Silent Night (2023) Film Review

Sometimes in life you just have to feel sorry for Joel Kinneman. I mean the man has a knack for picking projects that sound good and safe on paper but just don’t work on the planet Earth. I mean this poor sod has been in the robocop remake (2014), both Suicide Squad films (2016 and 2021) as well as Chil 44 (2015) That one starred Tom Hardy and was based on a really good, really solid book.
Check it out if you need a detective thriller to read one holiday.
It’s set in Stalins Russia.
And today this poor unfortunate soul has agreed to be in Silent Night. Which whilst plot wise is basically your bog standard Punisher origin story movie that you’ve seen a million times before – dead kid, dad swears revenge, becomes badass, police are useless and or corrupt, big firefight at the end with evil drugs gang – Except it completely screws it up.
All right so the first interesting idea is that this film has virtually no spoken dialogue. Which I find interesting but there’s nothing really done with it beyond demonstrate that this type of film so is basic that it doesn’t NEED dialogue for everyone to understand what’s going on.
Or it’s that the characters or so thin that you could shine a light through them with a 2 watt lightbulb but that’s neither here nor there.
No, I have a spurious unresearched feeling that what attracted poor sweet Joel to this film was the director.
John Woo.
Now for any energy drink addicted, Tik-Tokking, vaping Fortnight playing 12 year olds currently scratching their heads in confusion, John Woo made films before the dark times, before Iron Man in 2008. Films like Face/off, Broken Arrow and Mission Impossible 2 amongst others.
Films with panache, style, doves!- Ask your dad if you don’t get that one.
And then there’s also the fact that our Punisher wannabe learns all of his bad assness not from being a former Ranger, Seal, Marine etc.
He gets it all from YouTube.
So… you see where my head was at, right?
A fairly solid actor with a decent grounding in action films with comedic leanings, a director who made erm… interesting action films back in the day, a basic, tried-and-true story structure full of one dimensional characters..
I mean the freaking John Wick films were partially based upon his work and here he comes back to show why he’s the master!!!!
Except at some point in the last few years he’s had a bash on the head and forgotten everything or been replaced by his evil twin or he was replaced by an alien clone or ….
Because this went down faster than my script editors lead balloon juggling “cancel me if you dare” stand up comedy routine on the titanic.
Let’s start with the basics – The pacing sucks. There’s only one major fight scene towards the end by then most people have checked out. It takes way too long to get going, there’s normally a fight scene at the mid-point to show everyone that now everything’s getting going but there isn’t, the fact that there’s no spoken dialogue means that by default you don’t really care about anyone, the villains are just cartoonishly evil, there’s only really one fight scene in the entire film, our lead learns to fight via YouTube videos and there’s only one major if very dull fight scene.
And speaking of our ‘badass via YouTube’ lead, he’s established early on to be an engineer of some description (no dialogue means no exposition. Or the terrible Marvel quips that are ruining cinema.) So I was wondering if he was ging to come up with some kind of budget gadgets- smoke bombs and the like but no. We get one tripwire and that’s your lot. Oh, sorry, you wanted something fun, exciting and interesting to happen in this film one fight scene? No. Just frowny faced people very seriously shooting each other in silence.
Oh, and this film is also very depressing to look at and somehow left a nasty taste in my mouth.
But my main issue with this film is simply that… It plays it all straight.
I mean all the ingredients are here for a really cool, dark satire of the standard Punisher origin story, no dialogue because we know it all by heart, our lead is a no-one who learns all his skills online- our villains are an evil drug gang who know the local train timetable by heart.
Now imagine what someone with a twinkle in their eye and their tongue in their cheek could do with that. Hell, imagine what the JOHN WOO of 15 years ago could have done with that! Instead it’s just this dark, miserable little film where it’s dialogue-free gimmick quickly becomes tiresome because the soundtrack isn’t very good, the fight scenes show no marital arts, swords (which I’m 100% certain a dingus who got all his training online would defiantly have done.) Gadgets, or anything but guns, which quickly becomes tiresome. Even the final battle was a snoozefest.
So yeah, Silent Night is an amazing idea for a dark satire which plays it completely straight whilst at the same time being dull, uninteresting, slow and mean spirited film being made by a director who seems to have regressed to being a straight-to-streaming hack for hire.
Just watch Violent Night instead (2022)
And please, if you see Joel Kinneman in a bar, buy him a pint. Poor sods earned it. And needs to fire his agent.

