Tag: Action

Movie Review: KONG: SKULL ISLAND – mostly enjoyable franchise reboot, but lack of strong characters don’t do the fantastic visuals any favours

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I don’t know exactly how old I was when I saw the original King Kong, but I couldn’t have been any older than five.  I recall with reasonable vividness sitting in front of our black and white TV in the Springburn neighbourhood of Glasgow, Scotland, absolutely enthralled by the sheer spectacle, the charm, of the 1933 production that heralded a new era of moviemaking.  There is likely nobody in the western world who doesn’t know King Kong – even if they have never seen the original, Kong exists among the pantheon of famous movie monsters, along with Godzilla, Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees, Frankenstein, and Dracula, to name a few.  Kong has a place in our hearts because he reminds us as ourselves.  Possessed of a humanistic sense of justice and primal strength, Kong represents us – stripped of the daily bullshit and phoniness that we all succumb to, Kong is us laid bare, and mostly shat on by the kind of assholes we have to deal with now and then.  Too high and mighty an opinion for you?  Not a problem – Kong also works as a spectacle monster movie, even when the scripts are no good, the nature of the beast guarantees battles between colossal creatures to feed the eyes.

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Movie Review: LOGAN – thanks to the violence and an R rating, Jackman’s final Wolverine movie is the best X-movie since X2, but doesn’t transcend PG-13 roots

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logan

Logan is the R rated Wolverine movie that people were clamouring for, and thanks to the breakout success of Fox’s other X-Men property, Deadpool, it’s finally here.   It couldn’t have come at a better time, actually.  Less than a year after Deadpool, the Ryan Reynolds hit is still fresh in the minds of many moviegoers, certainly fresh enough to counteract the bad taste left by X-Men: Apocalypse last summer.  But does the R rating make it good, or just enhance an already good movie.  There’s definitely a difference, and for me it was the former, not the latter.  It is NOT an adaptation of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven’s Old Man Logan storyline, in any way, shape, or form – not even a loose adaptation.  I’ll get that out of the way first.

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Movie Review: ASSASSIN’S CREED – video game adaptation fails to engage as a movie on just about every level.

On By ANDREW HOPEIn Movie Reviews2 Comments

Image result for assassin's creed poster

Given that I already knew Assassin’s Creed was a critical dud, why did I end up watching it?  I’m asking that myself, having witnessed it first hand.  I don’t usually read reviews of movies I’m going to watch in case they might influence my viewing and elements of my own reviews, and I didn’t with this one – one look at the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate score was all I needed to know.  As anyone who’s scrolled through my reviews knows, I’m largely a genre fan, so some movies I’ll watch regardless – that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

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Movie Review: THE GREAT WALL – Utterly forgettable, underwritten monsters-attack movie. Even Damon looks uncommitted.

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Image result for the great wall poster

D’you remember last year when Matt (Jason Bourne)Damon had to defend himself from accusations of what is referred to as “cultural appropriation” after doing a press junket for his movie The Great Wall?  The accuser here was TV actress Constance Wu, who clearly only knew two things about the movie: that it was set in ancient China and starred white actor Matt Damon.  Of course, it had to be racist casting, right?  Trouble was, Wu had not read the screenplay and likely had not looked at the trades before jumping to her conclusions.  The Chinese influence behind the camera on this movie is significant, and Damon was hired specifically because of worldwide name recognition.  With a budget of $135 million on the line, it made sense to put someone like Damon in the lead role in order to guarantee a healthy global return.

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Movie Review: SciFi thriller MORGAN is a mostly dull and poorly written retread of other movies.

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morgan

Have you heard of the Black List?  I don’t mean the James Spader TV show, I’m referring to the list of great, unproduced screenplays of the year.  Being on the annual black list is something most would-be screenwriters dream of.  It generally leads to a big money sale, and knocks down the doors of the movie industry.  It includes some really good movies – Arrival in 2012, Spotlight in 2013, Manchester By The Sea in 2014, etc.  But it also lists screenplays that went on to be critical and commercial duds: The Johnny Depp scifi thriller Transcendence, and the Naomi Watt starrer Shut In from 2012, and 2013’s Pan that’s best left forgotten.  The 2014 list also includes Morgan, the movie I watched last night.

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