In short: Orca (1977)

After an encounter with an orca whale, Irish fisherman in Newfoundland Nolan (Richard Harris) decides to catch one of these lovely mammals to sell it to a marine park. The project goes very wrong indeed when Nolan becomes responsible for the death of a pregnant orca and her little orca foetus. Her mate clearly has seen a couple or ten revenge flicks and, after a bit of crying, uses his superior intelligence and physique to make Nolan’s life a living hell before it will eventually kill him.

Michael Anderson’s Orca is the kind of nature strikes back movie one really can’t imagine having been produced by anyone but Dino De Laurentiis, and really shows all the hallmarks of the guy’s admirable willingness to throw money and talent at idiotic projects. The script’s (credited to Sergio Donati and producer Luciano Vincenzoni) attempts at making a vengeance flick where the vigilante is a whale are as bizarre as you’d expect, with mind-boggling moments like that shot that looks rather a lot like a crying orca eye and all sorts of additional nonsense.

In good old Dino tradition, this is packaged into a wonderfully looking film, with beautiful surface and underwater photography by J. Barry Herron and Ted Moore, a score by Ennio Morricone (that does indeed include what I can only interpret as a love theme for two whales), and a pretty great cast. Richard Harris is of course soused and very Irish, Charlotte Rampling tries to trump the general weirdness of proceedings by doubling the intensity of every single line reading (I’m particularly fond of her hilariously dramatic exposition bomb in form of a university lecture), Will Sampson provides the mandatory Native American whale wisdom that saves exactly nobody, and the rest of the cast do their best with what they are given.

The thing with Orca is, if you are willing and able to either buy into its set-up emotionally or at least can accept it, shrugging, it can be a highly entertaining film, full of suspense scenes you haven’t quite seen staged this way before, as well as some moments – particularly in the Arctic last act – breathing a nice atmosphere of doom. It’s also a film against all reason convinced of its deep emotional resonance, the sort of thing that’s at once a bit admirable and embarrassing, and certainly never the kind of film you’re bound to forget, which goes a long way with me.

Red Sparrow (2018)

Bolshoi ballerina Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is hurt in an on stage accident that will later turn out not to have been an accident at all. In any case, she will not be able to dance again on her old level, leaving her and her sick mother without much of an income or even a place to stay, for even their apartment belongs to the ballet company. Fortunately or unfortunately, Dominika’s uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts) is deeply involved in the world of espionage and is perfectly willing to provide his niece with a way in, especially after he has provided her with information concerning the truth about her accident and is probably quite satisfied with the talent for violence she then demonstrates.

Eventually, Dominika lands in a school for sexspionage (headmistress: Charlotte Rampling) where she shows talent as well as a rather unwanted spine. Thanks to her uncle, and one General Korchoi (Jeremy Irons), she soon is set upon her first case/victim. There’s a highly placed mole somewhere in the Russian secret services, and Dominika is supposed to seduce the mole’s handler Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) to find out their identity. Dominika for her part might have plans, perhaps even feelings, all of her own.

Francis Lawrence’s spy novel adaptation Red Sparrow is an at times rather impressive watch, yet it it is also full of niggling little problems. The most obvious faux pas right from the start is the filmmaker’s decision to have all the Russian characters – none of whom is actually being played by a Russian actor, pretty much the only nationality where that sort of thing is still allowed without people on the Internet shouting angrily – speak with mild, fake Russian accents, because clearly, all Russians talk in accented English with each other, right? It’s definitely the sort of decision that already starts the film up feeling highly artificial. The movie’s problematic idea of Russia is further increased by its portrayal of the little it shows of the country’s culture as exclusively inhabited by rapists and human monsters. The film’s portrayal of the political side of things seems to have little to do with actual Russian nationalism and the way it works today and much more with a US-style nightmare vision of their old enemy turned new enemy but actually staying completely the same. Which would bother me much less if the US secret services at least were played a little less like a goody-goody bunch who apparently don’t do horrible things on a daily basis. Edgerton’s Nash is such a nice, careful, pleasant and loveable guy it is impossible to buy him as a spy, for whatever country.

