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Reviews
60 Minuten (2024)
Came or the action, stayed for the story
I'm almost surprised by how good this movie was. I had expected some action, and the premise wasn't new. It's a film in real-time, not unlike "Nick of Time" with Depp or the classic "Rope" from Hitchcock. Basically, the bulk of the movie is that the main character has sixty minutes to get somewhere and there are forces that don't want him to make it. The movie starts off, then the clock literally starts counting down and it's Go-Time.
Because the scenes have to move quickly it was almost surprising how much story unfolds through dialog and interactions. There is more going on in this movie than just a guy fighting his way across town.
The ticking clock adds an extra layer of tension and I found myself checking the time on my own clock, not just the run time of the movie. They really do line up pretty well, which is a huge credit to the editors. This isn't one of those movies where they have five minutes to defuse a bomb, but we cut to another scene that's ten minutes of dialogue.
It was stressing me out various points in the film. But, it's not a super involved plot, and yet it has some good character development. None of which I typically expect from films like this. Well worth a viewing.
Point Blank (2019)
Frank Grillo needs some good scripts
I know everyone is going to see Anthony Mackie is the big name in this movie, and while his character is the focus and the driving narrative (without Mackie this movie won't work) it's Frank Grillo that's doing the heavy lifting.
Don't get me wrong. Makie nails it. I know he can do action, but he's a very believable every-man in this film. I believed his motivations, and he makes mistakes, but what guy in that situation wouldn't? It's a classic ordinary person in an extraordinary situation. Most guys can come across as a man of action playing it down, but he made me forget he was in a MCU movie/show for a bit.
But Grillo's character IS the plot. He is the one with the character arc and the reason Makie is even there. So, while the movie is mostly from Makie's point of view, Grillo's character provides the plot twists and character development.
It's not a very deep movie, but it has a more going for it than your typical B-movie action film. There characters aren't one-dimensional and for those that think it's just mindless entertainment might have missed the forest for the trees.
I've enjoyed a lot of sleeper-hits from Grillo, and think he should be doing more or getting more recognition. I do think he lacks a certain screen presence and charisma that could set him apart from others in the genre, but he's a solid actor with some range. He, unlike Makie, will always have to be the tough guy, however.
I'd put Grillo more on the level of Scott Adkins - someone I enjoy seeing and deserving of a really good script every now and again, but I can't see ending up on the level of any one of the Hemsworths.
I will 150% agree with any comment on the musical soundtrack (good or bad). You'd think this was meant to be a low budget action comedy from the 80s. I guess those were the only licenses they could afford at that point.
A House on the Bayou (2021)
This was better than it should have been.
Alex McAulay is, in my opinion, a great director but very weak writer. If you've seen "Don't Tell a Soul" you'll understand where I'm going with this. In short, his scripts are very convoluted and require things to happen so the plot can keep going, but he makes sure the right people are doing the right jobs to pull it all together.
I'm going to start with saying Angela Sarafyan needs more leading roles based on this movie. She is absolutely carrying this film. The plot is all over the place, the twist and turns are just a series of 90-degree angles strung together. The acting from the cast overall is decent, the logic is phoned in, but Sarafyan sells every single scene she's in which is, thankfully, most of them.
Overall there were things that happened that could be considered unpredictable but that's only because they come so far out of left field, they were practically thrown from the parking lot. But that's just the script. As I said, that's not where McAulay shines.
Visually this is a great movie. The tone, the music, the buildup, all works. Sometimes the payoff falls flat but I think that's because the film clearly wanted to be one thing and was too well disguised as something else. It's not very scary or suspenseful but I found myself wondering what was going to happen next, mostly because I became invested in Srafyan's character. Everything she does feels as real as you can expect from an ordinary wife/mother thrown into an extraordinary situation.
Samaritan (2022)
2 minutes and 17 seconds
It took me exactly 2 minutes and 17 seconds to know how this movie was going to end. That's not the point of this film. While this could be called a "superhero movie" it's more of a character study put on the shoulders of Stalone, but it's Walton is carrying the film so to think of it as a Stalone film or a Super/reluctant hero film isn't already setting the wrong expectation.
Overall Stalone does a good job. I didn't have to re-watch (2m 17s) to see the nuances he puts into his performance to understand his choices. The film is a slow, but it's more about the character development and the kid's motivations, than a superhero being convinced to take up the mantle of kicking ass and taking names.
While I think the pacing could have been better, I don't know if that would have sacrificed the character development. Too fast and it feels rushed, too slow and it drags. In the end, everything felt organic to me.
Walton does a good job and the connection between his character and Stalone's feel genuine.
If you're looking for something like "The Boys" or MCU/DCU, this isn't going to be the movie for you. This is more like "Unbreakable".
