The Girl On The Train

If the number of girls on trains reading The Girl On The Train over the last couple of years is anything to go by, then the film of the book of the girl on the train is already on the fast track to box office success. Which is a shame really, because despite a first class performance from Emily Blunt, it really is a load of derivative, mediocre and frequently lazy old rubbish; if Southern Rail made movies instead of pretending to operate a train service, this would be the result.

The Girl On The Train

Full disclaimer: I haven't read Paula Hawkins' book. I don't know anything about it bar its Da Vinci Code / Girl With The Dragon Tattoo / Gone Girl-esque ubiquity among commuters, although that fact in itself should have alerted me to the film's distinct averageness. So whether its flaws are inherited from the source material or are entirely down to Erin Cressida Wilson's script, I don't know. But even if you were to approach it with the blissful ignorance of the novel's very existence, you'd know it was a literary adaptation before it's barely pulled out of the station.

Much of the first act is smothered in Emily Blunt's voiceover, explaining who her character is and what she's looking at from her vantage point on her daily slog to and from Manhattan, and it's a fair indication that the film is destined to go off the rails. It might be an old-fashioned point of view but I like films to show, not tell, and lengthy voiceovers are almost always a signal that somebody, somewhere, doesn't have the artistic chops to craft a truly cinematic experience. The fact that the voiceovers disappear once they've set the scene, returning only for a cringe-inducing sign-off, just drives the point home.

The Girl On The Balcony

Before too long then, we know that Rachel (Blunt) is an obsessive alcoholic who thrives on twice-daily gawps at the house she used to share with her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux), who's now married to Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). A couple of doors down live Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans), an initially anonymous couple who Rachel envies for their apparently perfect life. All these characters' stories are presented to us in a relentless tumble of flashbacks and captions, some of which are polite enough to let you know when you're back in the present day, if director Tate Taylor can be arsed.

Flashbacks - along with voiceovers - are another dangerous filmmaking tool, and Taylor wields them like a child with a chainsaw, hacking his story to bits and leaving you to piece together the tattered remains. Now I don't mind the odd bit of deliberate misdirection and cinematic sleight-of-hand that flashbacks can provide (Christopher Nolan's Memento and The Prestige took the device to new and thus-far unparalleled heights), but here they just come across as unnecessary. One notably egregious example occurs during The Girl On The Train's climax, pointlessly depicting at length (and in dubious taste) events we've already had explained to us. There's a high-profile film out soon that uses flashbacks with startling ingenuity, and it shunts Wilson and Taylor's film into the sidings; one can only hope that they watch it and think long and hard about what they've done.

The Girl On The Front Lawn

Eventually, as you can imagine (or know full well having read the book), there's an unpleasant turn of events for the characters, and the whole shebang becomes a '90s psychological thriller riddled with plot holes. Not least of these is a staggeringly inept police investigation headed up by the usually-formidable Alison Janney, wasted here as a detective who - in any other similarly-themed movie - would have had the case wrapped up by the hour mark, instead of doing dumb things like conducting half an interview with a prime suspect before inexplicably breaking off because an underling shook his head at her. I too found myself shaking my head, and not for the last time.

Tate Taylor's approach and visuals suggest a man who's watched Gone Girl quite a lot and thought, well, that worked, let's do that. But in attempting to mimic David Fincher, he's merely highlighted the difference between a director who truly understands the potential of cinema and a journeyman lumbered with a creaky script. Roughly ten percent of The Girl On The Train is made up of things happening, while the remaining ninety percent consists of people telling other people about things that happened, and frankly it's a waste of film. If you want someone to relay the story's events to you just read the book, because on this evidence, cinema is entirely the wrong platform.

Christopher Nolan's Parting Shots

If there's one thing Christopher Nolan knows well, it's how to finish a film. Not in the sense that his ability to sit through the whole of a motion picture is exemplary, even I can do that. What I mean is that nearly all his films have great endings.

Instead of wrapping everything up neatly in the final act before adding a cosy epilogue just so you know the story's definitely over, Nolan uses his final scenes to take the plot somewhere else entirely. A showboating Shyamalanesque twist is one thing, but Nolan's denouements are so much more than that - either extending the story beyond its own boundaries to the point where it feels like the credits are intruding on the rest of the film, or squirting the whole thing back up its own bottom, forcing you to reappraise everything you've just seen.

So here are six great Christopher Nolan films with six great endings, plus the coffee-flavoured chocolate in the packet of Revels that is Insomnia, which buggers up an otherwise perfectly good hypothesis.

