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The Crow (2024)
"If I'm ever hard to love, try to love me harder" - I tried, really.
The title is an actual line from this movie. I could have taken countless others. It points out the overal quality of the dialogue which is "self-published YA emo novel". That's to say: cringeworthy and often just plain dumb.
The other point that is immediately clear: the casting feels off for so many roles.
FKA twigs is not a good actress and she has no chemistry with Skarsgard whatsoever. David Bowles as Wickham (or Skull Cowboy, a role that was scrapped in the original due to the death of Brandon Lee) feels oddly out of place. Danny Huston is another one in a long line of villains that just whisper for dramatic effect. If you have the distinct deep raspy voice of Michael Wincott that works. Here it just screams "generic villain".
Another user is angry at the bad reviews suggesting it's because "we all hate remakes and don't give it a fair shot." I love the original The Crow, I also love the comic book. I tried with this, I really did, but it failed me.
As said before: the dialogue is terrible. The first half hour sets up the villain and the love story. None of it grabbed my attention. Vincent Roeg is nowhere near as interesting or menacing as Top Dollar and for the love story see my earlier remarks about FKA Twigs, the chemistry and the hokey dialogues.
Ironically the best scenes of the movie are the ones that very much copy the style and aesthetic of the original but even then it chooses gore over substance and never reaches the iconic status that made the original such a great movie.
Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023)
Seven Samurai but in slow motion.
Anyone who saw suckerpunch knows that Snyder is capable of greats visuals but can't write a coherent story.
This one is no different. While based on Kurosawa's movie it also borrows heavily from a whole host of other movies. The world is not much different from Star Wars and the backstory is so alike it almost feels like this should have been a Star Wars movie, the introduction of the villain is basically a worse version of the Hans Landa speech in Inglourious basterds, a more mature version of Harry Potter and the Hippogriff is used and so on and so on ending with a final scene that is just a different version of the Darth Siduous, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker triangle.
Character development is also typically for a Snyder movie almost non-existing. At the end of the movie everybody is still pretty much the same. Most characters feel flat and one-dimensional. Yes some have flaws but it doesn't make them more interesting because the flaws are all told by exposition, not by showing in the moment itself.
I would have given it a 5 but I deducted a point for the at times wooden acting and poor dialogues as well as the now over-usage of slow-motion and lens flare. It was once new and exciting. It isn't anymore.
I see people saying we have to wait for the "directors cut" but I really don't see how that is going to solve the main problem: the way the story is told and the flat characters.
Jack Ryan: Old Haunts (2022)
Ignorant to a fault.
I liked the first serie and thought the second was already a step down but the start of the third series is really getting on my nerves. We have a series of events and coincidences that are farfetched and not rooted into realism whatsoever.
There also doesn't seem to be a single person with a map or access to wikipedia in the entire writers/producers room. Tom Clancy would scream at the blatant ignorance shown.
* In episode 1 Jack goes with a dingy from the Black Sea to Greece. Greece does not border the Black Sea. If he needed to go to a NATO country he could have gone to Turkey, Romania or Bulgaria. To reach Greece he had to go through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. Both narrow straits with heavy traffic.
* In the same episode a 3 megaton nuclear device is called "low yield". "Low Yield" is around 10 kilotons or less. The Hiroshima bomb was 16 kilotons. 3 megaton is larger than almost the entire US arsenal of nuclear devices.
* The Czech Republic is "thinking of joining NATO". They have been members of NATO since 1999.
* The new Russian defence minister threatens the Czech president with an attack through Ukraine. Czechia does not share a border with Ukraine. Russia would have to go through Poland or Slovakia, both in NATO, to do so.
The Rookie: The List (2023)
I generally love The Rookie but
This was just a terrible episode. Every single bad cliché was interjected in the bank robbery: a cop inside doesn't call it in before it happened in order to explain something to her boyfriend, for some reason the bank manager doesn't press the silent alarm the first time, a trigger happy idiot causing mayhem, bad guys have unlimited ammo, people waking up from surgery are fully aware in seconds and having barely any issue with using the arm she just has been shot in, a car confrontation where the armoured police car with a bull bar doesn't take out the suspect car for some reason, convenient hostages just turning up, it just kept coming all for it to end in a "to be continued". I hope this is the last of these crossover episodes.
