Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

 

 Dreamworks’ take on Puss in Boots was introduced to the world in 2004’s Shrek 2. He was born fully formed – all his trademarks were right there, in his first movie: Antonio Bandera’s raspy, honeyed Pepé-le-Pew-but-Spanish voiceover work, the rampant narcissism, the fluid swashbuckling and stiff cartwheels, and that puppy-eyes scene. Like Shrek himself, he’s a fun creation that has long outstayed his welcome, always trotting out the same tricks in increasingly tired stories and working up a flopsweat while trying make it look effortless.

 He’s been around just about twenty years now, enough to feature in three sequels, one movie of his own, and six seasons of Dreamwork’s traditionally crummy tv series. He’s earned a quieter, more contemplative movie.

 Puss in Boots – The Last Wish… is kind of what that is. As much as its studio will allow, at least. Dreamworks have always chased Pixar’s cred with parents, that elusive quality of being equally entertaining and engaging for kids and adults; But they have also always been terrified of losing the children on the way. The result is almost always a (varyingly) mature plot delivered while all the characters over-emote and manically mug at the audience in panto performances that heavily feature the “Dreamworks face” (which this movie is chock-full of) and deploy jokes and action setpieces where quantity, not quality, is prioritized.

 The Last Wish succeeds in telling a coherent story with well-integrated themes, which is great. Unfortunately it does so while doing all the things described in the paragraph above. More damningly, it’s also, to put it bluntly, pretty fucking unfunny: the ratio of gags that land is shockingly low, and there’s a heavy whiff of formula to the proceeds. Everything is played safe, with a ton of zany hijinks to help parents babysit their toddlers.

 (It's not all bad, though; a death montage is mined for easy but genuine laughs, and there's a delightful running gag with a Jiminy Cricket spoof voiced by Kevin McCann.)

 Also good: the premise. Puss has recklessly endangered himself to become a larger-than-life adventurer, but now he’s on his last life… and he’s been targeted by a seemingly invincible, unstoppable, and very effectively scary wolf (voice of Wagner Moura from the Tropa de Elite films).
 Defeated and disheartened, Puss gives up and retires to live with a cat lady.

Elite wolf

 While there, he’s embroiled in the search for a wishing star he realizes can give him back all of his spent lives and recover his mojo. So he joins up with old Flame Kitty Softpaws (ugh, that name! Voiced by Salma Hayek) and a pathologically perky mutt (Harvey Guillén) in a race against other parties out to get the star for themselves. Arrayed against team Puss: Goldilocks (Florence Pugh), the three bears (Ray Winstone! And also Olivia Colman and Samson Kayo) and the film's heavy, amoral pie entrepreneur Jack Horner (John Mulaney, the movie's most overtly Shrek-like  conceit).

 Perrito, Harvey Guillen’s character, is a good stand-in for the movie itself. On the one hand he seems algorithmically generated, the sort of character hacky movies cynically deploy to inject ‘feels’ to the proceeds. And most of his attempts at humour are pretty lame. On the other hand… well, it’s hard to deny the power of a scene where Perrito finally fulfils his goal to be a comfort dog, or when he jokes about his horrific backstory. He’s there to hit specific formula bits, but it’s done with enough skill and feeling that, depending on how much you buy into the movie, it’s forgivable.

Big Monkey Island energy here

 Predictable but enjoyable, in other words... depending on your tolerance for this sort of thing. Well crafted, even if it relies heavily on pre-fab script formulas.
 And it has a secret weapon in its art style, which is often drop-dead gorgeous. Working within the framework set out by 2018’s Spiderman: Into the Multiverse, it uses variable framerates and rendering styles -often mixed within the same scene- to generate some beautiful and visually striking setpieces. The art direction is top-notch, with some beautiful painterly backdrops and action.
 If nothing else, that alone makes it worth a watch.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods

 There was a tiny window a few years back where WB seemed to give up with its DC cinematic universe.

 Having put out the most joyless crap possible with the movies leading up to (and possibly including, I never bothered to watch it) The Justice League, the next few that trickled out were a lot more interesting than most cogs set to fill out a function in a five-year phase or whatever usually are.

 I may not be a huge fan of either of the Wonder Women, but they do what they want to successfully - and in the case of the second one, it sets the movie in the eighties not just as a gimmick, but in an attempt to say something meaningful (if a bit shallow); That's worthy of respect. Aquaman is the most joyful, exuberant superhero movie this side of Into The Multiverse. Suicide Squad showed what James Gunn could do if given freedom to follow his batshit muse. The Joker is an uninspired mishmash of stolen stuff, and The Batman (2022) is a terrible, terrible movie, but they both at least have the grace not to give a single fuck about any continuity concerns. And Shazam!... You know how Superhero movies will often position themselves as belonging to a different genre? Like Antman being a heist movie, Multiverse of Madness being a Sam Raimi movie, etc. etc.?

 Shazam! is one of the very few of those that actually does justice to its adopted genre. It splits the difference between your standard superheroics and a teen comedy, and it does it with aplomb and plenty of great jokes.

 In any case, that period of the DC history is drawing into a close. No way to know how its new incarnation will go, but I doubt that we'll get a slate of movies with so much personality and that are allowed to... be themselves to this degree. It's a shame this 'no adult supervision' period had to close out with two of the most bog-standard superhero movies imaginable - first Black Adam, and now the Shazam sequel, which unfortunately loses most of what made the first one unique.

 It's a More-is-More-minded sequel, and it suffers for it. Overstuffed to the gills, it doesn't have space for nuance or character moments. Much like on those Marvel movies that mash together a dozen superheroes, everyone pretty much shouts out their character motivations and things happen because the plot dictates they must instead of any organic buildup.

 We begin where Shazam! ended, with Billy Batson (Asher Angel) now trying to lead a whole family of superheroes who are the laughing stock of his native Philadelphia. He's struggling with impostor syndrome (we know this because a pediatrician tells him, point blank, 'you suffer from impostor's syndrome!' and with getting his superpowered siblings to work as a team.

 Meanwhile, a trio of demigoddesses (played by Lucy Liu, Helen Mirren, and another one that's kept secret for a little bit) recover a mcguffin and start wreaking havoc, and Billy's brother Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) has the most unconvincing possible meet cute with a stunningly beautiful new student Ann (Rachel Zegler). Will a bundle of loose plot elements connect in the dumbest, most contrived way possible? Well, yes; this is a movie where an emotional beat is set early on when Mom (Marta Milans) makes a sadface when Billy calls her by her name instead of calling her mom. All T's are crossed, all I's are dotted in the hackiest way possible.

 Not that it's a complete loss. The villains turn out to be the Hesperides, and their motivation is a rather clever play on the Shazam origin story. This also gives the film license to pepper the film with mythological beasties; shame the one with the most screentime is a pretty generic-looking dragon.

 The humor is also a mixed bag, but hits enough of its marks that it doesn't leave a horrible taste behind. Shazam is played by Zachary Levi with a teen-like complete lack of filters, and is a pretty hilarious creation even when going for low-hanging fruit.

 As busy as the movie gets, it always remembers to be a comedy first, which might be its one saving grace. Loud, dumb, funny is one adjective better than how these things tend to go.

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.

Jung_e

  We're zero out of two on our success rate for Netflix Asian Sci-Fi extravaganzas. Jung_e is a very different proposition from Warrior of Future, though- it's meant to be a classier, more cerebral take on some pretty thorny issues, skimming a bit from a relatively new subgenre of sci-fi that mines horror from the subjective experiences of conscience uploads.

