Change Your Image
mange01
Reviews
Willy's Wonderland (2021)
Chicken soup for the soul?
One of the productions companies for Willy's Wonderland is "Chicken Soup for the Soul". A film about a mute, scowling Nic Cage beating satanic, animatronic animal mascots to death is clearly not going to qualify. It's more like a half-serving of fried chicken: cheap, cheerful and leaves you feeling slightly unsatisfied.
I say slightly because while some things were pretty good, there's ultimately too much repetition and too little ingenuity for this to become a stone-cold cult classic. Things get off to a familiar start when Cage's unnamed drifter arrives in a desolate Nevada town needing to get his car fixed. Unable to pay for the repairs for unconvincing reasons, he instead is badgered into doing some light janitorial work at the abandoned Willy's Wonderland. Mopping the floor and scrubbing a few tables seems like a suspiciously good deal when the owner is offering to pay for your $1,000 repair bill in return, but that's because the Chuck E. Cheese-style restaurant is populated by various possessed, anthropomorphised animals, led by the titular Willy the Weasel.
When Cage starts cleaning, the animals start attacking him and the revenge-seeking local teens arrive. Unfortunately, they're mostly anonymous and blandly-acted. The only two that stand out are gang leader Liv (Emily Tosta), daughter of the local sheriff; and Kathy (Caylee Cowan), Liv's bubble gum-popping, long sock-wearing best friend. Kathy's boyfriend Bob, Liv's fawning friend Chris and two other anonymous men round out the half-dozen. Try and guess which two die first. From there, it's pretty much 60 minutes of repetitious teen deaths, robot beatings, fizzy drinks and pinball. There's a certain amount of fun in watching Nic Cage beat a robot to death with a piece of wood but the unfortunately thin budget doesn't stretch to much in the way of imaginative kills and the film suffers from having a main character who is clearly never in any danger and supporting characters we're not really bothered about. You know who's going to die, so it's just a pity there's not more fun to be had in watching it happen.
But, it does skip past and it's competently made. That probably sounds like a back-handed complement but it's not a bad film, just a missed opportunity to do something a lot more fun. At least Nic Cage is clearly enjoying himself while working off his tax bill, unlike the dour and miserable Bruce Willis. Mostly recommended, but it's got no rewatch value.
Ouija (2014)
Slapdash doesn't begin to describe it
A door closing. An eye changing colour. Another door closing. If any of these things frighten you, you'll still find Ouija boring.
The acting is wooden (even from the usually good Olivia Cooke), every plot development is telegraphed and predictable, and the whole thing reads like a first draft full of placeholder dialogue.
After watching it, I was completely unsurprised to find that half the film had been re-shot and the last 20 minutes completely added from scratch.
It's a film with no scares, no good dialogue, no interesting ideas, nothing at all. It's completely and totally vacuous.
A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)
Oh dear
Die Hard films used to be fun. No matter how much trouble John McClane was in, he had a wisecrack or two and Bruce Willis always looked like he was enjoying himself. They were fantastic action films, with great stories and memorable villains. And then they made this one.
So, what's it about? Well, a Russian oligarch is about to go on trial for corruption because he fell out with an aspiring politician. For some reason, John McClane's son Jack, who is in Moscow, shoots a man in the head and is arrested. John finds out and flies to Russia, hoping to... something. That's it. The film spends all of 5 minutes setting this up before John is sat in a taxi in Moscow. There's no point to any of this, there's no motivation behind anyone's actions and the villains are completely anonymous. One of them is called... Chagurin? Chagrin? Something like that. The "plot" meanders on as John rescues Jack, they fall into the middle of the two Russians' dispute and ultimately end up in Chernobyl. Of course they do! Because when bad guys in Russia have an Evil Plot, it has to involve the only place other than Moscow that moronic screenwriters think the average cinema-goer has heard of. But don't worry, they never even try to explain it. Or the fact that Chernobyl is in Ukraine now and not Russia. Or the villains' motivations. Something about a double-cross? I didn't catch it.
Throughout all the other films, John McClane was reckless, but he never intentionally endangered the lives of innocent people. In fact, he tried to help them. In this film, it's like he's playing a video game and he gets points for causing more damage and injuring more people. After he rescues Jack, they pursue the bad guys through Moscow traffic. John commandeers vehicles, punches passers-by in the face, smashes through barriers and into other cars. Then, he drives his very large SUV on top of the traffic, crushing the vehicles beneath. He leaves a trail of destroyed cars and possibly maimed and dead commuters lies behind him. And this is all played for laughs because as he drives off, a woman screams in terror and he yells, "sorry ma'am" in reply! Do Russian lives mean less than American ones? He's possibly injured or even killed people and at no point does he care or do the Russian police even show up! The rampage continues for about 20 minutes and no-one tries to stop any of them.
