Also showing: Saints and Soldiers 2: Airborne Creed, The Campaign and Husbands

Our film critic rounds up this week's best of the rest
p44 FRI EDITION FILM 28.9 (L-r) WILL FERRELL as Cam Brady and ZACH GALIFIANAKIS as Marty Huggins in Warner Bros. Pictures comedy THE CAMPAIGN, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Warner Bros
28 September 2012

Saints and Soldiers 2: Airborne Creed

Cert 12a, 94 mins

**

RYAN Little’s sequel to the first Saints and Soldiers tells the story of American parachutists sent into southern France in 1944 to support Allied troops marching on Berlin. Three get separated and come across beleaguered French Resistance fighters who need all the help they can get.

The film is a war story that is decently told, with good production values but a striking lack of originality as we flash back to scenes of domestic bliss and forward to the scenes of battle. Corbin Allred, David Nibley, Jason Wade and Nichelle Aiden are competent among the cast. Watchable but hardly memorable.

The Campaign

Cert 15, 85 mins

**

YOU couldn’t really make a truthful film about the present state of American politics without being accused of parody. But Jay Roach’s effort, starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, doesn’t worry about overdoing it, even though it daren’t call anyone Democrat or Republican.

Ferrell is Congressman Cam Brady, long-term and seemingly safe in the betting for a big win, until he makes a gaffe so big that another candidate, Marty Huggins (Galifianakis), the manager of the local tourist office, is put up against him.

The rival is the stooge of big business which wants to turn the South Carolina town into a huge Chinese sweatshop and thus make millions. But, being as dumb as a Tea Party host, he doesn’t realise he’s being used. Meanwhile, the campaign manager (Dylan McDermott, the funniest man on screen by a mile) tears his hair out.

Ferrell does a kind of George W impersonation, with The Hangover-style gags, at one point releasing footage of himself seducing Galifianakis’s wife as a campaign ad.

The Campaign is hardly subtle and the ridiculously compromised ending, which suggests virtue will finally prevail, is just pie-in-the-sky. But there are some laughs, it doesn’t overstay its welcome and neither side in the present fight for the presidency is likely to be offended.

Husbands

Cert 12a, 138 mins, reissue

****

THE perils of disappointed middle age are what this 1970 John Cassavetes improvisatory movie is about, and virtuoso performances from Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, Cassavetes himself and Jenny Runacre are the reasons to see it.

There are moments when you think it is all too much like a scratching of the male menopausal itch, but just when you doubt it the revelations about life and love and broken relationships hook you again. Cassavetes was a masterful anti-Hollywood director who probed human failings until he reached right under the skin.

Babymakers

Cert 15, 98 mins

**

THIS brash, often vulgar feelgood comedy from Jay Chandrasekhar stars Olivia Mann and Paul Schneider as a married couple who can’t conceive and break into a sperm bank to sort things out. Chandrasekhar plays a hired pro engaged to help out. Some funny moments but not many, despite decent playing from Mann and Schneider.

Cross of Honour

Cert 15, 102 mins

***

NORWEGIAN director Petter Naess takes an honourable stab at this good story from the war years which has the surviving crew from a German bomber linking up with a British crew in the same plight. Gradually they find a kind of friendship as they negotiate the snowy wastes of a harsh northern winter.

The film has only a serviceable screenplay and so its actors — including Rupert Grint (late of Harry Potter) as a northern British grunt and David Kross from The Reader — haven’t a lot to go on. But their little world in the wooden hut they find eventually becomes a microcosm of the real one, where they can leave behind some of the sillier prejudices of war.

I’m not sure, however, that the German officer would throw a signed copy of Mein Kampf into the fire.

House at the End of the Street

Cert 15, 90 mins

*

JENNIFER Lawrence and Elizabeth Shue appear in this make-do horror, and they are the only possible reason for seeing it as mother and daughter move into a new house next door to where a young girl murdered her parents. The daughter befriends the surviving son and then the trouble starts. There’s mercifully not much gore but as a psychological thriller it simply doesn’t rate either.

Resident Evil: Retribution

Cert 15, 96 mins

**

THE fifth entry in the franchise from director Paul W S Anderson betrays and even glories in its video game origins. It’s low on plot and much higher on mayhem as Milla Jovovich attempts to escape from an underwater prison and zaps zombies by the dozen.

One of these days they’ll stop charging patrons a premium for mediocre visuals that are no better than very average 3D television.

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