 It unfortunately fails spectacularly at grounding any of its ideas or assembling any sort of interesting argument. This is not decent sci fi, in other words, but it also fails at a more fundamental level - it's not even a compelling or interesting story. Writer/director Yeon Sang-ho (he of the really fun Train to Busan) has the bones of something worthwhile, but he seems more interested in mining cheap sentiment out the elements in play than in exploring them in any worthwhile way.

 So- what is it about? Well, it's the future, and everything's gone to shit because climate change. Humanity spread out to a space stations that immediately decided to go to space war with each other. At one point early in the war, lone mercenary/superhero soldier Captain Yun (Kim Hyun-joo) had the chance to end the war but she fucked up, so as the movie starts the war's been going on for decades.

My screencap plugin crapped out, so here's a promotional still.

 Captain Yun survived that mission, but was left in a coma. Some time later a corporation called Kronoid approached her family and got them to sign a contract for the rights to upload her brain and effectively 'own' that copy. A couple of decades later they decide to clone her conscience and have her run simulations of that final mission on her because apparently if she finishes it... something? (This is a deeply stupid movie that not only paints everything with the broadest of strokes, it also makes several YA-fiction-level conceptual leaps, so bear with me).

 They assign her daughter Seo-Hyun (Park So-yi) to run the project. Because there's no way that could cause any problems, right? In any case, Seo-Hyun is determined to restore her mother's honor in the eyes of her people, so at least there's a motivation there.
 But Kronoid is a private corporation, and they're driven by the bottom line. Also, they treat Captain Yun's cloned consciences as an object they can torture or do whatever they want to at will. So we get treated to a lot of instances of "Hey, look how horrible this obviously horrible thing is!". And the science of it... ah, hell. You get colour-coded emotions taking over percentages of the brain, it's that level of talking down to the audience. Basic; really fucking basic bullshit.

 On one hand Jung_e is trying (and failing) to juggle these high-level ideas, but it's also an action movie, so we're treated to many replays of Catain Yun's botched mission, and everything gets wrapped up in a big, explosive finale. There are a lot of fun action beats - I like the quadruped tank with wheels, or the many fun uses of a grappling hook (games have known grappling hooks are awesome since at least Bionic Commando, why's it taking movies so long to recognize this?)
 Unfortunately the action scenes, while plentiful, are not enough to save the movie. I didn't find them particularly compelling: the camera moves are energetic, but the editing is a bit choppy and everything ends up feeling a bit disjointed and drained of momentum. The budget is also not quite up to what it's trying to do- This is clear early on, whenever you get any exterior shots of a flooded city, and doubly so by the end, where the all-action climax features more CGI than anything solid. (The budget is about a third of Warrior of Future's, for reference.) 

 Don't even get me started on the deeply manipulative maudlin streak running through this thing, which is so ridiculously contrived it had me laughing out loud several times. 
 I tried to like this, I really did, but... well, there's not much here to like. Bits and pieces, like how they portray androids being shut down or how a suave dipshit talks a big game and then breaks down when he has to give a presentation. The rest is a very disappointing, boring mess.

Cocaine Bear

 So: back in the 80s a plane had to jettison a bunch of plastic containers of cocaine over the Georgia wilderness. A bear got its paws on it and consumed a hell of a lot, and soon died of overdose. It was dubbed Pablo Escobear and Cokey the Bear by the media, which was in fine punning form those days.

  And... that's it, that's the whole story. 'Based on true events' is maybe a stretch, then, for a movie that chronicles Cokie's fictional drug-fuelled rampage across the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest. But that's fine; one of the movie's considerable charms is that it doesn't give a fuck about propriety; it's a gleefully amoral tale that manages to clear the (very low) bar set by gimmick movies by nailing the gimmick, with some bonus points for displaying a very enjoyable mean streak. Yes, it's a lot better than Snakes on a Plane. Not that that's saying much, but still.

 It's not all smooth sailing. A lot of the film's humor is character based, with such gems as sensitive man that keeps crying all the time (Alden Ehrenreich) or unattractive older people flirting and trying to get it on (Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Margo Martindale; Martindale, always a welcome presence, is so good that she almost pulls it off.)

 And so on. Some of these are fun - like when two middle schoolers dare each other to try the cocaine and end up eating it as if it was sugar, or when a bunch of yokel petty criminals pick a fight with someone they really shouldn't; But the script keeps throwing 'wacky' traits and situations at the characters with no real payoff. It's all a bit too broad, too precious and... well, mostly not funny at all.

 So all these characters converge on the park for different reasons: the two kids are there because one of them wants to paint a waterfall (it's explained, a little, but seriously... this script!) A young nurse (Keri Russell) is there because she's one of the kids' mom, and she enlists Martindale's ranger and her crush to help on the search. Then you get a couple of mobsters sent to recover the drugs (Ehrenreich and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) by their boss (Ray Liotta, in one of his last completed roles) who's too hands-on to stay away from the action, a couple police officers, some paramedics, the trio of yokel teen delinquents, and some hitchhikers to bulk up the body count.

 There's not much of a plot here: the nurse is looking for her kid, the mobsters are looking for the drugs, a cop is looking for the mobsters, and all the while the C-bear is going around killing everyone as she hunts for more coke. That's it. Everyone gets given a reason to be there, but incident does not necessarily equal either story or drama, or in this case, comedy. Luckily for us, while the script mostly fails in making these assorted goofballs funny it does succeed in giving the bear a lot of screentime, and that's where the movie shines.

 You can tell they spent a sizeable part of their budget on Bear-dward SNOW-den, and rightly so; She's a brilliant WETA creation that's both scary and pretty damn funny. And the script lives up to its brilliant/dumbass premise whenever she's on, having her [SPOILERS!] do a line of coke off a severed limb or be resurrected, Popeye-like, when a cocaine packet shatters and sprinkles her with magic dust. Or just by having her zip around like greased lightning whenever she detects cocaine anywhere.

 I was a little worried about the gore, as the first few deaths are pretty tame, with maybe the oddly bloodless severed limb (I hate that!) But pretty soon there's a very chunky headsplosion, and most deaths after that are a lot better. Director Elizabeth Banks (a well-known actress who's been on a shit-ton of movies in the last twenty years) does great by the material, injecting a lot of energy into the proceeds even when the script hangs her out to dry.

 Most of the movie's missteps (IE, the non-ursine comedy bits) are front-loaded; It gets a whole lot better as soon as the bear is given more to do. It's not going to blow (ha!) anyone's mind, but god knows they could have half-assed it and they didn't. It does exactly what it says in the tin, and thankfully it doesn't just call it a day there.

Knock at the cabin

 A little girl (Kristen Cui) is catching grasshoppers in the woods* when she notices a huge man nearby (Dave Bautista). The man introduces himself as Leonard, and after some tense awkwardness, he manages to ingratiate himself enough to gain the girl's trust. Then he starts asking pointed questions about what the girl is doing, about her parents, about the cabin they're in... and then his friends arrive: three more adults, wielding hand-made weapons (Rupert Grint, Abby Quinn and Nikki Amuka-Bird.)

