Reviews

Tired, stale jokes delivered by unlikable, one-dimensional cardboard cutout characters, with a liberal helping of humor that wants to be absurd, but reads like the scriptwriters just wrote random words on the wall and then threw darts at it. Take a plot outline that could be described in detail in three sentences or less, add in some casual racism and bigotry, stir until it's completely muddled, and you have Deadbeat in a nutshell.

The best thing about this show is when the credits end, and I'll be going out of my way to avoid anything by Miller, Heller or Labine, as the writing, directing and acting are universally awful. Hands-down the worst of Hulu's "Originals". They should probably just stick to buying in quality content from overseas and pretending it's "Original", if this is the best they can manage to buy in for themselves.

Let's ignore the plot and mediocre acting, such as they are. (It's said the script was only 32 pages long, and honestly I'm surprised it surpassed 32 words.)

This is lazy filmmaking at its worst. It's the story of a sailor with so little seamanship he should never have left his local marina on a day sail, let alone circumnavigated the globe. The pacing is poor, the character simply impossible to believe, and the plot painfully predictable.

And then we come to the ending. I shan't say what happens, but this mediocre film is blown out of the water by its diabolical, absolutely execrable ending.

Give it a miss. You'll thank me.

If there's one thing you can say for Disney, it's that you know what you're getting.

Almost every movie has the same animation, the same visual aesthetic, the same jokes, the same saccharine music, and espouses the same morals in the same overly sentimental way.

The only real variation is in the quality of the animation, and Brother Bear is sloppier than most, with some really lazy animation in places.

Definitely one to miss, and not really suitable for a G rating either due to the material, jokes, and near-constant characters hitting each other.

Now You See Me starts off promisingly, but sadly spirals downhill very quickly. Nonsensical "magic trick" after nonsensical "magic trick" goes completely unexplained, and save for one minor trick near the start of the movie, the explanations behind those few for which explanations are attempted become more and more nonsensical. Few films ask you to suspend disbelief to this degree, and the rare few which do are universally terrible.

There is a great cast in this movie, and although the CGI is often mediocre, the cinematography is of the standard you'd expect from a mainstream Hollywood film. And yet, all is wasted because of a plot with gaping holes in it, the size of the Holland Tunnel. No attempt is made to fill them in, either. You watch scene after scene, asking yourself why you're even continuing, and hoping above hope that all will resolve itself in the end.

It doesn't. The ending is even more childish and ham-fisted than the rest of the movie. Now You See Me is a staggering disappointment, and it all comes down to one of the weakest scripts in recent memory.

What a shame.

Thoroughly two-dimensional, cardboard cutout characters -- and even then, half of them make no sense in their supposed roles.

A painfully predictable plot with poor pacing and no real sense of a worthwhile story to tell.

The "twist" ending that you'll see coming by the midpoint of the movie, if not sooner. And a thoroughly childish attempt to turn this into a "love story".

I can truly think of no better parallel than this: Serenity is sci-fi for the Twilight generation.

A mediocre movie with all the personality of tepid dishwater.

I was lucky to see Turbo at a preview today, and had a great time. I don't want to give anything away, but suffice to say that I greatly enjoyed the movie. The plot's cute, the characters amusing, and there are some hilarious one liners. (As well as a few somewhat more risqué jokes for the adults, although they'll fly over most kids' heads.)

It's not going to rival Pixar at their best, but it's a lot of fun. I will say, though, that this isn't a film I'd bother with 3D for. It takes a back seat, and is little more than a gimmick. You won't be missing anything at all to watch in 2D.

But other than that, heartily recommended!

The five-word summary: Visually spectacular self-indulgent claptrap. I understand that the book is very good, but standing by itself this movie is absolutely and utterly meaningless. The entire "plot", such as it is, could be described in six sentences or less. The visual imagery is stunning, but towards the end gets extremely repetitive. The music is beautiful, but the sound-effects are absolutely diabolical - at points it seems as if there are less than ten separate sound effects used in the entire movie, repeated ad-nauseum.

It defies belief that this movie is so well-rated on IMDB. I can only draw two conclusions - either the book is great, and people are willing to forgive the fact that this movie cannot stand in its own right for anybody who's not read the book first, or people vote this movie up because they want to feel clever and believe they found some hidden meaning in a movie that basically has none.

This is the second Shyamalan movie I've seen, after Sixth Sense. That was a good movie - this isn't. The two movies are literally the exact opposite of each other. Where Sixth Sense is clever, unpredictable and intense, Signs is patronising, condescending, thoroughly predictable and painfully slow.

Realistically, the plot of this movie should have consumed no more than about ten minutes, and was padded out with scenes that wanted so badly to be suspenseful - but weren't. That was probably partly to do with the weak plot, but equally to do with the laughably bad special effects, that belonged in a 1970s movie.

