Tag: Film

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023) Review

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Quick Synopsis: I feel the title adequately explains it.

As we approach the end of the year, I’m starting to think of the awards I will give out in January, and try to note the contenders for each award. Some are pretty much settled (Worst Moment is likely to go to Twisters for a character introduction that tainted the rest of the film). In contrast, some still require a lot of thinking (the Most Disappointing category is depressingly packed so far). One award that won’t be given is Best Title, if it was, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (HVSCSP, pronounced Hoo-vis-car-seep) would win that easily. I love that title, it promises so much. Not just the plot, but also the type of film it will be. A title like that is not going to be an incredibly depressing look at the human condition. It will be quirky, and it will be unique.

What you might not expect is just how damn sweet it is. It’s incredibly heart-warming, with the central relationship being more believable and recognisable than a vampire story should be. Some writers would have focused on the sexual energy of vampires, but HVSCSP is more sweat than sexual, and is all the better for it. I love the central relationship. There’s a moment between the two where they’re just sitting listening to music. There’s no dialogue, no dancing, they’re just sitting near each other. By all logic, that should be boring as hell. But it says something about the talent of director Ariane Louis-Seize, plus the performers Sara Montpetit and Felix-Antoine Benard that it works. You can tell there are moments when both of them want to speak, and you know exactly what they would say, and the characters know that too, so they want to respond, but because it wasn’t actually said, they don’t. That scene is a microcosm of the film as a whole; incredibly sweet and wholesome.

I’ve seen some reviews which have stated they wished this had more bite. I’m assuming they only said that for pun purposes. Cynicism and meanness would have ruined this. Yes, vampire movies usually do need to be dark and broody, but this particular film? It needs niceness. It’s like a Wes Anderson movie being caressed by Tim Burton.

Don’t get me wrong, there is some violence, but it’s used to tell a story. The killing of the clown in the opening scene is shown to have traumatised Sasha, so it makes sense that even with the ability to do so, she would be reticent to commit violence unless she needed to. This builds up beautifully to a moment where she violently attacks a group of people threatening Paul. If the film was filled with violence, that scene wouldn’t land. If the violence was shot as “cool” and fun, that moment wouldn’t land. HVSCSP understands restraint better than a German dungeon mistress and uses it to great joy.

It’s not perfect. The soundtrack is kind of bland. The aforementioned scene of the two listening to music together? Perfect song choice. The rest of the movie? Forgettable. I’m not saying EVERY film needs more 80’s dark synth music, but some Bauhaus would have improved this immensely.

I also found it difficult to get a solid grounding on the universe contained within HVSCSP. Are people aware of vampires but decide to ignore them? Are they aware but deathly scared? Do they consider vampires as mythological creatures? There are moments which support all three assertions, so it’s difficult to work out what world this takes place in. This leads me to the other problem; with the exception of the main two, the characters are all tremendously bland. It doesn’t feel like a real group of people, they’re not main characters in their own life, they’re only supporters of the tale we’re being told right now.

This is still a lovely film. It’s not among the best of the year, but it’s worth watching, even if only once.

Red One (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Santa gets kidnapped.

Studios put a lot of thought into release dates for big movies. Sometimes it’s to avoid competition with a similar release which may split the audience and negatively affect the box office, sometimes because it wants to be in people’s minds when they nominate films for awards, and sometimes it is to make use of certain demographics (releasing kids films during the summer holidays etc). With that in mind, it is truly baffling why Red One, a Christmas movie, was released in the first week of November, which despite what the adverts on television may be telling you, is not Christmas. I can’t imagine there’s much crossover between the intended audience of Red One, and the intended audience for Night Bitch or the new Lord Of The Rings. There are only two ways I can justify it;

  1. They need it to fail so they can recoup the losses in some form of Hollywood accounting BS
  2. It’s going to be released on streaming services just before Christmas.

There is, of course, the possibility that they want this to be a slow-burn success, that audiences will be so impressed by what they see that they will tell their friends, who will then tell their friends and sooner or later everyone will go see it.

If they wanted that, they should have made a better movie. It’s not terrible, it’s just deeply deeply flawed. The main issue is one of tone. It’s not sure whether it wants to be a family-friendly Christmas adventure or an action movie. At times, it seems like it’s aimed at children, with infantile references and simple narratives, but then there are sexual references and mid-level swears which you’d expect in a mild 15.

