Jolt – Movie Review

TL;DR – I had so much fun with this film, but it is very much a film made for me, and that mood will not be for everyone.   

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene

Disclosure – I paid for the Amazon Prime service that viewed this movie.

Jolt. Image Credit: Amazon Prime.

Jolt Review

There are some films out there that are created on a particular wavelength. These movies have facets that might engage one person but deeply frustrate others. On some level, all films do this, but some hit harder than others. Today we look at a movie that is very much my groove, but oh boy, could this rub others the wrong way.  

So to set the scene, when Lindy (Sofia Weldon) was a child, she tended to explode with violence on a moment’s trigger. Even when she was diagnosed with an intermittent explosive disorder, it did not lead to her getting the help she needed. Now an adult, Lindy (Kate Beckinsale) has it mostly under control, but this needs almost constant electro-shock therapy. Trying to find some normalcy, she tries to go on a date with Justin (Jai Courtney), but things go awry when the waitress (Savvy Clement) is just the worst and when Justin ends up in a dumpster with two bullets in his chest.  

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Movie Review – Ant-Man and the Wasp

TL;DR – A fun self-contained romp in the MCU that has all the charm of the first film with a bit more focus and a more interesting opponent.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid and post-credit scene

Ant-Man and the Wasp. Image Credit: Marvel/Disney

Review

Ant-Man (see review) was a bit of an odd duck of a film when it first came out. It followed on from Avengers: Age of Ultron (see review) as a kind of epilogue to Phase Two even though it didn’t kind of fit there. As well as this, it had the misfortune of being one of the two films in Phase Two where Marvel had big director missteps, with Edgar Wright stepping away from the project. It had all the makings of Marvel’s first big complete failure, yet it wasn’t. Indeed it was a fun little heist film with a lot of charm. Part of this has to be the groundwork Edgar laid down, but also the commitment of the actors to just go for it. Ant-Man was also one of those crystallising moments that showed that Marvel needed to work on a few things behind the scenes and the fruits of those decisions have been films like Black Panther (see review) and Thor: Ragnarok (see review). With this in mind, today we look at the first direct follow up which fixes one of the issues from the first film, and we see that right in the title because today we are looking at Ant-Man and the Wasp.

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Movie Review – I, Tonya

TL;DR – An interesting look at the concept of an unreliable narrator, wonderfully acted, but there were some facets of the film that didn’t work for me.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is a sort of mid-credit scene

I, Tonya

Review

From many angles I, Tonya is a fascinating film, it is incredibly well acted, it is telling the story of one of the weirdest moments in sports history, and it using a really interesting framing method to tell its story. However, while there were a lot of really fascinating factors at play here, there were also some real issues that I feel the unreliable narrator aspect really devalued and muddied the waters in an area that really should not have been. So today we are going to take a dive into the world of figure skating and look at the life of one person that challenged every part of the system.

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Movie Review – Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

TL;DR – This film is an hour and a half of pure fun, and probably the first video game film to work in a very long time, and some of the best casting I have seen in a while

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle. Image Credit: Sony.

Review

So to be honest right from the start this was a bit of a surprise. It has not been a good year for remakes in 2017, for example, The Mummy (see review) or the Ghost in the Shell (see review) all fell a bit flat on release. Add to this, it has been over twenty years since the first film, and all the information in the lead up to its release did not display Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle in a flattering light at all. Indeed, it felt like this was going to be another case of reheating an old franchise rather than trying to do something new, and we are getting a bit tired of this. However, none of this came to pass, instead what we got was a fun romp through the jungle, with superb casting, and sense of knowing exactly what it wanted to do and succeeding in it.

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