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Ticket Stubs #10: Jeff Bezos fights the “War of the Worlds”, Mark Wahlberg can’t get “Flight Risk” off the ground, Nicolas Cage is devilishly creepy in “Longlegs” and Labour’s woes remind me of “Mo”.
Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #10.
War of the Worlds
(Rich Lee, 2025)
War of the Worlds is a ninety-minute Amazon Prime promo into which gigantic alien machines occasionally stomp.
The property — let’s not pretend it’s a movie — was acquired during pre-production by Jeff Bezos’ online retail empire which reportedly required the inclusion in the story of an Amazon delivery driver, or whatever dystopian corp-speak term they use (‘purchase fulfilment facilitator’, or some such). At some point this grew from a single character in a branded T-shirt and baseball cap to a screenplay littered with references to Amazon and Amazon products. I counted twelve between the dialogue and the action on screen. There could have been more; the plot occasionally distracted me from the marketing.
Will Radford (Ice Cube) is a domestic terrorism analyst for the Department for Homeland Security who is settling in for another day of violating the Constitution when freak weather phenomena herald the arrival of meteor-like entities from which towering mechanical extraterrestrials emerge. Radford’s immediate concern is for his daughter Faith (Iman Benson), who is pregnant and thus obliged by movie law to go into labour at some point during the running time. Radford isn’t keen on her ‘skinny-assed’ boyfriend Mark (Devon Bostick), the aforementioned Amazon delivery driver, but directs him to her location after she is injured (and, naturally, goes into labour). Radford’s other kid Dave (Henry Hunter Hall) is a mouthy punk who’s pissed that dad deleted his video games.
Competing with all this soap opera is a plot line about a secret government spy programme called Goliath, which Radford believes is a conspiracy theory, and a shadowy network of anarcho-hackers calling themselves the Disruptors trying to expose it. Eventually Radford learns the truth then recruits the basement-dwelling revolutionaries to bring the architect of Goliath to account. Oh, and stop the aliens. Because in case you’ve forgotten, and it’s easy to see how you might, this is an alien invasion movie. It’s the first adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel in which the war of the worlds feels like it’s getting in the way of the plot.
Ice Cube isn’t exactly Al Pacino in the acting stakes but he’s not helped by the screenplay, which makes Radford so spectacularly incompetent that there ought to be congressional hearings into how he was hired in the first place. Early on, he pauses his search for terrorists to spy on his daughter and chastise her for her unhealthy breakfast choices. Not content with this, he remotely accesses her Macbook and reads her Facebook Messenger exchanges with her boyfriend. Missing national security threats while infringing on citizens’ privacy? Call off the hearings. This dude was born for government work.
Radford is constantly surprised by very obvious plot revelations, such as the existence of Goliath (‘They lied to me the whole time! To my face!’) or his son’s involvement with the Disruptors (‘How could you?! My own son is hacking the government?!’) After all these years as an intelligence analyst you’d think some would rub off on him.
War of the Worlds is a desktop movie in the style of Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) or Megan is Missing (Michael Goi, 2011), with almost the entire action confined to a computer screen. It was originally conceived early in the Covid-19 pandemic but wasn’t released until 2025 and required the services of a script doctor. The entire surgical staff at Cedars Sinai couldn’t save this screenplay. (There is, admittedly, one half-decent line when Radford’s home is blown up by the extraterrestrials: ‘I don’t have alien invasion insurance!’)
As a movie, it’s one of the worst of the year. As advertising for Amazon, it is thuddingly relentless. At the climax, when all hope seems lost, the Amazon-driver boyfriend steps in and transports an all-important flash drive across Washington D.C. via Prime Air, Amazon’s drone delivery service. When the drone becomes stuck a nearby homeless man is enticed to free it with the offer of a $1,000 Amazon gift card. After Amazon saves the day, Radford scolds his bosses: ‘You risked all of our lives just to spy on people’s Amazon cards!’
War of the Worlds is available now on one of the streaming platforms. The name escapes me.
Flight Risk
(Mel Gibson, 2024)
Mark Wahlberg is too damned good for Flight Risk.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know the twist, and even if you haven’t I’m assuming you aren’t one of those insufferable babies who chuck a tanty over spoilers. The thing about spoilers — I’ll circle back to Flight Risk anon — is that they only ruin your enjoyment of bad movies. In fact, I would argue that the test of a good movie is if you can still enjoy it once you know the twist. Movies that repay a second or third viewing because their twist prompts you to see the whole story differently — think Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) or Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005) — are about more than mental trickery or excitation of the senses.
