Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

I'm well into the swords-and-sandals genre so I had a good time with this sequel. And why not? It's got a lot of spectacle and a great cast - Paul Mescal! Denzel Washington! Pedro Pascal!  Matt Lucas!   But of course it doesn't have the power of the original: it  has a less clean storyline, and though he is a fine actor Paul Mescal is no Russell Crowe. We start off following a very similar path to the original: Hanno (Mescal) is captured by the Romans and wants revenge for the death of his wife, the target of his wrath being General Acasius (Pascal).  He is bought by Macrinus (Washington) who among other things trains slaves to be gladiators. From this point on the story arc thankfully diverges from the original if  not always in a good way.  Spoiler alert: Hanno is really (would you believe it?) Lucius, the son from the first film of Crowe's character, Maximus, and Lucilla, sent away by his mother to protect him from assassins.  Lucius is angry about ...

I had seen this back in the day but couldn’t remember much about it.  Given that it is reckoned to be one of Ridley Scott’s weaker efforts my expectations on a rewatch were low.  Maybe because of this I ended up quite enjoying it. Admittedly it got off to a poor start: a credits sequence over which a forgettable mid-tempo ballad is played.  Very 1989.   This is followed by a sequence the only point of which is to show us that Michael Douglas’s character (NYPD detective Conklin) is a bit of a biker on the side.  Inevitably Chekhov’s Motorcycle returns at the end.  We then get a poorly staged action sequence of sorts in a restaurant. Thankfully from this point on the film picks up as Conklin and his sidekick Vincent (Andy Garcia) are tasked with transporting a member of the Yakuza to Japan.   Scott’s visual flair is in evidence once we get to Tokyo, bringing to mind the Chinatown sequences in ‘Blade Runner’.  This was Douglas’s first role ...

It's a shame this film didn't trouble the box office since it has a lot going for it, not least the unusual setting of medieval France. Naturally, given that Ridley Scott is at the helm, it is visually impressive.  And it has a great cast, headed by Matt Damon, Adam Driver, and Jodie Comer, with even Ben Affleck turning in a decent performance. But I guess the thing that stood out for me was the intriguing story, apparently based on real events, told in three 'chapters', each setting out the truth from the viewpoint of each of the three main characters. This structure has clear echoes of the Japanese classic 'Rashomon', although in that film the different accounts contradict each other on key points, whereas here each account adds more information or gives a different viewpoint, but doesn't materially conflict with either of the other two accounts. For example, in the account of Jean, his response to his wife Marguerite telling him of her rape by Jacques is ...

Anyone coming to this expecting the usual merry japes will be very disappointed. This is a sort of origin story for Robin Hood (played by Russell Crowe), and a rather dour one at that, which starts with him as an archer in King Richard’s army, and it is only at the very end of the film that he has become an outlaw. I don’t think Sherwood Forest is ever mentioned, and the climax of the film is a battle between English and French soldiers on the south coast. During the film Robin gets to pretend to be  Robert of Loxley,  the husband of Lady Marion (Cate Blanchett, great as always), and as such he plays a key role in helping King John defeat a French invasion.  Robin in this version of the legend is even more of a proto-socialist than usual.  He fails in his attempt to get King John to sign a forerunner of the Magna Carta, but by way of compensation the film ends with Robin and Marion setting up some sort of commune in the forest. So a lot of liberties are taken with bo...