Reviews

I turn on the movie thinking it's 50-50 whether I'll like it or not. Mel Gibson is a plus going in, so maybe 70-30 in favor; although while Mel is trending towards paycheck Bruce Willis, he's still picking better scripts. Cynical burnout setup is somewhat clichéd, so downgrade to 60-40 or even 55-45. Soap opera home lives raises the question of whether I'm going to be using FF on the remote. Probably, so overall we're at 40-60. Action sequences raise interest a little but can't raise the overall 40-60. FF engaged, favorable odds downgraded to 30-70. Stakeout authenticity inappropriate for modern day attention spans and odds of giving it a thumbs up plummet to 10-90. FF again, 5-90 against. There is little wit and sophomoric, self-indulgent scripting and direction bleed remaining energy from not only the film but the viewer. Makes you wonder how you could've turned this blunder on in the first place. Wildly overrated with self-serving positive reviews. Well, there you go. In the end, the odds of this being watchable are down to 1-90, unless you've got absolutely nothing better to do. Terrible and a waste of time.

The trip is worth the wait. This is indeed a mystery and the threads doggedly pursued and revealed throughout the episodes weave together at the end. And, naturally, the reveal, while simple at one level, was something but thoroughly logical and satisfying - albeit it with some complexity and a little moral ambiguity. I liked it. I liked Harry's relationship with Sonya and their mature dialogues and understanding, both explicit and unspoken. Interwoven storylines like season four are much better than the emotive digressions of season three. This season was a far cry from the previous disappointing season three and a big improvement.

Although this was victimized by COVID, even after an impressive pre-release marketing campaign, the film is just not that good. A classic B-movie with an A-level budget, frenetic (bordering on incoherent) editing and a silly spin on searching for horcruxes (reference intended), the moebius strip time spin just didn't really work. Maybe the bonding agents are on the editing room floor somewhere, but I'm sure the book not based on the movie is much for fulfilling and illuminates the internal workings of the characters beyond "save my child" and "I hate life so I'm taking everyone with me". This is comic book level stuff for a work alleging to be of substance. The character motivations are ridiculously thin and cliched. Much of the monotone dialogue lacks punch and vitality. For all the pretension, this is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

This movie is flat. Scenes changed and I kept waiting for something to happen in a substantial way. There is some graphic violence, but it added little to any tension or actual drama, and if it had been edited out you probably wouldn't even notice. The character with the most chilling gravitas is the Matron. All of the "episodes" in the movie are way too thin and didn't allow for any character development. I also wondered if it was miscast. Sort of felt like it. The book is compelling, complex, and a page turner and you, the reader / viewer, actually engage the characters and care about them. Much, much better than this cinematic miss.

This is a sad piece of work. I recently watched this for the second time and kick myself for not remembering why it was a waste of time the first time around. Some highly stylized colorful visuals lamely attempt to evoke a certain nostalgia for the Seventies, but it is all for naught. Vintage cars and apparel styles don't cut it. Fleetingly brief moments of inspiration are betrayed by the dead chemistry of the major players, porous, sloppy writing (if it qualifies as such), and the intended outrage behind "the crime" never ignites, let alone takes off. It just didn't work for me and I'd recommend skipping it as it's not really funny nor engaging.

La Femme Nikita? The character arc for Stephanie was a derivative mishmash of the latter, with random clichés drawn from hither and yon. Kinda. Sorta. Or might have been. Cleaning up from a depressed "user" and going on to become a semi-skilled cosmopolitan assassin trained amongst the Scottish heath challenged the silliness of suspending disbelief. Just not plausible. Who was Serra and what was his problem? Why he was ultimately the bad guy was never fully explained, or if it was, it wasn't compelling at all because I don't recall it registering. (It's possible I had dozed off during that exposition.) He didn't come across as angry, vengeful, smart, devious, cunning, dangerous or even sexy. All of that must have been left on the cutting floor much to the viewer's regret. Overall, too bad, as it would be interesting to see what Ms. Reynolds could do with better material of this genre.

