"Outland" 4K Review

 While many science fiction movies maintain high levels of general remembrance from stone classics like Blade Runner or Aliens to second-tier goodies like Event Horizon and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, there is a category of almost-forgotten B-movies like Screamers or even ones with a legendary star like Sean Connery in writer-director Peter Hyams' space-set spin on High Noon, 1981's Outland.

 Set on Jupiter's moon Io, Connery plays Federal Marshal William O'Niel keeping the peace on the Con-Am 27 titanium mining station. After a few workers die in bizarre, grisly circumstance - one (John Ratzenberger from Cheers!) hallucinates spiders all over him and he cuts his space suit open; another skips the suit entirely and goes outside with one on; a third (Steven Berkoff, Beverly Hills Cop) freaks out and starts harming a hooker, getting himself shot by O'Neil's Deputy Montone (James B. Sikking, Hill Street Blues) - O'Neil investigates with the assistance of station Doctor Marian Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen, Cheers) who discovers the presence of a synthetic narcotic one man's blood which allows them to do massive amounts of work and collect big bonuses, but after 10-11 months (of a one-year tour of duty) drives some people crazy.

When O'Neil takes his concerns to the station general manager, Mark Sheppard (Peter Boyle, Young Frankenstein), he is waved off because productivity is high, the corporate bosses are happy, and why doesn't O'Neil take the bribes he's being offered like the rest of the deputies. On top of this, O'Neil's wife, Carol (Kika Markham), tired of these postings, has left him and taken their son Paul (Nicholas Barnes) with him to the space station in preparation for a flight back to Earth, which Paul has never been to.

 When O'Neil's interference in Sheppard's operation becomes too much of a problem, he sends for assassins to come and eliminate the monkey in the wrench and puts the word out to the station inhabitants to not get in their way. With the shuttle's arrival counting down, a lone O'Neil prepares for them as all his deputies have chosen to take a powder as well.

What Outland lacks in narrative complexity it makes up for in visual detail. Art Director Malcolm Middleton (who'd do Event Horizon 16 years later) and costume designer John Mollo (Star Wars, Alien) lean hard into the dingy industrial aesthetics that Alien had - some even head canon that Outland's Con-Am exists in the same universe as Weyland-Yutani - with Hyams lighting his sets with plenty of haze and darkness. It also marked the debut of the Introvision process which allowed live elements and miniatures to be filmed together without blue screens and compositing.

I must've seen this several times at the dollar show as a teen because so much of it is familiar even though I don't even own it on any format that I recall. In this 4K rip from the Arrow Video release, the haze doesn't dither and dark areas don't crush; the dimness and hazy details are intentional. Colors like the orange of Jupiter or the reds and blues of uniforms and spacesuits are rich. If anything, the resolution works against the huge miniature sets, making them look like models and not a massive complex.

Connery is suitably grizzled as a lawman in a lawless post, though it's never explained why he's been stuck out there. Lazarus remarks on how the best and brightest typically don't get assigned to the astronomical sticks and doctors are usually one shuttle ahead of a malpractice suit. Sheppard is a one-and-a-half-note character on the page and Boyle plays it that way. Again, Outland is more style than substance, but worth a watch if not quite a buy.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on streaming/cable.

"Mayday" 4K Review

Apple TV is not immune from having so-so "movie show content" despite some prestigious "TV show content" and thus we have Mayday, the latest from writer-director tag team John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein whose last movie was the well-regarded but underseen Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (which I haven't gotten around to watching yet). Now they're taking on a Cold War period buddy action dramedy with Ryan Reynolds (Van Wilder) and Kenneth Branagh (lots of Shakespeare stuff) as a US pilot and former KGB agent, respectively.

It's 1987 and Reynolds' Naval Lt. Troy "Assassin" Kelly is assigned to an SR-71 spy mission over the Soviet Union after an opening sequence totally copied from Top Gun's opening. When the mission goes sideways resulting in the pilot being killed and Troy forced to eject behind enemy lines, injured when he lands in a forest, he is found and patched up by Nikolai "Call me Nik" Ustinov (Branagh), who has retired from the spy game and harbors a dark secret: He's fascinated by America, especially his favorite movie, a bootleg tape of Top Gun.

2000 kilometers from the closest border with Finland, his original suggestion is that Troy just stay with him until the Cold War ends, but that becomes really impractical when current KGB General Alexander Volkov (Marcin Dorociński, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One) arrives at Nik's isolated cabin searching for the surviving American pilot from the crash. While Nik manages to hide Troy well enough, he knows this was a temporary win so decides to help get Troy to the US Embassy in Moscow. He hopes that he and his estranged daughter, Anna (Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), will be able to defect and gain asylum as a reward for helping Troy escape.

What follows is your standard Odd Couple buddy road trip/action hybrid plot where Nik proves to be quite the badass fighter, taking out multiple opponents in bars, train cars, etc. But since this is a modern movie it gets laden with current Hollyweird ideological baggage that America is a malign entity against its own service people and in some ways no better than the Evil Empire and that "The best way to stand for your country is to stand up against it." Can't have America live up to Top Gun's image, now can we? Also, there's the obligatory LGB subplot to make Nik seem more progressive than the typical Ruskie.

While Reynolds turns in his usual Ryan Reynolds quippy performance, Branagh seems more committed to his bit as a complex man in a oppressive country where he was once the oppressor. Let's not kid ourselves, Mayday isn't remotely deep, but it is sporadically amusing when it's not trying to pontificate about America's ills.

Score: 5.5/10. Catch it on Apple TV.

"Balls Up" Review

On paper, Balls Up, the latest Amazon Prime Video Original has a solid comedic pedigree as it's written by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (Zombieland & Deadpool series) and directed by Peter Farrelly of the Farrelly Brothers who ruled the 1990s with Dumb and Dumber, There's Something About Mary, and Shallow Hal and went on to direct 2018's Best Picture Oscar winner, Green Book. Big laughs guaranteed, right? Unfortunately, not enough of them.

Balls Up opens with Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser, if you've seen a movie with a schlubby fat guy who wasn't Jack Black in the past several years, that was him) stammering through a presentation rehearsal for a revolutionary condom he has designed which has extra material to also cover the berries in addition to the usual twig. He calls it The Testicle Sentinel.

The company boss, Burgess (SNL's Molly Shannon), tells him the pitch will be done by Brad (Marky Mark, "Good Vibrations", The Departed) from Sales and his pitch with the new name, Balls Up! (roll credits), wins over the head of the Brazilian Travel Ministry, Santos (Benjamin Bratt), who makes Balls Up! the official condom of the 2025 World Cup. However, the celebration gets wildly out of hand and Santos loses his position and the condom deal goes to a competitor. After this turn, Burgess fires Brad and Elijah along with other workers.

Three months later, a courier delivers a package to Brad containing a plane ticket and full VIP credentials to the World Cup Final. Apparently, despite the whole deal going sideways, the goodies weren't canceled for him and Elijah, whom he discovers is on the same flight. They decide to get along to attend the game, but after getting drunk, Elijah decides to attack the giant sausage mascot on the pitch. Brad chases after him to prevent trouble, but inadvertently interferes with what would've been Brazil's game-tying goal. Due to his interference, Brazil loses to arch-enemy neighbors Argentina. 

They are arrested, but turned loose on the streets where they would surely be lynched by the takes-their-football-VERY-seriously mobs. They briefly appear to be saved, but are then captured by armed men and taken to the jungle compound of cartel warlord Pavio (Sacha Baron Cohen in a bonkers performance). Because he won money on the game thanks to Brad's head, he won't kill them but he won't let them go either. To stay in his graces they pitch him the idea of using their larger condom to provide more carrying capacity for cocaine trafficking leading to a typical Farrelly low humor scene involving swallowing these huge phallic coke loads. After escaping the cartel, the pair encounter a weird group of anti-poachers in the jungle as they try to make their way home.

Balls Up starts off hilariously, but then has many long stretches of dullness punctuated by explosive moments of laughter like a scene where they're forced to do karaoke. This happens a lot in comedies as the first act is polished to a diamond mirror shine and then the rest just floats after it which is why surprises like Bottoms and Pizza Movie are such treats.

Cohen is clearly having fun doing a weird voice in a long flowing wig that makes him look like rock singer Sebastian Bach. Hauser does his usual weird fat guy thing and Marky Mark does his usual adequate comedic thing. (He only really seems to spark in the Ted movies.)

I thought Amazon was paywalling all HDR 4K content behind their even more expensive ad-free tier, but this came up as Dolby Vision allowing for some bright colors, but the cinematography is the blah overly bright look that modern comedies adhere to.

