After Brummie legend Steven Knight kindly premiered four of his six TV series to date at Cineworld Broad Street, his first Peaky Blinders film was shooting in Westside’s Gas Street Basin on Monday.
Part of the billboard-sized display at the top of the cinema’s escalators is my 2014 picture of the director Steven standing with his then leading man Tom Hardy in Bishopsgate Street for the premiere of their one-man, Birmingham-to-London motorway thriller, Locke.
According to all of the reviews of Hardy’s many films gathered by global reviews aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, that unsung, low budget Locke film is now ranked at No 3 on his CV behind only Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Dunkirk (2017) – so that’s more kudos for Westside BID!
Especially as none of Hardy’s expensive-to-make, overblown Venom films, including new release The Last Dance, make his Top 20…
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE (15, 110 mins)
The ever-watchable Tom Hardy returns for the third and probably / hopefully final time as investigative journalist – and complex Marvel character – Eddie Brock.
First film Venom (2018) saw Eddie becoming a super-human host to the alien symbiote of the title. The pair were not only able to work together in one body, but they were also launching the wider Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) at the same time. Now that’s multitasking!
Shot just before Covid, Let There Be Carnage (2021) saw actor Andy Serkis (aka Gollum the grape and Caesar the ape) directing Woody Harrelson as serial killer Cletus Kasady, himself host to a symbiote called Carnage.
Three years later, Eddie and Venom are now both on the run in their own worlds. Co-stars include Stephen Graham, who was also shooting in Gas Street Basin this week for the Peaky Blinders film.
The verdict: **
Definitely made for fans rather than first-time chancers, one might wonder if The Last Dance is Hardy’s way of joking that he will never appear on Strictly.
Even if he did, his foxy trot couldn’t be much sillier than the disconcertingly uneven mixture of premise, action and ’Til death us do part’ special effects on show here.
While it’s a given that such a combo is all part of the Venom package for wired-in fanboys and girls, even developing the twin characters’ buddy-ethos won’t make the CGI-heavy film itself appeal any more to the unconverted.
One might expect Hardy to return for a cameo in any future Spider-Man movie in need of a shot of vitamin V, but really… The Last Dance is further proof that Marvel’s superhero era is more superzero these days. It really is not so marvellous any more.
As a great leading man and a brilliant character actor rolled into one great British star, it’s time Hardy held a proper movie together again. Something like George Clooney’s underrated thriller Michael Clayton (2007), perhaps?
THE FRONT ROOM (15, 95 mins)
American brothers Max and Sam Eggers make their feature directing debut with a mixed-race, psychological horror based on a 2016 short story.
A heavily-pregnant wife who has lost one child is landed with her husband’s widowed stepmother when she comes to stay in the front room intended for new baby daughter ‘Fern’.
The verdict: +++
Norman never told wife Belinda (Brandy Norwood) about his stepmother Solange’s previous behaviour on the religious front, so the idea that she could be be possessed is a shock, never mind the incontinent old girl bringing her late husband’s ashes along to justify the tagline ‘All hell moves in’.
Kathryn Hunter gives the best performance in the film as the annoyingly-named Solange, but can a likely decent inheritance (if Solange croaks any time soon) literally be worth both the grief and the ‘Misery’ for any host family?
Ideal viewing, then, for anyone who actually needs to learn the hard way that someone else’s money isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
Meanwhile, the relatively implausibility of this film might leave you wondering what ever happened to more believable flat share thrillers like Single White Female (1992).
● Your reviewer: Graham Young has been reviewing films for the media in Birmingham for the last 35 years, serving the Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post, Sunday Mercury, BirminghamLive and BBC WM. He was the 1996 Regional Film Journalist of the Year, and runner-up 1997-99.
