Tag: Film

Halloween (2018)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Before I start this review I should state: I’ve never seen a Halloween film. Well that’s a lie, I might have seen the first one, but when I was like 10 so I wasn’t really paying attention to it. As such my knowledge of the film series is stuff I absorb through pop-culture osmosis. So I know a little bit (He’s called Michael Myers, the third one is unconnected to the rest of the series and was originally meant to be the second one, THAT music etc), but not enough that I feel emotionally connected to. Despite that; I still REALLY enjoyed this. It seems to ignore all but the first one, and is all the better for it. You don’t need to have watched a lot of films to get this, as long as you know the basics of the character you should be fine, actually considering how well scripted this is I don’t even think you’ll need that. It does a great job of bringing you up to speed, explaining what’s haunting certain characters.

The script for this is actually really good, the kills are simple. He doesn’t go around doing elaborate traps, he just kills them the simplest possible way. There’s one scene in particular which is a masterclass of horror film-making, it’s just him walking through houses, massacring the inhabitants. There’s one moment during this where I knew the film had me; where he’s in the house with a baby still in its seat, and I panicked for it, I panicked for the fictional character. There’s usually child immunity in horror films, it’s like an unwritten rule; children in horror movies are safe. This is not the case in this; Michael Myers kills a child. Not the baby, but one of the first deaths in the movie is a child so he can take his dads car. If I remember correctly it’s the first death we actually see as well. It’s a great way of saying that all the usual horror tropes are off, so anything goes.

The downsides of this film; there’s one death which is kind of embarrassing to watch. It’s where Michael Myers stamps on someone’s head, it looks incredibly fake and is almost comical. It breaks the tension completely and takes you out of the moment. There are also issues with the characters. The ones who survive are fine, it’s the ones who die that you don’t really care for. There are some characters with promise who then die before they get to fulfil that promise. And there is a twist which is completely unnecessary and stops mattering after a few minutes, it seems like it is only there because it was the only way they could think of to move the plot from one moment to the next. Luckily the moment that builds up to is superb. The final setpiece of this film is amazing to see. Incredibly tense, great character work, and it subverts a lot of what you know from the original film, recreating scenes from it but with the roles reversed. This is all accompanied by a FANTASTIC soundtrack, with an obvious debt to the original music, but updated to a modern sensibility.

So yeah, I loved this movie. It was tense, gripping, superbly made, and just all-round fantastic. And Jamie Lee Curtis gives the performance of a lifetime, reclaiming her crown as the queen of horror.

See-Saw (Day Four: Saw IV)

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Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Budget: $10million