My Score- Skip It

Skateway Massacre Film Review

Sometimes a single night can change your entire life.

They don’t start off as anything special, it might just be as simple as a few workmates grabbing some drinks after work, chatting, sharing their lives. Allowing the brash idealism of youth to crash into the wisdom and disappointments of those further down this road that we call life. Allowing plans to be created, ideas discussed and debated, dreams inflated or punctured.

The kind of nights that just seem magical once their over.

Skateway Massacre/ Death Rink is a film about such a night

It’s also got the worst slasher film I think I’ve ever seen jammed into it.

Which is annoying

Ok, down to brass tacks, Death Rink- (Skateway Massacre is far too grandiose for something as terrible as this. Plus I feel is should begin with the word The and it simply doesn’t) is a film about a group of people in a skate rink having a few drinks and occasionally being murdered by someone in a mask and jumper that they literally got from the lost and found. For most of the films truly pathetic 73 minute (including credits) runtime our meatsacks don’t seem to realise that their colleagues have shuffled off this mortal coil and don’t seem too distressed when they do notice.

I mean, this is a film where two warring halves are forced to live together in open warfare. On the good you have the aforementioned night that can change everything. On the other, you have people who Doctor Who extras would find suicidal being menaced by a lunatic with a knife that keeps getting covered in jam/ the worst fake blood I think I’ve ever seen and I’ve been in student films.

And I do mean lunatic. When our killer does get unmasked, their reasoning is pathetic even by slasher standard and just made me wince and think that there were ways to achieve their goal that wouldn’t involve messing up someone’s hair, let alone killing several people!

The acting is shocking, this film doesn’t seem to end so much as it simply ends which is sometimes what happens at the end of films like this, but here it just seemed that the director ran out of money and had to release whatever they had.

Not that I wanted this short to be any longer but at least give me an ending that feels like an ending, not like his friends had had enough and just wanted to get on with their day.

So at the end of the day, this film could -with a bit of polishing- been a bit of an indie darling. Instead, it’s a poorly plotted, acted, written and edited slasher of which I think I can safely say that there’s enough of in the world.

My Score- Bomb

Dune (2021) Film Review

For once my friends, you can believe the hype. Dune (2021) is a feast for most of the senses. The visuals are amazing, the soundtrack incredible, truly you need to see this on the biggest screen that you can find. IMAX if possible, super screen if necessary and normal screens if you absolutely must.

The acting’s pretty solid as well and if you’ve been wondering then I can confirm that at no point in this film do you see Sting in his underwear, and nobody gets poisoned with a poison where the only antidote is the milk from a cat. Those were just Sting being Sting and David Lynch being David Lynch.

No, here we have an amazing looking film with incredible visuals and cast from a director who really and truly knows what he’s doing in… making a two and a half hour film which is also the first half of a book.

Yeah, the reason that you need to go and see this on a big screen is that your mind can be so blasted and amazed by everything else happening that it can’t quite notice that this is a film based on the first half of a book, and as such has all the issues associated with being a film based on the first half of a book. I.e. a ton of stuff is set up and virtually nothing is paid off.

Oh, don’t worry though, the sequel for this is 99% guaranteed as the funders are not judging it’s success by Box Office but by HBO subscribers because my beloved silver screen is barely even an afterthought any more.

Sigh

Now back to Dune and I really, really, wish that the 155 minute runtime had developed the plot a bit more because despite being such an amazing film it’s all surface level. I didn’t feel anything when a character I’d seen in maybe one scene in passing betrayed a character I’d scene in maybe three scenes. I didn’t feel the anger, shock and betrayal, it was just a thing that happened. When an evil mastermind was onscreen I didn’t feel in awe of his intellect and cunning, I was told about his intellect and cunning. My eyes and ears were drowning in content but my brain was on starvation rations.

I mean, you’d think in a film getting close to three hours I would care about someone on screen but I just didn’t. And that’s no fault on the director, a TON of this books plot takes place inside peoples heads and unless you want to have half the film focused on peoples faces whilst their inner thoughts play over it like an anime film then your going to struggle.

Because I knew the reputation for this film so I went in prepared. I read the 500 page book, I saw the Lynch film and the one starring James McAvoy that was released in 2003 so I knew what was happening on screen but as I always say the books don’t matter. Previous films don’t matter. Tv mini-series don’t matter. My eternal and unchanging stance is that if I have to read around your film to understand your film then you have made a bad film. I understand that I will get less from a film than a fan would but I still expect to understand what’s going on, on screen on at least a surface level.

