'Win Win' review:

"Well, it's no trick to make a lot of money... if what you want to do is make a lot of money" says Everett Sloane in 'Citizen Kane'. It's a point of view shared by Paul Giamatti's character, lawyer Mike Flaherty, in Tom McCarthy's indie comedy 'Win Win'. Unlike his best friend Terry (Bobby Cannavale), Paul hasn't pursued the almighty dollar with any fervor and, as a result, he finds himself struggling to support his wife (Amy Ryan) and daughter and keep his legal practice open. Like a figure straight out of a Robert Riskin screenplay, Paul has chosen to dedicate his life to the less than lucrative cause of helping the poor and vulnerable.

All around him expensive problems are mounting, each of them ticking time bombs ever present in his thoughts (a fact which is giving him regular anxiety attacks). A tree threatens to fall down on his house and the boiler under his office could explode at any moment, but he is unable to afford the solutions to these problems and can't bring himself to tell his wife. To make matters worse, the high school wrestling team he coaches (along with Jeffrey Tambor) can't win a single game. In an effort to solve his financial problems, Paul soon takes the desperate and deeply immoral step of becoming the legal guardian of an elderly client (Burt Young) suffering from dementia - checking him into a care home and pocketing the money intended for his upkeep. By the standards of American movies Paul is something worse than a "loser" - though this most certainly isn't the view of McCarthy's compassionate humanist film.



The scheme is complicated when the old man's estranged teenage grandson arrives on the scene. Kyle (Alex Shaffer) has run away from his unstable mother (the terrific Melanie Lynskey) and is looking to live with his grandpa, only to find him at the old folk's home apparently under the care of Paul. Unwilling to return home, Kyle moves into Paul's house where it is soon discovered that he is something of a wrestling prodigy. This accounts for the other half of the titular win-win situation, though this being a movie, things don't go smoothly for very long.

Compared alongside other Fox Searchlight indies, 'Win Win' is not all that wacky or, in reality, infused with jokes. Cannavale's man-child character is certainly written as broadly comic, and 'Arrested Development' actor Tambor can't help but be at least a little funny, but overall the film is content to provide occasional wry titters as opposed to hearty guffaws. Even the usually explosive Giamatti is oddly subdued, though he gives a compelling and watchable performance. Much like his recent turn in 'Barney's Version', Giamatti can't help but elicit sympathy and brings his unorthodox brand of charm to the role.



Meanwhile, Amy Ryan (Beadie Russell in 'The Wire') is good value as Paul's forthright and disarmingly sweet wife Jackie. Moments of tenderness and sentiment in 'Win Win' are never allowed to be cloying and are usually quickly diffused - though they last just long enough to ensure that the film has a heart. First-time screen actor Shaffer, hired because of his real-life wrestling prowess rather than his stage chops, is the only weak link amongst the cast. His delivery is wooden and his character reads as emotionless, though it's hard to be sure how much of this is down to bad acting and how much is down to his character's written emotional distance.

'Win Win' is in some ways boldly unconventional for a mainstream American film, not only in its refusal to moralise about its characters, but also in its depiction of the relationship between a sports coach and his wunderkind. The usual Hollywood narrative of their relationship would involve both parties bonding, before coming away having learned some home truths - the triumph is that they grow as people and win the big game. Here things are less clear cut and ultimate sporting victory is less than assured. But as promising as all this sounds, any recommendation of the film must come with a huge caveat.



All too often the film indulges in cringing, heavy-handed metaphor. For instance, as a half-hearted Giamatti jogs before the titles, we see him overtaken by two other joggers - at which point he stops, turns almost to camera and sighs. "Oh dear", we think, "things are not looking up for this guy". Cut to: his wife lying in bed with her daughter. "Where's daddy?" asks the little girl. "He's out running" comes the reply, before the child's all-too-cute response: "from what?" And what is a falling tree or a volatile boiler if not a sort of sword of Damocles metaphor, for forces which could quite literally crash down on his life or explode under the build-up of pressure at any moment? And being wrestled into the dirt by his pupil at the start of the film's third act is nothing if not a symbol that he has reached his lowest point. A skillful use of imagery is to be admired and enjoyed, but McCarthy's movie suffers under the weight of all too on the nose symbolism.

