Monday new releases: 5 August 2024

Trap and The Edge of the Blade are in cinemas, Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare are both on Prime Video

M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is a film about a man whose obsessions prevent him from being fully present for his children. To that end, Shyamalan casting his own musician and songwriter daughter Saleka as the pop star at the centre of his arena concert-set thriller isn’t nepotism or favouritism – at least not just nepotism. It’s kind of what the film is about.

Josh Hartnett plays a Philadelphia firefighter taking his 12-year-old daughter (perfect Ariel Donoghue) to a Lady Raven concert as a reward for her high marks at school. He’s distracted by what seems to be an unusual amount of police and security. Middle-aged white men like him are being pulled out of the crowd by cops.

It turns out that he actually is the one they are after and has to find a way out of the venue – with his unsuspecting daughter – before the net closes in.

The concert isn’t just a trap set for Hartnett’s character, the appearance of Shyamalan himself in a cameo as one of Lady Raven’s concert team confirms that it’s also a parent trap. And if that wasn’t clear enough for you, Shyamalan casting The Parent Trap’s Hayley Mills as the FBI profiler leading the hunt confirms it.

The contrivances here – and there are many – are part of the pleasure of a film that also showcases Hartnett in a way we have never seen before. If this was a more serious picture, we’d be talking about an awards conversation.

He’s mercurial, moving from hyper-focus on his immediate predicament to doting dad, showing the struggle he has to keep his two worlds both apart and together.

There’s one (or two) too many twists because he simply can’t help himself but I do always leave a Shyamalan film feeling extra-attentive to my surroundings, as if everything is a potential clue.

Sword fights have been a staple of cinema since the beginning. There’s something about the way the blades catch the light and glint as they swish and crash together that’s really cinematic.

With The Edge of the Blade (known in France as Une affaire d’honneur), Vincent Perez – with the collaboration of ace stunt and fight co-ordinator Michel Carliez – has taken this knowledge and built a rewarding drama around some exciting and well-constructed set-pieces.

Paris, 1887. Duels to settle disputes and slights remain all the rage, even though they are illegal. Traumatised veterans of the Franco-Prussian War use them to seek the adrenaline rush they have been missing.

Master swordsman – and one of those veterans – Clément Lacaze (Roschdy Zem) is enlisted to train a young woman (Doria Tillier) who has called for a duel of honour after she is ridiculed in a newspaper for her proto-feminist campaign for female equality.

Lacaze, himself, has a beef with Colonel Berchère (played by director Perez), a bully who killed Lacaze’s nephew in a stupid and unnecessary duel and these two strands are destined to converge.

Satisfying.

I don’t often watch movie ‘making of’ documentaries but I will always be drawn to live performance behind-the-scenes films. One of my favourites is Wagner’s Dream, about Canadian director Robert Lepage’s mammoth effort to stage new, technically daring, productions of the Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera in 2010.

What is it about French-Canadians and their ambition to create jaw-dropping theatrical spectaculars? At the beginning of 2020, Cirque du Soleil were the biggest theatrical producers in the world with over a dozen productions in their repertoire and billions of dollars of box office revenue.

Within a couple of months, the Covid pandemic meant that all the shows had to close and the company laid off 3,400 people – 97 percent of their staff.

Without a Net follows the 2021 efforts to rebuild the show O, which had been resident at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas for 18 years. After the pandemic dispersed many of the cast and crew to the four winds, they have only eight weeks to remount one of the biggest and most complex (water-based) shows you will ever see.

One of the things about working in showbusiness is that the craft is all about making difficult (or even impossible) things look easy. The result is that audiences get to take the incredible for granted but the effort, the practice, the skill, the talent – and the technical and design vision – on display is something to behold.

Anyone who tells you that theatre isn’t a real job should watch this.

Finally, a film that is better described as The Ministry of Musclebound Heroes.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare takes a real secret World War II operation – known as Operation Postmaster – and then cartoons it up into an action comedy that actually does a disservice to the real people concerned.

A Dirty Dozen-like group of ragtag off-the-books characters are asked by the least convincing Churchill I have ever seen (Rory Kinnear) to sink the supply ship that keeps the German U-Boat fleet operating in the Atlantic.

Many, many people are then shot (bullets and arrows) and blown up to achieve this goal. But they are all Nazis, so we celebrate.

Henry Cavill as the leader, Gus March-Phillipps, confirms his lack of impact on me but this is now the second time that I have seen the man-mountain Alan Ritchson (playing a Dane) steal every scene he is in. Maybe I need to watch that Reacher show after all.

I realise that over time I have conflated Guy Ritchie in my mind with the guy from Coldplay, to the extent that I think of them as the same person and feel just as little about both their music and their films.