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, that facial hair had to

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 here.  Let me

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 and delivering a