Cranky T-Rex's Blog

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: