Casting Call: The new Transformer movie - working title "Revenge of the Curly Haired Humans" - is looking to hire for the lead roles, two extremely annoying and unappealing actors that can't act. It's impressive how they can make each Transformer movie worse than the last. Diggable Planets "Cool like Dat" which plays early in the film is probably the worst and least cool track ever made and the rest of their 90s hip-hop selection is awful. Annoying as hell transformer Mirage (good name for a stripper or a trans gender entertainer) kills a cop by crashing his car into a divider and there is tons of other anti-american / commie references. What exactly do the animal "Transformers" transform into by the way? Those poor beasts really got shafted by the creator but at least he gave Optimus Primal (lol!!!!) a little monkey fur on his shoulders which must definitely come in handy for something?!? Am I the only one that thinks Optimus Prime has a ridiculous voice matched only by his inane one liners - and yes I know he is supposed to have that voice but it does not make it ok IMO. If you can get past all that crap some of the action sequences are not too bad... I am on an action choreography critique campaign with a particular focus on unrealistic fights where the participants have opportunities to end their adversary but instead let him/her (is himer a word?) take a lil breather instead of crushing hisers (why de heck doesn't English have a neutral form like our ex-pals the Ruskies do?) skull... Anyway, Revenge of the Beasts action sequences suffer severely from this annoying phenomena. I will call it the "now that you've killed me, I really regret not having killed you those couple times when I could have syndrome. My gen Z chikd says it's ok to post this perhaps slightly unpolitically correct comment so if you have a problem with it you're too conservative.
The movie is not bad, but Kevin Hart is just terribly annoying. And why does he have to emphasize race? "Why are you asking a black man to steal a police car". What does that have to do with it? Later in the movie "I am boiling that white woman". Why is race at all important?! Stop referencing if its not important. Not everything is about race.
Kevin Hart seems to permanently play the exact same character who just does not stop talking and tries to be funny by just talking too much. Which it is not. Too bad. It is the same as Melissa McCarthy who also can only play 1 single character and is also absolutely never funny with her one-liners.
Could have otherwise been a fun movie if it had a different actor in it.
Woody Harrelson did kill it and is the only thing saving this movie.
Kaley Cucuo her role is so tiny that its hardly worth mentioning.
Story itself is kind dumb and 13 in a dozen. Or perhaps 15 in a dozen. You see the plot "twists" coming 5 miles away.
Anyway. I could smile a few times and it was fine having this movie play while I was reviewing some document for work.
After a zombie outbreak, Las Vegas is quarantined away from the rest of the world and becomes a city of the dead. Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada), the owner of a casino, has 200 million dollars locked in his vault and hires a team of mercenaries, led by Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), to retrieve it. Things become more complicated when Scott’s daughter, Kate (Ella Purnell) tags along and they discover more than just your average zombies inside the city.
What Works:
The best part of this movie is, hands-down, the gore. We get some absolutely gnarly kills of both zombies and humans alike. The best part is, a lot of them are shocking, so you don’t even see it coming until the blood seems the splatter across the screen.
Dave Bautista is solid as the main protagonists. I was expecting him to be a comedic hero, like his portrayal of Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy. That really isn’t the case. He doesn’t have many funny moments. He is the emotional core of the movie. He gets a few scenes where he gets to act in hurt and despair and he does a good job.
Matthias Schweighöfer plays the best character of the movie, Ludwig Dieter, the safecracker. Dieter is the comic relief character, and from the trailer, I was ready to bet everything that he would be extremely obnoxious. I was wrong. Schweighöfer does a great job and is both funny and charming. He was one of the only characters I was actually invested in seeing live.
Finally, I really enjoyed the unique zombies they had running around Las Vegas. I’m not used to seeing zombies on horseback or zombie-tigers. Having an actually intelligent army of the dead was something I was not expecting, but it was certainly unique and gave us a few fun moments.
What Sucks:
This movie is almost two and a half hours long and it simply doesn’t need to be. There are plenty of scenes and lines that could have been cut. This film drags at times, that’s for sure.
The biggest problem I had is the cinematography. Zack Snyder not only directed this movie, but acted as his own cinematographer. He should never do that again. He really likes to have one object or person in focus at a time and make everything else a blurry mess. It’s both distracting and ugly.
Most of the characters are really underdeveloped and not only that, they are really stupid. You can make me care about characters by making me emotionally invested in them or by making them competent. There are so many terrible decisions and most of them aren’t developed enough for me to care.
Finally, this movie has problems with its tone. I supposed I shouldn’t be that shocked when a Zack Snyder movie is dark and depressing, but this film was marketed as a fun thrill ride. It really isn’t that. Almost everyone dies and by the end of it, it all feels like a waste. Nothing much was accomplished and the character we spent a huge chunk of the movie trying to rescue dies without any acknowledgement. If Geeta (Huma Qureshi) had survived, it might have felt somewhat worth it.
Verdict:
Army of the Dead has solid performances from Dave Bautista and Matthias Schweighöfer, a very unique batch of zombies, and some amazing gore. However, the tone and cinematography are a mess, the characters are stupid and underdeveloped, and the runtime is too long. It’s a decent enough watch, but don’t spend any money on it.