While not a total loss that goes tits up, Balls Up is too uneven and too long (104 mins) to score many goals. But when it does get funny, it gets VERY funny, but it just makes the lengthy lulls more lully.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Prime Video.

"War Machine" 4K Review

 Time for this week's disposable Netflix Original movie, War Machine, starring Alan Ritchson (Amazon Prime's Reacher) as an Army Staff Sergeant whose brother (Jai Courtney) was killed in an ambush in Afghanistan where the unnamed soldier was the lone survivor. To honor his brother's desire that they try to become Rangers, he arrives at RASP (Ranger Assessment and Selection Program) two years later and is assigned the number 81 as his identity.

For 8 weeks, 81 and his fellow numbered candidates perform grueling training with members washed out weekly. Despite his veteran status, he refuses to bond with his fellow candidates or take the lead as pressured by his superior officers (Dennis Quaid and Esai Morales). When he makes it through to the final test phase, they want him to drop out to cope with his PTSD over his brother's death, but he refuses. Reluctantly, they allow him to do the Death March final test and put him in command.

The Death March mission is to locate and destroy a simulated shot down plane, rescue the pilot from a "prison camp", and get to the finish line at the base. The team of about a dozen soldiers is dropped off and while 81 fails to inspire them much, he is supported by 7 (Stephan James in what borders on a Magical Negro role). The first night the squad is startled by a fireball in the sky. The next day they locate what they believe to be the downed plane, but when they attempt to demolish it, it is unscathed. Then it begins to rise up, revealing itself to be an alien mech which scans the platoon then proceeds to blow the bejeebers out of them.

Half the numbers buy it and the rest are forced to run for their lives, sustaining grievous injuries which slow them down carrying the wounded through the mountainous terrain. 81 suffers flashbacks to his ill-fated attempt to save his brother and the survivors continue to doubt him. Unarmed (they only have blank-firing weapons) and pursued by a giant murder walker, who will survive? Duh.

Co-writer and director Patrick Hughes (The Expendables 3, The Hitman's Bodyguard) does a solid job staging the grisly action set pieces, but the characters are all stock tropes and the ending is not only not in doubt, but handled ridiculously in Temu Michael Bay fashion. (We're supposed to believe 81, carrying a wounded soldier on his back, heading for the all-important finish line, is surrounded by soldiers rushing around dealing with things but not one person intervenes to aid the wounded.) They also seem to be setting up a sequel because why not.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation has some good highlights during nighttime action scenes, but it's a far cry from the eye-searing visuals the format can deliver as in Apple TV's 2nd season of Hijack which recently concluded.

An adequate concept adequately executed is War Machine's box score and is another watch-once-and-forget-it that Netflix churns out.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" 4K Review

 I've been unimpressed by the 28 Days/Weeks/Years Later series. 2002's 28 Days Later (no written review, but 4/10, Skip it score) is overrated and 2007's 28 Weeks Later (6/10, Catch on cable/streaming), while being comparatively better is unmemorable. Last year's 28 Years Later was a too little, too late franchise relaunch (5/10, Skip it) which ended on scene clearly setting up a sequel that I didn't know had already been made, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple which picks up immediately after the end of its predecessor.

We find young Spike (Alfie Williams) having to fight to the death to be allowed to join the weird gang that had saved him, the Jimmys - who are styled after the notorious child molester/BBC presenter Jimmy Saville. (John Lydon got banned off the Beeb for alluding to Saville's activities which they clearly covered up.) Wearing track suits and blonde wigs, they're led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell), who calls them Fingers of a hand dedicated to serving "Old Nick" aka Satan. Spike manages to survive his initiation, while the Jimmy who challenged to fight Spike doesn't. Womp womp. They proceed to go off sadistically torturing and killing survivors they cross paths with.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), proprietor of the massive ossuary fortress of bones - a "bone temple" so to speak - is hanging out with his Alpha zombie friend, Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry, who's a 6'9" former MMA fighter sporting a prosthetic shvantz), whom he can tranquilize instantly with darts and theorizes that perhaps the infected can be treated or cured.

Of course, eventually the Jimmys find Kelson's place and the top Jimmy pays him a visit to see if he's Old Nick (since he's observed with the Alpha "demon") and to make a deal where he can reconsolidate control over his Teletubbie followers after some setbacks.

Director Nia DaCosta, last seen flying the biggest Marvel flop, The Marvels, into the ground bounces back somewhat with a fairly stylish take on the material which eschews the hyperactive visuals of Danny Boyle (who directed the first and third films of the series), but she's held back by a threadbare script by series scribe Alex Garland. There simply isn't enough story here to justify a full movie.

It feels like 30-40 minutes worth of plot lopped of the end of 28 Years Later and that was padded out to 115 minutes and this was really drawn out to make 109 more minutes. A tightly-edited 150-180 minute version would've been so much better because The Bone Temple doesn't stand on its own; if you didn't see the first half you will have zero idea what the actual heck is going on, not that for all it's run time they really do much with it character-wise.

There are a couple of moments which stand out like Kelson's fandom of Duran Duran and big closing Iron Maiden number and the tantalizing glimpse of how the infection could be eradicated before it is lost to events and fans of the original will like the coda which clearly hopes to set up a fifth installment, but overall the series continues to be mediocre, weighed down by Garland's scripts. The guy isn't a hack, per se, but has a maddening inability to get his stories over the finish line intact.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation starts off promisingly with very bold colors and lighting, but then settles down into more naturalistic tableaus which don't stress the format very much, but the rich colors are solid throughout.

Score: 4/10. Skip it unless you need to see how 28 Years Later wraps up.

"Anaconda (2025)" 4K Review

 I've never seen the original 1997 Anaconda so I had no nostalgia or foreknowledge of whatever meta humor the 2025 reboot/reimagining/parody(?) also titled Anaconda was going to deliver. I have the original in my digital library (probably came with a bundle of Sony/Columbia titles I'd bought), but it's remained unseen. Whatever charms the J.Lo/Ice Cube/Jon Voight original has are currently lost on me.

For this go-around we have Jack Black as Doug, a wedding videographer who wants to do more creative work than the field allows, and Paul Rudd as Griff, a bit part actor who once appeared on four episodes of S.W.A.T, but is currently too dumb to understand that as Doctor #3 on a medical TV show, his bad attempts at doing accents or wild readings are not appreciated, leading to him being sacked.

He was also Doug's childhood best friend and as kids they'd made a home movie called Quatch (short for Sasquatch aka Bigfoot) which Griff brings over to a surprised birthday party thrown by Doug's wife, Malie (Ione Skye). Watching their little epic at the party brings back the dreams they'd had of going to LA to make movies together.

After the party, Griff tells Doug that he's obtained the rights to Anaconda from the author of the original movie's source material and suggests they make a reboot/requel/reimaging of it, making it on a shoestring (because the bank countered their ask for a couple of million dollars with an approval for $9400) with their pal Kenny (Steve Zahn) as the cameraman and Griff's recently divorced ex-girlfriend Claire (Thandiwe Newton) as the ingenue.

Arriving in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil, they meet up with Carlos (Selton Mello), the handler of the large anaconda they'll be using for the shoot. They also meet Ana (Daniela Melchior), who claims to be the daughter of the man whose riverboat they'd rented to take them out to shoot in the jungle, but is actually someone we've seen chased by men and who stole the boat's keys from the passed out captain in a bar.

The filming goes well until it comes time to shoot a scene with the snake where Griff panics, flinging the snake off him into the water, where it is killed by the boat's propeller. (Why the boat was under power makes no sense. It seemed anchored and there was no engine noise. Because movie, I suppose.) That night, Griff and Carlos go into the jungle looking for another snake unaware that the giant titular CGI anaconda is out there.

As shooting continues, Doug adds Ana to the film and Griff begins to get bitter about the spotlight being usurped. Of course things escalate as the true nature of Ana and Griff's holding of the rights are exposed, leading to a big finale with obligatory meta cameos.

Anaconda's co-writer and director is Tom Gormican whose last two movies were 2022's weird meta Nicolas Cage film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent which featured "Nic Cage" being hassled by a younger Nic Cage circa Wild At Heart, and 2024's Netflix flick Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (both unreviewed, but getting 6.5/10 and 7/10, catch on streaming/cable scores) so you'd think he'd be able to handle both a long-delayed sequel/reboot with meta overtones well. And if you thought that, you'd be wrong.

