Similar to conversion camp com-drams like But I'm A Cheerleader and The Miseducation Of Cameron Post, this is sweet, charming and funny with a bunch of strong performances, but so mild as to only really have anything to say to tweens/early teens.
Rating: Good
This movie is charming, evocative and stylish, but it's also a jumble of ideas that never quite coalesce into a cohesive story so it's hard to settle in and enjoy it. It spends a lot of time setting up Inside Out-style rules and layered metaphors - all of which are a lot of work to get to the message 'appreciate life' - while regularly swerving into classic Pixar grumpy/enthusiastic buddy comedy or slowing down for Ratatouille-style appreciation of jazz or pizza or whatever. Nice enough, I preferred it to Coco, but it's not as good as Inside Out and I probably won't ever be tempted to watch it again.
Rating: Pretty Good.
This looks gorgeous - all the design work is fantastic, from the live-action production design through costume and make-up to the giant VFX cities. The direction's not bad either, though it has that 'visual effects artist's directorial debut' feel, all impossible angles and moves for the VFX shots, and locked-off medium and close-up shots for any other scene. Unfortunately, the script is dreadful. It's full of clunky exposition, the structure is a complete mess, and the characters at their most believable are walking collections of hackneyed cliches and tropes but don't even hit that a lot of the time.
I gave up on it halfway through; I may go back to it, but when I've already seen full-tilt sequences of giant walking cities battling and eating each other in the first twenty minutes, is it worth shrugging through more of this story in the hope that there'll be more city fight sequences that somehow up the ante?
Rating: Bad.
Slick but soulless, the latter surprisingly so from the director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hulk.
The storytelling is enjoyably lean in the first half, then frustratingly anaemic in the second. The action is exciting and well-choreographed if a little floaty and uncannily fast. The de-aging effects are mostly very solid (I imagine that if there was only the one, de-aged Will Smith in this movie then someone who had never heard of him could quite easily get through most of it without realising he was a visual effect). The acting is competent all-round, though they barely have anything to work with and Owen's accent wobbles a lot.
Outside of technological interest, not much stands out here. Certainly not as good as The One or Face/Off.
Rating: Fine.
Just watched this and not really sure what I think. It looked good, came up with some striking imagery, but I don't know what it was trying to say. It feels like a bunch of gritty real-world themes (mental illness, the economic divide, political riots) thrown at a comic book character without any sense of cohesion or thesis. It's just 'look how crazy and weird this guy is, look how angry people are, look what arseholes the rich are'. If anything, it seems very misanthropic - people are either arseholes or sheep in this movie. But again, I don't know if that's the intent of just the result.
Perhaps I'll now go read some amazing interpretation of the movie that convinces me it's genius, but until then I'm putting this down as a muddled style exercise.
Bet-hedging score: Fine.