Women deserve better films than this, don't give them this. We're not helping women, whatever the hell that means, by giving them the most basic, bare bones, modern, disgusting trite nonsense this is. There's an eyerolling "girl power" montage right before the main titles appear. For no reason. It's not a commercial on television, it's not an advertisement, it's just a random clip show of girls doing stuff. It's just gross. There's no point to it other than flaunt, "Aren't I doing the female sex a positive by saying how good it is to have a vagina?!" All of the male characters are very comically sexist, white, and troublesome, outside of Patrick Stewart of course. The action is tired, a lot of it borrowed from stuff like Now You See Me and Mission Impossible, except much more obnoxious, thanks to Banks needlessly making all of our three new leads as insufferable as possible. Stewart especially I've never hated this much, not even back in the Twilight days. None of her jokes make any sense, she babbles every line, and she does it every time she opens her mouth. I was able to endure fifty minutes or so before realizing I didn't even know any of their names or what was going on because the film's priorities lie in all the wrong places, establishing the organization and the villain rather than our leads. There's even a humorous piece during the first major car chase where one of them asks, "Who is that? Why is he shooting at us?" And I was like, "I'm asking the same thing!" The first line in the film is, "I think women can do anything." Is this really a debate we're still trying to have and the media trying to push on to the general American public? Women in the west are the most freed and supported than at any other point in human history. How fucking ironic that this film that wants to act as a female power move is funded in part by China, a place that has internment camps for Muslims; they show happy Muslims in the film in that opening montage. Hey Banks, why don't you use some of your money you had to make this movie and go help out those people instead of sucking more Hollywood dick to get to make the Invisible Woman film you're now directing? I guess virtue signalling is more important. I only get heated about this because how hypocritical the people who are making this film are being. Glad this shit bombed.
Charlie's Angels (2019) is everything I expected it to be, and that’s unfortunate. I can't think of a single thing I liked about this. It felt more like 119 minutes commercial to promote the new Charlie’s Angels song by Ariana Grande. This movie is yet another victim of American “wokeness”. Hollywood thinks that filling a main cast with women, having a female director and saying "girl power" enough times is all you need to create an empowering movie. Some women might like that but I’m not one of them.
Everything about this movie was hyper-generic:
the plot / villain - the whole Calisto shenanigans is outdated and tired - oh no, a bad guy has stolen dangerous tech and is going to sell it to another bad guy;
The dialogue is dreadful. I think the screenplay was entirely constructed of viral woke tweets;
the action scenes were pretty average, copy paste from other movies. It was weird to see all these skinny women with spaghetti arms to beat all the big men.
The three leads have absolutely no chemistry or star power. The characters were not likable and lacked personality. I just didn’t see where they had enough of a developed relationship. The Angels seemed dysfunctional, like mediocre spies who had no idea what they were doing. Kristen Stewart looks so damn awkward in all movies she's in. And the comedy (if you can call it that) just fell flat.
Charlie's Angels (2019) follows the ‘focus more on the politics not the plot movie’ rule, so it has one reason to exist - to empower women. But that’s the most frustrating part - it paints gender politics so simply: women = strong, men = bad. I mean, they even had a German security guard to harass one of the main characters because she looked hot on the security camera, I’m hard pressed to believe German men act like that at work. I thought we are past having characters saying stuff like "Women can do anything" as though it's some kind of revolutionary statement. Why don't instead of writing these dumb pseudo-empowering one liners, write engaging and realistic character arcs for women? Also, I hate movies that feel like they are punching you in the face over and over to get their point across.
One more thing I extremely dislike - they visit like 15 different countries in the film. But you barely notice because everywhere people speak ... English. Yes, even German security employees communicate with each other in English. It happens a lot when Hollywood makes movies in foreign countries.
It isn't an easy task, trying to sum this film up in a couple paragraphs, but I will do what I can. This is one of those films that I walked into with sky-high expectations and it is one of the very few that not only met those expectations, but beat the piss out of them as well. Kingsman: The Secret Service has all the makings of a great thriller/comedy/action/spy/romance film and if you are a fan of movies at all, I highly recommend it. I am not going to go into detail about the movie, you should really just go watch it.
Throughout the film, there were a couple of times that I was reminded of the Men in Black franchise. Though Kingsman has nothing to do with extraterrestrials, the humorous secret service theming is very familiar. But I found Kingsman to be superior in several ways. The story is complete and satisfying with a few decent twists but nothing totally mindfucking. And if you are like me and expect a certain level of character development in order to be happy, you won't be disappointed.
There is a small bit of disbelief that you have to suspend in order to enjoy the movie, but I had no trouble with that. The fight scenes were ridiculously cool, even for someone like me that isn't really an action kind of guy. I am more about finding an emotional connection to the characters in a film and I became fairly attached to several of them in this one. My only real complaint was that a couple instances in the film that utilized a green screen were very noticeable and almost hard to get past. But what it lacks in green screen effects, it more than makes up for in humor and other special effects.
So, in conclusion, this was a movie well worth seeing. So hurry up and catch it while it's still in theaters.
