It wasn't bad. But honestly I'm very very disappointed this isn't a TV show. I misread the trailer and wasn't expecting a movie. I think this would have been amazing as TV show. It could have done what the True Lies tv show failed to do. It would have done what I expect the upcoming Mr and Mrs Smith show will fail to do. Kaley did a solid job as an action character. She's no Megan Fox in Rogue (2020) [awful movie but Fox was excellent] but she was solid. I'm not her biggest fan but I don't hate her and, respect where respect is due, her acting was more than okay. David however, like the plot, was under-fulfilled. I think he could have done more with his character of the straightman muggle husband. The script just didn't give any room for it. They did have more chemistry than I expected they would. I saw the trailer and in no way did I think I would buy them as a couple 100%, I was expecting maybe 60% buy in, but I kinda do.
Antagonists Bill Nighy and Connie Nielsen were enjoyably bad. Though Connie was under written. I didn't really get that slightly psychotic character from her the way the script seemed to want me to.
The tone of the movie was uneven. You're never really quite rocked out of the mood of the movie, but you've never sitting comfortable in it either. Mr. and Mrs. Smith the movie was very much a sexy spy "kill a bunch of guys" movie with likes of whiplash pans. True Lies the movie was very much an Arnold comedy with a bunch of one-liners and amusing growls. There are others that are more about the romance like say Mr Right or This Means War. Which are all very much comedic spy stuff with a heavy heavy dose of RomCom. The ingredients were there to make this the variation that focused on Romance with a capital R. I haven't seen one of those in a while and like I said they had the chemistry for it. But the movie wants to be an R-rated comedy so it tries to have it's cake and eat it too.
Almost every problem I had with this would have been resolved if it had been a full season length. Heck I might have even bonded with the kids. They could be given personalities and then maybe I'd care when their health is threatened.
If last year's Top Gun Maverick gave everyone the slightest bit of hope in regards to films that click with the general audience and blow up at the box office, this is the kind of film that'll make any self-respecting film fan lose all hope. Here's the deal: kids will pretty much like this by default, adults who are looking for validation of their childhood obsession will like it, and people who show up to see an actual movie won't. It's pretty much the blandest, calculated, do-nothing film they could've made out of this material. The animation is devoid of style and looks like it was originally rendered for a Dreamworks project back in 2008, the voice acting is mostly ass, it triggers the nostalgia & reference button way too often, the story & characters are watered down to a point where they're almost non-existent, it's not funny and its boomer rock soundtrack choices make absolutely no sense. It's irredeemable trash, like every product that rolls of the Illumination Entertainment conveyor belt. Nevertheless, I'm willing to bet that due to the large fanbase of the IP, this will be one of those films where in the short term some of the discourse will insist that "some people/critics don't know how to have fun" or "it's made for the fans" (only for those same people to deny ever liking it in the long haul, of course). Here’s hoping Illumination doesn’t listen to those voices in the same way that DC did after the release of Suicide Squad. This is not a foundation to build a franchise on.
2.5/10
How is this movie getting such glorified reviews??? While the action scenes are fine, the story is somewhere between illogical and ridiculous.
None of the story lines make any sense, it's just one fight/chase after the next up until the idiotic finale. And yeah, let's connect the laptop of our villain super-hacker to the local network, what could go wrong.
Did the father have wives of 3 different asian nations, or was it just crappy casting?
I'm half tempted to give this full marks just for daring to play Radiohead's Everything in Its Right Place during your typical military in dropship scene. Anyway my boy Gareth knocked out another cracking piece of scifi. You really don't mind when a director takes a few years off and comes back with something like this. There's certainly a fair amount of Rogue One, Blade Runner and Terminator in the mix, the latter of which he takes the Judgement Day plot and turns it on its head defying expectations where I assumed it was going just due to the tropes of the genre.
There's also a lot of stuff on screen for 80mill in comparison to other recent effects heavy films. Gets you wondering if budgets elsewhere escalate to $200 mill mark due to talent demands or that something like this has less behind the scenes VFX artists but take longer to bake? I dunno. Either way, check it out. The trailer gives too much away (as always my opinion) however there's plenty more that isn't shown.
NB. Watch out for the Scarif Easter egg
I feel like I don't want to be too harsh on this film but I have to be sadly....
Boring. Slow. Uninvested. Unoriginal.
A very slow and predictable plot. Uninspiring turn from Tommy Lee Jones, who phones in his performance with all the class of a 1980s Motorola cell phone! I couldn't have cared less about whether this father/son relationship had any development. Why? Because Brad Pitt's character is also boring. He's a machine - we get that spelled out to us several times.
Now... Brad Pitt acts well. The visuals are good - but in a world of Interstellar and Gravity, they're underwhelming.
I liked the view of Moon travel. That's the only positive.
For a 2 hour film though, it felt like 3. That's a bad sign for any film. I'll be avoiding this one when I see it advertised on TV.
