Reviews

The idea presented in the movie had a lot of potential. However, the plot quickly goes south. Here are some thoughts:

1. Why would the guy who hates being reborn, who also has a gun that can trap souls (whatever absurd concept is this...) wants to destroy everything instead of just ending itself?

2. Why is everyone except the vilain stupid? I mean they get killed like flies, except the main characters.

3. If the superbomb can kill everything why does the villain need to fly to Glasgow? Why not just get it over with.

4. You know, bikes can outrun a plane, especially while going uphill.

5. Poor guy doesn't have money to pay rent, but can forge katanas out of nothing.

I usually like watching these three, but today no... The first thing that put me off was the idea that, supposedly, they were trying to help some poor people, but deliberately choose to pursue stupid ideas. You do not have to be a genius in order to see that their means of transporting fish were all doomed to fail...

I guess people like these three for the interaction between them, but that stops being funny when it's the only thing you see in the film.

The culmination of the episode was that, after failing to do what they were planning, they left the poor village in a helicopter. The cost of that alone could have fed the village for quite some time, I guess...

Best parts of Top Gear/The Grand Tour were those where they succeeded something interesting. It is entartaining watching someone manage to do something you can't do or can't ever afford. However, failing intentionally is just not funny.

As it is natural when you have a bunch of supernatural super-heroes, in order to keep making movies one needs to invent more and more outrageous villains. They might work in comics, but as someone who doesn't really care about context and would like to see an entertaining movie, I found the bad guys in this movie as stupid as always.

So batman realizes something is up as lizard aliens appear randomly in the world. Therefore, he decides to round up some people with superpowers, since he's the only one with no superpowers. In the meantime, Steppenwolf comes around and searches for some weird boxes which will connect the destruction of the Earth to his home planet somehow. Who even cares? He has an army and considerable power, but he really needs those boxes, so he goes around for them. As soon as I saw the Amazons on their little island, my expectation of this movie dropped.

Our good guys tried to beat Steppenwolf and his fellows, but failed. Funny how it mostly resumes to punches or sword slashes, or batman's tricks. However, our heroes don't have a scratch, as usual. And Steppenwolf, with all his army doesn't manage to bring down 4 people.

They don't bring him down, so as expected, they resurrect Superman using a box. I found it lame. I expected to see Superman living since he doesn't die easily, so somehow, he must have survived. Resurrecting him with the box was an overstretch. Anyway, he comes back and starts beating our heroes until Lois calms him down. Predictable, exactly how I imagined it.

Then, in the final battle, with some weird purple ball threatening to cover the Earth, our good guys fight the Steppenwolf and his bees, but can't make it without our good Superman. When Superman comes, he makes easy sport out of the bad guy, goes to save some people miles away, then comes back and finishes the job. Who came up with the absurd idea that Superman's breath can freeze stuff? This may work for kids, but hey, we're watching a movie where everyone flies and no one ever gets hurt.

It was a nice try, but it didn't felt good. I cannot begin to wonder what will they do next? Will they fight Supersayans and Freeza across the universe? Who knows, because Superman's back and we need to get more powerful foes to justify another sequel.

I enjoyed the first two thirds of the movie. Not the best story, but bearable. Then I realized that there is not much time till the end and many things needed to be resolved. After the gunslinger emptied an armory of bullets, all things started going so fast till you hit the end. It felt like they ran out of cash or something when filming the movie. Everything was building towards something, then you catch the boy in no time and construct a final fight which ends in 2 minutes. With one bullet, the evil fortress explodes. Why??

The movie is well and carefully made. It's the script and the story that bothers me. It is all crafted so that they could kill each other in the end.

The idea is that a bounty hunter takes one precious prisoner to get his reward. In the blizzard he is forced to stop at an inn in the middle of nowhere. Having 10000 dollars to cash on the prisoner he is too careless and behaves just like having a gun in his hand the whole time can save him from every trouble. He drinks coffee without worry, he stops for a few days in the middle of nowhere in an unknown house, whose owner is nowhere to be seen, he brags with his prisoner, etc.

On the other hand, the black major smells that something is off, but does not do anything, and starts by killing the only harmless man in the plot...

The story could have ended in the moment the bounty hunter and the female prisoner entered the caban: shoot him on the spot and leave the others outside in the cold... That's what feels off, the fact that the story is told so that it lasts longer.

As for the whole minutes spent showing scenery, or the two men planting poles to reach the toilet, it's just a waste of time.

