Film reviews

In which Nat talks briefly about the movies she’s been watching this week for no particular reason and that probably don’t warrant proper reviews, but hey? Wouldn’t it be nice if we all chatted about them anyway?

I’m really hoping this feature will take off. What do you think? Is it catchy enough?

This week, we have three screens playing The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (2021), Tango & Cash (1989) and Road House (1989)

Screen 1: The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (2021)

The bodyguard Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) continues his friendship with assassin Darius Kincaid (Samuel L Jackson) as they try to save Darius’ wife Sonia (Salma Hayek)

Nat says: ‘Oh dear. Oh wait! Oh, never mind’

This is a sequel to The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017). I’m not sure anyone really wanted a sequel, since it was quite a bad movie, the sort of film that feels like an investment opportunity put together by asset management funds in Benelux and the Bahamas to give terrorists a chance to avoid paying taxes. But here it is, reuniting the cast and the director.

The first half is dreadful. It tries hard to recreate the same scenario as the first movie, with Reynolds and Jackson now hating one another again, without really understanding the characters. There are fewer jokes, the action is poor and even the usually reliable cast struggle to give the movie life. It has Antonio Banderas playing a Greek man who’s upset with the EU’s treatment of his country so kidnaps its ‘leader’. Every so often, it cuts to a picture of ‘Athens’ that usually isn’t (but sometimes is) Athens. It’s just poor.

I also really dislike it, since most of the jokes are about Hayek being both a sexual women and one who swears a lot. Look at here run! Look at her breasts wobble! Isn’t that funny? Women running? Women with big breasts running?

Did the world just stop turning on its axis, beholding such innovation in writing? I don’t think so.

About halfway through, though, just as I was about to give up on it, the movie decides it wants to be something different: a flat-out comedy. Suddenly, it’s just Reynolds being Deadpool again. There are jokes about what sort of movie they’re homaging. Reynolds’ much-alluded-to father is revealed to be (spoiler alert) Morgan Freeman and Samuel L Jackson’s reaction to that piece of hubris is priceless. It actually all starts to work and to entertain.

But should you watch it, just so you can watch that second half? No.

The wonderful Rebecca Front appears in it a bit. She’s funny. But her scenes are all in the trailer, too.

Continue reading “The TMINE multiplex: The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Tango & Cash and Road House”

Out in cinemas

La la la! Here’s another Marvel movie! Yay! I love Marvel movies. I’m so looking forward to this! Wait… Shang-Chi? Who? What? Maybe even… why? Trailer, please… Huh. A couple of cameos by people I’m not that interested in, some okay martial arts, Awkwafina being annoying. Aren’t trailers supposed to make me want to watch a movie, not put me off?

It really was an unpromising start and when I sat down to watch Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), I was confidently expecting to be as underwhelmed as I was when I watched most of the Disney+ Marvel shows. Bar Black Widow (2020) and certain parts of WandaVision (Disney+), it’s been feeling like Marvel has been struggling to kickstart its franchise back into action, following the closure that Avengers: Endgame (2019) brought to its decade-long story.

Surprisingly for me at least, Shang-Chi manages to both restart that storyline and make us care about – and let’s be clear about this – an absolute nobody of the Marvel comics whom nobody but nobody outside of a comics shop has ever heard of. And who goes into comics shops?

It’s one of those movies that transcends many of its sillier foundations to become something much more. Shang-Chi, while by no means a threat to Shakespeare or Mamet in its writing, is fun, engaging, character- rather than punch-driven, and generally a pleasure to watch from start to finish – and beyond, because of the obligatory credit scenes.

Continue reading “Review: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)”

Available in cinemas

I’m not quite of the generation raised on video games – movies were still the dominant medium for me growing up, with TV there in the background, too. But I imagine that the members of Generation Alpha are going to be more video game-literate than we Millennials are cine-literate, and be able to quote the best scenes from Grand Theft Auto as easily as I can quote Notorious or When Harry Met Sally.

As such, Free Guy is taking a big chance: it’s a take-down of modern video games that ends up concluding that “video games would be better if they were more like documentary movies, wouldn’t they?” I wonder how well that will go down with its target audience – or will it just go over their heads? Or am I misjudging those viewers, all raised on Fortnite, who might even agree?

Free Guy takes as its basis the likes of The Truman Show (1998), The Lego Movie (2014) and Tron to give us ordinary guy Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a bank worker who lives in Free City, a town divided between those with really, really exciting lives (the sunglasses wearers) who are always zooming around at high speed, shooting things, ignoring the law and generally having fun; and the regular people, who all seem to do the same things day after day after day, often getting killed in the process, only to be reborn again the next day. Little does he know, he’s only a character in a video game and those people in sunglasses are the players.

But one day, he spots sunglasses-wearer Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) and realises she’s The One. Inspired, he changes his narrative and follows her. Then, when he acquires a pair of sunglasses himself, he learns the true nature of the world and decides to advance up the levels of the game to win her over.

Nevertheless, he’s still only a character in a video game, a video game run by the evil Taika Waititi (Green Lantern, Jojo Rabbit). So can Guy ever truly be free?

Continue reading “Review: Free Guy (2021)”

In cinemas now and available on Disney+ Premium

Pfft. You know how you can really like someone and want them to do well, and usually they’re so reliable, you never have to doubt them – and then they do something really dumb? No? Okay, just me then… Awks.

Normally for me, though, the Rock – aka Dwayne Johnson – is one of those people. He can sing in Moana, he can star in a terrible Fast and Furious spin-off, he can act with a giant CGI gorilla and I’ll not flutter an eye lash. No matter what movie he’s in, no matter how dumb it looks, it usually turns out to be somewhere between “better than I thought it was going to be” and “totes awesome!”

And Emily Blunt is one of those people, too. True, she was almost Black Widow in the Marvel movies before a scheduling conflict meant Scarlett Johansson had to step into the breach at the last minute to take her place – I am just not ready to imagine a world where that never happened, but I can forgive Blunt for something she never actually did. Isn’t that nice of me?

But apart from that near-slip from her, I’ve been able to rely solidly on Blunt’s presence in a movie since more or less The Devil Wears Prada (2006) to know it’s going to be in the above-mentioned quality bracket.

And now we have Jungle Cruise, in which would-be explorer-cum-scientist-cum-sufragette Blunt decides to head to South America in 1916 with her closeted brother (Jack Whitehall) in order to find a slightly magical flower that could cure all known diseases, if you can believe all the old parchments, maps and wives’ tales that she’s collected. There they meet Johnson – and his rival (Paul Giamatti) – and charter him and his tourist-attraction vessel to take them down the Amazon to find the flower.

There’s a couple of obstacles for them. Naturally, there’s headhunters and cannibals. There’s also the zombie-like conquistadors who first found the flower, led by Edgar Ramírez (American Crime Story). There’s also a relative of the German Kaiser (Jess Plemons) who wants to get the flower for himself and is in hot pursuit of Blunt in a surprisingly modern submarine, aided in his quest by some helpful bees.

Yes, bees.

That’s where they lost me. Pfft.

Continue reading “Review: Jungle Cruise (2021)”