Culture

The A-Team is a creepily bizarre weirdo of a movie that'll wreck your day. Eager to see it because you whiled away happy childhood hours watching Hannibal, B.A., Face and Murdock don disguises, build wacky tanks, flip cars and help with problems no one else could help with? Well, what you'll get movie-wise is a queasy gobbledygook of a party to which you're not invited.
Liam Neeson chews scenery as Hannibal Smith, leader of The A-Team. In the film's opening, he assembles his crack commando unit of egregious miscasting: sleepy ultimate fighter Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as temperamental ass-kicker B.A. Baracus, District 9's unfunny Sharlto Copley as hilariously crazy Murdock, and shrill, pornographic Bradley Cooper as a smooth-talking ladies man Face. This tribute-band version of The A-Team heads for a wacky trifle of a war zone called Iraq, where they're framed for stealing counterfeit moneymaking plates and must then bust out of jail to clear their name.

In remake world where all dreams come true and sentimentality reigns supreme, comes the 2010 version of The Karate Kid. I assume there was karate in the original (I never saw it or its sequels) but this one is devoid of any – or, as Jackie Chan says, “everything is kung fu.”
If 12 or under, you'll enjoy this Karate Kid. Otherwise, prepare yourself for disappointment. For no reason whatsoever, single mom (Taraji P. Henson) and her child Dre (Jaden Smith, son of Will) move to China. Jackie Chan plays their maintenance guy who gives kung fu lessons to Dre so he can gain inner peace and defend himself against bullies. Predictability is the name of the game here as we see bullies kicking ass, an evil kung fu academy and a ridiculously cornball kiss. Even the “Feeling Strong Now” montage was weak.

Being an English woman abroad, I feel more fondness for Russell Brand now when I see him pictured with Katy Perry in US Magazine than I did when he lived just down the road from me, drinking in the pub round the corner from my office. As I juggle the debauched stories from his autobiography, My Booky Wook, and the scandalous tabloid headlines with his current cleaned-up, red-carpet-friendly persona, some apprehension gets mixed in with that fondness. Brand's confessional, hyper-literate, surrealistic stand-up comedy is brilliant. When he made the move to Hollywood with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the obvious fear was that he'd lose his edge and let his latent vegetarian-yoga-buddhist side take over his talent.
We English were pleased to hear of Brand bringing down the Jonas Brothers at the MTV Video Music Awards with a canny reference to French philosopher Foucault, but still it was assumed American celebrity would eventually ruin him. Although Forgetting Sarah Marshall was funny, it could have easily been a fluke. The idea of a spin-off from that film in which Brand's rock star character, Aldous Snow, is chaperoned by record company intern Aaron Green, played by Jonah Hill, from London to a come-back concert in Los Angeles sounded dubious. I was prepared for Get Him To The Greek to be disappointing, maybe even a disaster. Instead, red-carpet Russell Brand is a revelation in a movie that should make him much more than just Katy Perry's boyfriend this side of the Atlantic.

Don't expect horror from this dysfunctional freak show. Splice is not scary and only pretends to be a psychological thriller. It's a “what if” scenario focusing on scientists who play God, splice together some DNA stew and then decide to raise the prototype like a child. They watch it grow, try to teach it, but give up and… have sex with it. I'm not kidding. Even with its international credits, Splice still comes off like a bad American movie about really bad parenting.
Splice starts off promising. The credits are spelled in veins popping out of embryo-like skin and the actors peer in at you as if you were the experiment. Bio-technology at the N.E.R.D. laboratories has created a new species of lumpy penis-headed slugs named Fred and Ginger. Top-notch scientists and live-in lovers Clive and Elsa (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley) are on the verge of the next breakthrough using human DNA, but are blocked by corporate big wigs, so they go rogue and proceed with the experiment in secrecy.