The Caffeine Chronicles: Attendant Review

Last week I became privy to a not particularly well-kept secret: the latest addition to London's burgeoning independent café empire is located in a restored Victorian toilet. I'm not taking the piss [that's enough loo jokes—Ed]. Lovingly cleaned and tarted up, Attendant opened for business a few weeks ago and offers breakfast, brunch, lunch and afternoon tea. Because where better to quaff your coffee than in front of a shiny porcelain urinal?

Attendant, Fitzrovia

Attendant is located on the corner of Foley Street and Great Titchfield Street in Fitzrovia, just up the road from the Riding House Café. Just look for the lovely typography on the sign and head downstairs. If you're in a rush, you can ring the bell at street level and the staff will bring your order out to you, but I'd recommend paying a visit.

While I waited for the others, I ordered a double macchiato and, because it was Good Friday, a sparkling Mini Egg blondie. The lunch special of the day was a meatball sandwich, which looked amazing, but sadly I had already eaten (I believe pulled pork was on the menu earlier in the week). The coffee is from Caravan and was very good: rich, smooth and creamy. The blondie, which contained all manner of unhealthy ingredients, such as marshmallows and edible glitter, was chewy and very tasty.

Mini Egg blondie and double macchiato at Attendant

It is, of course, the setting that makes Attendant unique, and the café has been decorated with immaculate attention to detail, from the green bar stools that match the original wall tiling, to the beautifully spotless urinals themselves, the vintage lamps, and the tiled walls that have been left in a carefully distressed state. It's a bit of a gimmick and I wasn't surprised when The Bro told me the owner was a PR guru, but if you can back up your USP with great food and coffee, then why should that matter? 

I lav the décor!

I'll definitely be back for more coffee and sweet treats, and I'm also keen to try out the lunch menu. The only minor problem is that ironically, they don't actually have a customer loo.

Attendant. 27a Foley Street (downstairs), London, W1W 6DY (Tube: Oxford Circus or Goodge Street). Website. Twitter. Instagram.

Do As I Say II: Trance Review

I've seen most of Danny Boyle's films—hell, I even watched the London Olympics opening ceremony and I don't really go for all that shiz—but it's his more recent works, Slumdog and 127 Hours. A somewhat controversial opinion, I know, but I'm not proud. Boyle's latest film, Trance, is what he and the crew did "to keep [themselves] sane during the Olympics." A funny description of a film that's more than a little tricksy and has almost as many possible worlds and possible realities as Inception, perhaps. But I enjoyed Trance a great deal. It's slick, stylish and just good fun.

Danny Boyle introduces his new film Trance at a preview at the BFI

As the film opens, Simon (James McAvoy), a young auctioneer, tells us how difficult it is to steal a painting these days thanks to the evolutionary arms race between the auction houses and the thieves. The auction houses all have their drills, he says, and sure enough, when some hoodlums burst into Delancy's just after the hammer has fallen on a £27-million Goya painting, Simon puts his training to good use and attempts to stop hoodlum-in-chief Franck (Vincent Cassel) by tasering him, getting knocked out by Franck's gun in the process. It soon transpires that Simon may not be the have-a-go hero he initially seemed as we learn that he was working with Franck and the gang to steal the painting. The only trouble is that when Franck knocked him out, he developed amnesia and can't remember what he did with the painting.

The doctors don't offer any useful solutions, so Franck presents Simon with a list of hypnotherapists and tells him to pick one. No, not Paul McKenna. Oh, OK, I guess I'll go for Elizabeth—the one who looks like Rosario Dawson. Of course, Simon can't tell Elizabeth he needs her to help him recover a stolen painting, so having just about managed to register under a false name, he asks her to help him find his car keys, which she does remarkably quickly. And before you know it, she is a part of Team Hoodlum, as they all try to work out where the painting is.

But nothing is quite as it seems and it remains unclear who, if anyone, we can trust and what exactly is real and what is part of a dream, a flashback or a hypnosis-fuelled hallucination. Images and scenes we think we have already watched re-appear later on with different meanings and a different perspective. When you say that someone is an unreliable narrator, there is usually some sort of benchmark against which we can judge them. In Trance, this doesn't really happen, which I think makes it all the more interesting. I'm still not entirely sure exactly how it all fits together and why, but that's OK; my brain will keep thinking about it for a while.

