Reviews

Pointless and overlong, a disjointed mess of a film.

I don't really know what direction Disney are going to take with Star Wars in the future and frankly I don't care any longer. I am wholly indifferent and have no intention to see any more of these garbage films in a theater. None of the major loose ends from The Force Awakens are resolved in The Last Jedi, we don't get to find out who Rey's parents are/were, what lead to the first order becoming a force in the galaxy, who Snoke is and what his origins or motivations were. The only mystery that is unraveled is Luke's voluntary seclusion - which of course is deeply unsatisfying since it's contradictory to what we know of the character from previous films.

To say that the plot of TLJ is simplistic would be putting it mildly, none of the villains are in any way convincing as their only motivations are being evil and none of the supposed heroes are in any way compelling either since they all act like disorganized morons and apparently the only way to make a buck in this universe is by selling arms, either to fuel or fight an insurgency no more than a few hundred men strong.

What are "the resistance" resisting against? The first order are evil yes we fully understand that any organization that keeps building planet killing weapons to cause wanton destruction is evil, but evil TO WHAT END? Having Leia fly through space like superman, Luke dying from going out of mana, the slow-mo chase through space, all the inappropriate and misplaced humor - these are all profoundly idiotic plot decisions but what really bums me out about this film is I have no reason to care about any of the characters in it.

Very minor spoilers ahead

It's for the most part nicely shot and nicely lit. Keanu Reeves, despite hamming it up with an unnecessarily raspy voice in every scene, is also capable as the lead and there are several strong supporting characters that provide for some depth in an otherwise simplistic and shallow plot.

There ends all the good I have to say on the subject of John Wick.

Strangely enough one of the primary failures of John Wick is the sound design, it's not as godawful as Chappie with its belt fed rifles but there is a terrible discordancy here between what we're shown and what we hear. The soundtrack in particular sticks out like a sore thumb whenever Wick's "man with a purpose" leitmotif lights up. There's something to be said of the missed opportunity of including somber jazz or grunge and instead going with generic and grating hard rock in a movie which is otherwise more tonally similar to noir than typical action fare.

The plot's pacing and direction is where the film really begins to lose me however and it becomes clear rather quick that little forethought or planning was put into the script. Wick is described as a loser for example by a man who spent the preceding night trashing his very un-loser-like home and stealing a car that he admired so much he would rather keep than sell to his fence. Not enough time is spent on the titular character himself either to establish him in any way, instead what we get is a couple lines spoken about him in hushed reverence from another character - who neither he has been properly introduced at that point. And from that point on the rest of the movie is singularly focused on the revenge plot and while it plays out in a number of visually interesting settings the fight choreography, visual effects and inconsistent behaviour of Wick as well as the extremely long scenes make for a complete doozy. Instead of allowing for a gradual buildup of tension followed by brief bursts of violence our Hero dispatches enemies with such ease and in such great numbers that it's hard not to think you're watching Max Payne: The Movie. I'm reminded of a quote regarding droids in the Star Wars prequels, if our heroes are able to deal with these enemies with such ease and in such great numbers that their presence is entirely inconsequential, why even include them?

Finally there's the issue of our Russian crime boss being played by someone with a very obvious Swedish accent. I don't hold anything against Michael Nyquist but he's a poor fit for "menacing bad guy" and even if he were able to speak English without his accent there's precious little he could do with the pathetic dialogue afforded his character. Attempting to pass of a Swedish man as a Russian mobster so jarred me out of the movie I ended up simply fast-forwarding past any scene where he made an appearance, which of course meant John Wick took a nosedive towards the end.

It might be interesting to consider for a moment what could've been done with the basic themes and characters here if the project was in the hands of a competent director, editor, makeup team and effects artists but it'd be a lot simpler to simply say - don't bother.

Mindless entertainment usually has some charm to it if nothing else, Guardians delivers none of that. Throughout the whole film it provided maybe two sincerely funny moments while the rest of it came across mostly as unintentional comedy thanks to a gibberish script. I've never laughed at someone dying of cancer before but the prologue of Guardians is just so hilariously god-awful it had me in stitches all through the opening credits.

