Reviews

Films

River Queen

Directed by Vincent Ward, starring Samantha Morton, Kiefer Sutherland, Temuera Morrison

This adventure-drama from director Vincent Ward has been on the shelf since 2005, and there's something rather non-urgent about seeing it now, frankly. But it deserves an outing on account of the handsome location photography and fervent performances, not least from Samantha Morton. She plays Sarah O'Brien, a young Irishwoman in 1860s New Zealand and the daughter of a surgeon employed by the British army (Stephen Rea). He has very mixed feelings about his employers, and finds himself implicated in the army's brutal clearances which desecrate sacred Maori lands. As tension builds between the soldiers and the tribesmen, Sarah falls in love with a Maori and bears his child - and then the father dies. When the confrontation between the indigenous peoples and their imperial oppressor reaches a crisis, a Maori chieftain kidnaps the child (his grandchild).

Sarah must now begin an epic search for her son, and in doing so confronts a terrible dilemma: to which tribe does she belong?

What is interesting about Ward's story is that the dividing lines are not as clear as they seem. As Irish people working for the British army - and Sarah at one stage finds herself tolerated as a kind of camp-follower-cum-amateur-surgeon - Sarah and her father feel a secret kinship with the Maoris who have chosen to make peace with the British and even take their shilling and join up. Are they sellouts, traitors? Or are they just doing what needs to be done to survive, both as individuals and communities?

Poignantly, Sarah has an admirer from within the Anglo-Saxon ranks: a soldier called Doyle, played by Kiefer Sutherland, who nurses a hopeless passion but is far too much of a gentleman to force himself on her in any way. The other males are rather predictably constituted. Cliff Curtis plays Wiremu, the Maori who is an uncle to Sarah's child and basically a sympathetic character. And there is the British army commander Baine, played by Anton Lesser, a cruel and arrogant man who has long, straggling hair, like some colonial Custer.

One point of comparison might be with Ford's The Searchers, except that it is Sarah who is doing the searching; she is dramatically at the center, not the ferocious menfolk. And Morton certainly carries off the role. She can play indomitable, sensual, self-reliant; politically right-on in an 80s sort of way. She can be attractive, but never with the passive giggliness of a conventional romantic lead - and light years away from comedy.

Jumper

Directed by Doug Liman, starring Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, Samuel L Jackson

An elegantly idiotic sci-fi thriller that initially feels as though it might have derived from Philip K Dick - but lacks the master's lysergic idiosyncracy. It's the story of svelte and sulky Hayden Christensen who discovers in himself a disconcerting ability to teleport out of trouble. At first, he uses his power to empty bank vaults, pick up women, and picnic in high-security tourist sites, but then he realizes he is being hunted by malevolent killers led by a silver-coiffured Samuel L Jackson. About half way through, Jamie Bell pops up as a Geordie-accented guardian angel of a fellow jumper, and together they must battle Jackson and his "paladins", who try to disable their prey with massive jolts of electricity.

Director Doug Liman, who made his name with Swingers before inaugurating the Bourne franchise, plays everything with a commendably straight face, creating extravagant action sequences and inserting tortured love scenes for Hayden to glower through. But it all amounts to very little in the long run. The Guardian

(China Daily 02/26/2008 page20)