tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7055649691394185382024-02-07T15:58:22.280-05:00Cranky T-Rex's BlogCranky T-Rex tears into meaty discussions of politics, philosophy, and culture with his sardonic wit.CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.comBlogger137125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-44406619278585395432021-01-04T01:09:00.002-05:002021-01-04T01:11:46.855-05:00Cobra Kai Season 3 Is a Mess<p>If you haven't seen <i>Cobra Kai </i>or at the very least up to Season 3 of <i>Cobra Kai</i>, here is your spoiler warning. Read further at your own peril.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgushS8LZPPrTbBVZ_cmue9MnetcHFvu1GtdHZo51AqVdXcCcobFtpWIRxu101_sWEiWkKHi35vNP_SpK_9Tcx_jnHOVhOlLgdVpaV84hj1PPGXEbi0u1piZWSGSrbMKvQ6X19nJd7zVjk/s1600/CobraKaiLogo.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="975" data-original-width="1600" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgushS8LZPPrTbBVZ_cmue9MnetcHFvu1GtdHZo51AqVdXcCcobFtpWIRxu101_sWEiWkKHi35vNP_SpK_9Tcx_jnHOVhOlLgdVpaV84hj1PPGXEbi0u1piZWSGSrbMKvQ6X19nJd7zVjk/w400-h244/CobraKaiLogo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>I didn't do reviews of the first two seasons of <i>Cobra Kai</i> mostly because I came to the party pretty late on both. I have an innate resistance to new streaming service things and didn't really want to start in with Youtube's. Moreover, the idea of going back to the <i>Karate Kid</i> universe seemed just incredibly sad to me. <i>The Karate Kid</i> didn't really need a sequel, much less three, and especially not the dumpster-fire reboot it got. "Now they want to do a TV series to launch Youtube's streaming service? Yeah hard pass on that nostalgia bait," I thought. <p></p><p>Ended up watching it anyway though, and I was pretty pleasantly surprised by Season 1 of <i>Cobra Kai.</i> It was rough around the edges, but they took a really novel approach by making the show all about Johnny and his redemption and executed it quite well overall. Fans had long had debated whether Johnny or Daniel was actually the villain of<i> The Karate Kid</i>, though admittedly it was usually tongue-in-cheek, and <i>Cobra Kai</i> was smart enough to walk that line with its story by neither needlessly tearing down Daniel nor whitewashing Johnny's misdeeds. It also knew how much to wink at the audience without becoming an outright parody, and it handled the callbacks with a similar level of balance. Having it be one of the few shows out there to take shots at SJWs didn't hurt either. Bottom line, it felt like a show made by people who really loved <i>The Karate Kid</i> and had a great idea as to how to revisit it.</p><p>Season 2 was a little less pleasant. <i>Cobra Kai </i>was always a concept that couldn't have very long legs by its very nature, and Season 2 demonstrated they were already running out of reasons for the show to continue to exist. It had more characters we didn't need, more silly teenage drama, and especially more contrivances to put Johnny and Daniel at odds again since obviously their inevitable team-up can't happen until the climax of the series.</p><p>Then we get to Season 3, and Season 3 is a mess. This season feels like a textbook example of something being a victim of its own success. With Netflix's deeper pockets and the popularity they earned from the first two seasons, they can afford the cameos and the big fight sequences and all that stuff that at best doesn't matter and at worst actively interferes with what does matter, and even if the people who made the show in the first place know better, the suits funding it do not and are going to demand it regardless of whether or not it makes sense to do.</p><p>The heart of the show has always been Johnny and Miguel. Everything not connected to them was a waste of time. Daniel's stuff invariably turns into a rehash of the old movies and inevitably gets loaded up with nostalgia bait, which is fine in small doses to remind us where we came from, but the less it relates to Johnny, the more intrusive it becomes. <i>Cobra Kai</i> is interesting explicitly because it isn't the "Daniel has a mid-life crisis that Miyagi has to help him through" show we all expected it would be.</p><p>That means the more the show leans into stuff like Daniel's trouble with his kids, one of whom they constantly seem to forget even exists, or his issues with the dealership the less interesting it gets.</p><p>This is why characters like Robbie and Sam suck (other than the fact that I just don't find the actors likable in the least.) The only thing interesting about Robby was his relationship to Johnny, but Johnny already has a surrogate son in the form of Miguel thereby making all the Robby stuff redundant. The saving grace of Robby's existence was the notion that Johnny's arch-enemy was raising his kid better than he was and even then that part was basically the bad rehash of <i>The Karate Kid</i> story that nobody wanted.</p><p>In fact, Robby is so irrelevant to anything else that he disappears for most of this season and even the characters don't care he's gone. Every once in a while somebody goes "oh right, Johnny had a son and he was the star pupil of the Miyagi dojo until we brought Sam in to replace him, what ever happened to that guy?"