Monday 24 December 2018

Aquaman (2018)

It's visually gorgeous, Momoa is charming and that Sicily action sequence is great, but overall this is a mess. Scuppered by the lead character being introduced in a previous film and yet still having a ton of origin stories, lore and Atlantean politics to get through, the narrative is all over the place. It's filled with tropey beats (in the wrong order) and characters and most of the action is either rote post-Kingsman punching or rote CG battles. Even the music can't decide what it wants to be, flitting between wailing guitar, orchestral and 80s electro.
Amusing sidenote: Nicole Kidman is digitally de-aged at the start of the movie. When she reappears in present day, she is no longer de-aged but because of all the work she's had done she still looks so uncannily smooth that they had to put a grey wig on her to age her up a bit!
Rating: Bad

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Hands down the best Spider-Man film ever. Effortlessly blends a variety of visual styles and riffs on the audience familiarity with Spidey's backstory while using all of the character's (characters') iconography to full effect. Funny, exciting, touching and intricate without being over-worked.
Rating: Great

Sunday 23 December 2018

Night of the Comet (1984)

Some cool ideas and visuals, and surprisingly solid B-movie performances, but it's let down by sluggish pacing. It never really gets out of second gear, missing the solid structure and escalation of a low-budget Romero, Rodriguez or Jackson.
Rating: Fine

Wednesday 19 December 2018

Tomb Raider (2018)

Bland. Uninspired dialogue, a scattered structure and a shift from grounded action sequences to CG Lara bouncing around the place like she's in Jumanji. I didn't even find the puzzle-solving that satisfying because most of the time Lara either just knew how to instantly solve the tumbler-locks or started quoting clues that we'd never heard before.

I did like the reveal that rather than a supernatural witch queen, the corpse in the tomb was a carrier for a deadly virus, that was cool.

Nowhere near as good as National Treasure, never mind Raiders.
Rating: Bad

Tuesday 18 December 2018

Assassin's Creed (2016)

Bloody terrible. It's so po-faced and convoluted, yet barely anything actually happens over the two hour runtime. The visuals are quite nice, though the action scenes are poorly directed - the camera must jump the line once every three seconds.
Much like the redesigned Animus, it may look pretty but it's overly complicated and makes little sense.
Rating: Awful

Sunday 9 December 2018

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Disappointing. It's a load of moderately interesting ideas thrown at a tired cliche of a plot, and it doesn't get going for at least the first hour - this really could have done with at least twenty minutes trimming off. As others have noted, it has touches of Idiocracy, Kaufman and Gondry about it, but the thing I was reminded most of was Gremlins 2 - that's the level of satirical sophistication it was playing at. Not necessarily a bad thing, but here the story drags too much to make up for it.
Rating: Good

Monday 3 December 2018

Game Night (2018)

Consistently enjoyable, and regularly laugh out loud funny. Not an absolute riot, though, just very solid.
Rating: Good

The Predator (2018)

A big, awful mess - the characters are all back-story and nothing else, the story is pretty much 'there's a bigger one, and like ten macguffins', the action scenes weren't particularly interesting and the CG was poor.

This just feels like Friday The 13th Part 3 or Jaws 4 or something, another cheap rehash of the same idea. I think they really need to take some big risks if they want to rescue the franchise from stagnation. Send someone to their home planet or have them take over Earth or have a good one show up speaking fluent English and join the NYPD or *something*. Give the species something else to do beyond hunt/fight.
Rating: Bad