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Alita Battle Angel review

Kinda went into this movie with no expectations, I don’t think I even watched a trailer and overall I can say it’s a very flawed movie, but altogether pretty good. I enjoyed it pretty much throughout although some niggling things stuck out to me.

The plot is pretty basic, and one of the biggest problems I had at the start is the start. It starts at the start and people are like ‘so, isn’t that where you’re supposed to start?’ yeah I guess but usually when you have a movie set in this completely alien anime world you need a lot of exposition and world building and that takes time and it can be a little boring to slog through which is why you don’t usually start your movie with that.

So the start of the movie is this weird twenty minutes of pretty boring exposition dumps and world building where Christoph Walz finds this robot head and brings it back to life and introduces it to the world and what not which is this semi fish out of water narrative. We’re introduced to the world by her experience of it.

It works but it feels like it’s rushing to get this exposition out but also there’s nothing actually happening. But eventually you get to an action sequence and it was pretty good, I like the action, the level of violence is pretty awesome and they get away with that and keeping it 12a I guess because it’s robots. Because if this was people it would be an 18 for sure because she straight up kills people. People are decapitated and maimed throughout and it’s pretty cool because even though they’re all cyborgs they have human faces and attributes so it’s not like that crappy robocop reboot where he’s just fighting faceless drones.

The thing is if I wrote this I’d have tried to put this action sequence at the start and then when you’ve got the audiences attention you subtly drop the exposition in flashbacks or something. Because setting the relationship at the start with Christoph walz’s character dates it. You see their relationship in real time and there’s no gap to fill yourself. If you left it to a flashback it implies they’ve known eachother longer so they can care about eachother.

The acting is ok, the writing is ok, the effects look alright, I have no real complaints with any of it, it was a solid if a little predictable. But predictability doesn’t make a movie bad if what you predicted is fun and interesting, which this movie most certainly is.

Honestly my biggest gripe with this movie is that it’s a movie.

I just got this niggling feeling that it would’ve worked so much better as a tv show on amazon. It wasn’t a particularly long movie but it felt like a lot of it was trying to cram as much stuff into one movie as possible and I feel like some of it was crunched and some of the scenes feel more episodic than in a typical movie formula.

A tv show would’ve really let the plot develop nicely and in a more organic way and it wouldn’t have left us with an ending which felt sort of flat. And it could’ve easily been converted to a tv show since most of the main cast are already relatively unknown television actors, you’d just need to snip the bigger names like Walz and Jennifer Connolly, two actors which if I’m being honest brought nothing of note that justified their casting. I could easily see their roles being played just as well by someone much cheaper and less well known to satisfy the budget of a tv show instead of a movie. I know people like Christoph Walz and I like Jennifer Connolly because I love rocketeer and the original hulk but are these really big names that put butts in seats? Not really.

Overall I liked it and I liked some of the cameos like with Jeff Fahey playing the awesome cyborg dog bounty hunter and Nova being played by Edward Norton. But these characters just make me want this to be a tv show even more. If this were a tv show that cyborg dog guy could get his own episode or even an arc not just a five minute scene. That’s what I hate about this movie, it has so much potential I feel like is being wasted just to cram it into this hunger games style movie template because that’s what they think will make the most money.

To be honest I think the hunger games model is played out since most those trilogies just sort of fizzle out and we had this slew of teen movies after which tried and failed to emulate that. I just want to watch a full real satisfying movie with a beginning middle and end and not have to watch a sequel or a trilogy or just a non movie. I really really want to not have the only real complete movie I’ve seen this year be about a talking yellow electric rat.

Yeah I know this movie was last year I guess, like I go to the cinemas anymore. If you go to the cinema these days you’re an idiot, there’s just not enough decent movies out there these days to justify it when you have streaming services. You pay once or a monthly fee and you get to churn through all this garbage looking for the hidden gem in the comfort of your own home, what’s not to love?

Genuinely not shilling haha.

I don’t have much more to say about except I really enjoyed it, the action was super cool, I liked all the characters and the feel. It has this weird cyberpunk nineties feel which I really liked. Even down to the main love interest guy, who has this nineties haircut that makes him look like the kid from Hocus Pocus.

At it’s heart Alita is basically a love story, and not a bad one honestly. The romantic stuff wasn’t cringy or forced, it just could’ve developed better over a series of tv episodes instead of in an already cluttered movie. But it’s refreshing to see a romance in a movie these days that doesn’t feel forced. I liked it, I liked the characters, I think it all worked well. The overall plot is bog standard ‘get to the place’, the plot is completely ancillary to the characters honestly because it feels like scene to scene is more episodic.

In summary just a fun, cool movie, might be a bit violent for kids but it’s worth a watch for sure and I hope it gets a sequel, I heard it did pretty well in china so it might be getting a few more.

 

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Us – Movie review

I actually watched this a while ago and didn’t really feel like reviewing it because it was just kind of ok. I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to do a review, it just sort of passed over my eyeballs without really grabbing me or me really hating it. It was a solid meh.

But due to this recent content drought do to my erratic work schedule and near constant writers constipation, desperate times call for desperate measures. Which includes but is not limited to poetry examining the uncomfortable truth of my existence and movie reviews about movies that did not wow me at all in being especially bad or good.

So Us, what’s Us about? Err, clones I guess *spoilers* except not really because it’s sort of revealed in the pointless bit at the start which ruined the whole movie for me. Sorry but it did.

It’s one of those movies that has this overly long pre-ambles where something happens before the movie starts proper. But it added nothing really and the story would have been more interesting/mysterious if they’d cut it shorter or left it out. With it in it bloats the first act and forces them to cut down the bits where you’re supposed to get to know the family so you can care about them. But don’t worry none of them die, oh yeah spoilers, except who cares?

They should’ve just started the movie at the fucking start, why do movies hate to do this now? Just have the family going on vacation, give us time to set up equilibrium and get to know the family and then gradually build the to the freaky shit.

If you read my blog, (which no one does haha) you know how I feel about this director and Get Out, if you don’t I think Get Out is probably the most overrated movie in history. It’s barely a movie, it’s an overly long episode of the tales from the crypt that won an oscar or something. But we all know why, if Jordan Peele were white and the movie wasn’t about racial politics nobody would’ve given a shit. But that’s the world we live in, a silly movie like Get out about white people wanting to suck out black people’s brains so they can steal their bodies wins oscars while nobody gives a shit about Hereditary because it was made by a Jewish guy and it wasn’t political, it was just good.

So really the problem here is hype, Jordan Peele is like seen as this genius when he just made an ok b/horror movie that he made political and people had to get on board with it or be labelled an ist or an ism or whatever. And now his new movie is still kinda political but it’s more subtle, so subtle it’s audience doesn’t really get it and it’s not being lawded with the same fan fare.

Honestly if I think about it I think I liked Us more than Get Out, only because it’s a more interesting concept and the movie was sort of more dynamic I guess, I dunno. It was more entertaining as an idea, more ambitious, less silly, even though under serious scrutiny it kinda makes no sense.

