Cranky T-Rex's Blog

The summer's winding down, which unfortunately means the season of big blockbuster movies shall shortly come to a close as well. It's been a pretty lackluster year I have to say, but Hollywood has one more over the top action movie to throw at us before it switches gears into low-budget horror flicks for Halloween, and that's The Meg . As ideas go, it's a pretty good one because...it's Jason Statham vs. a giant shark, how could that possibly go wrong? You have to figure it will either be a hilarious campy affair or a ridiculous action flick powered by the charisma of one of the last remaining true action hero actors. At the very least, it can't be a worse monster movie than Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom right? Yeah, that's a pretty low bar I know, but like I said, we've had a lot of disappointing blockbusters this year.  Fortunately for me, other than one pesky nagging issue, The Meg delivers on the premise: Jason Statham fights the prehistoric mon...

Well, I guess while Disney is turning its entire catalog of classic animated movies into live-action adaptations, why not do Winnie the Pooh too?  Thus we have Christopher Robin . There are pretty much two schools of when it comes to the promos for Christopher Robin . One is "OMG SOOO CUUTTEEE!" and the other is "Good God why does Pooh look like he's angling to be the next Chucky?" I of course, fall into the latter.  The CGI stuffed animals look unsettling as all get out to me, and watching Ewan McGregor interact with them seemed like some kind of Youtube parody video rather than an actual attempt at a family film. So going into this, my only question was whether or not they intended to lean into the horror movie vibe, which actually would've been a new and different thing to do.  Unfortunately, they try to play this movie entirely straight and the results are mixed to say the least.  So let's talk about why Christopher Robin just can't overcome...

How are we still making Mission: Impossible movies?  I guess because Tom Cruise hasn't managed to kill himself doing stunts yet.  Although he did manage to fracture his ankle shooting this one, so they had to put Fallout on hold for a couple of months while he healed up. You can see that take in the movie too, because if nothing else, Mission: Impossible Fallout endeavors to bring you as an authentic an experience as possible, no doubt due to Cruise's personal insanity. Fist fights, motorcycle chases, HALO jumps, helicopter flying...it's pretty clear Cruise happily decided to play stuntman for all of it.  Might make him crazy, but it certainly gave me a reason to check out his movie. This also happens to be the movie that Henry Cavill was in the middle of when WB came calling for Justice League reshoots, which as you may recall resulted in the awful CGI Superman face since he was not allowed to shave off the mustache he grew for this one.  So, t...

After you watch The Equalizer , you never look at a Home Depot quite the same way again. It was one of those movies that looked like it would at best be mediocre, and then surprisingly turned out to be an inventive, fun little Taken -wannabe starring Denzel Washington of all people. While it ended with a sequel hook, it didn't seem to be the kind of thing that would ever get one, and yet, here we are with The Equalizer 2 . As you may have guessed from my previous writings, I'm always skeptical of sequels, particularly when it comes to sleeper hits like The Equalizer that seem like perfectly self-contained stories. We saw how the Taken franchise descended into garbage real fast, for example.  Then again, we've got John Wick 2 now to show everybody how it's done: keep what's good, expand the world, don't repeat the first movie beat for beat. The trailers for Equalizer 2 didn't look like it would repeat the first movie beat for beat, so that was goo...

Let's face it, the only reason anyone has any interest in  Skyscraper is because it stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.  Otherwise we'd all take one look at this Die Hard meets Towering Inferno homage and laugh it straight to "looking for something to fall asleep to on Netflix at 1 AM." But The Rock tends to make good, fun movies out of all kinds of stuff.  Hell he made a Jumanji sequel that was one of the most surprisingly enjoyable movies of last year.  Of course the last movie I saw him in was Rampage , and as I said in the review for that, he really let me down on that one. Since then I've also seen his version of Baywatch on TV and just...dear God why. So naturally my normal enthusiasm for a Rock action movie was blunted quite a bit going into Skyscraper .  My hope was that somehow he and his team would manage to do something fresh and original with this concept.  Alas, there was absolutely nothing fresh or original to be found h...