Cassel is great as the very French counterpoint to McAvoy's nervous and nice (or is he?) Simon. He is by turns chilled out, spending half the film parading round his amazing apartment barely dressed, and bad-ass. I like McAvoy a lot, but although it may be due to the slippery nature of his character, he wasn't as convincing as I felt he needed to be.

When I reviewed Iain M. Banks's novel Surface Detail, I highlighted some of the similarities to Inception, as well as 127 Hours. After re-reading my post, some of the ideas behind Trance wouldn't be out of place in this book either. Trance is probably too action-packed and covers too many themes to be considered very deep, but doesn't claim to be particularly deep either. The soundtrack was fab and visually, it's a stunning film. A lot of the scenes were shot in my old manor, Marylebone, while Simon's high-rise apartment is supposed to be in the Docklands. They were shooting for two days directly outside my office in King's Cross and I even saw Vincent Cassel when I was heading out for a run, but it looked like the scenes were being shot indoors and I couldn't work out which ones they might have been.


I saw the film at a preview at the BFI last night and I thought Danny Boyle was going to be doing a Q&A at the end. Sadly, he only came to do a brief introduction, although the BFI did include a short interview with him in the programme notes. "Directors usually think they're giving too many clues, and everyone else says, 'No, you're not giving enough'," he says, before explaining that in Trance, a lot of the editing involved putting clues that had been removed back in. "The idea is that you shouldn't have to watch the film twice to understand it, but that if you do, it'll still make sense." I would like to watch Trance again at some point, and it's definitely well worth the cinema ticket price, even in central London.

Do As I Say: Compliance Review

I was a little nervous about talking a few friends into seeing Craig Zobel's new movie Compliance with me when they would have preferred to see Oz the Great and Powerful. I was fairly sure I would find it interesting, if hard to watch, but I was worried they might just find it too depressing. In the end, we all came out with similar "fascinating, compelling and disturbing" verdicts. Oh, and only a handful of people in our screening left before the end.

Almost all of the action in Compliance takes place in a fast-food restaurant, in which the manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) and employees all have their secrets and their vulnerabilities. It is a busy Friday night and a cock up involving an errant freezer door and $1,500 of wasted bacon stocks have left everyone on edge. Sandra receives a call from a man who claims to be a cop (Pat Healy) and who tells her that he is with a member of the public who is accusing a ChickWich employee of stealing from her purse. The employee in question is Becky (Dreama Walker, taking a break from wreaking havoc on Peter Florrick's re-election campaign), who is hauled out to the back room, where the caller, who says his name is Officer Daniels, asks Sandra to do increasingly inappropriate things in the name of investigating the alleged theft. It starts with a strip search and, as Daniels tells Sandra to draft in others, including her fiancé (Bill Camp) in to take their parts in the rapidly unfolding horror show, it soon gets a lot more creepy.

Sandra's attitude towards Becky shifts scarily quickly too. When she first tells the shift manager Marti (Ashlie Atkinson) what is going on, she explains that a cop is claiming that Becky stole the money; later on, she tells her uncomfortable fiancé that "Becky stole something" even though the extensive strip searches and a search of Becky's bag yielded no evidence to suggest she had stolen anything. As for why the police weren't sending anyone out to ChickWich to talk to Becky and possibly make an arrest, Daniels says the theft is part of a wider investigation into Becky's older brother and his supposed involvement in drugs. The cops were all too busy collecting evidence at Becky's house, he says.

And Daniels does always have an answer for everything. He uses tactics often employed by psychics: when he first tells Sandra about the theft, he says, "you have a young, blonde employee...about 19 years old," and it is Sandra who provides Becky's name. Sometimes he messes up: at one point he says to Becky's co-worker Kevin that she stole the money from the till rather than from the customer. Remarkably, though, he gets away with it. We would all like to think that we wouldn't be so gullible, that we would question the things that we were told by a stranger on the phone who has offered no proof as to who he really is or any evidence to suggest that what he says is true, and that we wouldn't let things go as far as Sandra does. As I mentioned earlier, though, all of the employees are feeling vulnerable—they don't want to lose their job, for example—and this makes it easier for the caller to manipulate them.

