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Film reviews round-up: 47 Metres Down, Girls Trip, Hounds of Love, The Wall

47 Metres Down (15)

★★☆☆☆

Johannes Roberts, 87 mins, starring: Mandy Moore, Matthew Modine, Claire Holt, Yani Gellman, Santiago Segura, Chris J. Johnson

“Oh my god. It’s….huge!” one character exclaims in this very generic shark movie. It’s the Great White shark she is referring to although the line is delivered in a tongue in cheek way, as if a double entendre may well be intended.

We know we’re going to see blood right from the moment when sisters Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) spill a glass of red wine in a swimming pool at their luxury Mexican hotel. They’re a bit bored, sitting by the pool and sunning themselves.

Lisa is still moping after her boyfriend split up from her on the grounds that she was too dull and unadventurous. The sisters need some excitement. Late night party going takes them only so far. When they’re offered the chance to go shark watching, that’s the ultimate bait.

47 Metres Down is competently enough made but suffers from a plot almost as rickety as the ancient cage in which the two sisters descend into the deep to view the sharks. Captain Taylor (Matthew Modine) is the Ahab/Robert Shaw-like type skippering the boat but you wouldn’t trust him with a toy boat in the bath, let alone a real one out at sea. His ship is decrepit in the extreme. He’s an ageing hippy type in a bandana who looks as battered and weatherbeaten as his ancient vessel.

This is a voyeuristic affair. It goes without saying that the object of our gaze isn’t the sharks at all. It’s the two women in their swimsuits. “It’s like going to the zoo except you’re the one in the cage” is how their underwater trip is presented to them.

The chain attaching the rusty old cage to the boat is brittle. It breaks and the sisters plummet “47 metres down.” Needless to say, Captain Taylor hasn’t made any meaningful provisions for rescuing them.

Captain Taylor may be a lousy sailor but at least he pumps the sisters with information about the “bends.” If they try to swim their way to safety, they will die (even without the shark eating them.) The faster the sisters breathe, the faster they will use up their oxygen. They’re advised (a little absurdly, as if Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army is on the scene) not to panic.

Given that they’re stranded on the ocean floor, one sister has her leg wedged beneath the metal cage, both their oxygen tanks are emptying fast and a Great White shark has a morbid fascination with them, panic is really the only viable response.

In the best shark movies, the fight against the underwater predator takes on a symbolic force. The shark stands for all that is wrong in the heroes or heroines’ lives. The struggle to survive is cathartic. The films’ protagonists need to deal with bereavement or break-ups.

We’re always aware of the back story, even as the shark bites apart metal or chews off limbs as if they’re made of marshmallow. Here, the fact that Lisa is a little depressed about losing her boyfriend hardly cuts it.

Director Johannes Roberts deals with the basics effectively enough. He knows how to crank up the tension by cutting away every few moments to the oxygen meters on the women’s diving equipment. He doesn’t show his hand too soon, either. The Great White is shown on screen only fleetingly. When it does appear, its teeth look just as sharp and lethal as any die-hard Jaws fan would have hoped.

The film makes increasingly claustrophobic viewing. Its title hints at one of its fundamental problems. 47 metres down, it is going to get very murky. Much of the film unfolds in near darkness. There’s lot of gurgling and heavy breathing on the soundtrack.

The sisters are warned that they are at risk of nitrogen induced hallucinations. It seems as fi the filmmakers themselves have succumbed to the nitrogen bubbles as the movie becomes ever more nonsensical. The material here could have made for a tasty enough short film. At feature length, it is strung out far longer than it should have been. The shock tactics lose their impact and the film soon drifts off into near meaninglessness.

Girls Trip (15)

★★★☆☆

Malcolm D. Lee, 122 mins, starring: Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Regina Hall, Tiffany Haddish, Kofi Siriboe, Larenz Tate

This is a case of girls (or middle-aged women) behaving very badly, an exuberant and shamelessly vulgar comedy about four old friends who reunite for a trip to New Orleans for the "Essence Music Festival." They're members of the self-styled “Flossy Posse.” In their prime, they took it as given that their appetite for alcohol, sex and high jinks exceeded that of anyone else.

