Reviews

Part of me can understand a lot of the low scoring reviews of this ep. But for me, it was among the strongest content Marvel has put out.

No, its not action heavy. No, its not superhero heavy. No, it isn't pure entertainment... It's something far subtler, and more pure.

To call it a 'woke' episode, is wrong. The messages it sends are not forced, its kinda realistic. But because its an emotion heavy ep, it's sad that it'll probably go unnoticed.

This ep has more heart than nearly all of the other MCU movies and episodes combined.

I already thought the Falcon and Bucky were awesome. Now I legitimately think they the strongest duo in the MCU. And this episode demonstrated it naturally and realistically.

Slow episode, yes. But its what Marvel has been totally missing for a long time now. To take a step back and just put some emotional investment into its characters is sadly rare. But here, it shines.

Positives: Lets start there, why not.

So This film feels like it is held together on the performances of Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh and Dave Harbour - the latter two especially.

The dynamic of their mismatched 'family' is fun to watch, and actually has a lot of heart. Luckily, this runs throughout the whole film, because without it, I think it'd be completely forgettable.

The opening is fantastic, and immediately gave me Winter Soldier vibes. Safe to say, I was excited for a darker spy/espionage movie...

The cons: ...Sadly that movie never came.

What starts great, quickly descends into stock standard Marvel-style drivel. The plot is fairly predictable, and the characters 'plans' are incredible dumb.

Some of the action scenes are okay, but most are ruined with quick cuts that make everything feel like watching marbles going through a blender.

Worst still, is the total underutilization of the characters abilities.

At one stage we're told Pughs character is the best assassin in the world ...but we're never shown that?

We're told Black Widow is the best spy in the world... but she doesn't do any spy work throughout the film?

Worst yet, they had Taskmaster - a character with such an amazing and formidable ability, but they squander it for stock standard fight scenes we've scene a million times.

Overall: Like I say, It's enjoyable enough to warrant a watch, but it could have been so much more with a little bit of competence.

It's not a great start when the opening scroll makes you cringe and scratch your head. But in hindsight it was actually quite a good set up for what followed... That's if you can follow it. The first half of the movie jumps around so damn much that it's hard to really take in what everyone is doing. The plot is forced along at lightspeed, as is the dialogue which could have easily been replaced in parts with a bunch of chipmunks squeaking over each other, and I'm sure no one would have noticed.

The writing is simply awful, and characters motives and actions are frequently illogical. Things just happen at random. All the time. I have never in my life seen so many ex machina moments in a movie. In fact I swear that not a single character in the whole film solves a problem by themselves or without the solution just being handed to them.

The movie looks great, and there are plenty of cool aliens wandering around in the background, but the movie moves at such pace that you can't enjoy them because they are gone in the next second. My favourite moment in the whole film is a moment when Rey is thinking. It's probably the first moment (and among the only moments) when the movie actually takes a breath and lets us get an idea on what a character is feeling. We can see the internal turmoil she is going through, and it's genuinely impactful. I remembered this one moment more, over the entire final battle scene because it wasn't just spectacle and chaos.

Surprisingly this films savoring moments are sprinkled out across the end of the film, which I, for the most part, enjoyed. However it really does not exempt the rest of the unnecessary trash that is packed into this film, and so I just cannot get behind calling it a 'good' movie.

A meh ending to a poorly executed trilogy.

For a moment or two after seeing the trailer, I seriously had a flicker of hope for this film.... But oh how wrong I was.

The 'found-footage' style could have been OK in this instance, if it wasn't for ol Night using every cliché in that genre. Some moments of this film are simply eye roll worthy, just because of how often we see the same thing happen in other movies.

The plot moves along rather unevenly, and by the end it is simply a relief that the film is over.

I will however give it the 'creep' factor, with a few bits that were genuinely unnerving. But again, the majority of the jump-scare-esque horror that comes with the found-footage style is rather predictable.

The twist (as there always is one in his films) is pretty average and I even thought, because it was so average, that there was going to be another twist to rectify the actual one. But alas there wasn't... which may have been the real one all along...

Watchable for the most part, but nothing special at all.

I owe The Hobbit (the book) a lot in the way of sparking my imagination as a child. It was a fantastic story of a little guy doing big things, having grand adventures, and seeing an impressive outside world.

When I heard Peter Jackson was going to do the Hobbit, I was both excited and nervous. As were many. When I heard he was splitting it into two parts, I thought 'okay, makes sense'. But when they announced they were going to split it into THREE parts, my heart sunk. I knew they would be stretching, an already rather short story, thin.

Sad to say, I believe I was right.

I wasn't overly impressed with the first installment, but very much enjoyed the second. I think mainly due to the City on The Lake and Bard's character/story being an interesting and engaging tale to tackle, and even found it more entertaining than the main story. That along side the brilliant Smaug, left me excited for the third film.

Battle of Five Armies starts off immediately after the finish of the second film... Which was the first of many, many problems. It felt horrendously out of place and absolutely should have been the end to the second movie.

From then on everything seemed very oddly put together. The event's didn't seem logically cohesive, and the film repeatedly left me wondering 'what the hell is the point in that?' The storytelling was easily the weakest of all the Middle Earth films. The editing was chaotic and poor. Unnecessary over the top CGI plagued otherwise brilliant make-up, costume and set pieces. And the dialogue/dramatic moments were borderline cringe worthy.