The events of the film are "inspired by" the real-life case of a man who, during the 1990s and 2000s, pulled the same scam on a number of fast-food restaurants and grocery stores. The controversial experiment by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s reveals the extent to which people automatically obey authority figures, even if they believe that this obedience is causing physical or mental harm to others. Although this study would never get ethics approval now, a more recent study conducted a replication where the participants showed highly compliant and obedient behaviour in a virtual environment. It's easy, you see, to sit and watch Compliance and say, "I would never behave like that," but the scary thing about the film is that we don't know how we would react.

Compliance is only 90 minutes long and it plays out almost in real time. It is tense, compelling, thought-provoking and deeply unsettling. Dowd's Sandra is the most complex character—Walker doesn't have a lot to do other than sit around clad only in an apron and look scared—and determining who is a victim and who is to blame (and for what) is far from easy is this morally dubious field. I thought it was a decent movie, but if I'm honest, I'm more interested in the behavioural and psychological principles that underlie it than in this specific story. In places, it reminded me of some of the more annoying Michael Haneke trademarks—like when Paul in Funny Games turns to the camera and chides the audience for their complicity with his torturing of Ann and George. And much as I found Compliance interesting, I would probably have got more out of a well-written behavioural psychology book; luckily, Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test is next on my list.

Time Flies When You're Having Fundi

It's to Fundi's credit that I ordered one of their pizzas from their KERB stall at lunchtime today, even though I'd eaten pizza once already this week at Caravan, and even though I was craving my usual Friday Bleecker Street cheeseburger. But I could hardly turn down an Oxford-based purveyor of wood-fired pizza, and besides, their pizzas looked really good.

Fundi's KERB pitch

£6 will buy you a margherita with delicious mozzarella and tasty tomato sauce. More interesting toppings are also available, but weren't up my street. I'm a purist when it comes to pizza, anyway; if you have good-quality ingredients and a wood-fired oven, you don't need a lot of fancy toppings (take note, Caravan). My pizza was just about the right size for me, although I was pretty hungry and couldn't manage the brownie I had bought for pudding. The base itself was thin, but with "puffy" crusts that are just crispy enough.

The art of pizza

Overall, a fab pizza, and as I haven't seen Homeslice at KERB for a while, it's good to have another great pizza option in the mix. Of course, what would be even more amazing would be if I could have half a Fundi pizza with a mini Bleecker Street burger—a Funcker Street burgza, if you will. Because there are few first world problems more challenging than whether to order pizza or a burger from your favourite street-food market as a Friday lunchtime treat.

The finished product

Fundi will be doing a few test dates around London over the next few weeks, including KERB's market at the Gherkin on 21 March, and they also pop up at various Oxfordshire venues. Maman spotted them at the Library pub on Oxford's Cowley Road recently. Oh, and if you're wondering, and because I'm a linguist I was, the name comes from the Swahili for "person skilled in maintaining or making specialised equipment" and the plural of the Italian for "anatomic nomenclature for bottom i.e. crust."

Fundi @ KERB and elsewhere. Check out the "find us" section of their website or try their Twitter feed.

Very Bad Pharma

After the tension-establishing opening scene of Steven Soderbergh's new movie, it felt as though Side Effects was going to be another Contagion, Soderbergh's antepenultimate film, in that it was shaping up to be a dispassionate but scientifically accurate depiction of a particular medical issue. In the case of Side Effects, this meant portraying bad behaviour at all levels within the US pharmaceutical industry. Drug companies put out irresponsible actors and take doctors out for lunch. Doctors accept payment from these companies for "consulting" work. Everyone is tired and overworked. Mistakes sometimes happen. It's an interesting and important topic, but one that may work better in a Ben Goldacre invective than in a movie.

Fortunately, about halfway through the film, a series of twists move the film away from this clinical, matter-of-fact approach, finally making it earn its "psychological thriller" categorisation. The film started to drag a little towards the end of the first half—I wasn't in need of a course in bad pharma 101—but it really picked up in the second half. It portrays a world where there are few heroes and few who act altruistically. The performances by Rooney Mara as a young woman suffering from depression, and Jude Law as her psychiatrist, were complex and interesting, and overall, Side Effects is an intelligent, engaging and thought-provoking film. It's hard to write much more about Side Effects without giving too much; I have tried not to spoil the film completely, but if you plan to watch it, you'll enjoy it more if you read no further.

