The Girl on the Train

Tate Taylor’s The Girl on the Train, based on Paula Hawkin’s best selling novel of the same name, has been one of the most talked about and hyped releases of the year. With an all-star cast lead by Emily Blunt, it certainly has a lot to live up to.

Divorcee Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt) is an alcoholic, she has been for a long time, with alcohol-induced blackouts littering memories of her marriage. It all fell apart for Rachel when she caught her husband Tom (Justin Theroux) cheating on her with their estate agent Anna Boyd (Rebecca Ferguson). Every day, Rachel catches the train past her old neighbourhood, glancing into her old house and the surroundings. She becomes fixated on Tom’s neighbours, Scott (Luke Evans) and Megan Hipwell (Hayley Bennett), the archetypal relationship that Rachel desires. After a series of far from lucid moments, Rachel wakes up injured in her apartment. She can’t remember anything from the night before and finds out that Megan is missing.

It’s taken me nearly a week to get my notes together after watching this mess of a film. There was a tremendous amount of hype for The Girl on the Train leading up to release, with many heralding it as another potential Gone Girl, and the comparisons to that are important because technically and thematically it’s obvious that Taylor draws inspiration from Fincher’s film (or rips it off as some may view it). Full disclosure, I wasn’t as enamoured with Gone Girl as many others were, but to compare these two is just insulting.

The first issue comes with the mystery. Judging from the marketing, The Girl on the Train promised to be a dark and gritty mix of procedural crime and psychological thriller. What we get is barely a flash of the crime element until the denouement when all the puzzle pieces are revealed at once, well-and-truly together and not particularly intriguing, engaging or even intelligent. The rest of the film is composed of horrendous editing, a very ugly use of low-framerate photography and a thinly laid psychological pastiche that does very little to enchant the audience.

People are praising Emily Blunt’s performance as the one saving grace this film has, but I can’t even agree with that. She spends most of her time pretending to be intoxicated and stumbling around helplessly in a role that certainly might trump the other performances on-show but is still not worthy of the kudos that it has received. There’s no real downfall for Rachel because she’s already spun-out of control by the time we meet her. The material is just so poor that even such an able cast can’t dredge a solid character out of Erin Cressida Wilson’s script.

Allison Janney's character is probably the only half-enjoyable one, solely because she goes around somehow knowing everything about everyone and being a hilariously smug detective. It’s as annoying as it sounds but hey, at least she’s not sulking around with all the other depressed, dopey characters, whose sole-interactions with the world seem to be abusing each other and engaging in ridiculous love triangles. There’s one particularly absurd scene towards the end that just about sums up The Girl on the Train, with the audience's reaction a mix of 10% genuine shock, 80% belittling laughter, and 10% heading for the exit.

The Girl on the Train is a poorly acted, poorly written, frustrating, tedious, ugly lump of a film, which squanders all its energy on its meandering plot. I couldn’t honestly recommend that anybody spend money on this total misfire, but given the book’s performance, I know that they will.

High-Rise

Ben Wheatley's adaptation of J.G. Ballard's classic 1975 sci-fi novel brings up a lot more questions than it answers, although none of them really are about the fate of the characters. The themes revolve around the futility of utopia and how fragile society really is. While these themes are fantastic to explore in a film, the presentation of them seems a little muddled and it takes a while to sort them out through a lot of mess.

Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) has just moved into a new high rise apartment building which has everything you could ever want contained in a single building. It seems like a perfect place to live, with places to shop, exercise and socialise all in one. After getting closer acquainted with his neighbour Charlotte (Sienna Miller), Laing learns that there is a fragile class hierarchy within the building, with poorer families on lower floors and wealthier couples and singles further up the building, with the architect of the building, Royal (Jeremy Irons), living in the rooftop penthouse. Soon the building starts to fall into disrepair and with that the social structure begins to disintegrate leaving Laing to question the hierarchy and his place in it.

When the self-contained society begins to break down, it seems like a bit of a surprise, almost as if it was rushed in the script. And while signs of the disintegration are all around, it seems like a shock when it comes. The film as a result almost has a delirious quality that has to do with the lack of lighting that comes along when the lights in the building go out. Some of these stylistic choices also make the subtext about the fall of society and class warfare a little hard to make out, which is a shame because that would a really exciting thing to see. The thing I found hardest to keep up with was the characters ultimate acceptance of what was happening around them. There was little acknowledgement that what was happening was so absurd.

The aesthetics of the film were perfect. While it is not exactly set in the future, it does take place in "the future of 1975", as though all the fashion and furniture and vehicles of that decade never went out of style. It definitely adds a level of comfortability in the beginning of the film as this is an instantly recognisable time and place.

I was surprised at the large cast of stars in this movie as all of the actors are quite a draw. Tom Hiddleston shines as Laing and is completely comfortable in the role. This could be the role that nabs him a James Bond bid because he is able to be suave and also take on some more physical action scenes. Jeremy Irons is always great for a sinister authority figure who you're unsure of whether you can trust him. Elisabeth Moss was a surprise to see in this and although she doesn't have a large part, she is totally takes over her character. Supporting roles from Luke Evans and James Purefoy are just a delight to watch. The only performance I wasn't entirely convinced by was from Sienna Miller, who's character was important but she didn't give the character any real interest.

High-Rise has a lot of great things; it's cast, the style and the themes buried deep down are all what I was expecting from this movie, but in the end it wasn't an entirely enjoyable experience. The sloppy way that the movie was put together felt very disappointing despite the fact that it should have been better.

Dracula Untold

Gary Shore's Dracula Untold sets out to tell us the totally true and not at all embellished story of how the most famous vampire ever became a prince of the night. Or is the devil? Anyway, the only thing that comes close to a history lesson in this movie is a five minute sequence that doesn't really know what its talking about at the start of the movie.

Vlad Dracul (Luke Evans) is the prince of Transylvania whose kingdom belongs under the umbrella of the Turkish Empire, led by Mehmed (Dominic Cooper), a white guy in make up to make him look Turkish (seriously there was better casting of Hollywood films in the 50s and that was a time when everybody was openly racist). So Vlad angers Mehmed by not adhering to his wishes and thus condemns his people to be slaughtered because he doesn't have an army. Vlad travels to Broken Tooth Mountain, where he knows a vampire lives for his help. The vampire Caligula (Charles Dance) agrees to give him the power to stop Mehmed's army. (Just a side note, the vampire Caligula is apparently the Roman emperor).

This movie does have some admittedly spectacular fight sequences early on, but soon they get a little repetitive, like a side-scrolling video game. Once Vlad figures out how to use his vampire powers against the armies of Mehmed, you'd think the movie would be over. Instead we have to sit through another hour of people getting thrown in the air.

We get a couple of decent performances. Luke Evans definitely knows how to brood and this role calls for a lot of that. Sarah Gadon plays Vlad's wife and is one of the only redeeming characters of the film. Having Charles Dance (Game of Thrones' Tywin Lannister) in your film might bring some gravitas to your cast, but when you don't use him at all, it's a wasted opportunity.

I'm a bit worried that this is the launchpad for Universal's revival of their monster movies of the 30s and 40s. They were fantastic films, but the quality of this movie and those to come might taint the nostalgia for me.

Verdict: A very drawn out and overdone version of Dracula. Reading Vlad the Impaler's Wikipedia page is not only more exciting, but you'll learn something too. Also, what was with the present day ending?