'Why put yourself through this?' you may ask. Well, two reasons: Robbie Coltrane and Michael Kitchen. And, as it turns out, Sophie Marceau is not hard on the eye, either.
Robbie doesn't have much of a part, unfortunately, but does get to shoot people and performs with gusto - Kitchen's role is even smaller. The script (by Neal Purves and Robert Wade) is incredibly cheesy, e.g. 'What's the time?' 'It's time for you to die' but the plot itself, involving oil pipelines through central Europe, couldn't be more timely.
Robert Carlyle is rather restrained as the villain. With Denise Richards, Judi Dench, Desmond Llewelyn, John Cleese, Samantha Bond, Colin Salmon, Goldie, David Calder, Patrick Malahide.
Amongst many seriously OTT sequences (I was often looking at the screen saying 'What???') is the attack with a tree sawing helicopter. I was amazed that BMW allowed their car (a Z8, if we must know) to be sawn in half.
It's of course very professionally put together with Adrian Biddle on camera and Jim Clark editing - this is the film he deserted Will Boyd's The Trench for - you can't really blame him. Jim thought the film was 'old fashioned and interminable', the title song crap and the credits sequence 'kitschy'. (None of which I can argue with.) Vic Armstrong was responsible for the action scenes, and the various things that blow up all over the place.
No comments:
Post a Comment