As the film opens, we see a pristine New York apartment sullied by large splatters of blood. Flashing back to three months earlier, Emily (Mara) is waiting for her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) to be released from prison. He has been serving a four-year sentence for insider trading and Emily hasn't taken it well. She knows she is supposed to be happy about his return but she can't quite shake the "poisonous cloud" from her mind. She leaves work one day and very coolly drives her car at full speed into a wall. Later, in hospital, psychiatrist Jonathan Banks (Law) suggests she stay in hospital for a while to recover, but Emily insists on being released, promising she will come to see him several times a week.

After consulting with her previous shrink Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Dr Banks prescribes a series of antidepressants for Emily, all of which have pretty nasty side effects. Emily mentions that her friend recommended a new drug called Ablixa, which is being advertised heavily and which happens to be made by the company for whom Banks is a "medical consultant." Initially, Ablixa makes Emily feel great, but then a whole load of other side effects kick in, most troublingly her sleep walking, or, sometimes, sleep cooking. Meanwhile Martin tries to rehabilitate his life. He is thinking of setting up a new financial services company with someone he met in prison, but his attention is distracted by his wife's downward spiral. And Dr Banks isn't without problems of his own. His wife, a former investment banker, has been made redundant and they are struggling to pay her son's private school fees (hence the need for him to take on the pharma consulting on top of his heavy case load).

Then, something terrible happens. Something that changes the course of the whole movie. Questions of guilt and blame come up. If a person does something while on medication, do you blame the person, the drug or the doctor who prescribed it? As we discover more about the whole murky situation, our empathy shifts rapidly among the characters, and it remains uncertain until the end exactly which characters are the worst of a bad bunch, although as the credits begin to roll, we wonder whether we can trust any of them, and who, if anyone, is really crazy. After all, "we all go a little mad sometimes."

Side Effects is slick and stylish, complex and compelling. Zeta-Jones, and her über-throaty accent, may have been the weak link in a generally strong cast, but this didn't detract from a well-made, enjoyable movie. I've come to expect no less from Soderbergh's movies and I think it would be a great shame if this really does end up being his last. If you are interested in finding out more about the murkiness of the pharmaceutical industry, you may like Ben Goldacre's latest book Bad Pharma; I found it quite dry, especially compared to Bad Science, but it is also very informative.

The Caffeine Chronicles: Notes

Update (July 2016): This branch of Notes has now closed, but you can still visit the King's Cross and St Martin's Lane cafés. 

Notes is a coffee shop that has been on my to-try list for quite some time. They have two outposts in central London and one, I've just discovered, not very far north of my office in King's Cross. I've walked past the Covent Garden branch on Wellington Street several times but it always felt like it was the wrong side of Covent Garden for my Marylebone days. Now, though, it's one of the first good purveyors of coffee I pass after crossing the Thames on my way into the city centre, and I finally stopped in for coffee and a cake on Sunday afternoon.

Notes, Covent Garden

It was fairly busy inside, but not to the extent that I had to wait for a table. The décor is fairly standard indie-espresso-bar 101 (exposed pipes, low-hanging light bulbs, etc), but with a few colourful touches, like the bright stools at the perching tables near the bar. I took a moment to eye up the La Marzocco machine, ordered a double macchiato and went to sit down. I happened to be sitting next to the cakes, which meant I then got up again to order a blondie with berries as well.

Double mac attack

A little sweet treat

The blondie was great—its dense, moist sweetness contrasted nicely with the slight sharpness of the fruit. My macchiato was also good. They use Square Mile coffee and it was was rich and flavoursome. As is often the case, there was more milk than I prefer. I should get into the habit of asking the barista to just "mark" it with the milk (as the English translation of macchiato suggests) and add a tiny dollop of foam, but I figure it's a good way of gauging the truly excellent baristas. At £2.80 for a double macchiato, the coffee is verging on the pricey side, although if I'm sitting and lingering over my drink for a while, I don't mind paying a little more.

Spot Notes' famous new neighbour, Balthazar, in the background

As well as serving good coffee, Notes is also a café and a wine bar. They run a whole series of events, from a home (coffee) brewing class, to wine tastings and jazz nights. The Covent Garden branch is a airy, well-designed space and I would definitely be keen to see what Notes has to offer of an evening.