</p><p>It's even worse because for a minute there it looked like he would finally settle the will they/won't they between Johnny and Daniel that had already gotten pretty tired by the end of Season 2. It's not like these two guys spent their whole lives in a bitter rivalry after all. They hadn't seen each other in decades until the first season of <i>Cobra Kai</i>. Hell they all but bury the hatchet at the end of the first <i>Karate Kid!</i> So it makes the constant excuses to full-on hate each other increasingly tedious and contrived.</p><p>That's why it was really nice to see the season open up with them working together to find Robby, since that seemed like the perfect way to segue into the part we've all been waiting for where they have to team up to fight someone else. But nope! We got a Season 4 and we're saving it for that, so Daniel has to get all pissy for no reason so they can split up again, and then everyone promptly forgets about Robby because he serves no purpose otherwise.</p><p>Much the same can be said about Sam. Sam was initially poised to be a direct point of conflict between Daniel and Johnny, and then they just switched her over to her being Miguel's 'Ali'. That was fine, but now she's everywhere in the show despite having nothing to do but act as one fourth of the love quadrangle and perpetuate the "Daniel doesn't know how to relate to his kids" thing that was played out by the end of Season 1.</p><p>Then they decide they want Sam to be the Miyagi-do leader only to give her PTSD so she can't actually do it, which itself feels completely out of place in a show that routinely allows the kids to throw down without any real consequences. The kid who gets his arm violently broken by his former best friend is completely unaffected by this, but Sam can't be in the same room with Tory without having a panic attack? (Tory is also completely superfluous this season given the existence of Hawk, the previous bully's return, and ultimately what they do with Robby.)</p><p>So I don't care about Sam, or Robby, or Hawk, or all the stunt kids we need to involve so we can have massive karate fights. I care about Johnny, Miguel, and to a lesser extent Daniel, and every minute we spend with these dumbass kids is time away from the actual story worth telling.</p><p>Speaking of wasting time, let's talk about Kreese. Bringing Kreese back to be the combined villain both of them have to deal with is good. Trying to humanize and explain why Kreese is who he is while at the same time making him ever more cartoonishly evil is not.</p><p>First of all, the "villain's not really a villain" thing is Johnny's bit. It's why the show is <i>Cobra Kai</i> and not <i>Middle-Aged Karate Kid</i>. Doing this for another character just cheapens what they've done for Johnny and like a lot of things in this show, feels redundant to boot.</p><p>Second of all, it doesn't work if you wait until after Kreese steals Cobra Kai from Johnny to do it. Johnny is our main character, so once he's betrayed by Kreese, nobody cares what Kreese's thought process is. He is now the bad guy and all we care about is taking him down. It'd be like Thanos trying to explain why he snapped <i>after he already did it</i>. Nobody's gonna listen to your sob story after you wiped out half the known universe.</p><p>Third of all, it is already a huge stretch to think Kreese is so dangerous that neither Daniel nor Johnny can beat him alone considering Miyagi laid him out in his prime. When Kreese was just a thing Johnny had to get past, it worked, but once you try to make him seem unbeatable to both men, you gotta do some rehab. So every minute you spend with him should be trying to show what changed there.</p><p>We need to know how exactly he transformed from just kind of an asshole who slunk off into the night after his team lost an underage karate tournament into a complete sociopath that's ten steps ahead of the entire main cast to the point we need both sides to team up just to defeat him, especially since you already have an established potential threat from outside the Valley that serves that purpose better...which brings us to Okinawa.</p><p>Look it's great to see Kumiko and Chozen. Those are cool cameos, but they are utterly wasted here. That entire side trip has almost no bearing on anything, it's built on a plot point that's raised explicitly for the purposes of the cameos then immediately dropped, and everything about it is so stupidly convenient it's painful. Worse, they raise all kinds of questions that are just hand-waved away because "shut up, it's a funny cameo and we don't have time for that."</p><p>This is where Chozen comes in. If you wanted to get to the Johnny/Daniel team-up, Chozen is the ideal villain for it. He's an outsider. He's Daniel's problem so Johnny gets to be a little more heroic by helping, he's the same age so there's no questions about why an 80-year old man is any physical threat to them, and he's from outside the entire ecosystem so he can show up out of nowhere and be anything you want.