ORBzine - Movie Reviews July 2000
| TITLE & REVIEW | VIDEOS |
The Chicken Run
Yes, this film is inspired by the true-life horrors of battery hen farming.
Julie Sawalha
voices the protagonist, a hen named Ginger, who is trying to organise a
Great Escape. Her sidekick is her Absolutely Fabulous co-star
Jane Horrocks [
The Witches].
The villains are the dimwitted Farmer Tweedy and his wife, voiced by
Miranda Richardson [
Legend of Sleepy Hollow].
Ginger tries repeatedly to escape the confines of their rather spacious WWII-style POW camp - yes, these aren't really battery hens, but their more liberated free-range siblings! However, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape she keeps ending up in the cooler. Ginger's hopes to leave the camp are finally boosted by Rocky the Rooster [Mel Gibson - Braveheart ], who flies [!!!] into the camp. The other hens are overwhelmed with the presence of the first male of their species they have met [the senile ex-RAF rooster doesn't count]. Ginger is frigid towards him - movie heroines always are, and she predictably thaws towards him as the movie progresses. In this reviewer's opinion the makers should have made another Wallace & Gromit. While this film has its funny moments it fails as a satire - it cannot effectively imitate the WWII POW films, and anthromorphosises what is basically a very stupid animal that rarely gets treated as well as shown in the film. And the REAL irony? After you watch this film you will probably head along to KFC and munch on some chicken-burgers.
|
|
Mission Impossible II
A gang of crooks steal a biological formula, and blow up an airliner full
of people in the process in order to cover their tracks.
The only problem is that they stupidly allow the police to discover that the
pilot never boarded the plane, and thus anyone of a suspicious mindset
[and when IMF is involved, suspicion is a definite virtue] know that foul
play was involved.
Ethan Hunt [Tom Cruise - Interview with the Vampire ] is assigned by his new boss [Anthony Hopkins - Freejack ] to recruit a team and recover the formula. The only pre-requisite is that a civilian female jewel-thief played by Thandie Newton [ The Young Americans] is one of the IMF team. Dougray Scott plays the villain, a renegade IMF agent who is apparently an evil clone of Ewan McGregor. He likes to have a big bodycount on every mission, which makes one wonder; how did a trigger-happy creep get to be in the IMF, especially after the events in the first Mission Impossible film?! As to be expected with a John Woo film, there are lots of OTT action scenes. There is a break-in scene obviously intended to look bigger and better than the one in the original film. And when Cruise straps on a side-arm you just KNOW there's going to be a shoot-out. Anyone who has seen the trailer will know that the climax involves motorbike road-racing, but Cruise is not the late, great Joey Dunlop - the chase is typically OTT but without the sense of fun that Woo brought to his Hong Kong films.
|
|
Return to the July 2000 Special
Return to the ORBzine Homepage.
© Speculator 2000-6