IRON MAN 2

The original Iron Man film, released in back in 2008, formed a pretty solid one-two punch with The Dark Knight. Together they reasserted the Superhero movie as a critically viable and commercially successful enterprise. Yet, Iron Man differed significantly in terms of mood from Nolan’s Batman offering.  The Dark Knight was about as broody as a fertility clinic and as cheerful as a morgue, Favreau’s Iron Man attempted to capture the comic’s sense of fun. In terms of mood, it’s much closer to Raimi’s Spiderman films. This was a breath of fresh air for critics who were growing tired of these grandiose and ‘worthy’ Superhero origin stories that lock onto a serious mood from the very first scene and rarely relent for a smile throughout.

The film had a naturalistic feel uncommon to superhero flicks and the dialogue was zippy and spontaneous. The whole production felt as fresh as a squirt of Febreeze. It was also a fantastic and deserved success which, of course, necessitated a sequel. As is often the case with follow-up efforts, Iron Man 2 aims for the sky, but is weighed down by a lack of focus, a cocktail of contrary moods and a general lack of bonhomie. If I could ask Iron Man 2 one question, it would be this: Why so serious?

The film begins with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) announcing his identity as Iron Man to the press. Across the world in Russia, Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) mourning the recent death of his father regards the announcement with interest and begins work on constructing similar technology. His plan is to use the technology to destroy Tony Stark – the son of the man he holds directly responsible for his father’s undeserved life of abject poverty. You may think that the whole father-son dichotomy that underlies Tony’s Russian rivalry would be meaty enough to fill a film. Unfortunately, Iron Man 2 has sequelitus and chooses instead to pull in about 3-4 different directions.

Where do you start? There’s the complicated relationship between Tony Stark and the long suffering Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) which isn't ever granted any great importance. Whilst the first film was a good showcase for the chemistry between Downey Jr. and Paltrow, the flair and energy that once existed between them seems spent. Sure there’s still the snappy dialogue, but it seems less witty and dynamic than before. Tony Stark also has to contend with his own mortality – the palladium core in his chest that keeps him alive is slowly poisoning his body and there is seemingly nothing he can do to stop it. Such realisations can be difficult on a man, and Stark is led down a dark path for much of the film – he starts drinking, alienating his friends and self-sabotaging his business. It’s a far-cry from the self-aware, it’s-nonsense-but-you-love-it tone of the first film. It’s a shame that this path doesn’t really go anywhere and that all these different strands are resolved with such ease. Iron Man 2 is a bit of a mood roulette – you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get next.

Tony also has to contend with a rivalry between himself and a rival defence contractor Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell – who looks like he’s having a good time throughout – at least someone is) that is threatening to bubble over into violence. All this and I haven’t even mentioned Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson’s roles in the film. I do so for good reason – they are almost entirely superfluous – they are here to service The Avengers, Marvel’s next big superhero project. It’s almost as though Favreau were told that he had to include these two characters and made no real effort to ingratiate them into Iron Man 2’s wider story. Despite this, Scarlett Johansson is responsible for one of the films better scenes. Late on in the film, she dons a skin-tight black catsuit, infiltrates Justin Hammer’s compound and in doing so kicks all kinds of ass. It’s a stand-out scene because for once, it’s action that doesn’t merely involve robots hitting each other.  

RED

Director Robert Schwentke was the man who brought us the sketchy, overly coy adaptation of The Time Traveller’s Wife. As such, the gun-toting Red is something of a change of pace for him. Based, apparently on a graphic novel of the same name by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner – although it could have just as easily been based on an early draft of Stallone’s script for The Expendables – Red sees a group of elderly James Bond types band together to prevent their own extermination. It’s all an excuse to see the likes of Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich brandishing automatic weapons, quipping nifty one-liners and smashing heads. And why not? We love to see actors trying something a little out of their comfort zone and we as a nation sure as heck love watching action films, so the likes of Red and The Expendables end up being almost inevitable. Unfortunately, Red isn’t half as much fun as its premise.

By all rights Bruce Willis is now the king of aging tough guys, so naturally he’s the star of this film. He still looks and acts the part with ease and emits sass with every breath. Willis plays Frank Moses (a much better name than Sly’s Barney Ross in The Expendables) a retired former C.I.A. black ops agent, who spends his days flirting with Sarah (Mary Louise Parker - the star of Weeds) a phone operator for a pension’s office in Kansas City. When Willis discovers that there are people who want him dead, any way anyhow, he heads to Kansas City and fearing for Sarah’s life, kidnaps her in order to keep her safe. Frank soon discovers that the C.I.A are hunting down everybody connected with a secret mission that occurred in Guatemala during 1981. Thus ensues is a whistle-stop tour across the United States as Frank gets in touch with his old contacts and tries to get to the bottom of the attempt on their lives.

