Change Your Image
drcath
Reviews
Grimm: BeeWare (2011)
Conflicts make Grimm's storyline strong
In Grimm this week, Nick is trying to access a tweet from a cloned phone. But the suspect using the phone is cautious and has found a way to block the signal.
'Can you get round it?' Nick asks Sergeant Wu.
'Of course I can.' Wu replies, tapping at his keyboard, 'I'm Asian.' Grimm has avoided the whimsy trap, but it could still go the way of Person of Interest and become a police procedural with window dressing. The solution is a cast of supporting characters who are worth watching just for themselves (Reggie Lee's interpretation of Wu is 'Officer Sulu before his first coffee of the day') and enough quirky and gruesome detail to make the story lines satisfyingly rich and interesting. My favorite examples this week was finding out that bee-venom carries a signature which tells you where the insect came from, plus the scene where David Giuntoli has to examine a dissected tongue which looks alive enough to hump away like a large pink inchworm.
But back to the story: the tweet is being sent by a Mellifer, supernatural bee-creatures who, in the usual Grimm combination of the antique and modern, use social media to hatch murder plots. The first person to die is a young lawyer, injected with bee venom while a flash mob performs 'YMCA' on a bus. Except the bee who delivered this venom would have to be, as Hank puts it, the size of LeBron. The decoded tweet leads Nick to a deserted paper mill. Armed with some information from Aunt Marie's Encyclopaedia of Weird Stuff and with the tracking powers of Blutbad Munroe (who agrees to get involved when Nick bribes him with a bottle of Bordeaux), Nick discovers that the Mellifers, like all social insects, have a queen. And, in a cunning move designed to appeal to every StarTrek fanboy on the planet, this Queen Bee is Nana Visitor clad in tight black leather.
In this episode of Grimm, the tensions between Nick's job and being a Grimm are beginning to show. The Mellifers might appear to be the aggressors, but the two women they have killed are actually Hexenbeists – creatures who are attempting to destroy them. The Mellifers have a crucial role in Grimm world as communicators, but as a cop, Nick is charged with protecting the third of the women the Mellifers are after. Nick has met Adalind Schade before when she attacked him with a syringe full of spider venom, but what he doesn't know is that his station Captain is also in league with the Hexenbeist, revealing that other links between the human and Grimm world do exist and will probably come into play as the plot develops. In the end Nick is forced to choose between being a cop and being a Grimm – and goes with being a cop – only to discover that this might have been exactly the wrong thing to do. The conflict gives the show momentum, with the sense that this choice is one that Nick is going to have to make over and over again as the story progresses. And that isn't the only place where interesting tensions lie: Nick has to keep his powers secret from his girlfriend and partner and Juliette in particular is beginning to show signs of unrest as Nick spends evenings hitting the books in his Aunt's trailer. Juliette is also one of Nick's vulnerabilities, as is his partner Hank. They might be the way his supernatural enemies decide to get to him.
In terms of the story, Visitor's character lobs the plot ball forward in her dying words to Nick: he is coming. Neither Nick nor we know what she means, but we're guessing he isn't Santa with a sack of toys, and while the monsters we've met so far are fun, the introduction of an anti-hero both ups the stakes and gives the storyline the structure it needs to hold my interest. With all these possibilities opening out, I'm intrigued to see what happens next time.
The Escapist (2008)
"It's our imagination that makes us free "
Frank Perry (Brian Cox) is a long term prisoner in a London jail where the guards look the other way and one would be wise to avoid the attentions of Rizzo (Damian Lewis), the boss inmate and his unhinged junkie brother Tony (Steven Mackintosh in scenery chewing form). The arrival of a new cell mate, Lacey (played by newcomer Dominic Cooper) coincides with Perry receiving the first letter from his family in fourteen years. His daughter is a heroin addict and close to death. Perry decides he must get out, to see her and make things right while there is still time. He goes to his closest friend Brodie (Liam Cunningham) and they enlist on-the-edge pugilist and thief Lenny Drake (Joseph Fiennes) to put together their plan.
But the film begins with the escape, cleverly setting up many questions in the head of the viewer, which are then answered in flashback. We want to know why Frank starts the escape attempt what appears to be a stab wound, how drug dealer Viv Batista (Seu Jorge) gets involved and why Lacey is part of the team when he has arrived in the prison so recently. The answers come, but slowly so that it's only at the very end that the little hints and clues scattered through the story of the escape attempt itself make sense.
This structure and the final plot twist would alone make this film worth repeat viewing, but not just for that. Writers Daniel Hardy and Rupert Wyatt (Wyatt also directed) let images rather than words do the talking, and with a cast of this calibre it pays off brilliantly. The actors are allowed to use their faces and bodies to tell us the story: Brian Cox letting his face fall into a pile of regret when he reads the letter, Damian Lewis's posture as he walks past the cells to find out what happened to his brother, the tiny shifts of expression on Dominic Cooper's face as he relives his forced dalliance in the showers with Tony, from self pity to self hatred and back again. It's top notch stuff.
Comparisons with "Shawshank Redemption" are inevitable, but while "Redemption" was really a story about hope, "The Escapist" is actually a film about redemption, about the single unselfish act that can redeem wasted years, perhaps a wasted life. And, as Perry points out, that we're only as free as we allow ourselves to be.