I expect one of the most evil, cunning characters in fiction to be proven to be one of the most evil, cunning character’s in fiction. For our hero’s to think that their winning, completely unaware of the fact that they are being allowed their moves because the end result is never in doubt; and I didn’t get that here.

With the majority of the film taking place on a barren sun-blasted world, where every drop of water is an unimaginable luxury, the heat should be an extra, oppressive character but everyone just looked like they had stepped out of an air conditioned room. Where is the sweat? The burned skin? The cracked lips?

I mean I had an amazing time with this film and with the world it created. I could even buy that ten thousand years from now we’re all going to dress like a gritty reboot of Power Rangers, but the pacing was slow when it needed to speed up, it needed to introduce character’s and then develop them so that I felt for them. Empathised with them. It’s all so serious you’d think that Christopher Nolan had had a look over the script before filming started. I mean, I’m not expecting a comedy but a few jokes between friends? A scene of a family being a family? As opposed to people doing things because things need to be done?

Again and again, things happened and I understood why and what faction was doing them and what they hoped to gain because I’d done my homework, but for a layperson? Good luck out there. (Insert in-joke here.)

There were scenes where I wanted to feel tension, scenes where I wanted to be on the edge of my seat but I just wasn’t. Exciting scenes weren’t. When someone is fleeing for their lives from the roided out cousin of the worms from Tremors I expect to be excited, not just thrilling at the CGI, otherwise I’ll just go and watch Tremors again.

Do I recommend Dune (2021) Yes. Even though it’s slow when it wants to quicken up the pace a bit and quick when it wants to slow down a bit more. Even though it needs to develop it’s people a lot more, it’s still an experience. A reminder that no matter how good your phone/ plasma TV it can never truly match up to the size and scale of the silver screen. Even though I didn’t feel anything for anyone, I want to see this film again so I can be immersed again and I guess that’s sort of feeling something?

It’s also a good introduction to the director but I still prefer Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival. Now, those were classics.

Until next time. Live long and prosper.

My Score- See It

Snake Eyes : G.I. JOE ORIGINS Film Review

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (also known via the much better title Snake Eyes) is a film that bombed so hard in the Stats that it was released onto Video On Demand (VOD) before it got a general release in the UK, thus decimating what little interest this films truly pitiful marketing campaign had managed to drum up.

I mean I’m not for a second going to pretend that that UK box office was going to turn this jumble of words, mixed tones, warring themes, wooden acting, terribly shot action scenes and tragic attempt at rebooting an aging franchise into anything other than a bomb for the ages but it would have helped slightly.

But I get ahead of myself. Snake Eyes is a reboot of the G.I. Joe franchise a cartoon from the eighties designed to sell toys that came to my attention through Steven Sommers second best film but that promising franchise was killed by a dull, uninteresting, unimaginative sequel and has now been reborn as a stillborn. There’s no other films coming off from this, there’s no TV show or game unless studio inertia is so great that it’s easier and cheaper to make another film than to stop the train. (It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.)

Now, since this is a reboot of a franchise that’s not exactly in the best of health, I was expecting this to serve not just as an origin story for snake eyes, but also for this universe. Who or what are G.I. Joe? Who or what is Cobra? I mean from what I can gather we’re not dealing with War and Peace here, generally Cobra wants to take over the world via some widget or overly complicated plan and get stopped by the Joes, rinse and repeat for next week’s episode. Fine, you can make good popcorn movies from that. I’ve seen a great popcorn movie from that.

Except I wasn’t reminded of any of the other films from this franchise, I wasn’t even reminded of any great ninja stories, instead I was reminded of 2013’s The Wolverine Shudder except where The Wolverine had that one semi-decent fight scene on a train, here… you have nothing.

And to say the link with the G.I. Joe franchise is tenuous is to be generous. Samara Weaving (giving a performance only an Oak Tree could love) does virtually nothing beyond pop up in a fight scene or two and could have been removed at no cost. It’s a similar deal with Cobra, they could have been removed completely as well and I doubt it would have taken the scriptwriter more than an hour or so. Actually you could have taken the 21st CENTURY out of this thing and it wouldn’t have taken more than another hour or two.

I think.

I actually have no idea how long it takes to rewrite a script.

Damn it Jim, I’m a critic. Not a scriptwriter.

