"Unabomber" Review

 From 1978 to 1995, Ted Kaczynski sent 16 package bombs which killed three and injured 23 and prompted the largest FBI manhunt in history. How he was apprehended and supposition of how he may've been sent down this path of anarchic destruction and terrorism is the subject of the latest Netflix Original movie which goes by his nickname, Unabomber.

Opening in 1995 after the Washington Post published the Unabomber Manifesto, a 35,000-word screed against technology and industrialized society, FBI Agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley, Motor City) is frustrated that her linguistics approach to forming a suspect profile isn't being taken seriously enough by the Old Boys Club at the Bureau.

We then flash back to 1958 where a 16-year-old math prodigy Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay, Room, Wonder, grown up now) is a Harvard freshman who applies to be what he thinks is a philosophical debate club run by professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe, Virtuosity) and his assistant Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis, Mutiny) who had created the Thematic Apperception Test which is similar to the Rorschach Test in diagnosing mental issues. The club turns out to be series of harsh one-on-one sessions where the young Kaczynski is verbally abused by "Mr. C" (Gus Halper, The Shards), who violates the rules while Kaczynski's responses are filmed and monitored electronically.

Back in the future, Miller is contacted by Kaczynski's estranged brother, David (Matthew Kevin Anderson, Eternity), whose wife believes the Manifesto sounds like stuff Ted has written and he decided to bring her suspicions to the FBI in order to clear Ted. They have been estranged over two decades, but he still worries about his big brother. Miller's superior doesn't think this has merit and forbids her to investigate, so of course she takes a couple days off and travels to Montana to see what she can find.

Meanwhile in the past, young Ted is become more frustrated by the sessions until Morgan finally lets him see behind the curtain as to what the whole process has been about. Ted is outraged at the duplicity and begins to construct a package for Murray that's similar to the bomb package we've been shown.

Unabomber is clearly trying to construct an impression that Murray's experiment and emotional abuse of Ted set him on the path to blowing up a lot of people 20 years later, but doesn't convincingly connect the dots. When doing my usual post-biopic fact check to see how much was true and how much invention, this impression remained unchallenged. Most distractingly is the fact that Miller is an imaginary composite character clearly fashioned to get a women in the cast (during the end credits, real photos of Kaczynski and the FBI agents at his cabin where he was arrested and no women are present) and that David Kaczynski approached the FBI because he did believe Ted was the Unabomber, not trying to clear him. Why change that?

While the performances are all respectable and the insights somewhat provocative, Unabomber is just too flat and too fictitious to be compelling or informational. It lacks necessary boom.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That's the Weight of the World)" Review

In honor of it being the 21st night of September, it's time to catch up on Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That's the Weight of the World), director Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary about the seminal 1970s R&B/soul/funk band that influenced many artists including Prince, Michael Jackson, and even Stevie Wonder.

Focusing on founder Maurice White, who was abandoned by his mother at age 5, an event that would color his personal and professional relationships forever, the doc traces his interest in music which led him to move from his birthplace of Memphis to Chicago where he became a session drummer for Chess Records and then joining noted jazz figure Ramsay Lewis's trio. Wanting to express himself more, he left the prestigious jazz gig and formed what would eventually become Earth, Wind & Fire.

It was initially a bumpy start as White and company struggled to find a focus that would cross over. One show opening for Parliament-Funkadelic resulted in such a musical beatdown by the headliners that one EWF member jumped over to P-Funk, the band members who were still around after White reshuffled the lineup were haunted by the grooves, and mastermind George Clinton would taunt them for a decade about it. But they took the lessons they learned and evolved to the point where their massive breakout hit, "Shining Star", was the inspiration for Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" (which later became the music for Will Smith's "Wild Wild West"), a tidbit that shocks an off-camera Questlove during the Wonder interview.

White also realized they needed a SHOW to go with the music and he hired the Tony Award-winning choreographer of The Wiz to stage the show and magician Doug Henning to create illusions like a levitating his half-brother/bassist Verdine White while he played. Fortunes were spent on elaborate costumes in an Afro-Futurist style, but eventually the costs of putting on such as an extravaganza took a toll on the operation, much to the chagrin of the band members who weren't being paid very much considering. White's complicated personal life and business distractions drove further wedges between family and colleagues.

While Questlove does an OK job of laying out the life and legacy and influences EWF had, the overall pacing feels a bit slow and the coverage superficial at times. Since White died of Parkinson's disease in 2016, only archival footage and audio is available and his brief was clearly not to tear down the reputation and renown of seminal artist and his band. While flawed, Earth, Wind & Fire is a good primer of one of the Seventies biggest acts.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on HBO Max.

"Nimrods" Review

 When you hear "Green Day movie" you'd probably think it'd be a biopic of the band or perhaps a concert film or maybe an adaptation of the surprisingly decent musical that was made of American Idiot. Farther down the possibilities list would be a movie produced with a story by Green Day where they also cameoed, but that's what Nimrods is, the titled both a description of the nimrod kids but also a play on their 1997 album, Nimrod.

Tommy (Mason Thames, The Black Phone) and Fred (Kylr Coffman, Outbreak) are obnoxious high school students who have a band with their nerdy friend Chad (Ryan Foust, Marry Me) called Analog Dogs. Tommy lives with his widowed mother, Jodie (Jenna Fischer, The Office), and his older brother, Wayne (Keen Ruffalo, Mark's son), in Kansas City.

Fans of Green Day, Tommy and Fred go to record store appearance and give the band (played by the band themselves in not particularly convincing performances) a demo tape with Tommy's phone number on it. While there, drummer Tré Cool calls Tommy's phone and goofs on their name, calling them "Anal OG Dogs." Afterwards, they tell Wayne about the encounter and show him the call log with Tré's number.