The film is also host to one of my pet hates, as almost every argument results in someone running out of the room hysterically - though I concede that a stroppy sixteen year-old kid, with a history of anger management issues, might behave this way (it's just irritating to watch). It must also be said that 'Win Win' contains some of the most contrived, cynical and obvious product placement seen in recent memory, with frequent mentions (and depictions) of the Nintendo Wii. These moments also break the film's believability. After all, nobody has actually played with their Wii since some time in 2010. There are also some unfortunate cack-handed comedic references to 'Star Wars' which are ironically less funny than Jar Jar Binks. All told though, 'Win Win' is as admirable as it is imperfect, mostly for its refusal to buy into the American Dream and thanks to a decent cast.

'Win Win' is out now in the UK and is rated '15' by the BBFC.

'LA Noire': Game changer?

Rockstar, the video game developers behind the popular 'Grand Theft Auto' series, today released 'LA Noire' - an open world detective game set in 1940s Los Angeles, which boasts almost miraculous, hitherto unprecedented motion capture technology. For the best part of a decade video games have been shamelessly aping Hollywood, often even drawing from the same talent pool, but 'LA Noire' comes with the added credence of having been shown off at the recent Tribeca Film Festival.

The "video games as art" discussion is increasingly tedious and redundant, but 'LA Noire' is - at least in terms of acting - a potential game changer for how the medium is seen as a means of telling stories. I've only played it for a few hours so far, but its characters make realistic facial expressions, display subtle changes in emotion and are even often played by recognisable US TV actors giving really decent performances (including the bulk of the cast of 'Mad Men'). Personally, I think the games that best make the case for the art form are those which try less to copy Hollywood and try to play on the medium's own strengths (for example 'Flower' or 'Shadow of the Colossus'). However, whilst games from 'Resident Evil' to 'Call of Duty' have, for years, attempted to tell Hollywood stories using a faux-Hollywood aesthetic, 'LA Noire' may be the first game to do so with this degree of credibility. (Yes, I've played 'Heavy Rain', but that was woeful.)



In any case, 'LA Noire' wishes it was a film and is no doubt written by a frustrated film student. Like Rockstar's other games, it puts you in a world informed by the movies and television much more so than history (which is not to say that it isn't a rich and interesting world all the same). And in that spirit I am going to review it on this blog as if it were a film. Too often a story that would be laughed off a cinema screen is given the benefit of the doubt (if only by gamers) because we don't expect games to have the same quality - the same ability to tell stories. In order to see whether 'LA Noire' bucks that trend I'm going to be reviewing it as if I'd watched it as a show on HBO.

So, if you're interested in that, check back in the week for that. And for reviews of 'Pirates 4: On Stranger Tides' and US indie comedy 'Win Win'.

'Attack the Block' review:

The success of 'Attack the Block', a comedy-horror movie written and directed by Joe Cornish (of 'Adam & Joe' fame), was always going to hinge on how the director portrayed his protagonists: a gang of so-called "hoodies". The film is set on a South London council estate which is invaded by ravenous extra-terrestrial monsters and follows a group of youths as they attempt to defend their housing block with samurai swords, fireworks and whatever else they have to hand. It's sort of like 'The Goonies' meets 'Aliens' via 'Shaun of the Dead'. But since the earliest trailer, (for me at least) question marks have hung over whether the comedy was going to be derived mainly from cynically picking on the country's inner city poor - with nothing more than a string of cheap, tired and obvious jokes at the expense of a feckless group of stereotyped "chavs".

Yet whilst the film opens with our would-be "heroes" mugging a young woman at knife point, Cornish manages to strike a delicate balance between humanising his gang of hoodlums, moralising about their actions and poking fun at them, and in the end the film is pretty perfectly pitched. Yes, there are gags at the expense of the kids' social class: for instance the film revels in the absurdity of their "urban", youth culture patois. But the film also riffs on the speech patterns of white, middle class, West London stoners. Almost everything that isn't scary, or at least jumpy, is played for good natured laughs, and the film most definitely has its heart in the right place.