I wasn’t a fan of Chris Evans in this. He’s usually very good, and he can do comedy. But for some reason, his style didn’t work in this. It’s hard to buy him as a regular human, even when he is standing next to The Rock. I should point out, that there’s a moment where Nick Kroll gets possessed, and the vocal performance is bad to the point of embarrassment. Other than that, most of the performances are fine, and it’s always nice to see Bonnie Hunt.

There are also pacing issues. It takes FAR too long to get to the point. The opening also repeats itself or says things that could have been saved for later. Personally, I think we should have stayed with Chris Evans character before moving to the mystical part, then our experiences would have been similar to his, with our eyes and minds slowly being shown the magic.

The magic is the best part. Red One incorporates so many worldwide Christmas myths and legends that it’s almost an educational experience. I really enjoy the way they incorporate Gryla. I kind of wish they put more in, but I suppose the hope was to save them for sequels.

In summary; disposable fun, that really should have been released either straight to streaming or closer to Christmas. At the moment, it feels like it’s been sent out to die, and it doesn’t deserve that.

Don’t Move (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: When a killer injects her with a paralytic agent, a woman must run, fight and hide before her body completely shuts down.

Did Netflix gaslight us into thinking their original films used to be good? I thought they were, but looking at the list, there’s a lot of shit there. Well, maybe “shit” is a bit harsh, but for every Glass Onion, there are about 40 Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga‘s, films which are so forgettable that they barely register as being watched. Maybe Don’t Move will be different?

It starts promising, it sets the tone very quickly, and it’s really interesting. The opening kidnapping is shocking, not just because of how sudden it is, but also how cold and calculating it is. You can really see how the killer lures his victims. He picks up character information so quickly, incredibly observant. He’s essentially a detective who uses his powers for evil.

I like how minimalist DM is. There are a few other characters, but it is mostly just Finn Witrock and Kelsey Asbille. Finn Wittrock is good, but he never really feels like an individual, instead coming off as a mix between Bill “Pennywise” Skarsgard, Casey “Not Ben” Affleck and Leonardo “No Don’t Turn 26, you’re so pretty” DiCaprio. Asbille does A LOT considering she’s paralyzed for the majority of the runtime. She has tremendous eye-acting, which is essential because that’s the only way she portrays emotion for most of it. The small cast allows the talents of the two leads to really shine. It also helps Asbille’s character seem more isolated. This could have been TERRIBLE if it cut to her previous life too often (as was done in The Mercy) in an attempt to examine her life. Because we only see her in the context of a kidnapping victim, we feel scared and isolated alongside her; all we know in this world is her and her kidnapper.

I do have some issues with the script though. Not that it’s bad, but I feel it wastes potential. Whilst DM is good, it could (née, should) have been great. Her losing her body autonomy (we call that “Being An American Woman”) should have taken place in real-time, it lasts 10 minutes onscreen instead of the (I think) 20 it was said to have taken. Adding the extra 10 would have made it so much more interesting. That’s the case for the whole film actually. It’s crying out for a gimmick. Maybe that’s real-time, so we get LONG shots of her being driven to the cabin the kidnapper hopes to keep her in, the longer the drive, the more we become aware of just how hopeless her situation is. Maybe it could have done the always impressive long take, making it seem like it was all filmed in one take (as in Boiling Point and 1917) with scenes of forestry masking cuts and time jumps. Maybe if it was all from her POV, so we are truly in her shoes, feeling her fear and helplessness. Any one of those would have made it a genuinely impressive feature and would have helped it stand out. As it is, it’s just pretty good.

It’s a shame to watch a film and get distracted by what it is instead of what it could be. But this isn’t quite refined enough to distract you, so you can’t really help but let your mind wander. It’s a great concept, but there’s not quite enough in the narrative it to justify stretching it out to feature length instead of just having it as a short. It’s not, but it does have big “based on a short story” energy. This is where a gimmick would have helped it, it would have hidden the narrative swamp of boredom.

