With its tongue firmly placed in its cheek, Neil Marshall's The Lair is the established action-horror director returning to familiar territory concerning his career with decidedly diminishing returns. Cut from the exact cloth as cult favourite Dog Soldiers (which, in turn, was a deliberate homage of John McTiernan's Predator), Marshall's latest sees the director idly treading water whilst openly and flatly stealing from his early playbook which first brought him recognition.
Where the high-concept "werewolves vs. military" bluntness of Dog Soldiers' charmed as a novel throwback to a time when the horror genre was preoccupied with self-aware slashers and a growing interest in international cinema, The Lair, emerging two decades later with a similar blueprint, cannot help but feel like a stale retread. With no new spin to offer other than a tinge of sardonic humour and ironic detachment, to watch The Lair is to be constantly reminded of how far it falls short of the movies it brazenly attempts to emulate.
Set in the fatigued years of the protracted War in Afghanistan, Royal Air Force pilot Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk, who scripted Marshall's previous The Reckoning and serves as cowriter and executive producer on The Lair) is shot down by Taliban forces while deep into enemy territory on a recon mission. Pursued by her attackers, she takes shelter in an abandoned Soviet black site laboratory, a subterranean labyrinth of genetic experimentation home to an army of humanoid monstrosities waiting in stasis. If the ponderous setup of The Lair has reminded you of The Descent, rest assured Marshall is merely demonstrating he has returned to his roots within the genre.
Likewise, when Sinclair escapes the cavernous medical facility and is picked up by Hook (Jonathan Howard) and his ragtag squad of American soldiers, they head to an outpost for, in the film's corny parlance, "misfits, fuckups and outcasts" to strategize — the evocation of Dog Soldiers in tone and premise is highly calculated. The self-reference on display is as if the director was anticipating audience reactions to be heavy in "return to form"-type sentiment after his recent efforts that strayed away from his brand of monster movie (Hellboy, The Reckoning) fared poorly.
Predictably, these scaly vestiges of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan awaken and pursue Sinclair, thus beginning a bloody, raucous, series of action set pieces that only serve to highlight how well-worn Marshall's formula has become. Written with an ironic approach to genre where any potential horror or thrill falls in service of an overbearing and detached sense of humour, The Lair borders on accidental parody in how clichéd and formulaic its dialogue and characters feel. The film is populated with walking, talking archetypes (and occasional stereotypes) rather than characters. They're one-dimensional and loaded with forced quips to defuse any and all tension from a given scene — perhaps in some misguided emulation of McTiernan's Predator. The incessant winking and nudging The Lair pulls after any moment that had the potential to scare or excite quickly becomes grating, even with the cast respectably committing to the bit to a fault.
Of course, being caught halfway between sincere throwback and ironic parody could be overlooked if the film fulfilled the basic requirements of this specific subgenre with arresting action and grisly horror. But even in this department, The Lair falls woefully short. Marshall's action scenes are frenetic yet dramatically inert, and often murky and illegible through Luke Bryant's shaky and dim cinematography (his second collaboration with Marshall after The Reckoning). Characters get eviscerated in an increasingly brutal (and occasionally impressively practical) manner the more the monsters advance, but due to the flippant tone and dull form, these sequences leave little impact.
Even the creature designs — hulking alien-human hybrids with inky black skin, sharp claws and an unhinged jaws — are bland and uninspired. They don't exactly strike terror so much as they humorously remind one of Tom Hardy's Venom. Ultimately, it's a challenge to get into a scene of desperate, bloody combat between monsters and soldiers when every one of them ends in an overly-telegraphed joke which inevitably falls flat.
Resting on his laurels, Marshall's The Lair is a formulaic pseudo-homage to better films — not only to earlier examples of the action-horror genre like Predator, which Marshall clearly admires yet patronizes, but also to the foundational films of his career, which, in comparison, feel worlds apart in terms of craft and originality. I understand the desire to recapture the spark of creativity found within the genre that gave Marshall's early work such cultural endurance, but the lack of evolution or even experimentation with the formula makes The Lair feel like a bad cover rather than a fresh new single.
