Bullet Train – Movie Review

TL;DR – Several interesting ideas are going on here, but they never coalesce into something worthy.    

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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

Disclosure – I paid to see this film

Brad Pitt punching a life sized mascot.

Bullet Train Review

When you are making an action film, there are many different styles that you could employ. There is the grizzled machismo of movies like Rambo, the high-octane yet safe for families action of the Fast and the Furious films, or the grimy rawness of films like The Northman. But one of the more recent action styles has been this smooth, free-flowing, and fast-talking style of cinema that was thrown into the spotlight with Deadpool. While that style has been divisive, I have generally enjoyed it, and today we see another example of it in the form of Bullet Train.       

So to set the scene, it has been a long road of recovery for ‘Lady Bug’ (Brad Pitt) since he got shot doing a job in Johannesburg. But he is finally ready to take on a new mission, and his handler (Sandra Bullock) has picked an easy one for him. He must go on to a bullet train stationed in Tokyo, Japan, retrieve a briefcase with a train sticker on the handle, and remove it before the train reaches Kyoto. The only issue is that ‘Lady Bug’ is not the only operative working a job on that train as “Lemon” (Brian Tyree Henry), “Tangerine” (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), “The Wolf” (Benito A. Martínez Ocasio), “The Prince” (Joey King), “The Father” (Andrew Koji), and “The Hornet” (Zazie Beetz) all have their own plans in how this will go.     

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The Boys: Season 3 – TV Review

TL;DR – It was a slow start to the season, but it did start to hit as it went on, but more than anything, this felt like it was just setting everything up for a season 4 and not a complete whole in its own right.  

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

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

The many press conferences of Homelander.

The Boys Review

Some shows have a simple premise on the surface, but you find the depths underneath when you outwork that premise. With The Boys, we get ‘what if people with superpowers were pricks’, but from here, we start delving into what that means. What would having all that popularity and fame do to someone with superhero qualities and who could destroy ordinary people instantly. This is taken even further but exploring what corporate/political frameworks would exist to manage and exploit this phenomenon. Now we are in the third season, and all of that groundwork has been laid, but then the question is, what will grow from this foundation? 

So to set the scene, at the start of the season, everything is in a state of stability, or well as much peace that one can when dealing with people who can shoot laser beams out of their eyes. Hughie (Jack Quaid) is now one of the chief members of a task force working with congresswoman Victoria “Vic” Neuman (Claudia Doumit) going after rogue supes. The rest of The Boys’ team, Butcher (Karl Urban), Frenchie (Tomer Capone), and Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), run sanctioned missions targeting supes that mess up like Termite (Brett Geddes). Over at Vought, Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) has been keeping a more fractured Homelander (Antony Starr) under wraps as he goes on an apology tour after the events of Season Two and then promotes Starlight (Erin Moriarty) to co-captain to smooth over the disastrous press from the Stormfront (Aya Cash) revelation. But stability can’t last, and as Hughie sees Vic pop some dude’s head, he discovers there is no way he can get anything done while working in the system. Now from here, we will be looking at the episode and season as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.    

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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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