Jurassic World Rebirth

 The Jurassic World movies are built around a seriously toxic, mind-numbingly idiotic plot point: That dinosaurs are just not cool enough, and that people will get bored of them quickly. The original Jurassic Park was built around the awe that these creatures inspire; They're the entire appeal of the franchise, for fuck's sake.

 This whole concept seems to come from one Colin Trevorrow, who's finally left the Jurassic World building to go fail upward somewhere else. He leaves behind three of the stupidest mainstream films of the last decade.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is helmed by the infinitely more capable Gareth Edwards, working from a script from David Koepp -  a man who's produced his share of shit, but also some cool stuff. Their tack, which is to hew closer to Jurassic Park than to any of the sequels, is solid.

 Unfortunately, they've chosen to carry forward the stupid, stupid baggage from the Jurassic World films. So as the film starts, we're informed that dinosaurs are dying all over the place, and people just don't give  a shit.
 Well, most people. Obviously evil biotech companies are after dinosaurs' magic blood, which they know they can use to eliminate heart disease. And since there are no more parks, they need to go get this magic dinosaur blood (it needs to be from the biggest dinosaurs, because they have the biggest hearts, you see!) from closed off areas near the equator where dinosaurs still roam free.

 You know what, after re-reading the paragraph above, I'm not sure Koepp is that much of an improvement over Trevorrow. Sadly, it doesn't get a whole lot better.

 An obviously evil suit (Rupert Friend) working for one of those obviously evil big pharma companies hires a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and a dinosaur expert (Jonathan Bailey) to go get the magic dinosaur blood with him and a group of other PMC types. On the way they rescue a family who decided to go sailing in dinosaur-infested waters, so when things inevitably go wrong and everyone gets stranded in yet another dinosaur island, the film splits its time between the PMCs going after their quarries and the family trying to make it to safety.

 And... it's mostly fine. It's dumb - really dumb - and noticeably making an effort at being very kid-friendly (complete with a cute baby dinosaur following the family around and basically acting like a puppy). It's also overstuffed, making its relatively lean (for the current status quo) runtime feel much longer than it actually is.
 But action is mostly good. There's extremely little sense of risk - this is the kind of movie that blatantly only kills evil characters or the ones it doesn't spend any time developing. It also cheats all the time by making pursuing monsters either disappear or suddenly fall back in the interstices between one shot and another; The worst offender in that respect is a scene where the family out-paddles a chasing dinosaur (a scene that's directly taken from Crichton's book for the original Jurassic Park).

 OK, I'm not really selling it, am I? It's got good momentum, the effects are pretty good (although nothing groundbreaking), and there's good variety. There's also good dinosaur variety: We get Quetzalcoatlus, Mosasaurs, Titanosaurs, and a few others. The mutated dinosaurs fare less better, but at least the sausage-headed big bad is a botched mutation, so it looks like something out of H.R. Giger's sketchbooks than an actual dinosaur.

Seriously, the HR Giger estate must not be thrilled.

 The main issue here is that the movie is in too many ways really fucking basic. An early scene where Zora (Johansson's character bonds with another one played by Mahershala Ali is representative - they trade sad, sad news and make sad sad faces at each other, while all the time Alexandre Desplat's extremely intrusive, manipulative score indicates to us that we should be sad too. The filmmaking relies far too much on glib lines, reaction shots and hearty laughs (tm) whenever someone does something that's supposed to be funny - the rhythms almost make things feel like they're edited like a trailer a lot of the time. This might be a side-product of being aimed at children, and I fucking abhor it.

 David Koepp's script is another major problem. The plotting is... fine, but all the characters are fairly nondescript, the humour is terrible, and every interaction is clumsily handled or botched. Oh, and he insists on writing young people, that's always funny to watch. In this one he's created a lazy zoomer who offers weed to a pre-tween! Isn't that hilarious? The less said of his attempts at a 'stick it to the man' messaging, the better, but at least he includes an American family of latinxs as the coprotagonists - that's actually appreciated in the current political environment.

 Going by his work, at this point I'm convinced that the indelible characters from the first Jurassic Park are all Crichton and Spielberg.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is a blatant bid to recapture the magic of that fist movie - there are a ridiculous number of references, callbacks, and scenes that mirror events from it. It's a pale imitation, though, and it's weighed down by too many iffy elements. A respectable attempt, and much, much better than the last few tries, but it still misses the mark.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E

 It's kind of obvious when you think about it: who better to direct a frothy Bond-like spy movie than Guy fucking Ritchie? After Sherlock Holmes's unlikely success divorced him from both his grittier, street-level crime comedies and the twin debacle of Swept Away and Revolver, he finally got his chance at it when he was offered a script that had been in development hell for more than twenty years - an adaptation of a 60's TV series that had been previously attached to Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino and Matthew Vaughn.

 I don't think I ever watched a single episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E, but its reruns were an eternal presence on TV while growing up (enough for a popular local band to call themselves after one of its characters).

 This modern adaptation's plot concerns two excellently named spies - the smug, suave, sophisticated Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and the uptight, violent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) forced to work together along with an East German mechanic (Alicia Vikander) who is connected to a man with the potential to shatter world peace.

 The script (by Lionel Wigram and Ritchie) follows the expected trajectory - the two are antagonists at first, then bicker constantly as they grudgingly come to respect each other. It doesn't place much weight in plausibility (the villains end up being Nazis, for fuck's sake); This is firmly in the world-hopping, light entertainment camp of spy fiction: Ridiculously attractive, competent people charming and shooting their way through a conspiracy mostly set among 1963's Rome jet set society.

 Wry humour and competence porn are the order of the day, epitomized by the film's first-rate kick-off, a busy, exciting, and often hilarious exfiltration across the Berlin Wall that at one point has Illya chasing a car on foot, Terminator 2 style, and catching up to it and start dismantling it with his hands to establish just how badass his character is. Amazing.

 Plot is largely a formality; It's all about the characters, who are ridiculous but well thought out, funny, and bounce of each other in interesting ways. And sometimes, that's enough, especially when the surfaces are kept as carefully as they are here. Ritchie's slightly toned-down directing style fits the material well, injecting some well-made split frames on some of the action but mostly keeping the excesses limited. He flexes his formidable talents to keep the pace relentlessly bouncing forward instead. The Cinematography by John Mathieson is excellent, with a slightly de-saturated, kodachrome-like palette that only enhances the natural beauty of the summery Rome-set seaside locations on the film's back half. 

 Most of all, it's the actors. Cavill's outsized looks and charisma are a natural fit for a Bond figure, Armie Hammer's intensity works extremely well for his role, and Vikander is ridiculously good, as always, in a role that's quite unlike anything she's done since. How is this woman not a bigger star?

 Elsewhere Elizabeth Debicki cuts an imposing figure as the film's sophisticated villain, and Hugh Grant has a tiny, welcome role where he steals most of the film's best lines with his characteristic wry delivery.

 It's a hugely enjoyable film - lightweight by design but anchored with some fun action scenes, led by that initial chase across cold-war Berlin and quickly followed by a bathroom brawl which features a huge amount of destruction to the premises, as is right and proper (no porcelain was harmed during the shot, which results in a few points deducted.