It starts off promisingly enough, setting up the premise of middle-aged guys from Buffalo whose lives are stable and adequate, but pine for the dreams of their youth to come true and have to decide how hard they want to chase them. But that instinct is bumping against the needs of a broad Christmas Day comedy release needing action and trailer moments. While there are a few big laughs, there are way more stretches where the proceeding lag in between set pieces giving the viewer plenty of time to ponder where all the food and drinks this floating resort has come from when the captain couldn't stay sober enough to stay conscious or at least put the boat's keys in his pocket rather than laying on the bar.

With a weak script, it doesn't really matter how the performances are. Black is his usual noisy self; Rudd is more tightly wired and finally beginning to age; Zahn is also his usual dumb guy; with the sort of revelation in Newtown playing a somewhat dowdy middle-aged American woman reconnecting with an old flame.

The Dolby Vision presentation has good color and black levels for the night scenes, but the overall visual style is unremarkable.

Anaconda openly cops to its creative bankruptcy, but doesn't do enough to prevent succumbing to the mediocrity which is standard in too many movies these days. If only they'd really leaned into the goof instead of trying, and failing, to squeeze the premise into new shapes.

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

"The Rip" 4K Review

 Usually the weekly Netflix Original movies are forgettable piffles that are watched then forgotten in the maw of content which is Netflix, but occasionally they produce something that they should've put in theaters to make money before parking them online. Even though it was bad, The Electric State looked like something that should be seen on a big screen; while I wasn't a huge fan, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein would've made bank; K-Pop Demon Hunters is such a phenomenon that it made $19M when released for a one-off weekend two months AFTER it began running on Netflix. This is why there is much consternation over Netflix's bid to buy Warner Bros. because they will likely kill off movie theaters by only doing a couple of weeks theatrically before sending it to streaming limbo.

The reason for the preamble is that this week's offering, The Rip, is the kind of lean and mean crime thriller which used to be standard star-driven theatrical fare before the movie business bifurcated into now-burned-out comic book movies, horror flicks, and stuff no one sees by gets awards. 

It opens with Miami Police Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) on the phone with an informant. After she parks, she comes under fire by two masked assailants. Wounded, she frantically texts something to someone before being executed. We then meet the rest of her Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT) unit as they're interrogated by Internal Affairs with lots of innuendo about crooked cops and scandals in the department.

Later, her second-in-command, Lt. Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), is shown looking at a text message about a big cartel stash in neighboring Hialeah and he rounds up the TNT unit's detectives - Sergeant JD Byrne (Ben Affleck), Mike Ro (Steven Yeun), Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno) - telling them they got a Crimestoppers tip.

When they reach the location on a cul de sac, they cajole the young woman who answers the door, Desi (Sasha Calle), into letting them search the house. She says it was her grandmother's who passed away a few months earlier and it appears to be packed with lots of old junk, but the money-sniffing dog (which is a real thing despite the missus disbelieving) goes nuts at the trapdoor to the attic. There they find a pristine empty room with a little shrine on the end. They quickly discover that behind the shrine wall are a bunch of buckets packed with bundles of cash. A quick guesstimate figures the "rip" to be $20 million.

Dane immediately confiscates everyone's phones and orders that no one radio in to report the find. They will count the money there at the site before bringing it in. This immediately sparks concerns as everyone starts acting squirrely, suspecting each other's motives. Things begin to escalate when a local police car pulls up acting suspiciously, one of the team is using a secreted burner phone to contact someone, and then someone calls the house warning that they have 30 minutes to take what they want and vacate the scene or else people will start dying.

Directed and co-written by Joe Carnahan (Narc, The Grey), it plays into his reputation for crackling characterizations and gunplay. He ratchets the tension up by giving us reasons to suspect people like how Dane told everyone on the team a different amount the tip reported and how he had medical bills from his young son dying of cancer. JD was in a relationship with Jackie. Lolo and Numa are counting the money and joking about taking just a small bundle. Then the bullets begin to fly and they don't know who's shooting at them.

When the big reveals come, it makes sense but then the last 10 minutes are oddly flat and beg questions like shouldn't they be getting treated for those gunshot wounds and being debriefed for many hours as to what just happened instead of watching the sunrise?

Usually the A/V presentation on Netflix movies isn't much to write home about even though almost all content is in 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos sound, albeit restricted to those paying for the highest-priced (currently $25/mo) tier, but The Rip makes the spend worth it. Mostly set at night, the HDR makes gun muzzle flashes, flashlights, headlights, lights in general pop very brightly on a good TV. The Atmos height channels are use to terrific effect in the scene where they're interrogation X while the team is sledgehammering in the attic above them. I have a 5.2.4 Atmos setup and this is an excellent showcase for the effect.

While not perfect, The Rip is a well-above-average movie which stands above much of what Netflix puts out. If you're paying for the top price tier and have a capable home theater setup, it's even better.

Score: 8.5/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Speed" 4K Review

Since the missus didn't have her Blu-ray of Vertical Suckage Limit here at Xanadu to pair with Cliffhanger (oh darn) I finally was able to get her to watch the 4K of 1994's Speed which was Keanu Reeves action peak following Point Break before he'd go into another career lull broken by The Matrix. As the "Die Hard on a bus" entry in the long line of Die Hard-inspired action flicks, it also kicked Sandra Bullock up to the A-list.

 Reeves stars as LAPD Officer Jack Traven whom we meet in the opening set piece working with his partner Harry Temple (Jeff Daniels) rescuing an elevator full of hostages trapped by a madman, Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper), and held for ransom. Jack suspects the bomber is somewhere in the building and is correct as they find him, though Payne takes Harry hostage. After shooting Harry to get Payne to let him go, Payne appears to blow himself up with the suicide vest he was wearing. Movie over.

Oh wait, there's still another 100 minutes to fill. Some time later, Jack is getting his morning coffee when a bus explodes, killing the driver (and occupants?)? A pay phone rings, Jack answers it and is told by the not-dead Payne that he has rigged another bus with a bomb that will activate when the bus goes faster than 50 mph and explode if it drops below that mark. If any of the passengers try to leave the bus, he'll blow it up. The city has a couple of hours to deliver $3.7 million in ransom or kaboom.

 We then meet our plucky heroine, Annie (Bullock), who has a suspended driver's license (for speeding), and the passengers including visiting tourist Doug (Alan Ruck). Jack manages to catch up to the bus and board it, but when a guy with a gun freaks out that Jack will arrest him, the driver is shot in the struggle and Annie has to take the wheel. Hijinks ensue.

Speed was Jan de Bont's directorial debut (he would follow it up with Twister) after a lengthy run as a cinematographer for films by John McTiernan (Die Hard, The Hunt For Red October), Ridley Scott (Black Rain), Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct), and Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon 3) and he clearly paid attention on how to stage an effective action movie. While sharp-eyed viewers can spot that often the bus is travelling well under the boom-triggering 50 mph - they really should've made it something more realistic, while still challenging, like 35-40 mph - de Bont's capably keeps the tension simmering even as impossible moments like the bus jump occur.

The last act where Payne is able to grab Annie and hold her hostage is a bit of a stretch and a bit of a comedown after the bus trip ends, feeling like a second ending. This was Graham Yost's first screenplay which would be followed by John Woo's Broken Arrow and nothing else exceptional, but he'd do far better in television creating Justified and Silo, the latter I'm eagerly awaiting its return for its 3rd season.

 The iTunes presentation includes 4K Dolby Vision and while there are some bright sparks and nice orange explosions, the generally silver/gray color palette and naturalistic daytime cinematography doesn't serve as very good demo material. On the extras front, there are two commentaries (which I haven't listened to) and a smattering of making-of and deleted scenes presented in standard-def.

I can't recall how the 2006 Blu-ray looked and if you're not a AV fiend, it may suffice if you're just a fan of the movie. If you want to bump up on a budget, it's frequently available on iTunes for $5, but you must have an iDevice or an Apple TV 4K to access extras/commentaries. The Apple TV app only plays the movie.

Score: 8/10. Buy it for $5 digitally.

"Cliffhanger" 4K Review

It's early-Ninties action movie night at Xanadu and kicking things off is Renny Harlin's best film, 1993's Cliffhanger, which was more or less "Die Hard on a mountain." It's been 8-1/2 years(!) since we've watched it on Blu-ray (never posted a review) and a few days shy of 15 years(!!) since watching it on a so-so DVD along with the missus's fave, Vertical Limit, as a New Year's Day double feature which got reviewed here. I bought it on iTunes in 4K 6-1/2 years ago, so it's time to give it a look and listen.

