"Trap" Review

 So M. Night Shyamalan has photos of the big bosses of Hollyweird committing heinous felonies (or at least really skeevy morally depraved stuff) because why else would he be allowed to make a movie of a screenplay as intrinsically terrible as the one for Trap, which at this writing has a 6.1 average score on IMDB which also indicts the stupidity of audiences while also explaining a lot of why so many politicians remain in office?

Trap stars Josh Harnett as Cooper, a fireman who's also an awesome girl dad who is taking his tween daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see her fave pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan - one guess as to who her dad is). But as we know going in from the trailer, he's also the Butcher, an unimaginatively-named serial killer whose signature move is hacking up his bodies like a, you know, a crazy person.

But the cops somehow know he's going to be at the concert and have set a trap (roll credits!) for him by deploying a literal army of black-clad SWAT officers toting assault rifles as well as tons of regular dress cops who cover every entrance and exit. There is enough man and firepower present to knock over a moderate-sized country, so there's no way the Butcher can escape and the concert goers won't even seem to notice the armed prison vibe during the show.

Having entered Fort Hockey Arena despite the show of force, Cooper asks a super helpful merch booth worker, Jamie (Jonathan Langdon), what all the troops are for and Jamie tells Cooper that they're there to catch the Butcher. (This is also in the trailer.) How will our plucky serial killer possibly escape?

 Well, as the great Ryan George Pitch Meeting series always says, it'll be super easy, barely an inconvenience because at every step of the way, Cooper will be able to hear the next important piece of information, either by always being right there when someone says it or conveniently listening in on a purloined walkie talkie when the FBI profiler, Dr. Grant (Hayley Mills, presumably hired because she started in The Parent Trap and Shyamalan has even less originality that we thought), broadcasts Basil Exposition infodumps.

There is so much stupid going on with Trap that it's hard to know where to start cataloging the transgressions, but the alarm bells began going off within minutes as detail after detail elicited annoyed, "That would never happen," comments from me (ahhhh, the benefits of home theater, where you can stop to heckle a movie without annoying strangers) and raising the question whether MNS ever been to a concert in his life? Does he know how anything works in reality?

During the show a guest performer emerges from the floor of the arena. The floor in the aisle opens up and a staircase emerges with the guest standing atop it before descending down to walk the floor towards the stage. There are no barricades around this chasm so anyone not paying attention could fall down into it. Many pop shows have runways that thrust out into the crowd so any guest would emerge from the stage surrounded by barricades. MNS only stages it this way because Cooper sees it as a possible escape route.

At another point Cooper manages to access an area where SWAT troops are getting a briefing about their mission so he can conveniently hear what they know about him. The concert is going on and the place is staked out. Wouldn't this briefing have been done beforehand?

Then there is a B-plot about Riley having issues with mean girls at school and Cooper repeatedly running into one of their mothers in the concourse. Did I mention that Riley keeps leaving the concert of her favorite artist to find her dad running all over? That happens when everyone knows that the only time people leave their seats is to hit the bathroom during the mid-show part of the set when the artist wants to play something off the new album or a boring ballad. NOTHING IS REAL!!!

And hoo boy there is the whole Jamie the merch guy situation where he enables so much by doing things that WOULD NEVER HAPPEN like leave his booth to take Cooper to get a t-shirt from the back area. He just gives it to him as if every item of merch isn't counted out and in to determine how much money should be in the til and to cut the venue their percentage. And he doesn't even take the rest of the box to sell at the booth! (He does get a good mid-credits callback moment.)

When Cooper's escape plan leads to him getting backstage after the most convenient pretense ever to get Riley involved with the show, the way he gets Raven to facilitate their escape hammered the OH, COME THE F*CK ON!!! meter so hard the needle bent 45 degrees. Does this big star not have an entourage, handlers, beggars and hangers-on? Why is her dressing room so sparsely done up? (Seriously, I have been in nicer green rooms as a nobody musician than this space.) How does no one notice she's taking off with some guy and his kid without comment?!?!?

Now I will admit that once he gets out of the arena with Raven, my level of interest ticked up from enraged apathy to vague curiosity whether the back half of the movie could be better? It's not and frankly indulges in new flavors of stupid leading to a twist even I saw coming and a final twist which again requires everyone to be moronic to unbelievable levels.

 Aspiring screenwriters are constantly lectured about making sure their screenplays follow basic logic, so it must be super appalling to see MNS get away with attracting a reported $30M budget for a script that with get a neophyte in a night school class advised to pursue a career in the food service or housekeeping industries. Cooper is supposed to be this brilliant psychopath, but he has every step of his dodging capture literally handed to him. He's as if Tugg Speedman wanted to make The Silence of the Lambs as his Simple Jack character.

The entire chain of events depicted would unravel if everything doesn't go totally according to the hackneyed way MNS types them out. If they didn't have all the cops in plain sight, Cooper would have suspected nothing. What kind of sting operation has massive shows of police force? Without the cops, he doesn't ask Jamie the Very Talkative Merch Dude Who Can't Keep A Secret what's going on, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. If Raven's people say, "Hey, where is she going with that guy?" then he's caught. It's maddening.

Hartnett has been having a bit of a moment lately due to his co-starring role in last year's Oppenheimer (that was the movie about making the atomic bomb, not the one about Barbie in the "Barbenheimer" double-feature) and while he tries his best with the garbage MNS typed up, his efforts are wasted. I never cared for him during his teen idol days in the late-20th/early-21st Centuries where I felt his shtick was acting like a puppy dog with caterpillar eyebrows. But now in his mid-40s, his face has filled out and he looks like Kyle Chandler's brother. (Paging casting directors!) Someone get him a good script, please.

As for the other major purpose of this dumb movie, launching Daddy's little girl's pop and acting career, Saleka Shyamalan is adequate to the task. She's perfectly fine playing a pop singer and her music is as generically bland as most of what passes for "music" these days on the Spotify charts. In the one restrained directorial choice Daddy S makes, he shoots the numerous concert segments from the point of view of Riley's seat in the arena, not up close like a concert video. So the view is filled with idiots filming on their phones and she's only really seen on the video screens.

Shyamalan has had so many career highs and lows due to his own poor choices that one could get whiplash. After a killer opening run of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village followed by a decade of Razzie Awards bait before coming back with The Visit and Split, only to piss that comeback away with Glass (seriously, screw you, Night, for that ending!) and seemingly alternative between OK and bad movies (according to my missus who watches more of them than I do), he's firmly back in the Suck Zone with Trap. Don't let him trap you into wasting 100 minutes of your life on such dumb dreck. Go watch one of his early movies instead.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

"The Union" 4K Review

 Another week, another star-studded Netflix Original that will be consumed and forgotten almost immediately. This week's movie snack is The Union, a blandly-titled spy caper action film packed with more talent than in deserves slumming for a check & being able to shoot in nice places.

After an opening sequence in Trieste, Italy where an unnamed squad of military gear-clad operatives led by Nick (Mike Colter, Luke Cage) and supervised by Roxanne (Oscar-winner Halle Berry, ) are all killed by unknown snipers along with the guy they'd grabbed who had a McGuffin briefcase containing the identities of every spy for every agency in the world; the case which was spirited away by someone after the squad wipe.

 We then meet Mike (two-time Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg, Ted 2), a New Jersey working schmo who is banging his 7th-grade English teacher (Dana Delany) who kicks him out in the morning, so he passes her husband having breakfast in the kitchen in the morning (wait, what?!?), on his way home to where he lives with his mother (Lorraine Bracco, looking hefty). After a quick montage showing him doing his blue collar job, he and the boys adjourn to the bar for brewskis.

Into this dive arrives Roxanne, who turns out to be an old high school flame of Mike's. After some drinking and flirting, she takes him to their old makeout spot where she then injects him with something. He wakes up in London to find out she works for the Union (roll credits!), a secret spy agency that's less blue bloods and more blue collar in their recruiting. The London office is led by Tom (Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons, Portal 2) and staffed by a colorful assortment of caricatures including Foreman (Oscar-nominee Jackie Earle Haley, Breaking Away) and some other red shirts. (Spoiler alert!)

 Ted wants Mike to lead an attempt to recover the McGuffin so after a montage showing how Marky Mark, er, Mike packs six months of training into a couple of weeks, off they go for a bunch of capering, action, double crosses and a bunch of stuff that I can't even remember as I write this review two weeks later and frankly don't feel like tabbing over to the Wikipedia page to look up.

 The Union tries to be a comedy, a spy thriller, an action flick, with some romantic tension mixed in because of course while trotting around Europe's nicer areas in bright 4K Dolby Vision. I kind of want to compare it to the Kevin Hart Netflix caper flick Lift which aired last January before disappearing from everyone's memory, but I can't remember much about that and don't feel like reading my review again.

After her appearance in John Wick: Chapter Three -Parabellum I thought Berry deserved a shot at more action roles, but should've specified "in good movies" like the John Wick series. She's looking great at 56 (at time of filming in 2022), but whoever thought the blonde "Karen" hairstyle with these long hanks falling over one eye half the time was a good look must've harbored deep resentment toward her. Bad hair, BAD!

Everyone else seems to be having fun collecting a paycheck to make believe in luxurious places, so who cares about the performances or anything else in this forgettable piece of content?