Hey look, another Marvel movie!  Man they are just cranking these things out lately. It's going to be weird to have to wait until next March to get the next one considering we've had one roughly every three months since Thor: Ragnarok.   This time it's Ant-Man and the Wasp , which believe it or not marks the 20th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When this whole thing started out, who would've ever believed Ant-Man would get one movie let alone two? After all, they effectively booted him out of the original roster for the Avengers when they started the cinematic universe explicitly because the concept seemed too goofy even for the MCU. I guess once you make Guardians of the Galaxy work, everything is on the table. In any case, the first Ant-Man was a surprisingly fun little film that somehow managed to do the concept justice without getting too ridiculous for words.  Now its sequel has the unenviable task of both following up on the original...

For some reason people actually liked Jurassic World enough for it to make all the money, so now we have to suffer through yet another attempt to continue the Jurassic Park franchise.  This one's called Fallen Kingdom , which I guess refers to the destruction of the island all the dinosaurs have been hanging out on since the first movie. See the dormant volcano that made the island has gone active again, and if our heroes don't act fast, it will render the dinosaurs extinct. Again! (Except for me of course.)  So even though they can obviously make dinosaurs at will, the humanitarian thing to do is to send Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard back to the island on a mission to round up as many dinos as they can and ship them to the mainland (where they can get loose and wreak havoc on civilization.) Look I'm a dinosaur and even I think that's a stupid idea. Turns out it's only the tip of the iceberg of how monumentally idiotic this movie gets.  In ...

The Merc with a Mouth is back in one of the most anticipated comic book movies ever. After all Deadpool is pretty much a perfect film, no doubt due to being a passion project its creators had to fight for years just to make and then fight to stay on budget to finish. It did everything exactly right in order to create a comic book movie completely unlike anything else we had seen to date. Hilarious and gratuitously violent, it lampooned everything about comic book movies while celebrating them at the same time.  Add to it the fact that Ryan Reynolds might as well be Deadpool in real life and you end up with a superb transition of the character from the comic books to the big screen. Not to mention the advertising campaign, which is a work of pure genius all its own.  It just made for a uniquely awesome experience that is just as good the 5th time as it is the 1st, which is why it made an obscene amount of money for both its release time and budget. Of course, making an obs...

Well here it is folks. Marvel's finally getting Thanos off his ass and putting him to work for perhaps the most ambitious movie of all time.  That's right, it's Avengers: Infinity War . Look what can you say about Marvel's movies by now?  Even the total stinkers are at least entertaining enough to get you through a couple hours at the theater, and the ones that are really good, are really, really good .  I guess the only question about Infinity War is "how the hell is this going to live up to all the hype?" I just couldn't imagine how you'd put THIS many characters in one movie and not have it turn into a complete debacle.  Plus Marvel's track record for villains is extremely hit or miss.  You're going to spend almost a decade hyping up this one bad guy and he's supposed to deliver?  It all just seemed impossible to pull off. And yet, they did it.  Now I have to try and explain how without spoiling the movie for those few of you who ...

Ah Rampage , a game I spent untold hours playing on my NES as a kid, mainly because it had no save option so either you played it until the end or you had to start over.  Since punching every building in the United States to rubble takes a few hours, it was exceedingly rare that I got to play long enough to see the end. I also never expected to see it turned into a movie.  After all, it's a pretty sparse story. Humans get turned into giant were-monsters and devote themselves to leveling America.  I guess that means you're not especially confined by existing narratives when creating the movie, but it's pretty hard for that not to come across as a goofy Godzilla knock off. After all, that was kind of the point of the game, to be a goofy Godzilla spoof. But hey, as I said on Twitter at the time, if anybody could make a good video game movie, it'd be Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.  He's kind of the king of ridiculous action flicks today, and he was teamed up a...

Chappaquiddick would probably be up there with Watergate in terms of political scandals if it weren't so hard to spell. For those who not might be familiar with it, some decades ago, just as we were landing on the moon, Ted Kennedy got drunk one night and drove his car off a bridge and into a pond. He walked away from the accident just fine, but his passenger, a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne, was not so lucky. Unlike the heir to the Kennedy castle, Mary Jo slowly suffocated over a period of three to four hours, having been left trapped within an air pocket inside the submerged vehicle because Kennedy was too concerned about his political future to report the incident until he was forced to the next morning when civilians discovered the car. Then he and his political fixers massaged the story just enough so voters desperate to see the Kennedy dream realized at last could look the other way and not feel bad about him going essenti...

