Last week's review of Vacation started with "I hate reboots. Almost as much as I hate remakes. And spoof movies (unless they have Mel Brooks or Leslie Nielsen involved) are generally the worst of all."
I should have reserved that for this week's reboot of the Hitman series.
I normally argue that you shouldn't try to remake or reboot a good film because it was done right the first time. The implication of that logic is that it is not a bad idea to reboot a poor movie as you could actually make a better movie than the original.
Monday, 31 August 2015
Friday, 28 August 2015
Film Review - Vacation
I hate reboots. Almost as much as I hate remakes. And spoof movies (unless they have Mel Brooks or Leslie Nielsen involved) are generally the worst of all. So Vacation looked at first sight to be a shocker that I really shouldn't bother with. The trailers looked quite funny though, and there was a clear self-reference to the originals that made me somewhat hopeful that it might be a half decent successor to the Chevy Chase originals.
In the end the worst thing about it was probably the forced appearance of Chase himself at the end of the movie. Almost, but not quite, rescued by the appearance of the original car.
Some of the jokes along the way were a bit puerile, some were just stupid, others were referential to the original. But most of them got laughs. The opening credits were funny and got the whole audience giggling away so when some of the weaker jokes came later the momentum continued through them and on to some of the better laughs.
Even the lowest and cheapest gags were at least throwbacks to the originals so when they didn't warrant laughs themselves they did get a smirk of nostalgia. There are even some really sneaky Easter Eggs for fans of the original.
Watching the original would probably be beneficial if you want to get the most out of the nostalgia value but it isn't really necessary.
And, I still want to know what the swastika button does.
In the end the worst thing about it was probably the forced appearance of Chase himself at the end of the movie. Almost, but not quite, rescued by the appearance of the original car.
Some of the jokes along the way were a bit puerile, some were just stupid, others were referential to the original. But most of them got laughs. The opening credits were funny and got the whole audience giggling away so when some of the weaker jokes came later the momentum continued through them and on to some of the better laughs.
Even the lowest and cheapest gags were at least throwbacks to the originals so when they didn't warrant laughs themselves they did get a smirk of nostalgia. There are even some really sneaky Easter Eggs for fans of the original.
Watching the original would probably be beneficial if you want to get the most out of the nostalgia value but it isn't really necessary.
And, I still want to know what the swastika button does.
Monday, 17 August 2015
Film Review - The Man from UNCLE
Up front, I hate Guy Ritchie, I dislike Henry Cavill, I am not a great fan of Armie Hammer and I can just about put up with Hugh Grant. And on the other hand I loved the original Man from U.N.C.L.E. tv series.
So I went in to this film with low expectations. I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. I am not going to get carried away and suggest it is as good as the original series. I am certainly not going to forgive Guy Ritchie for his treatments of other franchises. This one I am going to give him some credit for.
The 60's styling is excellent. The consistency of the sets, clothing, cars, gadgets, decoration, phones, ... throughout the film really does hold up well. I didn't spot anything that didn't fit. No doubt, there are styling slip-ups somewhere, but I didn't catch any of them. Also there were a few of the action sections where the transitions from the original series were used.
The performances are pretty good as well. They are getting some stick on imdb for being wooden, but I felt that they were fitting with the characters and the original source material. Cavill was certainly a huge improvement on his Man of Steel performance. Armie Hammer does a decent job of keeping a straight face despite having most of the best jokes. Both are a little flat, but this matched with the original characters. Hugh Grant, when he does officially turn up, doesn't do particularly much. This does mean that he doesn't do anything wrong though.
The baddies are a bit flat. Again it is quite in-keeping with the TV series that they are just stereotyped villains. They could have benefitted from been a bit more rounded. Certainly the husband could have been fleshed out, or mashed together with the Nazi torturer to create a single complete character.
Meanwhile, if the spy story isn't holding your attention, you can always play 'spot the cameo' instead. David Beckham is the obvious one. Hugh Grant plays an identified character in the second half of the movie but you can also spot him a couple of times before he is introduced. On the more obscure you can also spot Chris Evans Ferrari California in a cameo at the race track. Unfortunately we don't get cameos from Robert Vaughn or David McCallum.
