CinemaSerf

This doesn't start well, indeed after about ten minutes I thought it was just going to be "Tyrion Lannister" does "Bruce Banner". Well I was quite pleasantly surprised as it takes those foundations and, with it's tongue firmly implanted in it's cheek, and with him suitably armed with his newly radioactive mop, we set off on a crime caper with a difference. Kevin Bacon's "Bob Garbinger" runs a big chemical company that routinely churns out enough gunge into the rivers and streams of the city to give Julia Roberts and Albert Finney enough work for a lifetime. "Winston" (Peter Dinklage) is trying to rear teenage stepson "Wade" (Jacob Tremblay) whilst holding down a menial job in one of those plants. When he gets a terrible diagnosis from his doctor, he thinks he has company health insurance - but when platinum turns out not to be all it's cracked up to be, he decides to ask his boss to intercede. That just sees him rather savagely treated and dumped into a drain where, well let's just say it isn't envy that has turned him green. Meantime, we learn that all in his garden isn't exactly rosy for "Garbinger" either, so with hoodlums chasing him and his wacky brother "Fritz" (Elijah Wood doing his best impersonation of "Gru") organising a kid-napping it falls to the irritated "Toxie" to save the city, nobble the baddies, rescue "Wade" and maybe even stop his eye from constantly popping out of it's socket on a great big stalk! This is quite an entertaining parody of many things super-hero with shades of Hammer and John Carpenter thrown into a mix that is held together amiably by a Dinklage who looks like he is enjoying himself. He even manages to rescue a cat! The scenario serves to remind us of just how cavalier we have been and still are with our environment in the name of convenience and though Bacon isn't really at his best, he and his band of "Nuts" provide plenty to swing a pretty lethal sponge-on-stick at! High brow it isn't, but when "Winston" discovers the astonishingly corrosive powers of his own wee...! Mindless and enjoyable, and I liked it in the end. Wouldn't bet against a sequel.

When "Russ" (Matt Smith) asks his bartending, hard-living, pal "Hank" (Austin Butler) to mind his cat whilst he returns to London to look after his sickening dad, he's narked but agrees. Little does he realise that "Russ" has been involved with some ne'er-do-wells in the city and so fairly swiftly "Hank" is having to develop an whole new pain threshold as first the Russians, then the Hebrews lay into him. The cops are soon involved and his paramedic girlfriend "Yvonne" (Zoë Kravitz) has to find new ways of stitching a wound - and all for what? "Hank" hasn't a clue who they are, what they want, or where what they want might actually be? It's only when the spikey-haired British geezer makes a reappearance that things might start to make some sense - but I wouldn't bet on it! Now despite the fact that Butler is almost always being beaten up - often clad only in his Calvins - he manages to exude loads of charisma into this daft crime caper. Certainly, it plays fast and loose with medical science and serendipity does intervene once or twice more often than you could realistically expect, but it's a solid action-adventure feature that is bloody, violent but still darkly entertaining. The scene-stealing Hasidic Hebrews (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio) won't drive on the sabbath, but gun-toting? Well that appears to be allowed? There's a manic enforcer who has traits reminiscent of an angry chimpanzee and there's duplicity at every turn before a denouement that is fairly predictable, but nonetheless enjoyable to savour as the calamities accumulate and the initially gullible "Hank" discovers he and "John Wick" must be distant relatives. There's a cat, and a bandage - but an American Humane Society disclaimer at the end, so clearly it can act too. It is a bit derivative but it doesn't hang around and it shows us clearly than Butler isn't just a pretty face.

Adriano Tardiolo is really good in this biblically apt story of the young "Lazzaro". He's a generous-spirited young man who energetically helps out in his community - one under the thumb of the uncaring dominatrix "Marchesa" (Nicoletta Braschi) who treats this agrarian community little better than the animals she describes them as. She has a teenage son "Tancredi" (Luca Chikovani) who, though spoiled, has a bit of a rebellious streak and so when he befriends "Lazzaro" and discovers the young man's hilltop hideaway, he decides to abscond from his mother and feign a kidnapping. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his mother sees through his wheeze and declines to pay up the ransom but that stalling has the benefit of allowing these two young men to establish what they hope will be an indelible friendship. Then "Lazzaro" takes a bit of a tumble and when he awakens, nothing is as it was. For all but him, decades have gone by and it's only a chance encounter with childhood friend "Antonia" (Agnese Graziani) and her family of somewhat understandably sceptical scrap merchants and petty thieves that offers him a chance of a new life in the city. He is shy and honest so doesn't readily fit into their community but she won't allow them throw him onto the streets even if she reckons he's pretty useless, too. It's pretty clear to everyone that all he really wants is to find his friend - but what chance now? This mixes a culture of cruel, venal, exploitation with a delicate religiosity and that turns out to be quite a poignant combination as events unravel in the latter part of the film. Tardiolo hasn't a great deal of dialogue, indeed there isn't really that much here at all, and that works well. It's presented as something akin to parables concerning kindness, do unto others, reap what you sow kind of thing, before a denouement that is both ghastly and yet somehow affirmatively symbolic. What does it mean to be human in a sense of humanity rather than chemical engineering? What does set us apart from the animals? Superstition, faith, love, fear, music, decency? Lots of questions posed amongst the simplicity here and it's delicately delivered and engagingly thought-provoking at times.