I Just Watched (Films)

[Animalmother]

Extraction
I avoided this as it was a Netflix made action film, they have a pretty bad reputation. So I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Chris Hemsworth has to rescue the teenage son of a crime boss from a Bangladesh slum. Based on a graphic novel I'd never heard of. Much up close and John Wick style action occurs as Hemsworth singlehandedly wipes out the Dhaka criminal element and about 90% of it's police force, imagine Max Payne 3 without the slow mo. Directed by a stuntman so the action is excellent and the other stuff in-between is a bit dull. Interesting to see Hemsworth do something other than Thor and in his own accent. Not spectacular but an enjoyable action flick. There's a sequel in the works I do believe.

[Hatredsheart]

Extraction
I avoided this as it was a Netflix made action film, they have a pretty bad reputation. So I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Chris Hemsworth has to rescue the teenage son of a crime boss from a Bangladesh slum. Based on a graphic novel I'd never heard of. Much up close and John Wick style action occurs as Hemsworth singlehandedly wipes out the Dhaka criminal element and about 90% of it's police force, imagine Max Payne 3 without the slow mo. Directed by a stuntman so the action is excellent and the other stuff in-between is a bit dull. Interesting to see Hemsworth do something other than Thor and in his own accent. Not spectacular but an enjoyable action flick. There's a sequel in the works I do believe.

Coming to Netflix June 16th.

[Animalmother]

Plus he kicks the shit out of a gang of kids..

[Raid]

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

I'm really struggling to think of a film ruined by its principle casting more than this. There are other problems with the film, don't get me wrong, but Dane DeHaan as Valerian is one of the most unlikeable sci-fi protagonists I can think of. If he was going for Han Solo as played by Keanu Reaves with the sexual magnetism of Arnold J. Rimmer, then he fucking nailed it, but good lord he's awful. Cara Delavigne isn't nearly as bad, but the two have the chemistry of a love scene by George Lucas. And it doesn't help matters that it was based on a comic named "Valérian and Laureline", and it feels a little insulting removing Laureline's name from the title when she's no less important to the story and they seemingly want to give star billing to such a crock of a performance.

It's such a bloody shame too as the film is absolutely brimming with imagination and colour and amazing design work, and it looks every bit as expensive as the €197 million budget suggests, but the narrative isn't very well defined and it just never really hooked me. I've resisted watching it for years as I knew it was a disappointing flop, and while I got more out of it than I think that description suggests, I feel like it could have been so much better.

[Wrathbone]

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

I'm really struggling to think of a film ruined by its principle casting more than this. There are other problems with the film, don't get me wrong, but Dane DeHaan as Valerian is one of the most unlikeable sci-fi protagonists I can think of. If he was going for Han Solo as played by Keanu Reaves with the sexual magnetism of Arnold J. Rimmer, then he fucking nailed it, but good lord he's awful.

I hated him in this and I hated him in the second Andrew Garfield Spider-Man film, which are the only two films I think I’ve seen him in. He has zero charisma and no acting talent that I’m aware of.

Even if they’d replaced him with someone decent, I think Valerian had too many problems to be salvageable. It was an incoherent, unpleasant slog from start to finish.

[Sly Boots]

Haha, oh well. I was pleasantly surprised by it, for sheer imagination alone it's worth watching. I didn't mind the lead, I'd previously seen him in A Cure For Wellness and didn't mind him in that.

[Wrathbone]

To be fair to the film, I watched it under poor circumstances, on an iPad in the back of a car on a long and stressful journey where we were stuck in traffic for hours. By the end of it I was longing for someone to shoot Cara Delevigne’s stupid monobrow off.

[Raid]

To clarify, I think there's enough in the film to watch it despite its flaws. There are obvious hints of the same brilliance that went into The Fifth Element - apparently Besson was asked when making TFE why he wasn't instead making Valérian and Laureline given the stylistic similarities, it's just a shame that it's used to portray a clumsy story (I wouldn't go as far as incoherent) marred by one of the worst pieces of miscasting I can think of.

[Can't think of one]

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

I'm really struggling to think of a film ruined by its principle casting more than this. There are other problems with the film, don't get me wrong, but Dane DeHaan as Valerian is one of the most unlikeable sci-fi protagonists I can think of. If he was going for Han Solo as played by Keanu Reaves with the sexual magnetism of Arnold J. Rimmer, then he fucking nailed it, but good lord he's awful. Cara Delavigne isn't nearly as bad, but the two have the chemistry of a love scene by George Lucas. And it doesn't help matters that it was based on a comic named "Valérian and Laureline", and it feels a little insulting removing Laureline's name from the title when she's no less important to the story and they seemingly want to give star billing to such a crock of a performance.

