Reviews

The premise is a guy with limited - as it turns out extremely limited - outdoor experience trying to survive for four days in the wilderness. He can bring along a backpack full of whatever he wants as long as it is something no sane person would bring with them on a hike.

If anyone actually wandered off into the wilds with the stuff this guy hauls around in his backpack they would need Search and Rescue before the weekend was out. He carries no useful items. Instead, he tries to Rube Goldberg complicated, prone to failure, and largely ineffectual solutions to basic problems with pre-established simple solutions.

Example. He wants fresh water. Does he bring purification tablets? No. Apparently there was no room left in his backpack after packing much more important outdoor items like an electric drill and a laptop. Does he boil the water? In one episode he boils a tiny amount of water in snail shells. A moment later he crafts an antenna out of aluminum foil making you wonder why he didn't make a bowl out of the foil and boil water in it. Never mind.

The next time he needs fresh water he makes a UV light wand from a pair of LEDs, one at the top, one at the bottom of a stirring stick. He then gently stirs a cup of water for a few moments and drinks it. This is a seriously stupid and dangerous alternative to boiling. UV light can disinfect, if it is of the right wavelength and has sufficient exposure, strength, and duration. This hack didn't meet the exposure criteria, at a minimum, as the water in the center of the glass was never exposed. Not to mention he placed the UV emitters in a glass test tube, blocking UVB. I just hope for his sake the water he drank came from a bottle of Perrier offscreen.

The point is his "hacks" are largely theoretical and not practical in the slightest. Compounding the problems are the obvious presence of a camera man, staged meetups at the conclusion of his hikes, laughable decision making, visible "cheater" devices to make his hacks work, and a generally unlikeable main character.

Between the technical problems and an actor who apparently has never been outside before this is poor viewing. Four stars for a decent idea of a show. No stars for the poor execution. Four stars.

The basic premise "stitching" is stolen wholesale from the first episode of Torchwood, wherein someone can read the mind of a dead person for a short time after death. Torchwood did it first and better with a high tech glove. Here we have a skintight outfit and a bath, not unlike what Fringe did when it copied from Torchwood. The skintight outfit is explained away as necessary for gibberish technical reasons - though no reason is given for the low cut top.

Actually, the skintight outfit and low cut top are not there for technical reasons. They're there because the lead actress looks good but can't act. The same holds for the rest of the cast, with the sole exception of Salli Richardson.

The mystery plots make no sense because they could all be resolved without stitching. In the first episode they use stitching to prove a bomb going off and killing the maker was intentional. But that information didn't help them, as the other devices were still unaccounted for. Plus it was unnecessary as forensics could tell the man was on the opposite side of the room when the bomb went off.

The show gets worse as time goes on, with teenage angst relationships, teenage emotional outbursts, and teenage drama.

Four stars for the lead actress's looks. If you're a horny 15 year old boy whose parents have blocked your internet access the skintight outfit may be enough entertainment for you. For everyone else: Pass. Four stars.

Six thirty year old college students go on spring break to a run down isolated cabin in a swamp. Who wouldn't want that experience? They must have booked the cabin a year in advance to get such a great place. Not understanding that spring break isn't the end of the semester, these future student loan debt relief recipients toss their school laptops into the swamp. A crocodile still recovering from shock that anyone would willingly occupy that cabin gets zapped by the shorting out laptop batteries and is magically transformed in a genuinely bad CGI rendering.

The bad CGI crocodile is bad, really bad, yet miles better than the acting. It's indescribably bad. Exceeded only by the dialog. It's indescribably indescribably bad. Ten stars for the crocodile. Minus five stars for the crocodile taking so long to do the audience wants in eliminating the cast. The longest hour you will spend being "entertained". Five stars.

Mountain Monsters is easily the best and most authentic Bigfoot/Alien/Cryptid/Ghost show ever made. Nothing about it was meant to be taken seriously and the boys seemed to be having a good time playing an adult version of hide and go seek out in the woods at night chasing fairy tales. Unfortunately, lead actor "Trapper" passed away and the show ended. This show attempts to recreate the magic of Mountain Monsters by relocating out west and changing the hunt from Cryptids to Aliens.

We're introduced to the cast the same way Mountain Mobsters did it: the Leader, the Rookie, etc. None have strong personalities and it's easy to confuse which guy playing cowboy dress up is which. And cowboy dress up they play: cowboys from the old west. We're talking ten gallon hats, chaps, the whole costume. They ride horses for some reason. They carry six shooters and lever action prop rifles. It's like they walked off the set of Cowboys vs Aliens. None of this is appropriate or necessary for what they do. It's only there to dupe you into believing these actors are cowboys.

