Category: Reviews

Reviews of movies, television, games, and whatever else strikes our fancy.

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Review: Fast and Furious 6

Fast and Furious 6

The tagline for Fast and Furious 6 us _”All Roads Lead To This”_ and it’s actually pretty apt. I’m a fan of the series because I like watching fast cars but this is probably the first film where everything went right. In fact Furious 6 (as it’s called by it’s own title card) is likely the best film in the series.

Yeah, I’m saying that after 6 tries (or five, depending how you count) they’ve finally gotten the formula right and the movie is entertaining as hell from start to finish.

This isn’t to say the movie is objectively good by any stretch but a movie doesn’t need to necessarily be objectively _good_ to be solidly _entertaining_.

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Review: Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek INto Darkness

So, time to talk about [another of my most anticipated films](https://awesomefriday.ca/2013/01/matts-most-anticipated-of-2013/). I am a life long Star Trek fan. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. When I was a kid I watched The Original Series. When it debuted on TV I watched Every episode of Next Generaion, Deep Space Nine and even Voyager despite all it’s problems. Enterprise, I am of the opinion, got cancelled just when it had gotten really good. I’ve seen every movie multiple times and, perhaps most relevant to what I am about to say, I really liked JJ Abrams 2009 reboot of the franchise.

Yes, it has problems. Hell, the whole plot falls apart if you pay more than a cursory amount of attention to the details, but it has that certain extra _je ne said quo is_ that makes me forget all this as I watch it. Despite it’s ridiculousness it sucks me in and I enjoy it every time.

Naturally I was excited for a sequel and today we got one. So how is it? It’s… well it’s something.

Continue reading “Review: Star Trek Into Darkness”

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Review: The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

I feel like Baz Luhrman has the potential to be an amazing film maker. He has a strong and distinct artistic and aesthetic voice, he can get Oscar calibre performances out of the actors cast in his his films and his films are often entertaining (except for Australia, which was boring).

Luckily The Great Gatsby is one of the entertaining ones, but as with his Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge I came away thinking “that was pretty fun!” But feeling like something was missing.

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Review: Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3

As a sequel not only to Iron Man and Iron Man 2 but also to The Avengers, Iron Man 3 has a lot to live up to. The Avengers changed everything, not only for the characters involved but for the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well; how do you sell these characters as solo acts again?

Luckily Marvel has employed some very smart people because as it turns out Iron Man 3 follows up nicely on a everything that preceded it, is one of the strongest stand alone films produced by Marvel to date and is probably the prefect anchor for the second phase of Marvel films.

Unfortunately in reviewing this there are going to be what could be considered some very mild spoilers involved. I promise that I won’t reveal anything big and keep the rest to a minimum, but if you want to go in blind (which I recommend you do) then just know that this is a movie I absolutely recommend seeing and stop reading right now. If you want to know what I think in detail, hit the jump.

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Review: Oblivion

Oblivion

Do you ever read or watch science fiction? Have you ever had your mind blown at some plot twist or big reveal? Has a story ever made you think about things in this world in a new and different way?

Oblivion is a film that really wants to have this kind of impact on you but doesn’t. That’s not to say that it’s a bad movie just that while it is _good_, or rather _pretty okay_, it isn’t _great_.

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Review: The Place Beyond The Pines

The Place Beyond The Pines

I have a lot I’d like to say about The Place Beyond the Pines but I can’t because it would spoil the plot and that would diminish your enjoyment of this great film. Yes, it’s great and you should see it. Derek Cianfrance has assembled a feature of great power and thought and you should see it.

In fact, that’s the TL;DR version of this review. It’s great. Go watch it before you read this. I’m going to avoid saying anything that would spoil the plot but there’s plenty beyond the plot to spoil and I feel you’d go into this best if you go into it blind.

So go. I’ll wait here. Last chance. Ok good.

The Place Beyond The Pines is a fantastic film about fathers and sons and they’re influence on one another and about sins and feelings that are passed from one generation to another. It follows Handsome Luke (Ryan Gosling), a motorcycle stunt rider turned bank robber, and Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), a rookie cop who ends up involved in his case, and their relationship with their respective sons.

To say it’s a powerful film would be the understatement of the year. Gosling and Cooper as the two leads both give tremendous performances as characters under stresses they never anticipated and circumstances they’ve put themselves in.

