Tiny Flash Gordon

The problem with Marvel trying to widen the scope after the universe effecting events of Thanos and his technicolour dream glove is that the more you explore "different" realms the more obvious it becomes that everything is basically the same. The multiverse of "madness" turned out to be the universe of "quite similar but the traffic lights are upside down" and here the unknowable quantum realm, where physics and time don't exist in any way we understand, is just another alien world.

To be fair, the alien world is a pretty cool one. There are funky creatures and weird characters, giving things a 50's B movie or Flash Gordon vibe, complete with appropriate wacky visuals. Sadly all this stuff is rushed, not really giving the chance to take in the view or enjoy fun moments, including a cameo everyone would surely love to have seen more of. You get the feeling an earlier phase of the MCU would have leaned into the "Lost in Space" of it all a bit more but here we have to move quickly on to the Super High Stakes. These involve Jonathon Major's Kang, played in a reserved style that makes him menacing but a little out of sync with the rest of the movie. Given he is from another dimension that may be the point. Kang's sidekick MODOK is a fun take on a ridiculous villian but the departure may divide comic book fans.

On the hero front its good to see Michelle Pfeiffer given a substantial role and it looks as if a grown up Cassie Lang is intented to be a fixture going forward but Evangeline Lilly has such a reduced role it seems pointless keeping "The Wasp" as part of the title. Micheal Douglas is enjoyable when on screen but kept mostly to the periphery of proceedings and while he is having fun you can tell he isn't exactly massively invested in whats going on. Leading man Paul Rudd is, well, Paul Rudd. He brings the charm and liability to Scott Lang you've come to expect. He manages this despite being stuck with a pretty stupid character arc where he begins the film suddenly averse to helping people for no well defined reason.

This is symptomatic of some fairly lazy writting in parts, with some of the most by the numbers dialogue yet seen in a Marvel movie. Fortunately there is enough visual and stylistic creativity on display to make the film more than watchable, if certainly no Giant Man of the genre.

7 hyper intelligent insects out of 10 ants.

Comments

Icky Ice Cream

Note before the review: It has emerged that generative AI featured in the making of Ice Cream Man and the filmmakers appear to have been less than 100% honest with how much it was used. I have reviewed the film as I saw it and have not taken the way it was made into account. If you (understandably) want nothing to do with a movie that used generative AI then give this one a miss. "The kids have gone fucking insane" screams a father just before his son and daughter, having already mangled his hand in the garbage disposal, set fire to him. How you feel about the idea of that scene pretty much tells you what you will think about the whole of Ice Cream Man, the latest bloodstained offering from gore hound Eli Roth. The premise is a basic one: a quite overtly sinister ice cream man comes to town and, the day after he hands out his freezer based treats, any child who consumed them turns into little murder bots and begin dismembering the local adults. A couple of kids who didn...

Eight is the Loneliest Number of Legs

Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into cinemas to deliver a much needed box office shot in the arm to the once invincible MCU and prove that the wall crawler is Marvel's most enduring hero. It delivers on the Spiderman feeling but loses steam as the 2 hour 20 minute runtime rolls on. Since everyone he cares about is either dead or has forgotten him after the events of No Way Home, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has been focusing solely on his Spider-Man duties. As a result, he has more or less eradicated organised crime in New York and is idolised by the city populace. On the downside, he is devoid of real human contact apart from phone calls to a detective and a grudging pseudo-friendship with gun toting vigilante Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), aka The Punisher. He still pines after his lost relationships with MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) and it seems his isolation is beginning to have a physical effect on him. This couldn't come at a worse time, with a new threat that can s...

Summer of 75

Tony opens with a quote from the late chef, and subject of this semi-biopic, Anthony Bourdain's memoir. It goes: "I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking." He's not wrong. The Tony (he's much too cool to let people call him Anthony) we meet at the beginning of the film is an insufferable blowhard. He tells anyone who'll listen about his great future as a writer, despite seemingly having an aversion to doing any actual writing. He assumes the panel awarding a prestigious scholarship is too stupid to see his pitch is nonsense bravado. He condescendingly explains the meaning of what he thinks are obscure words, despite not always knowing himself. While he does change over the course of the film, it's hard to map an actual character journey. That's because more than a biopic or chef's origin story, Tony is a summer vibes hangout movie. The story take...

Let's Do The Timewarp

The plot of The End of Oak Street sees an early 80s suburban family, and their entire neighbourhood suddenly transported back to prehistoric times. There's some talk of solar flares and time bubbles by way of an explanation but it's all nonsense in service of one central idea: dinosaurs in suburbia. Turns out this idea is so good it not only sustains the film but leaves you wondering why nobody has done it before. The central family consists of Anne Hathaway's frustrated novelist Denise Platt and her pizza delivering husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), along with their children Audrey (Daisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). While Dad and the kids are exactly the type of characters you would have expected to see in an 80s family adventure but Denise is a more modern female lead. She wants to achieve more than simply being a mother and is unhappy with her simple suburban life. Add in the fact she plays the realist when things kick off and her constant negative vibe can mean ...