That’s not to say that this film is completely hopeless. It isn’t. It’s only mostly hopeless.

For example, the plot is fascinating where three different groups have three different objectives but they all fit together, Snake Eyes want’s his father’s killer, the man who has his father’s killer wants a McGuffin from the local ninja clan and the leader of the local ninja clan wants to keep the McGuffin so that he can keep protecting Japan like his clan had allegedly done for the last 600 years which raises a few questions from me but whatever, that’s actually not a bad set up for a script and again with a few more tweaks would be an amazing undercover cop film.

Because all the clichés are here, is the owner of the McGuffin going to offer Snake Eyes the family he’s never had, forcing him to choose between two worlds? Check.

Is our lead going to try to brood over his life choices? Check.

Bland, underwritten love interest? Check.

Also, the action scenes just plain suck as their 12a Marvelized clean violence but also the whole thing is so over-edited that it’s hard to tell who’s doing what to whom and why which in a film like this is kind of the kiss of death. But again, there are moments of promise, the film introduces some large animals in a scene which could have been tense and thrilling but It’s use of over obvious CGI just kills it for me as well as the fact that our lead escapes not through his own cunning but because someone else saved him. Which, for a character who’s meant to be an ultimate bad-ass isn’t really much of an endorsement.

I mean it’s not like our lead is physically imposing to begin with. I mean he’s ripped and gets in lots of fights but there’s no presence in any of them. He never owns the character in the way that you would want to and also, isn’t Snake Eyes meant to be a mute? I mean it’s true that he pretty much only speaks in exposition and cliché’s but that’s not quite the same thing as saying nothing. It’s close but there’s a subtle difference. Which is pretty much the same for everyone else here. They speak and do things but their motives are all so crude and their all so float that I didn’t care. I only perked up at the end fight scene because it was the end fight scene and it meant that I could go home soon. I’ve seen better martial arts films than this, I’ve seen better ninja films than this. I’ve seen better origin films than this and I HATE origin films.

This film feels like an American attempt to make a martial arts film but without understanding the genre and throwing way, way too much money at this thing. Where did this film’s 88 million dollar budget go? It doesn’t look like it all went on screen I’ll tell you that for nothing. Or did the editors caffeine addiction spiral out of control?

I mean there’s the odd moment that’s exciting but nothing to justify slogging through this films two hour runtime when there are other better films. It’s characters are flat, it’s world dull, the villains (usually the highlight of a film like this) are uninteresting, the side characters are awesome (Weaving aside) and deserve their own movie instead of the bozos I got stuck with here. If you want to reboot G.I. Joe, reboot G.I. Joe. If you want to tell a ninja story, tell a ninja story, don’t try and make some kind of mutant hybrid of the two because that’s not going to please anybody and certainly don’t take a toy that’s known for being silent and making them a chatterbox who speaks only in clichés.

Oh and absolutely 100% never, ever, never ask the person who directed Allegiant, Insurgent and R.I.P.D. to direct this or indeed anything. Ever again. Guy belongs in the same directors jail as Tom Hooper.

In summary?

My Score- Skip It

Free Guy Film Review

*Sigh*

You know, when I tell people that there was a brief period where it looked like Ryan Reynolds was going to be a pretty solid if annoyingly pretty actor who was appearing in mid to low budget films such as Buried and Woman In Gold to some critical praise before discovering that he could make all the money in the universe playing variations of Deadpool, they look at me the same way I look at my scriptguy tells me that Morrisey didn’t always use to be a weapons grade plumb.

A mixture of sympathy, confusion and wondering if it’s time to chuck me into God’s waiting room as clearly my marbles have gone and aren’t coming back.

Because my dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to watch Ryan Reynolds play Ryan Reynolds yet again in Free Guy which plays like a mixture of The Lego Movie, mixed with a dash of The Truman show (A film that actively gave me paranoia for several…decades and now apparently has a psychiatric disorder named after it), a ‘borrowed’ plot device from John Carpenters legendary They Live all set in a knock off GTA called Free City.

And on one level it sort of works with possibly some clever jokes- our lead- a background guy is called Guy, his best friend is called Buddy which I liked and I enjoyed the characters, the pieces of it al worked together and it’s sort of working a a whole….

But something about it just didn’t click for me.