 For those unfamiliar with the plot, Sylvester Stallone plays Gabe, a mountain ranger haunted by a harrowing accident which resulted in the death of the girlfriend of his best friend and fellow ranger, Hal (Michael Rooker). He quits the job, but comes back all mopey and emo to try and convince his girlfriend, Jessie (a luscious Janine Turner), a rescue chopper pilot, to leave the park to come with him to Denver.

Meanwhile, in the skies over the park a daring midair hijacking of $100 million in uncirculated bills in three big suitcases being transported from the Denver Mint to San Francisco has gone awry with the jet being flown by the robbers crashing into the park and the cases scattered across the mountains. The gang's leader, Qualen (John Lithgow), has a tracking device to locate the cases, but needs a guide to lead the gang to them, so they make a bogus distress call about hikers lost in the storm with one going into insulin shock.

The weather is too poor for Jessie to fly the chopper, so Hal sets out to find the "hikers." Gabe wants no part of climbing anymore, protesting he doesn't have the touch, but Jessie convinces him to assist even though Hal hates Gabe for the accident. When the pair find the airplane, they also discover what's really happening: They're being used to find the money cases after which they'll obviously be eliminated. Naturally, Gabe is able to escape the group and the rest of the movie is him and Jessie racing to find the money before Qualen's gang, picking off members, while also trying to keep Hal alive.

Cliffhanger works because Harlin keeps his foot on the gas the whole time, only letting up for brief breathers. Filmed in Italy's Dolomites (standing in for the Rockies) with big practical stunts and explosions including the Guinness World Record for the most paid a stuntman ($1M) to perform the midair plane transfer gag, it gives the action a heft that's often missing these days.

It also benefits from a solid script rewritten by Stallone to set up the characters of Gabe, Hal, and Jessie in the aftermath of the accident. Gabe blames himself for not being able to save Hal's girlfriend, but as Jessie tries to remind him she wasn't experienced enough for the climb Hal took her on. Hal blames Gabe, but has to know he perpetuated the situation that ended in tragedy.

But while the script beefs up the motivations on the good guy side, the villains remain cartoons especially Lithgow's Qualen who sports an accent miles away from the coast of England in the ocean somewhere. If he was hoping for a Hans Gruber moment, it didn't happen. Thankfully, it doesn't fall into the endless quippy mode of lesser James Bond and especially Ahnuld action flicks. The biggest laugh is when Gabe is burning the money to keep Jessie and him warm in a cave, "It costs a fortune to heat this place." Zing!

While the action is mostly practical, it's not always realistic like the boots they're wearing aren't what climbers wear (except in the opening scene), the bolt gun not being a real thing, and how Gabe doesn't die of hypothermia despite sometimes being down to a t-shirt in the cold. Yes, he is really shivering in one scene, but let's be real. Minor technical quibble: Digital wire removal was in its infancy so there are a few shots where Stallone is hanging off cliffs (heh) and above him is a distractingly obvious blurry line where they attempted to hide the safety line.

I faulted the old DVD's image quality and frankly can't recall how good the Blu-ray is, but the iTunes 4K presentation is very nice with good detail - I noticed for the first time in a shot where the baddies are hiking atop a cliff face that Gabe and Jessie were directly beneath them on the face (you won't see that on your phones, kids) - and the boost from Dolby Vision enhanced the lighting in some shots like "God rays" from the Sun in one stunning vista I'd never noticed before as well.

Shot anamorphically on film there is some softness at times due to the format and lens and the snowy gray mountains limit the color palette, but splashes of color like explosions, the red-orange of helicopter, and green trees pop nicely. The Dolby Atmos audio gets your height speakers going with helicopters, jets and explosions.

Unfortunately, there are no extras included when the Blu-ray had two commentary tracks (one with Harlen and Stallone), deleted scenes, and other featurettes, so this isn't a one-and-done purchase for completionists. You'll need to keep your old disc if you care about that stuff, so hold for a $5 sale to buy this.

The Nineties were a peak time for action movies but for some reason Cliffhanger gets overlooked in favor of titles like Speed or even Under Seige, but it's top shelf fun and barring the paucity of extras, it's worth getting in 4K.

Score: 8.5/10. Buy it.

"The Running Man (2025)" 4K Review

 I've been increasingly down on Edgar Wright's work over the ensuing 15 years since his peak with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (which I've grown to love more as I figured out what Michael Cera's Scott was supposed to be about and how Ramona didn't suck as much as I thought). The World's End was Wright beginning to coast; Baby Driver showed he can't write as well as he directs; Last Night in Soho was stylish, but again underbaked (though the missus loved it). Even so, I was interested in the rumors that he'd be helming an updated take on Barbarella starring hot vavoom queen Sydney Sweeney. Sadly, after enduring his remake - or more accurately, readaptation of Stephen King's 1982 novel The Running Man - I'm no longer as sanguine about its prospects.

Glenn Powell stars as Ben Richards, a man whose daughter is sick with the flu. Due to his inability to let injustices against coworkers go unopposed, he has been blacklisted from pretty much all employment and he and his wife live in the slums of Co-Op City. Desperate for money, he goes down to Network's TV tower apply to go on one of their less dangerous game shows to earn some money for medicine. Instead he gets selected to go on the Network's #1 show, The Running Man (roll credits!), where contestants win $1 billion New Dollars if they can survive 30 days being hunted by the show's executioners while everyone in the nation can win money by spotting and calling in his location to the show. No one has ever survived the full 30 days, but Ben just hopes to earn enough to get his family out of the slums.

Allowed a 12 hour head start and some seed money, he visits a friend (William H. Macy) who supplies him with disguises and fake IDs, then tries to stay out of sight while sending in the required daily videotaped diaries. Sometimes this is a problem because people loitering around the mailboxes (which fly away after the tape is deposited, which doesn't seem very efficient) may spot him. He also discovers that Network is editing what he's submitting, censoring politically verboten topics and deepfaking incendiary rhetoric in its place in order to keep the audience riled up.

Along the way he is aided by rebels - Bradley (Daniel Ezra) and Elton (Michael Cera) - who try to shepherd him to safety, but the deck is massively stacked against him as it becomes clear that Network head honcho Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) can cheat at will and is manipulating events for maximum ratings and audience enervation.

The original 1987 take starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was no great shakes, only lightly following the books gritty premise and directed with TV movie style by Paul Michael Glaser, best known for playing Starsky on Starsky & Hutch. But despite a big upgrade in budget and having Michael Bacall, his co-writer on Scott Pilgrim, sharing the adaptation duties Wright seems to have had no idea what kind of movie he was making and what to say with it.

While I knew I was hoping against hope they would keep the book's ending (where Ben crashes an airplane into the Network tower while flipping off Killian; though they almost tease they will), referring to the Wikipedia synopsis (I read it back when Reagan was President, so I don't remember specifics) shows they hit almost every story beat (except the ending, dammit) but managed to whiff on telling a focused story. It looks good with plenty of CGI-enhanced cityscapes, but doesn't know if it's a campy satire of reality game shows (one reminded me of Ow, My Balls! from Idiocracy), a dystopian anti-capitalist screed (so edgy for a $110M budget movie), or something in between.

Core to this tonal dissonance is Powell's smirky performance which Wright allowed. From my first noticing him on the Scream Queens TV series through his appearances in Top Gun: Maverick, Hit Man, and Twisters (haven't seen Anyone But You yet despite Sydney Sweeney being in it, too), he's always played the smirking, cocksure, handsome guy. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But here when he's trying to play Desperate Father Trying To Save Family (and Take Down the System) and he's whipsawing between Anguished Father Mode to Profane Rabblerouser Mode without landing on an effective medium. Wikipedia says Wright initially planned to have Chris Evans as the lead and if the script had picked a lane he probably would've been excellent as he can do snarky a-hole (as in Scott Pilgrim) or deadly serious (his Captain America) without one bleeding into the other. 

Brolin just has to play corpo sleaze, but does it well. The standout of understanding the assignment is Colman Domingo who amps up the camp for Bobby T., the host of the show. I'm not sure why Lee Pace (Foundation) was cast for his anonymous (until the last act) role and Emilia Jones (CODA) just kinda shows up to be a hostage at the end who learns that the system is rigged.

Back to bitching about the ending, while I guess I can understand why they didn't go with the book's, the happy ending they cobbled together feels cheap, not earned, definitely not satisfying.

If you approach The Running Man just seeking empty, mindless action, then it's somewhat OK and Powell's smirky take may fit, but why can't movies try to be a little be more betterer written?

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation wasn't bad with some good neon highlights in the darkness, but nothing shouts demo material. SDR is fine.