Peter Stormare is very funny in this, whether intended or not. That was the highlight for me. In terms of a master class in theatre and actors actually on a stage, it was fine. The robbery was incidental to the story, and while serving as a catalyst / plot device, contributed little to the quality of relationships between the three principals.

Is it over? It was hard to tell. The screen went black and the credits rolled by, so I guess so. For all the flash-bang, the film was pretty lifeless. There was a story in there somewhere... I think. Something about a crime boss seeking revenge when his son was killed during an armored car robbery. Was that it? Jason Statham was in it? Really? So little registered I'm having a hard time recalling.

The banter between Anna and Rembrandt made the whole show. Hats off to the writers for that and coloring slightly outside the formulaic lines outlining the rest of the picture - chase, explosions, shoot 'em up bang bang type of stuff.

A question raised by the first film with some novelty. This film, rather than being labeled a resurrection, more aptly should have borne the subtitle RIP. We all would have been better off for it by leaving things the way they were twenty years ago. Times have changed and we've moved on. Regarding reality, this was a nostalgia piece simply and cynically made to make money. The story is relatively incoherent and uninteresting. Whatever might have been interesting was frittered away, such as the gaming aspect or the psychoanalysis tangent. It was not engaging and had no new or fresh ideas.

The heist premise was fine. It evaporated in the countryside and then I was watching another movie. I was able to trim the viewing time to about 15-20 minutes (or less) by fast forwarding through all the garbage to get a sense of the unremarkable and forgettable story/"plot". You might want consider doing the same.

That's the bottom line. Lacked the charm, creativity, humor, and wit of the first one, simply coming across more crassly as product. The TV series output is much better (i.e. Amusing) than this effort.

What started as an interesting premise evaporates over the course of the film. This had little to do with the actors and more to do with what looks like "artistic differences" between an over-the-hill director and continental producers. The poor writing may simply be contributory negligence. The combination of these essentially and successfully sabotages the movie. The cat's-claw-on-the-blackboard music feels purposely destructive and is just one indicator of whatever ego clashes and who's-in-charge drama was going on behind the scenes. Maybe someone should write that up and film it. It'd probably be better than the end product here.

This is basically what you would expect and shouldn't be surprised if it's simply nothing more than what it is. There are a few fight scenes that are done well. Acting was reasonable.

The main character is played well but leaves a lot of his backstory up to our imaginations. I would have liked to have seen this fleshed out a little more in terms of how he wound up where he did with his skill set - for example, using common objects at hand as weapons - and why he has been called upon professionally to apply it the way he does. I would have also liked to have known a little more about the female characters who seem to be very familiar with him, or had the relationships developed a little. But I guess that's irrelevant if the focus is on displaying martial arts equivalent choreography. The boy wonder role I suppose was meant to help get it at the backstory / relationship angle, but it didn't add much overall.

There's a piece in Granta written during the Bosnia war in the '90s that spent many pages describing the beauty of both the natural environment and the multiple cultures coexisting there. It then introduced a random guy who was hunting in the mountains to feed his family. An army patrol came upon him totally by accident and, after some dialogue, determined he was of the opposing ethnic group. They subsequently abused him and, slicing the skin at both the bottom of his spine and at his neck, inserted a pole along his spinal column under the skin, hung him between two trees and proceeded to roast him, apparently for the fun of it. This event was shocking within the idyllic literary context of what had preceded it and had the effect on the reader of having been mentally raped.

Bone Tomahawk has a little of this quality. Along with some prurient fluff and desert travelogue, the film reflects the hard, unromanticised existential barrenness associated with Cormac McCarthy's work about the old West, tinged with a little bit of Larry McMurtry's Blue Duck. The characterizations reflect the settler's resignation of everyone understanding their roles, as well as the inevitably of them walking into a fate ultimately beyond their control, all the while making conscious choices to fulfill them. The representation of the savage's cosmology with the rock circles was left unexplained, but was a crudely constructed representation for a culture totally beyond the comprehension of the settler's (i.e. weird sounds, bones in cheeks). All that is presumed by the viewer is the lethal consequences when these two cultures came into contact with one another. The film doesn't really prompt us to ask any questions, only to accept the cowboys-and-Indians dynamic, while at the same time suggesting maybe we should be asking questions. (And recall the scene in the bar with the palpably demeaning "racial" hostility of the "professor" when being quizzed on the nature of the possible assailants.) And obviously, similar to the in the Granta piece, the jarring visualized butchering was a bit much and sort of unnecessary, a violent reality whose cruelty we don't want to admit we understand or have the capacity for, although it did move the story to its climax.

