David_Frames

The new Star Trek is all consuming - undercutting low expectations with a colourful landscape of rich visuals married with pace and driven by kinetic flair both in front of and behind the camera. Abram's Mission Impossible looked flat and felt static but Star Trek really moves with swooning camera movements, conspicuously eye catching composition and a degree of self-confidence that scoops you up and carries you along for that Hollywood Holy Grail – "the ride". There's artistry in its visual effects, an omission from most blockbusters, and the design is a combination of craft and graft, contrasting the smooth sheen of the Enterprise's bridge with her new boiler room bowels. Its future tech with a touch of real world grease and it speaks to the filmmakers intentions of partnering the geek aesthetic with something less esoteric for the unconverted.

Ironically for a movie that turns on future proofing legacies, the film's weakness is its story that feels slight and is driven by the commercial requirement to clear the decks for a new series of films – a deficiency that will become more apparent as time strips away its visual impact. Given that the script lacks any of the emotional or intellectual rigour that at least threatened to punctuate previous instalments, it does at least introduce a sense of fun and bravado that alludes to the best of the original series and it's more of a romp than before, signalling a new direction that owes as much to Star Wars, much apparent in the movie's dramatic thrust, as much to the series whose name it bears.

Goodwill notwithstanding, there are elements to this new approach that won't sit easily with aficionados of the Enterprise. The decision to wipe out 43 years of continuity, well conceived but poorly explained and embodied in a villain who is more plot device than character, is a poor return on a lifetime of devotion for hardcore fans – and the philosophical and moral implications of Nero's actions are given a cursory shrug in the interests of moving the story forward, a treatment which makes the decision seem flippant. The humour is sometimes too broad in a bid to appeal to an imaginary constituency of barely brain-stemmed teens, though it frequently recovers, and those on product placement watch will recoil with the news that both Nokia and Budweiser have made it to the 23rd century – a feat all the more remarkable on account of the nuclear war that occurs in Trek's chronology between our present and the time occupied by the libidinous Captain of the Enterprise.

Once the new cast settle into their familiar positions sometime during the final third, it feels natural and reassuringly familiar. Pine, retaining Shatner's cock sureness but dropping the melodramatic pauses, captures the spirit of his predecessor and is a worthy successor, though Orci and Kutzman could reward his performance by deepening his characterisation in the next instalment. Qunito's Spock is fine but lacks Nimoy's presence – how you miss the dulcet tones and Karl Urban's Doctor McCoy is perfect – instantly evocative of Deforrest Kelley without becoming an impersonation. True to the original series, the rest of the cast are little more than scenery, though the new Uhura is some of the best you'll see all year and certainly deserves more to do in future. Her sexually inspired turn adds a decent measure of human beauty to the gorgeous computer generated vistas.

A sensory treat it may be, visual effects and production design spit roasting your optics, but the impact is undermined by the absence of an equally inspired score. Great genre movies are defined by their musical dimension – imagine Star Wars without Williams, Blade Runner without Vangelis but the paucity of great compositions in recent years suggests that as the previous generation of great composers falls away, no one is coming up to replace them. A movie on this scale demanded symphonic support on an hysterical scale – something akin to Goldsmith's intervention in the otherwise lifeless 1979 film, but instead it's a generic score that substitutes volume for melodic coherence and memorable motifs. You've heard the like many times before and will be pushed to recall a note of it afterwards. The composers will claim that the trend is now toward so called 'emotional augmentation' – atmospheric scoring rather than out and out musical enrichment of the narrative, but this reduces what was once an integral part of these movies to clinical diagnostic support and it's unworthy of the potential of the movie score and the art form's heritage.

Exciting, inviting and a little bit frightening (the new Chekov's accent is as unsettling as any planetary destruction), Star Trek will polarise die-hards but have little trouble charming the uninitiated. It has scale, energy and a likable interplay between the leads, all of which go a long way toward apologising for some of the screenplay's less intelligible choices. Where it does succeed ultimately, is in evoking the spirit if not the intellectual curiosity of Rodenberry's series, and although we'll expect an extra dimension to the characters in the next instalment, there's enough optimism on display here to allow the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt…though just this once you understand.

Russell Crowe's Washington hack investigates the apparent suicide of a researcher on Capitol Hill and the murder of a drug dealer, discovering that, somewhat terrifyingly, all roads lead to Ben Affleck's congressman and his crusade against a unscrupulous defense contractor in this solid, if unexceptional compression of Paul Abbot's highly regarded BBC serial.

Several questions permeate the mind as 'Play' unfolds, namely why doesn't a single colleague of Crowe's ask how or why he acquired the hair of a forty year woman and can the skin around Affleck's eyes really be 15 years older than the rest of his face? These investigative omissions not withstanding, all strands of Abbot's plot remain well entwined and although necessarily truncated for the purposes of adaptation, lose nothing of the intrigue that made the TV series manna for the optic nerves.

