Noomi Rapace returns to her role as hacker-detective Lisbeth Salander in The Girl Who Played with Fire.

Credit: supplied

MOVIE REVIEWS (Week of July 9)

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist
Directed by Daniel Alfredson
The first film adapted from Stieg Larsson’s trilogy of novels, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, ultimately proved itself guilty of stranding two top-tier protagonists in a run-of-the-mill mystery. This second installment not only offers viewers an even less compelling thriller but also turns its leads into dreadful bores.

Director Daniel Alfredson’s criminally lax follow-up takes its time getting up and running. Since we’ve last seen them, leather-clad, bisexual hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and intrepid investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) have drifted apart. While Lisbeth intermittently comes out of hiding to call upon her lesbian lover (Yasmine Garbi), Mikael hires on a cub reporter who’s uncovered a sex-trafficking scandal that threatens the corridors of power. When Lisbeth is framed for the young journo’s murder, Mikael endeavours to clear her name.

Whereas Tattoo allowed two disparate characters to find personal redemption through their unlikely partnership, this chapter unwisely keeps Lisbeth and Mikael separated until its final minutes. Unfortunately, neither of these characters is nearly as intriguing when operating in a vacuum. Our investment in them is only further diluted by the fact that they’re forced to share screen time with extraneous, one-dimensional characters, including a dutiful cop (Johan Kylén) and heroic boxer (Paolo Roberto).

At least Roberto’s presence ensures the film has one proper action sequence during which he dukes it out with a cartoonish henchman (Mikael Spreitz). Not that it’s a particularly inspired sparring session, but it offers a brief respite from the film’s resolute solemnity. Given just how seriously this Girl takes itself, viewers should feel free to snicker at its over-the-top climax. Its unintentional silliness is the closest the film ever comes to genuine entertainment. —Curtis Woloschuk

LES HERBES FOLLES

Starring Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier, Anne Cosigny
Directed by Alain Resnais
Directors of the 1950s and ‘60s French New Wave cinema are rightly revered as auteurs of the highest order. It may be akin to filmic blasphemy, then, to say it, but Alain Resnais, an uncontested god in the New Wave pantheon, has directed a dud — a lively and somewhat intriguing dud, but a dud nonetheless.

After Parisienne Marguerite Muir’s (Sabine Azéma) purse is stolen, Georges Palet (André Dussollier) finds her wallet near his car. Theirs is no ordinary meet-cute, however, as Georges is a testy old bugger (maybe even a murderer) whose tenuous connection to Marguerite becomes a full-fledged obsession, thanks mostly to clues he picks up from her wallet’s contents.

Herbes is at its best when it dances with Georges’ troubled past. (A scene wherein he’s questioned by police, for example, is razor-sharp.) But the storyline begins to lose its way when it follows its own unfathomable absurdity. Resnais’ unwieldy pacing derails the action precisely when it shouldn’t — although an omniscient narrator (Edouard Baer, one of the film’s highlights) often manages to get things back on track. Then there’s the befuddling score by Mark Snow, which so closely resembles his previous work on The X-Files that you half expect Mulder and Scully to appear, dubbed in French, to bust Georges.

The 88-year-old Resnais received a lifetime achievement award at Cannes last year when he premiered Herbes at the festival. The French loved the film; English-speaking audiences so far, less so. C’est la vie. —Kaitlin Fontana

DESPICABLE ME

Starring the voices of Steve Carell, Russell Brand, Jason Segel, Julie Andrews
Directed by Pierre Coffin
Every actor yearns for a role that will leave an indelible stamp on cinematic history. In many cases, that character is the villain of the piece. All of which begs the question “Why aren’t there more movies starring villains?” French animation studio Illumination Entertainment does just that with Despicable Me.
Our anti-hero is Gru (Steve Carell), an Easern European not-so evildoer looking for a way to out-bad Bill Gates lookalike Vector (Jason Segel), his nemesis. Gru shoots for the moon (literally) but needs his arch rival’s shrink ray to make it happen. After repeatedly failing to breach Vector’s fortress, Gru adopts three orphan girls to help him gain access and discovers that super-villainy is a cakewalk compared to parenthood.
Despicable Me makes no attempt to be a Pixar clone. There’s no “it looks so real” animation. Here the cartoon characters look like cartoon characters, which adds to the movie’s kooky charm. Aside from a “touching moment” near the end, the story revels in continually upping the silly quotient with broad-ranging humour that will appeal to all ages.
With everything it has already going for it, the voice talent is movie’s proverbial cherry on top. Julie Andrews plays deliciously against type as Gru’s hard-hearted mom, while Jason Segel’s millennium-child villain is both hilarious and frightening. But it is Carell’s charismatic performance as the wonderfully warped and weirdly accented Gru that steals every scene in one of the freshest and funniest animated films to hit screens in a very long time.

PREDATORS

Starring Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace, Alice Braga
Directed by Nimrod Antal
Still stinging from the Alien vs Predator re-branding fiasco, Fox studios had to decide if they would euthanize the Predator franchise or try to reboot it. They opted for the latter, optioning a story writer-director Robert Rodriguez developed back in the ’90’s. For good measure, they also brought him on to produce. In the end, these proved wise choices.
The series’ latest incarnation opens with a disparate collection of eight trained killers — including a mercenary (Adrien Brody), an Israeli sniper (Alice Braga) and a mad doctor (Topher Grace) — wandering about a jungle with no memory of how they got there. They soon realize they’ve been dumped in a galactic game preserve for a canned hunt and they’re not the odds-on favourites. Egos and animosities must be set aside if they want to avoid being stuffed and mounted in some alien’s trophy case.
Director Nimrod Antal aptly captures the spirit of the original Predator from its treacherous tropical backdrop, to the cranky cast of characters, and familiar sound effects and score. More than just a mere copy, Predators boasts a fresh, intriguing storyline, tension you can cut with a knife (and a sword, and a machine gun...), and a near ideal pyrotechnics to gore ratio.  The cast also does the sequel proud.
In a counter-intuitive coup, Adrien Brody easily assumes an action-star mantle as the of the alpha dog of all alpha dogs. The once-willowy Oscar winner backs up his character’s stoic, no-nonsense demeanour with a beefy and buff physique. Against popular wisdom. Grace and co-star Laurence Fishburne threaten to one-up their fellow castmates with wonderfully understated performances — this despite a strong supporting cast that includes Rodriguez regular Danny Trejo as a hit man for the Mexican mob.
A successful mash-up of sci-fi, action, and horror, Predators is everything the original film and its resulting sequels aren’t: a taut, energized, character-driven flick with a wickedly dark sense of humour. —Greg Ursic