Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Well, the Justice League movie finally came out.  It was a movie. That played in theaters. So, uh...yeah I guess that happened... Look after four movies, only one of which can be considered anything remotely resembling "good", it's not a surprise that people (myself included, obviously) were a tad skeptical as to whether or not uniting the league was going to be anything but painful, and that was before we heard about all the production problems, the director switch, the re-shoots, and Henry Cavill's CGI-mustache removal. Yup they spent something on the order of $25 million giving Cavill a digital shave so he could appear in the re-shoots without changing his look from the next Mission: Impossible movie.  You'd think at that point DC/WB might've pushed back from the table and said "you know what, let's rethink this thing. How about we delay this release a few months and give everybody time to re-assess and re-work this project into something f...

The Marvel Cinematic Universe keeps chugging along, this time with the release of Thor's third movie, Thor: Ragnarok . Since the first two Thor movies are widely considered some of Marvel's weakest offerings (an opinion I share), there wasn't much in the way of excitement for another solo Thor outing when it was announced. Then the trailer came out, and boy did that change.  Instead of Shakespeare in the Park, suddenly Thor was like some crazy 80s-inspired sci-fi/fantasy/comedy mashup.  Plus the Hulk showed up in one of the most hilarious reveals we've ever gotten in a trailer. After that, I, like many other people, was pretty excited to see Thor: Ragnarok . It looked like it would be a ridiculously fun watch, which is saying something since this whole MCU universe only works because Marvel keeps finding ways to make the movies entertaining even if they aren't that great. For once, looks were not deceiving. Ragnarok is indeed ridiculously fun, and I had a gre...

Well by now it's on its sixth or seventh episode, but when Star Trek: Discovery 's premiere came out I did review it like I did with The Orville because hey, I'm a huge Star Trek fan and I had to at least give it a shot despite my poor first impressions from trailers and such. Like with The Orville , I did my level best to give it a chance to prove me wrong.  Despite the tone, the weird look with the Klingons, the SJW nonsense with the casting decisions, and the political commentary by the cast and crew, I went into it hoping for a good show because I wanted to see good Star Trek again. Sadly,  Discovery  is not good  Star Trek.  Frankly this show isn't Star Trek at all.  It doesn't even fit in with the JJ Abrams reboot, which itself already turned Star Trek 's corpse into a mindless zombie searching for brains, and unlike the reboot which could at least claim to be paced well enough to make you forget how stupid it is, Discovery fails on just...

Continuing in our series of "why the hell haven't you put a post up for your latest review yet, Cranky??", we have American Made , a comedic biopic starring Tom Cruise! This one is based on the "true story" of Barry Seal, an airline pilot who got roped into running guns and drugs for the CIA back in the 70s and 80s. That's certainly more innocent sounding than the guy probably was in real life, but hey it's Hollywood, what can you do. It's been quite a year for trailers since this was another one that got me into the theater. Maybe it's just that I've been on the lookout lately for just about anything that isn't a comic book movie or sequel to something I know that I can check out, but in any case, the trailer looked like some goofy fun, and generally I like Tom Cruise as an actor, so I took a flier on it. Pun fully and completely intended. For the most part I was rewarded for my decision, but while this isn't a Mummy -level cat...

Kingsman: The Secret Service was one of those rare movies that turns out to be a pleasant surprise. It looked like it was going to be a dumb, goofball parody of a Bond movie, and the studio buried it in the winter months, which means they probably agreed. And yet, it turned out to be a really enjoyable send-up of the spy movie genre that worked just as well on its own as it did as a parody. It had a great sense of humor and some fantastically inventive action sequences, and pretty much everybody loved it.  Naturally any movie that turns into a sleeper hit like that gets a sequel, and so now we have The Golden Circle . Sequels tend to make me nervous because they're tricky things to pull off, and most movies that get them really don't need them because they've told a self-contained story with character arcs that are finished at the end. So coming back for more usually involves ham fisted reasons to simply repeat everything you saw in the last movie. It ends up just be...