(Shudder)Where the high-concept "werewolves vs. military" bluntness of Dog Soldiers' charmed as a novel throwback to a time when the horror genre was preoccupied with self-aware slashers and a growing interest in international cinema, The Lair, emerging two decades later with a similar blueprint, cannot help but feel like a stale retread. With no new spin to offer other than a tinge of sardonic humour and ironic detachment, to watch The Lair is to be constantly reminded of how far it falls short of the movies it brazenly attempts to emulate.
Set in the fatigued years of the protracted War in Afghanistan, Royal Air Force pilot Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk, who scripted Marshall's previous The Reckoning and serves as cowriter and executive producer on The Lair) is shot down by Taliban forces while deep into enemy territory on a recon mission. Pursued by her attackers, she takes shelter in an abandoned Soviet black site laboratory, a subterranean labyrinth of genetic experimentation home to an army of humanoid monstrosities waiting in stasis. If the ponderous setup of The Lair has reminded you of The Descent, rest assured Marshall is merely demonstrating he has returned to his roots within the genre.
Likewise, when Sinclair escapes the cavernous medical facility and is picked up by Hook (Jonathan Howard) and his ragtag squad of American soldiers, they head to an outpost for, in the film's corny parlance, "misfits, fuckups and outcasts" to strategize — the evocation of Dog Soldiers in tone and premise is highly calculated. The self-reference on display is as if the director was anticipating audience reactions to be heavy in "return to form"-type sentiment after his recent efforts that strayed away from his brand of monster movie (Hellboy, The Reckoning) fared poorly.
Predictably, these scaly vestiges of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan awaken and pursue Sinclair, thus beginning a bloody, raucous, series of action set pieces that only serve to highlight how well-worn Marshall's formula has become. Written with an ironic approach to genre where any potential horror or thrill falls in service of an overbearing and detached sense of humour, The Lair borders on accidental parody in how clichéd and formulaic its dialogue and characters feel. The film is populated with walking, talking archetypes (and occasional stereotypes) rather than characters. They're one-dimensional and loaded with forced quips to defuse any and all tension from a given scene — perhaps in some misguided emulation of McTiernan's Predator. The incessant winking and nudging The Lair pulls after any moment that had the potential to scare or excite quickly becomes grating, even with the cast respectably committing to the bit to a fault.
Of course, being caught halfway between sincere throwback and ironic parody could be overlooked if the film fulfilled the basic requirements of this specific subgenre with arresting action and grisly horror. But even in this department, The Lair falls woefully short. Marshall's action scenes are frenetic yet dramatically inert, and often murky and illegible through Luke Bryant's shaky and dim cinematography (his second collaboration with Marshall after The Reckoning). Characters get eviscerated in an increasingly brutal (and occasionally impressively practical) manner the more the monsters advance, but due to the flippant tone and dull form, these sequences leave little impact.
Even the creature designs — hulking alien-human hybrids with inky black skin, sharp claws and an unhinged jaws — are bland and uninspired. They don't exactly strike terror so much as they humorously remind one of Tom Hardy's Venom. Ultimately, it's a challenge to get into a scene of desperate, bloody combat between monsters and soldiers when every one of them ends in an overly-telegraphed joke which inevitably falls flat.
Resting on his laurels, Marshall's The Lair is a formulaic pseudo-homage to better films — not only to earlier examples of the action-horror genre like Predator, which Marshall clearly admires yet patronizes, but also to the foundational films of his career, which, in comparison, feel worlds apart in terms of craft and originality. I understand the desire to recapture the spark of creativity found within the genre that gave Marshall's early work such cultural endurance, but the lack of evolution or even experimentation with the formula makes The Lair feel like a bad cover rather than a fresh new single.