Juror #2 (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Justin Kemp (Hoult) is called to jury duty for a man accused of murdering his girlfriend, a man Kemp knows is innocent because the actual killer was him, during a distressing car journey home on that night.

I will admit, I was a little lost going into this as I hadn’t seen Juror #1.

Now that that terrible joke is out of the way, I can get serious. I’m not going to, but the option is there. Juror #2 can best be described as a competent movie. It’s possibly Clint Eastwood’s last movie as a director and a fine film to exit on. Eastwood is a good director, but let’s face it, his real talent is picking really good scripts. That continues with this, where his directing never really gets better than “serviceable”. Actually, that’s mean, I suppose “functional” would be more accurate. There are no bad visual moments, but nothing that will really impress you.

Something like this isn’t about the visuals though, it’s all about the story and the performances, both of which are pretty damn fine. It’s not perfect. There are definitely a few scenes that don’t do enough to justify their inclusion. That’s especially disappointing in a legal thriller. When you watch a film based on truths coming out, where characters are trying to hide their past actions etc, you expect things to matter. If a random scene happens, you expect that it’s actually important and will matter. There’s a scene here where the main character picks up the phone that belongs to the lead prosecutor (played by the About A Boy pairing of Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette) after she accidentally drops it in the car park. There are a lot of ways this could have come up again; maybe she uses it to get his fingerprints, and maybe she will remember something about him later on. Nope, nothing. It doesn’t even tell us anything about the characters. That’s followed by another scene which is an intro to jury duty, again, completely unnecessary. It feels like it was only there because the writer did their research into what happens before you serve on jury duty, found out that you go into a room and watch a video before the trial starts, and wanted to show off that research.

There’s some great character work here. So many of the jury members have enough backstory and motivations to come off as believable. It would be nice if a few more of them were fleshed out, especially because of all the wasted scenes. There’s one weird character. Harold, played by JK Simmons is written almost TOO well. He’s a former detective who takes an interest in the case. His interest in the case gets him kicked off the jury, which is realistic. He then doesn’t appear again. Soooooooo, what was the point of that? Are we to believe that he just stopped? “Well, I’m not part of the case anymore, so who gives a shit?” If anything, he would feel more free. He can investigate it as a private citizen on his free time now he’s not locked in a jury room all day.

The performances? Pretty damn good. Why don’t films cast Nicholas Hoult as a leading man in romance films? He has the best eyes. The rest are pretty good, it is weird to see so many English actors in SUCh an American movie. Zoey Deutch is a delight, as she always is. Eastwood does cast his daughter, but it’s a minor role, the kind of role that’s okay for a nepotism hire as you’re not exactly going to get a major performer in such a small role.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: In the 1950’s Appalachian mountains, Hellboy and his rookie teammate hunt down a local legend.

I mentioned to someone that I had watched this. The response to that is normally a quick “is it worth watching?”, “How is it?” etc, the usual questions. The one I got for this? “What new Hellboy movie?”.

The first Hellboy movie had box office takings of nearly $100million, so A LOT of people saw it. Even the 2019 one (which I reviewed here) made $55million on a budget of $50million (you wouldn’t think it would be that expensive to put a massive pile of dog shit in front of a camera and then film it). Those numbers prove one thing; a lot of casual moviegoers are aware of this character. So it’s baffling that the studio not only released this straight-to-VOD but also had a marketing campaign that consisted of “just post a video on YouTube, people will find it”. Really, Hellboy: The Crooked Man (H: TCM, pronounced Ha-took-em) SHOULD be a cult classic. It should have a reputation as a folk horror comic book movie, a low-budget but high-effort hidden gem.

It won’t have that reputation though, because it’s a bad film. Maybe I’d be more favourable towards this if it wasn’t for how good the first two are. Then again, maybe I’d be less favourable if I didn’t have to suffer through the last one. Actually, that does a disservice, as even without the comparisons, H: TCM would still seem cheap. At times it looks like a video game, and at other times it looks like a porn parody where the actors forgot to have sex. I knew it would have a lower budget, so visually it wouldn’t be able to match the previous entries, but it still tries to, and it fails in that trying. The things we see in films aren’t real, but I appreciate some effort in concealing that. I’m well aware that Wallace and Gromit are claymations, but if the next film has a moment where we see the animators’ fingers moving them around, I’m gonna be pissed. This makes no effort to hide the metaphorical strings behind the visuals, so it’s hard to lose yourself in what you’re seeing as the visuals constantly pull you out.

