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Reviews
Batman: The Long Halloween, Part Two (2021)
Well... they tried.
Have you ever gone to places, or attempted to do something thinking that it would really suck, only to realize that maybe, after all, things seemed to be better than expected? And then see those hopes get crushed at the finish line? Well there you go. You have The Long Halloween in a nutshell, there.
Don't get me wrong, there was a true and honest effort made and the movie has some undisputable qualities to it. The way the characters are portrayed, the general tone, the choice of colors, the voice actors... well of course, I would take Hamill over Baker anythime to voice the Joker but he had very few lines anyway. Some small but important details, often overlooked in other productions, added to the positive balance. For example, the evil left side brain of Dent using his right hand as dominant, which is anatomically pertinent. However... the story they tried to tackle here is a real monster. It's the Everest of Batman tales and certainly Jeff Loeb's masterpiece in my opinion. It couldn't be done in just two parts if it were to be done right. Very large parts of the story, some being the most important ones, were left off and the final twist was a gross oversimplification of what really went on during this long, long Halloween. The rollercoster ends with a tiny slope and squeaky wheels.
I won't spoil it. If you really want the story, though, read the comic instead. It's probably the best Batman comic ever made, even if its visual style is decidedly odd. If you're going to watch the movie version, just watch it after you have read the original work.
Doomsday Device (2017)
Nemic, you shouldn't have.
Rule number one: don't make it a japanese folkore based movie if you don't knox your basic japanese history and your actors can't pronounce the two most used japaneser words in the story. "Shogun" pronounced as "Show Gun" and "chikara (power) pronounced "shikara" (an asian cousin of Shakira maybe?).
The rest of the movie is a train wreck and despite Nemic having been part of more crappy SyFy movies than you can shake a cattle prod at, none was as lkame as this one. He should have stayed away, he was the only decent bit in it.
Batman: Hush (2019)
A travesty.
Most of the Batman adaptations we have been blessed with (*cough*) lately seem to share the same flaw: whoever wrote the plot didn't get themselves properly acquainted with the source material or... just don't give a damn. I honestly don't know which is worst, but still, this how they seem to roll nowadays. Once and for all: the most interesting tales of the Bat available, of which the finest often were written by Jeff Loeb, are essentially relying on psychology and manipulation, smoke and mirrors. "Hush" is one good example. And yes, spoilers ahead, so you've been warned. So, a few points:
1- Aside from the occasional strike of genius, Eddie Nygma aka Riddler will NEVER be more than a C-lister. Combat will never be his real forte. And also he never was Hush to start with.
2- Hush was that *other guy* all along (go read the comic maybe?) who wasn't even supposed to be around anymore. He was such a mastermind and an expert at confusing the issues that the sheer level of paranoïa he instilled in the Detective was what made it fail between the Bat and the Cat. That and nothing else.
The storyline in this "movie" is dull, predictable, borrows the good bits only up to Catwoman's abduction and after that, becomes a terrible mess. There was no need to involve Lady Shiva and the Lazarus Pit. Can't the people at Warner help themselves from sprinkling cameos in the story when it's uncalled for? All the dramatic tension in the "real" story is gone. What remains is just a time filler and that's sad, the visuals are excellent, the voicing spot-on (except for the opera clown) and the combat choregraphies impeccable.
It's like a beautiful shiny tuxedo on an ugly hunchback with a Tourette Syndrome.
The Car: Road to Revenge (2019)
That car should never have left the assembly line...
Some movies just can't decide what they are about. This is one of them, in a very disappointing way. When you cook up a story, you need to decide what your antagonists are. The human baddies were... well, B-movie grade baddies. Their first real mayhem scene screamed "The Crow: The Rip-Off" cranked to eleven. It gets worse when you realize that the Car is haunted, which makes it pretty much a kind of second-rate Flying Dutchman kind of ghostly thingie, and one can go with that. Then, it all gets thrown, like the car owner, through the window: the car still needs a CPU to run... so what is this? A crossbreeding of Christine, The Exorcist and Knight Rider? Although it doesn't talk as such... and then, the story falls from the cliff (like the car...) one more time as even after the CPU is dealt with, the carcass can still revive itself, when it was made clear a minute ago that this was its Achille's heel?