So I went in to this film with low expectations. I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. I am not going to get carried away and suggest it is as good as the original series. I am certainly not going to forgive Guy Ritchie for his treatments of other franchises. This one I am going to give him some credit for.
The 60's styling is excellent. The consistency of the sets, clothing, cars, gadgets, decoration, phones, ... throughout the film really does hold up well. I didn't spot anything that didn't fit. No doubt, there are styling slip-ups somewhere, but I didn't catch any of them. Also there were a few of the action sections where the transitions from the original series were used.
The performances are pretty good as well. They are getting some stick on imdb for being wooden, but I felt that they were fitting with the characters and the original source material. Cavill was certainly a huge improvement on his Man of Steel performance. Armie Hammer does a decent job of keeping a straight face despite having most of the best jokes. Both are a little flat, but this matched with the original characters. Hugh Grant, when he does officially turn up, doesn't do particularly much. This does mean that he doesn't do anything wrong though.
The baddies are a bit flat. Again it is quite in-keeping with the TV series that they are just stereotyped villains. They could have benefitted from been a bit more rounded. Certainly the husband could have been fleshed out, or mashed together with the Nazi torturer to create a single complete character.
Meanwhile, if the spy story isn't holding your attention, you can always play 'spot the cameo' instead. David Beckham is the obvious one. Hugh Grant plays an identified character in the second half of the movie but you can also spot him a couple of times before he is introduced. On the more obscure you can also spot Chris Evans Ferrari California in a cameo at the race track. Unfortunately we don't get cameos from Robert Vaughn or David McCallum.
Thursday, 6 August 2015
Film Review - Fantastic Four
Fantastic?! Four?!
What an utter mess of a film.
I knew before going to see it that there were a lot of production problems as the movie was rushed out to fulfil some contractual clauses regarding who owns the rights to the characters. That is no excuse for this turgid mess.
Miles Teller and Kate Mara need to go back to their respective agents and fire them. At least Jamie Bell has the decency to hide behind CGI for the small sections of the movie where he bothers to show up.
Since I am on a bad film name binge this week, there are 5 of them, that much is obvious from the trailer. Also the Fantastic part just never happens. Hold on, while I go back to the trailer and scream about fraud. Most of the quotes in the three trailers are either not in the film, or are used completely out of context in the trailer.
I can completely understand why Stan Lee doesn't appear in the movie. He must be so utterly disgusted at what was done to his creations that he wanted to distance himself from it. That they need to squeeze in an adoption to justify their black character, and completely miss that "the Thing" is actually a metaphor for racial discrimination must be like a punch in the face to his original creative talent.
Shocking! 4 out of 10. And of those 4 points, one is a sympathy vote for Miles Teller that this follows his tour de force in Whiplash, and another is for Kate Mara in a superhero costume.
What an utter mess of a film.
I knew before going to see it that there were a lot of production problems as the movie was rushed out to fulfil some contractual clauses regarding who owns the rights to the characters. That is no excuse for this turgid mess.
Miles Teller and Kate Mara need to go back to their respective agents and fire them. At least Jamie Bell has the decency to hide behind CGI for the small sections of the movie where he bothers to show up.
Since I am on a bad film name binge this week, there are 5 of them, that much is obvious from the trailer. Also the Fantastic part just never happens. Hold on, while I go back to the trailer and scream about fraud. Most of the quotes in the three trailers are either not in the film, or are used completely out of context in the trailer.
I can completely understand why Stan Lee doesn't appear in the movie. He must be so utterly disgusted at what was done to his creations that he wanted to distance himself from it. That they need to squeeze in an adoption to justify their black character, and completely miss that "the Thing" is actually a metaphor for racial discrimination must be like a punch in the face to his original creative talent.
Shocking! 4 out of 10. And of those 4 points, one is a sympathy vote for Miles Teller that this follows his tour de force in Whiplash, and another is for Kate Mara in a superhero costume.
Wednesday, 5 August 2015
Film Review - Southpaw
southpaw
(ˈsaʊθˌpɔː)Jake Gylenhall
This bugged me throughout. There are obvious comparisons between this film and the Rocky series. So much so that the title suggests we are going to get the plot from Rocky II where he specifically trains to switch his lead to protect his weak eye. With Gylenhall and his funny eye on the payroll we are nicely set up for the same. Instead we get a single punch at the end claiming to be southpaw, but actually an misbalanced punch as he oversteps from a conventional stance.
