28 Weeks Later (2007)

Flaunting rules during COVID - maybe that I can kind of understand, but in the face of apocalyptic evidence post-the-virus in this sequel to 28 Days Later, it is hard to believe anyone, even kids, would "sneak out", but they do, and that lapse in credibility becomes the film's defining weakness as, repeatedly, family reunions defy apocalyptic chaos, characters display magical virus expertise, and John Woo-style theatrics push the story towards spectacle and away from the unsettling plausibility that made the original so engrossing.

★★★☆☆

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Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

A largely plotless survival horror with wooden 2D characters distinct from each other only in name, outfit, and weapon, this third Resident Evil movie, like the others, is easily dismissed as empty dross, but fans of CAPCOM's survival horror game series upon which these movies are based will derive great pleasure from the details - 3D geometric maps, zombie ravens, tourism posters - that recall so clearly the joys of the game.

★★☆☆☆

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Alien Vs Predator - Requiem (2007)

In the second of this daft series of movies that pits Predators from Predator movie against Aliens from Alien - though scene after dark, murky scene fails to distinguish which is which - the action shifts from the first movie's subterranean Antarctic pyramid to small-town USA, where way too many human characters blur together while a Predator, again sporting woeful Amstrad CPC-quality predator-vision, hunts Aliens whose number and purpose for marauding the town remain maddeningly unclear - they are just having a bad day, maybe.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)

The fact that the ensemble of characters in this romantic comedy (based on a Karen Joy Fowler bestseller) spend each month reading a Jane Austen novel and meeting to discuss it simply means that they are forever comparing Austen's troubled marriages, burgeoning romances, and complicated love triangles to their own: these parallels come thick and fast but are superficial, meaning you can smile - very gently - at this romcom even if you've never read a word of Austen yourself.

★★★☆☆

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1408 (2007)

In this Stephen King short story adaptation, John Cusack is perfect as the drily funny, cynical paranormal investigator and professional skeptic who checks into room 1408 of New York's Dolphin Hotel wanting to debunk claims the room is somehow evil, but both he and the viewers soon have the smiles wiped off their faces once the supernatural terror kicks in, though these chills and jump scares wear thin a good time before the movie's oblique, that'll-do, "whatever" ending.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween (2007)

John Carpenter opened his original 1978 movie with a single first-person-perspective shot that shows the young Michael Myers' passage around, into and through his family home, telling viewers in just four minutes as much as they are to learn across any of Carpenter's movies about the masked crazy and his motive for killing his older sister, but in this, director Rob Zombie's 2007 remake, that opening scene is extrapolated into a not uninteresting but probably unnecessary hour of backstory that thoroughly unmasks the masked killer; then, the movie becomes a faithful remake of the 1979 original with Malcolm McDowell effective in Donald Pleasence's role of Doctor Samuel Loomis, the psychiatrist who treats Michael Myers in a sanatorium, becomes close to him, and is the only one convinced, after his break out from the asylum, that Michael is heading back to Haddonfield, Illinois to wreak more destruction.

★★★☆☆

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Beowulf (2007)

With the exception of Ray Winstone in the title role who is transformed into the legendary, muscly Geatish warrior Beowulf, this computer-animated version of the Old English epic poem is populated by incredibly realistic animated versions of actors like Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar and Angelina Jolie as the mother of the marauding troll-like monster Grendell whom Beowulf is asked to slay, but far from eliciting wonder, the movie mostly leaves you feeling that director Robert Zemeckis' purpose for using such ultra realistic animation and not using the actors themselves was simply to be able to stage a series of peculiar nude fight scenes.

★★☆☆☆

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Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Nothing will ever compare to Die Hard 1.0, but this third attempt at recapturing the original's success is the best so far, even with its two or three more-than-unlikely, how-could-he-have-known-to-do-that? action sequences during a "fire sale" terrorist attack upon America that mobilises John McClane and sees him charged with protecting a perfectly cast Justin Long as the code-writer in over his head but still able to look down upon his Luddite savior.

★★★★☆

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Disturbia (2007)

In the more engaging first two-thirds of this suburban thriller, Shia LaBeouf's Kale Brecht is put under house arrest and like Jimmy Stewart's L B 'Jeff' Jefferies finds himself with nothing better to do than spy on his neighbours, but in the less engaging last third, this Rear Window premise gives way to an uninteresting serial killer thriller with David Morse obviously trying to channel Raymond Burr's Lars Thorwald as he stares back down the binocular lens but nothing else is trying very hard, least of all the writers.