Box Office: $139.3million

  • Fine. Let’s do this.
  • We open with an overly-long autopsy of Jigsaw. I’m going to give this film the benefit of the doubt and say this was done so we know for certain Jigsaw is dead so the audience doesn’t expect him to come back to life. No excuse for it to be quite this long though. And in quite so much detail. It’s odd, they’re playing it like it’s a scene from a horror movie. They’ve got the spooky scary music, dark lighting, and intense close-ups of body parts. But it’s not meant to be scary, it can’t be. How can it be?
  • We get the in-story reason for this now. They find a tape in his stomach. The one that he was shown to have covered in wax in the last one and eaten. They show that scene again in case you couldn’t remember it. This series has a weird approach to how it treats the audience’s memory. It replays A LOT of stuff from previous films, but also has so much where if you weren’t taking notes in previous films you wouldn’t remember who certain people were or why they matter.
  • I’m not lying about this being overly long by the way, it was five minutes long.Five minutes of someone just being cut open.
  • The tape is played, is pretty much what you expect. “my work will go on” etc.
  • Two people wake up in a room, one with his eyes gouged out, one with his mouth sewn shut. They’re chained to a machine that is gradually pulling them closer to a machine that will kill them. Who are these people? Does it even actually matter this point? Does anybody care?
  • Fight scene, and I have to say this isn’t really a fair fight, the guy with his mouth sewn shut is at zero disadvantage, you don’t need your mouth to fight really, whereas the guy with his eyes gouged out is fucked, not literally.
  • The guy with mouth sewn shut wins the fight and gets the key from the back of the other persons head. Because of course he wins. Don’t worry, you won’t see the guy from this scene again for like an hour, by that point you’d have forgotten who he was.
  • The police find Kerry from the last movie. Again, not much reason for this to be in this movie and not the last one. I actually want to see what this series would be like if it was edited into one long chronological story.
  • The police assume Jigsaw has a new accomplice.
  • There’s a book about Jigsaw, titled “John Krama aka Jigsaw. Is he the murderer the police say he his”. That’s not a typo on my end by the way, it genuinely says “he his”. Also, why would lead with his real name, then the fake? Also also, that book got published really damn quickly.
  • Daniel Rigg (who I think has been in previous Saw movies) seems to be the lead of this one. A cop who feels guilty for not being able to save people, particularly Eric Matthews (donnie whalberg from the 2nd one, who is still listed as missing). This film series has to be commended for that though; it’s done the film series equivalent of promoting from within. Most of the main characters for each film have been introduced in previous ones. It’s a great way of doing things and shows forward planning, rewards loyalty, and makes it feel less like a film and more like an actual world that exists.
  • He’s kidnapped, as a lot of people are in these films. Yeah, he’s definitely the lead. As condescending as this sounds it’s great to see a black lead in a horror movie. Especially one where his being black isn’t his main character trait. He’s not the black lead from Saw, he’s just the lead from Saw.
  • Oh, Donnie wahlberg is still alive it turns out. Barely, he’s being kept alive as the test for Daniel, who has 90 minutes to save both him and Detective Hoffman (who was in, erm, the 3rd one I think, I don’t know at this point).
  • His first test: he finds a woman in a pig mask tied to a chair, her hair tied to a machine that slowly pulls her head back. The tape tells him to let her die as it’s not his job to save her. From what I can tell her crime was being a prostitute. That does not seem worthy of death and torture. Or she might have been a pimp. Yeah that’s pretty bad.
  • He can’t find a knife to cut her hair loose so decides to deal with the problem in the most American way possible; he shoots the machine.
  • He gets the combination and saves her, but not before she gets nearly scalped and looses a lot of blood. What would have happened if her hair was fake and mainly made of extensions?
  • She grabs a knife and tries to stab him. In her defence, he was a black man with a gun, in his own house. The police have shot people for similar reason.
  • Oh that’s how she knew where to get the knife from, her tape said she had to kill him as he was going to arrest her for prostitution, so the only way for her to escape jail was to kill a cop. Obviously.
  • Wait, for him to have listened to that tape, she would have had to rewind it after listening to it?
  • Back to Donnie, who is chained to a ceiling suspended above an ice block. We flash back to the third one where he was knocked out by Amanda, because otherwise how else would we remember who he is? And we’re shown him being kept alive through tiny portions of food and an awful disgusting room. If he was on benefits the British government would describe that as “luxury”
  • Daniel goes to a disgusting motel run by an overweight guy in a white vest who owns a dog. He’s almost definitely a pervert/rapist/paedophile.