The Art of Self-Defense (2019)
Bad Knock off of Fight Club meets Karate Kid
Let me start by saying I figured out the plot twist about 35 minutes in. There were some details linked to character motives that DID surprise me, but it's no old school Shyamalan moments. If anything, it just made more sense. The end is easily predictable, and I just wanted it to be over, but it kept dragging on.
Like the movie itself, the action is slow and dragged out. Literally. Every fight scene in the dojo is in slow motion which was probably supposed hide how little skill everyone has but it just ends up highlighting it. It's as if the first hour could have been condensed but the writer/director wanted to pad the run time on what probably started as a script for the pilot of a TV show.
The movie only comes close to anything like a comedy about 48 minutes in then falls flat about 20 minutes later. The only real joke in the whole movie is about getting a custom-made black leather belt because the person wearing it is a karate black belt. As if they don't just sell black and brown leather belts in stores.
The movie finally gets going in the last 25 minutes. That's when everyone seems to realize they are on camera. Alessandro Nivola however nails every scene he's in. He comes across more like a cult leader, which is clearly the point of his character. He is, by far, the best part of this movie as the misogynist you love to hate.
Trick (2019)
It's better than you think
This is going to be an odd review to avoid spoilers. Yes, there is the danger of spoilers because this movie isn't as bad as it might seem. While I almost stopped thinking it was just another cheese slasher flick going for the cheap tricks, I'm glad I finished. I wonder how many bad reviews of this movie are from people who gave up early.
At first it felt like this movie was meant to be part of another franchise as the fifth or nineth of something else. There is even a montage that fast tracks the history of the main detective hunting the killer year after year (Not really a spoiler). That made me feel like this movie was trying to do something new, so it did have some creative choices right out of the gate.
Sure, the acting is average. The deaths are over the top. Dialog is campy. You find yourself asking questions like "how?". But that's honestly par for most slasher flicks. Even the "good ones" can be tired, lazy, and trope filled so you can't hold those things against this film. In the end it's still a slasher flick.
There are things this movie still does right if you're willing to stick with it.
Kateo (2022)
Couldn't even Finish
I thought I was almost done, turns out I still had an hour and a half left. I just can't. The action scenes seem to be the only reason this movie exists and they are so contrived they make the Fast and Furious movies looks feasible. One sequence required 3 vans to be moving at the exact same rate of speed and distance for longer than I could believe possible in any situation. And physics? What are those? We need you to have the power to fly now or this scene won't work. We're also going to need these vehicles to drive themselves for a little while just so the main character can jump from one to the other as his dispatches the drivers.
I can't do it.
I just can't do it anymore.
Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021)
Even as a re-skinned script it still fails...
I can't help but feel like this movie was a different script originally and the G. I. Joe stuff got tagged on. While pretending you're not watching a movie about THE Snake Eyes from G. I. Joe makes the movie a little more tolerable, it's still not that great of a movie. The people that are supposed to end up as the bad guys are almost the good guys while the good guy is basically a bad guy. As I said, they must have taken a script, and applied a G. I. Joe label on it.
That said, the only reason to watch this movie is to see a cool action movie, and even then it falls short. People draw swords and start kicking one another. People with guns run up to try and shoot someone point-blank only to have the gun knocked away as they get punched. People can jump off moving vehicles, over other moving vehicles, and land on yet another moving vehicle. There's the suspension of disbelief and then there's just magic now because the director says so. This movie also makes joining a ninja clan look as easy as signing up at your local dojo.
The Many Saints of Newark (2021)
Not the movie I was promised
Based on the trailers and promotional material I expected to see a movie about the origin of Tony Soprano. Instead, I got a movie about Chrstopher's dad and the civil rights movement. You hardly see much of Tony, as a kid or a teen. It's as if they took ALL of the Tony scenes of him as a young man and put them all in the trailer. The first half of the film has him as a young boy, something that was absent from every promo I saw.
This movie felt like either a bait and switch, or it was intended to be a totally different movie and they shoehorned in the Soprano's characters just to get the movie made. I kept waiting for how they were going to tie McBrayer into the lore of the original show, but they never did.
The only redeeming quality about this movie is the job the various actors did at playing younger version of my favorite characters. I did think young Paulie was a bit tall, but he had the attitude and Farmiga has the mom down perfectly. Stoll is perfect as a young Jr. And I liked what they did with Dante. But, again, they aren't who this movie is about making it all feel wasted in the end.
As a gangster movie there's nothing wrong with it.
As a movie about civil rights in the 60s there nothing wrong with it.
As a movie about a young Tony Soprano and development into the character we know from the show of the same name, it's just not there. This is a movie about some guy named Moltisanti vs. Some guy named McBrayer and has a young Tony Soprano thrown in there for maybe a total of 15 minutes. The movie even ends more abruptly than the series, as if they had to wrap all this up and get young Tony back in the film so sell the lie this is tied to the show.
