No spoilers this time.
I was fairly keen for this one.
I like the Despicable Me series and I think the minions were a nailed on case for a spin off.
One of the problems with this movie is that they have tried to use the Minions language as a tool. Bits of it you can actually understand, sometimes it steals just enough French to make sense, sometimes Spanish, often it is just a funny sounding noun that doesn't quite fit. Then they use the other characters for exposition, which means everyone around them is spending time trying to explain what is going on, rather than just get on with it.
The other major issue I have is limiting it to just following the three minions. Part of why they work is their sheer number and the interchangeability of them all. That means you can do silly crowd activities like their special 'banana' videos or you can have them all dress up differently or act stupidly, without it reflecting on a single minion personality. Picking three of them means they have to have individual personalities.
The plot is also a bit patchy, the villain, just isn't very villainous, the best bits are all in the trailer, New York and Orlando and London are all wasted as locations. The historic sections are all in the trailers and the 60s are wasted as well, I do wonder if the date was chosen just for the one useful pay off in the last scene and no-one thought to sit down and consider what else they could include.
It was just a little bit average all round.
Overall 6 out of 10.
Sunday, 28 June 2015
Thursday, 11 June 2015
Film Reviews - Spy and San Andreas
I am going to squeeze two reviews into a single post mostly because they were so terrible they don't deserve a whole post each.
San Andreas is a standard outing for Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson. Lots of action, lots of CGI, stupid story so full of stupid holes and bad characters. Alexandra Daddario provides a fairly efficient distraction, particularly in her bikini at the start and then doing her Lara Croft swimming impression near the end. If you don't understand that reference, I am not going to explain it to you.
4 out of 10.
Spy is a Melissa McCarthy / Paul Feig vanity project. A third rate James Bond spoof with very little going for it. Some notable names throw their hand in at trying to save it. Jason Statham has some funny lines, but also a lot of crap to wade through. Miranda has her first Hollywood film role but is basically just in as a foil for all the lines that weren't funny enough to give to McCarthy.
4 out of 10.
Film Review - Jurassic World
I was really looking forward to this one, about a year ago. Then the trailers took the edge off that interest as they gave away too much of the plot and the effects, and none of it was particularly good. All they should have done for a trailer was to show the first 45 seconds of the actual film.
In hindsight the trailers are even more annoying as bits of the trailer (Vincent D'Onofrio shouting about the lack of boats, guns etc) are not even in the final cut of the film!
The whole of the rest of the movie is just a bit of a let down. I didn't really care if the kids got eaten, they were dicks. I didn't really care if she got eaten, she is a heartless snob with no personal skills. I might have been upset if Chris Pratt got eaten, but more because I like Chris Pratt than because I liked his character. The one trick pony Mososaurus was so predictable as Deus Ex Machina that it was a total let down.
Then there are all the soldiers. The amateur park rangers who are armed with non-lethal weapons manage to score hits all over the place but the I-Rex is apparently immune to their weapons. So why are they carrying them? The professionals they then helicopter in with the heavy weapons have all the shooting skills of your average storm-trooper and the tactical skills of a mouse in a room full of traps.
Then there are just the basic stupid failures. You know what happened in the previous parks. You have the technology to tag and track every dinosaur. Why does that tag not have at least a tranquilliser, and more sensibly a small fatal poison in it that you can trigger to kill a single rogue dinosaur? Why aren't the walls alarmed? Why don't they check the tag location BEFORE they go into the cage?!
And the story holes just get worse: They have sold thousands of advanced tickets. They have built a massive specialist research enclosure. They have grown the thing to full size over several months. They have even sold the sponsorship rights to it. But at no point has the dinosaur training expert heard anything about it?
The few good bits come from the references to the original. Returning to the old site, the computerised gene character on the videos, some of the original dinosaurs on the holo-images, the Jurassic Park t-shirt*, letting out the original T-Rex at the end. Those bits are all good but purely from a nostalgia perspective. None of them actually add to the story.
Overall a disappointing 6 out of 10.
*Actually that one is a let down as it is over-played. As is Larry the character as a whole who is just in there as meaningless comic relief.
In hindsight the trailers are even more annoying as bits of the trailer (Vincent D'Onofrio shouting about the lack of boats, guns etc) are not even in the final cut of the film!
The whole of the rest of the movie is just a bit of a let down. I didn't really care if the kids got eaten, they were dicks. I didn't really care if she got eaten, she is a heartless snob with no personal skills. I might have been upset if Chris Pratt got eaten, but more because I like Chris Pratt than because I liked his character. The one trick pony Mososaurus was so predictable as Deus Ex Machina that it was a total let down.
Then there are all the soldiers. The amateur park rangers who are armed with non-lethal weapons manage to score hits all over the place but the I-Rex is apparently immune to their weapons. So why are they carrying them? The professionals they then helicopter in with the heavy weapons have all the shooting skills of your average storm-trooper and the tactical skills of a mouse in a room full of traps.
Then there are just the basic stupid failures. You know what happened in the previous parks. You have the technology to tag and track every dinosaur. Why does that tag not have at least a tranquilliser, and more sensibly a small fatal poison in it that you can trigger to kill a single rogue dinosaur? Why aren't the walls alarmed? Why don't they check the tag location BEFORE they go into the cage?!
And the story holes just get worse: They have sold thousands of advanced tickets. They have built a massive specialist research enclosure. They have grown the thing to full size over several months. They have even sold the sponsorship rights to it. But at no point has the dinosaur training expert heard anything about it?
The few good bits come from the references to the original. Returning to the old site, the computerised gene character on the videos, some of the original dinosaurs on the holo-images, the Jurassic Park t-shirt*, letting out the original T-Rex at the end. Those bits are all good but purely from a nostalgia perspective. None of them actually add to the story.
Overall a disappointing 6 out of 10.
*Actually that one is a let down as it is over-played. As is Larry the character as a whole who is just in there as meaningless comic relief.
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