I’ve been to see two films in the last week. These were Taken (with Liam Neeson) and Journey To The Centre of the Earth (with that bloke from The Mummy).

In taken, a retired CIA agent is on the phone to his daughter when she is kidnapped in Paris. He then has a limited amount of time to track her down before she is lost forever, and must use his skills, contacts, and a significant degree of violence, in order to rescue her.

It’s not the sort of film that would look to make you think; indeed if you do, you might start asking questions like “well what happened to that guy?” “what happened to the woman he left?” or “wouldn’t he have been better off trying to get the information out of so-and-so instead?”. It’s an action film. It has a lot of punching, shooting, a bit more punching and some torture. Oh, and there’s punching people.

As a simple piece of escapist fiction, it’s very enjoyable. It’s fast-paced and action packed, although I can’t help but feel Liam Neeson’s role might have been more interesting as an ex-IRA member rather than yet another US CIA/FBI/Secret Service agent (although obviously I don’t think Hollywood would have felt that they could portray a terrorist — even a retired terrorist — as the good guy).

Was it enjoyable? Yes. Was it a great film? No. It was probably a quite good film.

Although because I went to the cinema I was legally and morally obliged to buy popcorn, and reading the side of the popcorn box, and pretty much all of the literature around the cinema, I discovered that Odeon are allegedly:

Fanatical about filmOdeon

…but not so hot on spelling.

Which struck me as a teensy bit odd, since it appears they weren’t sufficiently fanatical about film to remember how to spell the name of the main character in a film — named after that character — which won six Oscars. Surely if you were fanatical about film, you would either know how to spell his name in the first place, or you would at least check before you mis-spell his name on the side of millions of popcorn cartons?

The character’s name in the film Forrest Gump is spelled ‘Forrest’ (there is a clue, if you look carefully, in the title of the film). Fanatical about film, my arse. Fanatical about making money by getting people to go and see films and buy stuff when they are there, more like.

Oh, and here’s another thing. Why, when they are advertising those DVD rental schemes by post where you pay a fixed monthly fee, do they say “no late fees”. Of course there are no late fees. If you borrow one film from them and hang onto it for three months before sending it back, you are still paying the ten quid every month, so you’ll have paid thirty quid to hire that film. It’s not, strictly speaking a late fee, but it does demonstrate why economically they are better off the longer you take to watch each individual film…

And then there was Journey to the Centre of the Earth with That Bloke From The Mummy (also known as Brendan Fraser, but I think everyone bar his close friends knows him as TBFTM). Again, not one where you want to look too closely at the plot — if the area is going to heat up to a point where it will kill everyone, and does so regularly, how have all the birds, insects and ruddy great dinosaurs survived since last time?

Although bizarrely enough I didn’t have any problems suspending my disbelief and accepting that there was a lost world in the centre of the earth, I find it more difficult to imagine TBFTM as the academic type he is pitched as in this. He’s a decent enough actor, but he comes over more as the lumbering jock type than any sort of academic.

But again, as a family film, I didn’t really have any complaints. It held the kids attention, they were excited, scared, thrilled and so on, and because it was the ‘Kids Club’ film on a sunday morning it had cost us a grand total of six quid for all four of us to go (as opposed to almost fourteen quid for me and the GLW to see taken).

Oh, and it wasn’t one of the 3D showings, but you could see which bits would probably have been used to best 3D effect — fluttering birds, dinosaurs chasing you and so on. Two enjoyable trips to the cinema to see films that were good entertainment, without being great films.