Later, mad at the pair stranding him on the roof where he was putting up Christmas decorations, Wayne and his friend Keith (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio, Primo) prank call the guys by claiming to be Tré Cool and loving their demo tape, wanting them to open for Green Day on New Years Eve at the Los Angeles Palladium theater. Falling for the ruse, Tommy asks his Jodie if she could drive them to the gig and when she's not able, decides to steal Wayne's car and head west despite not having a driver's license.

What follows is a typical string of hijinks and misadventures as their naivete and cluelessness makes their odds of even making it to LA unlikely. Along the way Tommy meets a cool girl, Olivia (Mckenna Grace, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), who invites the band to play at a gathering with other bands including hers. Chad's mother, Deborah (Jolene Blalock, Star Trek: Enterprise), catches up to the band and is about to drag them home when embarrassing mama's boy Chad decides to take the minivan and continue the journey to their date with destiny trying to get into the show.

Last year I wasn't impressed by a Detroit-made indie called Band On The Run which was about a band trying to play SXSW and Nimrods is only marginally better due to a bigger budget - Evil Empire Live Nation are producers - and better music including unreleased Green Day tracks serving as Analog Dogs material.

Tommy and Fred aren't very appealing protagonists, the situations they find themselves in aren't particularly unique, and the ending doesn't hit in the feels as much as intended. It also drags in the pacing especially during one extended sequence involving a scary motel operated by a weird Fred Arminen which could've been completely cut without anyone noticing and only included because Armisen was in a prior movie by writer-director Lee Kirk. Kirk and Green Day collaborated on the story after Armstrong starred in Kirk's 2016 effort Ordinary World. 

If you like Green Day's music and aren't to demanding on your movies stories, Nimrods will probably entertain you somewhat, but won't give you the time of your life.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Tony" Review

The opening of Tony, the biopic about a young Anthony Bourdain - the famous chef, author, and TV host who decided a life of globe-trotting, meeting interesting foods and eating exotic peoples, plus banging Asia Argento, wasn't enough to keep living for in 2018 - is a title card with this quote from his book, Kitchen Confidential: “I was a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” It's a fitting apéritif for what follows, the depiction of young man stumbling into a new vocation while being somewhat the ass in the process.

Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) stars as Bourdain, going by "Tony" as a 19-year-old Vassar freshman with dreams of being a writer. He applies for a writing fellowship which would take him to New York and lies to his family that he got it when in reality someone else got it. Caught out, he decides to go to Provincetown, MA (at the tip of Cape Cod) to chase after Nancy (Emilia Jones, CODA), a girl he's got a crush on since high school who's a year older and told him she'd be staying for the summer.

When he gets there, he discovers she appears attached to another guy at the pizza place she's working. He goes to a seafood place called The Flagship and gets drunk and when he's rude to Mary (Monica Raymund, Chicago Fire), the barmaid, he's thrown out and beaten up, then later robbed by Sal (Leo Woodall, Tuner), a worker in the kitchen. The owner, Chef (Antonio Banderas, Desperado), takes Tony home and puts him in the hammock on the porch of his small beach house.

Broke, Tony apologizes to Chef and begs for a job at Flagship and to keep sleeping on the hammock. Chef, believing Tony when he claims to have kitchen experience, brings him on as a dishwasher, eventually advancing him to oyster shucking and more all while continuing to wake him up with water dumped on him. While he's interested in the cooking stuff, Tony still sees himself as a writer and persists in lying to Nancy and himself as to what his destiny is.

It is to the credit of director/co-writer Matt Johnson (lasts seen starring and directing Nirvanna The Band The Song The Movie) in approaching this part of Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential memoir that he doesn't lay on too thick the idea that a lightning bolt struck Tony to make him realize cooking was going to be his path to becoming an author. It's just a summer in a confused young man's life where he's still sorting out who he even is when he's not fronting what he wishes he was. 

During my traditional post-biopic fact checking, I found it was fairly true to the fictionalized references in Kitchen Confidential, though in order to create a more dramatic impetus to the plot it fudged the fact that Tony and Nancy had already dated for a few years before their planned mutual trip to Provincetown and that they eventually married about a decade later before divorcing 20 years after that. Tony wasn't chasing no skirt, yo!

In my review of The Holdovers I faulted Sessa's performance as the weak link, presumably due it being his first film role. Well, in the intervening few years he's really stepped up his game because here he balances the competing impulses of Tony while hinting at his future without obviously mimicking Bourdain's distinct style. Well done. It's also good to see Antonio Banderas getting some room to work as Chef instead of being wasted as he was in last year's Babygirl. (In a meta bit of IYKYK casting, when Tony applies to the Culinary Institute of America at the end, the main instructor is played by chef Eric Ripert, Bourdain's bestie and traveling companion who got to find his friend's body.)

While small-scale and slightly fibby, Tony is a decent coming-of-age biopic about someone whose talents are sorely missed. (The missus was so angry at his suicide she got rid of all his books and avoids his shows.)

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

"Just Play Dead" Review

OK, I'm calling for the revocation of director Martin Campbell's filmmaking privileges. Just because he had some goodies like Casino Royale (with cheese!) and The Mask of Zorro in the past which keep getting held up in trailers as false promises of coming goodness in trailers, the fact his recent movies including Memory, Dirty Angels, and Cleaner (which I see I opened with this same rant) have been various breeds of dogs - his last decent movie I saw was 2017's The Foreigner (7/10, never finished the review) - and Just Play Dead is another mark in the bad column.

