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Reviews
Extraction (2020)
Man on Smoulder
If you've seen the redemptive classic Man On Fire with Denzel Washington you don't really need to see this vacuous pale imitation. However, it is different, but only in the most miserable sense...
Sure it's gun play is video game sharp (that's where my points for the film score), but it's soul is entirely borrowed, and never quite felt. So, hundreds of faceless, in this case Bangladeshi, people wiped out by a dubiously motivated white super soldier mercenary is always a horribly regrettable cliché of modern cinema. Bears absolutely no comparison to any historic reality. Unlike the gun violence in the USA, Bangladesh is simply not a gun toting country of child gangs and lawless gunplay. Famously, a warm and welcoming country, and rightly or wrongly, a pretty sedate, and ordered society. Not without it's problems, but nothing like this portrayal.
So, regrettably, without local precedent, it becomes a relentless slog of just killing. Human destruction, nihilism of the worst kind. I actually hoped Hemsworth would stop early on, and the film would make more intelligent choices not his choice of course. He was funny in the Thors, but Brad Pitt he ain't.... Wink wink... Of course it didn't change, more faceless bodies piled up, urgh.
Its essentially a complete video game fantasy for middle Americans, translated to film. Murdering the foreigners, just an impotent bedroom fantasy about death and murder, and not much else. Morbid fantasy for gamers, nothing for mankind. You know, set one in the USA for once, mow down the cops in scores, break some special forces necks. No? See you at the box office....
Charles I: Killing a King (2019)
Shame, it's such a one sided documentary.
I have to fully endorse the previous reviewers assessment of this quite pitiful love letter to the, largely accepted in history, tyrant Charles 1st. After bleeding the people dry, and exhibiting many other contempts, he shamefully went before his subjects. Largely unrepentant and contemptuous, convinced that the divine right of kings, he payed the price and the monarchy was humbled.
This documentary could not have recruited a more one sided, pro royal chorus of voices, if it had tried. Every contributor is such an uncritical Royalist. It's just so deliberate, a real deliberate attempt at revisionism. I'm a humble peasant, I'm not even a republican. But even I know, in that moment, he had to go. He was plotting yet another bloody war against his own people, it wasn't a tragedy.