Film reviews: The Thursday Murder Club | The Roses | Young Mothers | The Toxic Avenger
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as a married couple whose relationship turns toxic, The Roses is too drenched in cutesy irony to get properly nasty, writes Alistair Harkness
The Roses (15) ★★
The Thursday Murder Club (12A) ★★
Young Mothers (12A) ★★★★
The Toxic Avenger (18) ★★
First adapted as a vehicle for Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in 1989, novelist Warren Adler’s divorce satire The War of the Roses gets a 21st century update in The Roses, this time with Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as the married couple spitefully tearing strips off each other when their relationship turns toxic.
Flipping the gendered roles of the previous version, the film casts Cumberbatch and Colman as Theo and Ivy Rose, a hitherto happily married couple of ex-pat Londoners living their dream life in California, the former running a successful architecture firm, the latter a modest seafood restaurant they’ve cheekily decided to call We’ve Got Crabs. When a humiliating and very public gaffe destroys Theo’s career, however, he decides to channel his energies into raising their children while Ivy’s career suddenly takes off, propelling her to star chef status and a business empire that shatters Theo’s ego while unleashing hers.
Directed by Jay Roach (Meet the Parents) and adapted by Tony McNamara (who wrote the screenplays for Poor Things and The Favourite), the film has some spiky lines and a couple of perceptive things to say about the fallacy of trying to have it all in a modern relationship, especially when neither partner wants to be seen as holding the other back yet are equally unwilling to let go of the simmering resentments underlying their respective compromises.
But it’s also pretty broad as these things go, with supporting turns from the likes of Andy Samberg (as a cuckolded lawyer) and Kate McKinnon (as his sexually omnivorous wife) falling flat, and the escalating tension between the leads too drenched in cutesy irony to get properly nasty. File under “undemanding”.
The Thursday Murder Club isn’t so much undemanding as barely trying. A lowest common denominator adaptation of Richard Osman’s cosy crime novel of the same name, it wastes its stacked cast — Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie in the leads; Jonathan Pryce, Richard E Grant, David Tenant and Naomi Ackie in support — on a patronisingly rendered murder mystery that’s far too content to be a bit of fluff in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel mould when it could have reinvented its Miss Marple-esque premise for the era of Knives Out.
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Set in a luxurious retirement home that looks like a Farrow & Ball painted Hogwarts (director Chris Columbus made the first two Harry Potter films), it follows the titular group of sleuthing retirees as their passion for investigating cold cases leads them to an active murder involving the dodgy owners of their plush environs.
The mystery at the heart of the film is pretty perfunctory, except when it leads to a finale that involves euthanasia — a bit of a dark turn that the film glosses over as swiftly as it arrives, Katy Brand’s witless script ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of ageing in anything other than the most groaningly superficial ways.
The Dardenne brothers make a strong return with Young Mothers, another humanistic exploration of lives lived on the margins, this time revolving around a group of teenage mothers living in a maternal support home in the Belgian city of Liège, where they’re taught the basics of how to care for the babies their own youth and circumstances have left them woefully ill-equipped to handle.
Wonderfully played by a cast of unknowns, the girls are facing myriad issues: some are escaping abusive homes, some are suddenly reckoning with the psychological toll of being abandoned themselves as children, some are dealing with addiction issues or feckless — but equally young — boyfriends, others are preparing to put their children up for adoption. No matter the character’s circumstances, though, the Dardennes view each of them without judgment, their camera staying close at all times, as if holding them them in the protective embrace denied their real-life inspirations.
Where recent films by the Dardenne brothers have been more plot driven, this one reverts to the more observational, character-driven style with which they made their name — and of which they’re still absolute masters.
READ MORE: Film Reviews: Eddington | The Life of Chuck
Purveyors of schlock cinema, Troma’s 1980s comic book satire The Toxic Avenger gets a very belated reboot here, several years on from when it might have had any pop culture currency as a satire of the Marvel-fuelled superhero boom that peaked with a very different set of Avengers movies.
That’s too bad, because initially it’s an appropriately tongue-through-the-cheek spoof of superhero lore, made with a certain amount of B-movie brio thanks to writer/director Macon Blair’s deconstructionist affection for the material and star Peter Dinklage’s charismatic turn as its gory hero — a mild-mannered janitor turned embittered mutant who’s out for revenge against the Big Pharma exec (Kevin Bacon, hamming it up) responsible for dunking him in a vat of toxic waste in the first place. Alas, once the set-up is established, it quickly runs out of juice and jokes.
The Roses, Young Mothers and The Toxic Avenger are in cinemas from 29 August; The Thursday Murder Club is on limited release now and streams on Netflix from 29 August
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.