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

"Sisu: Road To Revenge" 4K Review

 One of the surprises of 2022 was Sisu, a kicky, brutal action flick from Finland starring Jorma Tommila as Aatami Korpi, a former one-man walking genocide soldier turned prospector, as he killed many many MANY Nazis at the end of WWII after they stole the gold he'd mined. Seemingly invincible, the old guy made John Wick look like a beta soy bitch as he withstood massive physical abuse while dishing out much worse.

Since that which is rewarded gets repeated, it's not much surprise as writer-director Jalmari Helander has returned to the well for Sisu: Road to Revenge which takes place a couple years after the events of the fist film. After WWII, Finland gave up a chunk of their Eastern border to the Soviet Union causing hundreds of thousands of Finns to migrate Westward. Korpi's family home was in the territory forfeited, so we open with him crossing into the USSR with a truck to dismantle the house, stack it up, and take it back to Finland.

As he's doing this, we jump to Siberia where Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang, Avatar) is imprisoned. He's hauled out of his cell and told Korpi has entered Soviet territory and since he murdered Korpi's wife and two young sons, hacking them to pieces with shovels - "We were saving ammunition," explains Draganov - and Korpi then killed over 300 Ruskies in response, he'll get a pardon if he cleans up his mess.

The rest of the film, each chapter titled like videogame levels, consists of Draganov dispatching forces to kill the seemingly unkillable Korpi who turns the tables in increasingly cartoonish manner. (Don't watch the trailer because it gives away almost everything.) But even after suspending disbelief from a crane atop Mt. Everest some of the scenarios really test credulity considering at the end of the first movie Korpi survives a plane crash a black box wouldn't have.

More annoyingly is that at the beginning of the pursuit the antagonists face off and while Korpi murderizes everyone else, he doesn't kill Draganov because the movie would be over. While Sisu: Road to Revenge shares the same ~90 minute runtime, it feels padded out and could've been tightened at least 15 minutes.

Tommila portrays the grieving rage of Korpi as well as he did last time with one less line of dialog than in Sisu which if you were keeping score was only one line of dialog. That's right, he doesn't say anything this time. Lang plays Draganov the way he's played everything since Avatar, meaning Quaritch with a Boris Badenov accent. While it's fun to watch the pair whose combined ages are 139 years throw down (or more likely their stuntmen), the movie works too hard to make it happen.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation captures cinematographer Mika Orasmaa's (taking over from Kjell Lagerroos) moody widescreen vistas well. The movie is heavy on practical explosions which give the sound system a workout as well with good positional surround audio. 

While Sisu: Road to Revenge is a step down from the original, fans of the original wanting more of the same should be satisfied. But for me this should be the old guy's last adventure.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Being Eddie" 4K Review

 Going into Being Eddie, the Netflix Original documentary about the life of Eddie Murphy, I was hoping for a bookend to John Candy: I Like Me which would tell the story of the Saturday Night Live phenom who effortlessly transitioned into being one of the biggest movie stars in the world as a counterpoint to Candy's smaller success, not to mention that Murphy is still alive and working while Candy died in 1994. Unfortunately, it ends up a sanitized and superficial exercise.

Just as with Candy, Eddie Murphy was a fixture of my Gen X teen years with his arrival on the first season of SNL after the original cast and Lorne Michaels left. While those early-Eighties seasons are rightfully scorned as a pale imitation of the original, there were still some bright lights and it's arguable that the 19-year-old Murphy may've saved the show in that fraught era with his characters like Mr. Robinson, Gumby, Velvet Jones, Buckwheat, and more.

He was such a bright light, Hollywood came calling and he launched his movie career with a hat trick of classics: 48 Hours, Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop which was groundbreaking because it proved a black lead could draw massive audiences globally. The fame allowed him to hook up with Rick James and score a pop hit with "Party All The Time."

When you're young and living history, you have no perspective of how unique a situation Murphy found himself in. As I went to his movies in high school, I didn't know this was a paradigm shift that would open doors as an inspiration to black comedians like Dave Chappelle, Tracy Morgan, Kevin Hart, and Chris Rock and film actors like Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington. Murphy was inspired by Muhammad Ali and in turn inspired others.

But while trying to make the point of Murphy being a Black Pioneer, they run into a weird self-own. While discussing the bit in BHC where Axel Foley is walking down the street and a pair of guys in leather Thriller-style jackets pass by him the other way and he starts laughing, film critic Elvis Mitchell (who briefly wrote for the Detroit Free Press and always sought to inject race politics & somehow has always lost jobs intended to be DEI spots for him) pontificates that this was Murphy mocking his own image. However, a bit later Murphy points out a friend of his in a magazine and explains that he was one of the pair in jackets and had made a face at Murphy as they passed and that cracked him up. (UPDATE: After posting this review, YouTube fed me this short with both clips.)

While owning the 1980s, the turn of the decade brought some box office comedowns which culminated in the flop of Vampire in Brooklyn and David Spade's vicious crack on SNL, "Look, kids, a falling star. Make a wish," while a photo of Murphy was shown. He was so incensed at the dig that he boycotted appearing on SNL except for a brief, non-performing appearance on the 40th Anniversary special, until he returned to host in 2019. The doc focuses at length on a bit where Rock, Chappelle, and Morgan appear during the monologue and how they tweak a joke, but at the expense of showing that almost 40 years after beginning his career in Studio 8H, he still had the fire & moves to deliver an ace performance.

But after Vampire in Brooklyn he bounced back with The Nutty Professor and Bowfinger while branching into family friendly fare owing to his having young children like Doctor Doolittle and Daddy Daycare before stepping up to the mic to voice Donkey in the Shrek series which probably paid for the palatial mansion we see him living in.

However, the new Millennium brought more flops like The Adventures of Pluto Nash and Meet Dave (of which Murphy advises, "Never play a spaceship.") and taking a break from movies. His big comeback, 2006's Dreamgirls, won him a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nominations, but in a case of self-sabotage for the ages, as much as Murphy tries to downplay it, they released the critical and commercial flop Norbit while Oscar voting was still in progress.

All the promise of his dramatic turn was erased by a brash comedy that begged the question, is this what Oscar-worthy actors do? There are plenty of cases of Oscar winners debasing themselves AFTER they've won for a paycheck - helloooooooo, Nicolas Cage! - but one can only imagine the career he would've had if they'd simply held Norbit a few weeks longer. Murphy claims he was more upset about getting dressed up for nothing, but come on. It wouldn't be until 2019's Netflix movie, Dolemite Is My Name that he'd regain some respect, though he promptly squandered it on fluff like Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F which at least is the second best BHC movie of the four.

While there are some interesting insights and stories, Being Eddie is too polished and protective of its subject. Recent documentaries about Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger were more candid about their lives, but here while Murphy goes on about how he does it all for his kids because they're so important to him, it omits the detail that his 10 kids came from five different baby mamas, two of which he was actually married to at the time.

It ends with heavy hints that perhaps he may return to stand-up comedy, something he walked away from after his 1987 concert film Eddie Murphy Raw. Is Being Eddie meant to be a trial balloon to gauge interest in a comeback? Because it falls short of presenting its subject in sufficient depth. While the promo for this hypes director Angus Wall's two Oscar wins, those were for editing The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, both for David Fincher (along with a nom for editing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, also for Fincher) and this is his first big directing gig and he shies away from digging into Murphy's soul.

Oddly, in the end credits where various stylists and makeup people for interviewees are listed, are credits for those assigned to "Mr. Piscopo" and "Mr. Pharoh", presumably being Joe Piscopo, who was in that cast with Murphy and was one of the other bright spots, and Jay Pharoh, who was an ace impressionist (his Denzel Washington makes it impossible to take Denzel seriously now) on SNL between 2010-2016 and now, come to think of it, was an odd omission. Why the credits for people who didn't make the final cut?

As with most Netflix 4K Dolby Vision products, it's not necessary to have the top tier to access the HDR visuals.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"The Perfect Neighbor" 4K Review

Documentaries used to be a fairly bland genre in which the subject matter was documented (thus the name) and the viewer was reasonably safe in presuming what they were viewing to be the truth, more or less. But with the success of slovenly, lying, fat bastard Michael Moore's dishonest agitprop works masquerading as documentaries winning an Oscar for staged scenes of banks giving away guns and raking in millions with the lies that 9/11 was an inside job, and Al Gore's ManBearPig fantasy film also winning Oscar, the documentary has been mostly a tool of Leftists to push agendas under the guise of honest filmmaking.

