No drama + no chemistry + no romance = empty movie.
Is this a terrible joke?
Let me rephrase. Whether this is true or not, it's a terrible joke.
Took my daughter to see this last night. It wasn't as bad as the reviews were making it out to be. The action was pretty good and the fight scenes were well choreographed. Overall the story itself was ok. Nothing special but entertaining. My main issue was with the way it ended. You will need to stay for the credits because they literally just ended the movie after a battle. Even with the bit shown during the credits, it's like they didn't know how to finish the movie. You can tell that they are trying to shoehorn a 2nd movie. Their fix to ensure this is set up was to basically put up a "To be continued" sign at the end. It's not an actual sign but I hope you get what I'm saying.
Overall if you're feeling trapped in your house and you want to get out and enjoy a movie I'd go see it. We had a fun afternoon munching on popcorn and watching some monster action on the big screen.
Streamed via HBO Max
Story-wise, it's the weakest compared to other MonsterVerse films. This film is more focused about Kong if you're wondering. I couldn't stand that Millie girl, to be fair I wish the human parts would be removed because I only want to see Godzilla & Kong fighting. But it's entertaining to watch.
To be honest, with these actors and these characters, I don't think it would be possible for them to make a film that's worth less than 6/10.
The original is better but I wouldn't class Double Tap as a disappointment. It's a good film in its own right, which is rare for sequels in general. Most importantly, it's damn entertaining. In a way, it's a perfect palate cleanser before Oscar-season hits us in the coming months.
It's a 7, but a damn good 7.
Don't waste your time
I meeean...
It was unsettling and gross. But scary? There's nothing scary about this movie. Mainly, the only creepy thing is the dissonant string music. I like horror movies, but more of the subtle, psychological kind. This one was too artsy and pretentious for me.
I guess the takeaway is don't consume weird shit strangers give you. Also, stay away from cults.
It seems people who are expecting a serious horror are disappointed by this, but being a Raimi fan (Evil Dead), I knew to expect a black comedy in this too. If you watch it with that mindset, it's great fun and highly entertaining!!
If you're a fan of the Super Mario Bros games (like I am), love Video Games, or have kids, I highly recommend this high fast paced, funny, and visually pleasing film!
A lot of critics didn't like it, but the Audience Score is at 95% for a reason! I love fun movies at the theater, and I bet you would too!
TLDR ? This movie is Disingenuous. At best, it's a Ghoulish dark satire of the republican party during the Bush/Cheney era. Except, they forgot to insert comedy or satire. As a result, it's grim and insulting, the parody is often at the expense of the audience being too stupid or uncaring, or religious. Large chunks of american history are deleted, omitted or filtered so that the movie can focus on the death toll of the war, or the "Wazzup" meme, etc.
large chunks of Dick Cheney's history don't make it into the movie, or are stylised / exagerrated / spoofed.
It is a well made disaster of a movie. Care went into making this.
But, it's as bad as Holmes & Watson, Star Trek Discovery, The Last Jedi or Ghostbusters 2016. It's deeply unlikeable at times, and it is actively trying to rewrite history as it goes. I'm not a republican or a conservative, i don't follow politics, this is a highly deranged film that is deceptive at times, and I doubt that any of the events took place, as a result of the ham-fisted effort at painting Cheney as some mastermind villain, working in the shadows. It's only missing that villain laugh track during the more hammy moments.
The most sanguine part of the movie is that they treat the WTC bombing and 9/11 properly, but they draw an enormous bow throughout.
part of the movie hinges on the use of executive power being wielded by Dick Cheney through the Bush Presidency, to the degree that they'll infer it becoming part of the reasons why Cheney brought the war from Afghanistan to Iraq, and that he also used the position to secure oil reserves in Iraq before the war started, as well as ignore questions / receive kickbacks from Haliburton contracts, and infer that he brought a lawyer into the emergency/control room during the "crash" period of 9/11 post-pentagon collision, as airline flights and air corridors were shut down, airports were being closed, and private/civilian aircraft were being tracked and landed in airports, etc. So that he could wield this Executive Power without asking the senate or the Congress or the President for approval.
It walks the line of defamation, and yet, apparently it's from the guy who made Anchorman 2 and Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Other Guys. Brad Pitt and Will Ferrel financed this movie, i think. Their companies are in the titles.
All of the Actors do a great job. I even like Annapurna for their video game productions (Donut County, Gorogoa, Edith Finch, Florence), and i've seen a handful of Annapurna movies, like Phantom Thread, Her, American Hustle, and Sausage Party...
