TMW #11: Better Man, Mufasa: The Lion King and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl reviewed
The week's biggest cinema and streaming titles reviewed, plus Christmas TV recommendations and the latest trailers
Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
No, it’s your Movie Wingman, swooping in with another fresh batch of Friday reviews. With one notable exception, this week’s big releases are all rather toon-ful, whether it’s singing CGI felines (Disney prequel Mufasa: The Lion King), singing CGI simians (Robbie Williams biopic Better Man) or an inventor’s dogsbody (Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl), whose silent expressions always speak volumes. Plus there’s Jude Law/Nicholas Hoult real-life thriller The Order, which we can confidently predict will never get an animated and/or musical spin-off.
If you’re a paying subscriber, we also have the team’s Christmas TV recommendations, which at the very least will save you vandalising the Radio Times with a streaky highlighter. Plus we have a bumper Trailer Club led by the greatest sky-surfing icon with a thing for red this side of Father Christmas.
Speaking of the big fella, why not be more Santa and gift a friend or relative a subscription to The Movie Wingman? It’s a thoughtful pressie that lasts 12 months and is way more cine-literate than an air fryer.
Enjoy today’s offerings and don’t be shy about posting a comment below (or giving us a like). See you on Tuesday for the grand unveiling of our top five films of 2024 and a ton of other fun.
Matthew (Matt and Jordan)
Reviews
Better Man
15, in cinemas 26 December
⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
The musical biopic gets genetically reengineered in Better Man, which tells the story of Robbie Williams’ life and music, only with a CG ape playing the ‘Angels’ hitmaker. In much the same way that musicals ask you to accept that the characters will burst into song every so often, with Better Man you’ve got to ignore the chimp in the room: from the outset, he’s not treated any differently to a human character. (“I don’t see myself as others see me,” says Williams, who provides occasional narration and singing, with Jonno Davies the performance-captured actor on set as Robbie, and his speaking voice).
It’s a hell of a bold gambit, but it pays off. In part it’s down to some very decent VFX. Robbie’s integrated well into the film’s environments and interactions, and emotes much more vividly than a singing photorealistic lion (see below). The ape even pulls off a variety of hairstyles to clearly pinpoint different eras of Williams’ life. Yes, it’s a blunt metaphor, but an extremely effective one: Robbie the outsider, with the outsized personality and can’t-draw-your-eyes-away magnetism. It’s also means the typical biopic concerns about aping (sorry) a real person’s looks, mannerisms and voice go out the window.
The use of the simian stand-in also dovetails well with Williams’ predilection for unfiltered introspection, as recently witnessed in his eponymous 2023 Netflix doc and 2017 biography Reveal by Chris Heath. Maybe the monkey mask helps, but there’s none of the sanitising that often plagues authorised biopics. From the off, Williams’ pulls no punches in his cheeky-chappy narration, and the film presents him and his collaborators with an unsparing candour (one interlude with a famous former girlfriend feels particularly honest). From his humble origins through the Take That days and beyond, it’s a frank look at Williams’ mental health, the surface success offset by self-loathing and substance abuse.
For anyone familiar with Williams (and in the UK, isn’t that pretty much everyone?), it’s a hell of a nostalgia rush, from familiar events like the Knebworth performances to a fantastically cast Take That line-up (the Liam Gallagher stand-in is less effective, though maybe that’s Rob getting one up on an old rival…). There’s also a fantastic back catalogue to draw on. The songs are thoughtfully deployed (not just rolled out chronologically), and director Michael Gracey - who previously helmed The Greatest Showman - not only stages some fantastical musical numbers (‘Rock DJ’ and ‘She’s the One’ being highlights), but actually uses them as opportunities to move the story along via montage, so it never feels like the songs are just plonked in for arbitrary inclusion.