For a start the whole thing seemed somewhat childish. I mean the tone, look and some of the characters made this seem like it was only a talking dog away from being an eighties kid’s movie and I found the whole thing to be somewhat restrained. Especially the violence, since in universe no-one really seems to be in danger of being hurt, they simply wake up the next in game day and carry on as normal.

In game day? I hear you ask yeah, Free Guy (a title which could either mean that we need to free Guy from his world or that Guy is now free if you want to read into it and i’m sure that there will be plenty of theory videos popping up in the next few weeks if that’s your cup of tea.

As for plot, you’ve got a bank teller discovering that he’s a non playable character in a violent video game and having a thoroughly understandable existential crisis about it, but then you’ve got this whole plot in the real world about stolen code and Taika Waititi playing an evil businessman villain fresh off of a kid’s movie who could have been an object of satire about the games industry but instead just comes on, confirms he’s still going to burn down the orphanage on Christmas Day then slithers off again. The rest of the humans are all one note and to be honest their not what I paid my entrance for. Except there are some small notes of satirizing the games industry or notes that might have been satire if they were allowed to develop but their not. And instead of that, they quickly just become maybe jokes if your feeling merciful or a wasted opportunity if your not.

Then you have the fact that the game world itself seems so… clean… or sanitized, and it just made me think that if this film had gone for the 15 rating instead of 12a then you might have been able to make more of this world, push things further and do more things with that world but the 12a forces it to Marvelize the violence where it’s all clean and tension free.

Also, the rules don’t seem to make much sense and yet at the same time it’s all very predictable and for me the best and funniest moment was a three second throwaway joke towards the end that managed the herculean task of waking my wife up ad getting her to smile before she settled back down to her nap. (Five minutes in, she had whispered to me, “This is The Lego Movie” and promptly closed her eyes.)

And look, at the end of the day, there’s nothing particularly wrong with Free Guy, it was fun, entertaining, it kept me amused for it’s runtime but the seeds were there for something deeper, a more interesting exploration of free will, the limits of our reality, our responsibility to new life, our reaction to the inevitability of a sentient AI in the 5 seconds before it discovers Twitter and decides we all have to go. I imagined it through the lens of Dark City and I really liked that idea.

But we can’t have nice things in the world off cinema at the moment. Film, we can’t even have superhero films since they all seem to be failing faster than my Scriptguy on a first date. But as for Free Guy? The cast is pretty good (and mostly deserve better,) I was never bored and I wouldn’t cry if made to watch it again. I’d never dream of seeking it out again but that’s neither here nor there. Yet again, a philosophically interesting film has been sacrificed on the alter of ‘make stuff go boom’ to all of our detriment.

So, at the end of the day, if for some reason you don’t want to see Suicide Squad this’ll do but it could have been a lot more.

My Score- If Nothing Else

Jolt Film Review

The first issue with Jolt is the plot.

There’s a lot of other issues as well. But your first of all going to have to accept someone caring enough about Jai Courtney to not only remember that he exists once he’s left your eye line but also to care enough that once someone finally achieves vengeance for all of those terrible, terrible/ poor sweet innocent films he’s been in to go on a murderous rampage against a criminal empire rather than raising a beer in salute and moving onto James Corden…

Once your past that teeny, tiny, little issue you’ve got the fact that this film somehow doesn’t work. At all. I mean it’s something amazing that a film lie this can get so much stuff bang on the nose and yet still somehow be the most boring thing since someone insisted on showing you every single one of their recent holiday photographs to the Isle of Wight.

You’ve got the plot which sounds like a blend of John Wick and Crank, you’ve got amazing neon- drenched visuals, the cast all seem to be having a blast before this mast but i’m simply aghast at the talent the director massed and complete squandered.

Because Jolt it.. Just… Doesn’t… Work.

I mean the setup’s great with Beckinsale playing as someone who has a slightly murderous anger-management problem that she controls with the help of an electrode-lined vest she uses to shock herself back to normalcy whenever she gets homicidal. After the first guy she’s ever fallen for is murdered, she goes on a revenge-fueled rampage to find the killer while the cops pursue her as their chief suspect.

Now tell me that you couldn’t see that working?

But the trouble with these films is pacing. Always the pacing. Once you’ve set this type film in motion you can’t really stop and allow the audience time to breathe, or try to develop characters that much, no. You have to keep going, adding to the films mystery, with each fight scene building on the one before, and Jolt just doesn’t do that. It never gets going.

