The Equalizer 3

Robert McCall sits in a chair

At the beginning of The Equalizer 3 we appear to be in familiar “action hero in retirement” territory. A sunny place. Beautiful scenery. The camera drinking it all in. Surely, any minute we’ll be meeting Denzel Washington in a Hawaiian shirt, a cocktail in one hand, a pretty young woman on his arm, in much the same way Matt Damon or Jason Statham were introduced in follow-ups The Bourne Supremacy and Mechanic: Resurrection. Instead director Antoine Fuqua gives us mayhem, horror, lakes of blood, a man with a machete buried in his face, and, sitting coolly in the middle of it all, one-man vigilante machine Robert McCall (Washington). He’s clearly laid waste to … Read more

Hide and Seek

Dakota Fanning in Hide and Seek

After Godsend and Meet the Fockers, Robert De Niro continues bumping along the bottom with this sub-Sixth Sense frightener. He plays the new widower with a ten-year-old traumatised daughter (Dakota Fanning) whose imaginary friend Charlie starts muscling in on the domestic action. Is Charlie a manifestation of the daughter’s loss? Or of her antagonistic feelings towards the women (Famke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue) who are floating around her newly available dad? Or is he just a malevolent spirit found lurking at the back of the Exorcist cupboard? Director John Polson and writer Ari Schlossberg keep us guessing with Kubrickian glides and Shyamalanian plot turns that suggest more than they deliver. Ultimately, Hide and Seek … Read more

Now Is Good

Jeremy Irvine and Dakota Fanning in Now Is Good

In Love Story, the 1970 weepie in which boy meets girl and girl dies – sorry, that’s it – it is, let me reiterate, the girl who dies. It always is, sickness being part of the female condition, in mainstream Hollywood of the era anyway. Different decade same idea in Now Is Good, a boy-meets-girl-and-girl-dies weepie with Dakota Fanning as the pale, interesting girl, Jeremy Irvine as the boy she falls for and leaves behind. To go into further plot detail is pointless – the publicity material points out that Tessa (Fanning) has a bucket list and that losing her virginity is at the top of it. But that’s little more than a … Read more