Tag: Ryan Kiera Armstrong

2022 In Film Day One: The Awful

On By troubledproductionsIn Year round upLeave a comment

And so begins our annual end-of-year round-up. As you can tell by the title, these are the worst films of the year. Unusually for me, most of these are fairly obvious, I don’t think there are any here that people will be too surprised/offended by. Although I did use to know someone who genuinely said Fant4stic was one of her favourite films, so I wouldn’t be too surprised if these did have fans. I’d be disappointed, yes, and would definitely judge that person, but I wouldn’t be that surprised. For most people, these will be fairly obvious.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore

Ups: Has some good visuals

Nice to see some of these characters again

Jacob is still entertaining.

Downs: Whilst Jacob is entertaining, they need to think of a better way to get him into the story as it feels forced.

Villain is neutered

Incredibly dull

Ezra Miller is in it.

They released a “homophobe-friendly” version in China, all it took was removing 6 seconds. But no, it’s “soooooooooo vital” to the plot.

Best Moment: There’s a moment where Jacob tries to get Queenies attention and she just ignores him, weirdly heartbreaking.

Worst Moment: The rescue of Newt’s brother. Just felt like padding. If you took it out wouldn’t effect the plot at all.

Best Performer: Dan Fogler

Opening: Dumbledore and Grindlewald have lunch together. A moment that’s so inconsequential that (as of writing) it’s not even mentioned on the Wikipedia page.

Closing: Jacob and Queenie get married, Dumbledore slowly walks down the street. Makes me think they should have changed the opening. The third main scene is on the same street, and starts off in the standard Harry Potter way of “Normal scene, then it turns out this character is magic”. So if they started with that, not only would it have kicked off the plot better, then it would have had bookends.

Best Line: “Our war with the muggles begins today!” A line that promised so much, in a film that delivered so little.

Original Review here

Firestarter

Ups: Good colour scheme

Downs: Incredibly stupid adults.

No sense of a cohesive style.

Feels like it was made to create a franchise.

Best Moment: At the old mans house. The only bit of the film with actual emotion.

Worst Moment: “it’s different for us we know what it’s like….”. That scene has THE worst piece of editing I’ve seen this year. Or a bad performance. The line is delivered as if it’s half of a sentence. She doesn’t get interrupted, she doesn’t slow down or lose her bearings, the camera just cuts away and there’s no sound of her talking anymore. It sounds like she’s been cut off by silence.

Best Performer: Ryan Kiera Armstrong. The biggest flaw with her performance is that she isn’t McKenna Grace.

Opening: They had creepy music over the production logo, I appreciate that. In terms of the opening of the film itself; there’s a baby in a crib, and when the parents walk away, a fire starts.

I actually typed that whole thing as soon as I saw the baby in a crib because I knew what was going to happen. I know it is a remake, but it’s a remake of a film I’ve never seen, so it should not be that predictable. It had a much better opening during the opening credits, and if it fleshed that out it would have been better.

Closing: She’s on the beach, and meets up with someone who tried to kill her, but who is no longer being telepathically controlled. He carries her. Emotionally lacking, not great narratively, and looks a bit dull.

Best Line: “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”. Definitely not the best line, but one that sums up how much effort went into the script.

Original Review here

Halloween Ends

Ups: It’s different.

Provides a definitive and fitting end to the franchise.

A good study into social grief and how demonisation of people can create demons.

Downs: Haddonfield doesn’t feel real.

Characters have changed personalities since last film.

So preoccupied with providing a twist, it forgets to have a decent story.

Needs more Michael Myers.

And more Laurie Strode.

So much wasted potential.

Best Moment: The opening.

Worst Moment: Corey and Michael locking eyes, which makes Corey evil. So stupid.

Best Performer: Jamie Lee Curtis, always.

Opening: Corey is babysitting a kid and accidentally kills him. Apparently, this is frowned upon in babysitting circles. It was an accident (and kind of the kids fault), but the town still blames him. The film never gets close to this level of small town paranoia and fear again.