I get the feeling this particular film would have benefited greatly from being down scaled, with the focus being on the characters in the 'situation' rather than the situation itself.

The 'situation' of course being the battle of five armies. A disappointing mess of 'what the F%#k is going on?' which felt tired and re-used from previous LOTR films.

I understand that it was suppose to be an big epic finale to the series, but it came across severely rushed and so plot riddled that by the end you ask yourself 'Is that it?'

Overall the film seemed to focus on the wrong things. And more than often, totally unnecessary things. I still cannot for the life of me understand why Albert got as much wasted screen time as he did, since he brought nothing but eye-rolling 'humour' to the film.

I could go on forever about things that were wrong with the film, but to be honest, the things that were right, were few and far between. The acting, in spite of poorly written dialogue and characters, was on spot. Even the bizarre romance between Kili and Tauriel was played out well (considering their back story and reasons for falling in love were nil). The costumes and make up were fantastic (as always), and the score/ sound effects were wonderful.

There are so few moments where this film shines, and as far as entertainment go, it was rather banal. Also, I know Jackson copped a lot of criticism from the length of Return of the Kings ending, however this one felt far, far too rushed and anti-climatic.

So much potential wasted.

"It is soooo good! Oh my god you will cry at the end! Such a good film, Paul Walker was amazing!"

...are all I seem to be hearing about this film, which I reluctantly went to see. Meh, I thought, a it'll be some mindless violence and if people are raving about it, perhaps it will be better than I expect...

...It wasn't.

Fans of the films are going to love it either way. Everyone else will be divided by either how gullible they are, how much they enjoy mindless action, and how humorous they find things.

Don't me wrong, I absolutely love mindless action movies, But the thing for me with this movie, is that it's not actually clear if they are taking the film seriously. I know, obviously it's not meant to be realistic, but if they aren't taking it too seriously then they do a bad job of showing it.

Usually in decent action films, the characters sometimes reference how out of control a situation is. Even if it's just a "woah that's crazy" or Take Bad Boy's II for example. They had cars thrown at them during the chase scene, but it was OK because the characters acknowledged that it was not a normal thing to be happening "They're throwing cars at us Marcus, how am I not seeing that!?" With Furious 7, not a single character seemed to realise what they were doing was complete and utter bonkers. (It still baffles me how they can drive a car through three skyscrapers and everyone just acts as if it's no biggie).

And oh the cheese! In the end I spent more time laughing out loud at the films ridiculousness, than actually really even enjoying it.

This film oozes with cheesy dialogue, cheesy clichés and cheesy performances.

The nail in the ol coffin even came pretty early on when they jumped the shark with Statham and Diesel crashing their cars head on to each other and getting out with a scratch. From there, I couldn't take anything they did at all seriously. Everything was laughable, even the obviously supposed 'dramatic' parts such as the aftermath of Vin Diesel pulling a 'Die Hard' and trying to take down a helicopter with a car.

At least JohnMcClain had the sensibility to get out of the car first.

Plot wise, trying to make it anything more than a revenge film, just made it a mess. In some parts, it even felt like watching cut scenes from a game.

Annnnd now onto the Paul Walker send off. Personally I thought it was OK, kinda cheesy, and didn't stir up any emotions. (For me his best role was in Running Scared, so his character in this was 'meh' to me.)

They did do well making a film with one of the main cast passing during shooting, however it was just not a good film. And I refuse to give it praise just because it was Paul Walkers last film. A bad film is a bad film.

In the end I give it a 4, but more like a 5 just sheerly because I really did enjoy laughing at it.

To be honest I wasn't expecting much going into this film, yet was pleasantly surprised about it for about the first 45mins. As with all isolation movies, there is a profound sense of eeriness, and there are particular things (such as the box from the previous expedition, and a strange log book) which, I thought, were going to be good set ups for more mystery further on in the story. The acting wasn't by any means bad either. Ron Perlman was, well, Ron Perlman, and James Le Gros did fairly well as his opposite. It wasn't even that the characters were unlike-able or underdeveloped.

But there certainly is a distinct point in the film where everything well and truly turns on its head. And from there it is all down hill.

It actually baffles me completely that a film can go from eerie and interesting, to ridiculous and plain stupid like flipping a light switch. It was like the writers got to a point and said "hmm, we haven't killed many people yet. Probably should drop the storyline and do some character culling." Then proceeded to make completely irrational decisions that left you screaming at the screen in frustration.

The biggest flaw in this film is that it never returns to the eeriness it started out with. Instead it decided it needed to go cliché and kill off characters in ways that were baffling. They never circle back to the set ups that they originally established, so leave you thinking 'well, what was the point'.

And there is none!

I am serious. The end of this movie has absolutely zero relation to the main storyline! And don't even get me started on the final shot. Whoever did that stroke of genius deserves a bullet.

Overall my experience of this film went a lot like this: 'Cool. Oh yup. Hmm creepy. Oh yup. Ooo nice! Hmm, interesting. Wait, what? No seriously, what? WHY!? What the f**k. What the hell, just use the dead guys jacket!! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?? ....Are you serious. What,the,f**k. Let me guess, that's it? ...Yup damn. Well that was terrible.'

As most people have stated, it was a film that showed serious potential but threw it all away by sticking its head up its own ass. Watch the first 45mins and walk away. At least the questions you have won't be shadowed by the unnecessary questions we are force fed at the end.