See-Saw: Day Two (Saw II)

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Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Budget: $4million

Box Office: $147.7million

  • We open with a guy who wakes up having to look at something truly awful: his own face in a mirror. Oh, he’s also got a mask in his face which is like a small iron maiden, for the face.
  • The TV showing the puppet is set to channel 3. I know ITV are struggling but weird they show this.
  • Jigsaws reason for killing this guy? He was an informant. Damn, snitches get stitches, yo.
  • The editing for this scene is disorientating. And not in a good way. In a “I’m not sure the editors knew what they were doing” way. It doesn’t flow, just random interjections into a standard shot. It makes it look like the DVD is broken.
  • And he’s dead, is telling the police about criminal behaviour really on a par with some of the other stuff he kills people for?
  • Hey it’s Donnie Wahlberg, proving exactly why he’s not the famous one.
  • “your mother won custody, I get to take you into custody” You can tell the writer was so proud of that.
  • “crackhead punks don’t have engineering degrees” I don’t think you’d need a degree to make that contraption. You’d need to know what you’re doing, yeah. But really all it is is a spring-mounted closing mechanism on a metal mask.
  • So he figures out who it is because of the company that made the lock? I guess in the Saw universe people don’t buy anything from companies they don’t work for.
  • For a specialised SWAT team, these guys are not smart. They go into a house and don’t check for wires. Did they not see the last movie when the guy got a shotgun to the face?
  • They tripped a wire and something happened, I genuinely have no idea what though as the way it’s filmed means you can’t tell what happened.
  • Somehow they still managed to find Jigsaw. Which considering how dumb these guys are is surprising.
  • “put him in restraints” you find a serial killer and your first thought is to have a hardcore bondage session?
  • Jigsaw tells Donnie he needs to go into the other room, and he actually does it, because he has no idea how people who make traps work.
  • “oh yes, there will be blood” Hey, that’s the title of…..well not this movie, but a movie.
  • “he’s in a safe space” Hah, he’s literally in a safe. Wait, that isn’t revealed until the end though. So ignore I said that.
  • Jigsaw even changed the voice message on Donnie’s sons (Daniel) phone. Now I’m going to spoil this by pointing out that the scene in the house has already happened before what we’re seeing now. So if anybody tried to phone him for the entire duration of the house-thing, it wouldn’t have worked.
  • Oh right, the house. Daniel and a group of other people have just woken up in what looks like a crack house (or my first year uni house).
  • “What is this, house arrest?” Yes, because the typical way the police give you house arrest is to drug you and throw you in a derelict house with a group of other people. Wait, is this movie in Texas? If so that’s probably accurate.
  • All these people are a mix of different race and personality. And one old guy. I think he’s going to die early on.
  • They’re all shocked when a seemingly unconscious woman (Amanda, the drug addict from the first movie) wakes up. I’m more shocked they didn’t notice an unconscious woman laying in the middle of the floor.
  • Why has she been kidnapped again? She said he saved her in the last movie. So why would he go after her? Unless……she’s in on it (spoilers, she is)
  • “this house has a nerve agent pumped through it. Those of you familiar with the Tokyo subway attack will know of its danger”. First of, nobody knows about that attack. Nobody. Secondly, that attack killed 12 people, yes, but on an entire subway line over course of a day that’s not that many really.
  • “what did he mean gas?” He didn’t say gas, he said nerve agent.
  • This trap would not have worked if someone wasn’t looking through the peep-hole whilst the door was being opened.
  • “how do you know who’s doing this?” Does nobody in these films watch the news? Or even just hear rumours.
  • “if we don’t find my son, I’ll hurt you” “bitch I got cancer, my life is pain” Not a direct quote.
  • “the puzzle piece I cut from people is only a symbol that they’re missing something”. This is bullshit. I know the movie (and for some reason, a lot of the “fans” of the character) see him as a source of righteousness, but his reasons for going after people are sometimes so flimsy. “He’s a police informant”. I’d have thought you would want police informants if you’re so high up on justice punishing those who do wrong. Same with “he takes photos”.
  • “the only door you open is between your legs”. That’s not a door. FFS someone please explain the vagina to him. Show videos.
  • “you’re the last person I saw before I woke up here”. How do you know? Your back was to him the entire time.
  • Oh no, the kidnapper and arsonist died. Oh dear.
  • Amanda (you know, the woman who is almost definitely in on this) says “he had a choice”. Did he? Did he, really? He was pushed into it, and only died when he was getting the second valve of antidote. If he just got the one for himself and used it, he’d have been fine. So really the lesson is “don’t try to save others”
  • Next trap: a pit of needles with a key in it somewhere. Xavier (who until this point has done nothing really) decides to throw Amanda in it. Because he’s a dick. This film is REALLY trying to build up Amanda as a sympathetic character so that the reveal does more damage. Tip for horror movies: if there’s a really sympathetic female character; she kills people. Goes for The Gallows, Scream 4, and this.
  • “what are you in here for?” “does it matter?” Well, it kind of does for character motivation etc. Could the writers just not think of anything?
  • So the reason that Jigsaw is going after Donnie is that he’s a crooked cop who arrests people without evidence. Would be a stronger justification if it wasn’t for the fact that Jigsaw was killing people for doing things that aren’t illegal.
  • Xavier figures out that the combination to get out is on the back of their heads. So decides to use a knife to slice the numbers off the back of peoples necks (including his own), rather than, you know, just lining them up and reading them.
  • He’s now killed, erm, Dave? Mike? I don’t know his name, the black guy. He killed him by using a spiked baseball bat and hitting him in the back of the neck with it. You know, the same area where the number that he needs is.
  • Now we find out what bonds them; they’ve all been wrongfully convicted by the same cop, apart from the kid who’s his son. Yeah, that will show them the error of their evil ways. How dare they get wrongfully arrested, they should know better. And how dare he be somebody’s son. That totally justifies his death.
  • Jigsaw takes them to the house, and it turns out to be the same house from the first movie. Nice callback, but the voiceovers of the characters really weren’t needed, you should depend on people recognising it by itself. This seems like they weren’t confident people remembered the first film. They go the complete opposite later on in the series, and you start to actually study ever film in the series due to how many characters they re-use in minor parts.
  • None of the cops are visible on the cameras, and nobody seems to realise this might be because of tape delay.
  • Okay now they’ve figured it out, it was being played on VHS. The scariest of all ways. Donny continues looking for his son and finds a lot of the bodies from earlier on in the film.
  • He finds a tape-recorder where we find out that Amanda was in on it all the time. What a surprise that nobody saw coming. It would have made more sense if his son was involved instead in a protest against his fathers methods.
  • We now have a 2-3 minute sequence where they explain the ending, in case you’re too stupid to realise.
  • “game over” and with that she shuts the door on him forever! Well, until the team that knows where he is finds him anyway.