Closing: The dead body of Michael Myers gets thrown in an industrial shredder. Perfect way to end this franchise. There’s a weird cult-like nature to the whole thing and it’s weirdly beautiful.

Best Line: “My son. This town turned against him after the accident with Jeremy Allen. They would’ve felt for him. They would’ve helped him heal. But because your boogeyman disappeared, they needed a new one.” This is the crux of the plot, but it’s handled as well as I handle things when I’m juggling.

Original Review here

Morbius

Ups: Show’s that Sony does have a plan for a future universe.

Something new

Downs: Terrible fight scenes.

Poorly written.

Leto is a prick.

Best Moment: Him testing out his powers.

Worst Moment: The fight scene near the end. An incomprehensible mess.

Best Performer: Matt Smith.

Opening: Morbius goes to a cave to get bats. Completely unnecessary. Could have been covered in dialogue. The scenes of them growing up would have been a better start.

Closing: Vulture somehow ends up in this universe. It may seem stupid at first, but the more you think about it and how it happened you realise it’s actually REALLY stupid.

Best Line: “Vampire bats weigh almost nothing yet can take down an animal 10 times their size”. This film thinks dialogue like that is smart. It’s not.

Original Review here

The 355

Ups: Some good performances.

Good editing outside of the fight scenes.

Downs: Incredibly bland.

Lazy.

Seems very netflix

The shadow of the villain doesn’t loom over the film.

Best Moment: There’s one piece of editing which is GENIUS. They go from a fight scene to someone slicing a tomato and the match-cutting is SUPERB.

Worst Moment: The ending where they all walked in the room to face not Bucky Barnes. Reminded me of that bit in Endgame where all the female characters ended up in the same scene. Just there to get a “woo you go girls” moment.

Best Performer: Fan Bingbang. Not in it enough but she’s incredible when she is.

Opening: Sets up Jason Flemyng’s character well, and the electronic macguffin. But then the film relegates him to the background. You never feel his presence.

Closing: The aforementioned worst scene. I’ll say again, the film did not need all the characters there. 2 of them only said 1-2 lines each, I can’t remember if Penelope Cruz or Lupita Nyong’o said anything, if they did it certainly wasn’t anything of substance. Jessica Chastain then explained what will happen for the benefit of the audience, in a very dreary monotone.

Best Line: When they explain the title. Completely unnecessary, but interesting nonetheless. It would be like if an Adele song was interrupted by a lecture, but a good one.

Original review here

The Bubble

Ups: Interesting idea.

Downs: It does a terrible job of juggling the performers’ time.

The hotel staff are the best part of the movie, and they’re not in it enough. Which is weird as it starts with them.

Tries too hard.

Best Moment: Beck’s dinosaur rewrite of Ladies’ Night. The only music sequence that actually works in the film.

Worst Moment: The TikTok dance section

Best Performer: Guz Khan

Opening: Establishes the universe this film is set in. Does a really good job of setting the in-universe franchise. But I feel it would have been more useful if we actually saw footage instead of posters. Just seeing the posters feels cheap.

Closing: A documentary about the making of the film has been released. Seems a bit cruel, and not really that narratively satisfying.

Most Notable Line: “you remember the reviews from your last film Jerusalem Rising”. Terrible dialogue, clunky as hell, and is unnatural. That sums up this film.

Original Review here

Firestarter (2022)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick summary: Andy (Zac Efron), and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) are a couple who have powers given to them by their participation in an experimental government trial. Together they have a child, Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who has the ability to set fires with her mind. When Charlie finds her powers harder and harder to control, her parents try to hide her from government officials who wish to use her as a weapon.

I went into this with trepidation. I was excited by the trailer, but I felt that the actual film would let me down. It matched expectations, by which I mean it let me down.