Life in the West was brutish and often short. What seems like a slow pace is the result of our expectations based on standard commercial films bathing us in action and visual fireworks. I suppose that begs the question of whether I would either recommend this movie or watch it again. On both accounts, I'd have to say no.

They say in space "no one can hear you scream." Nonsense. Can you hear me? This vacuous effort was so frustrating and insulting sensors are probably picking up my anguish across parsecs, maybe even multiple-dimensional quadrants. The Borg have certainly picked it up by now. In a morbidly (and depressing) way I wonder why there's an engaging fascination with how so little can be done with so much. What a waste! It's like the creative team (it was a "team" wasn't it? - they should be severely chastised!) sitting around the corporate conference table all had their imaginations and good sense scrambled during transport because it's clear it was lost along the way. If you edit out fluff, empty visuals, overwrought and repetitive (snore) action and inaction (as opposed to non-action), the end result would be worthy of about two minutes of film, the amount of a generous preview. Aaarrrgghh! The exchanges between McCoy and Spock were amusing. Zebra woman was sexy.

Just because it's a cartoon with vivid colors and non-human characters doesn't necessarily make this something for kids. There are many LOL moments but these are undercut and ultimately sabotaged by large swathes of unfunny scenes punctuated by unpleasant (and unnecessarily nasty) dialogue, images and themes. They dragged down the entire effort. Our expectations, based on the amusing but highly selective individual scenes-out-of-context preview(s), were profoundly betrayed by the committee that put this together. Clearly everyone was not on the same page and that's too bad because wiser heads whose vanity was set aside could have made the end result so much better.

OMG, she didn't mean it and she was just leading the poor guy on? Using him? I wonder if there isn't just a touch of misogyny in the writing here. What if the character genders of the had been reversed with the same psycho-sexual thread running through everything? What kind of entertainment would that have been? The Turing test in this case wasn't so much if you could distinguish the human from the machine based on dialogue, but rather more incisively whether the two could be distinguished based on feeling. It is clear that Ava had no feelings, feelings that were recognizable to the audience – apart from an innate hostility to being caged / imprisoned – and the one off of "How does it feel to know what you've created hates you?" I didn't think this was developed enough. Whether it is possible to acquire feelings, and understand them, is a question posed, vaguely, and left unresolved with Ava's liberation and entry into society in general. She didn't care about Caleb other than as a means of escape, and we, the audience, were beguiled by this plot device. In the end leaving him trapped by his own feelings. But did she even have the capacity for caring? We'll never know and it's left up to our imaginations. Something akin to whether an orgasm was experienced in the other, or whether it was simply faked. Or if it matters.

I suppose the McGuffin is assuming Ava could distinguish between captivity and freedom. How would she know (unless programmed), or was this simply a plot device?

In the end, this lazy movie really wasn't about anything. It wasn't really a love story, as there was no basis for the projected passion other than imagined fantasy. It wasn't really an indictment of maligned, acute interventions for mental illness now perceived as cruel and barbaric (we now have drugs for that). It wasn't really about guilt over past atrocities committed in incomprehensible contexts and manifesting itself in bipolar megalomaniacal behavior. Thematically, the "King of Hearts" did this much more sublimely as did "Girl, Interrupted" and even "Shutter Island" to a lesser extent.

Although admittedly, yes, Kate Beckinsale has a certain allure and Ben Kingsley has the mannerisms of rage down. I suppose one could venture to say that within the frame of this nothingness, dramatic role presentations were evocative and professional, though who were we really able to connect with? The redemptive mobius turn at the end, while amusing, did not adhere well to all that went before and seemed tacked on, coming across as creative vanity, ultimately empty and slightly insulting. Laughed about for a moment and then forgotten in the next breath.

