Running on Remakes

I’m afraid I don’t see the point of this remake of a vaguely remembered John Wayne movie, and it doesn’t help much that one can’t really make out half of what Jeff Bridges is saying because he’s keeping much of what he's muttering on the insideofhisdurnmouthifyoutakemahmeaning.

The opening of this True Grit is slow and wordy and takes forever to establish that Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) is a sly old devil and young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is a tough and canny negotiator. All good and well.

Add to the mix the overly officious Texas Ranger LeBoeuf, pronounced LeBeef by all and played well - as ever - by a heavily mustachioed Matt Damon, and you start getting the feeling that someone’s yanking your chain.

But it starts unravelling towards the end when, for example, Mattie is attacked not by one rattler down a dark hole, but at least three, and ole Rooster sure is going to get there in time to shoot ‘em to smithereens. Then he’s still got to get Mattie to a doctor and drive a horse to death and so on, all in the name of gruff chivalry.

Maybe this film was nominated for 10 Oscars as a red herring for much better works like The Fighter, or Hollywood thinks the Coen brothers should be rewarded for celebrating good old homespun Western values, like revenge.

But there is something deeply unsatisfying about the latter act when Mattie finally gets to shoot Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin in the cameo part). In fact, the only scene that really moved me, apart from the beautiful scenery, was when Rooster falls off his horse, pissed.

Wayne wouldn’t have been able to do that in a thousand years.

Which brings us to a black comedy. Or rather, an attempt at a black comedy, the first mission of which is to make the unacceptable palatable to us.

Think four Muslim fundamentalists bungling their explosive mission in Four Lions. We laugh ourselves silly despite knowing that any kind of fanatical fundamentalism like this isn’t really funny.

Wild Target is, like True Grit, a remake. In this case it’s a retelling of the 1993 French film Cible Emouvante by Pierre Salvadori. I haven’t seen that film, which also features a middle-aged man and a much younger woman, but it hardly works here.

If Emily Blunt blooms as a sexy, devious thief, then Bill Nighy does not sway as the French-learning, incredibly uptight, mother-dominated assassin. Yes, it is rather funny that his mother, played by the formidable Eileen Atkins, is worried that he’s starting to lose his touch as a cold-blooded killer, but sexy he is not.

Add to this uncomfortable mix Rupert Grint, whose character seems to be there solely as a device to connect plot dots rather than add any sexual or comic tension, and you have a rather slowly paced comedy that at least made a sextet of Auckland pensioners, no doubt yearning for the old country, chortle.

Oh, and Rupert Everett might just have found a middle-aged vocation: he makes a pleasantly sexy villain.

Neil Sonnekus