It’s a cool idea, it’s basically like there’s this underground society of clone people for some reason, and they like escape… for some reason and then want to kill their doubles… for some reason.

Yeah see what I mean? So we’re supposed to believe there’s some kind of facility cloning people and a little girl get down into it by accident and there’s no guards or scientists, the clones are just hanging around under there until one day they decide to murder everyone.

These are the parts that really bother me. It’s a cool idea but that’s all it is, it’s not very well fleshed out.

That’s it really, it has some cool bits, but it’s really just kind of a mess and it has no stakes or tension because Peele isn’t ballsy enough to let any of his characters actually die, in a horror movie.

Oh sure he lets the white family get slaughtered, that’s fine but his self insert character. They didn’t even seem to be that bothered that their friends were murdered. And neither do we because they weren’t developed to have any other character traits but being rich white assholes.

You could’ve at least killed the dad in the main family to add a level of suspense and danger, the families protector. But no, I mean if you cut out the gore you could’ve made this a pg13/12a. How can you convey fear when you know none of the main characters can die.

It reminds me of Hereditary *spoilers* that shattering moment when the little girl dies, it shakes the whole film. It’s heart rending and horrifying and it changes the whole film because you know if they can kill this little girl and in such a horrifying way, no one in the family is safe. *spoilers end.*

It’s just kind of like a safe bleh horror movie skating on Peele’s name, there’s no real substance to it, it has no real bite. I hate to compare it to Detective Pikachu but I feel like I’m going to be comparing every movie this to year to that movie about a little yellow electric rat that talks.

That movie had a satisfying pacing, a beginning middle and end. If you saw that in the cinema you’d feel like you got your moneys worth, like you’d gone on a journey. But Us just kinda feels like it didn’t have enough content or structure to be a film. It kinda gives me hope for his twilight zone show if it isn’t too woke. Because he has these good ideas but they don’t seem to have enough flesh on the bone to be films and they might work better as tv show episodes instead.

That’s all I have to say really, if Jordan Peele hadn’t been hyped up to be the second coming of fucking Hitchcock this probably wouldn’t be worth talking about. But I mean really, I’m harsh on the guy but what else is there in horror these days? Those shitty conjuring/annabelle/insidious movies that are just awful trash they keep churning out. Compared to those garbage movies Us is a fucking masterpiece.

So I’m not saying it’s bad, it’s just not great. Is it worth a watch? Sure, I think, so is Get Out, much more than Annabelle origins or whatever or the nun. But I’m much more looking forward to seeing Midsommar by the guy that did Hereditary, I think that’s going be my horror movie of the year. But I don’t want to get my hopes up.

 

 

4

The Kid (2019) – review

Hey there,

I didn’t really want to review this because it was just sort of meh but I thought I needed to let people know that I didn’t die haha. Just been busy with work and trying to find a new job and stay sane.

I watched this movie for a couple of reasons, I liked Dane Dehann despite the shitty spiderman movies and Valerian being bleh. I really liked him in Chronicle and Place beyond the pines, those are amazing movies that really grabbed me and in the case of Place beyond the pines, really moved me.

So when I see his name I think it could be ok and then I saw Chris Pratt’s Ethan Hawke’s name in a western together and I get horrible magnificent seven flashback and full body shudders. If you haven’t seen the magnificent seven remake, keep it that way, you’re not missing anything.

That discouraged me a little but then I found out this movie had an R rating which peaked my interest again, thinking this would be a balls to the wall actionfest.

Turns out I was wrong about all these things.

Because at it’s heart this is a movie about absolutely nothing.

I don’t know why this movie was made, I don’t think even the people that made it know why it was made. It just exists.

The movie starts with this abusive father beating his wife to death and his kid kills him and they run away from their even more abusive uncle played by Chris Pratt and somehow run into Billy the kid for no reason.

I thought it started kind of slow but there was some gore so I figured the movie was just building up to the action like Open Range. If you haven’t seen Open Range, it’s this really slow movie that climaxes in this awesome gun fight for like the whole third act, really great Kevin Costner movie. In fact there aren’t many Kevin Costner movies I don’t like, yes even waterworld and the Postman. I actually liked Waterworld more than mad max, heresy right. I just think overall there are more bad max movies than good and the good ones aren’t that good.

See this movie is so shitty and boring I’d rather talk about mad max.

Ok so they meet billy the kid for reasons and then a bunch of talking and nothing happens until he eventually escapes with the help of this kid because his sister gets kidnapped by the evil uncle who steps in and out of the movie when it’s convenient for the script. I always hate that, I hate when a villain just steps in and out when it’s convenient and I always sight robocop as a movie that did it right. In robocop the main villain almost has his own arc, he has his own scenes just to establish him and you follow him almost as much as robocop, the same for robocop 2 actually, now that I think about it and the villains were really relateable. That was a good sequel, SEE, see this movie is so boring and uneventful I’m talking about robocop now.

Ok so his sister gets kidnapped and I guess the story is about coming clean, or his arc is about admitting he killed his father but no one really cares about that. So the kid wants to free billy to go after his sister, which would’ve been a cool story line, I mean I want to see that movie. Where a kid saves billy the kid and then billy the kid does some bad ass stuff and saves the girl and has like a redemption arc. Does that happen? No he escapes and then just dies in a really underwhelming way and then Ethan Hawke sort of becomes the main character I guess, although this movie doesn’t really have a main character. It sort of goes between billy, the actual kid and ethan hawke, but none are really that likeable or interesting. It’s like having three bowls of underwhelming luke warm porridge to pick from.

Then after billy dies, which me and my brother thought was a joke, and there would be like a tarantino-esque history bending, but no he’s just out of the movie. Then the kid confesses and entrusts ethan hawke to save his sister and he does, the end.

And is the gun fight at the end epic? No it lasts like three second and it’s really underwhelming and boring.

All that happens is Chris Pratt gets his third and final scene in the movie, he just reappears for the purpose of dying and establishing he’s really mean because he let someone rape his niece. I mean he didn’t rape her, that would be weird. And then you have this cringe scene like five minutes later when she shoots her rapist in the dick and we’re supposed to be like ‘”Yeah you go girl!” maybe not that obnoxious. But there was no emotional resonance because this all happened in like the space of ten minutes.

It’s like a movie that takes ages to do nothing then crams all it’s emotional plot into like ten minutes and we’re supposed to feel anything for these characters, why? The only emotion I felt while watching this was boredom and I don’t even think that’s emotion. I sat down expecting a blood soaked semi historical western and got absolutely nothing.

This movie is a big nothing burger, it’s not about anything, it stands for nothing it’s just nothing.

Westerns in the past, movies in general in the past had morals, they had messages, they told stories and parables, they were about something, they didn’t just exist to swallow an hour or two out of your life.

It just goes back to this feeling I have that people just don’t know how to make movies anymore and it’s sad that the only movie I’ve seen recently that feels like an actual movie is about a talking yellow electric rat voiced by Ryan Reynolds.