There are some good moments. It is suitably violent and doesn’t waste time getting to the violence. The witch coming back to life scene was pretty damn good. Very creepy. There are a few other moments where you can see what it is aiming to be. It’s in those moments where you see the influences, the most obvious one being The Evil Dead. Considering how heavily indebted it is to The Evil Dead series, it’s surprising they didn’t just get Bruce Campbell to play the lead. It certainly would have been a better option than Jack Kesy. Nothing against Kesy, but he doesn’t have that special otherworldly factor to lead a film like this. There’s no presence, no sense of authority, he doesn’t feel like he OWNS the scenes, he never feels any more than just an actor playing his part. He lacks the physicality too. There’s a moment where I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be in slow motion, or if he just can’t run fast in the prosthetics.

Another positive is that, unlike similar movies, they do explain the myth behind the villain etc. So it’s very easy to understand motivations and character. The trouble is, it’s delivered in such a dull way that it’s hard to pay attention. Yes, the 2019 Hellboy was terrible, but it was never as boring as this.

The Whip (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: In response to government welfare cuts, a group of people attempt to steal a black book of blackmail material from the Houses of Parliament.

I was wary of this. It looked interesting, but so did A Kind Of Kidnapping, which was kind of a letdown (especially since I’m a fan of the director). I knew nobody who worked on The Whip, and even from the trailer it looked low-budget. After watching it, I can confirm its low-budget nature. I don’t know if it’s a green screen or was filmed on location and lit badly, but there are far too many moments where there’s a disconnect between the characters and the background. In a student film, that’s okay, but in a wide-release feature, you can’t help but feel a little disappointed.

The directing is definitely the weakest link in The Whips’ chain. Not just in terms of visuals, but the physical geography is lacking. One scene featuring a walk and talk on a bridge is particularly clunky regarding how it’s set out concerning character placement. What was even weirder about that is that the next scene is a static shot on a nearby bench which would have been much easier to play out, it would have had the advantage of hiding the Houses Of Parliament out of shot so that the “so what’s the target?” shot reveal would have felt more natural, rather than “stop and look behind us at the thing that’s been in the shot all this time and that we’re actually walking away from right now”. I also have issues with some of the performances. None of them are bad, but there are definitely some inconsistencies that should have been taken care of in rehearsals, or as Cath Clarke put it in the Guardian “more wooden than the panelling in the chief whip’s office”. Also, there are a few bad edits where the match-cutting could be a lot better.

Now onto the good; A LOT of effort has been put into this, and it shows. The opening credits are unique, with the names being written down in a notepad before appearing on screen. I love it when films put the extra effort in and tell a story or tone by the way they display the credits. Haven’t seen it done as well since Sometimes I Think About Dying. The closing credits are creative too, the traditional “photo alongside name” but done as newspaper headlines, and having other headlines providing a “what happens next” coda. I really appreciate that level of creativity.

So how about the actual film? Imagine there’s a line between “funny because it’s relatable” and “not funny because it’s too relatable”, this film dances down that line and then snorts it. The opening scene with the assessment is uncomfortably realistic; a government worker who’s not listening and spends more time looking at the computer than actually paying attention to the person she’s interviewing. Everybody who has had to speak to someone at the DWP can recognise that. The “can you tell me about her condition?” attitude of asking the carer when the actual person is RIGHT THERE is so prevalent that it’s actually taught as an example of what not to do because of how dehumanising it is. It’s frustrating the amount of effort disabled people have to put in to convince people that they haven’t magically healed, and just because they can manage their condition whilst at home and under certain conditions, doesn’t mean they can work full time. It’s difficult to watch scenes like that and not be fucking furious at our government (including the new ones who are basically the old ones just in a different jacket). On that note, Meg Fozzard is superb.

That frustration is shared by the characters, alongside their helplessness. They point out that marching isn’t enough, people marched against the invasion of the Middle East and it still happened. Being on the right side of history doesn’t mean dick if it kills you and nothing changes. As someone says “There’s being right, then there’s doing something about it”.

