theOneliner.com: Handling the Truth

It's time for another podcast with theOneliner.com crew, laying some truth out on The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Survival of the Dead and Legion. Are any of the flicks worthy of your time? Find out in this thrilling episode.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is an on occasion startlingly dark Swedish thriller, as a disgraced journalist and teen hacker team up to uncover the mysteries behind a long-missing member of a wealthy family. It's a very effective murder mystery, with lead characters that seem suitably fleshed out to avoid them feeling like cogs in the procedural machinery. If you spent too long thinking about the mechanics of the plot then the lustre perhaps tarnishes, and it's certainly disturbing enough to not be for the faint of heart, but it's a greatly enjoyable thriller and comes highly recommended.

George Romero's Survival of the Dead proves to be something of a misfire, the concept of a Zombie Western that focuses more on the attitudes of two feuding families to zombies rather than any amount of hot zombie killin' action not exactly succeeding. The effects are unashamedly low-budget and the acting... functional at best, but it's not without the odd moment of fun and larks. Sadly, not enough of them to support the film's running time and as such we're not recommending this to even die-hard Romeroites.

Legion ups the ante of dreadful by virtue of simply being no good at all. With God deciding to wipe out humanity by turning a goodly percentage of them into odd pointy limbed, stretchy-jawed killing machines, Paul Bettany's Archangel Michael rebels against his master and decides to help protect an unassuming waitress in a remote diner carrying a child that will turn out to be the saviour of mankind. It's an amazingly high concept excuse for an action film that doesn't have enough action in it, but if directed with a lighter hand it might have held some interest. However, the po-facedness of the film, occasionally in direct contradiction of what the script is doing, gives the film a bit of an identity crisis and scuppers any efforts to make us care about the characters. Not recommended.

That is all for now. We'll be back sometime soon, so until then keep your nose clean and if you can't be good, be lucky.