 There's some romance to accompany the developing bromance, and it's disarmingly sweet - a good contrast to Solo's more callous Bond-style conquests. Possibly my favorite nod to Risky Business.

 Unfortunately the film noticeably runs out of steam towards the end, particularly with a pointless climactic vehicle chase that drags on forever and a fairly prosaic wrap-up to the whole affair. Ritchie also has a tendency to retread older scenes adding new information throughout, which becomes a little tiresome especially when those scenes only happened a few minutes ago.

 That might be something from the show? I have no idea how much the film lifts from its inspiration, aside from the premise and affection for the characters, but there are a couple of scenes - particularly the unveiling of a vehicle for that last, disappointing chase - that seem like they must be referencing something on the show.

 As weak as the final act is, the unfulfilled promise of a sequel is as maddening now as it was nine years ago. This is a far better take on the less serious branch of spy fiction than any recent Bond installment or any of the Mission Impossibles (whose star, Tom Cruise, was attached to star as Solo; That would have been a completely different, and maybe not as interesting, movie). Oh well.

Alienoid: Return to the Future (Oegye+in 2bu)

 I was actually looking forward to the sequel/conclusion/second half of Alienoid, a Korean action movie that uncomfortably mashed together a wuxia epic and chintzy sci-fi spectacle - each half set in separate timelines, cobbled together with a mess of haphazardly plotted time travel and a very poorly thought-out alien conspiracy.

 While the modern sci-fi section was terrible, the wuxia storyline was surprisingly excellent; And by the end it seemed that, with most of the main characters stranded in the past, that would force the sequel to play to its strengths.

 And for all of maybe half an hour, it seems like it's working. The first few scenes follow the mysterious gun-toting woman - who we now know is Lee Ahn (Kim Tae-ri), the kid from the first movie, all grown up (to add to the confusion, there are two timelines set in the past, ten years apart).

 She now possesses a MacGuffin which will allow the evil aliens to return to the future to enact their cataclysmic terraforming plans, so all the bad guys are going after her. Trying to (mostly) help her are Dosa Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol) and his two cat/human hybrid servants and two other magicians played by Yum Jung-ah and Jo Woo-jin.

 That's a very decent setup! All of these characters are fun, and the first fight - against some mercenaries - is a lot of fun, a very traditional Chinese-style fight where Lee Ahn doesn't let her opponent unsheathe his sword. The way it's shot is not great, but the choreography is. The action/stunt director is Sungchul Ryu, returning from the first movie. There's some good wire work later on.

 What follows - which focuses on the sorcerers chasing Lee Ahn - is admittedly not as good, but it's all mostly fun. And then... it all goes to shit.

 First we, uh, return to the future to reunite with Min Gae-in (Lee Hanee). She was an extremely minor character in the first movie, the custodian of Lee Ahn's BFF whose main thing was being 'comically' smitten with Lee Ahn's 'dad'.

 Well, she turns out to be a badass... customs officer, and via an extremely convoluted set of contrivances she finds out about the alien conspiracy. She's also the descendant of a badass warrior monk (Jin Seon-kyu), who was blinded by the aliens when they took over a Dosa monastery.

 By the time we get back to the Wuxia side of things, the plot has spread like an ugly infection, squeezing the fun and joy out of the plot with convoluted revelations about the true nature of several of the protagonists, and more unengaging, effects-based action.

 Once all characters are yanked to the sci-fi timeline it's almost impossible to care about whatever the hell is happening - writer/director Choi Dong-hoon has let all of his worst tendencies subsume everything. All that's left is lousy plotting full of people shrugging off seemingly mortal wounds, terrible jokes, chintzy-looking special effects and deeply unexciting, CGI-dependent action with some occasional posturing. It seems to consciously go for the feel of a Marvel movie.

 It's an ignoble end for something that had a fair amount of potential.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

 Pity anyone trying to revive a beloved franchise. Not the execs who greenlight them, fuck 'em all - I mean the poor saps who have to develop them. Ghostbusters is a good case study: get burnt for trying something new, spend the rest of eternity doing these lukewarm, nothingburger rehashes.

 I've seldom seen a film so horrified of angering the fans as Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a film that was so focused on making up for the perceived transgressions of the gender-swapped previous film in the franchise it could have come with a complementary fellatio from a Sony intern. It's a cynical, manipulative, hollow mess that has nothing but cheap nostalgia and reverence on offer - not just for the first Ghostbusters movie, as it also transparently channels Stranger Things to evoke inchoate warm feelings for '80s comfort movies. It's so reverent it barely has any jokes (its one humorous scene a jarring Gremlins rip-off) and basically chooses to re-enact the original movie instead of having its own third act. To quote an infinitely better movie: a memory, trapped in amber. The sub-title really fits the film; It's a lifeless thing, an echo eternally bouncing around in old, dusty halls it didn't build.

 To say Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is better, then, is not really a compliment - it just means that at least there are glimmers of... something... there.

 After the events of Afterlife, the Spengler Clan (Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace) have been funded by original Ghostbuster Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) and relocated to the old firehouse headquarters in New York, because this movie is nothing if not willing to try and milk all the fucking nostalgia it can out of its props and sets. Know your perceived audience, I guess.

 And because the Ghostbusters are supposed to be scrappy underdogs (and because the Sony mandate is to reuse all the old stuff), their vehicles and equipment keep falling apart even though they're bankrolled by a millionaire. Nostalgia also dictates that the original crew be in the story, too, with a bigger role this time around, of course.

 Also making a reappearance: William Atherton as Peck, who's been promoted to Mayor after wrecking the city back in the '80s. He's, well, very understandably miffed at the new Ghostbusters recklessly endangering lives in a high-speed pursuit across the New York Streets. As opposed to his first appearance, he's the sympathetic figure here, not the protagonists, because the script hasn't done any groundwork and just assumes you're going to root for the team when these nitwits are clearly a threat to themselves and others, much more so than the original crew.

 There's a lot of waffling around, a lot of pointless side-stories, but when the plot finally kicks in it has to do with an imprisoned old god trying to break loose, and with a couple familial mini-dramas (stepdad needs to be more assertive, the daughter needs to... I dunno, grow up or something? It's not worth wasting digital ink on). Everything feels like filler, a platform for cameos from series actors and props (Hey, it's Bill Murray! and Dan Aykroyd! And Slimer! And Annie Potts, who gets to wear a proton pack this time! Who the fuck was asking for that?) Pandering shit.

 Oh, and they also bring back a couple of the kids from the prior movie, because of course they'd follow these people they barely know halfway across the continent. And that includes that insufferable little shit with the stupid name, too; Oh joy.

