Dan Says its Alright

  Fist Fight is a 2017 comedy where Charlie Day's mild minored teacher finds himself scheduled to fight his bad ass colleague Ice Cube. I'm always here for a gruff Ice Cube performance but Day's character is an annoying whiner and you wish Cube would just hurry up and spark him out. There's also a cringeworthy side plot involving a female teacher essentially grooming a high school student that makes the film feel way more than seven years old. Mission Impossible III is the third instalment in the franchise and is another completely different film. JJ Abrams bounces into the director chair meaning the film is zippy and technically precise but lacking the stylistic flourish of its predecessor. Where as the first two films offer a snapshot of their time, this feels much more modern and is less interesting for it. The entry I have enjoyed least so far but still a solid actioner with a show stealing turn from Philip Seymour Hoffman. A group of American tourists make the cl...

  Argylle is further proof that Mathew Vaughn is a director of style. You can always rely on his films to have some visual flair and stylish action sequences. How good the films actually are can vary wildly and Argylle is pretty much slap bang in the middle of his filmography quality wise. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Elly Conway, a writer of spy fiction who is so good at predicting espionage antics that her books have actually described the real antics of a shady renegade group of agents who know want to abduct her to gain the inside track on a missing computer drive that could expose them. Trying to keep her out of their clutches, and recover the drive himself, is good guy spy Sam Rockwell.  The movie is actually a fairly different from the one many people may have expected based on the trailers. Henry Cavill is in the film as square haired super spy Argyll (along with his even more musclebound sideman John Cena), but only as part of Elly's thoughts. This mainly boils down to a...

  The Nun 2 is a weak follow up to a weak film. Has a couple of somewhat interesting visual flourishes so is slightly better than it's predecessor but that is a subterranean bar to clear. Plot is pointless and exists only to fill time between the scares, which would be fine if said scares weren't so lame. The Conjuring franchise is seriously patchy but as long as even the rubbish entries keep bringing home the bacon we're gonna keep getting them.    The Players is a new Netflix rom-com, although it's light on both romance and comedy. Centres on a group of friends whose lives seemingly revolve around helping each other con people into sleeping with them. The lead character being female and one of the crew being bisexual doesn't cover the whiff of early 2000's, although it has neither the raunch or the banter of comedies of that era. What it does have is people in their late thirties talking like frat bros and being so unlikable you'll be annoyed they get the...

  The Iron Claw is a heavy film. Zac Efron's body is heavy with muscle. His character, Kevin Von Elrich, is heavy with the weight of family expectations. Come the end of the film his heart is heavy with loss. A jolly couple of hours in the cinema this is not but it is very watchable and notable as an eye catching debut from writer/director Sean Durkin and for some top notch performances. The film is based on the true story of the Von Elrich brothers. In addition to Kevin there's Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson) and Mike (Stanley Simmons).  Their father Fritz took wrestling so seriously that he changed his family name to that of his character but was never able to capture the most coveted titles and demands that his sons either finish what he started or achieve sporting excellence in some other way. He holds no truck with the old adage that you shouldn't play favourites with your kids, happily telling them what order he ranks them in, with potential Olym...

  The Holdovers sees director Alexander Payne re-team with star Paul Giamatti some nineteen years on from Sideways. It was worth the wait. Set in 1970, Giamatti plays cantankerous private school teacher Paul Hunham. Prickly and isolated, Hunham's only real joy in life is dropping the hammer on the college dreams of privileged brats so when he is left in charge of the children stuck in school over Christmas neither he or said kids are best pleased. The film focuses on his relationship with pupil Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a wayward teen one exclusion away from military school and a likely trip to Vietnam. Also staying over is Mary (an astonishing performance from Da'Vine Joy Randolph) the head cook facing her first Christmas since the death of her son.  What follows is very much the story you would expect, enemies learning to understand and respect each other and lost people helping each other find their way. While you may have seen this this before, seldom has it been ...

  Baghead sees Freya Allan inherit a dilapidated old bar from her estranged father (Peter Mullan) thus becoming the unwitting guardian of an undead witch holed up in the basement. Not an ideal scenario but the fact the witch can temporarily bring people back to life (if only for two minutes) and people are prepared to pay good money for a final farewell to their loved ones, posses a conundrum for Allan's broke and homeless character. Its fairly obvious the Baghead is one of those horror movies adapted from a breakout short (this seems to be the de facto way to get a horror movie made these days) and as such it has a provenly solid concept but faces the challenge of stretching this out to an hour and a half. It succeeds in some ways better than others. Filling in the plot has proven to be a struggle, with the writers never getting much further than the set up. Everything from there on relies on contrivance and stupid character decisions to drive things forward. There is an attempt ...

  In The Beekeeper Jason Statham is a beekeeper, someone who keeps bees. He is also a retired Beekeeper, a quadruple badass special agent who acts outside the law to keep society running properly. When the elderly lady he rents a barn from gets internet scammed to death he goes on a killing spree, starting with the call centre fraudsters before punching, shooting and vehicular homiciding his way to the big wigs in Washington. The Stath often doesn't get the respect he deserves as Hollywoods most versatile action star. He can do the shooting stuff, the driving stuff, the fighting stuff and look credible doing it in anything from lower budget crime capers to polished tent pole actioners, selling everything from gritty revenge to glossy heroics. The Beekeeper is slap bang in his wheelhouse and teaming up with ultra macho film maker David Ayer is a natural fit. In fact, its a wonder they haven't worked together before. The film is exactly what the trailers show it to be, a mythica...