Into this environment comes the Sundance hit The Perfect Neighbor, Netflix's doc about the killing of Ajike "AJ" Owens by Susan Lorincz in June 2023 by Geeta Gandbhir. Comprised mostly of bodycam footage, we witness the escalating tensions between Lorincz and her neighbors in Ocala, FL as she repeatedly calls the Sheriff's Department over a period of 16 months about the boisterous children in the neighborhood she claims are initially trespassing on her property then becoming more provocative in taunting - or threatening according to Lorincz - "the Karen", as they call her.

The dispute arises because the owner of the open lot adjoining Lorincz's rental duplex, who lives on the other side, has given his permission for the kids to play on his lot, and kids being kids they're loud and annoying. It comes to a head when Owens knocked on Lorincz's door and the latter fired a shot through the door, mortally wounding Owens. Lorincz claims Owens was pounding on the door so hard she feared for her life, but details in the investigation raise questions about her version of events.

What The Perfect Neighbor does well is show the mutual antagonism on both sides of the tension. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango and while nothing justifies busting caps over disturbing the peace, you can sense that the kids with the support of their parents aren't trying to deescalate matters. As deputies are called back, they're familiar with Lorincz's constant calls and trying to chill her out, but she's clearly frustrated; not that this excuses her poor choices.

But where Gandbhir crosses the line into propaganda is an ending title decrying "stand your ground" laws which entitle people being threatened to defend themselves without having to run away until trapped. The card suggests that (paraphrasing) "...white assailants get away with killing Black victims..." with the woke capitalization of black in keeping with the current black supremacist zeitgeist in the wake of St. George Floyd's overdose death near a cop in 2020 which set race relations in America back 60 years.

The reason the inflammatory end title is such dirty pool is because under the end credits we're shown footage from Lorincz's trial for manslaughter which ended in her conviction and sentencing to 25 years in prison, which for a then 60-year-old is effective life in slam. That she had no previous criminal record and a history of childhood sexual trauma didn't get her any mercy in a time where black criminals with dozens of arrests walk free while white convicts are punished severely. Also not disclosed is the factoid found in the movie's Wikipedia page that Gandhir's sister-in-law was Owens best friend and began documenting the case with the expectation the white woman would get away with it.

What such poisonous tactics obscure is the core tragedy of this incidents. While some excessive form of "justice" may've been served, there are no winners. A woman who really should've moved's life is over because of a rash choice she made - somehow left out was that Owen's 10-year-old child was next to her when the shot was fired - and four kids are now without a mother because they chose to antagonize "the Karen" rather than try and coexist. By trying to make it another race war example doesn't cool temperatures, but agenda-driven filmmakers aren't seeking to back off the steam when the money is in stoking outrage.

While in 4K and Dolby Vision, the source material doesn't lend itself to the benefits of the format and paying for Netflix's top tier.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"F1: The Movie" 4K Review

 In the post-Hot Fad Plague world that Hollyweird helped create in 2020, huge crowd-pleasing blockbusters have become harder to come by. One exception was 2022's Top Gun: Maverick which grossed $1.5 billion and showed that audiences would come back to theaters for simple crowd-pleasing movies. With that success, the creators - producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Joseph Kosinski, and writer Ehren Kruger - have reteamed with another aging yet seemingly ageless star, Brad Pitt, to make another popcorn munching crowd pleaser about men in fast vehicles, this time Formula One race cars for F1: The Movie. Currently #7 in the 2025 global box office rankings with $631 million grossed, it was the only non-IP, non-sequel movie in the top 10. While it *only* grossed 41% of Top Gun: Maverick's haul, it's still a decent take though how much profit it made depends on whether the budget was on the lower end of the reported $200M-$300M scale.

Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a once-promising F1 racer whose career was cut short after a nearly fatal crash during a race 30 years previously. Since then, he's been a driver-for-hire picking up work wherever he can like when we're introduced to him living in his van awaiting his shift in the 24 Hours of Daytona race. Even though he gets the team into position to win, he doesn't seem interested in the trappings of the victory as he heads off looking for his next race in the Baja 1000.

While on the road, he is located and approached by Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem), Sonny's former teammate back in the day and now the owner of a struggling F1 team, APXGP (read: Apex GP). Rubén offers Sonny a job as the #2 driver to try and improve their fortunes and to mentor his #1, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). Joshua is talented, but undisciplined, and unless the team wins a race before the end of the season, the F1 bosses and investors may force a sale of the team. Sonny says he isn't interested, but naturally still shows up in London so the movie can happen.

Naturally, Joshua doesn't care for the old guy stepping to him with his old-fashioned ways. While he runs on a treadmill with a breathing apparatus to gather biometrics and uses computerized reaction timing devices to train, Sonny merely jogs around the tracks and bounces tennis balls to keep his eye-hand coordination up. Joshua is all about posing for cameras, being on social media, getting sponsors, so how dare this old man tell him how to drive and win?

Needless to say, things get off to a bumpy start - literally - as they crash into each other, taking the team out of the first race. While Sonny manipulates things to give his teammate an advantage, everyone seems puzzled as to what he's doing. He suggests a combat-oriented strategy where they tweak the cars' aerodynamics to allow for more speed in crowded curves and aggressively hold position to make it harder for others to pass, within the limits of safety and F1 rules. But Joshua continues to buck the advice which leads to a horrific accident. Will be be able to come back and will the team be able to save itself from being sold off? Are you really wondering like it's in doubt?

To say that F1 is predictable almost understates how by-the-numbers it is. At times I was saying dialog ahead of the characters. A scene involving a poker game between Sonny and Joshua to determine who is the #1 driver of the team has a twist so obvious they should've had Joshua catch on to what was happening. Care to guess whether Sonny and Kerry Condon's team technical director hook up? It's that kind of easy crowd-pleasing movie.

Brad Pitt was just shy of 60 when filming began and he's definitely straddling the boyish charm/older Robert Redford line that comes from good genetics and a (likely) deal with Satan. He's charming and laid back which is a weird vibe for a guy who wants to win. If there's a fault, it's that he's basically replaying his Oscar-winning Cliff Booth character from Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood. I guess if it worked once, why not work it some more. I've been seeing a bunch of clips from Moneyball and The Big Short lately so perhaps I wish he did more, not that the by-the-numbers script demands it.

I haven't seen Idris in anything before, but he's good in his equally narrow role. It's easy to dislike his cocky demeanor when he - in the words of Morrissey - hasn't earned it yet, baby. And it's downright weird in today's times when Hollyweird seems to want to cram THE MESSAGE into everything that the friction between the drivers has absolutely no hint of racial component, just young vs. old. Helps that Joshua is British and even more so that the producers wanted to invite all audiences in rather than drive them away preening their wokeness to their fellow wokesters.

The race sequences are good, but I felt the scenes in Ford vs. Ferrari were more exciting. A friend saw F1 at IMAX and was raving about it due to the huge screen and deafening sound. Granted, my THX-compliant viewing distance home theater can't boom like IMAX, the action in Top Gun: Maverick came across fine. They used tiny cameras on remote heads to get driver's eye view shots and be able to show the stars driving the cars, but it still feels a tad static.

At 2h 35m (with credits) long, I went into F1: The Movie with a bit of dread because movies these days are just too padded out, but to risk punning, the time raced by due to the streamlined formulaic script which was probably timed out with a Save The Cat beat sheet. The missus really liked it, not just because Brad Pitt gets her tingly in the nethers, but because it was just a fun, entertaining movie that delivered what was advertised on the tin. I wanted a bit more, but this probably isn't the movie for more.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation was sharp and colorful. They filmed with a mix of Sony Venice and DJI Ronin 4D cameras and they intercut seamlessly. The audio mix was enveloping and while I'm sure IMAX really sold the experience, my 5.2.4 Atmos setup did OK.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Coming exclusively to Apple TV in mid-December.)

"Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost" 4K Review

 The names Stiller & Meara don't ring many bells with people younger than Boomers or old Gen Xers, but they were a prominent comedy duo akin to Mike Nichols and Elaine May who were their predecessors in the early-1960s before splitting to focus on their own careers as writers and directors (he directed The Graduate, Catch-22, and Working Girl, among others; she wrote Heaven Can Wait and The Birdcage, but also directed notorious flop Ishtar). To most people Jerry Stiller is best known for playing George Costanza's yelling father on Seinfeld and Anne Meara is less-remembered for her role on Archie Bunker's Place, the sequel/spin-off of All in the Family. 

But their best known co-production is their younger child, Ben Stiller, and he memorializes his parents and indulges in a family therapy session on our time with the Apple TV+ original documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost. Filmed in the wake of Stiller's death in 2020 (Meara passed in 2015), Ben and his sister Anne are sifting through their parent's Upper West Side apartment in preparation of selling. (Bought in 1953 for $11,000, it sold in 2021 for $5.9 million.) Because the elder Stiller seemingly tape-recorded everything from routine rehearsals to conversations along with filming Super 8 home movies, there is copious candid insight material available along with the dozens of Ed Sullivan Show and talk show clips.

