Reviews

I really like the Square so I was expecting Triangle of Sadness to be similarly brilliant take on wealth. Didn't quite get what I expected.

Triangle of Sadness never really finds its own voice as it first introduces a lot of oblivious characters, who all come across as thin stereotypes we have seen many times over in countless movies, and then puts them into situations that are what you'd expect them to get into. There is the dumb and jealous male model and his flirtatious girlfriend. There is the rich and loud Russian. There is the drunk captain. There is the prim head of ship staff. There is the lovely British couple who got rich selling grenades.

Making matters worse, there isn't much plot which Director Östlund tries to make up by stretching each scene to extreme lengths. The epitome of this approach is the seasickness interlude that had everyone throwing up for over 10 minute. None of it matters, just like the characters don't matter.

After what feels like an eternity, the story drifts to a dead end that is lifted straight from an old Amanda Bynes comedy. At least that poor teenage vehicle knew how to tie its own loose ends whereas Östlund abruptly abandons his characters as if having got enough of everyone.

Amsterdam sticks to its title about halfway through, and had it somehow found a way to stay on that track, it would probably have been one of the strongest movies this year. Unfortunately, right about there it hastily switches to a new plot that abandons the characters and just wants to create its own haphazard version of a disputed and forgotten part of American history. None of that ever works, just clunkers on with apparent disinterest from the people tasked to deliver it. The story that came before was just much more fun.

As expected, acting is all fine. Christian Bale especially gives a notable performance. However, the amount of recognizable talent showing up without much to do or anywhere to go is ultimately distracting. At least they knew what to do with Taylor Swift, and something similar should have been in mind for the rest of needlessly drafted big names.

There was so much going on, that it was difficult to understand who was the titular "gone for good". Corben's melodramatic plotting that originally took place in New Jersey fits poorly with heavy-handed social commentary on French immigrants, social work, Neo-nazism and whatever else thrown into the mixer, all struggling to advance the story and drifting the focus away from it.

Casting is another problem. Finnegan Oldfield in the lead is stuck with one expression on his face, and his chemistry with Nailia Harzoune doesn't register at all. The only standout is Guillaume Gouix but that only makes things worse as his storyline is an unrelated add-on to fill in the runtime.

Towards the end, the plot becomes increasingly jarring and haphazard. Then it all crawls to a lazy wrap-up, with not much feeling for the surviving cast members that pretend everything was solved.

One could guess Netflix first handed Wong and Park the skeletal script formula and they just needed to flesh it out a bit to fit their own personas. Why they agreed to do this remains a mystery. The story hits every single cliché in this category and is suitable consumption for those who only watch movies that provide no new content at all.

Things are made constantly worse by first-time director's constant lack of comic timing. But to begin with, much of the comedy is nowhere near what should be expected from these talents. Writing is uninspired and flat.

Neither have Wong and Park chemistry that would support the story. Both are of East Asian ancestry but that's not enough. Park's character is also written as a whiny loser who remains a whiny loser to the end.

Half-way through, Keanu Reeves makes a game appearance as a version of himself and briefly makes one think this might be heading somewhere interesting.

Apart from Timothée Chalamet - who slyly denounced having participated in Woody Allen's movie to improve his Oscar odds - occasionally doing too much of an Allen impersonation, especially when he narrates the events, the story bubbles on effortlessly and more often than not also delightfully. A whole bunch of actors make passing appearances, nailing a scene and never seen again, but that plays well to the story that essentially is just a chaotic, fateful day in New York.

Foreign Correspondent was a routine job that Hitchcock did for an existing messy and jumpy script that had been written for 5 years by at least 10 different screenwriters. Hitchcock didn't get the cast he wanted, and his disinterest in the production feels apparent throughout, with the story only momentarily getting alive when he got inspired by sets and locations. The film hasn't aged well, and its outdated sexism, uneven acting and overly long runtime don't work to its advantage either.

Knives Out is entirely built around a pretty clever twist that comes early own. Once that's out, it slowly putters out of ideas until dragging itself back to the mansion where all is revealed ... to be an average episode of Murder She Wrote.