 The script (by Jason Reitman and director Gil Kenan) is, like most Sony scripts, half-baked. Seriously, how can a distributor be behind so many movies with such shitty writing? Is it a quality control thing, production practices, do they have a running bet as to how much of a crappy product people are willing to take?
 In this case it's full of continuity errors, overstuffed with characters and exposition, and riddled with plain old bad plotting. It's more of a comedy than Afterlife, at least, but when the film's humor is indistinguishable from the purposefully bad dad jokes Paul Rudd keeps spouting, you're in trouble. It also sets up stuff that has no payoff or is flat-out contradicted: yet again, it repeats the same mistake Afterlife did of rehashing the final act of Ghostbusters and letting all the ghosts get loose... and then barely dwells on the aftermath to focus on a very underwhelming team-against-subpar villain thing.
 It's as if they didn't watch their own shit. It tries to replicate the triumphant ending of the original, too, but this time no-one's there to see it, which was the whole point of having the Stay Puft confrontation out in the open- The whole city was watching! For all its supposed reverence for its source material, this is a movie that doesn't have the first clue how on why it worked in the first place.
 Another thing that annoyed me: They make a big deal out of them tearing down the sliding pole at the fireman station (yes, this is a movie that fetishizes a brass cylinder)... and then it's mysteriously back in position again in time for a dumb joke. A small thing, but emblematic of how shoddy this whole thing is.

 On the positive side, director Gil Kenan has a much better grasp on spectacle than his predecessor. Most of it is your standard mediocre, expensive but fake-looking CGI stuff, but the crew manage to capture some cool scenes and at times lovely imagery. At the top of that list is Emily Alyn Lind as Melody, the ghost of an achingly cool teen with ethereal flames enveloping her, just walking in the nighttime New York streets; She's by far the best thing in the movie, though even she must bend to dumb, dumb, dumb plot necessities. Of the other new characters, most are just exposition faucets (poor Patton Oswalt... and the less said of James Acaster, the better). The only one who registers is Kumail Nanjiani, doing his usual schtick - but I like his usual schtick, so it's a positive.

 I mentioned earlier that saying Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is better than Afterlife isn't really a compliment- as it should be clear by now, it's more of an insult towards Afterlife. These are movies that exist only because these properties need to be impaled on a sharp stick and paraded around, shaken in the hopes some money will fall out, in hopes of appeasing a toxic fandom that will brook no deviation from the original formula.

 I'm beginning to think franchises are a lost cause.

UFO Sweden

 Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug) is a troubled young woman whose UFO-obsessed dad disappeared while she was very young. And because this is a very specific type of movie, running through a series of foster homes means that she of course grows up to be a John Connor-style teen delinquent who's a wiz with computers: she's even introduced hacking a keypad with a modified gameboy.

 When her father's car somehow reappears, crashing into some farmer's barn in the middle of the night, she contacts UFO Sweden - a bunch of middle-aged nerds/UFO enthusiasts - to try and make sense of what's happening. And as it turns out, the government is... well, not in on it, exactly - it's never quite clear what anyone is doing in this movie - but there's a lady in meteorological services who seems to be tracking gravity disturbances, data that Denise recovers and uses to zero in on just what happened to her father all those years ago.

 With the conspiracy angle a complete mess, the movie is left needing some antagonists. This void is filled by a well-meaning police officer (Sara Shirpey) who gets it into her head that UFO Sweden is some sort of cult, and a turncoat within UFO Sweden who just doesn't seem to like Denise much and so decides to become evil as a result. Hey, I didn't say that there'd be good antagonists.

 The script - by director Victor Danell and Jimmy Nivrén Olsson - is piss-poor, stringing some dire science fiction conceits along a series of terrible, terrible decisions, arbitrary developments and inscrutable motivations. Events don't really make much sense as presented, and its characters don't come out looking great, either; Just how UFO Sweden ends up rallying behind Denise, for example, is a mystery, given how she tends to behave like a little shit and only acts nice when she needs something out of them. But, you know, she's the protagonist, so not only does that shit fly, I think it's supposed to be relatable?

 It reeks of script improvisation or extreme tinkering right up to the point where the cameras started rolling. 

 However, while the filmmaking is not truly great, it's very muscular and features some pretty excellent chases, car crashes, a couple of interesting special effect sequences and a few instances of great comedic timing. The acting is also good, with a well-developed central relationship between Denise and Lennart (Jesper Barkselius), leader of UFO Sweden and an old friend of her dad's. Most importantly, it sticks the landing with a strong emotional scene that capitalizes on all the good work Torhaug and Barkselius put in throughout the movie.

 And while the music (by Oskar Sollenberg and Gustaf Spetz) consists of the expected sci-fi synths, they're lovely sci-fi synths.

 Whether you'll like it or not will depend on your tolerance for the iffy script, and if you can be bought over by the film's surfaces; Despite a long runtime for what it is, it doesn't really drag too much, and there's always enough going on even if it doesn't make sense all that often. It's not actually a good movie - within this space, I'd direct you towards Jeff Nichol's Midnight Special for that - but... I don't know; While I rolled my eyes a lot during its runtime, a good ending can retroactively enhance any movie. It's all right.

Alienoid (Oegye+in 1bu)

 Aliens - or Alienoids, I guess, but I'm not going to use that word because it's fucking stupid - don't just live among us; They're incarcerated within us.

 In Alienoid's barely sensical cosmology, the human mind is the ultimate alien prison. A warden alien stationed on earth takes receipt of hundreds of prisoners from his home planet every so many years and injects them into our minds. He's also tasked with hunting them down should they take control of their host and try to flee (they can manifest outside the host, carrying the floating human body like a helium balloon; it's a pretty cool/silly image). Earth's atmosphere is poisonous to them, so they can't just ditch us completely - they have to wear us like a suit... or like a (non-)oxygen tank that floats behind them.

 That's just the premise; This is a deeply, deeply convoluted and extremely dumb movie.
 The alien warden (Kim Woo-bin) is also a time traveller, and is accompanied by a wise-cracking floating robot who likes to take on his form - this allows Woo-bin, who plays the warden as a serious, no-nonsense stick in the mud, to also play a 'humorous' sidekick who likes to dress up in goofy suits. The first time he does that the soundtrack goes into full wacky mode. While I'm on that subject - the score for the whole movie is intrusive and really, fucking tacky; Replacing it would actually improve things measurably.

 I'm not really selling this, am I? Well, it does kind of suck, but there's also plenty of good stuff.

You'll have to take my word for it, but this scene is almost Woo-level cool.

 Alienoid is a movie of two halves. Half a movie of two halves, as it ends in a cliffhanger pending completion later this year. In any case - half of the story takes place in the modern age, the other half in the late fourteenth century.

 The modern story is honestly pretty shitty: a very kid-friendly FX-heavy adventure that I honestly struggled to muster any interest for, starring the warden, a ten-year old adopted kid sidekick (Choi Yu-ri), and the comedy robot. It's mostly about the kid figuring out what's going on with her 'dad' (which means we get reams of crappy exposition) just as he has to deal with a ship full of rebel alien mutants destroying large chunks of Seoul. The action has its moments but the CGI is very variable, with an unfortunate propensity to have extremely unconvincing humanoids fighting each other. I've had enough of that Marvel shit, thank you very much. I did like the design of the main alien invader.

 The half set in the past, though, is honestly kind of amazing. It's a ridiculously entertaining wuxia-style series of events that follow bounty hunter/bumbling apprentice dosa (the Korean version of a cultivator, as far as I can tell) Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol) as he tracks down a mystical dagger. Jun-veol makes for a very likeable doofus, and he has a real knack for physical comedy. Miraculously, the script actually follows through and provides him with some honest-to-god funny material!