For a film that is so unvarnished and such a unique take on the biopic, it follows a pretty standard template in the rise-fall-rise story, and the plot strand with Robbie’s absent dad suffers from too tidy an arc and an overly broad performance by Steve Pemberton, playing in the register of an Inside No. 9 character. But these are minor quibbles in a film that’s an infectious, moving ride, and offers hope for the musical biopic genre yet. Sit back, and let it entertain you… (Matt Maytum)
In short? The musician movie gets thrillingly reskinned, as the popstar life is presented thru a very different lens. Fast, funny, funky.
Stay for the credits? There’s no extra footage, though the ‘Thanks’ section is HUGE.
Best Supporting Watermelon: A key beat followed up with a nice payoff mark the stripy fruit’s most impactful screen presence since Dirty Dancing.
Mufasa: The Lion King
PG, in cinemas now
⭐⭐☆☆☆
Landing in cinemas at a low ebb for ‘live-action’ animated remakes, Mufasa is an uncalled-for prequel to 2019’s creatively redundant, CG-animated The Lion King. Not the best starting point, but there’s one crucial caveat: Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins directed it. Starring Aaron Pierre as the future king of jungle, and Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Taka (aka Scar-in-the-making) it’s something of a chase movie as the orphaned Mufasa and his adoptive brother search for a new home in the sun-kissed promised land of Milele, all while fleeing a pride of genocidal white lions led by Mads Mikkelsen’s vengeful Kiros. Jenkins is arguably the most accomplished filmmaker to have risen to prominence in the last decade, and brings a certain amount of soul and visual poetry to the film (extreme close-ups of feline faces, a reverential lens on the land), but that’s where the positives end. Falling into the trap of many-a-prequel, it’s an inessential story that ties itself in narrative knots to reach square one. The singing lions are still an uncanny nightmare, and despite poaching Lin-Manuel Miranda from the Moana sequel, none of the songs hold a candle (in the wind) to Tim Rice and Elton John’s original compositions. This one feels like a passing craze… (Jordan Farley)
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
U, in cinemas now, on BBC One/iPlayer 25 December
⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
The cheese-chomping inventor and his dog are back, but more importantly, so is Feathers McGraw, the dastardly penguin from The Wrong Trousers. This new feature-length animation inevitably doesn’t quite reach the heights of that perfectly formed, Oscar-winning short, but Vengeance Most Fowl is still more fun than you can shake a red rubber glove at. The formula is tried and tested (Wallace’s invention runs amok, the underappreciated Gromit has to save the day) but the laughs are pelted thick and fast. Feathers remains wonderfully sinister, whether he’s doing pull-ups in prison or MacGyvering up an escape plan. He’s still ominously silent, but there’s cracking voicework from Ben Whitehead, almost imperceptibly filling the tartan slippers left by the late Peter Sallis, and Reece Shearsmith, who voices Norbot the smart-gnome who’s a conduit for chaos. It’s delightful to be back in this world, and crucially for a W&G film, the action sequences don’t disappoint, with a Mission: Impossible-esque finale. Job well done, lad. (Matt Maytum)
The Order
15, in cinemas 27 December
⭐⭐⭐⭐☆
Justin Kurzel has dabbled in Shakespeare and game adaps, but his forte is the true-life, grim-AF thriller. Following his Aussie trilogy (Snowtown, True History of the Kelly Gang, Nitram), the director swaps his native land for the Pacific Northwest, adapting Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s non-fiction book The Silent Brotherhood into a terrifically taut cat-and-mouser. Rocking a Selleck-tier ‘tache, a brooding Jude Law (who also produced) plays Terry Husk, the new-in-town FBI man in pursuit of an extreme-right militia led by Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult, sporting About a Boy hair but also a cold-eyed glare that leaves no doubt how committed Matthews is to his lethal agenda). There’s something Michael Mann-ly about both sides’ dogged intensity and the lean punch of the set-pieces (one road robbery feels straight out of Heat). But the gorgeously dingy period vibe (it’s set in the early 80s) is all Kurzel’s own. Working from Zach Baylin’s (King Richard) script, the director draws obvious but unforced parallels with recent US events, resulting in a bleakly compulsive warning-from-history lesson. (Matthew Leyland)
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