Deadpool & Wolverine (15, 127 mins)
Verdict: Super smug
While watching the new Marvel spectacular Deadpool & Wolverine, starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as the two title characters, it occurred to me that maybe there is a more expressive way of rating films than giving them stars.
Instead, we could confer on them a number of emojis, those little symbols used in text messaging.
Thus, five crying-with-laughter emojis could denote a wonderful comedy, with a disappointing horror film getting a single shriek.
As for Deadpool & Wolverine, I would have to reach for three self-satisfied smirks.
It is superhero cinema at its smirkiest, a movie that will be rapturously applauded by some, while greatly testing the patience of others.
I have a foot in both camps. While there’s nobody better than Reynolds at wooing the audience with a nod and a wink, he works so hard at dismantling the so-called fourth wall that by the end there’s hardly any of it left.
The script, co-written by Reynolds, further assumes that everyone going to see this film will know all about Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Fox, which meant that characters from the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe could henceforth hook up with those from Fox’s X-Men series.
BRIAN VINER: It is superhero cinema at its smirkiest, a movie that will be rapturously applauded by some, while greatly testing the patience of others
While there’s nobody better than Reynolds (left as Deadpool) at wooing the audience, he works so hard at dismantling the so-called fourth wall that by the end there’s hardly any of it left
Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in a scene from ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’
The jokey references to this merger, and to Hollywood politics generally, quite quickly become tiresome. A film can be too glibly self-aware by half. Indeed it is almost a surprise not to find Reynolds (famously also the co-owner of Wrexham AFC) at any point sporting a club scarf, like Eric Morecambe waving a Luton Town placard during his Roman Empire playlet with Glenda Jackson.
And yet for all that, Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is sometimes funny, sporadically very funny, and introduces a splendidly improbable new baddie in the form of Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova, as bald as an egg but much harder to crack.
The plot, as always in these films, is the standard baffling multiverse nonsense, but beefed up with copious swearing and sex gags in an apparent bid to persuade us that comic-book silliness is really for grown-ups.
It begins with Wade Wilson (Reynolds) working as a used-car salesman with his pal Peter (Rob Delaney), having applied unsuccessfully, as his Deadpool alter ego, to join the Avengers.
Gloomy and purposeless, he is propelled back into the world of super-heroics by a sly boffin called Mr Paradox (enjoyably played by Matthew Macfadyen as a sci-fi version of sneaky Tom from TV hit Succession). And to save the galaxy from evil Cassandra, he joins forces with Jackman’s grumpy Logan, aka Wolverine, long presumed dead.
The pair have solid chemistry and send up their uneasy alliance with panache (‘have you been checked for ADHD?’ asks Wolverine, not unreasonably). But the effect of all those in-jokes, all that smirking, is to make this movie a send-up of a send-up, leaving us with the awkward impression that the cast might be having more fun than the audience.
The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare (16+, 120 mins)
Verdict: A leaky vessel
There’s a parodic feel, too, to The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Guy Ritchie’s ham-fisted attempt to bring to life an excellent book about one of the most remarkable escapades of WWII.
The book, by Damien Lewis, is called Churchill’s Secret Warriors, and its sub-title calls it an explosive true story, which it is. Operation Postmaster was a top-secret 1942 mission which broke international law and was carried out by a small group of iconoclastic commandos, with the blessing of Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear).
Led by Major Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill behind a luxuriant bush of facial hair), the aim was to disrupt German U-boats wreaking havoc by disabling their supply vessels. It’s an amazing yarn, but Ritchie botches it. The script is as lacklustre as the acting is clunky.
There’s a parodic feel to Guy Ritchie’s ham-fisted attempt to bring to life an excellent book about one of the most remarkable escapades of WWII
The normally reliable Kinnear, fat-suited up, makes a lousy Churchill, looking like a bad waxwork. And the Carry On films had more convincing femmes fatales than Eiza Gonzalez (left), playing the estimable Marjorie Stewart with hardly a shred of plausibility.
Moreover, any tension dissolves as soon as you realise that every Nazi is a dimwit who can’t shoot straight. My advice is to read the book instead. It’s terrific.
Deadpool & Wolverine is in cinemas now. The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare is on Prime Video.
Chariots Of Fire (PG, 125 mins)
Verdict: Oscar-laden Olympics classic is still a winner
To use the Chariots Of Fire vernacular, what an absolutely capital idea it is to re-release Hugh Hudson’s 1981 drama, anointed Best Picture in the Academy Awards, on the very day that the 2024 Olympic Games begin in Paris.
After all, it is 100 years since the Olympics last took place in the City of Light, and Chariots Of Fire celebrates the remarkable accomplishments in those 1924 Games of two great British athletes: the devoutly Christian Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) and the Jewish sprinter Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross).
If you’ll forgive some personal reveries, the film has always had a mighty resonance for me. I first saw it, aptly enough in Paris, as a desperately homesick teenager living there alone, in a gap year between school and university. Its tub-thumping patriotism stirred me greatly and still does.
Moreover, I then spent four happy undergraduate years at St Andrews, which famously (if a little bizarrely) doubles for Broadstairs as the athletes in Team GB, as they were not then known, go for a practice run on the beach.
You can imagine the hoots of derision every time it was screened in St Andrews, and the town’s handsome West Sands were announced as ‘Broadstairs, Kent’. Anyway, those connections notwithstanding, Chariots Of Fire is one of the glories of British cinema, and now’s your chance if you’ve never seen it on the silver screen.
Hudson’s direction is superb, as are Colin Welland’s Oscar-winning screenplay, the Vangelis score and all the performances.
The only person who did not emerge with his reputation enhanced was executive producer Dodi Fayed, then a little-known playboy who had been set up in the movie business by his father, Mohammed Al Fayed. For offering cocaine to the cast he was thrown off the set by the film’s producer, David Puttnam, who also described him as ‘one of the laziest human beings’ he had ever met.
Ian Charleson as triumphant Eric Liddell
Nobody wants to die – but when they do, it’s your job to find out who did ’em in…
by Peter Hoskin for The Daily Mail
Nobody Wants To Die (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £17.99)
Verdict: Frictionless future-noir
Nobody wants to die. Except they do die — quite a lot — in this rainy, neon-lit future-noir. It’s your job, as the laconic detective James, to solve a series of murders, all while getting to the bottom of a conspiracy and coming to terms with your own past. It’s proper grisly work, but somebody’s got to do it.
If that already puts you in mind of the movie Blade Runner — another rainy, neon-lit future-noir featuring a laconic detective — then you’re not far off.
Even with its big sci-fi ideas, such as people being able to switch bodies at will, Nobody Wants To Die is hardly an original creation.
It riffs on everything from the movies of the 1950s to the mechanics of the Arkham games.
Still, it does so with tremendous style. This is an extraordinary looking game — in everything from its vertiginous cityscapes to the facial tics of its characters.
And its script is smart enough to not just pay homage to its inspirations but also, sometimes, poke fun at them.
The main problem is the gameplay itself. Once you get to grips with James’s various gizmos for manipulating crime scenes — rewinding time, highlighting evidence, that sort of thing — you’ll find that solving these mysteries is rather too straightforward. The game has a tendency to spell everything out with insistent little prompts and hints.
So you end up feeling less like a supercool detective and more like a frustrated errand boy; doing what you’re told until the whole thing ends after five or six hours.
Like that fifth bourbon in the local dive bar, this one goes down a little too easily.