I enjoyed free guy. Ryan Reynolds was as dependable as ever, and the supporting cast kept up with him.
I wish they’d dug a little deeper into Truman show/Groundhog Day/Edge of tomorrow type introspection, instead they stayed thematically consistent with the action game theme by leaning into action scenes which was fine. Lots of gaming in jokes if you’re into that kind of thing, though they lost me a bit with the Vox pops of real life streamers, most of whom I didn’t recognise.
Arkansas. This has got a surfeit of talent, with Liam Hemsworth, Clark Duke, Michael Kenneth Williams, John Malkovich, Vince Vaughn, and more. It has a laid-back style, and yet has lots of vivid scenes, with Hemsworth and Duke working in mild confusion as a pair of drug dealers, under the eccentric park ranger of Malkovich, where they attract attention from the likes of Eden Brolin, in a small but charming role, and Vaughn as their overboss-in-absentia. A pleasing but unpleasant mix of brutality and poetry, appropriately grimy, visually interesting, solid soundtrack. Good performances even if the film as a whole is a little wonky from trying to depict things differently.
Zombieland: Double Tap. Can’t help but think this would have been better had it been completed and released a decade ago. It’s decent but it’s not an improvement in any way over the first, and it’s impossible to justify why it took so long to make an inferior film. Everything it does, Zombieland did better, and there’s no saving grace anywhere. Zombieland had a good mixture of laughs and gore, this has less of both. Confusing and a little sad.
Z for Zachariah. Margot Robbie looks incredibly young here, and also gets the majority of the acting, in a teeny tiny cast alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor (not one of his best performances given his skill as an actor) and Chris Pine. I never thought I’d see a plot point and character tension around the disassembly of a clapboard church to build a waterwheel, yet here we are. Not bad at all, but a little lightweight. Captures an awkward social triangle nicely.
Kate. Extremely average. Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a retiring professional killer, Woody Harrelson as her handler. Decent fight scenes, but everything else you’ve seen a dozen times before.
War Dogs. There’s hardly even a story here. The best parts of it are about the logistics, as a perfectly cast Miles Tellers goes into the arms business with his corrupt friend, Jonah Hill, only to find out his friend who he knew was corrupt, is corrupt. I don’t know what you’d call this as a morality tale? The Moron and the Scorpion?
Destroyer. A leathery Nicole Kidman shambles through life as a cop/disaster, carrying alcoholism and an estranged daughter, and staggers into action against a criminal from her past. Poor Toby Kebbell gets lumbered with a role that requires serious menace and weight, without getting anywhere near enough screen time to develop it. The air of desperation through it all is palpable, and it’s the best aspect of the film.
Boss Level. Frank Grillo needs some better films to star in, and this is a start. Densely unoriginal, the Grillo Pad is a veteran trying to reconnect with his estranged wife and child, except he’s caught in a time loop of a single day, and various assassins keep killing him. After months of this, he finally has the bright idea to try and solve the issue. The best thing about this is his lack of progress, as the film cheerfully depicts the ways his plans go awry, making the most of the repetition in ways familiar from other films (Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow). Grillo carries it off with resigned gruffness, and the film is enjoyable almost all the way through, as he resorts to violence, gets killed, and tries again another way, over and over again. With some better writing, the family scenes could have been good, but yet again it’s left to the love interest (Naomi Watts) to work miracles neither the script nor their scenes allow. Mel Gibson plays a decent bad guy.
Hostile. A salutary lesson in why post-apocalypse films shouldn’t do flashbacks. Without some real change, via make up, wardrobe, effects, or preferably, acting, the character appears to be the same person before and after The Event. It just doesn’t work.
Candyman. This is better than I thought it would be but not quite as good as it wants to be. It has a great idea and largely runs with it, but also incorporates some very pedestrian ideas that it could have left out. There’s some nice social commentary and observations about the refreshing of urban myths, and it has a solid ending that escalates into something new. Another I should rewatch.
Den of Thieves. A bit like Heat on a smaller budget, a gang of motivated and trained criminals pull heists, and a gang of cops tries to stop them. Gerard Butler is a deeply unpleasant man and a maverick cop, his opposite number Pablo Schreiber is altogether more bearable (or perhaps just less unpleasant). They abrade each other nicely, and while the cops are rather forgettable as a whole due to a lack of screen time, the crooks are a little better defined, including 50 Cent, who appears to be more around 75 Cent judging by his bulk, and O’Shea Jackson, who has his father’s punchable face. They put together a big score, the police hunt them. Some excellent firefights, and I was pleased to note not just variety in weapons but also things like their loadouts, sights, etc. Ending a leetle bit wobbly.