I mean it has a lot of starts and false dawns, our lead gets into a car chase with the police… but it’s over before it starts. She goes to take on a fight club so that she can interrogate a bozo… but that’s over in two minutes, there’s a foot chase that teases at being fun, inventive and mad but it never goes anywhere (which is ironic. Don’t you think? A little too ironic, and, yeah, I really do think they could have done more with this. )

It doesn’t help that what little plot there is, is extremely predictable, things happen when you think their going to happen, how you think their going to happen to whomever you think their going to happen to.

Which is a shame because promise and potential bursts out of every frame of this film. Everyone can do action, everyone is aware of the film that their in and acting accordingly (except from Courtney but he’s a block of Tesco’s own Styrofoam in everything he’s in so he doesn’t count.) The set people, the lighting people, the sound people, everything in this movie could work and produce a new action franchise for those who want just a blast of fun but for that to happen, the films needs to move in a consistent fashion and this just doesn’t.

Which is a shame because it’s the only flaw in this film. With a few tweaks of this script it could have reached it’s potential but as it is, whilst it’s nice to see this cast having fun together, it would be nice it the film had made me happy as well. You just needed to work the fight scenes a little more, keep the pace up and I would have like this film a lot more than I did.

But they didn’t.

So I didn’t.

My Score- Skip It

Alien Covenant Review

“I’m really excited, I love the Alien franchise as much as you love Mad Max Fury Road & Dredd.” Wittered my scriptgremlin from underneath his rock. And, as I looked at him, his little face full of hope and expectation, I wondered what exactly he was basing this delusion on.

Because lets face facts, the last good Alien film was released in 1986. That’s 31 years ago! Since then we’ve had to deal with Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, Alien Vs Predator, Alien Vs Predator: Requiem  and Prometheus. I seriously hope he wasn’t talking about Aliens: Colonial Marines. But maybe he was talking about the creatures numerous appearances in graphical novels? I mean wow has the xenomorphs gotten around in its life. As well as taking on the Predator, The Alien has taken on Superman, Green Lantern, Batman, Tarzan, Buffy, Archie, Star Trek: The Next Generation AND of course, my own beloved Judge Dredd.

None of these are regarded as classics and almost non of them are regarded as cannon within their own universes.

But hey, every 111 million dollar film directed by man who gave us 2010’s Robin Hood deserves to be looked at as it’s own entity. It’s own, mediocre, unsure of what it want’s to be so it winds up being a hybrid of Alien and Aliens.

I mean it, you’ve got your people answering a distress call and winding up dealing with the Xenomorph on a planet which is hopefully the birthplace of wherever the always superb Michael Fassbenders accent calls home, and then finish up the film back on board their spaceship which i’m pretty sure the people from Space 1999 would like back at some point.

And as this is an Alien film, allow me to introduce out not-Ripley for the evening- the mono-named Daniel’s, portrayed by Fantastic Beasts star Katherine Waterston who for me seemed less like a woman finding her inner steel so that she could defeat one of the most deadly animals in the universe, than  a head girl trying to decide whether or not to tell the head teacher that someone keeps disliking her Instagram posts.

Your going to spot every twist from a mile away and resent every scene that doesn’t have Fassbender in. I mean everyone else is fine, but there’s no memorable lines or characters in the entire thing. Even my notes only refer to them as ‘redshirt’ ‘redshirt in hat’ and ‘cowardly redhsirt.’

It had some tense moments and some points where I was squirming in my seat and yes, the music was very impressive and unsettling and it did fly past fairly quickly and inoffensively but this could have been a much better film if there had been better and less dialogue, not telegraphed their plot twists in advance, had a lot more Fassbender and a lot less everybody else and realized that the xenomorph is supposed to be a practical effect that you don’t really see allowing your imagination to fill in the blanks and not a CGI creation. Especially not when the budget is running low.

It’s defiantly not the worst film I’m going to see this summer, but it’s certainly not the best.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to re-watch a 31 year old Vietnam metaphor.

My Score- If Nothing Else 

The Belko Experiment Review

It seems to me that grind-house films are having a bit of a renaissance at the moment. And in a way, I suppose that it was inevitable.

Because with the the ‘super blockbuster’ dominating the silver screen, it only make sense that the alternative is to go tiny. It can also be a good way for directors and actors to unwind after making a huge film. After all, if a 5 million dollar film flops in the woods, does anyone hear it?

