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Open Water 3: Cage Dive (2017)
Avoid!
Ugh this film! Bad, pure bad!
OK first the pros...the sharks look decent, when there are any. But having few shark shots and building the tension isn't a bad thing, Jaws after all is all about that, its the characters themselves who are the problem here. We follow 3 obnoxious dumbass Americans filming themselves as they travel to Australia to go on a shark cage dive, things go wrong and we are then suppose to route for these dumb s**ts for rest of the movie. It doesn't help that it takes 30 painful minutes before we even get on the ocean. Its similar to how Blair Witch started except in that at least we are learning about the witch & the drives of the characters etc, but with this movie we have a 30 minute build up telling us how unlikable, shallow and dumb these 3 people are and all i thought was "i have to spend the next hour with these idiots" so by the time they get in the water I was routing for the sharks. And boy are these 3 loathsome fools dumb, iv not seen victims in a horror this dumb for a long while, I ended up annoyed yelling at the TV! The film is even pretentious enough to think you'll care about these meat heads, there is even an awful love affair plot thrown in which the film makers seem to think this will add deeper story & tension, its not enough that the scenario itself is the main drive of the story, how the situation would effect you mentally and what it takes to survive etc...no apparently we need a love triangle to really add to the drama....give me a break! It all comes down to most the film being filler made up of hollow drama because they spent all the budget on a handful of decent sharks shots.
As for the sharks, the shark shots are the only reason this gets any stars form me, they are very decent but so few. So if you didn't care about the characters stuff and just wanted shark action you wont find that here either, even when we finally get a kill its so brief and tame. If your curious enough every single shark shot is in the trailer...all of them!
So in summary this is just a drawn out horrible filler heavy soap opera episode with some sharks. Avoid and just watch the trailer for the sharks and escape watching some annoying brats for 90 minutes.
Alternative recommendations would be 47 Meters Down or The Reef, the characters are likable and the shark bits are really tense!
Walking with Dinosaurs 3D (2013)
Great visuals but with bad dialog and annoying voice acting.
Probably great for kids under 10. If your older and are a big fan of dinosaurs its worth watching for the actual dinosaur scenes as the effects are pretty well done but I recommended watching it on mute or with Jurassic park music playing over the top as the voice acting is extremely annoying. The dialog just grates against you and just spoils the great visuals, plus to be fair the story is rather poor. That said I understand there are a limited number of ways to tell stories about Dinosaurs, but this hits a lot of clichés set by older dinosaur/taking animal children's films. So its a bit of a shame that the great work put in to the dinosaur effects was tainted by the voice acting, and it really does drag it down, surely it would have been better to just have narration instead of whinny annoying American accents spurting out stupid obvious lines. Iv seen kids films with far better life teaching stories and writing, films should never talk down to kids so this had no excuse really. But to be honest I'm sure the target audience will not care as the marvel of the great looking dinosaurs will likely capture their imagination until they are old enough to watch Jurassic Park of course. In the end if i was to show a dinosaur film to a kid it would be 'Land Before Time' any day over this.
Video Game High School (2012)
This Film Ran Out Of Lives Quickly
Im reviewing this as a huge fan of both film and video games. From both perspectives, this film is complete trash, full of hopeless childish humour. At its core it's not a totally bad concept, but in its execution as a film it comes across that it was made by a group of people who have absolutely no idea about the gaming world other than what they see in the top 10 charts at their local shopping stores. According to these film makers gaming is about nothing but shooting and violence, which is true to some degree for some but what about adventure gaming, RPG's, plat-formers, sports and so on (see Wreck It Ralph). There is so much to play with in the world of video games but this feels like its been aimed at the easiest fan base, appealing to the current largest selling game, in this case 'call of duty'. Sure there is the odd appearance of other genres of game here and there, but overall its focus is on militarized combat simulator games and that is what i found to be one of the films biggest problems and what i found to be teetering on being slightly uncomfortable.
Anyway i digress, to get to the point this is a very unfunny, charmless mess of a film that maybe 10-15 year old's will find amusing. In it's premise it's treated more or less like a video gamer take on Harry Potter where there is a special school for young "gifted" gamers. Again, the general "plot" is built around shooting games where our main guy has to prove his worth in school, get the girl and gain respect all by shooting people, thats essentially the plot. This is a school where class mates resort to virtual shootouts to settle school yard arguments and by "virtual" i mean life like graphics, as in real. This is where i feel one of the main problems lies and what made me a bit uncomfortable. There is no attempt to make the gaming scenes look like video games to separate the realities, for budgetary reasons or just the notion that in this possible "future" graphics are so advanced. Whatever the reason though i found this focus of the film and the manor in which it is executed did not leave a good impression and was not sending out a very good message considering the amount of gun crimes you hear about in America in recent times. Even in a couple of scenes in the class rooms there are a selection of real physical rifles and machine guns on the wall behind the teacher.....in the class room...really? Yes, to hit it on the head this is a film essentially about a special school in America teaching & encouraging kids to be the best at shooting people, think about that for a minute.
As for the acting its full of Disney channel reject style teenagers running around acting like idiots committing all sorts of buffoonery while talking nonsense. Not one character feels realistic here, they are all essentially cartoon characters and not one of them is likable or can be related to which in a comedy is a total crime.
On the subject of comedy this is the films biggest failing of course. It just isn't funny in the slightest, not even enough to slightly redeem itself from the huge list of shortcomings the film already has and what really makes the humor suck is the lack of understanding and poor portrayal of character comedy. This films badly written script & characters seem to reduce all gamers to a level of slapstick stupidity and stereotyping of the weirdo nerds that society doesn't understand. Look, gamers are everywhere in real life as part of our society, across the world, of all ages. Bankers, sports stars, artists, students, postmen, taxi drivers, you name it. Its not some underworld society, they are everyday people who happen to share a hobby and all share for the most part the same sense of humor as the rest of the world. They aren't a special species with their own language of comedy, they have the same likes and dislike as everyone else. I guess my point is that ultimately the script is so annoying due to it being so damned lazy. Instead of writing real fleshed out characters you can relate with along with some witty humor they went for the dumb and easier option of writing gamers as bumbling idiots with oddball character traits that are neither clever nor compelling. Its not a type of humor that everyone can jump on board with and relate to as you can with some teen comedy films like American Pie or SuperBad. With this it seemed like they felt they couldn't be bothered to go broad with it, instead opted for the super lazy and dumb because they decided they were writing about some sub human race called "gamers" and not about human beings who play video games. As i said before the makers of this film do not have a clue about the video game culture, comedy and human behavior in general.
So in summary then, trashy, soulless, dumb teen comedy recommended only to 10 year old's who play nothing but 'call of duty' games.
Thanks for reading :)