</p><p>If not that, at least do something more fun with him. When I realized he wasn't going to be the new Big Bad, I thought it would be really funny if he showed up as a completely reformed and super nice guy, putting Daniel constantly on edge because he's waiting for the next shoe to drop. Instead they try to have it both ways where he both seems like a scary rival and yet is in fact a nice guy who doesn't even seem to carry a grudge against the guy who repeatedly humiliated him in his youth even though the rest of the people on this show still can't get over what happened to them one summer in high school. Basically they didn't take it far enough.</p><p>That's where the questions come in. Sato said to him "now to you, I am dead," and that was <i>before </i>he tried to murder Daniel at the festival. How does that turn into Sato taking him back and teaching him everything he knows including stuff Miyagi never taught Daniel? Shouldn't Chozen have spent a few decades in prison for attempted homicide? Did they just decide the humiliation of getting his nose honked in front of the whole community was enough punishment? I want the flashbacks to explain <i>that </i>stuff, not how Kreese got a girlfriend who ultimately died off-screen.</p><p>But you know what? I was still willing to go with it as long as we got to the team-up, which we kind of did.</p><p>The thing that ultimately had me say 'sayonara' to this season was Ali. When Ali first shows up it seems like they're about to do something even more interesting than making Johnny the good guy and Daniel the bad guy, which would've been to say that neither Daniel nor Johnny were the bad guy in <i>The Karate Kid </i>and that it was actually Ali all along.</p><p>She lays it on so thick with Johnny you'd think she came just to screw up his thing with Miguel's mom. She invites him to the party that Daniel happens to be at with his wife as if to create a beef, and all the while it almost seems like she's plotting something or other.</p><p>But, nah. Ali's actually just the hero of the season. She's the one that finally makes Johnny and Daniel see eye-to-eye by trashing them both equally in front of one another, and making Daniel look like more of a dick than he was before. Because why have the cameo be anything other than just rehashing <i>The Karate Kid</i>, <b>again</b>.</p><p>I thought at the bare minimum she'd be essential to Miguel's recovery since they had noted she was a doctor in the earlier seasons, but nope. It's boring, it's lame, and it's another wasted cameo in a season of wasted cameos.</p><p>Hopefully next season will stop stalling and get to the payoff already, but considering they're bringing in Terry Silver I doubt it. The only thing left to do after that is have Hillary Swank show up to train them all in yet another secret move Miyagi never taught Daniel for reasons.</p><p>Anyway, that's my rant. Hope you enjoyed it more than I enjoyed this season.</p>CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-87105526774938512532018-08-16T14:49:00.000-04:002018-08-31T14:53:10.369-04:00The Meg ReviewThe 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 <em>The Meg</em>.<br />
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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 <em>Jurassic World: Lost Kingdom</em> right?<br />
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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, <em>The Meg</em> delivers on the premise: Jason Statham fights the prehistoric monster shark known as megalodon. What is that issue though? Well, let's talk about it:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/I4PbOGxVsBs" width="100%"></iframe><br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-605045404486964152018-08-08T14:15:00.000-04:002018-08-31T14:16:06.344-04:00Christopher Robin ReviewWell, 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 <em>Christopher Robin</em>.<br />
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There are pretty much two schools of when it comes to the promos for <em>Christopher Robin</em>. 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.<br />
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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 <em>Christopher Robin</em> just can't overcome the creep factor:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LJILGOewUFw" width="100%"></iframe><br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-31741580070896362252018-08-02T20:37:00.000-04:002018-08-12T20:38:40.958-04:00Mission: Impossible Fallout ReviewHow are we still making <em>Mission: Impossible</em> 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 <em>Fallout</em> on hold for a couple of months while he healed up.<br />
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You can see that take in the movie too, because if nothing else, <em>Mission: Impossible Fallout </em>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.<br />