Gosling, as with previous performances in Drive and earlier films such as The Believer seems to have mastered the art of calm, quiet rage. The rage in this case comes explicitly from his circumstance and implied self loathing rather than from an unexplored backstory.

Cooper by contrast manages to convey his characters barely covered guilt and fear with a visceral realism, and I can’t help but be reminded that he was nominated for an Oscar last year.

Both these men I am sure will win all the accolades they deserve in the next few years.

Following them is their sons, and Dane DeHaan playing Luke’s son Jason. This kid is going places. He hasn’t been in much, but between this and Chronicle the kid has some chops and I expect he’ll be one of the next big kids on the block.

The supporting cast, rounded out by Ben Mendelsohn, Mahershala Ali and Eva Mendes is pretty stellar as well. I wish Ben Mendelsohn has more to do in the film but that’s a minor quibble.

All of this is of course due largely because of Cianfrance’s directorial style. Much of the film is filmed in long single shot takes shot with unsteadied cameras. The desired effect of this –which often does not work– is to create a more intimate feeling for the film. In this case it works incredibly well, creating the feeling of being right there beside the characters as they are going through their trials.

Further, while many films will have a character (or two) explicitly state the moral or message of the film, Cianfrance elects to show instead of tell; the characters actions inform us rather than the script and i very much appreciate a film that trusts it’s audience in this way.

Cianfrane has only directed 3 features so far, and only two of those have released wide, but he can count myself as a major fan moving forward. This film is ambitious in it’s message and scope and it pulls it off on all fronts.

This [one of the films I’ve been most looking forward to this year](https://awesomefriday.ca/2013/01/matts-most-anticipated-of-2013/) and I’m happy to report that it’s the first one to knock it right out of the park.

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Review: 42

42

As you may recall [42 is one of the movies I was most looking forward to this year](https://awesomefriday.ca/2013/01/matts-most-anticipated-of-2013/). As both a baseball fan and history buff, how could it not be? Jackie Robinson is one of the all time great players and his story is one of the most important in American history, not just baseball history but American history.

Given these two things I feel I could be forgiven that I hoped this movie would be great but unfortunately it isn’t. That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s actually a good movie but it’s also not exemplary. Other than being about Jackie Robinson there’s nothing that really sets it apart from any other “underdog/outsider makes good” sports story.

Like I say, that’s not a problem per se however it is kind of disappointing. There are a lot of things about 42 that are great though, so let’s talk about them.

First, the story is tight. It focusses on Robinson’s first season and not his whole career. This is a good thing because he ended up playing for a long time and eventually won a world series in 1955 a full 8 years after he debuted. There is a lot to explore but keeping the movie to his first major league season keeps the story more focussed and honestly, these sports movies always have 2 minutes of footnotes at the end about where the characters ended up and the World Series fact works as one of those given that his first season was by far his most important.

If I have complaints about the story they are first that the film, admittedly likely out of necessity glosses over how Branch Rickey chose Jackie Robinson ignoring basically all of the scouting and selection process (save seeing Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson’s names of a board at one point). It likely would have made the movie too long, but I still would have liked to see some more of the “who do we choose” stuff than just the one scene we get.

Second, it’s pretty much entirely predictable. To be fair, it’s a true story that I know, but also it’s an “underdog/outside makes good” sports movie, there’s a pattern to these things. Everyone is uncomfortable or doesn’t know what to think at the start. Antagonists say things like “you’ll never make it” and “you don’t belong here” and eventually he wins over most everyone and wins the day.

As an extension of this, while the film does actually very well with lot of these tropes it also does pretty poorly with others and the film is peppered with scenes that feel like they’re right out of a lifetime movie of the week that just scream “LOOK AT HOW BAD RACISM WAS AND HOW AWFUL PEOPLE WERE”.

Where the movie does shine greatly is in it’s supporting cast. Chadwick Boseman is good as Robinson but Harrison Ford is great as Branch Rickey, the owner of the Dodgers determined to integrate baseball. Ford is a great actor and it’s nice to see him remembering that for a change instead of just playing a grumpy old man. Oscar worthy? I’m not sure, but it’s certainly the type of role that the academy loves.

The other standouts for me are Christopher Meloni as Leo “Nice Guys Finish Last” Durocher, the manager of the Dodgers famous for telling the team if they didn’t like Robinson they would be missed, and also Alan Tudyk as Ben Chapman (manager of the Phillies) who famously opposed Jackie Robinson’s presence. There are a string of scenes where Tudyk has to yell a string of racial epithets that, were it myself in his place, I think would have made me sick as soon as the camera stopped rolling and as a member of the audience made me legitimately uncomfortable.