Not that cowboys possess any special knowledge or skills useful for a UFO hunt. Quite the opposite I should think.

The plots are the usual debunked "mysteries": crop circles, cattle mutilations, alien possessions, etc. All appropriate for a fun guys-night-out in the woods trying to scare each other. Too bad what's missing from this show is the fun. Where the Mountain Mobsters crew were clearly enjoying themselves, this lot seems embarrassed to be there and just want to go home.

I have it five stars more for the memory of Mountain Monsters than for what this show actually is, which is not good. Five stars.

This is a remake of the John Carpenter classic. A prisoner is brought to a police facility. The officers quickly learn that the prisoner is wanted by very bad men. The good guys find themselves besieged, cut off from communication with the outside. In desperation they let the prisoner help them defend and... watch the Carpenter movie.

Both movies are low budget affairs with cheap sets, poor camera work, and unconvincing action scenes. Despite the budget constraints, Carpenter's movie was engaging, thrilling, and memorable. This movie was silly, dull, and instantly forgettable. The budget of both films was probably the same. The difference is where the money was spent. Carpenter spent on story and creating tension. This film spent on a couple of recognizable actors. Carpenter did it right.

Three stars for reminding me to rewatch Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. No stars for this terrible film. Three stars.

A huge meteor is about to crash into the earth killing everyone. Our government springs into action and assigns a grand total of six people to work on the problem.

The team gets down to work by watching old movies and decides Deep Impact looks like fun. They find an old space shuttle from the retired program (probably the one in the Smithsonian), fill the tank, light the fuse, and off they go. No spoilers but if you're alive to read this you can figure out they succeeded.

The acting is bad. Really bad. Like bad for Asylum bad. If you don't know what that's like imagine your personal worst-actor-ever nominee and remove that individual's ability to remember lines and move their facial muscles.

The CGI is actually better than usual for Asylum, but that isn't saying much. It's the practical effects that let them down. There is gravity in space. The surface of the asteroid has plants. The costumes are from a popup Halloween store.

The drama is gripping. The world is about to end and our lead hero asks his team if they want to bail on the rescue mission "because most of you probably have families". None of our heroes take him up on his offer. A couple minutes later he gives the exact same speech and asks again. In a surprising turn of events none of our heroes take him up on his offer. That's good writing.

Asylum is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Over the past twenty five years the only thing the brain trust in the Asylum has learned is that people have different sexual preferences. We're informed our male hero is gay as is our female pilot. It has nothing to do with anything but there you go.

One half a star compared to a professionally produced. For an Asylum film that's average. Five stars.

Three women go on spring break with plans to deal... who cares. I don't. You won't. No one does.

While it's touching that the director's mom posted five fake positive reviews, the truth is this "movie" isn't. The industry has minimum standards for a professional production and this attempt fails to clear the bar.

That problems start with story. Even being generous there wasn't enough actual plot for a half hour TV episode. It was so lacking they needed to pad it out with corte a música (quick cut musical montages) to reach a barely sellable length.

The acting... let's be honest, it wasn't. No one onscreen has training, ability, or natural talent. They should all go back to their day jobs and stay there.

If they had made a spring break comedy with the cast it might have worked. Everyone would focus on the attractiveness of the performers and not worry that what was coming out of their mouths was lacking an emotional connection to what was going onscreen. It might have gotten five stars. But they didn't make that. Three stars for pretty people in limited clothing. Three stars.

This movie is ostensibly an action comedy, while offering little of either. After a lengthy and incredibly predictable meet-cute between two people with as much chemistry as toilet paper and a bidet, we are thrust into the main plot ripped wholesale from other movies and remade into something less than the originals.

Less pause for a moment and consider that last point. This film manages to not only be less than the sum of the parts, it's less than any one of the parts. That's actually not easy to do. It takes the skilled hands of writers who partied away all of their brains cells during their lengthy strike break coupled with a director who one can hope was hired due to a mixup in HR.

Once the main plot gets underway our heroes... why am I bothering? I won't reveal any spoilers because if you've ever seen a rom com, any rom com, this movie is pre-spoiled.

Another unprofessional release from a streaming company. Why do they continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over and... Three stars.

