Best films on the box: August 18-24

Film and television critic Philip Wakefield assesses the best movies on offer on the box this week, for Tuesday, August 18 to Monday August 24.

Tuesday, August 18

Welcome to the Jungle
2003, AO, 8.30pm, TV2
In his best big-screen rumble, The Rock plays a bounty hunter on the trail of his boss’ son (Seann William Scott), a dude with Indiana Jones pretensions looking for fortune in an Amazonian mining town run by a nutcase robber baron (Christopher Walken). This recipe for an action-comedy smorgasbord - think Hong Kong-influenced Brazilian brawling - is leavened by exotic escapism, eye-popping filmmaking and skew-whiff characters.

Wednesday, August 19

Across the Universe
2007, AO, 8.30pm, Sky Movies 1
"I read the reviews today, oh boy …" Critics couldn’t come together for Frida filmmaker Julie Taymor’s musical take on the ‘60s. Praised and pilloried in equal measure, it radically reinterprets Beatles songs to evoke the social turmoil of the All You Need is Love decade. The screenplay, by The Commitments’ Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, is surprisingly hamfisted but the palette’s gorgeous and the music, choreography and special effects stellar.

Thursday, August 20

Bandits
2001, AO, 8.30pm, Prime
Funny, quirky romp about a suave thief (Bruce Willis) and his hypochondriac partner (Billy Bob Thornton) who escape from prison and embark on a string of bank robberies to finance a new life south of the border - only to come unstuck when they kidnap a bored housewife (Cate Blanchett). Barry Levinson directs a dark comedy that delights with its one-liners and performances but never quite fulfils its promise.

Friday, August 21

Live Free or Die Hard
2007, AO, 8.30pm, Sky Movies 1
Bruce Willis return for his fourth Die Hard shoot-‘em-up, as the Energiser Bunny of Big Apple cops, John McClane. This time he tries to thwart cyber-terrorists led by Timothy Olyphant (TV’s Deadwood, Hitman). The movie is a lot like one character’s description of the unstoppable cop: “There’s tough – and there’s stupid.” Len Wiseman (Underworld) directs; Cliff Curtis co-stars.

Saturday, August 22

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
2007, PGR, 7.30pm, TV2
The magic’s starting to wear thin in the fifth instalment of the Hogwarts franchise, despite a new director waving the wand (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’s David Yates). Coming midway in the batting order, Phoenix feels as if it’s marking time with a mechanical conspiracy plot in which a teenage Harry makes an enemy of the Ministry of Magic while questioning his identity on the eve of arch nemesis Lord Voldemort rising from the ashes.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
2008, PGR, 7.30pm, TV3
The whip-cracking bone-kicker’s back - older, crankier and with a whippersnapper who wants to try on his Fedora for size. Indy IV amusingly completes the family circle but can’t keep up with the other Joneses in the 27-year-old series, largely because of a convoluted plot that lurches from one cliffhanger to another and surprisingly cruddy visual effects. Steven Spielberg directs Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf and Karen Allen.

Wah-Wah
2005, AO, 8.25pm, TV One
Were it not a “semi-autobiographical” account of actor Richard E Grant’s coming of age in ‘60s Swaziland, Wah Wah would seem an extreme, melodramatic take on mad Poms who go out in the midday sun. Grant’s diplomat father (Gabriel Byrne) succumbed to chronic alcoholism after his wife left him and Her Majesty’s government seemed poised to do likewise during its “last gasp of empire”. Emily Watson and Nicholas Hoult (TV’s Skins) co-star; Grant directs.

Twister
1996, PGR, 10pm, TV3
Big Love’s Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt play daredevil scientists in pursuit of the ultimate twister in this dynamite disaster drama directed by Speed’s Jan de Bont. It’s easy to castigate the formulaic mechanics and forecast the protagonists’ fates but Twister’s jaw-dropping special effects will keep you sucked in until the end. Philip Seymour Hoffman co-stars.

The Net
1995, AO, 10.30pm, TV2
Sandra Bullock plays a computer geek whose everyday existence is wiped out with the stroke of a delete key when she taps into a hi-tech plot to bankrupt the economy. The premise is chilling but the execution is chocabloc with bells-and-whistles when what should have been ringing in the filmmakers’ ears were alarm bells about credibility. Jeremy Northam co-stars.

Schindler's List
1993, AO, 10.35pm, TV One
Steven Spielberg’s masterful account of how a womanising, profiteering, Nazi industrialist helped to save the lives of more than 1000 Jews at the height of the Holocaust won seven Oscars, including best picture and director. Rarely has the tragedy and horror of the Holocaust been dramatised with such nightmarish, epic intensity - or used to starkly illuminate the truth of the adage that to save one life is to save a nation. Liam Neeson, Ben Kinglsey and Ralph Fiennes star.

Sunday, August 23

Meet the Fockers
2004, AO, 8.30pm, TV2
If not for the immensely likeable cast, this would be a feeble in-laws romp indeed. But Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand, as the outrageously liberal – and Jewish -- parents of Ben Stiller’s nurse, are the perfect foil for his archly conservative, ex-CIA father-in-law to be (Robert De Niro). They imbue the strained hi-jinks with boundless goodwill and help Focker to transcend its reliance on trite kid- and pet-driven scatological gags.

Tsotsi
2005, AO, 9pm, Maori TV
The winner of 2006’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is overwhelmed by its noble intentions. Presley Chweneyagae plays a young Johannesburg thug who’s reborn after a botched car jacking lands him with excess baggage: the victim’s baby. Tsotsi’s gangster dynamics are riveting but the surrogate shantytown dad scenario never convinces and although Chweneyeage’s performance is phenomenal, his character’s rediscovery of the child within is phoney and sentimental. Director Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) adapted his screenplay from Athol Fugard’s novel.

Monday, August 24

The Chronicles of Riddick
2004, AO, 8.30pm, TV3
Pitch Black II is pitched on a far grander scale than the original but is still rooted in more lunar looniness than Flash Gordon at his goofiest. Van Diesel’s fugitive is fleeing bounty hunters when he winds up the unlikely saviour of the human race in a close encounter of the apocalyptic kind with a crusading horde called the Necromongers. Karl Urban and Judi Dench co-star.

 

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