There’s nothing inherently terrible about it. It’s just incredibly dull. Part of it is that there doesn’t seem to be any passion involved in making it. There doesn’t seem to be a reason for this to be remade besides “we could”. It’s reminiscent of The Omen remake from 2006. Keith Thomas only has only directed one feature-length film before (The Vigil), and his inexperience shines through here, where there’s no sense of a continuous style. His visual style really doesn’t mesh well with the music. John Carpenter’s score is very synth-heavy and almost future-retro, but the visuals are just pedestrian. It’s like the music is neon, and the visuals are fire.

The blame isn’t all his though, the script is also quite weak. Some reviews have picked up on this, and how the writer was also responsible for Halloween Kills. Personal opinion, I absolutely loved that film, because it did something different and focused on the effect on the wider town. But this is lacking what I enjoyed about that. A lot of the background characters are there for plot purposes. The childhood bullies, in particular, walk the line between being unbearably cruel to the point the teachers would pull them up on it, or not really being bullies at all, just saying “hey, you’re weird”. The adults aren’t much better, almost all of them just being walking cliches. It’s a shame as the performances are pretty solid without. Zac Efron has matured into someone who is surely due a role which gives him a chance to get award nominations. Essentially, give him the roles that you would have given DiCaprio 15 years ago. Ryan Kiera Armstrong has to carry a lot of this on her back, and considering she’s only 12 years old she does an amazing job. She probably gives the best performance in this, my only criticism of this is that she reminds me of McKenna Grace, which makes me disappointed it wasn’t her in this (although that wouldn’t have improved the film tbh).

There are some weird choices in the script. I will say it’s not all bad though, a scene where they meet an older gentleman and he gives them shelter for the night is what this film should have been more like: good character work, plus it showcases the paranoia that the general public would have towards her if they found out, so highlights exactly WHY the family have been in hiding for so long. It showcases a world bigger than these characters, and for a brief moment, everything feels real. It also has genuine emotion. Now I’ve talked about the good, onto the bad; the opening scene is Charlie as a baby, setting her bedroom alight. It’s not that exciting an opening. It’s just there to demonstrate her powers, which means that there’s no waiting for it to happen because we’ve already seen it. It would be like if Godzilla opened with a full-grown Godzilla destroying a city, a waste of what we’re there for. Now I know really we’re not there for a small fire, we’re there for a large “BURN EVERYTHING” roaring rampage of vengeance, but that’s in the trailer. So really you’ve got nothing to look forward to while watching this.

What makes the opening more baffling is if you cut that section out, it would have one of the strongest opening sections of the year. The need for a “small scene before the credits” have never harmed a film as much as it does here. If this opened with the credits, it would be a much stronger movie. Not just because it would cut out an unneeded scene, but also because the opening credits are great. They’re video recordings of the parents volunteering for medical experiments. Just short recordings that look dated. It’s a great way to set the film up, and the characters. It would make it seem like the parents are fully-fledged characters instead of the background ones they seem now.

Of course, there is always a possibility that was a decision made in the edit. Which is how I’m going to clumsily segue into talking about one of the worst edits I’ve seen. At least, I think it’s an edit, it’s either that or an atrocious line delivery. There’s a moment where it seems like Sydney Lemmon’s character stops mid-sentence. Not “trails off as she loses her train of thought”, she gets halfway through a sentence and then just stops talking. It’s just as the camera cuts away too, so even if it was a bad delivery, editing on that moment just highlights it. A bit like in Killer Kate when the music stopped at the exact point the characters stopped talking just highlighted the silence and made me think the version I was watching was broken. An editor’s job should be to hide those issues, not highlight them.

There’s just a sense that nobody cares about. The director already said there have been discussions of it being a franchise, either in a sequel, prequel, or spin-off. So he’s not thinking “No, I didn’t tell you enough, there are all these things in this cinematic universe that I want to explore” otherwise he’d know how he wants to franchise it. The studio just wants to franchise it for the sake of franchising it.

It’s a summary of how the whole thing feels, nobody knows why they’re doing what they’re doing, and what they’re doing isn’t that great.