Tag: reboot

Dub’s Take: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1 out of 5

“Planet of the Apes 10” (or “X”), at almost two-and-a-half hours, is too damn long. I wanted a Charlton Heston-style pun with “YA BLEW IT UP”, but I couldn’t figure one out.

I’m no historian either, but wasn’t there a time when movie studios wanted shorter films in theatres to increase the number of showtimes in a day? But the era of butchering overlong “auteur” films has been over for a long time, hasn’t it? Last-century classics like “The Wild Bunch” and “Once Upon a Time in America” were championed once their unaltered versions were repatriated, but it seemed left-minded executives could come in whenever they wanted and cut scenes they thought were superficial. Today, it’s the studios producing these overlong movies, maybe in their post-COVID attempts to revitalize theatrical box-offices with tentpole “experiences”.

I grew up with the “Apes” films up to “Conquest” and I’m always down for a monkey movie. “Kingdom” starts nobly, not only by having lots of different kinds of monkeys in it, but by taking place “generations” after the other entries, serving as a soft-reboot of sorts for the resuscitated franchise. I liked the dialogue’s seasoning of existential despondency and the throwback soundtrack, both which recall the 1968 original. “The Witcher” ‘s Freya Allen successfully auditions for “Tomb Raider” with her role. And the special effects were pretty good, including some effective mo-cap, and a high-angle of some windy trees in the prologue that was eye-catching on a big screen.

But the film is purposeless other than as distraction. Its formulaic first act set-up of rescue & revenge segues to a meandering middle and a predictable end, with too many “what ifs” for a road picture and not enough actual adventuring. Extended passages like a campfire and a cameo from William H. Macy are too much texture for a monkey movie. The worst element is character actor & pasty White guy Kevin Durand’s main antagonist Proximus, for which Durand adopts a problematic Keith David impression. Producers should have just hired Keith David instead.

Nothing here couldn’t have been done in a hour-and-a-half – the median length for all four original Apes sequels. No wonder there’s a conscious audience shift to streaming: who wants to pay modern prices and leave their home to take an uncomfortable nap?

Poster sourced from impawards.com. Do you have any good Charlton Heston or Planet of the Apes puns or jokes? Leave yours in the comment box below!

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Dub’s Take: Road House (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

The original “Road House” (1989) is a cult classic. That doesn’t mean it’s any good: it means a very niche group think it’s excellent, my wife & I included. It’s full of bloody, cathartic, testosterone-fuelled violence that still holds up 35-years-later, even if some of the dialogues or procedural bits may be dated by today’s standards. So when I say the Road House remake is “hot one-and-done garbage”, it’s because at its core, it isn’t “Road House”.

What works about the remake are the villains: they are exceptionally cast. Contemporary UFC titan Connor McGreggor is one-note as the primary tough guy, but he looks like he’s having fun, so the viewers have fun, too. Billy Magnussen takes the Ben Gazzara role from the original as the whiny suit, and JD Pardo from TV’s “Mayans M.C.” is a brash biker with cropped bleach-blond hair: they, too, realize they are acting in a Road House movie, and thusly are also fun to watch. The original Road House is, above all, fun.

What doesn’t work is everything else. Like February’s “Argylle“, “Road House 2024” tries to trend with young, current audiences (in Argylle, we had a female-led cast & non-sequitur humour; in RH2024, we have MMA-based fighting & post-produced “awkward” pauses) but without the budget, the star-power, or the script to make it truly memorable.

Action scenes are quite-clearly CGI-enhanced, including a ghastly prologue with Post Malone fake-punching, and at least two fake car accidents. Jake Gyllenhaal as hero Dalton is miscast, spending too much time in his own head method acting when the role shouldn’t have called for it. Maybe things would have been different had his Dalton received a satisfactory back-story, or if the screenplay concentrated on some of the modern challenges of being a bouncer, but the script does neither. As a result, Gyllenhaal is working when he should be having fun. The film is also poorly-lit in its night scenes, and so roughly edited you can’t tell whether a gator eating somebody is a failed rescue or a murder.