Barber mirrors as visualization of trying the same thing over and over expecting a different result. The traveler was warned about potential psychosis as a "minor" side effect. Sarah Snook was outstanding and worthy of loud, enthusiastic praise. Big thumbs up! The complexity of her character was more than fully realized on any number of levels, although sometimes the stilted writing unavoidably benumbed some of her soliloquies. A great performance. Ethan Hawke sort of plodded along as a plot device too often but I think redeemed himself and transformed my appreciation of the whole picture by his enthusiastically wild embrace of the future self he'd been seeking out when they finally converse in the laundromat. That was a great scene and recontextualized what had come before.

Frankenstein meets the Terminator meets Blade Runner meets Barbie as emergent biotronic warriors mobilizing against the yellow menace. I actually didn't think it was that bad with some imaginative stuff resonating across several levels of boilerplate. How do you know you're alive? At what point do we become conscious with conscience? How is this programmable in a machine? And how about when a machine can "feel", like appreciate a sunset? I appreciated the irony of the scientist saving her daughter, and then her preferring to play with her "mother". That was funny. Would have liked to have known a lot more about the "machines" that communicated in garble-speak, a language we humans can't understand. What were they talking about? What was the role of the "chief security officer" and what was her backstory? She appeared to play a significant yet underdeveloped role that was under-communicated.

This is wildly overrated. What seemed to start out with promise evaporated along the way and I thought the ending didn't do the setup justice. In fact, the bad guy and his environment weren't compelling or particularly interesting, and was only used to fill up time and resolve the plot, sort of, at the end. He didn't come across as monstrously depraved, as he should have. He came across as merely inbred and seedy. It would have been more interesting and intriguing to unpeel the bible school network and get under the oily skin of the proprietor family and their allusionary attraction to the 'dark side" (That's right – allusion not illusion). I appreciated Woody Harrelson's character's home life. Their realized dynamics came across as too painfully and uncomfortably real and were well written. Matthew McConaghey's character was not entirely believable, even within the Usual Suspects narrative setup. Rather than being swept away with plot developments and transcendent character development, the presentation devolved into annoying "look at me, I'm working hard at acting".

Visually appealing yet remarkably devoid of content and vitality. But that's what a Hollywood "action potboiler" is supposed to be all about, isn't it? I'm not sure what I was expecting, and yes, I'll have to reflect on that, but ridiculously slicing-and-dicing and hole punching and barbwire garroting, etc., the generic Russian prison tattooed bad guys in the local hardware warehouse left me cold and annoyed I'd shelled out the price of a ticket. I wonder how it would have played if he'd worked at Dunkin' Donuts? Admittedly, the bad guy was venal and repulsive, just another "thug doing his job" (trained on the streets of Grozny?) when no one else on the oligarch's staff can get the job done - and he got his just desserts. Yay! And the reformed teenager finding him on the street at the end to thank him? You're kidding, right?

Unbelievably bad is being colorfully generous. Elizabeth Hurley was the only person "alive" in this movie, and she's probably embarrassed about that. No passion or pulse from anyone else. Wooden dialogue delivered in the same, uninspired, deadening way. In several, if not many of the scenes, Depardieu seemed to be reading lines from a teleprompter off to one side of whoever he was supposedly addressing. No elaboration of any back story. And his mysterious friend from a past life, now living in Moscow who let's him drive his Mercedes in Moscow traffic? Come on. This was a ridiculous effort, probably partial payment of Depardieu in his effort to migrate from France for the tax haven of Russia.

Just so-so (yawn). What began with a reasonably interesting premise turns into a cliché of a cliché of a cliché. What passes for style is simply a mirage for no imagination and cut-and-paste scripting. The Russian sociopath mobster boogie-man? Can't we do better than that already? Shifting from Europe to Miami may be photogenic but was completely unnecessary. The shootout near the end reminded me of several other interchangeable shootouts, at one point I had to ask myself what movie I was watching because I'd seen nearly the same staging somewhere else. The only surprise to me, the uninformed, was Emma Rigby, who is a knockout with her hair down. I hope she matures into an interesting entertainer.