Emily Blunt

The Fall Guy

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Ryan Gosling in shades

For a while you couldn’t escape Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt banging the drum for The Fall Guy. They were everywhere, doing Herculean amounts of publicity, usually a sign that a big-bucks movie isn’t quite as good as everyone expected. Which turns out to be true. But The Fall Guy is not bad. It is entertaining enough, with diverting performances, cool action, stunts and so on. But it’s not a Tom Cruise movie, pleasing though Gosling is as the stunt guy who comes back from serious injury to save the day, get the girl and defeat the bad guy. We all know, don’t we, that it’s based on the successful TV show starring … Read more

Jungle Cruise

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Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson

Exactly what it’s meant to be, Jungle Cruise is the walking, talking, filmic version of the Disney theme park ride it is based on. No one gets hurt, or wet, or even scared, no one laughs at the jokes, which are deliberately weak. It’s fun, in that slept-through-half-of-it way. Christmas afternoon, here it comes. The idea for the movie first took wing after the success of another film based on a theme park ride. But why saturate the market? And so Jungle Cruise got parked while Pirates of the Caribbean did its thing, after which the normal thousand-and-one interruptions to the process of getting an idea onto the screen got in the way. … Read more

Wild Mountain Thyme

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Anthony and Rosemary at the gate

From the very first shot of Wild Mountain Thyme I was thinking “Good god, surely people aren’t still making films like this!” The opening shot being an overhead of the lush slopes of rural Ireland while the soundtrack twiddled away in madly shamrocky fashion. It got worse. A beejaysus-Irish voiceover announces “I’m dead”, by way of an introduction. The whimsy-ometer starts climbing into the red zone. And then I realised it’s Christopher Walken doing the bad Irish accent. The letters W, T and F start to appear in the air. What the actual, it actually gets even worse, as we’re introduced to one Oirish character after another. Enter Walken as old farmer Tony … Read more

The Devil Wears Prada

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Women in black: Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt

The sort of film that has an inbuilt media audience – women’s magazines – who will receive it with the same lack of scrutiny as they treat each launch of a new beauty product, The Devil Wears Prada is a clever title halfway towards being a clever film. It’s adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna from Lauren Weisberger’s chick-lit novel, and since Weisberger’s spent some time working at American Vogue as editor Anna Wintour’s assistant we don’t have to look too far for its inspiration. Anne Hathaway plays the simpering Weisberger avatar, an intern/newbie at a fashion magazine not unadjacent to Vogue. And Meryl Streep is also clearly styled on the fashion bible’s redoubtable editor, who … Read more