 It's a very tense scene. Director M. Night Shyamalan adds some unnecessary Dutch angles, a rare bad decision from someone known for his formal mastery, but thankfully they're an anomaly - the rest of the movie is beautifully shot. Most of the dialog comes almost verbatim from the novel the movie is based on (Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the Woods,) so that's another hurdle out of the way. It's some of the most effective filmmaking Shyamalan has done in ages, and I'm happy to say he mostly keeps up the good job. And while he takes his liberties with the source material, he manages to wrangle a good story out of it.

 That's sadly not been a given for a very long time. I love the guy - he's made my all-time favorite superhero movie, and a couple other films that I rate pretty highly. (Also: the very worst superhero movie.) And seriously, even at his worst the dude can still direct beautifully. His stuff will always be at least interesting.

 But it's not really a hot take that he's not always great at the whole storytelling side of things.

 Back to the movie: young Mei runs back to the cabin, which was rented by her dads, Eric (Johnathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), and quickly convinces them that they're in danger. Then Leonard and friends attack, staging what's possibly the most apologetic home invasion ever. You see, they're normal people too and don't have anything against Eric, Andrew and Mei. But a higher power has contacted them and given them a very important mission: the end of days is coming, and unless the family does something horrible of their own free will, the world is going to end.

 It's a weird, but compelling premise - most of the movie (and the book) is basically a discussion between these two groups of seemingly reasonable people, each trying to get the other to see what they consider a basic, self-evident truth.

 Because Mei's family is being held against their will, you get a lot of tension, escape attempts, and maybe a side of what seems like Stockholm syndrome. And because this is a horror movie, there are some gruesome twists and a possible metaphysical turn.

 The acting is mostly superb, especially Dave Bautista as someone who's trying to do his utmost to be the voice of reason in very unreasonable circumstances, and his co-home invader Nikki Amuka-Bird who seems just as terrified as the people she's terrorizing. Shyamalan and co-writer Steve Desmond have pivoted a very bleak and unsparingly brutal book into a 15-rating thriller that keeps the violence short and mostly off-screen, which is probably the right call to make the movie commercially viable (though I can still dream about the Pascal Laughier adaptation).

 It's a very faithful adaptation, too, at least until it diverges for the ending. Can't say I found it wholly satisfying, and it was a bit of a letdown after an almost stellar, suspenseful first hour. But it's an interesting take on the material, and it works: it's fair to say Shyamalan has made the material his, seeing how his ending ties into preoccupations he's grappled with in his movies as far back as my beloved Unbreakable. Honestly, I'd rather have that than an uninspired faithful-to-the-letter approach.

 It also plays a neat trick on people who know the novel, mining a ridiculous amount of tension out of an impending event that never happens. Well played.

Paddington 2

  When we last saw our little illegal immigrant bear from Darkest Peru (voiced by Ben Whishaw), he had successfully gained asylum with the London browns without ever going through the proper channels. This is what we're teaching our children these days...

 Little Paddington's having a grand old time, and he's made a number of new friends around the neighborhood. But he's sad because his beloved aunt's birthday is coming and he wants to send her the perfect gift. It's not long until he finds one, with a little help from an antiquarian friend (Jim Broadbent, returning -as almost everyone else- from the first film.) The gift is a pop-up book detailing a number of London landmarks. Paddington immediately realizes it's perfect because his aunt's dearest wish is, wouldn't you know it, to go to London, and we soon get a prime example of the weapons-grade charm these movies deploy as Paddington imagines taking his aunt on a tour of old Blighty tourist attractions made in the medium of, well, pop-up books, and the scenery folds out and back into place in place of scene transitions. It's a lovely, imaginative idea, beautifully realized by (returning) director Paul King.

 Paddington immediately sets out to make money to buy the book (on the one hand, he's not immediately sending it out of the country, but he does intend to ship out a one-of a kind pop-up book. Hmmm.) Unfortunately, he happens to mention the book to a new character Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant). Mr. Buchanan is a fading theatrical star (now reduced to doing dog food commercials in costume) - a ripe old ham, of course, and Grant has a huge amount of fun chewing on any scenery within reach.

 And of course the book is a McGuffin - Or a treasure map, I should say, which leads to a dead circus performer's treasure. Buchanan steals the book and frames Paddington, so the film then splits between Paddington's prison time, and his adoptive family trying to solve the crime and clear the bear's name.

 It's a similar setup to the leadup to the third act of the first movie, except here their separate adventures comprise the entirety of the second act - which is fine, because Paddington's stay in prison is a delight. It gives the series' themes of winning people over and bringing them together a workout, as a ton of inmates and wardens enter the yarn, with pride of place going to the prisoner cook Knuckles (played with gruff charm by the great Brendan Gleeson).

 It will all lead up to some wacky adventures as the main plot is resolved, but the considerable charms of the movie are found elsewhere - In the goofy humor of its many many jokes, the technical attention to detail and imaginative transitions (again, the influence of Wes Anderson is not hard to see), or in the little flourishes and links in the script. It's not without its convolutions and clunky bits, but it's hard to be down on a movie when it sets things up so that you know where the coin the bear takes out of his ear to make a payphone call came from. Or one that hides a (very funny) full blown musical number with a ton of extras as a mid-credits stinger.

 Rewatching these films, I think maybe I've been a bit more down on the first one than I should have, and maybe thought better of the second one than it really is. They're on a pretty even keel, all things considered, even though I still like the second one better. But they're both an absolute joy to watch - funny, clever and lovingly made. What more can you ask for out of a kid's movie?

 Well, maybe a bit more rectitude in their messaging. By the end of 2 (spoilers!) you've got two bears living illegally with the browns. And we all know where this road leads: people brazenly talking bear in the streets, marmalade and salmon bones in the pavement... for shame. Keep Britain Ursine Free!

Project: Wolf Hunting (Neugdaesanyang)

 There's a scene early on in Project: Wolf Hunting where a suicide bomber detonates in a Philippine airport - he's not a terrorist, he's trying to get at one of the many criminals being deported to Korea that day. By setting off a bomb in a crowd. Ahem. Anyhow, in the aftermath the camera lingers lovingly on the carnage - debris, a pair of broken glasses, a severed arm, arrayed tastefully on the sidewalk. And then comes the blood, running like someone's given up on cleaning the mess and decided it would be better to spill a bucket of red paint on everything and call it a day.

 It's pretty much a promise. At this point I'm legally bound (I think) to quote the director (Hongsun Kim) and say that 2.5 tons of fake blood were used in this movie. That's basically a full rhinoceros and a bit put in a blender. 

 But before the film once again indulges its wild side, there's almost half an hour of a surprisingly restrained, pretty compelling non-violent thriller.

Red rain is pouring down, pouring down all over me.

 Because of the airport attack, the same criminals that were being extradited to their native Korea from the Philippines in that first scene have to be taken on a cargo ship (The Frontier Titan) departing from a private dock. The boat takes quite a few passengers - about a dozen criminals, the same number of cops, a doctor and his assistant, random workers... enough to allow for a pretty respectable body count later on.

 We get some time getting to know the criminals and the cops as they settle into their rhythms for the next few days. There's a highly professional police lady (Jung So-Min), a police brutality enthusiast captain (Dong Il-Sung, I think?), a rapist punk asshole (Seo In-guk; They even explain he was a teacher for maximum despicability, though I have no idea how he landed that job with grills and full-body yakuza tats), and a ton more. Only a few of them ever get to be proper characters, but the movie does an admirable job of giving a lot of the others a little personality or a fun little line at least.

