tkmcc-08780 Reviews

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)

Was this written by a child?

[2/10 · 22 May 2024]

Operation Postmaster, the true event from which this movie is (very) loosely based, is an amazing story that would make a fantastic movie. Unfortunately, this isn't that movie.

Instead, what we get are invulnerable wisecracking good guys facing impossibly cartoonish bad guys. The tiny bits of suspense are lazily provided by inconsistencies like super smart guys suddenly doing something dumb, or an unfailingly stupid character unexpectedly doing something smart, for no good reason. No poor decision by the heroes can't be fixed by an even dumber action by the villains. It's the kind of thing a small child would do when setting their favorite toys against the bad toys.

Sure, the explosions, smug lines and action are kind of cool, but eventually the lack of real suspense or story writing made the movie boring. I found myself wishing the movie would just reach its completely predictable outcome and end as quickly as possible.

Napoleon (2023)

What was that?

[2/10 · 28 November 2023]

Can anyone figure out what kind of a story Ridley Scott was trying to tell? I saw at least three. First is a historically speculative dom/sub love story that might have been interesting as a standalone fictional movie by a better director. The second is a sketchy biography of Napoleon that leaves the viewer with little insight into or any real interest in the whiny lead character (I kept hearing Joker). The third is a kind of historical movie told in incidental but spectacularly filmed battles with non-historic "enhancements", apparently filmed to satisfy Scott's penchant for directing grand scenes.

The whole story is poorly told, with little educational and only limited entertainment value. You'll have to know your history to follow the movie, but if you know your history you'll be appalled. The costume and scenery departments did a fantastic job. The rest of this mess was a huge disappointment better consigned to the dustbin.

Joker (I) (2019)

Dark Through and Through

[10/10 · 18 October 2019]

Joker superficially resemblances movies like Falling Down. But this one has so much more. The movie starts out slowly. Very slowly. At one point I was wondering how long it would go on at such a slow pace. However, pieces are being carefully placed, seemingly unrelated, but definitely not at random. Then the bomb maker has all the pieces he needs. The explosion is unexpected and violent, a tipping point that triggers all the pent-up madness and fury. The slow burn start served to immerse us in this world so we can be engulfed and swept along by the flood. Events spiral out of control as the pieces slam into place. Reality and illusion blur. Themes of family, friends, mental illness, loss, deceit, and ultimately society's failure, crash together in an increasingly shocking ride. There's nothing happy about this movie. It is dark, through and through. I rarely do this, but I'm going again tomorrow...

Us (II) (2019)

Interesting Concept, Really Bad Movie

[1/10 · 1 June 2019]

Having an intriguing idea is great, but the director still needs to make a good movie. "Us" just isn't a good movie. It starts out with great promise. The dark and chaotic prequel sets the tone, followed by a family dysfunction dynamic that carries into the present timeline and promises to be an important and interesting part of the story arc. An early unsettling event provides eerie foreboding. Then the unsettled becomes terrifying. The "Us" seem supernatural, able to climb walls and outrun normal humans. The movie looks like an isolated, somewhat dysfunctional family facing mortal danger, with great potential to come together while depending on something in mom's background - or not. It's looking like Peele can really do horror! Then it goes off the rails. The isolated family idea gets tossed quickly as the story expands to include characters we have no emotional ties to. Then, the weird supernatural qualities of "Us" suddenly and inexplicably vanish. The family tension theme falls away while the main characters become invincible, removing any real sense of tension (or interest really). With no good main character arc, you start wondering where this is all going. Unfortunately, it's not a good place. Either a horror movie can have a mysterious, unexplained cause, or it can have a well thought out, carefully explained and integrated back-story that teases out as the story unfolds. Unfortunately, Peele achieves the worst of both. He spoils the suspense by "telling" part of the back-story, but then leaves out even the most basic explanation why this could be remotely plausible or undiscovered. I spent the rest of the movie punching holes in the whole ridiculous premise instead of actually watching it. The final "twist" wasn't nearly satisfying enough to make up for this stinker.

White Boy Rick (2018)

Gritty, intense

[9/10 · 21 September 2018]

This is a real roller coaster of a movie - dizzying highs and sickening lows. In all the betrayal and redemption there's a dysfuntional but compelling family story that forms the core of the movie. It's a bit choppy, some things seemed a bit unfinished and the dialogue and accents (reportedly realistic) are sometimes hard to follow. But the performances are worth watching. I'm probably going to see it again.

