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****
Dir: Nacho Vigalondo (15, 110 mins)
Anne Hathaway stars in this bizarre monstermash/comedy drama that surprises and entertains but ultimately collapses under the weight of its central conceit. Hathaway plays Gloria, a hard drinking woman, who gets dumped by her boyfriend after one alcohol fuelled night too many. Her subsequent mental breakdown reveals that she has the ability to control a monster that is terrorising downtown Seoul kaiju style. Yep, that’s a big premise. When she reveals her bizarre abilities to her group of friends including old friend Jason Sudeikis, she gains a giant robot nemesis, also terrorising South Korea. As long as you don’t mind the idea of someone’s personal problems leading to wholesale city destruction and loss of life, Colossal kind of works. Hathaway has fun with her role, Sudeikis struggles with a plot twist, and Tim Blake Nelson and Dan Stevens are wasted but Vigalondo’s film is engaging, inventive and daring. It’s Pacific Rim with depth and human emotion triumphing over the CGI, that manages to have a drunken brawl with sad humans who also lay waste to a city. Vigalondo has already done an excellent time travel movie Timeless and Extraterrestrial a low key alien film, this is another genre busting development for an original gimmickly effective mind.
Opens April 21