 As the police and their wards settle down, a few other pieces are moving into place. Some shady outfit's monitoring the ship from a computer-filled control room, the doctor surreptitiously goes down to the hold of the ship to administer sedatives to a heavily mutilated, badass-looking mutant zombie imprisoned in some sort of high tech bed (!) and, more immediately relevant, the guys working the kitchen grab a crate of guns and get the Under Siege party started by shooting up the bridge, take the ship out of the grid, and kick off the second act.

  (I know I'm prone to run-on sentences, but that was bad even by my standards. Anyhow.)

  The prisoners are freed in a ridiculously bloody warden massacre (ridiculously bloody is the catchphrase from now on - gotta use up those 2.5 tons, after all.) And because the ship is so big, a few of the other cops don't even notice the coup! They're on other parts of the boat, investigating, say, why the wireless signal is gone, or a weird axe-waving dude on the bridge.

 It's really well staged, with some good suspense as the threads are pulled taut, and a payoff of a series of high body-count confrontations. The action is great but old-school- it reminded me more of eighties action movies than the long takes and more show-offy moves of modern material, with huge arterial sprays added everywhere for flavor. Complete with the sound of a high-pressure hose going off with each squirt. It's intense, and gory, but not exactly grim... It lacks the medicine-textbook-like elan of modern horror, or its focus on prolonged suffering, and the action-like tone is another excuse, should you need it, to enjoy the mayhem

 A fun time at the movies, in other words. The over-the-top violence also gives the action a very welcome kick whenever it threatens to get a little monotonous.

 Not that that's ever a serious problem, because soon all the bloodshed awakes the monster in the hold, and he proceeds to get in on the action and starts ripping his way through the survivors - cops and criminals alike. Unkillable, super-strong and able to avoid bullets... he's basically a Resident Evil boss monster. 

 The movie's gone from pure, ultraviolent action to some sort of insane action/slasher hybrid. It's grand!

 I'm not going to pretend all the kills are good: There is a lot of punching people into pulp in this movie, and a lot of boring deaths where the monster just grabs people by the neck until blood jets from their faceholes. But there's also a lot of ripping body parts off with bare hands, a bit where someone tears another's arm off and proceeds to bludgeon the newly-minted amputee to death with the wet end. That old standard. Someone's teeth are put to viciously good use. A crowd-pleasing hammer time moment. And so, so much more. 

 And because this is a Korean film, it goes the extra mile and gets ridiculous -well, even more ridiculous- in the home stretch. As if everything going on isn't enough, you get a sci-fi (ish) twist that reminded me a little of The Witch, another very enjoyable Korean movie, but on steroids. After all, it's not every day you get a WW2 flashback that also serves as a device to pump up the body count by a dozen (and against some Unit 731 motherfuckers, no less!)

 

 That final morph in genre allows for some really over-the-top action of the sort the movie hadn't really dipped into up to that moment, right at the point where a saner movie would be winding things down, and it really makes this an essential action/WTF movie. If it wasn't already.

Xtremo

 Early on in the slick, entertaining 2021 Spanish actioner Xtremo, two blood brothers, Lucero (Óscar Jaenada) and Max (Teo García) get involved in a shootout on a drugs laboratory. Bullets tear chunks off walls and detonate dusty explosions everywhere as the pair forge ahead firing, guns akimbo. It's a scene we've seen many times before - from Robocop to The Raid, which is a problem that will plague this movie to the end, but it's also a statement of intent and a clear reference to the films of John Woo (except that the blood here seems to be all CGI; what are you gonna do...)

 This makes sense as the film is a passion project for Garcia, a martial artist and professed 80's action film fan; He's been trying to make a movie in his homeland of the genre he loves for the best part of the last two decades.

 Set in a Spanish, but multicultural underworld of (mostly) honorable crime families, Lucero plays his part as the agent of chaos / murderous nutjob, complete with Yakuza training. After the raid on the Colombian drug lab, he stages a coup and proceeds to kill the head of his family (and his actual father) in an attempt to disrupt the balance of power between the city's crime families in a poorly-defined long term plan to take over all of them.

 His blood brother Max is part of the old guard and must go, despite the fact that he was about to begin life as a civilian with his son. And so is a third sibling Maria (Andrea Duro). The aftermath leaves Max presumed dead, his son dead, and Maria missing in action.

 Cut to two years later. Max and Maria are underground, plotting to bring down Lucero when he resurfaces to take control of the families in some sort of underworld council meeting. But then Max takes a troubled teen (Óscar Casas) under his wing... with disastrous results for both the teen and their (carefully?) planned vengeance.

 The script is a mixed bag. On one hand it's great at setting up constant and varied setpieces, and full of great lines for both heroes and villains, with the villains getting some ridiculously good flair and loopy bits of dialogue (at least in its original Spanish version.) On the other hand... well, the plot isn't all that great. The teen character is a good example; while he's an integral part of the movie, he doesn't add a whole lot and it's hard to shake the feeling the film would do better without him.

 People's actions don't always make sense, which is normal in this sort of thing -those action scenes won't line themselves up, you know- but there's a little too much plot here, which is a problem when that's definitely not one of its strengths.

 More serious is a lack of payoff to things that seemed to be carefully set up - a particularly vicious villain is dispatched in a pretty unsatisfying way, for example, and Maria, who's established as a badass in her own right (and has a great fighting presence) is criminally underutilized.

 It's ridiculously slick, though. Director Daniel Benmayor uses that Netflix money to stage a lot of very attractive aerial shots of Barcelona and gives the film an attractive, glossy sheen. The action is a bit more variable... literally, as it seems to switch filming and editing styles depending on each scene' s inspirations; The initial drug lab fight is very accomplished and clear, a later bathroom brawl is much more chaotically edited (though legible), but then there's a fight on a darkened garage that seems a lot less polished (Garcia seems to punch someone so hard he completely disappears for a split second, a weird but very funny editing glitch.)

 It also doesn't really reach the heights of either its inspirations or the lesser, Netflix-produced 87 North films. Garcia is obviously an accomplished martial artist and shows off plenty of cool moves, and he certainly looks like he could take a mortar shell to the face and keep moving forward; The movie capitalizes on that by mostly using him as a tank who just takes the damage and occasionally repays it with interest. But as a result the fights don't really flow very well, which is a problem because as mentioned before, the action locations are varied but kind of derivative: A bathroom brawl! A discotheque shootout! An abandoned garage fight!
 You're left with solid scenes that are missing something to latch on to, and seem to drag on after a while. Huge gushes of blood can only take you that far.

 Still, it might not be great but it's certainly good enough - and full of wince-inducing bloody carnage (stand by for a great, extremely bloody throat stab).

 Garcia is not a great actor and his character Max is a bit clichéd, but he's got a nice intensity, and when it breaks down he's always very likeable, as is his sister Maria. But it's the bad guys who hog all the best lines and most memorable moments.

 It's a good movie. I have to admit I wouldn't be hugely disappointed if we never get an Xtremo 2, but these people have proven themselves, dammit, and I'd love to see what they do next. Here's hoping they keep getting to make the sort of thing they obviously love.

Warriors of Future

 Warriors of Future is a Chinese big-budget effects-heavy action extravaganza. If you've watched any of those, you know what to expect: a shitshow, to put it bluntly. Shallow characters, cheap, brazenly manipulative twists, cheesy sentimentality, Broad and extremely unfunny jokes, naked nationalism, crappy CGI...

