Simon Morris looks at three movies that take certain short cuts to reach their audience.
A Great Friend is a typically French character comedy, that takes the old city slicker/country bumpkin formula and adds some unexpected twists. Starring Lambert Wilson (Mrs Harris goes to Paris) and Grégory Gadebois (Délicieux).
Sound of Freedom is an American surprise success – a low-budget real-life thriller about rescuing kidnapped children from traffickers in Colombia. Stars Jim Caviezel (Passion of the Christ) and co-produced by Mel Gibson (Passion of the Christ).
And Retribution sees Liam Neeson in Speed territory – trapped in a car with a bomb primed to go off under the driver’s seat. Co-starring Noma Dumezweni (The Little Mermaid) and Matthew Modine (Stranger Things).
Movie Review - A Great Friend
An actor I’ve always been fascinated by – as much by his name as anything else – is French star Lambert Wilson.
As his name implies, he’s entirely bilingual - English and French – despite being born in Paris and having his biggest hits in France, notably a recent triumph as General Charles de Gaulle.
In A Great Friend, Wilson plays Vincent Delcour - billionaire, entrepreneur and philanthropist - a man who has everything, but also has an awful lot of people depending on him.
Photo: Supplied
He’s the envy of the world, but is he happy?
It seems not. Recently he’s been subject to panic attacks. He needs to get away, away to the countryside where people are people, not mere items on a spreadsheet.
But the trouble with the countryside is when your car breaks down, you’re dependent on a passing local to help you.
In this case the local is Pierre – played by another veteran French star Grégory Gadebois. Having picked up the stranded Vincent, the taciturn and grumpy Pierre reluctantly lets him stay the night.
But next day, the refreshed Vincent wonders if he can stay longer. This idyllic rural life could be the making of him.
A deal is struck, but then, as Vincent gets to grips with the real country values typified by Pierre, he wonders if there might be a few things he can teach his unsophisticated host about life. And love, perhaps.
After all, it’s plain that Pierre’s making no progress with Camille, the woman of his dreams.
I know it sounds like a routine, French city slicker/country bumpkin farce - the sort of thing we’re used to seeing in films like Dany Boone’s Welcome to the Sticks.
Writer-director Eric Besnard is another veteran whose CV includes comedies, thrillers and period dramas like the recent Delicious, also starring Gadebois.
So, hard to pigeon-hole, and so is A Great Friend. For a start, neither Vincent nor Pierre is quite what they first appear.
Vincent was certainly not born to the hi-tech high life – he’s constantly nagged by memories of his humble beginnings. And nor is Pierre the simple peasant he presents himself as.
Pierre has hidden depths, while the cosmopolitan Vincent has hidden shallows. And the longer the two rub against each other, the more they find themselves drawn together.
The French title was Les Choses Simples – “the simple life”, if you like – but the clumsier-sounding A Great Friend is a better summary of what it’s about.
Like all good movie comedy-dramas, this one depends on character - getting underneath the obvious surface to find unexpected nooks and crannies. Will Vincent learn to shut up, for instance? Will Pierre ever loosen up, and risk making an idiot of himself now and again?
And they both learn that sometimes the unexpected can happen and you have to deal with it. I had no idea there were bears in the Alps, for instance.
A Great Friend is what happens when you enliven an apparently familiar story with two unfamiliar characters.
In French cinema, a story isn’t always about reaching a convenient conclusion. Sometimes it’s about watching how people change – in this case, from odd couple to great friends. With an ending I didn’t see coming. Not a bad formula for a good movie.
Movie Review - Retribution
Retribution sees Liam Neeson in Speed territory - trapped in a car with a bomb primed to go off under the driver's seat. Co-starring Noma Dumezweni (The Little Mermaid) and Matthew Modine (Stranger Things).
Review - Sound of Freedom
Sound of Freedom surprised the pundits – certainly the liberal elite pundits - by succeeding rather more than expectations.
Some weeks it out-grossed far more prestigious titles like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One.
There must be more to it than simply a less cumbersome title?
Photo: Supplied
All the headlines are about how well Sound of Freedom slots into the current culture wars in the United States – from the presence of religious right figures like producer Mel Gibson and star Jim Caviezel, to the theme of child sex-trafficking, which chimes with the paranoia of the Internet’s lunatic fringe.
Certainly star Caviezel has been pushing the film firmly towards the QAnon fan-base. It’s even been championed by Donald Trump of all people.
Whatever you may think of the film, its unconventional marketing strategy is clearly working.
Obviously I have no way of knowing how accurate the background to Sound of Freedom is, or even how reliable a picture it paints of the real-life Tim Ballard.
I gather the story has been tweaked considerably for dramatic effect, and the actual child-slave situation is far more complicated than the simplistic, stranger-danger scenario described here.
But it’s a movie, not a crusading documentary – even if it sometimes claims to be. We meet heroic Tim Ballard –Caviezel - tirelessly tracking down pedophiles and rescuing children for US Homeland Security.
One day Ballard learns of a particular case – a very young brother and sister taken from their happy home in Honduras, then whisked off to the jungles of Colombia.
The reason Ballard is involved is that, notoriously, the vast majority of the clients of these child-smugglers are American pedophiles.
Ballard ropes in the assistance of a reformed criminal called Vampiro, played by the best thing in the film, respected character actor Bill Camp.
Rather than trying to track down the child smugglers, Ballard and Vampiro set up a scheme to attract them. They’ll set up a private sex-club, with the aid of a tame multi-millionaire.
And surprisingly, this bit actually happened, though it was entirely a Colombian initiative, rather than the work of a couple of heroic Americans.
The sex club scam was a success, though the little girl Ballard was chasing remains a prisoner deep in the Amazon jungle.
When Ballard decides to rescue her, he falls foul of his boss who reminds him foreign enterprises aren’t part of his job description. But he’s encouraged by his equally heroic wife, Mira Sorvino, who urges him to let freedom ring.
When you’re faced with a film called Sound of Freedom, you’re reminded how much that loaded word has changed over the years, and how much we associate it with a certain type of right-wing ideology.
In this case, it also means freedom from the actual facts – from the misleading, early shots of innocent kids being snatched in the street by criminals, to Ballard’s entirely fictional rescue mission to find one child in the heart of Colombia.
In addition, at the end of the film Caviezel pops up as himself urging audiences to buy more tickets for friends and family.
In this way they’ll draw attention to the cause and the film, which he modestly compares to books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of the most important works in history.
The director of Sound of Freedom, Mexican Alejandro Monteverde, clearly went along with this hard-sell by his star, though he’s subsequently expressed some discomfort at Caviezel’s more extreme politics.
I assume he’s happy enough with the film’s unlikely success though - success, I might add, that owes very little to any intrinsic quality. It’s Rambo without the political nuance, essentially.
