News from other sources
Bollywood's spoof Osama bin Laden movie proves global hit
Budget movie is banned in Pakistan but will be released in the US
A small budget film about a fake Osama bin Laden video has become one of India's biggest box office hits of the year and is about to hit American cinema screens.
Tere Bin Laden (Without You Laden) has grossed more than $2m in India, despite having a first-time director and initially only being shown on 344 screens.
The film tells the story of a young journalist from Pakistan whose repeated attempts to obtain a visa to the US to pursue his media career are thwarted. Finally he resorts to unscrupulous means by making a bogus Bin Laden video to sell to the news channels with disastrous results.
The film's main character is played by one of Pakistan's biggest pop stars, Ali Zafar, the first time a Bollywood film has featured a Pakistani actor in a main role. Zafar said he hoped the film would challenge people's misconceptions about his country. "People in Pakistan, especially the educated youth, are by and large very liberal and desire progression and peace," he said. "People who have seen pirated copies of the film in Pakistan have loved it and are open to it."
The film, directed by Abhishek Sharma, has been banned in Pakistan, for fear of provoking attacks on cinemas by Bin Laden sympathisers. Zafar said: "I don't think the government is willing to take any risks because it's a very precarious situation. I do understand where they are coming from. If a single incident happens in Britain and the US, you see how perturbed people are and all the sadness that comes with it. In Pakistan, something like this happens almost every other day. Pakistan is a country in a lot of turmoil."
He denied claims that it made light of terrorism attacks, but insisted it focused on attitudes in the west towards Pakistanis. "As soon as Bin Laden's name is mentioned, there are issues and perceptions that come with it. But the point of the movie is to comment on that and how fear is generated. Through humour, some very serious issues can be commented upon."
The film recouped its budget in India alone and has made a further £200,000 in the UK, Middle East and Australia, despite limited releases. That figure is expected to double when the film is released in the US on Friday.
Production company Walkwater Media said the delay of the US opening was not due to the nature of the storyline, but to test the waters in smaller markets first. Aarti Shetty, producer, said: "We were always going to release the film in the US a little later. When it released in India and we looked at the media support and numbers, we thought we should make use of the buzz around the movie."
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Beautiful Kate | Film review
This dour, good-looking film, transposed from the American west to a bankrupt sheep station in the Australian outback, is directed by British actor Rachel Ward. Her husband, Bryan Brown, plays a bitter, overbearing widower and failed politician dying of heart trouble and cared for by a dutiful daughter (Rachel Griffiths). Black-sheep son Ned (Ben Mendelsohn), a drunken writer, returns home after a 20-year absence for a bout of blood-letting and truth-telling. The chief skeletons in the family cupboard and graveyard are the eponymous Kate, Ned's twin sister, who died in a car crash, and Ned's brother who committed suicide. It transpires that the beautiful, wilful Kate, beloved by her father, was seduced her brothers, probably because life in the bush was so tedious. The film is well acted but both blunt and awkward.
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Gainsbourg
Joann Sfar's bold debut is a highly enjoyable â if low on detail â life of the charismatic French singer Serge Gainsbourg
In the 1930s Warner Brothers developed a serious line in earnest, inspirational films celebrating great scientists, liberators and social benefactors, usually played by Edward G Robinson or Paul Muni, dedicated to Longfellow's lines in his "A Psalm of Life": "Lives of great men all remind us/ We can make our lives sublime/ And, departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time." But Variety's contemptuous neologism "biopic" stuck, and biography has never had much standing in the cinema â unlike the literary world where, under the larger rubric of "life writing", it's a serious matter both to practise and study.
Orson Welles's Citizen Kane in the 1940s and the Italian Marxist Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano in the 60s attempted to find an inventive form that would give cinematic biography the status of its literary equivalent. But while popular epics such as Lawrence of Arabia and Gandhi have won Oscars and provided prize-winning roles, critical condescension has continued almost unabated.
Recently, however, as popular culture has come to be taken more seriously than it was when 20th Century-Fox made colourful showbiz biopics 60 years ago, a succession of movie lives of rock stars have done away with traditional narrative forms. Mostly made by independent film-makers, they've mixed documentary and fiction, fantasy and reality in an attempt to get at complex, vital truths: one thinks for instance of British pictures about Ian Curtis, Ian Dury and John Lennon, as well as Todd Haynes's American masterwork I'm Not There in which six different actors play faces and facets of Bob Dylan.
