dwells

(Time Out, 1991)

RAW FISH, Mount Fuji, geisha girls. Sumo wrestling, samurai warriors, sadistic game shows. This is what Japanese culture means to the West; but to Japan, Western culture is everything. Baseball is the national sport; Schwarzenegger dominates the cinemas; Reagan nets $10 million for lecture tours; rap and acid house fill the clubs; Madonna sells out the stadiums; whisky is preferred to sake; Western musicals are all the rage.

Does a uniquely Japanese culture exist anymore? Even the Japanese are worried it doesn’t. Strangely, we in London will soon be better placed to find out than they. Brace yourself for the Japan Festival: four years in the planning, £15 million in the spending, with 120 events spread over four months. Taking in Kyoto gardens and Kabuki theatre, Sumo and cinema, a weekend festival in Hyde Park and the V&A’s biggest exhibition this century, it aims to ‘foster a greater cultural understanding between the two nations’ — and give us a great time doing so.

However, many Japanese have complained that the festival relies too heavily on traditional art forms. ‘It’s like having an England Festival with Morris dancing, coracle-making and madrigal-singing,’ said one London-based student. While that’s not entirely fair — the festival’s opening play, Ninagawa’s 1988 ‘Tango at the End of Winter’, is an honourable exception — it does demonstrate the inherent problem: is there a modern Japanese culture, or are they just Americans in disguise?

Old Kyoto, new Shinjuku

At the Ryoanji Temple in old Kyoto there is a Zen garden. Lovingly maintained since the fifteenth century, it consists of nothing more than 15 rocks set into white gravel. The bigger rocks are covered in moss at their base, suggesting a Pacific island in miniature, and the gravel is carefully raked around them into concentric circles, suggesting ripples, as if the rocks had just surfaced from the sea. It’s one of the most exquisite, perfect things I’ve ever seen. ‘Japanese people don’t come here very much,’ says the guide sadly. ‘They find it rather sombre.’

In the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, amid neon signs hundreds of feet tail, there are multistorey video arcades on every corner. Half the games, predictably, are the Beastbusters shoot-’em-up variety; the other half, a digitised version of the centuries-old game Mah-jong. A typically Japanese touch is that the video rewards each win by divesting a compliant, computerised girl of another article of clothing.

Though the Japanese perceive the essential conflict in their society as between them and the US — witness the fact that the recent American book ‘The Coming War With Japan’ sold out its 40,000 print run in Tokyo within a week — the real conflict is more universal: simply, that between old and new. In a way, it’s the same thing. When Commodore Perry’s gunships steamed into Edo in 1853, two centuries of isolation ended, forcing Japan to adapt or perish. When Fat Boy dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, ending the newly industrialised nation’s dreams of military conquest and ushering in seven years of American occupation, Japan had the lesson driven home again: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Japan is a hothoused nation, forced to develop at an accelerated pace like some  strange  experiment  in   genetic engineering. The result is that the Japanese consider themselves by turns the greatest nation on earth, and the least culturally developed.

Jesus Christ Superstar

In an attempt to shed some light on this cultural schizophrenia, I went to see a Japanese language version of ‘West Side Story’. Performed by the Shiki Company, which owes its status as Japan’s pre-eminent theatre company largely to the money made from Western musicals like ‘Cats’ and ‘Phantom of the Opera’, its choreography was breathtaking. It was such a faithful re-creation of the Broadway hit, in fact, that I wondered why they bothered. My suggestion that they could at least have re-cast the rival gangs not as New York WASPs v Hispanics, but Tokyo delinquents v Koreans, met first with shocked silence, then typical Japanese doublethink. ‘That makes no sense. There is no racial prejudice against Koreans.’ Yeah, right.

Keita Asari, who still runs the Shiki Company almost 40 years after founding it, is well aware of the contradictions, but proud of beating the Americans at their own game. ‘It’s true,’ he smiles. ‘We do dance it better. And in a sense that symbolises the state of Japanese people right now. To an extent we are copying the West, and audiences have the notion that anything Western is wonderful, and traditional things are obsolete. But then if we can do it better… And we are going beyond copying. We have gained the power to use the form of Western-style dramas to express our own modern life.’

‘Ri Koran’, for instance, an original musical by Asari, recently dramatised the hushed-up history of Japan’s wartime activities in China. It was a sell-out success to match any of the Shiki Company’s Western imports.