I'm settling on 5/10 because of Brad Pitt's performance and some of the visuals (particularly the Moon). But I could have gone as low as 3/10 or 4/10 based on my mood leaving the cinema!
It’s funny to know that this movie was intended to come out before the pandemic, because by releasing it now it might provide some unintentional food for thought for the morons who believe that a certain virus was actually conceived in a lab.
I genuinely wonder if those people will read that far into this film, I’d find it deeply amusing.
The good news is that there are definetely a lot of things this does better than Spectre.
The action is memorable and way more visceral (though it doesn’t quite surpass the Mission Impossible Fallout bar) and the characters are generally more interesting.
I loved the women in this in particular, they all have distinct personalities and they’re not flawless human beings or overpowered (e.g. Ana de Armas is bubbly and fun, but at the same time she’s inexperienced and chaotic), like some blockbusters tend to do.
At the same time, we shouldn’t pretend that this film invented strong female characters for Bond, especially after we’ve had Eva Green and Judi Dench.
Meanwhile, James Bond himself has a very satisfying arc in this film, which isn’t too dissimilar to Tony Stark’s arc in Avengers Endgame , with a bold pay off in the third act. I’m happy that this film gave us confirmation that Mads Mikkelsen didn’t end up castrating Bond during that scene in Casino Royale.
It’s paced very well, more like a traditional action film and less like a drama, which was the case for Skyfall and Spectre. Don’t let the runtime intimidate you, it doesn’t feel longer than 2 hours.
And finally, the whole thing just looks great, it’s produced excuisetely. The cinematography isn’t quite Skyfall level, but Roger Deakins is an impossible bar to clear for any cinematographer.
Unfortunately, this film really struggles with its tone, bouncing between some cartoony stuff and very dark, dramatic moments.
It wants to honor the traditional Bond stuff, but at the same time it can’t let go of the roots of the Daniel Craig iteration, which makes it feel like an uneven artistic vision, because the foundation of Craig’s Bond rests on this idea that this isn’t the traditional Bond.
It’s going for the same tone as Skyfall, meaning its pretty serious, while also incorporating some campy stuff with the plot and the villain (but never going into straight up silly territory, like Spectre).
The problem is that you could still take the villain and the plot seriously in Skyfall (Bardem is still scary despite the camp, the hacking plot feels grounded), and that isn’t the case here, the plot goes too much into sci-fi territory for that.
Also, Rami Malek didn’t leave much of an impression on me, the accent is wonky and he feels like a stock villain (very much like Waltz in the last film). There’s not really an interesting motivation there, or an interesting evil plan. It’s a campy and theatrical plan, and it feels very familiar.
Finally, this film can be fairly predictable at times (for example: Matilde being Bond’s daughter was extremely obvious, but they still try to somewhat play it as a twist. The same goes for Lea Seydoux being framed in prologue.).
So, it’s good, it pushes the creative boundaries of what a Bond movie is in some ways, which is the best stuff.
But I kinda hope they bring in someone with a fresh, fully realized artistic vision to really shake things up again for the next reboot.
7/10
Ps for the Bond producers: please, please make a spin off with Ana de Armas’ character.
I REALLY don't get why most people didn't like it. In my opinion it really worked quite neatly
She screams at every turn
I mean if you’re trying to hide from a dragon in a cave can you at least :asterisk_symbol:try:asterisk_symbol: to muffle your screams?!
The rating should at least be in the 90s for sure! Very inspiring movie for me personally. If you have an idea you are trying to get off the ground, watch this movie, then you will start working on it immediately after. Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross do an amazing job with the soundtrack. Interesting note that approximately 83% of trakt has been coded while listening to this soundtrack :)
Do me a favour and don't see this because of me. That way I can feel I'm getting my revenge for sitting through an hour and a half of PG-13 boredom. I just hope they make another so I can not see it.
Enjoyed it, but didn't like them replacing everyone from the first & killing off Duke right away. Also could've done better, nothing like the first one. Weak on story & The action.
If I was 12 and it was 1986 I'd have given it a 9/10 and watched it again already
An underwhelming effort from a company that seems to have fallen behind the curve. Creatively it’s pulling too much from Zootopia and Inside Out while not adding much of its own flavour, almost every choice in this movie is predictable. Sure, the racism/prejudice commentary is more aggressive now that we’ve entered the post-Trump era (seriously, you should go back and look at how Zootopia handled that same topic, it feels quaint now), but besides that it doesn’t bring much to the table. The worldbuilding lacks the clever intricacies of Zootopia, the pretty animation style has some unique textures but it’s no Across the Spider-verse, and emotionally it feels more like Illumination than Pixar. It’s a very straightforward, cheesy romcom with a formulaic set-up for the main characters (think Notting Hill, Crazy Rich Asians, and countless other movies your mom loves), some ok comedy (bad puns notwithstanding) and a boring adventure (fixing pipelines, how exciting). The score’s pretty interesting because it seems to pull a lot from Indian folk music, on the other hand the songs sound generic and overproduced. Overall, I’d easily recommend this over some other animated films from this year, as this does genuinely try as a movie. However, that doesn’t change that I expect both children and adults to be mostly bored by this.
