TV review: Disenchantment

(M) ★★★½

Creator: Matt Groening.

Cast: (voices of) Abbi Jacobson, Eric Andre, Nat Faxon, John DiMaggio, Tress MacNeille, Matt Berry, David Herman, Sharon Horgan, Maurice LaMarche, Lucy Montgomery, Billy West.

Service: Netflix.

If you drink and ride, you're a bloody idiot.

Comparing Matt Groening's latest creations to his two previous babies - The Simpsons and Futurama - is grossly unfair; one is the greatest TV show of all time, the other is a supremely under-rated gem that was so great it survived being cancelled twice (and here's hoping Futurama survives its third cancellation).

But compare we shall, because that's often the best shorthand for understanding quality and giving something a creative context. So the short version of this review is that Disenchantment isn't a patch on either of its older Groening siblings. It starts to hit its stride partway through the second episode but its humour only occasionally reaches the lofty heights of its predecessors. And despite its progressive outlook, it lacks the social commentary bite of The Simpsons and Futurama at their best.

But, like I said, such comparisons are grossly unfair. On its own, Disenchantment is fine fun, with some good characters and some solid storytelling that escalates dramatically as the first series progresses. There are also some nice points to be made about the weight of expectation, and the struggle of finding one's identity.

The star of the show is Bean (Jacobson), AKA Princess Tiabeanie AKA Princess Tiabeanie Mariabeanie De La Rochambeaux Drunkowitz. As the oldest child of King Zøg of Dreamland (DiMaggio), she is expected to be a respectable royal. However the first episode finds her ditching her diplomatically advantageous wedding, after which she regularly spends her time drinking and fighting.

Typically she's accompanied in her pursuits by exiled naive elf Elfo (Faxon) and Bean's personal demon Luci (Andre), with said pursuits often running her afoul of her kingly father.

As is the custom of modern TV, Disenchantment rewards binge-watching. Around episode eight, the pay-offs mount up and the story arc kicks in. Seeds you didn't even realise were seeds, planted way back in episode one, suddenly start to bear fruit, and the ability of the show to make the most of callbacks - something The Simpsons and Futurama have never done - works a treat.

Prior to that, the series' good-natured humour and engaging characters will keep you watching. By season's end, it moves into full cliffhanger mode, which is amplified by the fact Netflix has ordered 20 episodes yet this season is only the first 10. So some story strands bear fruit, others frustratingly don't. It's a ploy to get you coming back for series two, which helps make up for the lower strike rate of laughs when compared to The Simpsons and Futurama.

The best elements of Disenchantment overcome the worst. Side characters such as The Herald get the best lines, which makes up for the side characters among the king's court that aren't funny. A bachelor party visit to Mermaid Island is a funny plot, while Bean's search for a job is less so. Luci comes off like a boring version of Futurama's Bender, but Bean is a refreshing character, who's more like a cross between Bender and Leela.

Largely, it works. It's boldly different to Groening's other work, while still looking and feeling familiar. It's still short of greatness, but it's engaging enough to warrant returning for season two or even a re-watch to pick out the foreshadowing you missed first time around.

And to read all the great signs hidden in the background of the village.

The Happytime Murders

(MA15+) ★★★

Director: Brian Henson.

Cast: Bill Barretta, Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Leslie David Baker, Dorien Davies, Elizabeth Banks, Joel McHale, Kevin Clash.

Spot the puppet. The answer may surprise you (it's the guy with the beard).

Firstly, this is not the first time "Muppets" have gone hardcore. That honour goes to Peter Jackon's sickly twisted cult comedy Meet The Feebles. Of course, they weren't actual "Muppets" but it was the next best thing.

While The Happytime Murders is also destined for cult status, it has something Meet The Feebles didn't have - actual Muppet cred, courtesy of director Brian Henson.

Henson, son of the late great Jim, is a longtime Muppeteer, and has directed Kermit and co in such films as A Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island. Just what his old man would make of this sweary mess of sex-and-violence noir is a question for the ages.