Conclusion: overly violent movie (predictable), with questionable plot, lengthened just for the sake of telling a longer story.

I looked forward to seeing this movie as I like Jean Reno very much. Unfortunately, this movie was a bit of a disappointment. The premise was nice, having a police squad which does what it needs to do in order to stop crime, even if this means using some non-standard methods. Unfortunately, the action scenes showed that they do not seem at all professionals. For example, in the final showdown where the bad guys are heavily armed, there are two members of the squad who insist in using a baseball and an iron bar to beat some of the bad guys. Not to mention one of the initial scenes where in order to put down one of the bad guys Jean Reno comes with an excavator through a wall... Why??? How absurd is that? Then it comes the chase in Paris where the squad runs after the bad guys, but to my surprise the police is nowhere to be found even if they exchange gunshots in populated public places... Then, instead of sealing the parking, Jean Reno and his lover go alone in the dark, searching for the bad guys, providing a perfect opportunity for the girl to be killed... Another point is the dialogs, which do not seem at all natural. It feels that they are cut and pasted together, and even if I'm not French, I can tell that the accent of some of the actors is at least bizarre (Margaux, for example). Another fact which made the movie so dull is seeing Jean Reno walk. It is so obvious that he is old, too old to portray a cop which leads a brigade which fights crime directly.

I really looked forward to see this movie, as the trailers alone were so funny. The movie was funny, and what I enjoyed most was the minion language, which was a nice mix of different languages (I heard French, Italian, English, etc).

Unfortunately (as I feared), almost all the plot was included in the trailers: the history of the minions, the three minions' journey, the arrival in New York, Villain-Con in Orlando, Scarlett Overkill, the stealing of the Queen's crown. There were some "new" twists in the end, but the first half of the movie was known and totally predictable. Taking away the surprise by including almost all the plot in the trailers is a good way to ruin the movie experience.

This is one of the first AI movies in which the AI is portrayed as a superior intelligence, compared to humans. Even if the story is simple, there are only 3-4 main characters, the movie seems always on the edge. The filming, lighting, pacing are all very well chosen. There are a few moments where you can really feel the tension.

The movie raises multiple issues, like the question if an AI should be treated as a computer (which can be discarded/dismounted/shut down) whenever you want, or as a human being with feelings, memories, desires...

The ending is really non-standard. All AI movies I've seen recently, all have happy endings. Not this one. Ava tricks Caleb into believing that she likes him, but, in fact, all she wants is to be set free. In the end, Nathan is dead, and Ava leaves Caleb trapped in the fortress, with nowhere else to go.

This movie had an interesting premise, and I was eager to see it. I always like movies toying with artificial intelligence, and until now, every such movie was a disappointment in at least one aspect: artificial intelligence is not that intelligent. Avengers: Age of Ultron has the same problem. Ultron wants to clean the Earth of people, and to do so, it finds an extremely complicated method: raise a city up in the atmosphere, and then leave it fall, so that it would simulate a meteorite.

The movie starts with the Avengers team fighting to get the sceptre used by Loki in the previous Avengers movie. Once they find it, Thor decides to stay three more days to celebrate (??). In these days Stark and the Hulk (in human form) study the scepter, and try to make Jarvis communicate with the "artificial intelligence" within the sceptre. Of course, things go wrong, and Ultron comes to life, with the purpose of keeping the Earth safe. The problem is that the only way it sees this possible is to kill everybody.

The movie is full with really absurd stuff. I know it's cool to fight in the city and blow up buildings, but whoever did this in real life would not be left to do it again (killing hundreds/thousands of people every time). Supposedly, all the Ultron robots are made from the strongest metal known on Earth, but this does not stop our heroes from beating them and ripping them up with bare hands and kicks. In some scenes, they seem like ripping plastic... Plus, they never get hurt, which would be fine by me, if they showed they had some superior tactics, not just bruteforcing through the crowd of robots.

There were lots of surprises along the way: the appearance of Ultron, the red fighter, the plan with the city. Still, in the end you are left with another story with the same ending. The Avengers were overwhelmed, but they manage to beat up all the bad guys, while saving (almost) all the people.

There are many questions: why choose such a complicated method to erase mankind, when Ultron could get into any computer he wanted, thus into any house/computer/mobile phone? Why did the red guy (which seems extremely strong) not kill Ultron from their first encounter? He seemed he had the necessary juice... And again, the main thing that bothered me: why is always artificial intelligence portrayed as not so intelligent?