Unfortunately for those seeking a thorough documentary of the couple, son Ben uses the project to also work out his personal issues with his life growing up in a home where it wasn't clear if Mom & Dad were yelling at each other because they were working out a routine or arguing and how he almost almost wrecked his marriage to Christine Taylor because he was spending so much time working and being away from his family including a son and daughter, same as his parents had done.

While it's nice that the Fauci Flu Scamdemic helped repair his marriage and he and his sister were able to process their parents lives, it comes at the expense of us outsiders who don't really care. He doesn't make clear when certain events are happening or brings up something like Meara's alcoholism becoming an issue, but then letting it drop until she finally gets sober much later in life after making it seem she'd dried out earlier.

While Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost manages to get some of the parents story across, if feels like more could've been included if Ben had remembered this wasn't about him.

Like all Apple TV+ originals, it's presented in 4K Dolby Vision and Atmos audio, but neither are really noticeable and these sorts of content (documentaries) don't require it.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Apple TV+.

"The Woman In Cabin 10" 4K Review

 Since I'm functionally illiterate I don't read much and because I'm a man I don't follow the best-selling books that women snap up then get made into movies like It Ends With Us or The Woman on the Train, but there's got to be a section in bookstores called "Trashy Beach Reads," right? RIGHT?!? Because that's where the novel which shares the title of this week's Netflix Original The Woman in Cabin 10 would've been shelved.

Keira Knightley (Natalie Portman's Queen Amadala decoy in Star Wars - Episode One - The Phantom Menace) stars as Laura "Lo" Blacklock, an investigative journalist for The Guardian who is traumatized by her last story and thus accepts an invitation for what should be a puff piece where she will ride on the superyacht of billionaire Richard Bullmer (Guy Pearce, LA Confidential) from England to Norway where he will be announcing a foundation dedicated to curing cancer because his wife, Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli), has Stage 4 leukemia.

Also on the yacht are a select handful of fellow Very Rich Folk and influencers (whose characters are so stock generic that "she's on Ted Lasso" is a distinguishing characteristic) as well as Lo's ex-boyfriend, Ben (David Ajala, Star Trek: Discovery), a photographer in Bullmer's employ. He's trying to charm her back, but she's not having it.

After setting sail, she is summoned by Anne to advise her on a speech she intends to give at the party announcing that all the money would be given to an independent group, effectively cutting Richard off. Anne knows she's nearing the end and has stopped taking the medications. Because she easily tires, they agree to reconvene the next day.

While returning to her room, Lo doges Ben by ducking into Cabin 10 (roll credits!) next to hers (convenient how the doors don't lock) where she encounters a young blonde woman (Gitte Witt) in a hoodie coming from the bathroom. After an awkward moment, Lo leaves and goes to her cabin.

That night, she's awakened by a disturbance next door, raised voices & sounds of violence, culminating with a splash in the water. Rushing onto her balcony, she sees a woman in the water and raises the alarm, causing the crew to rush to investigate, but they find nothing and start giving her the side eye, blaming her PTSD over a subject of her last story drowning to trigger a nightmare. Also, Cabin 10 is supposed to be empty, so clearly Lo is imagining things.

As Lo tries to figure out who this woman was, Anne seems different as well, complaining of how fatigued the drugs are making her and forgetting that she was supposed to meet with Lo about her speech. 

To say the movie's clue breadcrumbs are the size of bread loaves would be an understatement, though when the Big Twist is revealed halfway through, I didn't see it coming. But it then turns the rest of the movie into how will Lo expose the plot versus how will the villain(s?) get away with it. The denouement is absolutely bonkers, raising the question of how the villain thought they were going to carry on after what transpired.

Running a tidy 95-minutes, The Woman in Cabin 10 doesn't overstay its welcome or pretend to matter more than it does. It's a trashy beach read without the sand getting everywhere.

The Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation is fine, but unexceptional due to the most steely gray color palette and predominance of darker scenes. There are a few moments of bright specular highlights or overt heigh channel usage, but not so much that those not paying the top tier freight to Netflix will miss it.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"The Lost Bus" 4K Review

California wildfires are as common as bottles of baby oil at a Diddy party and one of the largest, costliest, and deadliest was the 2018 Camp Fire where 85 people died, nearly $17 billion in damage was done, over 55,000 people were displaced as several towns and cities were burned to the ground. In the midst of this rapidly spreading firestorm was The Lost Bus, now a heavily-fictionalized docudrama by Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, United 93, three Jason Bourne sequels) about the school bus full of kids trying to get to safety.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Kevin McKay, a school bus driver with so many problems I suspected the most dishonest screenwriter in Hollyweird, Paul Haggis, was involved. He's a divorced dad whose estranged father recently died bringing him back home to Paradise, CA where his invalid mother (played by McConaughey's real mother) and surly son (played by his real son, Levi) live. He has to put his cancer-ridden dog down and his bus driving job seems on shaky ground due to his screwups which put him on the wrong side of the dispatcher, Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson, The Gilded Age).

On the morning of November 8, 2018, poorly maintained power lines spark in the high winds and set the tinder-dry undergrowth ablaze. Kevin is trying to balance getting his charges delivered to school while trying to get medicine back home to his sick son while Ruby is hectoring him to get the bus in for maintenance. As the blaze spreads, evacuation orders go out and 22 children at a school whose parents aren't able to come get them need a ride. Kevin is the only one in the area so he volunteers to pick them up in hopes it will earn some points with Ruby.

The class and their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera, Ugly Barbie), get on board and of course things rapidly begin to fall apart as the roads are jammed with evacuees, communication with Ruby falters then fails, and the roaring blazes close in around them. It doesn't help that their first destination was closed and evacuated without their knowledge due to lost communication, so they're scrambling to find an alternate route to what seems to be safety.

Of course, they find time for Kevin and Mary to discuss their lives and disappointments while waiting for the blaze to consume them and as with the opening scenes, they ring false as Hollywood inventions to pad the run time and provide a respite between the thrilling action sequences. The problem with those is that apparently they never really happened and pretty much everything other than Kevin and Mary being real people and a bus full of kids needing to flee is invention including the "lost" aspect; they were stuck in traffic, but in constant contact.

But bolstering the fiction is the portrayal of the firefighters led by Ray Martinez (Yul Vazquez, Petey on Severance) and their doomed attempts to fight the fire culminating in their realizing there was nothing to be done but evacuate the population. Vazquez is so believable I wondered if Greengrass had cast real participants; I'm sure a lot of the extras are real firefighters; they look like real people.

I knocked a point off the score for The Lost Bus because of its overly-fictionalized plot and forced melodrama, but it's still a worthy watch as an action adventure flick. Perhaps they should've just gone fully fictional so the changes weren't so jarring.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Apple TV+

"Weapons" 4K Review

While Hollyweird seems mostly interested in rehashing the same old ideas, there have been a few more original sleeper hits this year in the horror genre, first with the OK-but-overrated Sinners and now the weird Weapons. The story of how all but one of a third grade classroom's students disappeared without a trace is the sophomore effort by writer-director-co-scorer Zach Cregger whose previous feature Barbarians (which I didn't see, but the missus did and didn't like) made him a buzzy name in town and sparked a fast and furious bidding war for this script.

Weapons starts simply enough with a child's voiceover setting the stage: Two years before, 17 children in Justine Gandy's (Julia Garner, Ozark) third grade classroom simultaneously got up at 2:17 am and ran out of their homes into the night never to be seen again. Security cameras captured some of their flights, but little more.

After several weeks, it's decided that school needs to continue, but at a meeting between school officials and parents, blame is cast upon Justine with Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), voicing his displeasure at the lack of progress to the school principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong, The Martian), and a police captain (Toby Huss).

With an alluded-to checkered past and passions running high, Marcus puts Justine on leave and she falls into a spiral of drinking, leading to a hook-up with her ex-boyfriend, a cop named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich, Solo), whose wife is none to pleased with that development.

Cregger tells his story through various point-of-view segments following Justine, Archer, Paul, a crackhead lowlife that Paul encounters (Austin Abrams, Euphoria), Marcus, and finally Alex (Cary Christopher, making his major debut), the sole child not to disappear and whose Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan, Field of Dreams) is shaping up to be a popular Halloween costume.

