Edge Of Tomorrow

If there's one thing I hate, it's films which include that universally familiar helicopter shot of the Thames with the Houses Of Parliament and the London Eye, then stick the utterly redundant caption "LONDON" over it for the benefit of people too dumb to dress themselves. It happened in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and immediately told me the film was aimed at total fucking idiots. So when it turned up in Edge Of Tomorrow, I punched the person next to me out of rage and settled in for a completely average sci-fi videogame shoot-em-up. And that's exactly what I got. But not for about an hour. The rest was ace.

When you gotta go, you gotta go

There's so much to love in the first act. Tom Cruise plays deliciously against type as Major William Cage, an oily PR gonk who'd do anything to weasel out of a fight, and it's as refreshing as a jug of iced water down the front of your undies. No sooner is he railroaded into joining the battle for humanity against an army of alien bastards, for which he is hilariously under-equipped, than he falls into an inconvenient time-loop which is masterfully handled by director Doug Liman. It's easy to bore the audience to tears by repeating stuff over and over (see also Vantage Point, my BlogalongaBond reviews), but Chris McQuarrie's zippy script doesn't fuck about. McQuarrie and Liman ruthlessly shove the plot towards the all-important exposition while playing the scenes for LOLs, of which there are many - mostly gleefully derived from Cruise dying horribly. Watching him struggle to get the safety off on his ludicrous battle suit for fifteen minutes is almost as much fun as seeing Bill Paxton playing exactly the soldier that Aliens' Private Hudson would have become.

When the action moves to the beaches of northern France and a full-on barney with the bad guys, the cracks in the story start to show. There are obvious parallels with the second world war - much of this section plays out like a PG Saving Private Ryan - but for no clear subtextual reason. Edge Of Tomorrow is a knockabout sci-fi extravaganza, and it makes no claims to rival the existential crisis of Groundhog Day, which is fine but also a shame; the opportunity to have it actually say something is right there, but instead it's happy to be a film about Tom Cruise learning to be Tom Cruise.

How To Be Tom Cruise, Step 1: Run funny while pulling a daft face

At this point though, all is still well: Emily Blunt is fiery and caustic as the Full Metal Bitch who's the only one with the knowledge to help Cage through his predicament; Noah Taylor does the Basil Exposition thing well enough and everything is trucking along so nicely that when Cage understandably takes a day off from dying horribly to go to the pub, we're happy for the chance to see him take it easy. But at around the half way mark, the gags dry up, it all gets a bit serious and when the final act rolls around Edge Of Tomorrow reverts into exactly the completely average sci-fi videogame shoot-em-up I was dreading. At one point I thought Liman had stitched in scenes from Pacific Rim, so generic was the climax. It's an argument for another day, but why is Hollywood so scared of doing an original finale? It's like a comfort blanket filmmakers think we need so we don't go stumbling out into the night, confused and terrified by the slightest alteration to a tired formula.

Anyway, Edge Of Tomorrow does what it does very well, it's just that what it does is only partially interesting. Having turned out an hour of first class blockbuster entertainment, it chickens out, puts the safety back on and delivers a denouement that's merely fine. Then, as if to ensure the erasure of any leftover goodwill, it parps out a catastrophically confusing coda that makes literally no sense whatsoever. Still, you've seen Tom Cruise be a hero, you've seen him die countless times and you've seen a sweaty Emily Blunt get up off the floor in a sexier way than anyone's ever got up off the floor before, and you've seen it about half a dozen times. Something for everyone there.

Submarine

I've got to say I'm very pleased with how 2011 is turning out. After 2010 parped out just four films that I would allow onto my DVD shelf, this year has already presented four that I'm itching to see again, and it's only 74 days old. So well done 2011 and well done Richard Ayoade for directing the sublime, subdued and substantially good Submarine.

With a cast of hyper-real characters, a handful of fantasy scenes and a script full of lines that literally nobody would ever say in real life ("Once, I ripped my vest off in front of a woman... it produced a very atavistic response"), Submarine is destined to be labelled with the nauseating "offbeat" and "quirky" tags that often get used to describe something that isn't Transformers 3, even though that film will almost certainly feature all of the above. Apart from the "atavistic" bit, obviously.

Ayoade marshalls all the elements of his film with such a deft hand it's hard to believe that it's his first feature, but with several ingenious music videos to his name already, he's clearly set to join Edgar Wright and Garth Jennings as a force to be reckoned with in the field of visionary British directors. His own script, adapted from Joe Dunthorne's novel, is full of pathos, romance and pant-pissing LOLs, Erik Wilson's cinematography is heartbreakingly gorgeous and Alex Turner's original songs are things of aching beauty.

Alex Turner: 'Piledriver Waltz'


But it's the cast that effortlessly wins you over: it's impossible to take your eyes off Craig Roberts as the deadpan hero Oliver Tate; if he doesn't become the icon of a generation of teenage boys then there's something wrong with the world. Yasmin Paige is exactly as alluring, aloof and untouchable as teenage girls are to teenage boys and Noah Taylor, Sally Hawkins and The Mighty Considine are note-perfect as the supporting cast of hopelessly tragic yet heart-warmingly human characters.

Struggling to find something wrong with it in order to not come across like a fawning berk, all I can come up with is that Submarine drags ever so slightly in the final act. Fortunately there are enough shots of Paddy Considine's tremungous hair to kep you entertained and you can be sure that zingers like "Feel my piss" and "You've got to shut this shit down" are lurking just under the surface, waiting to remind you that British film in 2011 is about so much more than stammering royalty.