Dallas Buyers Club (16) ****
It’s hard to believe Matthew McConaughey is the man who gave us the forgettable Sahara and the formulaic Failure to Launch. The awful Fool’s Gold was a particular low point.
Somewhere along the way, he decided to take a break from the dodgy romances and wait for the good roles to come in - which they did.
But his heartwrenching performance as an emaciated AIDS patient in Dallas Buyers Club is the one that could well win him an Oscar next month.
In a drama all the more touching because it’s laced with humour, McConaughey plays the real life character of Ron Woodroof.
A straight, macho cowboy in the mid eighties, Woodroof was already in trouble from his wild lifestyle before a collapse landed him in hospital.
There, he was given the bombshell news that he had the AIDS virus. It was the early days of the disease and with few effective treatments approved, doctors gave him just weeks to live.
The movie’s story is twofold - the first shows Woodroof’s inability to cope with the diagnosis and the social stigmas attached to it.
Far more effective and enjoyable is the second hour, where Ron - frustrated by the pace at which medicine is moving to tackle AIDS - takes matters into his own hands.
With the help of a drag queen (a very good Jared Leto) he sets up a Buyers Club - one of several in the US at the time - which exploits loopholes in the law to track down treatments.
It’s a rousing, funny, touching real life drama that’s carried by McConaughey’s terrific performance when the pace occasionally drifts.
Robocop (12A) ***
Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi thriller became an instant hit and is still regarded as a landmark in the genre to this day.
But Hollywood’s a conservative place and producers will reboot old ideas in the hope of finding a new audience - or even better, developing a potential series.
That’s the thinking behind this Robocop remake, a movie that lacks the wit and spark of the original but works decently well as an action movie. It goes without saying that if you adored the original film you’ll be raging against this machine.
Swedish/American actor Joel Kinnaman is a wise casting choice as Alex Murphy, a cop investigating corruption in Detroit in 2028.
When a car bomb attack by those who want him silenced leaves him fighting for his life, his wife (Abbie Cornish) has little choice but to sign him up for a controversial new scheme.
After the US public vetoes plans to put crime-fighting robots on the streets, a powerful OmniCorp businessman decides to target seriously injured policemen instead, turning them into ‘Robocops’ with the latest technology - the idea that these Bots with a conscience will get the green light.
But what the company doesn’t bank on is their experiment going rogue.
The cast, and they’re an impressive cast, all deliver. Cornish does her best with an underwhelming wife role. Kinnaman has the right combination of angst and ass-kicking to play the central role. Keaton’s enjoyably snaky as a corporation boss motivated by greed. And Jackson’s revving like he’s in a Tarantino movie, trying - but not quite succeeding - to bring a little mischief to the script.
It’s the great Gary Oldman who fares best as Norton, a medic who becomes emotionally attached to and responsible for the man machine he has created. The scenes between him and Kinnaman are the best in the film.
