The Harry Hill Movie (2013)

Really good fun, very inventive and even a few good songs. The villians are the only let down, being not particularly funny or interesting. Trim them right down, and this would be the best hour-long tv special imaginable.
Rating: Good

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

As with the first one, very disappointing. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, by which I mean it's a load of over-cooked, pointless scenes stitched together into a needlessly dark mess. Everyone in this Middle-earth hates each other and is a mean, grumpy prick. There are no likeable characters of any substance except Gandalf and Bilbo, and the latter doesn't do anything for large swathes of the film.

And once again, the 3D is barely there.
Rating: Awful

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

Leaving aside issues of accuracy, this film strikes a great balance between fun and heartstring-pulling. A great ensemble and clever script, left me tearful by the end.
Rating: Very Good

Don Jon (2013)

Very enjoyable, gentle film. The story is slight (in fact, I was a bit annoyed that I happened to see the trailer as it showed so much of the enjoyable tone and style of the film that there wasn't much left to surprise me), but touching. Every character is lovable - even the bro friends are open-minded and positive influences - except for Johannsen's, who briefly provides some tension before disappearing. On the other hand, it is refreshing to have no contrived jeopardy or true-love ending.
Rating: Very Good

Gravity (2013)

Brilliant film. Good lead performances, masterfully paced, great 3D and effects, and even very touching in places.
Rating: Great

Escape Plan (2013)

Very poor. Terrible dialogue (in a bad way - the banter either falls flat or just doesn't make sense), wooden acting (and I do think better performances could have been teased from the two leads by a better director), nonsensical plot, a mass of cliches. It both wastes a load of great character actors (which makes me wonder whether the script was good at one point then got gutted after they signed up) - Neill, Caviezel, D'Onofrio, Amy Ryan - and also has fucking Vinnie Jones and fucking 50 Cent in it (both giving adequate performances as thugs, one a baddy thug and one a goody thug).

Basically, the 20 minute prison escape segment from Face/Off, but done badly and looped a few times.
Rating: Awful

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013)

One third very funny, one third surprisingly sweet, and one third uncomfortable to watch in a bad way.
Rating: Good

Captain Phillips (2013)

Very tense, well-made, well-acted. Only suffers from not being able to have much structure due to being based on true events, but still recommended.
Rating: Good

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013)

Disappointing sequel to a brilliant film. There's scope for a fun take on lost world movies, but it gets bogged down with pointless returning characters and bland new ones, plus some tacked-on character reset/progression that makes Flint pretty passive and annoying. The 3D was also pretty much non-existent.

The two original director-writers only did story on this so perhaps that explains it...
Rating: Bad

Filth (2013)

A great lead performance, but no drive or depth. Essentially just a series of scenes of a nasty, fucked-up guy being nasty and fucked-up. A sledgehammer of a film.
Rating: Fine

About Time (2013)

Dull and lazy. The time-travel feels like a gimmick tacked on to an otherwise rote Richard Curtis twee hyper-English romance - it barely makes any difference to the story and doesn't even make sense (and I'm not talking about 'time travel is impossible' stuff here, just basic logic), and is pretty much used for that one Groundhog Day set-up of 'guy makes a silly mistake, cut to him doing the same thing again but without making the mistake' over and over again. I left before the end.

Just watch Groundhog Day again instead.
Rating: Bad

Pain and Gain (2013)

This film had its moments, but it's what you'd expect from giving an Elmore Leonard type script to the guy who did Transformers - hugely over-long with no subtlety and a shitload of gay panic, racism, man feeling up a dead woman's fake tits etc. Marky Mark is pretty bad as usual, playing his usual "angry moron", but Tony Shalhoub and The Rock are excellent (it's becoming strangely common for The Rock to be the best thing in a film).
Rating: Bad

Riddick (2013)

Similar set-up as Pitch Black - Riddick and a load of bounty hunters trapped on a planet with a horde of alien beasts - except it takes most of the movie to get to that point. Katee Sackhoff is a Vasquez-type pretty much there to get leered over and either punch the leerer in the face or turn straight for him if he's a murderous convict who spies on her taking showers. She also gets one boob out for one shot, which is bizarre.

I didn't think Pitch Black was anything special really, and actually enjoyed Chronicles more as at least it was interesting (although not exactly good). It's a shame they reverted back to the PB model for this film and largely jettisoned the Necromongers/Underverse stuff. I know they had a smaller budget for this film, but they still could have carried on with that plot in a less epic way. This just feels like an uninventive, unmemorable straight-to-DVD movie.
Rating: Bad

Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

This film is really confused, which iirc was a problem with the first one. It flips between a Watchmen-type "weirdoes in home-made costumes getting the shit kicked out of them" thing and a Mystery Men cartoonish nonsense, but all the while with a pretty mean-spirited feel to it. Also, a lot of the time it wants to be a little character drama and the rest of the time an epic superhero movie, but it's not very good at either. The worst crime of all, though, is it's pretty dull. It spends nearly all the film setting up character motivations and barely has a plot, it's like the first half hour of a Spider-Man movie stretched out to feature-length with a dash of Spider-Man 2's "I don't WANNA be a superhero any more".

Jim Carrey's great in it though.
Rating: Bad

Elysium (2013)

A big mess. Not awful, just frustrating. No characters, just ciphers and walking plot-devices, lots of cliches, plot-holes, clumsy exposition and sledgehammer one-percent themes, and it felt more like a music-video director's first film than the sophomore effort of the District 9 guy. And as much as I love Sharlto Copley, his character is just another of those District 9 nameless saffer dickhead mercenaries.