Unfortunately, in common with much of the Festival, the Shiki Company has chosen to play it safe. Instead of bringing over ‘Ri Koran’, it will be performing its own version of ‘the musical with the longest-ever run in London’: ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’. With Jason Donovan currently packing them in for ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’, it’s a timely revival. But in Japanese? What does this nation of Buddhists and Shinto-ists know about Christ?

Asari explains: ‘Christianity came to Japan 400 years ago, and was accepted by the authorities. But at certain points after that they became afraid of Western culture and banned it. Those who refused to change were crucified — hundreds in Nagasaki alone. When Christ is put on the cross at the end of the musical, I wanted it done in the same way as to the Japanese in the past.’

His version makes that point by incorporating traditional Kabuki techniques — white-washed faces, a stage made up of seven movable drays or wagons, a mix of electric guitars and shakuhachi flutes, and an outrageously, unforgettably camp King Herod in a blue fright-wig that draws on Kabuki’s famous onnagata (female impersonators). The production is a stunning attempt to fuse Western and Japanese theatrical forms and carries the blessing, in a rare moment of conciliation, of both Rice and Lloyd-Webber. All the same the result, to British eyes, is slightly misguided: the direction gives little chance to show off the Shiki Company’s dance skills, and the tattered biblical rags and painted faces are disturbingly reminiscent of the rock band Kiss.

But while ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ proves that traditional theatre still has relevance today, London will also play host to the real thing: the Grand Kabuki of the Shochiku Company. If you want to know about Japan’s cultural roots, and how they affect modern Japan, this is where to look.

Noh theatre at all

Kabuki began in 1603, influenced by the elitist and incomprehensible Noh court dramas (George Bernard Shaw once quipped ‘The Noh Theatre is no theatre at all’) and the more populist Bunraku puppet shows. It suffered a minor hiccup when the Shogun, worried at off-stage indiscretions between male and female actors, banned women; and another hiccup a few years later when, worried about offstage indiscretions between the men and the boys who now played women, the Shogun banned boys too. But basically it has been Japan’s preeminent form of drama for centuries.

On a typical evening, I was treated to five hours of Kabuki interrupted by two intervals. It’s not easy, at first: the Japanese themselves can’t understand the archaic dialogue which, in an English frame of reference, would be closer to Chaucer than to Shakespeare (in London, the audience will receive a simultaneous translation on headphones). Jetlagged to the point of hallucination, I began to hear the stylised, sing-song growls as English sentences, scrawled in my note-book in a sleepwalker’s shaky hand for posterity: ‘Mr Ridley taunts you with no cause,’ says a Samurai warrior, with surprising topicality. ‘Screw in this totally modern model of a motorcar,’ ripostes his adversary. The death scenes last half an hour. With her final breath, the suicided heroine intones, deathlessly, ‘Here the drinks are very expensive. Would I were in Martinique, paying no more for the same.’

After cold, sweet coffee from one of Tokyo’s ubiquitous vending machines, the next two acts made more sense. For the most part, words are superfluous. The sets are spectacular, from the simplicity of a cherry tree showering its pink petals in act two to the undreamt of mechanical complexity of act three, when two boats bob around in a ‘lake’ before rowing gracefully down a ramp right through the audience. The painted faces convey a greater subtlety of emotion in a tilted profile and raised eyebrow than all the theatrics of a Glenda Jackson; the dances have a precision that only decades of training can give; and it’s not until you remember, half-way through, that women have no place in Kabuki that you realise these are in fact onnagata, the famed female impersonators.

The next week, I was ushered into the dressing room of Kankuro, at 36 one of the youngest and most popular Kabuki actors, from whom I hoped to discover how Japan could reconcile the old and the new. The room itself was a metaphor: tatami mats and television, yukata gowns hung up alongside suits. But though Kankuro hosts a weekly chat show on Channel 6, he uses his slot to persuade viewers of the need for tradition, for the old arts. He needs little prompting: ‘One thing I find disheartening is to hear so many disparaging comments about us from Westerners; they just say “Fuji! Geisha girls!” But the younger Japanese too are very ignorant. If you ask them what is a Geisha, they say a prostitute. The Japanese too are turning into idiots, like Westerners.’