 The humor is extremely broad, as usual, but it works more often than not, and the action is very good - not as good as classic wuxia, and it focuses on magic rather than on martial arts (the harry Potter school of kung fu) but it's exciting and very well staged. The scenery and magical mayhem are top-notch - imaginative and full of cool and funny ideas. A lot of Mureuk's wizardry, for example, comes from his painted fan - he pulls out weapons and magic from it, including two cats who shape-shift into sidekicks and accompany him for most of the movie. I love this sort of thing.

 The plot gets a lot less exposition-heavy than the modern-day storyline, too, at least until the closing moments, so of course it's gonna overcomplicate things with weird asides and ridiculous secondary characters, some of them delightful (plus: a little-seen but often-referred to character goes by Dog Turd).

 Even when the main plotline comes to the fore it's more fun, as it allows a love interest / time traveller (Kim Tae-ri, getting a lion's share of cool moments) to pull out a gun in the middle of a brawl in an ancient Korean estate. 

 That's not to say that the main story gets interesting, but at least it doesn't spend all of its time tangling itself into unsatisfying knots. It's an excellent take on modern wuxia, and it more than makes up for the soul-less modern half.
 It's a shame that writer/director Choi Dong-hoon is so enamored of his crappy narrative, as he can tell a hell of a ripping story when he's not preoccupied with conveying the inane particulars of the alien's masterplan.

 The good news is that it seems like the sequel will be led by the more likeable characters; Given how good they, and the mayhem that surrounded them, were here, that's definitely something to look forward to.

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One

 For months on end before the release of the latest Mission Impossible, we were bombarded with featurettes on how Tom Cruise really had driven a motorcycle off a cliff in the alps. And good on him; The scene, in the final movie is a brilliant stunt, and knowing that there's very little trickery involved makes it that much more impressive. We've also found out since that that scene existed because Cruise really wanted to do it; the script in these movies is pretty malleable, so writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (along with co-writer Erik Jendresen) put things together so that it would happen.

 That makes so much sense to me. I've liked bits and pieces off a few of these latter Mission Impossibles - a stunt here, an action beat there - but if I have to be honest, I've found less and less to like about them as they've chugged along. To the point where I've found the last few, including this latest installment, to be kind of insufferable; Bloated, ponderous, dumb and messy, despite having a bunch of actors I really like playing likeable characters and some great action.

 And it's all down to these fucking pseudo-improvised scripts. They don't exist because someone wants to tell a story. They don't even exist because the franchise needs to continue, so people have sat down to figure out a story. They exist because Tom Cruise wants to drive a motorbike off a cliff; Everything else? Eh, we'll come up with something.

 The threat this time around is a rogue AI that's pretty much already infected all IT systems in the world. There's a neat sci fi conceit around how nothing electronic can be trusted - I'd be much more impressed if that hadn't been thoroughly explored elsewhere (it's a foundational event in the Cyberpunk RPG's history, for example- the societies there can't even be sure of how much of their own history has been rewritten!). All the nations are after two McGuffins that something something maybe control the AI or whatever, and one of the McGuffins just happens to be in the hands of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), an estranged member of the Mission Impossible team. 

 The US sends Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the rest of the MI team to recover it, which is a deeply stupid move given how many times he's gone rogue on them (they even joke about that - maybe instead of lampshading it they could, you know, not trust him in the fist place?). And they're all surprised when, oh no, he goes rogue again in the most flamboyant, ridiculous way posible. Because, this fucking script.
 That's just the premise and the first half hour or so of the movie. Then there's how the plot develops, which is basically a series of arbitrary "and then that just happens". Contrivances, coincidences, bullshit, clichés (let's have the hero choose which one of his friends he has to save!). It's all dumb, all the time - and even worse, boring. It's especially egregious when the script wants us to believe the AI opponent is playing 4D chess against the protagonists.

 I wasn't invested in a single thing that happened in the whole movie; Since everything is arbitrary, nothing is thought through, how could I?

 You get the usual world-hopping collection of set pieces - the Abu Dhabi airport, Rome, Venice, the Orient Express. A ridiculously attractive thief (Haley Atwell) gets embroiled and there's lots of chases, stunts, etc - but not nearly enough to make up for all the fucking pedestrian conversations where everyone just keeps posturing and hyping up how critical shit is and Fuck. This. Script. I hoped against hope that the positive reviews and the seemingly lighter tone meant that maybe this one would be different... but no. Even the action scenes are stretched until wear out their welcome; Why the hell did anyone feel this movie needed to be more than two hours and a half long?

 I did find some things to like: mainly new sub-villain Pom Klementieff, who's introduced trying to run down our heroes and looks like she's really having fun doing it; Good for her, at least someone besides Cruise is having a good time.
 I also laughed at a bit where her sociopath boss Gabriel (Esai Morales) screamed "Ethaaaaan!" when foiled. That was a fun action movie moment; I'd have preferred he scream the full name, but I'll take it.

 Some of the action beats are cool even if the scenes around them ramble on and on; McQuarrie knows his way around an action movie, even when he seems to have lost all sense for pacing. A couple of the fights in cramped spaces were nice, and a swordfight on a bridge over a venetian canal was pretty atmospheric. A finale with a derailed train almost compensates for all the dead weight. Almost.

 It really bothers me because, on paper, I should love this. Reminds me of my father complaining about the stuff I used to watch as a kid; I guess I can rest easy that for now it's only a few franchises I've really soured on: this, the Fast and Furiouses (post 5) and any Marvel movies by the Russos. I'm not that far gone yet.

Meg 2: The Trench

 The Meg was a movie with very, very few redeeming qualities: It wasted a fun premise on hoary clichés, unexciting and generic action, and way too much waffling with its corny, boring as fuck characters. It seemed to expect us to care about a bunch of shitty melodrama, while failing to deliver even close to the amount of madness needed to make it palatable.

 Director Ben Wheatley (in full anonymous studio director mode) course corrects admirably for the sequel. This movie has a lot of problems, but embracing its ridiculous sense of excess is not one of them. It populates its almost two hours with silly developments, punchy deaths, and not just shark attacks but some sort of crocodile dinosaur monsters and a giant octopus. Quantity over quality, absolutely, but in owning that it's a dumb monster movie and committing to it with enthusiasm, it makes its plot holes, continuity errors, laughably shallow characters and dodgy CGI entirely forgivable.

 After the events of the first movie, Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) has turned into some sort of a 'green James Bond', as his friends describe him while debating just how awesome he is. That only factors into the first scene and never really matters again, which is par for the course for this movie's script (by Jon & Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris - the same team who did the first one). It's fine; it gives Statham a decent fight scene, at least.

 The movie gets going properly after some table setting, when Jonas and suave scientist Jiuming (the great Wu Jing, who criminally doesn't get a single fight of his own) mount an expedition to the trench where The Meg originally came from: a hidden, mysterious ecosystem blocked off by a thermocline (a barrier of cold water). They take along a few characters to act as redshirts (these movies are firm believers in plot armor), and get a stowaway in Meiying (Sophia Cai), Jonas's teen stepdaughter.