 ...and that's pretty much my review of Warriors of Future. Except that the CGI is pretty good, and you really need to dig into it if you want to get offended by the nationalism. Other than that, this is an absolute piece of shit somewhat redeemed by pretty explosions, some cool action action beats and mech designs, and a lot of unintentional laughs.

Hey, is that Crysis 4?

 So let's get the good stuff out of the way first: it is actually so bad it's good, at least some of the time; my favorite thing in it Nick Cheung as the general, a guy who's 650% gravitas, always squinting off into the distance while the camera rotates around him reverentially:

MAXIMUM SQUINTAGE

 This guy had me in stitches every single time he appeared. Every. Single. Time. Which is, thankfully, a lot of times, though most of them served zero purpose except to remind you he's still there... squinting.

 But there's so much more. This is a movie unafraid to boldly go where everyone and their fucking grandmother have gone before. Consider the case of the bereaved protagonist, moping after his lost daughter. Will he meet a precious moppet miraculously alive in an alien-infested hospital? And will said moppet heal his broken soul? I shan't spoil it, dear viewer, but if you appreciate shameless cheese, you'll like appreciate this movie.

 And it wraps up after almost exactly an hour and a half, which is downright considerate. Wish more terrible movies did that. That's including an inexplicable post-credits sequence setting up... uh, I have no idea what it's supposed to be setting up.

 The action isn't half-bad. Barring a couple of hiccups, the CGI is actually at the level of a mid-tier Marvel movie, which is high praise for this sort of thing; in fact, there are several Marvel 'homages' here, specifically an overused Iron-Man-Helmet-Cam type deal, which is just as annoying as on the Iron Man movies, and an extended Captain America reference.

 The choreography and the way it's filmed is a bit less impressive... so I guess it's like a Marvel film in that respect as well. It takes its cues from videogames more than anything else, overtly so; There's a little bit too much editing, too many show-off speed ramping effects, and too little style to get me excited, but it's always easy to follow and while what was happening was almost invariably stupid, it did hold my interest.

 Everything is overblown; expect an overtly dramatic orchestral score, a fucking cornucopia of unnecessary, drawn-out flashbacks, slow-motion emotional moments, inspirational speeches... the works. While the movie can be mined for a ton of clearly unintentional comedy, the bits of actual 'humor' here invariably fall flat on delivery. It's not a matter of the comedy being broad - it's... basically the jokes consist of the characters bickering in the most uninspired way imaginable and bullshit screaming matches. It's dismal.

 It's hard to gauge acting with a script this bad and a story so basic, so I'm giving the benefit of doubt to Louis Koo (usually very dependable, a regular in Johnie To's films) and a cast of faces that may be familiar to anyone who's watched HK cinema in the last decade.

 And yes, that includes Squints McDelicious. I'd like to state for the record, though, that according to Wikipedia he was in something called "Raped By An Angel 4: The Rapist's Union". I dearly hope he played this same character, contemplating rapist worker's rights with the same thousand-yard stare.

 You'll notice I haven't gone into the plot yet - hey, you're pretty observant!

 In the end, I can't say I resent this movie for being as bad as it turned out to be; As I wrote of Messr. Emmerich recently, if you ordered a turd sandwich you can't really complain about it tasting like shit. To be clear, there's some fantastic Chinese cinema out there - it's when they get populist and blockbustery like this that you need to lower expectations accordingly. This one's definitely not an exception.

Paddington

 Of course I think it's great. I'm not that dead inside yet; give it a few more Zach Snyder movies.

 Paddington is a ridiculously British, ridiculously cute, and very very funny 2014 adaptation of a popular series of extremely British picture books that go all the way back to the '50s. The titular character (voice courtesy of Ben Whishaw, and image courtesy of a bunch of talented computer artists) is a bear from Darkest Peru who sneaks illegally into the country by boat, and... well, that's as far as I can stretch that joke, because the movie has a pretty un-British-like sympathy for illegal immigrants. At least a couple of characters do put on a stony front for a while, but they can't keep it up for long because Paddington is obviously an exception, one of the good immigrants, not like all those others, you know, some of my best friends are immigrants, etc. etc.

 Ahem.

 How does a bear find his way to old Blighty from Darkest Peru? That's explained in a spiffy prologue that's filmed in the style of an old adventure documentary and contains some of the film's best jokes; that's not a slam on the rest of the film, which is chock full of great gags and very funny lines.
 Turns out a daring British explorer (Tim Downie) met Paddington's uncles during a geographical survey, way back when. He befriended them, taught them to speak when he learnt that they could mimic him ('LON-DOHN,' says the bear; 'Good Lord!' replies the overwhelmed explorer. Then, without missing a beat, conversationally: 'Now try Stratford-Upon-Avon'...), and regaled them with  tales about the wonders of the empire. Finally, when it was time to go, he promised them that they would always be welcome at his home in London.

 Many years later, the bear couple who the adventurer befriended have become proper posh British wannabes, voiced by Imelda Staunton and Michael Gambon, no less. When an earthquake strikes and leaves them with nothing, they decide to send their nephew back to London, thinking that he'll receive a warm welcome there (the tales they tell him of refugee children left at train stations don't really match up with the prologue's time frame, but it's a cute detail.)
 So begin the adventures of young Paddington, asylum seeker. So named because his bear name is unpronounceable to most humans, and he was found in Paddington Station. After some misadventure, he's taken home by the Brown family. The mother (the always welcome Sally Hawkins) is quite taken by the soft-spoken, extremely well-mannered young bear, but the father (Hugh Bonneville) is much more of a... well, let's say he's a Daily Mail reader.

 From there on you get bear-out-of-jungle incidents as the amiable ursine explores human contraptions, and cutesy bits as he slowly but surely starts winning his new family over, even as the patriarch tries to get rid of him. And as Paddington searches for information on the explorer who invited his uncles to London so long ago, he comes to the attention of a shady taxidermist (Nicole Kidman) who wants our protagonist stuffed for an exhibit at the London Museum of Natural History.

 Most of it goes as you'd expect. Paddington is a very sweet movie, and it's much funnier and more inventive than it needs to be, but it is still a kid's movie, so it does point its sights down a little as a result. It's at its weakest as the plot finally kicks into gear in the final third, but even before that it's perfectly willing to dip into dreary panto territory. It's never not fun, but it's so good when it's good that it's a bit of a shame when it goes for low-hanging fruit.

 Thank goodness, then, that it's got an ace up its sleeve in director (and co-writer) Paul King. This is an extremely good-looking movie, one that pays a lot of attention to frame composition, inventive shots and interesting set design. That's rare these days even in films for grown-ups. King is a veteran of the very psychedelic, extremely acid tinged show The Mighty Boosh; Here he understandably tones down the show's more out there sensibilities, but keeps all the exuberance, resulting in a film that's often a joy to watch:

Trust me, these look much better in motion...

 There are a lot of side-on shots, both static and with lateral movement (a la Wes Anderson,) and carefully composed visual gags. Add to that some lovely flourishes, some magical realism, and a salsa band providing diegetic music at appropriate moments, and you've got yourself something pretty special.

 Want more good news? OK: the sequel is even better.

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead

 Wyrmwood's apocalypse is weird.
 On the one hand you have an airborne...something... that turns people into zombies, brought on by a meteor shower. There's the rare individual who's somehow immune, but for everyone else, it's gasmasks or zombiehood.
 So far. so good. But whatever happened, it also rendered all oil inert; gas won't burn, and, more importantly, gasoline doesn't work as fuel for cars any more. It'd be a weird detail, except that later on people figure out that zombie breath (and farts) are not just flammable, but work as a perfectly acceptable fuel substitute.
 It's a... creative way to kick off a Mad Max / Zombie mashup, to be sure.