The tempting window's of Balthazar's boulangerie

The Covent Garden branch also happens to be across the street from the new London version of Balthazar. You won't be able to get a table there for a while, and even the accompanying bakery and patisserie was pretty full when I walked past. The cakes and pastries looked great though.

Notes. 36 Wellington Street, London, WC2E 7BD (Tube: Covent Garden). Website. Twitter.

Packing a Punch

Last night, I went to a preview of Eran Creevy's new film Welcome to the Punch at the BFI. There was supposed to be a Q&A with one of the stars, James McAvoy, afterwards but before the film started, we were told that he was sick and wasn't going to make it. It was hard to be too disappointed, though, when Mark Strong showed up at the end along with Creevy and producer Rory Aitken to discuss the film with Chris Hewitt from Empire.

Rolling with the punches: Rory Aitken, Mark Strong, Eran Creevy and Chris Hewitt

I didn't see Creevy's film début, Shifty, although I didn't exactly avoid it either, and I was drawn to Welcome to the Punch by the impressive cast list and the stylish trailer. The film opens with a slick, stylised night-time chase sequence around the City of London. With the bright lights of the big city, the eerie blue-ish glow and Harry Escott's eerie electronic score, you wonder for a second if you've walked into some kind of Tron prequel. Detective Max Lewinsky (McAvoy) is trying to intercept bad guy Jacob Sternwood (Strong) and his gas-mask-wearing cronies from running off with the spoils of their latest heist. Ignoring orders from his superiors to wait for back up, Lewinsky follows them into an underground car park and tries to knock Sternwood off his motorbike. But unlike Lewinsky, Sternwood has a gun and he isn't afraid to use it. Instead of killing the detective, however, Sterngood's moral code dictates that he "only" shoot him in the knee.

Three years later and Lewinsky is waiting for an opportunity to bring Sternwood in, and luckily for him, Sternwood's teenage son Ruan (Elyes Gabel) has just been picked up at City Airport, bleeding half to death, and taken to hospital. After Lewinsky's new boss Nathan (Daniel Mays) bodges an operation to catch Sternwood at his current hiding place in Iceland, Lewinsky is determined to prove to police chief Thomas Geiger (David Morrissey) that he hasn't lost his edge and is back on top form after his injury. As he and his partner Sarah (Andrea Riseborough) try to put into action a plan to catch Sternwood senior, Lewinsky gradually comes to realise that things are not as straightforward as they seem (are they ever? Cf Broken City and pretty much every other crime thriller), as some of his colleagues turn out to have links to Sternwood and his associates. Meanwhile, Geiger wants to force the government to allow his Raid Squad (invented by Creevy, but based on the Flying Squad) to be allowed to carry weapons, which means schmoozing his ambitious former press officer Jane (Natasha Little), now the campaign manager for the shadow home secretary.

Welcome to the Punch manages to pack in the punches in its 100-minute length. It blurs the boundaries between the goodies and the baddies, and Sternwood and Lewinsky, despite operating on opposite sides of the law, turn out to have more in common than they might have thought. It's a violent film, but the violence is often very stylised, with some scenes borrowing heavily from the likes of Guy Ritchie. I enjoyed the first hour or so but the final act, and particularly the last fifteen minutes, felt too rushed—the big reveal of what exactly has been going on and why took up roughly 30 seconds of dialogue and is complicated enough that I wanted to make a flowchart. More character development might have been nice too. In fact, in the original version of Creevy's script, there was a lot more back story of the two leads. Sternwood had regular panic attacks, for example, and we found out more about what happened to his wife that led him to be estranged from his son—an event that also gave him more in common with Lewinsky, apparently. These scenes were filmed but cut. As Mark Strong put it in the Q&A, you have to find a balance between maintaining the momentum of an action-driven film and creating credible, multilayered characters. Creevy said that Strong and McAvoy's acting was good enough that the back story wasn't needed. I'm inclined to disagree but I tend to prefer the "thriller" to the "action" element of these films...