Once you know Clive Owen’s bank heist was a fake-out, Nicole Kidman has been a ghost all along, and the SS officer’s kid ends up in the gas chamber, is there any reason to revisit Inside Man (Spike Lee, 2006), The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, 2008)? (More fool you for visiting The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in the first place.)
Anyway, Flight Risk. Michelle Dockery is a U.S. marshal tasked with locating a weak link in an organised crime enterprise (Topher Grace) and press-ganging him into turning state’s evidence against Mr Big. She pinpoints her guy in the wilds of Alaska and persuades him to testify with the time-honoured tools of threats and violence, before bundling him onto a rinky-dink charter plane bound for Seattle. Piloting is Mark Wahlberg, complete with an aww-shucks-ma’am Dixie drawl and a fondness for New Order.
No sooner are they in the air than Wahlberg reveals himself to be a hitman for the indicted crime boss and informs the marshal and the witness that they won’t be making their intended destination on account of being dead. Hardly ideal, but still better than flying Ryanair. Dockery and Grace team up to fight the hired killer, which involves repeatedly overpowering him, ineffectually tying him to something, then turning their backs so he can launch another surprise attack.
Of course, this leaves Dockery with the tricky issue of having no one to fly the plane, which is where Hassan (Maaz Ali) comes in. He’s a pilot with the marshal service and from the ground he guides Dockery on how to control the aircraft, in between flirting with her incessantly. Not only does she have a solid HR case when she gets back on terra firma, it’s also like, dude, read the room. There’s a Cessna 208 with no pilot hurtling towards an Alaskan mountain. Now is not the time to be thinking with Little Hassan.
Dockery, who is a bit of a drip as a lead, suspects the crimelord has a mole inside the U.S. Marshals but her guess at the traitor’s identity is wrong and the double agent is revealed to be someone thoroughly implausible. The need for her to have a confrontation with this someone leads to a runway climax with plenty of crashing and smashing and digital-effects fireballs, and that’s always fun but even these scenes are, like the rest of the movie, just fine but nothing special.
Mel Gibson, who directs, makes some odd casting choices. Not only is Dockery a weak lead, but Grace’s blithe and quippy demeanour quickly comes to grate. Wahlberg is what you’re watching this film for. He exudes campy menace like so many mu-ha-ha villains in action movies but there is also a latent sadism. This is one hitman who enjoys his work. The performance deserves a better movie than Flight Risk, an action flick that never really takes off.
Longlegs
(Osgood Perkins, 2024)
Dolls are bad news.
Chucky, Annabelle, M3GAN. That creepy puppet Anthony Hopkins had in that movie with Ann-Margret. (Magic, Richard Attenborough, 1978.) I have no solid leads on the Cabbage Patch Kids but if they dig up Babyland General Hospital and find mass graves, let’s just say I won’t be surprised.
Dolls are very bad news in Longlegs, a Silence of the Lambs-ish horror thriller about the F.B.I.’s hunt for a satanic serial killer who somehow prompts otherwise loving fathers to axe-murder their wives and children. Common to all the families is a daughter whose birthday falls on the 14th of any given month and the appearance in their homes of a life-sized doll modelled on said offspring.
Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is a fresh-faced fed with possible, though unreliable, psychic powers. Recruited to the search for a madman who calls himself Longlegs, Harker cracks his Zodiac-esque ciphers and is soon in pursuit of Dale Ferdinand Kobble (Nicolas Cage), with whom she had a close brush as a child.
Where Longlegs works, it works because of Cage. Monroe’s mousy, awkward turn isn’t without its gawky charms but she struggles to carry the picture. Cage, meanwhile, doesn’t carry the movie so much as bundle it into the trunk of his station wagon and make off with an unhinged cackle. Every time he appears on screen he is accompanied by a systolic-surging whomp, an unnecessary exclamation point on a performance that is disturbing enough without the score constantly shrieking at us. It might have been more disturbing to forgo a score altogether during these scenes.
Kobble/Longlegs is Struwwelpeter meets Charles Manson meets Buffalo Bill, with a hint of the Child Catcher, but most resembles every shock-rocker who has ever had parents and religious groups panicking about ‘devil music’. Longlegs puts the panic in Satanic panic, and for that matter it puts the Satanic in it too. This isn’t one of those ambiguous jobs where it might or might not be: no, in Longlegs the Devil is real, his emissaries walk among us, and coaxing us into acts of depravity is their mission.
That is why movies like The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) and The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) don’t work for me: there the Devil is a supernatural pantomime baddie, possessing and threatening and tormenting, an all-powerful, all-cackling uber-wrong’un. Longlegs director Osgood Perkins understands that Satan’s true terror lies in his gift for temptation and legerdemain. He prospers not by imposing his will on man but by exploiting our weaknesses so we choose to do his bidding. The Devil is a mortal trickster and the price for falling for his sophistry is eternal death, but his sophistry appeals to our basest selves. When the villain is Satan, the enemy is our own nature.
