Reviews

Films

Rescue Dawn

Directed by Werner Herzog, starring Christian Bale, Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies

At 65 years old, Werner Herzog continues to work, continues to make movies and, as recently as two years ago with his remarkable documentary Grizzly Man, showed himself still capable of making films with modern-classic potential written all over them. Now, with an eye to the commercial Hollywood market, he has put together an effective, unassuming and old-fashioned action adventure which is - perhaps a little faute de mieux - probably the best film of the week.

It revisits the subject of a documentary he made 10 years ago called Little Dieter Needs to Fly - the true story of Dieter Dengler, a German-born US navy pilot who in 1966 flew a top-secret bombing raid into Laos. Dengler was shot down, captured and tortured by the Laotian equivalent of the Vietcong, but with remarkable resourcefulness and daring, he escaped his prison camp and was finally rescued by his own side, half-starved and half-crazed, after 23 days in the jungle.

Here, the British-born star Christian Bale brings his formidable presence and concentration to the part of Dengler; Steve Zahn plays Duane, the fellow American who escaped with him, and Jeremy Davies gives an outstanding performance as Gene, the third American, who has become psychologically unglued after years of captivity in the bamboo prison. Emaciated, spaced-out, all but incoherent, this is a double-distilled method performance from Davies, with a little of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, but a touch more plausible and authentic.

Sleuth

Directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring Michael Caine, Jude Law and Harold Pinter

In its own way, this film is an awesome, even terrifying, demonstration of star power. If really, really big names are involved, they can get anything made. Even this. And this is a Dead Film Walking, a zombie of a film, a shuffling Frankenstein's monster of a film, leaking electricity from its badly-fitting neck bolts, tragically whimpering at the pointless agony of its own brief existence. Whose idea was it to zap this raddled corpse with electrodes and make it jolt and reel and stagger around for 88 impossibly painful minutes? The culpable white-coated scientists are its stars, Michael Caine and Jude Law, whose conceit the idea appears to have tickled; its screenwriter, Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, and its director, Kenneth Branagh. This formidable quartet's very worst aspects have here come together in a perfect storm of rubbishness.

It is an unendurably boring, stagey, boring, arthritic, misconceived - and did I mention boring - new adaptation of Sleuth, the 1970 play by Anthony Shaffer, about a middle-aged thriller writer called Andrew Wyke, who invites his errant wife's sexy young lover Milo to his palatial country pad, ostensibly to discuss divorce arrangements like a civilized person. But really he wants to toy with him, play games with him and generally mess with his head - as revenge for being sexually humiliated. It became a 1972 movie starring Laurence Olivier and a young Caine. Now it is Caine who plays the malign oldster and Law, very self-consciously indeed, inherits the younger man's mantle. But wait. "New"? A "new" version? Well, it is new in the sense that Pinter has tinkered with the plot and very much recreates Wyke in his own image.

The Guardian

(China Daily 11/27/2007 page20)