Searching (III) (2018)

Innovative, great story but may have reached a bit

[8/10 · 14 September 2018]

To begin with, this story is told entirely through screens - computer monitors and TV's. It's surprisingly natural since we spend so much time in front of screens. While the movie is a great drama and crime story on its own, the use of screens is skillfully exploited to build plot twists, tension and pacing.

The basic story really touches on family, loss and a father/daughter relationship that's both tragic and triumphant. Anyone with children will immediately identify with these elements. The use of screens is essential here as Cho (the dad) not only searches for clues to his daughter's disappearance but also slowly gets to know his daughter in ways he never knew.

The search for clues is central to the crime drama and provides the backbone for everything else. Several sometimes subtle clues jar with the apparent story line, or just seem odd or important but aren't followed up right away. Unlike some other movies, in Searching these are intentional and do eventually lead to red herrings or an unexpected story twist.

The movie does have flaws. While the use of screens is very successful, there are some places where it's stretched a bit to make it work. Some of the clues stretch credibility, but I didn't think it was too distracting. I suspect that if I watched it again I'd find some more loose ends, but the innovative screen approach and frantic pace of the movie makes these a harder to pick up, at least for me.

A Simple Favor (2018)

Cleverly funny, wickedly complex

[10/10 · 14 September 2018]

Or is it wickedly funny and cleverly complex? There's a lot to this movie. It's a crime drama but it's also a mom story with characters you can identify with. There's always something just under the surface that you just can't pin down, but what's hidden is pleasingly revealed by masterful story craft. This framework allows, really requires, that the characters develop both through revealing their pasts and by changing as the story progresses. None of the major characters are simple. Even the secondary characters are a bit complicated. Kudos to Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively who brilliantly portray vulnerability, strength and cunning often and unexpectedly exactly when needed. The entire cast is a delight to watch. This movie demands your attention but rewards it in the detail that leads to complex twists. Despite the dark story arc there's a lot of sly and clever humor that comes from both nerdy awkwardness and wicked darkness. This is a movie well worth watching.

The Little Stranger (2018)

Dark, Gothic, Wonderfully Opaque

[9/10 · 7 September 2018]

I fully expected a movie along the lines of VVitch or Annihilation, and I wasn't disappointed. It's a bit horror movie, possibly a ghost story, maybe a murder mystery and much a gothic drama. The suspense builds from the overwhelming sense of foreboding. There's a malevolent presence but the source is just not clear. You're sure something is going to happen, it'll likely be bad, and you're not sure what it is or what the cause is. Some reviewers were confused by the switching back and forth between past and present, main character narrative, half followed leads and choppiness - I think it's there on purpose to throw off the viewer, and it worked. Is it supernatural, is it madness, is it the supernatural causing madness or madness causing the supernatural? It's hard to tell what's behind the events but the frequent often conflicting and ambivalent clues keep the audience involved and guessing.

Several themes are at play here - class conflict, the decline of England after the world wars, unrequited love, the fall of a once great family, child and teen angst, family/child/parent conflict and dysfunction, rural vs. city lifestyle, male/female conflict, and more. Some are explored more than others, but overall it adds to the complexity and depth of the movie. There's enough here to likely get most people out of their comfort zones at least part of the time.

The buildup is a bit slow - maybe not so much a pacing problem as a slow burn that several reviewers have noted. If you're expecting lots of fast, horror action, this isn't a film for you. If you're looking for complexity, a enigma, and something different, you may like this movie too.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Incredible true story comes with a lot of fictional baggage

[6/10 · 20 August 2018]

There's much good about this movie, starting with Ron Stallworth's incredible deception of the Klu Klux Klan. Racism in all its ugliness is powerfully shown. There's a lot of humor at the expense of some really dumb people. Unfortunately, there's a lot wrong with the movie too. Most of this is because the director embellished the true story. I'm not a big fan of directors tinkering with what really happened in order to add their own touch, and then still claim "based on a true story". The result of the tinkering is a very uneven movie, particularly in the apparently "easy" parts of infiltrating the KKK and the "hard" parts where things go wrong. The "easy" parts are, remarkably, mostly the true story. Apparently this wasn't dramatic enough, so a lot of fictional "hard" parts were added to build tension including whole characters and situations. That's bad enough, but the added parts often made no sense, such as having no real origin (like one character's intense suspicions) and no resolution to the dilemma presented - they just seem to go away, are forgotten or have no effect on the inevitable story arc. Many seem to have been thrown in only to make already duped people look even more ridiculous. The characters themselves are, with a few exceptions, just caricatures. It's not hard to figure out what's next since they do exactly what you expect. Eventually the movie just got boring since it all moved to an inevitable and very easy to see end. Ultimately, the movie is maybe an hour of an amazing true and humorous story marred by over an hour of superfluous and poorly executed fiction.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