You’d think that all of this would make this a deeply cynical watch, and at times it is. But it is also weirdly idealistic. Hard to explain but I’ll try. I guess the message of it is; everything fucking sucks UNLESS we do something now! It has moments which are clearly made to inspire you, whether it’s the scene in the back of a car where a politician tells someone “Young people don’t tend to vote for us, so we encourage them not to vote”, it’s made to encourage you to engage in politics (although that scene does take too long to get to the point). It’s also nice how it shows an older politician who is just as disgusted with his party’s actions. Makes you wonder if a better world is possible if we just remove the person at the top (and as someone who is currently reading a book about the history of Rome, the answer as to whether that is true is……unclear). He’s clearly not comfortable with repeating his party’s message, especially as he knows it’s barbaric and badly explained. As he says:

“Of course they didn’t get it, they’re not supposed to get it, if they got it they’d be furious”

The lack of internet security in government buildings is depressingly accurate. It is FAR too believable that our government’s wi-fi has zero encryption, probably because the people who need to use it are computer illiterate to the point where they DEFINITELY keep their passwords on a post-it attached to the computer screen. Just as believable is that they’d purchase a safe which opens if you tap the top of it. Just as believable. It’s that reality that really helps this film work. It doesn’t quite feel like a documentary, but it does feel so believable that there’s a small part of you that wonders “Could we do this?”. It provides hope, and that’s sorely needed right now.

Transformers One (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A look at the inciting incident in the hatred between Optimus Prime and Megatron

I was mildly looking forward to this. The trailer caught my attention, and I thought, “That looks like a lot of silly fun.” A bit like the second coming of The Lego Batman Movie, which I still think is dumb brilliance. It’s not dumb brilliance, it’s just brilliant. Yes, it has some silly jokes, but nowhere near as much as it could. Before it fully settled into the tone I spotted numerous opportunities for some silly jokes, and I assumed it was the scriptwriters missing opportunities. That’s my bad, this is not attempting to be silly, just entertaining, and yes, Virginia, there is a difference. Everything makes sense within the logic created. Also, EVERYTHING is played straight, to a horrific extent at some points.

This isn’t a “fun and joy for kids” movie. It deals with colonialism, disability rights, hierarchal power structures, appeals to authority fallacies etc. It doesn’t shy away from darkness, characters are decapitated, torn apart, mutilated at birth, and stabbed repeatedly. You don’t expect kids’ films to feature a scene of a main character being horrifically tortured, and you certainly don’t expect it to be shown and not just implied or cut away from.

This is only the second film that Josh Cooley has directed, and he does brilliantly. It will be a weird thing to say as a response to an animated kid’s film, but I feel he would make a fantastic horror film. He knows about scale, he knows about tension, and he knows how to maximise character pain so that the audience can feel it, I shouldn’t wince in pain when an animated robot gets hurt, but this manages it. He’s helped by the animation style; it is almost stop-motion in how physically real the world looks.

It’s very well cast. There are NAMES in this, Johannson, Hemsworth, Fishbourne, Hamm etc. And all of them nail it, they actually act, and they’re not just doing their normal voices. The real MVP is Brian Tyree Henry. There’s one moment in particular where his performance is one of the best I’ve heard all year, not just in kids films, in general. His conviction and passion is breathtaking, and it’s genuinely chilling to hear him deliver it, particularly the line “No, I want to kill him” which would easily be seen as cheesy if delivered by a lesser performer.

I know I’ve seen the first Michael Bay Transformers movie, and I think I’ve seen the second one too. But I can’t remember much from them, they were fine as I was watching them, but nothing stands out, it was just metal smashing metal like some Robot Fuck Club (great band name). This? I will remember this. At the risk of sounding crude, it’s f*cking fantastic. It has everything I want in a movie; laughs, good characters, references to Key And Peele sketches, looks fantastic, heart, and some mild terror. Some people may argue that the start of darkness is too obvious. Those people are wrong, it’s not “predictable”, it’s foreshadowing/storytelling, and damn fine storytelling at that.

AfrAId (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A family takes an experimental AI into their house. Everything works out fine. Psych! Stuff starts to suck.

