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Lucy in the Sky (2019)
A Movie without Point or Purpose
Let's keep this short, shall we? Lucy in the Sky is a movie you do not want to watch. There is no reason to in any shape or form. Ultimately, the movie is a slow plod about rather boring characters attempted to make interesting which ultimately leads the viewer absolutely nowhere.
For those who like watching movies with absolutely zero payoff, formal ending, or reason for being, this may just be your cup of tea. For everyone else? Skip it. Like the plague.
Few points:
- It is not sci-fi, so for those thinking it is, it is not. It's a character study on an astronaut "inspired" by real events.
- The movie starts to spiral out of control midway through, and comes crashing through the atmosphere at an alarming rate 3/4 through. There is no ending. The movie has Natalie Portman acting crazy for no real reason, getting arrested, then it ends with her three years later doing nothing that connects the ending to the rest of the film. You turn it off upset because there are other bad movies you could get more entertainment and value from watching.
- Most of the characters act like extraterrestrials. Not from Earth. Natalie's character, Lucy, is treated like a foreigner at her job. It's almost as if the other actors really work at NASA and she is there as Natalie Portman, not the character she is portraying. The entire work depiction is unrealistic. It's as if the people directing the movie have never had a 9-5 office job (they likely have not) and they are people attempting to depict a work environment they've only experienced through other sources of media, such as their own atrocious movie.
- Lucy fosters her dead brother's daughter. Why this is important, or what importance the girl (daughter) has in this movie, I still am pondering. My ultimate conclusion? There isn't one. She was there as a distraction; a character added into a boring movie to somehow trick the viewer into believing there's more depth to the film than there really is. Well let me clue you in: there isn't!
There's many more things to be said but I've wasted more time than I should have. The seven mins to write this review were more enjoyable than any seven minutes watching this pointless farse of a film. I should have just watched Ghostbusters 2 for the 10111th time, as it was on TV during the time I spent wasting on Lucy.
What a pointless, irrelevant film.
The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018)
No Reason to Finish
There are some movies that you realize by the 15-20 mark are not movies you need to finish watching. This is one of those movies. It is excruciatingly boring, which tells an eyelid sagging story.
Sam Elliot, who seems to have lost his chin, who can speak no louder than a near inaudible mumble, mopes around on foot, sometimes with his dog on tow, reminiscing about the old days. He does this every five minutes, it seems; as if every day of his life is just him reliving the past every few steps he takes.
Cliche: CHARACTER LOOKS INTO A MIRROR. REMINISCES ABOUT HIS/HER PAST. Can I ask who on planet Earth, stares blankly into mirrors and then suddenly has vivid flashbacks of their past? Why do movies continue to do this? This happens to no one in real life. It is not as if a person looks into the mirror and discovers their face for the first time in their lifetime.
Anyway. Did not finish. I turned it off during his dreadfully boring haircut. And keep in mind, this is just after we got done seeing his younger self sit through a five-minute shave.
This movie is a joke.
Mile 22 (2018)
::camera flashes to Mark Wahlberg snapping a bracelet against his wrist::
Unwatchable.
I immediately knew this movie to be garbage both during and following the opening scene. So much so, that I turned the movie off around the 20 minute mark and watched something else more enjoyable. I know when to cut my losses.
::camera flashes to Mark Wahlberg snapping a bracelet against his wrist::
Treat Mile 22 as a Stock that you purchase, which immediately begins to taper off and hit your stop limit. You sell and ditch it before it devours more of your money (or in this case, time).
::camera flashes to Mark Wahlberg snapping a bracelet against his wrist::
Treat Mile 22 as a video game that you install and can barely begin to play due to technical bugs and issues. You uninstall and attempt to get your money back (and can if you bought it on Steam).
::camera flashes to Mark Wahlberg snapping a bracelet against his wrist::
As an action movie fan, with some of my favorites coming from the 80's and 90's, I always like when there's a new action or cop movie out on the block. I find that today there simply are not enough of them or if they do exist, they are B or C grade direct to consumer releases.
::camera flashes to Mark Wahlberg snapping a bracelet against his wrist::
Mile 22 is disjointed from the word GO. It suffers from awful dialogue, jumpy scenes, jittery camera angles, and that the tell-tale sign of any bad action movie made since the year 2001: chopped up action scenes.
