Jean Reno

The Doorman

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Ruby Rose

There are good things and bad things in The Doorman, a Die Hard retread that hands the Bruce Willis role to Ruby Rose, the onetime model and TV presenter who made her name in Orange Is the New Black and has played Batwoman with some aplomb in TV shows Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and, unsurprisingly, Batwoman. She is one of the good things. The character she plays a bit less so. In a pre-credits sequence we see Rose’s Sergeant Ali trying and failing to protect an American diplomat and her daughter while on active duty in Romania. Both mother and daughter die in an armed ambush and Ali is traumatised as a result. … Read more

Flushed Away

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Roddy the Rat holds on tight in Flushed Away

Aardman, the animation house that gave us Wallace and Gromit, announced the ending of their collaboration with DreamWorks (Shrek) just as Flushed Away was released. And watching it, you can understand why. High on sentimentality and laden with backstory, it’s a DreamWorks movie with Aardman touches, rather than what Aardman probably hoped for – an Aardman movie with DreamWorks muscle behind it. A good movie that could have been a great one, in other words, though the good stuff makes it worthwhile. The over-complicated story tells the tale of Roddy St James, a privileged London pet rat (voiced by Hugh Jackman) who gets “flushed away” down the toilet and into the sewers, where … Read more

Jean Reno: The Bulletproof Star

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Jean Reno and Natalie Portman in Léon

In a long career that’s seen him starring in films good, bad and spectacularly terrible, the public’s affection for French icon Jean Reno has never wavered. How does he do it? Big guy. Woolly hat. Stubble. Shades. Round shades. Dark round shades. Doesn’t say much. Kills people. Sensitively. Ask a roomful of people to come up with a word or two about Jean Reno and that’s pretty much what you’d get. You might also get French. Likes his dinner. And cool. Very cool. But what about versatile? Best known for playing loners, hitmen, tough guys, individuals who don’t say much because they don’t have to, to most people Reno is that French guy … Read more