Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
UPDATED 4/1/2025: Completely revised the When To See scale to reflect the extinction of rental stores and 2nd run dollar show theaters in today's streaming world. The original version of this can be visited here. -----------------
Oh, fercryingoutloud! ANOTHER movie review blog?!? Another guy who
thinks his opinion matters and wishes to inflict it on the overloaded
Information Superhighway? (What ever happened to that buzzword? Haven't
heard it in ages.) Why should we care?
A: Yes, yes, and why not?
The purpose of this blog when started after seeing Avatar in 2009 was to allow me to get back into the habit of
reviewing movies and DVDs like I used to between 2004-2008 for IGN and The Digital Bits before life stuff and editorial differences ended those associations.
Initially intended to not be 1000-2000 word chin-stroking
epics, but mostly a few
paragraphs about what I've been watching and whether they might be of
interest to you, I unfortunately got slack about actually writing anything. While I logged and scored everything I've seen, I didn't write reviews in a timely manner and after a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.
Since fixing hundreds of unwritten reviews is impossible, I've dedicated myself to knuckling down this year (2025), and as of this revised update only a few reviews need to be finished off out of over 40 this year. I may also go back and start publishing older reviews, even if they're just scores; perhaps adding a sentence or two. Use the hashtag options and search box to see if I saw something in particular.
With movies even more outrageously expensive and even an all-you-can eat
service like Netflix and Amazon Prime can still cost you time (which is
worth more than money because you can't make more of it), I give
movies a numerical score (wow! original!) and how urgently it is for you to see it. Since the Hot Fad Plague of 2020-2022 completely upended going to the movies and everyone and their dog started subscription streaming services (as well as good old cable for Boomers), I have radically revised the When To See scale from six to basically three points:
1. Pay full/matinee price to see it at a theater. Pretty self-explanatory. The rare times I now go see a movie theatrically, I'll rate whether it's worth going to the show and how much you should pay.
2. Catch it on cable/streaming. This is the most common recommendation now because I see the overwhelming majority of movies at home, but also not every movie needs the theatrical experience. Whether you choose to wait for it to come to your streamer/cable channel of choice, rent or buy it digitally, or hoist the black flag to obtain it, is up to your budget and/or morals. Movies with this ranking are worth your time.
3. Skip it. Even for free, life's too short to waste on bad movies.
For Blu-ray/DVD reviews, I'll recommend whether they're worth buying since there's no rental options anymore now that Redbox has joined Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Family Video in oblivion. The quantity and quality of extras or the audio-visual quality factor heavily here.
As always, these reviews are just one lifelong movie fans opinions, except that unlike other critics & fans, mine is the only opinion that matters and all reviews are 100% correct in their judgements. If you disagree, that's fine, but understand that you are incorrect in your opinion. ;-)
Wardriver is the new Paramount+ original streaming movie. It is quite terrible and bad and boring and stupid and you shouldn't watch it. Why? Well, I guess I should say something to justify this, not that it matters.
A rough-looking Dane DeHaan (Chronicle) plays Cole, a wardriver, which is someone who goes around looking for open internet access points, in this case so he can steal company payroll using a magic computer program which just hacks things instantly. He is laundering his proceeds through the Dark Web, dealing with an anonymous user named "RTOMMASI" (half-point for the L.A. Confidential reference) who sends Cole's cut back in the form of cash cards. To show that Cole isn't a really bad guy, he tosses a card in the mailbox of the single mother across the street. Awwwww.
One day he gets beat up by Oscar (Mamoudou Athie, Archive 81), the doorman for a restaurant Cole ripped off who shows up at his door and forces himself inside. He says that a young woman who comes to the place with her father mentioned she had over $800,000 in her checking account and he wants Cole to steal it all or else he'll rat him out for the restaurant payroll theft.
Cole does as he's told because he's a little bitch, but then starts looking into his target and finds that Sarah (Sasha Kelly, Supergirl from The Flash) wasn't coming with her father, but that she was a side piece and that the money belonged to her sugar daddy boyfriend, Bilson (Jeffrey Donovan, Burn Notice), and that he'll hurt her if she doesn't return it. Trying to make good, he proceeds to skim off a bunch of ATM terminals - because ripping off a bunch of random strangers to save some chick you robbed is quite chivalrous - and try to put it back and make right.