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This also happens to be the movie that Henry Cavill was in the middle of when WB came calling for <em>Justice League</em> 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, that facial hair had to be incredibly important to his character in <em>Fallout</em> right? Let's talk about it:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/B1RtQ2m-Phk" width="100%"></iframe><br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-85207913697310038572018-07-26T10:46:00.001-04:002018-07-26T10:46:14.161-04:00The Equalizer 2 ReviewAfter you watch <em>The Equalizer</em>, 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 <em>Taken</em>-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 <em>The Equalizer 2</em>.
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As you may have guessed from my previous writings, I'm always skeptical of sequels, particularly when it comes to sleeper hits like <em>The Equalizer</em> that seem like perfectly self-contained stories. We saw how the <em>Taken</em> franchise descended into garbage real fast, for example. Then again, we've got <em>John Wick 2</em> now to show everybody how it's done: keep what's good, expand the world, don't repeat the first movie beat for beat.<br />
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The trailers for <em>Equalizer 2</em> didn't look like it would repeat the first movie beat for beat, so that was good, but it did look like it was going to water down the concept from a guy helping people around him to a guy just getting revenge for his friend. Now that I've seen it, I can tell you the trailers are a pretty accurate representation of what you're getting here.<br />
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That doesn't mean it's terrible though, so let me tell you how <em>The Equalizer 2</em> manages to balance out the bad with some good:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QZZHiS33i1g" width="100%"></iframe><br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-4617539312256407272018-07-19T22:44:00.000-04:002018-07-19T22:44:06.276-04:00Skyscraper ReviewLet's face it, the only reason anyone has any interest in <em>Skyscraper</em> is because it stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Otherwise we'd all take one look at this <em>Die Hard</em> meets <em>Towering Inferno</em> homage and laugh it straight to "looking for something to fall asleep to on Netflix at 1 AM."<br />
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But The Rock tends to make good, fun movies out of all kinds of stuff. Hell he made a <em>Jumanji</em> sequel that was one of the most <a href="http://crankytrex.blogspot.com/2018/01/jumanji-welcome-to-jungle-review.html">surprisingly enjoyable</a> movies of last year. Of course the last movie I saw him in was <em>Rampage</em>, and as I said <a href="http://crankytrex.blogspot.com/2018/04/rampage-review.html">in the review</a> for that, he really let me down on that one. Since then I've also seen his version of <em>Baywatch</em> on TV and just...dear God why.<br />
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So naturally my normal enthusiasm for a Rock action movie was blunted quite a bit going into <em>Skyscraper</em>. 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 here. Let me tell you about all the ways <em>Skyscraper</em> falls down:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jyWjSREb4kw" width="100%"></iframe><br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-64426855801688574212018-07-12T21:40:00.001-04:002018-07-12T21:40:28.447-04:00Ant-Man and the Wasp ReviewHey 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 <em>Thor: Ragnarok.</em> This time it's <em>Ant-Man and the Wasp</em>, which believe it or not marks the 20th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.<br />
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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 <em>Guardians of the Galaxy</em> work, everything is on the table.<br />
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In any case, the first <em>Ant-Man</em> 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 and delivering a satisfying experience in the wake the stunning climax of <em>Infinity War</em>. <br />
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Between that and the trailers making it look like this would actually be The Wasp, featuring cameos by Ant-Man, I can't say I was especially excited for this one. Marvel's certainly earned my trust and then some with their history, but it's hard to muster up a lot of interest in Scott Lang's antics when you know that the world is ending elsewhere.<br />
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So, did <em>Ant-Man and the Wasp</em> win me over or is it Marvels first total flop? Well, here's what I thought:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lR7hL8Pd9us" width="100%"></iframe><br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-13436063346281374562018-07-05T14:21:00.000-04:002018-07-05T14:21:54.733-04:00Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ReviewFor some reason people actually liked <em>Jurassic World</em> enough for it to make all the money, so now we have to suffer through yet another attempt to continue the <em>Jurassic Park</em> franchise. This one's called <em>Fallen Kingdom</em>, which I guess refers to the destruction of the island all the dinosaurs have been hanging out on since the first movie.
