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Reviews
Apartment404 (2024)
It's kinda of an achievement
It is incredibly difficult to assemble such a star studded cast and end up producing such an uninteresting show. By casting people like Yoo Jae Suk and Jennie, you'd expect to see a show in which they can shine. Instead, the show is filled with dumb games, people sitting around eating ramen, and just wasting time. The "mystery" they solve is not interesting at all and how the mystery is solved offers very little entertainment value. You see camera crew blurred out in the background on multiple scenes. What's that about? I am not sure what future episodes have in store, but if they are anything close to Ep 1, they are going to be highly unentertaining.
Kingdom: Ashin-jeon (2021)
Just fell short of reaching all of its potential
This "sidequel" appeared to have a lot of elements to be a very special piece of work. Very interesting story line and great acting, especially by Jun Ji-Hyun. However, it failed to deliver a knockout punch. One of the things I really liked about the Kingdom series was the fact that it offered a highly plausible mechanism by which someone could have been zombified. Although the exact formula that led to zombification was never explained, the original series did show how the dying king was given different concoctions, acupuncture, and other "remedies" to force him to stay alive long enough, eventually causing him to be zombified. Unfortunately, that part of the overall Kingdom story line becomes diluted by this sidequel. Here, zombification is attributed to just a single plant. The movie spends much time on the suffering of Ashin, setting the grounds to justify her actions later on in the movie. However, her revenge by the end of the movie just isn't satisfying enough. I think she deserved more and the audience deserved more. Is there more to come with a sequel? I don't know. But, just on its own, it failed to deliver all that it could have.
No Sudden Move (2021)
We find out who was being conned at the end...
As with most Soderbergh movies, the movie itself is very stylish and packed with star power. In Soderbergh's earlier works, you took away the fancy wrapping and found exquisite gifts inside. Here, however, removing the fancy wrapping revealed a gift card to your local grocery store. Sure, some of you may be thrilled with a gift card, but for me, it was a major let down.
The story itself is very convoluted. How some of the characters come together and are put in certain situations are unconvincing or even not adequately explained. It seems like everyone has their own angle or play, leading to backstabbing and double/triple crossing. It's a movie about a bunch of characters (whom I could not sympathize nor empathize with) are trying to con each other. Then I realized at the end of the movie... The only sucker in this story was the audience who was conned out of 2 hours of their lives.