I wanted so well to like this after being so impressed with Shyamalan's past work. I couldn't like it, because it was a mediocre, wishy-washy movie made even worse by the hype that preceded it.

Don't waste your time - any B movie running on cable for free is likely to be as good, if not better.

I never saw the original NBC show, but Comedy Central's two-week reincarnation of the show to see how it fared was not wildly successful, in my opinion. Quinn's humor gets repetitive quickly, and he doesn't hold a candle to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. Perhaps that was Quinn's problem - having to follow such a great show was bound to make his own seem mediocre at best.

I doubt we'll see this returning.

This film is being billed in the USA as a Jackie Chan flick. Don't buy into the hype - Jackie has a short (2 minutes approx.) cameo in a scene that makes little sense and is hardly tied in to the rest of the film. His presence in drag is unexplained, and worse still his voice has been dubbed by somebody who apparently spent two hours at the dentist's before filming, and was still under the effects of the anaesthetic - or at least it seems that way.

The rest of the film is passable - some good shots of Hong Kong and Guangzhou, but some glaring plot holes as well. Nothing to write home about, but a fairly good performance from Michelle Yeoh at least brings this up to a 5 out of 10 effort.

Slow, boring, nonsensical and self-indulgent, this must be amongst the most over-rated films of all time. At the end of the day, this is a film which it is fashionable to rate well, and pretend that it meant something to you - and hence you must yourself be as clever as this film desperately tries to be. Unfortunately it fails. "Being John Malkovich" isn't clever, it is contrived.

The Virgin Suicides, to me, is one of many films that is overhyped and overrated. Yes, it is visually stylish - and at least in the beginning fairly well written and directed. The acting is quite good, particularly from Dunst, Woods and Turner. The script totally fails to be tied together, however, and ends up weak, empty and pretty much meaningless. It is difficult to tell what the director intended this film to mean - if indeed it was meant to do anything beyond depress.

In the end, this is a disappointing mess that could have been so much more...

I have to admit, I rented Lost and Delirious on DVD having seen the trailer but expecting it to be one of those movies that turns out to be a disappointment. I'm glad I gave it the benefit of the doubt, because it most definitely surprised me! This is a very well directed, tightly scripted movie with beautiful cinematography and amazingly mature acting, particularly by the very young Mischa Barton.

As another IMDB user has commented, this is not so much a film about lesbians as a film about love - and what it can do to you when it doesn't work out right. There's really nothing I'd change about this film, and that in itself is the best possible comment I can give. I rarely give out "10 out of 10" ratings, and if IMDB allowed a 9.5 this film would have received that from me. As is, I am sorry to have to round it down to a 9, because if anything the film was better than that suggests...

The Transporter seemed like a good, solid movie for about 95% of its running time. To be sure, this is a movie where you must surrender disbelief before you walk into the cinema, in the genre of films like the Die Hard series and many modern Asian martial arts movies. Facts don't get in the way of a good story, and in a good story such lapses can be easily forgiven. This is sadly not one of those films, though. I can only presume that the budget ran out, and deadlines did their damage, because after what seemed promising through almost the entire movie quickly turned into a shambles with one of the weakest endings I have ever seen. I won't spoil what happens, although the ending could hardly be any more spoiled if I tried - suffice to say that you will leave the cinema thoroughly disappointed, and perhaps even tempted to try for a refund.

As the film progressed, I'd been expecting to want to buy it on DVD if only for some funny scenes, alongside its impressive special effects and fight scenes (which borrow heavily from the movies of Jackie Chan in places). As I left the cinema, though, it was with the knowledge that even if I received this film on DVD free, I'd sell it to get something better with the money. That would not be a difficult proposition.

This has to be one of the worst comedy premieres I have seen in a very long time, and made all the more disappointing by seeing an actor with the talent of Tim Curry relegated to a role that lets him do no more than unenthusiastically spout stale one-liners. All in all, a modern-day Mr. Belvedere with anything remotely funny removed from it. QVC would be more entertaining - don't waste your time!

MTV's Undressed follows a very, very simple formula. Show attractive young men and women - at least, in the most stereotyped and 'conventional' model of what is attractive - and keep them in their underwear talking about having sex, as much as possible. Nothing here is realistic, nothing deals with issues that real kids deal with, nothing has plots that couldn't be written better by the average 12 year old. Of course, this appeals to MTVs target demographic perfectly, but it doesn't make a good show. Cheap, soft-porn smut - definitely give this a miss.

The Deer Hunter claims to be a film about war, and to believe the hype you might think it was a good one. It is, unfortunately, neither. The film consists of a series of disconnected, almost unrelated scenes - you're never given the time to form any emotional attachment to the characters. Huge swathes of time where this could happen - time that would be the meat of any good movie - is completely skipped in what seems to be an attempt to prevent that bond from forming.