*** Obvious statement: CONTAINS SPOILERS, duh. Including a
little one for Inception, but nothing too fun-destroying.***

Following

It's only in the film's final minute that we discover what the whole plot's been leading up to, and it's a far more devious and sinister double reverse counterbluff than we thought it was. In the final shot the bad guy literally disappears into the crowd and you can't quite believe that's how it's going to end. But it is.

Memento

In a film so back to front, upside down and inside out, Memento's ending isn't even anything as simple as the beginning of the story - in the chronologically re-edited version this shot comes over half an hour in. But it's in this scene that our absent-minded hero does the unthinkable to himself, setting up the action for the preceding two hours and leading up to the very first (literal) shots. And that final line: genius.

Insomnia

As if being a distinctly average thriller and, ironically, a good cure for insomnia wasn't enough, Insomnia is the only one of Nolan's films not to follow the pattern that forms the entire basis of my incisive observations. There will obviously be repercussions from the events of the last scene, but they're pedestrian in comparison to, say, Memento's mind-squootling finale. Bad Nolan.

Batman Begins

It was always Batman Begins' job to set up a sequel, and after seeing what Nolan did with a lesser villain like The Scarecrow, to tease The Joker as the next bat-villain was only ever going to cause uncontrollable fanboy tumescence for three long years. No superhero origin film would be complete without a final shot of a man in tights zooming towards camera, and Batman Begins does its duty in a classic shot that, as you can see, doesn't work as a still at all.

And take note, Marvel - this is how you tee up the next chapter: before the credits.

The Prestige

The final reveal through a room full of drowned Hugh Jackmans reveals the terrifying extent of his character's desperation to be a better magician than Christian Bale's, and is so disturbing that you almost forgive the clichéd scene that precedes it in which Bale shoots Jackman and then explains the whole plot to him in the exact amount of time it takes for him to cark it. Almost.

The Dark Knight

Commissioner Gordon unwillingly sends the entire police force after Batman when he sacrifices himself for the good of Gotham by taking the rap for Harvey Dent's dastardly deeds, and the dark knight goes on the lam for what looks like four more years of geek frustration. In the space of a couple of minutes you realise this superhero is even more heroic than you thought, and you just want to give him a hug. And a Strepsil.

Inception

Everything's wrapped up, Ellen Page has stopped asking silly questions and you can finally stop frowning like Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island. And then, just as you're reaching for your coat and accidentally tipping the remains of your popcorn over your neighbour, Nolan drops that final shot on you. What a bastard.

To comment on this post, click here

Mildly Crackers Weirdery

I’m well aware that this blog is fast becoming little more than an excuse for me to have a geekgasm every time a new trailer is released, but it really isn’t my fault if people keep puking out exciting trailers is it? IS IT?! No. So stop going on about it.

Today’s miniature slice of microtainment comes in the shape of one solitary minute of mildly crackers weirdery from Batman Begins / The Dark Knight director Christopher "Yet to make a bad film, although Insomnia wasn't all that" Nolan. Imagine the trouble he has squeezing all that onto his passport.

His new film, Inception, is probably so called because it’s so far from a cinematic release that it’s practically still at the inception stage. In fact it’s not due to wallop your nearest big screen for 11 months, so don’t get too excited after watching this:



Described in possibly the most pretentious sentence ever written as a "contemporary science fiction tale set within the architecture of the mind", Inception looks to be just as spanky as Nolan’s other non-Batflicks (Insomnia excepted). Memento is endlessly rewatchable thanks to its barking backwards-forwards-backwards structure and The Prestige, despite having a twist you could see from the cinema car park, was also an atmospheric and disturbing winner. Even Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s sporting that expression that looks like he's trying to calculate a complex equation while holding in a potentially violent fart, might not be able to sink this one.

The filming of Inception is so secretive that rumours started flying round that Nolan was actually making a third Batman film, which is so outrageously mental that it could be true. However, this trailer seems to have dispelled that idea… unless it’s all a cunning ruse; an Inception deception, if you will (you won’t), a magic trick as wicked as anything we saw in The Prestige. Whatever, if it wears a cape and growls like a laryngitic lion it’ll be ace, if it frowns a lot and stubbornly refuses to follow a linear plot it’ll still be ace.

Come back to The Incredible Suit soon for more pointless frothing over ludicrously premature blipverts. I know I would! Well… I might.

To comment on this post, click here