 Wyrmwood is a 2014 Australian action/horror/comedy hybrid written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner (his brother Tristan co-writes and produces). It starts on the same night everything goes to shit, following two siblings separately - Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Brooke (Bianca Bradey), who both happen to be immune to whatever's causing people to turn undead.
 Well, actually it starts in media res, in a scene from the middle of the film they later just repeat, but let's skip that.

 In any case: Brooke is an artist who barely survives an attack in her studio from her now-zombified model and assistant. She calls her brother to warn him something bad is happening, to get out of town, and is then taken by some sort of military group.
 Barry in turn deals with a home invasion (in a particularly brutal fashion; the dude acts like he's in a zombie movie long before he realizes he actually is in one) and takes his family on the road until they discover gasoline is no good any more. Luckily, they all have gas masks; The bad news is that, well, they're not very good at using them. Barry's wife and child don't share his immunity, and it's not long before he has to put them down.

 This leaves him understandably suicidal; lucky for him, another survivor pops by and stops him from finishing himself. Before long, Barry's found himself a group of survivors, and they discover that they can use zombies as fuel; so they do what any bunch of zombie movie protagonists would; they suit up with paintball armor until they look like the baddies in a 1980s SNK game, convert a pick-up truck into a tank and plug in some zombies into the engine to harness their burps as fuel. Y'know, the usual.

 Meanwhile, Brooke is handcuffed to the wall in some sort of laboratory where a mad scientist, working with the military, is running ethically dubious and painful tests on a bunch of people who are immune to the disease. Can't say I agree with his methods, but you have to respect that he was already set up and working on a plan pretty much on the eve of when things went to shit; that's way more foresight and organizational ability that I'd be willing to credit any governmental agency with. In any case, in between being experimented on and trying to escape, Brooke... uh, discovers that she can take control of zombies telepathically.

 And honestly, that's ok. Because if we've accepted zombie farts can magically power internal combustion engines, pretty much anything goes at this point, right?

 What the movie lacks in consistency, budget or sanity, it makes up for with a manic, likeable energy. It's not a good movie, exactly -to be honest, I'm don't think it's even aiming for quality; But it's seriously entertaining.
 By the third act the pieces have fallen into place, the two plot lines intersect, and it turns into the Mad Max B-movie it wanted to be all along; Despite all the rough patches, jittery action, crappy CGI blood splatters, dubious character work and the mad libs script, it's almost impossible not to enjoy the ride.

Skinamarink

  Skinamarink is an experimental Canadian horror movie about a couple of very young siblings (one of them four, the other six, at a guess) who awake one day in their home to find that their father's disappeared... and so have all the windows and the door outside. They weather out the weirdness by camping out in the living room with their favorite toys while a VHS keeps looping through ancient (and public domain) cartoons. Then something starts playing around with them.

 I doubt I'd even have heard about it, except that it captured some people's imagination and became a minor viral hit; made for $15k and with no marketing whatsoever, it took two million in cinemas; hell, that such a nakedly uncommercial movie made it to the big screen in the first place is some kind of achievement.

 It's an unrelentingly oblique movie; The camera always faces away from any action, focusing on, say, an empty stretch of wall while you piece together what's happening from noises, how the scene is lit, and maybe, if you're lucky, some movement at the edge of the frame. That's when things are actually happening; most of the time, nothing is, and you're literally watching dry paint.
 There's a further layer of obfuscation in the heavy grain filter applied to every scene, mimicking the lossy video of yesteryear - but this goes a whole lot further than retro movies like Christmas Bloody Christmas; every frame is saturated with static and darkness (no windows, remember?) to the point where it makes it hard to make things out, making it seem very likely that something is going to coalesce at any moment from the background. Scenes are mostly static (ha!) and drawn out, but others mimic the young protagonists' point of view.

Sometimes it reminded me of how you never get to see the adults' heads in Peanuts.

 A movie that's more about questions than answers, that perversely makes you have to parse out what's happening in even the most mundane scenes, and that stretches tension with no payoff on purpose... I get why it became a sort of viral sensation, why people would want to check it out. Hell, I did, as soon as I saw it on Shudder.

 ...It put me to sleep within thirty minutes.
 There'll be people more in tune with its batty wavelength out there, I'm sure, but I found it a chore to sit through, even with a running time of a hundred minutes, cut into two installments (because I really did fall asleep). There's just not enough of anything here.

 The movie's tactics are pretty blatant - get viewers engaged by making them have to work out what's going on, draw out tension by hiding it, trying to dig its hooks in their imagination, and every huge now and then fire off a jump scare or a snippet of... well, let's call it plot, but really it's more of a situation. 
 It is remarkably creepy, and it does do a good job of capturing pre-teen memories of being up way past your bedtime. But I found the whole thing weirdly artless and almost pedestrian, relying on very basic, universally creepy elements to do its work for it. I appreciated what it was going for, but it, to put it bluntly, bored me out of my skull; There are tons of shorts on the web that go for the sort of thing that movie is going for - I'm not saying they do it better (some do, some don't), but I don't see why this stands out.
 Given its microbudget I might be a lot better disposed to it if it had been half as long, but as stands I just found it tedious.

 Not that it's a complete loss: there's a couple of good (non-jump) scares, including one that's respectably cruel, and one decent joke that uses editing and context for effect. There's some mildly cool imagery towards the end, and the overall vibe is creepy enough. But it's way too meagre a showing for an hour and forty minutes.

Source Code

 Man, I miss title credit sequences. Source Code, back from the halcyon days of 2011 (they were already rare back then) has a good one, with some lovely aerial shots of Chicago and environs, unorthodoxly-positioned credits, and an almost Lalo Schifrin-esque score.

 And then we're thrust into the life of Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhal). Or are we? It's quickly revealed that Colter, who acts as if he'd just woken up in a stranger's shoes, well... has just woken up in a stranger's shoes. One minute he was flying missions in Afghanistan, and now he's on a Chicago commuter train where a woman he doesn't know but clearly thinks she knows him (Michelle Monaghan) talks to him as if he was someone else.

 A quick visit to the bathroom and a glance at a mirror convinces Colter that he is in fact inhabiting someone else's body. Then the train blows up, and he finds himself in some sort of mechanized limbo...

 From there the mystery starts being unraveled, one revelation at a time. It turns out Colter is being sent back in time to the train by a shady army outfit to discover who set the bomb; Over and over and over again, reliving those final eight minutes, doing different things until he manages to figure out who it was. And while he's at it, he also needs to figure out what's up with his situation.

 The science is silly (of course quantum mechanics are invoked, along with some mumbly techno-babble,) extremely inconsistent, and kind of falls down as soon as you think about it. But it can be forgiven, because this rickety scaffolding supports a tight, pacey, satisfying mystery with some Hitchcockian suspense and some intriguing themes about duty and the demands a country might place on those in its service. Nothing too deep on any of the fronts, but the fact that it manages to tell a coherent, compelling story while juggling all of this is pretty impressive.