I went in with no preparation, and assumed it would be a dark comedy with political overtones, because, politics and Steve Carell, and I can see Aquaman later on. It can't be that bad, it's Christmas week.
This movie has the unfortunate effect of making you hate theatrical movie releases and critics, and perhaps all movies.
Yet, it's so well made, it has style, artistic credibility, and it's directed, shot and lit perfectly, the sound is on point, the acting is sometimes forgettable, But it's similar in style to other "moral" drama films, like "The Big Short", leading into the Global Financial Crisis where they pander heavily on people's motives and actions of "we're getting away with it", sic. The pandering is incredible.
It is a better political movie than most, but it's utterly manipulative and disingenuous at it's heart, and nothing can make that funny or amusing.
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 is unhinged and deranged, while Vice, is just powdercoated hatred and bile, trying to hide under progressive and democratic ideals. it's more like an upmarket youtube political conspiracy movie talking about Hilary Clinton's "SECRET Brain surgery", George Soros, the Koch brothers or the Jewish conspiracy movies you get recommended after watching "The Young Turks" or "David Pakman".
They even sink low enough to include a "Ghostbusters 2016" poke at the audience in the end credits by lampooning the partisan nature of the film, in an attempt to skirt criticism and outrage
A sideplot about an hour in, has a series of scenes in a focus group with the same strangers. The marketer/political consultant asks the group to raise their hands to choose between climate change or global warming. Another time, it's a choice between Estate Tax or Death Tax, inferring that marketing & political think-tanks, along with Fox News, used politically correct language in the 90's and 2000's to make conservative ideas palatable.
At the end of the movie, Cheney is in a cross-chair interview, after just having had a heart replacement. As the interview starts, the scene pauses, and Cheney/Bale instead, turns away and lectures the audience directly (invoking Frank Underwood's, stylised yet sociopathic 'lectures' in House of Cards) , saying he did what was best for America, despite the cost and the lives lost in the war(s) sic. It's just on the borderline of "helping make america great again" and a typical Frank Underwood self-justification, we fade to black, get a terrible americana/Fly Fishing title credits to the music of West Side Story's Puerto Rican version of "Coming to America" and we return to the Focus Group, mid-credits. The final scene has the consultant ask what people thought about the movie. A member of the group, complains that the movie insults conservatives, while the neighboring person insists it's factual, with the first man then calling it liberal propaganda, and then calling the other a libtard, sic. and hits him, both getting into a fist fight, while the camera turns away, to another woman, who turns to her neighbour in the room, and says she's going to enjoy the next Fast and the Furious movie (sic).
The implied comment is that they did the research, and had to improvise the story in-between, because nobody would speak about Dick Cheney's history or family to set the record straight. When/If you see a biography of Barack Obama in a few years, attending child brothels with kevin spacey in indonesia, receiving oral sex from a pansexual transvestite, while he's snorting a line of cocaine off a preteen boy , while another person is handing Barack a membership form for the Democratic Party ... Vice, is going to be the movie that they quote and use dialogue from.
This is the kind of movie that Alex Jones and infowars would make of Hilary Clinton & Barack Obama, by selectively omitting pages from a biography, and denigrating the characters and roles they undertook. The excuse would be, they couldn't confirm the story, so they took liberties and stuck with the facts, being transcripts, police records, licenses, marriage dates, etc.
I'm Australian, I genuinely don't care about the politics, but the smearing of the republican party is like a sledgehammer at times.
There are several Saturday Night Live level 'jokes' or skits/scenes that don't even make you cringe, they're just deeply unsettling attempts at humor or levity. Care went into the timing to paint several scenes as 'dark', or darkly funny at the expense of others. I expect people would laugh at them, it didn't connect with me, or the other 5 people in the theater.
It's not quite Fahrenheit 11/9 levels of insanity, on the contrary. It walks the line of parody, conspiracy and defamation neatly in a lighthearted attempt to skip 20 years of context, in a 2 minute conversation.
There's an early moment, perhaps 40 minutes in, where Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld is ruminating to a younger Dick Cheney in a random hallway of the oval office, about the imminent bombing of cambodia while Nixon is talking with Kissinger in a spare room of the Oval Office to avoid recordings. Mid-lecture, you hear Carell while we see a village about to be bombed mid-lecture, a typical cambodian/indonesian forest village, women and children sitting around, before explosions occur, and the scene changes back to Carell & Bale, unphased.