Wow. I won't even bother providing a synopsis because my review title says it all. With a script from a Xerox machine there is little hope, but decent casting might have helped. Instead we get the 2020s-stereotypical collection of has-been and never-will-be "talents" specifically chosen for anything other than acting ability and given nothing to work with and no way to shine. Blame this on the director and screenwriter, both of whom should have done us all a favor and stayed on strike permanently. This a heist caper with no intelligence, excitement, or mystery. There was never any doubt of the outcome, and frankly you wouldn't have cared if had gone the other way.

The sets and set dressing are amateur hour: a prop warehouse strewn about the backlot. The CGI is obviously CGI, meaning it had one job and failed at it. The sound editing is just plain weird.

Three stars because I didn't turn it off and was able to (with some effort) stay awake to the end. Three stars.

Movies are sold based on the script. Then a director is selected to bring the script to life. Sometimes the director doesn't like the script - or doesn't understand the script - and takes the film in a completely different direction. The result is invariably a disaster: a hodgepodge of the writer's vision and the director's conflicting vision (think Congo where the director refused to read Crichton's book). Both the writer and director visions might work on their own, but jumbled together? Not a chance. This would seem to explain this film. Let's see if we can unpack it.

The script is an action film. The assassin premise and so forth should produce exciting action scenes. We don't get any - there's too few action scenes and what's there aren't exciting. That's on the director, who presumably didn't want to make an action film. There's some humor, which can work in a buddy type action film, but here it feels shoehorned in by a director who was handed comedians as his leads and didn't know what to do with them. This is understandable: the casting is so poor it is inexplicable. The last third of the movie is all director. The action script is tossed in favor of an ill-conceived eighties-style romantic comedy that doesn't work in part because the leads have zero chemistry. Neither the writer nor director deserve blame for the ending, which appears to have been parachuted in on studio notes. It's discordant and unsatisfying and not worth your time.

The editors did what they could to try to make this collection of disconnected scenes understandable, but they can't work miracles. Their best efforts could only produce a boring, tedious, plodding movie that starts off in one direction, changes course, meanders about for a good long while, before mercifully ending in the least satisfying way possible. I'm being exceedingly generous in giving this four stars, the stars earned by virtue of the film being too benign to hate. Four stars.

A father arranges a charter flight for four friends to help his daughter celebrate what must be her tenth annual 21st birthday. The charter is crewed by a pilot and horny flight attendant. The plane takes off, has a sky monster encounter, and eventually the movie ends. The bulk of the movie takes place in one room decorated to resemble an airplane cabin.

The five woman board the plane in full horror movie party mode. They attempt to seduce the flight attendant, take random drugs, and dress up in bikinis because this is a horror movie and that's what people do in horror movies.

The festivities take a turn for the worse when the plane is sucked into the Bermuda Triangle, enveloped in a thunderstorm, and used as a combination surfboard and buffet by a tentacled monster. It's all downhill (pun intended) when the only pilot onboard involuntarily exits the plane intact through a half-inch hole in the ceiling. The birthday girl assumes the controls and... no spoilers here.

No one thing stands out as worse than another: this movie is consistently uniformly bad in every regard. That's rare because usually someone involved in even the worst productions has a modicum of talent or ability. Not so here. While no worse than anything else, perhaps most memorable aspect of the movie is the unique "nasal cam". Virtually every scene is shot from below, as if the camera operator was too wasted to stand or was a small dog with a GoPro glued to its head. Particularly disturbing were the extreme closeups that consumed fifty percent of the runtime, suggesting this was originally intended as an ENT medical school training film.

As with every other aspect of this film, the less said about the acting the better. Though in fairness the pilot's laughably inappropriate suggestive eye-wags were good for a chuckle. The special effects were Asylum Films grade; nothing more needs to be said. The script may have been written by AI trained exclusively on one star horror movies.

Three stars because I watched it to the end.

For 75 minutes a group of attractive people allow themselves to be filmed. That's pretty much all there is to this not-quite movie. You're supposed to believe sabotage at a research facility in Kazakhstan released a monster and only a collection of pretty people from the US could stop it. You won't believe that for a second.

The acting peaks - and I can't believe I'm saying this - with Eric Roberts. It's all downhill from there. The majority of these folks aren't even actors by profession; they're former special forces soldiers.

The camera work is an abomination. Dutch angles, weird close ups, off center distance shots. All inappropriate, none of it works. It's as if the extent of the cameraman's training was skimming through a cinematography textbook written in a foreign language.

The editing, likewise, is an affront to the senses. Scenes flicker, shift focus, spin around, and lack any sense of continuity. I don't know much footage ended up in the cutting room floor, but they should have spliced that together and realized it instead of this mess. It can't make less sense.

