It’s almost impressive how a movie can be as absurd as Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, while at the same time being a fairly enjoyable thrill ride. If you can set aside the oh-so-numerous plot holes, inability to stay true to its own logic, and a plot that relies on things happening because the movie needs them to, it’s, at the very least entertaining. From a top level though, it’s fairly obvious that the Jurassic movies are now just another Sharknado with better actors and bigger budgets.
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While the first movie was about so much more than what it was about, an indictment of Bush-era politics and the war on education, Incredibles 2 manages to capture the same adventure and delight of the first movie, without giving much attention to the deeper layers. Thankfully, with writer-director Brad Bird back at the helm, the movie is visually fascinating, hilarious, wonderfully performed, and fairly constant entertainment rush for its seemingly brief run time.
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There’s an inherent joy at the heart of Tag, a movie about a group of friends who have been playing the game for thirty years, which is based on a true story. The bonds between the group of friends are honest and heartfelt, even as they violently slap and punch each other to see who is next to be it. And while that sweetness is nice in a field generally dominated by cynicism and aggressive negativity, it’s not enough to carry a movie short on actual story, well-developed characters and anything really beyond the premise.
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Stylistically, it’s an interesting mashup between a thoughtful heist film and your basic documentary, but American Animals, while entertaining, doesn’t necessarily deliver on both fronts. While detailing the story of a group of college friends who rob their library of extremely rare books, the film covers the bases of what happened but doesn’t delve deeply enough into the why of it all.
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Horror, as a genre, has become rote, all about jump scares, gore, and a by the numbers approach to storytelling to ensure enough of the central cast is alive for future installments. Hereditary thankfully, and gloriously, eschews most norms of the typical horror flick, while still existing in the field, and upping whatever metric is used to measure things on a scale of disturbing to nightmare fuel.
I really wish when they make these gender-swapped remakes of movies, they would at least make them good to shut up the sexist whiners who think the female version is traipsing over some sacred ground. But like Ghostbusters before it, Ocean’s 8 is a collection of great actresses doing mediocre things in a movie completely unworthy of them, based on a previous movie that didn’t really need a rehash.
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Right off the bat, I can say that Solo was much better than I expected, I just didn’t expect very much. While entertaining, watching the space heist has an extra jolt of thrilling, it’s basically a pointless endeavor that is ultimately the answer to questions that weren’t worth asking. What exactly is the Kessel run? Where does Han’s last name actually come from? How did Han come to own the Millennium Falcon? I wasn’t excited to see Solo, and through no fault of my own I saw it twice, but I’m glad it was interesting. I’m just beginning to understand what people are saying in regards to superhero fatigue. As much as I’m enjoying the recent run of Star Wars movies, maybe a little more space between space epics is warranted.
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excellent awkward 