To this category belongs Gainsbourg, aka Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque), a portrait of the French singer Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991). It's an altogether bolder film than La vie en rose which brought an Oscar to Marion Cotillard as Ãdith Piaf, though it too has a central performance, from Ãric Elmosnino, that is remarkable both physically and aurally. It's the feature debut of the 38-year-old writer-director Joann Sfar, a comic-strip designer who, like Gainsbourg, was born in France of Jewish parents, and he finds Serge's "Rosebud" in his Jewish background.
In a pre-credit sequence the young child Serge (born Lucien) is rejected as "too ugly" by a little girl on a summer beach. The film then switches to his wartime childhood in German-occupied Paris. There he reacts against his father's ambition for him to become a classical musician, and against the authorities that force him to wear a yellow star pinned to his chest. He mocks and puzzles the French collaborators by the heavily ironic gesture of being the first to turn up and demand his star, before others start forming a queue. But the atmosphere of the time makes an indelible impression. From the antisemitic posters that line the streets two images continue to haunt him: a Humpty Dumpty grotesque and a mocking beak-nosed caricature that becomes his aggressive alter ego. The movie is rather vague in its treatment of the war, as about much else, though it does have a touching episode in which Gainsbourg lives secretly under the protection of a Catholic boarding school in the countryside, which evokes Louis Malle's autobiographical Au revoir les enfants, a key work in the cycle of French movies dealing with Jews during the Occupation.
In one of the best early sequences Serge's precocious interest in music, painting and sex come together when he attends a life class where he's supposed to keep his back to the nude model his elders are drawing. He subsequently chats up the model and takes her to a bar for a soft drink, where he encounters an elderly music hall chanteuse and exuberantly sings along with her to her biggest hit, a risqué number called "Coco". After the war the central role is taken by Elmosnino as the charismatic, chain-smoking, heavy-drinking Serge â lover, composer, performer in an ever-changing variety of genres and rebel with a mission to épater les bourgeois. His first two marriages don't figure in the film, chief attention being given to his affairs and collaborations with Françoise Hardy, France Gall, Brigitte Bardot and of course Jane Birkin. Laetitia Casta is priceless as Bardot, prancing around Serge's apartment wrapped in a sheet, charming Serge's parents. The late Lucy Gordon is a fetching, playful Birkin, and there's a highly amusing scene in the late 1960s when Serge's music producer (played by Nouvelle Vague director Claude Chabrol) tells them that their erotic duet "Je t'aime⦠moi non plus" (here, unlike most of the other numbers, performed in the original version) could land them in jail.
The self-destructive aspect of Gainsbourg is touched on impressionistically. The cops pick him up dead drunk in the street and transport him in a black maria not to jail but to a concert engagement. Most remarkably, we see him record his reggae version of "La Marseillaise" with a Jamaican group (as aggressively provocative in its way as Jimi Hendrix's treatment of "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock). It's followed by right-wing veterans threatening to lynch him before being drawn into joining him in a straight version of the song.
This enjoyable, handsomely designed, somewhat ragged film brings us close to Gainsbourg as a personality. But it won't help anyone to a high score on Mastermind with "The Life and Work of Serge Gainsbourg" as the specialist subject. Nor will an average British audience come away understanding what François Mitterrand meant when he reacted to Gainsbourg's death saying: "He was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire. He elevated the song to the level of art."
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The War Lord | DVD review
Charlton Heston plays a Norman knight in this impressive costume drama set in 11th-century France
Director Franklin J Schaffner (1920-1989) went into TV immediately after service during the second world war with the US Navy and built a considerable reputation during New York's golden age of live TV drama before turning to the cinema with a succession of intelligent, visually striking pictures. Patton is most famous, but before that he had two happy collaborations with Charlton Heston on Planet of the Apes and the less well-known The War Lord. In the latter, a highly impressive costume drama set in 11th-century France, Heston (right) plays a Norman knight going dangerously astray when assigned to a remote garrison on the fringe of Europe, where Christianity confronts paganism. The literate script is by British novelist John Collier and Millard Kaufman (author of Bad Day at Black Rock), the music is by Jerome Moross (Oscar-nominated for The Big Country), and the haunting atmospheric photography is the work of Russell Metty who shot Spartacus, A Touch of Evil and most of Douglas Sirk's later films. Richard Boone is first rate as Heston's loyal lieutenant.