That isn't to say there aren't things to like about Welcome to the Punch. The acting is generally great, with the two leads and, of course, David Morrissey standing out, with good performances from Johnny Harris as henchman #1, and Peter Mullan as Sternwood's best friend and trusted advisor. When I first saw Mullan's character sitting in the back of a car, I thought for a second it was Alan Sugar, but that may be because of all of the long, sweeping shots of the London skyline, particularly of the City and Canary Wharf and particularly by night, just like the opening credits of The Apprentice. And in general, the film is slick and sexy and definitely fulfils what Creevy kept describing in the Q&A as the "aspirational thriller" he sought to make.

Other things that emerged in the Q&A included the difficulty of gaining permission to film in Canary Wharf and the City. They were initially turned down, as the powers that be were worried about the film portraying criminals running amok in their 'hood, but in the end, they liked the vision and decided the film would probably be good PR. Having Ridley Scott on board as executive producer probably didn't hurt either. Strong talked about the training warehouse, which housed all sorts of different weapons—most of them decommissioned. He was encouraged to pick the weapons he thought his character would use. Then, he had to get a trainer. "I thought I was old enough to have avoided [films that require] that," he said. There is a fight scene between his and McAvoy's characters in the back of a van, where stunt doubles and choreography would have been too difficult, so they just went for it, apparently. Meanwhile, Creevy talked about stepping up from a £100,000 film to something like Welcome to the Punch, with a bigger, bigger-name cast and so much more to balance. He had to learn to adapt to the needs of each actor, from Harris's high-octane, slightly scary and very sweary on-set press-ups to Riseborough's desire to be called by her character's name whenever cameras were rolling, and Mark "I'm quite zen" Strong, who knows how to pace himself.

If It Ain't Broke...

The trouble with including specific dates in a movie, particularly if the date falls between filming and the release date, is that you can get caught out by any significant events that may transpire in real life. In Allen Hughes' new film Broken City, for instance, dodgy deals and a general state of corruption would be the least of New York City Mayor Nicholas Hostetler (Russell Crowe)'s worries in the final days of his re-election campaign, because the film is set in the last week of October 2012, while New York was  being battered by Superstorm Sandy. It is lucky, then, that I am not one of those people who seem to think that movies have to be 100% factually accurate at all times—a pretty contradictory notion.

A corrupt bargain? Russell Crowe, Jeffrey Wright and Mark Wahlberg in Broken City. Image.

The titular broken city is certainly more similar to Gotham than real-life New York—so we hope, at any rate. At the start of the film, we see Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg) in court, accused of the murder of a man he shot while on duty as a cop. He believed the man in question was responsible for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, although the man was cleared of the charges. He is freed by the judge, but Mayor Hostetler and police chief Carl Fairbanks (Jeffrey Wright) reveal that they have evidence that could bring Taggart's innocence into question, and he is forced to leave the police force. Seven years later, Taggart is working as a private detective. He has quit drinking and is living happily with his actress girlfriend Natalie (Natalie Martinez), whom we saw hugging Taggart at his trial when the judge announced he was free to go. Her back story and the history of her relationship with Taggart turn out to be tied in to what happens later, albeit more tenuously than the film makers probably intended.

Out of the blue, Taggart receives a call from the mayor, who, he discovers, wants him to investigate Hostetler's wife Cathleen (Catherine Zeta-Jones). She is having an affair, Hostetler says, and he wants Taggart to find the other man before the mayoral election in a few days' time. His campaign against his idealistic rival Jack Valliant (Barry Pepper) isn't going as well as Hostetler has hoped and he wants to make sure his opposition can't use his wife's betrayal against him. Even without the $50,000 fee, it's an offer Taggart knows he can't refuse, but the further he digs, the more deeply he is ensnared in the city's corrupt ruling class. Because nothing is as simple as it seems, of course.

Except Broken City ends up being more straightforward than Hughes would like to think. It is a fairly solid, paint-by-numbers thriller that entertains but never really surprises. The script could have been sharper and wittier; the acting is adequate, although no one really shines. I generally like Mark Wahlberg and he is perfectly likeable in this film, but it isn't his best work; Crowe is suitably creepy and menacing, but both he and Zeta-Jones seem to be calling in their performances. Jeffrey Wright and Kyle Chandler, who plays Valliant's campaign manager, are good, but neither gets enough screen time to really excel. If, like me, you enjoy political or crime thrillers, you'll probably enjoy Broken City but it's definitely not one you need to rush out to catch at the cinema. And sadly, it may be the best Mark Wahlberg film for a while, judging by his IMDb page.