Tag: Never Let Go

2024 In Film: Day Four (The Could Be Better)

On By troubledproductionsIn Year round upLeave a comment

Bad Boys: Ride Or Die
Ups: Some creative shots.
Fitting continuation of the story.
Downs: Too many scenes exist just to exist.
The villain reveal is too obvious.
Best Performer: Will Smith
Best Moment: Reggie killing everybody.
Worst Moment: The Tiffany Haddish scene. I like her as a performer, but her entire section was unnecessary, if it was cut out it wouldn’t be missed.
Opening: There’s a wedding, and then Marcus has a heart attack. Some good visuals and sets up the characters’ relationship well.
Closing: Mike and Marcus argue about who gets to cook on a grill. They then insult Reggie before remembering what he did earlier. It takes the two characters WAY too long to remember.
Best Line: Y’all are some terrible fucking fugitives.
Original review here

Drive-Away Dolls
Ups: Some nice visuals.
Unique.
So very horny.
Downs: Unfocused.
Characters are unsympathetic too often.
Best Performer: Geraldine Viswanathan.
Best Moment: The fall of the Senator. Gloriously cathartic, and gives a reason to some of the plot points.
Worst Moment: The small flashbacks. Don’t match the tone of the rest.
Opening: A man is killed carrying a briefcase of dildos. You don’t find out what the briefcase contains until later.
Closing: The two leads drive off to get married. Kind of sweet. But I felt like them meeting up with the Aunt would matter more, like she’d have an effect on the plot. Or at the very least say something surprising/funny to end the film.
Best Line: I’ve had it with love. I know bards and troubadours are high on it, but I don’t believe it’s relevant to the modern 20th soon to be 21st century lesbian.
Original review here

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Ups: Actually has space to breathe so the action impresses you.
Nice colours.
Hemsworth is clearly having a lot of fun.
Downs: Some of the effects are a bit weak.
Nothing makes it stand out.
Not that memorable.
Best Performer: Hemsworth.
Best Moment: When Dementus captures Furiosa’s mother. Harrowing.
Worst Moment: There’s an action scene near the end with really flat visuals
Opening: Weirdly calm talking about destruction and society ending. It’s pretty harrowing, but there’s not much urgency about it.
Closing: Hemsworth has a tree growing out of him.
Best Line: Where are you going, so full of hope? THERE IS NO HOPE!
Original review here

Malum
Ups: Some pretty damn good music.
Downs: Bad dialogue.
Some pretty bad editing.
Best Performer: Jessica Sula.
Best Moment: The cult staring her down, chilling.
Worst Moment: The interviews, mainly because whilst they are creepy, but there’s a way to make them creepier.
Opening: Police notice saying this is footage from the event. REALLY helps you buy in. Then creepy handheld footage. Well, some of it is creepy (weird chairs etc), and some is so mundane that it becomes creepy. Yes, it feels cheap, but its effective. Then, it transitions into modern times, where you assume the person we meet is our hero. Nope.
Closing: The plan worked
Best Line: “She don’t even look like people anymore”
Original review here

Never Let Go
Ups: Anchored by some great performances.
Some very creative visuals.
Original
Downs: Disappointing script.
Trips over itself trying to confound expectations.
Needed to focus on the survivalism aspect more, as those are the most interesting moments.
Best Performer: Berry, obviously.
Best Moment: The suicide. Horrible to see.
Worst Moment: How “the evil” is defeated, bit weak.
Opening: Simple world-building. Effective.
Closing: The monsters were real, society collapsing wasn’t.
Best Line: One touch without a rope on, is all it takes.
Original review here

Sting
Ups: Some pretty brutal moments.
Pretty damn impressive characterisation.
Downs: Wastes time.
Not the best lit.
Weird music choices
The winter aspect doesn’t really come into it as much as it could.
Best Performer: Part of me says Alyla Browne, but Ryan Corr just edges it out due to the emotional complexity.
Best Moment: When the mother tells the step dad how much he means to her daughter. Odd to put a piece of character work instead of a horror/action set-piece, but it’s really sweet. The fact its then followed by someone screaming when they find the skinless corpse of a bird says a lot.
Worst Moment: The exterminator’s reaction to the dead bird “looks like it had sex with a blender”. Feels too “written”.
Opening: An old woman knits whilst watching tv, then hears scuttling in her walls. It does a pretty good job of setting up her current state of mind, with her needing notes on the walls to tell her her name and address. The exterminator arrives and is killed. The set-up? Brilliant. The death itself? Weak. As an opening, it’s okay, but it does take longer than it should to get to the credits, especially for such a short movie.
Closing: The spider is dead, but it lay eggs. Sequel!
Best Line: “my dad is awesome”
“is that why he never visits?”
Cutting.
Original review here

The Beekeeper
Ups: Some interesting fight scenes.
Could be a useful tool to teach people about phishing scams.
Downs: Stathams accent.
Some of the worst dialogue ever committed to film.
Best Performer: Josh Hutcherson. Utterly despicable.
Best Moment: The original call centre being burned down. Deliciously cathartic.
Worst Moment: The aftermath of the suicide. Mainly because of how bad the dialogue is.
Opening: Quick unsubtle introduction to the relationship between Clay and Eloise.
Closing: Parker points a gun at Clay then lets him scuba away. Kind of disappointed it ended so quickly, not because I wanted more of the film, but because the implications of the events of the film are never given enough time to be explored.
Best Line: “Madame President”
Original review here

The Zone Of Interest
Ups: Harrowing.
A fascinating look at the psychological tricks ordinary people needed to use to survive that time.
Downs: Bit dull.
Meanders at times.
Could teach more.
A bit more clarification could have been helpful.
Personally, did nothing for me compared to similar films.
Best Performer: Christian Friedel.
Best Moment: When Hoss notices human remains in the river his family play in. The first crack in his armour.
Worst Moment: The random girl hiding food. Doesn’t really add too much.
Opening: Can’t remember it exactly, but I remember it did do a good job of setting up the idea that this was just a normal day to them. The soundtrack of screaming was just something they put up with during their gardening.
Closing: Janitors clean up the museum which stands on the site. Good to know that it pushes the idea that his ideas failed and are now (kind of) condemned to history. That his legacy was one of cruelness and inhumanity. Might have worked better with people on a tour.
Best Line: I wasn’t really paying attention… I was too busy thinking how I would gas everyone in the room.
Original review here

Venom: The Last Dance
Ups: Sweet at times.
Shows glimpses of brilliance.
Downs: Too often it hints at concepts which would have made a much better movie.
Never feels like a finale.
Some of the coincidences are far too convenient.
Krull is underused
Best Performer: Tom Hardy
Best Moment: The Space Oddity scene.
Worst Moment: The fight between the many symbiote, because it hints at what would have been a MUCH better film.
Opening: Eddie Brock is getting drunk. Essentially, what we saw in the last Spider-Man movie. The multiverse aspect NEVER comes up. Sooooo, why?
Closing: Venom is dead but the symbiote lives on. Reports that Sony celebrated this movie by having a cake and eating it were made up by me.
Best Line: I’m so done with the multiverse shit.
Original review here

Never Let Go (2024) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

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.