As I continue to catch up on getting reviews posted to the blog, here's a little movie that popped up a couple weeks back called American Assassin .  This is apparently based on a book series that I unfortunately haven't read so I can't comment on how well it was adapted, but essentially they want this character Mitch Rapp to be your new Jack Ryan. This is another one where a trailer actually got me into the theater.  It had a reasonably interesting premise: a guy decides to personally go kill every terrorist he can find after they murder his fiancé, and in the process he runs into professional terrorist-killer Michael Keaton, who as these things go runs a secret terrorist-killing unit for the government and is forced to train Rapp to do it the right way. The main danger with that kind of trailer is of course that Keaton could be nothing more than a glorified cameo in a bad B-movie.  Fortunately he wasn't, but unfortunately, it's not enough to save this movi...

Well I've been pretty lax lately about putting up posts for the reviews on the blog.  Blogger makes it somewhat of a pain in the ass so it tends to dissuade me, but in any case I have two TV shows to talk about with you all for this one. First up is Marvel's new Netflix show, The Defenders , which teams up all the heroes from all their other Netflix shows.  Of those, the only one I genuinely enjoyed from start to finish was Jessica Jones , but Daredevil wasn't too bad.  Iron Fist had a few good secondary characters, but otherwise just kind of sucked.  As for Luke Cage , well, I had plenty to say about that one already. So how does putting them all together stack up? Not well, I'm afraid: And then there was The Orville , Seth MacFarlane's personal Star Trek fan fiction/parody/homage.  The trailers for this thing made me cringe, but as a huge Star Trek fan myself, I had to at least give this one a shot.  Sadly it too made me very cranky:

It's tough taking fliers on movies like The Hitman's Bodyguard that don't have pre-existing history backing them up, which is why so many movies today are sequels or comic book adaptations or reboots.  With those you at least have some idea of what you're getting, with all these other one-offs, you're basically just going on whatever they put in a trailer, and half the time the trailers turn out to be a problem anyway because they're either incredibly deceptive or they spoil the whole movie. That is of course assuming you even see the trailer since the trailers for these movies tend to get buried under the latest big thing from Marvel or DC/Warner Bros. So it's tough to build any kind of hype or momentum for these kinds of one-off action flicks, but despite all that, in this case it was indeed a trailer that got me into the theater. Seeing Ryan Reynolds and Sam Jackson's back-and-forth in the first trailer for this piqued my interest, even though th...

Anyone who has followed me for a while knows I'm not exactly a big fan of Christopher Nolan, and yet I was pretty interested in his new film, Dunkirk . I'm not sure why since Nolan has a track record of failing to live up to the hype, such as with  Interstellar.   Interstellar got me super psyched since it was such a cool concept and I'm a space geek, but the movie itself is just straight up laughable when it isn't boring as hell.  So you'd think I would've learned by now. I guess it's just because Dunkirk is about one of history's greatest turning points. 300,000 mostly British soldiers stranded on a beach with the full might of the Nazi war machine closing in on them. The fate of the entire Western world hinged on whether or not they could cross a body of water so small they could practically see home from the shore. Their saviors? Ordinary British civilians who got in their little boats and sailed across the channel to rescue their countrymen, ...

Well  Spider-Man: Homecoming  was certainly one of my most anticipated movies of the year. Sony finally returned Spider-Man to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for an epic cameo in Civil War , and now we were going to get a full on standalone story for this new Tom Holland version of the wall crawler done MCU-style.  Add in Michael Keaton playing the villain, and you've got plenty of reasons to be hyped. That of course made me super nervous going in.  I wanted this to be an Independence Day -level movie, the kind that I'd want to turn around and walk right back in for another viewing, and it's tough for a movie to live up to that kind of hype.  Not to mention it had to follow the few fantastic comic book movies we've already had this year and there have been serious concerns that the trailers may have spoiled the entire movie. Alas Independence Day it was not, but as I've said before, even the less than stellar Marvel movies tend to be worth the price of admis...

Hey look, another sequel! This time it's for Disney/Pixar's license-to-print-money, Cars . I actually hadn't seen the original Cars or its sequel because it was a concept that never appealed to me enough to bother, so I actually went back and watched both before I headed off to Cars 3 . I found that Cars 1 is, as others before me have noted, basically just Doc Hollywood with talking cars. Since I liked Doc Hollywood , and Cars did an ok job of translating it (existential questions about this universe aside), I enjoyed it. Cars 2 was just terrible. If Cars 1 is Doc Hollywood , Cars 2 is like Mr. Bean or The Tuxedo , one of those awful movies where some dumbass character trips their way into a spy movie and is comically better at being a spy than the professionals. Meanwhile Cars 3 got off on the right foot with a very dark teaser trailer, and it seemed like we might be in for a Cars version of Rocky III , and you can't go wrong with Rocky III even if ...