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Carla Bruni's no Greta Garbo, but she's an attention-grabber for director Woody Allen
France's first lady may not know how to handle a baguette when on camera, but she's added to Woody Allen's roster of beauties
It's always good to be the boss. No one knows that better than Woody Allen, the film director who once defined edgy, angsty, sexy humour and now seems to be keeping to a script firmly designed for his own fun and games.
After all, what was one to make of his latest act of casting French first lady Carla Bruni in his latest project. Bruni is more than capable of setting male hearts aflutter. Yet her acting chops seem a little less striking. During shooting for Allen's latest movie, Midnight in Paris, Bruni reportedly took 35 takes to nail a scene with a baguette.
It has been a long, long time since his movies have generated the critical acclaim of classics like Manhattan and Annie Hall. But he certainly has been having fun. Since 2005 Allen has been on a sort of European tour of movie-making, giving him the opportunity of working with some of the most beautiful women in the world in some of its most romantic locations.
There were his British films, like Scoop and Match Point, which both starred Scarlett Johansson, and Cassandra's Dream, with Hayley Atwell. Or You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, which featured Freida Pinto, Anna Friel and Naomi Watts. Then it was on to Spain with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, starring Johansson again, as well as Penélope Cruz and Rebecca Hall.
The quality has been mixed. But what's been consistent is Allen's knack for casting, directing and, sometimes, acting alongside incredibly beautiful women.
Sigh. It is like an old man's dream come true. Which is handy. Because that is exactly what it is.
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Frontier Blues | Film review
The feature debut of a 31-year-old Iranian director resident in London since 1986, this deadpan comedy performed by a non-professional cast is set on the border with Turkmenistan in the far north. The quiet, desperate lives of four men, variously mad, sad and dangerous to know, interact over a period of a few days. There's a Turkmen chicken farmer, learning English so he can move across the border to find a better future, accompanied by a woman he hopes to marry but has never spoken to; a dim-witted Persian lad who takes his donkey everywhere, and his kindly uncle, owner of a men's clothing store that stocks nothing that will fit anyone; and an explosive 55-year-old musician, currently acting as guide to a naive photographer from Tehran and grieving for his wife, abducted by a shepherd driving a green Mercedes. It's shot in long, static takes on bleak, dusty locations. My favourite exchange goes thus â Pickup Driver: "Where are you going?" Pedestrian: "Nowhere." Driver: "Hop in, I'll give you a lift."
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The 10 best dancers
From ballet to contemporary, dance is enjoying a real upsurge. But for poise, power and poignancy, who has the best moves?
