Maggie (12A.)
Directed by Henry Hobson.
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson, J.D Evermore and Douglas M. Griffin. 95 mins
His name is Arnie, and he's now the slowest action hero in the west. Arnie vs zombies is a crowd pleasing proposition (at one time he was due to star in I Am Legend) but instead he has decided to use his audience with the undead as an opportunity to do a bit of Serious Acting.
This is a mopey, slow burning drama, about a mopey, slow burning zombie apocalypse. In this film Zombism has an incubation period and after you've got bitten there's a period of weeks / months while the condition takes hold and you become the full flesh eating zombie. Arnie is a mid-western farmer whose daughter Maggie (Breslin) has gone to the big city and gotten infected. He brings her back to the farm and prepares to spend their final few weeks together. So this is basically an emo father/daughter disease of the week melodrama, a weepie played out beneath big black gloomy drapes.
Maggie is a film that pulls in several different directions at the same time, all of them wrong ones. It teases you with the prospect of unclassifiable novelty and originality but is ultimately a perverse exercise in denying audience expectation. It's not scary, it's not horrifying and it's not moving. The supernatural undercuts the emotional and the emotional undercuts the supernatural. Arnie is decent enough, but for all his decades of experience he still shows no real aptitude for acting human roles. The film is ponderous and too entranced in its overcast mood. Viewers though will resent that having pried open this whole zombie incubation period contrivance to operate in, they haven't found anything to do with it.
You may also wonder what the interest is in films that try to form some bond with the Undead: this, Warm Bodies, Colin, even Shaun of the Dead. What in the culture makes us want movies where we can relate to the undead. Surely this is taking Hug a Hoodie to the extreme.
Poor old Arnie. With this and Terminator he has a tough month, indeed a tough comeback after the end of his stint as Governor of California. Arnie's only 67 he didn't want to retire, but his movie career is heading for the great action sequence in the sky. Right now I'm struggling to think of a politician who had quite such an undignified career after leaving office. Former Democartic mayor of Cinncinatti Jerry Springer? Right now Schwarzenneger is the Lembit Opik of the big screen.
Maggie (12A.)
Directed by Henry Hobson.
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson, J.D Evermore and Douglas M. Griffin. 95 mins
His name is Arnie, and he's now the slowest action hero in the west. Arnie vs zombies is a crowd pleasing proposition (at one time he was due to star in I Am Legend) but instead he has decided to use his audience with the undead as an opportunity to do a bit of Serious Acting.
This is a mopey, slow burning drama, about a mopey, slow burning zombie apocalypse. In this film Zombism has an incubation period and after you've got bitten there's a period of weeks / months while the condition takes hold and you become the full flesh eating zombie. Arnie is a mid-western farmer whose daughter Maggie (Breslin) has gone to the big city and gotten infected. He brings her back to the farm and prepares to spend their final few weeks together. So this is basically an emo father/daughter disease of the week melodrama, a weepie played out beneath big black gloomy drapes.
Maggie is a film that pulls in several different directions at the same time, all of them wrong ones. It teases you with the prospect of unclassifiable novelty and originality but is ultimately a perverse exercise in denying audience expectation. It's not scary, it's not horrifying and it's not moving. The supernatural undercuts the emotional and the emotional undercuts the supernatural. Arnie is decent enough, but for all his decades of experience he still shows no real aptitude for acting human roles. The film is ponderous and too entranced in its overcast mood. Viewers though will resent that having pried open this whole zombie incubation period contrivance to operate in, they haven't found anything to do with it.
You may also wonder what the interest is in films that try to form some bond with the Undead: this, Warm Bodies, Colin, even Shaun of the Dead. What in the culture makes us want movies where we can relate to the undead. Surely this is taking Hug a Hoodie to the extreme.
Poor old Arnie. With this and Terminator he has a tough month, indeed a tough comeback after the end of his stint as Governor of California. Arnie's only 67 he didn't want to retire, but his movie career is heading for the great action sequence in the sky. Right now I'm struggling to think of a politician who had quite such an undignified career after leaving office. Former Democartic mayor of Cinncinatti Jerry Springer? Right now Schwarzenneger is the Lembit Opik of the big screen.