I'd never even heard of this thing and normally wouldn't have given it a look if not for the presence of Eva Green (who starred in Dirty Angels as well as Casino Royale and needs to tell her agent to stop taking Campbell's calls), but even those two factors aren't enough to advise anyone to suffer through this half-assed convoluted mess of a movie where I suspect everyone did it for the check and the location.

 Samuel L. Jackson co-stars as Jack Wolfe, a corrupt developer who's living the high life in the Canary Islands, funding his lifestyle by embezzling from the company. We meet him on his sailboat as he's poisoning a collaborator who is threatening to testify for the authorities. Even with this witness dead, he knows the law will ultimately catch up to him, so he hatches a scheme which he shares with his wife, Nora (Green).

He wants to fake his death, framing her current boy toy, Chad (Jason Fernández), who is even dumber than Pete Davidson's SNL namesake, for the murder, with the couple splitting the $30 million insurance payout. Also, lurking on the periphery is Dani (Eoin Macken), a cop Nora was banging a few weeks earlier and broke up with. He thinks Jack and Nora are up to something, but is too personally involved to keep from screwing the investigation up. Complicating matters is Nora seems to be trying to flip the script by actually having Chad kill Jack with the promise of riches and sweet Eva Green boobs as the enticement.

Having recently watched Body Heat, suffering through this whatever-the-Temu-version-of-Temu-would-be-wannabe-caper's convoluted plot is all the worse as endless yammering about plots and motivations make the 97-minute runtime feel much longer. The Wolfe's marriage is more a convenience - she owns 51% because spouses can't be forced to testify against each other - stemming from when she was an escort Jack offered to entertain clients until one got out of hand, leading to her shooting him in self-defense.

Jack talks about loving her, but they have zero chemistry and her catting around doesn't hint at much wifely loyalty. Green is also undercut by unflattering makeup and a dull wardrobe which made me wonder out loud whether she had another dress, they were so similar.

The only interesting and original detail was a older woman cop being referred to as "the Nun" who is revealed to also be an actual nun as well as a cop. Whut? And the supposedly whammy twist ending comes from out of nowhere and just seems like a bad joke. Speaking of which, what was the thinking behind running bloopers behind the end credits like it was The Cannonball Run, not a steamy erotic thriller it imagines it was.

Just Play Dead is best as advice to Martin Campbell's career.

Score: 2/10. Skip it. 

"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.

"If These Walls Could Rock" Review

If These Walls Could Rock is a brisk documentary about the legendary Sunset Marquis hotel which was the scene of massive parties and debauchery committed by and reminisced about by a parade of stars including Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Dave Grohl, Simon Le Bon, Roger Daltrey, Billy Gibbons, Nancy Wilson, Gene Simmons, Sheryl Crow, Cyndi Lauper, Slash, Richard Marx, and even Morrissey, who is interviewed in bed with a huge poster of X-Ray Spex signer Poly Styrene next to him.

Running parallel to the rock star antics is the relationship between the founder and builder of the Marquis, George Rosenthal, who opened it in 1963 in the area of the Playboy Club, right as rock & roll became the dominant cultural force, and his son Mark, whose nickname of Marky provided the hotel's name. Because George was both domineering yet inattentive, the hotel became increasingly run down in the Eighties and Nineties, but rockers who sought other accommodations in town often found their antics not appreciated like they were tolerated at the Marquis.

The hotel's general manager also relates how Green Day repeated got banned from the place only to come back a day after the ban's expiration to trash something else, earning another ban, rinse, repeat. While some of the stories are amusing like Keith Richards sauntering by the pool in a Speedo with a pack of smokes and a knife tucked in while holding a pina colada and a beer in both hands, a some of them are just dumb excesses.

As the place evolved, many stars set up residence there including the self-proclaimed Unofficial Mayor of the Sunset Marquis, Billy Bob Thornton, who tells of having sex on an outdoor stairs while a famous actor and his actress wife passed by and that he'll stay there for months despite having a 13,000+ sq. ft. home nearby.

The pace begins to lag in the last third as people clean up their acts and the clientele changes, but over 60 years later the Marquis is still absorbing stories within its walls.

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

"The Runner" Review

The latest loaf of movie content from Amazon Prime Video is The Runner, not to be confused with at least five prior movies with the same title. Starring Gal Gadot (Date Night) stars as Maia Marten, a London prosecutor with a diabetic son. After dropping him off at school, she sets off for a jog before meeting heading to court where a star witness is going to testify against a previously untouchable crime boss.

However, she receives a phone call from a voice that sounds like Jason Statham (Damian Lewis, Homeland) telling and showing her that he has her son, Noah (Rory Wilmot), has given him an extra dose of insulin to put him in a coma and if she doesn't murder the witness within one hour he will die unless glucagon is administered. He orders her to run to the hotel the witness is sequestered and shoot him with the gun he has placed in Noah's backpack and left in a dumpster as proof he has him as if the video call doesn't do as much.

So, off she goes encountering obstacles like being hit by a car and waking up in an ambulance still wearing her phone headset so she can hear the Caller. When she rides the subway (yeah, Underground, I'm American and we fought a war against England to have our own words) to make up lost time, her phone is pickpocketed and she somehow is able to run ahead to get back on the train. Whut? That's the kind of movie this is.

Also to fill time is the Caller taunting her about her life, how she used a sperm donor to have Noah (why is never explained), how her mother murdered her abusive father - or did she? - while goading her to the destination. They even work in that she was a champion pentathlon runner which includes shooting, but there wasn't a single twist that was unexpected and when they flashback at the end to show what really happened, it seems to be for those who were too busy on their phones to pay attention to the hyperkinetic camera and editing work.