This utter stupidity continues throughout. But it isn't even fun stupidity! The whole thing has such a dour, po-faced glumness to it that there's no enjoyment to be gained from it at all. Even the attempted "jokes" fall flat because Bruce Willis is so grumpy throughout the whole film. There are a couple of lines that made me smile, but there were even more missed opportunities. At one point, John and Jack shoot a glass ceiling and shower some henchmen in glass and nobody thought to have John tell his son "shoot the glass"?!?
So, what do you get when you take a Die Hard film, suck the life out of it and in its place inject a threadbare plot, endless stupidity and mind-numbing dialogue and then film it in a slapdash way and make it both boring and grim? You get this awful excuse for a film.
Wind Chill (2007)
Unremarkable
There's not really anything to dislike in Wind Chill, but there's nothing to write home about either. Emily Blunt (doing her best American accent) and Ashton Holmes (doing his best Jesse Eisenberg impression) are two university students who (seemingly) meet for the first time when he offers to give her a lift home for the holidays. While taking a "short cut", they're driven off the road and his rickety old car packs up. Then strange things start happening...
The problem is, they're not strange enough or spooky enough. The film begins with dark shadows outside the frosty windows and (no spoilers) doesn't do much else to elicit terror in its audience. There's also very little chemistry between Blunt and Holmes and they're both far too old for their roles as students (Blunt was mid-20s when Wind Chill was released, Holmes nearly 30). The explanation for what's happened to them is also very predictable. You don't need to have seen many horror films to work out what's going on long before the girl and the boy do (neither character is ever named).
It is an original idea, but it's reliant on so many films that have come before it that there's unfortunately little to recommend or remember.
Whiteout (2009)
Like a bottle of cheap Russian vodka - does exactly what it says on the tin
Cheap vodka will get you drunk. It isn't to be savoured, admired or bragged about, it's just a means to an end. This film is pretty much the same: it's clunky, predictable and dumb. It's not terrible and it's reasonably entertaining at times, but there are many better ways to spend 101 minutes.
The idiocy starts in the first scene when, over Antarctica in 1957, a Russian pilot decides to start shooting his passengers. Only he does it very slowly so that the intended victims have time to shoot back and kill him and his co-pilot. The plane goes down and 52 years later, Kate Beckinsale's U.S. Marshall must investigate a mysterious corpse that was found in the middle of nowhere. Bodies start stacking up, logic goes out the window and your eyes will start rolling!
I've seen people say that this is the kind of film you watch when you just want to kill some time without thinking too hard. I feel that way sometimes too, but if you want to do that, there are much better films out there to so with: films that are more thrilling, more interesting, better-written and better-made. Like I said, it's not terrible, but be wary when a film that already has bad reviews has people commenting "lower your expectations before watching it". If you do take the plunge, get ready for: characters explaining every minor plot detail in absurdly stiff dialogue, cheap CGI snow (most of the reported $35 million dollar budget must have gone straight into Ms. Beckinsale's bank account because it certainly didn't go towards the special effects), a predictable and poorly-shot backstory for Beckinsale's character and a dull and uninspiring ending. You'd at least expect the director of Gone In 60 Seconds and Swordfish (Dominic Sena) to string a few thrills together, but they're few and far between.
Whiteout can't even decide what kind of thriller it wants to be. Inside the first 10 minutes, Kate Beckinsale walks into her bedroom and slowly peels off her clothes until she's in her underwear. She then heads into the bathroom and, with the camera at bum-level, bends over slowly and turns the shower on. So, should we expect something exploitation-y and slasher-like? With gratuitous shots of Beckinsale in as little clothing as the Antarctic weather will allow? And a masked killer hacking his victims to pieces with an ice pick? No - there's no more disrobing and while there is a masked killer, there isn't any hacking-and-slashing. Or is it an intelligent, well-written thriller, with great dialogue and a twist ending? Definitely not.
There are a couple of decent scenes and Beckinsale does her best with what she's given but underneath the snow and ice, there's nothing of substance. If you're in the mood for a bloody thriller that's set in a frozen wasteland and based on a comic book, check out 30 Days of Night. If you fancy a smart, well-written thriller that doesn't pander or waste your time, watch Wind River. If you want something unsatisfying that's neither A nor B, watch something other than Whiteout. Oh, you're a Kate Beckinsale fan as well? OK, watch Whiteout. But don't say I didn't warn you.