  • When he gets to the room there’s the picture of the motel owner and instructions to go to his room and do something whilst disguised with a pig mask. He’s still wearing the exact same clothes though and didn’t get the mask until he was in the motel room. So if there’s cameras all over the place as the tape said, then that would be noticed.
  • Yup he’s a rapist. We’re shown video evidence, he recorded it. I mean, I don’t care what happens to this guy, he’s a serial rapist who tried to deny it until the final moment.
  • He’s made to climb into a bed and tie himself up. Then gouge his own eyes out. He succeeds until the final part, and his limbs get torn away. Ah well.
  • Flashback to the time Daniel beat up a guy for abusing his wife and kids. Most the victims are kind of assholes so there is a cathartic quality to the deaths.
  • More flashbacks, this time to when Jigsaw was alive and his wife (oh yeah, she’s been in this movie, but her scenes have been really dull) worked at a health clinic and got robbed by a drug addict who caused her to miscarriage, causing him to become Jigsaw. Nice touch, kind of unnecessary.
  • Daniel now goes to a school where he finds the guy abused his wife and kids. They were being held together with spikes running through both them. To survive she has to pull the spikes out, she’ll live but he will die. This is weird as it’s a test for her. She seems to be being punished for being abused. We don’t need Jigsaw punishing women for being in abusive relationships, the police and courts already do this. He decides to let her save herself by giving her the key and setting off the fire alarm so that people are alerted. I don’t get what Daniel’s lesson in that was.
  • Crime scene technician there seems to be the worst ever and accidentally sets off a harpoon that kills another person at the scene. That’s not Jigsaw that did that, that’s not applying health and safety rules.
  • The cops (one of who i’ve already forgot her name) go into a room where the puppet is. They play the tape round it’s neck, obviously (seriously, why do none of the people in these movies remove the tape from the room and play it somewhere safe where more people can help solve it). The puppet explodes in her face giving her a shrapnel facial. I really wish the make-up team did a better job here, she looks fine just with stuff in her face. It’s not particularly devastating to see.
  • Just realised Donnie and Hoffman trap is being overseen by the guy who had his mouth sewn shut at the start. I haven’t mentioned that much but only because there’s not much happening there. I think Hoffman can die but not sure how. This film has WAY too much going on yet also somehow manages to have nothing happen for a lot of it.
  • Flashback to what was possibly Jigsaws first test. He kidnapped the guy who killed his unborn child and nailed him to a chair.
  • Jigsaw puts a torture device on his head, a series of knives where the drug guy has to push his head into them to unlock it. Jigsaw refers to it as a “tool”, which sounds silly, but that’s how Americans refer to guns.
  • The trap doesn’t work, mainly because the chair breaks. The guy decides that whilst he’s been heavily mutilated and lost a lot of blood, it would be a good idea to attempt to kill the guy who put him there. Jigsaw just moves out the way, causing the guy to fall into barbed wire.
  • Daniel, and another cop (Peter Strahm) end up in the same building the third one took place in. We get more flashbacks to that movie.
  • Wait, this isn’t a flashback, the entire film is. It’s taking place alongside the third one. Clever idea, but not cleverly done enough.
  • Daniel bursts through the door before he should, despite them not being any real warnings against this this is seen as a cardinal sin, it releases ice blocks which finally kill Donnie. He does this after shooting the mouth-sew guy. He shoots him again as he was reaching for his own tape recorder. Weird, a black cop shooting a white guy for reaching for something innocent. That never happens the other way around.
  • The tape tells him that “your impatience killed Donnie, if you did nothing he would have been saved. You failed”. That just seems unfair as he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He was penalised for rules which weren’t really stated. I mean, he was told “don’t rush through a door, ever!” but that was by a cop, a long long time ago as part of a different moment.
  • And now we find that Hoffman is the real accomplice. Oh no, not Hoffman, he was so……he existed.
  • Hoffman locks Strahm in a room and I’ve gone past caring tbh. I don’t care about any of these people. There are too many twists and character turns that make zero sense and add nothing. It’s like watching late 90’s wrestling, just without the actors later killing their wife and child due to brain damage.
  • Oh, that’s the end? So to sum up the ending; one cop is locked in a room, one has been shot, one has had something blow up in their face but is still alive, one has become evil. Does that sound like the end of a movie? Or the end of a second act? NONE of these films stand on their own. I can only imagine how fucking pissed I’d have been if I saw these at cinema, having to wait a year to find out if a character died, but not really caring either way.
  • Wait, I forgot to say. Jeff died too.