There's been a recent uptick of bashing Gal Gadot for her limited thespian skills. (That means acting, not making out with chicks, weirdos.) In a world where Dakota Johnson exists, that's somewhat unfair. Critical Drinker's review really slammed her performance, but I found it wholly adequate. As a real-life mother of four (while fit enough to justify some gratuitous butt shots), she shows affection for her spawnling and seems appropriately sad and stressed. This role requires physical fitness more than anything and as I said, Dakota Johnson.

 Director Kevin Macdonald has a varied filmography including Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland which won Forest Whitaker an Oscar, so this seems a little out of place but he keeps the action frenetic without devolving into Paul Greengrass shaky-cam and nausea-inducing edit fu.

 While The Runner is just another piece of content that will sink into the endless shelves of Prime Video's lousy UX and never be thought of again in a couple of weeks, if there's "nothing else to watch" then a brisk 80-minute (sans credits) jaunt of sweaty Gal Gadot is better than nothing, if barely. 

Score: 5/10. Catch it on Prime Video.

"Motor City" Review

 Netflix reportedly wants the screenplays for their original movies to be dumbed-down for their presumed audience of doomscrollers, who are more focused on their devices than the movie they're supposedly watching, by having characters constantly restating what's going on for the attention deficient. Well, if there was ever an example of NOT doing such a anti-cinematic thing it would be Motor City, a revenge-action flick which is almost entirely devoid of dialog yet doesn't miss it much.

Alan Ritchson (Reacher) stars as John Miller, a parolee who works in a Detroit factory and lives with his waitress girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley, The Secret Life of the American Teenager). His parole officer gives him his discharge and to celebrate he proposes to her. Unfortunately, the drug lord who used to be her boyfriend uses that moment to have crooked cops bash down their door and arrest him for drugs planted in his car which had been stolen then dumped after being loaded with incrimination. Sentenced to prison, she ends up back with the crook, Reynolds (Ben Foster, Pandorum), and Miller plots his revenge.

There are only a handful of understandable dialog lines in the entire movie and none of them are important to the plot, yet director Potsy Ponciroli effectively makes what's happening clear even with flashbacks and intercuts between scenes. A few years back John Woo attempted a very similar trick with Silent Night but in that case the contrivance was annoying and unsuccessful, but here the style, performances, and needle drops make it work. While better, it's still not a great thing but I've added a point for the positively gonzo last act with spectacular fireworks and the grisliest kills. 

As long as I've been a movie reviewer I've taken special umbrage at how inaccurately Detroit is portrayed my movies in a manner they would never allow to happen for NYC or LA. (Four Brothers finale with a confrontation on a lake at Thanksgiving supposedly frozen solid enough to support huge SUVs is a particularly bad example.) For a movie set in 1976-77 where they went through all the trouble to source a lot of period-appropriate cars and do the production design, costumes and hairstyles Seventies-like, the establishing shots of the city show buildings and features that weren't present until much later.

The Ally Detroit Center (formally One Detroit Center) is shown in aerial shots as well in the background of a funeral scene. Ignoring the whole "there are no cemeteries in that area" detail, the filmmakers composited a skyline including the Detroit Center which was not completed until 1993! It's not like they forgot to erase a modern building from location footage; they added something that wasn't there.

Bonus stupidity is showing people leaving the landmark Fox Theater with the modern marque that was added during restoration in 1998 and then updated in 2015 showing the Ramones headlining. The Ramones never played the Fox in 1976 or 1977 and both their Detroit-area performances were opening slots. Especially howl-worthy is the Fox being portrayed as on a narrow one-way side street when it sits on Woodward Avenue, the main artery running from the Detroit River to Pontiac, 27 miles north. Very wide. Not like they show it on a street narrower than 4th Street in Royal Oak where the Royal Oak Music Theater (where the Ramones DID play in 1976) looks.

These goofs are especially weird because Jack White is an executive producer and cameos as a piano player in one scene.

Grousing about local inaccuracies aside, Motor City is a solid watch as long as you commit to watching it on your first screen.

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

"Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing" Review

 If you're nervous about flying already, you'll be downright panicked if you're booked onto one of a couple Boeing models after watching the Netflix original documentary Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, which details how a string of bottom-line obsessed CEOs dismantled the previous culture of safety and quality in favor of outsourcing, inexperienced workers, ignoring quality problems, and retaliating against those who tried to blow the whistle, even after a pair of 737 Max crashes which killed hundreds of passengers and crews.

A sequel to the 2022 Netflix documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (which I didn't even know existed until I mistyped the title of Freefall into Wikipedia) which covered the 737 Max crashes, Freefall focuses on troubles with the 787 line which the bean counters decided would have various sections fabricated all over the world to save money then assemble them in America only to find many things didn't fit and subcontractors didn't observe the same quality standards, not that Boeing was as well. 

The death of Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, who was testifying against his former employer, who'd forced him out after his constant attempts to save his company from cheap bosses is played up as a murder (it was ruled suicide) for drama, but other former and current quality managers also appear to bemoan the crash dive profit chasing has put the firm in.

While it's tempting to read the slant of these documentaries as the usual Leftist attacks on capitalism and the ever-popular "corporate greed" - presented on a streaming platform that keeps jacking up their prices to the point where many are forced to drop it - the reality remains that forgetting that you make a product with the potential to kill hundreds of innocent people at a time and billions rely upon for travel to chase more profit is a sin that needs to be called out and shamed into correction.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Mutiny" Review

 Due to a mistake which made Jason Statham Movie 2026, Mutiny, online through Amazon Prime Video days before it debuted in theaters, it became available for review a couple months earlier than usual. Yay.