If you've got a bright 4K TV, you'll get your money's worth from the colorful cinematography, but you can find plenty of great demo videos on YouTube with better plots than The Union.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"The Instigators" 4K Review

What is Doug Liman's problem with movie titles? After a nearly two-decade run of major bangers like Singers, Go, The Bourne Identity, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, he got jinxed by studio interference which turned his 2014 Tom Cruise-Emily Blunt sci-fi action classic based on the manga entitled All You Need Is Kill into Edge of Tomorrow which sounded like a soap opera sponsored by a feminine hygiene product manufacturer whose clientele was too sensitive to handle the Twilight movies. The freaking tagline for the movie - Live Die Repeat - was a better title and they've somewhat tried to undo the damage by having it listed on digital retailers as Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow which was too little, too late.

Since then he's had a mix of box office disappointments (American Made with Tom Cruise), disastrous flops (Chaos Walking) and direct to streaming dreck like Locked Down, a blah Wuhan-lockdown set romcom-heist flick. His last effort was the Amazon Prime Original remake (heh, original remake) of Road House which got most of its press for Liman's very loud and public whining about its distribution and his payment and Conor MacGregor's weird performance. It was modestly entertaining, but disposable.

Now he's already back with another more-or-less direct-to-streaming movie for Apple TV+, The Instigators, which having seen the movie makes no sense whatsoever and doesn't even hit at what this surprisingly entertaining and energetic heist dramedy has to offer. The marketing for this was so poor that I didn't even see a trailer for it and only happened to catch it because we'd just resubscribed to ATV+ to watch some series and it had just dropped. Other than starring Matt Damon and being directed by Liman, I really had no idea what this was going to be.

Matt Damon (say it!) stars as Rory, a divorced former-Marine who is hinting to his therapist, Dr. Rivera (Hong Chau), that he may be suicidal. Seeking to make some quick cash to pay off back child support and be able to see his son again, he joins up with heist crew masterminded by crime boss Besegai (Michael Stuhlbarg) with Scalvo (rapper Jack Harlow) and Cobby (Casey Affleck, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Chuck Maclean).

The plan is simple: The Boston Mayoral runoff between incumbent Mayor Miccelli (Ron Perlman) and young reformer Choi (Ronny Cho) is happening and Miccelli is expected to win and thus will be receiving massive amounts of cash bribes at the victory party which will stored in a safe for pickup the morning after. The trio of robbers are to slip into the wharfside venue before dawn when only a skeleton crew of workers would be there, get someone to open the safe before the armored truck arrives, and take the rowboat of cash out of there. Easy peasy and a good split of a good take in the cards. However, Rory just wants the $32,480 he needs - if there's more, he doesn't want it, if there's less, Besegai will have to pay him the difference. 

However, the plan goes disastrously wrong as the boat develops a leak and can't be used as an escape and the venue's kitchen is packed with workers. Apparently the election is undecided, but appears Choi may upset, and Miccelli is refusing to concede so the party is dragging on until the dawn. Complicating matters is the fact that so much bribe money had come in there had already been two drops to armored cars made and there is very little cash in the safe. REALLY complicating matters is when trying to find their way out of the building they wander into the area where Miccelli, his lawyer, Flynn (Toby Jones), and others are waiting. Scalvo decides to rob them as well, taking a bracelet from Miccelli, before the police chief and Scalvo end up killing each other in a gunfight draw. Rory and Cobby escape in the anticipated armored car.

With their clean caper now a massive clusterfark with a dead cop, everyone is very interested in catching our dunderhead duo especially Special Operations Unit Detective Toomey (Ving Rhames), dispatched by Miccelli to retrieve the bracelet and Booch (Paul Walter Hauser), sent by Besegai to retrieve the money and tie up the loose ends Rory and Cobby represent and by tie up I mean murder them.

To try and recap what happens next would spoil the surprises, but for once in a very long time I had no idea where the story was going to go next and end up. Sure, it's a safe presumption that the two Big Stars' characters probably are wearing plot armor that prevents death, but the twists, turns and double-backs kept the mystery of how the heck they were going to get out of this mess alive.

Affleck and Maclean's script keeps things moving with the emphasis on entertainment rather than trying to make lots of Acting Showcase Moments focusing more on character details like how Cobby needs to have a child blow into his motorcycle's Breathalyzer interlock to get it started (a gag which pays off at the end) or how everyone in town seems to understand Det. Toomey operates on the Dirty Harry side of the law and allow him to do what he wants as Alfred Molina's baker associate of Besagai experiences. 

Liman seems in far better form than Road House or Locked Down exhibited with the few chase scenes cleanly executed while balancing the dramedic elements of the story. The performances are all good though Damon's passive Rory may be too laid back for some tastes.

With such a stacked cast, it's odd that Apple took such a low-key approach to The Instigators release beginning with the title. An instigator is someone who provokes conflict and neither Rory nor Cobby set out to stir the pots and are more concerned with escaping the blowback. I don't have a better title than The Instigators in mind at the moment, but it doesn't change that it's a weak title.

While other critics and the herds at IMDB seem more immune to The Instigators' charms, it's a tidy 101-minute long romp which will keep you guessing and not bore you with self-importance. If you have ATV+, give it a watch, you're paying for it.

Score: 8.5/10. Catch it on Apple TV+.

"MaXXXine" 4K Review

 After the sleeper success of A24's slasher horror movie X and the surprise prequel Pearl (both reviewed here) it was announced Ti West's trilogy would conclude with MaXXXine with the sole survivor of X (spoiler alert!), Maxine Minx, trying to move beyond porn into "legitimate" movies in 1985 Hollywood. How did she do? Let's find out.

 Mia Goth returns as Maxine. It's six years after the Texas Porn Massacre and at age 33 her porn career is nearing its end. She auditions for a horror sequel, The Puritan II, directed by statuesque female director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), and gets the part. She's being tailed by a shadowy figure who watches her when she does her shift in a peep show and there's a creepy private investigator, Labat (Kevin Bacon, having a ball), menacing her on the shadows behalf.

And lurking farther around the edges is the Night Stalker, the infamous serial killer who murdered at least 14 people between 1984-85, and may be responsible for Maxine's sex worker friends turning up dead with Satanic symbols branded into them. A pair of police detectives (Bobby Cannavale & Michelle Monaghan) think she's somehow connected to the crimes and are harassing her leading to a preposterous finale.

 While X and Pearl had their gimmicky charms, I was bored by MaXXXine. Not even the Gen X-baiting Eighties throwback vibe could make an empty story interesting. Ignoring that there were extremely few female horror directors (or even female directors in general) at the time, Bender doesn't really add much to the plot than digressions about being driven to succeed and creative vision. Perhaps this aspect could've been fleshed out more, but West doesn't try.

The ultimate reveal of the villain was only a surprise to those who weren't paying attention to the very end of X or the opening scene of MaXXXine. Western Union couldn't have telegraphed the "surprise" harder. Every character is basically a cutout stereotype which even good actors like Giancarlo Esposito, who plays Maxine's agent/lawyer like an ambulance chaser, can do much with. And the ending where people are suddenly armed when they would've had no reason to be and what Maxine does yet walks free were disbelief suspensions too far.

Goth is an odd actress. With her odd invisible eyebrows, she's not a standard beauty - she'd be great as Hazel O'Connor in a biopic that exactly seven people would probably see - and she's most worked in the left-of-the-dial art film scene in movies like Infinity Pool, Nymphomaniac, and the Suspira remake. But in her second swing as Maxine, the character seems thinner & more mannered, drifting at times towards Elizabeth Berkeley's Nomi from Showgirls in 'tude. Goth co-wrote Pearl with West, so why not team up again?

If you saw the first two movies of West's trilogy it's understandable that you'd want to see how it finishes up. Perhaps if you lower your expectation sufficiently, the disappointment may not be too bad, but it's overall a skip.

With a period look gritty film look, the 4K presentation doesn't really offer much visual ooompf as far as highlights and shadow detail. I didn't really feel 4K and the audio mix was nothing special.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"A Quiet Place: Day One" 4K Review

One of the most unique premises in sci-fi/horror in recent years has been that of the A Quiet Place series which told of a world where humanity has been nearly made extinct by alien monsters which hunt by sound, forcing humans to live in silence or die. The 2018 original A Quiet Place, co-written and directed by John Krasinski, was a brilliant exploration of the premise due to one child being deaf (and thus unable to know if she's making noise) and another is an infant who can't control when it cries.

2021's A Quiet Place Part Two was less successful as it was bogged down by the premise that at the end of the world there will still be selfish bandits preying on others as if they have any way to use the loot. But its opening sequence showing the alien invasion from the family's point of view in their rural town was harrowing and provides the impetus for what's depicted in A Quiet Place: Day One, which shows what happened in Manhattan.

 Lupita Nyong'o stars as Sam, a terminal cancer patient at a hospice outside NYC. She's a bit of a misanthrope, trashing her fellow residents in a poem she reads in group therapy. She reluctantly agrees to go on a day trip to the city in hopes of getting some pizza and annoyed that it turns out to be a marionette show. She ducks out to get a snack at a bodega and when she returns she learns the group is heading back to the hospice due to some unspecified emergency which we rapidly learn is an alien invasion as meteors carrying the monsters pummel Manhattan.