 

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Detective Pikachu – movie review

First thing I want to do is just register my disdain, this movie has no right being as good as it is, NO RIGHT!

It certainly has no right to be the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. I mean, I’m as surprised as anyone. I honestly wasn’t expecting much from this movie, it’s probably good that my expectations were so low and that the last movie I watched was captain marvel which almost made me stop believing there would ever be a good movie again.

I mean captain marvel was barely a movie, it was just a really fast slide show of stuff happening with splosions. And Shazam wasn’t much better.

So how does a movie about a talking yellow electric rat make them both look like garbage in comparison, how is that even possible? Also goes without saying this is better than deadpool 2 hands down. This is probably the best Ryan Reynolds movie I’ve ever seen.

It’s simple, it was an actual movie. It wasn’t political, it wasn’t a spectacle comic book movie, it was just a movie. It had a basic three act structure giving equal weight to be beginning the all important middle I rant about and the end. It wasn’t like shazam that had this bloated first and third act with no middle, it was just all ass and titties, you need some waist in the middle otherwise you’re just a blob of flesh.

You need some time in the middle where we get to know the characters and they go on a journey, if you just have a big opening and no middle we don’t care about the end.

I literally can’t think of a flaw with this movie. It looked great, the characters were great, the story was great, the acting was great. It has heart and real emotion, the emotional scenes felt real and believable and not heavy and tacked on. I genuinely cared about the characters and it nailed the tone right out of the gate. I think tone for a movie like this is really important. They could’ve gone super cartoony and silly or taken themselves too seriously. It could’ve been another dragonball or death note movie fiasco. But it nails it in the first scene. The characters are fun but they do a perfect job of making you believe this is just the regular world with pokemon.

That could’ve made or broken the movie, because if you can’t buy the idea pokemon exist or it’s done in a stupid way it just breaks the immersion and becomes cheesey. The director of this movie just gets it, he perfected the tone. We have fun and humor but we also have the emotional resonance that carries the plot.

Now the plot is nothing special, it’s sort of a hollywood plot. Guy is trying to investigate his father’s death and then mysteries happen. And I want to say the ending was predictable but it was good predictable, it was satisfying. It didn’t subvert my expectation into a pile of shit like last jedi. But it also did subvert my expectations a little bit but I saw some of the twists coming, but there were twists, more than one in a movie about pokemon.

I almost didn’t think movies like this could be made today, movies that actually feel like movies, that have that structure. It’s like film makers don’t know how to make movies anymore and they just copy everyone else around them. So maybe if this movie came out ten or twenty years ago no one would’ve cared but the sheer fact the standard for movies is lower and some brainless comic book movie can make millions and get a fresh on rotten tomatoes a movie as competent and entertaining as this is an instant classic.

What more can I say, I was entertained from beginning to end, I enjoyed every part of it. It’s my film of the year so far. Go watch this movie.

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Diana in the dark chapter 16 ‘Dark Descendants’ (remurdered)

Hey there what’s up?

Don’t really have much to talk about this week, just been working and watching the expanse which I still really love. It’s just really well written and every character that annoys when they’re first introduced has grown on you by the end of the season and I really love that.

They introduced this ‘stronk empowered wamen’ character in season 2 who just seemed really generic and annoying at the start of the season and now I really like her arch. They just really developed and rounded her out from her introduction. She like starts off as this generic badass and then she becomes sort of a fish out of water character to a rebel and then comes full circle to be really bad ass again but by then I was really rooting for her. I mean yeah it doesn’t really make sense for her to be ability to beat the shit out of grown men especially considering she’s a martian and supposed to have weaker bones and she’s fighting earthers who live under higher gravity. But martian marines are supposed to train under higher gravity and she isn’t tiny and skinny, she does look kind of built a little. Not overly so but it’s more believable and then of course she’s most effective when wearing power armor.

All round, I’m just loving the show and the world and the characters, just another great- I was about to say show on amazon but then I googled it and apparently it was originally on scy fy but then got cancelled after season 3. Which just seems fucking crazy to me, unless it dips in quality in season 3 dramatically to a point where you would drop the whole show which would have to be drastic I’d say it was budget related because looking at the visuals in this show it cannot be cheap to make. So if it’s pulling in good to fair numbers I can see why it might get axed by scy fy for just not be cost effective. But I love it and I hope it keeps going on amazon like Bosch and Sneaky Pete.

I also watched the Shazam movie and it was ok, I don’t really want to do a review on it because I didn’t really have strong feelings about it in either direction. Just a pretty solid fun movie. I didn’t think it was as good as aquaman which I think is the top of the shitpile of modern dc movies.

The story is basic, the characters are ok, the action is good, I liked the feel and the tone and how it really puts you in the ‘Big’ mindset where you’re like ‘What would I do in this situation?’. I think it takes the perspective of the audience and makes it a lot more relate-able than other comic book movies.

But I think the message of the movie is shitty and half baked and it suffers from the same syndrome most movies do today where it has no real middle. It’s like some surgical nightmare where a chick has huge fake tits and a huge fake ass but their waste is too small to support them both and they just snap in the middle under the pressure haha.

The middle of this movie is basically one five minute montage and then all we’re left with is a really bloated first and third act. This is the only reason aquaman is top for me because it was more balanced, it had a really satisfying second that made the film feel more like a journey. It felt like a movie from the eighties and it was great.

There really just isn’t enough meat to the story or the middle bit to carry us through to the end, which is why it’s just ok.

And the reason I said I hated the message is because the message is basically “family” in air quotes but then proceeds to totally shit on the family. Because the message isn’t really family, it’s totally anti-family as it represents real blood related families as shitty people who hate and treat you like shit and abandon you because someone else can do a better job. Your actual parents will neglect you and fuck you up and you’ll kill them or forget they exist and instead embrace a group of ethnically diverse strangers as your ‘real’ family to take on the big bad guy who had his real family screw him up.
It’s very subversive and I don’t take kindly to this narrative that ‘anyone can be your family’ any group of random people cannot be a family. A family is defined by blood relation, any other definition is an attack on the family, attempting to water down and erase the meaning of the word, which if you’ve read 1984 isn’t a good thing. Words are nice, keeping their meaning is important, so let’s stop trying to undermine them and reinvent for a silly political agenda.

The most healthy and enriching environment for a child is still the nuclear family, no matter what some trendy buzzfeed article might say, having a mom and a dad is still much better than not having them on average. I’m not trying to say some people can’t be shitty parents or single parents can’t be great, or foster kids can’t turn out great. I’m talking about averages, not one off, I’m talking about the rule not the exceptions that prove the rule. You coming to me and saying ‘but I was adopted and blah blah blah’ doesn’t prove anything, you’re one of like a billion people, your anecdotal evidence is meaningless when compared to the stats of the thousands of other people that didn’t get so lucky.

Anyway rant over and I don’t think a review is necessary, it’s ok. Pretty standard for comic book movies today just being alright. Kids will love it but hopefully wont internalise the subversive message.