I felt a big misstep was showing Elysium before they actually got there - it was so dull and broad. Wish the film had spent more time on Earth building that world and having Elysium as some unreachable paradise.
Rating: Fine

Pacific Rim (2013)

Looks great, great design, CG feels very solid (the monsters more than the robots), 3D's effective.
Fights are easy to follow, but it is intentionally imperfect and misframed a lot of the time, which I liked. And they were generally interesting and exciting - the monsters keep doing new scary stuff, the robots keep pulling cool new tricks.
The plot is a draggy collection of cliches, and the accents are incredibly bad (Idris Elba manages to do a bad English accent), but I'd deffo recommend seeing this on the big screen in 3D.
Rating: Good

The World's End (2013)

I enjoyed the first half but found it got more uninventive and/or clumsy as it went on.

On a second viewing months later, while it has loads of great stuff in it and I did perhaps enjoy it a little more, I still think it doesn't quite stand up to the first two.

I've realised that they maybe could have solved a lot of them at the writing stage by merging Steve and Andy characters. This would give Nick Frost more to do and allow Gary (or at least his addiction) to be the villain of the piece (until the end anyway) without taking it over. It would also cut the pre-Newton Haven stuff down, give more time to develop the other three characters plus maybe show stuff like Marsan's 'empty' being mulched. They also probably could have done with cutting out the last pub brawl, or doing something different with it.

It's one of those films where watching the extras you see how much thought has been put into the themes, character dynamics and backstories and it's frustrating that a lot of it, even implied, doesn't come through in the actual film - or perhaps that there's so much of it that all gets given a little bit of space but not enough to take onboard. So in TWE, even though there's maybe a line of dialogue each about the underlying issues that Steve and Andy have with Gary (the obvious ones are "stole the girl he fancies" and "legged it after the car crash" but the deeper ones are stuff like "stopped him from being the alpha male at school by always outshining him just enough" and "disappointed him by turning out not to be the legend that he'd been idolising"), I never took them onboard because there's just so much going on the whole time. I heard the lines of dialogue but never really absorbed that stuff. Compare that to Shaun and Ed in SOTD or Nicholas and Danny in HF, where the whole film revolves around their changing friendship. Taking Steve out could solve that.
Rating: Good

Man of Steel (2013)

SPOILERS BELOW

Original forum post:

I think I'd say it's better than Superman Returns.

The trouble I had with the spectacle (mostly the superfights) was not the amount of it, but that it was all very Transformers-y - disorienting handheld shots of rapid sequences of big things getting destroyed, with untold collateral and property damage but no sense of weight or consequence to it because we're already onto the next thing being smashed up.

Plus the Krypton sequence immediately reminded me of Revenge Of The Sith.

The other problem with the spectacle for me was that the film feels very front-loaded. You get this exhausting Krypton opening rebellion battle then Zod/Jar-El fight then Zod sentencing then planet destruction then you get about a minute before you're into an oil rig disaster sequence. The best part of the film for me was when it calmed down and started doing flashbacks to Jon Kent talking about the decisions Clark will have to make, intercut with Zod broadcasting creepily and Supes deciding to trust humanity and communicate with the military. Unfortunately, it then switches back to a load of boring fights and Superman grimacing a lot while flying into things, the military suddenly turn into cardboard cut-out, gung-ho idiots, and presumably hundreds if not thousands of people getting killed off-camera while we're supposed to give a shit if some Daily Planet intern or random family die.

There were good bits, and they gave it some depth (eg Zod could easily be interpreted as a criticism of US foreign policy) although it gets a bit heavy-handed at times (Clark goes into a church and asks a priest's advice while being framed next to a stained glass window of Christ - the easiest and most pointless of all metaphors!), but I would like to see a more measured director take the next one, someone like Spielberg.

Finally, I totally knew they'd put a Lexcorp sign in there somewhere!

Rating: Fine

Re-watch 2021:

I was far too generous to this movie! I suspect that, much like with Snyder's Dawn Of The Dead and Watchmen adaptations, I was so relived that it wasn't as horrible as it could have been that I gave it a free pass on a lot of stuff. Watching it again now, I realise how bad it actually is.

This movie does not care about humans, and barely feels like it was made by them. There is zero characterisation, and the dialogue is stilted,  didactic and frequently nonsensical. The death of thousands is window-dressing and Clark blithely destroys the entirety of the Kryptonian race while the movie attempts to put emotional weight on the death of an anonymous family or a genocidal monster.

What's more, the action is poorly-directed, and the storytelling is rushed, overloaded and confusing. Perhaps if they had cut the Krypton prologue and the Genesis Machine stuff, focused on a story about Clark deciding whether to trust humanity and have Zod show up to create tension within that framework, this could have been an interesting movie. Or maybe if they'd spent more time with Krypton, developing it as a forboding reflection of humanity.

The best thing I can say about this movie is that there's the occasional nice-looking shot.

Rating:Awful.

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

The first 2 mins of the credits were better than anything in the lazy, boring film that preceded them.

Instead of moving from game to game cramming in as many clever references as possible, the film spends most of its time in the candyland game, to the point where it's barely worth them setting it in video games. The characters are all dull, the story's messy and overworked, the references are clumsy and the film's internal logic never really makes sense and often contradicts itself. The whole thing just lacks imagination, it's like a straight-to-DVD Toy Story knock-off.


Rating: Awful

Frankenweenie (2012)

Saw this in 2D and really enjoyed it. Burton's best for a while. It's too long, even at just over 90 mins, and Burton fans may get a little annoyed with yet more allusions to James Whale's Frankenstein films, but it's generally very inventive and entertaining. It's got some relatively dark stuff in there, as well, and it's pretty brave to be in black and white all the way through.
Rating: Good