The directing is very cheesy and generally it's just a bit boring.
The fights have so many cuts that they're unwatchable, it's not possible to follow the action and it literally makes me feel ill.
It's basically a superhero movie about a couple of guys who spontaneously decide they want to kill all of the mob bosses and turn about to be somehow superhumanly competent while also being dumbasses.
Some moments are funny stupid, other moments are awkwardly stupid, but the stupidity never stops.
A cartoon of a TV show. The comic tone of the show doesn't so much undermine the toxic ideology of white supremacy as in Jojo Rabbit but instead provide a simple, comfortable, palatable bad guy. The comedy, however weak, provides a cover for ignoring the complexity of the evil it touches.
The spy drama is like a see-saw, where the advantage shifts from one side or the other, but there is no real sense of struggle when the balance shifts, and no sense that the victories are earned. Each complex challenge has an easy solution.
As for the personal drama, Hanna herself is also not a particularly compelling main character. I would have expected a greater sense of excitement (whether wonder or fear) when the girl who grew up in the wilderness finally rode her first vehicle, or saw her first TV or listened to her first mp3, but she mostly takes it all in stride. Hell, even as awkward as she is, she's still far too comfortable around other people given her extreme lack of interpersonal experience. There isn't a sense of how deeply this incredible background should have shaped her or the difficulty she should be facing in overcoming it.
Really impressed by some of the casting in this show: Brendan Fraser, Timothy Dalton, Alan Tudyk.
It commits a lot of time to explaining how useless and worthless the characters are as they bumble their way through the plot.
Overall, the show has a vindictive, bleak and juvenile tone to it, while also being somewhat restrained, full of edgy jokes that feel like they've emerged from the pen of a teenager who's afraid to be too edgy lest they offend their mother.
For example, there is "Crazy Jane" whose superpower revolves around her multiple personality disorder who gets to provide the wish fulfilment of doing something like, violently stapling a poster to someone's head, but doesn't have to deal with the moral complexity of that action because it was just her "bitch personality" doing it. In fact, 3 out of the 4 heroes in the original group (all but the protagonist) have superpowers that practically have personalities of their own, therefore justifying a wide range of out-of-character actions on the basis that "their superpower did the bad thing". The bad thing is played for a bit of drama or a joke and then we move on and forget about it because the thing they did wasn't on purpose.
On the matter of vindictiveness, it's a little worrying that the mental illnesses experienced by many of the characters are just framed as character-defining quirks belonging to "losers" and not as, like, genuine mental illnesses in need of professional treatment.
In the end, my experience is that the show is watchable but kind of boring and shallow.
In the original animated film, Mulan wants to be normal but she's not very good at it so she feels like an outsider until she finds her place by using her unique talents as a soldier, even though that's socially unacceptable (and illegal) as a woman.
In this remake, Mulan is good at literally everything and born with superpowers, but no one is willing to accept a woman who's competent at anything so she has to struggle with the lie of pretending she's a mere mortal until she decides to stop being ashamed of being the physical embodiment of perfection.
A few flaws presented themselves right from the outset.
First of all, the show is Stargirl, not Starman. Why does it start with an action scene revolving around Starman's death instead of starting with Courtney, the girl who will be Stargirl?
Secondly, it's not clear why Starman is such a dick to his trusted and heroic sidekick Pat. Immediately after Pat runs into an exploding building and rescues him, Starman waxes on how he needs someone ACTUALLY heroic to inherit his powers. Of course, the real reason is just that the staff is not compatible with him. Surely it'd be easier to just say that instead of dissing your best friend on your deathbed. Perhaps the compatibility issue will be clarified as a bit of a Thors Hammer "worthiness" scenario, but if so it's still not clear how Courtney is any more qualified than Pat aside from simply being Starman's daughter.
Moreover, if they wanted to say that Starman is heroic, perhaps they could heve spent his screentime showing how heroic he really is?
Thirdly, what were the villains trying to do 10 years ago that was so important it needed to be shown to us steaight away? After the villains defeated the heroes 10 years ago, what have they been doing? Just sitting around and scheming it seems. (And apparently also raising a child in their eeeeevil mansion.)
They set up a (boring) character arc for Courtney where she would have to learn to accept her new stepfather. But then that arc is resolved halfway into the first episode -- not through character growth but simply when she is presented with an opportunity to blackmail her new stepfather (but I suppose she's only blackmailing him "heroically"). Following that, there's no character arc provided for her. Overall, the only real conflict is external, and we're never given any sense of the stakes.
Just in general, the writing is terrible and the acting is unconvincing.
After the first episode, I had deep concerns about this series. It starts with a pretty cool and funny origin story for the members of the Umbrella Academy but it spends little time addressing the question of who these people are. (Sure, you get plenty of information about "what" they are. One's a drug addict, one's an astronaut, one's a celebrity, etc.)
In the end, the show has so little faith in our attention span that it has to tell us the central plot, like something ripped from the Heroes TV show, a time traveller announces that the world will end in a few days and they don't know how it will happen but they have to stop it.