I finally got around to watching the much lauded Hacksaw Ridge the other day.  It suffers quite a bit from being obvious Oscar Bait, but overall it was a decent movie.  I'm not really interested in doing a review here though; I just found the movie incredibly instructive for another discussion that continues to rage in the social media circles in which I run.  This time it was re-ignited by a couple of people disrupting a version of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" that features a Donald Trump lookalike being brutally murdered instead of the Roman Emperor. As usual, one side asserts that disrupting the play goes against their principles and should be condemned, while the other insists that these are the rules imposed upon us by the Left and they should therefore be made to suffer them just as we do.  Or, to put it more succinctly, Be Better Than Them vs. Payback's a Bitch. I of course fall into the latter group for many re...

Now that Marvel and Disney have made all the money, everyone's gotta have a shared movie universe.  Universal tried to get theirs started with Dracula: Untold , but nobody wanted more of that movie, so now they're trying again by rebooting The Mummy .  To increase the odds of this one actually working, they recruited some Grade A star power in the form of Tom Cruise to play the lead. For a brief moment, that idea had incredible potential.  With the first trailer it actually looked like they might unceremoniously kill him off, thereby demonstrating their universe actually was a "Dark Universe" in which anybody was fair game for monsters that have often been seen as goofy in the past. Of course that moment passed as quickly as it came since they would shortly show him surviving in another trailer clip, thereby ruining all of the tension the scene could have had in the movie as well as dashing any hopes for this thing to be a serious effort. Despite...

I've been pretty clear about my distaste for the current crop of DCEU movies, which is why I went into Wonder Woman expecting yet another train wreck of epic proportions despite it having obscenely good buzz.  Obviously one always hopes these movies are going to be good, but given the track record it's impossible to do anything but put the bar on the floor going in. Meanwhile, we had the usual political firestorm surrounding this movie because feminism can't leave anything well enough alone for people to enjoy.  In addition to the usual hot-takes about "first female superhero movie evah!" (it's not), The Alamo Drafthouse announced a women's-only screening, including only female employees(!?), and when people rightfully pointed out how a men's-only screening of say, Thor: Ragnarok would result in the theater being burned to the ground by screaming harpies, the screaming harpies complained about having their safe spaces invaded.  Just can't win ...

Damn that is a long title for a movie, which I suppose makes sense since each successive installment of Pirates of the Caribbean seemed to be exponentially longer than the last.  (Not to mention more confusing and just generally less entertaining.) But hey, we can't just assume because it's the 5th movie in a franchise that really didn't need a sequel in the first place that it'll be terrible right? I mean Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow's usually pretty funny, the previews have some cool effects like a zombie shark, and they even showed Will and Elizabeth coming back.  How can you go wrong with getting the band back together to fight zombie sharks? Turns out you can go pretty wrong, so let's just get to it and I'll tell you about the pratfalls of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales :

Robin Hood got his gritty prequel story not too long ago, so why not King Arthur? I must admit the trailers for King Arthur: Legend of the Sword were intriguing.  They had flair, and the Arthur legend is such a classic journey of the hero story that you can do almost anything with it and still have a good movie. The key word there being "almost."  We had a King Arthur movie starring Clive Owen where they tried to do the "real" Arthur, and that sucked pretty hard.  So it was with that in mind I went into Legend of the Sword with tempered expectations, but hope for something fun and different. Well, I certainly got the "different" part because it seems director Guy Ritchie couldn't decide which particular "anything" he was going to try with this and just decided to do everything.  Sometimes that does indeed turn out to be fun, but is it enough to save Legend of the Sword ? Let's talk about where it went wrong enough to become a box o...

