'Midnight Meat Train': Review
The Midnight Meat Train (2008) Director - Ryuhei Kitamura Review by: Peter Higgins Midnight Meat Train. First things first: great title. No, really: great title. But is that the only thing it has going for it? Possibly. Certainly, the presence of Vinnie Jones in the cast isn’t exactly a selling point. Vinnie Jones? Is he still around? Afraid so. Meanwhile, the hero unfortunately looks like Ben Stiller’s less talented little brother and the rest of the cast is made up of people you can sort of remember from ancient episodes of Law and Order/CSI/NCIS. Oh, and Brooke Shields plays an art-gallery-owner. Add to this uninspiring mix the fact that it’s based on a short story by Clive Barker, and the portents are not good. But that title: how can you resist? You can’t. The script is dumb, the CGI-heavy effects are insane, the characters behave in the way characters always do in silly movies, but you can’t stop watching. For two reasons: firstly, the film looks absolutely stunning. The director, Ryuhei Kitamura, and the cinematographer, Jonathan Sela, both deserve praise here: the widescreen compositions are gorgeous. The interior shots especially are suffused with a dusty light that makes them more suited to some intense Scandinavian drama than a crazy flick about a guy who kills people with a really big hammer. As an aside, it’s particularly amusing to see our heroes’ NYC apartment – obviously the combined incomes of a waitress and a struggling photographer are more than enough to pay for this hilariously swanky downtown pad. The other factor that makes it work is – shudder – Vinnie Jones. It helps that he only says two words in the entire film. Someone somewhere has finally realised that Vinnie Jones only works on film if he shuts the f*ck up. Have him wandering the streets of New York in a sharp suit, his lips sealed, and it’s fine: he looks suitably menacing and dangerous. It’s only when he tries to, you know, act, that the whole thing fall apart. Luckily he isn’t called upon to do too much in-depth emoting in Midnight Meat Train, and the film is the better for it. Weirdly, Midnight Meat Train, for all its gore and menace and violence is never actually scary. Nor is it particularly intense or nerve-wracking. It has no place for logic or common sense or coherent motivation. But it does have a peculiar atmosphere of foreboding, and it looks like no other film I’ve seen. With a better script, and with better actors, the film-makers involved could really come up with something special. Midnight Meat Train isn’t bad, but I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
The Midnight Meat Train (2008) Director - Ryuhei Kitamura Review by: Peter Higgins Midnight Meat Train. First things first: great title. No, really: great title. But is that the only thing it has going for it? Possibly. Certainly, the presence of Vinnie Jones in the cast isn’t exactly a selling point. Vinnie Jones? Is he still around? Afraid so. Meanwhile, the hero unfortunately looks like Ben Stiller’s less talented little brother and the rest of the cast is made up of people you can sort of remember from ancient episodes of Law and Order/CSI/NCIS. Oh, and Brooke Shields plays an art-gallery-owner. Add to this uninspiring mix the fact that it’s based on a short story by Clive Barker, and the portents are not good. But that title: how can you resist? You can’t. The script is dumb, the CGI-heavy effects are insane, the characters behave in the way characters always do in silly movies, but you can’t stop watching. For two reasons: firstly, the film looks absolutely stunning. The director, Ryuhei Kitamura, and the cinematographer, Jonathan Sela, both deserve praise here: the widescreen compositions are gorgeous. The interior shots especially are suffused with a dusty light that makes them more suited to some intense Scandinavian drama than a crazy flick about a guy who kills people with a really big hammer. As an aside, it’s particularly amusing to see our heroes’ NYC apartment – obviously the combined incomes of a waitress and a struggling photographer are more than enough to pay for this hilariously swanky downtown pad. The other factor that makes it work is – shudder – Vinnie Jones. It helps that he only says two words in the entire film. Someone somewhere has finally realised that Vinnie Jones only works on film if he shuts the f*ck up. Have him wandering the streets of New York in a sharp suit, his lips sealed, and it’s fine: he looks suitably menacing and dangerous. It’s only when he tries to, you know, act, that the whole thing fall apart. Luckily he isn’t called upon to do too much in-depth emoting in Midnight Meat Train, and the film is the better for it. Weirdly, Midnight Meat Train, for all its gore and menace and violence is never actually scary. Nor is it particularly intense or nerve-wracking. It has no place for logic or common sense or coherent motivation. But it does have a peculiar atmosphere of foreboding, and it looks like no other film I’ve seen. With a better script, and with better actors, the film-makers involved could really come up with something special. Midnight Meat Train isn’t bad, but I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.