::camera flashes to Mark Wahlberg snapping a bracelet against his wrist::
Just watch the first 20 minutes, where Mark Wahlberg is busy talking to some lady in what I believe is a police compound. The camera leaps around from facial shot to facial shot, pans around the back of a characters head, angles itself sideways against a wall, proceeds to show you the back-quarter of a talking woman's head ... and ... why??? If two characters are talking/having a conversation, do I, the viewer, need to be transported in 1000 different visual directions? No. This is armature film making at its finest. It is the crap we've been handed for nearly two decades now.
::camera flashes to Mark Wahlberg snapping a bracelet against his wrist::
Why do I keep putting the same sentence in this review?
::camera flashes to Mark Wahlberg snapping a bracelet against his wrist::
Because that is what this movie does to you as a viewer. Just watch. Then laugh. Then turn it off and go watch something better. This movie isn't worth the time to even complain about.
Mark Wahlberg does nothing to redeem his tiring and tedious career in this garbage bin movie.
The Predator (2018)
Predator Review
There is no valid reason any person should be asked to spend their paycheck on the absolute and utter garbage this piece of trash movie is, was, and always will be. To spend money on this movie is to be scammed by execs in Hollywood using the name of a semi-popular franchise to lure you in, rape your wallet, and laugh as they do it.
I am a Predator fan, with the original being one of my favorite all-time movies. I enjoyed Predator2, and to some extent (though they are both awful) will watch AVP1 and AVP2. Predators was fine, though it could have been more.
This? EASILY THE WORST MOVIE IN THE FRANCHISE. It is an insult to even compare this movie to the others. I was yelling at my TV the entire time (and laughing at the absurdity) of how silly, ridiculous, illogical, awful this parody of a film was.
For starters, it is NOT a Predator movie. Do not think that it is. It is a bad parody of a Predator movie; one that tries to be comedic and funny every other step of the way but is never once funny. And why should it be? It's a movie about a killer alien species who hunts inferior prey, not a slapstick comedy movie. Yet they try to make it fun and cute every moment they can ... nor do they, and nor do you want them to. That's not why any Predator fan, new or old, would watch the movie. To me, this movie feels more like the chaos of Transformers mixed with the bad comedic elements of Pacific Rim than anything else. It's loud, its full of CGI (most bad), it warps the viewer all over the place, from scene to scene, with illogically absurd story lines, it shuffles nameless tack-on characters like a full deck of joker cards, and, lastly, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Every character is the worst walking Hollywood cliche you can think up. No character is worth more than penny were the year 1945. They have a good cast of actors ... yet they utilize them in the worst possible scenarios, wasting any talent they had for failed popcorn laughs during the course of cheesy throwaway scenes.
Bobby Fisher makes a special guest appearance as a boy genius-prodigy-child who is the next step of human evolution ... because he is on the specturm? Accompanying him is the trigger-happy G4TV biologist whose point in the movie I still can't fathom? Also: some rogue government agent who just murders people (including his own men) at random whilst brandishing naught but a laugh and smile; a crackpot team of military rejects that are as unforgettable as they are unrealistic and unlikable; Miranda Lawson <<err, I mean, Yvonne Strahovski>> who simply vanishes in the back-quarter of the movie; a cute and cuddly pair of Predadogs; andddddd Jake Busey as his father's sputtering shadow, who ... well ... is there for a few bad comedic moments only to .... eh, who even gives a damn?
The story they embark on is so bad you simply have to watch it for yourself. But if you do, find a way to watch it for free. That is my only advice.
And the ending. Oh my lord, the ending. It's as if a 13 year old fan-fiction writer (and not a very good one) put together that scene. I was howling at the roof when I saw. Absolute. Raw. Absurdity. THE DARK PREDATOR LIVES!!!!!!
This is literally one of the worst movies I've seen in a long while. Predator fans must watch it because they are required to. And they will all hate it. There is no way anyone can walk out of this movie liking it unless you are perhaps 11-16 year old boy. Yes: it's that bad.
Destination Wedding (2018)
Straight off the Script
This movie is an example of two people reading scripted dialogue, word for word, without any belief that either of them 1) believe what they are saying and 2) are actually coming up with the words themselves.
The characters don't even process one another's lines; it's simply machine-gun mouth-fire from one "witty" bullet of dialogue to the next.
For anyone who has already thought about the points these characters are trying to hard to convey, nothing about the dialogue is interesting.
All-in-all, a boring movie filmed in one weekend that has no overall redeeming qualities. It felt like play rehearsal.
Down a Dark Hall (2018)
The Example of Faltering Acts
This is all you need to know about this movie:
- First Act shows promise and intrigue, with decent and well-acted characters.
- The Second Act treads upon questionable ground, straddling somewhere between "Umm, maybe?" and "Umm, No."
- The Third Act is a complete mess, from start to finish, where the movie tracks off the rails, where the wheels fall off the wagon completely and utterly.
The end leaves you with a firestorm of garbage (literally); a story that was told so poorly; with throwaway characters and plot lines that leave you regretting you stuck around.
The perfect example of work that starts well and finishes terribly, just as so many movies and novels before it. I simply don't think most people understand how to tell a complete story. Usually because most people have a good idea, and start that idea before finishing it, only to try and make up a slapdash ending before they run out of time or simply become bored with their work. There's obviously more to it than that with movies ... but who cares the cause and reason, this one is just more suffering of the same. Terrible.
Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018)
Haha. Laughably bad. But still not funny.
There's not much to be said here. This is a straight up money grab, though I'm not sure whose money they are actually grabbing. Not mine.
Anything you remember from the original you might as well toss out the window. This movie is as B-level as you get, possibly C. Remember those direct to DVD Steven Seagal movies? This one is right up those trash buckets' alley. Stallone and "The Animal" Dave Bautista have secondary roles at best. If I had to count, I'd say Dave utters, maybe, 8-9 lines the entire movie, none of which are interesting or memorable. The movie itself is so ridiculous, illogical, and scattered. There's no substantial plot, no real point to what little plot exists beyond that unsubstantial mess, and anything remaining is as cheap and low-grade as you get. The entire movie is full of throwaway characters. When you do watch this, just count on six hands how many characters are in the movie yet have no actual point what so ever. For fun, I'll give you a quick start:
- The blonde/brunette girl who OooOoOoooOOs at the beginning, in the truck (maybe ... Abigail?).
- The brunette girl who works for Stallone (maybe ... Abigail?).
- The blonde girl who works for Stallone (maybe ... Abigail?).
- The 3 Legion Hackers
- The Scar-Faced African Gangster
- The girlfriend of the main Jet Li's "brother"
- JESSE METCALFE (I mean, I'm laughing as I type this, but I'm still trying to figure out WHAT exactly his entire point in the film was. Thinking, thinking, thinking, deep in my mind, and still can't figure it out. The guy is next to useless, beyond so, even, and comes off as just a helpless puppy in the movie who is there just to make the other main characters seem more useful).
- Dave Bautista
You could even argue 50 Cent, but I guess he does have a purpose in the film, and at leas this character contributes something, even as ridiculous as it is.
Apparently this Hades prison has no ability to stop wave-based signals either, for 2-way audio communication works just fine in this electrified floor setting. Really, the entire prison is a joke. It's security, its layout, its prisoners, the way its ran, the way the prisoners work ... none of it has any thought behind outside a couple of screen writers who drew the story out on a napkin over lunch. It is that shallow.
Let's not even talk about the abysmmal "shakey-cam" all of these trash A-C level action movies have started abusing for the past 15 years. Or the lack of direction. Or the awful script. The poor dialogue. The vacant acting. The amateur cinematography...
There is no redeeming qualities to this movie--at all. You will watch it, you will (maybe) finish it. Subsequently, immediately, you will forget it after giving it a bad review, then proceed to delete it from your hard drive.
AWFUL.
The Fate of the Furious (2017)
Jumped the Shark BIG Time (SPOILERS)
Unlike other negative reviewers, I AM a fan of the franchise. To date, I have seen every F&F movie in the theater. That trend ends now.
Fast and the Furious 7 was not a good movie. But this? It is the most asinine movie I've ever seen. It's so ridiculous and full of half-written plots, cheesy one liners (back-to-back-to-back-to- back), soulless, replaceable characters, and the stupidest action sequences you'll ever bare witness to.
The plot? Who cares? There's some loose connection with trying to tie together the Shaw Brothers with Cypher (Charlize) ... but its distant and laughable at best. You can obviously tell there was little attempt to ever extend the story of Shaw from FF6, as the results in FF7 were laughable. But this movie just magnifies that 100-fold.