 Trapped in the island due to all the bridges being blown up by the military - considering they landed everywhere as shown in the other films, what's the point - Sam decides to not head for the seaport where evacuations are being conducted, but to head north for Harlem to get pizza from a specific place.

Along the way she's joined by Eric (Joseph Quinn, Eddie Munson from the 4th season of Stranger Things), an English law student who's shellshocked by what's going on. She doesn't want the company, but lets him tag along with her and her cat Frodo as they dodge aliens in various harrowing encounters.

 A Quiet Place: Day One is a larger scale rendition of the events depicted in the 2nd film, but isn't overly bloated with action sequences, portraying the mayhem more impressionisticly as aliens attack at the edges of the frame, out of focus. Writer-director Michael Samoski - whose last film was the terrific rediscovery that Nicolas Cage could still act, Pig - who collaborated with Krasinski on the story ably manages the scares and pathos of the story, staging some nail-biting close calls as well as charming moments of caring in a world at its end.

But undercutting the story is the same flaw that harmed Kate, the forgotten 2021 Netflix Original starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as an assassin dying of radiation poisoning, in that what are the stakes for a character who is a dead woman walking? The original movie was about a father trying to protect his family, Day One is about a surly dying woman with no apparently family or friends living for what exactly? Same with Eric, what's he about? Since conversation is lethal, there is little time for Basil Exposition chit-chat and thus who are we rooting for other than Frodo, the chillest cat in the world who doesn't ever hiss or freak out as monsters are inches away. (This is due to the makers not wanting to use CGI or frighten the two cats, Nico and Schnitzel, to get a reaction because they couldn't be trained to do those actions.)

That we're not actively rooting for Sam's death is a testament to Nyong'o's performance as she gradually paints Sam as a woman resigned to her fate, but not rushing towards it, if only to protect Frodo. The ending is predictable, but how else could it have wrapped up. Quinn is good, but has little to play. Also making a brief, but impactful cameo is Djimon Hounsou who I forgot until prepping this review was in the 2nd film, so he's playing the same role.

I'm not sure how many more Quiet Place movies they can or should make despite their being a profitable series thanks to keeping the budgets low because how many ways can you do "Shhhhh, don't make a sound" tension. It's a unique premise, but sometimes you can only take them so far.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation is good, if muted due to the gray, post-9/11 inspired color palette. Colors, where they appear, are rich. Where the party really starts is with the Dolby Atmos audio. The series has always had really smart sound design, using height channels to great effect as in the first film's scene where a racoon is on the roof and you hear it scurrying around. Here helicopters whir overhead, aliens gallop with meaty thuds and even though you will have to turn up the volume to hear the whispered dialog, when the booms occur, they don't rattle your eardrums.

Score: 6.5/10. Catch it on cable. 

"Skywalkers: A Love Story" 4K Review

 If you watched Free Solo - the Oscar-winning documentary about the attempt to climb Yosemite's El Capitan for the first time without any additional ropes and gear - and thought, "Nope to all that!" then you'll be equally noping through the Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story.

 Telling the story of fellow Russian "rooftoppers" - daredevils who climb buildings, cranes, radio towers, etc. for the thrills and fame - Angela Nikolau and Vanya Beerkus, who became soulmates and collaborators after Angela, the daughter of circus performers and sole female rooftopper in Russia, connects with Vanya, a popular presence on social media. While he was more of the daredevil, she brought an artistic flair, posing in glamorous outfits in extremely dangerous locations for striking photographs.

As a team they had sponsors for their adventures until the tag team of the global scamdemic shut down the world and then Russia's invasion of Ukraine made their country a pariah state which limited money-making opportunities. They try to make money selling NFTs (remember when they were the fad for 15 seconds?), but cracks begin to form in their relationship including trust issues which for their line of art is a potentially lethal flaw.

Vanya decides they need to go out with a big splashy climb, attempting to scale the Merdeka 118 tower under construction in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Topped by a spire soaring to 2,227 feet, it will be the second-tallest building in the world only behind the Burj Khalifa in Dubai of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol fame. (For reference, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were "only" 1,355 feet tall.)

With the assistance of contacts in the area with drones to surveil the area, Vanya develops a plan to access the tower by climbing up onto an adjoining sports arena, then cross an intervening shopping mall, then climbing the tower's stairwells to access the spires under the presumption that the security camera coverage may be incomplete and the guards will be distracted by the World Cup Final match that night. More than usual, not getting caught is a big deal because Asian countries don't play with such shenanigans and if busted, they could face years in slam.

Adding to the complexity is his decision to snag a piece of scaffolding, lug it to the top of the hollow spire and lay it across to make a narrow shaky platform to perform a swan pose which consists of Vanya lifting Angela above him in the big Dirty Dancing move used by Ryan Gosling in Crazy Stupid Love. We see them struggle to pull this move off on the ground (clever editing, no doubt) so the prospect of doing it nearly a half-mile above the ground where failure would be fatal. And if that's not enough, Angela suffers an injury while preparing which prevents her from using an arm for weeks leading to the climb which has to happen on World Cup Final night or their cover would be lost.

The last act of the film consists of their attempt filmed with GoPros and drones and without spoiling the conclusion, it's a tense and fraught experience when unexpected workers force them into hiding for nearly a day and with limited food and water due to needing to carry extra batteries for the gizmos and the expectation it was going to be a one-night hit-and-run, when they finally get their chance at the spire, they're in rough shape and the overall bad ideaness of this caper is off the charts.

While packed with stunning footage of their exploits, we never really get inside the heads of the couple, especially Vanya who doesn't do much narration of his feelings. The stresses of fame, ambition, and making a living weigh down on them and as they realize many of their rooftopping community friends are leaving the scene due to terminal encounters with gravity (i.e. they're falling down and going splat), the "We can't do this forever," aspect calls into question whether they have anything in common beyond their half-mile high club adventures?

While ultimately superficial, Skywalkers: A Love Story has plenty of thrills and tension for those who'd never in a million years put themselves where these two do for love and fame.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"The Trigger Effect" Review

 For some reason the missus got the bug to watch The Trigger Effect, the 1996 feature directorial debut of screenwriter David Koepp who at this point had hits like Jurassic Park, Death Becomes Her, Carlito's Way and the first Mission: Impossible movie on his resume. Not streaming free on any services at this writing, it was a trip to the high seas for a HD copy as I wasn't in the mood for my DVD.

 Opening with a long tracking shot through a Los Angeles mall showing people suffering various indignities and rude behavior, it settles on our lead couple, Matthew and Annie (Kyle MacLachlan and Elizabeth Shue), who are having a hard time watching their movie due to a pair of loud-talking black moviegoers including Raymond (Richard T. Jones). Their attempts to shush the talkers goes about as well as you'd expect, so they leave the theater to go home to their infant daughter (who's with a sitter, duh) and suffering from an earache which is making her cry constantly.

In the night there is a city-wide power which triggers a rapid breakdown in society. Matthew's attempts to get medicine for the baby are thwarted due to phone lines being down and the pharmacist refuses to dispense it without the script leading Matthew to steal the medicine. Adding to the stress between the couple is the arrival of their friend Joe (Dermot Mulroney) who stays with them. Matthew's not too happy about his arrival and there are hints of Annie's wild past and some relationship with Joe alluded to.

When a burglar robs the house and ends up shot by a neighbor, things really go farther off the rails leading the trio to decide to make a road trip to her parents' place in Colorado. This leads to further peril as they again cross paths with Raymond at a diner (though they don't seem to recognize each other) and another traveler accosting patrons asking for some gas, Gary (Michael Rooker doing his Michel Rooker thing). Not a lot of trust at the end of the world, is there?

If this all seems familiar, it's because it's a similar premise as 2023's Netflix Original Leave The World Behind where I criticized:

But the biggest problem is that pretty much the entire scenario was told in two whole fewer hours in a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (S1E22) which is about a cul-de-sac which experiences a power and communication outage and after a kid says he read in a comic book that aliens may be behind the event and that they send advance scouts who look human to blend into the neighborhood, everyone immediately goes DEFCON 1 and suspects each other with disastrous consequences. It's a very memorable episode and it only takes 25 minutes to tell its tale. (It's on Amazon Freevee if you'd like to watch it.)

 According to the Wikipedia page for The Trigger Effect, Koepp was partially inspired by this episode as well due to his uncle, actor Claude Akin, starring in it. (Shouldn't Rod Serling be getting a royalty?) As a result the instant rush to anarchy requires a bit of a leap this time. But that's not to say the premise is too much of a stretch. Just look at how people lose their minds if they can't log into FaceSpace or what happened recently with the CrowdStrike computer bug which grounded most air traffic and kept Delta down for days.

However, it should be noted that when it was filmed in 1995, the Internet as we know and take for granted barely existed. The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 and the software was released to the public domain in 1993. At the time of filming there were perhaps 20,000 web sites. The collapse of society depicted is strictly analog, but also presumes that everyone will pretty much become their worst selves.

This would be more effective if not for Koepp's flimsy characters & decision to allude to much more than he explains. There's time for hinting, but also needs to a point where things are explained. I don't go for the "it's up to the audience to decide what it all means" posturing. (Looking at you, Anatomy of a Fall.) The reliance on coincidence becomes reality-breaking by the end with a pat kumbayah resolution.

