Locked in: Richard Roxburgh as jailed journo Peter Greste in ‘The Correspondent’.
THE CORRESPONDENT ***1/2 (119 minutes) M
Urgent, topical, compelling, The Correspondent presents the ordeal of Australian journalist Peter Greste as a gruelling, ultimately uplifting tale of personal endurance and moral triumph in the face of political corruption and bureaucratic indolence.
In a career-topping performance, Richard Roxburgh – an actor whose range respects no boundaries, it seems – inhabits Greste as an unassuming field reporter filling in for a colleague to cover the 2013 tumult in Cairo before suddenly being arrested on fictitious charges of collusion and sentenced to five years in a prison system reminiscent of the one in Midnight Express.
There begins the prolonged torture of dealing with a twisted legal system and impotent Australian Consulate officials whose chief purpose is to infuriate taxpayers.
With his seat-filling gear engaged, director Kriv Stenders (Red Dog; Australia Day; Danger Close) fashions the piece as a legal drama with a serrated edge, injecting palpable tension into the proceedings despite the inevitable outcome.
The back story about the guilt Greste feels over the death of fellow reporter Kate Peyton (Yael Stone, terrific) adds considerable ballast to the dissection of Greste’s parlous position, and his increasing frazzled mental state.
The film is based on Greste’s book The First Casualty and was adapted by veteran Peter Duncan, who directed Roxburgh in the very funny, long-forgotten 1996 political satire Children of the Revolution.
By any reasonable measure The Correspondent is a superbly realised work aimed at a mature-aged audience who will appreciate an aggressively engaging, fact-based film that speaks forcefully to a host of hot-button issues, most prominently the perils faced by journalists working in places where the precept of press freedom is an unwanted foreign import.
Yet can it overcome the dire reputation Australian films have at the minute? So many films – even really good ones – come and go within a week or two due to poor marketing and audience aversion to their national cinema, something we thought we were free of after the banner year of 2015.
One hopes The Correspondent can overcome all that and hit big in theatres. It certainly deserves to, though that counts for very little in today’s movie firmament.
WARFARE ***1/2 (96 minutes) MA
Set in war-ravaged Ramadi, 2006, Warfare vividly succeeds in placing you inside a platoon of US soldiers pinned down in a house as the enemy closes in. With support slow and casualties mounting, the situation becomes increasingly jagged and deadly. Directors Alex Garland and war veteran Ray Mendoza (military advisor to Garland’s Civil War, and a character in the film) can’t be faulted for the searing realism they bring to their portrayal of modern combat – the sound design is particularly powerful – and for showing how little high-tech resources count against a gushing wound. The film strives hard to avoid being political and it’s certainly no flag waver, though there’s no avoiding its salute to the courage of soldiers and whole-hearted endorsement of earth-shaking American air power.
SINNERS * (137 minutes) MA
If there is a fate worse than being attacked by a vampire, ladies and gentlemen, it’s having to sit through Sinners, a complete dirge of a film that commits the one Cardinal Sin of any vampire movie – it’s boring.
Super-dull and way too frigging long, Sinners is set in the infamously prejudiced American Deep South of 1932 where small-time hood twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan) set up a music hall for fellow blacks.
It takes a solid 80 minutes of mind-numbingly tedious situation and character set-ups before the vamps eventually turn up to start munching through the guest list, but even then, it’s a drag with the incredibly annoying stop-start pacing and weak special effects that look like they’re from a high school production.
All this is set to the strains of an over-emphatic soundtrack that, in one astonishingly pretentious sequence, includes a potted history of African American music. You won’t think hard about the dumbest scene ever in a vampire film until to behold this gem.
About the only original bit in the movie is the sight of a River-dancing vampire. That aside, Sinners is starved of ideas, most notably with its deployment of the age-old cliche wherein vampires disintegrate upon being touched by the rays of the rising sun.
(When, oh when, will movie vampires learn that the surest way to hang on to their precious immortality is to get a wristwatch and check the local newspaper for sunrise times. Jeez Louise.)
Plenty of signs in Sinners of lazy filmmaking. Apart from the cheap-as-chips VFX – it’s something of a shock to discover the storied Industrial Light and Magic was involved – there are scenes in the music club where the background action doesn’t match the audio.
Director Ryan Coogler has made some OK films such as Black Panther and Creed – Fruitvale Station was awful – but here he appears to have his eye off the ball. As for the Jordan’s double role, we’ve just seen from the failure of the Robert De Niro film The Alto Knights that such stunts can draw a blank with audiences.
The film is replete with lots of sandwich-board messaging about the Deep South and racism and all that sort of thing, which is perfectly fine only it would have been less tedious had the filmmakers thought of something new to say.
The KKK is bad. Who knew?
And aren’t we tired by now of vampire films that take themselves so seriously? Time was when they had an element of fun – like when John Carpenter cast James Woods in 1998’s Vampires – but there’s no fun or humour here. That might have helped. If you can’t be scary, at least be funny. Please.
Still, the thing looks good, having been shot on film and in 70mm. (Well, 65mm if you want to get technical.)
Also worth acknowledging is how close the film came to boring your humble servant out of his skin. The damned thing is crammed with all these irritating false endings that’ll make you wish for a vampire apocalypse just to get the stupid thing over with.