Vaslav NijinskyBorn in 1890, Nijinsky trained at the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, where his amazing virtuosity swiftly became apparent. As the star of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes,his intense characterisations in new-wave ballets like Scheherazade, Carnaval and Petrouchka won him a huge European following. "Nijinsky never once touched the ground, but laughed at our sorrows and passions in mid-air," wrote one spectator. His reputation grew with the choreography of several modernist works, but by his mid-20s he was displaying signs of the schizophrenia which, with brutal prematurity, would end his career.Josephine Baker
Three-quarters of a century before Beyoncé, there was Josephine Baker, the "Black Pearl" of the Folies Bergères. Born into poverty in 1906, Baker became a chorus dancer in the jazzy vaudeville shows of the Harlem Renaissance before, at the age of 19, launching a career in Paris. Funny, flirty and entrancingly sexy, she shocked many, but tantalised many more, by appearing practically naked on stage. In her most famous number, the Danse Sauvage, she sent up prevailing notions of race with a fabulously provocative shimmy in nothing but a skirt of bananas.Fred Astaire
You can freeze-frame a Fred Astaire dance sequence at any point and the image is always perfect. The Astaire hallmarks, evident in the nine RKO pictures he made with Ginger Rogers in the 1930s, were a supreme musicality and poise. He'd glide across the screen with that nonchalant half-smile, in an effortless hailstorm of tap, and make it look so easy you were sure you could do it yourself. But Astaire was more than a dancer: he was the embodiment of an era; defined, like the man himself, in elegant black and white. Those shimmering ballrooms are gone, but the films are ours forever. He was, quite simply, the greatest.Michael Clark
His career has been well documented: the transgressive choreography with its punk styling, the descent into heroin addiction and the long climb back. All of which serves to distract from Michael Clark's superlative gifts as a performer â most evident in the years when he was dancing other people's work. His finest performances were with Ballet Rambert, which he joined in 1979, aged 17, and where he became the muse of artistic director Richard Alston. Clark's mesmerising interpretation of Alston's spare, reverberant Soda Lake remains, for me, the stand-out performance of late 20th century British contemporary dance.Yuri Soloviev
"If you think I'm good, you should see Soloviev," said Rudolf Nureyev after his defection from the Soviet Union in 1961. The finest of the post-war generation of Leningrad male dancers, "Cosmonaut Yuri" combined a phenomenal jump with supreme clarity and refinement of technique. Several of his performances are preserved on film, notably Kirov Ballet's The Sleeping Beauty, and the reverence in which he held classical dance is apparent in every step. An enigmatic and intensely private figure, Soloviev was found dead at his dacha in 1977. The cause was a gunshot wound to the head, probably self-inflicted.Gelsey Kirkland
Few ballerinas have battled as many demons as the elfin Gelsey Kirkland. After six brilliant years at New York City Ballet, which she joined in 1968 at the age of 15, Kirkland joined American Ballet Theatre, where she became the partner, offstage and on, of the Soviet-born superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov (above). Twelve years later, traumatised by the failure of her relationship with Baryshnikov and bedevilled by anorexia and cocaine addiction, she left the stage. But she could produce performances of translucent intensity. Her Juliet, at Covent Garden, was for my money the most heart-rending interpretation ever.Nadezhda Pavlova
In 1973, an unknown 16-year-old ballet student from Perm, USSR, entered the International Moscow Ballet Competition, and before a heavyweight panel of judges, and against professional competitors, performed a series of excerpts from The Nutcracker. Pavlova's performance (happily, caught on film), was so joyous, so intoxicating in its perfection, that the judges gave her the rarely awarded Grand Prix. Thereafter, her story would be a sad one. Recruited to the Bolshoi, an unhappy marriage and Pavlova's fragile sense of self caused a gradual decline. Into that first thrilling performance, though, she poured the hopes and dreams of a lifetime.Carlos Acosta
Born the youngest child of 11 in a rough quarter of Havana, Carlos Acosta was sent to ballet classes as a punishment for delinquency. In 1990, aged 17, he won the gold medal at the Prix de Lausanne, and today there is no nobler prince on the ballet stage. Acosta can turn on the fireworks with the best of them, unleashing huge leaps and turns, but the keynote of his performances is their charm and musicality. Acosta doesn't brag, he lets his dancing do the talking, but he has probably attracted more newcomers to the ballet than any male dancer since Nureyev.Altynai Asylmuratova
St Petersburg has been the cradle of ballet genius for a century and half, but for sheer radiance, few of its stars have matched Asylmuratova. Born in Kazakhstan, she joined the Kirov Ballet in 1978, aged 17, and became a noted exemplar of the company's luminous, soft-backed style. As Odette in Swan Lake or Nikiya in La Bayadère, her pearlescent beauty was matched by a bewitching expressiveness. She used her arms, in particular, to mesmerising effect, drawing you into her tragic, lunar realm. Yet Asylmuratova was the most grounded of individuals. In 2000 she was appointed director of the Vaganova Ballet Academy, where she herself had trained, and retired from dancing without a backward glance.Alina Cojocaru