 Performances are OK considering the one-note characters everyone is stuck playing. Shue was following acclaimed turn in Leaving Las Vegas which broke her previous frothy ingenue image from movies like Adventures in Babysitting and the Back to the Future sequels, but was also her career peak because she never really appeared in anything substantial after 2000's Hollow Man. Doubt that? She's been in 20(!) features since then - name two of them. Name one. No, her role in the first season of The Boys in 2019 doesn't count. 

There's a visceral potency to the premise of what happens to a society when the lights go out, but for some reason no one really seems to be getting it right. The Trigger Effect is just a middling stab at it.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Not currently on any services, but available to rent/buy.)

"Beverly Hills Cop" 4K Review

 With the Netflix Original Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F hitting streaming, it's time to revisit the series which I've owned for quite a while after buying the trilogy in 4K from iTunes for $10. Before starting, I've seen the first one several times, I think I've only seen the sequel once and only remember that it was very mean-spirited, and don't think I've seen the third one, but have heard it's pretty terrible. Let's find out!

Kicking off is the OG Beverly Hills Cop from 1984 (my senior year in high school), the movie that blew Eddie Murphy up into superstar status after his first two movies, 48 Hours and Trading Places. And he was only 23 at the time.

For those unfamiliar with the movie (I'll keep spoilers for a 40-year-old movie to a minimum) somehow, Murphy plays Detroit Police Detective Axel Foley, a young hotshot we're introduced to as an attempted undercover sting involving cigarettes results in a mayhem-causing chase through Detroit's downtown streets. The aftermath has him on thin ice with his boss, Inspector Todd (real-life Detroit cop Gil Hill, who the documentary White Boy Ric alleges may've been dirty), who warns Axel that if he screws up again, he's out of a job.

Matters are complicated when Axel comes home to find an old friend, Mikey (James Russo), has broken into his apartment after getting out of jail. In his possession he has a paper bag filled with German bearer bonds. After hitting a bar and reminiscing over how they stole cars in high school and how it was odd that Axel became a cop, they return to his apartment only to be ambushed by two assailants who knock Axel out and then execute Mikey, taking the bag of bonds. 

Put on vacation by a fed-up Todd, Axel drives to Beverly Hills to find answers by checking in with art gallery manager Jenny (Lisa Eilbacher), an old friend of his and Mikey's from Detroit, who had gotten Mikey the security job at the warehouse of Very Wealthy & Obvious Bad Guy Victor Maitland (Steven Berkoff). When he goes to Maitland's office to accost him, he's bum-rushed by a half-dozen security men and hurled through a plate glass window and arrested by Beverly Hills PD.

We now meet Detectives Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) and their boss, Lt. Bogomil (Ronny Cox). They are by-the-book professionals who have no use for Axel's rogue antics and he repeatedly gives them the slip or tricks them into situations because of course the hip guy is going to get over on the squares, can you dig it? Many hijinx ensue.

Revisiting Beverly Hills Cop now is instant flashback to the era. The soundtrack was so ubiquitous with hits like Glenn Fry's opening theme "The Heat Is On", Pointer Sisters' "Neutron Dance" (during the opening heist chase), and the omnipresent "Axel F Theme" by Harold Faltermeyer which for music store keyboard department employees was the tag-team partner to Van Halen's "Jump" for needing a sign forbidding their playing the way guitar departments have a "NO STAIRWAY!" sign.

Murphy is in full control here as he BSes his way into situation - several scenes were improvised by Murphy, which would bite the sequels in the butt as "Eddie does something funny" is not a substitute for writing - and throwing race cards at will (though without the malice you'd get nowadays). But it's not all razzle-dazzle bluster; there are moments of quiet drama where Murphy shows that he wasn't just a young buck comic, but had acting chops as well. (I still believe that he would've won an Oscar for Dreamgirls if they hadn't released Norbit while Oscar voting was still happening. If they had just waited a week, his career the past nearly 20 years would've been far different.)

Credit for holding this wacky comedy-gritty crime movie together goes to director Martin Brest who manages to balance the competing tones nicely, allowing Murphy room to cut loose without it becoming overly indulgent & obnoxious. (Which the sequel illustrates when tone is handled incorrectly.) Brest had directed the charming geezers-robbing-a-bank movie Going In Style before and would go on to direct the well-regarded Midnight Run before blowing up his career with the tag team of Meet Joe Black and the Bennifer debacle Gigli, but here he nails what the material needs.

The tropes of hip vs. square, urban street smarts vs. urbane procedure following, West Coast vs. Motown which would become stock items on the buddy cop crime comedy checklist began here and when you see how poorly things go when the balance isn't maintained, you appreciate even more what Beverly Hills Cop accomplished. It's also fun to see co-stars Paul Reiser and Bronson Pinchot (both in their second film roles ever and Pinchot pretty much converted mincing art gallery employee Serge into Cousin Balki on the Perfect Strangers sitcom) and Damon Wayans make his debut in a bit part as Banana Man.

As for the presentation, the 4K Dolby Vision is good and clear, but nothing you'd show off to demo your home theater. This is due to the look of the film being deliberately drab in Detroit before getting bright in Beverly Hills. Audio is basic 5.1, clear and dated, typical of the era.

Score: 8/10. Buy it for $5 or less.

"Pearl" 4K & "X" Reviews

 Doing something different this time in that this double-feature are directly related movies which we watched in reverse order than they were released. But first some background for those not familiar with the gimmick.

In March 2022, snooty film snobs favorite studio, A24 (the 21st Century's Miramax), released an art house slasher movie titled X about a ill-fated group making a porno film on a rural Texas farm owned by an elderly couple in 1979. It was quite buzzy because it was an A24 joint and who the killers were. But where it got interesting was when it was announced that they had already filmed a prequel about the origins of the old woman, Pearl, in X titled Pearl which would be released in September 2022, just six months later, and that a sequel, MaXXXine, would be coming in 2024 continuing the story of (spoiler alert) the survivor of X. 

The final film of the trilogy opened this weekend meaning it'll be on video in a matter of weeks and since I was interested in that one, I figured it was time to catch the first two. I'm not a big horror movie fan, but the missus is and she'd seen X and Pearl, but suggested we watch them in reverse order because she thought it wouldn't change the story and wanted to see how it'd play. So that's what we did and thus this tag-team review.

 Set in 1918, Pearl introduces us to the titular character (Mia Goth) in a subversive manner by introducing this farm girl as she feeds the animals in the barn while 1940s style credits play before she impales a goose on a pitchfork then takes it down to the lake to feed to an alligator. Swell girl!

Her husband, Howard (Alistair Sewell), is off fighting the Great War, and she's under the thumb of her strict dour German immigrant mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), and caring for her invalid father (Matthew Sunderland). Pearl dreams of being a dancer and sneaks off to the picture show where she makes the acquaintance of the projectionist (David Corenswet, the new Superman in James Gunn's upcoming reboot). This angers her mother and leads to lethal family drama.

 Since I hand't seen X I had no context as to what Pearl was supposed to be about other than as a small story about a sad bad seed farm girl. But what is interesting is how director Ti West filmed and color-graded the picture like a Technicolor Douglas Sirk melodrama. Usually movies set in old times go for a muted nostalgic tone like the Kansas scenes of The Wizard of Oz, so it's a jolt to see it look more like the Oz part of the film. Presented in 4K HDR on Amazon Prime, the colors are so hot, bright, saturated and amped up it looked like the garish Vivid picture mode on TVs that only lunatics prefer. Skin tones are flushed and primary colors like red and green are searing. It doesn't look like genuine Technicolor, which was a three-strip process that resulted in a very specific color tone, but it's definitely a look.

 The story, co-written by Goth with West, is fairly simplistic, more designed as a showcase for Goth with a couple of standout scenes like her confession to her kind, wealthy sister-in-law, Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro), of the very bad things she's done filmed in a long take without the obligatory cutaways to Mitsy's reaction which makes the eventual reaction shot an interesting choice. The final shot almost borders on camp, though.

 With that down, it was time for the next chronological entry in the series, X, which leaps forward six decades with Goth playing the double-role of elderly Pearl (unrecognizable under makeup which took 6-8 hours to apply) and Maxine Minx, one of the performers in The Farmer's Daughter which the producer/strip club owner Wayne (Martin Henderson) hopes to be bigger than Debbie Does Dallas. 

Along for the production are fellow performers Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi, bka hip-hop artist Kid Cudi), director/cameraman RJ (Owen Campbell), and his girlfriend/sound recordist Lorraine (Jenna Ortega). Things get off to a rocky start when Pearl's husband Howard (now played by Stephen Ure) greets Wayne with a shotgun because he forgot he had rented the farm's bunkhouse to him though he is unaware of the plans to film a porno movie there.

 Filming gets off to an uneventful start, but take a turn in the evening when Lorraine decides she wants to film a scene much to the consternation of RJ. Upset in the aftermath, he attempts to leave in the group's van only to find the driveway blocked by Pearl. He attempts to assist her back inside, but she has other ideas about his immediate life expectancy - not really a spoiler because the movie opens with the Sheriff's department on the scene with lots of bodies covered in sheets before doing the "24 Hours Earlier" thing - so we're off to the races as Porn Makers vs. Psycho Octogenarians begins. Who will survive? (Hint: The one who has another movie set in the 1980s opening this weekend.)

