TL;DR – Not the biggest or most bombastic action film I have seen, but it knows precisely what it wants to be and makes it work because of that.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene
Disclosure – I paid for the Amazon Prime service that viewed this film.
Plane Review –
For a long time, if you went to watch a Gerard Butler action film, you knew entirely what you would get. Some fun moments but no real substance. However, Greenland changed all that, and suddenly things became interesting again. But the question is, can that interest last?
So to set the scene, Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler) is running through security, which is important because he is the plane’s pilot. It feels like a relativity typical run on New-Years Day, bar for some weather and for a surprise passenger Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter), who is being extradited for a murder. But then a lighting strike takes out all the avionics and radio, giving them only 10 minutes to land the plane before they drop out of the sky. They make a miraculous landing, but getting the plane down might be the easy part.
TL;DR – A disaster film that leans into the emotion and is better for it.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene
Disclosure – I paid for the Amazon Prime subscription that viewed this film.
Greenland Review –
After falling off the face of the Earth, disaster films have started to make a resurgence in the cinemas. There have been good disaster films and bad, but one of the core similarities is that a bunch of them have stared Gerard Butler. Well, we now have another entry into this particular genre so let’s dive in.
So to set the scene, we open in Atlanta, Georgia as architect John Garrity (Gerard Butler), is trying to keep things as normal as possible for his son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) after his marriage with Allison (Morena Baccarin) fell apart. While this is happening, all of Earth is looking up at the Clarke Comet that was picked up only weeks ago. The scientists say it will burn up in the atmosphere and make a great light show, but after John gets a Presidential Alert, he realises that something more is going on and then the first boom hits.
TL;DR – I don’t think anything here will surprise you, but it was still a solid action flick, touching on all the big buzzword fears of the moment.
Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars
Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene
Review –
A couple of years ago I popped and on a whim caught a showing of London
Has Fallen. It was a perfectly fine if boilerplate action film and
overall I did quite enjoy it. Though my mileage was a lot further than a lot of
people as I had not seen the first film, so the fact that they hit almost the
same plot beats was not as much of an issue. Well the third film in the series
is out today and overall it’s pretty much the same as last time, with maybe a
little something extra.
So to set the scene, we open with United States Secret Service agent Mike
Banning (Gerard Butler) holding off a bunch of goons while under attack only
for it to be just a paintball exercise. His old Army buddy Wade Jennings (Danny
Huston) runs a training outfit and with Mike probably about to take over has
head of the Secret Service he’s hoping he can send some training contracts his
way. It is not likely as President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) has but a
ban on contract armies. Well one day after visiting a doctor’s to discover how
bad his back really is Mike is out protecting the President when they come under
attack by drones. When he wakes up all of his team is dead, the President is in
a coma and he is under arrest because they think he was the one who set it all
up.
TL;DR – Its, well it’s, ok, it’s not great, it’s not awful, it’s just ok.
Score – 3 out of 5 stars
Review –
So there is a satellite system that controls all of the world’s extreme weather, with a flip of a switch you can take out that cyclone barrelling towards the Australian coast, that heat wave over Paris gone, that mark-5 tornado, what mark-5 tornado. It all sounds great, but if you can see the flaw with this plan, well you can see where the film is heading. Overall, it has been a while since I have seen a big scale disaster film, maybe 2012 was the last one, so it was at least interesting to visit this genre. However, just be prepared that this is science-fiction, not science-fact film, I’m pretty sure there are some laws of thermodynamics that get thrown to the wolves to make this movie happen, nor do we have enough material to build a partial Dyson sphere. So overall I found Geostorm to be well fine, it had some things I liked and some others that I didn’t, and mostly they cancelled each other out. So today we will look at both sides of Geostorm, the good, the bad, and the surprisingly Scottish.
So to set the scene, in 2019 global warming sent the plant into a spiral of extreme weather events which killed millions. Looking death in the face, the world on the brink of destruction put aside years of amenity to create the ‘Dutch Boy’, a series of satellites around the world, designed to stop the extreme weather events. The main engineer of the project was Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) a man who is equal parts brilliant as he was obstinate, and after many years of work his brother Max (Jim Sturgess) who is employed by the White House was forced to fire him after a bad Senate hearing. Well three years later, and a couple of weeks before Dutch Boy is meant to be officially handed over to an international oversight team, a village in the heart of Afghanistan is discovered to be completely frozen. The Dutch Boy system had never failed before, and given the potential fallout from the lack of trust, or even a cascade of failures, it was a serious issue. So the Secretary of State Dekkom (Ed Harris) recommended to President Palma (Andy García) that there is only one person for the job, yep fired former main engineer Jake, so up he goes, but the clock is ticking.
TL;DR – One of the better action films I have seen in a while, grab your popcorn and sit back, just don’t expect it to have a nuanced view on world politics.
Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars
Review –
London Has Fallen is a good little action film, it’s not the greatest I have seen, but given the poor showing so far this year, bar Deadpool, it was refreshing to see something done really quite well. So it should be no surprise that London is falling is about stuff blowing up in London, and since the film knows that you know, then it is able to really push the tension.
TL;DR – You will forget this movie within moments of watching it, I mean I had to take notes so I didn’t forget, average in every possible way.
Score – 2 out of 5 stars
Review –
Ah Gods of Egypt, you are the very embodiment of mediocracy, you are the ‘slice of white bread’ of cinema, nothing wrong with white bread, but it is inherently lacking in substance. So before I go ahead and rip into the film for the next few paragraphs I should make it clear that Gods of Egypt is just average, not necessarily bad, but just tremendously average. So what I am going to do is use Gods of Egypt as a case study on how an expensive film can come out just so bland.
TL;DR Movie Reviews and Analysis 