Okay this film makes many many mistakes. The big one is it focuses too much on Jigsaw and his teachings. He’s an interesting character but he’s now dead and his disciples are ignoring his teachings, so as a character he is completely irrelevant to the narrative going forward. Yes, it improves the narrative of the previous movies. But Saw IV is not Saw II (despite containing a lot of the same fucking scenes), Saw IV is Saw IV, and as such it needs to focus on the characters in THIS movie instead of developing ones we know have no future development. It’s a huge logical storytelling flaw.

See-Saw: Day Three (Saw 3)

On By troubledproductionsIn See-SawLeave a comment

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Budget: $10million

Box Office: $164.8million

  • Okay the advertising to this features lots of teeth ripped out of mouths. That shit better actually be relevant.
  • “game over”, weird start to a film.
  • This starts as the second one ends, with Donnie Wahlberg in a room in near darkness. What’s that, it’s been a year since you saw the last film and you can’t remember too much about it, and the lack of light makes it even harder to see what’s going on? Pfft.
  • Like seriously, you can see what’s lit up by a flashlight that never stays still. It would be great as a video game, but this is a film, you kind of want to see the basic layout of what’s going on.
  • Ok from what I can tell he just broke his own foot so he could get out of being chained up. Why the police didn’t follow him there I have genuinely no idea.
  • The police think they’ve found him, but nope it’s just a random guy called Troy. He had eleven chains inside him that he needed to rip out of his body before a bomb went off. You’ll notice this as being quite similar to the traps in the previous films, only turned up to 11.
  • Oh good. Seizure-inducing editing. Why do horror movies hate people with epilepsy?
  • He doesn’t make it and he explodes, then how do they know where the chains were located in his body if the body is now mushy sludge?
  • Okay something VERY clever just happened. They found the tape that was left at the scene (Jigsaw still hasn’t gone digital, hipster). One of the other cops called Mark Hoffman immediately went and grabbed it. Now in a future film he’s revealed as working for Jigsaw (as seemingly everybody in this series does. You either die a hero or live long enough to be a…..okay that’s too much Batman for me).
  • Detective Kerry is caught in a trap, she can’t get out, she can’t believe a word you say. I had to say something here, she’s in 3 films and barely made an impression. That’s an issue with this series as a whole actually, with the exception of Jigsaw himself, none of the other characters are memorable enough. It’s not enough to have a good villain, a horror series needs a great hero too. Nightmare On Elm Street has Nancy, Halloween has Laurie Strode, the Scream movies have Sidney Prescott. If you want to you can do a Child’s Play and not use the hero eventually, but you need to do enough with them before doing so. This doesn’t have that, it tries to provide different “heroes” every film. But there’s nothing to them.
  • Kerry dies, but before she does she says “you” to someone we don’t see as the face is in darkness. The body looks like Amanda from the last two movies, and we already know Amanda is an accomplice of Jigsaw. So why is this being treated as if it will come as a surprise to the audience when it’s finally revealed near the end?
  • Amanda has been setting these traps but making them impossible to survive. Jigsaw disapproves. Yet somehow it’s still his voice on all the tapes presented to the victims.
  • Here’s a doctor, helping people. She’s going to be kidnapped.
  • And there it is, being abducted by Amanda from the last movie. Bought to jigsaw who is clearly in bad health, that’s probably from the cancer. She got abducted from the hospital where she works. Because hospitals are well known for being easy for people to sneak into without people seeing them.
  • “who are you?” asks a character who then says she knows who he is.
  • They force a weird necklace on her neck which will explode if Jigsaw dies. Very Battle-Royale.
  • So the main character is a dude named Jeff who has a dead child, and is very annoyed about that. He’s still mourning his son, so Jigsaw has kidnapped him, like a shitty therapist.
  • Jeff walks into a freezer and finds a naked woman. He also finds a tape recorder telling him the woman was a witness to the hit and run that killed his son, but she didn’t testify, she’ll be sprayed with freezing water until she dies. This is where the film falls apart for me and shows the difference between a great plot, and a great script. Firstly; why did she have to be naked? Once clothes are soaked in freezing water they won’t exactly keep her warm, if anything it will make her colder and will stick to her body causing her more pain. Is it because “booooooobs”? I fear it is. Because even when a woman dies, she has to be sexy, damnit! Now my next point, and the most important one. Why does the tape explain who she is? He knows, he obviously knows. If he’s been obsessing over this court case he obviously knows her, so why does the tape say it? It’s just for the benefit of the audience. It’s the horror equivalent of a character saying “as your sister who you haven’t spoken to properly in a while because of an argument we had years ago” (which I swear is pretty close to actual dialogue I’ve heard in a film). Jeff tries to save her but fails and she dies anyway. I mean you could argue that because she drove away he didn’t know who she was. But then how did Jigsaw find out who she was?
  • And we’re back to Amanda and the Doctor (not the doctor from the first one, this one’s a lady doctor, so she automatically gets hate mail from lonely nerds, her name is Lynn). Her and Amanda are having tense moments, Amanda teases her in a way that would be a lot better if it was a more charismatic character. Telling her about the way she could kill her but it would be pointless as she’s going to die anyway.
  • Amanda: “you’ll be surprised what tools can save a life” then she picks up the torture device she was locked in. Symbolism! Really, really, really unsubtle symbolism.
  • We get another flashback, this time to Amanda being put in the trap. I’m genuinely interested whether all this stuff was filmed at the same time as the first one, or whether they just re-recorded/recreated a lot of it. If they did it all at the start I’m impressed at their forward planning.
