Reviews

Surely this movie was a joke. It simply must have been a spoof. For anyone who is unwisely considering this movie instead of the book or at the very least the Rod Taylor film...all I can say is please reconsider. If however you have already read the book, seen the Rod Taylor movie and are assuming this might be a worthy way to spend a few hours, all I can say is that your sock drawer needs tidying and your refrigerator could do with sorting...anything rather than this soiling your eye-balls with this rubbish.

********Potential Spoiler (if it's possible to spoil this dross) *********

I won't bore you with a blow-by-blow account of every failed detail...instead let's simply cut to the last act of this film and say it left my mouth hanging open. Both the Eloi and the Morlocks are totally misrepresented in a shambling travesty that completely undermines the conclusion of the story. Firstly the Eloi in the novel are supposed to be a child-like, naive race that kind of resemble human cattle, superficially living in a paradise but actually reverted back to an almost brain-dead state of obliviousness. But that's not quite the oppressed 'noble savage' bullsh*t we get in this film, making their wicker village in the trees and speaking perfect English, ending up like a cross between a sh*t Endor and that bloody atoll in Waterworld.

With the Morlocks however, the only problem was the way they look, act, sound, move......oh to hell with it, everything is wrong with them!!!! They look like a cross between the trolls in Fraggle Rock and that annoying naked brown lump called 'Station' from Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. Savage and terrifying?? Only if you are a 5 year old bed-wetter who hides behind the sofa watching Scooby-doo. Instead we get these boggle-eyed muppets jumping out of the ground like a budget remake of Michael Jackson's Thriller. Sweet Jesus!! Oh and as the cherry on that cake we finally have a bleached Jeremy Irons desperately trying to pretend he's doing Shakespeare or something......rather than p*ssing his career down the same drain that Dungeons and Dragons offered him. Jezzer - in future, just say no.

Avoid this film like the plague unless (like me) you enjoy classic Hollywood mistakes.

OK let's start by making a few concessions just to pre-empt at least some of the flack that my naughty 2 out of 10 vote might provoke. Firstly I'm a comic fan and have been for many years, predominantly Marvel but not exclusively. Secondly I'm one of those awful people who likes Batman as a character more than Superman and who was wowed by both Nolan's take on Batman and The Avengers (though for slightly different reasons). Lastly I went into MoS pretty enthusiastic although I'm not a the biggest fan of the character or Zack Snyder.

*phew*

Now that's all over, let's get on with talking about just how much I hated Man of Steel.....err.....I mean my glorious review. Ta-daaaa!!

Let's start by saying to all of the people who haven't seen this movie who are excited because of Lord Christopher of Nolan's involvement...hold your horses buddy (or buddette?). This film is very Zack and very little Chris. Any film about Superman is obviously going to have to stray far more into the fantastical than a Batman movie, but this film not only revels in Superman's super-dooper powers, it rubs your face in them.

Now on any other day I'd try to be pragmatic and weigh up the good and the bad, but in this case I think that would be difficult and misleading. Let's be clear and say that this isn't a film that started well and then 'Jumped the Shark'. No, no, no. It's a film that's started very badly, briefly failed in an attempt at interesting backstory, completely fumbled it's build up to the final act and then totally obliterated the entire film with the most horrifically tedious final battle that I have ever seen. How many times have you wanted to ask for your money back? I wanted my money back, a shoulder to cry on and a bottle of Optrex to wash my eyes out with.

If I say this is the worst film that I have seen in the last 10 years you will either not believe me or think I'm an exaggerating fool. But this was easily the worst (big budget) film I've seen in 10 years!! It was truly terrible in every way. The script was appalling, the direction was abysmal, the concepts were hackneyed and ill thought out. The special effects were surprisingly awful. Golden opportunities were squandered, actors were wasted and the final 40 minutes of the movie was so shockingly terrible that I swayed between open-mouthed shock at how bad things had become....and just sitting there laughing. Yeah this film made me start laughing my arse off. I ended up reaching a stage where I was bored, laughing, shocked and depressed all at the same time....whilst all the while knowing that none of these emotions were what the director had intended.

'Less is more' might not be a sentiment that Zack Snyder is familiar with and it may not be something that Superman fans would expect from a movie about a character who is super powered to such an extent, however this film ends with a fight sequence so relentlessly ludicrous it was like Fast Forwarding through 10 hours of footage from a strobe lit 1980s rave party interspersed with a montage from a WWE computer game.

In an effort to make each sequence even bigger Zack Snyder seems to have forgotten somewhere along the line that he had a story to tell. He certainly seems to have forgotten those early sensitive, thoughtful trailers that enticed us. This film is nothing like that for 95% of the time and not at all for the last 40 minutes of the film. Instead it's just more explosions and destruction and fighting and more fighting and explosions and fighting and blah and blah and blah and blah.........until you just want to go home and scream.

A truly terrible film.

Recently I have had the pleasure of broadening my horizons by watching three Scandinavian films each representing 3 different countries and 3 very different types of movie:- Let The Right One In (from Sweden) Trollhunter (from Norway) and most recently Festen (from Denmark). All I can say is that if these films are any kind of representation of Scandinavian film-making, then I'm already hooked.