Kevin McDonald, last seen helming The Last King of Scotland, keeps the tempo up and pastes each frame together with thick set suspense but although State of Play grips from the outset it's an efficient rather than scintillating couple of hours. What's missing you feel, is the depth of character that the longer running time of the television series afforded.

Crowe, our guide to the underbelly of Washington shadow politics and newsroom maneuvering, imbues his journo with an easy manner and a quick wit, but for someone up against a conspiracy involving a slew of homicides and the top echelons of government, seldom lets his canter become a run as he frowns his way to the awful truth. Affleck meanwhile, is never entirely convincing as the libidinous career politician with powerful enemies, gawping when you imagine he was reaching for shock and occasionally very angry indeed when someone behind the camera holds up a white card with 'emotion' scrawled on it. This is a shame because the part, formerly the property of David Morrissey, misses the Gordon Brown lookalike's heft, while the miscast malformed twin of Matt Damon can do little more than oscillate between composed and tearful. If 'Play' is essentially a two hander between the Journalist and the Politician, Affleck's lack of muscle "Beadle's" the enterprise – one good hand and one withered grabbing the viewer and it's not quite the same.

Mind you, despite the occasionally underpowered leads no-one involved is anything less than adequate, Helen Mirren's newspaper editor and Rachel McAdams eye candy hackette providing assured support despite pared down roles. Always watchable and often involving, it's not the bravura thriller it might have been but it won't give Paul Abbot a reason to sue either – besides one day they'll have the technology to paint Affleck out and replace him with a young James Stewart – imagine that.

Want to make a trashy movie but not have those imbecilic executives interfere? Well the trick is to keep it cheap and don't show the script to anyone. Neveldine and Taylor, the duo behind Crank, played the game beautifully and the result was a high octane, low rent orgy of violence, sex, profanity and insanity. If you were in the mood, and more of us needed it than we cared to admit, Crank was a tonic, though one that made you ill and vomit blood for days afterwards.

Anchored by a game and wide eyed Jason Statham who got to deliver lines like 'does it look like I've got C**T written on my forehead?' (yes), Crank was a movie that brushed aside coherence, logic and any sense of it's own importance for laughs and thankfully 'High Voltage', er, cranks it up a notch, though the directorial duo will have to dig deep for a third instalment – though I wouldn't bet against them having a go.

Voltage beings where the original ended with the Stath falling a mile from a helicopter and bouncing off a parked car – dead presumably, but no because the Chinese warlord responsible for his original poisoned predicament has Staham's Chev Chelios scraped off the roadside and deposited in a makeshift surgical theatre where his heart, strong enough to survive the original film and so a desirable commodity for his wizened nemesis, is extracted and replaced with a battery powered stopgap designed to keep him alive and his organs fresh for transplantation. You'd be forgiven for losing the thread at this point but the movie is only 5 minutes old when Chelios thankfully regains consciousness and on Doctor's orders, begins a hunt for his real heart while subjecting himself to electric shocks to keep the temporary one functioning.

That, if you can believe it, is the setup, and you won't be shocked to learn that it's a fairly sober foundation for what follows. Shot on prosumer camcorders, Crank 2 is saturated in the promise of bargain basement vulgarity and doesn't disappoint. Edited with an eye for the absurd, it feverishly presses on across ninety monged out minutes in which guns are inserted into rectums, nipples sliced from torsos, fights segue into Godzilla style monsters battling against miniatures (with actors in caricatured masks of Statham and his enemy battling it out) and in the funniest sequence, Geri Halliwell appears in flashback as Mother Chelios, taking the young Chev to task on a talk show in which a few British cars and a reject from a mad max movie dressed as a British punk are dropped onto a Californian backlot for the least convincing but most enjoyable English flashback you've ever seen. Chelios may be a hardline misogynist and causal racist, "Is that some change loose in my pocket or did I hear a chink?" is his riposte to one of the Chinese Villains, but there's something about the former Sydenham market trader that would make him likable if he were playing a recidivist paedophile and he brings his gruff, er, charms to every scene.

There's little that's fundamentally new about the second Crank – it's structurally the same as the original and hits many of the same beats, but the sense of fun and embellishment of every frame with unashamed excess, makes it hideously enjoyable. Counting the instances of 'f*ck you Chelios' should be your new drinking game when it comes to DVD but in the meantime, High Voltage is essential for those that like their junk movies tasteless and baseless. The end, which such is the pace, you arrive at 15 minutes before the film itself, promises a third which on this evidence would be well worth a punt - as Chelios would say, "Bing F*ckin' Crosby!"