The plot’s almost as superfluous as the plot for The Expendables and it’s even more episodic. If you know the cast list for the film, you’ll sit there checking off the appearance of each and every big name. Once they’ve established Bruce Willis as Frank Moses, you prepare yourself for the next star, and so on and so forth. It’s circular, lifeless and uninspired stuff. Why when everything is being forced so neatly into the proceedings and each character is given their own fair amount of screen time does the whole thing feel so uncomfortable? The screenplay seems to lack a sense of inspiration or improvisation that could set it apart from the slew of action movies that work their way into cinemas every year.

It just goes to show, it’s not enough to have an all-star cast and expect them to do all the work. This film may have a good box office, but will it remain in our memories for long? All the big players acquit themselves well, but they do so within such formulaic and predictable confines as to make the whole thing null and void. What’s the sense in getting all these stars together for a movie with a silly premise if you’re not even going to have any fun with it? As it is, it’s just one contrivance piled on another, which amounts to little and grows stale very quick. When you’re reaching the half-way mark of the film and you start thinking, “well, that’s everybody on the cast list except Helen Mirren, so I guess we’ll see her next”, you know something’s gone wrong.

It’s not helped by interspersing the action with clunky CGI. At one stage a car chase occurs between Frank Moses and the C.I.A agent sent out to terminate him (Karl Urban). Moses pulls on the handbrake, steps out of his car as it completes a 360 and ambles away to avoid the backside of the vehicle before it impacts with his torso. This could have been a neat little stunt, but the movement of the car is so obviously done with CGI and you can tell the whole thing was done with absolutely no risk to Bruce’s person. That kind of sucks the whole enjoyment out of the affair and renders any chance of excitement negligible. Later in the film, Morgan Freeman ties up the man he believes to be behind the assassination attempts on their lives and slaps him across the face. Am I being paranoid or was this slap actually computer generated? The slap lacked any sense of ‘meat’ – just like the film itself. The whole thing is one big missed opportunity and yet it’s difficult to get worked up about a film like Red. The truth is, I’m not angry about its failings, I’m just disappointed.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE)

This film starts off by paying its dues to a number of horror movie conventions. We are introduced to two dotty, sexed-up American ladies road-tripping through Germany. As is often the way when Americans venture into foreign climbs, their car receives a flat tyre and they find themselves hobbling on their high-heels through woodland in the dead-of-night. It’s when they make their way through the woods and find Dr. Heiter’s house of residence that things start to get a little strange. Not that director Tommy Six’s vision of Germany isn’t a little perplexing from the get go. When the two girls are left stranded by their flat tyre, another car pulls up next to them, rolls down its window and reveals a rotund, heavily-perspiring German looking to take advantage of the hapless duo. The only normal Germans we see during the course of the entire film are two policemen introduced towards the end of the film and even they are characterised by a kind of bumbling inadequacy. 

Not that our two American representatives fair much better – they are loud, screechy and generally annoying who inspire no sympathy whatsoever. They aren’t helped by some horrendously clunky dialogue (sample: “There’s no signal” – “What? There’s always a signal!”). It comes as something of a relief when at the films midpoint, the two girls find their mouths clamped to the back-end of another human being thus removing their ability to talk. This is all part of Dr Heiter’s (played by the sinister Dieter Laser) twisted design. He seeks to create a self-sustaining human Siamese-triplet – or as it comes to be known the Human Centipede. The mechanisms and the manner in which these humans connect to one another are almost too horrible to describe, but if you’ve seen the trailer or heard any rumblings about this film, you’ll likely already know about it. There are times during the course of this movie that you’ll need an iron stomach just to persist with this film’s brutal distastefulness. Cinema-goers have been subject to toilet humour for some time now (thanks Adam Sandler) but now it seems we have to be subject to toilet horror too?

