Reviews

How did this crap even get made? Maybe I don't understand british humor, or slang, but that shouldn't be a requirement to watch a movie. Usually, with the aid of captions, I can suss out what the slang means even if I can't understand the accent. I managed to watch about 40 minutes of this before angrily shutting it off. Wooden lines being delivered by robotic actors. Stultifyingly boring. I'm sure there's a whisper of a plot in there somewhere but since it took 40 minutes for the macguffin flashy drive to make its appearance and disappearance, I couldn't believe that there was anything worthwhile coming down the pike. I doubt the script ran longer than 50 pages, as the one-line-at-a-time dialog from the 1st eight characters barely account for three typewritten pages. Boring. Lackluster. Waste of time. Made me wish I could punch both Jenn & George & stuff a sock in Simon Callow's posh mouth.

Don't beat me up because I don't consider Guy Ritchie film royalty. If I think of him at all, I remember that he used to be married to Madonna, which doesn't earn him any brownie points either. All these 9 and 10 star reviews have me questioning if they were written by family and employees.

So. I have to watch this with captions on because I can't understand all the mumbled dialog, and still the British slang is taking me out of the film. The humor attempts are falling flat, and the music is loud, awful, and overpowering. I've almost made it through the 2nd episode but won't bother going further. The whole story is just too stupid. Might've worked as a standalone 2 hr movie, but 8 episodes of characters making really stupid decisions over and over is ridiculous.

14 minutes in, DNF. Honest to God, I don't know what is the worst part of this crapfest. The jarring robotic beep beep beep signifying some sort of technology was being used? SC's Scottish-Brooklynese accent? The prison therapy circle jerk? Then, because none of that was bad enough, dump Dyan Cannon into the pot and give it a good stir. To be honest, had I looked at the cast list first and seen her name, I would have immediately passed on this flick. I detest her voice, and too many people lied to her when they said she could act. I barely made it through the ridiculous moaning and groaning of fake s*x. Almost bailed at the commercial break, decided to wait a tad longer. Nope. Alan King as mafia boss & more of eardrum- rupturing beeping and I'm done.

I get it... you want someone to read & like your review and you figure you'll get more attention if you click the button to add the spoiler header. But, dammit, if someone WANTS to read a REAL spoiler review to help understand the film, they're gonna be pissed because all you did was post your boring, unhelpful opinion. So stop being a jerk.

Now that I'm done ranting, here's my "no spoilers" review. It's a decent enough movie, the characters were well cast, the house was cool & creepy, I even jumped once. Fifteen minutes in, I knew how it would end. It's been done before, but the getting there was worth the watch.

I knew going in it was going to be hokey. All the clichés were present in the synopsis. So, my biggest confusion centers around where in the hell is Tomahawk Lake supposed to be? I was raised in WI, so I'm familiar with how a normal Midwest accent sounds. Aside from the main family, pretty much everyone else sounds like Beverly Hillbillies meets Deliverance. Barry Corbin raised the bar on "over the top", good for chuckles. The music score is typical 80's TV cheesey synthesizer keyboard, a few strings added to tell us something spooky is about to happen. No spoilers here, you'll figure it out. But, yeah, Gerald McRaney in a wetsuit. Yum.

How do I get one of those jobs where the movie producers & backers pay you to give 9s & 10s on Imdb?? This is total dreck. It's like a thesaurus for profanity. I get that it is/was intended to be a parody but it misses every mark. WHY is cussing up a blue streak supposed to be funny? I can cuss pretty artistically myself, but I use this skill in situations that call for it. These characters couldn't put a 10 word sentence together without 9 of them being a profanity. It's not funny. There is no acting skill required, just the ability to shriek and cuss louder than the crappy background soundtrack. Hard pass, 45 minutes was 40 too many.