I don’t really think it’s worth a cinema visit because the budget isn’t that amazing, it’s sort of a smaller movie, you’re not gonna get as much out of it as you would seeing the avengers in the cinema. But it’s worth a stream.

Anyway, got proofreading to do for the latest chapter of Cur 2, didn’t get much done this week because work stuff completely kicked my ass but hopefully next week will be different, probably wont be though haha.

See you…

–

I just sat there for a moment looking down at it, turning the would-be weapon in my hand, getting a feel for the weight. The weight of his words swished around in my head. I didn’t have to ask if everything was true; it just made some sort of insane sense, a puzzle piece falling into place.

This was what I waiting for.

“What do I do?” I asked.

“Whatever you want.” Brodie—my brother—smiled that prepackaged smile.

A lapping feeling of black waves poured over me, covering me, feet first. It was like a dream, like a wish realized. A whole dark world opened up before me, welcoming me like some returning hero from long exile.

I was home, whatever that meant.

I went from a sad emo only child with a serial killer blog to Dark Diana Mistress of the Damned with not one but two siblings of the night at her side, more or less.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, suddenly rising to a mid-crouch, the ceiling was far too low for his stature. He leaned over Wendy, and opened each eye, then gave her a few little love taps to bring her just to the brink of consciousness. “I gave them just a little more than you to keep them under. I didn’t know whether you wanted them to talk, sometimes I like them to talk, confess, scream, spit, whatever.” My brother paused and looked down at her like she was Christmas ham and looked back up at me. Smiling that plastic smile. “It seems necessary sometimes, but it’s up to you. I think she’s past a confession at this point.”

“I know all I need to,” I said stonily.

“I figured as much.” He smirked.

Wendy’s eyes rolled back and forth under her lids and then fluttered. She looked around, obviously confused. Unable to move her head, as it was pinned with plastic wrap across her forehead. She saw me and her eyes went hot and spicy; I could almost see blood squirting out of them.

I could feel it then, my heart pounding, the dark dancer gripped the knife, moved my hand, and my feet went on their own. I let go, let it take me, as it purred incessantly in my ears.

I stood, as if someone yanked my strings, and glided over to her side, staring down at her.

She was beautiful, a perfect specimen, really. It was a shame. A beautiful tragedy.

Wendy was my friend, kind of. That was what made it special, the setting, the night, the company.

She looked up at me with wide terrified eyes now, she’d seen the knife, she could no doubt feel the squashing pressure of it now. The helplessness, the hopelessness. The cornered animal; anger leaving and being replaced with a dreadful reflection. She could feel it now, no doubt see it in my empty eyes.

Wendy knew she was about to be swallowed, there was no other way. Not a muscle she could move, not a penny she could spend, not an eyelid she could flutter. Nothing would spare her this, this was fate, this was the end, her end, and it was as beautiful and poetic an end I could ever hope to see.

Only one question savaged me; where to start?

I put my hands through her hair, making a soothing mocking cooing noise. It’s sibilant voice humming below my own.

Tears leaked from her eyes, and she made a pitiful mewling noise, a white frothy spittle gathered under the tape around her mouth.

I felt the boney fingers curling on top of mine, squeezing the knife, lifting my hand like Abraham, but no one would call out, no loving god would stop this.

It came down like a guillotine falling, such beautiful effortless purpose, a thread through the head of a needle.

The knife entered her torso just under her ribs, she gasped as the cool steel touched her. An almost ecstatic sound of breath escaped and held, resisting, then relenting. Her body tensed and went limp. Only her eyes held onto some tiny spark of something.

I stood there for a moment feeling it. Life, death, power, powerless, emptiness. A tingling sensation traveled down my back and to my legs as I continued to cut.

She breathed raspily over spurts of disgusting sticky blood. Her fingers dancing and convulsed under the plastic.

I was somewhere about two inches into her chest cavity when she finally died, near her heart. I felt it stop beating, listlessly clinging to life just for the sake of routine.

Wendy slowly wound down like a clock, just slipping away. Her golden skin; pallid and white, specks of blood on her face.

I’d managed to keep most of it contained the plastic did the rest. There was something there, a tremendous feeling of relief, something I’d been holding onto let go. Like I’d discovered a phantom limb left to atrophy. A balled fist finally unclenched, a third eye opened, a set of wings stretched for the first time. A complete unwinding of a tension I didn’t even know I’d stored up over a lifetime.

Released all at once and all at once I knew I’d have to do it again, and soon.

–

 

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Glass – review

I, like everyone who watched split thought it was ok I guess, some people were blown away by James Mcavoy’s drama schoolkid impressionfest, I just thought it was lame and silly. I never really had my belief suspended, I never found him creepy or felt like he was becoming different people. I just saw silly James Mcavoy doing a bunch of silly voices and faces and it felt dumb and forced.

And he does a lot more of that in this movie and it seems to be the focus since the other characters are in a coma at least one is pretending to be in a coma. I watched this and the death wish remake with my brother and for those that haven’t seen it, the death wish remake is probably the most phoned in performance from Bruce Willis in recent memory. And when this movie started I asked him ‘do you think his performance will be less or more phoned in for this movie?’ and understandably he said less because it’s not a remake it’s a sequel to one of his best movies, arguably.

Oh how wrong he was. I mean it’s weird to harp on the performances of a movie as dumb as this, but it’s just the thing that pops out at me the most, and it’s not just Bruce Willis, they’re all terrible, it’s like no one but the kid who played his son in the original movie took this seriously.

Because you have Bruce Willis who literally spends most of the movie sitting down who just looks like he wants to take his check and go home, he does so little in this movie and he’s supposed to be the hero, I wondered if they just had him for the day. You have Mcavoy doing his silly impressions which got old in split and you have Samuel L Jackson doing his half hearted mastermind bit. But for the most of the movie he’s just pretending he’s in a coma. So essentially two of the main characters are old guys who are getting paid to sit down a lot.

And then you have Sarah Paulson being Sarah Paulson. She has no acting range whatsoever, she plays the same fucking character in everything. I know this from watching every season of american horror story, where she plays multiple different characters sometimes in the same season. She must have played like ten or so different characters in American horror story and they’re all the same, pathetic whiney people or smug whiney people. All she can do is sad or smug with an air of unearned authority, and that’s what she brings to this.

I really think it would have been a much stronger movie if it took her character and had a real movie actress play that role and make her the centre of the movie. Like she’s a psychiatrist hired to debunk superheroes but then the more she learns about them, the more she begins to believe. It could’ve been like a weird superhero version of silence of the lambs. But no, the movie just spends so much time dicking around with these pointless characters.