So, not a terrible film but the sins of later movies are starting to show: the over-complicated plotting that is somehow still too simple, the bland characters, the terrible editing techniques.

See-Saw: Day One (Saw)

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It’s that time of year again. The time of year where I actually get compliments on my face, mainly because people think it’s a Halloween mask. Like a creepy art student when they see a woman in a coffee shop, the day draws ever closer, creeping slowly until we’re glad it’s over. So we’re going to live-blog another horror series. Was considering doing The Omen, or maybe Halloween, but I came to a decision. After chuckling at Chucky, guffawing at Ghostface, and flipping off Freddy, it’s time to jerk off Jigsaw. It’s the Saw series. We start with the first one, because…..because it’s the first one. This really shouldn’t be this complicated.

Director: James Wan (Insidious, The Conjuring, Furious 7, Aquaman)

Budget: $1.2million

Box Office: $103million

  • I actually like the credits to this. The font etc they use brings to mind a dodgy 80’s VHS video nasty.
  • Very blue tint over everything. Hah! It’s a blue movie.
  • A guy (Adam) wakes up in a bathtub chained to a pipe and accidentally pulls the plug out, sending a key down the drain. This is actually VERY IMPORTANT, so the film decides to show how important it is by barely focusing on it at all so if you sneeze you miss it. You can’t even tell what it is until much later on.
  • Wait, how long was he underwater for? How did he not drown or something? He must have been in there a while otherwise the other guy would have been more aware of him. And why was he in the water anyway? He could have got hypothermia and died, which would ruin Jigsaws plan.
  • I like that Cary Elwes is in this (as Doctor Gordon). He really doesn’t get as much work as he should. He’s also chained to a tub in this. This entire plan rests on the two of them not being able to pick locks.
  • “what’s your name?” “My name is very fucking confused”. Look, I do love the script to this, but the dialogue is sometimes awful. Yet it thinks it’s very funny, weirdly enough most of the supposedly funny lines go to the actor who also wrote the script.
  • “that’s what they do, they take out your kidney and sell it on eBay”. You can’t sell kidneys on eBay. You have to use Amazon or craigslist.
  • “are you a surgeon or what?” It later turns out that Adam has been following Dr Gordon, so he knows he is a surgeon.
  • There’s a lot of luck in this plan. Mainly, luck that the tape in Adam’s pocket wouldn’t break when he fell onto the floor earlier. How long has Dr Gordon been awake to not notice the tape in his pocket, but also know that screaming has no purpose (and yet also somehow didn’t wake Adam up)?
  • So Jigsaw punishes people for their sins. Adams sin is that he takes photos. Bit weird.
  • The doctors’ tape says that he can only escape if he kills Adam. This would have been a lot easier if, you know, he wasn’t chained to the wall.
  • Tape players in movies are fantastic, always being rewound to the right moment.
  • Adam sticks his hand down a dirty, shitty toilet so he can help…..the person who has just been told to kill him.
  • Considering how much shit is in that toilet, the smell must be overpowering.
  • How has he never heard of the Jigsaw killer? If there was a serial killer operating near me, I would know (and be really annoyed at the competition).
  • Hey, it’s Danny Glover!
  • “he’s not really a murderer”, Nah, he is. Just because he’s leaving them to die but not actually striking the final blow himself doesn’t make it not murder. Otherwise burying someone alive wouldn’t count as murder.
  • So they think the doctor is a killer because they found his pen nearby. How did they recognise it as his? Does a doctor with no criminal record have his prints on file?
  • They’ve established it’s not him, his alibi is someone he nearly fucked. They still make him sit in on a survivor interview, because…..erm, so he can tell the story at this point in the film?
  • Flashback within a flashback. That’s too many flashbacks. This is the first really iconic one, the reverse bear trap. It’s put on someone’s face and when the time runs out it opens, ripping their jaw open. Sexy. To unlock it he has to get the key out of someone’s stomach who is supposedly dead. He’s not, however, he just can’t move. Not sure why the detail about him supposedly being dead is in it. He’s her former drug dealer so it would have made more sense if she had to do it whilst knowing he was alive. Would have been more thematically pleasing and a harder choice for her. She’s actually pleased this happened as it helped her get off drugs. Not entirely sure how, as surely trauma would make someone MORE likely to do drugs. And now we’re back in the bathroom.
