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.
When the grieving fiancé (Paula Beer) of a German First World War casualty visits her beloved’s grave in 1919, the sight of a veteran French survivor (Pierre Niney) laying flowers upon it is the last thing she might expect but the first which she meets. Inspired by Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 film Broken Lullaby, itself based on Maurice Rostand’s ‘L’homme due j’ai tué’ play of two years earlier, such is the set up to François Ozon’s César award-winning Frantz, a heartbreaking tale of love, loss and lies, intertwined with intrigue.
There are a great number of cruelly self-destructive lines in Alien: Covenant. ‘This is a monumental risk not worth taking’ says one character; ‘How did she end up here’ says another. Whereas Prometheus felt like an unnecessary, but successfully atmospheric, origins story to Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, the problem with its first sequel is that it adds to the pointlessness only derivation and oddities. The visuals are still impressive, as is Michael Fassbender (the only returner from before) but here is a plot so messy that such a degree of scrutiny is required – to simply fathom what’s going on – that exposed is the plain fact that none of it actually makes any sense.
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