The young actors feel authentic and bring a measure of understated comic brilliance to their delivery. Especially Alex Esmail as Pest, who looks something like "Dappy" from N-Dubz (only he's funny on purpose). It's also great to see a British film which revels in locally specific detail and which focusses on a number of black characters. At a first glance it would seem that Cornish has made his debut film very much in the mould of friends Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. Nick Frost has a supporting role and Cornish plays with Hollywood genre conventions - especially those of sci-fi and horror - throughout. The screenplay is peppered with pop culture references and, as with the likes of 'Hot Fuzz', humour is mostly drawn from contrasting everyday British banality with an improbable hi-octane situation, with the alien invasion prompting lines like "I've got one text left. This is too much madness to explain in one text."

Yet compared to the Pegg/Wright oeuvre, Cornish's film is less obviously a sustained pop culture geek-off, in spite of frequent references to video games such as Gears of War. Instead it works quite capably on a surface level - as a comedy with scary bits, even for those without an encyclopedic knowledge of the work of Steven Spielberg. The in-jokes lie under the surface - satisfying for those in the know, but not intruding on the film's tight structure and engaging forward momentum.



It's terrifically well realised too, especially in the early shots which frame the housing block as some sort of futuristic, science fiction obelisk, and trace the hallway strip lighting as if it were on the inside of a spaceship. As a setting the block is versatile and filled with several distinctive environments which cleverly break up the film's predominantly black and grey colour palette. The alien creatures themselves are really well designed and fairly frightening, and Cornish has admirably shunned a more commercial '12A' certificate by filling the film with some pretty visceral, over the top gore.

Far from being the sustained, middle class wink that I'd feared, 'Attack the Block' is the smart, funny and slickly produced feature that I'd hoped for. As a first time director, Joe Cornish has displayed a level of assuredness that is encouraging and - if he can resist the inevitable overtures of Hollywood (he has already co-written the upcoming 'Tintin' film) - his brand of eye-catching, socially conscious and unpretentious comedy could be a sizable boon for British cinema for years to come.

'Attack the Block' is out now across the UK and has been rated '15' by the BBFC.

'Midnight in Paris' review:

The 64th Cannes Film Festival opened last week with an out of competition screening of Woody Allen's latest, 'Midnight in Paris'. I wasn't in Cannes but managed to see a showing of the film (appropriately enough) in the French capital, where it went on general release later that same day. Maybe it had something to do with the film's local setting - and certainly the ubiquitous posters for it on the city's streets won't have done any harm - but the showing I attended was a sell out, as a diverse crowd flooded in to the main screen of a Pathé multiplex in Montmartre. Of course, it's become a truism that Allen's films are much better appreciated on the continent than in the US/UK (a fact acknowledged by the director himself in 'Hollywood Ending'), but I was still surprised to have to queue up to see a Woody Allen film - and in a mainstream cinema.

'Midnight in Paris' follows Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a surrogate Woody Allen figure - a Hollywood screenwriter who is in love with a romantic view of the French capital and with an idealised view of the past. He loves the city and its cultural legacy so much in fact, that he wants to get away from his home in California permanently and have a shot at being a "serious writer" - an ambition not supported by his high-maintenance fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). Gil wants to take long walks in the rain and sit in left bank cafés working on his novel, but his peace is disturbed by Inez's cynical, right-wing parents and the intrusions of her pretentious, know it all friend Paul (Michael Sheen).



Like Miniver Cheevy before him, Gil feels like a man out of time and wishes he were born in a more intellectual, artistically vital era - for him, the Paris of the 1920s. And it is to that period of time that he finds himself magically transported every night at the strike of midnight, where he mingles with his heroes, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). This bizarre twist in the tale - not hinted at in the trailer - that harkens back to Allen's work as a short story writer or his 'Deconstructing Harry' and 'The Purple Rose of Cairo'. Over the course of these late night visits to the romanticised past Gil meets and falls in love with Adriana (Marion Cotillard) and has to decide between the past and the present.