Editing, cinematography and acting is all top notch throughout. But bent on delivering its one twist and nothing more, the story has left the characters without fleshing any of them out. Everyone is such a paper-thin stereotype that quite a while it feels inevitable they'd eventually turn out to be something more but instead they all end up being just as completely one-dimensional as they first appeared. Poorly written characters also ruin heavy-handed attempts to say something useful about immigration and privilege.

This probably is not an actual spoiler but the biggest turn of events in the Frozen sequel is that Elsa gets a magical new dress. She got a magical new dress in the previous one, too, and that sold well to all little girls.

Going in, nothing else needs to be known about the movie as that already tells you whether seeing it is your cup of tea or not. Except maybe that no need to worry about another year-long round of Let It Go as no new song is even remotely memorable.

Detective Pikachu is a haphazard collection of various plot devices seen many times in all sort of movies, and without Ryan Reynolds's inspired turn as the voice of Pikachu himself the movie would be almost unbearably bad. Some of the worst CGI in near memory is dumped on the screen in one utterly pointless action scene you'll be hard pressed to unsee. A total mess only for hardcore Pokemon fans and those enjoying Reynolds's comedy in whichever setting.

Do I really need to say anything else? The same stuff as always but produced much more professionally.

The usual recycling of the female empowerment storyline with Kunis and McKinnon reliably playing the same roles they always do starts with a few good gags early on but gradually falls apart into a complete mess. McKinnon seems to improvise as much as she can to make up for the writers' diminishing interest in their own story which occasionally keeps the audience more invested than it should.

There is a tired attempt at the end to setup a sequel of sorts so anyone spending money to see this should know it might not be over when the credits roll.

In Ready Player One, though having lots of exposition, Steven Spielberg delivers a wonderfully thrilling first third, but soon afterwards fails to keep the pace and lets the story to gradually succumb to over-reliance on characters and plot twists that were common in 1980s but look sorely outdated and tedious in 2018. This as such is largely in purpose as the story wants to be seen as a tribute to pop-culture - for some reason meaning the 1980s' culture only - but it doesn't make boring the audience any less acceptable. The last real highlight is a magnificent scene in the Shining's hotel.

The plot follows characters in the virtual reality and in the real world, jumping back and forth. Action involving the actual people is often poorly staged. Plot rushes from one place to another without much logic. Characters come and go as they please, and it is later difficult to remember what actually happened. The big end fight in the virtual world appears to be staged only because a big end fight needed to be at the end, having no logic, reason or real feeling and bringing nothing new to the long series of purposeless end fights in expensive blockbusters.

Hit and miss, and increasingly a miss towards the end, Ready Player One is still a reliable Spielberg that probably will entertain younger audiences more than those who actually remember the 1980s.

The word is out that the very respectable Rian Johnson had put his watermark all over Last Jedi, but on the last line it largely comes across as more of the same Star Wars sausage as the previous installment from JJ Abrams. Whatever your feelings were about it, you'll feel the same about this one.

Expectedly glorious production values and uniformly good acting get bogged down by the script that is an uneven mess jumping all over the place. Ray's scenes with Luke don't go much anywhere but make a far more compelling thing to watch than Resistance's artificial standoff with the utterly incompetent First Order (which also has the disadvantage of the rulebook changing whenever needed) or Finn and Rose's contrived quest to find some random hacker and share a message about animal cruelty. After one central character, first reduced to a ridiculous clown, gets a deliciously laughable sendoff, hopes get briefly elevated there might actually be something at stake here, but then nothing much happens. So many die but nobody gets hurt.

The Last Jedi milks both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to such extent that it seems ever ready to toss away any reasonable logic to squeeze in another gorgeous throwaway fan-service variation of what was an integral part of earlier stories but now stands only for some nostalgic shivers or gorgeous cgi. This was already the case in Force Awakens, but if something positive should be said, the well is about dry after this one, and for the final episode they need to come up with something truly original - unless they go back to the beginning, once more, rebooting the copying within their reboot.

