MrHlad

Stuntman Ryan Gosling must find a lost movie star in order to save the film of his beloved Emily Blunt. And for her, he'll go through hell. David Leitch delivers an entertaining tribute to the stunt craft and all those who practice it. He combines great action with surprisingly even better romance, a nice bit of wit and humor, and the obvious joy of goofing around on set with the friends he's spent his entire career with. And it's great to watch.

Zack Snyder must have gone definitively insane because he made not one, but two completely useless movies with nothing in them. The first one at least had a stupid recruitment of heroes, the second one is based on slow motion shots of farmers in a field and one poorly shot fight. You won't care who survives and who dies. You can't count how many slow motion shots Snyder crams in. You'll just sit and wonder where the filmmaker who was poised to be the new genre star after 300 has gone. It's a harrowing film. And slowed down most of the time.

Jean Kayak is stranded in the North American wilderness and must learn to fend for himself. And even though he'll eventually turn into a courageous outdoorsman, hunting hundreds of beavers to buy his beloved a ring won't be easy. This frantic black-and-white slapstick combines the classic silent films of Charlie Chaplin and other legends with the poetics of Looney Tunes cartoons, the visual style of Karel Zeman, and the intense action of Wallace and Gromit. You've probably never seen anything like Hundreds of Beavers, and you definitely should.

I've waited more than twenty years for a movie or TV series adaptation of “Fallout”. It pretty much sucks.

The world is in danger as an ancient spirit returns to the scene, intent on turning everything into ice, and he must be stopped by the Ghostbusters, young and old – or rather, the old ones. The sequel to the successfully rebooted franchise refuses to move on, relying on the nostalgia card, which of course stops working after half an hour. And then it gets bad. They don't really address the plot, the new characters or ideas, they just look for ways to reference something from the original films, forgetting that the film should build up, lead to something and you should care about the characters not just because you saw some of them thirty-five years ago. A useless film that may well bury the franchise.

The original Wages of Fear really didn't deserve this. Julien Leclercq has literally emasculated the story and left the complex and nuanced characters as empty shells. Relationships, complex pasts and ambiguity are virtually non-existent. Still, it could have been a fine thriller about two trucks filled with nitroglycerin, but Leclercq is completely inept at action, edits poorly, shoots the action dully, and intersperses it with really ugly CGI at times. As an action B-movie, it's boring and annoying. As a new adaptation trying to follow up two famous films, it's downright embarrassing.

Good stuff, though a little different than I expected. Dev Patel turned out to be a good action hero, but more importantly he managed to show his talent as a director. He knows how to play with visuals and over-stylized colours, beautifully evoking the feeling of two worlds in an Indian metropolis, and he's totally confident and assured in action. He makes imaginative use of camera and editing, as well as cover versions of 80s songs, and he's not afraid of blood in the slightest. Monkey Man is very much a gritty spectacle, and in the action scenes it recalls The Raid or Ong-bak, and Tom Yum Goong with Tony Jaa in its dirtiness and uncompromising nature. So it's rather disappointing that all this visual and action deliciousness is based on the most banal revenge story, there are virtually no supporting characters and the Indian mysticism has perhaps too much space for my taste. Moreover, it doesn't really get going properly until somewhere around the middle, so I left the cinema feeling that I might not have gotten quite what I was hoping for. As a debut, however, Monkey Man is mature, imaginative and clearly acted and filmed with gusto. As an action filmmaker, Dev Patel will definitely interest me.

In Hollow Earth, Kong discovers a civilization terrorized by a giant monster, and since he's no match for it, he must join forces with Godzilla. And all the while, things are going horribly wrong. The new entry into the Monsterverse is utter bollocks, except that director Adam Wingard fills it with lots of cool fights, a nicely colored world, and doesn't waste any time. The two hours are a fine loud action flush. That's all it is. But that's all anyone could hope for.

Eighties classics, Jake Gyllenhaal on top form a solid cast, Doug Liman behind the camera, and Prime Video as a streaming service that goes toe-to-toe with these guys... the result? Well, let's just say it fell short of expectations. The new Road House is a film whose makers seem to have misunderstood the magic of straight-up 80s action movies and trip over their own feet. Overlong, with a dysfunctional hero who smiles and looks like the nicest guy in Florida the whole time, at least, but we know the trauma is in there somewhere... it's just that since we know it, there's no need to wait a hundred minutes for it to be resolved. And in between, we spend time with boring side characters who are just as goofy as in the original, only here they're god knows why give more space to talk about their life's hurts. And there's a hell of a lot of music playing to go with it, and they're staring dreamily into the stupid. All that delays the fights – though maybe that's not such a big deal. Gyllenhaal's getting his kicks, Conor McGregor enjoys his madman, and the rest of the male cast is just there to get smacked around, and Daniela Melchior is there to give the bouncer a disingenuous bashing. That's okay. But the way Liman conceptualizes the action scenes, the bullshit he comes up with with the camera, and how vehemently he tries to be different and innovative, only to have it usually blow up in his face (it's really not very pretty to look at) is the final nail in the coffin of disappointment. The new Road House doesn't actually do downright well at practically anything. It does something average, something slightly above average, but most of the time it's just completely off. And boring at that.

Three mates once invented a fake friend, Ricky, to whom they blame all their troubles even as adults. But now their families want to finally meet him, so they hire a broke actor to impersonate Ricky. And things get a little out of hand. This wacky comedy is pulled forward by the great John Cena, a few jokes work, a few don't, and the film fails to leave a significant impression. For two hours, though, it's quite pleasantly entertaining.