The question of whether this is something that we as an audience want to see is somewhat null and void (although the film survived only on the basis of a strong word of mouth campaign – “did you hear about the film where a crazy doctor sews together three human beings by their...”). It’s void because The Human Caterpillar is a badly put together film. Tommy Six, whilst making a brave decision to persist in the creation of this film and not to water down the central plot-conceit delivers a rather conventional film. The camerawork is your typical made-for-TV kind of fare (Six has his roots in Dutch television). The characters are dull and are only there to serve the plot. There’s no real sense of location – the film is set in Germany only because it allows Six to draw from and make comparisons to the various atrocities the Nazis committed revolving around experimenting on humans.

 In some respects this film is critic-proof. There will always be an audience for this film, because it’s so damn niche. There’s just nothing out there that plays on such a uniquely, stomach-churning and plain revolting level. The trouble is that viewers may arrive at this film expecting it to be equally as provocative and as unique as its premise and it really isn’t. There will be very few repeat-viewings of this film. Maybe a more talented cast and crew could create something equally distasteful yet exponentially more watchable. I can say now that I don’t think this will be the case with The Human Centipede II (The Final Sequence).

BURIED

There’s a scene in Kill Bill 2 where ‘The Bride’ is buried alive. It's tense, exciting and visually appealing and yet the possibility that such a sequence could be stretched to feature-film length never hit me. This brings us to Buried, a film with a neat, if not entirely unprecedented premise. Yet, I’m not sure if this kind of thing has ever been done in such a visceral, unrelenting and uncomfortable fashion. Cinema at its best should transport us away from our own life - be it to a more wonderful world, or, as in the case of Buried to a brutal, nightmarish reality. Indeed watching Buried in the darkness of the cinema as I writhed about uncomfortably in my chair, I had the unsettling sensation that the walls were closing in on me and the air was becoming steadily thicker. Don’t be surprised if when you leave your seat at the end of the movie you find yourself praising some higher power for simply having the ability to get up and leave. Buried is the kind of film that grips you right from the start and doesn’t let go until like its protagonist, you have been shed of all hope.

Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) an American contractor working as a truck-driver in Iraq awakens in complete darkness. Like Paul, we see nothing and can hear only the sound of his increasingly frantic breath as he scrabbles around in the darkness realising the full horror of his situation. He is buried some distance under the ground (though not so deep that he has no phone signal) in a wooden coffin with only a lighter, a torch that doesn’t work particularly well, a couple of glow sticks, a knife, a flask of alcohol and most importantly – a mobile phone. Unlike The Bride, Paul cannot focus all his energy into a punch and break his way out of the coffin. If you haven’t seen the trailer or heard anything about this film beforehand, all you need to know is that Buried is 94 minutes long and that all 94 minutes occur inside the coffin. There need be no further plot analysis – indeed to find out any more may impair your enjoyment of the film.

Buried, like any film of its ilk owes a debt of gratitude towards Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which Jimmy Stewart’s broken leg keeps him confined to the rear room of his house until the end of the film. Despite having placed these restrictions on the scope of the film (an experiment he would later repeat with Rope) Hitchcock was able to engineer what might be his most suspenseful film. Three years later audiences saw and loved 12 Angry Men, which was set solely in a jury room as the titular men attempt to argue out a verdict for a particularly tricky murder case. In recent years we’ve had Flightplan, Panic Room, Devil and best of all, little seen Spanish thriller Fermat’s Room, all of which keep their protagonists trapped in a fixed location. However, the key point of comparison for this film is 2002’s Phone Booth – an intriguing concept which saw its star Colin Farrell, held against his will inside a telephone booth as he attempted to negotiate his escape without being shot down by the sniper surveilling him.

Buried and Phone Booth share a few things in common. They are both, primarily, star-vehicles. It was in Phone Booth that Colin Farrell first proved he had the potential to be a decent actor. However, more impressive still is Ryan Reynold’s performance in Buried. What’s incredible about the performance is the surprising range that Reynold’s is able to showcase despite extremely limiting extraneous circumstances. Running the full emotional gauntlet without a psychological gambit left unexplored Reynold’s proves here that there’s a future for him in the movies that lies outside playing the Romantic lead in the latest dreary Hollywood rom-com.

Moreover, both Buried and Phone Booth confine their characters and force them to use the phone to attempt to save their lives. Where Buried differs from Phone Booth and a key reason why it is a significantly better film lies in the adept directorial handiwork of Rodrigo Cortés. His camerawork in particular deserves some plaudits – there isn’t an inch of the coffin left unscathed. By fixing the location and having only one real character on screen for the course of the whole film, the director always runs the risk of boring the audience. I can happily confess that I wasn’t bored once; I was too busy sharing in Paul’s fear, hope and desperation. This kind of sustained suspense is a real rarity. Just don't be fooled into thinking that the premise of this film isn't weighty enough to support it's 94-minute running time.

