Reviews

The high score reviews here are most likely paid-for promotions, but the low-score anti-woke reviews are equally unfair.

I think the main negative for the film would be why do Hollywood insist on making films based on the assumption that the viewing demographic is composed entirely of slightly-overweight teenage girls of mixed race - none of whom, I suspect, would ever watch a film like this?

I suspect some of the low score reviews are also by people who have not actually seen the film. For example, it's a MOUNTAIN LION!!! Not an African Lion! They are native to North America! What's the problem?

The Good:

1. The creature SFX are excellent.

2. The heroine is suitably kick-ass, although not very plausible. The film's critics continually pick on her fighting skills, which develop as the film progresses, but I thought that was reasonably well handled - she's inexperienced, she gets better. OK.

3. Nice cinematography of what looks like the Pacific Northwest.

4. The fight scenes are well-choreographed and gory.

5. There's a dog in it.

The Bad

1. Quite apart from the pretty unlikely plot, the film has no suspense or tension whatsoever. The script is lifeless, and not helped by injections of native Comanche and native French (equally incomprehensible). The direction is sound - but somehow lacking. There is no build-up. No sense of menace. One never feels the heroine is in real danger. Certainly, one feels no sympathy for the Indian Braves as they are mown down like skittles in a bowling alley.

2. We all know exactly what's going to happen - nothing new on that front. No plot twists at all.

3. The animal SFX, particularly the bear, are mediocre.

4. The native American Indian background stuff is plain ridiculous.

5. The heroine looks exactly like Violet, the daughter out of The Incredibles. I'm sure that isn't a coincidence - but does raise the question how many young girls (or young men, to pacify the woke brigade) who wanted to be like Violet will watch this film?

6. Apart from the heroine, there is a conspicuous absence of acting ability.

I have always been a great fan of the first three Predator films, and AVP (which I thought was pretty good even though the critics panned it.)

This film is nowhere near as good as any of those four, but certainly stands head and shoulders above The Predator (2018) and AVP: Requiem (2007)

The only good thing about this film is the action sequence in Prague, which is in no-way believable but still a terrific piece of filming and direction. I'm guessing that wrapped up about $50M of the budget right there.

Shame about the rest of the film. Quite frankly, it makes CIA Black-Ops look like a laughing stock. No-one will ever hire Blackwater again!

Ryan Gosling is utterly humourless. His jacket would be a better actor. My dog is a better actor. His one-liners (such as they are) just make you roll your eyes.

Captain America is so OTT he is bizarre.

The rest of the cast were written in by the woke brigade, as usual.

Writing & (lack of) plot are appalling.

1. Girl with pacemaker who can run, jump, swim, fight, get kidnapped and suffer no ill-effects. Reason she has pacemaker? Plot device to allow hero to track her. Really? Is that the best the scriptwriter could come up with?

2. Guns with endless magazines (not to mention the single-cartridge flare pistol which fires about six shots).

3. Bullets with impossible trajectories (men shooting upwards into a 2nd floor apartment from the ground can't possibly hit furniture on the far side of the room.)

4. The hero gets repeatedly stabbed and just continues as if nothing has happened. In fact, a wax replica of Ryan Gosling would show more pain and emotion. Any real person would need an ambulance after the first couple of strikes, and probably never make it to hospital.

5. What's with the Tamil guy? Brilliant fighter, beats everyone - but then turns around and just gives up at the end. Uh?

6. One on one fight sequences done with fast edits so you can't see the impossibliity of the techniques.

7. Oh, yes. The flashbacks. Utterly pointless. Utterly guessable. Presumably just put in to extend the runtime.

8. The bad guys repeatedly do stupid things for the furtherance of the plot. Told to kill Ryan Gosling (the finest and toughest assassin the CIA has ever produced) painlessly, do the team of special forces guys just shoot him from a distance? Of course not. The leader pulls a knife and tries to stab him to death. (a) That's probably not painless. (b) It's not a great idea.

In summary, it's an OK actioner if you've got nothing better to do before bed, but park your brain at the living room door.

This is not normally the kind of film I would watch. I'm more of an Independence Day and Armageddon kind of a guy. But having seen the highly polarised reviews on IMDB I was curious and gave it a try, and I have to say I'm glad I did.

