bloke called Tucker (Jai Courtney) who enjoys torturing and slaughtering women while taking them on shark tours. He also dispatches the occasional man when they get in the way.
The film is an absolutely abysmal mess, sporting the host of story holes and plausibility lapses that have become so common in so many Australian films.
It’s not even a dog’s breakfast. It’s a mess of a breakfast even a dog would turn away from. Good horror films keep their cards close to the chest. Dangerous Animals shows you its cards right from the get go, sapping the proceedings of any tension or sense of threat.
Written by Nick Lepard and limply directed by Sean Byrne – who made the pretty nifty 2009 horror-comedy The Loved Ones – the film (an Australian-American co-production) stumbles within the first five minutes, setting the tone for what is to follow.
We are then subjected to a string of stupidities so egregious one is forced to wonder – yet again – how films with such poor storytelling are still being made in Australia today.
Blaring music, terrible dialogue and an astoundingly unconvincing, by-the-book psycho performance by Courtney – who would share an elevator with this obvious nutter, let alone a long boat ride? – are set against scenes of sadism, bad jokes and, for whatever bizarre reason, a splurge of nauseating virtue signalling about how sharks are just misunderstood fish. Urgh.
It’s tempting to end the review here, but let’s do the right thing and quickly detail some of the film’s many failings, first issuing a loud-and-clear…
*** spoiler alert ***
…so that you can avert your eyes should you intend seeing Dangerous Animals, perhaps returning here once you’ve seen it.
Here we go…
* The film opens with a pre-credit sequence where two young tourists have come to see the sharks because they missed a planned group tour having slept in after a heavy night of partying.
“So, no-one knows you’re here,” says Tucker.
Problem is, Tucker says this while the guy tourist is using a friggin’ mobile phone! The film is set present day, establishes how young people are constantly texting each other, yet we’re supposed to swallow that this couple didn’t once tell anyone where they were?
(Incidentally, the film would arguably have worked much better without this opening sequence as it establishes Courtney as a psycho killer. Might it have been better not to know that?)
* This is another Australian film that relies heavily on the police being utterly inept morons.
To wit: we’re supposed to believe the killer has somehow managed to knock off dozens of women in the one location without the police ever suspecting a thing or inquiring as to why the last thing all these disappeared women did was book a shark tour with this guy.
* There are a couple of times when the star victim (Hassie Harrison) knocks Tucker out yet, given that she knows what he’s been doing, doesn’t seize the opportunity to just finish him off.
* She finds a cabinet with two signal flares, but only takes one, retrieving the other one later. Why not take them both?
* Though the guy who tries finding her (Josh Heuston) goes to great lengths in his investigation, he never once bothers calling the cops until he’s on the boat and it’s way too late. If a plot needs to factor the police out of the equation it has to work much harder than what we see here;
* Though she is in fine voice, the woman doesn’t bother yelling or screaming when she lands on a beach lined with tents containing people;
* Why does Tucker get so upset when his prehistoric VHS RCA video camera goes overboard? A few minutes later we see him buying another one from a junk shop. What’s the big deal?
And that’s just a short list.
Dangerous Animals was really tough to sit through, proving a torture far worse than anything the hapless victims on screen had to endure. How many more of these terrible local films are we going to have to suffer?
Come on, Australian film industry. What the heck is going on?
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