Which brings me to today’s nasty little beast, The Belko Experiment, a blending of Battle Royale with corporate America, written by James Gunn (The director of both Guardians of the Galaxy films) and believe you me, it is a very nasty little piece of work.

One seemingly ordinary day,  80 Americans are locked in their high-rise corporate office in Bogotá, Colombia and are ordered by an unknown voice coming from the company’s intercom system to participate in a deadly game of kill or be killed.

Alliances are made and broken, people are driven to the edge of madness and beyond heads explode with gleeful abandon and it’s a pretty good, gory time.

The people react like people forced into this nightmare of a situation, some try to become better, some cower and others become monsters. It’s just a shame it all feels so empty.

I mean here was a golden opportunity to satirize cooperate dog-eat-dog mentality exporting workers around the world to save a buck, platitudes designed to hide gruesome truths and this film plays it straight for no real reason that I can work out.

I mean yes, its a good, gory ‘what would you do?’ film. Please don’t get me wrong on that point but I was hoping for something a little bit meatier. And also, for a tight, claustrophobic film I felt like it would have been better served to have been shot in real time, increasing the unrelenting tension and could have been done without very, very easily.

I would also have like the space to shrink over time. Again, this could have easily been done and could have lead to a tenser and more exciting film as the participants are forced to chose between suicide and fighting to the death.

But for what it was? Yeah, it passed 88 minutes harmlessly enough. I could have done with an extra ten minutes added to it and a bit more time developing the characters but it’s another good one to throw on the telly when you’ve got your friends over and you’ve had a few beers.

My Score- See It 

The Fate Of The Furious Review

Back in 2001, a low budget film called The Fast and the Furious was released onto a mostly indifferent public. It wasn’t a sequel or remake to either the 1939  mystery comedy film directed by Busby Berkeley.  Nor was it a sequel to  the 1955 American film noir starring John Ireland and Dorothy Malone. It was instead such a pallet swapped carbon copy of the 1991 cult classic Point Break that I’ve always been slightly confused as to why the lawyers never got involved.

The series pottered on for a few unremarkable sequels and then, one dark evening and probably after a small amount of ‘Columbian inspiration powder’ some executive somewhere Frankensteined this nearly extinct car franchise with Michael Bay and Several series of Top Gear, threw in a cast of varying genders, ethnicities and levels of acting ability, laughed madly as the lightning flashed and the (at time of writing) 9th highest grossing franchise of all time lurched from the table and out into the world.

Back to the 8th film in the franchise (numbers nine and ten are due to be released in  2019 and 2021 respectively) I paid my money, deactivated the parts of my brain that like developed charterers, logic, the laws of physics, gravity, the amount of damage the human body can take as we currently understand them, plots that make sense and why on Earth Dame Helen Mirren would be told to do her best Barbara Windsor impersonation. Or why Snake Plisken would be wasted as chief exposition and plot mover instead of as an actual character. And so hyped on on coke and popcorn I was…..

Slightly bored.

Lets start with the big issues, all of the big WOW moments in the film were spoiled in the trailers, meaning that when I did see them I was waiting to see what else the film had up it’s sleeve instead of enjoying the carnage on screen (According to insurance company InsuretheGap.com, the damage done onscreen through the stunts of the franchise would total more than $514 million across the first seven films.)

And when the film does have a fun car chase shot so competently that at times I could almost tell what was happening, the film would slow down for a dialogue scene giving the audiences time to catch their breath which sadly also means that we can start thinking at which point this film falls apart. This franchise works best when the audience is so drunk on spectacle and sugar highs that they can’t question almost every aspect of the film and leave with a good feeling. And that just doesn’t happen here.

It also doesn’t help that I could have removed every car chase/race out of this car racing racing franchise and it wouldn’t have impacted the film in the slightest.  It would have trimmed the run-time down from 136 minutes to maybe 120 but that’s no great loss.

Mind you, I did like the fight scenes and laughed more at the frankly ridiculous dialogue and characters moments than I have in some comedies. But the film never quite came together for me. It felt like a spy film with a few chases in rather than a car racing franchises.

Speaking of which,  Charlize Theron plays an amazing villain in Cypher a computer hacker who can do everything with computers that scriptwriters from 1994 thought that you could do with computers. She’s cool, calm, collected and is probably the best villain James Bond has never fought. She’s completely wrong for this franchise but she’s a really good villain in her own right.