  • Now back to *checks notes* Jeff. In his next room: the judge who sentenced the driver that killed Jeff’s son. He’s at a bottom of a vat slowly being covered in liquidised pig bodies. The only way to get the key is to burn his sons belongings. This REALLY should be better than it is. It should be full of emotion and despair, but it’s not. I don’t know whether it’s the acting, the fact it’s shot like a standard horror movie, or the music being completely wrong, but it just rings hollow. You don’t feel the gravity of what’s happening. He does it, and saves the judge’s life. This is the other reason this film doesn’t really work for me, he should have tried to save everybody. He should have gradually come round to the idea of saving people. So there’s not really any “will he attempt to save them or will he not?” as we’ve already seen that he will. It completely robs it of any dramatic tension.
  • And back to the doctors office. Lynn is planning to relieve the tension on Jigsaws head by drilling into his skull. Pretty disgusting but again, it could be better. You see it happen but you don’t feel it. You don’t wince when she cuts it with it a saw, or anything. Compare that to the arm severing scene from 127 hours. You FELT that. When he went through the nerves in his arm, it was uncomfortable to watch as you felt how much it hurt. You don’t get that in this. The only editing tricks they use are the typical “quick cuts and bright lights” they’ve used throughout these movies.
  • And now more flashbacks back to Amanda surviving the first test. Jigsaw points out that the old Amanda is a completely different person and she needs to devote herself to him now. Incredibly creepy the idea that he can have a cult of followers. Never really touched upon though. I mean, yeah, he has a lot of followers it turns out, but never really feels like a cult.
  • We see Amanda abducting Adam from the first movie. I hope you remember the first movie, because if not then a lot of this film will mean absolutely nothing to you. MAJOR problem with these films actually; absolutely none of them stand up on their own. Every film feels incomplete somehow.
  • Oh, we’re seeing the entire preparation for the room in the first movie. Because that’s what this horror movie needed; flashbacks of people moving stuff. It adds to the first movie yes, but it adds NOTHING to this movie. If you take that entire section out it would take nothing away from the narrative, all we discovered from it was “Amanda helped Jigsaw with the room”.
  • A bit with Lynn, and then BACK TO THE FLASHBACKS. This film is attempting three narratives at once, and none of them are working. Amanda kills Adam, I think. It was mostly dark.
  • We’re back with the (I think) main story of Jeff. The judge is alongside him, and seems remarkably well-composed considering. Actually, they both seem really clean considering. Jeff triggers the next trap by kicking something, I think he kicked the door open. A guy (the one who killed Jeff’s son) is tied in what is essentially an iron crucifix. It slowly twists, breaking the guys limbs, but doesn’t start until the end of another recorded message on tape.
  • The judge is smart, he looks at the key to the machine and tries to figure out what to do. Jeff wastes the entire time just staring at the kid being tortured. This is one where time is of the essence, so now he’s realised he’s wasted all that time just standing there when he should have been doing something, and now with a definite time limit, he monologues. Jeff’s a dick.
  • The key activates a shotgun, killing the judge. That entire trap could have been avoided if they pulled the key out and got out the way. Or if they hooked it with a coat-hanger.
  • The trap twists the guys head, killing him, but after Jeff got the key. If he hadn’t dicked about he definitely would have managed to save him, it’s the same for the first trap too.
  • Lynn calls Jigsaw a murderer. His response “I despise murderers”. Really? So you don’t count “rigging 5 shotguns so it kills a police officer when he triggers it” murder? You can’t claim manslaughter as you knew what would happen, and you know what it would cause, and it’s five fucking shotguns.
  • Jigsaw covers a tape in wax, and Amanda freaks out over a letter. Why did either of these things happen? You won’t find out. Not in this movie anyway.
  • More flashbacks! Amanda killed Donnie Whalberg. This scene doesn’t belong in the third saw movie, at least not near the end. It’s not part of the narrative of this film, it’s the narrative of the second one. Yes, it’s about Amanda, who a lot of the narrative of this has been about, but it’s the conclusion to his arc, so it’s more his. He dies because he taunted Amanda by saying “you’re not Jigsaw, bitch”. Which, I can’t explain why, but is just a shockingly bad piece of dialogue. This scene went on way too long, and was so badly lit it was kind of hard to see what was going on.
  • Okay and now we’re back to Lynn etc. Amanda has a kind of monologue about how Lynn isn’t shit, and she’s better and still needs help. She cries, emotes, but…..nothing. The performance just doesn’t work. It’s first-year drama student level of “emoting”.
  • Amanda manages to shoot Lynn. You knew it was going to happen, and you knew Lynn was Jeff’s wife. I think it was supposed to be a twist but the whole “Lynn and Jeff are a couple” was really obvious. The only surprising part is that Amanda shot her without looking at her. Of course, Jeff sees this and shoots Amanda. She lives long enough to hear Jigsaw monologue his motivations to her for a few minutes in a scene which again isn’t needed as we kind of guessed everything he said. More to the point; how did Amanda not realise Lynn was Jeff’s wife? She didn’t realise they shared the same last name? Or look at ANY photos in their home?
  • Just realised Jigsaw uses tapes a lot. Is he buying hundreds of tape players in bulk?
  • Jigsaw makes a reference to Jeff’s daughter, making it obvious she’s been kidnapped.
  • Jeff goes to his wife’s side. She’s in pain but doesn’t seem to make it clear to him that if Jigsaw dies, she dies too. Which would be pretty useful information considering that Jeff then slices Jigsaw’s throat, with a saw, possibly a jigsaw, I’m not that well versed on my saw types. Okay, I get that her voice is wavering due to the blood loss, but she could hit something metal against something else to get Jeff’s attention.
  • Oh, this is the twist. Jigsaw plays a tape as he dies indicating that he’s kidnapped his daughter (was that a twist? It was pretty obvious really). And now he’s dead nobody else will know where Jeff’s daughter is. So, Jigsaw essentially killed a child here. Will she be saved? Find out in another movie! Because god knows this film can’t be allowed to close it’s own stories.
  • And so yeah that’s that over. The main villain of the franchise is dead. So I’m sure they’ll be no more sequels. I mean, it would be stupid for them to do more, right?
  • One final point; why did so much of the promotional material depend on ripped out teeth when there was NOTHING like that in the film?