Oh Christ, what a forgettable, uninteresting and pitifully bland mess of a film this was. I suppose it appeals to easily impressionable simpletons but I struggle to see how, there's hardly any character development, the plot is nonsense from start to finish, the antagonist is some bland and boring caricature who seemingly only exists as a vehicle to introduce Thanos (who is a big deal I'm assuming?) and it's all just so damn predictable. Perhaps worst of all the ending is just another anticlimactic retread of the old and tired "power of love" trope.

I may have given Guardians at least one point if it had decent effects and camera work put into it, but none of that is to be found here.

There's a scene in Edge of Tomorrow where people in a pub are talking about the possible motivations of the antagonist alien species might be, Tom Cruise responds to this by saying "what difference does it make?". This is obviously meant to be interepreted as a matter of factly statement about the business of fighting for your survival but I can't help but feel it's also a line put in there by the screenwriters addressed to the audience in which they're trying to tell you not to worry about the nitty gritty of plot details in a movie featuring time travel as its premise.

And of course, getting past the fact that time travel as a plot device doesn't hold up to any form of reasoned scrutiny it has to be said that what Edge of Tomorrow manages to do with this conceit is really enjoyable to behold. Bar a couple really tired clichés, the basic elements of plot progression and character interaction come together really nicely here. Pretty much my only major complaints about this film are the generic and utterly uninteresting enemies, a retread of the tired old mothership ending that grants our heroes an automatic victory upon its destruction, sorely lacking audio production and a miscast Brendan Gleeson who's completely out of place as a stern faced general (I have never seen him pull off a stern face).

It's fantastic too that practical effects are used to such a great degree and when CGI appears it rarely stands out.

Well, it's got a nice soundtrack at least. But the audio editing is done very poorly.

The CGI for the most part isn't offensively bad either, but I'm not a twelve year old any more and it's not for the CGI I watch films.

No, I watch films because I hope for an engaging experience where for a moment I'll forget I'm just watching a contrived spectacle and allow it to take me for a ride. But that's all Man of Steel ever is, a contrived spectacle.

This is one of those strange films where almost every scene feels really drawn out and at the same time laughably rushed. The introductory sequence we see at the beginning could have set the stage for a compelling battle of ideologies, or given us some food for thought about our own consumption of natural resources and the value of space exploration. Instead it does neither, giving us only a single trite bit of dialogue to inform us Krypton is coming to an end and that everyone's going down with the ship.

Rushed too, are the the scenes that introduce to us Clark Kent the character. There's not much for me to say here other than they don't make a lick of sense in the context the film constructs for us.

Then we get to the introduction of the Lois Lane character who for whatever reason is in the thick of the action from there on out, just more contrivances layered upon a very shaky plot. I completely zoned out and stopped caring altogether when Clark cauterises a wound with his eye lasers, that garbage scene was on par with the c-section from twilight.

Isn't it odd how a film that continually stresses the importance of a search for how and why through its cinematic language actively discourages the audience from considering these things?

The premise is simple enough; A woman wants to split from her husband in order to leave the country since he won't leave with her in order to care for his terminally ill father.

But as soon as we clear the premise the film drops the subject completely and instead meanders off to tell us about a comically inept housekeeper, her irresponsible husband and the laughable nature of the Iranian justice system that attempts to make sense of the mess. Except nothing is played for laughs.

It completely baffles my mind why this film wasn't more focused on its central plot, instead we get a badly paced debacle that feels a lot longer than it is. Every scene looks the same, sounds the same and plays out more or less the same with very few exceptions. It quickly becomes obvious no care at all was given to ways in which set design, audio and environmental cues could be used to move the film along.

If this were a school project I'd be impressed, there's solid acting and the basic shot structure is competent. But judged as a film that won an academy award I must say it's highly overrated, especially when all the missed opportunities are taken into consideration.