I like this new version of Spiderman. The story was good, the movie was entertaining. Seeing it left me with a positive feeling. There are things that seemed more logical than in the first movie:

• Father disappearing because he found the mutation formula - Spider-man does not produce all the webs himself, but has a device for it. Imagine from where would Spider-man produce thousands of meters of web, if that must come from inside him...? - He is just a high-school kid, with desire to show off. - He is not bullet proof, and is not immune to damage. He can get hurt.

There are some exaggerated scenes, and some flaws in the script/making.

• The slam-dunk scene is way exaggerated. Imagine doing that in your highschool gym, and not getting on the first page of your newspaper: Freak flies over basket court! - The "magical" equation contains an expression of the form log(g exp(something)). This is all they could come up with. Somme sigma, a pi, an exp and a log. They didn't bother seeing that the log and exp cancel... Do us all, who know a little math, a favor, and if you want to write a complicated formula, find a scientist and get a really complicated one. - Even if in this movie Spiderman gets hurt, the battles he has with the lizard-guy are way off balance, and if the lizard guy was such "animalistic" as portrayed, Spider-man would not have survived their first encounter. - They could have finished off the lizard with the nitrogen. Instead, they let it regenerate... so it could kill someone at the end. As far as I know, lizards cannot regenerate their heads.

This movie is not perfect, but it is entertaining, and that's the point.

This movie has been a total disaster. It was quite predictable up until the ending scenes, which made no sense. Here are the things that annoyed me: 1. There are many points in the movie where Liam just seems to want to get caught. What sense does it make to meet with his daughter when cops are on his/her tail. 2. This man seems to be able to exit exploding vehicles, even while in an elevator shaft. 3. Even if he is a super spy, no one would forgive him for just making a huge row of car accidents with multiple deaths, just to get away from cops. If he were that good, they would not have caught him at the gas station. 4. He has the sindrome 'the good guy does not get shot or hit' all throuought the movie. 5. The actual husband of the dead woman has two life insurance policies on his wife, and no one notices until the end. 6. The main cop (same as in "The last stand") seems to be smart but is not.

My conclusion: not worth watching.

Apart from the comic lines and the classic shooting where good guys rarely die, there is not much to this movie. It is well paced and resembles classic Arnold movies, but the script is horrible. It tried to bring something original, but I guess the producers didn't bother thinking too much of the story itself.

The bad guy manages to escape from a multiple car convoy stopped to ask approval to move on... How stupid is that? Once the convoy starts, it never stops; that's the point... Then the bad guy manages to get his hands on a 1000 horse power car with which he wants to reach the border with Mexico. This is so wrong, I don't know where to start: why choose the car as a transportation vehicle? Their answer was that the car was faster than the helicopter. How about the fuel? A 1000 HP car drinks gasoline like water. At the speeds shown in the movie he would need to refuel multiple times on the way... A car can easily break and can easily be stopped.

Of course, he manages to rip off the police blocades (like there could be only two blocades from Las Vegas till Mexico) with the help of some of his buddies. The feds obviously lose him, and for some reason are not able to reach the Mexico border faster than the car...

Then there is the scene where this guy, using his car, manages to ram two SWAT jeeps off the road, and his car has just a few scratches.

The fight in the border city is hilarious. Ten men are killed by four untrained, less armed men. Classical action movie style: bullets do not reach the good guys.

In the end, Arnold fights the bad guy. He probably breaks his jaw, neck and back, but in the end, it brings the bad guy in town tied to its car hopping on one leg.

As I said, the action is interesting up to some point, and there are some comic lines, but the rest is a disaster. If the US Police, FBI and administration would be like this, then it would be a shame. In reality, in a situation like this, after killing 20 cops, they would have sent military planes to blow up the car.

I started watching this expecting to watch something similar to the old Asterix and Obelix films. This is totally different, but not in a good way (at least not for me).

The first annoying thing is the French used throughout the movie whenever someone from Britannia talks. I know they want to imitate Englishmen speaking French, but the result is horrible.

The scenes look awful. They look so artificial (the Galois village, the forest, the army). Even the grass looks artificial. Watch some scenes from the old Asterix movies (like Asterix vs Cesar or Asterix aux Jeux Olympiques) to see what I mean.

In the old movies, the characters were taking everything seriously in a comic way (remember Cesar, Brutus, Numerobis...). Here they give you the feeling that they don't really mean what they say, so much of the comic factor is artificial.

While I'd watch anytime one of the old Asterix movies, I will never see this one again.

