Cast:
Kate Winslet, Helen McCrory, Alan Rickman, Stanley Tucci, Jennifer Ehle, Matthias Schoenaerts
Director: Alan Rickman
116 mins
“A Little Chaos” is Alan Rickman’s second
cinematic effort in the director’s chair, some eighteen years after his debut piece
“The Winter Guest”. It features Kate Winslet as Sabine De Barra, a successful
working woman who has been chosen to build a hugely important garden and
fountain at the new permanent residence of King Louis XIV in the 17th Century. Rickman
himself plays the great French monarch and the catering budget must have been
severely stretched due to the purchase of substantially more than a mere side
order of ham, going by his performance here. Weighed down by a permanently
torn-faced display of abject scunneration as the result of a tragic event in
her life, Winslet as De Barra finds herself at odds with competing gardeners
who are jealous of the attention the King has bestowed on an outsider and a
woman at that. How dare His Maj?!
A protector of sorts emerges in the shape of head landscape architect of Versailles, Andrè Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts). As sure as night follows day, the inevitable romance blossoms like the floral surroundings between them. Rickman recruits Stanley Tucci to play a major member of the court and he at least offers some light relief while De Barra’s secret past is revealed to be much more melodramatic than it actually needs to be.
The whole texture and tone of the film is all over the place and at just over 116 minutes, it’s quite frankly a tedious chore having to sit through it all. However, the biggest problem is in the ridiculous casting of Schoenaerts. He’s been ok in previous fare such as “Bullhead”, “Rust & Bone” and “Blood Ties” but with “A Little Chaos” he is horrendously miscast. He and Winslet are utterly devoid of any chemistry on screen - with no sparks emerging between them despite both actors’ best attempts. Rickman himself slows his pace down to that of a sonorous snail, with a slightly arched eyebrow his solitary concession to action, and indeed, acting. A dismal waste of time.
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Cast:
Sean Penn, Jasmine Trinca, Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Peter Franzen
Director: Pierre Morel
195 mins
In "The Gunman", an ambitious and
entertaining action thriller from Taken director Pierre Morel, Sean Penn’s
character, the grizzled but physically fit soldier-turned-mercenary Jeff
Terrier, employs both his loving and fighting credentials mixed in with his own
moral standards.
Terrier is based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo almost a decade ago, a period of atrocities and strife following years of civil war. The guman - a former special-ops guy assigned to protect a group of NGO workers, among them comely doctor Annie (Italian actress Jasmine Trinca), with whom he’s romantically involved — they nuzzle each other at the communal dinner table, as Terrier’s bossy colleague Felix (a lost-looking Javier Bardem) slinks around jealously. Terrier may look and act as if he’s someone who really cares, but it becomes clear early on that he’s accepted a not-so-selfless mission. Fast-forward eight years: He’s a changed man, now doing humanitarian aid in the Congo himself, but he’s also lost his lady love, and worse yet, someone is trying to kill him. In his search for answers, he treks first to London, where he quizzes an old cohort (Mark Rylance’s Cox, who, with his slicked-back balding mullet hair and snappy suit, looks instantly guilty of something or other), seeks out another former associate for help (the welcome, growling presence of Ray Winstone), and eventually treks to Barcelona, intending to find out what his crabby old pal Felix is now up to.
All of that globe-trotting should be exhausting, but Penn’s Terrier keeps his stride, frequently removing his shirt so we can see how trim and finely sculpted his torso is: If Penn’s got the face of a guy who survives whatever comes his way, his body is definitely the sort of thing you have to work for. Penn’s vanity — both in the way he shows off his physique and in the way he drives home the nobility of the once-wayward Terrier — is either the most deeply annoying thing about The Gunman, or the one thing in it that actually works. The film pretends to be much more serious than Taken, but at its heart, it’s just as ridiculous.
