Curse of the Golden Flower

15, 114 mins Four stars

Zhang Yimou’s latest film has spectacular, beautified action of the sort he delivered in Hero and House of Flying Daggers, but here it’s combined with an over-the-top version of the kind of melodramas he made earlier in his career, such as Raise the Red Lantern. That film’s star, Gong Li, plays a 10th-century Chinese empress scheming to bring down her husband (Chow Yun Fat) before he can complete his nefarious plan to dispose of her. The couple’s adult sons are drawn into the feud in sordid ways, and the family’s breakdown becomes so extreme as to be comical. It’s not clear Zhang intended humour, just as it’s hard to know if we’re supposed to see vulgarity in the imperial palace’s ornate, gilded decor. In both cases, though, what we’re given is richly enjoyable however you view it. And the action sequences are a whole other source of pleasure. There may be nothing here as brilliant as the showpieces of Zhang’s previous martial-arts movies, but the huge climactic battle is a worthy opponent for 300’s combat scenes, and there are regular appearances from some wonderful ninja-like killers. They always arrive by descending from ropes, even when there seems nothing above but an empty sky. EP

Shooter

15, 126 mins, Three stars

Having been betrayed by the military, while on duty in Ethiopia, ace marine sharpshooter Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) has retired to an isolated cottage in the mountains with his beer, his dog and enough guns to take out an entire army. But when asked to do his duty and help protect the president, the patriotic Swagger can’t say no. He ends up framed for an assassination attempt on the president and goes on the run. Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) has given us an action film that any normal paranoid conspiracy nut and antigovernment gun freak will love. Hell, I don’t have a gun and I enjoyed it! So what if it’s a post-9/11 rerun of Rambo? It has a lot of fascinating detail relating to everything from treating a wound with sugar to taking a man out with a single shot over a mile away. And Wahlberg makes an appealing and believable man of action — particularly when he is suffering with pain and shooting bad guys. CL

Unknown

15, 98 mins, Two stars

One option for film-makers with a limited budget is to find a new way of trapping characters in a tense predicament within a confined space. That’s what Simon Brand, a first-time feature director, and Matthew Waynee, a tyro screenwriter, have set out to do in this thriller, and they clearly don’t believe in half measures. Five men (including Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear and Joe Pantoliano) wake to find themselves locked in a dank warehouse. None can remember who he is or who any of the others are. They figure out that some sort of incident involving a mind-fogging gas has temporarily wiped their memories. They also deduce that, before this restart, some of them were criminals and some were victims, but there’s no way of knowing who was who. It’s a novel set-up, but plainly an improbable one. As the action unfolds, Brand and Waynee don’t work up enough dazzle to blind us to the silliness of the whole thing. EP

Wild Hogs

12A, 100 mins, One star

This comedy’s main characters are four suburban friends (John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H Macy) who decide to flee their midlife ruts by motorbiking from their hometown of Cincinnati to the west coast. It’s hardly the most rebellious idea they could have had, but it still makes them a hundred times more daring than the film’s creators. Aimed squarely at middle America, this was never going to be a movie that ripped up the map, but that’s no excuse for the director, Walt Becker, to stick so closely to the speed-bumped roads of ancient formulas. In one scene, our heroes are chased by an angry bull. In another, they go skinny-dipping (with the water safely above the actors’ bellies) and a gay man sees them and leaps to the wrong conclusion. You get the impression that even the people who wrote, staged and performed this stuff didn’t think it was funny. EP

Perfect Stranger

15, 109 mins, One star

It’s sometimes said, in defence of big stars in bad films, that even Oscar-winners can’t choose their projects as freely as we might imagine. I’m prepared to believe this up to a point, but the number of supersized stinkers in Halle Berry’s CV can’t be only a matter of bad luck. In her latest calamity, a whodunnit directed by James Foley, she is an investigative journalist who goes undercover to spy on an advertising mogul who may have committed murder. He’s played by Bruce Willis and, whether or not he’s a killer, he has no chance of inspiring dread, thanks to a toupee that looks like an upturned shoe-brush. The final twist is laughable, but on the whole the film is just painfully boring. Several scenes consist only of Berry exploring internet chatrooms — and we all thought Hollywood had realised years ago that shots of people typing away on keyboards simply can’t be made to look exciting. EP

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