Some films watched en route to NZ.

Zombieland is just brilliant. One of the funniest films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a spoof zombie romp that’s just perfectly written, and very, very, very funny. Particularly good is the scene with Bill Murray. I don’t want to plot bust, so all I will say is just see it.

Ondine is a pile of pap. Colin Farrell is a loser Irish fisherman who pulls a pretty but flaky girl out of the water in his net. Now I know this sounds a promising start, but it’s really not. Farrell has the haircut of a South American footballer’s, and is called Syracuse. The film is slow and moody, and I was so bored I switched it off after 15 minutes. Maybe I should have given it more time; maybe not.

I was expecting Clash of the Titans to be a ludicrously over-GCI-d film, chock full of action for a generation with an attention span of a chicken on speed. It partly is, but there is some character development, and Ralph Fiennes does a good job as Hades, and Gemma Arterton is quite good as the mysterious muse to Sam Worthington (an excellent Perseus). I enjoyed it much more than I should have.

Bruce Willis (erm, I mean John Travolta…see comments) stars in From Paris With Love. Should I stop there? No, I’ll go on. He’s Wax, and he’s been sent to Paris to weed out some terrorists. He enlists the naive but enthusiastic Reese (Jonathan Rhys-Myers with an American accent and a gorgeous French girlfriend), a junior official in the US embassy, as his side-kick. It’s a totally ludicrous over-the-top adventure film, with Willis meeting out lethal punishment to legions of drug dealers and terrorist suspects, but then there’s a delicious plot twist, which for me completely saves the film, and actually makes it quite good.

What can I say about Wild Target? It’s a modern-day Ealing comedy; a coward’s In Bruges. Bill Nighy is a 50-something hit-man who falls in love with his target (Emily Blunt) and ends up protecting her against another assassin hired to kill them both. And in an excruciatingly contrived plot twist, Rupert Grint (the ginger one from Harry Potter) gets involved and joins the merry band. Grint is like an English Adam Sandler, in that if you see his name on the cast list, run a mile. There’s no doubting that Wild Target is a poor film, badly written like many English comedies, but there’s an endearing warmth to it, and some gentle laughs, that keep you from popping the off switch.