This kind of manipulative sledgehammer is used, repeatedly to invoke... satire? outrage ? compassion ?
This occurs about 5 or 6 more times, with even less subtlety.
Alfred Molina's "restaurant" scene, Molina's character offers Cheney and 3 seated guests at a restaurant table, Extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay as menu options , is ham-fisted, but it's executed darkly and humorously, similar to say, Aaron Echkhart's Thank You For Smoking scenes, lampooning Tobacco, Firearms and Alcohol lobbyists.
It's the kind of movie where you could let things slide if you were a lifelong US democrat, because it tries to tell harsher truths of the political and military consequences, overtly, by flashing to bombings, drone strikes, torture, rendition, deception and greed, during the more infamous moments of nixon's career and Bush's presidency.
And it profoundly relies on Fly fishing to represent Dick Cheney, as other movies do (2007's Shooter) to the point where they use gaudy Americana as Fly Fishing decorations (rockets, drones, Oil Rigs, missiles, the white house, Surveillance cameras) in the end-credits.
There's element's of Zero Dark Thirty in the invocation/flashes of torture, waterboarding, confinement, exposure, even the Abu Ghraib incident/leak with a prisoner being dragged by a Dog Collar by Lynndie England (the "work safe" versions) appears here. and rendition scenes along with the "Shadow government" themes of Dick Cheney's role as Vice President during George W Bush's tenure. It is highly implied several times that Cheney set himself up as the Executive, the CEO in charge of the war by undermining George Bush and, being responsible for the birth of ISIS, hiding reports from the president, etc.
They walk the line when it comes to defaming the Cheney family, there's also an implication of Lynne Cheney's father, Wayne Vincent murdering his wife in an argument by drowning, and of Lynne Vincent, being raped by her father Wayne in an over-edited and dubbed scene that was heavily muffled to avoid the censor noticing. Wayne, is seen pointing to his daughter during a muted, abbreviate shouting scene implying alcoholism and frequent domestic violence.
It extrapolates the most defamatory versions of people, and highlights that absurdity.
It takes what should be parody or simulacra, a 'bad saturday night live' sketch comic scene, and extrapolates moments as their cheapest moments. It's also high budget, they take Sam Rockwell's version of President Bush, Governor Bush, and rotoscope him into the more infamous moments of Bush's Presidency, i.e. the mid-war "Mission Accomplished" presentation on the Carrier Deck.
Any more pretentious and it would have an art degree.
Yes it has been done before, yes the budget is clearly a bit lower than others, yes the usual hoops are jumped through but there are also a couple of interesting morale and shocking moments. Not always well judged but also a surprise to see them addressed in a popcorn movie like this.
Easy escapist entertainment with its heart in the right place.
A good movie ruined by lame pop culture references and political agendas.
The last 15 minutes are rushed and spoil the integrity of the entire movie, especially that unecessary ‘courtesy tap’ quote at the movies final scene. Good not great.
The story beats are as basic as i don't know what, the ending is laughably predictable and the performances barely passable. Seen strictly as a revenge movie however, it's immensely satisfying. It's Home Alone for grown ups.
The fact that it's quite gory doesn't hurt either.
"Put that cookie down. NOW!"
That is Arnold Schwarzenegger's best line ever.
This show will get you laid anywhere in the woke world.
This movie was everything I hoped it would be. Waited 19 years for it. Definitely not disappointed.
This was actually the worst movie I've ever seen.
A movie that never justifies its existence.
I have a lot of respect for what John Favreau did with The Jungle Book.
He managed to do something that every remake should aim for, but usually fails to do: improve upon its original.
This, however, is the exact same movie.
There was zero effort put into improving things, or even do anything different, for that matter.
And to some degree, I get it: the original is almost sacred to some people, and they’ll act autistically if you change too much.
There’s also an upside to that, which some critics don’t pick up on: if a story works in 1994, it still works in 2019.
But you could at the very least try some different shot compositions, or different music cues, or anything to not make this movie completely creatively hollow.
Yes, it looks just like a Discovery documentary.
At the same time, the realism strips the expressiveness of the animals away, so those things cancel each other out.
There’s just no reason to watch this over the original.
5.5/10
Visually impressive. Nothing else is though.
Tries hard to be deeper than it is.
Honestly after all the fuss, all the hype, all the money spent to finish this...we’ve essentially got basically the exact same movie.