Four stars for seventy five minutes of pretty people chatting, playing army, and taking showers. No stars for the director who neglected to tell anyone he was making a movie. Four stars.

If you can't beat em join em.

The premise is plagiarized from Dead Like Me, the acting is amateurish, the pacing is plodding, and the plot has no resolution. But hey, ten stars!

The show is ostensibly about a girl who dies and turns up as ghost. She doesn't remember how she died. Now you're probably thinking "who cares how she died, she's dead isn't she. Knowing how she died is a meaningless bit of trivia now that she's a ghost. More important is how she'll get on in the afterlife."

Well stop thinking that this instant because you'll never learn anything about the afterlife except ghosts are confined to the area where they died and they can't interact with the living.

But wait! Unlike every other ghost in history, our heroine *can* interact with the living! Well, almost living: she can interact with her monotone sad-sack no facial expression friend. Together they're going to solve the mystery of her death and... nothing. It doesn't matter if they resolve the case. She's still dead.

All kidding aside, this show is boring. The cast is surprisingly unattractive and completely lacking in basic acting skills. The casting must have been based on demographic forms because aside from one-of-each diversity no one on the show is an actor. This matters because the episodes are mostly filler that's meant to be emotionally charged but isn't because you're taken out of the scene by the poor performances. Lost in the morass of filler is a thin thread of a primary story that depressingly goes no where. Literally. No spoilers but the conclusion isn't worth slogging through to the end.

Three stars for reminding me to rewatch the entertaining and professionally produced Dead Like Me. The weakest actor in that show was a supermodel turned actress and she could act circles around this group of amateurs. No stars for putting this summer camp theatre production on air. Three stars.

Martin Laurence and Will Smith reprise their roles as Miami Narco cop partners. They introduce Laurence's DEA agent sister as Smith's love interest. Beyond that things get a bit confused.

There are drug smugglers with a hundred goons, a hundred DEA agents, a hundred Miami cops, and a few hundred assorted other extras. With the exception of Laurence, Smith, and Laurence's sister everyone dresses the same, shoots a gun, drives the same cars, has exactly zero personality, and is onscreen for a maximum of three seconds.

This is an action movie but the action scenes are lacking. During the action scenes you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys because the camera cuts away so quickly. A ton of guys are dying but you can't tell which side is winning because you can't tell anyone apart. Eventually the shooting stops but no one takes stock of what happened.

There are no character arcs. At one point a DEA agent dies and his own team refers to the guy as 'an agent'. That's how little character development there is.

The action scenes are inpossible. Our heroes take cover behind wood crates which are bulletproof. Smith fires five hundred rounds from his pistol without reloading. Hundreds of bystanders must have died in all the high speed car crashes and from stray rounds sprayed by our heroes at crowded intersections.

Five stars for the loud, hectic, frantic action scenes. No stars for the plot (whatever it is) and for the terrible acting by everyone involved in this. Five stars.

The premise is Zoey (Jane Levy) following an MRI mishap can hear a stranger's innermost thoughts expressed through song and dance. It's an interesting premise that could and should lead to interesting plots. Unfortunately, the writers of this show wasted the potential through one-of-each flavor-of-the-day checkbox characters and a depressing through-story centered on her dying father. The series survived because of Jane Levy's likable onscreen presence and occasionally entertaining musical numbers.

This Christmas specials doubles down on what didn't work in the original series: the checkbox characters and depressing father story (he's dead but more present and sadder than ever). It then proceeds to overwhelm Jane Levy's natural gifts by making her selfish, petty, and thoroughly unsympathetic. The musical numbers likewise disappoint. The net result is a tedious, annoying Zoey haranguing her friends and family (and us) into experiencing the worst and seemingly longest Christmas in history.

I'm so tired of checkbox characters. Someone needs to inform Hollywood that "gay", "black", "cross-dressing", and so on aren't personalities. They are attributes that make an individual neither more nor less interesting. But Hollywood stops at the label and the result are one-dimensional cardboard characters. Aside from Zoey, everyone in this has a label and the depth of a puddle.

Three stars for Jane Levy, primarily because of goodwill earned in the original series and in Suburgatory. No stars for anything else in this unfun production. I don't recommend watching this. Three stars.

In the first few minutes we have a spaceship where the bridge crew is seated in office chairs (with rollers!), a cigarette smoking doctor blowing smoke in people's faces in sick bay, and the vacuum of space being so loud you have to turn your TV volume down. Your worst fears are realized: this is a cheap movie.

