The Grey Man (2022)

Very slick and tons of fantastic action, but there isn't a single moment in the entire film that isn't a tired old trope. Even Chris Evans' acid-tongued sociopath, while fun, feels like a carbon-copy of a '95-'05 John Travolta character. The rest of the performances are solid but unenergetic and similarly derivative.

Pretty much worth watching for the action, and possibly for the fun of shouting out which film is being stolen from at five seconds intervals, but it'll drop right out of your head afterwards.

Rating: Fine.

Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

Where the previous entry felt more like a Resident Evil movie, this one feels more like an Uncharted movie. It takes about 80 minutes to actually get a character into a wild environment with dinosaurs in it - until then it's jetsetting espionage with sexy bounty hunters and spending far too much time getting all the current and legacy characters to the dino factory. This wouldn't be an issue if they had gone all in on the 'dinos have taken over America' angle, but this is mostly done in montages and the one time they do ask 'what would an action scene with dinosaurs be like in contemporary America', the answer is basically 'they'd run fast down streets at you'. They're hobbled by the fact that the set-up only involved a handful of dinosaurs escaping from one mainland location and they never come up with a way to get around that.

Meanwhile. the writing is dreadful, the fan service is lazy and clumsy, the action is badly-directed, there are big logic gaps, and characters make stupid decisions every few seconds.

Truly embarrassingly bad.

Rating: Awful.

Thor: Love And Thunder (2022)

SPOILERS BELOW

Makes so many of the typical action/comedy sequel errors seen in MIB2/Blade 2/Anchorman 2/Toy Story 2 etc. Jokes are brought back from the previous movie and stretched into tedium, the careful tightrope-walk of tone tips over into distancing cartoonishness, heavy slabs of pathos are dropped into a film that can't support it, and modified versions of certain elements are ported over without success.

Instead of Thor smashing up hellspawn to Led Zeppelin, he's doing a Bugs Bunny act through owl aliens to Guns N Roses. Instead of Jeff Goldblum funnelling his persona into a vain cruel despot, we have Russell Crowe doing the same, except he's playing a children's book Zeus with a terrible Greek accent and a tacky cartoonish lightning bolt symbol as a weapon. For the British actor as the main villain with an indirect grudge against Thor, in place of Cate Blanchett's arch performance there's Christian Bale giving a straight dramatic rendition of a grieving father.

There are some big wasted opportunities - Thor with the Guardians is binned ten minutes in (I appreciated how much cruft Waititi swept away at the start of Ragnarok, but this felt like something he could have actually done a lot with, especially considering how poor the alternative turned out to be), and most egregiously they bring Natalie Portman back and give her an interesting set-up as Mjolnir-powered Jane then mostly waste it by giving her cancer and killing her off, with most of her time before that spent negotiating her romantic relationship with Thor.

It doesn't have the stylistic flair of Ragnarok. One of the few new jokes is that 'screaming goat' meme that was popular about ten years ago, and is repeated constantly. A lot of the logic doesn't hold up. Valkyrie doesn't get to do much, nothing new is done with Korg and arguably he's overused.

If I had to watch one of the three non-Ragnarok Thors again, I genuinely am not sure which one I'd pick.

Rating: Bad.