Reviews

I have no problem believing that black people may have been kept as slaves well into the 20th century. I have a big problem believing though that a large group of them could have been so isolated so close to civilization. Them having no idea that the world was 100 years more advanced than they knew was too improbable to believe.

Their only inkling of the outside world in their entire lives appeared to be someone who dropped in via a parachute. No authorities came to investigate the disappearance of the man or ask questions of the homeowner? Not once in the lifetime of all of the slaves did they ever hear or see an aircraft pass overhead? No sirens from emergency vehicles on the highway? There were no service roads, or nearby homes which would have invited traffic?

Johnny Lee Miller's character tosses out a line about a man being richer for the things he lives without. I guess this was the writers' way of explaining how/why he chose to live a century in the past. Even so some bits of the outside world would have imposed themselves. Did he ride a horse on the highway into town to get supplies...pay property taxes...do his banking? No relatives, lawyers, developers, authority figures, service personel, mail carriers, solicitors, municipal inspectors, etc ever showed up on the property in a car wearing modern clothes over the ensuing decades?

It was all just too hard for me to believe, although it made for a great shock when Alice finds the highway.

The other part that was incredible was how quickly Alice adapts to 100 years of technology. It seemed like a few days -- maybe weeks? -- and suddenly she's sashaying, talking and swinging around a pistol like she stepped out of a 70s blaxploition action movie.

The acting was good, particularly by Miller and Palmer. It was the writing that was a let down.

Let's start with the basic setup. It's essentially a mashup of The Equalizer/John Wick/Taken.

A woman who is tasked with managing a charity account worth $2 million is scammed out of the money via the "Microsoft detecting errors from your PC" scam. Who put this naive-to-the-point-of-stupid-woman in charge of so much money without some safety protocols in place?

Her beekeeper -- Jason Statham -- goes on an Equalizer-style revenge spree after the woman kills herself. The movie's goofiest plotline is that Statham is a Beekeeper... an elite special forces group that exists to 'protect the hive'... whatever that means. The movie constantly strains to work this awkward metaphor into some sort of coherent plot point.

A la Taken, Statham's character works his way up the food chain of the scam organization to get to the leadership.

Along the way there's plenty of John Wick-style mayhem which gets boring pretty fast. Statham literally walks up to scores of trained mercs and such and lays waste to them with nary a blow landed on him.

Much like those bad kung fu movies, while Statham is taking out bad guys 1,2 and 3, bad guys 4,5 and 6 stand around stupidly doing nothing until it's their turn to get maimed and incapacitated.

As least Keanu Reeves' Wick takes some blows and bleeds as a result. Statham looks uninterested as he tosses and cripples the villains left and right.

The movie's conclusion hints that this might be another ho-hum franchise for Statham, virtually indistinguishable from his Mechanic movies.

The initial premise of woman plotting revenge against her cheating husband was good. Then an spontaneous murder takes place, and things take an abrupt turn.

My wife and I both figured that it would evolve into one of those situations where two people, each guilty of murder for different reasons, and conspiring against each other, are forced to reluctantly cooperate to avoid being arrested.

THAT would have made for a great suspense story.

Instead it gives way to a tepid story about a whiny serial cheater and his put upon wife. She gets her revenge which is way out of proportion to her own crimes. What were we to feel for her in the end? Sympathy? Revulsion?

You're time is better spent watching something else.

I came into this never having watched the series so my take on this is distinctly different from those who did.

I really enjoyed this. It's very much an over-the-top crime drama/thriller with a standard plot premise... honest man/cop on the run trying to redeem himself while authorities begrudgingly come around to believing in his innocence. (The Fugitive, The Negotiator, etc) Andy Serkis is the cartoony villain with wild eyes and an over-the-top hairpiece that will have you laughing. At times it seems like he's in a whole other movie... a parody of the Joker in The Dark Knight.

At the other end of the spectrum is a dead serious Idris Elba who is excellent at conveying a wide range of emotions just through the use of his expressions.

The supporting cast are solid too... Dermot Crowley and Cynthia Erivo, particularly.

There's a little bit of Se7en thrown in the mix, and some good action sequences. The CGI is though is obvious when it is used.

And, yes, there's a big nod to James Bond in the final act as other reviewers have noted. Sadly, Elba is too old for the role of Bond, unless he portrays a Bond already close to retirement for a movie or two.

The cons:

The opening set piece did a good job of recapturing the aesthetic of the original series. CGI Indy was visually impressive, but for the odd uncanny valley glimpse here and there. More notably though, it didn't feature the visual and scripted gags that were a hallmark of Spielberg's first trilogy. It's almost business-like in the way that it sets up the rest of the movie.

Like Crystal Skull, this adventure is rooted more in science fiction than classic archeology. The time travel gimmick just did not work for me. Time travel movies always create paradoxes that can't be resolved... or they create more questions than they answer. This one is no different. Does the dial create the rifts or just find them? Indy informs Voller that Archimedes' didn't know about continental drift, therefore the rift they are headed for will not take them to 1939. But, in a too-wild-to-believe coincidence, the continental drift error takes them to Archimedes himself. What is the probability of that, especially considering that neither Voller or Indy take into consideration the vast movements of the earth around the sun and the movement of the entire solar system through the galaxy? Archimedes himself would not have known about these celestial movements at all so the calibration of his Dial should have been even more wildly inaccurate.

