An intolerable movie, this was a noisy affair, so unnecessarily loud, repetitive, wholly unimaginative, and just plain boring.
I hated it and hope you do too.
Death of a Unicorn (2025).
Category Archives: Film
The Score (2001).
The stories were rampant at the time and bloody hell they were amusing: Brando refusing to be directed by Frank Oz for he moonlighted as a Muppet, Miss Piggy to be exact. The lionised thesp apparently took an instant dislike to the bloke, so Bobby De Niro had to take over directing duties, Brando fed instructions through an earpiece.
Frank Oz valiantly played Yoda through all of his incarnations, for fuck’s sake. Give him some slack, Marlon!
Anyway, it’s three generations of method maestros sharing the screen; sadly, none of them chew the scenery and you can just imagine what Michael Mann or someone of that caliber would have done with the material, even if the script is a bog-standard bag of cliches.
A movie completely bereft of style, any Tom, Dick or Harry could have put this together, as it’s as visually nondescript and anonymous as a hundred TV movies from the past 30 years. Only this came out in cinemas and features three quite extraordinary actors.
It’s good enough, but 90 mins of the three of them having an unscripted conversation in a pub toilet would have been more engaging.
Tombstone (1993) is the Val Kilmer Show.
It’s a one-in-a-million movie that shouldn’t exist. But it’s here … with us.
And it’s an utter riot, from Billy Zane with hair to Michael Biehn spouting Latin. It’s indeed a frenzy of quotes, with Val Kilmer’s lines more like witty sayings you gleefully take into life than the casual dialogue of his permanently plastered Doc Holliday.
A perfectly orchestrated yarn and the definitive O.K. Corral flick, it works as elegiac drama and pure entertainment. It’s the kind of Western Martin Scorsese would have made, such is the movie’s vibrancy and the finesse of the direction.
Kilmer is at his most weird and iconic here, his best ever performance. It’s so unlike anything else he did, and I can’t recall many other actors creating such an impression in a supporting role. You think of Doc Holliday, you see Val Kilmer in an instant. Alas, despite the mammoth career he had, it never quite matched his undoubted talent.
His wee swansong in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) was a lovely, heartfelt touch from Cruise, but it’s sad to see. It’s taken on a greater resonance now.
Disney madness.
Wee stroll around Haymarket, Edinburgh, and within two minutes I’m assaulted by an ad for Snow White (2025) emblazoned on the side of a manky bus to Wester Hailes, immediately followed by a vessel to East Craigs with a Cinderella panto gig (starring the redoubtable Grant Stott) draped beneath its windows.
Meanwhile, a lad was carrying a rug over his shoulder into your generic ‘Men with Ven’ and I had Aladdin’s magic carpet in my head.
My mind has been infected by corporations today.
It now functions as a low-rent Disney medley.
Bye for now.
The Driver (1978). Watch. Promptly repeat.
It’s certifiably COOL and immaculately framed, from a director who understands framing and why it matters.
Ryan O’Neal is once again in a masterwork in which he’s the only actor you can envisage as the protagonist. No one else did impassive cool like him, and it’s even a cool that suggests dimensions behind the glacial exterior. His career never progressed beyond that ’70s apex because director’s didn’t use him properly, oblivious to the magnetism and effortless insouciance he could radiate within a narrow range.
You don’t need a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue in a movie this visual, which is what movies are, first and foremost. And the verbal exchanges may be minimal, but memorable, nonetheless.
Why is this so stylish? It’s from 1978. Influential is the term.
The Ghost and the Darkness (1996).
Was my fond memory of this movie clouded by nostalgia? Of course it was, but it’s not entirely rubbish.
We have embarrassingly cruddy dialogue exchanges and a bog-standard voice-over which is so nondescript it could be applied to a hundred movies. It runs out of ideas after 45 minutes, but looks and sounds glorious despite all the unchallenged British imperialism on display.
There is a ‘wasted opportunity’ dimension to it, given the highly respected screenwriter William Goldman penned the screenplay, and the Michael Douglas deuteragonist is as multi-dimensional as a Ned robbing Toilet Duck from a Lidl, in broad daylight, wearing a tracksuit from 1977. And Ice Man and Gekko’s methods of snaring this man-eating beastly duo aren’t imaginative and wearily become tiresome.
It’s nothing special; it’s not garbage, either, because it’s kind of funny.
But I don’t think Roger Ebert liked it much.
Even if Alex Ferns, a.k.a. wife-beating EastEnders villain Trevor Morgan, makes an appearance.
Alita: Battle Angel (2019).
Eavesdropping on the Lothian Buses no. 29 bus brought me here.
Christoph Waltz features so I thought it worth a proverbial bash. It looks spectacular in an anonymous way. It’s cliche-ridden to the max. It gets boring very quickly.
I evacuated after 34 minutes.
Next.
Ghost Ship (2002).
The opening is ingenious, a peach of gleefully shameless gore and sadly the rest of the movie can’t top it. It’s a neat wee concept for a horror but it’s as predictable as you get. I made a wee bet (with myself) that one of the characters would allude to the Mary Celeste. Within half an hour they did exactly that.
These movies are funny – actor-stars like Gabriel Byrne turning up in dross for the lolly. Why not? I’d do the same if I were still offered decent scripts after my sins.
Some of the kills were amusing. It looks fine enough. It’s stupid, but I wasn’t bothered. A shitter to watch if you’re ever on a DFDS Seaways and you have fuck all else to do as the bar has closed.
Blink Twice (2024).
The funereal pace of the exposition does it no favours; it was painful enduring this and it didn’t stop being dull for a long time in this never-ending crawl to the big reveal that you knew was coming from the off. All the characters were daft and vexing beyond belief, the type of folk I’d go out of my way to annoy – petty pursuits like sprinkling a bit of the ol’ Cyanide in their cocktails for a private wee chortle.
The premise didn’t go anywhere unexpected and any social commentary was hamstrung by conformity to genre convention and reliance on cheap splatter … which is all the movie really is.
But it did get moderately entertaining once the faffing around ceased.
2/5.
Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995).
I don’t care that Steven Seagal is a conceited asshole with zero acting talent, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995) is a bloody great movie – funny, thrilling, and better than the first outing. This was when Sensei Seagal’s ego was bananas but could be justified through bone-crunching mayhem that was pulled off so well, you believe it when Casey Ryback doesn’t even get a scratch on him after 90 minutes of knife fights.
Not these days. He’s a fucking pie presently.
Bye for now.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 