Harry Brown begins with effective scenes showing the mundane life of a retired marine who is in the twilight of his life, his routine includes playing chess and meeting up with another old man in a local pub. But all this is threatened when Harry Brown decides to clean his neigbourhood of the hoods and drug mafia. Michael Caine plays the ageing veteran, the film is definitely a treat to Caine fans; the movie falls into the vigilante genre and has been compared to Gran Torino. Emily Mortimer abandons her chirpiness in playing a serious detective. I liked it.
Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow undertake a long and winding adventure in search of an evil doctor who predictably tries to destroy the whole world. Interestingly in Kevin Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the scheming doctor Totenkopf is played by Sir Laurence Olivier some 14 years after his death. The whole film is a tribute to the adventure genre and the films of yore, the tone resembling the forties science fiction films and an example of the west’s fixation with everything Tibet (Snowy mountains, secret passes and monasteries with silent monks and cloud covered air bases). And before I forget Angelina Jolie drops in (literally) sometime before the end,
As it is, the concept of a sequel is a very stressful one, imagine if the film you are to continue is the Silence of the Lambs; no ordinary task. Ridley Scott’s Hannibal takes of ten years after Silence…with Antony Hopkins returning to his famed role of Hannibal Lecter. Looking at Hannibal as a standalone film, it scores high points in an entertainment audit, what I personally thought was that Demme’s Silence was more about Clarice Starling than the man-eating classics teaching psychologist. Lesser the Lecter, the better. Julianne Moore creditably fills the large void left by Jodie Foster and unearths a different Starling, interesting thriller but lacks the greatness.
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