AfrAId was directed by Chris Weitz, who also directed About A Boy, The Twilight Zone: New Moon, and The Golden Compass, which is a weird film history if you think about it. Not really relevant at all, I just wanted to mention it.

I went into this with lower expectations than I would if Gillingham were playing Barcelona (football joke, I NEVER make them), I knew it had bad reviews and box office, and bad horror movies are usually The Crow-est of the low. So I knew this would be terrible. But then something went wrong; it’s not terrible. It’s not good, but it’s not terrible. It is never bad enough to be awful, but also it’s never quite good enough to stand out. It doesn’t help that it’s quite derivative, it’s not saying that much which hasn’t been said before (primarily by equally stupidly titled M3gan). It can’t compare to that, and not just because the AI in this isn’t as memorable, or as well-written. Occasionally it only does things BECAUSE it’s a horror movie, there’s no “non-creepy” justification for many of the AI’s choices.

On the plus side, it does seem like it has something to say, which I always like to see in a horror movie. The proliferation of AI is a concerning development and one that’s too big for films to ignore. This film also says a lot about how families interact with themselves and with technology, especially concerning how that affects parenting. It doesn’t always work, though. There are some parts where the AI nature of it just

The revenge porn bit, in particular, didn’t sit right with me. I don’t care that it ruined that kid’s life, he knowingly made and shared porn of his girlfriend. I don’t give a shit that he won’t go to college or that he’s being tried as an adult. To be perfectly honest I hope he gets hit by a fucking car. Now it gets fun. No word of a lie, I legit wrote that line, and then that character died in a car crash. So that’s nice.

On the upside; the performances are good. John Cho is underrated (as anybody who has watched Searching will know), and I’m still waiting for the world to pay attention to just how utterly fantastic Katherine Waterston is. Both of them feel slightly beyond this movie, almost like this was a film made years ago and only just released now to make use of their fame. There’s also no issue with direction; it looks good, has decent audio cues etc.

The main issues are pretty much entirely down to the script. The pacing is like a drunk driver; all over the place, causing great damage, and indefensible. The ending is a huge letdown. It goes too “real”, with the AI making incursions into reality which are a bit too far-fetched and would be easily solved by humans. The closing scenes are also far too predictable, to the point where it feels like a parody.

In summary; not as bad as I expected, but not as good as I wanted. AfrAId is like people who discuss politics on Twitter, too concerned with saying stuff “now” than trying to figure out how to say it.

Never Let Go (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: In response to a worldwide evil, a mother (Halle Berry), protects her children via tethering them to the house with a rope, thus ensuring no evil can come to them. As the years go on, she struggles to keep them content with their new lifestyle.

I have a mixed history with Alexandre Aja (the director of Never Let Go, or NLG, pronounced Nelgg), I enjoyed Horns, but I found Crawl a bit poor, so I was unsure what to expect. Halle Berry is in it, which bodes well as she does seem to be more careful about what scripts she chooses lately (probably because of Catwoman), and even if a film is bad, Berry is always good. I wasn’t aware of the two child actors in this, but they are pretty damn good in this. It’s not “good for child actors”, just flat-out good. So that’s definitely a plus. Aja’s directing is pretty decent too with some brilliantly creepy set-pieces and creative visuals. There are moments where it is a bit too dark to see, but that’s to be expected in a film set in a cabin that lacks as many lights as this does. It’s also a genuinely interesting story, and provides a real sense of survivalism, particularly with how difficult it is even for those experienced in it. Doesn’t matter how good you are at hunting if the animals have all gone somewhere else (unless you’re a nomadic tribe obviously). And it doesn’t matter how good you are at farming if it’s too cold and flooded for the crops to work. It’s not “organic salads made entirely from hand-grown fruits”, sometimes it’s “eating fried bark”. You’re only ever one winter away from starvation, and that will lead to you making difficult decisions like wondering if you should kill your dog. So much of NLG is utterly fantastic. The film itself? Far from it.

