SHUTTER ISLAND (15)
Scorsese turns the screw, layering on the twists and revelations
Author Dennis Lehane must be one of a very small group of writers who can claim that film adaptations of their work have met with uniform success.
His previous novels, Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, have been brought to the screen in Oscar worthy fashion and while Shutter Island may arrive without quite the same moral depth that has categorised Lehane’s work, as a big budget B-movie blessed with a quality cast and a legendary director, it’s hard to beat for sheer entertainment value.
Set in 1954, it takes place almost entirely on the remote Shutter Island in Boston Harbour, which is home to a hospital for the criminally insane.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays US marshal Teddy Daniels, who is called along with partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) to the island to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner who seemingly vanished from her cell.
A secretive staff aren’t offering much help and the men running the hospital (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow) seem to have plenty to hide. Teddy is often traumatised by flashbacks to his wartime experiences where his platoon liberated a concentration camp and the horrors he saw there.
On top of that his wife was killed a couple of years earlier and Teddy thinks her killer might also be on the island.
If it had begun with the words ‘It was a dark and stormy night’, Shutter Island couldn’t have been more of a pulp fiction.
The ominous score and fog-bound visuals scream lurid melodrama from the very first frame, as a boat emerges from an unnaturally thick mist, generating an air of suspicion and mistrust from the off.
It’s a crackpot but wildly entertaining blend of Agatha Christie and Scooby Doo, a rattling thriller full of rain-lashed locations and vicious black humour.
The early parts consist mainly of Teddy and Chuck interviewing staff and patients and even this quietly grips. As it becomes increasingly fevered, Scorsese turns the screw, layering on the twists and revelations.
Its brilliance in the later stages is that even we don’t know what the truth is, all the way to a knockout finale that’s open to interpretation.
Now that De Niro prefers to play it safe with his movie choices, Scorsese has found his new muse in the shape of DiCaprio, and Shutter Island marks their fourth time working together.
DiCaprio is impressively authoritative, grabbing the film by the throat and shaking it vigorously in Teddy’s unyielding quest for the truth. But Scorsese rolls out one great actor after another, with von Sydow especially memorable and great character actors like Elias Koteas and Ted Levine adding flavoursome backup.
Rip-roaring, at times demented and at times thought-provoking, Shutter Island manages to combine some of the best elements of The Wicker Man, Total Recall and Alfred Hitchcock and there maybe isn’t a higher recommendation than that.
Director: Martin Scorsese
Running time: 138 mins
THE GREEN ZONE (15)
A pacy exciting action film
Set in 2003 just after the invasion of Iraq, Matt Damon leads a unit of coalition soldiers tasked with finding WMDs. They consistently come up empty-handed and begin to suspect dodgy intelligence, but those in command insist the intel is good.
But if Damon can bring in the general who can prove there are no WMDs, it will turn the war on its head. Though obviously sharing a director and star with the Bourne series, Green Zone is sufficiently different to be its own entity, both in character and plot.
Damon is superb, like Jason Bourne but less grumpy and less superhuman, and therefore more believable. Seven years after the fact, the film is slightly covering old ground and not really telling us anything we didn’t already know about WMDs but the great skill of director Paul Greengrass is his ability to drop us into a situation and immediately establish the stakes and geography and execute the sequence with consummate ease.
In its focus on the people fighting the war and those covering up their mistakes, it provides an intelligent and muscular thriller that still has plenty to say about our involvement, while also delivering a pacy, exciting action film.
Director: Paul Greengrass
Running time: 114 mins
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (18)
A superb, densely-plotted thriller makes its two sequels highly anticipated
The first of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s multi-million selling Millennium trilogy is brought to the screen in visceral, uncompromising style in this superb, densely plotted thriller that begins with journalist Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) being found guilty of slandering a powerful politician.
He believes he’s been set up, but while he’s waiting to start his prison sentence he’s asked by a rich patriarch to investigate the murder of his niece 40 years earlier.
Meanwhile computer expert Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, right), she of the titular tat, is involved in a bizarre relationship with the man who controls her money, and is tasked with keeping an eye on Mikael’s investigation.
As an old school murder mystery procedural, with clue building on clue at a stately pace, this is consistently gripping and tense, with a midsection that’s as good as any crime thriller of recent years. The tension ratchets up as secrets are unearthed and director Niels Arden Oplev manages to generate suspense and momentum simply from Mikael looking at photos.
His movie may have been even better if some of the fat had been trimmed from an overly detailed opening section and one too many endings, but Lisbeth’s character development is sure to be important in the context of the two already filmed sequels, both of which must be highly anticipated.
Director: Niels Arden Oplev
Running time: 152 mins