THE TOWN

First up, some congratulations must be offered to Mr. Affleck for finding this year's most boring film title and then having the tenacity to stick with it. Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort was originally shipped to theatres under the code name ‘Criminal Intent’. Now that’s a pretty bad name, but it’s got nothing on The Town - a real snooze-fest of a title that fails to provoke any feeling whatsoever. Given The Town’s popularity, it’s possible that we’ll see an onslaught of similarly adventurous movie titles – perhaps ‘The Field’ or ‘The Quarry’ or even ‘The House’ (even in the process of throwing these titles out there I am reminded that there are films in existence with names such as The River, The Village and The Cottage). The Town is a movie that deserves a better title. It’s a couple of notches above your average heist movie and will provide further positive momentum for Ben Affleck’s Hollywood reappraisal.

Affleck’s stock fell with a series of films including Daredevil, Gigli, Paycheck and Jersey Girl - a period of time where every film choice represented another nomination for The Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor. His rehabilitation began with a critically lauded performance in Hollywoodland before Affleck made a wise decision to get behind the camera and start directing. His first directorial effort was the good but not without its problems Gone Baby Gone where he proved that he had a good directorial eye and was more than capable of bringing the Boston streets to life. His follow-up directorial endeavour is The Town, so called because it is a non-judgemental rendering of Boston’s bank-robbery capital ‘Charlestown’ and the folks that make their lives there.

The film echoes another revered, august Boston heist-flick, The Friend’s of Eddie Coyle in its opening heist sequence, which also does a good job setting the mood. Charged without being explosive, fast-paced, smartly edited it also manages to tell us everything we need to know about all its primary characters. Doug MacRay (Affleck) the crew’s leader is a tough and experienced criminal who is disheartened by the path of his life. James “Jem” Coughlin (Jeremy Remmer) on the other hand is a ruthless career-criminal whose fate has ‘hardened’ – removed his sense of mercy and turned him into a volatile monster, keen only to avoid being ‘jammed up’. Their Heist is derailed by Bank Manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) who manages to set off the silent alarm using the nub of her toe. Fleeing from the cops, Doug and Jem take Claire hostage and make their getaway. It is here that Affleck injects a little visual poetry into what is otherwise a workaday thriller: we see a blindfolded Hall stumble her way down a beach, her hair blowing in the wind, told as she is to ‘walk until you feel the water on your toes”.

When they find out that Claire is a Charlestown local the MacRay crew is left paralysed with the fear that they may run into each other once more and that she may be able to identify them to the FBI. Jem, all distorted temperament offers to deal with things his way, but Doug wants to try and settle things without violence. He seeks her out in a Laundromat, charms her and before long the two are lovers. Soon enough, Doug wants nothing more than to get away from Charlestown and start a new life with Claire, but his ties to his old life style hold him back at every turn.

There has been something of a tendency to overstate the extent to which The Town is a success. If anything it’s about 20 minutes too long and the story never really pulls itself above your general Heist-movie fare. FBI Agent Frawley (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) is there only to push the plot forward (mostly through the use of clichéd dialogue) and to represent an outside threat to MacRay’s crew. Thankfully, Affleck, Remmer and Hall do get an opportunity to flex their acting chops by playing trapped, conflicted and interesting characters. The scene that I felt worked best in the context of the film is the only scene in the film to include all three actors working with each other face-to-face. Although the MacRay crew wore masks during the bank-robbery, Claire was able to discern the ‘fighting-Irish’ tattoo on the back of Jem’s neck. When Jem discovers that Doug and Claire are seeing each other he joins them for lunch in order to put the spooks into Doug. It’s the viewer who is left reeling though, as he tries desperately to influence the proceedings and ensure that Jem doesn’t present Claire with a chance to catch sight of his tattoo. The combination of being more knowledgable than the characters on screen, yet so powerless can have quite the effect on a viewer.