The movie is bearable, the action is interesting, but the whole thing is predictable (up to a certain point). We know immediately that the new guy will be the first to do what no one else has done before...

There are lots of points I don't agree on, but the main one is the end. The premise of the maze is that the smart ones will get out. The feeling of the one who watches is exactly the opposite. If someone thought to kill all the staff, the doctors, the maintainers of the maze, then why not save all kids directly? The end scene shows the survivors being flown in a helicopter above the maze. The survivors need to be stupid if they didn't realize this was a setup... If they wanted to save them, all they needed to do was to fly the helicopter in the center of the maze and pull them out...

Other things I found odd: - the new arrivants are not fully briefed on the maze and the dangers inside. That's the sure way of making someone curious... - how can the maze runners always find their way, and map it, if the maze keeps changing? - how could the kids fight a mechanical spider with sticks? In the end, the thing could just wipe them out directly. - the world ending brain disease justification of these maze trials was a little absurd... I'm curious what the book does with this...

edit: I just read the book, to see how it ends. In the book, the maze is covered, so clearly, no helicopter can reach the Glade. Furthermore, the kids are "saved" using a bus, not a helicopter. I don't know what the script writers have for brains, for putting that helicopter fly over the maze scene at the end.

I liked the action and the beginning of the plot, but the rest was just silly. I know someone with whole brain power would be very smart, but to claim it would have power over matter and time it's a level of sci- fi that is not believable (at least for me...) This reminded me of Transcendence. The same phenomenon: you get so smart you can do anything you want.

There are several severe inconsistencies in the movie.

1. Why would superior intelligence imply that you can kill anyone, with no reason, enemy or not? (See the hospital scene) On the other hand, when dealing with real enemies (the Chinese guys), Lucy doesn't kill them, but plays with them. Maybe this is needed to create the stupid gunfight (a la Matrix) between the French police and the Chinese at the end of the movie.

2. If you are super smart and tapped into anything that moves, then why do you need to swipe and zoom with your fingers, like on a phone/tablet. Can't you do that in your head? Speaking of technology, in the scene where Lucy first gets a hold of a computer, after she gets smarter, she opens tons of windows (supposedly learning) and does not close them down. No matter how smart you are, the computer's RAM will run out if you try and do that. It looks good on the screen, but is not realistic.

3. Why would Lucy search and find some researchers to talk to when she already knows more than any of them? It's like seeking advice from a young kid about what to do in life... In the end, a bunch of them are gathered in a room with the sole purpose of looking at her while she reaches her 100% brain level and while the Chinese smash through the police.

4. If she's that smart, why didn't she make the blue drug herself, or find the production site in Taiwan, rather than start a war in France?

5. Why does she travel in the past with a chair?

There are other points, but i do not want to waste my time any further. The movie looked promising, but like Transcendence, it goes way too far in assuming brain power can make you a sort of God, above physics, gravity, everything.

I say this movie is enlightening since it opens the eyes of the viewer to the dangers of mass surveillance (video, computer, cell, etc)

On all other points it is completely stupid...

1. A computer who can do whatever it wants (supposedly it has some kind of artificial intelligence) and has all the computational power it needs, cannot update itself in secret (noting that the system admin is a complete idiot) and needs to reach to some people through some nice phones, so that it could move to an empty storage house somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in order to make its desired upgrade.

2. The main character arrives in Prague, where it gets to a casino and after winning 100000 euros and gaining the attention of the security personnel, it comes back to win the 3000000 euros jackpot... How stupid is that... Like they couldn't see that he was cheating with its phone.

3. A sniper and two armed men cannot kill an unsuspecting couple in Prague. Later on, the FBI agents with BMW's have a really hard time keeping up with a Renault Cargo.

4. They realize that Echelon does stupid things, but they decide to keep it online and do what it says.

5. In the end, they thought this was not messy enough, so they made agents fight each other.

6. The hero saves the day by making the computer find its conscience and notice that it does not keep the rules it needed to keep. So the Intelligent Computer decides that after all this stupid series of events it will shut down and give up, which it does.

There are many other lines and scenes which are ridiculous.

The movie is captivating and watchable, but in the end it left me unsatisfied since many of the scenes presented are not plausible or not intelligent at all.

Here are a few facts:

1. The main character is an ex CIA operative and an engineer, but he doesn't remember his daughter is allergic to peanuts and cannot start a washing machine.