And still, I had a lot of fun watching this thing, once I had adjusted my perspective on it towards it being a really high budget exploitation film of the kind nobody makes anymore (and really, that was seldom made at all even in the past). It’s a surprisingly unpleasant film for what at its core is a mainstream spy movie, full of torture, sexual violence, threats of sexual violence, and a lot of random nasty stuff put in just to make the film feel extra gritty. There is, for example, no reason at all to give our heroine’s uncle the incestuous hots for her apart from making him even less pleasant than he already is; it’s like adding kicking dogs as an additional vice to Hitler. The thing is, director Lawrence turns out to be a great big budget exploitation director, so all these scenes of suffering, vice, and men not named Edgerton behaving toxically, only to be punished by our heroine in one way or the other, are unpleasant to watch in just the right way to be entertaining, and not just only in the “did that big Hollywood production honestly just do that?” kind of way. The film has a melodramatic, operatic drive to it, really digging into the core of making movies you enjoy to cringe at. And like with a lot of good exploitation fare, you can perfectly well argue the whole she-bang is actually a feminist film about a tough woman with an untouchable moral core beating all the asshole men in her life with their own vices.

It helps that Lawrence the actress seems – as usual – in absolute control of her abilities, not attempting to portray Dominika as a normal person but the sort of heightened, iconic near-mythological being that exists in this sort of plot. It’s an honestly great job at point-exact overacting through a lot of grim facial expressions, never laying it on too thick, but always exactly as thick as the film needs. Her counterpart Edgerton – usually a fine actor - is surprisingly colourless, but then, what’s a guy to do when a script doesn’t give him any actual personality beside being as morally upright as a knight? The rest of the cast does traditionally fine character actor work (sadly, Irons isn’t there to do more than look thin, pale and sad), so it is difficult not to enjoy the film at least on this level.


But then, I’ve never pretended to dislike exploitation films, so I’m certainly not going to start complaining when I see one made by talented people who have been provided with a lot of money for excellent outfits and only the best locations and sets.

Restless (2012)

The 70s. Ruth Gilmartin (Michelle Dockery) is worried about her mother Sally (Charlotte Rampling). Sally seems to develop something of a paranoid strain, talking about people watching her from the woods surrounding her country home. She’s giving Sally an autobiographical manuscript to read, promising it will explain everything. From it, Sally learns that her mother is actually an exile Russian named Eva Delectorskaya (in the flashbacks that make up two thirds of the two-part movie played by Hayley Atwell).

After the murder of her brother by French fascists in the 30s, Eva learns that her brother was working as a British spy for one Lucas Romer (Rufus Sewell). Romer hires on Eva, too. He’s responsible for a subset of British intelligence trying to bring the USA into the fold of the war against Germany, by means more foul than fair.

Eva turns out to be a rather exceptional spy, but there’s a reason why decades later, she’s not living under her own name and always watching her back. She will need the help of her daughter to finish something that started more than thirty years earlier.

This BBC two-parter directed by Edward Hall based on a novel by William Boyd (who also scripted the films) is not completely successful. I’ve heard the novel is quite a bit better than the movie, but I can’t vouch for it, because I have still not read every interesting book ever written, unfortunately. The film’s strengths are obvious: the cast is top-notch, the BBC has a knack for historical productions that seem authentic on a TV budget (even a comparatively high one), and the plot is certainly not lacking in the good stuff of spy business, paranoia and romance. Alas, even some of these strengths don’t quite work as well for the film as they could. While Atwell and Rampling are great as always, it’s also difficult to take the idea seriously that Atwell will age into Rampling. Indeed, I have difficulty imagining two actresses who look less alike. This may sound like a minor problem, but I found the regular shifts between the two actresses rather jolting and not really helpful for immersion.

That isn’t exactly something that is helped by the 70s part of the film. Where the 30s do look authentic enough in a “look, it’s a classy TV reproduction of the time” manner, there’s little of believable temporal flavour visible in that part of the movie. Again, this isn’t a terrible problem but does make the movie’s ability to convince of its world somewhat shaky. There’s also the fact that Hall’s direction is often a bit bland, demonstrating an approach to direction that seems rather too fond of coasting on the achievements of actors and production designers but not always doing enough to with them. There are, however, a handful of very capably realized suspense sequences – particularly in the second part – that are alone good enough to make the films worthwhile as spy movies.

The script isn’t without its troubles too. The 70s parts of the film are – in general – just not terribly interesting, taking up too much of the film’s running time and slowing it down for what often feels like no good reason at all. I’m also not terribly happy with the way the flashbacks and the way their information influences Ruth are handled, seeing as it heavily suggest she’s the slowest reader ever, even when confronted with the sort of manuscript any sane person would dive into in one sitting.


However, the elements of the two-parter that do work, do work rather well. There are the the already mentioned suspense sequences, our lead actresses (as well as Sewell and the usual British bunch of absurdly talented minor actors), as well as a handful of moments of delightful paranoia and distrust. Restless’s problem to my eyes isn’t so much that it isn’t good, but that its flaws seem so obvious and so eminently fixable (and are supposedly much better handled in the novel), one can’t help but ask oneself why they weren’t fixed.