Overall, it's not a bad movie, but it's a horrible Soprano's prequel. I rated it low because I felt like a kid being told I was going to an amusement park, then taken to a jogging park and told to go amuse myself.
Fistful of Vengeance (2022)
I assume this was meant to fail.
The choreography was so bad, if I hadn't been a fan of Iko Uwais I would have thought he didn't know marital arts. His fights looked like he was performing a kata he learned before shooting the scene. Even Lewis Tan looked like he was just posing and posing and posing. I kept waiting for something to turn around. Every once in a while, there would be a moment where it looked like the fight scene was finally going to step up, but even at the end it wasn't very consistent or great. The fights from the show were far more intense, faster and more creative so I know it can be done.
Hell, the fights in Cobra Kai are better.
The script hit all the typical low budget marital art points and even had character development. The problem is that every actor just phoned it in. About the only person who was even trying to act was Francesca Corney, and this was her first acting job.
It felt like the actors were all contractually obligated to do this movie and the director was doing everything in one take, so the editors had to cut various scenes to chop out the bad parts making even explosions seem clunky.
About the only thing redeeming about this movie is the soundtrack, and even that felt hit or miss.
Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman (2021)
Poorly Written
Peyton isn't bad in this, and I can tell she's taking chances, but she just can't carry this movie. She's basically just playing Tori Nichols from Cobra Kai. Still, she doesn't do a bad job, but she also has almost nothing to work with. I blame the script. It's full of shortcuts, stereotypes, and lazy writing. It's clear they are trying to make Aileen a sympathetic villain. The victim of both misogyny and classism but then they turn around and nullify all the sympathy they've been building for her the whole time. In short, there is nothing in the movie that's believable only to find out the person telling the story can't be believed so what was the point?
Spoilers/Examples of things that were poorly written from here out.
-The Beach Scene at the beginning... Jenny has NO reason to get up and invite Aileen over. Then to invite her to stay the night? I get they need to set up the marriage to Jenny's father, but there had to be better ways than just "so the movie can happen"
Things that just didn't make sense form a writing perspective.
-The Boat Scene... She's almost assaulted on a boat in the middle of the ocean by the son of her husband's friend while friend and husband are right outside the cabin? Again, this scene is needed to show her as more of the victim, but it takes the lazy rout to get there.
-Dress Shopping... The store isn't aware of who she married? It was in the paper! Later, she's wearing actual cut off denim shorts making it seems like she will always look like she doesn't belong.
-Check Writing scene... The whole purpose of this was to get Jenny to talk to the lawyer for exposition. This is only to set up the confrontation scene where Aileen is confronted with that classism again. I was actually rooting for her to kill the lawyer in self-defense.
-"Black Mail" Scene... She's wearing shorts, cowboy boots and a bandana for a shirt. It's like her husband gives her a $5 allowance or something.
It's at this point in the movie that Aileen proves to be an unreliable narrator making me wonder if anything that's happened in this movie, so far, was real persecution or just Aileen making up excuses for what she's done. All my emotional investment goes right out the window.
I almost didn't finish the movie, but there was only 30 minutes left. These last 30 minutes are right out of a film noir story so it's defiantly not real.
Dark Light (2019)
Interesting Concept that could have been executed better
I want to like this movie. It has a lot of creativity and unique concepts with characters you have motives outside of "this needs to happen because I'm in a horror movie." Things are happening while the characters are responding to them.
Where the movie breaks down is more in the execution. Low Budget aside, I think the director does well with what they have to work with. The monster, however, acts as a generic creature from every other horror movie with a different look. The creativity is mostly in how they operate.
The only flaw this film has is that it depends on serious contrivances to keep the movie going. No spoiler but there is a moment in the movie where the only reason the story can keep going is that there's a cow there. As in, if that cow wasn't there, the movie wouldn't be able to continue. That's the worst of it, but it's other lazy writing moments like this that drag down what is an otherwise fresh take in the Creature Feature genre.
The Bad Batch (2016)
I wanted to like it
While Suki Waterhouse sells ever scene she's in, and I believe her character - I had a hard time feeling any connection to Arlen. It feels like this is just a series of events in this character's life in a crazy world and we're watching her adapt to it. But outside of that, we don't know much about her and her character arc is more like a subtle curve.
This brings me to the world this character is in and I love dystopian movies. I actually liked the world created in this movie. I feel like this is a setting meant for a TV show where you can explore more facets of it. Not a movie where the world has to be pushed to the background most of the time. But when it shines, it shines.
Save for Momoa's spotty accent, everyone does a good job. I didn't realize Jim Carrey was even in the movie until near the end when he finally made a facial expression that gave him away. I thought Reeves was going to be a throwaway cameo but he becomes a big reason the main character makes the choices she makes so without his character the whole 3rd act doesn't exist.
