Theo James

Fuze

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Will Tranter aims a rifle

Fuze adds another little gem of a film to under-regarded director David Mackenzie’s list, joining Starred Up, Perfect Sense, Relay, Spread and Hell and High Water as unusual takes on genre, often with a heavily procedural slant. Things click, click, click into place in Mackenzie films, though often the tumblers line up in unexpected ways. Here, what looks like one sort of film quickly becomes another and then another. But things starts off in familiar territory, in the Paddington area of London, where a huge unexploded bomb has been exposed during the preparatory work for a new development. In come the bomb disposal guys, an army team led by the bluff, sweary Major … Read more

The Monkey

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The monkey beating its drum

A man killed by vape, a woman blown to bits on diving into a swimming pool. Fish hooks, a coffee steamer, on they go, the vectors of weird death, in Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey, a Stephen King story tricked out with Final Destination-style ingenuity and given a comedy-macabre polish. Groans followed by chortles is the idea, with the reactions stopping this side of disgust, as Perkins tells the story of twins who grow up to be adult versions of the milquetoast/asshole combo they are as kids and the malevolent mechanical monkey that follows them on their journey, wreaking bloody havoc all the way. A pre-credits sequence shows the monkey doing its thing – … Read more

Archive

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J3 is revealed

Here’s Archive, the debut by writer/director Gavin Rothery, who deserved better than for his film to slip between the cracks, which it did a bit thanks to the Covid restrictions. Instead of getting the big-screen release that was on the cards, it slunk out onto streaming months after it was due to be seen. Rothery’s CV is full of art department gigs. He worked with Duncan Jones on Moon and Archive at first looks like it might be operating in the same territory. Lone guy marooned somewhere, taking orders from a stern voice back at HQ, possibly going mad in the process. Except George (Theo James) isn’t in an off-world location, he’s in … Read more