Spy Game

There was a time when it seemed Robert Redford would stay forever young.

While his contemporaries slowly wrinkled and went bald, Redford remained supernaturally preserved. His boyish face, framed by that lustrous golden fop of hair, seemed to elude the ravages of time.

But eventually, Father Time did catch up with him. The craggy lines came, his sturdy posture started to hunch a little, and gradually that perfect, bouncing blonde coiffure started to look like a mockery of the ravaged features below.

Sadly, the only person who didn’t seem to notice any of this was Bob himself.

Oblivious to the fact that his face was starting to resemble a wedding cake left out in the rain, he kept right on choosing classic young man roles. First, there was The Natural (1984), where a 48-year old Redford (already 15 years too old for the role) outrageously appears in a flashback as his character’s 18-year-old self.  Less Sundance Kid, more ‘Sundance, who are you Kiddin’?’

Worse was 1990’s Havana (the famously duff Cuban rehash of Casablanca) where viewers were asked to believe the beautiful young starlet Lena Olin would be powerless before the raw magnetism of Redford – whose face by now was looking as worn and leathery as a battered chesterfield sofa.

It wasn’t until Indecent Proposal (1993) that Redford himself finally realised the game was up. When the only way you can get Demi Moore into bed is by offering her a million dollars, you know your days as a twinkly-eyed lady-killer are over. Following this, Bob promptly took his crow’s feet behind the camera to continue his film career as a director.

All of which, by round-about route, brings us to Spy Game (2001), a film which saw an older, wiser, age-appropriate Redford return to acting. He plays a veteran CIA agent who’s just about to toddle off into retirement.

But on his ‘last day at work’ (see Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, Robert Duvall in Falling Down etc), he learns that his protégé (played by Brad Pitt) has been captured by the Chinese government while carrying out an unauthorised mission.

Fearing a diplomatic incident, the CIA’s spineless bosses want to wash their hands of Pitt and let the dastardly Chinese execute him. Will Redford find a way to rescue his friend? And can he do it before the leaving speeches and carriage clock presentation?

Given that Redford is playing a retiree, some viewers might be tempted to sit back and relax, happy in the knowledge that any age-related embarrassment will not be on the menu. Over-confident fools!

Ever enthusiastic to grapple with such an elastic concept as time, it turns out our Bob has picked a film that’s riven with multiple decade-spanning flashbacks. So, we’re barely out of the opening credits before Redford's teleported back 20 years to events during the Vietnam War.

Facing this challenge, most actors would use a little judicious hair-tinting or forgiving soft-focus camerawork to help portray their younger self. Not our Bobbie. He simply dons a Seventies-era flared collar shirt in the ironclad belief that he still doesn’t look a day over forty. (Note: at this point, he was 65.A pensioner. More Cocoon than Platoon material.) It’s patently ridiculous, but all you can do is sit back and admire the chutzpah of the man.

It’s hard to fathom where such copper-bottomed self-confidence comes from, but we perhaps touched on the real reason earlier – it’s that incredible bouffant.

While every other male Hollywood barnet has slowly thinned or greyed over the decades, or simply grown implausible (Stallone, for example, looks like he’s wearing a black woolly cap), Redford’s magnificently-coiffured mop has remained perfectly preserved atop his head.

Each time he looks in the mirror and sees that golden thicket, he must think he’s immortal. Perhaps somewhere in an attic there’s a painting of a balding, greying Redford, but with a face as smooth as a baby’s backside.

And speaking of things that don’t get old, what more timeless movie thrill is there than an exploding helicopter?

This takes place during the infamous Vietnam flashback where Redford orders Pitt to assassinate a top NKVD official. While Pitt lies in wait for his target, he’s spotted by a gook helicopter which opens fire on him. Pitt returns fire with a machine gun, damaging the chopper’s engine.

The wounded whirlybird spins slowly towards the ground before disappearing behind a small hill. We hear a crash and a huge fireball suddenly erupts into the sky. Charlie don’t surf, and after this chopper fireball, he don’t fly either.

Artistic merit

You can’t fault the explosion which is a spectacularly large mushroom cloud of reds, yellows and oranges. But, marks have to be deducted for not actually showing the helicopter explosion.

Having the chopper disappear behind a convenient piece of geography is a tired old cheat we liked to see ended. Surely, there’s a Hollywood special effects union that could take action?

Exploding helicopter innovation

Both method (gunfire) and location (Vietnam) have all been done before. Even the fact that helicopter explosion takes place in a flashback has been done before.

Positives 

Viewers of a certain vintage (particularly those dumbfounded by modern gadgetry) will experience a retro thrill at seeing a real-life pager play an integral role in the film.