An entirely forgettable affair in every sense of the word, Justice League fails to setup any further direction to the DC world-building than a slow descend back to camp where it was after Tim Burton's Batman movies 25 years ago. Nolan's years at helm are certainly far away by now.

The bafflingly conventional, illogical and randomly jumping story doesn't have a single unexpected turn of events and instead treads waters that have been trod many times before and with greater success. The CGI is strangely haphazard, with very little care how it stands out when scenes are edited together. Steppenwolf is an eye-wateringly bad villain, becoming a clumsy scarecrow whose motivations and powers come and go.

Actors are an uneven bunch, both as characters and as talents, and fail to generate camaraderie or chemistry. Ezra Miller is so much better as an actor than the rest that he becomes a distraction by reminding us about it constantly. Every time his delivery elevates the poor material, it turns against the movie when the next one who opens his mouth only looks cringe-worthy.

Targeted at mass consumers of daytime talk shows, Girl Trip wants to maximize its reach by teaming up four different stereotypical women who seem to have nothing in common but are nevertheless assured to be life-long friends. This as such is the usual setup in these female ensemble comedies, and it is also unexpected how the utterly artificial story never feels anything but scripted and staged. It is painful to watch how these clearly useless, middle-aged women force themselves to hide friendship distractions such as separate personalities and to harmonize their behavior and even their outfits by bullying and patronizing each other until after a series of drunken escapades they finally locate that one thing in common they all can agree on: big c***s.

The experienced cast has no trouble making all the needed faces, spreading legs and rolling butts, and sometimes watching these fine actresses have fun together gives a momentary relief from the actual product.

The new adaptation of IT has a lavish Spielbergian approach to the proceedings which partly works and partly really doesn't. All child actors are well cast, with their strengths and weaknesses perfectly at display. Their interaction and friendship is handled with ease and good humour and is by far the most enjoyable part of the story.

Less tasteful is how they interact with adults who are distant and authoritative or just as much monsters as the one that is after the kids. The recent Stranger Things, one cast member of which reappears, had this covered much better, with the obvious note that Stranger Things itself is an evolution of King's and Spielberg's earlier works. The school bullies are also ridiculously evil and inhuman which is seldom seen in today's media.

As King's popular novel is much copied, the terrifying events, however carefully produced, come across somewhat outdated. The number of jump scares feels like yet another throwback to old-school horror. Music swells to underline everything that happens on the screen, with no emotion without a score to tell the audience exactly what they should be experiencing right now. That gets intrusive quickly.

What the marketing entirely skips, this is actually the part 1. It covers the first half of the novel only, with the rest coming in the part 2.

Always reliable if not exactly visionary, director Doug Liman has another entertaining outing with Tom Cruise, reinventing his charm, swagger and grin as tools for finding easy cash and marital respect when honest work doesn't exactly get one far enough.

Cruise plays a totally reprehensible and despicable character and yet manages to keep everyone invested in the ride that accelerates with every misstep on the way, fully captivating the audience to wait for the extent of the looming train wreck. Cruise is entirely game here, not once trying to make audience feel sorry for his character or thinking that maybe he had a heart of gold, after all.

Worth pointing out is also a stellar turn from a less prolific Domhnall Gleeson whose ambitious CIA operator is equally blind, naive and brilliant, and Gleeson makes his oily presence wonderfully effective.

The Osiris Child gives a strong feeling that at some point during the production the team realised there were no new ideas in the story or in the world-building or in the characters, somewhat deflating their high ambitions and resulting in a choppy ride when quirky editing choices and unchronological order attempt to liven up the seen- that, been-there proceedings.

This doesn't succeed to save much, though, as buying the story depends on buying its monsters that are done with genuine 1980s rubber-suit quality. Maybe the original intention was to give the film a vintage vibe but if that was the case it fails to translate on the screen, leaving the main story driver outright ridiculous and sinking whatever was still afloat.

If something positive needs to be said, Kellan Lutz is trying harder than he has ever tried, and next to the monsters he is the less distracting one.

