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Hellboy II: The Golden Army
US 2008
Starring: Ron Perlman, Luke Goss
Director: Guillermo Del Toro

Somers Town
UK 2008
Starring: Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello Director: Shane Meadows

OFTEN after receiving an Academy Award, directors are filled with ill-advised self-importance. Not Guillermo Del Toro. He has followed up the Oscar-winning Spanish Civil War fantasy-drama, Pan’s Labyrinth, with Hellboy II: The Golden Army. This sequel to his 2004 modest hit once again encases Ron Perlman in ridiculous red make-up as the Devil’s offspring working undercover in New York City with two mutant friends against other more destructive fantasy beings.

This is not a film to be taken seriously. It begins with the young Hellboy (Montse Ribe) being told a bedtime story on Christmas Eve in 1955 that establishes the Golden Army of the title, 4,900 mechanical warriors created by forest folk to wrest control of the Earth from humans but deemed too powerful to call into battle. Several decades later, pale-skinned Prince Nuanda (Luke Goss) decides to break the truce between humans and fantasy creatures and obtain the three pieces of his father’s crown to resurrect the deadly army.

No particular reason is given for this. Rather, it is an excuse for Del Toro, working from a story co-written by Hellboy comic book creator Mike Mignola, to wheel out the fantasy creatures, parallel worlds and large examples of clockwork. There are nods to Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, while for great stretches it seems to be a showcase for Del Toro’s command of big budget action sequences. When the director eases up, he coaxes some amusing moments: Hellboy calling one character a “glasshole” and inducing his best friend Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) to join him for a beer. “My body is a temple.” “Well, turn it into an amusement park.” The scene of Abe and Hellboy crooning along to Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” could well be regarded as one of the 10 best scenes of the year. But Hellboy II is far from being one of the 10 best films of 2008. It is not just self-indulgent: everyone indulges themselves here for what is essentially a big fat cinematic doughnut with nothing in the middle.

The second attempt to bring Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s bungling spy, Maxwell Smart, to the big screen after 1979’s The Love Bomb (and who remembers that?), Get Smart is aimed squarely for the nerd dollar. Yet in casting Steve Carell in the role made famous by Don Knotts (and who remembers him?) it tries to have it both ways. Carell’s Smart is a dedicated but effective intelligence analyst who writes long reports that no one in his organisation, called Control, reads. Although accident prone, he can do the action stuff. This is a bit of a cheat. Meanwhile, Anne Hathaway, as Agent 99, is the straight woman to Carell’s shouting klutz.

The “sophisticated” comedy comes in the form of gentle mockery of George Bush, as the fictional President (James Caan) is seen reading to school kids while the country faces an imminent nuclear attack. You think of Bush reading My Pet Goat as terrorist planes hit the World Trade Centre as shown in Fahrenheit 9/11, to which Michael Moore is currently filming a sequel. There is also a moment when Smart tackles a bad guy by acting as an agony aunt after hearing his woes in hours of surveillance footage.

The film is at its best when it goes purely for laughs, notably in a cameo from Bill Murray as Agent 13, a spy stuck in a tree outfit desperately wanting human interaction. Murray gets sixth billing for a minute’s worth of screen time. Most of the action consists of dumb slapstick – various devices malfunctioning in Smart’s clumsy hands – bare buttocks, slamming into walls and that old favourite, excessive vomiting (Smart in a fighter jet). For all the big budget chase scenes and explosions, this is a more tolerable experience than Carell’s last family comedy, Evan Almighty. The choice of an Englishman (Terence Stamp) to play the chief villain is not that smart and, although Russians are depicted as the nominal villains, as we have seen in Georgia this summer, they have the last laugh.

Patrick Mulcahy

* * *

“I WISH the Japanese had waited six months.” So said British novelist Winifred Watson of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which propelled the United States into the Second World War and – among myriad more serious consequences – derailed Hollywood’s plans to film her novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. More than six decades on, the book has finally made it to the big screen in this frothy but entertaining little confection, a gently naughty period-piece aimed squarely at the “mature” audiences who made Stephen Frears’ Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) a modest success.

Events here handled with competence and a suitably light touch by director Bharat Nalluri, who seems to have learned much from the deceptively silly comedies in the 1930s and ’40s by the likes of Mitchell Leisen and Ernst Lubitsch. Although Indian-born, Nalluri was raised and educated in Newcastle – where, as it happens, Watson lived her

whole life. Having stopped writing novels in 1943, she died in 2004, having enjoyed a belated return to the literary limelight when Mrs Pettigrew was re-published four years earlier. That led directly to this adaptation by David Magee and Simon Beaufoy, Oscar-nominees for Finding Neverland and The Full Monty respectively.

The scriptwriters are unlikely to trouble the Academy with this genial but somewhat slim tale, in which downtrodden spinster-governess Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) makes an unlikely foray into London’s glamorous theatre-world after accidentally becoming social secretary to a scheming but ditzy American actress, Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams). The pair – Delysia’s Yankee ebullience contrasting with ever-so-English Guinvere’s emotional reserve and down-to-earth common sense – make an engaging duo as they navigate their way through the more bohemian strata of high society – an opulent, decadent environment whose social whirl is, if anything, increasing as war-clouds darkly gather.

Adams finds extra dimensions in unpromising-looking material, exuding an old-fashioned star-quality and a coquettish bounciness that’s crucial in keeping the ambitious Delysia on the right side of likeable. As her songwriter beau Michael, Lee Pace combines matinee-idol handsomeness with an offbeat charisma. If there’s any justice, both Adams and Pace should become household names sooner rather than later. The three American leads don’t have it all their own way, however. Kincardine’s own Shirley Henderson is on prime scene-stealing form as acerbically world-weary fashionista Edythe, nailing the glossy looks and vocal inflections of late ’30s London to a tee.

Readers may recall my enthusing about Shane Meadows’ delightful Somers Town after I caught it at the Berlin Film Festival back in February. This no-budget tale of teenage friendship was tucked away in the young-people’s section, but was widely hailed as preferable to several pictures chosen for the main competition. For my money it’s more satisfying and consistent than Meadows’ big box-office breakthrough, This Is England, although his masterpiece remains the shattering Dead Man’s Shoes (2004).

Somers Town – written by Paul Fraser – is the first time Meadows has made a film outside his native Midlands, mainly unfolding in the north London area which provides its title. Somers Town lies between Euston and King’s Cross/St Pancras, the latter being the starting-point for the Eurostar rail-link whose owners commissioned Meadows to make a promotional short. He ended up delivering a mini-feature about two lads who find themselves in the area. Aspiring photographer Marek (Jagiello) lives in a poky flat with his gruff dad (Ireneusz Crop), a Eurostar labourer. Tomo (This Is England’s Thomas Turgoose) has run away from a tough domestic situation “up north”. Their wandering paths cross and they soon become firm friends – and rivals for the affections of French waitress Maria (Elisa Lasowski).

It isn’t a spoiler to say there’s nothing of earth-shattering import in Somers Town: no tragedy, melodrama or state-of-the-nation diagnosis. This is, instead, one of those increasingly rare films which knows its limitations and works successfully within them, delivering a comic but occasionally poignant and subtly topical glimpse into ordinary lives that gradually builds surprising emotional impact and resonance. Featuring excellent performances (the two leads are superb), lyrical cinematography and a nicely-judged acoustic score Somers Town may not quite be 2008’s best British release, but it’s emphatically a must-see, confirming that Meadows belongs in the very front rank of Europe’s younger writer-directors.

Neil Young