How To Train Your Dragon

While Dreamworks’ Shrek franchise continues to earn more money with each inferior addition to its series, the studio’s animation filmmakers are showing signs in other areas that they may yet be able to rival Pixar in the quality stakes. Last year their Monsters vs. Aliens was laugh-out-loud hilarious and made great use of imaginative characters, and How To Train Your Dragon is even better. It’s a really well told story full of heart, action and comedy and it’s refreshingly free of the pop-culture in-jokes that have so often been Dreamworks’ lazy standby.

Based on a novel by Cressida Cowell, the film centres on Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), a clumsy teenage Viking whose tribe lives a perilous existence in the village of Berk, perched on a rocky outcrop in the middle of the sea and continually under attack from vicious dragons. Hiccup excels at inventing but is useless with an axe, and his father Stoic (Gerard Butler), head of the tribe and also Berk’s premier dragon-slayer, is resigned to the fact that his son will never follow him into battle. When Hiccup amazingly succeeds in shooting down a dragon with one of his inventions he determines to secretly kill it and prove his worth as a warrior. But when he finds the trapped dragon he discovers not only that he can’t bring himself to kill it, but that the dragons may actually be much more friendly than the tribe believes.

The story follows the well-worn ‘young innocent secretly befriends the enemy’ formula with all the plot-turns you would expect, but filmmakers Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders tell it without irony, prioritising strong characterisation, and the film is genuinely engaging and moving as a result. Added to this they create some thrilling flying sequences and an intense action finale, representing arguably the best use of new-style 3D in animation yet.
  
The film also features great voice acting, with Gerard Butler in particular giving his most recognisably human performance in years as Stoic. He was clearly born to play warriors, and not much else!

How To Train Your Dragon is out now.

The Bounty Hunter (futuremovies.co.uk)

Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler have an interesting track record between them. They’ve both excelled in their respective fields – she as a brilliant TV comedy actress, he as a powerfully manly leading man – and swiftly descended to churning out awful romantic comedies. Neither has been in a great movie for a good few years; is The Bounty Hunter the one to break that downward trend? You probably won’t be surprised to read that no, it most certainly is not.

The story begins with Jennifer Aniston’s ace reporter Nicole getting a whiff of a possible story from a reported suicide case. In her haste to follow up a lead she skips a bail hearing for a petty automobile incident and ends up, unbeknownst to her, on the wrong side of the law. As chance would have it, Nicole’s ex-husband Milo (Gerard Butler), drunken former cop and bounty hunter for hire, is assigned to apprehend her. Milo jumps at the chance to escape his substantial gambling debts and simultaneously get one up on Nicole, but his simple plan for an easy payday is scuppered as soon as he finds her.

Nicole has no intention of going to prison, and soon convinces Milo that they could make more money by going gambling together, but neither of them have yet realised the more pressing issue, that Nicole’s investigations have made her the target of several shady criminals. If this wasn’t bad enough, Milo’s creditors are equally intent on doing him some damage for non-payment. Is it possible that in the middle of all this craziness the bitterly feuding ex-couple could find themselves back in the arms of love once more? Well, you already know the answer to that one.

This is premium-grade convoluted Hollywood rubbish, but it had the potential, in the right hands - I’m thinking Soderbergh or Spielberg - to make for a great movie caper. Unfortunately the right hands weren’t available, and Hitch director Andy Tennant makes an absolute pig’s ear of the whole thing. This type of multi-stranded narrative requires deft pacing and editing to ensure it is balanced and running smoothly, but here every scene feels as if it’s been thrown on to the screen with no attempt at all to integrate it into a coherent story.

Aniston’s comic talents are thoroughly wasted in Nicole, a character without one notable feature and zero lines of memorable dialogue. The ‘jokes’ that centre on her character mostly focus on the fact that she has breasts (shocker!), and there is one stupidly misjudged moment when a rather average looking woman turns her nose up at the suggestion that Aniston’s character used to be a model. Butler fares marginally better, getting a few funny lines and releasing an endearingly gutteral growlish chuckle every now and then. They don’t fit together onscreen though, and never convince as a couple who have been married. When they finally kiss the moment has all the fizz of three-week old Coke.

The overwhelming impression is that this must be a severely compromised and recut version of writer Sarah Thorp’s original script (at least I hope so, for her sake). Support characters pop up and then disappear unannounced, plot threads are left hanging and the main characters behave schizophrenically, their motivations and affections shifting inexplicably from one scene to the next. The police corruption plot-strand is so badly chopped up that at the end we get a hilarious Scooby Doo-style exposition scene shoehorned in to tie things up. It’s as if Tennant was in the editing room and suddenly noticed that even attentive viewers would be a little puzzled as to how events were resolved.

If you want to see this kind of story done with all the tension, humour and sizzling-hot chemistry it deserves, watch Out of Sight featuring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez at their best. If you’re happy to settle for whatever half-hearted guff Hollywood decides to push your way, go and see The Bounty Hunter.

4/10

On general release now. This review first published on futuremovies.co.uk.

Law Abiding Citizen (futuremovies.co.uk)

This slab of big, dumb, glossy pap has an interesting idea at its core. The innocent man wronged is a movie mainstay, and we’ve seen his kind battling against the odds for some kind of personal justice time and again. But what if, unlike Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, or Tom Cruise in Minority Report, the wronged man lost his own sense of right and wrong somewhere along the way, and became an amoral monster, driven to mete out disproportionate measures of wrath to anyone and everyone? If it were done well, that could be a pretty terrifying movie. If it were done badly, it would be Law Abiding Citizen.

The film positively glistens with stupidity from its opening moments. If director F. Gary Gray’s lack of interest in believable characters isn’t obvious from the speed with which Gerard Butler’s motivation is supposedly established, it becomes unmissable after Jamie Foxx’s lawyer appears on the scene, making some ridiculous and irrational choices that conveniently fuel Butler’s growing sense of injustice. Cut to 10 years later and Butler’s had time to set up so many elaborate ways of killing people that even Saw’s Jigsaw would stand up and applaud.

Granted, there is a certain amount of mindless fun to be had with this kind of film. I enjoy seeing Butler get his maniacal grimace on and deliver lines like “I’ll kill everyone… it’s gonna be biblical” as much as the next Spartan. But when Viola Davis, who gave a jaw-dropping, Oscar-nominated single-scene performance in last year’s Doubt, is so inexcusably wasted by a director as she is here, then we are dealing with something much more dangerous than a mere guilty pleasure. This is an all-out assault on decent cinema.

You can actually feel yourself losing intelligence as Law Abiding Citizen moves interminably towards its meaningless conclusion, and my advice, if you have the misfortune to end up in a theatre where it's playing, is get out while you can. Avoid this drivel at all costs.

2/10

Law Abiding Citizen is in UK cinemas from 27th November. This review first appeared on futuremovies.co.uk.