gilleliath

I thought I could watch the Stath in pretty much anything. But no - not when it is embroiled in Guy Ritchie's God-awful dialogue, convoluted story and minimal action. I've said it before, Ritchie has absolutely no idea how real people talk, and the fake 'locker room' tone of the script is excruciating - not only that, like a lot of recent films it is just bad English. Not street, not cool, just wrong. The accents are all over the place, too.

So I've gone from thinking I could watch anything with Statham, to not thinking I can stand to watch anything else by Ritchie.

Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb.

This leans so heavily on TCM for its visual style that at times it is almost a shot-for-shot remake, with its sunny yet creepy Texan countryside, sinister low camera angles, and its peeking out from dilapidated old shacks and abandoned trucks. But its use of 70s music is enjoyable, the action strikes a good balance between horrible and daft, and the premise is interesting enough: the horror of age seen, for once, from the pov of the old not the young, and it's also something of a satire on today's wannabe culture.

It's a sad sign of the times that a film can having making a porno as its main plot device, star plenty of attractive people, and yet be so entirely un-titillating. You can still have sex in the movies these days: you're just not allowed to enjoy it.

I can understand why Orson Welles thought it would be a good idea to abstract the 'Falstaff' scenes from several of Shakespeare's plays and put them together into one piece. But the problem is, they are not the central scenes in most of those plays; they are more in the nature of comic relief. So the result here is, in truth - and as might have been expected - a shapeless piece without a strong narrative current, and lacking its logical climax which would - of course - be the Battle of Agincourt, as portrayed in Henry V.

Both sound and vision here are a little murky, but it's not purely a technical problem. The likes of John Gielgud, experienced Shakespearean actors accustomed to enunciate, make themselves clear enough; but the star of the show is, I'm afraid, often unintelligible.