Reviews

There's a lot of excessively harsh reviews here. This movie is just average. It has problems in a few areas, but it isn't worth hating and the visuals and action are fun. It also is clearly having a lot of fun with the period and with fashion, which isn't for everyone.

For my money, among DC films, the trash heap that was Aquaman fully deserved all the 2's and 4's this movie's getting. The fact it currently gets 6.9 is inexplicable to me. It was nonsensical idiocy with no plot or character. WW84 is just clumsily written and directed but at least seems to know what a movie is supposed to be and, y'know, has three discernible acts.

I suspect this movie is getting review bombed because there are obvious parallels to Trump in the male villain. He's a sleazy/trashy conman/businessman who's a loser and a failure and desperately wants more wealth and power and somehow gets it when no one expected it. That said, it's not exactly the story of Trump at each step, it's just taking a character who's similar and telling a morality tale about related themes. But I don't doubt the partisans will take offence.

This movie just really needed more editing (2.5 hours is too long for what they have) and better direction. The logic of the McGuffin at the centre of the story isn't explained very clearly, but withholding the explanation isn't that interesting or exciting, it's actually pretty cliché.

Not being clear about what's happening until way too late in the movie muddles the plot and just makes the hero look incompetent because it's not clear what a disadvantage she's at or why. Either explain the threat almost as soon as the McGuffin is in play and have the hero be really, really weak and in danger or reveal the danger of the McGuffin in the third act after the hero solves the mystery and then have them suddenly in danger from it. But this movie tries to do both and ends up just revealing the threat in dribs and drabs so no one knows how much to care about the threat to the hero, because we have no idea how bad it is.

Maybe they were trying to please everyone and have a strong and capable woman but put her at just enough disadvantage that at times she needed a man's help as well? If so, they just succeeded at pleasing no one. She's not the same model of female empowerment anymore, but the guys who have a problem with female empowerment still aren't going to be satisfied and the vast majority of average viewers who aren't that political are just annoyed they have no idea if she supposed to be powerful or weak in any given scene.

All in all it was entertaining enough that I didn't turn it off, but long and uneven enough that I was checking the runtime around the 2 hour mark.

People should really stop claiming this movie is funny, and the trailer should be pulled for false advertising. There's, like, maybe 4-5 jokes in the whole film. I'm not saying 4-5 are funny, I'm saying there are only 4-5 times where the film briefly even tries to be funny.

This is a drama, but a drama written and directed as lightly and carelessly as a comedy. So we don't care about the characters and we don't care about the stakes. But it's not funny either and the romance is just going through the motions - there's no meetcute, there's no "will they, won't they" it's just "boy meets girl, boy spends time with girl, boy and girl are a thing now". The whole film is mostly filler.

It's strange because the casting, the 70's period stuff and the production values are quite good, and the plot makes sense (there are a handful of moments where characters do inexplicable/stupid things but it isn't clear if it's meant to be funny or the scriptwriter is just that dumb) it's just not clear why you would care to watch it. Most of what you end up watching is a couple of mediocre crooks try to figure out how to make a kidnapping work and struggle. If you want to spend 90+ minutes filling in the time wondering about how you might plan a better kidnapping, by all means watch this movie. If you want to be entertained, dramatically, romantically or comedically, please, watch anything else.

It's fun, the plot is generally working, the set piece fight scene is everything you'd expect but then they have no idea how to finish it. There's a big twist that's supposed to explain things but isn't convincing, there's buckets of loose ends that are just dropped and then the finale just makes no sense at all.

Look there's probably a perfectly adequate, if stereotyped, teen romance in here. Something I'd happily watch. Some of the people making the movie may even have filmed all the pieces for that movie. There are even elements that are pretty unusual and refreshing in here: the female lead is adorkable but not sexless, it's almost always one or the other; they're two high schoolers, they have sex, but the movie isn't about that and there isn't a single conversation about virginity; there's a male/female bff friendship in a highschool movie (although the film never even addresses the idea of them going through puberty as best friends of opposite genders, which seems like a wasted opportunity and an elephant in the room the whole movie); the gimmick about the rules of their friendship is a reasonable ploy for this kind of movie.