I had this movie spoiled for me so I knew it had no range and probably no budget because there’s a cool sequence at the start not the very start because that’s dumb as shit. Where Willis as a superhero is taking on the massive evil of white kids punching old asian people for viral video purposes, we really needed a superhero for that, it’s not like the police could’ve done something about that. There’s no way the police could’ve just watched their videos and then Willis could just tell them where they live. It’s like superman decides to beat the shit out of someone for speeding or spitting on the sidewalk.
I mean in the first movie he takes on a serial killer kidnapper and a terrorist but in this he’s stopping violent pranksters from going viral gee wizz. And they make a salt bae joke just to date the movie, salt bae is a meme that’s old now, people reading this now will have no idea what that meme is about because its just about a guy who salts beef in a weird way.

Why put that in your movie? Why put yourself in your movie? Every M. Night movie he makes a weird awkward pointless cameo. When Hitchcock did this it was very minor, in some cases other films would put a cut out of him in the background as a silhouette. I’m not sure he had speaking parts. But this was a guy who was very engaged with his audience, the trailer to Psycho is just him talking about it on the set and people went to watch it based on that. It was Alfred Fucking Hitchcock, M. Night is no Hitchcock and no one thinks it’s clever or funny to see him appear in his own movies, it’s just weird and sad.

Yeah so he has this weird pointless cameos where maybe three people would be ‘oh he’s playing the same character as he did in unbreakable – a movie that came out almost twenty fucking years ago!’

The ego on this guy, I can barely fathom it. I have to imagine the impetus to the movie being like him sitting and watching the marvel movies and their success with the cinematic universe and being like “I can do that.”

No, no you can’t please stop.

My brother was psyched when he saw the after credit like twist bit at the end of Split where it was in the same universe as unbreakable, I groaned and now he knows why.

Because he was thinking that this was something twenty years in the making and it would be totally epic, packed with awesome ideas, culminating in this amazing completion of the franchise.

I looked at it and saw a guy thinking he could get in on that sweet cinematic universe money like a fucking scammer by dredging up twenty year old characters like dusty Halloween skeletons. So where he saw pragmatism and culmination of twenty years of ideas I saw the true raw cynicism of this movie. All his movies are pg-13’s or 12A if you’re like me and have the misfortune of being in the UK. So Split, a horror movie about a serial killer multiple personality person is made in a way that children can watch it. I looked it up and I think all his movies are pg-13’s. This isn’t a style thing, this is a fucking marketing strategy, he sacrifices tone and any artistic integrity to mass market all his films. It’s like reverse sleaze, he makes his movies wholesome to make as much money possible. It’s smart but also I’m watching a movie where a guy is strong enough to rip people in half and you can’t show any blood or murder at all. Like what’s the point?

As I said I watched the red letter media review of this so I already knew what happened in the movie, I don’t care about it being spoiled because I didn’t care and you shouldn’t care about spoilers either because you’ve either seen it or you shouldn’t bother. And to be fair if you’ve seen the trailer you’ve see the whole movie anyway.

But the most frustrating thing about this movie is it could’ve been ok, to get back to the point I was trying to make earlier, it starts off pretty fun. You have a set up where Willis is a superhero vigilante who stops pranksters for some reason and doesn’t wear a mask in the age of smart phones and is then surprised when he gets caught.

He and the beast have a cool fight at the start and you can be forgiven for thinking this is cool to see the beast square off against Willis, and it really should’ve been the movie. Willis tracking down the Beast and then an epic showdown.

But no, what happens instead is they get captured and for some reason taken to the place Jackson’s character has been held for twenty years to be convinced they’re not actually super heroes by Sarah Paulson in these really boring therapy sessions.

That’s when you realise this movie isn’t leaving this one building. So you have this guy trying to do a little marvel universe but he doesn’t want to spend marvel money or the effort that goes into that type of movie. So his epic conclusion literally takes place in the parking lot of this one building the whole movie is shot in.

Literally half the movie is set up. It actually starts around the one hour mark and at that point I was actually sort of enjoying it. Because what you expect from this movie is that the previous two movies handle the set up and this movie can be just one long pay off, one epic third act. But no it takes a really long boring hour of people talking and the pointless side characters from the other movies coming back to do basically nothing. Like Willis’ son from the first movie comes back and it’s the same actor and his whole point in the movie is that he googles Kevin (splitguy). The girl from split does the hulk thing of calming the beast so he can be murdered and Jackson’s mother doesn’t do anything except wear terrible ageing makeup because it’s the same actress from unbreakable and she’s actually younger than Jackson.

After they’re captured nothing happens for the first hour. Bruce Willis is sitting down for ninety percent of this movie, he basically does nothing in a movie that should be about him and then he dies in a puddle. I’m not kidding.

He’s fighting the beast and then this super secret organisation that for some reason meets in restaurants and just waits for people that aren’t in the organisation to leave so they can talk about their plans. Apparently the wait staff in the restaurants are in the secret organisation too because they heard everything. So they show up like at the end of the movie and they just shoot the beast when he’s distracted by budget Alita Battle angel. Jackson is killed by the beast and the Bruce Willis is just drowned in a puddle.

My brother was like ‘this is when he fights back and beats all their asses’ and I knew what would happen so I just shook my head as they just dragged this old tired man who just wanted to sit down and get a check so he could buy booze and go home over a puddle and then drown him as he doesn’t even attempt to fight back.

The whole time I was watching this I was thinking ‘this is what M. Night deserves for making this movie’.

So they all die and the twist is there’s a secret group that kills superheroes for the sake of balance but then the peripheral characters from the other movies get together to expose super heroes to the world. Because Mr Glass’ real master plan was to die and expose the world to superheroes. Which is just dumb because we only find out they’re being suppressed at the end. The secret organisation plot line could’ve been good if M. Night wasn’t such a crack addict for twists and actually established their existence at the start of the movie. Because during the entire course of the movie there’s no threat. All you’re expecting is Splitguy to escape and do some splitguy stuff, but if you established this organisation from the start and didn’t hold it back as a twist like a retard it could’ve been a decent plot point not just seem like something you pulled out of your ass to ruin your movie.

Oh also double twist, Kevin’s (splitguy) dad was on the same train as Willis in the first movie so that train crash created both the Beast and Willis. Oooohh OMG Wow much epic such twist, it’s not like you totally just pulled that out of your ass. No this was the plan all along and it’s just genius and it comes full circle, such wow much genius.

It’s not even clever, it’s just bleh. I just didn’t care, there’s so much about this movie that’s just like ‘so what’. Like how long it takes to try and convince us that them being superheroes is all in their minds when we don’t care. We just want something to happen. I just sat there watching people sitting down talking about stuff I didn’t care about expecting a film to happen and it never did.

A weird shirtless sperg and an old man sort of had an uncomfortable wrestle in a parking lot and then they were killed. It’s less like a movie plot and more like a headline in a florida newspaper.

I mean the problem with this movie of which there are many is it has some decent ideas but they’re just so badly handled it’s not even funny. This movie isn’t so bad it’s good, it’s just shit.

And don’t look at this as a twenty year build up to this. This is just a bunch of people who are so desperate for attention and money they’re willing to dig up a movie that was pretty good just to suck the marrow from it’s bones for a sequel. It’s sad. People don’t think you can retroactively ruin movies but you really can, I’m sorry. A shitty movie doesn’t hurt a good book but a shitty sequel makes the previous movies look like shit. They don’t look better in comparison, especially if it’s made by all the same people like this. It just makes that good movie look like a fluke, or it makes you feel stupid for liking it in the first place.