In April 2001, Sir Anthony Dowell, then director of the Royal Ballet, promoted 19-year-old, Bucharest-born Alina Cojocaru to the rank of principal dancer. The ritual was enacted onstage, after a performance of Giselle which, in the view of many critics, aligned Cojocaru with the very greatest interpreters of the role. Tiny, imperious, and every perfectly proportioned inch the temperamental ballerina, Cojocaru is a performer of heart-stopping loveliness. Her emotional range is profound, her balletic line as supple and fine-drawn as a Toledo rapier-blade. A once-in-a-generation phenomenon, to be sought out and seen at any cost. Luke Jennings
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Mark Kermode's DVD round-up
Madness reigns in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, while Jim Carrey's gurning spoils I Love You Phillip Morris
Having finally won a long overdue best director Oscar for one of his most solidly pedestrian works (The Departed), Martin Scorsese cuts himself some cultural slack with Shutter Island, a romping old-fashioned psychodrama replete with murderous plots, ghostly visions and the kind of split personality disorders beloved of campy exploitation cinema. In the paranoid 50s, war vet turned US marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is sent to the titular madhouse to investigate the disappearance of a dangerous inmate. Cut off by fogs and storms, and increasingly detached from the "real world", the patients and carers of this gothic establishment seem to have descended into some form of communal madness, presided over by the quietly sinister Dr John Cawley (Ben Kingsley, featuring villainous bald-cum-untrustworthy facial hair combo) and his Nazi-sounding associate Dr Jeremiah Naehring (Max von Sydow). Lightning flashes, tempers rage and a throbbing headache of suspicion shows no signs of abating; the more Teddy and his comradely chum Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) learn, the more it appears that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Adapted from a novel by Dennis Lehane, and boasting the same big-budget B-movie visual sensibility as Cape Fear, Shutter Island is a guilty pleasure in which everything is turned up to 11 â not least the harrumphing classical jukebox accompaniment, which flits from Ligeti to Mahler and sounds on occasion like Bernard Herrmann attempting to bring a large ocean liner in to dock. The reference points are scattershot, with allusions to the Holocaust sitting uncomfortably alongside riffs from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, all set within the shadow of William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration, which provides an unacknowledged blueprint for the unfolding madness. It's a lively enterprise, teetering on the brink of homage, threatening constantly to tumble over into pastiche. Anyone with a working knowledge of nostalgic bug-house shriekers should be able to spy where it's all heading from the outset but there's great satisfaction to be found watching things play out with such wanton abandon. Relatively scant extras (a couple of interesting but hardly in-depth docs) suggest that an enhanced home-viewing package may be due in the near future.
"I've been waiting all my life for my version of Hal Ashby to come along," says Jim Carrey in the scrappy behind-the-scenes DVD featurettes for I Love You Phillip Morris. This may seem unusual coming from the man who made his name playing wacky cartoon caricatures like Ace Ventura and The Grinch. Yet as both The Truman Show and Man on the Moon demonstrate, Carrey has long held loftier ambitions, and this "unbelievable true tale" from Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (in whom Carrey spies Ashby's humanist spirit) seems tailor-made to broaden his canvas. Carrey plays Steven Russell, a super-straight cop who becomes a flamboyant gay con man, and who is now apparently whiling away his hours in long-term solitary confinement.
It's a peculiar film which struggles (with occasional success) to tell an overly wacky story to a mainstream audience â an enterprise which remains untested in the US, where a release date is still pending despite Carrey's high profile. Co-star Ewan McGregor (who plays the eponymous former inmate) talks about the tension between the tender and the comedic in the movie and states clearly that: "I didn't want to look like a straight man playing gay, or a stereotype of what straight people think gay people are like." Nor does he, although Carrey's typically in-your-face OTT gurning is perhaps harder to embrace. At its best, this thoroughly odd affair has something of the strange charm of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which similarly dramatised a delusional narrative and asked the audience to figure out the "truth" for themselves. The fact that it's being marketed as "this year's most hysterical laugh-out-loud comedy" does it no favours whatsoever.
At a key moment in From Paris With Love, John Travolta (Ben Kingsley's hairstyle twin) makes a smirking in-joke reference to Pulp Fiction, the film which revitalised his all-but-dead career in the mid-90s. It's a particularly ill-judged moment which doesn't so much playfully recall past glories as remind us just how far Travolta's stock has fallen once again. Indeed, even in the wilderness years immediately preceding Pulp Fiction, Big John rarely made movies as witless, charmless and joyless as this meat-market action movie.
