MrHlad

Dumb action movies like The Fast and the Furious work with a simple rule: there has to be enough interesting things going on in them that you has no reason to dwell on how much they don't make sense, how many laws of physics are broken, and how bullshit it all is. The ninth installment of this car franchise didn't do it. Justin Lin's direction is surprisingly boring and unimaginative, and his action sequences are a level worse than what he showed in the earlier films or what his colleagues came up with later. Yeah, it's always banging, crashing into things, falling from somewhere, driving fast and shifting gears even faster, but compared to previous installments, there's just nothing here that makes you go "wow, this was so cool, I don't care that Vin Diesel can't act and doesn't have a neck." On top of that, sadly, all the fun characters that were capable of keeping up with Diesel and settling him down have disappeared, so now there's just him as an alpha-male and buffoons running around, whose original job was to be comedy reliefs and now they're trying in vain to look like heroes. Honestly, is there anyone who realistically cares anything about the characters of Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris or Nathalie Emmanuel? Diesel is on his own. John Cena's serious acting is utterly mismanaged, Charlize Theron has more or less a bigger cameo, and the whole thing drags on from nowhere to nowhere, and even the best action scenes, the most you can say is "OK, but you did so much better last time." Fast and the Furious 9 is probably just as stupid as the previous installments, it's just much more obvious thanks to the lackluster action and unimaginative direction. And much more of a chore to finish.

So sloppy, it's like nobody was trying very hard with Army of the Dead. The characters are so uninteresting that I didn't care what order they died in, the actors have no charisma or nothing to work with, and the first really interesting and entertaining action scene3 doesn't come until sometime at the beginning of the last quarter. Once they start shooting and slashing properly, it's quite fun, with Snyder keeping himself in check, so there aren't nearly enough of those slow-motion sequences to make it boring, it's just that there's about an hour of completely unnecessary ballast that is boring, where the most entertaining thing is how it all makes no sense at all. Sure, in a B-action flick, that shouldn't really matter, it's just that Army of the Dead may be a B-movie, but it really isn’t. There's climactic brutality , it only falls into the horror category because there are zombies. And Snyder's playing with the camera, which often leads to ugly visuals full of out-of-focus shots (which was supposedly the artistic intent), is more annoying than effective. I don't know. An hour after the closing credits, I can recall virtually nothing of it. Just that I was expecting a lot more than another routine Netflix movie, and I really didn't have those expectations particularly high. An unimaginative and boring waste of time.

Thanks to Sicario, Wind River, and the few Yellowstone episodes I've seen, I like Taylor Sheridan a lot, and I was understandably excited for his new release. Unlike my colleagues, however, I had the advantage of having read the book, so I was rather cautiously looking forward to it. And thanks for that, because that's why I’m so disappointed with Those Who Wish Me Dead. While Sheridan did get rid of some rather boring and unnecessary plot lines, unfortunately he was left with what was already a problem in the book. That is, rather uninteresting characters and, above all, the pointless waiting for something to actually start happening. Angelina Jolie sits on a watchtower with a trauma, Jon Bernthal is a cool sheriff dealing with an expectant family, a little boy whose dad pissed off the wrong people who killed him runs around the woods, and ridiculously incompetent hit men try to complicate everyone's lives. And it takes an hour for all the uninteresting plot lines to come together, the forest to catch fire, and for Angelina to finally be able to save the day. The ending doesn't look bad, and as a survival thriller set in a burning forest it could be interesting, except that we have that hour beforehand to spend with boring characters on a story that is, to say the least, B-grade trite and simple, which I don't mean as a compliment. I'm finally going to finish watching Yellowstone to fix my appetite and remind myself why I like Sheridan in the first place.