I am Groot.  I...am Groot. I AM Groot. I am...Groot. I aaaaam Groooooot. Or in human speak: at last, the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel has arrived.  Like most people I was skeptical of the first one when Marvel announced it and then pleasantly surprised at how good it was when I got to see it, though it wasn't without a few issues . Then, again like most people, when the sequel was announced I wondered if they were going to be able to recreate whatever dark magic allows them to make a movie featuring a talking raccoon and a tree that can only says his own name and not have it turn into complete garbage. Of course this is one of those movies where what I have to say about it really isn't going to matter. Everyone loved that first one so much there's no way anyone was missing out on this even if the reviews were Batman v Superman -level bad, but for what it's worth, I can confirm that Marvel does in fact keep dark wizards chained up in the basement...

You'd think the death of lead cast member Paul Walker and the touching sendoff his character was given in Furious 7 would've stopped the Fast and Furious franchise cold, but that one made all the money and Vin Diesel always imagined a trilogy of 7,8,9, so here we are with The Fate of the Furious . It's pretty impressive for any franchise to get to their 8th movie like this, but considering how hard it is to make one great movie much less eight, it hasn't always been a smooth ride (no pun intended.) The first one is essentially a great remake of Point Break , only with drag racing instead of surfing. The second and third ones are universally panned for their lack of Vin Diesel (and also for being terrible in general.) Diesel and Walker got back together for the fourth one that, despite some pretty awful CGI, more or less put the series back on track. Fast Five is the stand out of course, since it's an incredibly fun heist movie that brought in the additional...

I suppose it was only a matter of time that the Power Rangers got their gritty live-action reboot given all the properties from my childhood that have now been gobbled up by Hollywood and turned into generic explosion fests so the studios can cash in on the licenses while they still mean something to someone.  Usually it's Generic Action Plot #5: rebellious teenager with daddy issues learns he has a great destiny and must save the world with his awesome inherent expertise in everything.  And of course they can't give these things subtitles since that might keep people from confusing this new thing with the thing they actually like.  Far be it for them to make it easy for us to distinguish between the franchise Power Rangers, and the new movie Power Rangers open-parenthesis, 2017, close-parenthesis. It's also not the first time somebody tried to do a Power Rangers movie, and that first one doesn't exactly hold up.  So the odds against this thing bei...

It seems the real magic of Disney is their ability to separate people from their money.  This time, rather than crack that Disney vault so every soccer mom in the country rushes to grab a Bluray of Beauty and the Beast , they got mom, dad, and their 2.5 kids out to the theater this weekend by remaking the movie entirely. Of course it isn't the first time they've done this.  Last year the Mouse raked in an obscene amount of green with The Jungle Book in addition to the pallets of money they already get from having brought Marvel and Star Wars inside the castle.  They've also done Pete's Dragon , Cinderella , and a pseudo- Sleeping Beauty with Maleficent, and pretty much everything in the rest of the animated library is slated for its own live-action remake in the next few years, all of which are certain to go forward given this had record-breaking hauls this weekend. Now I'm no fan of musicals so normally this isn't the kind of thing I'd go to see no mat...

As something of a giant monster myself, it was a foregone conclusion I'd get out to see Kong: Skull Island opening weekend.  Unfortunately, the last time my hairy friend got to appear on the big screen, he was murdering innocent dinosaurs just because some cute blonde showed him she could juggle.  Given what Hollywood has done to Godzilla in the past, I can't really blame the guy for that, so I had high hopes he'd find some redemption in this one. From the trailers, it certainly appears they learned something from the painful slog that was Peter Jackson's King Kong , since it looks like my man gets to throw down early and often with everything from pesky humans to Godzilla-wannabes, with nary a dinosaur in sight.  Speaking of Gojira, that's actually the polar opposite of the last Godzilla movie, which I enjoyed thoroughly but was received poorly by a lot of people for not having enough Bryan Cranston or kaiju on kaiju action.  So does this second entr...

When I first heard about Logan , needless to say I was skeptical.  Fox's history with superhero movies is not exactly stellar, and while some of the X-men films are at least watchable, they're still largely terrible movies, never mind good adaptations of the source material.  The fact that their second attempt at Deadpool openly mocks their first version is proof enough on that score, and Fox had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making the new one. However, we can all agree that Hugh Jackman's portrayal of Wolverine was the shining light of the X-men movie universe, even if his previous two solo outings kind of sucked too.  Everyone likes him so much they even shoved him into X-men Apocalypse's CGI-fest to try and put something in that movie worth watching.  (Fun fact: X-men: Apocalypse was my first review on Youtube , and boy did I have plenty to be cranky about.) After that stinker tanked, we heard  Logan was going to step through the R-rat...