For younger readers, a pager was a bit like a mobile phone on which you could receive, but not send, very limited text messages. Until the early 1990s, they were seen as the height of twentieth century communications technology. But kids, before you start feeling smug, in 20-years everyone’s going to think all this Twitterbook and Facetweeting you do is a bunch of backward tomfoolery. You’ve been warned.

Negatives

In recent years, James Bond and Jason Bourne have popularised a whizz bang view of the espionage world. One where agents hack into top secret files with a few seconds of computer wizardry, dispose of the guards with their mixed martial arts skills before parkouring their way to safety.

Spy Game, though, paints a decidedly old-school picture of the world of espionage. One where fragments of intelligence are painstakingly pieced together after hours spent poring over dusty brown folders.

Which therefore makes the choice of Tony Scott to direct utterly perplexing. Famed for his fidgety camerawork, rapid cutting and over the top approach to filmmaking, he would seem the perfect choice for the latest Tom Clancy rather than this Le Carre-esque tale of spycraft.

Interesting fact

The exploding helicopter sequence isn’t the only scene in the film where the producers looked to save money on the chopper related budget of the film. According to IMDB, Tony Scott wanted extra money in order to use a helicopter to film a scene that takes place on the roof of a tower block.

When the producers refused, Scott used his own money to pay for a helicopter. I just wish he’d thrown the money at the chopper fireball scene instead and given us a better thrill.

Favourite line

In one scene, Redford’s character dispenses a little advice to his young protégé: “When did Noah build the ark? Before the rain.” Given Redford creaky appearance, it’s fair guess he was talking from first-hand experience.

Review by: Jafo

Still want more? Then check out the Exploding Helicopter podcast episode on Spy Game. You can listen via iTunes, Spotify, Player FM, Acast and Stitcher. Or right here and now....

World War Z

Perhaps World War Zzzzzzzz... would have been a better title.

After countless re-writes (and even re-shoots), this lumbering, re-animated corpse of a film has finally shuffled onto our cinema screens. And what an odd beast it is. Ostensibly based on Max Brook’s acclaimed novel about a zombie apocalypse, it’s a sprawling mess.

As often happens in Hollywood, the film’s producers paid a fortune for the book rights then ripped the innards out of the story. In place of the novel’s interesting reportage approach, they put soupy tosh in which ‘ex UN worker’ Brad Pitt travels the world to find the source of a global zombie pandemic. Then cures it. Single-handedly.

The film kicks off with downtown Philadelphia being over-run by a rapid zombie onslaught. It’s all impressively hectic, and the zombies themselves are super-fast and scarcely seen as individuals. More often, there’s just a sudden blur across the screen as some punter is whacked to the ground.

The director’s signature shot, though, is of a swirling mass of zombies climbing over each other either to push over a bus or summit a giant wall. It’s a bold idea, but the obvious downside is that the zombies couldn’t look more CGI if they had ‘Industrial Light and Magic’ stamped on their foreheads.

Brad narrowly escapes with his straight-from-central-casting family – the weepy wife, older asthmatic kid who needs an inhaler and, yes, even ‘cute’ younger kid who refuses to leave a zombie-marauded flat without her soft toy. Unquestionably, the film would have been more bearable if they’d all been chewed up in the first scene. Useless as characters, they might have at least made a decent meal.

As it is, they stick around like mould for the first half of the film, eating up scenes and adding nothing. It’s just one of many mistakes.

Traditionally, zombies make a variety of moaning noises, but so piss-poor is the script of World War Z that most of the pained groaning comes from the auditorium. Lazy writing prevails. So Brad, supposedly a veteran of war zones, leaves his mobile on while creeping through zombie territory. Do you think it goes off? Well, d’uh.

And when our buff hero enters a locked glass room, there’s a special cut-shot showing him leave his weapon outside. Cripes, maybe now he’ll get trapped inside when the zombie shows up. Even the most knuckle-dragging viewer is beyond such flabby plot-manoeuvring these days, and even the zombies look embarrassed.

The boy Pitt also suffers rather too obviously from leading-man-jinx syndrome. He drives through Philly and it’s suddenly over-run by zombies. He jets off to South Korea and actually causes an attack. (That pesky mobile.) Then he arrives in Israel where, yippee, they’ve built a big wall and everyone’s safe. But no sooner has he done some leonine pouting than here come the zombies and virtually everyone else dies. It’s tempting to think that had they just locked him in a cupboard at the outset, none of this might have happened.

Just over eighty minutes in – and there’s no delicate way to put this – the movie pretty much drops off a cliff. Having hitherto spanned the globe with hugely expensive, thousand extras-featuring setpieces, the ‘action’ suddenly moves to a single, internal ‘medical laboratory’ set – and stays there.