I could write a novel on the silly action sequences. There were so many: the wrecking ball; the submarine; the Rock ambushing a torpedo gliding across the icy plain of Russia from the side of his car; Toretto's 2k!, no 3k, no 5k(!!) horsepower car tossing other cars around the streets of New York; the sudden ability for Cypher to hack every car in NYC, regardless of year or make, and somehow control them all like a Transformer-esque army (a literal battalion of cars) and then have them rain from 6 story buildings like cats and dogs... Still not sure how, since cars were just emerging through the sides of buildings that were not even parking garages, and a good many stories up. A 1988 Taurus? Hack it! A DeLorean? Hack it. A 1999 Jeep Cherokee? Hack it. Every car can be hacked, apparently, and then used to drive with pinpoint accuracy in droves, like tidal waves, to crash, counter, and explode upon a victim of your choice. Then, what about the Shaw Brothers in their GI Joe jet packs? Or Roman using his Lambo underwater in the Arctic Tundra of Russia, for a good few hundred yards, yet somehow comes out not wet, nor drowned, nor feeling any level of hypothermia...? Look, every scene in this movie is so silly that it stacks HIGH above the ridiculousness level of what we've come to love about this franchise. It's just tacky now. Soulless, and thoughtless--plain idiotic.
The characters have no semblance of their former selves. Remember the emotional bonds forged in #1, 4, 5, and 6? You won't see any of that here. The characters are simply there to spit one-liners at each other, as if they were a bunch of 13 year old boys jockeying over seats at a lunch table. You could take any character (minus Vin) away from this movie and the movie wouldn't be impacted. Kurt Russel and Scott Eastwood (Scott especially) are just cringe-worthy every time they talk. Scott's entire character was unnecessary--I guess he's a poor man's replacement for Paul Walker. He fails miserably on that account. Roman has no point at all in this film and has been converted into just a 100% useless laughing stock. He makes decisions that add no value to the team, but simply get them into situations worse than they are already in. He never does anything positive. Ludicrous and that less-than-one-dimensional hacker-girl are simply there to speak a few random IT terms the writers grabbed from a 5 minute search on the internet. "Slaving" a sub-marine? Their characters are as pointless as any others. Letty is just there to make the audience "believe" there is some semblance of Vin having resentment for turning his back on his family.
Given how powerful and elusive Cypher is, Toretto would never have the jump on her ... ever. The entire angle of him somehow just knowing where Shaw's MOTHER (don't get me started) is absurd. And then they try and explain the entire story of "How" in about 1 minute during the middle of the action climax ... and introduce Shaw's Brother, who is NOT DEAD (GASP!) only so he spouts 1-2 lines before moving on with life, as if he were never there.
Then, The Rock. Why is he even here? He and Statham hate one another yet they don't. Statham: supposed to hate Team-FF for killing his brother, but doesn't really hate them. Why? Well, because good old brother is still alive, and Statham has known this the entire time. So that makes his revenge on Toretto and his team in FF7 meaningless. Then, the baby thing? What in the hell was that about? Was I watching Baby's Day Out? Dunsten Checks In? Embarrassing, cheap attempts for a laugh.
Look. FF5 and FF6 brought some over the top action, but they brought i along with touching, emotional stories tied to deep rooted characters you've grown to love throughout the series. Add: good plots.
FF7 was a dud. Outside of Paul Walkers tribute, the movie itself was utterly pointless.
But FF8? This movie is plain awful.The people who are saying this movie is GOOD are just saying that because it's piling on the levels of ridiculousness introduced in FF7 (namely). However, its removing all of the deeper meaning and soul that made FF4, FF5, and FF6 work.
Hate to say it, but Paul Walker's death is sort of an analogy for this series: he was barely ethereal for #7 and the movie suffered for it ... losing it's way as he floated away. He had no part in FF8, and as such, the movie was without soul. It was a shell of former entries.
The Fonz is gliding high on his water skis in this movie; high up in the air, above Cypher's plane, looking down, down, down, far below ice-sharks circling Roman's watery grave, and deep beneath the ice of Russia's Tundra where remnants of a separatists' nuclear submarine lay burning.
Also: nice to see guys in 2017 carrying around nuclear launch codes in briefcases attached to their arm by handcuffs.