The School for Good and Evil (2022)
Tweens might like this ....
I don't know the source material but I can only hope it is better than this.
The story is filled with clichés in what ironically aims to be an attempt at subverting these same clichés. Twists, if that's what I should call them, are either dumb or predictable. Like I said in the title: this might appeal to tweens but that's about it.
The CGI is CW levels of bad and on top of that costumes, make up and sets look cheap.
Not a single acting performance is better than "meh" and this includes people like Theron, Fishburne, Yeoh and Washington. All of them seem to just be there for the payday. The best performance is by Cate Blanchett as the narrator.
The Mole (2022)
Room for improvement
I don't think it's bad. I do think they fall into some of the same pitfalls that plague so many other reality shows.
The weird thing is that this version is very clearly based on the latest Belgian run (some games are almost literal copies) but they don't quite get why that version is superior.
* You barely see people interacting when not playing a game.
* The constant skipping to the interviews/contestant voice overs make it seem very scripted. They need to limit those. Let the action and interactions speak for itself.
* Notebooks! Bring back the notebooks!
* Diversity. What you have is a group of people from a fairly narrow age range (25-40) who all look like they could start a modelling career and whose hobby is cross fit. Diversity is more than a bunch of attractive millennials with a different skin color. The Belgian runs have people between 18 and 50+. It's their personalities and different experiences that bring so much more to the game.
* I do like the use of cell phones instead of the large screen they use in the Belgian version.
* I didn't like the "ending on a cliffhanger" of the episodes. Why does everything have to end on a cliffhanger? Just finish after the selection. It destroys the pacing of the episodes because the elimination should be the emotional high point of the episode. Not the lead in.
* More of a personal note but the Belgian presenter, Gilles de Coster, has a very dry, factual way of interacting with the contestants during the games. I think that works better than Alex Wagner's.
If you want to see how good it can be, try and find the current Belgian version (especially series 9 (Germany) ).
MacGruber (2021)
Doesn't work outside of the SNL format
The movie should have been a clear indication that this doesn't work if it's not in short bursts.
The series however is even worse: It's infantile, crass and predictable. It's not even the good kind of infantile and crass. It just feels forced and repetitive with especially Forte and Wiig going through the same, unfunny, motions and set-ups over and over again.
The Lost Symbol (2021)
This feels like a cash grab.
Let me start off by saying I stopped reading Dan Brown after The Lost Symbol.
So it shouldn't be a surprise that I don't like the story. And yes, it is still the same story that basically is a treasure hunt based on mashed together masonic myths.
But the story is far from the main problem with this adaptation. Almost everything seems to be done by people that couldn't be bothered.
From hair and make-up, to sets (there's a quarry set that is so fake an amateur theater company would apologise for it), to the action, the writing, the casting and finally the acting. It's all just ... meh. The entire production seems to have been made as quickly and cheaply as possible.
At its best this is a C- show. At its worst it becomes laughably bad.
AINBO: Spirit of the Amazon (2021)
Starts off decent but quickly descends into a copy/pasted mess
The initial premise of the movie is decent enough and the for the first 20 minutes or so I thought this would get a 7. Points however dropped the longer the movie went on.
The story is a run-off-the-mill quest story made for children, plenty of things make no sense and especially in the second half it is all over the place. You can clearly see the influence from Disney/Pixar but it doesn't go any further than copying ideas without actually bothering if it makes sense storywise.
One of the worst parts, and one that annoyed me to no end, is that the main protagonist, Ainbo, never seems to solve any of the problems she faces. It's always the sidekicks that provide the answer (a blatant Timon and Pumbaa rip-off up to the point where they literally copied classic Lion King shots), or Deus ex Machina "Magic" explanations.
It's somewhat frustrating as a dad to bring your girl to a movie where a girl is the "hero" only to see that she, at no point, is able to do things herself. Even when she faces the big evil she just gets handed the right tools with no real explanation.