So to repeat myself, 42 is a good movie but not a great one. If you like sports even a little you should probably see it. If you don’t like sports you could certainly do worse (Scary Movie 5 is out, for example). I only wish that it were a great movie instead of just a good one.

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Review: Spring Breakers

Spring Breakers

Spring Breakers might be the smartest movie I see all year based on one fact: It’s managed to advertise itself dubstep and drug fueled sex romp for four girls but it’s actually a highly intelligent movie highlighting the emptyness and malaise felt by the current Gen Y crowd.

Yeah, I said it, Spring Breakers is really good and you should watch it.

The basic premise is this: four college girls played by Ashley Benson, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens and Rachel Korine (Director Harmony Korine’s wife) want to go to spring break but have no money despite saving all year. All of them are desperate to go, and two of them stage a robbery of a local restaraunt to get the necessary funds.

They then head down to florida for spring break and indulge in all the dubstep and drug fueled debauchery you can imagine without the film being X-rated before getting busted for posession and subsequently bailed out by Alien, the wannabe rapper and drug dealer played by James Franco, who then invites them to roll with him and his crew. Alien though is ankle deep in the criminal world of Florida and things get pretty real pretty quick.

At least three of the four girls are playing against type here, being current or former Disney pricesses, but that serves to highlight just about everything they do and make it, conciously or not (and whether you’ve seen their work or not) all the more shocking, especially Hudgens and Benson as the two bad girls of the group (Korine is the deluded one and Gomez is the good girl). All of this plays out semi-linearly, jumping back and forth around the immediate action.

James Franco is enough reason to see this film though. I know a lot of people who hate him, but every once in a while he bats one right outta the park and this is one of those times. He disappears right into Alien and it’s almost surprising he made it back out.

What makes his performance great is that you come to realize that Alien seems to undertand not only that hes a Svengali type character, but also that he’s kind of useless at it. There’s a weird sincerity about his character who is trying so hard but is ultimately still just a really highly functioning poser. He wants the thug life but doesn’t actually seem to want to be a thug, and later in the film when he says he’s falling in love with the girls it’s totally sincere.

This is one of those movies that looks like it’s going to be stupid but then turns out to be great, that has managed to marketed as one thing but is actually quite another. It manages to present what’s going on without necessarily praising or celebrating it which is hard to pull offl. It’s sharp and intelligent and gorgeous to watch. Fair warning though, this is a movie that you are going to either love or hate, I can’t see any middle ground but that’s kind of the point. Either way, I can’t recommend anything other than that you watch it.

So go watch it already.

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Review: G.I. Joe: Retaliation

GI Joe Retaliation

My biggest problem with 2009s _G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra_ was that it says just too generic. G.I. joe was always about colourful characters and ridiculous world domination plots and while it certainly had the latter it definitely lacked the former.

Retaliation fixes that first problem, mostly by casting Dwayne Johnson but also by adding Ry Stevenson and Jonathan Pryce. That’s not to say its perfect though, as it also adds Adrianne Palicki and D.J. Cotrona, the former of whom seems to phone in everything except her admittedly smoking hot body and the latter of which does pretty much precisely nothing except occasionally admire the formers admittedly smoking hot body.

Jonathan Pryce in particular has a ball playing Zartan playing the president, but it’s Johnson who anchors the film and he does a great job doing it. He’s perfectly suited to a movie that’s all about the action and explosions, not because he’s bad but because he buys in more than any of the other Joes that aren’t killed in the first reel. That would be a spoiler except that its in the trailer.

Channing Tatum is also nice to see and he has good chemistry with Johnson, and when Bruce Willis shows up he’s his usual Bruce Willisy self. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not exactly extraordinary either.

The plot is pretty basic and picks up a few years after the last film ended. Zartan is still the president. Joes still fight the bad guys. Cobra still wants to take over the world. Many explosions ensue. Zartan has the Joes and attacked and the few that survive fight the good fight.

