CinemaSerf

"Gazza" (Peter Andre) is in the boozer regaling his mates with a story that is so remarkable that his best mate "Johnzie" (Jamie Lomas) thinks it's going to blow their socks off. He was facing disaster with his beloved nan looking like she was about to be turfed out of her care home unless he can find £35,000! There is virtually no hope he can manage this until he discovers that he is the doppelgänger of an imprisoned Jamaican gangster who is about to inherit a $3 millions. He comes up with a plan to learn the patois, don the dreads and head to the sunshine with his mentor "Winston" (Wil Johnson) to try and convince the local population that he is the true heir! Can he pull it off? Preposterous? Well, yes. It's clearly a labour of love for Andre and director Fredi Nwaka who did just about everything on this production, but the film just doesn't work. The script is weak and contrived and even though the supporting cast, especially the scene stealing "Uncle Godfrey" (Oliver Samuels) do inject some life into the film at times, the whole production is little better than amateur and misses way more than it hits. There's a lively soundtrack but that's about the height of it.

Tom Cruise sports an eye-patch as he takes on the role of Nazi war hero Claus von Stauffenberg. Badly injured he returns to Germany where he is quickly appointed to staff rank with regular access to an appreciative Führer (David Bamber). His arrival co-insides with the increasingly stark realisation from many politicians and officers alike that their hopes of winning the war were dwindling and that something is going to have to be done about removing their neurotic Chancellor and instituting a new national order that might be able to negotiate some sort of peace. Of course, some of the High Command were still fiercely loyal so it was a bit of an eggshell treading operation for von Stauffenberg and his allies as they are not sure whom to trust whilst they put a daring plan into action that could result in a coup treasonable in anyone's book if they fail. Relying on a fair-to-middling selection of mainly British actors, Bryan Singer does ok with his star here, but the film does really lack jeopardy as it rather trundles out of the traps and gurgles it's way along before finally enlivening for the last twenty minutes or so. Cruise's legendary charisma deserts him here and frankly, he hasn't really the gravitas to carry this off convincingly - and that goes for Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and (fleetingly) Kenneth Branagh too as this whole production struggles to really capture the complexities and dangers faced by these conspirators - the braver ones and the skin-savers. The actual intricacies of their "Valkyrie" operation itself are superficially glossed over and, given we all know what really happened, the film offers us little compelling to get our teeth into. Disappointing, I'd say. Sorry.

I must admit I didn't quite understand just what was going on at the start of this. "Lee Kang-su" (Kang Ha-neul) is a brash and confident young man who manages to get information on drug dealers which he then passes on to the police and/or the public prosecutors in return for a cut and them getting a reduced sentence if they turn state's evidence. Thing is, the further up the food chain they get the more political "interference" the investigators encounter and pretty swiftly that causes problems for this young "Yadang" as he ends up a victim of his erstwhile protector, ambitious prosecutor "Ku Gwen-hee" (Yoo Hae-jin) and pumped full of blue methadone to the point where he doesn't know day from night. Once released, though, he unites with similarly manipulated former police captain "Oh Sang-jae" (Park Hae-joon) and an young actor (Chae Won-bin) whose career was wrecked after she, too, was exposed to this highly addictive substance and ultimately used as a glorified hooker by someone extremely close to the presidency - and the election is looming. Once the story gets up and running, this proves to be quite an entertaining, if not always entirely plausible, analysis of lucrative drug running and politicking in a South Korea that seems determined to stamp out criminality however perilous that path might be. It's a gritty, sometimes seedy film that sees both men and Chae Win-bin deliver strongly and in the case of Kang Hae-neul enthusiastically too. There is plenty of action across the two hours and the denouement has something of "The Sting" (1973) to it as vengeance knows few bounds. Worth a watch.