  • “you have something I don’t, information” That’s not exactly his fault. If you’re not aware of a serial killer in your own town, that’s on you.
  • “this is the most fun I’ve had without lubricant”. Okay then.
  • Dr Gordon continues work instead of checking his daughter’s room to let her know there are no monsters there. This is supposed to show him as a work-obsessed monster. But he just finishes the paragraph and then goes to check the room. And stays with her, singing songs to her until she’s okay. He did exactly what he should do. He’s doing a job which he can’t really abandon, it’s an important job which he needs.
  • This film is essentially a live-action version of Condemned. That game was freaky. And had more pigeon-collecting than most games.
  • About 50% of Danny Glover’s dialogue is the word “asshole”
  • Actually, love the way detective Sing dies in this. Tripwire setting of shotguns. It’s simple but effective, is the mark of someone who is just starting to set up traps. Although this kind of goes against Jigsaw’s modus operandi to kill people who deserve it, he’s killing a lot of cops.
  • They’ve found a box containing a phone and cigarettes. The phone isn’t useful though as it was only meant to receive calls, not make them. Which is kind of bullshit tbh, because all phones can dial the emergency services in case of….you know…emergency.
  • And now another flashback. This film deserves credit for the main action taking place in one room, but it doesn’t half take liberties with flashbacks.
  • It turns out the doctor was kidnapped by a person wearing a pig mask who sneaked up on him. Why did they wear the pig mask if they were sneaking up on him? All it would have taken is someone seeing them and shouting out “oi, piggy”.
  • “my last girlfriend, a feminist vegan punk broke up with me because she thought I was too angry”. Love that line.
  • The make-up on this is on point. Doctor Gordon looks emotionally distraught and near death.
  • The lights go off so the camera can’t see them, and they start to whisper to discuss their plan. Why did they turn off the lights when it was them speaking that would have given the game away? He could have just sneakily written something on the back of one of the many pictures and threw it over.
  • I can’t tell whether Adams “death” is bad acting or great bad acting. I’m leaning towards the latter.
  • “this thing electrocuted me” how? It doesn’t seem to be part of a circuit.
  • “The guy who paid me to stalk you, he’s a tall black guy with a scar around his neck”. And you didn’t connect this to the story the guy told earlier about the black guy who got his throat cut who was following him earlier?
  • “I don’t care if you covered yourself in peanut butter and had a 15 hooker gang-bang”. Are we sure I didn’t write this?
  • The way they set up Zepp as a red herring villain is kind of genius, to be honest.
  • Adam is just around the corner taking pictures, like a few feet away. How did Dr Gordon not notice him from that distance? He would have seen him, at the very least heard him.
  • All this computer and equipment is set up in the home of the kidnapping victim. That’s not normally how it’s done, is it?
  • And now we have the scene; the one that defines this film; Doctor Gordon sawing his leg off. I do like how brutal this bit is, but after seeing it done differently in another film, it could be done a lot better.
  • This is where it goes from being good to great; the ending. It turns out Zepp was just another player in the game, the actual Jigsaw rises up, turns out he was the body in the middle of the room. A great twist, like, nobody saw it coming. Mainly because it’s a bit strange. I mean, nobody noticed him breathing for about 6 hours? He didn’t move, defecate, or even cough in that entire time? An ageing cancer patient managed to stay perfectly still on a cold floor for that length of time? But forgetting that this is a magnificent piece of storytelling.
  • “The key is in the bathtub”. Two points: 1) the film gave no indication that was important. 2) Let’s say it didn’t go down the plughole when he emptied it. That means he’d be able to unlock his chain and escape almost instantly.
  • I do like this film more than the others, mainly because it forgoes the torture-porn the series became known for tight plotting and character work. It’s not perfect, there are a few moments which are inconsistent with character motivations etc. And the timing is a bit off at times with nothing happening for hours in-universe.

