I'm not sure what this movie is trying to be. Is it a character drama with intricate and complex characters? Or is it a whodunnit murder mystery?
Without choosing a direction, it fails to be both, and so I can only give it a 6/10. The synopsis also mentions a moral dilemma that Daniel has to work through, but I didn't witness any moral dilemma.
The cinematography is great. The characters are complex and interesting and acting is outstanding. The initial plot is interesting, but then it just tapers off.
Venturing into minor spoiler territory, we spend much of the film just watching people talking about things that happened, which I find a very dull way to tell a story through film. There is only one scene where we actually see a flashback. I wanted more of the storytelling to be like that.
And (into major spoiler territory now) we never really find out what happened by the end, so it's left completely ambiguous. Too ambiguous to make the character drama pay off because we never get confirmation of whether the subtle things we may have noticed during the great acting were truth or lies.
The ambiguity also resulted in me not particularly liking or rooting for any of the characters, or rooting against them for that matter. WIthout any resolution to the characters, their words are just... words.
And on a surface level, we don't get the satisfaction of solving the murder mystery. I was hoping for some kind of big revelation, like Daniel being involved in the death (intentionally or accidentally), or Maleski framing Sandra with his suicide.
It was good, but not as funny as his other specials. I had to subtract 1 from my rating because a lot of the material is recycled, so I had heard it before, which is a real shame.
What was really disappointing was that this didn't really follow in the footsteps of the original Jumanji movie. There was no need to title it "Jumanji," they just set me up for disappointment.
The original film had such a great format, they roll the dice and some new danger rolls in, and they have to survive whilst still trying to carry on with the game, adding new dangers every time they roll. It's what made Jumanji, Jumanji. The new film didn't follow that at all.
The characters were all sucked into this Jumanji video game with 3 lives, so there was no real danger. It's their in-game "avatar" that dies and immediately comes back, rather than any consequence, so the exciting danger that the first movie had wasn't there.
To add to that, the effects and scenarios that the characters are put in just aren't as good either. The first Jumanji had monsoons, swarms of dangerous animals, stampedes, all coming out of this board game into the real world. In the new film, the Jungle may as well not be there, the main threat is a gang of people on motor cycles. A few different poorly CGI'd animals make brief appearances.
It wasn't very funny either. The trailer probably shows you the funniest parts, and even that wasn't particularly funny. It wasn't an awful film, it just wasn't good.
I saw the trailer for this film and thought it looked like a cheesey Rom-com, but watched it anyway as I've seen Kumail's stand up and am a fan.
I was actually pleasantly surprised to find out it wasn't a cheesey one-dimensional Rom-Com, but actually a genuinely well written story with interesting characters and character development.
I wouldn't really class the film as a comedy, but there are a few funny moments in there. It's mostly Kumail's character adding humour to situations organically, rather than over the top slapstick comedy situations just happening out of no where.
I only found out it was all based on a true story at the end. It suddenly hit me like "Damn! That must have been heavy to live through!"
I'd definitely recommend a watch.
Great film, loved the 80s throwback too, the music from the band is really entertaining!
Unfortunately the end becomes really cheesey and even has a misplaced pop song which lets the film down a bit, but it's still a good watch.
I didn't think this movie would be any good, but Bryan Cranston is probably my favourite actor, and a few of James Franco's films have made me giggle, such as "This Is the End," and "The Interview." So I decided to give it a shot.
It was pretty awful. The plot is what you'd expect, standard soppy story of guy trying to win father-in-law's approval, but being humorously obnoxious. The twist in this film is that the guy is rich and had no parental figures/role models growing up, so he swears a lot and has bad manners etc.
I just found that there were no jokes in this film. It's mostly that slightly humorous things happen, and that's about it. For example, slight spoiler:
One of the jokes is the family arrive at the daughter's boyfriend's house to meet him, and he's got their Christmas photo freshly tattooed on his back. Still a bit red raw. Ok, that would be hilariously awkward if it happened in real life, but it's just not that funny in a comedy film.
It was just a bit of a waste of time... there are far better films to waste your time on. I think I might have found this film a lot better if I was 13 actually, and hadn't really seen these types of films before. All the juvenile sex jokes and toilet humour would have been fresher.
The movie starts off quite good. It's intrigues you and has a good setting, and then it just becomes so dumb.
As the blurb says, it's about people who get stuck in a grocery store in a strange mist, and starts off being about their relationships and the mob mentality kinda thing. Despite the sci-fi setting (strange mist) it's quite relatable to modern relationships, and you think it's going to be quite character driven.
About half way through it just gets stupid though. Some of the action sets in and characters will so frequently be reacting so unrealistically to things (eg. a whole group of people staring at danger instead of running away) and it's not because the director thought people would be shocked like a deer in the headlights... it's so obviously so they can get "cool action shots" or have someone die to create a plot turn.
The story is based on a novella by Stephen King. The narrative of the story was actually alright, but I feel the direction and awful Hollywood dialogue ruined it.
