Archive 1997-2016
Dave Lizewski wonders why, in the “real” world of his movie, no-one has donned a superhero mask to defend the innocent from Manhattan’s strangely brazen and abundant muggers, mafiosos, and other criminal types.
Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers begins with a rousing musical number. But as a slightly hassled spectator who ran up the back stairs in order to catch the beginning of the first number, the first thing I noticed was that the acoustics favoured the band’s sound rather than the singers.
In a mythical Viking universe, one in which brave warriors in horned helmets speak with accents more suited to Scottish pub-hopping than Scandinavian military raids, there is a town called Berk home to a slight, self-absorbed and altogether different boy named Hiccup.
It’s always a bad sign when a movie starts with a lame voice-over (Transformers, anyone?). It’s even worse when the film is described as a cinematic “game-changer” – the same term used to tout Avatar – for the devastating failure of its conversion to 3D format after being filmed as a convention 2D movie. But even in two classic dimensions, there is plenty here to gripe about.