Festen start off as slightly humorous tale of a family gathering to celebrate a 60th birthday party which quickly deteriorates into an incredibly bleak and shocking portrayal of unearthed family secrets. Without spoiling how things play out I can say that a number of bombshells are dropped during toasts at the party which alter how the family is perceived and unravel the fabric of the family forever.

The writing is superb (I'll have to assume it is a faithful translation, but I can say that the subtitled dialogue wasn't clunky at all). The direction has a 'home video' quality which I wasn't very keen on at first, but once you're used to it it works quite well for a film that is very much stripped down to the basics of story telling. Lastly the acting is generally excellent, of particular note were the actors playing Christian, Michael and Helge who were all truly great and thoroughly believable. The only performance that didn't work for me was the thankfully brief appearance by the American boyfriend Gbatokai who felt a bit like an amateur actor amongst professionals.

This is a truly great film for people who appreciate a simple style of basic film making to try and tell a story with a heavy topic, just through great acting and a great script. However beware of the description of this film as a 'black comedy' which it most certainly isn't for 90% of the film.

If you are looking for a straight up Yakuza movie, this isn't for you. If you are looking for a straight up comedy movie, this isn't for you. If you are looking for a straight up horror movie, this isn't for you.

But if you are looking for a surreal combination of all three with a heavily lactating land-lady, a gangster being licked by a man with a cow's head, a spirit medium having psychic abilities beaten into him, gangsters fighting Yakuza-dogs and a man putting a serving ladle to a use not suggested by the supplier (OMG!!) then this movie might be for you.

A crazy trip worth a couple of hours of your time if you're happy to not have the narrative explained to you every step of the way.

If you haven't already watched this I want a written apology from you. This may well be the greatest TV programme in the last 40 years.

And just before you start dismissing me by thinking "Oh it's another Shirley Bassey crackpot who's lost their perspective" that's where you are wrong. This special is great for people who love classic Shirley belting out a selection of standards.......but it's even better for fans of late 70's early 80's cheese.

A particular highlight is when Robert Goulet trots down some stairs to rattle off an upbeat base-baritone slice of cheddar, the likes of which made me laugh until I slipped off the sofa in a heap. Winks, knowing nods, pointing to ladies in the audience, biting his bottom lip with closed eyes feeling the passion of the moment and a stance like he's still riding his horse.....Robert uses every cheesy cliché in the book and invents a few others on the fly.

This is the sweet sh*t right here.

What a washout!! A great concept and not a terrible movie........but not a good movie either unfortunately.

The main point of the movies carries throughout and any whingers about it's science fiction credentials and believability are missing the point spectacularly...however this film just isn't funny enough.

It's mildly amusing but for a film with so much potential, well that is a tragedy. This movie feels like something that's gone through a first and possibly a second draft but should have been thrown back to the writer for more work or passed on to someone else for a treatment.

Middle rung. Average. Watch it when you've got nothing better to do.

Every so often a list is published stating boldly 'The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time'. These lists are always contentious and anyone with an ounce of sense knows that the list will deviate from their own tastes at some point. These lists vary to some degree but there are a number of movies - The Godfather, Star Wars etc that we expect to feature somewhere. As a movie fan I recently decided to fill in the blanks by making a point of watching those movies that frequently feature in Top 100s but have passed me. One of which was The Searchers.

All I can say is viewer beware.

Perhaps my expectations were unrealistically high but this is a hugely sentimental, overly long, poorly acted and poorly written lumbering ox of a movie. This may have been ground breaking in its time but its merits today I must confess were lost on me. John Wayne is usually wooden in my opinion, but in this movie he manages to multi-task by being wooden and unlikable at the same time. Way to go big guy!

The entire movie meanders and trudges along without feeling like there will ever be a satisfactory conclusion. And guess what, there isn't. Others may complain about westerns of this type as being anachronistic, racist, sexist relics....but actually The Searchers commits are far worse movie sin. It's boring.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly this most assuredly isn't.

Remember the 1995 Judge Dredd film with Sylvester Stallone?? No, me neither - it must be all the trauma of watching that steaming heap of 'dog-chocolate' 17 years ago.

Luckily a couple of slightly more sensible people have gotten together to make a Dredd movie the right way. The fan-boy way. The way it should have been made the first time round if Danny Cannon had a brain bigger than a grape!!

So do you remember the 2012 Judge Dredd film with Karl Urban?? No? Well that's because nobody bothered to go and see it...and that's a tragedy because this movie is really good. Really really good. It doesn't care about how everyone else in Hollywood would have made it. It doesn't care about the disgrace that Danny Cannon emptied from his bowels into our cinemas and it doesn't care about how other comicbook movies are handled. It just sticks happily to the source material just enough to keep everyone happy without getting unnecessarily clunky or geeky.

So whether of not you're a fan of the comics or not, just watch it. Do it now. Because it's definitely in the Top 5 movies of 2012.

Oh and he keeps the helmet on ;)