They're in or near their 40s, though, and they barely see one another. Ryan (Regina Hall) is the ringleader, a very wealthy media personality married to a sports star. She seemingly "has it all." In fact, as becomes apparent during her debauched reunion with her friends, she is nowhere as happy as she looks. Her husband has been cheating on her, she yearns to have kids and the effort of keeping up appearances is grinding her down.

Her fellow musketeers include journalist turned snooping celebrity blogger Sasha (Queen Latifah coming on like a latterday Mae West), the now very prim Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith), so devoted to her children that she has forgotten how to party, and the reckless Dina (Tiffany Haddish), who has just been sacked from her office job after assaulting a colleague.

This isn't a film which holds back in any way. We realise as much early on when one of the posse is caught short on a trapeze and gleefully urinates on the passers-by below. Girls Trip is the filmic equivalent of a hen party that gets very badly out of hand. The humour here doesn't come with any nuance attached.

We are served up gags about what grapefruit skin can do to enhance oral sex; we see Queen Latifah hallucinating on absinthe and trying to copulate with the furniture in a nightclub.

When the posse sign in to a seedy motel after being thrown out of their luxury accommodation, they're flashed at through the window by a dirty old man who informs them that where they are staying is actually a brothel. There's a dance off followed by a catfight between Ryan and the scheming younger woman who has been sleeping with her husband.

Some of the film is very clunky. There are more than enough pointless celebrity cameos (including everyone from P. Diddy to Mariah Carey.) After all the irreverence that has preceded it, the sanctimoniousness in the final reel is hard to stomach.

The conspicuous consumption and unquestioning celebration of money, fame and popularity on social media also begin to grate. What Girls Trip does have going for it is an irrepressible energy and an absolute lack of embarrassment about its own crudity and pants down humour. The four leads seem to be enjoying themselves and (judging by the spectacular early box office results in the US) so are their audiences.

Hounds Of Love (18)

★★★☆☆

Ben Youngs, 108 mins, starring: Emma Booth, Ashleigh Cummings, Stephen Curry, Susie Porter, Damian de Montemas, Harrison Gilbertson

What is it with Australians kidnapping and torturing strangers? In Greg Mclean’s lurid and unpleasant Wolf Creek (2005), a Crocodile Dundee-like character preyed on backpackers in the outback. Here, the serial killers are an everyday couple, John and Evelyn White (Stephen Curry and Emma Booth), living in Perth in the suburbs.

Writer-director Ben Young has made a very striking but self-conscious debut feature - one in which the shooting style shifts from low key naturalism to extreme stylisation. He is clearly as influenced by David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as he is by more conventional crime thrillers.

He’ll throw in huge slow motion close-ups of the faces of his protagonists or dream-like shots of characters in their gardens or in the school yard, going about their daily lives, little realising the evils happening in their home town.

The film is set at Christmas time in 1987. It is blisteringly hot. The heat gives the killers the excuse to offer lifts to girls they spot in the neighbourhood, walking home from school.

Young doesn’t portray John and Evelyn simply as monsters. As we first encounter them, they’re like any other suburban couple living in straitened circumstances. Their kitchen is tidy. The only real hint at how depraved they are is given by the porno videos they keep under their VHS and the blood stains on the tea towels.

Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings) is the teenager who has the misfortune to come within their orbit. She is a rebellious school girl, still trying to cope with the emotional fall-out from her parents’ separation.

Her mother Maggie (Susie Porter) has set up house on her own, declaring she wants nothing to do with Vicki’s father, Trevor (Damian de Montemas), a wealthy surgeon. Vicki is forced to stay with her mom two nights a week. Frustrated at not being allowed to go to a party with her boyfriend because her school grades aren’t good enough, she sneaks out of the house anyway.