Wrath of Man. For a Guy Ritchie film, this has some astonishingly bad dialogue. Or perhaps it’s the delivery? Perhaps both, but it’s not up to par, but nor is it Jasem Stateham’s fault either, for all that his acting has the emotion of a Lego man. With a cast of solid names (Eddie Marsan, Josh Hartnett, Holt McCallany, Jeffrey Donovan) you’d think the acting would be better too. Fucking Andy Garcia turns up for some reason. The action scenes do not compare favourably to the likes of Den of Thieves, including stuff like totally impenetrable body armour, which slightly undermines what’s supposed to be a gritty revenge film.
My wife and I have been going through a lot of the action films on Netflix on Saturday Nights. I won’t do as nice a write up as @OhBollox but a few thoughts.
The Night Comes for Us - Over the top gratuitous violence. Any attempt at story is just to keep the violence going. But…it’s some seriously fun violence. More machetes than guns. A lot of improvised weapons. It’s batshit crazy at points and my wife actually cringed a few times…but I call that good.
Kate - While I agree it is extremely average and very predictable, I really liked Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and some fun fight scenes.
Gunpowder Milkshake - Probably my favorite of this post. Sure, formulaic, but fun characters and I love the style of the film. It’s like what if you crossed John Wick with the styling of an early Bahz Luhrman film.
SAS Rise of the Black Swan - This is the weakest one on this list. Some good tactical scenes, but I liked the bad guys better than the good guys in this one, and that always kinds of messes up a movie like this for me.
The Vault - Average like most of these, but in the key parts of the movie, it had good tension.
Space Sweepers - This was a lot of fun, and I expected to enjoy it, I was unsure if my wife would, and she did too. Really good mix of humor, action and world building.
Your reviews are always solid gold. Gold, Jerry, gold!
Wait til I do a rewatch of Alien: Covenant. Eyes will bleed.
The original title was “SAS: Red Notice” but as far as I can tell Netflix forced the title to be changed in order to put it on their service since they have their own “Red Notice” movie coming in November. Whatever they want to call it, it wasn’t very good…
Black Widow. As far as I’m concerned, most Marvel stuff is ice cream for bed-wetters, as Logan called it, but some of it is more interesting, and it’s largely due to the lack of superpowers. There’s a strong element of action espionage to this, akin to the Mission Impossible films, and the scale is more human and interesting. The dysfunctional faux family is good, especially Florence Pugh as the younger sister, who gets most of the good lines, and David Harbour as the comic relief. Rachel Weisz is a little bit wasted, she could do a role as slim as this in her sleep. Ray Winstone is horrifically comically miscast as a Russian general, on what I presume is a bet or a wish from a monkey’s paw . There’s still far too much CGI, and as soon as any scene moves outside of a room, there it is. The lack of practical stunt work makes a lot of the action feel neutered, and it’s obviously cheaper, easier and safer to use CGI, but even for things like individual fight scenes it distracts as a background. It gets to the point where you realise the creators have realised they just don’t care about even minor background details being real, they can just CGI them in.
Free Guy. Ryan Reynolds carries this the whole way. Not two sets of footprints turning to one, but about ten, as he manfully hauls a so-so script, director, and the rest of the cast, including Shawn Levy as a bag of hair and Taika Waititi as a moron, to the finish line of what should be a light, cheerful action film that is almost two hours long. There is nothing in this film that justifies even ninety minutes. You’d think the action scenes set in a video game would be spectacular. They are not. Too many filler lines, vapid central ‘message’.
Pig. Nicholas Cage as a hermit hunting for truffles, truffle pig abducted, quest to regain pig. Didn’t get it. Some of Cage’s best work in years? How would you know, does it matter, and quite frankly in this case, amongst the avalanche of shit, who cares. It’s not about the thing it’s about, yes, but ultimately that’s all the film has, and it’s not impressive. “I remember every meal I ever cooked. I remember every person I cooked for.” is so divorced from the reality of being a chef it seems wantonly ignorant, and somehow Cage has kept his palate living in the woods drinking his own piss. Righto.
Malignant. So a pregnant woman in an abusive relationship suffers a home invasion. The neighbours, hearing screams, phone the police.
After watching this film, I don’t think James Wan could direct a stream of urine. This film does not respect the audience. The acting is so uniformly terrible I began to suspect there was indeed a dark entity involved, possibly in the casting process. The writing is awful. There isn’t a single stupid cheap visual horror film trick that goes unused. The score is incompetent. The camera work is so dire as to be intentionally bad.
This is supposed to be someone’s house.
There’s almost two hours of this shit. I’m sure my life is meaningless, but I can look myself in the eye in the mirror, every morning, proud I didn’t direct this fucking tripe. Someone will claim it’s ‘self-aware’ and ‘camp’, when it is merely awful.
I am not a clever man, and I like some films that are, at best, of dubious quality, but this film isn’t any good, on any level, nor is it even worthy of a hate watch. It’s an embarrassing failure of craft at every stage, and it’s a disgrace on the part of everyone who participated in it. May it soon be forgotten, and God have mercy upon those who approved its production.
But did you like it?
line of the year!