The polarised reviews seem to be aimed entirely at creating a low IMDB score and discouraging viewers. They bear no relation to the quality of the film or its content. As one reviewer sagely noted, the phone call went out and two hundred negative reviews flooded in. I can think of no reaction which better highlights the mindset of the people at whom this film is aimed....

Even as a Britisher, and somewhat remote from American politics, I can understand the hatred which the aforementioned people have heaped upon it. The film is an uncompromising look into one not-so-unlikely future where to be different is to be - quite literally - branded and outcast.

The film has a number of levels, depending upon how intently you're going to watch it. Personally, I found the opening half an hour boring, filled as it was with a lot of personal exposition and little action, but gradually the characters became more interesting and I stopped skipping bits. I'm guessing that the gay love scenes probably upset a lot of viewers. That aspect of the plot - a married man concealing his sexuality in the same way that a muslim woman would conceal her religeon by not wearing a hijab, thereby fitting into society's norms - was perhaps a step too far. Very thought provoking, though.

The acting is excellent throughout. The female leads outshine the men - not in a woke Hollywood way, but in the sense that women often tend to be stronger than men in situations which require moral fortitude and common sense rather than physical courage.

Again, I can see why the film was hated - the 'good guys', who are either family-types, gay, bisexual or Indian, keep a gun-toting, all-American redneck chained in the barn so he can't betray them. They make the effort to try to understand why he hates them, and in the end he comes to realise that people are still people, whether they are white, brown or gay. An all-American redneck changing his principles and admitting to it is obviously quite impossible. Silly director.

A lot of the negative reviews for this film seem to centre on the fact that it could never happen. Well, it happened in America, before Black people (ostensibly) gained the same rights as everyone else. It happened in Nazi Germany. It happened in Eastern Europe in Bosnia. It happened in Cambodia. It's happening right now in China. That nice Mr Yeltsin would like to see it happen in Ukraine. Hence my opening comment. Show films like this to the kids in school, so when they grow up they don't make the same stupid mistakes as their ancestors.

Claptrap which ticks all the boxes for political correctness.

I'm a great fan of both Gerard Butler and Frank Grillo, but both are utterly wasted in this film. The script manages to kill all suspense, and has no dark humour whatsoever. You really don't care who the good or bad guys are, or what happens to them. It must have been difficult to make a film with such a decent cast and plotline boring, but it was the one thing the director succeeded in.

The technical side is also appalling, featuring so many staged and unlikely gaffes it's almost funny. Or maybe it was meant to be funny, and I missed it.

Bent cop pulls large gym bag out of his bottom drawer and heads for the evidence locker. Nothing suspicious there, then.

Contract killer has a 300-round machine gun. Jolly useful.

The heroine gets shot once in the stomach and sits around half-dead for a good portion of the movie, before suddenly springing to life and performing incredible acrobatics.

On the other hand, Gerard Butler and Frank Grillo get shot multiple times and it hardly slows them down.

There is completely bullet proof glass to the cells, but you can put your elbow through the armoury window.

Oh, and changing the keypad code to the cells requires a write process of at least thirty seconds - twice.

Most of the police seem to be toting large calibre single-shot cowboy guns. They fool around with these in a way which I personally found quite frightening by suggesting even in a movie that a police officer would do any such thing. Then they fire them one-handed, and (unsurprisingly) never hit anything. Whatever happened to the two-handed Weaver Stance? In an era when the ultra-realistic combat style of John Wick is the de-facto standard, why make something so incredibly amateurish?

And the ending is absolutely ridiculous. It looks like the director changed his mind after taking the closing shot and said, "hey guys, how about we have some love interest between the brutal contract torturer/killer and the honourable lady cop?"

WARNING: just in case you think the film will be harmless fun to watch with your partner, there are some wholly gratuitous scenes of torture and violence a la Tarantino, which don't add anything to the film and further reduce my rating of it from three stars to two.

I utterly fail to understand why people who simply don't like this kind of film go to the trouble of leaving bad reviews.

It's a Martial Arts film.

It will therefore have a simple plot to allow the maximum use of the hero's abilities, otherwise why not cast Benedict Cumberbatch, or Sigourney Weaver as the lead.