Not much reconciliation there. But then Kabuki actors are like nobility in Japan: schooled in deportment, in the traditional instruments, songs, dances and speech, lessons handed down from father to son. Kankuro, who was a star even as a child, is the eighteenth successive generation of his family to become a Kabuki actor; his two small sons, whom I saw perform, have a stage presence beyond their years. They will be joining Kankuro on the South Bank next month.

The family connection doesn’t end there: Kankuro will be performing the Lion Dance for which his grandfather was world-famous. Kneeling on the tatami mat, the yakuta gown slipping open to reveal very Western Y-fronts, he shows me a family album: pictures of Granddad with Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pavlova; Olivier presenting him with the sword he’d used in ‘Hamlet’. He almost made it to the London stage, but World War II got in the way. ‘I’ll be fulfilling his dream,’ says the dutiful grandson.

And here, suddenly, is another key to understanding Japanese culture: the family. It’s well known that a large part of Japan’s economic success derives from companies making themselves into a surrogate family for their employees; a worker is liable to see more of his boss, even in a social context — the piss-up after work, the weekend golfing — than of his wife. But this sense of family also provides a sense of continuity, of common purpose to the arts, evident in everyone connected with the festival I talked to. Asari’s Shiki Company, with its pension plan, is like a family. In Kabuki outsiders are almost unknown, because the best actors are those who started alongside their fathers at the age of three. The influential film   programmer   Etsuko  Takano   (of whom more later) was given a cinema to manage by her brother-in-law. Mr Iowe, who is heading a team to re-create a Kyoto Garden in Holland Park, comes from a 200-year-old family of garden architects. Sumo wrestlers live in ‘stables’ where everyone eats, sleeps and trains together: a surrogate family. Only the most senior ones can get married, and move out.

Even teenage rebellion is a communal activity — witness the thousands of youths who gather in Yoyogi Park of a weekend, dressed in identical James Dean uniforms! The few times I was allowed out without a guide, the fact that I had made my own way to an appointment was met with amazement; not so much that I had found the place (Tokyoites are forever getting lost in their own city), but that I should wish to travel alone.

And yet a true artist is by nature solitary, developing his or her own unique vision at odds with the common consensus. How can the Arts in Japan fail to be anything more than a pastiche, borrowing elements from the West, from their own traditions, but developing nothing new?

Keita Asari rejected this theory out of hand. ‘It’s no different in Japan to the West: people who are creative do it alone. Look at Hokusai [the printmaker responsible for ‘The Wave’, whose work will be celebrated at the Royal Academy of Arts in November]. He was stubborn, he would only paint when he felt like it; he was always drinking sake. We in Japan are always yearning for this type of person, whom we consider genuine artists.’

That may be so. All the same, to Western critics, modern Japanese fine art appears derivative; their greatest classical musicians play to perfection, but lack soul; their rock stars would find the Eurovision Song Contest outrageously wild; their modern drama is, as Asari himself admits, in its infancy. (Ninagawa, whose ‘Tango at the End of Winter’ is the first major play of the festival, is an honourable exception.) And so we return again to the question: have the Japanese a unique culture for today, or just a glorious tradition?

A resounding yes

In two fields at least, the answer is resoundingly yes. The first is manga, the comics which make up a third of Japan’s yearly publishing output; though they are not represented in the Festival because no sponsorship could be found, a manga exhibition will be held at the Pomeroy Purdy gallery in October. The second, better known to those who visit London’s repertory cinemas, is film.

Here cross-cultural fertilisation has worked a miracle. Kurosawa, for instance, owes as much to John Ford’s Westerns as to Kabuki, but his samurai films then heavily influenced the Spaghetti Western of the ’60s — ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ were direct lifts — as well as European directors such as Wajda (witness ‘Ashes and Diamonds’). And anyone who saw Itami’s ‘Tampopo’ or Otomo’s ‘Akira’ will know that Japanese films still have much to teach us.

The Japan Festival is highlighting the rich history of Japanese cinema with a season of classic wide-screen movies at the NFT, and the biggest ever Japanese retrospective at the Barbican. Entitled ‘The Big 50’, it will screen in chronological order the work of 50 different directors from 1931 to the present day and include the premiere of Kurosawa’s latest, ‘Rhapsody in August’. The season has been criticised, like the rest of the festival, for concentrating on past glories. But it also points up the modern malaise in the Japanese film industry: as with the British, it’s stronger on quality than quantity.