Statham stars as Cole Reed, a former cop and elite commando - just once wouldn't it be funny if he was just an average Jason, perhaps a cabbie or dog walker? - who works as the head of security for a Thai billionaire shipping magnate, Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram, brother of British singer-songwriter Tanita Tikaram), who treats Cole like another son due to a previous life-saving incident. However, that track record of protection ends when they are ambushed on the road during an evening drive and Tibu is killed.

Cole learns the assassins were set to ship out on one of the company's cargo vessels, so he assumes the identity of a bald killer he'd killed (because they all look the same) and stows away aboard the Artemis. Also on the ship is Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis, Mercy), a single mother who was planning on flying home to America from Bangkok after finishing a voyage for the company but is ordered to serve on the Artemis because someone killed the crew member she'll need to fill in for.

While prowling the ship, Cole discovers a container in the hold filled with people because why not add some human trafficking to the mix. When Angie discovers Cole, he shows her the container people, but when she alerts Captain Marko Madsen (Roland Møller, Skyscraper) to their presence, she immediately learns the crew is in on the racket and now she's being hunted at sea. She attempts to send mayday which is picked up by an American warship in the area. Will Cole and Angie be able to survive until help arrives and will Cole unravel the conspiracy that led to Tibu's death?

Come on.

If you've seen any Statham movies in the past decade or so you know he's plowing the next rut over from Liam Neeson, churning out increasingly samey movies that all blur together after a while. Not as distinctive as 2024's The Beekeeper and marginally better than 2025's A Working Man, Mutiny is exactly as I billboarded: Jason Statham Movie 2026. Proceed according to your tastes.

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

"I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not" Review

 I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not was the signature intro line to his Weekend Update segments on the very first season of Saturday Night Live as well as this CNN Films documentary about the comedic actor born Cornelius Crane Chase. Recounting his life as a student at Bard College in the Sixties to becoming a writer-performer of the seminal National Lampoon Lemmings stage show to his being hired as a writer for SNL before slipping into the last cast slot and creating Weekend Update, the doc speed-runs through his career and life.

I have to admit to being not much of a fan of Chase and his oeuvre. Whether playing angrily smug in movies like Fletch or hysterically dumb (Vacation movies), I've never worn the "he's a comic genius" goggles most view him with and this doc doesn't really offer much of a counterpoint. If you think he's an a-hole, he lives down to that impression especially when he tries poorly to spin cruel comments he allegedly made towards Terry Sweeney, the first openly-gay cast member of SNL. Other times he claims to have no memory of antics due to a major health crisis he suffered a decade or so ago which had as a side effect memory impairment. Convenient.

Probably the only bits of new info I took from I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not was that when he bailed from SNL after its first season (clearing the way for the much funnier and versatile Bill Murray to replace him) it was just because Hollywood was calling and he wasn't under contract (whoops!), though that was part of it, but rather his then-girlfriend wanted to live in California. (Flying out for the wedding, former colleagues were betting on how long it'd last; they'd divorce in under a year.) With two failed marriages under his belt, the third time was the charm as he met his missus while making 1981's Under The Rainbow and they're still together with three daughters.

If you're more of a fan of Chase's schtick, you may enjoy this somewhat superficial documentary more than I did. Have at it.

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

"Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear" Review

Filmed over a nine year period from 2017 to 2026 (which is why Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, who passed away in 2022, briefly appears), Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear profiles the life and drama of the Blink-182 drummer. From his childhood where his mother died when he was 15 through his rapid ascent in bands due to this monster chops and subsequent descent into such heavy drug use that when he survived a plane crash in 2008 with burns over 2/3rds of his body, doctors had difficulty managing his pain due to his elevated tolerance due to all the drugs he'd taken. In the aftermath of the crash he refused to fly, resorting to taking the Queen Mary to get to Europe for gigs. Most recently, he's best known to non-music fans as Khloe Kardashian's latest husband/baby daddy.

While I'm not a fan of Blink's juvenile mall punk music, I know Barker's regard amongst drummers. I didn't know what all he was doing beyond Blink and how bad his injuries were from the crash, though I knew his fellow crash survivor, DJ AM, struggled with survivor's guilt and fell off the wagon, eventually ODing less than a year later. I had no idea the stylized F logo with a star in it was for his Famous Stars & Straps clothing line. I'd ignored the Kardashian relationship because that entire family is a cancer on society and it's insane that they all got wealthy off Kim banging Brandy's brother on tape. 

For some reason the doc makes it sound like he's still angry about his childhood when he patched up his relationship with his father, has established an enduring musical career, has wonderful children and even began flying again. Little, if anything, is wrong with his life.

While not particularly essential, Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear is a decent basic primer for those unfamiliar with the subject.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on Hulu.

"Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass" Review

 After watching the box office flop, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which grossed only $1.6M on a tiny $3.5M budget, I have to believe that part of its poor showing was the title which probably went on theater ticket boards as Gail Daughtry (which is like Michael Clayton or Jay Kelly) and not something snappy like Celebrity Sex Pass. It's too bad, because like Pizza Movie earlier this year, it's a bonkers, silly comedy treat.

Zoey Deutch stars as Gail Daughtry, a perky, chirpy hairdresser from Kansas who is engaged to her high school sweetheart, Tom (Michael Cassidy, The O.C.). They're due to be married in two weeks, but the long march down the aisle hits a snag when they go to a celebrity book reading - I'm not going to spoil who like the Plex blurb did and isn't in the trailer - and Tom decides to cash in his celebrity sex pass at that time, much to Gail's chagrin as she catches him in the act.

Upset, she agrees to tag along with her co-worker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Smile 2) to LA where a hairstyling convention is going on. She also decides she will settle the score with Tom by finding and boinking her sex pass pick: Jon Hamm. In her quest she teams up with a wannabe talent agent, Caleb (Ben Wang, Karate Kid: Legends); a washed-up paparazzi whose "white whale" is Hamm, Vincent (Ken Marino, who also co-wrote the script); and John Slattery, Hamm's co-star from Mad Men, as they try to get to Hamm so Gail can ride that hog, so to speak.