 Once in the trench, the crew find an illicit mining operation and sabotage gets them stranded in the ocean floor From there it's a series of action scenes pretty much all the way to the finish line - fighting against various underwater beasties, then a host of evil mercenaries protecting the mining operation, and then all hell breaks loose as the thermocline is breached and a bunch of Megs, along with what may as well be a fucking Kraken make it to the surface (decompression doesn't seem to exist in this universe). 

 And you know what? It works. The action is varied, extravagant and fun: you get survival challenges, a nasty death when a helm breaches deep underwater, a die-hard-in-an-oilrig section, and an assortment of monsters going wild in some sort of beach resort which more than makes up for the piddly similar section in the first movie. This one has shots from within the shark as it snaps people up! Sure, there's barely any blood, but it's the sort of silly carnage that wouldn't necessarily benefit from it.
 The effects are... well, they're very artificial-looking, modelled after Chinese blockbusters where they don't really care about things looking even marginally realistic. Unless you're unusually sensitive to that, the action is cool enough that it's never more than a minor distraction.

 The script is terrible, but at least this time around it understands that it's only there to carry the characters from one peril to the next. It could stand to be a lot funnier (the characters communicate in glib sentences that often clunk lifelessly to the ground and... just lie there, flopping around in a sort of slow humour death), but at no point are we asked to care for some tired, trite melodrama.
 There are continuity errors aplenty, and while it's hard to accuse a movie with a plot as dumb as this of having plot holes, there's definitely a surfeit of dumb. As with the bad effects or the lack of anything deeper to say than 'the only thing cooler than a shark is a shark the size of five sharks', it's part of the movie's DNA; If you can look past it, there's a lot here to like.

Beast

  Beast is a ludicrous, but not ridiculous enough take on Man versus Nature, where the man is Idriss Elba and Nature is a lion that's presented as some sort of silent, efficient assassin just as long as it's not trying to kill Elba or his family. It's competently made, but the script (by Jaime Primak Sullivan and Ryan Engle) is... well, it's terrible.

 Elba plays Nate Samuels, a doctor who flies out to the bush in South Africa so he can reconnect with his daughters (Leah Jeffries and Iyana Halley). Things have been dicey since he separated from their late mother, you see, who died before they could reconcile. So he's got that typical hollywood sad dad thing going on where his daughters barely speak to him. But it's fine, honestly - trite, and convenient (they can bond while getting hunted by a lethal predator!) but the actors make it work.
 Also good: Congenial weirdo Sharlto Copley as Martin Battles, Nate's childhood friend; His relation with Nate and rapport with the girls is warm and genuinely charming.

 Martin is a preserve ranger, so as a treat he takes out Nate and his brood out to an area of a local preserve where tourists don't get to go. Things go south as the family is trapped in a crashed jeep by a stalking lion - one we know from the (fun, silly) prelude has sworn bloody revenge against humanity after poachers killed his pride. If the prelude had ended with the lion roaring at the sky while the camera pulls away, it wouldn't be a better movie, but... Wait, you know what? Fuck that, it'd totally be a better movie.

 OK, that's the basis for a fun, silly B-movie. Unfortunately Beast drags on for too long and commits the cardinal sin of making the lion be an almost laughable threat, incapable of eating these lousy civilians even though it has them all but served on a platter. Not because it's foiled in any particularly clever way, they just keep it away with kicks and screams. The fact that Cujo is still fresh in my mind, having rewatched it recently, does not help this movie's similar second act at all.

 There's some business with a band of Poachers that, besides giving the lion a revenge arc and a very short interaction with the protagonists, does fuck all for the story, an absolutely dire minor sideplot about a poacher killer (which seems like something that was mercifully cut shorter than it was originally intended to be), a late-film change of location, and, despite how lean the movie is (it clocks in at ninety minutes), a lot of what feels like wheel spinning. There's some scenes that might have some tension in a movie where there was any actual risk, but given how badly the lion fucked up the many, many chances it got with a clear shot at Nate and his family... yeah, not buying it.

 The effects are mixed, with some unnatural-looking action scenes along with some pretty well-made ones. Most FX shots would not look that bad on a more fantastic movie, but here the uncanniness sticks out like a sore thumb - we're too familiar with the real thing, thanks to David Attenborough and his ilk. The scenery is beautiful, and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot does it justice; Director Baltasar Kormákur keeps things moving nicely whenever there's not a lot of leonine action going on. It's the script that's the main problem here, with a rote plot and terrible confrontations between Elba and the lion - a pretty big problem when that's the main draw.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

 Here we are. Five movies in. A bunch of TV episodes and movies, a couple dozen videogames (one of which is a stone-cold classic). Comic books, proper books, tabletop roleplaying games, the works. I've consumed a lot of them as they've come out over the last... forty-two years.
 I feel fucking OLD.

 Indiana Jones, like seemingly every other thing these days, now belongs to Disney. And if there's one thing Rodent House doesn't do, it's to let its properties lie, even when maybe they should; so it's time to put Harrison Ford in hat and leather one last time before he croaks.
 The other thing our corporate overlords don't tend to do is to take any risks, not any more, so the whole thing kind of feels like re-heated leftovers, with a lot of callbacks, references, and at least one familiar face who has no reason to be there plot-wise. Fan service.

 But damn it, for a while there at least it works beautifully. In a prologue set in the waning days of World War 2, a digitally de-aged Indy (never did get used to hearing his gruff older voice come out of a sometimes convincing younger mouth) and new-to-the-series-longtime-friend Basil (Toby Jones) are sniffing around a castle as it's looted by the Nazis. Their goal? The Lance of Longinus, a fun reference to a long-debunked myth about Hitler (also a plot point in the Wolfenstein games, so it's a pretty shallow cut as far as these things go.)
 An allied bombing stops the looting short, freeing a captured Indy, and soon there's a car and motorcycle chase, ducking nazis within and without a speeding train... you know, derring-do and modern swashbucklery! Fun Indiana Jones-style stuff, more in the vein of the third one than the first. It's about as safe a choice as possible, but I'll take it.
 The Spear of Destiny turns out to be a red herring, to be replaced by the film's real McGuffin of Destiny: Archimedes' Antikythera, the titular Dial. Along with it we get our first real glimpse of the film's villain, Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a nazi scientist who alludes at some sort of ultimate power that can be unlocked with the dial. 

 The epilogue ends rather abruptly - things build up to an explosive climax, and then... it kinds of fizzles out; We jump from things about to blow up good with a weirdly unsatisfying cut to a point in time where the British have the situation under control and the trainwreck is already a fait accompli. Get ready for that sort of thing, this movie has a ton of continuity errors and pacing hiccups.
 In any case, that's the prologue done; and it's mostly downhill from here.

 Cut to nineteen-sixty-nine-Indy being waken up by his neighbours playing Beatles and David Bowie, in a scene that does a pretty good job of painting him as a defeated old man. Time hasn't been kind to him - he's lost his son Mutt (yay!) and divorced Marion (boo!). Students in his classes can barely stay awake or get engaged in his lectures, in a pointed reference to the beatlemania-like zeal of yesteryear. The dude is, the film is telling us, done.

 Luckily his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Basil's daughter, comes to snap him out of it. Turns out her father went a bit crazy over the dial, convinced it had dangerous powers, and now she's come to have a look after her dad entrusted it to Indy. She is, in turn, followed by a bunch of ruthless CIA spooks who are working with none other than Voller, who's pulled a Von Braun and is now working for the States building rockets. But he's done with that; now he's after the dial.