Claire Danes and her floppy annoying hair was my first aggravation. Gere's choppy dialog. Constant jump cuts and light flashes and weird over saturated colors. I spent the first 20 minutes trying to figure out what Gere's character was supposed to be, a cop? FBI? Parole officer? Still don't know. Which means, I don't know what Danes was supposed to be either. So the 2 of them are bouncing around, from office to car to diner to office to crime scene to wherever...Danes acting like a vapid cheerleader and Gere acting like he's guilty of something and angry about it. By the time I got to where they're standing on opposite sides of a railway crossing with a train passing between them, my eyes hurt. I quit. I have no idea what this movie was about other than that a girl was kidnapped & Gere is haunted by a previous kidnapping. And I don't care. This mess isn't fit to watch.

On the entertainment hand, I found the movie to be pretty well cast and scripted, a "feel good" movie with a few tugged heartstrings. Though the actors' ages jibe poorly with the actual characters' ages at the time of the events pictured, the cast was still pretty believable. The actor portraying Lonnie was too old for the character but it was a minor distraction.

On the factual side (since the movie identifies as documentarial in nature), I feel like the movie whitewashed its main characters into a ministry of "all are welcome, open heart, open doors" when that isn't quite true. Evangelical Pentacostal at the root, faith-healing, speaking in tongues, anti LGBTQ, association with Billy Graham Crusades, Southern Baptist Convention and some pretty right-leaning messages broadcast via mega churches and the Trinity Broadcasting Station leave me convinced, as usual, that the real reason churches in general continue to proliferate is to generate wealth for a few at the top of the pyramid and keep the sheep in the audience hypnotized by lulling messages.

Do some research on Chuck Smith, Lonnie Frisbee, and Greg Laurie, as well as Harvest Christian Fellowship and Harvest Crusades. This movie leaves a lot out of the real history of Chuck & the kids.

Watchable, but with a spoonful of salt.

*For the record, I'm an old white lady who walked away from a Pentacostal church as a teenager and, after decades of searching for a spiritual home, find myself happily identifying as agnostic. Go ahead and come at me, I'm too old to give a crap.

MAYBE if I understood German and could watch it without American accented English audio. MAYBE if the dubbing from German to English had been done by actual English speaking German actors so I could keep my head in the story. The dubbing just doesn't work & is too distracting. Additionally, it's as if the dubbing actors were reading off a script without any knowledge at all of the film. They're just delivering lines without the correct emotion for the scene. This is so bad. I figure any review scored over a 5 is phony. Quentin Tarantino ought to be pissed at all the folks mentioning his name in any comparison to this mess. 30 minutes and I'm out. This is so awful it's not even funny.

The premise sounded interesting, "what if...??" Started slow, had some really unnecessary characters, probably just to fill time. I was annoyed and grossed out by the whole bossa nova - dinner scene & had to fast-forward through most of it. Blechhh! Surely the writer could have come up with a better way to insert these characters into the storyline? Ugh. So I got to the end, and I was even madder. I had to rewind because another reviewer mentioned the play/record button. I was then able to listen to the "recording" and ignore the fight scene, then the ending made slightly more sense, but still.....soooo many plot holes. I'm pi$$ed off and feel cheated out an ending that would have worked. The wonderbread arc was totally ridiculous. I really wish I hadn't seen this. Can't recommend it. Skip it. I promise, you're going to wish you had if you watch it anyway. Don't say you weren't warned.

Shondaland knocked it out of the park with Queen Charlotte. I binged all 6 episodes today and it was great fun. The costumes were delicious, the characters well fleshed out. Charlotte's backstory makes her more human, explains her iron maiden depiction of Season 1/Bridgerton easier to understand. (Caveat: season 2 I didn't care for, didn't even finish). Now, just for fun, I might have to go back and watch it again. Every once in awhile I got confused by the quick flashbacks & bouncing back & forth between young Charlotte and older Charlotte, which is why I gave this an 8 instead of a 9. Lady Danbury is, once again, my favorite character. She's devious, but humanized. She's just taking care of business. And George...well, he's just George. Thankfully, Charlotte didn't go over the wall.

