Author Archives: tldrmoviereviews

Movie Review – xXx: Return of Xander Cage

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TL;DR – This is a perfect popcorn flick, as long as you don’t try to think through the plot, which you can’t help but do in the 2nd act.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

xXx: Return of Xander Cage. Image Credit: Paramount.

Review –

XXX: Return of Xander Cage is a film of many things, interesting set pieces, an incredibly diverse cast, a title that you really need to be careful with when searching on the internet for researching the movie, but also some missed opportunities. So it should come as no surprise that everyone is trying to create the next Bond, and why wouldn’t you? if you could swing 25 feature films out of a single premise. There have been multiple attempts over the years to create the new spy king, a fresh new face. Now for me, the best attempt has to be Kingsman (Click here to see Review), but many people have tried and one direction they went in was recasting the Bond-type with an extreme sports star, and well I have heard worse premises. However, after twelve years, and fifteen since Vin Diesel has been the lead, did we really need another crack at this formula to see if it works, well if this is anything to go by then … maybe?

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Movie Review – Monster Trucks

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TL;DR – Honestly this is one of the silliest premises I have ever seen for a film, but wow it was a surprisingly good film, with great creature creation, and some great action, well worth a look.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Monster Trucks. Image Credit: Paramount.

Review –

I was not expecting much from Monster Trucks, I mean it has one of the silliest premises I have ever heard, well not the silliest, I mean it is no ‘Tetris the Film’ silly but still. However, the more it went on the more I really started to like it, maybe even against my better judgement, but here we are. Now I am under no illusion that it is not a perfect film, none at all, but in a world where children films is usually a cover for lazy filmmaking, it is great to see a film take care and effort with the small details.

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Movie Review – Collateral Beauty

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TL;DR – Collateral Beauty has me wondering how projects in Hollywood gets greenlit, how did this mess of a film pass through so many different layers of approval, and at no point did someone go ‘Hey maybe this is a terrible idea for a film’

Score – 2 out of 5 stars

Collateral Beauty. Image Credit: Warner Bros.

Review –

It is ironic that a film about an advertising company would be lambasted in the press and critic circles for the advertising of the film. Indeed, all of this would actually be quite amusing if not for the fact that Collateral Beauty fails spectacularly on nearly every front. How a film with this much talent, yet such a clearly terrible premise for a film, got put into production I do not know. Of course there are a few saving graces for Collateral Beauty, which is what stopped it from getting a lower score than this, but I can tell you right now, unless we have a truly terrible year for cinema I know this will be on my worst films of 2017 list, and we are only three films into the new year.

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Movie Review – Passengers

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TL;DR – The biggest problem with Passengers is that it keeps hinting at a better film out there, but unfortunately it never quite gets there.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Passengers. Image Credit: Sony.

Review –

So would you say goodbye to everyone you love, board a spaceship in a hibernation pod for a 120-year journey just for a chance of a new life on a new world, even though you know when you get there everyone from your past will be dead. It’s an interesting thought experiment and one of many that Passengers speculates on throughout the film. When the film is at its best it is looking at an answering these questions, when it is at its worst it’s ignoring them to quickly tie the story up.

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Movie Review – Assassin’s Creed

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TL;DR – The best movie adaption of a video game, but that was not really a high bar to cross and Assassin’s Creed kind of just stumbles across it.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Assassin’s Creed. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.

Review –

It is one of those weird things of Hollywood that no matter how many times they try, no one has made a decent adaptation of a video game into a movie. Now part of this has been that people have been adapting video games without understanding what there were, and also there are a lot of difficulties condensing a long interactive experience (sixteen hours for the first Assassin’s Creed game) into a two-hour passive movie. To the point where the most successful and critically acclaim versions of this genre Wreck-It Ralph & Tron used video games as just the backdrop for their story. This can be complicated even further as video games are big multi-billion dollar industry so if you’re making a film, you’re gonna want to franchise the heck out of it, the big problem with last year’s Warcraft (See Review). So within all this mess comes the Assassin’s Creed film, based on the incredibly popular series of games that has the fascinating caveat that you could set it at any point in human history. So how does it go, well for a video game adaptation movie, it goes quite well, for just a movie, it is a bit meh.

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My Top 10 Films of 2016

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So here we are at the end of the year, the sound of fireworks still ringing in our ears, the excess of Christmas just a faint memory, and the realisation just dawning that you probably won’t get your money’s worth out of that gym membership you bought for your New Year’s resolution. However, it is also a time of reflection, a look into the past and the hope for the future, and while 2016 has been referred to as a dumpster-fire year, there were some great moments in film, and this is what we are celebrating today.

So far in our end of year countdown we’ve looked at the Most Disappointing Films of 2016 (Click here to see), and we’ve looked at the Highly Commended films of 2016 (Click here to see), but now it’s time for the grand finale with our Top 10 Films of 2016.

Arrival3
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My Highly Commended Films of 2016

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In the afterglow of the turning of a new year we look back at what came and to the future at what will be, but any more than that then you get a three ghost situation and that’s Christmas’s thing, and it doesn’t like people encroaching on it. So we continue the end of year listing of thing which we started yesterday with the list of our Most Disappointing/Worse films of 2016 which you can see by clicking HERE. However, today what we are looking at are those films that were good, or interesting, but that were just held back from getting into the coveted Top 10 List. These are all interesting films but they are also are all slightly flawed films and that is generally why they missed out. Now just a warning I will be discussing these films, and some of them are still in cinemas, so be careful because spoilers are incoming.

Kung Fu Panda 3 2
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My Bottom 10 Films of 2016

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It’s the end of one year and the start of another and among the fireworks, booze and celebrations there is one tradition that transcends all and that is the tradition of end of year lists and who would I be to buck this trend. So over the next three days, we will be seeing the best and worst that 2016 had to offer with regards to movies (so we can have at least some positive things to say about 2016). Tomorrow we will have the movies I class in the ‘highly commended’ category and the day after we will have the all-important ‘best films of 2016’. However today we start with the opposite, with the worse or most disappointing films of 2016.

Ben-Hur 2.jpg
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Moana Review: Powerful Story and Beautiful Animation

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TL;DR – A beautiful film from the animation, to the story, to the characters, a must watch this holiday season

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Moana. Image Credit: Disney.

Review –

Moana is a powerful story which is brilliantly animated, wonderfully acted and tells a great story. All of that would have been enough for me to recommend it to you, but on top of this Disney took a big risk in telling a story from Polynesia a place that rarely gets a look in this modern media landscape yet it is full of fascinating stories. I highly recommend you check Moana out at the movies if you can.

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Analysis – Rogue One is a Case Study on the notion of Death

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Rogue One (Rouge One: A Star Wars Story). Image Credit; Disney/Lucasarts.

Before we start I need to make it clear that this blog will be full of spoilers for the recent Rogue One and Suicide Squad, as well as last year’s The Force Awakens, and all of Star Wars in general, so proceed cautiously if things like this concern you.

So when I was watching Rogue One yesterday for the third time, at which point instead of watching the broad strokes of the story you instead focus on more of the details, it occurred to me that not only is Rogue One interesting in the fact that it kills off its entire leading cast (yes I said there were spoilers don’t complain that I didn’t warn you) but also how it kills them. Now of course, as most people know, there were extensive reshoots with Rogue One which may have drastically changed the outcome of how characters died, but that is a discussion for another day, today we will just be focusing on the movie as it is in cinemas.

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