There is a huge cloud of melancholy that hangs over Indy in his senior years. Loved ones have died, or moved away. He's living in a squalid apartment, falling asleep in front of his TV night after night. His accomplishments in past adventures -- including as a spy(!) as we learned in Kingdom -- have not earned him any sort of recognition or interest from either the public or the government.

The action sequences are missing the tension was drawn out in the early movies in similar scenes? Remember the very first movie? In the first ten minutes, we saw Indy barely outrun a boulder, pull at his whip frantically to get himself out of the hole and under the closing stone gate, race across fields with arrows and blow guns at his back... Who can forget that fight between Indy and the huge German as an out of control airplane slowly circles around them? The chase scenes and such in this movie are competent, but never generate that level of "OMIGOD!-will-he- make-it-in-time?" that we saw in the original movies.

The pros:

The death of Mutt Jones. I expected that there would be a throwaway line about how Indy and Marion's son was off living his own life and adventures as a way to explain his absence. Instead, the character is effectively used to provide context to Indy's weary attitude, and to explain the absence of Marion.

The return of Marion. We all wanted Indy to finish up on a positive note. After a movie and a sequence where we get sad and depressed Indy, the movie comes full circle (again) for both of these characters.

Helena. I actually liked the prickly relationship between Indy and Helena. I thought it was justified very well, and it evolved organically into the mutual admiration and affection that we eventually see. That said, I don't see a need to continue the series... or a spin-off series... with this character. The Indy series ends in the 60s, well past the time of the earlier trilogy, which were a tribute to pulp novels and cliffhanger serial movies. The producers will never be able to recapture the spirit of those earlier movies.

You know a franchise is bankrupt when it ends on a cliffhanger... and you just shrug with disinterest.

Vin Diesel walks around looking perpetually constipated. Villain Jason Mamoa seems to be channeling Heath Ledger's Joker at times. Former stone cold bad guy, John Cena, is now the goofy half of a road trip duo. Helen Mirren's Queenie is dropped in for just one scene with no explanation as to how she got there. Does it make sense? No, it's strictly for fan service. Michelle Rodriguez... okay she's still hot so I was fine with any of her scenes, even the dumb one where she wakes up in an underground prison in the Antarctic.

I thought it couldn't get any stupider after they went into space in the last movie. I was wrong. Not only are some of the action set pieces stupider in this movie, but they look worse for it as a result of some sub-par CGI. Early on, the crew deals with a giant nuclear bomb/ bowling ball rolling endlessly through the streets of Rome. Watch the reactions on the faces of the background crowds as they scurry out of the way. They are underwhelmed as they react to something that will be digitally inserted later on. You'll react the same way.

It's not surprising this disappeared from theatres so quickly.

I'm an outlier... I found it just okay and the weakest of the three movies.

The movie has an intriguing structure. Rocket is not part of the Guardians most recent mission. That's because he's dying in a sickbay and the rest of the crew must leap into action to recover the tech that will save him.

Nonetheless Rocket is still a big part of the story, because we learn of his origins through extensive flashbacks. It's a touching but dark tale.

A lesser part of the movie is given over to the relationship between Quill and the new version of Gamora. It also has its sad moments as Quill laments over what he lost when his version of Gamora died.

Because Rocket is metaphorically sidelined for much of the movie and Quill is mopey, there didn't seem to be as much humour as past episodes.

There's lots of action. A hallway fight scene is particularly well choreographed.

However, like all superhero movies this one degenerates into a thirty or forty minute big interminable battle that really tested my patience.

Look! The bad guy simply waves his hands and throws Guardians around like he's using the Force. How many times are we going to see this cliche in this movie and all the other ones like it?

And, as hard as our heroes crash into and through walls they just groan a bit and get up. No broken bones. No concussions.

Periodically though we are led to believe that one of our beloved gang HAS actually died. That lasts for about thirty seconds before they are revived again. Rinse and repeat.

The powers and abilities of various characters such as Nebula grow and wane as required by the story.

There are improbable sequences such as when giant tentacled creatures the size of houses flee alongside small forest creatures and people, and none one of them gets crushed under foot... or tentacle.

Many things explode or collapse. Background characters appear to die, but there's never a mention of the carnage afterward.

Just once it would be nice to see one of these movies end on a quiet dramatic moment rather than a balls to the wall battle.

Paradoxically, this movie is undone by its very premise.

Without going into details, the plot-within-a-plot requires that Mel Gibson deliberately engage in some subpar acting.

Even in bad movies though, Mel Gibson always stands out for his commitment to his role. So when my wife and I saw his subpar performance and mugging in this movie, we guessed the reason for it and the twist ending well before the end.

We even anticipated that the fact of his character's birthday would play a part in the twist and we were right on that score too, more or less.

The acting by the supporting case, particularly the over-the-top villain is similarly mediocre. But whether that's due to the requirements of the story, or just genuine bad acting is also hard to determine.

For these reasons, in trying to be too clever, this movie ultimately fails to entertain.