He doesn't get it all, but goes to leave a note with instructions how to access the hundreds of thousands he did nab and she catches him so of course they start cozying up to one another. She then proposes they collaborate with Oscar to engineer a heist at Bilson's house where he has $3M in cash. Meanwhile, his Dark Web pals are starting the threaten to expose him. Commence with a whole bunch of double crossing and scams that you'll see coming from a mile away and then almost everybody ends up dead, so happy ending, I guess.
I should have known it would be terrible because it was written by Daniel Casey, the guy who typed F9: The Fast Saga (aka the second worst Furry Fastness movie, the one with the Fiero in space). He is so much of a hack he can't even bother giving any of the characters any reasonable details to root for. We know nothing about Cole other than he's a hacker, lives alone, vapes constantly, and chews on lollipop sticks. Does he have a family? He doesn't want to talk about it, meaning Casey didn't want to think something up. Why does Cole's Dark Web pals threaten him? What happened to honor among thieves?
The howling stupidity of this flick is captured by a scene where Cole is trying to retrieve a skimmer from an ATM in a gas station convenience store. While he's trying to dislodge it a pair of cops come in for donuts or whatever and he's behaving so hinky that one of the cops begins to pay attention. He gets the skimmer off before the cop walks over and he is able to escape without being stopped which really speaks highly of Utah law enforcement.
We're supposed to believe this high-tech Robin Hood is an elite hacker (he has a password cracker called Brute Force which decodes passwords within seconds!) who mitigates his crimes by tossing cash cards to the single mom, but does nothing but stupid things which constantly have him under someone else's thumb, but when confronted with the risk of capture can't muster the neurons to, oh I dunno, WALK AWAY FROM THE ATM AND COME BACK LATER WHEN THE COPS ARE GONE!!!!
Unlike the Temu Heat knockoff that was Crime 101 (5/10, review tk), Wardriver's sole purpose is to send up another red flag about hiring Daniel Casey to type your movie, yet it seems he must have kompromat on half of Hollyweird because he's got a LOT of work lined up with people who should know better. Doubly horrifying, he graduated from my high school. Ugh.
Fuze is a movie so inconsequential it's a mystery why it was made. The setup as broached by the trailer is that an unexploded bomb, presumably from WWII, is found at a London construction site. A military ordinance disposal team lead by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass) orders a wide area surrounding the bomb to be evacuated and cordoned off.
Due to a main electrical line running under the site, power to the area is also cut which is very helpful to the crew of bank robbers including Sam Worthington (Avatar) and Theo James (Divergent series) who remain in an apartment, emerging after the evacuation to bring out prepositioned equipment to break through the basement wall into the adjoining bank.
Overwatching the bomb effort is Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Loki), a police superintendent looking at screens for traces of untoward activity in the cordoned zone, sending in officers when something pops up. Eventually the robbers escape and the manhunt is on and if you've seen one caper film you should be able to predict most of the supposed twists that occur. Even the setup raises red flags as we're expected to believe a bomb has been laying there undiscovered just under the surface for 80 years.
While the missus thought it was fine enough and kept her awake, I found it all flat and predictable with a superfluous coda that sets up the cabal involved. The only real surprise what one death, not that it mattered other than the lack of plot armor it reveals.
I'm getting tired of bemoaning the inability of Samara Weaving to get the breakthrough role she deserves. I'm behind on my write-ups for Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (7/10) and Over Your Dead Body (5/10), but it's coincidental that my last posted review for one of her movies before those was just 11 months ago for the disappointing Eenie Meanie (5/10, stream/cable) because Carolina Caroline is almost the same movie and also fails.
Weaving plays Caroline, a young woman in a nowhere Texas town who is taken with a grifter, Oliver (Kyle Gallner), who scams her boss at the gas station by pulling a grift involving making change. She chases him to his car and gets the money back, but it's obvious these two are going to be hooking up pretty quickly. In short order she's pulling the scams herself and so it's time to take the crime show on the road, stepping up to pickpocketing, bank fraud, and when that's not exciting enough, actual bank robberies across small southern towns while they road trip eastward towards South Carolina. Naturally, the fun and games come to a screeching halt when a robbery goes sideways with the law hot on their tails and the stakes soaring.