It's such a bloody shame too as the film is absolutely brimming with imagination and colour and amazing design work, and it looks every bit as expensive as the €197 million budget suggests, but the narrative isn't very well defined and it just never really hooked me. I've resisted watching it for years as I knew it was a disappointing flop, and while I got more out of it than I think that description suggests, I feel like it could have been so much better.

[Wrathbone]

Dragonheart (1996) is one of my favourite generic fantasy films, with a decent cast and good-humoured, dragon-based adventure. My impression is that it was received well enough but wasn't a massive box office success, and so I was stunned to discover recently that they made not just one, not two, but four sequels. Four! Naturally I had to watch them all and find out if they're as terrible as I expected them to be (spoiler: of course they are).

Dragonheart: A New Beginning (1999)
The original film is by far and away the best of the series, but this was easily the best of the rest, mostly because the production quality took such a massive nose-dive that it's hilarious they deemed it acceptable for public consumption. The CGI is bad - really bad, even by 1999 standards. This was the same year that Phantom Menace was released and frankly Jar-Jar Binks looks astoundingly good in comparison. I present to you the imaginatively named Drake, the dragon:



And it only gets worse in motion:



Yes, it has Mystic Asian tropes, as well as the Asian characters being highly-skilled martial artists. Still, I enjoyed its mercifully short 84 minutes more than anything that follows.


Dragonheart 3: The Sorcerer's Curse (2015)
This started out with mild promise, with Mace Tyrell lending some genuine acting chops to a minor peasant role that is sadly abandoned quickly. Our hero this time is the inspiringly-named Gareth, accompanied by Angry Scottish Woman and Irritating Pillock Monk, who is meant to be the comic relief but has such painful delivery that I considered muting it every time he spoke. Together they fight generic fantasy baddies in some confusing dispute over Hadrian's Wall, presented not as the simple border marker that it was in reality, but as a towering structure in the vein of the Great Wall of China, complete with stone towers, ramparts and patrols across its entire length. This is somehow less plausible than the fantasy aspects of the story.

Supposedly the dragon CGI cost a whopping $7m this time, which is not remotely apparent, but it's certainly a step up from poor, maligned Drake, who is replaced in favour of Drago. Sadly this is not the behemoth Drago of Rocky IV fame, but it is voiced by Ben Kingsley, who might quite literally have phoned it in after being told to say some things a dragon might say. Overall this is possibly the worst of the lot, veering from wacky capering to grimdark twaddle.


Dragonheart: Battle for the Heartfire (2017)
While Dragonheart 2 and 3 had little relation to each other or the original film, Dragonheart 4 is a direct sequel to 3. Or at least it's supposed to be, by virtue of tenuous references to previous characters, despite having little narrative relevance. Anyway, none of that matters because they somehow waved a big enough sack of cash to get Patrick Stewart to voice Drago, and his delivery is Patrick Stewart enough to be entertaining. The plot revolves around a young man who finds out one day that, surprise, he's the king! Then after a montage of him going about doing king things in a mildly irreverant manner, he finds out that, surprise, he has a sister and she wants to usurp him! Also she does magic, and he has super strength, because something something dragon magic and superhero films were doing well at the time. Patrick Stewart goes all Picard in trying to mediate their relationship and then there are some vikings and somehow it works out. Honestly, I think I drifted out of consciousness for a chunk of this one. Not a total disaster, but a bit snooze-worthy.

Dragonheart Vengeance (2020)
Hold onto your equality hats, because we've got a lady dragon this time! And she's an ice dragon, oh boy! And she's voiced by famous actress Helena Bonham Carter! And... well, that's all it's got going for it, really. Yet another young generic farmboy gets embroiled in adventure after his family are slaughtered by bandits. It's fine though, he gets over it and leaves with his cows while the house is still burning with his family inside. There's a salty ranger character whose D&D stats may as well have been shown on screen, and he helps Hero Farmboy get revenge by hunting down and killing bandits, which of course requires a dragon. And because she's a female dragon, she of course has to have a long and tedious scene where she helps Farmboy romance a peasant girl. The 97 minute runtime felt like double that.


In conclusion, they should have stopped after the abominable CGI of the second film. Or perhaps they should have simply stopped.

[Sly Boots]

Never seen any of these, likely never will, but enjoyed the writeup nonetheless

By the by, is that Francis from Malcolm in the Middle in the top pic?

[Wrathbone]

It is! Christopher Masterson. I was more distracted by the monk character who I couldn't place for ages, then I realised he's O'Keefe from Band of Brothers. He doesn't seem to have done a huge amount of acting, but what a career leap in the space of a year!

The original 1996 film is worth a look, as it has Sean Connery churning out a dragon voice in typical Connery fashion, as well as a young David Thewlis hamming it up as a baddy with a broad Yorkshire accent.