Throw in a bit of Rocky with the rags to riches background. A bit of Rocky V with the financial problems. Add some Rocky Balboa with the dead wife. Have a problematic relationship with the kid throughout. All we are missing for the whole Rocky series is an appearance from Mr T. If we are doing a boxing film anyway, why not steal the one-eyed black character from Million Dollar Baby and get an Oscar winner in to play him.
So with that copycat nonsense out of the way we can get to the rest of the film. There are a lot of other problems. How he goes from being a multi-millionaire to living in a run-down rented shack, overnight, makes no sense. Why the courts withdraw custody is unclear. Where the babysitter is when he is out at his losing fight is completely missing. Headbutt a referee and get a ban of a year cut to under 4 months. Pay off boxing judges but still lose a close match on points. Always covered in wet blood and seeping wounds but never any scabs or scars.
The boxing scenes are not too bad. Gylenhall obviously put a lot of work into his physique. Just the story is so patchy that it becomes a distraction.
Overall 5 out of 10.
Throw in a bit of Rocky with the rags to riches background. A bit of Rocky V with the financial problems. Add some Rocky Balboa with the dead wife. Have a problematic relationship with the kid throughout. All we are missing for the whole Rocky series is an appearance from Mr T. If we are doing a boxing film anyway, why not steal the one-eyed black character from Million Dollar Baby and get an Oscar winner in to play him.
So with that copycat nonsense out of the way we can get to the rest of the film. There are a lot of other problems. How he goes from being a multi-millionaire to living in a run-down rented shack, overnight, makes no sense. Why the courts withdraw custody is unclear. Where the babysitter is when he is out at his losing fight is completely missing. Headbutt a referee and get a ban of a year cut to under 4 months. Pay off boxing judges but still lose a close match on points. Always covered in wet blood and seeping wounds but never any scabs or scars.
The boxing scenes are not too bad. Gylenhall obviously put a lot of work into his physique. Just the story is so patchy that it becomes a distraction.
Overall 5 out of 10.
Film Review - Mission Impossible Rogue Nation
I hate the Mission Impossible movies and it is important context to consider the previous 'efforts' in the series.
The first MI move seemed like a good idea. Take a classic 60's action series with clever spies who do amazing confidence tricks, add Tom Cruise, update for 1996 technology and off we go. Then they took the main hero of the 171 episode TV series, cast John Voight to play him, badly, and made him the bad guy. No amount of tricks and stunts and special effects was ever going to make up for taking such a chunk of franchise history and throwing it away. I am stunned that David Koepp still gets writing work. There must be an awful lot of Producers out there who think Carlito's Way is so great that all his other disasters are forgivable. They really are not!
The second MI movie now seemed like a bad idea but the first one made some money, so they bring in John Woo to direct and Anthony Hopkins to try and give it some weight, and manage to make an even more terrible movie than the first one!
Third time round, still cashing in, and they bring in JJ Abrams to direct it and add Phillip Seymour Hoffman for weight and Simon Pegg for laughs. Surely, this time, we get something worth watching? No, it manages to be even worse than the first two! JJ you should be ashamed that your name is on this.
Four, why am I even going to watch this? Adding Jeremy Renner and trying to make it funny and hiring one of the Pixar team to direct can't help, and yet somehow it does. This one is still bad, but it is the least bad of them all.
So now we get to the latest in the series, and the trailer looks terrible. Ridiculous stunts, bad Simon Pegg jokes, Alec Baldwin! I am four movies in to the series so giving up now would just be pointless.
I am on a bad-title binge this week (see Southpaw for more) so I am going to start with the stupidity of "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation". There isn't actually a nation involved at all, never mind a rogue one. Even when this is crammed into both the trailer and the movie it is so clearly done for effect that the whole scene seems stupid.
There are still plenty of stupid bits. The whole underwater computer nonsense was a complete waste of time. An underwater computer hidden under a power plant? He can't take any metal in with him but he has a computer on his arm? Not that it matters because most air tanks are made from glass fibre these days anyway, so he could have just got hold of some non-metallic fittings and spent as long under the water as he wanted to. Two of them break in to the factory, when only one of them has to be there, and spend several minutes repositioning a massive gantry crane and none of the staff notice? Then he runs out of air, and isn't it suddenly handy that there were two of them...? I don't mind a bit of suspension of disbelief, but part of the allure of the original MI series was that they tried to minimise that by using tricks and good planning rather than this sort of nonsense.