 There are a bunch of twists and turns- Helena, in a fun reversal, bucks the sort of role her character would normally have in an Indiana Jones movie and is more of an agent of chaos, and a lot of fun. She brings with her a tween sidekick (Ethann Isidore) who gets a way-too-cute introduction with a homemade plane dashboard. As the action bounces around ports in the Mediterranean, is he going to get a chance to fly a real plane? Well...

 The movie hops from destination to destination, and setpiece to setpiece, at a good clip. The action is constant... but unfortunately very uneven, and full of continuity errors and lousy sequencing. It also pulls a lot of moves that wouldn't feel out of place in a late Fast & Furious sequel; I'm not necessarily against that, but it felt a bit out of place here. Overall, it's fine - not very exciting and weirdly lifeless at points, but it's got enough silliness and variety to be entertaining.
 The script is harder to excuse. For all of its straining to recapture the magic of the previous films, it's also full of dodgy twists and developments, stupid, inexplicable decisions, and it never compensates by  coming up with anything cool. Plot holes abound and things happen just because... well, the good guys can't lose the bad guy's trail, and viceversa, because then there'd be no more movie.
 There are also a few very weird, dumb choices, like establishing a character can't swim and then having him swimming without any major issues, or a seemingly fatal bullet wound that doesn't really end up informing the action in a major way.
 The movie's had a long and troubled production, which undoubtedly accounts for some of the issues; but also consider David Koepp was involved as a writer. That's been a warning sign for the last couple of decades.

 Once you take all of this into account, any goodwill accrued in those excellent first twenty minutes and the other good things the movie has got going for it has been spent by the time we arrive at a very... weird finale, one that does not compare that well to Jones facing off against alien phenomena. It's the furthest afield any of the mainline movies have gone outside the realm of credibility... and it's kind of for nothing. Like everything else in the movie, the supposedly momentous final stretch is oddly impact-less; it doesn't serve much of a function for our heroes' journey. I mean, I see what they were going for, but it feels extremely forced and artificial; Unearned.
 Not to mention it's a pretty underwhelming way to dispatch the film's villain and resolve the plot. Even if it kinda fits with the series' ethos of letting the bad guys get killed off by whatever it is they're looking for, it was particularly uninspired.
 At least the coda is nice, and the series manages to end sweetly on a couple of grace notes.

 I normally like director James Mangold, but as with so many of these manufactured Disney would-be cultural events, here he seems to have lost control of the CGI monstrosity he's ushered into being. Even when the movie is good -as it is in the prologue, and occasionally elsewhere- it feels a bit too fake, much of the action weightless and artificial. Luckily the actors are very game, starting with Ford not just fully inhabiting his iconic character, but also giving him a lot of depth and soul. Waller-Bridge brings a lot of impish energy to the proceeds, and while Mikkelsen is maybe too obvious a choice as a villain, his usual chilly, calm and collected brand of villainy is still pretty cool. I found it funny that he kind of sounds like the voice of reason, even after donning full Nazi regalia and talking about [SPOILERS] going back in time to kill Hitler to save the Reich. That's a good one, Koepp.
 And of course you've got the John Williams score doing a lot of heavy lifting in the background. Fully counts as another character. I'm not one for nostalgia, not much... but damn- those themes.

 So. This is definitely not good, but it's not exactly bad either; I think I liked it about the same as the previous sequel (which is: not that much, but I also don't seem to hate as much as everyone else). Even at two hours and a half it didn't feel like a chore, I don't regret watching it. Don't need to lock it in a box and forget it in a warehouse somewhere, but it'll probably end up on a high shelf along with that crystal skull and other lesser knick-knacks.
 Faint, qualified praise... but what are you going to do? Sometimes it's best to let sleeping dogs lie.

Jurassic World: Dominion

  The second Jurassic World movie was an unexpected amount of (extremely dumb) fun, and it made me kind of wonder if the third one in this new trilogy might be any good, especially since there were some good bits in the trailers for it.

 No, it is not good. It is bad. It is fucking bad. It is the worst thing I've seen since Glass, and honestly I'm pretty confident in saying this is way worse than that. It is a cynical, hacky piece of shit where you can feel the contempt the writers have for the audience in every beat of it's cockamamie plot and in every worthless utterance of its shit characters.

 Either the strains of directing and writing were too much for Colin Trevorrow to apply the modicum of fun he applied to Fallen Kingdom's script, or maybe I forgave it too much because that was directed by J. A. Bayona, who is that much better at infusing the inane story with an energy and beauty undeserved by the material... I don't know, and at this point I don't care. This is pure shit, and some cool dinosaur bits can only mitigate that to a small degree.

This guy (or gal). This is one of the folks that slightly mitigate the overwhelming turdosity.

 So yeah, I guess it's safe to say I didn't like it! And I really don't feel like giving a movie I've wasted two and a half hours of my life to more time, so this will be even more hastily written than usual because this deserves much, much less than that.

 Here, let me illustrate just how bad this is. The two non-entities played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard (imagine two decent genre actors getting to inhabit two characters as the protagonists for three whole movies - eight or so hour's worth of material! - and not making the least impression other than an annoyed 'ugh, these guys again?' whenever they appear...) Anyhow, they've recently arrived at Malta looking for their daughter. Malta has, Wikipedia informs me, just over half a million inhabitants, and they home in on an illegal underground dinosaur market because that's a thing now, which, ok, honestly that's pretty cool.
 So Pratt and Howard are looking for their daughter, who for blah blah shit plot reasons was abducted by a big company. Bryce Dallas Howard literally goes up to a random stranger - with absolutely no reason to chose her over the other hundred or so people in the market - and it turns out... it's a smuggler with a heart of gold that happened to see her daughter mid-abduction and feels guilty about it. One of the maybe dozen people who know anything about her on the whole island.

 You hear that? That, my friend, is the sound of the writers not giving a fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

 And that's what we're dealing with here. Shitty basic contrivances like this are basically what drive the plot forward. The action is deeply mediocre, there are no stakes because this movie is terrified of killing even tertiary sympathetic characters (guess Trevorrow misinterpreted why people disliked the childminder's death on part one). So the dinosaurs are as a result not scary, because they can't kill anyone unless they're evil.

 Yes, they bring back the characters from the one movie in the franchise everyone likes, except well, now they have to work with Trevorrow's lines and the b-plot of a movie that doesn't have much of a main plot in the first place. Goldblum is just let loose and allowed to be Goldblum, which in another movie would be lazy and distracting, but here at least his (what I'm guessing are) ad libs are kind of better (not by much) than any of the material anyone else gets. Poor Sam Neill is absolutely terrible, overemoting and mugging like an idiot, and given the general downturn in everyone else's acting quality, I'm sure as hell not blaming him.