The script never states when the movie is set with our only clues being gas costing $1.47 the cars dating from the 1970s and 1980s and the total lack of cell phones. Even the music played in bars is generic country. At one point a birthdate on a forged ID is mentioned which may place the time in the early-1990s, but there are no cues like Nirvana t-shirts, etc. While there's something to be said for timelessness, this just distracted me.
It also takes its sweet time getting going which gave plenty of time to wonder why we're supposed to believe a hot little number like Caroline would be instantly smitten with Oliver. He's not particularly handsome and she gets on the grift tip rather quickly considering her father, Hank (Jon Gries, Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite), seems like a decent, kind man who raised his daughter alone for reasons we discover in a hair-raising scene with Kyra Sedgewick.
I'm surprised critics swooned over this "Southern Gothic crime tale" comparing it to Badlands or True Romance when it's a faint copy of those movies. Weaving is touching and beautiful, but as too often is the case, it's wasted here. Again.
Irish director John Carney occupies a very specific niche making movies about musicians that never really feel realistic. Best known for 2007's Once, whose signature song "Falling Slowly" won the Best Original Song Oscar and catapulted the Swell Season into NPR fame. Subsequently, 2016's Sing Street about a high school band in Dublin garnered a Golden Globe nomination. While I scored it a 6/10, the never-written review was going to call out the insanity of a band in Dublin in 1985 not being fans of U2 which would be like making a movie about a soul singer in 1960s Detroit without mentioning Motown.
Carney's latest is Power Ballad, a slight dramedy starring Paul Rudd as Rick Power (get it?), an American who gave up his fleeting chance at rock fame years before to settle down with his wife and teenage daughter in Ireland. While playing a wedding gig at a castle with his band The Bride & the Groove (punny) where an old friend of the couple of honor is former boy band star Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas of Jonas Brothers boy band fame). They ask the band if Danny could sit in for a tune and they rock out Stevie Wonder's "I Wish." (Also famous for being the main loop for Will Smith's Wild Wild West theme.) Video of the jam goes viral.
After the festivities wind down Rick strolls the grounds of the castle and encounters Danny who invites him into his suite which is loaded with recording equipment and instruments. The pair spend the evening hanging out and playing songs while drinking and smoking. One of the songs Rick plays is called "How to Write a Song (Without You)" which lacks a bridge, but has verses and a chorus. In the morning, as the band is heading home, a worker from the castle brings Rick a guitar case with a $6300 Gibson J-200 acoustic with a thank you note for the jam session.
We then see Danny's life with a huge mansion that is very beautiful, but sterile and cold-feeling compared to Rick's small and cluttered home in Ireland. His label and manager, Mac (Jack Reynor, Sing Street), feel his latest tunes are generic and his career expiration date approaches. Struggling, he plays "How to Write a Song (Without You)" and his girlfriend, Marcia (Havana Rose Liu), overhears him and tells him it's great and he should record it.
Six months later, Rick is at the mall and overhears a very familiar melody wafting from the mall's sound system. He hunts it down and discovers Danny has finished the song, released it as his, and his having a career Renaissance as a result as the song tops the charts, gets awards nominations, and gets Danny playing arenas. Rick struggles to contact Mac who blows him off especially when Rick admits he can't prove he wrote the song with any demos or performances anyone can vouch for.
Even his wife, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett) and daughter, Aja (Beth Fallon), doubt him and combined with guests at weddings asking for the Danny's song to be played, Rick spirals, wrecks the van which his family in it and gets fired from the band. After Rachel kicks him out, he ends up at the door of Sandy (Peter McDonald, who also co-write the movie with Carney), the band's guitarist with a not-great idea: Fly to Los Angeles and confront Danny at his concert. This and the pair's crashing of the afterparty at Danny's mansion goes pretty much as expected.