Etsuko Takano, who programmed ‘The Big 50’, candidly admits that ‘Japan is rather behind in culture, especially in the movie field. We need good education — we don’t have any courses for film; subsidies should be encouraged, film centres strengthened. Japan is about to be born again into a new phase; but people don’t know what to do at this changing point. We need ideas, we need to support Japanese movies and stop just buying from America.’

It’s a litany which will be familiar to us Brits; but Takano has already done more than most. Over 60, with water on the knee, she is still a tireless globe-trotter and a conversational juggernaut who devotes her whole life to popularising film. In 1974 she started Japan’s first repertory cinema, at Iwanami Hall, showing European and Third World art movies as well as forgotten Japanese masterpieces. Now, it’s said, the 240-seat cinema has become so influential that a favourable opening there can guarantee nationwide distribution. One of her protegees is the documentary filmmaker Haneda, the only woman represented in ‘The Big 50’. Her latest offering, a three-hour film about ageing, got record attendances.

‘People thought I was crazy to do it, but it was an epoch-making event. The queues stretched round the block, people thought there had been an accident! After that it was shown in 600 different cinemas.’

And here, suggests Takano, lies a simple remedy. You could almost double your film-making power by letting in women. Everyone else I asked about the inherent sexism of Japanese society refused even to contemplate the question; one interpreter was so outraged that she answered the question herself without relaying it. But for Takano, who was thwarted in her own ambitions to direct in the ’50s, it is deeply rooted in Japanese culture.

‘In Japan, there are no career women directors in drama, only documentary, which is less threatening. In China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, they have women directors. So at Iwanami Hall I am trying to use a lot of women and encourage them. But in a way, this is a good time for women, because we are only given a chance when things get really bad — the Leader of the Opposition Party, Ms Doi [who has now resigned], came out when the party was in a terrible state. If we can use this chance, we may be able to improve things.’

Given that Japan’s few businesswomen still speak in a simpering, high-pitched voice so as not to offend their male colleagues, we won’t hold our breath. Nevertheless, Takano is proud of inaugurating an International Women’s Film Week to tie in with the annual Tokyo Film Festival. ‘Everyone said to me, “Why do you want to do this? Women will never be able to do anything good.”’ It was a hit. She shows me the glossy brochures, but they only reinforce the impression that ‘feminism’ is a word with no Japanese translation. They are unpromisingly titled ‘Feminine Brilliance On Screen’ and, the crowning irony, the only advertisements inside are for perfume.

One glimmer of promise, however. According to Takano, ‘Now in Japan people are saying that the will for culture and the will for the economy should be the same size; and if they’re not, we’re proceeding in the wrong direction.’ The ex-chairman of Toshiba, who has helped raised funds for the festival in Japan (twice the sum donated by English companies), confirmed her statement. If Japan is to bend its iron will towards developing the arts as it has towards developing its technology, by the twenty-first century there will be no more arguments about a ‘unique Japanese culture’.

But for the moment, that question remains. Back to London for the final piece in the puzzle. ‘Visions of Japan’, the mammoth exhibition for which three rooms are currently being customised at the V&A, aims to present everything that is most vibrant about Tokyo. Masterminded by the one of the world’s most exciting and influential architects, Arata Isozaki, it presents past, present and future: from a full-sized temple and tea house, to a room filled with the sights and sounds of a contemporary Japanese city (including Godzilla’s Corner, massage machines, a vending machine labyrinth and a ‘sound shrine’), to a future vision of an electronic paradise. The festival’s chief concession to modernity, it’s an overwhelming, confusing, fascinating mish-mash, not unlike Japanese culture itself.

At this point, I gave up trying to understand it all and, as seekers after enlightenment have done for centuries, travelled to ask the advice of the Buddha himself. ‘Master,’ I pleaded, prostrating myself before him. ‘Can you tell me: what is the spirit of Japan?’ Answer came there none. I think he just couldn’t hear me above the noise of his Walkman.