Host. A small film on a tiny budget, that quickly becomes genuinely unpleasant. Effective horror, not even an hour long. While somewhat limited, it’s also genuinely creepy.
Suicide Squad. Another fundamentally sound James Gunn film. A mismatched band on an impossible mission, albeit still with some cracks showing. Gunn appears to get a lot of value out of any budget, so he doesn’t seem to receive large budgets, or at least it sometimes doesn’t go where it should. Again, there’s a large amount of CGI but also a good amount of practical work and stunts, which is really good. Some of the action is a little generic, but there are some noteworthy scenes, especially for Robbie as Harley Quinn, and the film has Idris Elba’s Bloodsport jostling with Cena’s Peacemaker for top dog. Joel Kinnaman plays Lean Brendan Fraser playing Generic Guy, for some reason, and there’s no need for him to be here at all. Much like Melchior as Ratcatcher, a character who exists solely to perform a plot function isn’t something that should really exist, especially when your film is over two hours long, and your vague sentimentality about them being the ‘heart’ of the film is misplaced, mawkish, and belongs somewhere in the middle of the previous century. Likewise the setting and vaguely South American bad guys, allowing for disposable people. Some seriously good fun overall though.
Horror in the High Desert. A decent found footage attempt, which is unfortunately undermined by the few people featured simply not being able to act with enough conviction to carry it off. The found footage sections are competent, the interviews really let it down, and there’s a really bad wince-inducing moment, where a pivotal piece of video has been deleted, and the only reason I can think of is the actor in question simply couldn’t supply a good enough performance for that scene to work, so it was removed and explained away. Awkward.
Gunpowder Milkshake. Bags of stylistic intent, no style. Applies to everything from environmental design and scenery to line delivery. Trying very hard to be cool. Occasionally briefly amusing enough to raise a smile.
The Lighthouse. If your nightmares had mad sex dreams about lighthouse keepers, it’d be Robert Pattinson and Willem Defoe, and here they get their own luminously-lit film of mermaid fucking, seagull battering, and turps drinking. There’s nothing quite like being locked up with an arsehole when you are also an arsehole, and things Do Not Go Well. The visuals alone are worth it, and you know with Eggers involved it was never going to be a normal film. Not so much an undercurrent of homoeroticism as a riptide.
Riders of Justice. A revenge film with a difference, Mads Mikkelsen plays a soldier home from Afghanistan seeking to find the reason for the death of his wife, and trying, without knowing how, to make a connection to his teenage daughter. Helped by three socially atrocious hackers, who steal whole scenes between them, he goes on a violent spree and simultaneously tries to deal with the family’s trauma. The costs of violence are here from the beginning, as each character gets their own measure of PTSD to cope with, and the escalating problems pile on further stresses. Enjoyable, and all the more touching for not ignoring the in-built psychological strain of killing.
How was Sting?
He’s put on weight!
Dune doesn’t come out until Friday here in the U.S. but I’m looking forward to it because of the source material. Some of your criticisms were already concerns of mine based on the trailers but I’ll be happy with just a competent adaptation if not an amazing one.
Yeah, the combat looked iffy from the trailers and I’m tired of Chalamet, who is fine, but there are other young actors out there. Dune just seems to be a huge artistic trap for grandiose directors.
Copshop. An enjoyable pulpy mess, although you’ve got to wonder what exactly is supposed to be scary about Gerard Butler here, a supposedly feared hitman, who never does anything fearsome, and so inspires about as much fear as your emotionally distant stepdad. Frank Grillo plays a con man on the run, which is fine, but also cheerfully kills people in such a manner as to blur his character; why’s he fleeing if he’s apparently better at killing than the people sent to kill him? Regardless, the real star is Alexis Louder, a rookie cop, and her revolver, and the film shines when it’s playing around with gunplay. I enjoy films when they pay attention to the specifics of the weapons used, and while that goes out of the window eventually, attention to detail is always appreciated.
Old Henry. I appreciate this film solely for Tim Blake Nelson, a criminally under used actor, and his performance is the best thing about an otherwise completely unremarkable Western about a man drawn back into violence against his will. Stephen Dorff as the bad guy is nowhere near as good, but that’s more down to the role he has of riding up to farmsteads and threatening to shoot people, or shooting them. Not a lot of space for nuance there.
Halloween Kills. The funniest thing about the series is no matter who does what, efforts to emulate the original fall into its shadow, and efforts to top it fall short. No idea what Jamie Lee Curtis is doing here. Starts off with a creepy tone, descends into stupidity, and a hackneyed warning about mob mentality.
The Invisible Man. Elizabeth Moss escapes from an abusive controlling boyfriend, only to end up in an even greater nightmare. I was not particularly enthused about this one, to begin with. But there’s some excellent use of sound, and the film is restrained for most of its runtime. Surprisingly good looking film, great cinematography, framing, pacing, and Moss is superb. Some of the CGI isn’t great, and several later scenes are less terrifying than earlier scenes, but overall an excellent film.