The reason for this sudden stomping on the budget brakes has been exhaustively documented across the internet. In a nutshell, the film’s producers had to scrap the entire original third act (a zombie showdown in Moscow that cost £100 million) after disastrous preview screenings. The snag was, by that time they only had about 33 quid left. And thus the final act.

Here’s what happens. Brad escapes from Jerusalem in a passenger plane and gets a radio message ordering him to head for the one place on earth where mankind can still be saved: Wales. Yes, you did just read that. And don’t worry if you laughed, because so did most of the audience.

Inevitably, zombies have clambered aboard in club class so the plane crash lands in the middle of nowhere, in Wales. (Sorry, that’s a tautology.) Natch, everyone dies in the crash except Brad and a saucy Israeli soldier. Impressively, given that their brief – literally – is to locate ‘a medical facility outside Cardiff’, they find it in no time.

From then on, all you have is Brad and half a dozen British thesps in a Seventies-looking studio set – the sort where the walls wobble if you bang against them. It’s like Doctor Who and Casualty had a one-night stand, and this is the ugly baby. The Brits all look a bit dazed to be in the presence of Hollywood royalty. Brad himself looks like he wants to cry.

The ‘plot’ for this strand is that a potential cure lies in a cut-off wing of the lab populated by a dozen extras-I-mean-zombies. But guess what? These ones don’t move at the speed of sound. That would obviously mean more cameras, snappy editing – more cost, basically – so these ones just loll about in the traditional manner. ‘They’re dormant,’ explains one of the Brits, looking every bit as confused as the audience.

And so follows a Scooby Doo-style mission to reach the cure, with every cliché crammed in – squeaky doors, crawling under windows, ‘almost’ dropping things – all patently calculated to just while away the minutes. And when these zombies do finally start chasing our heroes, there’s no blur-across-the-screen swiftness, just the laboured jogging of forty-something extras trying to run with their arms stretched out without falling over.

The whole segment is a disaster and, in Exploding Helicopter’s experience, literally unprecedented. For context, imagine the final third of Man of Steel taking place in a library; or Lord of the Rings’ climactic battle based entirely in a hobbit hut. It’s all so giddily wrong that the cinema audience were howling with laughter.

In a final twist of the budget knife, the last scene shows Brad reuniting with his family in ‘Nova Scotia’, which couldn’t look more obviously like Wales if there’d been a male choir singing ‘How green is my valley’ in the background. Holding daffodils.

Fortunately, the helicopter crash scene was filmed before the money ran out – otherwise, it may well have featured a Fisher Price toy on a string. What actually happens is this: as literally hundreds of CGI zombies scale a high wall, one military chopper decides that – rather than just shoot from a distance – it’d be better to swoop down really low so they can all hop aboard. The undead hordes obligingly clamber on, and the weighed-down machine first spins then drops to the ground, exploding.

Artistic merit

Nil. What remains is only the memory of how chunkily yet another ‘calamity’ has been constructed from nothing.

Exploding helicopter innovation

The idea – having a chopper weighed down by marauding zombies – is pretty good, but this scene loses massive points for blatantly manufacturing unnecessary danger. Also, the whole episode comes across as a flash-edited barrage of soupy-looking CGI figures. It never remotely feels like you’re watching actual zombies on an actual helicopter.

Do passengers survive?

Given that all those hanging on to the outside are already dead, this is largely an academic point. Presumably the crew die in the explosion or face the horrifying alternative of being eaten alive by an unconvincing special effect. Oh, the shame.

Positives

The most terrifying moment of the entire movie occurs in the first few seconds, when – among the faux news footage clips – Piers Morgan makes a cameo as himself, The sight of his bloated, self-satisfied features in widescreen is truly horrible to behold.

Negatives

This may well be the first bloodless zombie film. So desperate was the studio to secure a PG-13 rating that nothing remotely nasty is allowed to happen onscreen. Which is something of an achievement, when you consider it’s a film about almost the entire population of the Earth rending each other limb from limb with their teeth.

So when Brad brings down a wrench on a fallen zombie, you see nothing but Brad’s head and shoulders. And when he chops off a woman's hand to stop a bite infection spreading, all you see is her worried face. George Romero, this isn’t.

Favourite quote

“We’ve lost the east coast. China is dark.”
No global disaster movie would be complete without a grizzled general gravely muttering this sort of cod-military nonsense.

Interesting fact

The film – with its powerless director, unrealistic schedule and hacked-to-pieces script – has become a symbol of how Hollywood messes up movies. The huge volume of online journalism about the botched job of making the film is far more entertaining than the finished product.

Review by: Chopper

Still want more? Then listen to the Exploding Helicopter podcast review of World War Z. Listen via iTunes, Acast, Stitcher, Podomatic or YourListen.