Follow our guide to the best places in Europe to take your minds on a rollercoaster ride

Dinopolis, Spain

In the province of Teruel, famous for its dinosaur finds, you can take a train ride past animatronic dinosaurs and visit a palaeontology museum with one of the world’s largest collections, including full skeletons of a Tyrannosaurus rex and a brachiosaurus. Until the science of cloning moves on, this is the closest you’ll get to Jurassic Park.

Details: Open Thur-Sun only; daily July-Aug; www.dinopolis.com

EuropaPark, Germany

Europe’s biggest theme park in Rust, southwestern Germany, has nine rollercoasters, with a tenth on the way. The gimmick is the 12 zones themed for a different country of Europe, so that England has, for instance, a flying London bus ride, while Greece boasts a Poseidon water-coaster.

More likely to promote European unity among the young than any number of hustles from Brussels. Further educational opportunities include exploring the Mir space station, a rosarium and a water power station, and watching performers in a full-sized re-creation of the Globe Theatre.

Details: www.europa-park.de

Euro Space Center, Belgium

A full-scale reconstruction of the US space shuttle will put children aged 10-18 into astronaut training, including whizzing around on the multi-axis chair and entering a micro-gravity simulator. Southeast of Brussels, it’s the most fun you can have without blasting into orbit.

Details: www.eurospacecenter.be

Futuroscope, France

Bizarre edifices of glass and steel with giant balls and organ-like pipes — Futuroscope’s striking buildings have been seen by more than 35 million visitors since the park opened near Poitiers in 1987. The educational aspect, however, has largely been lost amid the motion-simulator rides and IMAX adventures, and non-French-speaking youngsters may find it baffling.

Details: www.futuroscope.com

Kristiansand Zoo and Amusement Park, Norway

Norway’s most-visited tourist attraction is one of the world’s loveliest zoos. It is set over 150 acres on the southern tip of Norway, so the animals have the freedom to roam.

And so do you, getting up close to monkeys and other creatures on open paths and rainforest trails. Kristiansand works closely with the WWF to save animals on the brink of extinction. Dyreparken also has an amusement park and a water park.

Details: Open year round; www.dyreparken.no

Puy du Fou, France

Bring history to life — and how. Founded in the ruins of a Renaissance castle in 1977, the park spans 110 acres, draws on a cast of 3,000 performers and puts on seven lavish 40-minute historical re-enactments. In one, a Viking longboat sails downriver to terrorise a village; in another, a jousting tournament gives way to the spectacular storming of a medieval keep.

Details: Open Fri-Sun; daily except Wed from June; www.puydufou.com

Terra Mitica, Spain

Opened in Benidorm at the turn of the millennium, this is less spectacular than PortAventura, in Barcelona, but marginally more educational.

The five themed zones of the “mythical land” include Greece, which honours Homer’s poetry with the Ulysses water ride; and Rome, with a 36m-high wooden rollercoaster called Magnus Collossus. Where the park itself fails to educate, use the queueing time to recount stirring tales of ancient myths.

Details: www.terramiticapark.com

Vulcania, France

Set amid the Chaîne des Puys volcanoes of Auvergne, the park offers rides, experiment rooms and 3-D movies, striking a good balance between the educational and the explosive. It erred too much on the side of the former when first opened in 2002, but its relaunch in 2007, with 11 new attractions, was a success. Two new attractions are planned this year.

Details: www.vulcania.com

Yorvik, York

The grandaddy of historical theme parks, this forced museums throughout Britain to raise their game and reach out to a younger generation through interactivity. Built in 1984, it had a £5 million refurbishment in 2001.

Your experience starts in a “time machine” that carries you back to 975, and continues with a ride through reconstructed Viking streets, complete with the smells of 1,000 years ago. A rollercoaster it ain’t, but 15 million visitors have come away understanding that there is far more to the Vikings than rape and pillage.

Details: Open all year; www.jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk

(The Times, September  2008)

England is no place for the thrill-seeking hydrophile. True, this summer the whole country became one giant water park, but minus the slides and fun. So when we heard that Europe’s largest water park was opening this week in sunny Tenerife, my partner and I booked the next flight out.

It’s the perfect place. Not only is Tenerife a constant 22-24C (71-75F) year round, with little rain, but the place also screams adventure. It surges from the ocean like the mysterious island of Dr Moreau, or King Kong, or Lost, its volcanic mountains rising to almost 4,000m (13,000ft). Raquel Welch was filmed in her shrinking fur bikini on its basalt moonscape; Nelson lost his arm to a cannon while trying to wrest it from Spanish hands.