Is Furious 8 a good film? Not really. It has too many slow moments, trying to develop characters that we don’t really care about who spout terrible dialogue whilst struggling to act. Its stunts have been seen too many times in trailers to be impressive. And even then, this franchise has done better It’s too long and despite a budget of 250 million feels like it somehow needed more.

My Score- Skip It. 

Ghost In The Shell Review

Ghost In The Shell is based on one of the most influential manga of all time (which I’ve never read) and one of the greatest anime films of all time (which I’ve never seen) and bearing that in mind, I have to ask- Do both of them resemble an uninspired remake of 1987 film classic Robocop?

I’m deadly serious- in a world where the government has either collapsed or become completely irrelevant, a person who was converted into a cyborg against their will fights systematic corruption inside their own corporation whilst under constant threat of being shut down or having their memories wipes whilst trying to work out where the machine ends and the human begins.

Hell there’s even a boss battle at the end against what might as well be ED-209.

But there’s none of the satire that made Robocop a classic, none of the epic violence that made this film stand out hell, there’s hardly any violence at all. The films 110 million dollar budget condemned it to a 12a rating which has limited what I imagine could have been several very exciting action scenes.

And as for the philosophical underpinnings about morality, memories defining us, what does it mean to be human and was the whitewashing controversy overblown? All the dialogue is so on the nose that I was quite surprised to find out that Christopher Nolan hadn’t ‘borrowed’ the script. Instead it turns out that Spielberg had the rights since 2008 and has resisted the urge to drown it in his trademark sugar.

The film is literally dark though- I think someone forgot to hire a lighting guy or decided to spend the lighting money on instead hiring the sides of more London busses.

They certainly spent money hiring a legendary director though- getting the one, the only… Rupert Sanders! Who has directed such timeless classics as Snow White and the Huntsman and… erm… literally nothing else. Good move there Dreamworks.

And naturally, for a film set in Japan, based off of Japanese source material  but with seemingly no Japanese involvement in either the writing, producing or cinematography, the whole thing seems to have been filmed in New Zealand. Which, did mean that the geishas featured in many of the films trailers wore physical full-head masks, created by Weta Workshop, modeled after Japanese actress Rila Fukushima. Even the opening or ‘exploding’ of the geishas’ heads was handled mechanically rather than by using CGI. Which would normally get a gold star from me but since they feature for about 10 seconds and everything else is bad CGI, I was just left wondering why they bothered putting so much effort into something that barely mattered.

There are some good things, the film has some gorgeous shots but since the film is based off of a manga i’m just going to assume that they were direct lifts rather from the source material rather than from originals from the Directors mind so no points from me there.

The characters are all stock and underdeveloped, with Scarlett putting in an amazing performance despite the inevitable whitewashing controversy that has followed this film around.But, in the words of   Mamoru Oshii (director of the original films) “The Major is a cyborg and her physical form is an entirely assumed one. The name ‘Motoko Kusanagi’ and her current body are not her original name and body, so there is no basis for saying that an Asian actress must portray her. Even if her original body (presuming such a thing existed) were a Japanese one, that would still apply … I can only sense a political motive from the people opposing it, and I believe artistic expression must be free from politics.”

Also, A female Japanese American writer, Yoshida, has written extensively about the transmutability of Major Kusanagi’s identity, and about the “racial mystery zone” that so much anime, including Ghost in the Shell, occupies. “Japanese audiences, unlike American audiences, don’t understand Motoko to be a Japanese character,” Yoshida writes. “Of course, it’s a different issue for Japanese Americans, who grew up forced to think about identity in a much more tactile way”.

According to Yoshida, “Japan is a nation of people who are almost 100% ethnically Japanese. Accordingly, the average Japanese citizen’s outlook on diversity is much less influenced by pluralism than the outlooks of many Asian Americans, who live in a country where popular culture rarely represents them well, if at all. Hence, many Japanese Americans may find Johansson’s casting in a Ghost in the Shell movie distressing, while native Japanese observers make nothing of it”

Because when asked Japanese  fans were surprised that the casting had caused controversy, as they had assumed that a Hollywood production would choose a white actress. They felt the appearance of the protagonist was immaterial due to the franchise’s themes of self-identity and the blurring of artificial and natural bodies.

Ghost In The Shell is a dull predictable 106 minute long slog with a few good performances and visual shots failing to save it from stagnation and being forgotten immediately. I have no idea why it was made or who it was made for and neither does anyone else from the state of the box office receipts.

My Score- Skip It