Streaming has its detractors (RH2024 director Doug Liman being one of them), but you have to admit it has its perks, such as downvoting things so your service knows you hated it. Getting sent direct to streaming is the best thing that could have happened to the Road House remake.

1.5 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Will you say “critics be damned” and watch the stupid movie anyway? Even if a movie is reviewed poorly by a majority, do you still reserve judgement? Or were you like my wife & I, waiting for it to come to theatres, only to see it was available immediately on Prime for instant gratification? Let me know in the comments below!

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Dub’s Take: The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

“Tarzan 2016” is a thing. What starts promisingly with Christoph Waltz & the great Djimon Hounsou squaring off is squashed once the title screen arrives, and conscious viewers notice the ‘registered trademark’ icon next to the logo. It still begs belief eight years post-release and reeks of corporate interference & franchise ensnarement. It’s mind-boggling thinking of what legal finagling forced such a decision – then you pause the movie on Netflix and it displays the logo on its idle screen without it. It isn’t even on the poster!

You can’t say the writers didn’t try to do something different: instead of another origin story, we open with an edified, middle-aged Tarzan, who retrogresses when he’s used as a pawn in the Congolese mineral trade. But then Waltz’s bad guy devolves into the one-dimensional schtick we’ve seen him do in every role since “Inglorious Basterds”, dragging Margot Robbie’s Jane from one set-piece to another while Alexander Skarsgård’s admittedly-shredded Tarzan is in hot pursuit. The action becomes the only point to the Sisyphysian push-and-pull, and the action scenes are a mish-mash of poor CGI & muted colours. While they’re thankfully not hyper-edited, anything in motion just looks like blobs – particularly the swinging-through-trees, which recall the ‘surfing’ from the 1999 Disney film.

The Casting Director got their budget’s worth, though. Acting is Tarzan 2016’s strongest quality, but was this caliber of work necessary here? Even Samuel L. Jackson had a chance to ham it up a bit, but he’s relatively low-key as the sidekick. There’s a five-second shot where Jackson lands on a tree branch and looks down, and he’s supposed to be hundreds of feet in the air but in reality it’s probably just a green screen beneath him, and it’s believable. I wish the cast’s effort had gone to a story with more follow-through: if not a “Birth of Tarzan” then maybe “Tarzan in Europe”.

2 out of 5

Poster sourced from impawards.com. Screenshots were author-obtained. Think I’m being too hard on Christoph? How about too easy on everyone else? Like yourself a good monkey movie? Planning to watch it before it’s “removed from Netflix”? Comment why don’t ‘cha!

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Jay’s Take: Men in Black 4

rbsh

Ah, the drive-in experience! Something I never got to do as a kid, something I never choose to do as an adult. We drive a 2016 Mazda CX-5 that has to be the biggest piece of shit on four wheels and completely unsuited to sitting idle for more then 20-minutes without whining that it hasn’t got enough attention (that and the brakes, and the transmission, and the suspension, and the mileage, and the warranty, etcetera etcetera). But when we do go, we only have one within 100 km or so of our house, since you know it’s old-fashioned enough to drive an hour to get there but not enough to not trend like crazy when something like Avengers comes out. Oh my god have you been to the drive-in lately? There’s still a drive-in? What’s a drive-in? Tonight there was no Avengers. There was, however, Men in Black 4 and Annabelle 3. Oh joy! All I could think about when sitting in the lot was how long it had left before the property became condos.

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Jay’s Take: Shaft 2019

ptroz

Shaft, the 1971 original, is a product of its time: a blaxploitation picture with a simple crime story driven by a cheeky lead hero. Shaft, the 2000 remake, is a product of its time: an attempt to shoehorn a diluted version of the brand-cough-character into a competent John Singleton urban crime thriller. Shaft, the 2019 reboot of the series, is a product of its time: shot and edited like a CBS primetime drama with a plot that would fit a 40-minute episode of Hawaii Five-O but stretched out to almost two hours. Thankfully, Shaft 19 (which is what Warner was hoping for, I’m sure) is probably the most successful of the three movies I’ve seen, in nailing the core character in an unoffensive plot that he served instead of domineering or underperforming in.

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