[Achtung Englander]

Traingle of Sadness

I loved it. My spoiler review for IMDB

Spoiler

Upon listening to Mark Kermode's review of this film, he simply did not get it. Kermode stuck to the easy interpretation of the film, that the rich suck. Although the film touches upon the irresponsible, anathema of the rich, it goes way deeper than that in the third chapter when the survivors are on the island.

In a story reminiscent to the 1957 film, The Admirable Crichton, roles are flipped when the unskilled rich play second fiddle to the survival skilled poor. Here the power dynamics shift as Abigail uses her new dominate role, afforded to her by her survival skills, to take advantage. It began with food, than with sexual favours, followed by feeling masterful which comes from being the maternal leader at whatever cost. They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This film perfectly exemplifies this condition.

This film is about avarice. From Yaya’s manipulation, to the rich guests’ gluttonous lifestyle (which fate has a glorious way of vanquishing) to Abigail’s exploitation of her position on the Island. Each of us plays to our strengths to survive, a statement that was made by the capitalist Russian Dimitry. Everyone was playing a game to survive, from lying to manipulation. They all appreciated that their life depended on playing a game of social skill. Whatever it takes.

The second chapter, The Yacht, is both hilarious as a straight-out comedy, but it is also very insightful about the divisions in society. The “lower-class” workers are literally found at the bows of the ship, while the white collar workers are found on the top decks (and who are prepared to put up with the foibles of the rich guests in anticipation of large tips) and who somewhat oblivious to the workers below them. For example Paula (the hostess) did not recognise her colleague, Nelson (the engine room engineer) and could not vouche that he was not a pirate. Then you have the rich, as usual, taking advantage of everyone as play things (the wonderful skint about having a forced swim). It is only the captain who understands the idiocy of the job but he spends his days drunk, uncomfortable with the fact he sold his socialist principles for a comfortable lifestyle.

This film is deep and funny.

8/10

[Rusty]

Nice review. Might have to track this one down.

[Raid]

Godzilla vs. Kong

There comes a time in the writer's room of this sort of film, I assume, where someone brings up a plot hole and someone else mutters "nobody's going to care". The phrase may as well be this film's subtitle. It's a profoundly dumb piece of cinema scrambling for some sort of story so that they can flesh out the "big monster hit other big monster in the face and they make the city go boom" concept.

Here are some of the things that the film has no interest in explaining the logic behind, and just expects you to accept.

Spoiler

-The Earth is hollow.
-Inside the Earth is a hidden world of mountain ranges and kaiju (I assume they're only calling them Titans in this series because Pacific Rim already stole the term "kaiju").
-Despite being in the centre of the Earth, there's full daylight.
-Despite the Earth being spherical, this region is flat and there's a bit between the upper and lower surfaces where gravity swaps and up becomes down.
-We're told that nobody has managed to explore this region because they were instantly crushed when gravity swapped, despite that making no sense whatsoever.
-There's some sort of warp gate between Earth and Hollow Earth that's never explained, and that seemingly doesn't exist if you travel via the tunnel that Godzilla burns through the entire planet by breathing nuclear fire directly downwards.
-The titans have at some point been collectively capable of gigantic stonecraft, as there are statues of something resembling Kong.
-Inside this region is a power source for... something related to the Titans.
-The tech corporation the film revolves around takes a scan of the power source. They are then instantly able to replicate it.

The biggest issue with the film though is the fact that Kong is nowhere near as interesting a monster as Godzilla. On the one hand you've got a gargantuan lizard whose scales produce a charging effect that you vibrates the alveoli in your lungs, building to produce a nuclear inferno that can slice through mountains. In this film he uses this stream of atomic fire to burn a hole through to the centre of the Earth. Kong is a really big ape. His defining feature is that he can pick up trees. They entire plot of the film revolves around the human characters trying to think of a way of making Kong relevant.

It does build to a climax that doesn't quite justify the preceding 90 minutes, but that at least rectifies one of the film's principle issues.

Spoiler

The big fight isn't Godzilla vs. Kong, it's Godzilla and Kong vs. Mechagodzilla. Mechagodzilla is almost as preposterous as his original incarnation from the Toho films, but he moves with some of the same entertaining little features that the Jaegers from Pacific Rim use such as gigantic rocket thrusters in his back to make him rotate.

I guess I enjoyed it? Honestly I found myself a bit bored in the first half. Destruction for destruction's sake doesn't really do anything for me. There must be a million human casualties in this, given the scale of the final battle, but at no point does the film really bother showing it. It just means the fights feel far smaller than they're depicted as. I don't find the CGI skyscrapers being demolished in this any more exciting than the cardboard ones in the originals.