The Shadow Line – Episode 4

After things really seemed to be getting somewhere with episodes 2 and 3, last night (the first time I have watched The Shadow Line as scheduled, 9pm BBC 2) things once again became a blend of baffling plot lines and bad dialogue, punctuated by the odd superb scene. This is one of those programmes so determined to keep us guessing that no sooner are we given a clutch of answers, a bucket full of more questions is splashed into our bemused faces.

The answers come in the form of customs officer Robert Beatty, who was the guy sultry sidekick Honey had a fight with last time. He’s one of these deep cover types working beyond the police, doing things they can’t like he doesn’t give a shit. It turns out that the drugs murdered Harvey Wratten used to get his rare Royal Pardon were already his. Beatty also reveals there was a second requirement for the Pardon; saving the life of a cop. In this case information was given to save him and his family from a car bomb. But it quickly emerges that the bomb was probably planted by Wratten too. So Wratten arranged a get out of jail free card for himself. Well mostly free, just minus millions of pounds worth of drugs.

Obviously Gabriel thinks this is getting somewhere with the case, that he’s been given three extra weeks to save. But it’s difficult to say where this breakthrough leads or what it means and his boss has a problem with that. Even though they’ve got a blurry picture of Gatehouse on CCTV too AND they’ve linked him to a big drug deal, where Gatehouse appeared to be acting on behalf of the vanished but ever present Glickman, who was in turn acting for Wratten because he was banged up. Confused much?

And that’s just the professional side of the police case. We haven’t even mentioned Gabriel’s personal problems. He didn’t have any agonising moments staring at that inexplicable briefcase full of cash this week but the mother of his secret child told him to tell his wife of their existence, who is finally pregnant. This is the cue for just one of many terrible lines in this episode. Gabriel, clearly in a sticky situation, blankly says “I’m in hell” only for the mother of his child to hit back with “No, we’re in limbo”. She then says she won’t have her son growing up in the shadows, which is far too forced a reference to the show’s title.

On the criminal side of the case, Bob Harris is sweating his hairy backside off because one of his supply lines has been compromised by customs, which is how the police know about Glickman getting the drugs for Wratten. How do I know he has a hairy backside you ask? I don’t for sure but I’m judging by the rest of his portly, sagging, ageing body. We’re treated to a scene with Harris and a gay lover, with Harris sporting a pair of very tight pants and awkwardly resting on his side like a beached whale, and the lover wearing nothing at all. He is sprung from a police station by an anonymous benefactor at the beginning of the episode and ever since has been stuck in camp seductive mode. He also gets some terrible lines and provides Harris with the information that apparently Jay Wratten is responsible for the busting of his line.

Jay of course, has been told by Andy Dixon the driver, that Harris killed Harvey. So he has a reason to piss him off. But Christopher Eccleston’s Joseph Bede interrogates Jay and he insists he didn’t do anything. We see very little of Bede this week, apart from when he’s questioning Jay and Glickman’s girlfriend, but Jay does get to pay another over the top, intimidating visit to Glickman’s son. And this is where we see the mysterious, deadly Gatehouse again.

Perched atop a mountain of office furniture, Gatehouse is across the street from Glickman’s son with some very fancy tech for listening to phone conversations etc. Eventually he decides to pop round to the home of Glickman’s son and play the kindly old fashioned gentleman card. Glickman’s sceptical daughter-in-law is won over by his harmless demeanour and Gatehouse gains access to the downstairs loo. After opening and closing the window briefly, he lets himself out. After calling her husband about the visitor, the wife goes upstairs to check on the wailing baby, prompted by the baby monitor. Their little girl is not there.

I was glad when Gatehouse showed up eventually last night because the rest of the episode had been poor. With Gatehouse though you know things are going to be suspenseful and tense and that something is going to happen, even without him doing very much. Here he’d magically whisked the baby outside, simply by opening and shutting a window in the toilet. Surely he must have had help? After dashing about the house absolutely distraught, she finds her baby and then Gatehouse, who chillingly tells her to call her husband “NOW” via the baby monitor. Glickman is then told Gatehouse wants to hear from him.

This episode has time for one more confusing but majestic scene. The journalist, otherwise known as that bloke from Casino Royale, who has been investigating police corruption throughout the series, features strongly in this episode asking people questions without really getting anywhere. Then he’s given the job of city editor at his paper, along with a far from feasible pay rise. Prior to this Gatehouse calls him up for an anonymous meeting but does nothing; not even speaking to him. Instead he gets hold of his home address pretending to be a deliveryman. Then comes the outstanding scene.