The whole hook for X is the unique killer(s) which changes up the usual Giant Supernatural Unkillable Monster formula. We've seen a bazillion slasher films, but outside of Mrs. Vorhees in the original Friday the 13th, how many have been older villains, much less really old? As opposed to the gaudy colors of Pearl, West (who also wrote and edited) goes for a grimy Seventies grindhouse vibe and it's a trip seeing the bright pristine red barn and yellow house all run down and grungy with age. It's also fun to spot the callbacks (or in this case foreshadowings) in shots and the lake gator.

The performances are all good with the cast fleshing out the stock characters nicely, albeit laying on the Texas accents a tad thick. Goth is so hidden under the Pearl makeup as to raise a legitimate question as to why not simply cast an older or different actress, but West felt that it was important to have a link between Pearl and Maxine. (It does raise the question why Maxine doesn't notice young Pearl could've been her twin.)

Taken as a package, X and Pearl, are an adequate horror movies with a couple of good gimmicks. Both could be a shorter and Pearl is the slightly weaker film because like the flop Furiosa, it's an unnecessary origin story that doesn't add much to the original for those not curious about everyone's backstory.

Scores: Pearl 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently in 4K HDR on Amazon Prime)

 X: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on no services, but available to rent/buy)

 

 

"Trigger Warning" 4K Review

Serving a sub-sub-sub-genre no one specifically asked for - action movies starring hot middle-aged Latina actresses - Netflix has come through with a pair of J.Lo-led entries within the past year (the terrible The Mother and the screamingly mediocre Atlas) and now the unexpected Trigger Warning (lame title with no relationship to anything) starring Jessica Alba in her first movie in five years and frankly her first since 2014's Sin City: A Dame To Kill For that anyone may've seen other than possible Mechanic: Resurrection, which I haven't even though I own it on 4K digital. Presumably because her kids are 6 to 16 years old and her suburban living company has made her very wealthy, she's decided to return to acting as a 43-year-old action heroine. Alrighty then.

Alba stars as Parker (no last name), a Special Forces commando (don't laugh) who we're introduced to in Syria in the middle of a chase which ends up in a morally gray area. She then gets a call from Sheriff Jesse (Mark Webber), her high school boyfriend, informing her that her also surnameless father, Harry (Alejandro De Hoyos), had died in a mine cave-in. So she returns home to Creation, No State Named to discover her father's death may not have been an accident.

 Harry lived in a mining building which was converted into a bar, so she mourns by walking around drinking straight out of liquor bottles. The bar's manager, Mike (Gabriel Basso), arrives and they hang out at another bar to drink and as they leave she notices a SUV with an assault rifle laying in plain sight in the back. She decides to follow the guys and witnesses them going to rob a hardware store. (In the middle of the night?) Conveniently, the back loading door is partially open (why?) and she's able to beat up all the robbers with her commando skills.

 The actual plot gets rolling when she discovers Elvis Swann (Jake Weary) is selling stolen military arms from a neighboring arms depot (convenient) and setting up a deal with a notorious domestic terrorist. It doesn't help that Elvis' daddy is Senator Ezekiel Swann (Anthony Michael Hall) who may as well have been named Baddie Whiteguy and given a Snidely Whiplash mustache. This puts Sheriff Jesse in the middle because he is also a Swann - a detail the script doesn't make clear early enough - and may be in on covering up Harry's death while he hooks up with Parker. (Awkward.) This leads to vengeance, death, and action.

As with every so-so movie the problems begin with the script which is maddeningly generic potboiler revenge thriller stuff. Writers John Brancato (co-writer of The Game, Terminator 3, Terminator Salvation), Josh Olson (A History of Violence), and Halley Gross (The Last of Us Part II videogame, ruh-roh) have decent pedigrees, but as with the indistinguishable from a ChatGPT product script for The Mother (despite Oscar-nominated writers there), there is nothing unique or distinctive here. There's something about Netflix movies which seems to homogenize screenplays into the dumbest common denominator.

Why don't Parker and Henry have last names and why name her Parker? What state is this? Is Swann a state or national Senator? (It's more implied Congress, but we can't be sure.) What happened to her mother who is only seen in a photo? Does she have no other family? Why is this bar in the middle of nowhere? How did the mine's tunnels happen to run all the way to the arms depot and have an access hatch into a container which allows for the thefts by Elvis's crew without the Army noticing? Why is her father's body laying out in the morgue instead of in a freezer? What was the back door of the hardware store open? Is there only one other deputy in the Sheriff's department and he's cool with what the Swanns are doing? This goes on and on because this is a TV movie-level script.

 Indonesian director Mouly Surya makes her English-language debut here and while she's lauded for her work in her homeland, there's nothing distinctive about the storytelling here, but the action is competently staged.

Which leaves Alba, who is actually pretty good here. For the bulk of her career as a starlet she's never been much in the talent department to go with her looks, but she apparently got some acting training in her 30s because her turn as Nancy Callahan in Sin City 2 was a night and day improvement over her performance in the first one. She also played the villain in the unseen Hallie Steinfeld vehicle Barely Lethal which was better than the material required. She's unlikely to suddenly become Academy bait, but she's respectable.

She struggles with the weak script to give her cardboard cutout character some depth, but is convincing in the action scenes. It's become a trope about how the tiny girlboss women kick the asses of big men who are physically larger and stronger, but the action choreography addresses this by showing her constantly being thrown around - she's 5'7" - but using jujitsu moves and improvised weapons and blades to even the odds. But she's not invincible: When she's badly beaten she passes out for three days and when shot in the arm, she doesn't use it, down to just one arm to fight with. She's bruised and battered like Charlize Theron was in Atomic Blonde's centerpiece stairway fight.

Despite the bad script and questionable direction which decided making all the guys look the same (short hair, beards) so sometimes we're confused as who's who other than her Army sidekick Spider (Tone Bell), who's black, Trigger Warning (seriously, what is that name supposed to mean) is a entertaining enough diversion that you're already paying for on Netflix, so it's not a total waste of time to watch.

As for the 4K Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation, with a few points where there are some bright highlights, there's nothing particularly demo worthy about the film's look and sound. If you're not shelling out for the top tier, you're not missing too much.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Remembering Gene Wilder" Review

If a documentary ever did what it said on the tin, Remembering Gene Wilder would be it. A pleasant overview of Gene Wilder's life and career with interviews with his frequent collaborator Mel Brooks (The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein), Wilder's wife at the time of his death from Alzheimer's in 2016, Karen Wilder, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Harry Connick Jr., Mike Medavoy, Rain Pryor (Richard's daughter), TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, and more, it fairly rotely runs down his life and career from while downplaying how his career continued despite minimal marketability for another decade after its peak.

It had occurred to me some time ago that for someone who was so lauded, his window of top work only ran just over a decade from The Producers in 1967 through 1980's Stir Crazy with his later works forgotten when he was in classics like Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and his Mel Brooks collaborations before moving on to teaming with Richard Pryor frequently even as Pryor's health declined due to MS.

While a lot of it was fairly familiar stuff even though I'm not a big fan, I was genuinely surprised at some of the details in his career like how his break came from co-starring in a short-lived Broadway play with Anne Bancroft and making the acquaintance of her then-boyfriend Mel Brooks. I'd always thought Young Frankenstein was strictly a Brooks joint, but Wilder actually created the premise and written a script then brought Brooks in. The real doozy of a story is how Carol Kane had received a Best Actress Oscar nomination - no, I'm not kidding! - and then didn't work for a year, but Wilder somehow saw a talent for comedy that no one else had noticed, casting her in his second directorial effort, The World's Greatest Lover. 

Luck seemed to smile upon him personally as well leading to his marriage to Gilda Radner after meeting filming Hanky Panky and his last wife while researching playing a deaf character in See No Evil, Hear No Evil.

Overall, Remembering Gene Wilder is a pleasant overview of a beloved performer's life and career. Whether you're a fan or a neophyte regarding his work, there's something to enjoy. It's just not super special in its execution.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Netflix)

"Less Than Zero" Review

 After the horror that was St. Elmo's Fire, it was time to check off another Eighties checkbox, the 1987 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' 1985 novel, Less Than Zero. The sentient Wonder bread boy Andrew McCarthy stars along with James Spader, Jami Gertz, and the actual star of the show, Robert Downey Jr., in a tale of sex, drugs, more drugs, the eternal suffering of the spoiled rich kids of LA, and even more drugs.

 We open with a high school graduation ceremony where we're introduced to Clay (McCarthy), his girlfriend Blair (Gertz), and best friend Julian (Downey Jr.) who is celebrating the funding for his record label, Tone Deaf (so creative) Records. Everything is wonderful and they lived happily ever after.

 Six months later, Blair is calling Clay at his not a dorm where he's attending Unspecified East Coast University majoring in Who Knows What begging him to come home for Christmas. In a serious of B&W flashbacks, we see that when he went home for Thanksgiving he caught Blair and Julian in bed together which really toasted his Wonder bread.

 Clay arrives home at his family's very swanky mansion in Unspecified High Rent District in LA and hops into his vintage 1960 Corvette convertible to find the others. Julian is in deep trouble with his label already failed and his coke habit so bad that he's $50,000 in debt to Rip (Spader) who is leaning on him hard to repay the money or else get made to work for Rip in an unfun capacity. Blair is also a cokehead and Clay is still upset about her hooking up with Julian, but love conquers all, right, so they proceed to get their shag on.