Perkins’ fourth movie as director amassed a mountain of box office receipts, a reflection of a canny, Blair Witch-style marketing campaign, but it is a flawed picture which struggles to amount to more than mood, atmosphere and that Nic Cage performance. If this sounds plenty for a diverting horror film, it might well be, but Longlegs suffers from Perkins’ evident desire to be making other horror films, horror films already made.
The most obvious inspiration is The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) — socially awkward, small town F.B.I. rookie hunts gender-ambiguous serial killer while flashing back to a childhood trauma — but the thunderous intertitles which introduce each chapter and a plot involving fathers murdering their families owe more than a little to The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980).
Longlegs makes a lot of noise, it made a lot of money, but other than Cage’s flesh-crawling performance, it makes no lasting impression.
Mo
(Philip Martin, 2010)
Labour’s woes after just one year in government set me to thinking about the early days of the party’s previous term in Downing Street, back when Britannia was cool, Tony Blair was the future, and things were going to get better.
For all that New Labour is remembered for control-freakery, its initial forays into the exercise of power were at times haphazard. Think Bernie Ecclestone, the Millennium Dome, Ron Davies on Clapham Common. But it had heart, something entirely lacking in Labour’s current iteration, and back then the party’s heart was represented by one woman: Mo Mowlam.
Funny and irreverent, soft-hearted and hot-tempered, Mowlam was probably the last politician to be universally loved by the general public, and certainly the last Labour politician. She had almost nothing in common with the interchangeable soul vacuums who clutter the House of Commons benches today. Mowlam’s personality is captured in Mo, a 2010 made-for-television movie directed by Philip Martin.
Mo is close to being a one-woman show. Although Martin reflects her relationships with husband Jon Norton (David Haig) and ministerial colleague Adam Ingram (Gary Lewis), his Mowlam stands apart not only from the grubbiness of late Nineties politics — how innocent that grubbiness looks at this remove — but from everyone else. Mo is something of a hagiography but gets away with it, just, because its subject did come to enjoy a kind of secular sainthood in her final years.
This was in part because of her role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, in part because of her determination to keep working despite suffering from the brain tumour that would eventually kill her, but mostly because she was so unlike her New Labour colleagues. Mowlam was cheerfully politically incorrect, charmingly inappropriate, and dedicated to the great cause of not giving a fuck. As The Guardian observed upon her death, she enjoyed ‘an extraordinary degree of public popularity, almost certainly unmatched by any other politician of her era’.
The Redcar MP is portrayed, inevitably, by Julie Walters. Walters is the anti-Meryl Streep. She plays her subject, not herself playing her subject, and so rather than an arch impersonation we get a looser, more naturalistic embodiment. This is particularly welcome with Mowlam, who was an anarchic personality; to render her controlled would have been dishonest.
There is a nice touch where, during one particularly frustrating meeting with Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, Mowlam tears off her wig and scratches her itchy scalp. The two nationalists are nonplussed: she has cut through their bravado. Walters won a well-deserved Emmy for her turn.
The film is a late-life biopic, dealing only with the final few years of Mowlam’s life. (She died in 2005, aged 55.) While this was politically the most consequential period of her life, Mo misses out on the early experiences that shaped her, such as her father’s alcoholism (there is a passing reference), her time working for hard-left MP Tony Benn, and her original career as a political scientist at the universities of Iowa, Wisconsin at Milwaukie, and Florida State.
During her time in Tallahassee, in the late Seventies, her boyfriend, Dan Sammons, drowned while swimming in Dog Lake, south-west of the city. Mowlam had planned to marry him and was devastated by the loss.
While teaching at FSU, she was also stalked by an unknown offender who once broke into her flat. Weeks later, Ted Bundy entered a sorority house on campus and attacked female students as they slept, killing two. Mowlam was convinced it was Bundy who had been scoping her out.
Also absent is Mowlam’s role in the modernisation project which dragged Labour from the electoral fringes to the electable centre, and how a frosty relationship with Gordon Brown helped stall her much wished-for rise to the top, though no one did more to sabotage Mo Mowlam than Mo Mowlam.
Mo, which was produced for Channel 4, gives us a glimpse of the woman and if it’s greedy to want more, I’ll confess to greed. The film is visually uninteresting but Walters’ performance, with its blunt warmth and wicked humour, is as scrappy and irresistible as its subject.
War of the Worlds, Flight Risk, and Longlegs are streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Mo on Channel 4.