★★★☆☆

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The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) (2007)

This film adaptation of Adolf Burger's memoirs, historically fascinating, gut-wrenching, and haunting, details his time in a concentration camp, a part of a team of prisoners forced to work towards the Nazi's goal of flooding the British economy with counterfeit money.

★★★★☆

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No Reservations (2007)

If you stir through this watery soup, you can occasionally glimpse the ingredients director Scott Hicks was playing with in the kitchen and see what his dish was supposed to be (an emotionally-stunted chef discovers love when she takes in an orphaned niece and meets a man) but the movie is served up in such a limp fashion and with so little energy, it takes on the flavour of a reprimand levelled at a successful career woman who, even though she is able to run the kitchen of a popular New York restaurant and takes in an orphaned niece without hestitation and is polite, calm and friendly with neighbours and colleagues, is nonetheless treated like a mental case, called a loon, and ushered off to therapy sessions with a psychologist because she isn't devastated at not having an Aaron Eckard with Point Break tresses in her life.

★☆☆☆☆

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Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

A uncommunicative young man forms an unhealthy dependency upon a mail-order Russian Build-A-Woman only to do away with her when he is ready to upgrade to something better, and true to real life, his small-town community rallies behind the murderer, is what I wanted this comedy to realise it was saying.

 

★★★☆☆

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Butterfly on a Wheel (US: Shattered / EU: Desperate Hours) (2007)

When their daughter is abducted, a devastated couple is coerced into performing tasks that further undo their perfect lives by a man who remains their constant companion for 24 hours, in this unlikely crime thriller with a twist at the end that is not as interesting as it would be if it were to be discussed by lawyers in a Butterfly on a Wheel 2.

★★☆☆☆

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Mr Brooks (2007)

One way the existence of this incredibly boring 2007 serial killer drama makes sense is if it were originally intended as a big-screen adaptation of Dexter, the tv series which commenced in 2006 -- perhaps the people behind Dexter pulled the plug and this became the movie not of Dexter the serial killer but Mr Brooks the serial killer with his alter ego, Marshall, and his blackmailer (a wannabe killer), and his pregnant daughter embroiled in some other crime of her own, and the police woman chasing him while going through a divorce, her partner in a fedora, and a whole lot of other convoluted Dexter-ish plot threads presented here with no discernible, marketable core premise.

★☆☆☆☆

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Death Proof (2007)

Quentin Tarantino is at his best making movies unfettered by conventions or expectations and that is the case with this grindhouse exploitation horror, really only one-and-half acts of any other more conventionally told flick, about a highway madman who kills women with his death-proofed car...until he comes up against some spunky women who fight back.

★★★★☆

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The Orphanage (El Orfanato) (2007)

Belen Rueda, who is so good in thrillers (for instance, Julia's Eyes), loans her weight to this slightly cheesy but perfectly entertaining Guillermo del Toro-endorsed gothic mystery with all the trappings: a creaky mansion by the sea that was once an orphanage, caves, pasty orphans in leg-braces playing nursery games, hidden rooms, ghosts, paranormal investigators, skeletons and treasure hunts.

★★★☆☆ 

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I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

A serial killer's victim is found minus a foot and hand but still alive, however when she wakes up in hospital she claims to be someone else entirely, not the victim, in this truly lamentable psychological thriller featuring what would have to be one of the most imbecilic plots and laughable denouements ever committed to celluloid.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Music and Lyrics (2007)

Most amusing when Hugh Grant's matured pop idol parades his old hits in front of small gatherings of adoring middle-aged women, this romcom is about a pair of songwriters falling in love while sparring over the business versus the authenticity of pop music lyrics, and it is all abit cloying - like being stuck in the presence of loverbirds being all adorable with each other.

★★☆☆☆

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Hot Fuzz (2007)

This is a hilarious genre-mashing comedy - part Lethal Weapon buddy cop action flick, part Miss Marple English village mystery, and part The Wicker Man - about a very earnest, high-achieving city cop posted to a small English village where the beat is particularly quiet but after a hilarious sequence showing the policeman exerting his zero tolerance on bemused villagers, schoolchildren and geese, a sinister criminal network with creepy ritualistic practices rears its head.

★★★★☆

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Premonition (2007)

Premonition seems like the wrong word at first because what Sandra Bullock's Linda Hanson experiences is more like a Sliding Doors-style double life - the life she has always lived and the other, a gothic nightmare featuring a dead husband, a disfigured child, empty pill bottles, and forced psychiatric incarceration - but as real life catches up to this nightmare future, the mystery of the premonitions becomes less bewildering, although it is never very involving and some details of the earlier-on premonitions are conveniently forgotten.

★★★☆☆

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