Meewella | Critic

According to P

Tag: Donald Sutherland

QuickView: The Mechanic (2011)

The Mechanic quad poster

“Good judgment comes from experience and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

Arthur Bishop

The ingredients to establishing a Jason Statham franchise are all present: a euphemistic job title, terse dialogue, a convoluted plot of double-crossing criminals, and explosive consequences. I was hoping, then, that this remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson movie would deliver something like The Transporter. Statham excels at playing the straight man — in this case the kind of Hollywood-written hitman who studies actuarial tables for tips on undetectable murder — but The Mechanic gives him little to play off that doesn’t feel forced. Training the hotheaded son of his former mentor never makes sense for such a meticulously prepared individual, and he fails to recognise a painfully obvious double-cross because it would cut the film short by an hour. This would be forgivable were the pace of action high enough to prevent us noticing, but The Mechanic moves surprisingly slowly with little creativity on display, just smaller versions of familiar stunts.

5/10

QuickView: Ad Astra (2019)

Ad Astra poster

“I do what I do because of my dad. He was a hero. He gave his life for the pursuit of knowledge. Because up there is where our story is going to be told.”

Roy McBride

Ad Astra (literally “to the stars”) is the kind of slow and thoughtful science fiction, grounded in reality and exploring themes of humanity, that takes time to percolate after the credits roll. It lies somewhere between Moon, with a gradually emerging mystery, and Gravity, with most of its peril coming from the very real dangers of space. Despite its scale, spanning the solar system, Ad Astra is a supremely personal story and Pitt acts largely with his eyes, his focused steady gaze as the unflappable astronaut gradually giving way to doubt. He is driven to discover what became of his father’s pioneering mission to Neptune and we see in both men how heroic determination leads to an unscientific need to be right, but it is in shedding those ideas of cold masculinity and accepting the fragility of his isolation that Roy emerges a far stronger figure than his father.

8/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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