The plot (if it can be called that) ropes together a pumped-up American secret agent (Travolta) with a winsome wannabe spy (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and sets them charging around the French capital shooting people and blowing things up while swapping unfunny anecdotes and witticisms designed to appeal to low-maintenance genre fanboys and Luc Besson completists. Considering the level of cranked-up on screen pyrotechnics, this really is impressively boring fare which actually succeeded in bludgeoning me to sleep. It's chauffeur-driven crap like this that makes you realise just how great director Louis Leterrier's Transporter movies are â who needs John Travolta when you've got Jason Statham? As the tagline says: "No merci."
Meanwhile Canadian-Armenian enigma Atom Egoyan regains some of the lost ground of Adoration with Chloe, an artsy erotic thriller based on the dumbo 2003 French folly Nathalieâ¦. Julianne Moore is the suspicious wife who hires an alluring escort to seduce her husband (yeah, right) with enjoyably ridiculous results. It's not in the same league as Exotica or even Where the Truth Lies, but at least Egoyan is emerging from the academic (and profoundly uncinematic) abyss into which he had disappeared of late.
- Martin Scorsese
- Leonardo DiCaprio
- Jim Carrey
- Ewan McGregor
- John Travolta
- Atom Egoyan
- DVD and video reviews
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The Karate Kid | Film review
Back in 1984 the director of Rocky, John Avildsen, had another surprise success with the not dissimilar Karate Kid, the tale of an Italian-American schoolboy relocating from New Jersey to Los Angeles and learning to hold his own with local bullies trained in martial arts by an ex-Special Forces thug. With help from a wise, gentle old Okinawa-born janitor, he becomes junior karate champ of San Fernando Valley. In this near-identical remake an African-American widow is transferred by her employers from Detroit to Beijing, her 12-year-old son's vicious oppressors are Chinese schoolmates and his teacher Jackie Chan. The new film is even longer than the original and far more violent. Jaden Smith (whose movie-star parents are the film's co-producers) is less likeable than Ralph Macchio, and Chan has the pawky humour but lacks the gravitas (or the significant backstory) of Pat Morita in the 1994 version. The British cinematographer Roger Pratt, whose films include Batman, two Harry Potters and Brazil, has done a characteristically first-rate job.
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Separado! | Film review
Made in Welsh, English and Spanish, this meandering documentary follows the likeable Welsh musician Gruff Rhys as he goes in search of relatives who emigrated to Patagonia from north Wales in the 19th century. He's also looking for the Welsh-Argentinian singer René Griffiths, briefly a star of Welsh TV when Rhys was a teenager. The story of the Welsh diaspora in Latin America has been told in fiction (by Richard Llewellyn in sequels to How Green Was My Valley) and several broadcast documentaries. So the material is not particularly new. But Rhys is an entertaining guide and he meets some interesting people along the way, albeit less quirky than Patagonians encountered in recent Argentinian cinema.
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The A-Team | Film review
From 1970 to the late 80s there was a flood of films and TV shows influenced by the moral and emotional fallout from the Vietnam war. One of the slickest, most bone-headed was The A-Team, which ran on TV for more than 90 episodes between 1984 and 87. A cynical, sawn-off shotgun marriage between Mission Impossible and The Fugitive, it centred on a cocky four-man US Special Forces unit framed and court-martialled after being ordered to rob a Hanoi bank and existing thereafter carrying out benevolent missions stateside while trying to exonerate themselves. The group was led by George Peppard as the cigar-chomping Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith, but the real star was the gigantic Mr T as the weapons specialist "BA" (for Bad Attitude) Baracus.
This belated movie spinoff, which has been updated to the Iraq war, is overwrought and incoherent, spends the first 45 minutes rehearsing an identical backstory, and is overacted â most depressingly by an ill-at-ease Liam Neeson, who can't emulate the cheesy charm Peppard brought to Hannibal. The heavies are all to be found in the Pentagon and CIA, and as in the TV series the incandescent violence is spectacular, but no one is seen to be killed. Well, actually I think a single body bag might have been needed.
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