We have finally reached the next phase of using nostalgia to sell people on entertainment. It used to be you had to reboot a property people already loved, or at least make a sequel or prequel to it, but with Ready Player One , they decided to try just cramming one movie full of references to every video game, movie, TV show, book, band, or concept you ever might have found memorable. DeLorean from Back to the Future ? Check. The Iron Giant? Check. Chun Li? Check. Akira's motorcycle? Check. King Kong? Check. Jurassic Park T-Rex? Check.  And that's just some of the stuff you can spot in the trailers. For me, the shamelessness of this sort of product placement seemed almost insulting, as if Spielberg was saying he doesn't even have to tell a story anymore, he can just flash things you love on the screen and you'll love his movie.  After all, it seems to be working out pretty well for Star Wars. On the other hand, this is ba...

For a while there it didn't seem like we'd actually get a sequel to Pacific Rim despite its obvious sequel potential, and then along came Uprising with its new cast and more importantly, new giant robots. The original Pacific Rim is by no means a great film, but it is the kind of fun, popcorn shlock that makes for a nice night out at the theater with your friends, so on the whole I enjoyed it. After all, where else can you watch a giant mech smash a Godzilla-wannabe with a boat like a baseball bat? Even the Transformer movies don't get that creative with their giant robot battles. That's not to say the idea of a sequel to Pacific Rim thrilled me, but I had hoped with all the setup out of the way, we might have time for a more interesting story. To some extent, I got that, but unfortunately the movie falls down in a few other important ways that makes this one far less fun than its predecessor. Here's some of the reasons Pacific Rim: Uprising just doesn...

Hollywood is still chasing that magic unicorn: a good film adaptation of a video game. They tried doing Tomb Raider twice before starring Angelina Jolie, and the results were...let's just be charitable and say mixed. But, the video games got a reboot, and Hollywood loves it some reboots of existing franchises, so here we are again with a completely new take on Lara Croft. The new version of Lara trades in her DDs for a little more personality and a lot more vulnerability, this time in the form of Alicia Vikander. It also dumps all the campy stuff that tends to go along with a character who is famous for somebody accidentally giving her giant triangular boobs.  Unfortunately, if you're going to play it serious like that you really have to be on point, and this new Tomb Raider ...is not. So let's talk about why that unicorn remains free:

Well it's here at last, the first black superhero movie ever to be released in February of 2018, Marvel's Black Panther .  Snark about the stupid amount of hype thanks to the politics surrounding this movie aside, my expectations for Black Panther were pretty much the same as I have for every Marvel movie, even though I wasn't especially sold on the trailers. Marvel's track record is making entertaining superhero romps, and even when they're rather mediocre, usually they're at least a good time at the theater. So that's basically what I expected here too. It's kind of what separates Marvel from its competitors, who tend towards either hitting a homerun like Deadpool or striking out so profoundly with something like Batman v Superman or Fant4stic that you want to find the nearest studio executive and drown them in their own blood.  Marvel on the other hand doesn't run from their comic book characters; they embrace the things that make them fun s...

Well now that Darkest Hour has gotten a few Oscar nods, I realized I neglected to put the review up over here at the blog.  It's doubly unfortunate I forgot since this was definitely one of my more anticipated films of the year, for all the reasons that it got Oscar nominations in the first place. I mean, Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill? Where could you possibly go wrong with that?  That's like Daniel Day-Lewis playing Abraham Lincoln, which is probably why everyone immediately started comparing this movie to Lincoln in the first place. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as I thought I would, but I can tell you it did absolutely earn some of those Oscar nominations.  Let's talk about which parts of Darkest Hour worked, and which didn't:

I don't think there was anyone on the planet who thought "hey, we need a sequel to Jumanji !" and yet here comes Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle .  Even with the increasing pedigree of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson at its forefront, this was still a film met with incredible skepticism by almost everyone, myself included. Still, despite that, it's had more staying power at the box office than Star Wars: The Last Jedi , and I paid to see it almost 3 weeks early thanks to Amazon Prime offering special early screenings at local theaters.  I did that for the novelty, fully anticipating an absolutely cringe-worthy experience that I would delight in regretting. Strangely...that's not what I got.  In fact, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle turned out to be a lot of fun. Here's what I had to say about it:

Our yearly Star Wars event has come and gone now. The Last Jedi didn't last nearly as long at the box office as we all probably expected, but then again, the movie wasn't nearly as good as we all hoped. That kind of cuts right to the chase, but the fact of the matter is it's an objectively badly constructed movie. You can like it anyway, that's fine, but it's just not good storytelling. So here's seven minutes or so of me talking about why: