Exp4ndables (15, 103 minutes)
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Dumb Money (15, 105 minutes)
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The smartest thing about the new Expendables movie, the fourth in the ever-creakier series, might be the title.
As you can see, they have ingeniously replaced the A with a 4. Apart from that, I’m tempted to say that it’s lament4bly predict4ble stuff.
The last time the Expendables rolled into town, they did so literally. I was at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 when, to promote Expendables 3, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Harrison Ford and co rumbled along the Croisette in a pair of decommissioned Soviet tanks, waving stiffly to the crowd.
The smartest thing about the new Expendables movie, the fourth in the ever-creakier series, might be the title
Everyone there recognised that Libya currently has enough problems without being a cliché in a daft action movie
I recall Ford lowering himself rather gingerly out of one, his single hoop earring an almost perfect demonstration of what you might call artificial hip.
He doesn’t appear in this one; maybe he exhausted himself playing Indiana Jones one last time. Nor does Schwarzenegger.
But Lundgren is back, along with that mighty old trouper Stallone, again playing Barney Ross, superannuated leader of a bunch of craggy-faced mercenaries whose idea of problem-solving is to slaughter everyone in sight and ask questions later.
Barney does things the old-fashioned way. He’s Barney the dinosaur.
Unfortunately, during another kind of barney — spoiler alert! — he meets his maker. This happens during a firefight in a military compound in Libya, and while the filmmakers can hardly be blamed, there was some muttering at Cineworld Leicester Square when the location flashed up on screen.
Dumb Money is much more engaging, a slick account of the financial imbroglio that erupted at the height of the pandemic, involving the video-game retailer GameStop
Director Craig Gillespie treats a serious true story with an appealingly light touch, rather like he did with his own enjoyable 2017 film I, Tonya, and like Adam McKay did in The Big Short (2015)
Everyone there recognised that Libya currently has enough problems without being a cliché in a daft action movie.
Anyway, the story has barely got going and Barney is seemingly dead and buried, with a wrecked aircraft and lots of rocks on top of him. He’s Barney rubble.
So that means someone else taking over the crew and hunting down the bad guy (Iko Uwais) who is not only responsible for Barney’s demise but also — with depressing inevit4bility — has a nuclear device in his clutches that could, yes, kick off World War III.
The natural choice as replacement leader is Barney’s big mate, the tinselly-named SAS veteran Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), but he loses the gig to his on-off girlfriend Gina (Megan Fox), a formidable mercenary in her own right whose mascara and lipstick can survive any battle unscathed.
Gina’s a cosmetic miracle, appointed by the group’s new overall boss (Andy Garcia). He is a shady character with a curious habit of sucking toothpicks while talking, like Kojak with his lollipops for those old enough to remember.
Still taken from the film Dumb Money (2023) starring Nick Offerman and Seth Rogan
Not a merry Christmas at all, Lee is left behind in New Orleans as the nonsense moves to a huge rusty cargo ship somewhere in the Indian Ocean, where the baddie is holed up with his deadly nuclear device and a small army of swarthy thugs.
They, of course, are the film’s true expendables, there only to exclaim ‘Yaaarggh’ or ‘Bleurrrgh’ as they take a bullet to the stomach or a knife to the jugular.
That is what happens when Gina and the others parachute onboard, but only for so long, because they’re soon all captured.
Fortunately, as you’ll have guessed, all their Christmases then arrive at once.
Well, only one Christmas, Lee, but there might as well be loads of them because behind his permanent grimace he’s a one-man war machine, who has never met a posse of killers without finding a motorbike equipped with machine-guns (there’s at least one on every rusty cargo ship) to wipe them all out.
Lee does, in truth, have a very useful new sidekick in the form of Barney’s old pal Decha (the Thai martial arts star Tony Jaa).
But all he really needs is his own set of unsurpassable fighting skills, and the brainpower to work out who might be ‘Ocelot’. Did I mention Ocelot? He (or she) is the film’s real villain, a scoundrel hiding in plain sight who for years has plotted to undermine Barney and friends. Will you be gripped by any of this, or care about the identity of Ocelot? Not a lot.
Dumb Money is much more engaging, a slick account of the financial imbroglio that erupted at the height of the pandemic, involving the video-game retailer GameStop, a small-scale Massachusetts investor called Keith Gill (Paul Dano) who thought the company’s stock undervalued, and hedge-fund titans played here by Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Nick Offerman and Sebastian Stan.
Director Craig Gillespie treats a serious true story with an appealingly light touch, rather like he did with his own enjoyable 2017 film I, Tonya, and like Adam McKay did in The Big Short (2015). He is well served by a raft of fine performances, especially from Dano.
As Gill — whose online pseudonym is Roaring Kitty — he astounds himself and his supportive wife (Shailene Woodley) by kick-starting a phenomenon known as a ‘short squeeze’.
He inspires small-beer investors to buy GameStop stock, becoming a multi-millionaire in the process and wiping billions off the worth of the arrogant Wall Street fat cats whose nickname for Gill and his ilk is ‘dumb money’.
Also showing…
The Lesson (15, 103 mins)
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Strange Way Of Life (15, 31 mins)
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Angelheaded Hipster (12, 99 mins)
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There have been some marvellous films these last few years about plagiarism and literary hoaxes, such as The Wife (2017) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018).
Sadly, The Lesson is not one of them. Alice Troughton’s film is an overheated, overly theatrical melodrama starring Richard E. Grant as J.M. Sinclair, a prissy, self-important novelist, supposedly ‘Britain’s most revered writer’.
He, his wife Helene (Julie Delby) and their surviving son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) live in dysfunctional grandeur in a large country house, at which a young tutor, Liam (Daryl McCormack), arrives to guide the boy through his Oxford University entrance exams.
From there it becomes a dark tale of jealousy and literary pilfering, complicated by Liam’s hero-worship of Sinclair, and with the shadow of Bertie’s brother’s suicide hanging over them all.
McCormack is very good, compounding the impression he made as the male escort in last year’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.
And there’s a striking score by Isobel Waller-Bridge. But (and I do know not everyone agrees) Grant is such a thumping ham that, perhaps aptly for a story about plagiarism, I didn’t believe a word of it.
I saw , a short Western by the great Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, at Cannes this year. We all filed reverentially into the cinema, and barely half an hour later filed just as reverentially out. It’s a sweet, mournful, exquisitely acted story, about a gay sheriff (Ethan Hawke) and his former lover (Pedro Pascal), who meet up again after 25 years. It’s in cinemas next Monday for one night only.
Hard on the platform heels of last week’s drama Bolan’s Shoes comes a documentary, Angelheaded Hipster, about the music of Marc Bolan and T-Rex. It follows artists such as Nick Cave and U2 recording covers of Bolan’s songs, interviews admirers such as Elton John and Ringo Starr, and delves deep into the archives to show fabulous footage of the man himself, described by Sir Elton as the pioneer of glam rock and by Cave as a better lyricist even than Bolan’s big pal David Bowie.
Since the first record I bought as a kid was Telegram Sam in 1972, I lapped all this up. And if you’re of similar vintage, so will you.