It gets worse.

The few recognizable faces acting their hearts out can't overcome tedious dialog, an incoherent script, and action scenes better left on the cutting room floor. This movie relies on "Tell, Don't Show", a death knell for a movie. Between the initial crawls, the introduction to the professor where he tells the crew what they already know so the audience can catch up, and actors stating vital information for the benefit of the viewer, not much of the plot is shown.

Three stars for the lead actors trying to do something with the lousy script. No stars for the weak supporting cast and TV movie feel of this. Three stars.

You know you're in trouble when the opening is on a radio station DJ smoking what must be a 20 year old cigarette. And it goes downhill from there. The pregnant girl has 20 year old batteries in her portable radio. They wear 20 year old makeup (we're not meant to notice this). And so on.

If you can get past a director who didn't give two seconds of thought to his setting you're rewarded with a script that starts and ends no where. The pregnancy is presented to us as the first one in 20 years. How this handful of people could possibly know this is left as an exercise to the viewer. Everything is left as an exercise to the viewer: what happened 20 years ago, what has happened in the intervening 20 years, why these people were chosen to be the ones we're supposed to be interested in, why the girl is leaving, what the girl hopes to find at her destination, and how she's meant to raise a child in a world where the water is toxic.

Because this technically isn't a movie - it's a collection of independent scenes in the same setting - it's exhausting. The scenes are disjointed and many of them and unnecessary and pointless. We're drowned in a flood of dime store philosophy that's meant to be "deep", but is insipid and juvenile. Aside from the girl wandering around little else happens of any import. It's also slow and boring and uninteresting.

Three stars for the actors getting a credit on their CV. No stars for the story, for the director who didn't care about the details, and for a script that should never have been green lit. Three stars.

Four a-holes are hired to rescue an a-hole from a pair of a-holes. The four a-holes rescue the a-hole from the pair of a-holes. The rest of the movie is the a-hole buddies of the pair of a-holes trying get the a-hole back from the four a-holes.

If anything about that synopsis strikes you as appealing then by all means go for it. I have better things to do than watching a-holes. There is absolutely nothing relatable, likable, or interesting on screen at any point in the movie. There is a lot of fighting and guns, but none of it is engaging in the slightest because you want everyone to die.

Three stars for a couple actors who weren't as bad as the others. No stars for the rest of this mess. Three stars.

A 60 pound woman is hired to lead a team of five mercenaries with unknown skills to rescue the daughter of some dude. The team lands on the island by helicopter and proceeds to wander around, finding corpses on the way to the two tents that constitute the "DNA research lab" doing cutting edge science without the benefit of electricity or heat or protection from the elements.

It soon becomes clear the corpses are themselves, which is hinted at when they find duplicates of their own personal items on the bodies. Eventually the entire plot is read to us by an actor reading from a journal. So much for show not tell. The plot is a unique mixture of zombie and sci fi. It's a clever idea and in more competent hands could have formed the basis of a blockbuster movie.

This isn't a blockbuster.

There is no one who is relatable as character or actor. This is partially because of the low standard of the acting, but most of the blame goes to the writer. The actors simply aren't given anything meaningful to say or do. Backstory and interesting questions are shut down by someone saying, in essence, "the writer can't think of an answer so shut up". The camera work does the lack of emoting by the actors no favors by being up close all the time. The background music constantly implies something important is happening when nothing could be further from the truth.

Five stars for the interesting plot.

Some sort of five person special forces-like unit is dispatched by a seemingly random voice on the phone to an exclusive off-the-grid luxury island to rescue some seemingly random client. We learn nothing about the voice on the phone, the client, or what these five people are doing together. The team arrives to find a deserted island and immediately is subjected to some kind of mind altering sonic blast. From that point on they hallucinate or vividly recall bad dreams.

There are enough positives here that the movie deserves more than one star reviews. The women are attractive, the cast can act to a reasonable B-movie standard, there is little bad CGI, and the director doesn't waste our time trying to make something of a plot that becomes obvious to anyone who has seen the movie Predator. There is an escape from the island subplot that is an appealing one though is never fully developed.

The primary negatives here are the derivative plot and lack of character development. Aside from their physical characteristics I could not tell you one thing about any of the five leads: not their names, skill sets, likes, dislikes, nothing. The only thing we learn about them is they are unprofessional: there is a lot of yelling and crying with virtually no actual communication taking place. The majority of the dialog is exposition about what we are looking at: "we need to get off the island", "I heard a sound", and so on.