Whenever you watch a film, you don’t watch it in a vacuum (or any other household appliance), it can set up expectations and then subvert them, and other times it makes them seem predictable. So movies now need to be written with that in mind. Never Let Go attempts to play with expectations, but in its attempts to do so, it traps itself like a fly in a spider’s web and is just as ugly. It knows that your first thought while watching this will be “Okay so is the twist going to be that she’s actually just making it up?”, which would work. Instead of subtly laying in clues, it has characters outright state that they believe that to be the case. It sets up that “twist” far too obviously, to the point where you begin to wonder if it’s actually a double twist and it turns out she was telling the truth all along. But that’s not a twist, that’s just a straight story. The way that NLG tries to set up both endings means that whatever ending it picks, it will end up feeling predictable. It traps itself by attempting to be too clever.

I suppose that’s to be expected, I mean, it has to attempt SOMETHING, the story itself really doesn’t lend itself to a 100-minute feature. It only has three characters, and the very notion of the story means they can’t interact with anybody else, and two of them have known only this life forever. So with nothing to upset the status quo, and no new characters introduced, it’s difficult to be hooked. I’ve seen worse films, but I’ve yet to see a semi-decent movie be as derailed by a poor script as much as this one was. I suppose at least they’re trying.

The Garfield Movie (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Garfield gets roped into a scheme alongside his dad to steal milk.

Well after insulting it in my review of Jackpot, I had to actually watch it, didn’t I? If only so my despair at that being rated lower than this would be accurate. There was always a chance that I would be wrong and that this would actually be really good. I mean, look at the cast. Hannah Waddington, Nicholas Hoult, Brett Goldstein, Ving Rhames, and Samuel L Jackson, that is a weirdly strong cast for a non-ensemble piece.

Like all good films, The Garfield Movie (TGM, pronounced Tigg-um) leaves you asking questions, especially with the final action scene. It’s just a shame that those questions are ones like “How fucking long is that bridge? This scene should have ended minutes ago, this movie fucking sucks”.

In 2010 there was a woman named Mary Bale who was filmed walking past a delightfully cute kitty-cat named Lola. She stroked Lola, who was clearly approachable and friendly. Lola’s tail was raised in happiness and delight. Mary then picked Lola up and threw her in a fucking wheelie bin like a bitch. That video was posted online and she became infamous. I have seen that video (I had to, it was EVERYWHERE at the time), so I can confirm that that footage is now the SECOND most painful video I’ve seen involving a cat. You know, because this movie is also about a cat, and is fucking terrible (in case I was being too subtle).

I should have known this would be terrible from the very start. It starts with Garfield ordering food on an app. So the first shot is of a phone screen. There is no effort to make it seem like real food is being ordered on a real app. It moves from the item he wants to the next item he wants, there is no scrolling and picking an item, it just magically goes from one thing he wants to the next thing. I know it’s a small thing to be annoyed about, but it does annoy me because it makes it seem low effort. Also, he’s not ordering a lasagne, he’s ordering a pizza (with sides, which he knocks off the table in the bag without eating them).

This just doesn’t feel like a Garfield movie. There’s nothing specific to the character. In fact, there are very free moments specific to him being a cat. For example, when his dad is tied up with rope, Garfield tries to untie him; he has claws. It’s not a Garfield movie, it’s a movie that has Garfield in it. He’s not a character with his usual characterisation and foibles. He’s not sarcastic or dour, he’s just a normal animated movie lead. I haven’t seen a film misjudge its own main character this much since the Artemis Fowl casting call. It’s not a Garfield movie, it’s more like it’s a standard kids film, that stars Garfield. He’s not a character, he’s an actor playing a character that doesn’t suit him. The tone is completely wrong too, it’s too fast.

So I’ve established it fails as a Garfield movie. It’s not even a good animated movie. It fails at being a movie, and the animation is terrible. It reminds me of the South Park game on the N64, only with less piss-soaked snowballs. The human characters look okay, but the animals themselves look terrible. There’s no sense of realness to it. The animals don’t feel fluffy or cosy, they look like balloons. This is going to be a weird criticism of an animated film, but it’s too much of a cartoon in terms of the physics. There’s a scene where Garfield bounces from one tree to the other without losing any momentum. I know, standard modern animation. But still, it’s completely out of place in a series such as Garfield which has always maintained a somewhat realistic style.

I’ve seen worse films this year, but I can’t think of a movie which has completely failed its own lead character as much as this one did. On the plus side, I don’t have to see it again.