With the star wars movies you can kind of say “well George Lucas had nothing to do with these movie” yeah but he did the prequels and they were panned, I didn’t think they were that bad and compared to last jedi and force awakens they’re masterpieces. But it doesn’t change the fact that there are officially more bad star wars movies/games/tv shows than good now. The franchise soured, the cow was milked so hard it started squirting blood.

So yeah that’s that, I knew it was going to be bad but I had to see it to know just how bad and I did and it was, please don’t watch it or do, who cares?

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I’m back and kind of a Han Solo review I guess. (Not very savage)

Yeah so that day job kaffufle is over and I can get back to my one true love, writing about weird shit and complaining about various forms of media for no money haha.

Just gonna blog about stuff today, I have some content but I’ll put it out tomorrow so just typing this thinking about what I need to do today and also trying to think of things to say about the Han Solo movie that haven’t already been said. Probably the most surprising of all the fact I didn’t hate it, in fact I rather liked it.

I know right, that is pretty shocking. I think maybe it’s because I had such low expectations of it, but I also had really low expectations of last jedi and rogue one and I still thought they sucked.

Anyway this is gonna be laden with spoilers because this movie has been out for awhile so if you’re reading this I’m assuming you’ve already seen it or don’t care.

The first scenes aren’t great and I feel like some of the references and jokes fell flat but on a whole I found the movie fun and inoffensive. And what’s more some of the things people complained about in the movie seemed kind of trite in the context of the film.

The first thing that comes to mind is Donglover’s Billy Dee impression, which was a little cheesey at times but didn’t ruin the movie on the whole. His character was ok, all the characters were pretty likeable and fun. I liked Alden Errenreich’s Han, I thought it was very accurate without trying too hard. Another complaint was the annoying robot side kick L337 who reviewers hated because she’s like an sjw robot. But I felt the way she was presented was for comedy. I didn’t feel like the movie was putting her up as a character to be taken seriously. And it made me think the people complaining just didn’t get the joke, or it was too subtle.

I actually think L3 is mocking sjws, not glorifying them. She’s kind of a C3PO type character, just a silly robot extra who’s not meant to be taken seriously. Just a wacky broken robot who thinks its a person. We’re never meant to take anything 3PO says seriously or see him as a representation of a thing or an idea. So I don’t get why L3 is taken as that. Maybe some of her scenes were cut but she isn’t even in it very long so I think the hate for her is totally overblown as she was never given enough screen time to get annoying. I just think people are overreacting because of the subject matter and it was just a harmless joke, not meant to be taken seriously.

The story is kind of meh and it feels more like Dredd as in a day in the life biopic instead of an epic story. The action is serviceable but I feel like so much is held back as sequel bait which weakens the film. It references Bosque but never shows him, why not? Is Bosque such an important character he can’t be in another star wars movie? What about Boba Fett? And yes spoilers, darth Maul is in it very briefly and I couldn’t help thinking why he wasn’t just in it. Like what is so special about these characters they can’t just be in the movie but have to be hinted at and shoved to the side? I really hate that shit, sequel bait nonsense, just put them in the fucking movie or don’t mention them. Its not clever, its just irritating.

I just really wish they would stop making movies already thinking they’re gonna get a sequel. You should make a movie like it’s the only one and throw everything at it, put all your ideas into it and make it work. Because as it stands the biggest problem in this movie is it has no real villains. And the only villain we really get is Draydon Voss I think his name was which is Paul Bettany’s character but he’s literally only in it for like two scenes.

He’s in it for his introduction scene and then again for his death scene. And that’s one of the things that really lets this movie down, it’s pacing. It just seems too fast, you’re never quite out of one scene or plot point and you’re already in another and I think there needed to be more breathing room and more building of characters definitely of the villains.
Because the other would be villain is Emfiss ness, however you spell that and again she’s only in it for a handful of scenes and then is revealed to not be the bad guy after all and it’s all sort of anticlimactic.

I really wanted there to be some lightsaber action, if not from darth maul himself then from an apprentice with like a lightsaber knife and you basically get that with Draydon Voss. He’s a decent villain, I just wish he was a little more fleshed out.

But in the same breath I can sort of justify this movie not having a villain relation to it not having a hero. Han out right tells us that he’s not a hero, he’s not the good guy. So it stands to reason that a movie about grey areas has no moustache twirling villain. It’s not a typical star wars movie about good and evil black and white, it’s sitting comfortably in the middle and in some regards that can feel a little unsatisfying but I guess it works.

Overrall I liked the movie, it looks nice, the acting was good, the action was decent, the ending was pretty cool. I expected it to be a lot cheesier and unbearable to watch but it really wasn’t. It was kind of like rogue one but good. Rogue one if it had any sense of fun and interesting characters and wasn’t just a dull gloomy slog that tried to trick you with a a stupid darth vader scene that got idiots clapping like trained seals despite ruining the cannon entrance of the original film.

The weaknesses of the movie I could see were that Han didn’t really have an arc he was pretty much the same character throughout. It kind of hints at a change towards the end, or well maybe it has a subtle arc because he’s sort of more trusting and happy go lucky at the start but learns not to trust people and shoots down his mentor in a reference to the Guido shooting first scene.

So I guess it did have an arc just not one that was particularly groundbreaking and sort of didn’t feel earned.

I honestly think it might have made a better tv show than a film because it has a lot of potential but a movie didn’t give it a lot of room to explore that. It could have been decent if it stayed away from netflix, maybe amc or amazon could have made it work.
I think the main reason people didn’t like this movie or weren’t excited for it is because no one really asked for it. I think if this movie came out and it wasn’t a star wars movie like it was just a standalone sci fi movie called Dan Solo space guy it probably wouldn’t have been released because it’s not really that special or mindblowing. It basically rides the coat tails of the films and also doesn’t stack up well against them so it’s like a double edged sword. It wouldn’t exist without the originals but is also measured by them.
I think when you’re making a movie you have to ask yourself ‘does this story really need to be told?’ and in regards to this movie I don’t really think it did. People would have loved Han whether this movie existed or not, whether we knew how he met Chewie or not whether we knew how he got his name/blaster/waist coat or not. So without that necessity it just boils down to a movie that’s made just to make disney lots of money on action figures and really nothing else. Just a paint by numbers, mildly entertaining movie.

It’s kinda just seen as a movie that didn’t need to exist but what movie really does? Maybe my standards are slipping (fat chance haha) but I thought it was a fun popcorn movie just to turn your brain off to, maybe take the kids too. It wasn’t spectacular but it was serviceable and nice looking and fun and really that’s all you can ask for these days.