Owen Wilson is fantastic as the central character, with his easy charm and impeccable comic timing working perfectly with this - his best role outside of a Wes Anderson film. Wilson's unpretentious likeability has seen him too often wasted in disposable rom-coms, but he was really made for intelligent roles such as this. He is supported by a brilliant ensemble cast too, with everyone from McAdams to French-Moroccan comic Gad Elmaleh (who brought the house down with his wordless appearance as a private detective) superbly cast. Especially Cotillard (I shouldn't need to tell you how appealing she is a screen actress). But alongside the laid back naturalism of most the performances, it was actually the showiest and most exaggerated turns that thrilled me the most.



Adrian Brody's appearance as Dali caused me to shed tears of laughter. Genius casting making for an inspired cameo. Whilst Corey Stoll as Hemingway was absolutely perfect, with a level of earnestness and intensity that was, for me, hilarious. Praise must also go to Michael Sheen for his slimy portrayal of Paul, a role reminiscent of all the New York pseudo-intellectual archetypes seen in all of Allen's best loved 1970s work. He manages to make the character just the right level of obnoxious and pedantic without seeming over the top and it's a pity he isn't in more than a couple of scenes.

It's the performances rather than the writing that is funniest and 'Midnight in Paris' is perhaps lacking in the sort of deft one-liners that were once the hallmark of Woody Allen's style. And unlike the adored 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona' this won't be up for any Oscars, if only because it's so relaxed and deceptively simple. But 'Midnight in Paris' is every bit as beautiful as anything Allen ever shot with Gordon Willis, and it's a screenplay full of interesting ideas even if they're not all explored with any depth. As the calamitous 'Cassandra's Dream' testifies, Allen can't write "British". But he does the American abroad very well and with this he has given every reason to anticipate his next film, the Rome-set 'The Wrong Picture', with some degree of optimism.



You might say that I was pre-disposed to enjoy 'Midnight in Paris', what with being in Paris and watching the film with an enthusiastic crowd. And you may have a point. And, after a patchy last decade (to put it kindly), it is fair to say my expectations for it were set extremely low - especially given that Allen's last film was utterly abysmal. But for the first time in what feels like a decade, I absolutely loved a new Woody Allen film, almost without qualification. For the first time since childhood I laughed during one of his movies: not knowing laughs of polite recognition, but hearty, belly laughs. For the first time in around a decade, here is a Woody Allen film with imagination.

'Midnight in Paris' has not yet been rated by the BBFC and will probably not see a UK cinema release until 2012. However, the film is currently on general release in France.

'Hanna' review:

From the vengeful "Bride" of the 'Kill Bill' films to Zack Synder's 'Sucker Punch', violent actioners featuring female protagonists are an increasingly common sight at the multiplex. Few eyebrows will be raised then, in the era of 'Kick-Ass', to hear about 'Hanna' - a film about a teenage girl brought up as a deadly killer. After all, Angelina Jolie has been shooting people on our screens for years. But whilst the vast majority of silver screen heroines are really just scantily-clad male fantasy figures - strong characters in only the most superficial sense - 'Hanna' is a smart, character-driven movie which brings to mind the complexities of Ripley in 'Alien' rather than the mindlessness of 'Salt' or 'Tomb Raider'.

The impressive Saoirse Ronan, who shone in director Joe Wright's 'Atonement', stars as the title character raised as a killer in an icy wilderness and tasked by her father (Eric Bana) with killing the secret agent (Cate Blanchett) who drove them into hiding. She quickly performs this task (or so she thinks) and then ends up on the run from the American military, as well as a bizarre group of German thugs/circus performers lead by an extremely camp Tom Hollander.

The film centres primarily on her awakening as a fully-fledged individual (rather than just a killing machine): it's a coming of age story for Hanna as a women. But the film also explores the ideas of motherhood via Blanchett's interactions with various figures in the young girl's life: her mother; her father; her grandmother. Behind Blanchett's pursuit of Hanna there is an engaging ambiguity. There is a wordless suggestion at one point that she can't herself have children. Does she want to mother Hanna? Or destroy her? Far from simply existing as a take-it-or-leave-it subtext, these themes compliment the film's moments of action and visa versa. Violence is almost always married to the thrill of experience and the development of character.