That’s pretty much literally it. This movie isn’t rocket science it’s a toy commercial, remember? Cobra takes over the White House after the Joes are eliminated and the proceed to try to take over the world. They come pretty close too, and even blow up London –also not a spoiler as it’s in the trailer, but what’s not in the trailer is that they’ve actually clearly targeted Birmingham on the map– which elicits … well, nothing really. It happens and then no one ever mentions it again.

Also, Snake Eyes is half way around the world for most of this and leads his own subplot for the first and second act. Yes, the nameless, faceless, silent guy is the main character in his own separate thing for most of the movie. Of course if this movie were trying to sell character development that’d be a problem but since it’s trying to sell ninjas fighting on mountains and men with guns blowing things up it’s not really a problem at all.

The film’s main problem then is that it’s not really tense. There’s no real feeling of peril in the film. Even with 99% of the Joes dying in the first act it never feels like any of them are ever in any real danger. It’s not boring either, the action is well executed, it just falls somewhere in between. There aren’t any real surprises except possibly what new cars and guns they are going to show up to the next scene in.

So that’s it really. G.I. Joe: Retaliation is not a bad film and if you like movies with explosions you could do a lot worse this weekend. For those of you who had the toys growing up you can rest easy that yes this at least looks and feels like a G.I. Joe movie which is a welcome change from the previous one. There are plot holes you could drive a tank through but when it comes right down to it? I had fun watching this movie and that’s all that really matters with a movie like this.

**Rating: 7/10 **
[rating=7]

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Review: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is more just The Pretty OK Burt Wonderstone

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

I’d like to preface this by saying that I went into this movie with incredibly low expectations. I think that might be why I had an OK time watching it. But that’s the problem really, is that it’s never more than just an OK time.

The structural problem here is that when it comes to the plot there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before, and when it comes to the magic it’s nowhere near as inventive as I imagine it could have been.

What do I mean? Well have you seen that movie where the main character as a kid was bullied and then found a way (in this case magic) to overcome his awkwardness and then grows up into a total douchebag, then loses everything and has to learn how to be a nice guy again to regain everything and be better off than before? Also, the only girl who has ever rejected him and endures YEARS of his being a total ass and then starts to forgive him at the first sign of him not being such a dick? Also also, he has a falling out with his best friend and partner over his inability to change but eventually reconciles once he’s learned to be a good person again while they’ve spent time apart?

I could go on, but I don’t have to, literally every character arc in this movie is something you’ve seen before and none of it is particularly well executed, which is a shame when you consider the list of amazing actors they’ve assembled.

Steve Carell is as good as he’s ever been at selling his deadpan reactions to the ridiculous but his character is all over the map, both a scheming evil genius asshole and an idiot AND just a normal nice guy, and the film can’t seem to decide which it wants him to start out as or grow into.

Steve BUscemi is the best friend and the film just wastes him. He’s basically Donny from _The Big Lebowski_ again, the character everyone just abuses without thinking.

Olivia Wilde is the girl, and she’s great. By far the most engaging and relatable but her story arc is also by far the most predictable and in the end she’s really just around to let us know that Steve Carell’s character arc is over. Which she does by sleeping with him. I would have warned you thats a spoiler but you’ve seen this movie before so it isn’t.

Alan Arkin also shines, as per usual, as the aging magician who originally inspired the main character and then also coincidentally shows up to help reignite his passion. Again, he’s great, but it’s just so damn predictable.

Jim Carry is the bad guy, a Criss Angel type douchebag with hints of David Blaine’s endurance tests and self harm thrown in. I suppose it’s something that I really did hate his character, that’s the point of an antagonist after all, but I also can’t remember laughing at much of what he did. One gag in the middle and his big final trick and that’s really it.

And then there’s the magic itself which you’d think they’d use to great comic effect but they just…. don’t. They try a few times but it always seems so forced and obvious that it falls flat and the one time they really go behind the scenes of a trick it’s the intricacies of the big comeback trick and it’s during the credits and while it was genuinely funny it also completely undercuts the ending.

I feel like this is a movie that might have been hampered by it’s rating. If it had been R rated they might have been able to actually explain the dichotomy of smart and stupid that Burt Wonderstone is with something like alcoholism and had it make sense, they might also have been able to go behind the scenes and show some of the nitty gritty of the business, but none of that happens.

Instead we’re left with a kinda funny movie instead of the hilarious romp that it could have been.

