Tag: Zero

2025 In Film: Day One (The Awful)

On By troubledproductionsIn Year round upLeave a comment

Bride Hard
Ups: You can tell it was fun to make.
Downs: Some of the dialogue is too unsubtle.
Dull music.
Never makes the most of its premise.
Best Performer: Sherry Cola
Best Moment: I guess the kitchen fight, because its the closest this movie gets to what it is trying to be.
Worst Moment: The hovercraft chase looks particularly bad.
Opening: Montage of lead characters growing up and splitting when one of their families moves away, set to a sappy song. Then, “30 years later”, the two are part of a bachelorette group in Paris. I have a small problem; the labelling isn’t clear.
Closing: She sets off the denoator whilst catching flowers. The person whose house is blown up doesn’t seem to care.
Best Line: Is this normal for an American wedding?
Original review here

Havoc
Ups: Very energetic.
Downs: It looks weird. Hard to explain, but there’s a filter which means everything looks like a cutscene from a video game.
Kind of hard to care about anything that happens.
Best Performer: Tom Hardy
Best Moment: The kidnapping of Lawrence
Worst Moment: The inciting incident murder. Doesn’t feel “big” enough.
Opening: Tom Hardy delivers a voiceover over scenes of him stealing, murdering, and performing unlicensed burials at sea. A pretty weirdly shot car chase scene follows, can’t explain it, but it feels “off” somehow.
Closing: Patrick has been shot and will possibly die.
Best Line: You live in this world, you make choices. Choices you try to justify. For yourself, for your family. And for a while, it works. Until it doesn’t. Until you make a choice that renders everything worthless.
Original review here

In The Lost Lands
Ups: Unique.
Downs: Looks like a video game.
Overstuffed.
Characters turn on a whim.
Best Performer: Amara Okereke
Best Moment: The torture of villagers. Effective and personal.
Worst Moment: The train crash, it looks fake as shit.
Opening: Batista’s character walks up to the camera and gives a gritty version of “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin”. This would have actually worked in the 1990s, but it now seems incredibly passe.
Closing: The two main characters who have spent the entire film working together decide to work together.
Best Line: The stronger the spirits, the weaker the senses.
Original review here

Keeper
Ups: Atmospheric
Tatiana Maslany
Downs: Meanders around.
Repeats itself a lot.
Some plot holes are vast enough to drive a truck through
Best Performer: Tatiana Maslany
Best Moment: The ending is satisfying.
Worst Moment: The cake. It isn’t impactful.
Opening: Quick scenes of women being murdered. Incredibly artsy.
Closing: Malcolm drowns in a jar of honey.
Best Line: This fork is going in your head one way or another. Might as well taste good.
Original review here

Kinda Pregnant
Ups: Amy Schumer and Urzila Carlson actually have really good chemistry and would make a great double act.
Some funny moments
Downs: It’s hard to like the characters
The premise is too dumb.
Most of the plot only happens because the characters are dicks.
Weirdly shot.
Best Performer: Urzila Carlson
Best Moment: The meet-cute. It’s believable and one of the few times she seems like a human.
Worst Moment: The break-up/threesome proposal with Dave. It feels incredibly fake. It would be like if you invited someone to your house on their birthday and all their friends were there, along with a birthday cake and a sign saying “Happy birthday”, but it wasn’t for their birthday, and you get annoyed at them for daring to think you were planning a birthday for them.
Opening: Two kids “playing mom”, well, pretending to be giving birth, with swearing. Weirdly short and feels like it’s there just because they know they can’t start the film with the next scene.
Closing: Public declaration of love involving a Zamboni and multiple vehicles being destroyed.
Best Line: “I will bite your fucking aorta”. Such a specific threat
Original review here

Matt And Mara
Ups: Some nice moments.
Nice to see low-budget movies get a release like this.
Downs: The characters don’t feel like friends.
They’re not that likeable.
Lack of cuteness
Best Performer: Deragh Campbell
Best Moment: The surly cafe owner.
Worst Moment: The car argument. Feels so forced.
Opening: A somewhat awkward meeting between the main characters.
Closing: Mara listens to music while holding her husband’s hand. She then puts a receipt in a book written by Matt.
Best Line: I’m letting my imagination reach the level of my stupidity, which makes it my reality
Original review here

Urchin
Ups: Some neat visual tricks.
There are moments where it shows you glimpses of how good it could be.
Downs: Unlikable lead.
Too episodic in nature.
Seems more focused on being visually interesting than being narratively compelling.
Best Performer: Frank Dillane. His performance is great, but his character is awful.
Best Moment: The karaoke bar. Three people singing an Atomic Kitten song should be skippable. But it’s incredibly sweet, and the way the three characters do it tells you so much about who they are.
Worst Moment: When he mugs the guy who tried to help him. Mainly because it’s too early on so colours your opinion of him. You spend the entire film knowing he’s a prick. If it delayed showing you that, it would have given us time to get some sympathy for him.
Opening: He wakes up, asks for money and is ignored. Interesting look in how hard that life is.
Closing: Arthouse weirdness. Probably killed himself.
Best Line: Each decision is yours.
Original review here

