Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Neil Marshall
Starring: Charlotte Kirk, Jamie Bamber, Jonathan Howard, Hadi
Khanjanpour, Leon Ockenden
Writer/director Neil Marshall burst onto the horror scene two
decades ago, drawing much praise for his first two movies. At a time
when the genre was still dominated by post-Scream teen
slashers, Marshall's 2002 debut Dog Soldiers, in which a bunch of gruff British army squaddies battle werewolves in
the Scottish highlands, was a welcome love letter to classic monster
b-movies. Marshall followed his debut with another monster movie, albeit
one with a much more sombre tone. The Descent swapped out
soldiers for a bunch of female spelunkers, all loaded with varying
degrees of personal baggage, who find themselves fighting albino
creatures in a subterranean cave system.
In the years since, Marshall has struggled to repeat the success of his
opening salvo of genre entries, though I have to confess to enjoying his
largely derided
Hellboy
reboot, a movie that owed more to the sort of British comics Marshall
(and this writer) grew up with in the 1980s than their American
cousins.
It's no surprise then to see Marshall attempt to emulate the formula of his
early films. Co-written with his romantic and creative partner
Charlotte Kirk, The Lair is something of a mashup
of Dog Soldiers and The Descent. Like the former it features a bunch of soldiers fighting
eight-foot-tall monsters, and like the latter it gives us a woman
recovering from a recent loss fighting albino creatures in a
subterranean…lair.
That woman is RAF pilot Kate Sinclair (Kirk), who stumbles upon an old
Soviet bunker when her fighter jet is shot down over a remote part of
Afghanistan. Chased into the abandoned facility by a group of gun-toting
Taliban, Kate stumbles upon what seems to be a research facility filled
with giant creatures in cryogenic chambers. When the Taliban gunfire
shatters the glass of one such chamber, a monster is released,
dispatching several of Kate's pursuers before giving chase to the downed
pilot.
Fleeing the bunker, Kate is picked up by a platoon of American
soldiers, all of whom have been assigned to this Godforsaken corner of
the world for past indiscretions. Yes, as Kate points out, they're the
Dirty Dozen. Kate tries to tell her rescuers what she witnessed, but
she's laughed off in public by eye-patch wearing Major Finch (Jamie Bamber), who privately contacts his superiors with her intel. As night falls,
the monsters congregate outside the army base like the natives of
Zulu or the gang members of
Assault on Precinct 13, leaving Kate, the Americans, three foul-mouthed SAS troops and a
captured Taliban driver to fend them off.
Unlike The Descent, which took an age for its plot to eventually kick in,
The Lair hits the ground running, with everything laid out
for us within 20 minutes. An early reference to Kate's dead husband may
have you worried that we're in for another horror movie that gets bogged
down in exploring "trauma", but Marshall has no such pretensions. He's
solely interested in offering up a John Carpenter-esque siege move with
larger-than-life characters and formidable baddies.
For the most part he succeeds, though it's more
Ghosts of Mars than Assault on Precinct 13. Marshall is self-aware of his film's (and indeed his career's) debt
to Carpenter, and in one scene he exploits our familiarity with one of
the most memorable shock moments from The Thing to prime
us for a surprise that never comes, only to then later cleverly catch us
off guard.
Miscast in
The Reckoning, her previous collaboration with Marshall, Kirk embodies the part of a
badass here, looking like an action figure brought to life in her
figure-hugging fatigues. It's a shame that she fades into the background
for much of the film, as Marshall attempts to juggle more characters
than are really necessary. Much of the humour comes courtesy of
Leon Ockendon as a Welsh cousin of the squad leader played by
Sean Pertwee in Dog Soldiers. The film's intense action scenes are soundtracked by his hilariously
understated comments, urging his men to "Kick his fucking head in,"
orders made laughable by the scale of the opposition. As the captured
Taliban driver, Hadi Khanjanpour delivers the film's most
convincing performance, and it's intriguing how a character set up
initially as a one-note villain morphs into an audience surrogate, the
one civilian among these GI Joes and Janes.
Not so convincing are the American soldiers, most of whom are played by
Brits with unconvincing accents (Bamber's is so terrible he often sounds
as though he's dubbed). Marshall spends a scene outlining the various
reasons why these men and women have been punished by being forced to
man this remote outpost, but save for one character's kleptomania, none
of their various traits actually play into the narrative. Bamber's Finch
initially seems like he's set to fill the obligatory role of the asshole
who jeopardises everyone else's chances of survival (think Paul Reiser's
Burke in Aliens), but he turns out be quite heroic. It's a nice subversion, but the
trouble is the film could have really used an asshole character to add
an extra layer of tension to the proceedings.
It wouldn't take too much tinkering with the script to elevate
The Lair above its Friday night six-pack and curry
aspirations. That said, in an era when so few mainstream genre films are
content to simply deliver a fun time, perhaps that's not such a bad
ambition.
