Film reviews: Materialists' hard-nosed tone gives way to sentiment in the latter stages

Irish Examiner

15 hours ago

THE course of love never did run smooth, but it does help to push things along if a chap is the right height and deep into a decent income bracket.
Materialists (15A) stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York matchmaker who assures her clients she will find them true love, but who employs very fixed and practical criteria when assessing the value of their prospective partners.
A 'voluntary celibate' herself, Lucy meets what her colleagues describe as 'a unicorn' — wealthy, charming, funny, and tall — in the shape of Harry (Pedro Pascal), a man who is very happy to be assessed on his material merits.
And that's bad news for John (Chris Evans), Lucy's ex-boyfriend and currently a struggling waiter-actor, because Lucy has grown up poor and has no intention of devoting her best years to a losing struggle against poverty.
Written and directed by Celine Song, Materialists is a deliciously chilly take on Jane Austen, where the rhythms of courtship and rumours of love are rooted in a pragmatic awareness of one's 'marketplace value' and the need to secure a viable future.
Lucy's is very much a transactional world, where relationships built on solid balance sheets are more likely to succeed; and while her ice-cold approach to nurturing nuptial success appears to preclude love at first sight,
Lucy herself has a romantic streak that finds her working especially hard on behalf of clients such as the increasingly desperate Sophie (Zoe Winters) — until, that is, her machinations result in a tragedy for Sophie.
The hard-nosed tone gives way to a more conventionally sentimental approach in the latter stages, which may disappoint the more world-weary members of the audience, but Dakota Fanning is brilliantly understated as the cynical Cupid, and she gets solid support from Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal as her suitors.
Nobody 2
Nobody 2
★★★★☆
Cinematic release
Nobody 2 (15A) stars Bob Odenkirk as Hutch, a gangland enforcer who takes a break from working off a $30m debt to go on vacation with his long-suffering wife Becca (Connie Nielsen), teenage kids Brady (Gage Monroe), and Lily (Madison MacIsaac), and his cigar-chomping Pop (Christopher Lloyd).
Unfortunately, their waterpark destination, where Hutch spent a happy family vacation as a child, is now a staging post for gangsters smuggling all manner of contraband goods; and when the hot-headed Brady gets in a tangle with the son of the local kingpin, Henry (John Ortiz), matters quickly spiral out of control into an orgy of violence.
The original Nobody (2021) was a surprise hit that earned its stripes when the ostensibly mild-mannered Hutch revealed himself to be a one-man army.
Here, there's no such twist, and much of the movie devotes itself to violence-as-slapstick, most of which, being neither funny nor realistic, grows increasingly laboured with every punch thrown.
Bob Odenkirk is good value as the square-jawed action hero who simply craves a little time off from the daily grind of bloody mayhem, but the script gives him very little to work with.
Bambi.
Bambi: A Tale of Life in the Woods
★★★☆☆
Cinematic release
Bambi: A Tale of Life in the Woods (G) is a live-action version of Disney's classic Bambi animation that begins with the birth of 'the little prince' deep in the forest and follows his passage through youth to maturity.
Directed by Michael Fessler, who is best known for co-writing March of the Penguins (2005), the film is not entirely dissimilar to a David Attenborough documentary (the cinematography is truly superb), although the facile voiceover ('The shadow of humans loom over Bambi's happiness…') is an irritating and unnecessary addition that attempts to superimpose an anthropomorphic interpretation of events.
Bring your ear-plugs and blot out the distraction: This Bambi works best as a beautifully detailed account of a pastoral idyll (the obvious tragedy excepted) and a paean to a biodiverse ecosystem that teems with rabbits, dragonflies, eagles, and boars.