Other than the obvious Trump jokes, just about the only thing that put The Great Wall on anyone's radar is the controversy over Matt Damon playing the lead. As usual, many people were up in arms that a white guy got a role in an Asian-centric movie.  Never mind that he's playing a white character that wanders into Asia looking for black powder and runs into a giant wall and the massive Chinese army staffing it, so it's not exactly like he stole a role from an Asian actor. Of course had the complainers bothered to note it's a Chinese studio making the movie, they wouldn't have had much reason to whine in the first place since it's the Asians making the call, and doing so for the specific purpose of getting their first big breakout film in the US.  What better way to do that than cast a superstar like Damon and split the movie's time between him and its Asian characters? There are however still plenty of good reasons to trash The Great Wall , and surpris...

Like John Wick , The LEGO Movie was also an incredibly pleasant surprise.  It looked like it was going to be some shameless attempt to sell toys (it was), but it turned out to be an incredibly funny and well-written film that did incredible justice to the little plastic blocks.  Anybody who grew up playing with LEGOs got to delight in seeing all the interesting ways they used familiar pieces to build things in this world.  And it gave us a brand new Batman. LEGO Batman was so well received that they decided to give him his own full feature, which as with John Wick: Chapter 2, made me pretty nervous.  In small doses this semi-parody of Batman is really funny, but I worried that trying to drag that out into a full couple hour movie would just get old and repetitive. Still the trailers looked promising, so did The LEGO Batman Movie deliver?  Let me tell you all the ways everything was in fact, awesome.

John Wick  was an incredibly pleasant surprise.  It's an action movie where you can actually see the action, and it built an incredibly interesting underground world of assassins that gave the whole thing a cool new feel.  Plus it has one of the single-best character introductions of all time, making their hero look like the ultimate badass before he even does anything. Then when he actually does things, he looked even more badass thanks to Keanu Reeves putting in enough work to do his own stunts. That's why news of a sequel made me super nervous.  John Wick was a perfectly reasonable standalone movie, and those tend to be the ones that make for the worst sequels since they have to invent convoluted reasons to not only do another one but also to try and raise the stakes in some way.  Usually what you end up with is just an unsatisfying, messy retread of the previous movie. So the question is, did John Wick: Chapter 2 fall into that trap?  Well, l...

It's not often you get a sequel 11 years after the last movie, especially if that last movie was itself a sequel nobody particularly wanted and that turned out to be absolutely awful. Yet, we have xXx: Return of Xander Cage anyway. Though I'm sure it was intentional way back when that people might confuse xXx for some kind of porn thing, it was actually just a sort of mishmash between James Bond and the X-games.  When the first xXx movie came out, Extreme Sports had become a pretty big fad, and Hollywood is always looking for something good to cash in on, so they created a movie wherein your typical 00 was just too stuffy and uptight to tango with the hardcore adrenaline junky criminals of the 21st century. So, to combat the new threat, Sam Jackson had to go find somebody a little more edgy.  Enter Vin Diesel, a world-famous anarchistic rebel with a penchant for crazy stunts and fur coats. That original movie was pretty fun overall, but it really didn't have t...

Hollywood doesn't exactly have a stellar history when it comes to turning video games into movies, especially thanks to Uwe Boll somehow finding his way in charge a huge chunk of them.  Most of the movies are almost unwatchable, and even the ones that are rarely have much to do with the games on which they are purportedly based. Despite that, they keep on trying to get a piece of the video game industry juggernaut.  We started 2016 off with a couple of attempts to finally crack that video game movie glass ceiling in the form of Warcraft and The Angry Birds Movie , but Warcraft was "meh" and The Angry Birds Movie was absolute garbage. Now along comes Assassin's Creed , and surely if a named actor like Michael Fassbender signed on to play the lead, this one has to be good right?  After all you've got a perfect action movie setup: a guy from the future is forced to relive the memories of his ancestor back in the 1400s who was a member of a secret organization...