While I am on "stupid", consider the Austrian policeman who has a truncheon that turns into a gun so that he can sneak it past security. Ignoring both the ability of someone disguised as a policeman to bypass security, and more obviously that Austrian police are armed anyway!
Despite the stupidity of some sections, the bulk of the film is actually fairly watchable.
Rebecca Ferguson steals the entire film. Every time she steps on the screen she puts the other cast in the shade. She also brings a sensible practicality to the ridiculous spy business as she repeatedly stops to take her high-heeled shoes off when she needs to run or fight.
The stunts and fights are generally pretty well done, even when they are stupid. The overall plot is passable when you ignore the silliest parts. Switch your brain off for a couple of hours and there are certainly worse things you could do with your time.
If they do make MI6, and the money men will be keen, I will probably go and see it was well.
Overall 7 out of 10.
The first MI move seemed like a good idea. Take a classic 60's action series with clever spies who do amazing confidence tricks, add Tom Cruise, update for 1996 technology and off we go. Then they took the main hero of the 171 episode TV series, cast John Voight to play him, badly, and made him the bad guy. No amount of tricks and stunts and special effects was ever going to make up for taking such a chunk of franchise history and throwing it away. I am stunned that David Koepp still gets writing work. There must be an awful lot of Producers out there who think Carlito's Way is so great that all his other disasters are forgivable. They really are not!
The second MI movie now seemed like a bad idea but the first one made some money, so they bring in John Woo to direct and Anthony Hopkins to try and give it some weight, and manage to make an even more terrible movie than the first one!
Third time round, still cashing in, and they bring in JJ Abrams to direct it and add Phillip Seymour Hoffman for weight and Simon Pegg for laughs. Surely, this time, we get something worth watching? No, it manages to be even worse than the first two! JJ you should be ashamed that your name is on this.
Four, why am I even going to watch this? Adding Jeremy Renner and trying to make it funny and hiring one of the Pixar team to direct can't help, and yet somehow it does. This one is still bad, but it is the least bad of them all.
So now we get to the latest in the series, and the trailer looks terrible. Ridiculous stunts, bad Simon Pegg jokes, Alec Baldwin! I am four movies in to the series so giving up now would just be pointless.
I am on a bad-title binge this week (see Southpaw for more) so I am going to start with the stupidity of "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation". There isn't actually a nation involved at all, never mind a rogue one. Even when this is crammed into both the trailer and the movie it is so clearly done for effect that the whole scene seems stupid.
There are still plenty of stupid bits. The whole underwater computer nonsense was a complete waste of time. An underwater computer hidden under a power plant? He can't take any metal in with him but he has a computer on his arm? Not that it matters because most air tanks are made from glass fibre these days anyway, so he could have just got hold of some non-metallic fittings and spent as long under the water as he wanted to. Two of them break in to the factory, when only one of them has to be there, and spend several minutes repositioning a massive gantry crane and none of the staff notice? Then he runs out of air, and isn't it suddenly handy that there were two of them...? I don't mind a bit of suspension of disbelief, but part of the allure of the original MI series was that they tried to minimise that by using tricks and good planning rather than this sort of nonsense.
While I am on "stupid", consider the Austrian policeman who has a truncheon that turns into a gun so that he can sneak it past security. Ignoring both the ability of someone disguised as a policeman to bypass security, and more obviously that Austrian police are armed anyway!
Despite the stupidity of some sections, the bulk of the film is actually fairly watchable.
Rebecca Ferguson steals the entire film. Every time she steps on the screen she puts the other cast in the shade. She also brings a sensible practicality to the ridiculous spy business as she repeatedly stops to take her high-heeled shoes off when she needs to run or fight.
The stunts and fights are generally pretty well done, even when they are stupid. The overall plot is passable when you ignore the silliest parts. Switch your brain off for a couple of hours and there are certainly worse things you could do with your time.
If they do make MI6, and the money men will be keen, I will probably go and see it was well.
Overall 7 out of 10.
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