Consistency, guys. A story can be slow, lame, badly acted even, and we all can still like a "so bad it's good" movie but that indecisiveness as to what the Car really is, makes it all very much pointless to watch. Super Hybrid was at least funny and earned brownie points for originality. The Car R2R is sloppy and can't even get its concept right.
Constantine: City of Demons (2018)
Just skip this. Hell is probably better.
This is just a loose mish-mash of two distinct stories in the Hellblazer universe and they managed to even mess that up. The tactics John uses here make no sense, and are just a deus ex machina the writers pulled out their ass because they didn't have enough imagination to come up with something that works. Of course they could have just used the original plot... which worked way better.
Read the comics.
Way.
Way.
Better.
The only right thing in this sorry excuse of a story is the voicing.
Mandy (2018)
Nick Cage's Trippin' Balls of Fire
I thought I had seen it all when it comes to movies with Nick Cage in them. The good, the bad, the ultrabad... I was wrong: I was missing the crazy.
This not really a story that we're seeing unfold there. t is, rather, a psychedelic trip the director had after snorting the ashes of an incinerated abomination, cremated right after a female cenobite gave birth to it during a shroom-induced seizure. The locations exist in two flavours only: surreal or mundane. Nothing is done to explain Nick's weapon of choice, there are weird bits of cartoon scattered all around the piece... the only thingthis vaguely reminds me of is the spirit that reigned in Metal Hurlant, only much darker in tone. And for such a paroxystic piece, it's a very slow burner, so you'll never know where you stand with the pace or the plot.
That movi is made to be analyzed by cinema students and psychiatry interns. It's certainly not mùeant for the average moviegoer looking for a good time.
Runaways (2017)
Social Justice Warrior League, Marvel Style.
It sounds cliché but still: I don't know where to start. Arsenic has been hollowed out to be *only* a SJW with purple hair and they've both aged and re-ethnicized Molly Hayes. We don't need SJW propaganda to take over our beloved characters and we don't need "diversity" to be enforced by tweaking the genome of an originally endearing little imp with a nekomimi hat. None of these serves any purpose other than the studio trying to get a good rep and we really should wonder who the entire show is aimed at. LSD's bracelet was a medical bracelet? Oh, let's make it a cult trinket. Hello? Have you *$@! even *read* the comics or did you just pick up a few bits and added it with random elements in a big shiny shaker?
Just so you know, there's someone out there who does the very same thing as you did there and he's been mocked for it. His name is Uwe Böll. Only he, at least, doesn't try to appeal to moraltards.
Aside from Molly, the rest of the cast look the part, but that's it. I started watching Cloak and Dagger thinking they had stretched the material too far, but Runaways rips it apart.
People who don't know the Runaways yet but are curious: read the comics and run away from this show.
Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (2018)
Did they even read the source material?
Had this been an entirely new and original story, I might have given it one more star. However, this movie lacks in several areas. Being (for better or worse) the Batman nerd I am, I always feel let down when movie writers can't either take a story and be faithful to it (See Batman: Year one, THAT was a good adaptation) or be completely original and creative on their own.
Batman:GBG is adapted from an "Elseworlds" comic. These work in a very straightforward manner: you take a DC character and change the context surrounding him. Some of the people he knows will still be there and they will be easily recognizable and yet slightly different. GBG put Bruce Wayne in the Victorian Era of Gotham and make the world's greatest detective face the worlds most famous serial killer, Jack the Ripper himself. You need few cast members but a good sense of narration to pull that one and the comic did. However, the movie forced into the story several irrelevant characters and used the oldest trick in slasher movies as its main plot twist: make one arguably soon-to-be-bad character the obvious culprit and then pull the carpet under the audience's feet by revealing a generally well-loved character as the actual evil bastard. Also, Jack's victims, in the comic as well as in our reality, were all random prostitutes. In the comic he killed them because they reminded him of a certain someone, in our reality, probably either the same or he just wanted to take out his frustrations on easy targets he couldn't be connected to. In this movie however, one of the most powerful enemies of the Bat, one who wasn't even supposed to be in the story, gets the helpless first victim's part, which is terribly out of character. Nobody in an Elseworlds is ever really out of character and this proves that Mr Liu doesn't know his source material or doesn't give a damn about it.
Watch this to burn away a boring evening and if you're not that much into Batman. If you actually read comics and/or are fond of the Batverse, stick to the original. It's shorter, doesn't throw at you a truckload of characters plus the kitchen sink but it *works*. This movie doesn't.