This movie had potential if they invested a bit more time in developing a decent story and character arc. As it stands: if you want an eco-friendly story about the rainforest: Ferngully is head and shoulders above this.
Walker (2021)
Like a roundhouse kick to the face
I just watched episode 5 because I really, really, wanted to give this the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately at a certain point you just have to admit defeat.
This feels like they had a mediocre police drama script, changed the name of the protagonist to Walker and the setting to Texas and had to stitch in the details afterwards without any regards to flow or continuity. Nothing here is worthy of your time: as a police procedural it's bland and stale, as an action series (like the original) it is non-existent, as a family drama it's below average with moments that would make Days of Our Lives viewers shake their head in disbelief.
The writing is lazy, the sound mixing is just plain weird and a fairly talented cast can't save this. If this hadn't been marketed as a Walker reboot this would have died long before it even reached the pilot stage.
Brave New World (2020)
Not Brave New World
Fans of the book can happily skip this. It might be loosely based on Aldous Huxley's groundbreaking book but it never manages to have the same impact as it. Making a 9 episode series out of a book that has a little bit over 300 pages, while avoiding the most thought-provoking parts of it, also didn't help.
There are things to like: good actors, the sets are gorgeous and the first three/four episodes are interesting enough.
There are also things to dislike: the writing is not always on point, the subject matter is watered down and after a promising beginning it becomes a soap set in a dystopian future. Especially episodes 6, 7 and 8 are just filler with an abundance of (modest) sex scenes and character development that feels forced.
The Craft: Legacy (2020)
Stop remaking things. Just stop.
I do hope none of the tween girls to which this movie seems to be geared wants to see the original because they will be in for a shock (and possibly counselling).
The best, most honest, moment of this movie is in the opening scene and it goes downhill very quickly after that.
Zoe Lister-Jones might have had a very clear idea in which direction she wanted this movie to go but it was the opposite direction of the original. The original was dark and broody. This is bubblegum "horror" at its worst.
The story is similar to the original movie with every bit of atmosphere and controversy sucked out of it. The acting is wooden with a special mention to Duchovny who clearly couldn't be bothered, the set-up is trying way too hard to be "woke" up to the point you could devise a drinking game to it and be on your way to the hospital by the end titles. To contradict the being woke part most of the characters are one-dimensional clichés (Ooh let's use magic to do our make-up!!!) with no character development.
I do hope this doesn't get a sequel because Fairuza Balk deserves better than this.
Artemis Fowl (2020)
Why even attach the name Artemis Fowl to this?
5 minutes into the movie and it has already ruined the whole idea of who Artemis is by having him surf.
2 minutes later and his mother is dead while his mother being mentally ill plays a major role in later books.
1 minute after that and Artemis is doing air tricks on a OneWheel
I unfortunately can go on like this for pretty much every minute of the movie. IT misses every single point of what made the books so well liked and why the figure of Artemis Fowl was such a breath of fresh air in Kids/YA literature. He's not a boy who does cool stuff, dreams of faeries and just happens to be smart. He's not a hero setting out to rescue his father, he's a cold, calculated, criminal mastermind who pulled a heist on the Faerie folk.
I doubt anybody who was involved in this script has read more than the blurb on the back of the books or was interested in making this an actual series of movies as they completely ruined several important plot lines from the books within the first 20 minutes of the movie.
I really don't have the energy to even go into the poor CGI, phoned in performances and middle of the road, crammed in Irish references. This is a terrible, terrible movie and I can only hope that in a decade it get's a proper remake like The Golden Compass had.
Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Nancy Drew (2020)
Finally, payoff?
This episode, unfortunately, showcases everything that is wrong with this adaptation. And I'm using the term adaptation in the broadest way imaginable. The writing, once again, is poor. The suspense is mainly one of disbelief with the police failing to detect an entire skeleton in people's jackets and pants as the sad pinnacle of how stupid this show can get. The court case is solved by a literal Ghost in the (house) machine but we have a pay off.