The other big negative is the plot is revealed in the first minute on the island when we see the Predator-like display with the alien glyphs. From then on you know what is going to happen, just not how. Without any spoilers suffice it to say the ending will not blow you away.

Five stars for the positives. It is by no means a great movie but it is watchable and even enjoyable at times. I did watch it to the end so there is entertainment value here. Five stars.

The basic premise is a bickering couple who recently lost their son takes a wrong turn off the interstate and their car breaks down at the Inbredville gas station and motel. Things quickly take a turn for the worse when the couple discovers hidden cameras in their room and encounter the locals who were rejected for being too redneck for Deliverance.

With competent direction no one is more likable than Luke Wilson or prettier than Kate Beckinsale. But in this movie the two of them are so annoying you want Luke to shut up and Kate to go off camera. It's so bad you'll almost find yourself rooting for the creeps with the surveillance cameras.

No spoilers here but this is a terrible horror movie. Once someone discovers they are in danger any normal person would arm themselves with whatever they could and put as much distance as possible between them and the threat. There are worse things than spending a cold night out in the woods. Being tortured and murdered, for example. Not so these two. These morons practically hang bullseyes on their backs and pose as human targets. It makes for tedious viewing.

Three stars for Luke and Kate in other productions. They're both enjoyable actors completely wasted here. No stars for the idiot plot, the incessant bickering, and for the hour and half fighting wanting to turn the movie off. Three stars.

The hackneyed premise is Kevin is obsessed with a coworker for three years(!) and is leaving the job so he writes a letter professing his love. He doesn't get the job, takes his old job back, the girl says she has a boyfriend and isn't interested, awkwardness ensues.

Let's consider what we've just seen. This guy has been in love with a coworker for three years. She's had three years to express interest in him. She hasn't. Their relationship has never progressed beyond coworkers. He knows she has a boyfriend. The guy is stalking the poor girl.

No one in this show is likable. We're meant to like Kevin, but he's a certifiable creep. The girl has no interest in him yet flaunts her relationship and flirts with him. The secondary characters are all seriously flawed and unlikely human beings. For example, the girl's roommate has a one night stand with Kevin and becomes obsessed. Kevin's sister is a drugged out loser. Etc, etc, etc.

Binge watch the first episode and you've seen the entire series. The show goes no where. Three stars.

A common theme of hip, artsy cliques is that suburbia is hell on earth. Vivarium takes this conceit literally and traps two people in a suburban development of identical homes. The pair are unable to find a way out. Ultimately the man works himself to death and the woman raises a child. The child reaches maturity and, her work done, she dies.

Ignoring the obnoxious "I'm superior" implicit in dismissing anyone who chooses to raise a family in suburbia, the problem with this movie is the couple did not choose the "suburban drone" lifestyle. They rejected it from the outset: they made fun of the neighborhood, rejected the option to buy, and panicked when they discovered it was forced upon them. These were not people residing in suburbia due to life circumstances, either. These people were prisoners, plain and simple: they were treated as such and they worked tirelessly to escape. So much for dismissing the "mindless drone" ego boost.

If the movie fails as a dark sendup of suburbia - and let me be clear, it does - it epically fails as entertainment. The first fifteen or twenty minutes sets up the premise, introduces the mysteries, and gives us all the backstory (none) and character development (none) and answers (none) we're going to get. The remaining hour plus is spent watching two prisoners enduring isolation together. The two leads are woefully miscast, having collectively the charisma and chemistry of an It's A Small World animatronic. The introduction of a third character, the child, should have injected some life into the proceedings. But the child had the personality of a Roomba.

Unrelentingly tedious, pretentious, dull and dreary, this is not a good watch. Suburbia is bad. There, I just saved you an hour and a half. Three stars for the real estate agent. Three stars.

Three friends live their childhood dream of search for D B Coopers treasure after the sudden death of the fourth member of their crew. The plot really doesn't matter, as it's lost almost as quickly as it is introduced.

But that's not the reason for the low score. It's the acting. The three friends are individually good actors in other movies. But together they may as well be appearing in different films. That's how bad their chemistry is.

Speaking of chemistry, the story stops being about a canoe trip about a third of the way in. The remaining two thirds of the movie is drug growing rednecks chasing them through the woods. This is less interesting than it sounds because you couldn't care less about the characters individually or in sets. They have no personality, no present, and no backstory.

Three stars for a boring river movie. Watch Up The Creek for a much better friends on the river comedy.