smoore-39

Almost devoid of merit - only worth viewing if you are turned on by well-oiled body builders.

The problems are many: far too low-budget to pull off the visuals (the cheap CGI backdrops are particularly poor), uninteresting plot, banal dialogue, lots of appalling acting from a group of body builders and soft porn actresses. Even the action is of questionable merit - the fighting is straight out of a pulp comic book. I'm disappointed because I first watched the prequel and found it to be quite good. The gods only know how this series managed to make it beyond the pilot. It is only redeemed for TV mediocrity by a reasonably characterful John Hannah.

I had expected more from Joss Whedan, but The Avengers (a.k.a Marvel's Avengers, a.k.a Marvel Avengers Assemble and various other permutations of this terrible title) is just another superhero movie: dull and hackneyed plot, poor characterisation, lots of fighting. It provides plenty for its pre-teen/early-teenage male target audience - great special effects, no romance and a very lengthy battle sequence at the end - but doesn't offer enough to adults to sustain interest for its 140-minute length. It is only saved from mediocrity by two factors: the humour in the script and Robert Downey's performance. I also credit Tom Hiddleston's performance as Loki, but the of the cast generally fail to shine. Even Samuel L. Jackson cannot make a real character out of the bizarre administrator/soldier hybrid that is Nick Fury.

I naively expected that a Hammer Horror film from the 21st century would be a step up from the low-budget affairs that bore this brand in the 1960s and 70s. While the film clearly has access to a larger budget than its predecessors it is essentially no better than an average vintage Hammer Horror.

Where Woman in Black differs in a positive way from earlier Hammer Horrors is in the relative authenticity of its period detail - it looks like a good quality BBC costume drama. I wrote "relative" because in one fundamental way is lacks authenticity to such an extent that I soon lost my ability to suspend disbelief - it is set in an isolated community in the north east of England, and yet judging by the accents of the villagers this is the one of the most multicultural isolated villages in the land. One of the main characters, a local landowner, speaks in an Irish accent for some inexplicable reason (yes, I know that the actor is Irish but he put on a good RP English accent when playing Julius Caesar in the Rome TV series). Perhaps I should also add that, accents notwithstanding, the quality of the supporting cast is quite high.

Where Woman in black very much follows on from the B-movie Hammer Horrors of the mid-twentieth century is in its formulaic approach to creating suspense and horror: very annoying use of loud noises as a cue for you when you should be scared, a mad and ugly villainess, villagers taken straight from Frankenstein etc.

And, finally, where the film fails to match up with Hammer classics is in the rather modest acting skills of its lead - Daniel Radcliffe still strikes me as having made his way to international stardom purely on the basis of looking like Harry Potter. Radcliffe's performance in Woman in Black is not bad. Indeed it is competent. But that is not good enough for a film with a very simple plot that unravels so slowly that whole minutes elapse with nothing more to entertain you than the visuals.