James reviews South America with Simon Reeve on Yesterday and The Shanghai Job (2017), on Great! Movies

Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the eighteenth episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’ 

There is a short intro podcast, which you can listen to if you like. But really it’s straightforward: you suggest upcoming Freeview programs and I review them. If no-one suggests anything, then I have a look and choose something myself. 

Remember: send suggestions and comments to contact@ireviewfreeview.com or go to IReviewFreeview.com. 

And don’t forget, on IReviewFreeview.com, is the page ‘What’s up next’ where you can see what I’m intending to review in the next episode. The delight is such, words fail me!

In this episode, I will review: 

Simon Reeve’s South America on Yesterday, Tuesday May 21, 8:00pm 

The Shanghai Job (2017), on Great! Movies, Wednesday May 22, 12:45am

That’s a chap tootling around South America and what looks like a fairly standard action-thriller, maybe OK if you zap through the dull bits. I couldn’t ignore it because it’s a request and anyway - you never know - nuggets can be found in the dross. Sometimes.

By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:

Under a threatening sky, a running man holding a pistol is poised in front of a map of South America.

Considering some of the other AI images, this isn’t too bad. In fact, it fits pretty well with the programs under review.  

So, here we go.

Simon Reeve’s South America on Yesterday, Tuesday May 21, 8:00pm 

Gosh, he’s a busy lad, that stubbly Simon Reeve. Here, he’s in South America, where the opening images are stunning. A 4*4 driving serenely through a vast blue/white meld of sky, land and water. Perfect for a pretentious poster blue-tacked to a student wall.

‘This,’ Simon informs us, ‘is the Bolivian salt flats. They can be seen from the moon.’ They come to a decrepit old pickup truck, where he meets a family ankle deep in salty water, hacking away with giant axes, carving out rectangular slabs of salt. Not the sort you use for your poached eggs, but sold for cattle to lick.

It’s a hard life: they might mine 1,000 blocks a day, and make perhaps $100. For lunch, they all pile into the truck, crank it into croaking life with a starting handle, and lumber off to a monument they have built: a sturdy, chunky set of steps, rising a few solid meters above the endless plain. A short, stubby stairway to nowhere made of salt: after all, what else is there?

Simon forges on, giving out nuggets of information like a squirrel dispensing his nuts. Under the layer of salt lies a greater treasure: lithium, needed for the batteries that power everything from mobile phones to cars to laptops to all things electric and moveable. Can Bolivia become a green powerhouse? I wouldn’t count on it. Someone will exploit someone, and no-one except the rich will be richer.

Simon is now in Brazil, looking at mega-farming, vast swathes of Savanna and forest vanishing. Disappearing at the rate of 7 trees a second. That’s my entire garden gone quicker than I can snap my fingers.

He visits the Pantanal, a wetlands area bigger than England, and meets a conservationist who helpfully cups his hand and explains the Pantanal is like a soup bowl, now surrounded by farms, but here’s a man with an oxcart, come at night, to carry them away. In the morning sunlight all is revealed: he’s on a old-fashioned Pantanal farm, an island of green shored up by hard work and hope. Before the flood they had 17,000 acres. Now there is just 700.

Simon dispenses some comforting bromides and looks at a jaguar sunning itself on a road before, ruminating about eco tourism, he hops over the border into Paraguay, to visit a group of outsiders. 

Parked outside a modern looking supermarket are neat little horse-and-cart buggies, one with a cement mixer in tow.

Disingenuously, he says ‘that’s the first time I’ve seen a cement mixer being towed by a horse and cart!’ for all the world as if this wasn’t all pre-arranged by a gofer with a laptop.

Anyway, - as he well knows - it’s the Mennonites, an anabaptist subset, who wear broad-brimmed hats, bibbed overalls and farm away like billy-oh. Think of the Amish from ‘Witness’ and add in tractors and a slightly less rigid take on technology. 

For a while, I’m sort of tempted by the simple lifestyle on show. Things are primitive, but not that primitive. Community! Friends! Family! Belonging! What we all want. But then there’s a two minute visit to a classroom, with the children dressed like little dolls, all lined up on pine forms, quiet and obedient, while a teacher holds a bible and talks about Christianity as if it’s a given fact God exists. So I despair at this shutting down of inquiring minds and decide their world would reject me like the incompetent sod I am.

But Simon moves on - no flies on this lad - to the Chaco, a dry forest larger than Spain, to visit yet another Mennonite community, a small town nestling in the vast forest: a bastion of neat-minded urban civilisation with manicured trees and straight streets.

And here there are cattle ranches, the forest tamed and flattened to graze herds of beef, grown to the right size ready to be taken away on giant trucks with a zillion wheels.

Simon is told some of the original natives are still at large, pushed deep into the forest. So he goes in search, edging his way through trees as spiky as a dinosaur. His guide points to a couple of branches with a ‘Y’ fork on the end. ‘Pillers’ he says. To hold up shelters.

And that’s all there is, the evidence hardly discernable to even a knowing eye.

They do not find the natives gone native, and with a final, heartfelt pean to a disappearing, if not disappeared hunter gatherer existence, Simon signs off and the credits roll.

Now …. whenever I watch travel programs of this worthy ilk, I become increasingly sad: a mixture of appalled realisation of vital things vanishing, mixed with guilt for my privileged life-style. I might only live in an annex so small four people need an extra chair, but with a button click I have instant heat, music, food and access to the greater Googleverse. I can get in my car and drive to walk along cliff-tops before having a nice cup of tea and a bun, driving home and slumping in front of my TV, another day lived, another useless 24 hours put safely into the past while the greater world rots around me.

