Anna O'Malley

It's the Mickey Smith movie! Well, not really, but the opening could easily be a Doctor Who episode. And the main reason I'm mentioning Mickey is that this movie stars... and is directed by!... Noel Clarke.

Mickey wakes up, finds himself in a van with a trapped kid, and then they escape... only to be smacked down. He wakes up again somewhere else, kicks lots of butt, and goes down... and repeat. Eventually a story comes out of people controlling other people, but it's given out in fits and starts and is largely a mess.

Okay, I'm going to be honest, and before I realised that Noel Clarke was the director, I was intending to hammer it a lot, but now that I know he is... I know who I'm hammering. This movie takes advantage of the conceit of the mind control guy momentarily coming back to himself to have lots of different vignettes, and most of them feature Noel Clarke beating people up in gloriously choreographed sequences... that commits the horrendous directorial decision of slow motion - fastmotion - slow motion again that directors use to make action look cool when there's nothing else going on. And it's annoying. Please, directors, stop doing this.

There is also a lot of plot convenience in that the woman just happens to be there when the guy needs help, and somehow Mickey (okay, he's not called Mickey, but let's call him Mickey anyway) manages to pick up and retain skills and knowledge while under mind control, and...

The acting is fine, but everything else could use work, including the title. I have only a superficial idea why it's called The Anomaly, and I'm sure there are far better titles available.

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