Cranky T-Rex's Blog

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...