McGovern (name of said journalist) rides out of the city in his leathers and into the countryside towards home and his wife, where he can tell her the good news of his promotion. The tension slowly builds as it’s evident something will happen. Then we see a car in the distance on a straight road, with McGovern heading towards it. Both vehicles, bike and automobile, disappear into a dip in the middle of the road. We hear a screech and only the car emerges on the other side. The episode ends with a close up of our fallen journalist, in the middle of a sun drenched road, blood dripping in vivid drops from his helmet against a background of bright blue sky.

Scenes like that are the reason I continue to watch The Shadow Line. Some of them use too much style but most are refreshingly well executed, subtle and classy. This episode was full of irritating performances, including McGovern/Casino Royale man’s intonation that made everything sound like a question, hardly a subtle portrayal of an investigative journalist. It also had some of the worst dialogue so far and perhaps more of it. And the plot development became frustratingly unsatisfying too. But occasionally I am still gobsmacked, even in this mostly bad episode, and I am still intrigued.

With some questions answered new ones arise. Why kill the pestering journalist when he appeared to know very little? More interesting still, why did Gatehouse kill him, when he was investigating police corruption? Do Gabriel and Gatehouse know each other? Perhaps Gabriel simply can’t remember with that bullet inconveniencing his brain. And how exactly did it get there? Was Gabriel responsible for the death of partner Delaney? Can Chiwetel Ejiofor put in a good performance despite increasingly ludicrous plot twists for his character and sledgehammer emotional dialogue? Will Bede and Glickman’s girlfriend get together? Will next week be more enjoyable and make more sense? Will I get to see Bob Harris completely naked?

I’ll keep watching for the answers.

22 Bullets

What’s the most painful thing you’ve ever experienced?  That grazed knee in the playground? A bit of cramp? A broken bone? Childbirth? You’d probably rather not share it or dare to relive even a slither of the agony. I’m male (so no excruciating deliveries of life) and I’ve never broken a bone. Not so much as chipped one. I cannot even imagine the pain of 22 adequate punches and seriously doubt I’d be able to stomach it; let alone 22 Bullets. That’s 22 pieces of pointed, sharp, solid metal thumping through your flesh at unfathomable speed, decimating the building blocks of you.

Now, off the top of your head, pick a tough nationality; the country most likely to breed the sort of superhuman capable of withstanding multiple gunshot wounds. Some of you probably instinctively pictured Arnie’s hard-as-nails, naked and battered frame in Terminator. I’m willing to bet none of you conjured the image of a Frenchman. France is a nation famed for its culture, its cuisine and its romance. In Britain members of a certain generation will think of the French as nothing but well-groomed surrender monkeys. It’s not a land known for its grunting and formidable bad-asses.

And yet one of their number is an internationally recognisable action-man. Playing key figures in big films like The Da Vinci Code and Ronin, Jean Reno is a Frenchman with attitude, as comfortable with a semi-automatic in his hand as he is with a single red rose or cloves of garlic. He gives 22 Bullets, aka L’Immortel, bags and bags of globally acknowledged gravitas.

Out on DVD and Blu-Ray on the 31^st January, 22 Bullets is a French gangster film set in Marseilles with the occasional drizzle of style. It’s fast paced and hard-hitting but rarely anything exceptional. However there are easily enough thrills and plot twists to have your eyes locked in a constant frenetic dance between the subtitles and the action set-pieces. At times you won’t have a clue what’s going on and the ending, for me anyway, came from nowhere and was somewhat inexplicable, but surprising at least.

The filmmakers clearly value the plot, despite there being nothing that remarkable or beguiling about it. The only details accompanying my disc of the film explained that Reno’s character is shot in an underground car park 22 times, and left for dead, despite abandoning his old life as a feared criminal in favour of family. “Against all the odds, he doesn’t die…” Apparently based on a true-story, the film skips fairly quickly over the shooting so important to the title, even if it is the catalyst for later events. The tag-line above had me imagining a bleeding and dying Reno, stumbling from the car park like a zombie to engage in an immediate shoot-out for revenge. What actually happens is slightly more plausible. Reno’s character, Charly Mattei, recovers in hospital. He then still vows to return to his peaceful family life and only takes up arms again when his trusted friend and aide is attacked.

For the most part 22 Bullets succeeds at being more than a good vendetta movie. There is some very funny dialogue between Reno and other gangsters, and Reno and the police. There are some luxurious shots of the French Riviera and locations are contrasted well. The golden lighting in the scenes in the hills with family works well against the harsher, urban and shadowy light during criminal scenes in the city. The majority of the action scenes have a compelling, realistic edge. The initial shooting is shocking in typical slow-mo. An exciting motorbike chase climaxes with Mattei deliberately hitting a police car head-on to evade his pursuers. Gun-fights and retribution assassinations are generally satisfying and suitable.