The Happytime Murders focuses on Phil Phillips (Barretta, another Muppet stalwart), who was the first puppet cop in an alternate Los Angeles that imagines humans and puppets living side-by-side. Kicked off the force for an incident that still haunts him, Phil now works as a private investigator.

His latest case is trying to solve the murder of a puppet cast member from an old TV show called The Happytime Gang, which brings him into the firing line of his ex-cop partner Connie Edwards (McCarthy).

The Happytime Murders is fitfully funny, but nowhere near as funny as it should be. Too often it goes for the racy sex joke or a wacky puppet gag, when something actually hilarious would have been a better option. The humour is often yearning to point out that hey, this is a movie for adults starring puppets, as if we hadn't noticed already.

The comedic approach is at odds with what makes the film work, which is when it gets on with being a good movie telling a good story. Phil is a great character, whose flaws and traits make him seem more human than his blue felt would indicate. His relationship with Edwards, despite its histrionics, is interesting too. Unlike the humour, these elements aren't straining self-consciously.

The plot is a semi-decent noir story, and as well as dialling up the laughs, cranking up the noirish elements wouldn't have gone astray. The closest relative to this film is not Meet The Feebles or the marionette mayhem of Team America - it's Robert Zemeckis' toon-noir classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.

That film also used its non-human/human interactions to examine prejudice (it's far less subtle in The Happytime Murders) to tell a properly noirish story, while also employing plenty of that film genre's cinematic style. The Happytime Murders would surely have benefited from a touch more Touch Of Evil, or a flutter of The Maltese Falcon, instead of looking like a Sesame Street on the wrong side of the tracks.

The puppetry itself is top notch and innovative, making the most of green screen and CG erasure to make its people-and-puppets world a reality. The cast are trying hard, when the laughs land they are great, the story has its moments, and Phil is a cool character you would happily watch in another hardboiled mystery. It's a shame there isn't more hilarity or noirish style to this ambitious cult-classic-in-waiting.

The Meg

(M) ★★

Director: Jon Turteltaub.

Cast: Jason Statham, Li Bingbing, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose, Winston Chao, Cliff Curtis, Shuya Sophia Cai, Page Kennedy, Robert Taylor, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Jessica McNamee, Masi Oka.

Aquaman had a lot to answer for.

What's scarier than the shark in Jaws? A bigger shark! And that's why we got Deep Blue Sea in the '90s. And the terribly made Mega-Shark series between 2009 and 2015 (expect that to make a comeback shortly).

And here we are at The Meg AKA Jason Statham versus a giant shark. Believe it or not, but this film started life as a book (much like Jaws did) back in the '90s. It languished in development hell for two decades until it finally surfaced as this Chinese-American co-production (hence the setting off the coast of China and the large number of Chinese actors in the film) which bears little resemblance to its source material.

While I'm as much a fan of big-dumb-fun movies as the next man-child, The Meg is mostly just big-dumb. It takes itself laugh-out-loud serious at times rather than being laugh-out-loud funny, and its attempts to shoehorn emotion and character development into proceedings is average at best and painfully awkward at worst.

Statham stars as Jonas Taylor, a deep-dive rescue expert turned functioning alcoholic after a rescue attempt went somewhat wrong. Jonas claimed a giant underwater creature was responsible for the misfortune, and you can probably guess where this going.

When a billion-dollar research project inadvertently comes in contact with a similarly huge marine beastie, stranding a sub crew on the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the scientists turn to Jonas to come to the rescue. But what have they found lurking near the ocean floor (I'll give you one guess)?

The predictability of The Meg is not a major problem - in fact, it subverts expectations from time to time. It's the combination of a largely po-faced approach and inability to land a joke that sucks the air out of this underwater adventure. The likes of a Samuel L Jackson getting eaten mid-speech a la Deep Blue Sea wouldn't have gone astray. Or maybe casting someone a little more self-deprecating than Statham. Or casting two leads with more spark than Statham and Bingbing. Or editing and shooting the jokes that are in there better so they actually land.

The likes of Rose, Kennedy and Ólafsson attempt moments of comedy, each of which sink like broken sub. Only Curtis manages to land laughs, almost in spite of the film. Wilson also has a good crack at it, but again is undone by the tone, pacing and style of The Meg.