As Julian's dire situation spirals out of control, he makes moves to clean himself up, but without much support from his fed-up family. Eventually it devolves into a chase where Clay and Blair try to rescue Julian from the pit he's put himself into. Will they live happily ever after? (Spoiler: No.)

It's nearly impossible to empathize with the characters here because who gives a rip about spoiled super rich kids making poor life choices? Boo-friggedy-hoo. The glossy representation of LA parties where houses look like art galleries with more TV sets than a sports bar is pure fantasy and unrelatable.

The exception is Julian, because Downey's nuanced performance brings his desperation to life as his life spirals down the drain. It also raises the question why RDJ chose to model his personal life as a drug-addicted loser breaking into people's homes and almost losing his career after Julian. Definitely not a scared straight success story.

But there is a single choice which completely torpedoes Less Than Zero even as a messy fantasia about shiny wealth and grungy drugs and it's making them high school graduates and not college grads. Throughout the movie, I kept thinking that there's no way 18-19 year-old kids would be in this situations just six months after graduating. We never see any trace of Tone Deaf Records existing; no way would Julian be in a position to open a club at that age; why would Rip allow Julian to go $50K in debt to him; and so on.

The cast was 21-26 years-old and there's nothing that requires them to be high schoolers; if fact, the studio added the graduation scene to make the characters more likeable and had the effect of wrecking the verisimilitude of the entire story. If they had just made them college grads and sent Clay east for a job, nearly all the problems nagging at the story would've gone away. Not that it would've been a much better movie, but at least it wouldn't be so implausible as to prevent suspending disbelief.

 Outside of Downey's performance and some slick visuals, there's not much more than zero to recommend in Less Than Zero.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"St. Elmo's Fire" Review

 While watching Andrew McCarthy's Brats documentary last night I realized I had some gaping holes in my Gen X filmography where I hadn't seen movies like The Goonies, Less Than Zero and especially the locus of the whole Brat Pack kerfuffle, St. Elmo's Fire. Sure, I knew the hit John Parr single ("Man In Motion") and David Foster's theme song, but I had never actually bothered to see the thing due to an utter lack of interest and apathy bordering on antipathy.

But in the interests of checking off another Major Cultural Touchstone checkbox (I only got around to seeing Saturday Night Fever a couple of years ago), that was the priority for tonight's viewing and as I suspected, my life for the past 39 years hadn't been negatively impacted in the least by missing this screaming mediocrity.

I'm not even going to bother trying to recap this hodgepodge of WTFery so here's the Wikipedia synopsis for those of you who didn't watch it 100 times in the Eighties as someone on Reddit told me. Suffice to say it's about a bunch of beautiful young people - Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy - and their awful grandma-dressing Plain Jane virgin friend, Mare Winningham, who graduate from college and pretty much mess up their lives shagging each other, having substance abuse problems, and generally being messes despite Georgetown degrees.
   
 Everything reminded me of my take on Allan Moyle's Empire Records where I noted that the movie had to be set on an alien planet because despite the characters looking human, no actual people actually behave this way. A perfect example is the subplot involving Estevez's character being obsessed with wooing a medical resident (Andie MacDowell) whom he went on ONE date with in college when she was a senior to his freshman. Ignoring that she seems to be living the lifestyle of an established doctor, his stalking of her would've been problematic 40 years ago, much less in today's hypersensitive times.

Desperate to appear more successful, he gets a job as an assistant to a wealthy Korean businessman so he can use the guy's home to throw a rager and invite her. When she blows him off to go skiing with her boyfriend, he abandons the house to his partygoers and drives to the mountains to make Say Anything look quaint. But does her boyfriend beat this weirdo down? Nope, he invites him in to stay the night before heading back tomorrow. (No, not to sit in the cuck chair to watch him rail Estevez's crush.)

I get that being young means having hyper emotions and making dumb mistakes (I was younger once), but everyone seems to be competing to ruin their lives the hardest and we're supposed to think it's adorable because they're all so darn attractive except for Winningham who dresses like a cat lady's cats in knitted outfits.

St. Elmo's Fire was director Joel Schumacher's first hit which he followed up with movies like The Lost Boys (he discovered his thing for sexy sax men here with an extended number with Rob Lowe), Flatliners, Falling Down, and The Client before wrecking the Batman franchise with Batman Forever (which I like despite itself) and Batman & Robin (nope). He directs the insipidness with style, but the script which he co-wrote is vapid.

Similarly to how I felt about Saturday Night Fever, I don't get how people got worked up over St. Elmo's Fire? It's not remotely as good as the overrated SNF and it just seems to coast on the association with the Brat Pack and being one of those Eighties movies with insanely stacked casts like The Outsiders (starring C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise) or The Big Chill (Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, JoBeth Williams), both from 1983, where almost everyone in a large ensemble went on to long careers individually. Even by the standards of the Eighties it's naff.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Brats" Review

 In June 1985, New York magazine ran a profile of the stars of the upcoming movie St. Elmo's Fire entitled "Hollywood's Brat Pack" - a riff on the old Rat Pack clique which featured Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., et al - which in a instant tagged, tarred and/or tarnished everyone in the movie and adjacent films with the shorthand that they were unserious, spoiled and/or untalented, well, brats. This had lingering effects on many of their careers even after the Eighties ended and though some soldiered on in their careers, others felt permanently damaged.

In the latter camp is clearly Andrew McCarthy - star of Pretty In Pink, St. Elmo's Fire, Less Than Zero and director of the documentary Brats (not to be confused with the slutty Bratz doll movies), which is based on his 2021 memoir Brat: An '80s Story. After musing to the camera in a precious manner about how the article messed up his career, he proceeds to call all his costars to talk about it, some whom he hasn't spoken with in over 30 years. (But he has their phone numbers?)

So off he goes for interviews with Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Rob Lowe, Demi Moore (all from St. Elmo's Fire) as well as Lea Thompson and Jon Cryer from Pretty In Pink as well as its director (and Thompson's husband) Howard Deutch, and Timothy Hutton, winner of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Ordinary People in 1981, for some reason.

Things get off very awkwardly with his interview with Estevez who looks at him with a mix of fear, pity, and embarrassment for him which prompted me to say the missus, "This movie is going to be Andrew working out his shit on everyone else, isn't it?" For the most part it is, though stars like Moore and Lowe who are still working and wealthy seemed quite relaxed about it. Money makes old hurts fade. Notably, Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald declined to participate, presumably because they want to move forward with their lives unless McCarthy.

 Interspersed with his therapy sessions, he sidebars into an interesting discussion with Lauren Schuler Donner, producer of Pretty In Pink and St. Elmo's Fire, and some casting directors about how the early-1980s represented a major sea change in movies as the works of John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) as well as movies like Risky Business and Fast Times At Ridgemont High changed the focus from the Seventies serious auteur era of Coppola and Scorsese, then the blockbuster era of Lucas and Spielberg, to movies focusing on teenagers stories starring teens and near teens.

Towards the end, a big surprise is his sitting down with David Blum, the author of the article that ruined his life. Blum explains the origins of the Brat Pack moniker and that it wasn't even intended as an attack, but was the doing of a 29-year-old writer trying to be clever. (I've seen it mentioned that McCarthy is only mentioned once in the article and that's via a castmate making a crack about him, so all this angst is over what?)

 As someone who went through high school at this time when Fast Times and Breakfast Club somewhat bookended my tenure, Brats was interesting as a reflection upon that phase of Hollywood and young people's lives starring and watching these movies. It's nice to see how the rest of the gang seemed far more able to cope with a headline than McCarthy was, but you'll have to wade through some self-pitying cringiness in the process. The way the scenes are filmed with multiple cameras wandering into frame is distracting as well.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Hulu.

"The Fall Guy" 4K Review

 The 2024 Summer movie season started with a thud as the hotly anticipated big screen reboot of the old 1980s TV series The Fall Guy starring Ryan Gosling (fresh off of an Oscar nomination for Barbie) and Emily Blunt (fresh off an Oscar nomination for Oppenheimer). Retooled as a rom-com action caper, it was expected to kick things off with a bang. Instead it was a damp squib grossing only $34M its opening weekend leading to it's being rushed to streaming after only 19 days in release while still in theaters. It had decent reviews and the stars are well-liked, so what went wrong?

Well, for starters, it's not a particularly good movie with a bad script, but since when has that been an impediment to financial success for Hollyweird?

Gosling stars as Colt Seavers, ace stuntman who's having a fling with Blunt's camera operator Jody Moreno. He's the lead stunt double for a-hole movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but things go very wrong on a stunt and his back is broken.

18 months later, he's out of the business and working as a valet when the call comes from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham, Ted Lasso) that she needs him to fly to Australia to double Ryder after his stunt double is injured. He's reluctant, but when he hears the director is Jody, making her debut, he hops on the plane, arriving on the set jet-lagged, but glad to see the stunt coordinator is Dan Tucker (Winston Duke, Black Panther). Less glad to see him is Jody who subjects him to repeated takes of a fire stunt while discussing their failed relationship over a bullhorn in transparently veiled terms.

Gail tells Colt what he's really needed for is to locate Ryder who's gone missing from the set, presumably on a bender. She tells him that unless he finds the wayward star and returns him to the set, the movie will be shut down and Jody's big break will be ruined. So of course he heads out to find Ryder, but instead finds what appears to be Ryder's corpse in a tub filled with ice which leaves Colt the prime suspect.