So, day one down. And that’s the best one out of the way. I can’t remember exactly when they started going downhill, but I know it happened and I’ve got that to look forward to.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

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This is a hard movie to review. It’s based on a true story, yet plays INCREDIBLY fast and loose with historical accuracy, not just slightly either, the year the film takes place is changed by almost a decade. Entire characters are invented for the purpose of the film, and some people have been made out to be a lot worse than they actually are (one of the fellow cops is portrayed as massively racist when in real life he was at worst incompetent) which is kind of bad when you realise a lot of people from this are still alive. That seems kind of mean, but it doesn’t affect how much I enjoyed this film. Well, I say “enjoy”, I didn’t really enjoy this, but I did like it a lot. I mean, yeah the pacing was a bit weird. It’s also very long, but it has a lot to say. This film gets you to ask a lot of very important questions about race, politics, and Steve Buscemi having a brother.

For those unaware: this is about a black police officer going undercover at the KKK. Seriously, that’s it, and it’s based on a true story, which is just as brilliant as it sounds. There’s a great moment in this which I KNOW really happened as I remember reading about it years ago: when the guy asked the Grand Wizard of the KKK (no, that’s actually what the leader is called, stop laughing) how he knew he wasn’t black, the Great Boy-Witch replied that black men pronounce letters and words a certain way.

I highly recommend seeing this film, the script is great, and the acting is just as good. I think it’s fair to say that it won’t be too long before John David Washington eclipses his father’s fame. Adam Driver continues to be incredibly good, and Topher Grace does his best to make David Duke somewhat likeable, in a role which definitely messed with his head. It seems like everybody in this film is at their best, Spike Lee really knows how to get great performances out of people. The writing is also really good, it would be so easy to make the KKK cartoonish pricks, but the script makes them seem like actual people. There’s a moment in the film where a member of the klan is lovingly embracing his wife as they discuss killing black people. In a way it’s kind of sweet, here’s a couple who clearly love each other, talking about what they love. It’s just a shame that what they love is being awful, awful people.

The main cause for my non-enjoyment was the ending. It had a great ending; an ending which is funny, completes the narrative and not the story (big fan of this as it means you feel the characters as existing outside of the film), and to the point. It then goes on, and on. It then starts to show modern klan rallies, the alt-right, and Hitler Simpson himself, culminating in people talking about the death of Heather Heyer, the young woman who was run over by a white supremacist/terrorist dickbag at a rally last year. It’s an incredibly poignant and sweet ending to the film, but it’s also really depressing as it makes you realise that whilst the klan itself are a relic of the 70’s, the attitudes and opinions they had are stronger today than I can ever remember (and they are, before you had Nazi’s as villains the reaction would be “bit cliche”, now it’s “typical leftie cuck SJW bitch. Making nazi’s look bad”).

cca

It shocks you. It cuts you to the bone. But more than anything; it inspires the hell out of you. This is not so much a film, this is a fucking rallying call, to all those who oppose the shit-heap that the world is in danger of becoming. This will light a fire underneath all decent people, and it’s REALLY fucking disappointing that it’s needed. But it’s the perfect way to end it, it makes you realise the real danger that people like that pose to civility.

