Cranky T-Rex's Blog

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...