In the end, this felt like a bunch of great ideas that were introduced without enough time to develop. The end result is a main character that just has things happen to and around her with no real understanding of who she is or why she does the things she does. To me she kind of completes what could have been a goal for the whole movie in Act 1 so at that point all that's left is to see how the movie ends.
Nocturnal Animals (2016)
If you're read the synopsis you've seen the movie
The synopsis of this film IS the film. The movie itself doesn't develop the characters any further. It doesn't expand on what you learn form reading the synopsis and it never really bothers to answer any questions or resolve anything.
This movie spends so much time telling two stories at once it doesn't have time to develop anything.
The first story is the woman reading her ex-husbands manuscript and reflecting on the failures in their relationship. The second is the story the woman is reading. From time to time we cut to her reaction to the story so that we don't have to react to it.
Yet, neither of these stories really land anywhere. The book is the first problem, as it only servers to make the woman think about the past relationship. Because we know it's just his book there are no stakes for the character. It's like knowing the whole thing is a simulation so what's happening to the characters doesn't really matter. It's not "real" in a story that's also not real.
Am I really supposed to be invested in a fake character written by a fake character? How much suspension of belief am I supposed to have?
Next is the story of the woman. We get hints of things that may or may not be indicators of a problem in her current marriage. But, again, this doesn't go anywhere. We're never told if she IS feeling this way or if these feelings are justified. In the end we don't know if she's realized the errors of her ways and wants to go back to her ex-husband if she going to apologies for the things that were her fault in the marriage.
Some would say "the ending is open to interpretation" while I say "the movie just wasn't smart enough to have an ending" - I hardly thing it has much of a middle. This whole thing feels like the set up for the REAL story. I'd rather see the movie where she meets up with her ex-husband after being moved by the book he read because she had no faith in him and now needs to decide if she's going to stay in her current marriage which may also be failing or go back to the man she broke the heart of.
Where is THAT movie?
The Detained (2017)
A perfect storm of a failure
This movie might have had an ounce of potential with a better director or better writers.
The lines are HORRIBLY written, there is no plot development and the characters are so one dimensional I'm surprised I didn't get paper cuts watching this film. The movie can't seem figure out what it wants to be either. While the dialogue is written as if this was supposed to be a Parody of Scary movies, only worse, the actors feel like they are trying to make this a scary film when they should be playing up for laughs.
Honestly, the actors themselves aren't bad for what they have to work with. It's like going to build a doll house and being given duct tape and chop sticks as the only things you can work with. A few times the character interaction is so over the top ridiculous that you think the movie might be finally going in a direction so ludicrous it would redeem the film by proving it was meant to be that bad.
But then it goes back to trying to be what it's not and shows it really is just a bad film because the people making it didn't seem to have a clue as to what makes a movie like this work at all.
The Feed (2019)
We were so preoccupied with asking if we could...
The idea is good. The concept is strong. The world feels so very "near-future" that I excitedly watched the first episode. By the time it was over, I was interested in what happens next - I wasn't hooked, but I was curious. Out of curiosity to the central plot I kept watching but I found myself sitting through an hour of a show waiting for those 15 minutes of plot advancement.
The show spends a lot of time with character interaction, but don't confuse that for character development. By the time the show was over, I still hadn't become attached to, or invested in anyone. I did not worry about anyone dying, I didn't worry about anyone failing to achieve a task because I didn't think it would really make the story any better or worse.
By the time the plot was all figured out, near episode six, the show takes a sudden turn and the explanations stop. Things I thought were going to be explained get dropped and new things are introduced without explanation. Even the ending fails to answer anything while still changing everything.
IF there is a Season 2 I will skip it as there are FAR better shows on Amazon Prime past, present and future worth my time. Looking forward to that Upload Season 2, for example and I still would like to see a Tick Season 3.
Mayans M.C. (2018)
Avoids everything great about Sons of Anarchy
At it's core, what made Sons of Anarchy work was the characters. They were real people with problems outside of their MC. Jax was a son, trying to be a better father than he had. Gemma was a mom, trying to protect her family. Clay was a power hungry and just wanted to stay in power. Remove the MC club and all those elements are in place.
Mayan's has none of that. It is all about an MC with problems inside their own MC. In fact, the main reason the EZ even joined the MC is because the plot of the show needs him to. So, from the first episode this is more plot driven than character driven. In fact the only character that is of any interest is Coco Cruz because you can remove him from this show and his story would follow him. Remove Angel, and suddenly his character doesn't exist because he's there only create tension or tie plots together when needed.
And, I'm sorry, but for two people who were supposed to be lovers Bolger and Pardo have as much chemistry as Sodium and Snails. I get that they were going for a Romeo and Juliette kind of thing but right now it's more Edward and Jacob (yea, sans Bella) right now.
They need to give the main characters half as much thought as they do the plot if they want me to watch season 2.