It will rely heavily on co-incidence and staged action sequences.

There must be some suspension of disbelief. Otherwise, the hero will get locked up in the first ten minutes and spend the rest of the film talking to his lawyer, whilst the bad guys continue with their evil machinations (note the contrast between REAL LIFE and ENTERTAINMENT).

The characters will be relatively two-dimensional (although in KOTD Luc Besson actually goes to the trouble to give them some background so you feel some genuine care for them).

The hero will win in the end, against all odds.

The bad guys will come to sticky ends - the stickier and more creative the better.

The lovely heroine will be rescued, and live happily ever after.

This film offers exactly these things, in spades. Jet Li is in wonderful form. The fight sequences are well-choreographed, and well-filmed and edited. There is some humour in them - they are NOT supposed to be realistic fights. The fight with the boxer in the takeaway; the fight in the gymnasium, and the fight with the twins are all classics, and beautifully crafted.

Have any of the critics out there ever seen a real fight? They're brutal, dirty, unpleasant and thoroughly un-entertaining, and the good guy doesn't always win. Does anyone really want to watch something like that? I'm a Third Dan (Master) in Wado Ryu karate, and I know what fighting is. I enjoyed this film because the fighting is entertaining make-believe, not gruesome reality.

And for the reviewer who doesn't know what the Kiss of the Dragon is, it's a secret Kung Fu technique for killing an opponent (a bit like the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart technique in Kill Bill).

Yes, it's all hokum.

IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE FUN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm really not sure who put all the positive reviews on here - I'm guessing shills, cast or family members.

The film borrows its sets and plot from the computer game Half Life, except the game had a bigger budget.

It borrows the creature from The Thing, without actually creating a particularly scary monster.

The script is wooden, the cast is - well, strange. The characters in Half Life have better acting ability.

The physics and biology is absolutely laughable. Heroine goes into 200 degrees of heat fully dressed - nothing melts, nothing burns, not even the soles of her trainers. She comes out a bit red, is all. And if in a room heavily contaminated with alien spores, if you don't have a nappy to put over your face, just pull your jumper up. Very Covid.

The Spetnaz troops are the best. Imagine a group of football supporters in blue and white striped underwear, carrying amazingly out of date firearms. You have the look, you have the discipline.

I give the film two stars, simply because the heroine gets most of her kit off, Ripley-style, towards the end.

MONSTER CGI: absolutely mind-bogglingly-awesome - although mostly derivative. Tron meets Transformers meets Avatar meets Pacific Rim meets Journey to the Centre of the Earth meets the remake of Total Recall meets the Incredibles. Not much is new, really, but it's all very spectacular and very realistic.

PLOT: absolutely mind-bogglingly-stupid. Completely impossible science, and all of it utterly unnecessary. Hollow earth? Yeah, let's just get rid of that annoying core of molten iron and have a dinosaur wonderland instead. Getting there? Two seconds no problem. Getting back? No problem - Godzilla can burn a tunnel that deep in ten seconds. Gravity reversal - no problem. Hang on. What the heck is gravity reversal? And why does it happen going down and not coming up? And why should it squash you? And why doesn't it affect Kong?

TWIST AT THE END: if you've ever watched WWE you know exactly what's going to happen.

CHARACTERS: annoying adolescents (multiple) - check. Troubled father- daughter relationship - check. Mad scientist (the Mexican out of the Hateful Eight, no less) wants to rule the world but screws up - check. The good scientist suffering personal loss who saves everyone - check. That irritating scientist dad bloke who ruined the other Kong film by sticking his oar in at every opportunity but now given a bit part for continuity purposes - check. The wicked female security agent with a fabulous figure who comes to a gruesome end - check. Any character not stereotyped or woke - no. The actor showing the greatest emotional range was undoubtedly Kong.

SCRIPT: knocked up by a couple of drunken screenwriters in a bar one night, and approved (re-writes cost money) by a committee of bean counters reviewing the box office figures from the last Kong debacle. No humour, no pathos, no genuine science, nothing original. Bleh.

SOUNDTRACK: fabulous monster noises, with an otherwise forgettable score.

DIRECTION & EDITING: excellent. Just needed a decent plot, script and cast.

