Movie of the Week: Now You See Me

This managed to slip into the cinema with no fanfare and no trailers, but it was a slow week last week, so we decided to risk it... and I'm glad we did.

The writeup says:

During their performances, the world's greatest illusionists known as "The Four Horsemen" pull off a series of daring heists against corrupt business leaders. The super-team of illusionists shower the stolen profits on their audiences while staying one step ahead of an elite FBI squad in a game of cat and mouse.

It was slick and enteraining with Mark Ruffalo playing the almost-Columbo-like FBI agent who's always a day late and a dollar short in the investigation, Morgan Freeman playing the ex-magician who exposes other fake magicians and Michael Caine playing the millionaire impressario and wheeler dealer who sponsors the Four Horseman's show - at first, anyway, because the tables soon turn. The Four Horsemen are on a mission, but there's someone else in the background. It all turns at the end and I think I'm still a little annoyed by the final twist because the director obviously led the audience up the garden path. I'd need to see it again to check if there was something I missed that might have given me a clue.

Anyhow, unreliable narrator's apart, this was well worth seeing.

Movie of the Week: Pacific Rim (2D)

Brenda Clough's review of Pacific Rim says it all and better than I could. See here. Yes it's full of plot holes,  it defies the laws of physics and materials science and it's full of cliches, just as she says. There's something deeply weird going on with the scale of the monster machines. In the hangar (or whatever they call the base) they look pretty big. Outside they look enormous - much bigger than they seemed before. It could have been Cineworld's speaker system, but the sound is terrible. As soon as the action starts, everyone seems to communicate by shouting at each other and that loses clarity, so on occasions I pieced together the plot (plot?) by hearing one word in three and guessing the rest.

Having said all that, it wasn't actually as bad as I expected it to be.

Why did I go if I expected it to be bad? Well, H and I do the Wednesday twofers whenever we can and this week was a thin week. It was either Pacific Rim or one of the animations (Monsters University or Despicable Me 2, and we missed DM1). Besides that H said she was curious enough to want to see it. So...

I expected Transfiormers-on-speed, but there was a plot... sort of...
The writeup says: When legions of monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju, started rising from the sea, a war began that would take millions of lives and consume humanity's resources for years on end. To combat the giant Kaiju, a special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers, which are controlled simultaneously by two pilots whose minds are locked in a neural bridge. But even the Jaegers are proving nearly defenseless in the face of the relentless Kaiju. On the verge of defeat, the forces defending mankind have no choice but to turn to two unlikely heroes-a washed up former pilot and an untested trainee who are teamed to drive a legendary but seemingly obsolete Jaeger from the past. Together, they stand as mankind's last hope against the mounting apocalypse.

Rinko Kikuchi was fine as the female lead, the only female in the film, in fact (another gripe). Charlie Hunnam is an engaging enough lead, but Idris Elba's East End accent felt out of place. Charlie Day was quite sweet as one of the geeky scientist researchers, in a double act with Burn Gorman who was so OTT that I think they were meant to be the light relief. Nothing in this film was light relief, however. With a body count in the millions (or possibly billions) the tag for 'moderate violence' seems a little misplaced.

I could say more but, oh yeah, OK, Transformers on speed just about covers it.