Movies I wish I had skipped. This could be for any number of reasons: the film was made sloppily, the narrative didn’t engage me, or I simply could not connect with the film in any way for whatever reason.
Rampage is a 1980s arcade game in which three giant, mutated animals—a gorilla, a lizard, and a wolf—stomp through city skylines. The monsters tear down buildings, destroy military vehicles, and eat people. All for points. The game was popular enough to be ported over to multiple video game consoles.
The video game has no story and few characters (the monsters are given names, at least). Yet, somehow, Hollywood has managed to give the intellectual property both of these things. At least, enough of these things to produce a marketable movie.
On the last day of Spring Break in Mexico, Olivia (Lucy Hale) is convinced by a man she meets at a bar (Landon Liboiron) to travel to an abandoned and remote convent with her friends. There, the stranger asks them to play an innocent game of truth or dare. One of Olivia’s friends remarks with a flippant comment along the lines of, “What, like we’re in seventh grade?”
Just to be clear, they’re not. The grown adults proceed to play the game in one of the more tonally awkward sequences of Truth or Dare (or Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare, an attribution tagged on seemingly due to the success of last year’s Get Out and Happy Death Day). The scene is meant to Continue reading Truth or Dare (2018) Movie Review→
Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm) is a negotiator. In 1972, he works for the U.S. government in Beirut. At a dinner party, he sums up the situation in Lebanon by calling the country a “boarding house without a landlord” that was thrown into confusion when the Palestinians “moved in.”
He continues talking in this politically-savvy way, as if he understands that the country is headed toward civil war. When he is brought back to Beirut 10 years later, however, he seems surprised at what he sees when he touches down.
In 1972, at the aforementioned dinner party, a person close to him is killed in the crossfire of a shootout. In 1982, Skiles is tasked with Continue reading Beirut (2018) Movie Review→
The main conversation surrounding Chappaquiddick, the drama from John Curran detailing the events following the drunk driving accident perpetrated by Ted Kennedy that cost Robert Kennedy campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne her life, is a political one. A political film breeding political conversation; the equation makes sense.
Apparently the liberal creatives behind the film are frustrated with the lack of liberal media attention for the film, and the conservative audience is the one championing the film for not sugar-coating the incident—although, to play devil’s advocate to the IndieWire piece, a good number of liberal-minded critics have given the film positive reviews.
In 2013, Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor told the soap operatic story about a woman whose life falls apart due to a reckless and ill-advised romantic relationship. With 2018’s Acrimony, Perry weaves a story with the exact same premise, frame narrative and all.
Temptation was a tone-deaf, overly dramatic tragic romance that failed on almost every level. Acrimony…well Acrimony at least has Taraji P. Henson. Continue reading Acrimony (2018) Movie Review→
Ernest Cline’s science fiction novel Ready Player One is not just laced in nostalgia; it is fully marinated in it. The story takes place in 2045, where most people in the world are deeply entrenched in an MMO-style VR video game dubbed The Oasis. With the death of the video game’s creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance, in the film adaptation), a massive game-wide hunt is afoot for an Easter Egg that will give its finder control over The Oasis.
In essence, it is a story about Easter Eggs created by a person with a strong fondness for Easter Eggs that itself is littered with Easter Eggs. It is a nostalgia vehicle. This is not inherently a bad thing.
In Pacific Rim: Uprising, the sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 film Pacific Rim, one-time military cadet Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) rips off junkers in a war-torn city to make his living. 10 years prior, Jake’s father (Idris Elba) sacrificed himself to stop a breach in the sea floor that allowed building-sized Kaiju into the world.
Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) moves from Boston to get away from her stalker (Joshua Leonard). In doing so, she gets a new job—as we see briefly in one scene where she glibly takes down a customer on the phone—and starts hooking up with people on Tinder—as we see briefly in one scene where she glibly tells a guy that all she wants is a one night stand.
When this one night stand ends in Sawyer seeing the face of her stalker in the man she has taken home, she goes to a psychiatric hospital to see a professional. During this meeting, she off-handedly mentions her previous thoughts of suicide. When the appointment concludes, she goes to leave, only to find that Continue reading Unsane (2018) Movie Review→
Harold Soyinka (David Oyelowo), a low-on-the-totem-pole businessman working for a nondescript white collar business run by Richard Rusk (Joel Edgerton) and Elaine Markinson (Charlize Theron) travels to Mexico to take a meeting, only to find out that he is being used as a patsy by his employers.
The man that he is in Mexico to meet, it turns out, works for drug kingpin Black Panther (not that one), who, upon hearing that they are being cut out of Richard and Elaine’s business dealings, assumes Harold is Continue reading Gringo (2018) Movie Review→
The 2008 horror film The Strangers is, at its essence, a ripoff of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games with a high concept marketing angle (i.e. eerie masks and a crude smiley face logo). Now, 10 years later, we are granted with another high concept sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night. It is a film that both relies on the weight of its predecessor to get people to see it and expects us to ignore that first film when it attempts the same template.
Much of Prey at Night is a rehash of the first film. The victims, in this case a nuclear family of four (Christina Hendricks, Martin Henderson, Bailee Madison, and Lewis Pullman), are stalked quietly and forebodingly by Continue reading The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018) Movie Review→
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