The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)

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I realised when I posted my review for The Happytime Murders that there was one point I forgot to make; I no longer trust Melissa McCarthy in films anymore. I like her in some, but she has a tendency to ruin some films with dialogue seemingly improvised on the spot which serves no purpose and isn’t funny enough to justify its own existence, so just ends up being annoying (I call this the Kevin Hart effect). I was really annoyed about that, luckily this film makes the exact same mistake, so I can make here instead. I won’t, but I could. This film has too many moments where the scenes go on long past the natural stopping point, just to let the characters ramble on.

Tonally it’s kind of a mess too, it’s attempting to be about 5 different films, it would have been better if it picked a style and settled on it. It’s not quite clever enough to work as a spy film, there’s no amazing twists which catch you by surprise, or clever plotting which runs throughout the whole thing; it’s a comedy first, and a spy movie second, and there’s enough comedies already that this doesn’t seem to be adding anything new to that genre. There is room for a comedic spy movie, as you can see from Spy (both the film, and the television series). When this film has a choice between character-based logical decisions, and a throwaway joke, it always goes with the joke. This has the effect of making it look like the characters aren’t taking the situation entirely seriously, which means you don’t really buy into the central premise. I go on about this a lot but the reason Airplane worked (and it did), was because although it was a comedy, the characters in it took it seriously, so it had stakes, you were invested in the plot one hundred percent. This doesn’t do that, and it’s all the worse for it. I mean, it is very funny at times, but it’s incredibly disposable and wastes a promising premise. It mainly wastes it by having the main characters actually be effective spies, it would be funnier if it was all by luck, or if they were actually awful at it and made the situation a lot worse than it would be otherwise, and it escalated from something manageable into something catastrophic.

So in summary, it’s alright, but I’ll be very surprised if it gets a sequel. I feel I would like it more if it was a netflix film, or an extended skit on SNL, but as a full length feature? It manages to both not to do enough, whilst attempting way too much.

The Happytime Murders (2018)

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I was super excited about this. It’s a puppet movie aimed at adults made by the Henson company. I will go on record as saying that “Muppets Christmas Carol” is one of my favourite films ever made. The trailer was hysterical and looked like nothing else released this year, so yeah, hopes were high. Sadly it did not meet them. I expected to sing this film’s praises. To talk about how funny it was and how I can’t wait to see it again when I buy it immediately on DVD the day it’s released. After seeing this I can say with absolute certainty that I’m not going to be buying it on release day, or at all. I don’t need to buy it, I don’t even need to see it again. When it was funny, it was funny, but outside of the puppets it was incredibly mediocre. It relied on the puppets waaaaay too much. There was a period in the 90’s where films thought they hit a formula:

Old person + swearing/drug/sex references=COMEDY

Replace “old person” with “puppet” and you have at least 50% of the jokes in this film. It thinks that just making them swear and make sexual references count as jokes. The actual jokes often aren’t much better, it’s the only film I’ve seen in like forever which does the “amoronsayswhat?” joke sincerely, twice. The last one I can remember doing that is Waynes World. That’s the biggest issue with a lot of the jokes in this; they’re too easy. They’re “we need a joke, this will do” level. They’re the first jokes you’d think of, no actual thought seemed to go into it. It’s like they didn’t care about the quality of the jokes, they just wanted to put jokes in, it goes for quantity over quality, but the quantity isn’t even that high. This wouldn’t be as unforgivable if the story was compelling. But it’s not, not really. There’s two big reveals in this, one is revealed in the poster, and one is incredibly obvious to anybody who has seen a film before. There’s no compelling mystery to keep you emotionally invested in the story. There’s no exciting twists and turns, or clever plot developments.

It does have some funny moments though. And the fact that the puppets use sugar as drugs is great, as is the subtle parallels to racial tension and discrimination. The bad thing about it? Both of those have been done before, and done A LOT better in the short-lived series The Fuzz. And that show had Rachel Bloom of Crazy-Ex Girlfriend fame. Does this? Does it bollocks.

The Equalizer 2 (2018)

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Yes, I deem it “The Sequalizer”. I know that’s incredibly obvious and lacks originality, but so does the film so…..

