Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This is the first of what was a hoped for franchise starring Tom Cruise.   To start on a positive note the plot to this film (based on a Lee Child novel of course) is a good one.   We start off by seeing a sniper kill several apparently random people; and then he is identified and arrested  very easily (too easily?). The alleged sniper, James Barr, wants his defence team to find Jack Reacher.  This is usually quite a challenge but surprisingly the elusive Reacher then turns up.  He has a personal interest in Barr, an ex-army sniper who evaded justice out in Iraq for a crime he committed, a wrong which Jack wants very much to right. So it's a strange turn of events that then Jack takes on the job of assisting the defence by reviewing the case against Barr, and would you believe it, Barr's been set up?  But why? Reacher's appeal as a character is that besides being a super-effective fighting machine he is also a super-smart investigator, and it's go...

I am always hesitant to disagree with Wikipedia but I am not convinced that this film is a Revisionist Western.  Take out a lot of the violence and what is left would not look that much out of place in the 1950s, and indeed the story has echoes of two beloved classics of that era, ‘High Noon’ and ‘Shane’. Certainly the underwhelming opening scenes feel very traditional as we are introduced to ‘Boss’ (Robert Duvall) and his main hired hand Charley (Kevin Costner, who also directs). Boss is an “open range cattleman driving a herd cross country”, again according to Wikipedia, although a minor disappointment is that we don’t get to see much of the herd in action.  Boss and his three hired hands seem to spend all their time sittting around at their wagon, with n ever a steer in sight. Things start to pick up when we meet the main villain, Baxter, an uncouth Irish immigrant and rancher who controls the local town.  Baxter is played by Michael Gambon, which is a surprising casti...

This film about a German plot to kidnap Churchill bears some resemblance to an earlier and superior wartime film 'Went The Day Well' in that in both films German soldiers take over a stereotypical English village. This film however suffers from two fundamental problems. The first is that (spoiler alert) we know the plot is not going to succeed.  This problem is further compounded by the fact that the German mission starts to unravel surprisingly early in proceedings. The second problem is that we see things from the point of view of the Germans, and are therefore meant to sympathise with them. To get around this the film does everything possible to stress that these Germans are ‘good Nazis’.   They behave very politely to the villagers, and the only people they kill are US soldiers rather than British, and then only in self-defence. Because the Germans are so nice, and are doomed to fail, there is very little tension.  The action sequences therefore don't carry much ...