4.5/10
Pros:
- The VFX work is great, especially the dinosaurs
Cons:
- No world building
- No exposition
- No explanations
- Nothing happens
- All of the potentially suspenseful moments were shown in the trailer
I love slow movies; Lawrence of Arabia is one of my favorites. But this film is surprisingly boring, and it makes an hour and a half feel like it's dragging on. There's no meaningful dialogue because the only two characters in the film don't speak the same language. It's a dinosaur movie where nobody gets eaten, and the dinosaurs are barely even an issue until the very end.
The total body count is five.
The cause of death is....stupidity.
I wonder if this movie would be funnier on a re-watch with that in mind.
To be honest I enjoyed the film. While it's nothing like the original Space Jam that's to be expected with 20+ years between the original and this sequel. However this film does have a few issues that really bug me, from the awful tech jargon used in the movie from the son to the poor acting and straight up dislike of LeBron. LeBron comes across as an awful father who forces his own ideals and opinions onto his children than letting them being individuals and that Basketball isn't fun and is solely just work. Also despite all the cool television and movie references throughout (felt very much like Ready Player One) it did feel a bit over the top at points and felt more like a big advert for WB content.
I really hated this movie, the characters were poorly constructed, especially the male characters. All of them manipulate Elle throughout the whole movie, telling her what to do and pushing her around when it suit them.
The worst part for me though was how lightly they treated Noah’s violent side. Lee wondering if he had hit Elle was incredibly painful to watch, and when he slams the car to make her come inside she really does seem frightened. He is a violent character that doesn’t change at all, just says a few nice words at the end to “make up for everything”. Lee gets some sort of redemption by helping Elle, but Noah doesn’t, and I don’t think that’s the message we want kids to get from movies like this one, that your boyfriend loves you because he gets into fights “for you” or that he manipulating you and other people around you is something sweet and a proof of how much he cares about you. That’s wrong, and this movie take on that is completely horrible and misleading.
80 plays, huh? I wasn't aware this movie had already been released.
Loved it! Just wish they had more of the Jack Hyde kidnapping scene instead of it being over and done with so quick with the money exchange.
The ending was cute too with the memories from previous movies...plus the children! Awww! Good ending to the movie triology.
Quite a disappointing follow up to a great trilogy. I’m sure the actors and sfx team put their work in but it doesn’t save this film. The plot felt flat, the pacing uneven which led to a relatively bland and lengthy viewing experience. Maybe the next film will help redeem the series but I for one won’t be chomping at the bit for it.
A decent but kind of unnecessary movie; it feels like it only exists to set up the next one. For one that focuses on ape vs ape with few humans in the script, there was surprisingly less action than in the previous films.
Honestly, I see no difference from the first, only that the visuals and action are twice as large. I loved the slow mo in the battle scenes, unlike in the build-up scenes. It tried to be visually beautiful, but everything felt artificial, just like the characters. Why does synder always find himself in the 'synder cut' situation? He's so talented and unique, but these washed-up versions make the experience feel like nothing. I'll still wait for it, though. I also disliked the monologues and the village/villagers aesthetic, but I loved the sci-fi elements and character stories.
This movie is already good on its own, but it becomes 10x better when you know what Patel went through to get it made.
The movie has already cemented itself as a classic of the vengeance subgenre, with echoes of Woo and Park Chan-wook, while bursting with enough originality for it to avoid feeling like a carbon copy.
It's a primal yell of a directorial debut from Dev Patel, already an underrated actor, who uses his unique experiences with religion and his own Indian heritage to bring the story of the film to life.
You can smell the blood and sweat wafting through the screen
It's okay. Probably more towards the 2.5 territory but I'm feeling generous. CGI gets a bit ropey and it becomes a bit too "girl-bossy" towards the end. Still easy enough fare.
Don’t go into this movie with really high expectations and you’ll enjoy it. I know I did. It’s obviously a lower budget than most would expect for an active movie. But it’s still very much an enjoyable watch. Just don’t let the well known actors cloud expectations.
Like an Asian Bridesmaid. Laugh out loud funny and crass.
So many back-to-back laughs—our screening was having a blast! Hilarious performances, great ensemble, and some stealth feels that had a number of people sniffling and crying. Go see it, in a theatre, and bring friends because a crowd only enhances the fun!
If I could give this a lower rating then I would.
Like a workday: you go in and get the job done but do nothing remarkable and won't remember it in a week.
If you really want to watch a teenage girl coming-of-age cartoon, watch Turning Red instead.