Without emotional attachment, the film is boring, trite and cliched. An obsession with a Russian Roulette theme doesn't make a good movie, and that (apart from some fair acting when dealing with the truly terrible script) is about all the Deer Hunter has. The real question here is how this movie has appeared in the IMDB Top 100 movies (99th at the time of this writing) when it doesn't have a coherent plot, has only average acting and really has no story to tell.

There are many much, MUCH better war movies out there. Give this one a pass, and try any of the others - whatever you choose, it is bound to be an improvement.

This film suffers from a script that is only rivalled in its poor quality by the absolutely appalling directing. The film starts badly with a succession of puns, and just goes downhill from there. Predictable, poorly crafted and full of mistakes (particularly near the end of the film), this is the epitome of what the film-makers craft shouldn't be. A tired, confused script, and ideas copied from every other film in the genre - except that the director clearly didn't understand the theory behind them. Terrible, avoid this like the plague.

I watched this film after having seen Vampyros Lesbos, and then read a comment on that film regarding The Awful Dr. Orloff. Where Vampyros Lesbos mostly succeeded, Dr. Orloff fails dismally - the characters are two dimensional and poorly acted, the dialogue varies from boring to inane, and the plot fails to grip the viewer at all.

Add to this that the film is absolutely riddled with errors, and you end up with a result that is only worth watching if you're a fan of cinematography's poorest works. Like Ed Wood? Watch this? Like the genre and want a good film - rent something else.

Seldom does a film fail on every single level, but 'Very Bad Things' does exactly that. Poor acting, shoddy scripting, and a complete inability on the part of the director to create any sense of emotional involvement with the characters robs this film of anything even remotely redeeming. It seems that the decision has been made simply to try and disgust the viewer, and ensure that you want the characters to die and the movie to end as soon as possible. This film isn't interesting, clever, funny or even a good way to waste an hour or two. A more accurate title would be 'Very Bad Film'.

As a work of complete fiction, Pearl Harbor works quite well. The plot is fairly interesting, albeit with a fairly slow and drawn-out start to the love story. The special effects are truly stunning - they're believable and there are a lot of them. The problem is, Pearl Harbor isn't supposed to be a work of complete fiction - it is supposed to be a history of a real event, interwoven with a fictional love story.

It is here that Pearl Harbor fails, in the worst possible way. The retelling of Pearl Harbor is one-sided, one-dimensional and hence utterly false. This robs the film of its purpose, and for me destroyed any emotional impact of either the historical or the emotional/fictional aspects it entails.

Probably the worst thing with this film is the intense racism it contains. From start to finish, the Japanese are portrayed as hateful, thoughtless robots with the exception of one character who's portrayed as doubt-filled - but only because he believes the attack may not benefit Japan. Of course, the American side is depicted as heroes and heroines every one...

A few examples of this disparity: pretty much without exception, every single Japanese character in the film has a grimace, scowl, or look of death on his face; Americans are given all of the 'good' emotions (laughter, happiness, sadness, fear, etc. - but never hatred). Whenever an American dies, we're treated to a display of the humanity of the dying character; whenever a Japanese person dies, we see little if anything. (For example, only once do we see a Japanese pilot when his plane is shot down. He falls from the plane but the camera ignores him - he is, after all, only Japanese, not human). Americans only shoot planes and bomb buildings; people aren't "involved". Japanese are depicted as shooting at people instead of the planes they're standing next to; at drowning sailors instead of the ships they're drowning alongside. The whole film is set alongside US flags, US children playing, even Santa Claus gets an appearance. The only thing missing is the apple pie... The Japanese people, by contrast, make only two tiny appearances - some kids playing with a kite in the background of one scene, and a Japanese lady walking in the grounds of a house in another.

I've never been tempted to walk out mid-film before. I was strongly tempted with Pearl Harbor, but didn't because I felt I shouldn't judge the film without seeing the whole thing. Now I've seen it, I find the result to be a very, very poor retelling of a historic event. See it as a work of fiction, or don't see it at all!

The feeling I came away with from The Astronaut's Wife is that it simply isn't what it could have been. A good plot premise and fair acting from the cast is let down by poor script, dreadful special effects, and one of the most painful endings written solely to cater for a sequel that I've yet seen! The end result is a movie that is a total disappointment - the best I can say for it is that it will fill an evening if you can find nothing better to do. It should have been so much more...

'The Limey' is a confused, uncomfortable Tarantino-wannabe. A combination of Tarantino's playing with the timeflow of the movie with scenes deliberately played in confusing orders, along with utterly pointless dialogue - but the problem is, the director and writer clearly don't understand why Tarantino's films work. The end result is a thoroughly disappointing mish-mash which annoys and sends you to sleep with equal vigor. Definitely miss this one, it isn't worth the effort to stay awake through!