I mean, it’s not really a bad film, Denzel Washington is good in it and some of the action scenes are great and as weird as this seems, the sound editing is some of the best I’ve seen, well, heard. Sound editing is like drumming sometimes, you only notice it when it’s REALLY good, or REALLY bad. The first one had the same thing, it was bland but it sounded fucking fantastic. This is a theme that reoccurs throughout the film; the things you liked about the first film will be here, and the things you disliked about the first film will be here too. The weird pacing, the needless subplots that don’t go anywhere, the terrible characterisation. All of it returns in this film, and because they were all in the first film too you’re looking for them to see whether they fixed them this time.

This would have benefited from a good editor going through it and cutting a lot of the fluff. As it is there are quite a few really dull moments that almost seem like they’re specifically there for the audience to take a piss break. A good editor would have reduced those and made it so the film flowed naturally and made it so you felt like you couldn’t miss anything. As it is, outside of the action sequences the film is so dull you can almost feel the seconds go by. The action sequences themselves are really good though. Say what you want about Fuqua, he knows how to craft a great fight scene. That can’t be easy, because you need to make it believable that a 60 year old Denzel Washington can win a gun fight with these people. You need your suspension of disbelief, the worst thing to happen would be for that to break, for you to realise mid-scene “wait a minute, that only happened because the character has been written as overpowered”. This film is done well enough that that NEVER happens in the fight scenes. The rest of the film? Not so much. It spends far too much time convincing us of how great Denzel’s character is, how kind yet vengeful he is. There are multiple random scenes that show him shooting dickheads, and then helping someone who needs it. Shootouts are followed with him helping an elderly Holocaust survivor. Doing this kind of thing once would be okay, but for the entire film to be it? Nah, it’s too much and it really puts you off. It’s like “okay, he’s a great person, we get it, now move on to the actual point”. The other big story problem: it has a twist which is so obvious I’m not really sure it counts as a twist. Not quite “so the person called Doctor Doom turned evil? Oh no, this is a complete surprise” but it’s close.

So in summary; I’m hard pushed to find a reason to say you have to see this. Only watch it if the first one was one of your favourite films (in which case: what the hell is wrong with you?)

The Festival (2018)

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I’m not proud of some of my reviews. Looking back at them,  y review of Darkest Minds said this:

Screen Shot 2018-09-04 at 14.29.48.png

My review of The Meg said this:

Screen Shot 2018-09-04 at 14.29.18.png

I really need to stop mentioning semen in these reviews, you don’t see Barry Norman or Roger Ebert talking about cumshots every review (maybe for their reviews of Basic Instinct I’m not sure). So I’m not going to reference it at all this review. Going to be completely clean and innocent.

So, this film. It’s very funny.  The opening scene shows the main character and his girlfriend having sex, he pulls out and ejaculates (DAMNIT, I lasted one sentence without mentioning it) over his graduation robe. When he’s at graduation his mum sees the stain, thinks it’s something else, so licks her finger to rub it off, then licks her finger again, an understated look of recognition and disgust on her face. THAT’s how this film starts, and it’s no false dawn in terms of vulgarity and general “eww”ness. Also in this film; the main character gets pissed on, his nipple ring gets torn off when it gets stuck on a fence post, and someone fucks a goat. This is not high-class cinema. It’s gross, vulgar, and very funny. That last one is subject to opinion, I mean, I found it funny, but I did spend a lot of it feeling like I should turn away as it was so cringe-ey, in a good way. The temptation as a director with this will be to cut away, quickly get to the next joke and move on, pack as many jokes as you possibly can into the short time, maximise the laughs. He does the opposite though; he holds, he keeps the scene going, wringing every drop of awkwardness past where it stops being funny, becoming incredibly awkward and hard to watch, in the best possible way. It’s a risky strategy but it pays off. This is a film definitely made by people who know what they’re doing, this isn’t shown just in the directing, but the writing too. Considering the level of humour in this it would be easy to just make it funny, but this has moments of genuine insight and pathos in it. One thing in particular came as a surprise; a piece of dialogue which was genuinely inspirational. In summary it was this:

“just because you’re a dick, doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Gandhi was racist yet still one of the greatest humans. Lance Armstrong was an abusive drug cheat yet raised millions for charity”. It’s an interesting piece of dialogue, and it really deserves to be in a more important film than this. Don’t get me wrong; it was a funny movie, and if it was on netflix I’d watch it. But I don’t need to get it on DVD. It just doesn’t do enough to stand out in a crowded field of similar movies. If somebody would ask “why should I see this film NOW?” it would be hard for me to think of a response. It’s a “I’ll watch it when I can” movie. It’s also got a dreadfully bland title which will be a bitch to search for in a few years time. Claudia O’Doherty was great in it though and I really want to see her in more stuff. And it is nice that the girl he meets and has sex with turns him down afterwards, and he accepts it. It shows the futility of placing all your hope on one person liking you, and also how to deal with it when it doesn’t work, which is an incredibly mature piece of film-making, and one I wish I saw more often.