**Rating: 3/10
[rating=3]**

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Review: 21 And Over

The problem with comedy is that it depends on so many subtle factors. Each of the vital elements – script, cast, direction, editing – must be both strong in itself and also interconnected with each other. When it works, it’s a beautiful thing that lifts the spirits and throws smiles around freely. When it doesn’t, when each element fails individually and disrupts the whole, you’re left with a bitty, unstructured mess that leaves an extremely sour aftertaste. Unfortunately, *21 And Over* is one of the sourest comedies I’ve seen.

The premise is one you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever seen any film starring a group of college kids that include an achiever, a sweary idiot and a introvert with a big day approaching. Miller, Casey and Jeff Chang (who is always referred to in full) are three high school best friends who have found College has pulled them apart in more ways than just geography. On the day of Jeff Chang’s 21st birthday – an important date in America that finally releases alcohol from the shackles of secrecy and fake IDs – Miller and Casey arrive at their old friend’s residence to treat him to birthday hijinx. However, Jeff Chang has a lifechanging interview for Medical School set up by Harsh Asian Father, and refuses to go out so as to be fresh and ready by 7am. Of course, his resolve disappears and extreme drunkenness soon leads to a race against the clock to get Jeff Chang home in time, incorporating spanking, punching and nudity along the way. Basically, it’s *The Hangover – The Early Years*.

Which would be fine, if the constituent parts amounted to anything. There are no new stories, it’s true, but the way in which stories are *told* has the ability to excite through creative choices. This narrative electricity is wholly absent in *21 And Over*.

One of the main issues is that the three main protagonists don’t have any kind of connection on screen. Compared to something like *Superbad*, their relationship never feels genuine, or that it stretches past the words on the page. Maybe it’s the casting, maybe it’s the heavy-handed direction and script; something seems to be holding the actors back, even though they’ve each proven very capable in their other films. Having the heart of the movie so unbelievable makes their journey together barely interesting.

The narrative structure and scripting is equally frustrating. Full of convenient jumps and side-steps, the main characters often behave in a way that does not endear them to the audience but instead leaves us scratching our heads at the way it unfolds. Lines are predictable and practical rather than cheeky and inspired, while characterisation is a standard journey from A to B. Set-ups and scenarios are garish and unattractive, the movie happy to propagate the myth that US Colleges are mostly full of flashing girls and dickhead jocks. It’s very hard to connect with a story that constantly dissuades personal connection.

It’s technically a mess, too. Apart from the previously mentioned ineffective direction, at some points the editing and ADR is so bad that the flow of scenes completely breaks down. Full of dubbed lines over non-moving mouths and jarring drops in pace, it’s odd to imagine how it was not corrected before release.

It’s not a total disaster, though. One or two of the lines break a smile, and chief Douchebag, Randy, has a couple of male followers who are genuinely hilarious in their literal narrative of his every action. More of this kind of curveball humour would have added much to the blandness.

By the end, you find yourself frustrated at the lack of imagination in the turn of events. The conclusion, a seemingly perfect opportunity for Harsh Asian Father to redeem himself in the face of his suicidal son’s newfound honesty, simply ends with straightforward violence and parental rejection. However, this squandered opportunity just matches what has been happening for the previous ninety minutes, and so the viewer is just left with rolling eyes at the missed potential.

If you feel the need to watch this kind of against-the-clock College comedy, there are much better titles to choose from. In fact, just watch *Ferris Bueller’s Day Off* again, even if you’ve seen it before. I guarantee you’ll have a much better time, and anyway, you’ve seen everything *21 And Over* has to offer many times before in much better ways. Avoid.

 

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Awesome Classics: Top Gun

Top Gun

Yeah, that’s right. Top Gun is a classic.

The problem with talking stunt something that everyone has seen is that everyone has seen it and everyone already has an opinion, and Top Gun is certainly a polarizing film among my circle of friends. In case you hadn’t already guessed though: I love it.

In case you haven’t seen it Top Gun follows Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a US Navy fighter pilot as he competes to be the best of the best at what he does at Top Gun, the navy’s elite fighter wining school. He shows up cocky, gets beaten, endures some loss, falls in love, and in the end is the hero. When you lay it out on paper it’s a fairly straightforward formula action movie. It’s that way on screen as well.