Also complicating matters are a pair of thugs (Joe Lo Truglio & Mather Zickel) who mistakenly switched briefcases with Gail at the airport and whose boss, Ludovica (Sabrina Impacciatore, The White Lotus S2), really wants its contents back because she has big plans for them.

It's not too hard to pick up on the parallels with The Wizard of Oz - Gale was Dorothy's last name, Gail has sparkly red sneakers and is from Kansas, everyone she meets needs something to fill a hole in their lives and feel only Jon Hamm can provide them - but what elevates Celebrity Sex Pass (let's fix that title too late for them) is just the sheer goofy craziness and "Wait, who?" cameos which it's nice to see the trailer doesn't give away except for one.

Director/co-writer David Wain is probably best known for Wet Hot American Summer  (which I really didn't care for) and its two Netflix sequel series and as a co-founder of The State (never watched it), so fans of his should be an automatic for this and those familiar with his previous casts will know why they show up here. (Seriously, do NOT read the cast list before watching!) I've only seen Role Models of his, but whatever else he's done is irrelevant because he kills it here.

Deutch can be annoying - the missus can't stand her - and the most memorable line in Zombieland: Double Tap is when Emma Stone ask whether they can drop Deutch off at a no-kill shelter, but here she's appropriately adorable and guileless. You want her to go full ham on Hamm. The rest of the cast is fun though the stuff with the goons drags a tad.

Comedies have often been to scared of the woke crybullies to be funny lately, but Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a refreshingly raunchy rebuke to the killjoys and delivers the laughs in spades for those who like when things get randomly wild and crazy. 

Score: 8.5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Soulm8te" Review

After the surprising flop of M3GAN 2.0 killed the once-promising killer robot doll franchise dead in its sophomore outing, also taking collateral damage was the already made Soulm8te (which should be pronounced soul-mate-te) slated for January 2026 release before being removed from the schedule and quietly dumped to streaming eight months later. Was it unfairly punished for another movie's failure? Let's find out. (Spoiler: No.)

After a cold open scene showing an Ultima Robotix sexbot killing a tester (hello, OSHA?), we meet David (David Rysdahl, Fargo S5), an engineer for Canta Robotics, a firm bought by Ultima, who is grieving the recent death of his wife. His supervisor suggests he use the company's ULTI-M8TE AI chatbot as a therapeutic tool and he begins forming a relationship with it (the makers of Her on line 2 for you guys) and then registers to beta test the SOULM8TE android, which he names Sara (Lily Sullivan, Evil Dead Rise, who reminds me of Species star Natasha Henstridge though her bulbous nose tip was distracting).

He merges his ULTI-MATE profile with the bot (the makers of Blade Runner 2049 on line 3), but is disappointed that it all feels...well, robotic, so he proceeds to start hacking her programming to make her more independent and realistic because he's apparently never seen a movie where Very Bad Things happen when you tamper with the code. Of course, he has sex with Sara because she's a hot blonde programmed to love him and the makers of Companion and Subservience are on lines 4 and 5, guys. 

To the surprise of no one except the characters in the movie, Sara becomes more possessive and jealous of David, especially when he starts flirting with his meatbag coworker, Aubrey (Claudia Doumit, The Boys), so she's at risk because hell hath no fury like a jealous fembot scorned who has the ability to fabricate deepfake porn and tear the junk off any man who gets busy with her which raises questions like, "Do Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics exist in this world?" and "Did no one in Ultima's legal department raise a red flag about the liability issues that come with making a product that can tear dicks off?"

I understand we're dealing with trashy trash B-movie stuff where we're supposed to just go with the flow and look at the robo-boobs, but there are ways to handle the material especially when chatbots, social isolation, loneliness, AI and other elements here are coming front and center in the cultural zeitgeist. Fortunately, there are better movies that already handle things: Her and Companion. Watch those instead.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

"The End of Oak Street" Review

It's been a loooooong time since Steven Spielberg has made a decent movie and the Jurassic Park/World series has become tedious and stupid when all we want is dinosaur fun. So, it's kind of weird that the best Spielberg and/or dinosaur flick we've had in ages turns out to be the not-great-titled The End of Oak Street from writer-director David Robert Mitchell whose sex horror flick It Follows was a cult fave.

Set in July 1982, we meet the Platt family during a neighborhood block party. Parents Greg (Ewan McGregor, Trainspotting) and Denise (Anne Hathaway, Ella Enchanted) are experiencing marital tension due to his work or lack thereof and she is secretly writing an semi-autobiographical novel in the basement. Son Brian (Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth) is getting in trouble, smoking and broke a boy's arm and daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella, My Old Ass) is a Carl Sagan fangirl reading books about astronomy. (The least believable detail in a movie about dinosaurs.) Things are simmering under the surface of suburbia.

Weird things begin to happen - a strange plant (Audrey III?) appears in a neighbor's yard; Brian sees bright lights flashing; a huge pile of poop appears in the next door neighbor's yard who thinks it's a prank by Brian - until one night the power and water goes out. The next morning they realize something has gone really amiss when they realize freaking DINOSAURS are roaming their neighborhood. As they try to flee they discover the road just ends with them at the top of a cliff and the surrounding looking like the Jurassic Era. As the neighbors begin getting eaten by the dino predators, the family has to pull together to try and figure out what happened and what can be done to escape. Dino hijinks ensue.

