omar sy

Shadow Force

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Omar Sy points a gun while lying on the ground

Lacking the crackle and wit of the usually fairly mad Joe Carnahan movie, Shadow Force is full of charismatic performers angling for a moment in the sun. Which, for most of them never comes. Gunplay and banter are there, but they’re swamped by slack verbiage and scenes full of characters never properly introduced. So when the trademark Carnahan Big Finale arrives – guns blaze, wisecracks spark – ignition does not happen. It should be good, with its mix of Kill Bill, John Wick and Mr and Mrs Smith plotting. Omar Sy and Kerry Washington play Issac Sarr (codename Sombra) and Kyrah Owens (codename Ombra), two members of a crack black-ops squad who, years before … Read more

The Killer

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Nathalie Emmanuel with the Eiffel Tower in the background

John Woo never feels fully in control of The Killer, the remake of his own film from 1989, an accusation you could never have levelled at the original. Flipping the gender of the assassin, and switching from Hong Kong to Paris both seem like sound ideas, not least because in some quarters the increasingly tight relationship between the assassin and his cop pursuer in the original seemed a bit too close to homosexual. No chance of that now. Omar Sy is in the cop role, and of all the many actors in this strangely off thriller, Sy probably comes out of it least shortchanged. There are two familiar tales here. First the “a … Read more

Untouchable

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Driss shows Philippe the finer things in life in Untouchable

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 April Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, 1968 On this day in 1968, the senior Conservative British politician Enoch Powell made a speech in which he alluded to Virgil’s Aenid – “As I look forward, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” A Greek scholar who also spoke Urdu – Powell as an ambitious young man had set his sights on becoming the viceroy of India, only to find in later life that the Indians were coming to him – Powell was referring to the prospects for race … Read more