That’s when she has her fateful encounter with John and Evelyn, who offer to sell her drugs. They persuade her to come home with therm in their car. Young plays cleverly on the audience’s knowledge and dread of what is going to happen next. We know that Vicki is putting herself in harm’s way and we can do nothing to stop her.

The screenplay deliberately withholds most of the details about John and Evelyn. He has money troubles. She is devoted to him but he is abusive to her and it is hinted she may be one of his former victims.

There are references to her kids (she doesn’t have custody and rarely sees them) and to her former partner who used to beat her up. (Ironically, John came to her assistance.) In their own low, cunning way, they are very meticulous. Their bungalow is like a fortress. They keep a vicious dog to scare off intruders - one that, to John’s fury, isn’t properly house trained and is continually pooping on the carpets.

Once kidnapped, Vicki has to work out how best to give herself a chance of survival. Terrified and emotionally fragile, she nonetheless shows considerable resourcefulness.

Just occasionally in what is a very macabre film, there are flickerings of humour. "We are not New York," the local police officer tells Vicki's parents when they report her missing. He blithely advises them to come back on Monday. It doesn't even occur to him that she may be dead by then.

Hounds Of Love provides an excellent showcase for its director and cast without being particularly satisfactory or coherent as a piece of storytelling. It has many loose ends. Occasionally, for example when Joy Division's funereal anthem Atmosphere blasts out on the soundtrack, it can verge on the pretentious.

The performances, though, are as striking as the direction. As John, Stephen Curry has an Errol Flynn-like moustache but his bland good looks do nothing to hide his rodent-like cruelty, misogyny and general obnoxiousness.

Emma Booth's Evelyn evokes our pity one moment and our loathing the next. She may be a victim herself but turns out to have a capacity for evil exceeding that of her partner. Best of all is Cummings as the victim who is battered and humiliated but still always fights back.

The Wall (15)

★★★★☆

Doug Liman, 88 mins, starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, John Cena, Laith Nakli

Generally, war movies are epic affairs with huge ensemble casts. However, there is also a long tradition of pared down stories in which bigger conflicts are seen in microcosm through the conflict of a few individuals. In John Boorman’s two-hander Hell In The Pacific, an American and Japanese soldier fought off against one another on a deserted island.In

In Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, events were seen entirely from the perspective of a horribly disfigured quadruple amputee, “a piece of meat that keeps on living.” Doug Liman’s new feature The Wall is more in their tradition than that of Dunkirk or A Bridge Too Far.

Set in Iraq, the film follows an American sniper and his “spotter” sent to a construction site in the desert where there has been a massacre. From their vantage point high up, Staff Sergeant Matthews (John Cena) and his assistant Sgt Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) can see dead bodies scattered in front of them. They don’t know if an enemy marksman is waiting for them or if they are about to stumble into a trap.

At times, The Wall has the feel of a formal exercise. It’s as if Liman and his collaborators want to box themselves into as tight a corner as possible and see if they can find a way out of it. Most of the film involves Isaac stuck behind a wall, wounded, thirsty, and paranoid, as he is taunted by the unseen (and surprisingly well spoken) enemy sniper, Juba.

If Isaac moves away from his cover, he will be shot. If he tries to save his injured friend Matthews, he will be shot. If he manages to call in a rescue team, they will be shot. His one chance of survival is to work out Juba’s location and to kill him first.

Given the constraints the filmmakers have imposed on themselves, this is a remarkably gripping affair. Dwain Worrell’s screenplay works both as a tense about two snipers trying to outwit each other and as an existential survival drama.

Isaac (impressively played by Taylor-Johnson with a mix of resourcefulness, defiance and despairing fatalism) achieves lots of little victories. He finds water. He bandages his leg. He retrieves colleagues’ equipment.

He eventually narrows down his adversary’s hiding place. However, he is also aware that his struggles are probably pointless. The grim reaper is coming for him whatever he does.