So how does Siam Park, so-called for its Thai theming, measure up? First impressions were spectacular. The owners of Tenerife’s long-established animal sanctuary Loro Parque have gone beyond building a mere collection of water slides and pools, and created a bona fide theme park.

Lengthy technical delays – the park was due to open earlier this year – have allowed the vegetation to flourish: 8,500 palm trees have been planted on the previously barren hillside, irrigated by the same desalinated sea water that is used on the slides to avoid depleting the island’s precious reservoirs. And the main rides are fronted by awesome sculptures: a giant Thai warrior, a 30m-high temple and the world’s largest dragon.

I was itching to try the slides and in my determination to be the first journalist down the terrifying Tower of Power, I found myself with a whole theme park pretty much to myself. It was just me, my partner of 25 years (our envious kids having been left to their schooling), the rides’ effervescent American designer, a few of the owner’s friends and family – and 75 underemployed lifeguards.

You could bottle the fun we had and sell it as an elixir of youth. The overstressed mother of our teenaged children screamed like a schoolgirl as the Dragon ride tilted us into a near-vertical drop, the sudden acceleration propelling us 5m up the curved wall of a giant funnel, then down and up the other side, and so on until we were expelled giggling and gasping into the lowest pool.

The Volcano whisked us round and round what the makers would probably like to call a giant whirlpool, but was more like being flushed down a Brobdingnagian toilet.

There were many other rides, including the world’s longest Lazy River to relax on, a whole Lost City for under-10s, and a long white beach overlooking a surf school on 3m-high artificial waves. But the pièce de résistance, clearly, is the Tower of Power. The only ride you do bareback, ie without using an inflatable tube, it drops you 28m down a near-vertical slide, then cannons you through an enclosed pipe in a tank filled with alligators.

According to Siam Park’s director, there is only one other ride quite like it, in Nassau, and that is 10m shorter. It is, quite frankly, absolutely bloody terrifying. My partner refused point-blank to do it. Just watching me climb the steps turned her knees to jelly and her face white.

The view from the top is magnificent. You drink in the bright blue sky and sheer volcanic peaks as though they were your final sight on earth. You are told to lie down, cross your ankles and fold your hands over your chest. It makes you feel as though you were already dead and being prepared for embalming. Certain in the knowledge that no one can survive such a drop, you relinquish all pain and earthly struggle. And then, with a helpful shove from the lifeguard…

Actually, I have little memory of the split-second before I emerged at the bottom blind, coughing and with water having been forcibly sluiced through every orifice. But alive! I felt like a million dollars. And the next time, with eyes wide open and nose held shut, I could even enjoy the ride.

I’ve been to several of the great American water parks – Schlitterbahn, Six Flags, Disney – and in many respects Siam Park tops them all. Lord knows what it will be like if it becomes as successful as it deserves to be. The stone paths can get painfully hot for sensitive soles, and there is no shade for long queues. But for now, it’s quite simply the most fun you can have with your clothes off.

NEED TO KNOW

EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) flies to Tenerife from Gatwick, with prices from £66.98.

Siam Park is in South Tenerife, just off highway TF1, exit 28. Nearest bus station is Playa de las Americas. Tickets £22 adults, £14 children (www.siampark.net/en).

The Gran Hotel Bahia del Duque (00 349 22746900, www.bahia-duque.com) has double rooms for £299 B&B.

More information Spanish Tourist Office (020-7486 8077, www.spain.info/uk); Tenerife Tourist Board (www.webtenerife.com)

Red

Red – C.I.A. code for “Retired, Extremely Dangerous” – is a bit like The Expendables in uniting an all-star cast of oldsters for one last fling. Unlike The Expendables, however, the acting is more explosive than the action.

Bruce Willis plays Frank Moses, leader of a gang of stir-crazy Black Ops retirees that includes a roguish Morgan Freeman, the paranoid acid-casualty John Malkovich and, less predictably, a gun-happy Dame Helen Mirren. Brian Cox joins them from the Soviet side as Mirren’s ex, convinced she still loves him despite her terminating their relationship with three bullets in his chest, and still there’s room for Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dreyfuss in supporting roles. It’s a dream cast, and they’re given plenty of space for their one-liners to zing.