That is to say that the movie is pretty shallow, especially by today’s standards, but it does make a cursory effort to be more than the shallow testosterone fest it seems to be. Two thirds of the way into the film when a beloved supporting character dies it shows the main character reeling and vulnerable from survivors guilt and regret. If it breaks from the mold at all it’s that in the age of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone churning out movies like Predator, First Blood, and Commando it dared to actually show it’s hero mourning instead of just shedding a single tear before throwing his head back and screaming at the heavens, invoking super human power to overcome the ridiculous odds he’s about to face.

Yes, I’m saying that the hero of Top Gun is in fact human whereas most 80s heroes were not.

Tom Cruise was 24 in 1986, he’s hardly at best form here, but he’s better than the movie needs him to be, especially when it comes to the switching back and forth between the ultra cocky public persona that Maverick cultivates and the unsure private persona you see when it’s just him and Goose, his best friend.

But then there is the rest of the movie. A movie with awesome exciting dog fighting, with dude-bro alpha male rivalry, with 24 year old Tom Cruise falling in love with 29 year old and taller than him Kelly McGillis, with a zillion catch phrases and and awesome high five/low five when the main characters score a point in volleyball. And yes, the volleyball features men oiled up and playing in the sand.

There’s a lot of people in this world that will tell you Top Gun is shallow. That it’s thinly veiled homoeroticism. That it’s stupid. They aren’t wrong (well, they are wrong about the homoeroticism, the intended audience for that was the girl friends of all the dude-bros that went to see it), but none of that matters. At the end of the day it’s well executed and fun.

Recently I had the chance to see it in 3D IMAX in the lead up to its Blu-Ray re-release and it holds up pretty well. There’s something to be said for the shared movie experience, when everyone in the theatre is there and completely into the movie. Only a few times have I truly experienced this, but it’s amazing. The 3D, well, I could write a whole other article on 3D but it was OK, but blown up to IMAX proportions the film was amazing.

And all this is fueled by Kenny Loggins 80s pop rock anthems.

So is the whole thing cheesy? Yes. Shallow? Absolutely. Fun? Beyond a shadow of a doubt. If you’re one of the few people who hasn’t seen Top Gun, or more likely someone who hasn’t seen it in years, now is the time. Grab the Blu-Ray (or go to a screening if they are still happening near you), have a few beers, crank the sound and take highway to the danger zone.

Yeah, I went there.

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Review: Jack the Giant Slayer

Jack the Giant Slayer

It’s been less than two hours since I walked out of Jack the Giant Slayer and I can barely remember what happened. That’s not exactly a good thing, is it?

Here’s the basic set up: Nicholas Hoult plays Jack who goes to the market and sells his horse for some beans that grow a giant bean stalk into the sky via which giants attack. Pretty straightforward, really.

The problem is that despite all it’s intentions, the movies just kinda boring. There’s some pretty cool set pieces but even though it kills off some characters –including ones I understood going in were major characters– it just never felt like there was any real peril, and the movie spends so much time going back and forth between the giants being farting, nose picking bumbling fools and menacing, angry, “let’s bite the head off this human” monsters that a tone isn’t ever really effectively set.

Similarly, Jack is chastised by his uncle for being a lazy and easily distracted fool but as soon as the bean stalk grows he immediately proves himself neither lazy, easily distracted or foolish. No development there, just a switch that gets flipped to serve the plot.

The plot itself is pretty thin and it’s not really compelling at all. In fact, it’s almost like they came up with a bunch of ideas for things they wanted to see happen first and then wrote just enough of a story to string those things together and nothing else. It’s frustrating even, since there are just a few changes they could have made which yes, would have made the story a bit more cliche but which would have given Jack a better personal, relatable arc. I get the feeling they might have been avoiding the heroes journey on purpose but the end result is uninteresting.

If you’ve seen [the trailer](https://awesomefriday.ca/2013/02/trailer-jack-the-giant-slayer/) you might go in thinking that it’s going to be an effects extravaganza but it’s not. There are effects everywhere to be sure, but the giants don’t look good enough for me to have suspended disbelief enough for me not to notice that all the CGI is good but nowhere near being great.

In fact at the start of the film the back story is provided by Jacks father reading the legend of the giants which is played out on screen in what’s meant to be stylized animation but instead just looks like terrible video game cut scenes. You can see that they were going for something similar to the [backstory sequence in Hellboy II](http://www.anyclip.com/movies/hellboy-ii-the-golden-army/story-of-the-golden-army/) but they missed the mark utterly.