And 11 seconds. That's all that I could stand of this trash. Not sure what I was hoping for, I should have known better. Jason Bateman only has one character, as another reviewer pointed out, and that is dead-pan Jason Bateman. Then I heard Will Arnett speak. As usual, I had confused his name with Will Forte, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to finish it. Maybe if the plot had killed him off immediately instead of Santa, it might have been okay. No such luck. That obnoxious voice...is it his real voice? It always sounds so incredibly, loudly fake & forced, like he came up with it for a comedy sketch and now thinks he has to use it for every character. I'll have to scout around for the British version. It HAS to be better than this.

Definitely skip the French-to-English dubbing. The actors hired to dub the English are horribly miscast, sound like they are high school students recording a cold table-read. I had to switch to subtitles 15 minutes in, thinking if there wasn't some improvement once I could get the voice tones of the individual actors I'd have to quit watching. I wanted to at least watch a full episode before deciding whether to continue.

As it stands now, 1 full episode in, the story feels a little Pink Panther-ish, a little Saint-ish, a little Now You See Me-ish. There's a few too many balls in the air, maybe one more episode will help me decide.

Shelly Winters over emotes her usual whiny character, James Darren has no character presence at all. Dame Ella & Mr. Ives must've needed the money. One more "baby" out of Mr. Real Corinthian Leather and I'd have thrown something at the screen to shut him up. I guess this is how gritty poverty was imagined by Hollywood in 1960.

As there are so few reviews and nothing below 6 (until my 3, which is really for no good reason other than it killed some time before a better movie started) the current average rating of 7 is way too high for this movie. Why were 60's films so awful? So unless you need to waste 2 hours, pass this one by; it's seriously overrated.

...that I can recite almost all of the dialog, but haven't seen it in about 10 years. Finally figured out how to connect my DVD player to my smart TV & voila, Rat Race! I still live this stupid, funny flick. Fave scenes are the airport tower "failure ", the ex-boyfriend revenge scenes, and the Smashmouth concert ending. Too many fun scenes, the whole thing is a funny mess. Prairie dogging...hahaha! Ewwww. If you've had a crappy day, there's enough ha-ha's to forget all about it.

I've read that there are an unknown number of versions of this film. 3, maybe 4, and apparently it's difficult to know which version you've actually watched. Well, the one I'm watching is called Confidential Report, on TCM. If any of the other versions are at all similar to this one, then they all suck. The dialog, the dubbing, the bad wigs and worse accents. The worst has to be Robert Arden. I can't tell if he's personally a horrible actor, or if Welles told him to be so incredibly obnoxious and use that grating voice. So much scene chewing that it feels like the main cast was having a contest. Can't for the life of me figure out why I even tried to watch this ego-stroking Wellesian crapfest.

This was superb. I'm not a fan of Ben Foster, but I think he was perfectly cast here. The dad was kind & devoted, loving, but misguided, doing what he thought was best for his daughter but forgetting that she wasn't supposed to be fighting his demons. Being a loner myself, that RV camp & its occupants looked like heaven to me. Couple of plot holes, didn't detract from the story enough to worry me. I'd bypassed this a couple times, glad I watched it. Y'all busting on the dad's mental health have obviously never walked in a veteran's boots, and it shows in your cruel comments. Shame on you.

Lee Childs sold out when he allowed Cruise to abscond with the Jack Reacher character so beloved by all of us fans of the books. I categorically refuse to see these films. Joe Mangeniello would have been better cast as Jack. Height, brawn, voice just deep enough to match what's in my head when I read the novels. I've seen the trailer & that's all I care to see, wish I could un-see it. Lee, you screwed up big time.

WHY is every Jason Segal movie sooo bad? I should have gone with my first instinct to blow it off, but I never learn. I watched it. Junior high locker room humor and of course, Jason's naked butt. He shouldn't show that to anyone. The rest of the cast I felt sorry for.