Compared to the actual product, Rough Night's theatrical trailer was superbly crafted and contained every single amusing part of the movie that is sloppily written and directed without much understanding of comic timing. Even the good jokes fall flat when the director does not seem to have a good grip how to land them.

Girls' attempts to deal with the body quickly get the feeling of an over-extended SNL sketch but it's still a staggeringly bad decision to undercut that by frequently visiting Paul W. Downs' mind-numbingly boring road trip elsewhere. Towards the end the story becomes increasingly joyless, shovels in a terrible crime subplot and then forces out one of the most fake happy endings in recent memory (and my memory is good).

Kate McKinnon is the only one who has some idea how to liven up the dull undertakings, and Jillian Bell certainly is right when she quips that she might be too much.

Not thanks to anyone else but her own skills to act against herself, Noomi Rapace single-handedly carries What Happened to Monday from start to finish, in seven roles that each gets a moment to make them alive. She holds the attention when the script and fellow actors don't have much to contribute, and when the surprisingly violent action takes off, she doesn't hold back anything. Half the score goes to her performance alone.

Least memorable are the quickly setup one-child dystopia and the expected thugs and their masters who maintain the uninspired system. Glenn Close does what Glenn Close has done many times, and yet another movie fails to make up its mind is she really evil or profoundly right. It would have made a better movie had they scrapped the poorly drafted political storyline altogether and concentrated on Rapace's low-level survival. Every movie needs not save the mankind.

Not this or any year's English Patient, the Ottoman Lieutenant plays out like a quickly written discount romance novel. A headstrong Philadelphian heiress bumps from one adventure to another. There is no denying any of her whims. Handsome men are readily available to compete for her pure heart, but the tall exotic one, of course, is who really makes her blush. Never once is anyone bothered by her not wearing a headscarf in this fantasy version of old Turkey. Ben Kingsley shows up to throw away yet another world-weary supporting role.

Outright revolting is how the movie sleazily attempts to excuse the Armenian genocide by depicting the Armenians as lowlife bandits and traitors that were no doubt asking for what came to them. Standing in for the presumed (but eventually non-existent) American audience, our heiress thinks it is best to stay silent about the mass murders the Turkish government carried out, and it very much seems that is what the movie wants rest of the Americans do as well.

While the movie has all the characteristics of a failed Hollywood production, it is produced by a Turkish company. Production money has been lavish, and the sets, costumes and locations are all top notch, to the extent that one wonders how much the Turkish government was involved.

While not an entirely wasted opportunity, Liza the Fox-Fairy doesn't generate much laughs, and its half-witted premise is thrown at the audience so carelessly that title character's hardships at the hands of a vengeful Japanese pop star ghost fail to make anyone care too much what happens next.

Most of the runtime is spent on going through all the people that need to die to push Liza over the edge, which understandably gets quite repetitive. Neither the deaths or the characters show any screen writing genius.

The execution itself is well-thought and careful, and the team behind the production seems to have felt all the way they are making a wonderful movie. It always lifts a bad movie when one sees people trying hard, even if they don't really succeed.

At this point, there is almost nothing real left in the Fast and Furious franchise except its readiness to offer the ever increasing number of actors their annual bonus for showing up for a day in front of the green screen and the palpable attraction between Tyrese and Eastwood. Everything else is so artificial, calculated, worn-out and void of any emotion that anyone looking for an actual movie needs to look elsewhere.

Annabelle: Creation is a thoroughly well-executed and thought-out medium budget horror in a creepy house with a creepy doll. It is also a borderline comedy at times, cleverly realising that the doll is not only scary but also rather ridiculous. Moving from scares to laughter and back was done with outstanding precision and taste.

The effect where something first happens with thundering sound and action, followed by a deafening silence in anticipation of potential further threats, is somewhat overused, but excellent actors and overall professional production let this kind of small issues pass without much distraction.

As a prequel to the previous movie which was also a prequel, the story is eventually tied to the previous Annabelle vehicle, which felt not only unnecessary but quite clunky and rushed. Stay put for a brief after-credit scene for more Conjuringverse things to come.