Fun but too many inconsistancies

[5/10 · 4 August 2018]

Based on the reviews I guess I was expecting too much from this movie.

Where were the technical consultants? It wasn't long into the movie before I wondered if there were any on the movie staff. The abundance of bad science, Roadrunner physics, medical miracles and technical mistakes really started bothering me early and just got worse. I almost want to see the movie again to count up how many unexplained gizmos there were to increase tension or simply to keep the plot moving.

The writing is lazy and depends more heavily on crutches than a ward of amputees. Crack shots that miss at the critical time, elite police forces that can't take the most basic precautions, a pilot who can barely fly makes perfectly timed critical mistakes to move the plot while expertly flying through canyons, equipment that fails at just exactly the right moment - it never stops. And trying to figure out why some characters suddenly do inconsistent things will give you a headache. At some point every hero should have been dead at least once, but were inexplicably spared.

I'm pretty sure if they'd fixed all the stuff discussed above the movie would have been an hour shorter.

On the plus side, if you can ignore the details the story is fiendishly complicated and twisty. Yeah, you can see some of it coming but I'll bet not most of it. While some of it is a bit silly and over the top, there's lots and lots of action. The camaraderie between the characters is nice to watch - they really click. The acting probably isn't Oscar worthy but pretty much everyone is entertaining.

Overall, it's dumbed down entertainment at it best.

The First Purge (2018)

I was hoping for a lot more

[4/10 · 13 July 2018]

I've never seen any of the other Purge movies, but I was attracted by the idea of a prequel that showed the beginnings of a dystopian world. Maybe a cool and complex conspiracy like V for Vendetta. That got flushed in the first few minutes because that's how long it took to cover it - in summary, something happened and now the country condones penalty free crime with an extremely thin explanation. Very disappointing.

I'm a political moderate, but the political messaging was really over the top. It was kind of like watching a hard left version of Hannity, and just as pointless. And it kept going on. Repeatedly. Over and over again. Many times. I think you get the point.

The villains were extremely two dimensional and completely uninteresting. What little writing talent was devoted to the protagonists, and this was a rare good point about the movie. There's some complexity there, with people you can root for. I liked them.

It was fairly suspenseful, but there were too many coincidental "just in time" saves for no good reason. This seemed to be just lazy writing. There is a semi-interesting conspiracy but the effect just didn't seem realistic. There's a good amount of well done violent action so if that's something of interest this might be a good movie for you.

Overall, I really wish I'd spent my time watching something else.

Hereditary (2018)

Argh - they told us too much!

[8/10 · 21 June 2018]

I think that if you like VVitch, you'll almost really like this one. It's one of those unique and different movies that's well worth seeing. It's quirky, shocking, terrifying and will make you very uneasy. And it stayed great until the very end when - they told us too much! If they'd left some things open-ended and subject to our own interpretation like VVitch or Annihilation it would have been perfect. Here's my recommendation. If you want everything explained in great detail, stay until the credits. If you want the unsettled and mysterious atmosphere of the movie to linger, wait until Peter goes to the tree house - at this point start gathering your stuff and start walking to the exit. Don't worry, there's not much of the movie left. But, don't exit just yet. A few more things happen, then - when you hear someone start talking, get out quickly! Now find some friends who did the same thing and discuss what you think was going on. It's a lot more fun this way.

Beirut (2018)

Great movie if it doesn't offend you

[8/10 · 21 April 2018]

I was surprised at the low viewer ratings here at IMDB (and other viewer review sites), especially given the relatively good critics' ratings. With a bit more research I found out this may be due to, depending on your perspective, a legitimate protest based on the background and location of the movie as well as the trailer. I'd recommend reading the negative reviews. If these don't bother you then you'll find an interesting and exciting spy thriller well worth seeing, with plenty of twists and tense moments.

Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018)

A good movie even for the non-religious

[8/10 · 7 April 2018]

This is definitely a religious movie but isn't overwhelmingly so. For example, it doesn't have the overbearing smugness of the protagonist Christians versus incredibly stupid or evil non-Christians. The characters have much more believable and complex motivations, with the Christians mostly (and properly) motivated by their beliefs. There's enough gray in the characters to make the movie interesting. The suffering of the Christians in Rome sometimes goes a bit over the top but not terribly so. The "miracle", which in many faith movies leads to the dramatic conversion of the antagonist, is well done in this movie and should appeal to a wider audience. The back-story, supporting scenes and resolution are quite believable. One pleasant aspect is that the "miracle" doesn't require divine intervention or stretching credibility but is due to believable skills and application of good Christian values, and is done with credible tension you'd expect from a first-class movie.

Would a non-Christian enjoy the movie? I think so. There's definitely a good story here and the movie is well done. Some reviews note that this may have lessened the religious story and/or focus on Paul, but it makes for a watchable movie without the cringe-worthiness of some more religiously focused movies. Judging from reactions in the audience it's clearly most immediately satisfying for the most faithful and will be well received by that group. For Christians who aren't the most faithful the movie has powerful messages to take away for further reflection.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Spectacular CGE. That's just about it.

[2/10 · 31 July 2017]

There's really not much in the way of specific spoilers here but may still give away some sense of the movie plot (as much as there is).

The CGE is visually amazing. Incredible. And lots of it regardless of whether it's important to the story or even related to it. And Cara Delevingne as Laureline is hot, especially since the story ensures she often wears little regardless of whether it fits the plot or not. She also sometimes has appropriate and skillful facial expressions. I really wanted to like her character.

On the downside the story develops very slowly. Somehow they were able to squeeze a one hour story into a well over two hour movie. There are many scenes which seem to be for, well, more CGE. The Rhianna dancing scene was especially notable in this respect.

The plot itself is lame, with little development until the very end when it seems the director realized he was running out of time and needed to wrap it up.

The actors are not very good, especially Dane DeHaan as Valerian. The two main characters utter many James Bond-like quips. However, unlike 007 or Black Widow these two aren't good enough to deserve the lines. They show incredibly little actual skill while smart-assing their way to success relying on plot holes and story world inconsistencies.

Their "romance" is - awkward. Think Anakin and Pademe, only worse. It just sort of happens and then gets forced to work with little chemistry or reason for it happening.

It's also interesting that the title of the movie changed from the comic series title "Valerian and Laureline" to a focus on Valerian. Laureline is an inconsistent character, sometimes strong but often subservient to the males and at least twice the helpless female. No wonder they took her name out of the movie title - she ends up largely as eye-candy and love interest with an occasional strong moment.

If you're expecting "Guardians of the Galaxy" this isn't it.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

Not very good

[3/10 · 26 May 2017]

I knew going in that this movie has its problems. I didn't realize how bad they are.

Good Things:

• Nice visuals and scenery: The spaceships look realistic and contribute to the confined space needed for parts of the movie. The planet scenes are appropriately alien with some nice touches.

• Interesting story line for the next movie: While the main story is hokey the backstory developed for the original "Alien" is engaging.

• Good protagonist (mostly): The main protagonist emerges as the movie unfolds and is someone you can root for (mostly).

• Fassbender: It's just fun to watch him perform his craft and this movie is no exception.

Bad Things:

• Predictable: Just about every major and minor plot point, surprise, action, etc. is completely predictable. The plot itself moves in a very obvious direction but just to kill any suspense there's way too much extremely overdone foreshadowing. The movie is just boring. I actually considering cutting my losses and leaving since it's too clear what's going to happen.

• Stupid, stupid characters: The characters repeatedly do stupid things which are essential for the plot to move forward or for them to die. It's not long before you just don't care what happens to most of them. They also seem incredibly poorly suited to space exploration or being part of a crew.

• Backward Technology: For the future the technology has some remarkably archaic features like "automated" systems that only remind the crew to do something instead of just doing it. If you've got a technical background you can amuse yourself by making fun of the movie.

• Poor plot: Besides the stupid characters, the plot requires events and coincidences that strain credibility. The main plot seems to awkwardly unfold just to get to the "Alien" backstory.

I could go on but I suspect you get the point. In summary, this movie was two hours of my life I'm not going to get back.