Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

The Children
UK 2008
Starring: Eva Birthistle, Stephen Campbell Moore, Jeremy Sheffield
Director: Tom Shankland

Summer
UK 2008
Starring: Robert Carlyle, Steve Evets
Director: Kenneth Glenaan

IN THE British horror film The Children, the young offspring of two dysfunctional middle-class couples are possessed by an urge to kill their over-solicitous parents in a remote country cottage in the winter. You can imagine that London to Brighton director Paul Andrew Williams, who wrote the original screenplay, pitched it as The House of Tiny Tearaways meets Village of the Damned.

Eva Birthistle and Stephen Campbell Moore feature as a Hackney couple, Elaine and Jonah, who visit Elaine’s sister Chloe (Rachel Shelley) and her partner (Jeremy Sheffield) in the country. Between them, the two couples have four children, all under the age of eight. Elaine also has a teenage daughter (Hannah Tointon) who would rather be somewhere else. Elaine’s younger children arrive in a queasy state and it is not long before they inflict pain on the adults, beginning with a sledge that goes out of control.

Shankland portrays the couples as simultaneously self-obsessed but driven by a determination of what is best for their kids. Home schooling, learning Chinese, earning gold stars for good behaviour, smacking and the MMR jab all get a mention. What is missing is a coherent reason for the children to act without due regard for their parents. Shankland photographs crystallising snowfalls as if they are somehow meaningful – the cause of an extreme form of seasonal affective disorder mixed with autism (from which Elaine’s son clearly is afflicted).

There is an element of social satire here, but making films in which children intentionally harm adults is problematic, not least because Shankland does not show them exhibiting any understanding of their behaviour. The violence is all awkwardly edited, dissipating its fun or shock value.

There is also another problem. There is only so much carnage that the under-eights can cause. Flooding the bath to create a waterfall when my mother was away was my principle misdemeanour when growing up in a council flat in London’s Old Kent Road. Fundamentally, the result is silly. From it, you could infer the parents are simply being punished for drinking too much red wine in front of their progeny.

You can watch the Transporter films from any point in their slender narrative for the stunts, fight scenes and car chases. At their centre is the champion diver turned action hero, Jason Statham. The point of his character, Frank Martin, is that he simply serves a purpose. Frank transports a package by car from A to B, beating up rather than killing villains on the way – unless he is particularly ticked off.

Transporter 3 reunites Statham with producer Luc Besson, who appears to have written the entire script with Robert Mark Kamen on the back of a bill of lading. This time, Besson has given the franchise a high concept twist: Frank is given a bracelet that will kill him if he strays more than 75 feet from his vehicle. Unfortunately, Besson does not exploit his premise to its full potential. Frank has his car stolen and has to chase after it by mountain bike. He wants to kill the villain, Johnson (Robert Knepper), but is parked too far way. That’s about it.

Besson also indulges his predilection for eastern European waifs. Having introduced us in the films he has directed to Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element) and Rie Rasmussen (Angel A), he presents the inauspicious debut of Natalya Rudakova. She plays Valentina, kidnapped and used as leverage by Johnson in order that her father (Jeroen Krabbe), a European Union minister, will authorise the docking of eight freighters carrying toxic waste. Frank is forced to drive Valentina first to Bucharest and then to Odessa in order that father and daughter may be reunited after the minister inks the paperwork.

The unlikely-named Olivier Megaton (not a very explosive talent, on this evidence) is in the director’s chair. Megaton edits scenes almost to disguise the action choreography. Moreover, he fails to cut the interminable scenes of Valentina flirting with Frank. I should have liked to report that Transporter 3 was a guilty pleasure, even with its risible dialogue. Sadly, it never gets out of first gear – nought to boredom in 103 minutes.

Patrick Mulcahy

THERE are few odder or more frustrating careers in current American cinema than that of Neil LaBute, whose brilliantly cynical 1997 big-screen debut, In the Company of Men, seemed to announce the sudden arrival of an outsize new talent. But while the intervening decade has seen his theatrical status hold relatively steady, he’s plotted a bafflingly wayward course through movies. Working with his own material, he’s done OK (The Shape of Things). Directing scripts by others (Nurse Betty) or adapting existing material (Possession, The Wicker Man) has seen middling-at-best results. And now, with the slick but disastrous Lakeview Terrace, he’s reached a creative nadir so low one hopes he’ll forsake celluloid altogether.

A thuddingly opportunistic, crudely heavy-handed thriller about contemporary race-relations in upper-middle-class suburban California, the plot “borrows” from the 1992 Ray Liotta and Kurt Russell vehicle Unlawful Entry – except this time, instead of a security-guard menacing a nice, yuppie-ish young couple, it’s a member of the Los Angeles Police Department. Samuel L Jackson, who can play this sort of stuff in his sleep, is

bad-ass veteran cop Abel Turner, a recently-divorced single dad Abel taking an unusual interest in young married Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington) when they move in next door. What really seems to get Abel’s goat is that Lisa, who is black, has chosen to marry  “outside her race”. He wastes no opportunity to make his views on the matter eminently clear. Trouble quickly ensues and, even more quickly, escalates, to the point of absurdity.

Lakeview Terrace’s whole nasty neighbour angle is only inches away from comedy. There’s one scene involving a chainsaw that’s played almost as farce. And one wishes that LaBute had gone the extra distance and pushed over into raucous satire. Instead, the film tries to make various dubious points on blazingly hot-button issues using a decidedly ropey, contrived, “serious” narrative framework. It would be dismayingly easy to come away from the results with the impression mixed-race marriages are more trouble than they’re worth and that blacks and whites shouldn’t share the same garden fences – because of blacks’ insecurities. Which presumably wasn’t LaBute’s intention.

Although no masterpiece, Summer is a rock-solid example of socially-conscious, character-based British cinema which has experienced a revival in the last couple of years partially thanks to the work of Shane Meadows. Geographically and thematically, Bolsover-set Summer treads similar terrain to Meadows’ films, but there’s a different kind of maturity and lyricism here which the 36-year-old writer-director, for all his many gifts, hasn’t quite yet developed.

It’s the third feature by Scots actor/director Kenny Glenaan, whose prescient terrorism-themed drama Gas Attack won the prestigious Michael Powell Award for the Best New British Film at the 2001 Edinburgh Film Festival. This year, Summer was beaten to that prize – by Meadows’ Somers Town, as it happens – but star Robert Carlyle was named inaugural winner of the award for Best Performance in a British Film.

Carlyle is quietly intense and moving as Shaun, a Scot who’s lived in the Midlands since he was a kid. Now in his 40s, he’s become live-in carer to his life-long best mate Daz (Steve Evets), a paraplegic since an accident in his teenage years, and whose heavy drinking has become chronic, terminal alcoholism. For both Shaun and Daz, genuine happiness was something fleetingly glimpsed decades before, during the sun-dappled season of their youth which provides the picture with its title and when they formed two corners of a short-lived youthful love-triangle.

While no one’s idea of carefree, escapist entertainment, Summer is nothing if not timely, given the current financial situation. Glenaan and scriptwriter Hugh Ellis  are careful to position Daz and Steve within a specific socio-economic setting – their lives blighted by the grim prospects prevalent in  mining areas as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s. Sensitively handled, engagingly to look at and fluently edited as the story ranges over three distinct time-frames, Summer is an unashamedly serious film about guilt, regret and wasted opportunities with its fundamental sadness crucially leavened by the salty humour of its ever-credible dialogue.

Neil Young