There are so many problems with The Fall Guy's script that it's hard to know where to begin, but since it's a rom-com/action flick we should begin with the childish relationship Colt and Jody supposedly have. Writer Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3, Hobbs & Shaw, Hotel Artemis) seems to never been in a relationship with an adult as every chemistry-free exchange between the two mistakes coyness for banter and they're so silly that I began rooting for them to not get together as is pre-ordained by these sorts of movies.

The caper plot is wildly convoluted and requires so many outside players that it'd never hold together, but what really stuck out was how many things would never happen even by the loose reality standards of silly popcorn movies. Jody would never advance from camera operator to director. Cinematographer or 2nd unit director, sure; operator, never. Colt's injury ended his career and we see him putting some electrical stimulator on it, but as he is repeatedly beaten, hit by cars, making high falls, etc. he never seems to suffer any ill effects.

Most egregious is the aforementioned scene where Jody repeatedly has Colt set on fire then thrown on wires into a rock (back injury, remember?) as obvious retribution for his falling out of her life after the accident. She is openly making it clear she's doing this to punish the man she supposedly feels for, but instead of being cute and romantic as Pearce imagines, it comes of as cruel and would be career suicide. Michael Bay wouldn't get away with enacting a personal vendetta against a stunt player - the stunt coordinator would step in and the studio would whack him - so there's no way a rookie female director would work again especially if Colt was injured.

There's a character of Ryder's assistant, Alma (Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once), who appears out of nowhere, participates in an action sequence, then vanishes without a trace and the movie within the movie's starlet, Iggy Palmer (Teresa Palmer, Warm Bodies), has a wild fight scene with Colt that makes no logical sense. The movie feels like it's missing chunks of plot to make it a still too long 2h 5m runtime.

While the script may be problematic, the greater problem is that David Leitch is not good at balancing tone in comedy and basic storytelling mechanics. Frankly, every movie he's made since "co-directing John Wick" has been inferior to the John Wick sequels directed by Chad Stahelski. Ive seen them all, so let's run 'em down:

Atomic Blonde - Very good except for having one too many twists at the end - seriously, drop any one of them and it's a better movie; having them all trips it up - and the fatal flaw of telling the story as flashbacks so there's never any tension because we know she survives. (Steven Soderbergh made the same mistake with Haywire.)

Deadpool 2 - The humor too often felt forced and mean-spirited compared to the original. Drags on too long.

F&F Hobbs & Shaw - More forced humor as it makes the fundamental mistake of trying to be a buddy action movie in which both leads get to be the funny guy. 48 Hours or Lethal Weapon had odd couple pairings, one wild man, one straight man; H&S had both Rock & Statham playing for laughs which Idris Elba was in a different, more serious movie, then stopped everything dead for Ryan Reynolds & Kevin Hart cameos.

Bullet Train - More tedious blathering "humor" with Brian Tyree Henry's endless nattering on about what Thomas the Tank Engine character various people represent. Who talks like this? No one. Once again, cool action fights wasted on clunky storytelling.

Leitch can stage and execute action well, but when it comes to telling a story or doing comedy - which is an art that comedy directors often struggle with (looking at you, John Landis) - he messes it up more than not. In The Fall Guy he makes a fatal mistake in shooting long rom-com banter scenes as single-take oners. Comedy is about timing and editing can make it sing, but when there's nothing to cut away to then you just have people babbling tediously.

 All the actors do what they can with the weak script and poor direction - Leitch, being a former stuntman both gets into the nitty gritty of how stunts are done and also shows patently unsafe or impossible practices - but poor Blunt really suffers from the weak writing. The missus proposed that someone like Rachel McAdams (The Notebook reunion!) may've been better, but I don't anyone could've overcome the structural issues of script and direction.

And if Hollyweird doesn't want to keep losing money, they need to stop letting Leitch make mediocre movies.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

The opening and closing bits on the street and screening room aren't in the actual movie.

"Atlas" 4K Review

AI is the big buzzword these days. From being stuffed into everything from Google searches to movie plots, it's unavoidable. While some view AI as the Great Liberator of Mankind (by freeing people from work so they can spend all their time consuming), there has always been the dark dystopian view that AI would revolt and destroy humanity a la SkyNet from the Terminator series and this is the angle taken by this weekend's Big Netflix Original movie Atlas, a movie about AI which feels written by AI, but not smart AI, more like Siri.

While the opening credits roll we are infodumped the background of the story: In the future AI is integrated into all our tech which is fine and dandy until the day a super AI cyborg named Harlan Shepherd (Simu Liu, Shang-Chi) manages to transcend his programming to take control of all the tech and launches a genocidal attack killing three million humans before hopping a rocket to parts unknown. Right off the bat, the news footage confuses because it appears to be near future before the whole rocket thing appears leading to my wondering when this movie is set. (I had to look it up and it starts in 2043 before jumping to 2071.)

 After the jump we meet the grown up Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), a messy woman with mussed hair who lives alone (no cat?) and plays holo-chess with her computer to show us she's really smart. Her mother created Harlan and he was sort of a brother to her, so when another cyborg associate of Harlan's is captured, she's called in to interrogate its head to find out where Harlan is hiding. She tricks him (or does she?) to reveal the location, an uninhabited world in the Andromeda galaxy. (More on this later.) She convinces General Boothe (Mark Strong) to allow her to go on the military mission to capture Harlan over the objections of Colonel Banks (Sterling K. Brown).

 Atlas wanted to be a Ranger, but washed out on the test which becomes a problem when the assault ship is attacked approaching the planet and she's thrown into a mech suit that falls from the sky only firing braking rockets at the last second preventing a big movie-ending splat. Coming to, she makes the acquaintance of Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan, star of the absolutely insane movie The VelociPastor which is about a priest who can turn into a dinosaur to fight ninjas and I'm not making this up!), the AI controlling her mech suit. For the suit to work at its best, Smith needs her to put on on a "sync" device which will allow them to join consciousnesses which is no bueno for Atlas due to her traumatic past with Harlan.

After finding almost all the other Rangers dead in their suits, the goal becomes to get to the rescue pod before the suit's energy is depleted while Harlan's minions chase her down. Will Atlas be able to save the Earth whose fate she figuratively has on her shoulders which has to be the reason she has that name, right?

A year ago J.Lo had another bad Netflix Original actioner called The Mother (not to be confused with the other Jennifer L's mother!) which was so by-the-numbers that I mused on how it felt written by AI despite a trio of highly pedigreed scribes typing it up. This time it's clear that the ScriptGPT AI used to cobble together the skeletons of many other movies and videogames hasn't advanced much in a year resulting in a so-bad-it's-bad mess from two feature rookies, Leo Sardarian & Aron Eli Coleite.

The howlers start immediately with Harlan's hiding planet being located in the Andromeda galaxy meaning we're supposed to believe that in just 20 years not only will AI develop to the level of totally human-looking robots, but that we will have the ability to fly to a place 2.5 MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY!!! That means (for the real science-challenged) at the speed of light (very fast) it would take 2.5M years to get there, but we're supposed to believe it's possible to travel there in a couple of days it appears and communications are instant. To quote the Critical Drinker, "What? The? F*ck?"

There's also a running gag about how Atlas needs coffee (shades of Capt. Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager) leading to a bit where in a future of rapid intergalactic space travel, the coffee vending machine sputters and fails like it's a 1980s buddy cop movie. And in a genuflection to modern woketardedness, a female-voiced mech named Zoe announces that her pronouns are "she" and "her" because in 2071 they're still trying to make that stupid fetch happen. (It's not going to happen.)

Mostly it's Lopez talking to herself and she does OK with the material as lame as it is? Will she get over her guilt for propagating this war in the first place and learn to trust Smith? Will we not notice how the entire plot is cobbled together from movies and videogames like Titanfall and the villain's motivation is the same tired "Humanity is going to destroy itself, so I'm going to kill them all first to save them" claptrap from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Godzilla: King of Monsters? Will J.Lo every make a good Netflix movie?

For those looking for good visuals and sounds for your top-tier payment to Netflix, it's an adequate Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation with bright colors and immersive audio, but in service of a forgettable dumb script. (Reminds me of how the Blu-ray of Green Lantern was a favorite demo disc despite being a terribad movie.)

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"Romeo Is Bleeding" Review

Because I'm not great about maintaining this site, I never wrote a review for Romeo Is Bleeding when we watched the DVD in February 2021, but looking back I see I drafted the first paragraph of a review:

"I couldn't remember much about the 1993 noir crime drama Romeo Is Bleeding other than one shot (which is one of the great foreshadowing bits in movies), that co-star Lena Olin was hot, and that it was a pretty good movie. After revisiting it for the first time in easily 20-plus years, only the first two points hold up."

 I gave it a score of 5/10. After rewatching it at the behest of the missus, I was being too generous. 

Gary Oldman stars as dirty cop Jack Grimaldi, who supplements his detective income with doing favors for Mob boss Don Falcone (Roy Scheider) via his middleman Sal (Michael Wincott). He's married to Natalie (Annabella Sciorra) and they have a cute house overlooking a cemetary. He also has a ditzy waitress side piece, Sheri (Juliette Lewis).