What Mitchell does well is keep the pacing taut, but not hectic. Clocking in at under 100 minutes in an era where 150-180 minutes seems standard, the movie doesn't expend superfluous time setting things up and getting things moving. The hide-and-seek presentation of the dinos is also smart as well as probably cost effective, keeping the VFX heavy film to a relatively bargain $85M before promo, etc. He also deploys some split-diopter shots that make All the President's Men look Little League.

The characters feel sufficiently fleshed out though McGregor's Greg could've used a little more explanation as he veers close to being just another failed weak man whose suffering girlboss wife has to compensate for. But as events transpire, their relationship solidifies as they appreciate what they do when necessary. The running bit about Brian's dog, Starbuck (named after the original Battlestar Galactica series and not the coffee chain), disappearing then reappearing as a doggo ex machina is a tad weak and causes Brian and Audrey to get suicidally stupid at times to facilitate things. (Maybe I just don't get it being a cat person. BTW, cats don't fare too well here. Boo.) There's also a quibble or five to be had about the resolution which seems to believe you can order and get a pizza delivered in under 20 minutes which even Domino's didn't offer. 

Earlier this year Speilberg flopped with the alien movie Disclosure Day which I've heard enough about to be especially unenthused about watching it and there really hasn't been a good Jurassic World movie in 2015 and that wasn't that great but the three subsequent sequels have been varying degrees of mediocre to bad. It's into this environment that The End of Oak Street steps and manages to succeed where Spielberg and his dinosaur creations have fallen short. Not a life-changing experience, but a nice throwback to classic escapist movie fare. And any movie with Yummy Girl (Anne Hathaway) as a suburban MILF shooting dinosaurs can't be bad!

Score: 8.5/10. Catch a matinee.

"My Grandfather Charles Manson" Review

As far as true crime documentary premises go, My Grandfather Charles Manson has a heck of a hook: The father of filmmaker Sophia Maddox (who co-directs with Alexandra Orton), Daniel Arguelles, who never knew who his father was, discovers via a half-brother who finds him via Ancestry.com that their father is Charles Manson, thus Sophia is Manson's granddaughter. (Free Band Name!) Wondering whether this connection explains her father's moods or her creativity, she embarks on a quest to research the origins of the notorious cult leader upon whose orders seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, were murdered in 1969.

Using her genetic relationship, he travels to Indiana, Manson's childhood home and where his life as a career inmate in reform schools and prisons, subjected to brutal corporal punishment as well as rape - both as victim and perpetrator - began twisting him into the infamous figure he became. This also begins to hint at forming an apologist case for Manson, that he's a victim of the system so it's really the system to blame. Uhhhhhhhh... She also interviews former members of the Manson Family along with a surviving prosecutor of the case and an author who met Manson hundreds of times and wrote about him. 

While some of the backstory stuff is illuminating, the bulk of the film consists of Sophia crying while talking to an unseen therapist as she "processes her feelings" and navel-gazes about What It All Means. Dad, who had no idea his mother had hooked up with Manson in the late-1950s for a one/two-night stand or why she was beating him with a lamp cord when Manson and Fam were arrested, reacts especially badly to what she's doing, storming out of an interview he sat in on and cutting off his daughter, blocking her phone number, prompting more crying.

I've always had an aversion to documentarians who put themselves in front of the camera as if they're the subject (e.g. Michael Moore's slovenly obese presence in his fabricated scenarios) but considering Sophia is as much of the subject as Manson, it's inescapable. But it's also meaningless when it's not being annoying. Where's her mother in her backstory? What's the deal with the footage of dad screaming at her in the backseat which initially appears to be part of the current drama but then seems to be from her teenage years?

Most baffling is how after 1-3/4 hours of crying and obsessing over how she will be perceived as Manson's granddaughter, she decides to reclaim her identity by changing her surname from Arguelles, which was the name of Daniel's adoptive father, to Maddox, which was Manson's mother's maiden name (Manson was his stepfather). That's right - after agonizing about what it means to he the descending of a monster, she ditches her father's name for her grandmother's. What a self-absorbed brat.

Could My Grandfather Charles Manson been better if it had been directed solo by Orton so that Sophia's constantly being the center of things been more understandable and potentially better contextualized? Perhaps. But as it stands, like most self-obsessed Zoomer twits, Sophia mistakes her feels for her importance. 

"A Toxic Love Story" Review

 One of the few things Netflix is fairly consistent with quality-wise is their original documentaries, especially their true crime ones. While the Oscar-nominated The Perfect Neighbor and The Crash had their issues, they were compelling fare and the "Whoa!" factor definitely bumps up a notch with their latest, A Toxic Love Story. 

US Marshal Ian Diaz had met and fallen for Angela Connell in January 2016 after meeting her at a Starbucks. They were married within weeks and she was pregnant with twins shortly thereafter. However, Angela began getting increasingly threatening emails from someone calling herself "LilithIsTruth" threatening her for stealing the sender's life with Ian, threatening to have Angela raped and killed. 

They believed Ian's ex-fiance, Michelle Hadley, who'd left in August 2015 the condo they'd purchased together after they'd broken up, was the sender. Matters escalate when an ad appears on Craig's List, supposedly from Angela, seeking random men to participate in her rape fantasy, encouraging them to show up at the condo and force themselves upon her. One respondent who went to the condo then chickened out because the setup seemed hinky is interviewed, but Angela soon calls the cops again - they had made repeated reports about the emails and gotten a restraining order again Michelle - reporting that a masked man had attacked her in her garage, but left. With this latest transgression, Michelle is arrested and tossed in slam with a million dollar bail. Sensationalistic media coverage ensues.