It makes me a little sad that these star wars movies aren’t going well because I can see the potential there. It’s a world too tempting not to mine but they’re just consistently coming at it from the wrong directions and milking it like a weird alien cow with blue green milk udders. And it’s reaching a point where its like they should have just left well enough alone because now Star wars is a franchise with more bad movies than good, more bad games than good. It’s a franchise that has been ground into the dirt by greedy feckless ideologues and there’s no real coming back from that. It’s like if someone asked me what I would do with the dcu right now I’d tell them to scrap it and start again. That’s all you can do at this point. But maybe don’t start it again haha.

That’s pretty much my full take on it, I probably wouldn’t watch it again but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. It was a fun romp, it was a long movie but I never felt bored or irritated and it ended in a satisfactory way. But herein lies the problem, should a star wars movie be just ‘satisfactory?

Anyway that’s enough from me, spent way too long on this already and just faffing about in general, trying to reset my body clock again to get my sleeping schedule back on point and thus I feel like death right now and just want to nap until doomsday.

See you…

 

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Hereditary review

So again my pirate brother brought me another gem for movie night and I really didn’t think much of this movie when I saw it advertised because of the slew of garbage tier horror we’ve seen for a long time now. Like every James Wan movie ever and the blum house movies such as get out and quiet place. Total garbage movies that are hyped to hell and back to get the seals clapping make lots of money. But they’re shit, they never pass the fridge test because they’re hollow trashy movies about nothing ultimately.

There’s just been a wave of forgettable lame horror movies that pin out pointless sequels, mainly looking at the insidious franchise here. The first one was ok but the sequel was beyond ridiculous, pretending like that was there plan all along. Motherfucker you made a dumb horror movie and it made lots of money so you pulled some weird time travel tranny ghost story out of your ass, admit it. I daren’t even watch the others where the old lady is the main character and there’s a prequel, that’s a hard pass. The saw movies are ok I guess but they’re just gore porn, there’s no real artistry there and if you look at the latest movies, the acting and set design is indistinguishable from an actual porno.

Now Hereditary on the other hand is quite unironically a horror masterpiece. It’s basically a James Wan movie if it wasn’t just slocky over produced trash. It’s sort of a standard format horror movie turned on it’s head to be more like a drama. And one of the big criticism is that it’s not actually scary which is bullshit, what that actually means is that it has no jump scares in it, you heard me right, not one. But it has this sort of oppressive atmosphere throughout that is just insanely gripping. You just have no idea what’s going to happen next and the movie is so subtle it just can’t help but get under your skin.

The pacing is perfect, the length is perfect, believe me it needs every minute of that two hours, every pause, every silence is permeated with dread and it had me on the edge of my seat for two hours.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so just creeped out by a movie, so completely at the mercy of a piece of film. It has this constant theme of a doll house throughout because the main character is someone that makes dollhouses and it fits perfectly with the tone. Because the movie wants you to know that these people are not in control of their own destiny, they are dolls playing a part and you the audience too are powerless because you have no idea whats going on or who to trust.

It’s just such a powerful movie that knows how to use it’s power to great effect. It doesn’t beat you into submission with constant jump scares or gore. It hits you once really hard triggering your fear and sadness to an extreme degree and then it waits. And as the audience the fear builds waiting for the next gut punch.

I really don’t know what to say about but it’s just an excellent piece of film making. Everything about it is handled so perfectly. Very little really happens in the movie and it doesn’t really expand out from the house but it feels like a rollercoaster you can’t get off. The visuals are amazing, it’s haunting from beginning to end and there isn’t a single jump scare. Comparing it to quiet place, they never really leave the farm in that and it feels like there’s no journey but in Hereditary it’s an emotional/spiritual journey so them not leaving the house much isn’t really an issue. Whereas in quiet place we’re sort of lead to believe an emotional journey has taken place when really we’ve just been running around a corn field with a big monster chasing us around.

But it’s getting a lot of push back from the jump scare addicted audience as expected. I think why jump scares would ruin this movie is because jump scares are almost tension release valves. Something spooky is happening then something pops up and says ‘Boo’ then its over and you can laugh about it with your friends. But this movie never lets you go, it never releases that tension, it just keeps it going and pulling you deeper down. There’s no comic relief like Get out, there’s no relief at all. It’s a total onslaught on your senses and your psyche and it puts you right in Tony Collette’s shoes.

The performances were amazing, Tony Collette in this is spellbinding, I don’t think I’ve seen someone play crazy as well as her. You see that a lot in movies where someone is screaming ‘you have to believe me’ and they look crazy and you’re screaming at the tv ‘believe her!’ because you know they’re not crazy because you’re seeing what they see. But in this movie she was just so fucking crazy I didn’t want to believe her. And there are parts of the movie that are so horrifying you just wish they were a dream and the characters do too, it’s amazingly powerful. It manages to put right where they are all the time.

I don’t know how to describe it any other way than just this slow descent into horror and madness and misery that you just can’t look away from.

Some of the critiques are that it kind retreads old ground and I have a saying ‘I’ve seen it before and better’ and yeah everything in this movie I’ve seen before but not better. I don’t care if a movie borrows from something else or is in someway derivative if it’s good or it elevates what came before in someway which this definitely does.

If I had to compare it to something it’s basically The wickerman meets insidious or sinister, a really deep and dark horror movie sort of wearing the skin of a slocky jump scarefest. But even today looking back something like the wickerman doesn’t scare me (and in the case of the Nicolas Cage version makes me laugh) but this movie not only scared me it deeply unsettled me on many levels and stayed with me for awhile. Not only the trepidation but the themes.

Something you don’t get from a lot of horror films these days, not just scares but real deep sorrow. There are worse things than dying sometimes living is harder, you can watch Jason slash up a million co-eds but can you watch someone break down mentally and spiritually after the death of a child? This movie perfectly portrays living with loss and it adds to this melancholy and dread a little of what made Silent Hill 2 so powerful. Not just the horror but the sadness, the horror of being alone, the horror of being unloved. The horror in sadness. It’s coming at you from so many different directions overwhelming you with sadness and fear and loathing all at once.

I mean you see a horror movie like Get out and it’s basically a comedy. It has a comedy director and for the most part comedy actors trying to bring to life this laughable script about brain swapping. Then you have quiet place and we’re supposed to believe they’re sad about the kid dying but we’re never introduced to the kid and no one talks about it because they can’t so it’s never addressed. And you’re supposed to be sad when the dad dies /spoilers/ haha. But it just felt kinda cheap and unearned.

Neither of these hugely successful horror movies have the kind of emotional weight of Hereditary and thus can’t come close to the levels of horror (in every sense of the word) it can convey.

It’s what the horror genre has been missing for a long time, serious film making. Not just idiots trying to spin a buck and tell some goofy story about sound monsters or inter racial brain swaps. But genuine love and attention and talent.

This movie is a work of art if only for the visuals. But pair that with the acting and set design, story, pacing and it’s truly a horror classic and I seriously mean that. I think this movie should be up their with the Shining and the Thing as horror movie that just lives on and on and I hope it becomes a cult classic.