 After providing the location of a Mob informant (an uncredited Dennis Farina) to Falcone, the informant and the FBI babysitters all get whacked by hitwoman Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin). Jack isn't happy about fellow lawmen getting killed and when she's arrested Falcone orders Jack to kill her. Conveniently, he gets assigned to transport her to a safe house hotel and she immediately begins to seduce him and because he's clearly not the sharpest bulb in the henhouse (I never really mastered idioms) he goes along with it only to be interrupted by the Feds arriving to pick her up.

Displeased by his failure, Falcone gives Jack two days to kill Mona. Mona counters by offering him a pile of money to help her fake her death, but of course there are going to be double-crosses and twisty turns of plot as Jack's double life unravels.

What's notable about Romeo Is Bleeding is how stacked the cast is. In addition to the previously mentioned actors, Will Patton, Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts on The Sopranos), James Cromwell, and Ron Perlman all have bit parts. What's also notable is how mediocre the whole thing is as it borders on parody of what a noir crime story is with obligatory jazzy score heavy on double bass and wheezing saxophone. A year later Pulp Fiction would nuke the old ways the same as how Star Wars made the previous year's Logan's Run seem like something 20 years older.

Screenwriter Hilary Henkin has only a few credits with the wild context of her previous film being co-writer of the original Road House and her sole subsequent (and final) credit being the brilliant Wag The Dog for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay with legendary playwright David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, The Untouchables) who I'm fairly certain did the heavy lifting. From the voiceover narration to the spoiler opening which tells us Jack's never in mortal peril. Director Peter Medak (that Species II may be his most known film speaks volumes) tries to jazz things up with some unique camera choices, but can't overcome the script.

(MEMO TO SCREENWRITERS/DIRECTORS: When you tell stories in flashback & we're supposed to be concerned whether the protagonist will survive perils, the fact they're alive in the present tells us they won't die, so no tension. Offenders: Atomic Blonde, Haywire, Romeo Is Bleeding)

Considering the thinness of the rote boilerplate plot, the actors don't really have characters to play as much as tropes and cartoons. Oldman is sweaty and panicked, Olin is exotic & loves being a killer in inappropriate outfit, Sciorra is cute, but Lewis is stuck as Jack's bimbette Sheri who is so dumb that when he stops by to see her after shagging Mona, I snarked to the missus, "This is like going finishing a fine steakhouse dinner then deciding to hit Taco Bell on the way home."

After finally writing up a review for Romeo Is Bleeding I hope I can finally remember that it's not as good as I remembered and stop watching it again. Spare yourself having to remember yourself.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

This trailer's music is utterly unrelated to the film's tone. WTF?

"Abigail" Review

The elevator pitch for Abigail is a model of brevity: An ersatz group of criminals kidnap a young girl and are to hole up in a mansion with her for 24 hours until a $50 million ransom is paid. The problem is that they are locked in without their cell phones and the girl is a VAMPIRE who begins knocking them off! (Not a spoiler, literally the selling point in the trailer.) Hijinx ensue.

 There's not much more to recap than that and just as with Damsel spending too much time vamping its first act as if we don't know where it's going (again, the trailers sell the twists), we get to spend over 40 minutes meeting the crew assembled by mastermind Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito). There's obvious Final Girl Joey (Melissa Barrera, Scream V & VI) who seems wrong for a life of crime; twitchy hard case Frank (Dan Stevens, Downtown Abbey!); dumb French-Canuckian muscle Peter (Kevin Durand); sniper Rickles (Will Catlett); annoying hacker chick Sammy (Kathryn Newton, as annoying as she was in Lisa Frankenstein); and creepy wheelman Dean (Angus Cloud, Euphoria, who the movie is dedicated to as he died of an OD in 2023).

The time is spent fleshing out who these strangers to each other are - the names are dished out my Lambert based on the Rat Pack - and it's interesting, but drags out too long as we wait for the vampire action to begin. But when it does begin, it's off to the races with some killer kills & some plot developments that weren't obvious and kept things fresh as Abigail (Alisha Weir) whips between pretending to be a helpless little ballerina and the monster she truly is.

In thinking about Abigail's above-average quality where the results transcend the premise, I thought about Ready or Not, the 2019 Samara Weaving-starring movie about a bride who spends her wedding night being hunted by her new in-laws in a demonic version of Family Game Night and that turned out to be an apt comparison because directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett helmed that lean mean thriller and subsequent Scream reboot movies. They know how to do "trapped in a mansion" horror well, so I was surprised to see that Abigail was a box office disappointment, most due to a weirdly high budget for a few name stars horror flick.

Other than the first act being twice as long as necessary - we know what the twist is; quit trying to drag things out, filmmakers - Abigail is a bloody good time with good gallows laughs to go with the oceans of blood.

Score: 8/10. Catch it on cable.

Trailer gives away too many good moments. The review sets the premise and is all you need.

"The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare" 4K Review

Guy Ritchie has had a wildly uneven career, qualitatively and successfully. After breaking out at the turn of the Millennium with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, he face-planted with the Madonna-led flop Swept Away (which led to their marriage and her sucking his talent away) and followed with a pair of movies so mediocre,  Revolver and RocknRolla, that I demanded he be blocked from making more movies.

He caught a reprieve when 2009's Sherlock Holmes (5/10, cable) was able to ride Robert Downey Jr.'s post-Iron Man Renaissance to box office gold, but then followed with a trio of disappointing efforts in the sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (didn't see), the bland The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (3/10, skip), and the disastrous King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (DNS), which killed a planned half-dozen movie franchise. (Memo to studios: Try making ONE good and successful movie before planning on making a bunch of them.)

But like a phoenix he came back with the last big Disney live action cash grab before the world ended in 2020 with the Will Smith-fronted Aladdin (DNS). Given a new lease on career, he then promptly reeled off a string of yawners and duds beginning with The Gentlemen (5/10, cable - the new Netflix series has good buzz, not that I buy it), Wrath of Man (4/10, skip), Worst Title Ever entrant Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (5.5/10, cable), and Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (haven't seen it yet, heard good things). Which brings us to his latest flop which only grossed $20 million worldwide on a $60M production budget, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, his latest exercise in working so hard to seem cool that he forgets to make it very interesting.

Based on an actual true caper called Operation Postmaster pulled off by far less attractive people than our stars here, TMoUW stars  Henry Cavill as Gus March-Phillipps (who was reputed to be one of Ian Fleming's inspirations for James Bond), a bit of a rogue who is tasked by Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear) via Brigadier Gubbins (Cary Elwes), also known as M (another Bond reference), to assemble an off-the-books raid to disrupt the Nazis U-boat supply chain in early-1942.

Because the German subs are sinking half of the ships traversing the Atlantic, England is being starved of supplies and the Americans are reluctant to enter the war in Europe. If the supply ship which brings CO2 scrubber cartridges (which allow the subs to stay submerged undetected for long periods) were to be sunk in its port on a neutral island of Fernando Po off the African coast, it would force the subs to be on the surface enough to be spotted and taken out. 

Gus assembles a crew including Alan Ritchson (Reacher), Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians), Hero Fiennes Tiffin and sets off on a fishing vessel with a stop at Nazi island base where Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer) is being held and interrogated. After a super easy, barely an inconvenience raid to free him, they head for the ship. Since it's an secret mission, if the British Navy catches them, they'll be arrested, and of course the Nazis will be less friendly.

Concurrently, a second team of a Heron (Babs Olusanmokun, the doctor on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and the Freman that Paul kills at the end of Dune Part 1), who runs a casino hall on the island and has connections to additional forces and weapons, and Majorie Stewart (Eiza González) travel to the island to reconnoiter and set up distractions to cover the raid. Majorie catches the eye of SS commander Luhr (Til Schweiger) and proceeds to play a high stakes game of seduction considering she's Jewish.

Along the way complications arise including the supply ship's departure being moved up, the hull being reinforced with armor, and a mole in the Ministry (20 points to anyone who gets that reference) making anything less than total success for our crew not an option.

While slickly made, Ritchie once again manages to drain the energy out of the story with leisurely pacing and an inconsistent tone which feels like a mashup of war movie and Ocean's 11. Are you making a war drama about a desperate mission upon which the survival of England hangs upon opening the seas or is it a jokey action comedy?

Everyone wears plot armor and barely gets a scratch while hordes of Nazis are mowed down. Characters are flattened into a pretty two-dimensional picture without much internal motivation beyond the most superficial like Marjorie's natural antipathy to the Nazis attempting to exterminate her kind. Compare this to something like Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds which was a revisionist war fantasy film and Ritchie and his three co-writers really come up short.

Cavill has an impressive beard and swagger, but other than the quiet comedy of him cleaning out the good cigars and booze while being ordered on the mission, he's just another one of Ritchie's shallow gentlemen like, well, The Gentlemen. The rest of the cast is fine, but not really challenged.

In counterpoint, the missus really enjoyed it more than she expected and I'm sure the presence of hunks Cavill and Golding had nothing to do with it. To be fair, González is a dish, especially when she shows up in a Cleopatra costume and asks if the dress is OK, to which I remarked, "It's not the dress."

The 4K presentation has good colors and balance, but not much in the way of demo-worthy HDR grading. It looks good on good TVs. Audio is fine; nothing outstanding.

Score: 5.5/10. Catch it on cable.