It’s annoying too that the despite a pretty stellar cast I couldn’t really bring myself to care about many of the characters. Nicholas Hoult is fine as Jack and Eleanor Tomlinson is fine as the princess (yes of course there’s a princess) but Stanley Tucci is basically just being Slimeball Stanley Tucci here. It’s not terrible to watch but it would have been nice to see some experimentation. Bill Nighy is the same as the leader of the Giants. It’s a voice role to be sure, but it’s just Bill Nighy’s angry voice and nothing more. (side note: despite voicing over the trailer, Sir Ian McKellan isn’t in this at all that I could see/hear. Weird.)

The standout for me is Ewan McGregor who basically dials up the swagger to 11 and runs with it. He steals most every scene he’s in, and every time he’s not on screen I found myself wondering when he’d be back.

In my mind I like Bryan Singer. He’s made some amazing movies, two of which I count among my all time favourites, but everything he has done since X-Men 2 has fallen pretty flat. He doesn’t nail down a tone, his pacing is all over the map, and character development is at a minimum.

That’s not to say that there aren’t bright spots. Again, there are a couple of good set pieces, there are a few funny moments and there are some nice character moments, but all in all the film is just mediocre fluff. Not outright bad, just boring.

My question is this: how many more of these “let’s take an old story and go all M. Night Shyamalan ‘what a twist!’ on it’s ass” movies are we going to have to go through? Can we be done now? Please?

Meantime, if you want to see Nicholas Hoult act well then go see if [Warm Bodies](https://awesomefriday.ca/2013/02/review-warm-bodies/) is still playing.

***Rating: 5/10
[rating=5]***

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Review: A Good Day to Die Hard

A Good Day to Die Hard

I’ve written quite a bit about this movie so for those of you who just want to TL;DR version that covers the important bits here it is:

* A Good Day to Die Hard is fucking terrible
* John McClane is even less relatable than he was in Life Free or Die Hard
* Jai Courtney is alright, but if you’re a fan you’ll wish he had a different big break into movies
* Die Hard is still the best Die Hard movie, and always will be (followed by “With a Vengeance”, “Die Harder”, “Live Free” and now “A Good Day”, and in that order)
* Mary Elizabeth Winstead needed to be in this movie more

So here we go.

In 1988 John McClane was a different kind of action hero. He was an everyman, nor an adonis or a martyr or highly trained ninja/soldier/pastry chef, he was just a guy who was thrust into the position of being a hero by shitty circumstances. He got the shit kicked out of him, no one believed him when he initially called for help, and when he finally prevailed he was so beat up it’s amazing he could still walk.

All of this worked because not only was John McClane more relatable than every other action hero (and indeed went on to be the template for so many other action heroes through the 1990s and on to the present) but because Die Hard was also a well constructed film. It’s an action movie yes, but it takes a good half hour before any of the real action starts allowing for a lot of character development and plot set up that’s often missing from the bigger more bombastic action films.

Fast forward to 2012 and the sad fact is that they’ve now basically unmade the character and fit him every so neatly into the mould he originally broke.

John McClane is no longer an everyman, he’s an action god, casually sending a flatbed mercedes cargo truck into an e-brake spin to avoid an oncoming RPG or driving a commandeered SUV through a guard rail on an overpass, landing it on a moving semi truck with a car trailer and literally driving over traffic to get to the road below, all the while spewing off bad one liners which have clearly been added in ADR.

I can’t tell if Jai Courtney is terrible or if it’s just the material he’s given to work with. He plays the son angry at his absentee father bit alright, but it’s kind of unbelievable. Especially when you consider that the reasons John McClane Sr. was absentee were a) his mother kept moving him away and b) John MCClane has literally saved three major cities and the entire country at this point, so it’s not like he was gone because he was a deadbeat dad, but that’s the angle they play it from rather than the “you were there for all those strangers but not for me” angle.

And since we know he was there for those strangers, and his exploits are known to people in that universe, it makes no sense that the bad guys don’t seem to know who he is and don’t kill him immediately when they find out. But of course they couldn’t even if they wanted to because the bad guys are actually incompetent in this movie. Previous bad guys just underestimated John McClane, these guys are actually idiots.

The main henchman even goes off on a cliched and pointless monologue at one point, after having John and John Jr. tied up, and they tie John Sr’s hands _in front of him_ so he can lunge at a bad guy when the moment strikes, and John Jr’s _behind his back_ so he can reach the super secret spy knife/gun –which they previously gratuitiously showed him putting in his shoe– so he can cut his bonds and strike said moment.