As he approaches 60 years of age, Rudd if finally looking like he's in his forties. He's charming and funny as usual, but also presents Rick's undercurrent of resentment at having traded music for family only to have his song stolen to elevate another whom he only showed fellowship to. Jonas is OK as well, though he's got the heel role as someone who steals another writer's work, but while he clearly feeling guilty, his desire to get back on top trumps his guilt.
For someone who loves semi-musical stories, he simply can't get the sonics right. It was especially bad in Sing Street as the band of novice high schoolers sounded like a slickly polished studio recording when they played and it's the same here for the wedding band. It's not impossible to get the vibe right - Light of Day and especially Breaking Glass nailed the live dive bar sonics - but Carney clearly doesn't care. Danny's arena performance is also staged weirdly with the stage way to tall for an arena (it's more stadium sized) with no stage design, video wall backdrop, etc. It looks like a rehearsal stage, not a full fat concert by a Big Star.
Having the movie end with a drunken, depressed Rick killing himself was unexpected.....KIDDING!!! JUST KIDDING!!! The movie wraps up succinctly with justice done and shown by inference instead of explicitly which denies the viewer some satisfaction in Danny getting his comeuppance, but overall Power Ballad manages to hum a passably entertaining story tune.
In January 2012, the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia was run onto rocks near Giglio Island off the coast of Italy, causing the boat to sink, flipping over onto it side killing 32 passengers and crew. The Netflix documentary Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea is the typical exercise using videos taken during the disaster with interviews of survivors - passengers and crew - detailing how it went down for them.
While they use graphics to show where various areas of the ship where people were located, they really whiff on zooming in to show exactly where they were like when a family with an infant child have to slide down a hallway to access the only lifeboats able to launch.
When the inquest, recriminations and charges are covered, details are introduced then never adequately followed-up. One surprising detail is that one of the interviewees was convicted of....something, it's never specified, and he never addresses it. They also omitted a ton of interesting and should've-been-included details as tallied in this Entertainment Weekly story.
Overall, Shipwrecked: Nightmare at Sea falls short of the much lighter Trainwreck: Poop Cruise episode also on Netflix last year, but is worth watching as a warning against 2nd-rate cruise lines. (Not reviewed because TV episode.)
Tonight we settle into a double-feature of 2006's The Devil Wears Prada and its 2026 sequel which tacked a 2 on the end. What follows is my IGN DVD review from 2006 after which I will update whether I had any new thoughts upon viewing this again for the first time in almost 20 years.
When Lauren Weisberger's novel The Devil Wears Prada became a best-seller in 2003, it was widely viewed as a roman a clef about Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine, for whom Weisberger served as an assistant. Full of gossipy tidbits about the behind-the-scenes business of high fashion, it was a "chick lit" hit and an obvious candidate for translation to the big screen.
Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is a plucky Midwestern college grad living in New York City looking for a writing career, having edited the Northwestern newspaper. After interviewing with the publishing conglomerate Elias-Clark, she's offered menial work at either Auto Universe or a second assistant gig at Runway magazine, working for the imperious editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep).
Miranda is a "boss from Hell" - demanding, dismissive, cruel, and capricious - who has driven many an assistant screaming from her presence, despite the job supposedly being one that "a million girls will kill for." Despite Andy's frumpy college prep appearance and utter lack of knowledge of the fashion world - she has to ask how to spell "Gabbana" - Miranda keeps her on and Andy tries to stick it out because she knows that if she stays a year, she'll have a good resume item that will allow her to write her own ticket to more rewarding work.
As time goes on, Andy gradually gets the hang of the job and routine, earning the grudging respect of Miranda's #1 assistant, Emily (Emily Blunt). It also helps when Nigel (Stanley Tucci), the photo editor, decides to take mercy on the fashion-challenged Andy and takes her into the magazine's "closet", the storeroom where all the clothes that are provided by designers for the magazine (and rarely returned) are kept. After finding something that the size 6 Andy could wear - one of the film's premises is that the just fine Hathaway is too bovine for the fashion world - and a trip to the salon, she begins to at least look the part of the "clackers" (named for the clacking of their stiletto heels on the marble floors) indigenous to Runway. (In a merciful twist, we're spared the obligatory Pretty Woman transformation montage; she just comes into the next scene with her new look and duds.)
