News: Will Smith

After doing his serious, heavy-hitting bit again in this week’s The Pursuit of Happyness (which has got him various award nominations – including for the Golden Globes, often an indicator of Oscar nominations to come), the Fresh Prince will soon be returning to the sort of territory for which we all know and love him.

We’ll have to wait a while though – his next movie isn’t due out in the UK until December. It does, however, promise to be a return to his sci-fi and action-packed best, as he plays the last man alive, desperately battling off the rest of the Earth’s bloodthirsty inhabitants, in I Am Legend. After that, 2008 will see Smith return to comedy, first playing a superhero who’s fallen out of favour with the public in Tonight, He Comes, before teaming up with Nic Cage for Time Share – a comedy about two fathers desperately trying to secure the rights to a holiday home for their families. The latter doesn’t sound overly promising, it must be said, but still – I Am Legend could be good, brainless fun.

Review: World Trade Center

UK Release: 29th September 2006

Oliver Stone uses all the tricks in the modern Hollywood film-maker’s book to convey the enormity of the attacks on New York, using disaster-movie effects and one breathtaking, digitally-created aerial shot.

With four times the budget of Paul Greengrass’s United 93, which dramatised the events of 11 September 2001 in a hand-held, documentary style, Stone’s film takes us deep into the rubble of the collapsed buildings, as two Port Authority cops (Michael Pena and an admirably subdued Nicolas Cage), await their rescue. Meanwhile, their wives, a tightly-wound Maggie Gyllenhaal and a stoic Maria Bello, play their own fraught waiting game as they watch the disaster unfold on television.

In focusing on the real-life experiences of the McLoughlin and Jimeno families the film switches from spectacle to close-up human drama — and sidesteps the politics. The outcome, though based on fact, might seem a bit contrived, and there are inevitable moments of sentimentality. But overall, Stone brings restraint to this portrayal of real-life heroism and fortitude in America’s darkest hour.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 129mins

Review by Andrew Collins