 Ben Ripley's turned in a smart script (well, except for the science) that does particularly well at making its characters credible under ridiculous circumstances. It's a little bit too Hollywood, especially when reaching what seems like a perfect ending, only to forge ahead and ruin it with an additional dollop of schmaltz. This really bothered me when I first saw it way back when, but I must be getting soft in my dotage because it resonated a bit more this time around; a bit too saccharine, but it feels earned. Gyllenhaal, and the script, do a great job at grounding us in the Captain's reality, and he, Monaghan, and Vera Farmiga (playing a sympathetic CO) deploy ridiculous amounts of charisma to good effect.

 Source Code was director Duncan Jones's follow-up to his sci-fi breakthrough Moon, back when he seemed poised to move to the big leagues; unfortunately he did make the move, but it was to direct the Warcraft movie, which kind of finished off his career. I liked that one despite its problems; can't and won't extend the same courtesy to Mute.

 These days he may or may not be working on Rogue Trooper, which sounds very exciting, but it also sounds dead in the water with radio silence over the last three years. We'll see; whatever he comes out with next, it should at least be worth watching.

M3gan

 The name stands for 'Model 3 Generative Android'. Which is cute until you wonder what happened with the previous two models - did they call them Mwangan and Emtwogan? Also, generative? That's the sort of crap a marketing department would come up with, but the name comes from M3gan's creator, Gemma (Allison Williams) - a supposedly brilliant techie. Tsk tsk.

 M3gan is a very dumb but fun techno-thriller written by the same people behind the stellar Malignant (the gold standard for modern dumb fun scary movies) and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who did the excellent Housebound. It's got some satirical elements, some heightened character stuff and quite a few jokes, but somewhat surprisingly it's mostly played straight.

 Gemma works for Funki, a Seattle-based company that seems to mostly make robot toys. Bored of working on the company's biggest hit (a high tech Furby knock-off; they're a little more intelligent, and a lot more asshole), she's been working behind her boss's back on the titular M3gan, a four-foot tall humanoid robot with an embedded A.I.

 In an unrelated development, her young niece Cady (Violet McGraw) is orphaned in an ironic traffic accident, and Gemma is named her custodian. It's good that they explain that Gemma made a promise to Cady's mom to take care of her should anything happen because otherwise it'd make no sense at all; Gemma has no maternal instincts whatsoever, is uncomfortable around children, and would clearly rather not be a surrogate parent. Her lack of a clue on how to deal with Cady is mostly played for laughs (if nothing else, it's an excuse for the most passive-aggressive unboxing ever)

 So she gets the brilliant idea to give the prototype AI toy to Cady and let her bond with it. She clearly has never watched or read any sci-fi.

Doing her best to earn a spot in the Blumhouse intro.

 M3gan and Cady get on famously - enough that just seeing them together prompts Gemma's boss to do an about face Re:M3gan and promote it instantly to the company's biggest project after a demonstration to the shareholders goes down very well.

 But Gemma's starting to have second thoughts as M3gan starts showing some troublesome behaviours: subtly subverting Gemma's authority over Cady, downloading material even when it falls outside of her allotted actions, turning on when she should be off, killing the neighbour's dog, making her system files unavailable, killing the neighbour... You know, little things, but they add up.

 So in the eve of M3gan's public reveal, Gemma decides to pull the plug on the little psycho doll and go home to finally have a heart-to-heart and connect with her niece. Meanwhile, at the office, M3gan does what rogue AIs do best: escaping destruction, engaging in fun but unnecessary carnage, and tracking down the protagonists for a very crowd-pleasing final confrontation.

 Because it's a Blumhouse/Universal production, it's got a bit better production than you'd expect from a solo Blumhouse outing, with lots of extras, locations, and some pretty impressive effects for M3gan (there are a whole lot of puppeteers listed on the credits, kudos to them.) It's a PG13 movie, so don't expect much in the way of bloodshed, but it fits well with the movie's genre and unexpected restraint.

 It gets a lot of mileage from the toy's uncanny valley mannerisms and inscrutability, as expected, and some unexpected weird touches (including that dance scene spoiled in the trailers; It would have been much more effective without seeing that bit coming, but hey, guess it makes sense from a marketing point of view.) The script does try to raise some points - I liked how it compares Gemma's lack of parenting instincts to just dumping the AI on the doll and hoping it'll work things out on its own - but it's mostly a sub-Crichton screenplay that hits all the usual technophobic points and threads them into an entertaining yarn.

 Even at a lean hundred minutes it feels a little bit undernourished, padded out by a particularly dumb industrial espionage subplot that could be cut out and no one would miss it (its only justification is that it increases the body count, and dat dance scene.) Still, it does what it sets out to do while always keeping a sense of humor about itself. It may not have Malignant's batshit crazy mojo, but that's a rare, precious thing; let's not hold it against poor M3gan.

Expect a lot of M3gans next Halloween...

 Ending spoilers - The rock'em'sock'em robots sequence was superb, but I really expected Gemma to remember that first, disastrous presentation and remove the flux capacitor or whatever it was that made M2gan's head explode. A screwdriver to the CPU is fine (and it was foreshadowed when Gemma pointed it out to Cady on Bruce, which is a nice touch) but a tad unimaginative.

Bones and All

 Where do I even start with this one.

 Bones and all is a beautiful teen romance/coming of age story about a couple of very fine young cannibals. It's a road movie, a rambling character study that also manages to establish an interesting type of vampire-adjacent monster with its own idiosyncrasies and cool little details. It's heavily indebted to David Gordon Green's early, quiet, naturalistic movies set against run-down Americana (a conscious decision, as reflected in that the man himself was asked to play a character) with splashes of graphic gore and some really nasty, excellently creepy scenes.

 It's a defiantly batshit crazy movie, aggressively uncommercial but released by MGM/UA. I loved it.

 Highschooler Maren (Taylor Russell) leads a sheltered life with her dad (André Holland). Extremely sheltered: she's allowed to go to school, but her dad locks her in her room when he's not with her.

 Maren manages to escape and goes to a sleepover with some friends, but the she loses control and almost bites one of their fingers off. Oops! She runs away back to her house, and when her father sees her covered in blood, it's clear that this has happened before, because they have a drill to clear out of town with only what they can gather up in three minutes.

 Some time and a few towns later, Maren arrives home to find that her dad gone, leaving her some money, her birth certificate, and a cassette with a long message explaining why he did it. The message is played throughout the movie, but the gist of it is that he's had enough of covering for a cannibal; much as he loves her, he's out.

 The birth certificate gives Maren a town and her mother's name, so she sets off to find her to see if she can make some sense of her situation.

 On the road she meets Sully (Spielberg regular Mark Rylance), another 'eater', who sniffs her out and... well, invites her over for dinner. Here's where we get hints of a well-developed mythology for Maren's 'condition'. It's an ever-growing hunger, much like vampirism, but it comes with a developed sense of smell that lets them, among other things, find each other. Sully has even developed it to be able to find people who are about to die, which he claims has let him avoid having to kill anyone.

 Rylance, like everyone else on this movie, gives an excellent performance, and it's unnerving to see the BFG be so unrelentingly creepy. When Maren takes off running at the earliest opportunity, it's perfectly understandable.

 While shoplifting across state lines, Maren has a sort of meet-cute with another eater her age, Lee (Timothée Chalamet). She awkwardly convinces him to take her under her wing, and teen biology does the rest. The love story is sweet and oddly underplayed- or rather, it's not so much about the standard romantic scenes, but about their connection. Like the rest of the movie, unsensational and honest.