There are no personal stakes. It is action packed, but the action lacks context. The weight of their actions (such as murder of a group of bank robbers) lacks gravity or consequences. And the bland, confident, sarcastic attitudes of the characters is out of place in what should be dramatic, life changing moments. Hell, their long lost brother, who has been a missing person for more than a decade, suddenly returns and... Everyone just acts like he's just returned from a holiday or something. Seriously!? Additionally, from his perspective he's spent like 30 years away from his family and away from anything resembling civilization until he finally achieved backwards timetravel and... His emotional response is that he is a bit annoyed that he gets to be young again.
The problems didn't end there. More and more it seems like among every character in the show, there isn't a single human who is able to have a single human emotion.
This show is basically a modern version of Buffy.
I feared it would be overly Christian but it wasn't. It's about as religious as you'd expect any TV show about Shaolin monks would be.
I enjoyed that it wasn't constantly focused on spectacle for the sake of spectacle and is solidly character-driven. I enjoyed how it took the time to explore the humanity of most of the characters (including villains) and there are moments you question whether certain characters are really going to develop into true antagonists.
The plot isn't always surprising, and not always perfectly executed (an example being where a demon just stands around holding an impaled Lilith while Ava decides to pick up a sword), but its characters are always thoroughly believable and the action is visually quite appealing.
This was a very pleasant surprise.
I find myself watching people bicker about the distinction between drizzle and rain with no hint of subtext or irony in a TV show ostensibly about politics.
This is a poor substitute for watching a better made show like The Crown.
Phenomenal, cosmic powers, and they use them to shoot people. Because shooting people makes the world better, I guess.
The antagonist manages to lead a group of immortals into a trap, and his brilliant plan is to shoot them. Would it be that hard to instead cage them AND THEN shoot them?
Why is it that every mortal in this film reacts to immortality with either complete jealousy or hate. No one says, "Oh my god! You're alive. It's a miracle from god. Praise Jesus or whatever." Instead it's: "I hate you for not dying for some reason. We can't be friends anymore."
The film struggles to stick to its premise, but it tries so hard to make us pity these immortals. Randomly being immortal apparently is really awful. But do you know what's even worse? Randomly not being immortal anymore!
Can you imagine? I'd hate to randomly be immortal. I certainly wouldn't be overjoyed or full of adrenaline for escaping death. It would be very humiliating. Like, gosh. I feel like I would die from the shame of not dying. I'm sure my wife would never forgive me.
I also really have to emphasise that they made some strange and awful music choices.
A power fantasy and a case study in (almost) everything wrong with police culture.
A whole lot of people shooting each other and dying to save the kid of some douchebag who's important for some reason, I guess.
The action is nice, but it struggles to give you someone to root for.
The main point of this movie is the spectacle of the dancing, but they edit the dancing o badly and you can't see any of it.
Of course, don't expect the story to make up for that.
The assassin just... loiters with a stupid smirk. Putting her fingerprints on everything. Waiting for someone to walk in on her assassination. She's bound to have been walking past numerous security cameras on her way in and out of these locations as well.
Her particular brand of psychopathy doesn't make her intimidating or intriguing. It just seems to make her bland and shallow and worst of all, inefficient.
Yes, there are people hiding some of the evidence for her, but that hardly serves her reputation as a master assassin. It's awfully convenient that her greatest achievements (such as killing a witness, two armed guards and a nurse silently in a hospital) all take place off screen.
Meanwhile, Eve is selected as the head of the taskforce not because she's collecting any of the ample amount of evidence being left behind by the assassin, but because she strings together theories based on gut feelings. You're telling me no ONE thought to check the hospital staff roster until Eve had an epiphany days later?
I expected this to be a somewhat realistic take on what Superman would be like growing up in Soviet Russia instead of the US. However, it's rapidly undermined by Superman's unlikely resistance to state propaganda and the laughable scene where he liberates a Russian gulag just in time for his childhood friend just in time for her to die in his arms. The cliches just keep accumulating.
I had high hopes for this series, but it was a bit of a let down.
It lacks grounding. The fights aren't really that exciting and rely on certain characters having superpowers that allow them to survive despite their stupidity. In fact, it's almost like they're powered by their stupidity. Like Thorkell, who fights for the sake of fighting and says he likes being on the "losing side" for a challenge.
The philosophy is broken. And the plot moves very, very slowly.
After hearing all the positive feedback about this film for its accurate portrayal of an outbreak, I was quite curious to check it out. I'm also a fan of Matt Damon.
But it is incredibly boring and it was impossible to stick with it through the first half.
I like to believe that it's possible to make an accurate and entertaining film about a disease outbreak. However, this is not the one.
It's hard to say how I feel about this film. The pacing is slow and it's at once extravagant and awkward and subtle. I often feel like I'm too old to get the jokes (and I'm not terribly old). At times the film feels like it's trapped in a bottle.
I was quite tempted to give up on it half way. Did I enjoy the film? Kind of. Did I laugh? Occasionally. Was I bored? Sometimes.
I persevered.
It was deep and honest and it moved me in a way few films can.
But I don't know if that was enough.
As much as I'd like to enjoy a Robin Williams performance (where he's still charismatic as usual) but when having to take on the role of an actual child, it isn't very convincing. The writing in general is pretty terrible, particularly for the children.
