Springs not entirely hopeless

Hope Springs
DIRECTED BY: David
Frankel
STARRING: Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carell
CERT: 15A

You have to admire any Hollywood producer for taking on a film about an ageing couple trying to deal with a dead marriage. If I was wearing a hat, I’d take it off to Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones for agreeing to get on board.
It’s not the most comfortable of assignments and everyone knows they won’t be bringing in the Batman numbers. For one thing, nobody wears a silly mask and, for another, it’s possible to understand what’s going on without a degree in Advanced Codology.
Streep and Jones are Kay and Arnold, married 31 years and settled in their separate ways. Or at least he is, content to hide behind his paper, doze off to the golf in the evening and sleep in the guest bedroom. She wants a bit more, so she books them in for an expensive week of couples therapy. Which might bring to mind unfortunate memories of Couples Retreat or, if you’re really a sucker for suffering, Marriage Retreat, the kind of thing insomniacs stumble across in the dead of night on the no-budget side of Netflix. Not that I would know.
Anyway, marriage counsellor Dr Feld (Carell) puts his patients through a course of renewed intimacy, but it’s never crass or ridiculous. Occasionally it does get funny and some of the laughs are good, but mostly the attempts at comedy feel strained, like the gags were tacked on for fear nobody would watch if writer Vanessa Taylor and director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) really tackled this stuff seriously.
But Hope Springs works best when they do at least try.
It’s not the fine film it could have been, but it’s worth watching just to see Streep and Jones do their excellent stuff. Jones in particular shows a side of himself that we haven’t seen much of before. As the therapist, Steve Carell plays it straight and we don’t see that often either. Which is a pity.
We don’t see much of Elisabeth Shue at all anymore and I can understand why if all she’s offered are roles like the bartender she plays here. Likewise Mimi Rogers, the former Mrs Tom Cruise, who turns up as neighbour Carol for a joke that might have been good if the marketing clowns hadn’t given it away in the trailer, as they tend to do.
These people must be stopped.

Premium Rush
DIRECTED BY: David Koepp
STARRING: Joseph-
Gordon Levitt, Michael Shannon, Jamie Chung
CERT: 12A

Readers of a certain age will remember Quicksilver, the RTÉ game show hosted by Bunny Carr, from which we got the immortal phrase, “Stop the lights!” a useful expression in almost every human circumstance.
These same readers and their children, may also remember Quicksilver the movie, starring Bunny Carr as the fastest gun in the west of Ireland, infamous bandit of the Burren. Ok, I made that up, but there’s no denying its potential greatness as a piece of cinema.
Quicksilver the movie actually starred Kevin Bacon as a Wall Street wizard who goes bust and finds an alternative and infinitely more fulfilling career as a daredevil bicycle courier. It also starred Laurence Fishburne and, for those of us who owned racers in our youth, these were the guys we wanted to be. They never stopped for the lights and neither did we. Because in Ireland in the ’80s, there weren’t any.
Like most things viewed in 3D HD Hindsight, Quicksilver was really kind of crap. Like slip-on patent leather shoes with white toweling socks, a fashion development whose founders have never been brought to justice. And compared to the lads in Premium Rush, the dashing heroes of Quicksilver were about as fast as sleeping cattle.
Wilee (Levitt) and his buddies are bicycle messengers in Manhattan, reckless fellas who don’t stop for lights, or anything else, for the simple reason that have no brakes. In these circles, such a basic safety feature is seen as a sign of weakness.
Wilee – as in Wile E Coyote, but actually fast enough to catch a speeding bird if he wanted – is obviously the best of the bunch. Which is why his services are requested by a woman named Nima (Chung), who needs to send a special delivery at 14 times the speed of sound. Not a bother. Except for a crooked cop named Bobby Monday (Shannon), who badly needs to intercept this urgent message on account of certain outstanding arrangements. Bobby has friends to assist in this wild chase. So does Wilee, whose sidekicks Vanessa (Dania Ramirez) and Manny (Wole Parks) compete to see how many times a human can cheat Death before he gets really ticked off.
That’s it, basically. Lots of mad chasing and not much else. Which is fine because director David Koepp (he made Secret Window and wrote Mission: Impossible and Spider-Man) does it all so well, capturing one brilliant chase scene after another, any number of crazy two-wheeled feats pulled off by a small army of stunt riders.
Exhilarating, I think is the word. Or as we would have said in our young racer days – right cool, boy!