Sadly for fussy viewers like myself, little details in 22 Bullets really start to grate and diminish the enjoyment factor.  I was willing to suspend my disbelief at the remarkable recovery from 22 potentially mortal wounds. But it’s not long before the signs of Mattei’s ordeal are non-existent. And an atrocious scene, in which Reno endlessly crawls through unfeasible amounts of barbed wire, as if more proof were needed of his invincible credentials, climaxes equally annoyingly. A car he’s thrown himself onto careers to a halt in an almost slapstick fashion as the film is needlessly sped up. It’s a shame that such corner cutting, shoddy shots made it into a largely well executed film.

On the whole 22 Bullets is an essentially harmless, enjoyable experience. The bouts of annoyance induced by some lacklustre moments and large helpings of cliché were not enough to spoil my day. A continual message about the importance of forgiveness and family runs through the film, which I get the feeling would resonate more with a continental audience than us Brits, or I could just be cold hearted and lifeless. It’s basically a decent action movie with a refreshing foreign flavour. But not one I could recommend buying.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Let’s be clear from the start that Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is not a great or even good movie experience. It spends 133 minutes undecided as to what type of film it wants to be. As a result it’s a largely dull tale that takes time to get going and never really bursts into life as you might expect. I’ve never seen the original Wall Street and honestly couldn’t say if seeing the first film would enhance or diminish your enjoyment of this post-9/11 and banking bailout sequel. Certainly a fan would have got some of the references that left me unmoved, perhaps a cameo from Charlie Sheen’s wax work face would have made more sense, but they ultimately may have been disappointed by the nothingness of this follow-up.

The cinema was strangely empty for the first night of a film jammed with star performances and lavish shots of the Manhattan skyline, all marshalled by acclaimed director Oliver Stone. It was dotted with the odd couple who may have been young when the first movie came out. Indeed at times Stone’s direction felt dated, with nostalgic fades between scenes and a less than subtle focus on the image of bubbles throughout the film. You can spot a bubble billowing child in the background of almost every scene with a crowd. Much of what really grated about this movie, besides the ponderous plot, was the way in which motifs and messages were rammed down your throat. These ideas are never fully developed or explored, for instance the focus on renewable energy that seemed to be thrown in simply to be topical, and are far from intelligent or insightful. What really makes you shift uncomfortably in your seat is the way in which the script makes it plain, through some at times terribly clunky dialogue, that it thinks it is saying something clever and new that needs to be said. In reality it merely scratches the surface of some big themes from recent times and then quickly ties itself up in knots with another strand of the purposeless plot that rarely engages the audience.

The opening titles also felt dated and these informed me that there were original songs on the soundtrack, which also sounded distinctly 80s and not exactly in keeping with the tone throughout. However for all the film’s faults it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes it such a lifeless watch but easier to highlight the aspects that make it more bearable than expected.

The first surprise (I was tempted to say pleasant but it really wasn’t) was the way in which I could tolerate so much screen time from Shia “dollar signs” LaBeouf. Since his childhood role in Even Stevens, in which he was passably amusing, I have found his acting irritating in every major film that has catapulted him to mega-bucks star status. However in this movie, despite being given some terrible lines, he is watchable not only as the young adult trader with a conscience but also as the infatuated lover struggling to keep his relationship together. The object of his affection, Carey Mulligan, was also a strong point of a poor film, as expected. Here she demonstrates an American accent and short haired sex appeal that might see her cast in more big budget projects across the Atlantic, but I would hope she tries to stick to quality British film in the main.  

In fact if Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps gets one big review tick it is for the acting performances. Michael Douglas, despite looking drained even after his transformation at the end of the film, has an undeniable charisma in the role of Gordon Gekko and again this is despite the fact he is given some appalling dialogue to work with. The film, whilst continuously slow and plodding, feels even more so before Douglas makes his first proper appearance. The reconciliation scene with his daughter Mulligan is also the one genuinely moving and engaging moment in the entire movie, which is a real testament to both performers given how little I cared for the back-story. Josh Brolin also plays the big baddie banker extremely well.

So whilst there’s no need to rush out to see a film with an identity crisis that can feel like that annoying high minded acquaintance who doesn’t really have an opinion of their own, there are worse ways of spending two hours thanks to some quality acting and the beautiful, shiny gloss of extreme wealth present in every escapist scene.