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!

Hotel Artemis (2018)

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I really dug this. I mean, I won’t buy it on DVD or anything but it was a great watch. It’s better than the adverts make it seem. I thought it would be kind of a dumb action film but it’s SO much more. The satire in it is spot-on, and won’t date. That’s the trouble with satire sometimes, it can become irrelevant really quickly. This won’t. This will only become irrelevant when one of two things happen: when we reach the time the film is set in (2028), or when poor people start getting treated with respect and dignity. So really this film has ten years of relevance, being set in a society where there are riots because access to water is being denied to people without money (something which a lot of people predict will happen in the future), so the film hits home in terms of satire. The rest of it? The plot is actually really well paced, it builds and progresses at a steady pace, not showing too much too soon, but also not spending so long building up that you end up bored. It looks stunning, the future-dystopian aesthetic showing a great mix of slick and dreary (like a Nick Cave album). The performances? Dave Bautista continues doing what he does, being terrifyingly intimidating with conflicting thoughts in his head. Sterling K Brown somehow manages to feel underused despite being a main character, and Jodie Foster is still a fucking treasure. I was reminded how truly great she is during this film, she wasn’t just acting vocally, or with her face, her entire body was consumed by her character, the way she stood, the way she walked, everything about her was character driven, and shows the difference between a great performer, and one of the greatest performers.

Despite that; Jodie Foster wasn’t my favourite part of the film. My favourite part of the film was the sense that there were other stories in this world. The spin-off potential is huge, everything about the world and the characters seems developed, to the point where if somebody told me it was a comic book adaptation I’d believe them. Even the way characters interact suggest a huge backstory behind their relationship (Batista and Foster in particular.

Now for the negatives; it’s really hard to find negative things about this. Not in a “it’s so brilliant it’s almost perfect” way, but in a “not a lot of it stood out” way. What it does, it does well, but it very does better than that. The plot is simply an excuse for the action scenes at times. I mean, that’s fine, but it would be nice if it tried harder. Also the satire doesn’t go quite as hard as you feel it should, it very quickly becomes just the backdrop, it would be like if Robocop had the exact same setting and atmosphere, but was a movie about golf.

So in summary; very good, but continued the modern trend of “Jeff Goldblum turns up for only 5 minutes”, and makes me disappointed that Sofia Boutella still hasn’t had a film franchise built around her.

The Incredibles 2 (2018)

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Fourteen years. Fourteen long years we waited for this. Cinema has changed, animation has changed, yet this film is set the day after the first one, so the characters haven’t changed. And I don’t care, this film was superb and I loved it.

The first one was Incredible, and this one was Incredible two (I’m so sorry). Everything about this film just works beautifully, the voice-work, the way it looks, the story, it all interacts with each other in the most wonderful way.

It picks up almost immediately after the first one ends, starting with a fight with the villain that turned up at the end of it. The action scene that that causes lets you know what kind of film it’s going to be: bombastic fun that looks INCREDIBLE (although let’s face it, with Pixar, you always KNOW it’s going to look great). The story is serviceable, it doesn’t come anywhere near the depth of Toy Story 3, or the heart of Finding Dory, but that doesn’t actually matter. You’re not sitting there thinking “well this story is pedestrian” because the way the film is done you don’t really care, you’re just sitting there amazed at what you see unveiling in front of you. It does what it needs to do, and it does it well. That’s not to say it’s a simple movie, it’s probably the only mass-market animated movie this year that has dealt with the themes this does. Themes of masculinity and feeling worthless because you’re not the one the family depends on, the emasculation that can cause.