A pay off that may be acceptable in a South American soap opera but is completely out of place here. I've only kept watching this show because I hoped, against better judgment, that it would pick itself up. That it would showcase Nancy Drew as the smart, independent role model from the books. The creators however seem to have no other intent than to destroy the legacy of Nancy Drew in favour of cheap twists and cliffhangers and lazy writing in order to solve those twists and cliffhangers.
It would have been a better use of my time if I just watched the Sophie Lillis fronted movie 8 times in a row.
The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018)
Not up to the standard set by the previous films
For those of us that saw the Swedish adaptations and the American remake of the Girl with the Dragon tattoo this really is a disappointment.
It doesn't help that the source material isn't as good as the original, Stieg Larsson written, trilogy but even so this should have been more than this poorly adapted, action driven reboot.
The millennium books are character driven mysteries, it's what makes them so compelling. This movie is barely more than an attempt to try and get Salander over as an action hero who can do everything at any time. The plot is all over the place, main characters are barely used and the action movie cliche book has seen heavy use.
Claire Foy actually does a decent job with the material given but it's hard to surpass Mara or Rapace's performance with this poor script.
The I-Land (2019)
Poor man's Lost
Full disclosure: at the time of writing I've only managed to see 4 episodes. If this hadn't been on Netflix I probably would have given up after 2 but now I just use it as filler whenever I have some time. If the final episodes do something magical I'll come back and adjust the score but I sincerely doubt it.
The parallels to Lost are obvious: a bunch of people that don't know each other wake up on a (seemingly) deserted island and a part of the story is told through some flashbacks.
However it very much goes wrong there. I'm not going into the "twist" because it really doesn't matter: a show like this should revolve around characters and where Lost did this superbly, The I-land falls flat. Really flat.
None of the characters are likeable or even remotely interesting, even the "lead" who seems to have a permanent frown on her face is boring. Then there's clearly criminal guy, black guy, woman who has no facial expression, guy that gets bitten and I think five others. I'm four episodes in and I still can't be bothered to remember half their names. There's no Jack, Kate, Sawyer or Locke here.
There's also little development to them, they are having "trust" issues in episode 1 and they still have the same arguments in Episode 4. It's like being at the Christmas dinner part when people start talking about politics but for four hours straight. It's all they do: have arguments and fights, it's exhausting. It also doesn't help that the dialogue feels forced on many occasions.
The last part I'll review are the "clues". They are so in your face I sometimes felt the series was actually insulting my intelligence.
In the end: it's only 7 episodes so it won't take too much of your life and if you're waiting in an airport terminal because your flight got cancelled this might be something you watch. If not: there's much better content out there.
Hellboy (2019)
Doesn't know what it wants to be
The Del Toro Hellboy had its faults but also had charm, a good script and Ron Perlman. This one doesn't have any of this.
The story is, literally, all over the place. Think of it as if trying to cram an entire TV series worth of material in one movie. It makes for a messy script with massive pacing issues and way too many side characters. There's also a fair amount of gore and attempts at humor but due to the poor pacing neither have the desired effect.
Let's go to the acting. For some reason they chose two American actors to play British characters (Lane and Kim) and they both deliver their lines with an English accent that's only slightly less ridiculous than Dick Van Dyke's in Mary Poppins. David Harbour does an admirable job as Hellboy but fails to bring the same depth to it as Perlman although he's not exactly being helped by the rather poor dialogue he gets handed to him. McShane and Jovovich are McShane and Jovovich. Not bad but nothing to get excited about either.
The last part is about the CGI. It's 2019. Some of them are really not acceptable anymore with the current technology. There are youtube channels that make more convincing effects.
Robin Hood (2018)
A re-envisioning of Robin Hood that just can't decide what it wants to be
From the opening sequence which is basically a medieval version of a modern gun fight in Iraq or Afghanistan to every thing that comes after it: this movie can't decide what it wants to be.
The movie is filled with ridiculous modern anachronisms and seems hellbent on putting the things it wants to get over not subtly on the menu but blatantly in your face.