The biggest problem is the editing. I remember an actor in one (good) movie dishing on the antics that went on during production and apparently the producers were so unhappy with the serious period drama they got they tried to demand it be reshot or recut as a competely different movie, when the crew refused they got in the editing booth themselves - with no experience at editing - and reedited the whole film trying to turn it into an action movie or something. I'm guessing something similar happened here because the continuity is a joke. There's a whole subplot with her Dad being angry at her that multiple characters refer to, and an apology from her, but we never see her Dad ever be anything but quietly supportive. There are weird scenes like Lee's girlfriend following her out of the party and then just giving up that don't go anywhere but were left in.

The tone is all over the place: it opens with a slapstick pants splitting scene (and all her clothes are at the drycleaners; seriously) like a Disney family holiday movie except it doesn't land and yet in another scene later in the movie someone she cares about is calling her a "sl-t" who "f-ed X". Those are both scenes that could work in a movie, but never in the same movie. This movie can't decide if it's a Disney family farce, a cutsie Amelie-style romance, straight-to-TV hallmark movie schmaltz, an 'American Pie' sex-and-cringe teen film, a family drama about sibling rivalry or a feelgood teen comedy. Maybe all those elements could've been used in the same movie if they were skillfully woven into a unified whole, but in this movie they came off as disjointed scenes from different movies, just weirdly played by the same set of actors.

As for her Dad he was completely miscast. In fact while all the teens were either adorkable, gorgeous, or paper thin two dimensional high school stereotypes, weirdly all the adults (including Molly Ringwald) looked like grizzled, middle aged people who've been through a few things or at least were in a serious drama type movie.

I'd complain about the many, many attrociously acted scenes, but for all I know there are scenes like that filmed for most movies, it's just that good editors choose the well acted takes but whatever producer's nephew edited this film slapped together scenes with takes that never should've seen the light of day. It didn't help the actors either that the script seemed only half finished, with a lot of lines sounding like placeholder copy that someone meant to come back and replace with something actually good.

Oh, and keep an eye out for the just dumbfoundingly badly shot motorbiking-in-the-rain scene that looked like a parody of a bad movie it was so obviously fake.

So it's a revenge movie. America seems to make about 400 of these every year. Bad kills/takes good guys' wife/daughter/dog (hello, John Wick), so good guy decides, with good/some/no justification, that calling the police is not an option and the only way to get justice is to abandon the rule of law, get his (it's always his) medieval berserker bloodlust on and go on a homicidal killing spree murdering as many people as possible (apparently the more killed the more true was his love) who are in any way even tangentially linked to the bad guy. About the only way anyone in America ever innovates in this category of movie is the vary the choreography and find novel ways of murdering someone. Oh and there's always the traditional American gun worship, you can't forget the gun worship.

There's a whole argument to be had over whether these films relieve pent up anger at injustice, or just restlessness, and so prevent outbursts of violence, or whether they basically glorify homicidal killing sprees and promote violence and a vengeful approach to conflict. FWIW, I can never get away from a certain amount of feeling dirty having watched one of these things.

Enter Juan Jose Campanella from Argentina with an actually original and innovative revenge flick. He goes the complete opposite direction from Hollywood's ever more divorced from reality comic book killing sprees with a film about a few ordinary police, and a grieving husband, struggling to bring a killer to justice. The background, very sparingly alluded to, is the fascist Peron dictatorship, thousands of political activists and opposition members who became "the disappeared", and generally a time when a great many people in Argentina found justice very hard to come by.

Unlike Hollywood's short attention span, where new revenge films pretty much have to have killed 100 footsoldiers and the head bad guy within 24 hours of the good guys' dog being buried, Campanella's story of revenge spans decades. And not just a then-and-now structure, the original investigation spans years and the present day story spans a good deal of time too. All of this piles on the dramatic tension - "will this monster ever see justice?" - and builds our appreciation of the heroes, they're not just risking being killed, they're risking spending decades of their lives on a futile hunt. And while guns are present, they're about as useful as they are in real life. No one's going around blowing away their problems with merry abandon.

And then there's the finale, which of course I won't spoil. I'll just say it makes every American revenge movie hero look childish and narcissistic. This is a revenge story for grown ups. The hero isn't just throwing a bloody and homicidal tantrum until he makes himself feel better; he's making a steep sacrifice to see justice done and to honour the person he lost.