There was a worry when the initial trailer came out that the film would focus too much on Jack-Jack, pushing him from background character to the main one, making him as insufferable as minions became. We really should have trusted Pixar more. They use him well, using him as an excuse for some amazing visual slapstick gags. More about the visuals; these films have their own visual style, it’s not just the animation. The architecture is a kind of future-past hybrid that just works beautifully and helps create a universe which is both retro and timeless.

Yes, the reveal of the villain is kind of obvious, but I’d rather a films twist was obvious than if it made no sense. And you don’t really sit there and analyze the story of this, you sit back and let it take over you. Pixar movies really are great, they’re the only studio for whom I eagerly look forward to almost anything (cars excluded) they do. Even the films which are thought of as bland, are only seen as such compared to the excellent standard they normally produce (seriously, give Brave a rewatch, it’s actually REALLY good). This is Pixar at their best, but if they make me wait fourteen years for another one, I will be pissed off.

Uncle Drew (2018)

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This film commits many cardinal sins, let’s list them before I get into the review:

  1. It’s based on an advert. I’m used to films based on a book, or a TV, or a party game, but an advert? FUCK that!
  2. Most of the cast are young people in old people prosthetics.
  3. It’s about basketball. A sport I have little to no interest in.

So really this review should be full of the kind of vitriol usually reserved for undercooked pastries. Yet……I liked it. Yes, a lot of the performances were so exaggerated and cringe-worthy that it made it hard to watch. Yes, the story seemed like it was all put together on the back of a cereal box, and not a big one, one of those travel boxes. Yes, there’s so much product placement it’s almost embarrassing. Yes, it feels it needs a 5-10 minute dance sequence in the middle of it. And yes, the traditional “a teams player gets injured mid-game and needs to be replaced” happens TWICE in the closing section and I’m still not entirely sure why (seemed to be just so can get a view of Shaq’s butt cheeks). But I liked it. It was funny as hell and incredibly heartwarming. It would have been so easy for this basketball movie to be an own goal, luckily it’s a real hole-in-one touchdown (I’m not great at sports metaphors). It knows just when (and importantly, how) to get to you emotionally, to the point where I was glad for the credits scenes as it gave me time to wipe my eyes dry after (no, you’re crying!).

The film rests entirely on Lil Rel Howery, best known as the friend from Get Out. He walks the line between outrageous comedy performance and reality performance brilliantly. If he was replaced by someone who leant too far the other way it would have ruined the entire film. Playing his role somewhat reminiscent of a less annoying Kevin Hart, he’s a great lead for this and should be commended. His character should too, well, the films approach to his character anyway. A lot of times in sports films when we see someone who is good at a sport it’s because they’re really good the first time they attempt it, or they show some skill for it early on. This makes it seem like being good at it is just a matter of genetics. This film shows the other way; it shows him young, not being brilliant the first time he picks up a ball, but he practices, and practices, and practices. It’s revolutionary for a film to show that, I don’t get why though, but I like that this film takes the time to do it.

 

So to sum up, I liked it, but I probably would have liked it more if I actually gave a crap about basketball as I would have appreciated the cameos more.

Breaking In (2018)

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I knew almost nothing about this film before seeing it, I hadn’t seen a trailer, or even a poster for it (yet I did see plenty of trailers for Entebbe at our local cinema, which would be fine if they were actually showing that film. As it is it’s like “We’re going to get you excited about this film you won’t see. Why’s piracy going up? I blame millennials and avocados”. I think a lot of you won’t know either so I’ll explain it. Essentially Gabrielle Union’s character has been locked out of her home by people who are trying to break into a safe in her (recently deceased) father’s home. The script does everything it can to make it tense, her children are locked in the home being held hostage, which ups the tension for her. But also to get into the safe the burglars had to cut off electricity, and after 90 minutes of that, the police are automatically called, which adds tension there. The script is so goddamn tense it’s almost genius. Sadly, the rest of the film didn’t add up. There’s no visual brilliance to it, it doesn’t seem, on a technical level, to be that impressive. A film like this should be an emotional rollercoaster, taking you on a wild ride. This is more like one of those old wooden rollercoasters, it’s steady, does its job, but it never really reaches the heights that other similar things do, so you feel it’s lacking somewhat. On the upside, it also doesn’t go as low as it could. There are moments where it seems like it’s going to go off the rails and crash horrifically, but it doesn’t, it stays on course and remains good. For example, the film is a female-focused action film, all “don’t underestimate mothers” etc. Near the end the dad arrives, and he arrives at such a moment that it seems like he’s going to save the day. The woman we’ve watched kick ass throughout, can only be saved by a man. But then he gets knocked out quite quickly and she has to save him.