With her increasing responsibilities at Runway, at Miranda's constant beck and call, Andy starts to have problems with her sous chef boyfriend, Nate (Adrian Grenier) and her art-gallery-manager friend Lilly (Tracie Thoms). Also showing an interest in Andy is Christian Thompson (Simon Baker), an author whom Andy is impressed by and could be helpful to her writing career. One sequence revolves around obtaining a copy of the unpublished next Harry Potter novel for Miranda's twins - a request slightly less feasible than obtaining a Bible autographed by God - and when he comes through, it clumsily introduces the possibility of romance.
I hadn't read the novel - hey, I'm a manly man, OK? - but as a film, The Devil Wears Prada fumbles being an effective update of prior workplace comedies like 9 to 5 and Working Girl by being too bland and toothless about its story and characters. This impression was solidified after checking out a synopsis of the novel, revealing a lot of angles that got cut in the process of Aline Brosh McKenna's script homogenizing the story into a popular hit. Considering it grossed $311 million worldwide, the producers surely aren't losing sleep over these changes.
The first problem is Andy and her career goals. In Working Girl, Tess (Melanie Griffith) had to combat workplace sexism in order to be taken seriously as something more than a secretary. Andy isn't being held down by anyone and no one is forcing her to become Miranda's on-call drone and it's not really explained how surviving a year of running errands is supposed to advance a serious journalistic career. Tess wanted to work in business; Andy could have waited tables and done freelance writing for all it matters.
Secondly, Andy's lousy friends are thinly written and hypocritical. When she bestows thousands of dollars worth of swag upon them that she's obtained from work, they're appreciative, but then they turn around and attack her for spending more time on her job than with them. Nate is an ungrateful tool - it doesn't matter when a dish like Hathaway comes home as long as she comes home, you mook - and Lilly is so underwritten that it was a surprise when a line revealed that they've been longtime friends and not just new acquaintances in the city.
Finally, the problem with Miranda is that in humanizing her by giving her a younger nemesis, Jacqueline (Stephanie Szostak), and an unhappy husband, Stephen (James Naughton), it dulls the boss-from-Hell aspects. Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman) in 9 to 5 wasn't anything but a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot, but Miranda is painted as someone who both demands the impossible, but is also a victim of ageism and sexism and we're treated to the hoary trope that if she was a man she'd be thought as merely driven, which was boring back when it may have meant something. Because she's not a total monster 24/7, it makes her more outrageous requests less threatening, as if the fact that she allowed a total fashion naif to work for her more than 15 seconds doesn't stretch the limits of credulity.
While the story really doesn't amount to much, The Devil Wears Prada is still fairly entertaining to watch thanks to its glossy look (directed by Sex and the City vet David Frankel), dazzling array of fashions on parade, some genuine funny dialogue that doesn't smack of sitcom-grade contrivance, and the performances of the leads.
Streep doesn't have much of a reputation as a comedic actress, but she's simply sublime as Miranda, even though her skill at fleshing out what could've been a one-note character ultimately weakens her as a negative force in Andy's life. One scene has her explaining to Andy how people like those who run Runway determined the color of the lumpy sweater she is wearing years before and it's a stellar mix of sneering condescension and motherly education. Thanks to Streep, we feel for Miranda, even though I don't think Miranda was meant to be so sympathetic in the beginning.
While The Devil Wears Prada feels particularly flat and predictable in its third act and ends on kind of a muddled note, it's still a decent trifle worth watching even though it's ultimately a triumph of style over substance. (Watch it while wearing some comfy sweats for added irony.) Too gentle in its satire and too pedestrian in its plot, it shows that when it came to balancing on its Manolos, the devil was in the missing details. ========== OK, 2026 Dirk here and I reread this review before watching and I must say I pretty much nailed it like a carpenter with OCD. On second viewing I noticed more business like how people scrambled to get out of Miranda's path when she strode the office halls. Considering how all the main stars have had massive award-winning careers over the past two decades and still look great, it's still wild to see Blunt so good in only her second feature role and just how luscious Hathaway looks, appearing to be made of cream and kittens' dreams. (At some point I dubbed her "Yummy Girl" and even as she's proven to be certifiably woketarded in real life, I still call her that and credit her for being the only non-terrible things in Christopher Nolan's craptacular The Dark Knight Reloaded and Intersuckular where she somehow manages to deliver the lines about love being the 5th dimension without bursting out laughing.)