The Meg (2018)

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The opening scene to this did not fill me with hope; Statham’s accent was off, we saw an action scene that wasn’t that great, and the character dynamics were a bit meh. It was at this point I worried, that I’d watch something just dumb, instead of dumb fun. As the film went on, I warmed to it, even at some points being able to tolerate Statham’s accent (why they couldn’t let him do a natural one is beyond me). It isn’t anywhere near as dumb as I expected it to be. I mean, if you think about it for a few minutes there are numerous scientific inaccuracies throughout, but the point is you have to think about it. They don’t immediately jump out at you. It’s fun enough, and well-crafted enough, that you don’t really notice any flaws or problems with it. Yeah sure, once you’ve finished you will have lots of “wait a minute, that didn’t make sense”, but in the moment you don’t care as you’re too entertained. Jon Turteltaub (who also gave the world the best bobsled-themed movie of all time in Cool Runnings, and also gave us the pilot episode of Rush Hour, which I didn’t even realise had a TV show based on it) knows what to do; he is great at showing scale. It would be very easy to forget how big the titular Meg is, to just show a plain shot of it with nothing else in frame to give an indicator, he doesn’t do this; every time the shark is on screen, you’ve given a reminder of how absolutely massive it is. It’s spectacle cinema, but in a different way than Skyscraper was. Skyscraper was about set pieces, this is about creating something larger than life, and I haven’t seen it done this well since Kong: Skull Island. It helps that the CGI holds up REALLY well in this film, there’s not many moments where you sit there thinking “that looks fake as shit”, although you do wonder how a movie featuring a giant shark can look more real than a scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming where two characters have a conversation.

It’s also funny as hell. With the right kind of jokes. You don’t have people get brutally killed then characters making jokes about it, the jokes are contextual and relevant, which is a welcome change.

I’ve spent most of this film gushing over how likeable and fun I found this. I suppose to be balanced I should talk about the bad things. That cast……are actually good. Ruby Rose continues to be incredibly likeable in almost everything she does. Hmmm, okay so I can’t go for that as a negative. Okay, the obvious pandering to the Chinese market…..wasn’t that big an issue. They had good narrative reasons for a lot of it so it wasn’t as jarring as it was in Independence Day. Damn, have to go with something else. The romance….actually kind of worked. Jason Statham’s character is joined by his ex-wife on the trip, so I expected it to go the traditional way and have them get back together. But nope, he ends up with another character, (played by Li Bingbing) joining her and her child. Okay that’s it; the child actor……wasn’t terrible and provided the film with a lot of emotion and heart, wasn’t distractingly awful, and her decisions didn’t render her a useless load on the rest of the characters. This was helped by both her performance, and good writing. Gosh darn it! Going to have to go with something else. The restrictions placed upon it by the rating? Actually that would be a valid criticism. It keeps threatening to be gorier than it is, and it would be a lot more satisfying if we could see more blood. This needs gore, we need to see destruction and lots of people eaten and we don’t get that. There’s a scene in particular near the end where the shark heads towards a crowded beach. The film builds up a brilliant scene full of carnage and fantastic set pieces, which we then don’t get as it pulls away at the last second. The film gives the audience an over-the-pants handjob when it really needs to fuck us.

And that’s where I’m ending this. Next weeks reviews will be The Festival and The Equalizer 2, where I’ll spend most of the review trying not to call it “The Sequalizer”, and probably failing.

The Darkest Minds (2018)

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I first became aware of this film a few weeks ago, I was at the cinema watching the trailers (controversial opinion; I actually LOVE watching the trailers at cinema) and saw the trailer for this. Now I had no idea this existed. I did, however, know of a film called The New Mutants, a teen drama/horror set in the X-men universe. As I was watching the trailer I thought “this new x-men doesn’t look as good as I thought it would” then I found out it wasn’t new X-men film. But whilst watching it; it REALLY wants to be. I haven’t seen a rip-off this poor since I released My C-men, described by critics as “a little hard to swallow”, “needs more substance”, and “a bit chewy”.