 There are some bright spots. The movie is bookended by some neat vignettes of dinosaurs not-so-gracefully integrating with our modern ecosystems, and that's by far the best part of the movie, all ten minutes of it. There's a really good scene where Dallas-Howard is slow-chased by a hairy, fingernaily dinosaur that was really well done. The Malta bit, which I was looking forward to was a major disappointment, an extended action scene that tries to crib Mission Impossible and has some cool concepts but fails because, well, to be kind, it's not directed by someone half as capable as Christopher McQuarrie, and the way it develops is as stupid as the rest of this turgid mess.
 Oh, I did like when the shaggy/fingernaily dinosaur teams up with a T-Rex at the end to take out a bigger dinosaur [umm... spoilers?] That's the type of stupid, stupid shit I can get behind. And also, because the budget for this is around a cubic shit-ton of dollars, there's a bunch of really nice shots, both CGI and some good photography.

 But seriously? Just avoid this shit. Avoid it like the fucking plague. I believe in redemption, but I'm sure as hell not giving this motherfucker Colin Trevorrow another chance to waste my money and time unless the waters have been well and truly tested by viewers braver than me.

Moonfall

  In director Roland Emmerich's new disasterpiece Moonfall, the moon comes so close to the earth that not only does it reach the stratosphere, it shears off a peak in the Rockies.

 Its gravity pulls off the tip of the Chrysler building and deposits it on the other side of the country (mostly intact, of course, so you can recognize it).

 Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached peak Emmerich; he's going to really struggle to top himself.

 I'm struggling to find words to express just how dumb this movie is. Calling it an insult to your intelligence is an insult to insults to your intelligence.

 But it all comes to expectations in the end; It doesn't make sense to go watch the latest from one of the brains behind 2012 and Independence Day expecting anything but undiluted idiocy.

 I hadn't seen anything of his in more than a decade, but after watching Troll, which is pretty much a (very) slightly less dumb, Finnish version of a Roland Emmerich opus, I got curious what the man himself was up to. Spoilers: I didn't hate it!

 Things start out quietly enough: on a routine space shuttle mission, three astronauts run into an sentient inkblot of ferrofluid-like matter, which proceeds to attack them, blasting their electronics and leaving them stranded in the ionosphere. The astronauts are played by Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, and an unknown black actor- guess one which one dies? In any case, Berry is left unconscious and Wilson heroically brings the shuttle back to earth only with manual controls.

 You'd think he'd arrive to a hero's welcome, but in the Emmerichverse organizations and institutions are evil and corrupt, their only raison d'etre to make things harder for the heroic individuals who actually get shit done- so the NASA turns on him and makes him a scapegoat.

 Ten years or so later Brian (Wilson's character) is almost destitute and estranged from his wife and son, which sets up the overtly familiar (pun not intended) and deeply deeply shitty drama that will ensue. We're also introduced to KC, a conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) who, just like real-life conspiracy nuts, is a loveable, cuddly teddy bear of an Englishman - he even talks like a kid's show presenter!
 KC's pet project is Dyson Spheres and other superstructures, which seems like a weird and very wholesome subject for a conspiracy theorist these days, but there you go. He's been gathering data and has discovered that the moon is going off its orbit, setting it on a collision course with earth.

 (Trigger warning - besides all the enabling of conspiracy-mindset bullshit , which of course turns out to be 100% correct, there are a couple of instances of Elon Musk being mentioned in near-orgasmic tones; SpaceX has a small part in saving the earth.)

 The NASA has also noticed the moon's inconstancy, but they're trying to cover things up because that's what institutions do, right? they quickly put together a mission to the moon to see what's up, and what's up is that the moon has developed a huge hole. When probed, the black ferrofluid blob (which, by the way, is a very unimaginative shorthand for nanobots) comes out and kills everyone.

 At the thirty minute mark the movie finally kicks into gear when a giant wave hits LA. That's... actually pretty efficient timekeeping for this sort of  film! From there the movie starts splicing its raison d'etre (splosions and buildings breaking) with its inane exposition and drama.
 Things end up with another space mission with our three intrepid protagonists going to the moon and into it. Because, you see it was actually hollow, a Dyson sphere all along! Complete with a captive white dwarf star to power it! KC was right! (Never mind that the smallest known white dwarf is roughly the size of the moon; that's actually one of this movie's lesser liberties with basic science and physics)

 Meanwhile there's a B-story where Brian's son takes an overland trek amidst the moonpocalypse as he escorts Halle Berry's character's son (ugh!) to get to an underground shelter in Colorado; incredibly stupid things keep happening all around them, so at least everything is kept consistent.

 You have to shut off your brain at one point, not just to enjoy this, but to survive it; plausibility just has never, ever been even a minor concern for Emmerich, nor is letting minor details like basic physics get in the way of whatever hare-brain scene he's conceived. This is, if I haven't made myself clear by now, a really fucking dumb movie. However, the mostly CGI mayhem can sometimes be beautiful, as shots of the moon flying close to the earth often are here, and the actual explanation for the lunatic goings-on is an unexpectedly ambitious (if still pretty dumb) slice of sci-fi.

 I expected a piece of shit, in other words, and got one, but... it's a fun piece of shit. It helps that it wasn't as disaster-porny as it looked, there are some other elements to it. Aside from the first half hour and a couple of dead spots later the pacing runs at a clip; this doesn't do wonders for the storytelling, but since the movie is what it is, that's no loss; at least things keep moving.
Low expectations were fully met. Huzzah, hurrah, etcetera!

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

 Had you told me as a teen that I would skip watching a big budget Jurassic Park sequel that prominently featured dozens more species of dinosaurs than in the original and had a huge setpiece around a giant volcanic eruption, I'd have thought you were nuts.

 Yet the first Jurassic World movie came out and was such an appalling mixture of pure idiocy, bad characters and a complete fucking lack of cinematic moments, that I not only completely avoided its sequel in the theaters, I've sat on it for four years.

 And you know what, it's a shit movie, but taken in the right spirit it's a fun shit movie, more than capably directed by J.A. Bayona. Its not good, but it does manage to be beautiful and well paced and its individual, technical components are made with skill and care.

As well-made as the action is, it's just as poorly written and dumb as the rest of the movie.
 This little guy, for example, somehow tosses a dino twice as big as him through a high window.

 Unfortunately, Jurassic World mastermind Colin Trevorrow provided the script, and it's a wall-to-wall turdfest. Proceeds start out well enough with a short prelude where a group of shady contractor types  return to the ruins of the partially submerged Jurassic World park to retrieve DNA from the first film's genetically altered dinosaur baddie find out that -gasp- maybe dinosaurs are dangerous.

 This establishes a few important things about the movie, mainly: a) It looks beautiful and has a lot of fun setting up its dinosaur attacks, and b) this is going to be a very, very dumb movie. Also c) these contractor types are really bad at their jobs. How-the-fuck-haven't-they-shot-themselves-as-soon-as-they-were-handed-guns terrible.

 After this introduction we jump to the mainland, a few years past the Jurassic World massacre. It looks like a volcanic eruption is going to wipe isla Nublar and its captive dinosaur population; There's some fun speculation about the world's reaction to that, which ends up being a shrug.

 Bryce Dallas Howard, a dinosaur businesslady in the first film, now turned dinosaur activist (her character's name is Claire, had to look it up despite just watching the movie) is forced to watch in horror as the situation unfolds. Luckily a millionaire long-time associate of John Hammond's intervenes and offers to fund an operation to rescue them. The old man is played by the redoubtable James Cromwell, so you know he's on the level. His right-hand man, though, is played by Rafe Spall, so you know that betrayal is incoming. The whole setup is tired and obvious.