But the film’s strength is also its weakness. This is the kind of action comedy where the comedy keeps stopping for the action, a disjunction laboured by the banal soundtrack: sardonic plinky-plonky keyboards for the witty dialogue, driving guitars for the machine-guns, rocket-launchers and interminable running from place to place. The more fun we have with Willis and Co, the more yawnsome exploding body parts become.

The script is loosely based on a much grimmer and tighter graphic novel by the iconoclastic British writer Warren Ellis. It’s still graphic, but far from novel. The plot could have been bought by the kilo in Poundland: a dozen people involved in a C.I.A. incident in Guatemala are, 30 years after the event, being killed off one by one. It’s as holey as a Polo mint, and less fresh-tasting.

In fact, it would be tempting to dismiss the film as an enjoyable misfire were it not for a breakout performance by Mary-Louise Parker as Moses’s love-interest, Sarah. Doe-eyed but sassy, she’s the only one who comes off as a real flesh and blood person instead of having stepped straight out of a comic book. It’s such a relief to find a warm, funny, human role for a woman in an action film that you can forgive Red almost anything.

Sarah reads trashy romance novels, dreams of exotic travel, and hates her job at a pensions call-centre where she phone-flirts with Frank Moses. Yet she gets more than she bargained for when Moses shows up unannounced in her house, saying hitmen are gunning for them both. She screams the place down, forcing Moses to kidnap her and take them both on the run.

“I was hoping you’d be a bit more understanding of the situation,” says Moses afterwards.

“I was hoping not to get kidnapped. Or drugged. I was hoping you’d have hair,” she replies. “I’ve had better first dates. Then again,” she smiles, “I’ve had worse.”

That could just as well sum up a film which, fun though it is, can’t decide if it’s stand-up or shoot-’em-up. Red? In a word, rum.

Dominic Wells

Film Roundup

Legend of the Guardians: the Owls of Ga’Hoole

Alpha and Omega

Easy A

Ramona and Beezus

Helen Mirren makes her second film outing this week, and at least her eighth royal screen role to date, as the seductively evil owl queen in Legend of the Guardians: the Owls of Ga’Hoole.

This is the heavy-hitter of the half-term releases: sumptuously and expensively animated down to the last ruffled feather. The plot’s nothing new – it’s Lord of the Rings with beaks, and a “use the Force” ending bolted on from Star Wars – but it does envelop you completely in its world, as any successful fantasy flick must.

Zack Snyder directs, he who made the ultra-violent comic-book films 300 and Watchmen. He cuts out the blood for a PG rating, but his signature slo-mo makes the battle scenes visceral enough for older children to enjoy.

That’s more than can be said for the charmless Alpha and Omega, also in 3D and sadly Dennis Hopper’s swansong, about two wolves from opposite sides of the pack who fall for each other in defiance of tradition. Its animation, after Legends of the Guardian, is like watching someone rub two sticks together when you’ve just witnessed a fireworks display.

Easy A is that rare thing: a high-school chick-flick with real wit and heart. Not as fizzingly original as Juno, nor as breezily acerbic as Mean Girls, it’s still one of the best in years. When a white lie about losing her virginity spirals (or rather virals) out of control, Olive (Emma Stone) finds herself branded the school slut – in an uncanny echo of The Scarlet Letter, which she is studying in English.

It’s a career-making performance: expect Stone to become huge. But it’s also a generous ensemble piece, where even the smallest parts get a great line or two. “This is a public school,” intones Malcolm McDowell as the principal. “If I can keep the girls off the pole and the boys off the pipe, I get a bonus.”

Another well-judged chick-flick, for a much younger generation, is Ramona and Beezus. The book series it’s based on is 50 years old, and though it’s given a contemporary topping, the core is pure Mom’s apple pie suburban Americana.

Ramona is “nine and three quarters”. She lives in the shadow of her perfect older sister Beezus, and her overactive imagination frequently leads to disaster. When her father (played by John Corbett, the hunky one off Sex and the City, this time with Dad Hair) loses his job, Ramona resolves to make money to keep the house from foreclosure…

Directed, written, edited and produced by an all-female team, it’s deceptively simple, entirely wholesome fun. If it doesn’t leave you with a lump in your throat or a tear in your eye, go see a doctor.

Dominic Wells