It's in moments like this where the film works best. As it is however, there’s a little too much expository dialogue and moments where the film begins to sag (Affleck’s character background – the whole thing with his parents, began to drag for me). There are three main action sequences which provide the film with a certain degree of impetus and keep the audience interested in the proceedings. It is Affleck’s camerawork in combination with an editor who gives his images a chance to settle before cutting that provides the action with a sense of lasting realism (which has in turn caused some critics to recall the street shootouts in Heat). So there it is. Despite The Town’s uneven nature, it’s easy to see why critics are eating this stuff up – it’s significantly better than much of this summer’s more action-packed cinematic offerings, be it Salt, Knight & Day or Predators. When it works, The Town is undeniably great, but I was left with the feeling that there is better to come from Affleck whose ability as an actor seems to improve year by year and his ability behind the camera had left us a lot to be excited about.

PLEASE GIVE

As an exercise in minimalist story-telling Please Give can frustrate in its lack of dynamism and impress in its focus in equal measure. Director Nicole Holofcener has made her name by constructing female-centric, stripped down films – being slight on plot allows a focus on character that a lot of movies simply cannot offer. Please Give is a paradigm example of this shift away from a focus on the plot and towards the characters. If it’s about anything, it is about the way that these individuals from different circumstances bump heads, fall out and learn to forgive each other. I understand that for some this may not sound overly appealing. This is not a film designed to please hyperactive or impatient cinema-goers who enjoy a complex plot. Those who are willing to give this film a chance, however, will discover an endearingly intelligent character piece.

Even without a plot to speak of, there must still be a framework or a structure in which these characters operate. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt) are a married couple who earn their living selling on furniture that they buy from estate sales. They seek to expand their New York living space by purchasing the apartment adjacent to theirs. Unfortunately for them, they can’t knock down the walls and create an extension until its current occupant, the elderly and cantankerous Andra (Ann Guilbert) passes on. Andra has two granddaughters who often frequent the apartment – these two women could not be any more different from each other. Rebecca (played by Rebbeca Hall) shoulders dutifully most of the care-responsibilities, whilst Mary is too self-obsessed and too heart-broken to show anything but distain for their Grandma’s suffering. The drama revolves mostly around the collision of these two families and the individuals within them with their own unique neuroses.

The audience is left to watch these characters bound blindly over their psychological pitfalls and attempt to come to terms with their position in the world. The film revolves around an overwhelming sense of white liberal guilt - some characters give too much of themselves to others, whilst others take too much with little to offer in return. This inbalance is the motivation behind almost every act and is the only real driving force that moves the story forwards. These characters must learn to accept their role in life and attempt to establish a happy equilibrium in which their relationship with the world at large is one of symbiosis rather than being parasitic in nature. Whilst it’s clear almost from the get-go that Holofcener has an ear for witty, yet realistic dialogue, it’s also clear that she’s not afraid to let things get downright awkward. See the scene where Rebecca is asked out by the grandson of her grandma’s friend. Or the excruciating scene where Mary asks Kate to explain to Andra what she plans to do with her apartment once she has passed on.

Because this film is character-centric and its characters have delightful moments of wit and because of its New York setting, some critics have been quick to compare Please Give to the works of Woody Allen. Whilst there are some clear points of comparison – Holofcener certainly explores her characters neuroses with the same degree of obsession that Allen often adopts – I don’t think the correlation is completely on the money. Holofcener’s characters have a sense of realism that often lacks from Allen’s verbose-caricatures. Whilst Allen’s dialogue often provokes uncontrollable laughter, the funniest moments in Please Give will evoke at most a titter. This should not necessarily count against the film, which seems rooted in a reality that Allen’s films often never quite manage to capture. By dialling back the comedic elements and not going for simple laughs, the film appears at once much more empathetic and touching. These are recognisable character archetypes dealing with recognisable character defects, be it middle-class liberal guilt, lust or jealousy.

Importantly, there’s not a bad performance in the film. You can’t help but feel that the game here is so loosely constructed and held together that if just one player were to drop the ball, the whole thing would fall apart. The two stand-out performances come from Holofcener mainstay Catherine Keener and relative newcomer Rebecca Hall. Keener, at this stage has the market in respect of middle-aged neurotic but somehow endearing women pretty much pinned down. It’s an emotionally nuanced performance; she plays Kate as if she is both entirely sure of herself and contradictorily completely out of place in the hustle and bustle of modern life. Rebecca Hall who has made a name for herself in The Town and (speaking of Woody Allen) 2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona re-asserts herself as one of cinema’s brightest up and coming actresses. It’s a performance of quiet desperation that is touching without ever becoming cloying. She is, perhaps, the beating heart of the film – all these characters are either looking to give something back to the world or to have somebody give something back to them and nobody typifies this dynamic better than Hall’s tired, emotionally-ensconced Rebecca.