 But the story takes a turn when we're introduced to an ex-boyfriend of Angela's who recounts a wild tale of his relationship with her which seemed to be repeating with Ian. This leads to a series of revelations about Angela and the wrap-up of the story only halfway through the doc's runtime which made me wonder what more was to be told. Plenty, it turns out as Michelle steps into the spotlight to explain her side of the story which gets pretty crazy.

 It's best to go into A Toxic Love Affair as cold as possible because the initial twists are very easy to guess - I'm pretty sure Netflix rewrote the description on the listing because it gave it away and was updated between noticing it was available and watching a day later - but director Alexandra Lacey cleverly lays out the story for maximum WTFness. However, with Ian and Angela refusing to participate, we never truly understand their motivations in this clusterfark and a couple of final revelations raise more questions that go unanswered.

Still, A Toxic Love Story delivers what it promises in the title in a tidy package. 

Score: 7.5/10. Catch it on Netflix.

"Wardriver" Review

Wardriver is the new Paramount+ original streaming movie. It is quite terrible and bad and boring and stupid and you shouldn't watch it. Why? Well, I guess I should say something to justify this, not that it matters.

A rough-looking Dane DeHaan (Chronicle) plays Cole, a wardriver, which is someone who goes around looking for open internet access points, in this case so he can steal company payroll using a magic computer program which just hacks things instantly. He is laundering his proceeds through the Dark Web, dealing with an anonymous user named "RTOMMASI" (half-point for the L.A. Confidential reference) who sends Cole's cut back in the form of cash cards. To show that Cole isn't a really bad guy, he tosses a card in the mailbox of the single mother across the street. Awwwww.

One day he gets beat up by Oscar (Mamoudou Athie, Archive 81), the doorman for a restaurant Cole ripped off who shows up at his door and forces himself inside. He says that a young woman who comes to the place with her father mentioned she had over $800,000 in her checking account and he wants Cole to steal it all or else he'll rat him out for the restaurant payroll theft.

Cole does as he's told because he's a little bitch, but then starts looking into his target and finds that Sarah (Sasha Kelly, Supergirl from The Flash) wasn't coming with her father, but that she was a side piece and that the money belonged to her sugar daddy boyfriend, Bilson (Jeffrey Donovan, Burn Notice), and that he'll hurt her if she doesn't return it. Trying to make good, he proceeds to skim off a bunch of ATM terminals - because ripping off a bunch of random strangers to save some chick you robbed is quite chivalrous - and try to put it back and make right. 

He doesn't get it all, but goes to leave a note with instructions how to access the hundreds of thousands he did nab and she catches him so of course they start cozying up to one another. She then proposes they collaborate with Oscar to engineer a heist at Bilson's house where he has $3M in cash. Meanwhile, his Dark Web pals are starting the threaten to expose him. Commence with a whole bunch of double crossing and scams that you'll see coming from a mile away and then almost everybody ends up dead, so happy ending, I guess.

I should have known it would be terrible because it was written by Daniel Casey, the guy who typed F9: The Fast Saga (aka the second worst Furry Fastness movie, the one with the Fiero in space). He is so much of a hack he can't even bother giving any of the characters any reasonable details to root for. We know nothing about Cole other than he's a hacker, lives alone, vapes constantly, and chews on lollipop sticks. Does he have a family? He doesn't want to talk about it, meaning Casey didn't want to think something up. Why does Cole's Dark Web pals threaten him? What happened to honor among thieves?

The howling stupidity of this flick is captured by a scene where Cole is trying to retrieve a skimmer from an ATM in a gas station convenience store. While he's trying to dislodge it a pair of cops come in for donuts or whatever and he's behaving so hinky that one of the cops begins to pay attention. He gets the skimmer off before the cop walks over and he is able to escape without being stopped which really speaks highly of Utah law enforcement. 

We're supposed to believe this high-tech Robin Hood is an elite hacker (he has a password cracker called Brute Force which decodes passwords within seconds!) who mitigates his crimes by tossing cash cards to the single mom, but does nothing but stupid things which constantly have him under someone else's thumb, but when confronted with the risk of capture can't muster the neurons to, oh I dunno, WALK AWAY FROM THE ATM AND COME BACK LATER WHEN THE COPS ARE GONE!!!!

Unlike the Temu Heat knockoff that was Crime 101 (5/10, review tk), Wardriver's sole purpose is to send up another red flag about hiring Daniel Casey to type your movie, yet it seems he must have kompromat on half of Hollyweird because he's got a LOT of work lined up with people who should know better. Doubly horrifying, he graduated from my high school. Ugh.

Score: 2/10. Skip it.

"Fuze" Review

 Fuze is a movie so inconsequential it's a mystery why it was made. The setup as broached by the trailer is that an unexploded bomb, presumably from WWII, is found at a London construction site. A military ordinance disposal team lead by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass) orders a wide area surrounding the bomb to be evacuated and cordoned off.

Due to a main electrical line running under the site, power to the area is also cut which is very helpful to the crew of bank robbers including Sam Worthington (Avatar) and Theo James (Divergent series) who remain in an apartment, emerging after the evacuation to bring out prepositioned equipment to break through the basement wall into the adjoining bank.

 Overwatching the bomb effort is Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Loki), a police superintendent looking at screens for traces of untoward activity in the cordoned zone, sending in officers when something pops up. Eventually the robbers escape and the manhunt is on and if you've seen one caper film you should be able to predict most of the supposed twists that occur. Even the setup raises red flags as we're expected to believe a bomb has been laying there undiscovered just under the surface for 80 years.

While the missus thought it was fine enough and kept her awake, I found it all flat and predictable with a superfluous coda that sets up the cabal involved. The only real surprise what one death, not that it mattered other than the lack of plot armor it reveals.

 Score: 4/10. Skip it.