Performances are either flat or over the top despite a talented cast and to make it worse it steals entire plot points from movies as The Italian Job and V for Vendetta while copying visuals and styles from, among others, the Arrow tv show, Kingsman (the irony!) and the Metallica short movie "Through the Never."
The movie isn't nearly as smart as it thinks it is linking modern themes to the Robin Hood myth nor is it a great adventure story. It's just a jumbled mess of poorly executed and mostly stolen ideas.
Beau Séjour (2016)
Great premise, disappointing ending
There's a lot of interesting things here. The premise of a girl coming back from the dead to investigate her own death is interesting enough. Five people can still see her. They all have some clues about her last moments but they all have their reasons not to tell her anything.
The setting in a rural part of Belgium is a nice change as well as are the characters who are all struggling with one problem or another. For 8 1/2 episodes I was absolute glued to my screen
Unfortunately the ending spoiled quite a bit for me. A lot of unnecessary red herrings are suddenly thrown in and even worse: the killer of Kato turns out to be someone who was not one of the "Five" that could see her. This would have been fine if you could look back at the past episodes and suddenly things become clear (like The Sixth Sense) but there was no indication at all, no clues, no moments which now made sense. And for a series that was this good up to that point it really is a disappointment.
21 Thunder (2017)
Just not very good
I gave this two episodes before giving up. This is supposed to be about a U-21 team in the MLS.
First of all: barely anyone of the players look like they're 21. A fair lot of them look almost 30. It can't be that hard to find some actors to fit the bill especially since some of them are overacting as if their life depended on it. To add to that the over-the-top situations half of them find themselves after just two episodes may fit a soap opera, they shouldn't be in here.
Second: if you're going to make a series about football/soccer at least get some people in there that can actually play. The training sequences are horrible, players can barely control a ball, let alone pass it. Same for the matches: what's this obsession with overhead kicks? It's like making a series about basketball where every other game is decided on a full court shot.
If you're watching this on Netflix, chances are Club de Cuervos is on there as well. Which is much much better.
Het tweede gelaat (2017)
A horrible script overshadows some good performances
Back in 1990 Jef Geeraerts wrote a book called Double-Face. I love that book. Jef died in 2015. I'm almost glad he never got to see how his excellent book about a serial-killer got butchered as badly as the victims in it.
This is the third outing of Koen De Bouw and Werner De Smedt as Vincke and Verstuyft and both are quite comfortable in their roles with especially De Smedt giving an excellent performance.
And that's where the good news ends: the female lead Sofie Hoflack gives one of the flattest performances of the year, there's no emotion, no depth, nothing. She seems to only have been cast for her willingness to do most of her scenes nude or partly nude. The sharp contrast with De Smedt, with whom she shares the majority of her scenes, is disconcerting.
The director, Jan Verheyen, knows his trade, he directed the previous one "Dossier K" as well, yet overdoes the aerial shots and fast cuts in such a way that it quickly becomes irritating. It is unfortunately also clear he wanted to emulate the American Way of making thrillers which simply doesn't fit a Belgian story. (There's a shoot-out near the end of the movie to illustrate that point perfectly).
The main problem however is the script. In the original book the killer is caught almost by accident and the remainder of the book narrates the chilling interviews Vincke and Verstuyft have with the killer who suffers from paranoia and schizophrenia. It was meticulously researched by Geeraerts who even spend time at Quantico.
This script however threw all of that overboard for a messy whodunit which will have you screaming in frustration at the reveal as nothing makes sense: all the clues, all the twists, false leads and suspects are rendered useless by a ridiculous plot twist which disregards all the information we knew about the killer up to that point, there's no motive and no clear idea behind any of it. It is, by far, one of the worst plot-twists I've seen in the last couple of years with the sole purpose of having a "shocking" twist and not bothering to make a small bit of sense. Even the actions of De Smedts character after he finds out who the killer is are only there to go into an action scene with, again, a bunch of aerial shots and fast cuts. It is a complete mess of a story that puts the whole movie beyond saving.
Don't bother with this one. Rewatch De Zaak Alzheimer/Memory of a killer which is in every way a superior movie.