The first time we hear anything of the pounding Chemical Brothers score is when Hanna makes a conscious decision to leave the safety of life with he father and accept her deadly mission. The music functions to make her anxiety and excitement palpable, and every time we hear the music subsequently - such as when she is escaping from a military facility - it, along with the artful strobe lighting, forms part of a hyper-stylised representation of Hanna's psyche. When soldiers surround her log cabin near the start of the film, the music stands for nervous anticipation of first contact with people other than her father. In this way Hanna is an example of proper cinema - often using sound and image to tell its story rather than simply leaving that to dialogue.

There is a terrific internationalist air to proceedings too as Hanna alternates between languages and goes through several countries over the course of her journey. Wherever she goes she interacts with people from other far-flung places too, but without the film being particularly showy about it. The film also manages to pull off something very rarely seen, as a kiss between Hanna and a girl she befriends (played by the terrifically funny Jessica Barden) manages to avoid seeming gratuitous or cynically motivated. In fact Hanna's relationship with Barden's character is not even really sexualised: it functions more as part of her character's longing for new experiences and human contact, played out with the only person (aside from her father) with whom she establishes a bond of trust.



In terms of cinematography and art design, 'Hanna' is tremendous and beautiful - especially when it comes to outdoor sequences bathed in naturalistic light and the warm fire-lit interiors of Hanna's cabin during the opening sections. The expertly choreographed lighting of the chase sequences is dazzling and bursting with energy. Though, as with Wright's much-heralded Dunkirk tracking shot in 'Atonement', there is a self-conscious aspect to some of the film's visuals. For instance, what do we gain from a brief shot from the point of view of a wounded animal during a hunt? It's jarring and out of place in a film in which the music and design is otherwise so consistently placing you in the position of the protagonist. Some of the accents, especially that of Eric Bana, are also pretty peculiar and changeable, though this isn't such a big deal in a film with such a stylised reality.

For some, the middle section of the film (in which Hanna goes on a road trip with a nice middle class family) might seem at odds with the pacing and the tightness of the earliest sections and the finale - and they may have a point, given the expectation of a straight thriller. But to make this assessment would be to miss the point of what 'Hanna' actually is. It's a film where action is secondary to character development, in which Hanna's interaction with non-violent people and her discovery of friendship - and just maybe Platonic love - is every bit as important as any scene of neck-snapping or gun-wielding. It's 'The American' from the perspective of a curious, confused and hyper-active young girl, rather than a middle-aged, world-weary man. This is what makes the film stand apart from the superficial "girl power" crowd. 'Hanna' is the real deal.

'Hanna' is rated '12A' by the BBFC and is on general release now.

'L'affaire Farewell' review:

'L'affaire Farewell', just released in the UK and directed by Christian Carion, is an unspectacular 2009 French spy thriller based on a "true story". Set in Moscow in 1981, the focus is on an ordinary French man living in Moscow, Pierre (Guillaume Canet), who reluctantly falls into spying for his government after striking up a relationship with a Soviet informer, Sergei (Emir Kusturica). Sergei is disillusioned with the state of his country and is willing to part with the names of most of the Soviet spy network in Europe and North America, crippling the USSR's ability to effectively participate in the cold war. The importance of this information means that suddenly Pierre is on a mission that goes right the way to the White House and is credited (by the film) with bringing down the "Iron Curtain" a decade later.

Yet anybody expecting a taut and gripping espionage thriller will leave the theatre disappointed. 'Farewell' is mostly concerned with the (I imagine speculated) family strife between the spies and their respective wives. Sergei is having trouble bonding with his teenage son. And he has a mistress. Pierre lies to his wife, saying he won't accept the spy mission. Trouble ensues. Aside from that, there are several tedious and poorly scripted oval office scenes in which a cartoon cowboy version of Ronald Reagan (Fred Ward) spouts exposition to his staff - who really ought to know that, for example, France is a vital ally against the Soviet Union.



There are also lots of moments of light comedy of cultural difference, as Sergei adorably mispronounces the name of Western pop bands and bends Pierre's ear over perceived French national characteristics ("you French are such chauvinists!"). Trite images of the Soviet Union are abound, as imposing statues of Lenin, decommissioned tanks and big scary monuments to the working class dominate the cityscape. Stern men in uniform lurk on every subway and take dour looking people away at the flash of a badge. Ultimately it's a patriotic TV movie about a French triumph rather than a cinematic history lesson.

