Movie Review – Suicide Squad

TL;DR – Sigh, oh DC, it really looked like you tried on this movie, but boy the best that you can do is an aggressively mediocre outing that adds nothing to the franchise, and as a self-contained film – well you can do a lot worse, but you can also do a lot better.

Score – 2 out of 5 stars

P.S. There is a mid-credits scene

Suicide Squad. Image Credit: Warner Bros.

Review

When it comes to that whole DC v Marvel comics rivalry which seems to permeate the internet these days, for me this was one of those arguments that was never really a factor in my life growing up. This is because we didn’t really get the comics where I lived, but what we did get was the animated series, like X-Men and Batman, and they were not aired in competition with each other, and indeed sometimes aired on the same TV channel. So growing up you were not a DC or Marvel person, it was more “did you see that episode yesterday”, I feel I really need to start with this up front because I really want this Justice League series to work, I really do. However I don’t think Suicide Squad is the film that will do it, and in fact all it does is show that DC/WB just don’t seem to know how to get this movie series off the ground. At best it is average, and at worse it is quite problematic, but in the end it is not really all that engaging and you’ll probably forget most of it within a day of watching it.

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TV Review – Stranger Things

TL;DR –  Engaging, Emotional, Tense, and about the most 80s thing you could ever watch, but boy should you ever watch it.

Score – 4.5/5 Stars

Stranger Things. Image Credit: Netflix.

Review

Stranger Things is a weirdly wonderful TV show, it is a complex web of 80s references, homages to films of that era, and call backs to the classics of the horror genre. All of that could have been done as a ham-fisted cash grab, banking on nostalgia over substance, *cough* Transformers *cough*, instead it is a well-crafted story with real talent, both in front and behind the camera, that draws you in at every moment. Now as I am reviewing the entire season at once there will undoubtedly be spoilers ahead, so if you have not seen Stranger Things yet, beware, and maybe come back once you have watched it.

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Movie Review – Jason Bourne

TL;DR – This movie is everything you have come to expect from a Jason Bourne film, but that means all the good and the bad is here.

Score – 2.5 out of 5 stars

Jason Bourne. Image Credit: Universal Pictures.

Review

I have to say before we start that the original Bourne Trilogy (Identity, Supremacy & Ultimatum) is probably one of my favourite trilogies of all time, for me I put it up there with the original Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. The follow-up Legacy had some interesting ideas but it lacked the style and understanding of the previous films, and it felt like they had just inserted the Bourne universe into an original IP. So given how high my impression of the first films was, and how low the follow up was, I was preparing myself for this iteration to be a train wreck, but thankfully it’s not. For me, it is everything the old Bourne’s were, however, the last of those films were made almost 10 years ago, and that is a bit of the problem if you are just doing the same thing over again.

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Movie Review – Star Trek Beyond

TL;DR – They finally found the right formula for the reboot series and it is glorious, the cast is amazing, the action is good, and every joke hits its mark.

Score – 5 out of 5 stars

Star Trek Beyond. Image Credit: Paramount.

Review

I think I need to start with some context before jumping into this review, on the whole, I do really like the Star Trek franchise, however, I have not been a fan of this rebooted Star Trek movie series. The first movie had great casting, but the story was full of logical problems and lazy short-cuts, that it removed any real emotional weight to killing off Vulcan, and I just really did not like it (2/5 stars). The second film Into Darkness did a little better with me, as it had some reasonably good character moments, and some interesting set pieces, but the need to recreate one of the most iconic conflicts in Star Trek, and then the ability to not quite pull it off left the movie feeling quite flat (2.5/5 stars). I want to say this upfront so you understand this 5 out of 5 I am giving the film (only the second one of 2016) is not because I am enamoured completely with everything Star Trek, I am giving this film a 5 out of 5 because it has bloomin’ well earned it.

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Movie Review – Ghostbusters (Ghostbusters: Answer the Call) (2016)

TL;DR – If you have never seen a Ghostbusters film then you should really enjoy this, if you have, it will take a bit to get use to the cast, but by the end you will be all on board.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

P.S. there is a post-credits scene

Ghostbusters. Image Credit: Sony.

