The film that lures Goldie Hawn, last seen with Susan Sarandon in 2002’s maligned The Bangor Sisters, back to the limelight ought to be a special one. Likewise, the new feature starring Amy Schumer, a comic surprisingly divisive based on her most recent turn in Judd Apatow’s terrific Trainwreck, should easily be a hoot. Jonathan Levine’s Snatched, penned by The Heat and Ghostbusters writer Katie Dippold, is however neither special nor, more’s the pity, anywhere near to being a hoot. That the talent’s on board is without a doubt; it’s just hard not to expect so much better and want for so much more.
Few opening credits feel quite so redundantly unnecessary as the appearance of ‘a Guy Ritchie film’ does at the end of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword‘s preluding five minutes. Already, by this early stage in what can only be described as a bonkers romp into the thickets of Arthurian legend, Ritchie has slam dunked a checklist of his signature motifs. Whilst giant elephants and villainous Magi stampeding on a pseudo-medieval castle, led by bad-egg wizard (Volde)Mordred, may not be typical of the Snatch and Sherlock Holmes director’s oeuvre, a flippant attitude to real time motion and laddish vibe are both very much present and correct.
In a year in which The Emoji Movie is an apparently acceptable entity, and in which The Lego Batman Movie can deliver an exuberant – and surprisingly layered – hit, the former controversy of a blockbuster having been spawned from a theme park ride seems but a drop in the industrial ocean. Yet, when Captain Jack Sparrow, played by then cult-curiosity Johnny Depp, sailed into Port Royal, Jamaica, aboard his sinking ship – to the strum of Hans Zimmer’s self-plagiarised Gladiator score – he brought with him the origins of a three billion dollar franchise. The Curse of the Black Pearl was not only far from the flop predicted by forecasters, but was met with a degree of critical acclaim.
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