SUMMARY: worth watching for the action sequences, but leave your brain at home. I cannot believe the big studios continue to spend so much money creating visually incredible films ruined by an utterly worthless plot, cast and script.

Enjoyable sky romp, with some edge-of-the-seat action sequences in a disintegrating bomber. At first the heroine is trapped in the lower gun turret and has the film largely to herself whilst tension mounts with the rest of the crew over the intercom and the plot gradually unfolds. In the latter part of the film, she escapes in specatacular fashion and becomes an action heroine to rival Ripley and Sarah Connor.

There's nothing wrong with the film as an over-the-top action adventure (although it does take itself a bit too seriously) - the problem is that the supernatural element seems to have been added as an afterthought, perhaps so the marketing people could add to the films appeal. The gremlin is shown in full CGI glory far too early, comes as no surprise whatsoever, and is actually entirely superfluous to the main plot. Everything that happened could have been more realistically attributed to either the attacking aircraft, or technical malfunction.

There is a lot of twaddle in the reviews here about female WWII aircrew - but from the closing credits it is made obvious that there were quite a lot around, and if they weren't normally involved in combat that was more likely a policy decision than a decision based on ability - just as in today's military.

OK, the woman/superhero/good, man/weakling/bad thing is a bit OTT, but that's the film industry at the moment, and - lets face it - no-one complained when Ripley blew the alien out of the airlock.

Summary: worth watching. Good build up of of tension at the start leading to some good action sequences, and even the unnecessary CGI gremlin is convincingly nasty!

I'm not going to discuss the political aspects of this film, as it deals with them with about as much insight as John Wayne and The Green Berets does the Vietnam conflict. This film is rather more a memorial to some very brave US soldiers who lost their lives through monumental command stupidity when a 'hearts and minds' US Military Outpost was placed (even to my militarily-untrained eye) in the most ridiculous location in Afghanistan (or indeed the entire Middle East), as was apparently acknowledged both before and after the event by the US Military themselves. Based on a true story, the film is basically a record of repeated attacks on the outpost by the Taliban, and the soldiers' attempts to defend the indefensible, interspersed with the usual soldierly chit-chat and team-building. I'm not entirely convinced that the real soldiers (US Cavalry veterans) who died would be entirely happy with the way their Hollywood counterparts portrayed them - for example, that no serious effort was made to secure or patrol the surrounding heights throughout the repeated attacks, even though the attacks always came from the same place. Furthermore, the soldiers are presented as chiefly concerned with the chit-chat instead of being careful - like keeping to cover, and not strolling across an IED-lined river bridge chatting happily to your mate. For the first three quarters of the movie, the firefights are chiefly of soldiers shooting at an apparently empty hillside, and it difficult to feel compassion when someone gets killed because they are all in the same camo and helmets and you can't really tell who's who. This is something the director obviously realised post-production, as the film is heavily overlaid with titles saying who is who, and also where they are (as the location is also pretty samey). However, in the effort to be fair to all the combatants, there are just too many to remember, and the only one who really sticks is Clint Eastwood Junior, sporting a ridiculous moustache. The barrack-room backchat is heavily-scripted, un-funny and generally pointless, adding to the difficulty in caring about the characters. It may be that this is real US army-talk - regardless, it isn't entertaining to listen to. The firefights are confusing and, I suspect, grittily realistic. Unfortunately, this makes them unsatisfactory to watch as you, the viewer, have no more idea what's going on, where the enemy is, or who is shooting at who, than the soldiers themselves. In summary, the film is a sound memorial to the soldiers who died and an excellent lesson for West Point in military stupidity - but as a war-film it lacks a sharp script, necessary character development, any real insight into the Afghan conflict, or the kind of close direction required for complex battle sequences to be comprehensible.

It seems that a lot of people are critical of this film because it isn't a real portrayal of War - that's war in general, not even the particularly unpleasant war in Bosnia involving ethnic cleansing and mass murder.

I've got news for those critics - war films about real war aren't fun. They're not exciting. They don't have a positive ending. They give you nightmares for weeks afterwards. They're called 'documentaries'.

War films designed for entertainment are like this one. They have amusing characters who do stupid things; they use made-up call signs because it sounds kinda military to those who don't know any better; the plot is far-fetched, and the good guys walk into the sunset with the girl.