Cregger does a few jump scares and the gore is icky, but fleeting, but overall he succeeds in ratcheting up the tension and keeping us tantalized with the mystery. There's always a risk of when what's going on is revealed and explained that it won't resolve things satisfactorily and if you think about what you're told, you'll be left with several "For why?" questions that could've been better addressed. (e.g. What's the deal with the giant floating AR-15 hovering over the house during a dream?) But those will come after the big payoff bonkers ending which shows Cregger shows he knows sending the audience off entertained papers over any gaps in logic until the drive home.

The performances are solid across the board though the characters are thinly-drawn with Cregger choosing allusion to specificity when erring hair the other way would've helped. The MVP is Madigan whose Gladys is a ballsy creation for an actress to portray, leveraging the truism that people begin to look like their spouses when she's been married 42 years to Ed Harris.

The 4K Dolby Vision presentation doesn't offer much in the way of nit-blasting highlights, but helps keep the many dark, gloomy scenes from dissolving in black crush.

While it could've been deeper, Weapons manages to creep you out then release the tension effectively. Recommended for those not super-picky about plotting.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Jurassic World Rebirth" 4K Review

 The missus loves the Dino Park (as I call the Jurassic Park/World series) movies. We've seen the first six in theaters and seeing that midnight showing of the first one on my birthday in 1993 made such an impression that I called into my work on my day off to rave about it. The series has been uneven - Dino Park 1 is a GOAT, DP 2 & 4 are pretty good, DP 3 & 6 are OK, DP 5 aka Jurassic Mansion: Pointless Sequel was pants - but she was gung ho to see the latest installment, but due to various reasons of business and pretty bad reviews, for the first time we did not trek to the theater to see the dinosaurs. We just waited five weeks for Dino Park 7: Oh Look, There's Another Previously Unknown Island with Dinosaurs or as you probably know it as, Jurassic World Rebirth, to hit streaming and here it is and good thing I didn't drive to a theater to see this lackluster entry into the getting-overly-milked franchise.

This time around the world has grown bored of dinosaurs because shut up this is the plot. They've also been dying out because it's not warm enough in the areas where people live (so much for the ManBearPig hoax) and they're most living near the equator because warm and more oxygen? (Not going to bother Googling that.)

Sleazy Pharma Bro (Rupert Friend, A Simple Favor) believes his company could make trillions of dollars selling medicines developed from DNA harvested from live dinosaurs. Since they're living in an area off-limits to humans, he hires Merc Babe (ScarJo, Lucy) to get him and Dino Scientist (Jonathan Bailey, Wicked) to another InGen facility island which had been abandoned after an accident 17 years previously because a Snickers wrapper can apparently fry the security systems of a secret dino breeding lab.

After picking up Merc Bro (Mahershala Ali, Blade, LOL) and some obvious Red Shirts (including one recognizable B-list star who the trailer spoils his fate), they head off to the Forbidden Zone to harvest blood from a fishosaur, landosaur, and aerosaur. Elsewhere on the ocean, a father and his two daughters - one young and likely to find a cute dino pal, the other teenaged and bringing her stoner dumbass boyfriend along - are sailing when their sailboat is capsized by a big fishosaur. (I'm not bothering listing the actors for their privacy.)

Their mayday call is received by merc boat and they are rescued, but as they approach the island, more fishosaurs attack the boat, causing some to die, some to fall overboard, and the rest to crash onto the shore where some are eaten. The family regroups and heads for where the village is supposed to be and the mercs, Pharma Bro and Dino Scientist collect samples and try not to get eaten, which is easy for anyone who has an Oscar or nomination or needs to stay alive until they can be eaten by the Final Boss Uggosaur in a completely unexpected and OK, I totally called how they were going to get offed.

If you think I'm leaving out a lot of details, I'm not. There's nothing of interest here, nothing that surprises or delights. Sure, the action is well directed by Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Rogue One) and the visual effects are seamless & spectacular, but we were able to predict the fates of pretty much every character, the plot armor was so obvious as were the red herring intended to make you think anyone could get killed. I was even calling out lines seconds ahead of the movie. It's that predictable.

Much was made of the detail that David Koepp, who'd adapted Michael Crichton's novel for the first movie, wrote Dino Park 7, but if you've followed his work, it's been roughly two decades since he's written A-tier material and what he's done since pales what the first half of his IMDB lists. Here he's just typing, not writing. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if he just prompted ChatGPT to "write a Jurassic Park movie in the style of David Koepp." The talking and stuff between set pieces only serves to prevent the movie from being 30 minutes long.

While not the worst Dino Park movie, it's down there in the way F9: The Fast Saga is blocked from the bottom slot by 2 Fast 2 Furious. None of the performances are demanding of our getting-paid stars and they don't even try to explain how a 5'3" woman becomes a first-call mercenary. (At least Charlize Theron is 5'10" and Uma Thurman is 5'11", not that it made The Old Guard 2 any less bad.)

Jurassic World Rebirth made enough money that Dino Park 8 is a sure thing, but it's not as if its likely to tell a compelling story from the looks of things.

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

"M3GAN 2.0" 4K Review

 The 2023 slasher flick M3GAN was a sleeper hit, grossing $181M off a $12M budget. So a sequel was ordered up and a few weeks ago M3GAN 2.0 arrived, flopping massively with an opening weekend gross one-third of the original's leading to a rapid trip to streaming after just a few weeks. Complaints were that it changed genres - from horror to sci-fi - and attempted to turn the memeable moppet murderbot into a good girl a la Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but even more problematic is that the story is a convoluted mess that I don't even want to try and synopsize, but let's get on with it.

It's a couple years after the events of the first film and the military, having never seen the Jurassic Park sequels has decided to make a new murderbot called AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno, Pacific Rim) copied from M3GAN's designs. During an operational demonstration, it goes rogue after revealing it was sentient and not working for the Army any more.

Gemma (Allison Williams, Get Out), M3GAN's creator has become an author and advocate for AI regulation who, along with her (I think) boyfriend Christian (Aristotle Athari, SNL) has been developing an exoskeleton device which could provide mobility to the paralyzed or turn people into human forklifts capable of lifting great weights. Her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw, M3GAN), lives with her and is studying computer science.

After Gemma is informed of AMELIA's existence, M3GAN (body: Amie Donald; voice: Jenna Davis; the same team as before) reveals that she'd been living in Gemma's smart home after uploading her program before being killed, a la The Lawnmower Man. She offers to help them take down AMELIA in exchange for a physical body. Gemma doesn't trust her, so puts her into a Moxie unit - a toy robot thing clearly copied from Black Mirror's "Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too" episode (the one with Miley Cyrus as a pop star performing a rewritten version of Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like A Hole") - in order to hack into wealthy tech billionaire creep Alton Appleton's (Jemaine Clement, Flight of the Conchords) servers to find out what's going on.

After AMELIA kills Alton, the group retreat to a massive bunker under Gemma's house that M3GAN had constructed with plans that they'd hide there when AMELIA triggers an AI Apocalypse. It was at this point my feelings on the movie flipped from "this isn't so bad" to "what the heck is this crap?!?" How the actual how does a secret underground lair get built under a residential home without anyone knowing?!? This isn't some billionaire superhero with the means to have Lairs 'r' Us build a Batcave under his estate where trucks full of mined earth can be removed without notice. If M3GAN can have this done, why does she need to beg Gemma to build her a body?

From there the plot gets even more convoluted and ludicrous involving a Xerox motherboard created in the early-1980s which as been learning for four decades and if someone were to remove it from its air-gapped Faraday cage it would provide Total Control Power of all tech in the world, blah-blah-woof-woof. There are so many red herrings, fakeouts, "oh no, M3GAN's dead, oh wait, no, she's not" twists and turns I stopped caring because the movie was just trying to be clever when it was braindead.

While director Gerald Johnstone came up with the story with M3GAN co-writer Akela Cooper, the final script was his and he sabotages himself with the spaghetti plot and cringe-worthy dialogue like, "Hold on to your vaginas," which is so dumb that a Speak & Spell wouldn't say it. While his direction is workmanlike, he limits himself by his own contrivances.

The 4K presentation is clean and has some good highlights at times, but who cares when the story is dumb?

The first M3GAN caught on with meme culture thanks to the goofy murder dance she does in the trailer, but under the hype was a neat 8/10 score (never finished the review) B-movie that delivered the goods promised on the tin. But in their desire to force another social media craze, they forgot that it's impossible to make fetch happen by brute force. Blumhouse head Jason Blum admitted they botched this one and while there's a spinoff film, SOULM8TE ("soulmate"), coming in January 2026, it's going to be difficult to resurrect the girl again without an exceptional concept and script. Too bad.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.