GOOD WILL HUNTING

This film gets by on the strength of its script. Sure Gus Van Sant is pulling the strings and drawing good performances out of his actors, but it’s the script that’s the real star. The script is so good that when the film was first released, way back in 1997 there was something of a squabble over who really wrote what. There were accusations that William Goldman - who only ever provided a couple of pointers - was a ghostwriter who completed the script. Goldman himself refutes any allegations of the kind, saying “I would love to say that I wrote it. Here is the truth. In my obit it will say that I wrote it. People don't want to think those two cute guys wrote it”. Those cute guys are also this movie’s stars – Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

Whilst there’s little doubt that this is their script, you can understand why this agnosticism might creep in. It evokes a kind of world-weariness, a world of talent spurned where frustrated, violent and psychologically damaged characters seek or avoid their purpose. Essentially, it comes across as the work of a seasoned pro. How could somebody who wrote this want to be a part of something as messy as Pearl Harbour (2001)? Despite a couple of slip-ups Damon and Affleck have proved themselves to be two of the most intelligent and talented people at work in the film industry right now – Matt Damon in his acting choices, Affleck mostly in his choices behind the camera (Gone Baby Gone and The Town). So thirteen years later, it’s not so surprising: two enterprising and talented kids write a superb script - no big deal.

Matt Damon plays Will Hunting, a young prodigy with a penchant for solving the most complex of maths problems with the least possible application. He is a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his clandestine problem-solving soon lands him under the watchful eye of Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård) a prize winning mathematician. Like any good Bostonian, Will frequents bars during the day with his buddy Chuckie Sullivan (Ben Affleck) watches minor league baseball games and drives around looking for trouble. As a child of abuse Will’s hatred has slowly shifted into a subconscious self-loathing which permeates through his every action. He is quick to violence, he doesn’t want to let anybody into his life – including his girlfriend Skylar (Minnie Driver) and worst of all he refuses to acknowledge his full potential. Professor Lambeau in an attempt to keep Will out of prison has him assigned a psychologist. This man, Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) knows something about wasted talent and a tough upbringing. Gradually he is able to break down Will’s defences and the two of them become friends of a sort.

That’s a sketchy plot outline – it’s a simple coming of age story. More so than in many a Bildungsroman does location play an important role in Good Will Hunting. Surprisingly, given that this is the work of two Bostonians, Boston is presented as an oppressive, dream crippling industrial sepulchre. At the end of the film any character that has a hope for the future is seen getting out of Boston. Will and Skylar escape Boston for California and Sean heads out on a prolonged vacation to India, China and Baltimore. It takes some level of maturity to paint the place you love in this kind of light. It’s a fine marker of the success of this film that it adeptly communicates both why one would want to live a life of this kind and why one would be so keen to get away.

Some viewers have a problem with the bad language in this film. I, on the other hand, barely noticed it. This can only be due to the script’s natural flow: the language offers a kind of poetic realism; the conversation is so smooth and unforced that it moves the plot forward without ever drawing attention to itself. Sure, there are great lines in here but they don’t really draw attention to themselves (except, perhaps ‘how do you like those apples’). The bad language didn’t strike me as gratuitous, this is how young men around the world speak, it is no different in Boston than it is in London. We are all, more and more in the process of developing potty-mouths – and we have been for a long time.

The performances are pretty much routinely great. Matt Damon pulls off something of a coup in creating a believable scarred genius. He’s equally good in his reflexive moments as he is in his more explosive, violent moments. Robin Williams gives his role an effortless pathos – the kind he is capable of bringing to a character when he challenges himself to step out of his comfort zone.

Re-watching Good Will Hunting I was worried that Skylar, pretty much the only important living female character would turn out to be underwritten or underdeveloped. I was wrong however – consider the fantastic and surprisingly tense scene where she first meets Will’s friends. In the process of telling a joke she puts on a mock Irish accent and we have no idea how Will’s friends, usually so quick to anger, will react. It’s a relief when they all break into laughter at the punchline. Skylar is both intelligent and ignorant; she is lovable without being perfect. We can understand why Will would follow her to California. This is endemic of pretty much every aspect of this film, there’s not a motive or impulse left unaccounted for – this is sharp, well structured and well acted stuff. It’s also the product of two cute guys, believe it or not.