Duplicity
(Tony Gilroy):
Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti
Running time: 125 minutes (12A)
Julia Roberts is effervescent, sultry and fabulous in Tony Gilroy’s follow-up to Michael Clayton. With her big wide lips, she looks like she is going to snack on Clive Owen’s grizzled head. Thankfully, his prickly smooth demeanour proves a capable defence. After the corporate-is-evil tone of Michael Clayton, Gilroy’s second film seems positively light-hearted. It filters screwball comedy into espionage thriller into a satire of corporate culture that borders on being glib. Owen and Roberts play former spies and lovers now working for a corporate boss (Paul Giamatti) who wants to bring down his alpha male opposition, a multinational run by Tom Wilkinson. The plot is multilayered to keep you guessing who is spying on who and Roberts and Owen work up genuine heat. Are they deceiving each other? Or is it all play? Indeed, are they being played? The ending, which includes a mind-numbing explanation, keeps spilling like it’s a mess nobody knows how to clean up. Entertaining, though.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop
(Steve Carr):
Kevin James, Jayma Mays, Keir O’Donnell, Peter Gerety, Bobby Cannavale
Running time: 87 minutes (PG)
Comedian Kevin James is shaped like a beach ball. His schtick in Mall Cop is to get laughs from the unexpected slapstick he throws on screen for a man of his weight. He plays Paul Blart, a hypoglycaemic mall cop who takes his job much too seriously. He’s a classic schlub: stuffs his face full of pie due to low self-esteem and has a habit of making a fool of himself. He patrols the mall on a Segway and falls for a pixie-faced girl (Jayma Mays) who runs a hair-extensions store. When the mall is taken hostage by a gang of criminals, he goes from zero to hero and earns a chance to win the girl. James, who starred in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, is a genial presence – an overweight everyman. He holds our attention for the full 87 minutes. But the script, co-written by James, is barren and barely funny, and the plotting is ramshackle. It follows the recent trend of dove-tailing comedy into ironic ’80s action movie territory with lazy results.
Lesbian Vampire Killers
(Phil Claydon):
James Corden, Mathew Horne,
Paul McGann, Emer Kenny, Lucy
Gaskell
Running time: 88 minutes (16)
If I had a stake, I’d hammer it into the empty heads of the makers of this dire, hammier-than-a-hogfarm C-movie. It’s a sexploitation flick travelling under the mantle of a spoof horror and stars James Corden and Mathew Horne from BBC’s Gavin and Stacey. This hapless duo play a hapless pair who find themselves in a country town overrun by lesbian vampires. They get stuck into killing them with the sort of gusto that wouldn’t take a film academic to work out the male-frustration subtext. It represents the worst of British trash culture: Nuts magazine on screen. I’m sure director Phil Claydon tried his best, but he can’t get beyond a Girls Aloud video: women with fanned hair in hot pants, high heels and fangs. One scene offers us an up-skirt shot before the camera rides up to a pouting mouth that begins to suck a lollipop. Claydon makes ’60s sexploitation mogul Russ Meyer look like an arthouse genius.
The script mangles Shaun of the Dead and Hammer Horror with TV’s The League of Gentlemen and Peep Show without one moment of bite. I can guarantee genuine horror, though – a moment of skin-crawling dread about five minutes into the movie when you’ll realise you should have paid attention to this review.
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