2. A company vanishes in one day without leaving any trace, and 10 minutes of the film are wasted while Ben tries to prove it did exist, and he was one of its employees. Bank receipts, payment checks do not vanish, and work contracts are usually made in writing.

3. There are a few scenes where shots are fired in a hospital and many civilians are killed; in the beginning all members of a CIA center in Belgium are killed. No one would authorize covering a sinking ship scandal with killing all people in a building.

4. The two CIA agents stuck in the moving train are willing to kill, but do not have the guts to pull the alarm signal and stop the moving train.

5. Father and daughter get a ride from a shootout. The girl drives at over 100km/h in the city. The father stops her using the handbrake, and then they sit and talk in the middle of the street for a few minutes. No pressure, the bad guys have gone to sleep, and creating chaos in the street will not attract the police.

6. They have a few thousand euros and they cannot get a place to sleep, so they need to go to the arabic friend and then sleep in some small apartment with a family and a kid's room. What happened with all the hotels? And if you don't want to get caught, what's wrong with sleeping in the car?

7. The exchange phase is comical. They all go to the car, and the Russian killer just sits there and waits for the bomb to explode.

8. After blowing up several important people in the middle of the city, we are expected to believe that Ben, who is injured, dirty and arrives at the airport just in time and passes through the checkpoint without being arrested or questioned.

It is nice to watch a movie and let your mind wander and immerse in another world, a world you may never see (and hope not to see) in your lifetime. Still, we shouldn't be forced to leave our brains on stand by during the movie.

I was entertained by the movie, overall, but in the end I felt like it wasn't finished, and had almost nothing to transmit apart of the fact that it is wrong to eradicate a species.

I didn't feel what was the climax of the movie. The final battle, for me was just like a simulation and I remember wondering how could the "real" battle fit in the remaining space till the end of the movie? Of what use were those training games between teams, and how would that aid with ship fighting? The only connection with the final fight is that drones dig a hole through the enemy and the blast passed through...

Ender was going to give up after he injured the other kid in the bathroom, but his sister managed to convince him to go back with just 2-3 phrases. And the final argument was that if he doesn't try, he will not succeed. What had that to do with the injured kid and the guilt he felt? What strategist would leave the Earth defensless and go light-years away to fight the enemy with his best ships? What if the enemy was already close to Earth, and launched an attack? The whole idea to use kids because they have better minds is ridiculuos. No one in his right mind would do that. What did they need to process, anyway? That the enemy was swarming and coming to fight them? The end is bizarre. How could a queen be so close to the human base and they didn't find it? The special effects and the acting weren't bad, but the story is not plausible.

I liked the movie overall, but in the end I felt that everything was rushed and little was presented...

1. I don't understand how a book presented in three 3h movies can seem so rushed... The meeting with Beorn was quick with no tension, no detail, no nothing. The journey through mirkwood was dull, a mere 2 minutes of wandering and then they jumped directly to the spider fight... The barrels escape came from nowhere. In the Lake town they were caught and they were gone. The search for the keyhole was stupid... Why the need of the light of the moon if they had a staircase which led to a wall smaller than one wall in my room where all they needed was to search a little for a hole? The story from inside the mountain seemed a totally different thing than the book... What was the story with the Lake chief? What is Gandalf doing, and why are the orcs here better armored (in the end) than in LOTR?

2. Fighting scenes are overly exaggerated... Probably influenced by LOTR. They get overly creative with all angle arrow shots and creative decapitations by Legolas.

3. The CGI is disappointing... There are a few scenes which seem taken from a video game. The orcs do not look real. There Is a scene where the orcs run over a lake bridge and Legolas follows ahorse when the riding doesn't seems at all natural.

The best thing the movie did was to make me read the book again, to remember the real details...

I knew that I shouldn't expect much, but this movie really is a disaster. Here are a few points: - the shark looks like in some Tom and Jerry cartoons, only with tentacles.

• the shark could rip a boat to pieces, but some guys go underwater with some sticks to 'capture' it. guess what happens? - I always thought what would be the equivalent of a shark on solid land. Looks like this shark can literally walk on land using its tentacles. This is really stupid.

• the people in the movie are really stupid. They see that something weird is in the water and they stay still, or they 'look close' until the shark eats them.

• they go after the shark with a small boat, smaller than the shark itself - the shark stands outside the surface of the ocean, in a few instances, using its tentacles, like its some kind of fly.

I like shark movies, but this was a waste of time. Watch it only if you want to count the bad parts in the script and acting.