Now’s the best time to mention the acting. The actors playing the bad guys are great Billy Burke completely fills the screen with his presence whenever he’s on. Levi Meaden is pretty great too, despite looking like what Gerard Way would look like if he was in a Green Day tribute band. The film definitely belongs to Gabrielle Union though. You never think “that actress can’t do this”, even when you feel it’s a bit weird that the character can do certain things with no training. To be honest, I did think it was going to end similar to The Drop, where it turns out she’s been a trained killer all this time. I felt certain that’s how it was going to end, as it explained a lot of the things she knew how to do, and I was really excited to see the actress do it as I feel she would have nailed it. Sadly that wasn’t the case, is a shame as I think it would have worked. It would have made it something different from just the standard plot which this has. That’s the thing that stops me loving it, it’s good, but almost everything has been done before. Also, the opening was needless.

Tully (2018)

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I had no idea what this film was about. I hadn’t even seen a poster. I assume a lot of you will be in the same boat so here goes: it’s about a couple who have just welcomed their third child (one of whom has an unmentioned disorder similar to autism, for drama) into the world and the mother is knackered, so they hire a night nanny so she can get some sleep. The night nanny is a young, confident go-getter who speaks slightly pretentiously (think Juno, and not just because Diablo Cody wrote both) and teaches the mother the real meaning of……sleep? I don’t know. I get it, a lot of people are going to like this film, personally, I didn’t. It’s not that it wasn’t a good film, it’s just such a personal story, but not one that engaged me personally. As such the things I would otherwise not mind, suddenly became huge problems for me. The adults who were speaking like pretentious movie teenagers just seemed really annoying and unrealistic. The one-scene characters who were just there to create conflict just made me think it was a waste of time. Actually, there’s a lot of waste in here. Infinity War was long, but it made those minutes count, almost every scene was needed. I can’t think of many scenes from that film where if you didn’t take them out, it wouldn’t make the film slightly less incoherent either in terms of story or character building. This is the opposite, it’s a lot shorter, but there’s more waste. In fact, I’d say there’s more waste than content. There are so many scenes here where if you cut them, it wouldn’t affect the movie at all, they’re that inconsequential, which, for a film that’s only just over 90 minutes long, is a terrible indicator. It’s the sign of screenwriting fluff (and trust me, if there’s anybody who knows about screenwriting fluff, it’s me, it’s my bread and butter, and black pudding, and sausages, and beans, and *checks word count* bacon, and eggs, and tomatoes and now I’m hungry).

Also the ending. It’s not quite as bad as Truth Or Dare, but it’s the kind of ending which you’ll either love or hate, I was not a fan. Mainly because I don’t think it earned it. It tries to be clever with a twist, but it just feels kind of cheap and doesn’t even provide a pleasing “aha!” scene. THAT’S what makes a great twist ending, that specific moment where a character in the film, and thereby the audience pieces it all together. Think of that scene in The Usual Suspects where you finally find out who it is, or the “where do you think we are?” scene from Scrubs. The entire ending could be summed up in that one moment, that’s the “wham” scene, where you marvel at the brilliance of it all. This doesn’t really do that, it just provides lots of little things in quick succession, so it means we don’t have that glorious memorable moment, to the point where I’m not entirely sure everybody in the screen I was in got what happened. Actually, I know they didn’t, as I overheard people’s discussions as they were leaving.

There’s no way to discuss this without actually saying what the ending is so here goes (spoiler warning): the night nanny she hired doesn’t exist and is a figment of the main character’s imagination, she’s imagining a younger version of her. It’s narratively unsatisfying and asks more questions than it answers. Specifically; what happened to the actual nanny then? It wasn’t ordered by her, her brother said he’ll pay for it and get it organised etc. It’s mentioned to him that they now have a night nanny, and he doesn’t respond “Well let me know the costs and I’ll cover it”, or “so when you order one it’s fine yet you refuse mine? What the fuck?” Or even “Where from?”. It’s just kind of frustrating. Which is a shame as there are some things to like in this, Charlize Theron is outstanding as always, she just throws herself into every character and it’s superb to see. Some of the dialogue will definitely cause a chuckle (although there are moments where the dialogue is written in a way that you’re reminded it’s a movie because it seems so fake), and the soundtrack is pretty damn cool as well. It’s just a shame it never really clicked for me. I think that’s the main flaw, I didn’t personally click with it, and I felt I should have. Which meant its flaws annoyed me more than it should, and the good things didn’t hit as much as they should.