For me, it did not live up to expectations.
It's a movie full of sociopaths. The protagonists most of all. Also, they are oddly confident and competent as scam artists to the point it makes me wonder why they were never able to scam their way into another job before.
If someone walks in on you watching this, then switch to some porn. It'll probably be less awkward.
Definitely a very ecchi story, but is there any substance hidden beneath the silly premise? Unfortunately not much. It's almost a parody when you hear a character pleading to learn the secret of the "Vacuum Butt Cannon" technique. Almost.
In the end it takes itself too seriously when it's being stupid, and not seriously enough when it has the chance to do some real storytelling.
Convenient and kind of mediocre. After trying the first episode, I wasn't convinced it would be worth giving the rest of the show a chance.
The character writing starts off pretty well, with drama is pretty basic, and Cha's relationship with his nephew is a great set-up, but it's unable to maintain this level of strong writing.
The spycraft isn't all that impressive. In order to cover up a phone call to the airport police call centre reporting a vague threat against the airplane, the bad guys immediately set off a fire alarm and within seconds, before there's a chance for anyone to talk about anything, there are call centre operators screaming in the hallways (these are supposedly trained police officers too!) and the operator who handled the call is assassinated before she can tell anyone. How do they know who took the call? If they're capable of all that, wouldn't it have been easier to just cut off the call? Nah. Murdering a police officer in plain sight is easier. Plus the assassin looked pretty cool!
Also, how can you freeze what looks like be a 5L cylinder of compressed oxygen by spraying it with maybe 500mL of liquid nitrogen? Why would freezing it increase the pressure inside the cylinder? Why does this make the cylinder explode like a bomb? How did the explosion take out the engine of a plane? Why is Cha immune to gravity?
An absurd premise (as if adding machines to boxing would make it more interesting), but the animation is a beautiful classic style, the music is great and the storytelling is exciting.
While the boxing matches are definitely beautiful to watch, the show struggles with the challenge of making the challenge of the boxing matches themselves exciting. We generally have to rely on drama surrounding the boxing matches to drive the tension in the story, while the combat itself is actually not important. The creators definitely recognise this: we never even learn the outcome of the final match and they didn't give us any reason to care. It's still a great story regardless, but it is robbed of some of its potential by its failure to invest in its core premise.
It further undermines its own premise of "mechanised boxing" when "Junk Dog" aka "Gearless Joe" decides to fight with the gimmick of not using the machines that are the signature of this anime. On the one hand, this is a reminder that machine-enhancement is completely unnecessary for a boxing match, but on the flip side, if the machines did have any purpose then they would be turning ordinary boxers into murder machines.
But putting aside the lack of commitment to its premise, it's pretty entertaining.
The opening sequence is kind of hilarious. A giant terrifying mecha aggressively reassuring the civilians that they're safe. They couldn't try to make it a little more convincing?
And later he jumps over a wall to escape from a Chinese electronics factory and lands directly in a rice paddy surrounded by Chinese farmers wearing conical hats.
Everything in this film is a stereotype. Every element is as bland as generic and predictable as it possibly could be.
This is one of the worst examples of Hollywood retelling a classical hero story.
First they feel the need to make it more "realistic" by removing anything supernatural from the story, but then the action is so absurd and over-the-top that this only makes it less believable.
Worse. They constantly tease the supernatural as a fake out as if they're mocking your intelligence.
In an era of superhero films, post Lord of the Rings, why do these directors feel they have to make a story "realistic" in order for us to take it seriously?
Setting that all aside, the characters are as cartoonish as they can get, and this is a boring story that bares practically no connection to the stories Hercules is known for.
Mediocre military porn. American soldiers massacring Iraqi soldiers without at any point recognising the Iraqis as anything more than cannon fodder.
And eventually I was turned off by the idea that Captain Walden should be given the medal of honor after pointing a gun at her own soldier, leading to the Mexican stand-off that got her wounded. Yes, she later "sacrificed herself" so that her soldiers could evacuate first, but there was absolutely no time spent showing that this was in any way necessary for the evacuation.
Also, don't watch this movie because of Matt Damon. He's wasted in this film.
Bland, predictable, but there are worse ways to waste your time. That said, the romance in the film is the opposite of cute.
Tired of having dull conversations? Watch this film with a friend, and if you can endure it to the end you'll have plenty to talk about as you vent at each other and try to make sense of the rubbish you've subjected yourselves to.
What the hell is this film?
Imagine a film where the first act starts off like a creepy version of Bicentennial Man.
And then the mid-section is like zany, action-heavy version of Blade Runner.
And the ending is the cheesy and fairy-tale mutated offspring of the ending from Interstellar.
Do you like feeling awkward and uncomfortable? Do you want to watch a highly intelligent robot (who should know better) standing around and being creepy? Do you want to watch his family treat him poorly in creepy ways while the robot continues to do creepy things? Then you'll be enjoying yourself for the first act.
Do you like watching robots getting framed for murder, getting hunted and blown up in a sexy PG Cyberpunk world? Then the second act is for you!
Is the story so far off-the-rails that only random aliens can make it worse? Absolutely!