This film has satisfactory acting, an occasionally amusing script, some terrific cinematography (especially the underwater sequences, which are a cross between James Bond's 'Thunderball' and 'The Abyss') and some excellent fight scenes. Essentially, it's 'Kelly's Heroes' set underwater.

No, it's not a real representation of how US Navy Seals (or the British SAS) would really act - but it's fun, its exciting, and it certainly kept me entertained throughout its runtime.

Don't be swayed by the critics - get a few mates round and a six-pack and enjoy it for what it is.

I was a great fan of the original Dad's Army series on the TV. I loved the characters, and the interaction between them. Even though you always knew exactly what was going to happen next, it was funny.

Although I seem to be in a minority, I also thought that the original feature film from 1971 was pretty funny, even if in a more slapstick way.

In summary, I think you can appreciate that the comedy bar does not need to be set too high for me to enjoy and laugh at a film.

So - what I just don't understand is how a well-funded, professional film-maker like Oliver Parker with access to excellent actors and actresses, and hundreds of hours of brilliant original material there for the studying, could produce such absolute garbage as this film.

OK, his track record is not spectacular. The St Trinians duology and Johnny English were only so-so, and most of his other stuff is a bit plodding and serious.

But he has a ready-made audience! Most people wanting to see this film would be wanting more of the original Dad's Army sitcom humour - more of the now-deceased characters; more of the same witty interactions, more slapstick humour, more 'don't panic' and 'we're doomed'! That would not be difficult, surely. But oh no. Instead, we get a 100 minutes of non-comedy as a bunch of highly talented actors are badly directed through a wooden script.

The plot is not funny. It's a hoary old femme fatale chestnut which revolves around Catherine Zeta Jones. Whilst she's a very good femme fatale - she's not funny.

The script is not funny. No-one says anything amusing. Interactions between the characters are laboured, dead and lack anything like comic timing. The slapstick sequences are so bad that you feel sorry for the talented actors forced to go through the motions.

The cast characters are not funny. Tom Courtenay as Jones looks and sounds like a dazed old man with Alzheimer's - quiet, sad and lost. There is no spark of the fire and craziness from Clive Dunn's representation. Bill Nighy as Wilson is no longer funny because he's a really nice chap who would never hurt a fly - he's now a public school snob who risks his relationship with Mavis over an old flame. John Le Mesurier's character would never have contemplated such perfidy! Michael Gambon as Godfrey portrays a senile old man who urinates up a tree in a field - the original Godfrey was an old-fashioned gentleman who would never have done such a thing. Bill Paterson's Frazer has such limited screen time he might as well not be in it. Toby Jones as Mainwaring bears some similarity to the original Arthur Lowe, but once again instead of appearing as just a bumbling, pompous but ultimately golden-hearted gentleman he just looks a bit sad and lost. Blake Harrison as Pike is about as close as anyone gets to the original Ian Lavender version, but even he is given strangely conflicting characteristics - the original mummy's boy Pike would never have dumped his girlfriend on the doorstep, or pursued a man-eater like Catherine Zeta Jones!

Even the two members of the original cast who appear have such brief roles you probably won't even notice they were there unless you read the cast list. Ian Lavender appears as a senior officer but is almost unrecognisable (and there is no tongue-in-cheek nod to his original role, which surely would not have been difficult to write in). And the vicar plays - the vicar. Very briefly.

The only even-slightly redeeming feature of this film is that it gives some screen-time to characters of the women who supported the Home Guard and the war effort. They are no funnier than the men, but at least they are there.

I think the out-takes during the end credits actually show that the cast of the film could have made a great movie if only the Director had let them.

Just for a few seconds, the cast members actually imitate the attitudes and interactions of the original Dad's Army cast, and just for a few seconds it's actually funny! I can only believe that the cast were told: "yes, you're playing the parts of Jones and Mainwaring and Wilson and so on, but you MUST NOT under any circumstances attempt to emulate the way in which the original actors Clive Dunn and Arthur Lowe and John Le Mesurier and so on played their roles. Any attempt at actual humour, real acting or changing the script and you're fired!"

At the final screening before this film went to print, a lot of people must have looked sideways at each other, and I only hope the director hung his head in shame.