When I reviewed it originally I scored it a 6/10, but on second glance it's worthy of a succeeded-at-what-it-was-trying-for...
Pardon the pun, but the only reason the airplane disaster film Deep Water appeared on my radar was because one of the dozen producers was KISS bassist Gene Simmons who hit the interview circuit wearing a baseball cap with the title on it. Since it's been a couple of months since we'd had a trashy shark movie like Thrash (4/10, Skip) we decided to unplug our brains for some dumb (hopefully) fun.
Aaron Eckhart is Ben, a pilot who is avoiding going home to cope with a very ill child by working a haul between LA and Shanghai. He's co-piloting with Captain Rich (Ben Kingsley, slumming) when during the flight where we kill the first act getting to know a bunch of people who will either die or we're supposed to care about surviving, a defective battery power bank wrongly checked into the hold by a raging a-hole, Dan (Angus Sampson), eluding the scrutiny of a distracted X-ray technician, catches fire causing a cascade of system failures leading to the plane having to ditch in the Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles from land. Unfortunately, there's a coral reef which tears the plane into three sections leaving the 30-odd survivors separated in variously precarious situations.
And there's a bunch of hungry sharks. Dun-dun-DUHN!!!!
Director Renny Harlin, coming off the trio of The Strangers movies, had directed the camp shark classic Deep Blue Sea so I suppose we're supposed to expect great shark action, but Deep Water is just dumb tedium. Perhaps there's a few surprises as to who gets eaten, but it completely drops the ball when it comes to disposing of Dan, whose battery triggered this whole disaster. He's been a complete bag of dicks the entire movie, implying that of all the kills, his will be the most visceral and satisfying. Well, it's not. Yeah, he gets his, but it's not like in The Lost World where the guy gets snacked on by two T. Rexes. (I was banking on four sharks grabbing a limb and ripping them off while a fifth shark swallows the torso, but apparently I'm more creative than the FOUR credited screenwriters.)
You can also tell this was a Chinese co-production because of the prominent casting of Chinese actors and the fact a small Chinese fishing boat rescues the survivors after the American helicopter crashes in a ridiculous sequence. China always saves the day in multinational productions. (Ironic that Simmons would be flogging this considering his love for the USA.)
2026 will probably go down as the year YouTube surpassed film schools for turning out wildly successful new filmmakers. The warning shot came in January with Iron Lung by YouTuber Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach which he directed, wrote, edited, and starred in, self-funding the $3M production and grossing a (then) stunning $51 million.
But the earthquakes came in May as a tag-team of original horror movies completely upended the natural order of things with Backrooms - an adaptation of a series of YouTube shorts helmed by their creator, 20-year-old Kane Parsons, raking in $350M off a $10M budget, making it A24's highest-grossing movie ever - coming two weeks after the word-of-mouth phenomenon Obsession blew Hollywood's collective mind by surpassing its projected opening weekend gross then increasing it's take the following two weekends; the first film since (I think) E.T. - The Extraterrestrial to accomplish this feat and that was by Steven Spielberg, director of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, not a 27-year-old YouTuber. Produced for a rounding error for Hollyweird $750,000, as of this writing it has grossed $407 million worldwide and turned its star into a early Oscar nomination shoo-in.
How much of a word-of-mouth hit was it? We met up with a friend about a month after it'd opened and almost right off without prompting he asked if we'd seen it, raving that it actually lived up to the hype. We didn't get a chance to see it in the theaters, but now that it's streaming we checked it out and, yep, believe the hype.
The premise is so simple it could've been inspired by a Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons where they parodied The Monkey's Paw short story. (It was!) Bear (Michael Johnston) has a major crush on his coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) at the music store they work with their friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless), the daughter of the owner, Carter (Andy Richter). The movie opens with Bear attempting to rehearse telling Nikki his feelings with the others, but he's such a sweaty dork they advise against it.