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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.)
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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 fact, the only thing worse than the writing in this movie was the parents sitting behind me who brought their little 3 year old with them to see it on opening night.
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So without further ado, here's me ranting for six minutes or so about how bad <em>Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom</em> really is: <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7qQMzoKXv5Q" width="100%"></iframe><br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-88984138738350280022018-05-24T22:20:00.000-04:002018-05-24T22:20:05.125-04:00Deadpool 2 ReviewThe Merc with a Mouth is back in one of the most anticipated comic book movies ever. After all <i>Deadpool</i> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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Of course, making an obscene amount of money guaranteed the sequel teased at the end of the credits, and so here we are. Sequels are tricky business though, especially when dealing with a surprise hit. How do you replicate that perfect bit of magic that makes a movie stand out the way <i>Deadpool</i> did? It's been done before, but the odds are rarely in favor of it.<br />
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Unfortunately, even with Cable and X-Force joining the fray, <i>Deadpool 2</i> finds itself on the wrong end of that statistical breakdown. So let me tell you why I was so very disappointed with it:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hSP0fS1Dzrs" width="100%"></iframe><br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-38668225130740960772018-05-04T13:04:00.003-04:002018-05-04T13:04:59.207-04:00Avengers: Infinity War ReviewWell 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 <em>Avengers: Infinity War</em>.<br />
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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 <a href="http://crankytrex.blogspot.com/2014/04/superhero-snowflake.html">really, really good</a>. I guess the only question about <em>Infinity War</em> is "how the hell is this going to live up to all the hype?"<br />
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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.<br />
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And yet, they did it. Now I have to try and explain how without spoiling the movie for those few of you who haven't managed to see it already. So, without further ado, here's my non-spoiler review of <em>Infinity War</em>:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K0oyPYDrVkk" width="100%"></iframe><br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-39396767742322248902018-04-26T11:34:00.000-04:002018-04-26T11:34:21.561-04:00Rampage ReviewAh <em>Rampage</em>, 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 again with the guys that did <em>San Andreas</em> (which was a pretty decent disaster flick all told), so maybe they just could pull off the first genuinely good movie based on a video game.<br />
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Then again, maybe not. Let's talk about where <em>Rampage</em> rates among the pantheon of video game movie dumpster fires:<br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-31611646843740311662018-04-20T11:16:00.000-04:002018-04-20T11:16:37.710-04:00Chappaquiddick ReviewChappaquiddick 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 essentially unpunished for killing this young woman. As a result rather than spending the rest of his life in jail for manslaughter, he spent it being repeatedly reelected to the Senate for so long that they still refer to it as "Ted Kennedy's seat" even though he's dead now.<br />
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Seems like it could make quite the captivating drama, doesn't it? I guess with all the properties from my childhood getting reboots anyway, somebody out there in Hollywood figured it was about time this story got told too.<br />
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To be frank, I was incredibly wary of this movie before heading in because Hollywood is not known for telling the complete truth about liberal heroes like the "Lion of the Senate." Fortunately, for once, they played it pretty straight. Let's talk about why you should see <em>Chappaquiddick</em> if you have any interest in correcting the historical record:<br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-57786595683928366392018-04-12T11:04:00.001-04:002018-04-12T11:04:52.326-04:00Ready Player One ReviewWe 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 <em>Ready Player One</em>, 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.<br />
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DeLorean from <em>Back to the Future</em>? Check. The Iron Giant? Check. Chun Li? Check. Akira's motorcycle? Check. King Kong? Check. <em>Jurassic Park </em>T-Rex? Check. And that's just some of the stuff you can spot in the trailers.<br />
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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.<br />
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On the other hand, this is based on a book people tell me is pretty good, and certainly the concept of the invasive virtual reality has made for some interesting properties in the past. So, is this movie just a parade of nostalgia, or is it something more? More importantly, is <em>Ready Player One</em> any good? Well...let's talk about it:
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-1339349068902957692018-04-04T23:20:00.001-04:002018-04-04T23:20:47.233-04:00Pacific Rim: Uprising ReviewFor a while there it didn't seem like we'd actually get a sequel to <em>Pacific Rim</em> despite its obvious sequel potential, and then along came <em>Uprising</em> with its new cast and more importantly, new giant robots.
