Comedy
Death Of A Unicorn (15)
Review: Popular culture has appropriated the unicorn as a rainbow-coloured metaphor for a highly desirable individual, who dares to stand out from the herd. Writer-director Alex Scharfman’s comedy horror rifles through literature and art dating back hundreds of years to reaffirm the unicorn as a ferocious beast steeped in myth, which is capable of wondrous healing and can only be tamed by a virtuous and pure-hearted maiden. Young women of such noble heritage are even rarer than horned beasts in Scharfman’s gory picture, which unleashes a family of unicorns to enthusiastically impale human victims on their spiralling protrusions.
Characters marked for death are glaringly obvious: they either attempt to kill the magical creatures for personal gain, and consequently ‘deserve’ a grim fate, or foolishly place press their heads against a door or wooden panelling to listen for the sound of approaching hooves and are rewarded with tapered bone in their brain matter. The quality of the digital trickery, which melds the creatures with live-action elements and human actors, varies wildly. Any scenes where unicorns are at full gallop or stalking prey in domestic settings, like the velociprators in Jurassic Park, are especially jarring.
Widowed corporate lawyer Elliot Kintner (Paul Rudd) drives into the countryside with his college student daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), to attend an urgent summit called by his terminally ill boss, Odell Leopold (Richard E Grant). The billionaire philanthropist has exhausted vast resources to find a medical cure for cancer and is looking to put pen to paperwork to officially confirm Elliot’s role in continuing his legacy when he is gone, under the aegis of Odell’s wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and spoilt son Shepard (Will Poulter).
En route to the Leopold mansion in the middle of a nature reserve, Elliot fails to pay attention to the road and hits a white-furred “horse-like mammalia”. Father and daughter arrive traumatised at the Leopold complex, with a dead unicorn in the boot of their car. They are greeted by Odell’s personal assistant Shaw (Jessica Hynes) and long-suffering butler Griff (Anthony Carrigan). Soon after, cries fill the night-time air and the Kintners and Leopolds deduce the deceased was part of a herd.
Death Of A Unicorn is an entertaining but tonally uneven romp through superstition, which sacrifices the privilege and pompous to ancient beasts that deserve to be protected not exploited. Ortega’s outcast is the only wholly likeable character, forging an unspoken bond to the magical creatures by touching a glowing horn shortly before her father wields a tyre iron to put one injured animal out of its misery. Intentionally overblown death sequences and jump scares are slathered in viscera to elicit gasps of shock and disgust. Scharfman’s film may not be a unicorn in common parlance but it’s not destined for the knacker’s yard either.
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Action
A Minecraft Movie (PG)
Review: To date, I have spent less than an hour playing the best-selling video game of all time. I was so perplexed by the crafting table system in Minecraft that my mentor – my young nephew – rapidly lost patience with my ham-fisted attempts to fashion a sword and suit of armour and he “reappropriated” the controller to do the blacksmithery himself. I wouldn’t last five minutes in director Jared Hess’s rollicking family-friendly adventure based on the game, which reunites the Nacho Libre ringmaster with his gregarious leading man, Jack Black.
A lot can happen in 300 seconds in three-dimensional pixellated worlds populated with creepers, endermen, skeletons, spiders, zombies and a chicken jockey. Each monster wreaks havoc in frenetically paced action sequences, which are the cinematic equivalent of dropping a mint candy into a bottle of cola – noisy, messy and fun in short bursts. A script credited to five writers is laden with Easter eggs for ardent fans but almost all those hidden nuggets passed me by (while people around me in the cinema contributed to a symphony of knowing chuckles).
One disparate plot strand involving a recently divorced high school principal (Jennifer Coolidge), who yearns for extra-curricular activity with an enigmatic new man (voiced by Matt Berry), is hilarious thanks to Coolidge’s impeccable comic timing, but belongs to a different film. One that I would rather watch – marginally – than the dizzying madness of A Minecraft Movie.
Former arcade game world champion Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison (Jason Momoa), owner of the Game Over World vintage computer and video emporium in Chuglass, Idaho, buys the contents of a storage unit and unknowingly acquires the Orb of Dominance. A young boy named Henry (Sebastian Hansen), who has recently moved to the town with his older sister Natalie (Emma Myers), unwittingly activates the Orb and is sucked through a portal with Natalie, Garrett and sassy real estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks).
They are stranded in the Overworld, where they learn the basic mechanics of Minecraft, befriend villagers, outrun exploding creepers and face hordes of angry piglins commanded by evil Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House), who reigns supreme in the fiery Nether. The terrified interlopers join forces with the Orb’s ebullient protector, Steve (Jack Black), to restore peace and find a way back home.
A Minecraft Movie careens between set pieces with gusto but human relationships are short-changed as the filler between outlandish interludes. Black’s high-energy buffoonery is the glue and he unleashes growling Tenacious D vocals in humorous original songs including the rock anthem I Feel Alive featuring Dave Grohl and Mark Ronson. The madcap double-act with Momoa reaches a delirious crescendo with the two actors hastily forming a man sandwich in midair to evade fireball-spewing ghasts. Two generous slices of larger-than-life lunacy.
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