I'm very fond of Tom Clancy, Taylor Sheridan, Michael B. Jordan and actually quite a bit of Stefano Sollima. So I'm taking what eventually came out of Without Remorse pretty hard. Heck, the story has almost nothing to do with the source material, that wouldn’t be a problem in itself, if the film wasn’t as entertaining as watching paint dry. Jordan's pretty good in the badass lead role, and the fairly simple plot with a 90s feel could work under certain circumstances, except... it's just so fucking boring! Sollima shoots everything incredibly static and without any charge or attempt to invent anything. I even suspected him of sabotaging the film at one point, because what was happening on screen just wasn't and perhaps didn't want to be action-packed. Without Remorse doesn't peak or build-up in any way. The film just goes from nowhere to nowhere and basically never gets interesting. A perfectly wasted opportunity for all involved. And a waste of time for the audience.

The Tom and Jerry feature film is not about Tom and Jerry, It's about a young girl who starts working at a hotel and had lied on her resume, and now sort things out, and two animated animals that show up from time to time and make a mess. The mess is pretty funny and Chloë Grace Moretz doesn't completely bore either, but everything else is unimaginative routine at best. And given that Tom and Jerry themselves are relegated to the background for whatever reason, I don't really know who the result might entertain or appeal to. Not me.

Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson may be done with Resident Evil and zombies, but their Monster Hunter is more or less the same thing. Only there are dragons and dinosaurs, but otherwise this duo once again serves up solid action wrapped in a very contrived and uninteresting story with characters you'll be glad you remembered their name. Unfortunately, the decent action loses out on points to an uninteresting story and boring characters. But perhaps that's all one can expect from Anderson.

Evil aliens have kidnapped the superheroes and now the kids must discover the power of teamwork and camaraderie to save the world. It's all overseen by Robert Rodriguez, who attempts to follow in the footsteps of Spy Kids and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D, making it all rather cheesy, colourful, predictable, poorly acted and almost physically uncomfortable for the adult viewer. On the other hand, I don't see why any adult should watch it. But kids might like it, again.

A strange genre mash-up that one minute tackles toxic masculinity and a few minutes later has former Hit-Girl fighting a gremlin who wants to tear her bomber apart. And occasionally shoots down Japanese fighters. Shadow in the Cloud is a movie that awkwardly mixes a bunch of completely different things together, resulting in a weirdly disparate mess that's lucky in that it features a nifty actress in the lead role and the whole thing doesn't run too long. This genre incoherence makes Shadow in the Cloud a pretty interesting film. Good but not very good.

If I never saw another Patty Jenkins movie in my life, I wouldn't mind at all. Not that I was looking forward to her Wonder Woman 1984 or was a big fan of the first film, but those two and a half hours with Gal Gadot went by as fast as, say, the Thirty Years War. And I'm convinced it's the fault of a director who just can't handle blockbusters and action movies. WW1984 has an extremely excessive runtime and unfortunately most of it is completely pointless filler. The 1980s setting didn't make much sense to me, the film could have been set almost any time before Batman vs. Superman. Virtually nothing happens, and when the action does come, it's mediocre at best. The only lighter moments are the romantic scenes where the film can lean on Chris Pine. But the biggest problem I see is that Jenkins clearly wanted to make something that would be reminiscent of the first and second Superman. That is, a naive comic book movie with a simple plot, easily distinguishable good and evil, and lots of hope and optimism. I don't disagree. It's just that the end result is more like Superman 3 and 4, which really aren't good movies. Overall, Wonder Woman 1984 doesn't feel like a big 2020 movie, but like something that was made two years before the first Iron Man, when Hollywood still didn't really know how to handle comic book heroes and heroines and the whole superhero genre was still in search of a new direction. And no, I don't mean that as praise for the old-school approach. Jenkins simply made not an old-school movie, but a movie that feels extremely old. Aside from the nice costumes and production design, I don't really know what to praise about it or why I should recommend it to anyone.

Two good actresses in a woefully predictable story. I'm quite surprised that Aneesh Chaganty made such a useless film after the brilliant and original Searching.