I recently read an interesting book on the Middle Ages which detailed how the records relating to various kings were amended after their reign at the expressed instruction of the new regime. For instance, Richard III, immortalised as a hunched villain by Shakespeare (writing, remember, for a Tudor audience), was in reality a relatively fair and popular ruler - and there is no evidence suggesting the popular story of his murdering the young princes in the tower is anything more than propaganda. Yet it has endured and, in secondary school, I first encountered that story as a historical fact.



Similarly, that great hero of English patriotism, Richard the Lionheart, was in reality a Frenchman who spent just six months of his decade-long reign in England (a country he despised), and that was only to gather taxes to fund his wars of religious intolerance and indiscriminate mass murder in the Middle East. And yet he is canonised a national hero by a statue outside the Houses of Parliament. History, so it goes, is written by the winners.

But you needn't look as far back as the as the twelfth century to find evidence of that truism: films - the dominant means by which most popular history is now transmitted - frequently pervert the events of even the recent past in the name of entertainment. The two biggest critical hits of the last year, 'The King's Speech' and 'The Social Network', both did this. It's just that they do it better. 'Farewell' is tedious, badly paced and scarcely even redeemed by its Clint Mansell score (which is eerily similar to his work on 'Moon', released the same year).

'L'affaire Farewell', being a French movie, tells us the story of the brave, selfless, ordinary French people for vanquished communism, and to whom every health insurance paying, tuition fee protesting "man and woman of the free world" apparently owe a debt of gratitude (so says Willem Dafoe in a pointless cameo as the director of the CIA). It's a "true story" and yet, funnily enough, all the names and details have been changed. It strays far enough away from "the facts" that there is a sequence in which Sergei's moody teenage son struts around a meadow dancing like Freddy Mercury (who he can't have ever seen) whilst listening to Queen on his Walkman (the epitome of freedom, apparently). It's a reality where Ronald Reagan begins every meeting by showing his aides the same scene from 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance'.



It would be unfair to accuse 'Farewell', directed by Christian Carion, of being wholly anti-communist/pro-capitalist, after all the action takes place at a time when France's own government was socialist under the leadership of François Mitterrand. So the film contains lines of dialogue in mild support of socialism: for instance Sergei tells Pierre that French holidays were introduced by lefties. In fact, the film is overall critical of both sides of the conflict, with the protagonists used by competing powers who ultimately show little loyalty to their spies once goals are met.

If it's "pro" anything, that thing is France. It's the story of a French triumph - one that we are told ultimately won the cold war. Reagan wants to interfere with Mitterrand's newly elected government, but the French president rebuffs him and stresses his country's independence, though he does honour their alliance and provides the US with intelligence. This isn't France as a US lackey but as the most vital power in ensuring the ultimate allied victory. It's a film about the moment when France changed history: for better, for everyone and forever. And don't you forget it. Who cares what actually happened? This is what happened now.

'L'affaire Farewell' is out in the UK now and has been rated '12A' by the BBFC.

'Thor' review:

Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and Captain America are popular and, to varying degrees, iconic comic book superheroes. With this in mind, Marvel Studios decision to make big, blockbuster films based on these "properties" is understandable and even inevitable. But Marvel, now owned by Disney, have bigger plans for their so-called "cinematic universe" which involve interlinking their different characters in the same way they did with the comic book continuity years ago. It makes obvious financial sense: like Iron Man but not so fussed about the Hulk? Well, chances are you're going to pay to see the big green guy anyway because of that Tony Stark cameo.

The ultimate goal for Marvel, as announced way back in 2005, is to make what (they hope) will be a massive super-blockbuster in the form of 'The Avengers' - the superhero equivalent of the Travelling Wilburys. And they have been steadily and unsubtly promoting that future franchise ever since by shoehorning cameos, in-jokes and geek-oriented references into each film - often via Samuel L Jackson. 'Iron Man 2' was so concerned with setting up the Avenger origin story that parts of that film felt like an extended trailer. The problem with this game-plan is that, in order to form the on-screen Avengers, Marvel have to set-up some less iconic and potentially less cinematic heroes for that movie to make sense. That's what brings us to 'Thor'. A superhero movie no one asked for.



