The Courier (18.)
Directed by Zackary Adler.
Starring Olga Kurylenko, Gary Oldman, Amit Shah, William Moseley, Craig Conway and Dermot Mulroney. 99 mins.
That Gary Oldman is a strange actor to place, you never really know where he's likely to pop up next playing the baddie. Two Christmasses ago he was about to win an Oscar for playing Churchill in The Darkest Hour; last yuletide he was appearing in Die Hard in a multi-storey car park, for the director of Rise of The Footsoldier 3, The Rise of The Krays and The Fall of the Krays. He'll act in anything; we haven't seen such thespian promiscuity since Michael Caine in the 80s.
Possibly the appeal for Oldman was spending the whole film with his feet up in a nice New York apartment. All the leg work is done in Lundun, where mysterious motorbike courier Kurylenko finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, but in possession of a bulletproof vest. The bulk of the film is an hour of her trying to protect a witness that Oldman needs killing from a heavily armed goon squad in the confines of a parking facility.
Oldman's chilled approach to the role is communicated by him playing it disguised as Jeff Bridges. The days of him ranting and raving as the baddy are long gone: now he has people lower down the chain do it for him. As the on-site project manager supervising the mayhem, William Moseley gives a spectacularly bad, but not unentertaining, approximation of Oldman's baddy in Leon.
The witness is played by Amit Shah, an actor who the moment he appears on screen makes you think that the bloke from My Beautiful Launderette who wasn't Daniel Day-Lewis is making a comeback, and somehow hasn't aged a bit in four decades. Alongside Kurylenko, the script calls upon them to try and conjure up some kind of ill-match buddy relationship: she is the black ops trained killing machine, he is the hopeless wimp. Given the script doesn't give them much to work with other than some really repetitive and graceless swearing, they do pretty well.
Four different names are given writing credits for this but none of them can do a proper line of profanity. At one point Mulroney has to say “it's a goddam s***show, s***.” What kind of f***ing swearing is that?
Directed by Zackary Adler.
Starring Olga Kurylenko, Gary Oldman, Amit Shah, William Moseley, Craig Conway and Dermot Mulroney. 99 mins.
That Gary Oldman is a strange actor to place, you never really know where he's likely to pop up next playing the baddie. Two Christmasses ago he was about to win an Oscar for playing Churchill in The Darkest Hour; last yuletide he was appearing in Die Hard in a multi-storey car park, for the director of Rise of The Footsoldier 3, The Rise of The Krays and The Fall of the Krays. He'll act in anything; we haven't seen such thespian promiscuity since Michael Caine in the 80s.
Possibly the appeal for Oldman was spending the whole film with his feet up in a nice New York apartment. All the leg work is done in Lundun, where mysterious motorbike courier Kurylenko finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, but in possession of a bulletproof vest. The bulk of the film is an hour of her trying to protect a witness that Oldman needs killing from a heavily armed goon squad in the confines of a parking facility.
Oldman's chilled approach to the role is communicated by him playing it disguised as Jeff Bridges. The days of him ranting and raving as the baddy are long gone: now he has people lower down the chain do it for him. As the on-site project manager supervising the mayhem, William Moseley gives a spectacularly bad, but not unentertaining, approximation of Oldman's baddy in Leon.
The witness is played by Amit Shah, an actor who the moment he appears on screen makes you think that the bloke from My Beautiful Launderette who wasn't Daniel Day-Lewis is making a comeback, and somehow hasn't aged a bit in four decades. Alongside Kurylenko, the script calls upon them to try and conjure up some kind of ill-match buddy relationship: she is the black ops trained killing machine, he is the hopeless wimp. Given the script doesn't give them much to work with other than some really repetitive and graceless swearing, they do pretty well.
Four different names are given writing credits for this but none of them can do a proper line of profanity. At one point Mulroney has to say “it's a goddam s***show, s***.” What kind of f***ing swearing is that?
