Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is in no way exploitative

Emma Thompson plays a prim middle-age woman who wants to try the different kinds of sex her late husband wouldn’t attempt.

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack appear in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (M)
In cinemas from Thursday
★★★★

Though this very intimate drama looks like a play (most of it is filmed on one set), it is, in fact, an original screenplay, the work of British comedian Katy Brand.

A rather prim woman in late middle-age calling herself Nancy (Emma Thompson in top form) checks into a hotel in an unnamed English city for a session with sex worker Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). She’s never done anything like this before, and is understandably tense and a bit terrified.

Widowed two years previously, Nancy — who taught religious studies at a high school — only ever had sex with the man she married. She has never had an orgasm (she faked them during her marriage) and now she wants to try the different kinds of sex her late husband wouldn’t attempt.

Leo, young, charming and speaking with an Irish lilt, seems an ideal therapist. Their first meeting is awkward, their second more advanced, their third highly sexual. As this odd couple get to know each other, Leo reveals he has told his family he works on a North Sea oil rig.

Thompson gives a very brave performance under the direction of Adelaide-born Sophie Hyde, who made a great impression with 52 Tuesdays (2013) and the Dublin-made Animals (2019), and who has also been responsible for some innovative Australian television productions.

Hyde’s direction of this intimate and sensitive film, and her skilful shifts between humour and poignancy, is exemplary. Thompson appears near the end of the film fully naked as she looks at herself in a full-length mirror, but the film is in no way exploitative. It is certainly very candid about sexual matters, the benefits of a sex worker — at least, one as charming as Leo — and the need to be open and free. The film is quietly amusing, but it also gets to the heart of the matter and doesn’t shy from the ugly side of human relationships.

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Bullet Train (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★

The 1974 Japanese thriller Bullet Train was an exciting ride in which three bad guys hide a bomb on the bullet train speeding at 322kmh between Tokyo and Kyoto and claim a large ransom to prevent the bomb exploding. If the train slows to 80kmh or less, the bomb will explode (a premise similar to that of the Hollywood film Speed, made 20 years later).

The new Bullet Train, which is based on the book, Maria Beetle by Kotaro Izaka, has an altogether different plot and the approach, by screenwriter Zak Olkewicz and director David Leitch, is totally different. Instead of a compelling exercise in suspense, the film seems to be attempting to spoof the thriller genre in the mode of Guy Ritchie. Instead, it falls flat on its face.

Brad Pitt, wearing a bucket hat and horn-rim glasses, plays Ladybug, the name given to him by his minder, Maria, whose voice, giving him regular instructions over the phone, is that of Sandra Bullock. First seen sauntering along a crowded Tokyo street with a Japanese version of Staying Alive on the soundtrack, Ladybug has recently undergone therapy for anger management. His mission is to board the bullet train and locate a case full of cash, a ransom to be paid to kidnappers.

This proves to be no simple assignment. Others on the train are also after the money. They include British “twins” Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry) — the former is white and the latter black, so the likelihood that they are really twins seems remote. There’s also The Prince (Joey King), a young woman dressed like a schoolgirl who uses her perceived innocence to lure victims into her orbit; The Wolf (Benito A. Martinez-Ocasio) and The Hornet (Zazie Beetz), while awaiting the train at its destination is White Death (Michael Shannon).

Taylor-Johnson and Henry prove to be the most appealing characters in the movie. Lemon frequently quotes Thomas the Tank Engine books as a source of inspiration. The use of Engelbert Humperdinck’s version of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles adds to the film’s forced eccentricities.

As the various bad guys line up to retrieve the cash, the cartoon-like violence escalates. And a bloody sight it is. Knives, swords, guns and other weapons that come to hand (a laptop is used in one encounter) wreak punishment on the hapless protagonists, but it’s all supposed to be hilarious. There’s even a highly poisonous snake crawling around the train, and a bottle of water contains a lethal dose of poison.

Little thought appears to have been given to any kind of reality. In one scene there seem to be other passengers on the train, including an old lady who complains about the noise when Ladybug and Lemon are engaged in fisticuffs. But later in the film the passengers not involved in the mayhem mysteriously disappear. And while there are the obligatory shots of the train speeding along the track, there’s no sense inside the compartments of any movement at all.

It’s all so silly that this sort of complaint hardly matters. But it’s sad to see a cast of decent actors lumbered with such second-rate material. Leitch, who was Pitt’s stunt double in some of his early films, including Fight Club (1999), has directed a couple of films prior to this, notably Deadpool 2 (2018).

His hit-and-miss approach here results in an unsatisfactory comedy-thriller, neither funny enough nor thrilling enough. Ultimately it runs off the rails into cinematic oblivion.

Brad Pitt stars in Bullet Train, in cinemas now