Tag Archives: Jeremy Irons

The Beekeeper – Movie Review

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TL;DR – It is a solid action film and one of Jason Statham’s best roles in a while.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

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

Disclosure – I paid to see this film.

Warning – contains scenes that may cause distress.

Adam Clay sits in a felid with his bee hives.

The Beekeeper Review –

Do you have a world that exists just outside of the one we live in, moving through the cracks of society? Well, can I just say that you have written something that I am very excited about? Today, we look at a film that explores what happens when you upset the wrong person, someone you never should have gone within 100 miles of.

So to set the scene, Adam Clay (Jason Statham) is a quiet person who keeps to himself, tending his beehives with space that he rents off Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), a retired school teacher who owns an old farmstead all by herself. One day, Eloise was doing her bills when spyware was detected on her computer, but the people she called didn’t help. In fact, they were scammers that took everything from her. Clay arrives for dinner to find her body, just as her daughter, FBI Agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), gets to the farm to find out what happened to her mother’s bank accounts. Clay is at a loss as to who would hurt someone as caring as Eloise, but unlike many, he has resources, a lot of resources. The kind that can find things the FBI cannot and does not care if someone goes on a rampage.

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The Flash – Movie Review

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TL;DR – Through all its pre-production issues, the final product is a blast of fun, but I am not sure it would have the staying power on repeat watches.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is a post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I was invited to a press screening of this film

The Flash running at speed.

The Flash Review –

We are entering quite a tricky period for Superhero films. While they have been the dominant media property over the last decade, the shine is starting to come off the genre. While we will probably not see the great Western collapse again, how many players does the industry have room for? Can you still engage with a property you know is about to be rebooted? And can multiverses still work? These are some of the questions we will look at with our review of The Flash today.

So to set the scene, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is living his life as part of the Justice League, but not as a leading figure as we see when Alfred (Jeremy Irons) calls him up before his morning breakfast to help clean up some of Batman’s (Ben Affleck) mess in Gotham City. But while he is very good at catching babies, the main issue in his life is trying to get his father, Henry (Ron Livingston), out of jail. He is serving a life sentence for murdering his wife, and Barry’s mother, Nora (Maribel Verdú), something Barry knows his dad did not do, but no one listened to him because he was just a kid at the time. In his frustration, Barry runs so fast that he breaches the speed of light and begins to transverse back and forwards in time, and surely nothing bad can happen from that.  

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Movie Review – Red Sparrow

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TL;DR –  A deeply confronting and often times dull film, there is a single moment that will probably determine if you like Red Sparrow or not, which is a huge gamble for a film like this

Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars

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

Red Sparrow banner

Review –

Wow, just like Jennifer Lawrence’s last film mother! (see review), Red Sparrow is running the gauntlet of reviews from amazing to trash and everything in between, and after seeing it I completely understand how you could come to such vastly different opinions on it. This is a film that is banking everything on its ending and how much you are going to gel with that is going to dramatically shape how you engage with this film because it can be a slog to get through at times. So what we are going to do today is look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of Red Sparrow. Then we will take a moment to look at that ending in a full spoilery moment.

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Movie Review – Justice League

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TL;DR – Is it as good as Wonder Woman, no not by a long shot, but it is also not the steaming mess like the last two films, so there has been some improvement here.

Score – 2.5 out of 5 stars

P.S. – There is a mid and end credit scene.

Justice League. Image Credit: Warner Bros.

Review –

Ok before we start I need to say that this is actually a very hard film to review because while it shouldn’t matter, you can’t avoid not looking into the issues this film had in pre-production. Firstly, you have the disastrous reaction to both Batman v Superman (see review) and Suicide Squad (see review) hitting after production had already started, and you can see the course correction that they tried to make here. But also during production Zach Snyder’s family suffered a great tragedy and he stepped aside which meant that the reshoots and final edit was completed by Joss Whedon. So it is hard to work out where to direct criticism, but also you don’t want to heap stuff on someone who has suffered greatly. So will all this groundwork I will try my best to be objective here but you can’t help but bring outside stuff into this.

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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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Movie Review – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

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TL;DR – An utter mess of a film, disjointed, nonsensical, and a very poor foundation for DC to build their Justice League series on

Score – 2 out of 5 stars

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Image Credit: Warner Bros.

Review –

You know I wanted to be surprised by Batman v Superman, it looked rushed, it looked like they had not given enough thought before rushing ahead with their Avengers competition, it looked like they were making all the same mistakes Sony made with Spiderman, but still, I wanted to like it, but alas this is an incoherent mess of a film with only momentary glimpses of being any good. To get us started, Batman v Superman starts with us experiencing the climax of the last film from Bruce Wayne’s (Ben Affleck) perspective, we then jump forward to two years later where a bat vigilante is attacking criminals in Gotham across the bay from Metropolis, Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is in Africa being the damsel in distress (a role she will be stuck in for this film) and everyone else is politely pretending that Clark Kent and Superman (Henry Cavill) are not the same person.

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