Compared to my comfortable middle class childhood of the 1950s, with hand-made Christmas decorations, ice on the inside of windows and dairy products kept one step away from rancid in cupboards aired with perforated zinc, I live like a minor prince. And contrasted to people with destroyed lives, huddled in the remnants of a slaughtered forest, I live like a king.

And on that uplifting thought, we move on to:

The Shanghai Job (2017), on Great! Movies, Wednesday May 22, 12:45am

Thank you so, so much, Doddy, for suggesting this action/thriller starring Orlando Bloom proving he too can channel Micheal Caine’s bad boy accent. 

God, ‘The Shanghai job’ is a load of derivative crumb, taking all the common tropes of the modern action thriller, lining them up like predictable wibbly-wobbly toy robots, shouting go! and hoping they don’t fall over, little legs waving in the air, as they amble their way unconvincingly towards a totally predictable finish.

So there’s Orlando himself, clad in a white T-shirt neatly sculpting his muscles, barking out orders like a bad-tempered chef. ‘Do this!’ ‘Do that!’ ‘get out of the car!’ ‘Get into the car!’

And his entirely predictable team of three: 

A: The older chap, but with all the moves, able to disable with a single punch Ka-pow!

B: The sassy, beautiful girl, expert at martial arts, driving and pouting;

And finally C: The teenage whizz-kid, socially awkward but - of course - a genius with computers and able to pilot a drone while balanced on the back of a speeding pop-pop-pop motor scooter.

So that’s the good guys. On the bad guy side there’s a beautiful woman with extended artificial fingernails, various shifty businessmen, and an interchangeable cohort of musclemen with motorbikes.

And between them is an honest cop who thinks our heroes are the bad guys. But he comes round in the end, so don’t fret.

Rounding out this depressing tick-a-known-character cast we have the hero’s beautiful and still loved former girl-friend, who has the thankless job of hanging about until she’s kidnapped at the last knockings and held as a hostage. But worry ye not! She’s rescued, of course. By the hero, of course. And becomes his GF again. Of course.

In order to escape this tedious avalanche of oh God, not this rubbish again, let’s consider the scribbled down on the back of an envelope plot…. (groan)

As I have said several times in podcasts previous, action film narratives are seldom designed to make coherent sense: they are simply a series of excuses to move the action from one set-piece to the next.  

‘The Shanghai Job’ starts with a gaunt, white haired young man sitting glumly in a security van as it makes its way along a Shanghai motorway. Yep, it’s Orlando Bloom, but so far removed from the Elf in ‘Lord of the Rings’ or the ruler of Jerusalem in ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ or even his role as a philandering chap killed by pitchfork in ‘Midsomer Murders’ you have to look several times to make sure.

Is he guarding something or being taken to prison? Before minds can be made up there is an explosion. The van is flipped over, motorbikes whizz up and something is stolen.

Yep, he was protecting an artwork and so now his reputation is in tatters, but who cares as it’s the opening credits, followed by ‘12 months later.’ Now he’s in a bar slugging down whiskeys, getting into a fight and hurrah! The film is starting for real.

By the way, in case you missed it, the ‘hurrah’ was an ironic post-watch insert, meaning ‘hurrah! the sooner it starts the sooner it ends.’

Orlando and his motley crew are given a job transporting a valuable vase (‘it’s the soul of China!’) to London, but of course it all goes wrong, with yet more men on motorbikes appearing and the vase changing hands a few times and somewhere along the line I’ve lost the will to live.

Really, typing this is like wading through wet sand, or eating couscous or pretending opera is anything other than dull. I got an interesting book the other day: I could read that. Or pick fluff from my naval or do a bit of pottering. I am, I have discovered, a world-class potterer.

But as for reviewing this film, my brain has stopped functioning, overcome by the relentless cliches, trite plotting and tired direction. They have so obviously run out of ideas they’re not even trying anymore. 

Take the GF rescue, as mentioned earlier. There he is and there she is, deep inside the lair of the beast, surrounded by heavies presumably there to make sure he doesn’t misbehave.

So what happens? He grabs her arm, hits someone and they run away. Bing bing bong and they’ve escaped!

It reminds me of an old tale from the days of weekly penny dreadful magazines. A writer was ill, but had left his hero in truly dire circumstances: chained to a post, surrounded by cannibals, about to be lowered into a pot of boiling water, that sort of thing. There was no conceivable escape. But they had to publish! No one could think of a way out. At the last minute the writer turned up. They gathered round to see how the escape was made, what ingenious plot twist did he have in store?

He sat down and wrote: ‘..with one bound Jack was free.’ (grunt)

As I said: they’ve stopped trying. As in life, it’s hard to keep going when it’s obvious from the first glimpse of the script it’s a bummer.

However I need some paragraphs to fill up the time. So maybe I’ll speculate on why some action films work and some don’t. Why the first ‘Raiders of the lost arc’ is a better film than ‘Commando’ but, in turn, ‘Commando’ is superior to that dud where Arnie plays a helicopter pilot.

Or maybe I won’t. Is there any sense in trying to rank films? When even the existence of existence is subjective, is there any point in wondering why ‘UP!’ is a masterpiece, ‘No Country for old men’ isn’t a masterpiece and Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’ was as forgettable as a cough in the dark?

Ooo - stop press! I have just remembered one more thing about ‘The Shanghai job:’ it finished with outtakes, which is never, ever a good sign. Rubbing your nose into the artificiality of it all is disrespectful. I mean, c’mon now: if you as the viewer have made the effort of suspending your disbelief, having a film jump up at the end shouting ya boo sucks, fooled you! Is a belittle too far.

And that misquoted war film title concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’

Don’t forget, contact me through the website Ireviewfreeview.com or email contact@ireviewfreeview.com.

And, also on IreviewFreeview.com, click on the page tagged ‘What’s up next.’ and see what programs I’ll be reviewing next time.

Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.