Aldis Hodge

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: The Invisible Man offers dark, intense thrills, sight unseen

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 4th March 2020

    If you stop to think about it for a minute, the very idea of an invisible person raises some questions and almost all of them are: what happens when they eat or drink or bleed or, yes, shit? At what point does something external to the person start or stop being ’also invisible’? There are a couple of different cinematic approaches to the science: Memoirs Of An Invisible Man takes a cue from H. G. Wells’ original novel and shows food filling a suddenly materialised stomach before being vomited back up again, while Hollow Man just er... never really mentions it. In a similar vein to that creepy, invisible stalker movie, this new film ignores the biological questions altogether because the title character’s vanishing act is achieved with a special suit made of... optics? Cameras? It looks like it probably works a bit like the invisible car in Die Another Day. So that’s just really clear. Good, simple logic. No questions, your honour.

  • Jack Reacher: Never Go Back

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 20th October 2016

    I still maintain that the first Jack Reacher is a decent action film, and one that has fun with tropes and clichés of the genre. Obviously, not everyone agrees with me, but I think ultimately I've been proved right. And in that sense, the original controversy surrounding Tom Cruise’s casting as Reacher didn’t make sense to me. As I’m not beholden to the source material in any way, Cruise seemed perfect as the all-star action guy with the charm and wit to carry through the self-aware humour. But, as there’s none of that here, this might just be the first instance of an actor being miscast in his own sequel.