New Release Review: 'Beasts of No Nation'

War is hell. No surprise there. Add children and matters just get worse. Three sentences in and already I worry that I'm sounding flippant... It's hard to write about something that's terrible and true and is somehow not in our distant past. Cary Fukanaga (the writer/director) faces the same trouble whilst putting it on screen.

Beasts of No Nation is set in an unnamed African country and follows a young boy, Agu (Abraham Attah), as he goes from a happy, if impoverished, life with his family, to a dead-eyed follower of Commandant (Idris Elba), the leader of a growing rebel group prone to guerilla warfare. The steps that take him from his family life to his rebel life are much as you'd expect: death, manipulation, death, a spot of black magic, drugs, and more death.

This isn't the first film to touch upon child soldiers, or soldiers so young that they might as well be children (the brutalising Come and See is particularly worthwhile, so long as you don't mind being flung into an emotional pit of despair for almost 3 hours), but Beasts of No Nation is the first to properly tackle the story of child soldiers in Africa - at least outside of documentaries. There's much to like, if 'like' is the right word when dealing with a film whose subject matter couldn't be bleaker: Fukunaga's cinematography is stunning; Dan Romer's score is highly evocative, and Attah's performance as Agu is preternaturally good. But, oddly, the film has little emotional impact. It'd make sense if the initial horrors hit home, whilst the subsequent ones became less brutalising due to the constant onslaught of death and depravity, making our journey through the film mirror that of Agu's. Unfortunately, that's not what happens. (At least not to me. Which suggests either a misstep on the filmmaker's part or means I'm dead inside... ) Instead, to appreciate the gravity of the situation, I found I had to step out of the film and tell myself 'This is something that happens', at which point the impact of what was happening finally landed - but not before.

Further compounding the problem is Elba's Commandant. As charismatic as Elba is - and he's very charismatic - he's simply too likeable. When he does terrible things it's hard to equate them with Elba, as he remains amiable, if occasionally irascible, throughout. At times, it felt like his TV character Luther had taken a wayward path in recent years (his wandering accent rather accentuated the impression). When things don't quite work out for him you don't think 'Aha! Karma has come for thee Commandant!' Instead you think 'Gee, that's a shame. I hope things start to look up for poor Elba'.

All told Fukunaga's film is still impressive, even if it's impact is more cerebral than emotional.

Visceral impact: 6/10
Impact-once-the-gravity-of-the-situation-hits-home-after-some-musing: 8/10
Overall: a conflicted 7/10

New Release Review: 'Sicario'

A truck (that looks rather like a tank) charges along baking tarmac towards its destination: the front wall of a nondescript house in a nondescript American neighbourhood. In less than a minute, and using only a handful of shots, director Denis Villeneuve builds an unrelenting tension that doesn't let up till the credits roll. Once the truck arrives, bursting through the wall of the house, the tension barely abates, but at least the situation is clarified: the truck contains an FBI strike team, and the house and its occupants are part of Mexico's drug cartel. Understanding who, what, why, where and when will turn out to be a rare thing in Sicario, where ambiguity and confusion reign supreme.

We experience most everything through the eyes of FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), who leads her strike team in the latest raid in a long line of raids, this time into a veritable house of horrors. Drugs are seized and bodies (presumably of rival cartel members) are found, and there seem to be an unlimited supply of both, as the feuding cartels continue to take pieces out of each other whilst also sending as much of their product across the US/Mexican border. Plan A in the 'war' against drugs clearly isn't working; enter Plan B in the shape of consultant Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). His task: "To dramatically overreact." He offers Kate the chance to join him and his team - which includes another outside consultant, the taciturn Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro) - as they set out to bring order to chaos. And so begins Kate's journey down the rabbit hole.

It's apparent within the opening moments that Sicario is a Hamlet-drama, i.e. anyone and everyone could be dead by the end of the tale, and Villeneuve uses all the tools at his disposal to accentuate that sense of perpetual danger: Roger Deakins stunning cinematography, with its canny use of space, only ever revealing enough of our surroundings to make us wonder what's happening just out of sight; Jóhann Jóhannsson's score, which might be the most relentless thing about the film, as it builds quietly, but insistently; and Blunt's confused and horrified Kate, our audience surrogate, who can deal with a house full of decomposing bodies, but finds the ambiguity of Graver's actions and agenda much more unsettling.

There's much more I could write about Sicario - there's Del Toro's enigmatic turn as Alejandro, the cog around reach everything else is moving; there's the matter of do-the-ends-justify-the-means of what Graver and his team are doing; there's Villeneuve's expert direction, which isn't so surprising after Incendies and Prisoners - but, for the most part, that all needs to be seen to be appreciated. So go watch it already.

Rating: 10/10