Another De Niro film from his comedy vault, the two-hour running time put me off, but Tarantino speaks fondly of the movie, so that sealed the deal. It’s terrible. Shame on you, QT.
It does have a wee something to say about ageism, but it’s barely even believable. And it’s another stomach-churning movie about American office culture, with its sycophantic, annoying-as-fuck employees who couldn’t be more boring and who live for the pleasure of working for boring cunts.
And I was bored.
Hated it.
The landscape offers a lot to work with, ripe vistas aplenty, but there’s no enduring image from the cinematography side of things.
I was expecting tension and chills; this was mainly boring and unimaginative. Nothing seemed to be at stake despite all the bloodshed, and the lack of any dynamic between the driver and the demented hitchhiker is a letdown. I couldn’t locate a personality in anyone here in what in essence is a variation of the same violent road encounter occurring every 10 minutes.
The laziness of writing pisses me off, be this in a slimy thriller like we have here or a mega bucks operation. It’s not difficult to insert a few character traits and attempt to build depth but nah, apparently it’s too much of a Herculean task.
Rutger Hauer could be a scary man, though. And what happened to C. Thomas Howell?
It wasn’t my choice to watch this ugly tripe.
And I’ll never watch it again, or any movie featuring anyone involved in it.
Unfunny, painfully coarse to the level of beyond cringe, and just plain annoying.
If someone gave me a DVD of this, I’d use it as a weapon to assault them with.
Bye for now.
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.
Belter of a trailer (and tune), though:
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.
I hear it flopped at the box office.
Audiences are stupid.
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.
A first for cinema?
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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’.
It was not meant to be.
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.
John Woo, you just disappointed me, pal.
Shite.
Watch this instead:
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.
