Your night in: Every movie on TV tonight rated or slated
If you’re not a Zac Efron fan, you may want to avoid 9Go! tonight. The good news is that there are plenty of other stellar options on TV, including a “singular movie experience” and an Eltham export going toe-to-toe with a Game of Thrones star.
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THE LAST SAMURAI (MA15+)
****
8.30PM CH. 7
Despite its breathtaking showpiece skirmishes, there is more to this historical epic than just merely rolling out the battles. Tom Cruise stars as Captain Nathan Algren, a haunted former Civil War hero plucked from hawking guns (and swigging liquor) on the US sideshow circuit to train a modernised army in 19th century Japan. Areclusive Emperor has an immediate military target in mind for his new fighting force: the renegade Samurai warlords who control the outlying provinces with the ancient warrior’s code of Bushido. A big movie with a little something always up its sleeve.
POMPEII (M)
**1/2
8.30PM 7MATE
You’re wasting your time wishing anyone in Pompeii will be beating the heat. No-one cares if gladiatorial poor-boy Kit Harington and pouty rich-girl Emily Browning will be falling in love any time soon. All that matters here is whether or not this photogenic pair will be falling in lava by film’s end. However, if you are attending this disaster movie purely for the famous natural disaster it promises to depict, you won’t have too many complaints. Director Paul W.S. Anderson quite rightly throws everything plus the kitchen sink at the volcano sequences. The relentless carpet-bombing with the molten rocks and the eerie descent of the accompanying ash clouds are genuinely transfixing.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
**1/2
8.30PM 7FLIX
Director Tim Burton’s effort here is a mild disappointment. Holding back the film is a series of unnecessary tweaks that play down the innocent charm of author Lewis Carroll’s original stories. Alice (well played by Australian star Mia Wasikowska) is now a 19-year-old woman returning to Wonderland well after her first visit as a child. Co-stars Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter.
G.I. JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA (M)
*
10.40PM 7MATE
This ultra-violent, incoherent and utterly underwhelming action flick – based on a line of little boys’ toys – is sub-bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. A cheap’n’blasty celebration of the worst cartoon warfare imaginable. You’d think it would be impossible not to extract some fun from a tale climaxing with a nuclear attack on the Eiffel Tower. But the filmmakers found a way. Stars Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller.
HOLLOW MAN (M)
**1/2
10.45PM 7FLIX
Cheesy thriller from 1999. Kevin Bacon plays Sebastian Caine, a Pentagon scientist who turns into an invisible man after he literally rubs himself out during a trial run of some new DNA-inversion technology (don’t try this at home, kids). In a confined lab deep underground, he picks off his workmates one-by-one until the scene is set for a final no-showdown with the ex-girlfriend that did him wrong.
APOLLO 13 (PG)
****
8.40PM GEM
Director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind) is absolutely the right man for the job for this compelling look back at the most action-packed American space mission of all-time. In the wake of Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, the Apollo 13 project was barely covered by the media until something went horribly wrong. Before the spacecraft even made it to the moon, the on-board electrical systems shut down. Suddenly, here was a real-life cliffhanger that sat the whole world on the edge of their seats as NASA Mission Control improvised wildly to come up with a solution. Will astronauts Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) make it back to their home planet alive, or be burnt to a crisp upon re-entry?
17 AGAIN (PG)
**1/2
7.30PM GO!
High School Musical heart-throb Zac Efron plays a disillusioned loser magically transported back to his youth to recapture his winning ways. A pleasantly predictable body-swap comedy. Nothing more, nothing less. Within the narrow confines of the genre, most viewers would rank it a notch or two beneath, say, Tom Hanks’ Big. Or the respective Freaky Fridays of Jodie Foster and Lindsay Lohan.
BAYWATCH (MA15+)
**
9.30PM GO!
While Baywatch ain’t all bad – it stars the unfeasibly likeable Dwayne Johnson, for cryin’ out loud – there isn’t enough good stuff to fill a two-hour movie. Johnson spearheads a squad of lightweight lifeguards at loggerheads with a heavyweight crime boss running drugs over their patch of sand. The filmmakers seem very unsure as to where the jokes are hidden inside this sketchy premise, and only Johnson looks like he might have a clue. Otherwise, it’s a leery, lumpy mixed bag of buff blokes in board shorts and budgie smugglers, and beautiful babes pressure-packed into revealing red one-pieces. A magnanimous gesture by the costume department allows just enough breathing room in the ladies’ outfits for the famous Baywatch go-to move: the slo-mo jiggle-jog along the beach.
DON’T TELL (M)
**1/2
8.30PM SBS
A middling courtroom drama based on a highly contentious (and lastingly significant) sexual abuse case heard in Queensland in 2001. Over a decade earlier, a 12-year-old student at a prestigious Toowoomba boarding school was molested by a predatory housemaster. With her adult life in ruins, Lyndal (a powerful performance from Sara West) goes looking for answers from an Anglican Church hierarchy unwilling to acknowledge there is even a question. As her legal team (serviceable contributions from Aden Young and Jack Thompson) ramp up the pressure on the protectors of her tormentor, Lyndal’s secret memories come back to haunt and hurt her with painful precision. Comparisons to the 2016 Best Picture Oscar winner Spotlight rarely extend beyond the purely thematic here.
CAPTAIN FANTASTIC (M)
****
9.40pm WORLD MOVIES
An uncannily focused drama-comedy introduces you to a family who puts the cult in counterculture. The window through which you will see this unusual clan is a magnificent, nuanced performance from Viggo Mortensen. He plays Ben Cash, the father of six very individual children he is raising, schooling and simply running wild with, deep in the forests of America’s Pacific northwest. The Cashes don’t just live off the grid. They may as well be living on another planet. The one missing link in this captivating tale is the whereabouts of Ben’s wife. Without giving too much away, it is her absence that triggers an unplanned return by Ben and his brood to conventional society.
GET THE GRINGO (MA15+)
***
7.30pm WORLD MOVIES
Those viewers open-minded enough to have not banished Mel Gibson to hell will be rewarded with a lively, unconventional and endearingly erratic action thriller. Gibson plays the only American prisoner in a Mexican jail. Not just any jail, mind you. This is Tijuana’s infamous El Pueblito prison, home to the meanest, mustachioed banditos south of the border. Inside this anarchic hive of activity, Gibson is free to provoke the mayhem demanded by Get the Gringo’s oddball story. All action scenes are conducted quite impressively, with a wild shootout inside the confines of El Pueblito ranking as the absolute standout.
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (M)
*****
8.00pm NITV
“The entire universe depends on everything fitting together just right,” says the narrator of this unique and utterly breathtaking drama. The speaker is a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy (remarkable newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis), and only a fool would question how she has acquired this wisdom at such a young age. The evidence put forward by Beasts of the Southern Wild is all too convincing as it is. The film is set on the flatlands of Louisiana, where Hushpuppy and her not-so-well-off neighbours are about to face a flood of biblical proportions. The youngster’s powerful survival instinct and the unifying spirit in the surrounding community are depicted in a highly unorthodox, yet directly mesmerising manner. The whole experience is like a dream come to life, with little Hushpuppy doing all she can to stop it from ending in a nightmare. Filmed with an amateur cast and staged with astonishing imagination and emotion, this is undoubtedly a singular movie experience. Do not miss.
Originally published as Your night in: Every movie on TV tonight rated or slated
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