Sure this fixes some of the issues with the theatrical version, removing the kinda pointless Russian family scenes for example. However instead it replaces them with other unnecessary scenes, like the Flash saving a woman who I think is supposed to be Iris West not that she ever says her name or does this have any bearing on the rest of the movie. Sprinkle in a little bit of Darkside where he wasn’t before and pad out with long slow mo sequences motion and establishment shots.
I’m not saying this is terrible, it’s not, just most of what works is already present in the theatrical cut, its just stretched out. I thought the theatrical was fine a 6/10 with some issues...this cut is the same a 6/10 improves on some aspects but is just a bit too long and replaces the old issues with slightly different ones.
Between these two different versions is a good 7/10 2 and a half to 3 hour movie somewhere.
Charlie day as Luigi and Jack black as bowser. Suddenly this is one of my most anticipated films of the year.
Finally a movie the brings the best of the east with a Hollywood favor. I love Asian movies that are just huge and entertaining with Epic battles and fantastic cinematography.
Matt Damon & Pedro Pascal played their roles perfectly around a fantastic cast of Chinese Actors like Hanyu Zhang and the likes. The mix was great and they pulled it off right, for once it didn't look like a cheap knock of a Hollywood Blockbuster!
Must watch for any fans of this Genre.
Let's hope for a sequel because they did the story justice, an unexpected twist which I enjoyed.
If you were to look up "mindfuck" in the dictionary, the dictionary woud bitchslap you into a coma then proceed to surgically insert The End of Evangelion DVD straight into your brain.
Overall, the movie was kinda bad. It has some good easter eggs (tho some of them are nonsense), but also too many cheesy-one liners noding the games (you know, "flawless victory", "fatality", "finish him"), kinda force them into it just to look cool. The acting was meh (except for Sanada, who seems the only one who can actually act); the story was rushed and without too much development. I liked they included some less-known characters like Reiko, Kabal and Nitara. The only cool thing is that the keep their promise on the bloody/gore side, so at least we had that. No more than a 5 over 10
The few seconds of return to childhood at the end was not worth the hour plus of bratty, violent, hypersexualized preteens you had to sit through to get there. Realistic depiction of some girls? Sure. I remember girls like that. But meaningful writing or filming to leave you feeling educated or wanting to act in some positive way to make a difference? Nope. You just can’t figure out why anyone let their kids do this film or how anyone could film it and not question why half the (very creepy) shots were necessary. I kept hoping it would redeem itself and the online outrage people had without seeing it was dramatic, but I’m going to have to say it was pretty spot on, unfortunately.
This was... great?!? I thought it would be a cheap nostalgia grab, but I couldn't have been more wrong. A fun, often hilarious movie that shows a hell of a lot of heart and does justice to the movies before it. Great feel-good movie, and just what the world needs in 2020.
Quite possibly my favourite comedy. I have seen this more than a dozen times and yet, it simply doesn't get old.
Mmmm yessss well... I'm going to need you to watch this ok? That'd be greeeat.
It is hard to come to a film like Psycho without at least some awareness of the likely surprises in store - the famous moment in the shower is so indelible in pop culture that it has lost its shock factor. Yet, in the context of the film it is still a surprising moment. What is so clever about Psycho is that the first half of the film suggests an entirely different genre and approach. Hitchcock creates a fascinating set-up and moral dilemma that keeps the audience intrigued so that by the time our heroine makes her decision to resolve this issue, you could be forgiven for forgetting the title of the film. But it is the arrival at the Bates Motel and Perkins’ entrance that immediately signals a change in tone, specifically a fascinating conversation between Perkins and Leigh in the motel parlour. It is Perkins’s nuanced performance throughout the film that suggest both a softly spoken innocence and a creepy underlying darkness to Norman Bates, and this is never more clear than in his introduction, as the focus of the audience shifts from Leigh’s character to Perkins. There is little to be added to the already iconic shower scene other than it is a masterclass in editing, music and performance (the shot that pulls back from the victim’s eye is still both horrifying and utterly mesmerising). The second half of the film could have struggled to live up to this and to a certain extent it does, but in the ensuing investigation, Hitchcock of course has one or two more surprises in store that are best left unspoiled and Perkins’ performance ensured that the loss of one great character would not be detrimental to the overall film. It is a shame the final scene feels the need to over explain the events of the film, but the final shot certainly leaves a great impression.