Go out and watch it, and then watch it again, I know I will.

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DeadPool 2 Review

So I watched deadpool 2 last night and I really didn’t feel like doing a whole review on it really because it was just kinda ‘meh’ (but then I did haha). Like it wasn’t a real movie, the first one I didn’t find to be mindblowing but it had a beginning/middle and end, a decent albeit made up villain (well all villains are made up but I mean he isn’t in the comics as far as I know).

DP2 has none of those things, and it just seems to be spinning it’s wheels from beginning to end churning out cringy gay and “edgy” jokes that were only half funny the first time and of course all the good jokes were in the trailer as usual. People just need to stop making trailers haha.

I just felt the whole movie was like a dog chasing it’s tail, it got really excited from the success of the first one so they upped the budget and just ran with it but they really had no idea what they were doing and it just goes around in circles.

I was like an hour into the movie waiting for the story to start because it just felt like it was dicking around and then I saw that it was a pretty good length so I wasn’t that worried but the ending was just really unsatisfying because it basically ends where it begins and I hate that shit (looking at you quiet place).

It sucks because it has some nice set pieces, like the prison, but they literally spend two minutes there which was really disappointing because prison movies especially sci fi prison movies are a guilty pleasure of mine. And the whole point of the prison section was to set up a character that was sort of a let down honestly.

Gonna go to spoiler town now so don’t read this next part. The prison bit is to establish the juggernaut. Which was a cool reveal that wasn’t ruined by the trailer but was ruined by the juggernaut haha.

He’s basically supposed to be the villain stand in for Cable, because Cable is touted as the villain but he’s not, he might as well be wearing a sign that says “Will turn good”. So the juggernaut shows up and all he really does is spout one liners and hit people, really bad one liners mainly about shoving things up people’s butts and turning people into cock rings. Just really unfunny and cringy lines that made me long to see Vinny Jones return.

Then he’s beaten by collosus who shoves a power cable up his butt. That was one of the points in this movie when I was like ‘am I watching a Wayans brothers parody movie?’ I don’t care if deadpool does weird shit that’s deadpool but when you have collossus shoving things up people’s asses you’ve just lost the tone of your movie and it’s just too absurd to take seriously at all. When throughout the first movie and the start of this movie they walk a really nice line between the absurd and the actual marvel universe, juxtaposing them perfectly.
And what’s worse is there’s so much set up to Juggernaut showing up only to fall flat on his face, the whole prison sequence is really on there to set up Cable as a villain and foreshadow juggernaut and it fails at both making those scenes totally pointless.

*End of the spoilers*

I didn’t buy Cable for one second as the villain and neither does the movie really. When he’s introduced in the prison sequence he’s fighting the guards in this really ultra violent gory movie without a single drop of blood. I noticed, he was basically just stunning these prison guards and I’m supposed to believe this guy is a villain when he can’t even kill these faceless guards in a shady mutant super prison, nah.

I loved all the terminator references though, I felt they really worked and the movie visually is very nice but I think structurally the film is a mess and they should have better copied terminator really. It basically rips off terminator and looper but it’s like it doesn’t even get the best bits. It completely misses what made those movies good, which was believable and intimidating villains. The movie copies the looper/terminator premise of a time traveller sent back to kill a child but the difference is in both those movies I believe the assassin will kill the child. You have no doubt in your mind that in both cases that’s what will happen because Bruce Willis’ character in Looper already does it one scene and in Terminator one and two it’s a soulless machine who’s only purpose is that mission. So the stakes are set from the get, this child is headed for a meat grinder and the heroes have to stop it, but not for one moment did this movie make me believe that Cable actually would kill the kid so it was totally toothless.

Ok so the story is basically dp has to save this kid from Cable who’s from the future and is trying to kill the kid because in the future he turns out to be a villain who kills Cable’s family. Straight out of terminator but it’s a good set up.

The only problem is they don’t copy terminator hard enough and send a villain back from the future to stop Cable and thus the whole movie falls apart because there’s no threat really other than the kid himself.

So essentially the only villain in this movie is a little fat kid. Oh my god I’m literally shaking haha.

I really don’t know why they didn’t totally rip off terminator and send the kids future self back to be the villain this movie sorely needed. They spent the time and money to cast a guy to play the role of his future self, why not use him? It just makes perfect sense since there’s no strong driving force in the movie at all to have him play a central role in the film. Say what you will about Francis from the first movie but he was a villain, he wasn’t an anti-hero or an anti-villain, he was a straight up villain and he made the movie work because he was the perfect straight man to dp’s funny man.

But this movie is so unbalanced its just laughable. And all the time and effort they spent maintaining the tone is just pissed away towards the end. This juxtaposed to the excellent villain of Thanos in infinity war is just even more stark and it illustrates how important a good villain in a story is.

Another example of this I bring up all the time is Robocop vs the remake. In the first movie the villains are really well defined and you follow them throughout the movie in the remake, the villain shows up to kill him and then disappears for the rest of the movie so you can have this boring drawn out training sequence to then they reappear at the end to die.

Cable has development in the movie but you never for one second buy him as the villain which is just too perfect comparing this to his role as Thanos which made that movie for me. So it’s not Brolin’s performance that’s to fault here, it’s entirely down to direction and writing. And honestly I couldn’t imagine a better Cable just like now I can’t imagine a better Thanos.

The story, well there kind of isn’t one, that’s that out of the way. Cable want kid dead cos bad future, Deadpool not want kid dead cos redemption?
That’s pretty much it, there were points in the movie that just reached points of parody and that’s sort of what this franchise is trying to do, straddle the fence between serious super hero movie and parody, but in this case it just failed at that, when before it succeeded. I think the comedy and silliness is good when and it works when it’s measured by seriousness and stakes and action that wasn’t in this movie.

I don’t think it’s a bad movie, the shitty jokes aside, I think the only time I laughed was at the goonies jokes and I saw those in the trailer. I thought it was entertaining and I think it had a lot of potential it just missed the mark for me. That being said I hope they keep making them, despite me saying I hope comic book superhero movies would just stop and go away. A cable deadpool movie with a decent story could work really well.

It just didn’t this time. I’m definitely not saying this movie is bad, and you should make up your own mind about it, I just think it failed at doing what the first movie succeeded at. It needed a better more solid villain to focus the story on and balance out the tone of the film. It’s not that I think the first movie was just so good a sequel couldn’t live up to it, I was one of those contrarian fucks who said the first one wasn’t that amazing either. It was over-hyped and despite being a good movie, it wasn’t that mindblowing compared to something like Logan that it paved the way for. It’s just sad, because Logan was like a glimpse into a world of comic book movies we could have gotten.

Instead of this cookie cutter capes and one liners bullshit to sell happy meals, we could have Logan. And even I have my problems with Logan but that doesn’t change the fact it is what comic movies should strive to be but never will. What I’m saying is children ruin super hero movies haha.

So in summation, decent (totally wrong word) fun, silly slocky if unbalanced movie that’s worth a one time watch at least.

See you…

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