I always feel as if I'm too harsh on paper, but then I find myself eye-rolling and fidgeting whenever I actually sit down to watch his films. They're never without their moments, and they're always conceptually interesting, but on the whole they irritate me. I haven't seen
Trainspotting or
Shallow Grave in about 7 or 8 years, though, and
Millions only once at an advanced screening.
I watched four quite recently, though, and this is what I wrote on them:
28 Days Later...Boyle's last-man-alive zombie film makes fine use of an impossibly empty London, but ruins it all by shooting on ugly DV and in self-consciously askew camera angles. It's a treat for zombie film fans - here the undead run faster than any of Romero's ever did - but it isn't helped at all by an eye-rolling final third, in which a military retreat turns out to be a master trick to get women to dress up as Victorians and perform sexual acts for the neanderthal soldiers; add to this other curiosities and you have an all-flash Boyle special: Cillian Murphy is allowed to speak Irish but Brendan Gleeson has to act his way through a bad Cockney impression; the lass playing his daughter puts in the worst performance seen in a British film this century; worst of all, Danny Boyle is a needle-dropper, and equates post-rock with thoughtful, empty streets and Brian Eno's 'Ascent' (which had already found its material match in For All Mankind and provided a suitably hopeful ending to Soderbergh's Traffic) with abandoned English motorways.SunshineSigh… This sci-fi opens well, never quite giving us much to care for in terms of the cosmic significance of a failing sun, which might sound like a pitfall but it actually aids character and whatever technical potential might have drawn Boyle to the project in the first place - it certainly looks nice, and the whole thing has a slickness familiar to a spaceship setting such as this. But the second half nosedives into a clumsy, half-hearted thriller that goes nowhere and makes even less sense than it initially suggested. It goes from a half-engaging and -original film into something frankly rather dull, though it's of note for not being laden with obnoxious musical choices.The BeachBoyle's postcard thriller is a cautionary tale and an exciting adventure in equal measure, beginning with clips of Apocalypse Now and a shot of a revolving ceiling fan; its second half recalls Coppola's film and the Conrad novella from which it was taken even more, with DiCaprio - compelling as ever - turning half mad in an extended sequence that allows for the director's usual quirky visual gimmickry (here, our protagonist's world and descent into a heart of darkness becomes a video game, almost as if Boyle wants all of his films to echo the popular trends going at the time). It seems only half successful at whatever it attempts - here a travel story, here a sexy drama, here a traumatic horror, and so on - and doesn't quite combine its differing elements convincingly.And I reviewed
127 Hours here.