The film never celebrates its B-movie status or over-the-top qualities and as such, never gets the "fun" to go with its "big dumb". The only things separating it from the Mega-Sharks and Sharknadoes of the world is the general quality of the cast and effects, but those shlocky series at least realised it was all a big joke.

This is aiming to be more like Jaws or Jurassic Park, but it lacks that next level of style, finesse, talent, direction, character and a tone to suit its subject material. That's not to say big beast B-movies have to be hilarious - the recent Godzilla remake is a good example of an oh-so-serious one. But that got the tone right on that delivery. It didn't splash about in a pool of bad jokes while being weighed down by its own sense of gravity, like this does. It decided it was going to be a story about family, set against the backdrop of a disaster movie.

The Meg strives to be the next great shark movie - the Jaws for the CG generation. But it's sadly not, and the film sinks as a result.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout

(M) ★★★½

Director: Christopher McQuarrie.

Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Michelle Monaghan, Alec Baldwin.

Anyone can fly a helicopter from inside the helicopter.

Read my full review of Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation here.

Read my full review of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol here.

The rarely disappointing M:I series has become notable for the increasingly crazy stunts Tom Cruise is willing to undertake. As such, those nutbag feats of daredevilry have become shorthand for the movies themselves.

So there's the one where he hangs from the ceiling, the one where he goes free climbing, the one where he jumps off a building in Shanghai, the one where he climbs the Burj Khalifa, and the one where he hangs onto a plane during takeoff.

This one will be "the one with the helicopter chase". Which is an insanely awesome sequence by the way, #oscarforstunts.

But this all exemplifies what's good and bad about the M:I films. They are exceptional action films, with gripping sequences that give us stunts we haven't seen often or ever before. However, that is often the only thing we remember about the movies, despite their usual solid plotting.

In Fallout, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his IMF colleagues are hunting a terrorist named John Lark while trying to get to three stolen plutonium cores before he does. Adding to complications is the fact Hunt and his team have already let the cores slip through their fingers once before, leading the CIA to add their own moustachioed man mountain Walker (Cavill) to the IMF group to oversee proceedings.

Throw in Ilsa Faust (Ferguson) from the previous film, plus an array of cashed-up supervillains, and you've got yourself another impossible mission that Hunt will choose to accept.

As is typical of these films, the plot is a complicated but well constructed mix of double-crosses, last minute saves and seemingly zero-sum scenarios. This is both the blessing and the curse of the M:I movies - they're great in the moment, and will have you on the edge of your seat, but ultimately they're strangely forgettable. Hence we remember the films not for their plots, but rather their stunts and spectacles.

In some ways, this puts them in the ballpark of 007 films, but without the charismatic and increasingly complex character of James Bond (or the glory of being first). This raises the other dichotomy of M:I - Tom Cruise. He's both a reason to watch the films and a reason they kind of wash over you.

Ethan Hunt is basically Tom Cruise In Action Mode, interchangeable with any of his other Action Mode characters, such as Jack Reacher, The Mummy's Nick Morton, or Night & Day's Roy Miller. Hunt has no defining character traits beyond his stoicism and the fact he cares too damn much, goddammit. It obviously makes him the perfect cypher to be inserted into any espionage plot, but it goes some way today explaining the forgettable nature of the individual films, and why you rarely hear anyone proclaim the M:I series is their favourite franchise (feel free to tell me otherwise in the comments).

Thankfully this is all somewhat offset by the presence by Rhames' Luther and Pegg's Benji, who have personality in spades, and inject a bit of much-needed humour into proceedings (the worst bits of Fallout are when Cruise attempts to say something amusing)

As mentioned, M:I Part 6 is a really solid actioner, with a tight and surprising plot, and some killer stunts (including another rooftop run, this time in London). It feels slightly mean to pick at the film for its weirdly forgettable nature, because in the moment it's great.

But if, like me, you've ever wondered why you rarely hear anyone pick this excellent franchise as their favourite, here's your answer: see if you can remember what this film was about in a year's time.