Aubrey MaloneA dumbed-down plot and wannabe polemic
Brick Mansions (15A)
There’s a good film to be made about the way people in ghettos become involved in drugs because they feel ignored and neglected by the powers-that-be in the posher end of town. But this isn’t it.
It would have been nice if it made even some attempt to treat us like adults in the audience. I can understand the cartoon violence, which is about as genuine as a two dollar bill. (PlayStation games have more realism.)
I can also understand the join-the-dots characters. I can even understand the dumbed-down screenplay, which plays second fiddle to the rat-tat-tat of the gunplay.
But when the film displays pretensions to being a polemic about urban renewal somewhere under the glossy pyrotechnics and quasi-macho credentials, that’s when my ‘Irish’ gets up.
It’s dedicated to the memory of Paul Walker, who died tragically in a car crash some months back. Walker personified the James Dean credo of ‘live fast, die young and make a good-looking corpse’. In many of his films (this one included) he broke all the laws of the highway code.
But then that’s easier to do when you have a director and a camera crew monitoring your every move. In the real world the cars coming at you when you’re driving at 120mph on the wrong side of the road don’t move out of the way quite so readily.
Brain into neutral
Walker plays a policeman trying to avenge the murder of his father. He thinks the man responsible is Tremaine, played by an actor with the rather exotic moniker of RZA. Tremaine pretty much runs the drug show in the Detroit ghettos of Brick Mansions, which have been walled off from the main city because of the crime that’s rampant there.
Tremaine, we learn, may not be quite as bad as we first imagine, despite the fact that he shoots one of his own men in cold blood early on. (But, hey, the guy deserved it – he had the audacity to tell Tremaine he didn’t have any suggestions as to how he should run his business.)
In alliance with Walker is the film world’s latest ‘sensation’, the dynamic Lino (David Belle). This is a man who’s able to jump off roofs into people’s apartments, somersault onto cars, dodge grenades, run faster than the Road Runner and kick-box half a dozen people to death all in the space of time it would take you to say, “Nice going, dude” (and without even breaking into a sweat).
Brick Mansions is the kind of film where you put your brain into neutral and your thrill seeking propensity into first gear. It moves along at a fair old lick but there’s more depth in a fortune cookie. From the moment the city mayor tells you he’s going to take care of the poor folk, you know he isn’t. That’s how subtle it is.
Thriller
“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist,” Tremaine informs us at one point. “All you need is a rocket.” The said rocket has been stolen from government forces by Tremaine, who has it trained on Detroit for most of the movie.
Will it go off? That’s down to whether Walker and Belle can defuse it, or escape the claws of Tremaine and his assistant Rayzah (Ayisha Issa).
If you thought the balletic elegance of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was something, the antics here put these into the shade.
The makers should have made up their minds if they were intent on making a thriller or training the actors for the next Olympics.
** Fair