An hour of breezy climbing-the-ladder banter, researched kind of well but still replete with whopping inaccuracies, Vice (2018) holds in admiration its protagonist’s uncanny appreciation of the mechanisms of power. Perfectly decent performances and a freewheeling narrative structure lost my interest just when events should have made the content interesting. It got decidedly shite by the last throes and I had no choice but to turn the farce off once the director broke the fourth/fifth/sixth wall.
Perhaps there wasn’t much human substance there to document beyond 60 mins.
For some reason I cannot and do not wish to fathom, a Mad Max ‘Easter egg’ appeared in the revolting Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) and it almost sullied my appreciation for anything Mad Max or even the name Max. Almost.
Furiosa (2024), a prequel set decades prior to the magisterial Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), thankfully does not feature a Deadpool or a Wolverine. Cunts.
Anyway, what was this movie like, you may enquire?
I was expecting a frenzied shitload of George Miller mental action which is always of the most inventive and considered (visually) kind, and he delivered. I was never in any doubt. It’s a feast for the eyes and ears, the stunt work once again mesmerising. And it actually has a deep storyline and characters for this kind of preposterous fare.
Ah, yes. It’s 1989 and Back to the Future Part II has ended on a cliffhanger and it’s a ‘To Be Concluded’. But nah, here’s a preview at the end credits to the final installment which is on its way very soon. Audacious.
It’s a promising premise that gradually feels like it’s segueing into gritty Euro thriller territory, a mature version of Taken (2008), but sadly doesn’t. We have a barely interesting character study by the end and the decisions the lad makes don’t appear logical (or believable).
I almost wished it to descend into mindless bone-crunching mayhem. Just for the ‘lolz’.
John Woo in his Hong Kong heyday made the most insane actioners of his time, movies that defied categorisation to the extent that he created a new genre. His pictures were somehow operatic and you could absorb real feeling from them. That and the mayhem, the bullets, the exploding heads, the carnage which seemed to have been concocted by Hannibal (psychiatrist, not conqueror of the Alps).
He ventured into the States and helmed the barking Face/Off (1997) and sadly never topped that, but how could he?
Now we’ve got a remake, for whatever reason, of one of his indelible HK masterworks.
It was depressing in its pointlessness, visually as dull as these things come. The scenes are shot and edited just like I would expect from your standard hacks for hire. Not a shred of artistic imprint was on this vacuous yarn. I didn’t think it could get any worse but then Eric Cantona turns up, looking away with the fairies and perplexed, which I found most perplexing. Fabulously talented football player. But he has the acting talent of a Wookie interviewing for the Third Reich.
Movies concerning sharks are usually a bit of fun, aren’t they?
The material will either be masterpiece-level cinema (Quint monologues), or guiltily enjoyable schlock (genius sharks swimming backwards). Actually, there is no middle ground in what is after all a genre about sharks.
And this frightfest from the deep?
Brainy people acting most stupidly through their unchecked arrogance, the treat their comeuppance.
I jettisoned the subtitles for the dubbing, just so it would be that wee bit more amusing. It was rubbish but funny, even if the premise trumped the end result.
This is the best-looking movie about gruesome happenings of the soul and imagination.
You’re seduced, almost, into its albeit engrossing web of cruelty through the outrageous grandiosity of its style; it’s obsessively framed and lit. Yet it somehow never descends into the pretentious, a rare movie that pulls off its conceit.
And Michael Shannon is in it and he can do no wrong.
This is a good movie in a landscape of capes and all that.
This is based on a lauded video game. I haven’t heard of it or played it, so I won’t bother alluding to the geneses of 2007’s Hitman. Timothy Olyphant has been around forever and he’s a fine actor but has never quite hit the A-list. I mind him first rocking up as the zany Mickey (“the freaky Tarantino film student!”) in Scream 2 (1997) and the slimy drug dealer in Go (1999). He’s had decent work ever since, though he was a monotonous ‘presence’ in Die Hard 4.0 (2007), but that’s down to having zilch to work with.
This movie kicks off with one of the most turgidcredits sequences I’ve seen, with ‘Ava Maria’ joining in the snores. The lack of originality wasn’t a shock; the entire film being an imitation number wasn’t, either.
It has a bit of visual verve to it, and we have a sympathetic protagonist (Olyphant is good) with more layers than I expected for this variety of trash. The dialogue, though, is so lumpen and stilted it’s like R2-D2 beeped the words and had them translated by a writer on the expired soap opera of mank that was Brookside. “Eat your sandwich, I need to get some sleep,” orders our eponymous hitman to Olga Kurylenko. Profound words. It’s a full 90 mins of this kind of exchange.
To add to the melting pot of the derivative, Dougray Scott (“I coulda been Wolverine”) is also in it with his Received Pronunciation Scottish accent, Sean Ambrose from Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) but as an Interpol agent. The plot is confusing and confused; even the actors seem confused as to what is actually happening and why. The totality of this flick is that it’s Bourne-lite and Luc Besson-lite at the same time.
Shite, but just shite. It has no pretensions to be anything else, so it receives a 1/5 from me.
Mental movie and in a good way. It has a lot to say about media and brainwashing but in typical Cronenberg style it’s through humans disintegrating or losing their marbles. It’s not as bad as Dr. Ian Malcolm vomiting on a sweet delicacy and metamorphosing into an insect, but it approaches it. One would always confuse the Davids Lynch and Cronenberg. They are thematically so similar, but Lynch veering more into dream territory and Cronenberg the flesh. This could have been a Lynch movie, though.
Videodrome (1983) is some experience, and I had to watch it twice to figure out what I thought was going on. It’s never boring and always … well, nuts.
I didn’t know what to make of this. Nothing happens but it does. The ‘conflict’ isn’t about anything important; zero character arcs. It got a bit dull. The quotes are memorable. It looks fabulous.
I saw it in the cinema in 2007 with a bucket of Blue WKDs. It was a masterpiece back then.
I’ll give it another whirl in a few weeks. With some Blue WKDs.
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Wanderings and ... wonderings. 