Okay, with that horrifying visual out of your brain I’ll get into more detail about this film. it doesn’t really work. It has many issues, the pacing, the story itself, and the underdeveloped characters. But the real issue; it’s a romance story where the romance at the heart of it doesn’t work. At no point do you buy them as a couple, I’m not sure whether it’s because of bad writing or just lack of chemistry, but it doesn’t really work.

The story itself also seemed to fall a little flat. There’s been A LOT of apocalyptic fiction aimed at young adults lately, so for one to stand out it has to do something different, something to make you think “okay, THAT’S why this is important”. For me, The 5th Wave did it through having an incredibly tight plot and astounding action scenes which really showed the brutality, but in a PG-13 way. This one attempts to do it by taking aspects of Hunger Games, the aforementioned X-Men, Maze Runner, Divergent, etc. As such, it never really seems to stand on its own two feet. There’s nothing about THIS film that marks itself as unique or special. Side note; how ripe is YA apocalyptic fiction for parody fodder? So yeah this film is just okay really. Not great enough to be remembered for years to come, not bad enough to make fun of that much. I mean, there’s nothing inherently BAD about this film, but there’s nothing really that made me sit up and take notice. The performances were good, but the characters are kind of meh so it balances out. Personally, I think the “oh, the person the audience assumes is bad turned out to be bad? quelle surprise” thing needs to stop happening (but then again if it was a red herring I would also boo that as being cliche, so can’t really win really). One thing which is kind of unforgivable though; the trailer.

See the film establishes that she can wipe herself from memories, and when she does so we see the characters memories of her and she kind of Thanos’s away. (turns into dust and floats away). So, what scene is in the trailer:

Screen Shot 2018-08-29 at 14.36.54.png That’s her, wiping the memory of her from the male lead. This happens JUST before the end and is one of the last moments where if you went for a piss, you’d be confused when you came back. The film leads up to this; and they put it in the trailer? Yeah, that’s not good. But at least they don’t put the very last scene in the trailer, where she accepts her role as the leader of the uprising and makes a call to arms in front of a stadium of other young people, they’d have to be an idiot to put that in.

Screen Shot 2018-08-29 at 14.40.01.png

God-fucking-damnit!

Ant-Man And The Wasp (2018)

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Have you seen Infinity War? If the answer is no, avoid this, or just leave after the actual plot concludes. The final scene to this will make absolutely zero sense if you avoided Infinity War, and it seems like this film references Captain America: Civil War more than it does the first Ant-Man movie. It’s a shame as the first Ant-Man movie was a lot of fun and is severely underrated when people talk about the MCU. This one feels important, but in a way where it’s not going to be known how important it is until the next film, which is a problem with Marvel films lately, they’re not self-contained so the endings are usually the equivalent of “Tune in next time”.  You know what this reminds me of? When a massive video game has been released and a year later they release a few new levels as an expansion pack/DLC, it’s that. It doesn’t stand out on it’s own at all, it’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to Infinity War’s Hamlet (Or The Lion King 1 1/2 to The Lion King if you prefer). But the thing is; it doesn’t even do that that well. It would be good if it had a few subtle background references to it running throughout. But it doesn’t, it comes in at big points in the film, but not often enough. So it somehow fails at even that. Okay, “fails” is a very harsh word to use, because if it wasn’t for the Infinity War stuff, I would consider this a great film, it’s funny, looks fantastic, has INCREDIBLY inventive action set pieces, and the performances are good.

Now Marvel villains are either incredibly amazing (Thanos, Loki, Killmonger) or completely forgettable (that guy, the other one, the yellow one). This comes soooo close to being the first one. She has a tragic backstory which makes her sympathetic, her motives are logical but she’s also terrifying, and she’s not just “the good guy, but bad!” which seems to be the general template to make a villain in Marvel films. But she’s not used enough, and her ending is woefully unsatisfying and seems like it came because the writer needed to get home early so just wrote “and then MAGIC!”. It’s a shame as one thing this does very well is it gives a lot of the background characters moments to shine, even if a lot of their moments could be cut and nothing would be affected (particularly Bobby Cannavale and Judy Greer, which is a shame as I love both their characters, I just wish they had more to do). The star of the show is still Michael Pena though, who maintains one of the best side characters they’ve created, which of course means he’s probably going to be run into the ground through overuse in the next one, or killed.

So should you see this? I’d say yes, but not yet. Watch it as part of a MCU marathon, it lacks enough context to survive on its own.