Film reviews: Project Hail Mary | Ready or Not 2: Here I Come | Dead Man’s Wire | Don’t Be Prey

Project Hail Mary (12A) ★★★

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15) ★★★

Dead Man’s Wire (15)★★★

Don’t Be Prey (12A) ★★★

Having played Neil Armstrong in First Man, Ryan Gosling returns to space as humanity’s last hope in Project Hail Mary, but this film about a science teacher (Gosling) corralled into leading a desperate interstellar mission to stop the sun from cooling strikes a decidedly goofier tone than said biopic about the stoic heroism that got us to the moon.

That’s partly because it’s based on a best-selling novel by The Martian writer Andy Weir, so the film has some of that film’s same YouTuber-in-space dynamic as Gosling’s Ryland Grace navigates loneliness and escalating peril by cheerfully narrating his ongoing predicaments to his ship’s many recording devices. These predicaments start with space-travel-induced amnesia and gradually grow to include remembering that the sun’s dying and then having to figure out how to communicate with a similarly lonely alien who’s also trying to find a solution to this problem in order to save its planet.

The ensuing bond between Ryland and this puppet-operated alien – a spider-like creature with a jaggy mineral exterior whom he nicknames Rocky – is really the film’s beating heart and directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The Lego Movie) are on surer ground handling their irreverent buddy-movie banter than they are handling the film’s more contemplative moments or its darker ones. Lacking the poetic visual instincts of Steven Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan or Ridley Scott, they give us tongue-in-cheek visual quotes of those directors’ landmark sci-fi movies instead, so the film never quite soars on its own and, in places, is surprisingly dull, never quite justifying its excessive running time. Elsewhere the jocular tone can make it seem frustratingly glib about the serious themes the film’s elliptical flashbacks to Ryland’s pre-launch life seem to be grappling with.

That said, Sandra Hüller manages to bring a sense of gravitas and playfulness to these scenes as the international mission leader convinced that Ryland will rise to the occasion even when he doesn’t believe it himself. And it’s hard not to root for Gosling, whose movie star aura elevates the film even when the directors fumble it.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come belatedly continues the grisly parlour games of Scream directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s 2019 hit about a new bride (Samara Weaving) who finds herself fighting for her life on her wedding night when she discovers her rich in-laws owe their wealth and power to a deal they’ve made with Satan. Picking up moments after the first film ends, Weaving’s Grace finds her ordeal far from over when her survival triggers another deadly game of hide-and-seek involving a cabal of six wealthy families who must hunt her and her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) to be in with a chance of controlling the world.

An entertaining cameo from body-horror maestro David Cronenberg as the world’s secret billionaire ruler gets proceedings off to a knowing start, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself, Sarah Michelle Geller, relishes her return to horror as one of Cronenberg’s heirs. Thenceforth it’s mostly an amped-up replay of the first film, but there’s still plenty of inventively gloopy, plasma-spraying fun to be had. Elijah Wood co-stars.

READ MORE: Film Reviews: How to Make a Killing | Everybody to Kenmure Street | The Bride!

Gus Van Sant returns with Dead Man’s Wire, the bizarre true-life story of Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgaard), an aspiring property developer who, in 1977, took his mortgage lender (Dacre Montgomery) hostage to bring his grievances to public attention and force an apology from his victim’s father, the owner of the brokerage firm he blamed for ruining his life.

Casting Al Pacino as the latter, Van Sant draws a direct parallel with Dog Day Afternoon, but this film has a queasy tension all its own. That’s partly down to the manner of the kidnapping: Kiritsis looped a wire from the trigger of his sawn-off shotgun to the neck of his victim to stop the police from shooting him. And partly it's due to Kiritsis’s many contradictions and the complicity of the analogue media in escalating the story. Never trying to force the film to be something it’s not, Van Sant instead crafts a sad, disturbing, sometimes pathetic tale whose relevance hasn’t diminished.

Offering a rare sympathetic portrait of the founder of an investment firm that collapsed, documentary Don’t Be Prey follows Australian entrepreneur Mark Sowerby’s efforts to complete the Oceans Seven, an open water marathon swimming endurance test in which participants must swim some of the toughest Channels in the world, among them the English Channel, the Scottish-Irish North Channel and Hawaii’s shark-infested Moloka’i Channel.

Personal trauma is, of course, never far from the surface of any film about crazy feats of endurance and this one acknowledges this cliché upfront, proceeding to show how Sowerby swam his way out of the depths of serious depression after his investment fund failed. If the film mostly takes Sowerby’s redemption narrative at face value, the insights into the strange world of marathon swimming make it worth watching.

All films are in cinemas from 20 March

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