War Of The Worlds
Ups: Unique
Downs: Terrible CGI
Does this story really need updating?
Feels low-budget.
Product placement.
The world never FEELS in danger.
Too dumb
Best Performer: Henry Hunter Hill
Best Moment: The aliens crashing. Complete chaos, just enough to wake the audience up.
Worst Moment: The reveal of what the aliens are feeding on.
Opening: He logs on and opens up surveillance cameras. Let’s you know the gimmick quickly. Does include a fun moment where two people are talking about how “I think I’m being listened to” and is told to stop being paranoid. It’s interesting and intriguing. Then we see the freak weather, and it looks fake.
Closing: The aliens are defeated. Ice Cube refuses to spy on people anymore.
Best Line: I’m going to go with the tagline: “It’s worse than you think”. Almost like they were trying to warn us.
Original review here

Zero
Ups: Creative concept.
Makes the most of the location.
Downs: Terrible performers.
No style.
Dumb script.
Indecisive in terms of genre.
Best Performer: Moran Rosenblatt
Best Moment: The taking down of America. Depressingly relevant.
Worst Moment: The drug-taking scene makes it seem like the film is pausing.
Opening: Narration over a completely black screen. Did have to check if my HDMI cable was working properly. A guy is asleep on a packed bus in Senegal when someone puts a phone in his hand. He seems confused as to where he is.
Closing: The two characters stand in the ocean and accept their deaths. Kind of poignant. We then get the aftermath of the events; Senegal hates America, then a woman wakes up with a bomb strapped to her chest, but in Paris.
Best Line: “So where are you from?”
“I’m from that place that they signed the Declaration of Independence” Not the “best” line, but the most notable, because it’s terrible. Possibly the worst line I’ve seen all year. No person speaks like that.
Original review here

Zero (2024) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Did you see 30 Minutes Or Less? It’s basically that, but not comedic.

Zero has a lot going for it. The use of African hip-hop gives it a unique sound. Plus, it’s nice to see a movie set in Africa that shows how stunning it can look; the coastline shots, in particular, are gorgeous. It has a unique concept (weird thing to say when my synopsis compares it to another movie) that lends itself well to high-energy and fun set-pieces.

It doesn’t live up to that potential, though. Part of that may be down to the performances. Hus Miller does not have the right gravitas for this role. I don’t want to seem cruel, but I think the fact that he co-wrote it may have had something to do with his casting. He comes off as someone you’d get if you ordered John Cena from Temu, mixed with “Angry Business Man who screams the lead character’s name at the end of a really shitty UK sitcom episode”. Cam McHarg at least has the physical presence required for his part. Moran Rosenblatt is the only performer who gave a performance I wanted to see more of.

The big issue? The plot is f*cking stupid. It’s a tonal mess that’s uncertain what it wants to be. Does it want to be a Statham-like action movie, albeit with a message? Does it want to be a zany comedy? Does it want to be an intense thriller? It feels like it wants to be all those things at once, which means it ends up being none of them. It’s not helped by how bad the action sequences are. I’m not sure how something can be both cheap and yet also feel overproduced, but Zero manages it. The action sequences have all the energy and excitement of watching a piece of bread become overcome with mould. It doesn’t have a unique style; instead, it decides to ape other popular styles (it loves to attempt Edgar Wright-style sequences, but gets the timing wrong, so it constantly looks like the film is pausing). I’ve said before that films sometimes seem so determined to have a visual style that they get stuck up their own arse (Spoilers for my review of Urchin by the way). This is the first time I’ve seen a film get stuck up someone else’s arse.

The thriller aspects? It feels like Zero attempts to have a mystery, but never wants to answer it. We get glimpses of why this is happening, and why the characters were chosen (one represents the wealth of America, one represents the violence), but it doesn’t feel satisfactory. It feels oddly condescending to Senegal. “America may have rich people, but people from Senegal are rich in experience and life, and aren’t violent at all” is a woefully simplistic take. The United States has caused a lot of issues (as have pretty much all world powers at some point, look up the atrocious acts Belgium committed in the Congo Free State), but to say that every act of violence in Senegal is due to them is ridiculous, and incredibly infantilising towards Senegal, treating them as if they’re children who are being misled by an adult.

There are two moments where it gets the tone right, but they’re completely different tones. One, the way the passengers on the bus react to the bomb strapped to someone’s chest. It’s exciting, dynamic, and slightly funny. The other moment is when a character is delivering a monologue, and the camera shows us Dakar residents staring at the camera, allowing us to read our own motivations into their stares. That’s the only moment where it feels like it knows the message it wants to impart, and there’s a real beauty in its simplicity. If it kept up the momentum from any of those two moments and kept that tone throughout, then Zero would have worked.

In summary, this is probably the first film I’ve reviewed where its title would also represent how I’d score it out of 5.