Bear's cat dies from eating oxycodone pills that his late grandma, whose house he now lives in, took. (This is the least realistic detail in the movie. Every try to give a cat a pill? Exactly. It should've been a dog; they eat anything.) While talking to Nikki on the phone she mentions dropping her tiger's eye necklace down the drain, so being the simp he is, he goes to a shop to buy her a replacement, but instead buys her a One Wish Willow, a novelty that promises to give the person who breaks it one wish. (Duh.)
He ends up not giving it to her when he drives her home after the pals hang out. When she confronts him whether he has feelings for her, he chickens out and denies he does, not that she hasn't already clearly friendzoned him so hard it's visible from orbit. Disgusted with himself, he opens the One Wish Willow and wishes that Nikki loved him more than anyone in the world. *SNAP*
Big. Mistake.
She immediately begins to throw herself at him, but it's weird as she seems to snap in and out of being in love with him and seeming confused as to what's going on. Things settle into a comfy couplehood and he gets to enjoy plenty of the benefits of being a friend with benefits, but things begin to veer into somewhat concerning to downright horrifying territory as Nikki's obssessive love for Bear begins to manifest in increasingly harmful ways.
While it'd be easy to be reductive and dumbly claim Obsession is a commentary about toxic men wanting dominion over women's bodies (as many feminists Karens squawked because everything is about being a victim), but it's really just a simple morality tale about unintended consequences. While Bear has entranced Nikki into loving him, he's quickly gnawed at by the understanding that this is wrong and tries to figure out how to free her even when it's supposedly everything he wanted.
Director-writer-editor Curry Barker's script actually fleshes out Ian and Sarah and their relationships with Bear and Nikki so that they're part of this crazy situation especially during a group party scene where a game of Truth or Dare Jenga gets out of hand. They have their own goals and cares, so their fates aren't just superfluous window dressing for the main couple.
The lions share of praise has rightfully gone to Navarrette as she conveys the various states of Nikki's deterioration as her true self tries to break free from the spell the willow has placed on her. She's a very cute actress - she's like a darker, sexier Anna Kendrick - but throws herself fully into the complicated role. After Amy Madigan's Best Supporting Actress win for Weapons, a far less demanding role than Nikki, it appears the Academy is loosening up in its bias against genre movies and Navarrette is already talked up for a Best Actress slot. Considering the success of Obsession rests primarily on her shoulders and ability to make the audience connect with this poor young woman, she'd darn well better get a nom.
Other than quibbles about the handling of the cat, Obsession is a rare horror movie that elevates the form with a sharp script and performances. If we'd seen it at the show, I would've given it the highest "Pay full price" when to see it rating, but now that it's streaming (it should eventually land on Peacock soon), I give it the score below and my highest recommendation.
In my review of Fountain of Youth (5/10) I noted that I'd assayed the checkered and heavily mediocre career of Guy Richie in my The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (5.5/10) review so rather than re-rehash things go read those after you get done with this latest loaf of even-less-barely-passable mediocrity, In The Grey, written and directed by Ritchie so this is all his fault.
Eiza González stars as Rachel Wild, a lawyer who specializes in collecting debts for wealthy interests. After Bobby Sheen's (Rosamund Pike) last negotiator was murdered after making a deal to recover $1 billion loaned to Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem - raise your hand if this is the first time you've heard of Javier's older brother being an actor) by her firm, Spencer Goldstein, she brings in Rachel to take a run at Salazar.
Rachel's play is to use lawfare combined with extralegal shenanigans conducted by her associates Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) along with various redshirts who lack plot armor, if you know what I mean. What follows is a rapid-fire sequence of tactical moves which result in Salazar's projects and assets being frozen and seized. Figuring he'll try to retaliate, elaborate escape plans are exhaustively made and rehearsed, but come on, we all know something will go wrong, right?
Even by the play-it-loose-and-look-cool low standards of recent Guy Ritchie movies, this is a low effort effort. Everything works flawlessly and Rachel seems to be able to stroll into court at will to get a judge to bless her requests instantly. When Salazar sends a squad to kill her, the team effortlessly counteracts them with lethality.
While there are a few throwaway laughs and stars are attractive, there is no there there and In The Grey ends up just another instantly forgotten trifle from the Guy Ritchie slop mills.
