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
Friday, 13 September 2013
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
Rating: Bad
Thursday, 5 September 2013
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
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
Thursday, 29 August 2013
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
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
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
Tuesday, 23 July 2013
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
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
Friday, 19 July 2013
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
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
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