Review

Ghostbusters as a movie is really quite simple, you have a bunch of people that stop Ghosts. The title of the film pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the story before you go to see it.

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Movie Review – The Legend of Tarzan

TL;DR – There are some aspects of this film that just work, but there are others that just don’t, if you do go to see it you will probably enjoy it, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

The Legend of Tarzan. Image Credit: Warner Bros.

Review

Hollywood remaking movies from the past are all the rage at the moment, with Disney doing live versions of their classic cartoons, we’ll have a Magnificent 7 film later this year, and the list goes on and on. This week we have the remake of the Classic Tarzan film/book series with The Legend of Tarzan. As far as reboots go, it’s ok, but there are a lot of issues with it, well one big one really, and all of that draws it down quite a bit.

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Movie Review – Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates

TL;DR – About as enjoyable as an overseas destination wedding

Score – 1.5 out of 5 stars

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.

Review

You know this is a movie I have seen so many times now, to the point I was going to have my review be same as – The Night Before, Dirty Grandpa, Grimsby and on and on and on. It feels like when The Hangover exploded on the screens, and Hollywood realised that people would go watch an R-rated comedy they decided that this would be the only type of R-rated comedy that would sell, so they change the setting and the cast, well actually no, not the cast because you see the same cast members over and over again, I’m looking at you Zac Efron, and the same wacky adventure, with the same jump scare humour, the only difference is trying to outgross the last successful film to see where the line in the sand is. All of this, at best, gets quite boring to watch, and at worse can actually drag down really important issues with it, see Bad Neighbours 2. I would like to say Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates breaks this trend and tries to do something different like Deadpool, but alas not, it is the same old shtick with a new colour of paint over the top.

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TV Review – Cleverman Season 1

TL;DR –  Cleverman is revolutionary TV show in many ways, its freshman season was a powerful work of cinema, though not a perfect one.

Score – 4 out of 5 Stars

Review

For those who have not seen the show yet, and you should go fix that, Cleverman is the story of Australia in the not too distant future. Where we lock people up just because they are different or because it is politically convenient for the government to shift the blame on to them, where people have to shed aspects of their cultural identity to try and protect themselves from harm just because they are perceived as being different, and where the government can use the catch-all excuse of ‘national security’ to hide things from the population and to deflect condemnation of the international system. So you know it’s clear that this is fiction because that would never happen in modern Australia…  To do my overview of the first season of the series I am probably going to spoil a couple of things, so you have been warned now to only proceed if you have watched the show.

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Movie Review – The BFG

TL;DR – Beautiful, touching, funny, heart-warming, if you go you will have a good time

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

The BFG. Image Credit: Disney.

Review

I grew up during the Disney Renaissance, in a time of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Mulan. It was a great time for fairy tales … but they all have that Disney-fication about their stories that removed a lot of the weird, I mean have you ever read the One Thousand and One Nights, or the original Hans Christian Andersen version of The Little Mermaid, that stuff be messed up. So when I was growing up the were two sources of weird that you could come across, the first was Paul Jennings which was adapted into the Australian mainstay of Round The Twist, and the other was Roald Dahl. His work was wired and wonderful, books like The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, were irreverent, weird, wonderful and full of heart. Now, movie adaptions of Roald Dahl’s books have been hits and misses, and Roald Dahl himself had been generally really negative about all the movie adaptions of his books. So with this in mind we have The BFG, a book I loved as a child, but with movie adaptions of books being such a mixed bag, how does this one go? The BFG is one of the best I have seen.

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Movie Review – Independence Day Resurgence

TL;DR – If you want spectacle, it has it, and indeed it still has a really good message which I think we need now more than ever, but it just does not hit the same mark as the first film.

Score – 2.5 out of 5 stars

Independence Day Resurgence. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.

Review

The original Independence Day is a masterpiece of cinema, it was technically quite brilliant for its time with the effects, it reinvigorated the genre in a time of stagnation, it blew the roof off the standard of what a blockbuster is, and at the heart of it, it had a really good story and theme. Seriously, go watch that speech at the end, I’ll link it below, it still is amazing.

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