david-meldrum

This is a really loveable family animated film, that is more subversive than it may first appear to be. A police-crime thriller plot in a city full of different species of animals (predators and prey living side by side) is jam-packed with good visual comedy, the scene with the sloth being worth the price of admission alone. What's especially neat is the way it sets up the idea of 'you can be anything you want to be' at the beginning, only to subvert it with something far more subtle about identity, diversity, and the way our urban societies our structured. In doing so it tackles what we can't do or be head-on, making it rather more daring than the well-intended bland messages of 'you can do anything' that populate so many family/animated films.

I've avoided this film for nearly 20 years because it's not really my thing - or so I assumed. But a quiet evening led me to its door and I gave it my best shot. There are things I admired - as I expected, Sacha Baron Cohen's performance is remarkable in its discipline, bravery and commitment. There are a couple of extraordinary sequences which hit the nail on the head, some of it genuinely perceptive as well as funny. But for my taste it too often feels like it may be punching down, a comedy it's hard to forgive; alongside that you're never quite sure who the makers are really laughing at, and I'

Despite having seen this before - admittedly not since its original release - and its place in the pop culture of the 1990s, I remember very little about this. But what we have in this Tarantino-written, Tony Scott directed thriller about a pair of lovers running from a drug gang, is a tight thriller (it lacks the undisciplined sprawl of many of Tarantino's later films) with a brilliant script that lapses too often into things that just haven't aged well into these more aware days. The performances are universally excellent, and Scott's sheen looks good (as always); Tarantino's obsession with men shouting in a Mexican standoff is probably not necessary in the film's climax, and it inevitably lacks extra depth. But it stands as a brilliantly made thriller that's not really trying to be anything else except well made.