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The original <em>Pacific Rim</em> 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.
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That's not to say the idea of a sequel to <em>Pacific Rim</em> 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 <em>Pacific Rim: Uprising</em> just doesn't quite measure up:
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-25698530235418759952018-03-28T13:07:00.000-04:002018-03-28T13:07:12.104-04:00Tomb Raider ReviewHollywood is still chasing that magic unicorn: a good film adaptation of a video game. They tried doing <i>Tomb Raider</i> 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.<br>
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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. <br />
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Unfortunately, if you're going to play it serious like that you really have to be on point, and this new <em>Tomb Raider</em>...is not.
So let's talk about why that unicorn remains free: <br />
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CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-37287917352936553092018-03-02T01:03:00.000-05:002018-03-02T01:03:02.224-05:00Black Panther ReviewWell it's here at last, the first black superhero movie ever to be released in February of 2018, Marvel's <em>Black Panther</em>. Snark about the stupid amount of hype thanks to the politics surrounding this movie aside, my expectations for <em>Black Panther</em> 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.<br />
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It's kind of what separates Marvel from its competitors, who tend towards either hitting a homerun like <em>Deadpool</em> or striking out so profoundly with something like <em>Batman v Superman</em> or <em>Fant4stic</em> 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 so even when the plot is dumb or the villain's plan is stupid or the CGI doesn't hold up, you can at least still enjoy the ride.<br />
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So the question is, where does <em>Black Panther</em> stack up in the Marvel pantheon? Well I hate to be that guy, but I'll spoil some of the review for you by saying "not very high." Let me tell you why:<br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-83542698852254360062018-01-24T12:23:00.000-05:002018-01-24T12:23:14.872-05:00Darkest Hour ReviewWell now that <em>Darkest Hour</em> 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.<br />
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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 <em>Lincoln</em> in the first place.<br />
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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 <em>Darkest Hour</em> worked, and which didn't: <br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-32919897022302562202018-01-08T22:35:00.000-05:002018-01-08T22:35:02.002-05:00Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle ReviewI don't think there was anyone on the planet who thought "hey, we need a sequel to <em>Jumanji</em>!" and yet here comes <em>Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle</em>. 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.<br />
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Still, despite that, it's had more staying power at the box office than <em>Star Wars: The Last Jedi</em>, 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, <em>Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle</em> turned out to be a lot of fun. Here's what I had to say about it:<br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-61718139963647735452018-01-04T17:11:00.000-05:002018-01-04T17:11:05.202-05:00Star Wars: The Last Jedi ReviewOur yearly Star Wars event has come and gone now. <em> The Last Jedi</em> 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.<br />
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So here's seven minutes or so of me talking about why:<br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-85995737508909386072017-11-22T17:50:00.000-05:002017-11-22T17:50:41.449-05:00Justice League ReviewWell, the <em>Justice League</em> movie finally came out. It was a movie. That played in theaters. So, uh...yeah I guess that happened...<br />
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Look after four movies, only <a href="http://crankytrex.blogspot.com/2017/06/wonder-woman-review.html">one of which</a> 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.<br />
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Yup they spent something on the order of <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/news/justice-league-reshoots-1202502433/">$25 million</a> giving Cavill a digital shave so he could appear in the re-shoots without changing his look from the next <em>Mission: Impossible</em> 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 fans and casuals alike can enjoy while saving ourselves $25 million in additional costs in the process?"<br /><br />But yeah, it's the DCEU, making rushed, highly reactive, and otherwise bad decisions is kind of their forte. Pity it isn't making good movies because <em>Justice League</em> is pretty much exactly what we all expected it would be: the kind of tangled matte of CGI scruff that inevitably results from years of poor decision-making. Hence it's getting savaged by the critics, of which I am certainly one. So without further ado, let's take the razor to the gnarled mess that is <em>Justice League</em>: <br />
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CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-26882265099957501202017-11-16T10:58:00.000-05:002017-11-16T10:58:38.578-05:00Thor: Ragnarok ReviewThe Marvel Cinematic Universe keeps chugging along, this time with the release of Thor's third movie, <em>Thor: Ragnarok</em>. 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.