Thor is somewhat harder to buy into than his future co-vigilantes. Iron Man is a normal guy - albeit a billionaire scientist with a fancy suit - whilst Hulk and Captain America are just victims of experiments in radiation. Crucially, they are all human beings. However, Marvel's Thor supposes that the realm of Asgard is real and exists on a distant planet, with the Viking "gods" of Norse legend being super-powered, space-travelling aliens. Thor, an Asgardian, throws a huge mythical hammer, Mjöllnir, that can only be lifted by those considered "worthy". In contrast to the likes of Spider-Man, his family aren't "normal" either: dad is Odin and his brother Loki. How could this story of a fallen god landing on contemporary planet Earth possibly seem credible? Ancient myths, like that of Hercules, are full of such stories (as are texts as diverse and evergreen as The Bible and Superman), but 'Thor' has to fit in with the likes of 'Iron Man', which featured the War in Afghanistan as a plot element. How can planet Asgard and the War in Afghanistan possibly co-exist in the same filmic universe?

The daunting task faced by director Kenneth Branagh has been to construct a film which marries both worlds - the fantastical realm of Asgard and a dusty New Mexico town - in a way which makes sense. And, surprisingly, he somehow does this rather well, aided by 'I Am Legend' screenwriter Mark Protosevich who solves the principal problem by using self-effacing humour. When the brash and violent Thor (Chris Hemsworth) lands on Earth (stripped of his powers), after being cast out of Asgard by Odin (Anthony Hopkins) for starting a war with a race called the Ice Giants, the film immediately becomes a fish out of water comedy of sorts. Thor tries to beat up a hospital full of doctors who are trying to heal him before being knocked out by an injection, and later he smashes a coffee cup and loudly demands a refill in a busy cafe. He acts pompously and is lampooned as a figure of fun whilst he adjusts to alien surroundings.



This jesting is an effective slight of hand that keeps us from laughing at the transition between the two worlds. As with a stand-up comic who cracks jokes about their own obesity, the film heads off any potential tittering cynic at the pass because it's meant to be funny.

From then on the young "thunder god" adjusts to his new surroundings fairly quickly and the world of Thor comes to makes sense to us. By the time he dons his faux-Viking battle fatigues and does battle with The Destroyer (don't ask) on Main Street, we have successfully suspended our disbelief. Instead we can enjoy the fights which - let's face it - are the reason we go to the cinema to watch superhero movies. Branagh perhaps commits the crime of shooting too much action in disorienting close-up and some of the effects work is a little ropey, but 'Thor' is nevertheless good value entertainment with its share of climactic fist-pumping moments. It's also not as shallow as you might expect, with pretty well-rounded characters and a sympathetic villain. Its director is best known for adapting Shakespeare for the screen and, had the Bard penned a treatment of the screenplay, it would be easy to imagine this story from the point of view of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) as a great tragedy.



This unexpected depth owes much to the actors. Hemsworth, for his part, is pretty good as Thor and his transition from, as Protosevich has put it, "an Old Testament god to a New Testament god" is carried off well. It doesn't feel like the usual sudden third act u-turn when he becomes worthy of reclaiming his powers because he has genuinely changed before our eyes, becoming more humble and gentle through his association with scientist Jane Foster, as played by Natalie Portman. It may seem as though Portman, a recent Academy Award winner, is slumming it in 'Thor' (an accusation also levelled at Branagh) - and who could blame her after 'Black Swan'. But she gives her all to the role regardless and elevates a love-interest character into something more interesting and appealing. Like Hopkins, Hiddleston and veteran Swede Stellan Skarsgård, she adds believability to this obscure Marvel tale, and in doing so eases what must have been the studio's greatest concern.

Fun, light-hearted and - at times - morally complex, 'Thor' is more than just a cynical means to an end (even if it does feature a completely pointless and convoluted cameo for another Marvel hero). That is not to say, however, that it isn't also serving as a Trojan two-hour advert for 'The Avengers'. It's just that it's good enough that you won't mind. For comic book fans, summer 2012 can't come soon enough.

'Thor' is out now in the UK and has been rated '12A' by the BBFC.