Film reviews: Crazy, Stupid, Love | Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times | Warrior | Soul Surfer | Killer Elite

Our film critics take a look at some of this week’s new releases...

Crazy, Stupid, Love (12a) **

Directed by: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa

Starring: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone

Ryan Gosling fans who only really know him from The Notebook should feel more comfortable with the Canadian actor’s appearance in Crazy, Stupid, Love than this week’s Drive. Sliding easily into conventional romcom mode, he plays Jacob, an emotionally unfulfilled commitment-phobe whose lady-killing prowess masks an overwhelming desire to settle down with the right girl. These feelings emerge as he takes it upon himself to school newly separated office drone Cal (Steve Carell) in the ways of love, and directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa broaden the story out further by weaving in the romantic travails of Cal’s momentarily unfaithful wife (Julianne Moore), their love-sick teen son, his emotionally confused babysitter, as well as the yearnings of sensible law graduate Hannah (Emma Stone), whose best friend just wants her to have fun with Jacob before settling down. Unfortunately, while Carrel does some good work and Gosling is good value (even if his goofy Dirty Dancing set-piece was pulled off better by Romain Duris in Heartbreakers), any relationship messiness is far too easily resolved for this to be insightful. Indeed, a couple of risqué moments aside, the surfeit of interweaving plot strands and knuckle-gnawing speeches about finding a soulmate ensure this is a titular “Actually” away from being a US Richard Curtis clone.

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times (15) ***

Directed by: Andrew Rossi

Despite coinciding with the emergence of Wikileaks and the launch of the iPad, this insider documentary about the crisis facing The New York Times in the digital age feels a little unfocused. Lacking the drama-enhancing deadline that benefitted Vogue documentary The September Issue, Page One’s arbitrary year-long time frame results in a film that jumps back and forth through the paper’s history to make a case for its importance as America’s “paper of record”. Touching on a few scandals along the way, it mostly reminds us how bad it would be if the under threat journal were to fold – and not just for mainstream media, but for all the new media that regularly feeds off the hard reporting the paper invests a lot of time, money and human expertise in acquiring. That’s a valuable observation of course, as are the scenes of veteran media reporter – and former drug addict – David Carr giving citizen journalists a reality check in the way hard news is actually gathered. But as other key players drift out of the film and stories are presented without context, Page One director Andrew Rossi struggles to match Carr’s tenacious ability to nail down facts and deliver compelling reportage.

Warrior (12a) ***

Directed by: Gavin O’Conner

Starring: Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Morrison

Flabbier than any film about disciplined Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters has any right to be, this noble attempt to build a dramatically absorbing family saga around the desperate-for-respect blood sport suffers from indulgent and predictable plotting and some of the corniest training montages since the later Rocky films. Saving it from tapping out, though, are the bruising central performances by Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton. Cast as estranged brothers driven apart years earlier by the destructive antics of their alcoholic father (Nick Nolte), their respective motivations are given equal weight as mysterious ex-Marine Tommy (Hardy) turns up on his father’s door step looking for a trainer for an upcoming winner-takes-all MMA competition and ex-fighter-turned-debt-ridden physics teacher and family man Brendan (Edgerton) attempts to get back in the cage so he can win enough cash to save his house. Thenceforth it’s a question of whether dark horse will triumph over underdog. But ridiculous and overwrought as it sounds, Hardy and Edgerton attack the warring siblings storyline with enough grace and credibility to ensure the films emotional blows feel as authentic as the physical ones look.

Soul Surfer (12a) *

Directed by: Sean McNamara

Starring: AnnaSophia Robb, Dennis Quaid, Helen Hunt, Kevin Sorbo

Sitting somewhere between Cheddar and Jalapeno Jack on the cheesy scale, this is about as bland as a movie about a good Christian girl being savaged by a shark could possibly be. Based on the inspirational true story of Bethany Hamilton, a 13-year-old rising star on the Hawaiian surf scene who lost an arm to a tiger shark in 2003, Soul Surfer dramatises her incredible tale of courage and survival by turning it into happy-clappy infomercial for the Sunday school set.

In the process it does a disservice to the positive message about faith it’s intent on disseminating by never truly showing that faith being tested. Instead, after the shark takes a bite out of Bethany (AnnaSophia Robb, below), her life is presented as a series of obstacles to be overcome with kindness and love.

The stress on her family or Bethany’s subsequent sojourn to Thailand to help Tsunami victims – material that, respectively, should be a gift for actors of the calibre of Dennis Quaid (cast here as Bethany’s father) or any filmmaker serious about examining the power of faith after a tragedy – is squandered in an effort to churn out bite-sized, piety-laden platitudes.

ALISTAIR HARKNESS

Killer Elite (15) **

Directed by:

Gary McKendry

Starring: Jason Statham, Clive Owen, Robert De Niro

Rather unsympathetically thrown out against the Cannes-certified Drive is this ploddingly retrograde Jason Statham headsmasher: nothing to do with Sam Peckinpah’s 1975 film, but a cobbling together of Ranulph Fiennes’ 1980s-set tome The Feather Men with countless Andy McNabisms.

From what can be discerned from ex-P.E. teacher Matt Sherring’s gibberish screenplay, gun-for-hire Statham must spring his kidnapped mentor (De Niro, coasting) by undertaking a series of hits in locations ranging from Oman to the Brecon Beacons. Tailing him is one-eyed ne’er-do-well Owen, whose banker bosses sit in darkened suites sipping tea, just so we can tell they’re evil.

Presumably the pitch was something Bourne-like, but it becomes apparent no-one – not debutant director McKendry, not even the over-qualified cast, clinging grimly to ill-fitting accents and facial hair – really knew what they were doing here.

Statham proves reliably terse, whether moonlighting as a doctor or, ahem, a military historian, yet with plausibility off the agenda, everybody else lowers their game. The dialogue’s awful, the action – think dual carriageways and Triumph Dolomites – frankly clapped out, and the whole so drab-looking as to make Tinker Tailor… resemble the average episode of ZingZillas. Less killer, more filler.

MIKE MCCAHILL