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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 <em>Thor: Ragnarok</em>. 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.
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For once, looks were not deceiving. <em>Ragnarok</em> is indeed ridiculously fun, and I had a great time with it overall. There's still reasons to be cranky about it though, so let's talk about them: <br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-74322155206381890832017-10-26T11:58:00.002-04:002017-10-26T11:58:54.982-04:00Star Trek: Discovery Season Premiere ReviewWell by now it's on its sixth or seventh episode, but when <em>Star Trek: Discovery</em>'s premiere came out I did review it like I did with <em>The Orville</em> because hey, I'm a huge <em>Star Trek</em> fan and I had to at least give it a shot despite my poor first impressions from trailers and such.<br />
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Like with <em>The Orville</em>, 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 <em>Star Trek</em> again.<br />
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Sadly, <em>Discovery</em> is not good <em>Star Trek.</em> Frankly this show isn't <em>Star Trek</em> at all. It doesn't even fit in with the JJ Abrams reboot, which itself already turned <em>Star Trek</em>'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, <em>Discovery</em> fails on just about every level.<br /><br />Fortunately for me though, STD is locked up inside CBS All Access so even though they're going to give it a second infection...er...second season, this will probably be the last time I'll ever have to talk about it:<br /><br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-77657840666181328162017-10-19T18:03:00.000-04:002017-10-19T18:03:24.308-04:00American Made ReviewContinuing in our series of "why the hell haven't you put a post up for your latest review yet, Cranky??", we have <em>American Made</em>, 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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For the most part I was rewarded for my decision, but while this isn't a <em>Mummy</em>-level catastrophe, it still didn't really live up to its premise. Let's talk about why Tom Cruise couldn't run hard enough to save this one:<br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-73115099820196131322017-10-05T13:12:00.001-04:002017-10-05T13:12:29.031-04:00Kingsman: The Golden Circle Review<i>Kingsman: The Secret Service</i> 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 <em>The Golden Circle</em>.
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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 being more of the same, which as we all know tends to get old quickly.
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<em>Kingsman</em>, on the other hand, seemed like it had the potential to be a franchise. While it did have a self-contained story, it set up a universe and a character that could continue to evolve if the people making it were clever. Since they had already delivered a movie that demonstrated they were, I was hoping they'd find a way to build a sequel that didn't succumb to the "more, bigger, louder" impulse.
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Unfortunately, I was wrong. Let's talk about how <em>Kingsman: The Golden Circle</em> became everything<em> Kingsman</em> parodied before and a bit of a bait and switch to boot:<br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-705564969139418538.post-19300056239641836902017-09-28T11:08:00.000-04:002017-09-28T11:08:31.583-04:00American Assassin ReviewAs 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 <em>American Assassin</em>. 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 movie from mediocrity. So let's talk about why <em>American Assassin</em> made me cranky::<br />
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<br />CTRhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13672302133003694598noreply@blogger.com0