Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

I enjoyed it very much, though it did (again) feel a little bit like more of the same, but with not as many stand-out memorable sequences, and a little compromised by being part one of a two-parter. I reckon it'll work better watched in a marathon with part 2 once that comes out, but honestly after that I kind of hope they start mixing things up again, bring some new characters in (or at least swap out some of the old characters for other old characters - I want the Aussie pilot from M:I 2 to come back!). It'd be fucking great if they repeated the Jim Phelps trick from the first movie (which never quite worked because of the recasting) and made Ethan the villain. Imagine if they'd revealed that at the end of this movie and had him kill off Benji, Luther etc - people would have flipped their lids!

Rating: Good solid MI fun, not one of the best.

The Flash (2023)

SPOILERS BELOW

It starts out surprisingly well, lots of comedy bits that work, some moderately good Flash action, and then a fun Calvin & Hobbes feel when he starts interacting with a slightly younger and much more irritating version of himself. It all zips along nicely. But then halfway through they start with the multiverse stuff and it just completely throws the film off-balance. In good multiverse movies like the Spiderverses and (imo) No Way Home, the multiverse stuff is central and integral to the plot, in messy ones like this and Dr Strange 2, they're just slung in to a different story with no real thought for the novelty of it. It gets worse and worse in Flash until finally it feels like Space Jam 2, just all these IPs on a conveyor belt trundling past the camera. And then the movie just exhaustedly falls into an ending - the obvious reveal of the purple time guy's identity, the way that apparently Barry is able to change his dad's past without messing anything up after all (is it because it's not a nexus event or whatever? Very flimsy if so.), and no resolution to the mystery of his mother's death (even if we were getting a sequel, which I assume is off the cards now, this movie spends its first half setting that mystery up - it's a terrible decision to just drop it). The Clooney cameo was good fun, though. But then the Momoa cameo was dreadful.

The CG humans are fairly terrible throughout - it feels like you're watching one of those Resident Evil CG movies a lot of the time. In the 'Speed Force Bowl', they do put a load of filters over it in a commendable attempt to make it feel like a stylised choice but this is undone by the facts that a) it still looks ugly and b) the rest of the movie is filled with plasticy faces too. It's just something you have to accept watching this movie - sometimes the people just won't look like people. Along with the tacky set-up, it really scuppers the IP cameo section.

As for Keaton Batman - he just doesn't feel right outside of a Burton movie. They tried, you can tell they did, but it just didn't work. The same goes for the whole movie, really.

Rating: some promise subsumed by messy IP manipulation.

They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

Half an hour too long, and the weird Death Proof fake-70s thing they were doing just felt distracting and unnecessary and not really a great choice for a film that already has so much conceptual overlap with Black Dynamite and the flashback sequences in the Watchmen show. All the actors are good though they're all in slightly different movies.

Rating: Okay.

Bullet Train (2022)

Didn't think much of it, felt very much like a Tarantino knock-off without any of the wit or charm. A few of the fight scenes were good, though.

Rating: Meh.

Cyrano (2022)

Looks great, Dinklage is great and everyone else is good, and it's snappily told. Unfortunately, it succumbs to the post-Frozen habit of musicals to make most of their numbers sound like modern pop ballads and hence bland, broad and forgettable. Cyrano's on-stage duel and the soldiers' farewell are stronger, but the rest feel like listening to Taylor Swift singing in the shower. If they'd cut the songs completely they would have had a bit more time for some sharper characterisation.

Rating: respectable but misguided.

Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny (2023)

SPOILERS BELOW

Where Crystal Skull was cartoonish to the point of stupidity, this is bland to the point of soulessness. There's no flair, no wit, no excitement, no sparkle.

Even ignoring the CG deaging which is often betrayed either by a lifeless digital gloss, or the more restrained acting style and drooping face of modern day Ford, the prologue is uninvolving, shot with a murky day for night look and missing the point of an Indy prologue - to start at a breakneck pace with something different to the rest of the movie and even the past movies. This is an anonymous Nazi chase full of CG figures jumping over train cars. It's Indy's Greatest Hits, made by people who seemingly have never actually seen the other movies. As with the entire movie, it lacks that Spielbergian verve that even Crystal Skull showed at points, and doesn't show any of Mangold's strengths either - the framing is careless, the action muddy and the cinematography flat.

The script is begging for a Tom Stoppard rewrite, to trim it down and maybe put some actual jokes and characterisation in there. Teddy is a charmless Short Round knock-off, Waller-Bridge gives it her all with Helena but has nothing to work with, and Indy himself has been given the Force Awakens makeover - he's now a failed husband and father who doesn't have the will to live anymore (pretty funny that they gave Mutt a nasty pointless offscreen death via 'Nam, though). Sallah and Marion are wheeled on and off stage for some quick fan service (along with some other clumsy box-ticking like a ten-second sequence of bugs crawling over the heroes, or Indy throwing out a Kali mention for no good reason), and the villains barely exist. The action sequences mostly involve Indy driving a CG vehicle because that's all he can do now. It's too goddamn long at over two and a half hours, 26 minutes more than the now second-longest of the franchise, Last Crusade (which could have done with chopping out that Alexei Sayle scene and being a couple of minutes shorter itself). And, somehow, even the big finale of Indy traveling back in time is carried out with as little energy as possible and tanks the entire movie.

Crystal Skull may have been awful, but at least it was an awful Indiana Jones movie. This is just some charmless 2020s schedule-filler wearing an Indy mask.

Rating: if not terrible then terribly bland.

Barbie (2023)

It's absolutely aimed at tweens, basically giving them a primer on adulthood and the patriarchy, but adults can definitely still enjoy it because it's funny and stylish and smart. It does hit all its themes and metaphors very directly so the kids will get it, but it makes a point of doing that with everything (the rules of the world, characters' emotional arcs etc) so it doesn't feel jarring, it feels like it makes sense that a Barbie movie would do everything like that. And also, it does treat tweens with respect and as intelligent young near-adults, it doesn't talk down to them or shy away from stuff or pull any punches, so it deals with a lot of deep stuff honestly even if it's in a very straightforward, fairly basic manner.

Rating: Really good.