Oh, and that bad guy? He’s meant to be malevolent but it’s so poorly executed that quite literally the only thing about him that I remember, let alone dislike, is that he chewed a carrot with his mouth open during his excruitatingly terrible monologue. That made me dislike him, but not for the right reasons.

This is the problem with structure of the movie: there are no surprises. Literally everything that happens is so obviously telegraphed that you always know what’s about to happen.

_Live Free or Die Hard_ was not a great movie but at least it tried to be something. I mean, it tried and _failed_, but at least it tried. _A Good Day to Die Hard_ feels like a movie that was made with a checklist. Big car chase? Check. One liners? Check. Kill a helicopter? Check.

It’s just a shame the checklist didn’t include “make this all fit together in any decent way.” Or maybe it did and they didn’t get to check that item off.

**Rating 2/10
[rating=2]**

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Review: Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies

It’s worth pointing out right now that I’ve liked all of Jonathan Levines movies (that I’ve seen). In particular he directed a movie in 2011 called _50/50_ starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen that went on to be one of my favourites of that year.

What I loved about that film was the relationship between the two main characters while Gordon-Levitts character dealt with cancer. How they interacted with and acted around each other felt very real and honest. Similarly in his previous film –_The Wackness_, a coming of age story set in 90s New York– the main character goes though everything you’d expect in a film like that but he manages to keep the whole thing feeling very grounded and real.

It’s fitting then how everything I loved about those two movies holds true in _Warm Bodies_, a film about a relationship between a girl and a zombie. Each of these films deals with relationships in awkward or extreme circumstances, after all.

Nicholas Hoult is “R”, a zombie literally shambling through life (or more specifically death) wishing that there was something more to do or be. Teresa Palmer is Julie, the daughter of the colonel who runs the city of survivors.

R and his best friend M, played by Rob Corddry, live at the airport. They shuffle around basically reenactign what little of human life they remember. Unlike most zombie stories they have basic motor skills and even the ability to somewhat communicate. R collects things when he’s out and about in the city and M signals to a barkeep that’s not there when he gets up from the stool he’s sitting on only to realize he doesn’t have to do that anymore. Both seem to realize that they’ve lost something in death and R wishes he still had the wherewithal to find it.

It’s one of their more wordy conversations that send them to the city where they cross paths with Julie and her group of volunteers out scrounging for supplies. In the melee the zombies kill everyone except Julie who R immediately falls in love with and saves and takes to the airplane he’s made his home in in order to keep her safe.

Throughout the second act we see Julie go from being scared to trying to figure out exactly what’s going on here and eventually developing a strong bond with R and slowly but surely restarting his heart and setting him on the path back to humanity before heading back to the city for the films third act where everything of course comes to a head.

Both Hoult and Corddry are great. It takes some skill to convey feeling in screen, it takes even more to convey _wanting_ to feel but not understanding how to do it or communicate it. Hoult shines in every scene he’s in with Julie in this regard, whether R the zombie struggling to make her feel comfortable or struggling just to tell her that he doesn’t want to hurt her.

Corddry supplies most of the laugh out loud moments in the film but not in the way you’d normally expect from him. Normally known for being bombastic and over the top he plays his part reservedly, by necessity, and he carries it off well. Comedians often turn out to be great dramatic actors and Corddry is certainly on his way to greater things that just being the funny sidekick. Palmer as well is in good form, in fact maybe the best I’ve seen her so far. Dave Franco has a supporting role as Julie’s boyfriend and while he’s not perfect you can see why he’s starting to gain traction like his brother James.

John Malkovich is Julie’s father the colonel. While he doesn’t get much screen time or development really he does well with what he’s given and he’s always nice to see on screen.

There’s a lot to like here. From the innocence of the relationship to the unconventional way the film deals with zombies. It’s not as funny as you’d expect but there are plenty of laughs to be had merely because of the circumstance.

Again, as strange as it is to say it, the film works because of the honest way the characters deal with the situations they are in. Sure, this story’s star crossed lovers are separated by life and death but it still manages to feel _real_ for lack of a better word. There’s plenty of opportunities where it could have gone slapstick and over the top but it never does.

It’s Romeo and Juliet but Romeo is a zombie and you should definitely check it out.

**Rating: 8/10
[rating=8]**