 It's a loose, shaggy story that's held together by some plot threads (Maren's search for her mother, and oh shit Sully keeps popping up, somehow getting creepier every time!) but mostly it's a quiet, sensitive character study about these young lovers dealing with having such a shitty, shitty lot forced unto them. 

 It's a gorgeous film, with a production design that effortlessly and subtly invokes the eighties mostly without any obvious signifiers (well, except the music, which is excellent - a great selection of early eighties post-punk and an original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).

 Luca Guadagnino's direction is unintrusive, with some interesting editing at points, and an firm command of mood, well accompanied by beautiful photography of both urban and natural landscapes.. The script is by David Kajganich, who previously had adapted Dan Simmon's The Terror for an excellent miniseries, so the great character work here should come as no surprise.

 Another one that's hard to recommend, but I'll still recommend whole-heartedly.

Strange World

 All of humanity is confined to a single city -Avalonia- ringed by impassable mountains. The city's premier adventurer and explorer, Jaeger Clade (Dennis Quaid) tirelessly mounts expeditions with his son trying to find a way around them, as chronicled in one of the movie's highpoints - a very funny song that finds Jaeger endlessly impressive... his son, less so.

 The movie begins with one of these expeditions. Young Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds a plant with weird properties - they discharge something similar to electricity - and insists on taking them back to the city; his father, irate, decides to continue into the mountains. so they separate.

 Cut to twenty-five years later. Searcher has revolutionized life for Avalonia when his plants turned out to be a powerful and renewable energy source, and he's now farming them, with a family of his own (his wife is played by Gabrielle Union, and his son by Jaboukie Young-White.) His father never made it back from the mountains.

 Life is good... until a some sort of malady starts affecting the electric plants (geddit?) Some scientists realize that all of their roots converge together and lead ever downwards; so an expedition is mounted by Avalonia's president (Lucy Liu) into a sinkhole that ends up leading into a candy-colored underworld.

 This underland is the main attraction in the movie - a beautifully rendered place, all pinks, reds, and oranges, full of weird plants, creatures, and striking vistas. Because we're operating in cartoon logic here, as soon as Searcher arrives he quickly reunites with his father, who's been stranded there all these years. So the three generations of Clade scions continue tracking the roots to see what lies at the heart of the corruption in this, wait for it, strange world.

 The conflict at the heart of the movie is, unfortunately, much more pedestrian: Jaeger wanted his son to be an explorer like him and is disappointed when he learns he became a farmer. Searcher, in turn, is desperate for his son not to become like Jaeger. Rote lessons will be learnt.

 Strange Word is another entry into Disney's recent string of nice but weirdly unmemorable movies. Not for lack of trying, though; Technically, it's amazing, and its art direction is top-notch, with cute, funny character designs and some impressive effects work (there's some fluffy cloud creatures that looked pretty cool.) There's also a cool twist lurking as to the nature of the strange world and how it plays into the plot. Unfortunately the characters are front and center, and |their arcs are didactic, plain and wholly predictable. Their conflict is so easily resolved it barely registers.

 And it does pointedly tick all the boxes people accuse Disney of ticking these days, for those keeping track at home; I'm sure it will propel a thousand 'think' pieces and trigger the usual crowd, but mostly it feels tired and... not insincere, but, well, almost. Algorithmic.

 Let it be known that in the ancestral cultural divide between Eurogames and (whatever the word for non Eurogames is), Disney have picked a side. The culture wars continue. The world at large shrugs.

Kate

  Kate's another John Wickalike movie from Netflix - they promote it as "'John Wick' meets 'Crank'"; "'John Wick' meets 'The Professional'" would be much more accurate, but they already used that for Polar. This one is actually produced by EightySeven North, the House that John Wick's money built, so you know that at least the action is going to be good.

 The titular Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is yet another ridiculously proficient assassin in yet another shady underworld outfit that needs full time assassins in their roster. She was taken at a young age and moulded into a killer by her handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), whom according to the rules of this sort of thing is either going to betray her or die heroically trying to save her from whatever conspiracy targets her.
 After something goes wrong on a job against the Yakuza in Osaka (the target's daughter is at the assassination site) Kate is left visibly shaken, and decides to retire. She promises Varrick that she will complete what they came to do in Japan, but after that, she's out.

 Does any last job ever go smoothly? As she's about to kill her final victim, Kate feels violently ill and botches it. This leads to a good running gun battle that transitions to a cool (and pretty artificial-looking) car chase, which ends badly.
 When she wakes up in the hospital a doctor soberly informs her that she's been poisoned with a radioactive agent - Polonium-204, and she only has twenty-four hours to live (that's six less poloniums than what the Russians used to kill Alexander Litvenko; in this case, though, it sounds like bad news).
 Kate stocks up on five stim-filled autoinjectors, and decides to go after the Yakuza kingpin she was after originally, who seems the most likely culprit.
 I liked the use of the autoinjectors throughout the movie; they end up being a sort of countdown clock.

 On a completely unrelated note, they could have called this movie Atomic Noirette, and it would be pretty accurate.

 As she tears through Tokyo's criminal underworld, it soon becomes clear that the only person who can lead her to her target is the crime lord's niece Ani (Miku Martineau)... the girl whose father Kate killed in front of her. With time and options running out, Kate kidnaps the girl, and things get a little complicated in mostly predictable ways.
 For one, there's internecine trouble within the yakuza, which means that Ani immediately becomes a target for Kate to protect. And then there's the fact that Katie killed Ani's father, and that's gonna come out at some point. I can't say anything there are any major surprises as the film barrels on to its conclusion, but for the most part it's solid. It doesn't embarrass itself.

 Helmed by visual effects guy turned director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan  (he's only directed this and the second The Huntsman movie), the action is, well, pretty good. It's not up to the studio's best efforts but it's bloody, dynamic, varied, and full of cool moves and little moments; Because of the Japanese setting, there's some nods to samurai movies and pop culture. There's a really cool variation of one of those bits where the killer seems to disappear but is wedged above the people searching for her; A great gun and knife battle with lots of horizontal panning and blood splattering paper walls, good stuff.
 It looks pretty stylish, in what can probably be called the EightySevenNorth house style by now - you know, a lot of nighttime, neon-drenched streets and stylized graphic violence. This one's a bit more naturalistic, despite taking advantage of the setting's animated billboards and cheesy J-pop soundtrack.

 Winstead's already proved she can do action, and does great here. Kate makes for a really compelling protagonist, enough to make it credible that Ani very quickly goes from being terrified of her kidnapper to thinking she's the coolest thing in the world. She gets as good as she gives, as well, especially as her health deteriorates; normally action movies use kid gloves with female fighters or cop out with acrobatics, but no such concessions here; she's brutally manhandled by stronger and bigger opponents, and it makes the fights that much more realistic and interesting (this was also one of the few good points in this... sorry, last year's otherwise disappointing The Princess.)

 The script... is ok. It strings together the action sequences nicely and has plenty of good moments, but has a little trouble dealing with the central relationship between Kate and Ani; by the end how Ani is feeling towards Kate seems really arbitrary. It's like some vital character moments were cut out throughout.

 More than anything else, this is Mary Elizabeth Winstead's movie to carry, and, like Mads Mikkelsen in Polar, that other Netflix John-Wickalike, carry it she does. Kate doesn't take a lot of risks, and isn't free of issues, but it's a slick, great action vehicle for a relatable and utterly badass protagonist. There's way worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

 P.S: I'm not watching that Netflix Bullet Milkshake movie or whatever is called. I have my limits.