Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear. That’s all I have to say about this really. I remember being kind of hyped up for this. It looked like it was going to be a mature bloody kind of film, but one that’s a lot of fun. It essentially looked like a mix of Logan and Thor: Ragnarok. Instead, it’s like a mix of Thor: Dark World, and a 15-year-old on Twitter. The Thor comparison is simple; I heavily disliked both and found them incredibly bland looking. The 15-year-old; that’s more complicated. You know when kids reach adolescence and they consider themselves adults? So they decide to act more “adult”, but all this means is they actually become pricks? Yeah, it’s that. This film is the cinematic equivalent of someone typing “I’ve got a big cock, you fag! Watch this video of people being executed. Hitler was my hero, megalols”. It has no nuance, subtlety, or actual maturity to it, in fact, it’s trying so damn hard to appear mature that it comes off as juvenile.
I did have kind of high hopes for this, hopes that faded when the early reviews came in. I understand this kind of film isn’t for everyone, so an average score in the ’60s would be acceptable. But at the time of writing the average score is 14%. That suggests a complete trainwreck, a film that fails on a very basic level. And it does. The pacing is just weird, it takes forever to say things that it could say in a minute, then glosses over things that they should focus on. We spend a lot of time introduced to characters who essentially don’t even matter. I’d estimate at least 30% of this film could be cut out and you wouldn’t lose anything. It doesn’t even have the decency to look good. I mean, it does in some parts, but in others, the CGI looks woeful, there’s one moment near the end in particular which is almost laughable. What’s not as laughable are the jokes, I think they’re supposed to be jokes, they have the cadence of jokes, but not the humour. It’s hard to tell because tonally this film is all over the place, and it’s not really helped by the performance. There’s a certain performer in this film who I have not seen in anything else, so I feel bad slating their performance because everyone can have an off day, so I won’t name them (if it was a very well known one, trust me I’d go all guns blazing, but with this it would just seem rude), but trust me, it’s one of the worst performances I’ve seen in a long time, probably not helped by the fact they’re playing a nationality that definitely isn’t their native one, and as such the accent wavers all over the place.
I mean, on the plus side the gore is a welcome change, they just couldn’t match the gore with grown-up sensibilities and tone (unlike Logan, which matched both PERFECTLY). And David Harbour is almost good enough to forget that he’s not Ron Perlman, almost. But it’s not good enough to pass over the multiple flaws this movie has. If I was thirteen years old, this would be my favourite movie, although I’d also be too young to see at the cinema. In a world where Marvel movies are making billions, films which seem this lazy are not acceptable.