The Menu Serves up a Macabre Treat

The menu is a squid ink black culinary satire that skewers the sycophants and disrespectful tourists that steal the joy from being a high end chef (or any form of artist) while also being a three Michelin star dark comedy and acting as a power fantasy of sorts for those in the service industry. The film centres around Anya Taylor-Joy's Margot as she accompanies potential boyfriend Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) to an island to eat at the most exclusive of restraunts. The restraunt, and indeed whole island, are presided over by Chef Slowik who is idolised by his diners and inspires complete devotion from his cult-like staff. The customers comprise the worst, but all too familiar, "enjoyers" of fine dining. There's a hilariously self-indulgent critic, some wall street bro's there for the bragging rights, a washed up, name dropping celebrity and an ultra rich couple with no appreciation for the privilege they enjoy. Perhaps most ridiculous of all is Tyler himself, a gate ke...

1 Conflicted Man

Say what you want about some of Clint Eastwood's recent output, the man delivers classic filmmaking and Juror #2 is no different. A cleanly shot and straight to the point courtroom drama about morals and justice, it feels like it could have been made anytime in the last seventy years. Nicholas Hoult plays Justin Kemp, a four years sober alcoholic who is summoned for jury duty. He'd rather be at home with his heavily pregnant wife but is happy to do his duty until a slight wrinkle emerges; a man is on trial for the murder of his girlfriend but Justin may well of killed her in a hit and run a year ago. Knowing the accused is innocent, but not fancying spending the rest of his own life in jail, he tries to convince his fellow jurors to return a not guilty verdict while not implicating himself in the death. A task made harder on both ends by Toni Collette's hotshot prosecutor, determined to land the conviction that will secure her the District Attorney position, and fellow jur...

Fortune Favours the Rich

For a comedy, Good Fortune paints one hell of a bleak (and therefore, let's be honest, probably accurate) picture of the current iteration of the American Dream. Money begets money and a life of cold plunges, ridiculously expensive watches and "business meetings" that consist of all expenses paid meals with your mates. Meanwhile, hard work begets nothing but more hard work in a gig economy not even an Angel can help you navigate. Said Angel is Keanu Reeves's Gabriel, a small winged minor deity who is in charge of preventing people from crashing as a result of texting while driving. He is desperate to make a more meaningful impact so, against the instruction of his boss, he decides to try and save a lost soul. He spots Arj (Aziz Ansari), a down on his luck, wannabe documentary maker, scraping by doing odd jobs via apps and sleeping in his car. When Arj is fired by wealthy tech bro Jeff for using the company credit card, he hits rock bottom and Gabriel attempts to inspi...

The Grey Advert

This Russo's action flick has all the ingredients of a top tier spy thriller but will leave you feeling like you've just watched an extended trailer for other films they want to make in the world of the "Grey Man". Ryan Gosling plays Sierra 6 (yes the Sierras are basically 00 agents with the twist they all used to be criminals) and is ideal casting as the sort of ass kicking man of few words this type of film is built around. All the archetypes you would expect are also present and played well by a stellar cast. Chris Evans is unhinged antagonist, Billy Bob Thornton is retired mentor, Rege-Jean Page is crooked politicain and Ana De Armas is the good agent caught in the middle. The plot is just as cookie cutter, involving Gossling being hunted by the people he used to work, computer files nobody was meant to see and hostages needing rescued. Of course, all these things are tropes for a reason and done well (like they are here) equal an enjoyable movie. And the Gre...

Gimme Shelter

The start of another year means it's time for the annual "Jason Statham is a retired killing machine trying to live a quiet life but being forced to start stacking obituaries" movie. The typically nondescript title of this year's offering is Shelter and Stath's former special forces badass is called Michael Mason. When the British government agency that he used to drop bodies for comes calling at his remote Scottish lighthouse he is forced to take action, something that is complicated by the presence of a young orphan girl named Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach). While our protagonist and his reluctant charge tear across the countryside, Naomi Ackie (criminally underused here) and Bill Nighy (putting in just enough effort to get by) scheme against each other at Spy HQ. Jason Statham movies can essentially be judged on three criteria; Does he get to do cool action? Are the bad guys formidable enough? Is the plot and dialogue entertainingly cheesy rather than just e...

2023 at the Cinema

Its the start of a new year which means it's time to put some movies in their place. This is not a definitive list of the best films of 2023, only things I saw in the cinema are eligible (sorry Killers of the Flower Moon) so if you're wondering why your favourite/most hated flick isn't on here it's because I didn't see it on the big screen. Also, I reserve the right to have a completely different opinion about any and all of the entries in a weeks time. 50. The Enforcer Tedious, no action "thriller" about a criminal debt collector and his trainee street tough. Not sure if this snoozefest began with aspirations of being a no nonsense Taken clone or a serious redemption story but a plot driven by coincidence, awful dialogue and a 99 cents aesthetic make it feel like something from the depths of Amazon Prime rather than a cinema release. No idea how they wrangled Antonio Banderas into appearing in such a damp squib. 49. Saw X After attempting a detective m...

Dan Says its Alright

Search This Blog