 Claire then gathers a team to go to Isla Nublar: two new completely forgettable characters I won't spend any more keystrokes on, and estranged love interest Chris Pratt the dinosaur whisperer. That character is a large part of why I put off this movie for so long.
 I like Pratt as a comedian - and he does get to show off his comic chops here, particularly in a very funny scene where he needs to get away from some lava while heavily sedated - but holy shit he makes for a terrible straight leading action hero in these movies. And the script just piles on the douche on his dialog; It's not just that I find him utterly unconvincing as a rugged outdoorsman badass, I fucking loathe this character.
 Anyhow! Once on the island they meet up with a small private army of obvious villains, and at least the film wastes very little time before they betray our heroes and leave them to die in the volcanic eruption.
 Meanwhile, the contractors abscond with a bunch of dinosaurs to... sell for profit at an auction. Yes, seriously. That is the villain's plot. I know they're establishing parallels to the original Jurassic Park sequel, but this is dumber in any way that counts.

 Inane plot aside, this island sequence is actually the high point of the movie - the protagonists need to flee the island, escaping the volcano and a horde of scared dinosaurs. I mean, stupid stuff keeps happening, but it's beautifully shot and expertly handled. It's exciting! Bayona, a good director who has made good movies, classes up the joint even while serving up nakedly, cynically manipulative moments such as when sad brontosaur is left behind to die in the island and wails piteously at the leaving boat.

 The quick pace continues as the dinosaurs are taken to the mainland - to a Resident-Evil-style secret facility built under the mansion belonging to the millionaire that funded the expedition. Sigh. Of course life finds a way during the auction, and people find out the hard way that attending an event with a bunch of live dinosaurs might be a bad idea. Special mention to just how fucking bad security is here; I mean, it's been terrible during the whole movie, but these guys really put some extra effort to earning their Darwin awards. A... lot of really fucking stupid stuff goes down, the good guys escape, the bad guys get their comeuppance. Yadda yadda.

 At one point a raptor jumps and runs away from an explosion like an action hero. This is where the dumb script and the talent behind the cameras line up and make the movie shine like... like a really, really dumb diamond.

 Of course another genetic hybrid dinosaur is introduced as the main menace, the equivalent to the first Jurassic World's souped up T-Rex.
 This carries forward Jurassic World's brilliant insight that dinosaurs are not enough to get viewers interested, what people are after are genetically mutated dinosaurs. FUCK THAT SHIT. I mean, if you're trying to make them sexier, at least have the balls to give them bikini armor, jetpacks and monofilament whips; why the hell introduce these uber dinosaurs if in the end they a) look less cool than regular dinosaurs, and b) fail to do anything regular dinosaurs don't do already? (And of course they're going to get their ass handed by regular dinos in the end, anyhow.)
 It's wrong-headed, self defeating and honestly, emblematic of how rotten these movies are at their core.

 I'm really surprised to say this, but despite everything this is a worthwhile movie. I would not have had a bad time at the theatre. It's a decent mixture of pure idiocy, bad characters and a lot of awesome cinematic moments.
 I'm happy Bayona got to play with such a big budget, and acquitted himself so well. But as always with this sort of thing I'd rather see him return to smaller, more personal stuff. Fun as this is, it's nowhere near as good as The Orphanage or Monster Calls.

Odd Thomas

 Dean Koontz is an weird novelist. I've read a couple of his books and enjoyed them, thought they were a bit cheesy, and proceeded to forget almost everything about them; I know I've read Watchers, for example, but the few things I remember from it are from the movie, not the book. I mostly remember his stuff struck me as being a bit less horror, more fantasy adventure.

 I haven't read any of the Odd Thomas books, but going from its 2013 adaptation... yeah, doesn't look like I need to change my mind.

 As directed by Stephen Sommers (he of Deep Rising and the first couple of Mummy Movies), Odd Thomas is a horror comedy about a guy with psychic powers (Anton Yelchin) who gets pulled into a race against time to prevent some horrific events. It's pretty similar to The Frighteners (but less successful with its horror) or John Dies at the End (but less successful as a comedy and a lot less weird.) It's fine. It's fun. Perfectly enjoyable, with some cool ideas, a handful of good scenes, and at least one clever twist.

 Odd (that's actually his name) lives in the small town of Pico Mundo, CA, where he works as a fry cook with a sideline as a supernatural investigator - we first see him finding a serial killer with help from the ghost of one of the victims, and then chase him down and bring him to justice (turns out, he's done this enough that he's gotten pretty good at fighting.)

 One thing that's interesting for this sort of story is that the guy is pretty universally beloved. There's a couple of throwaway lines intended to make him seem a bit of an outsider, but pretty much all the characters in the movie either adore him or are assholes. This goes double for the police chief (Willem Dafoe!) who not only trusts Odd implicitly and is endlessly patient with his phone calls even while he's trying to get it on with his wife, but is also willing to do a spot of cover up so Odd's psychic abilities remain a secret.

 Odd doesn't just see dead people. He also senses spirits no one else can see, which kicks the plot into gear when he starts seeing bodachs swarm into his neighborhood - they kind of look like ghostly, goopy, bug-like mashups of humanoid skeletal things that skitter all over the place - at one point one of them splits into several others; it's a cool creature design! The bodachs of Scottish folklore were kid snatchers, but seeing one of them was supposed to be an omen of doom, so it tracks with their use here. As Odd explains, they can sense when something bad will happen, and come to feed on it. So their being there in such numbers can only mean bad things.

 A cool touch is that he can't let the bodachs know that he can see them. There are a few good scenes of Yelchin pretending not to see stuff that his character can see but he (the actor) can't. A wrinkle on the usual reacting to green screen playbook.

 The rest of the movie is Odd trying to work out what apocalyptic event will happen to get the bodachs all riled up. It all leads to a potentially horrifying event with many real-world parallels in the US, but it's defanged to be consistent with the rest of the movie. It's a shame, because I would have kind of loved to see this sort of movie deal with that type of more mundane horror a bit more honestly, but it really wouldn't fit Odd Thomas's relentlessly upbeat tone.

 About that tone- unfortunately, it can get a bit grating. The protagonist keeps a constant narration going, and when he's quiet, the on-screen characters feel the need to fill the silence, or else a cheesy blues riff rushes in to fill the void. It's almost manically breezy, and the script isn't always up to the task; Lots of forced quips and character moments that don't quite land successfully; the poor girlfriend character gets saddled with a lot of them. Shit gets quirky fast.

 Sommers is pretty good here, fortunately, especially when he takes a deep breath and reins in his instincts a little. Most of the scenes with the bodachs are at least a little creepy and well done, and the action beats are well handled (the fight against an angry poltergeist is a highlight.)

 He does overreach his budget often, resulting in some spectacularly dodgy CGI, but at this stage that seems to be one of his directorial trademarks even when he does have the money. When the imagery is supposed to be unreal, it works pretty well. I'm kind of angry this guy was kind of relegated to the sidelines of Hollywood, while Roland Emmerich can still get semi-big budget films greenlighted.