The Wild Robot (2024)

The Wild Robot (2024)

 

image from Universal Pictures

9/10

Starring the voices of     

Lupita Nyong'o

Pedro Pascal

Kit Connor

 

Directed by Chris Sanders

 

It is not hard to say that this is going to go down as one of the best animated movies of this decade, because the story is that good. Based off a book by Peter Brown, Chris Sanders wrote this amazing screenplay and directed this masterpiece. He has not dropped the ball since he left Disney for Dreamworks, animations like How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods are part of his resume, so when I saw his name attached to this, I knew I had to see it.

The animation is not trying to compete with Disney when it comes to the graphics, the movie does not have a complete CGI look, you can see a form of hand painting used on the characters, which is why the budget is below $100 million.

The masterful voice acting in the movie and the flow of the movie steals you away from what you are doing, and you become lost in this new world. Sanders did a wonderful thing of not allowing Roz to become a lost puppy on screen, running around looking for something to do. Roz seemed confident and pushed to finding a reason to carry on, and once found, there was no stopping her until she was able to see it through to completion.

Roz is a robot, full name is Rozzum unit 7134. Her container was washed up on the shore of an island not inhabited by humans. She comes on, when an animal mistakenly hit her on button, then from that moment, she was following her basic programming running around the island, looking for someone to claim her as her owner and give her tasks.

The running around was not without its price, since she was not meant to be on this island and does not understand how to relate with the animals or navigate such surroundings. By the time Roz decided to slow down to understand the language and the surrounding she is in, she had sustained some considerable damages.

Nonetheless, the stumbling about led her to crash into a tree, which caused the death of a goose mum and smashed all her eggs except one. She took that egg, then lost it again and had to chase down a fox to be able to get it back. Her curiosity got the best of her, and she kept the egg until it hatched. The gosling was a runt. A runt meaning it was smaller than what a normal goose should be and in the wild, runts do not naturally survive. Roz met a possum mother with her babies, and she told Roz that she is now the gosling’s mother and must care for it. Roz took that as her new directive, modifying her programming and adopted the gosling. But since she did not understand what it means to care for a gosling, the fox, which initially tried to eat the gosling as an egg, decided to work with Roz to raise the child. The selfish process the fox thought will be beneficial to his survival, and the fox felt sorry for the gosling because Roz’s way of trying to care for this child was almost like she was torture.

So, we get to watch this two raise the gosling and prepare it for winter when it must migrate.

The whole process was not easy, and the animation made sure that we get to have enough comedic fun watching, and there are touching moments seeing them fail and some action in the ending with robot fights.

This is a must see.

Brothers (2024)

Brothers (2024)

 

6/10

Starring          

Josh Brolin

Peter Dinklage

Brendan Fraser

Glenn Close

 

Directed by Max Barbakow

 

One thing this movie has is the engaging factor. I must be honest – it is written in a way to leave you wanting to see how things will line up. What I mean by line up is. Instead of the urge to see how things will end, how the brothers will find a way to make amends and get ahead, you are held by the many missing blocks.

What happened to their mum?

The mum’s boyfriend who swallowed the emerald, how did that play out?

What weird thing was the beautiful and forever gorgeous Marisa Tomei cameo appearance into?

And how were the brothers going to deal with the cop chasing them?

Some matters, like the last one was not well tied up, and the movie had some incidents that will make you go, hmm!!! But in the end, it made for a good time, and I enjoyed holding out to the end to see how the things lined up.

The cast in this movie were excellent, and I hardly recognised Glenn Close.

The plot is about two twin brothers, Moke (Josh Brolin) and Jady (Peter Dinklage). You can already see how the difference in height gives you the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny De Vito feel, but the movie is nothing like that. These two brothers grew up as thieves, their mother (Glenn Close) was an armed robber and both brothers were just petty thieves when she left. During one of their heists, Jady got caught. He did not rat out Moke (something the movie does not really touch on), but Moke went on to turn his life around and try to be a better person after the incident. Jady got out early, and this was due to the assistance of a corrupt officer, Farful (Brendan Fraser). They had a deal, Farful will help Jady get out of prison with the aid of Farful’s dad who was a judge and he in return will do a job for them. As you can guess, Jady went to Moke and convinced him to help him out to carry out this last task. It was from there, Moke learned that Jady was in touch with their mother all these times, and they were running their own game and needed him.

How the family was able to iron things out and sort out their differences to get on top of the situation, well you will need to watch this movie on Amazon Prime to find out. Just note, it is not a masterful comedy, just a good enough movie to see when you have little or nothing else to watch.

Alien Romulus (2024)

Alien Romulus (2024)

7/10

Starring          

Cailee Spaeny

David Jonsson

Archie Renaux

Isabela Merced

Directed by Fede Álvarez

 

Alien Romulus is a good film, I tell you. It has been a while since I have seen a good film like this, and it carries its own weight of twist and turns, and it does homage to the franchise. There are ribcage bursting out things. Stabbing with the Alien tail, people running from a monster so huge that you wonder why not just give up. The movie plot is so dark it is amazing, and it is a great job done by director and writer Fede Álvarez.

It is a good thing to see what modern day graphics can do with these Alien creatures, and it is also amazing to see a familiar face. The moment I saw the late Iam Holm, I was like see what CGI can do. It was a nice work done, since we cannot get Sigourney Weaver’s character Ripley back into the franchise, thanks to the way the franchise has gone with her character.

This movie also takes place in space in 2142, and it follows the events of the first movie Alien (1979) the movie plot takes place between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).

After the events of the first movie, the humans took the remains of the Alien to a secret base to go work and see how they can merge the Alien DNA with that of humans and create a better evolved human race. Now how that played out, is something you will have to see, but this was a subplot in the movie that did not take hold until half-way in. So, what led to the Alien mounting another assault on the human race?

While they were doing their experiment in space, the Alien got out and damaged the whole space station. The whole thing was abandoned there in space.

Then comes Rain, an orphan miner who is trying to do enough time mining so she can finally leave the mining planet and go to a planet Yvaga where only humans live with the hope of a better life. Rain lives with her adoptive brother Andy, who is a cyborg with some broken motor functions, reprogrammed to protect Rain by her late father. When Rain was unable to leave the planet, her ex-boyfriend called her for a one-time job in space. The reason she was called is that they need Andy to help them get into the abandoned space station and steal the cryostasis chambers that will allow them to escape to the planet Yvaga. This was supposed to be a get in, get the chambers and get out, but as you know how these things go.

They got in, got the oxygen working, and they mistakenly got the heating on and the frozen cloned facehuggers got lose and well, as you can expect things did not go as planned from then on.

Enjoyed the movie more than I expected to.

Transformers One (2024)

Transformers One (2024)

4/10

Starring          

Chris Hemsworth

Brian Tyree Henry

Scarlett Johansson

Keegan-Michael Key

 

Directed by Josh Cooley

 

I have to say this movie was underwhelming. I had some idea at the back of my mind that I was going to like it, since it was now an animation and there is very little you cannot achieve when you are doing animation, but I was in the end disappointed. The main problem is how the story develops. I am not going to lie and say that I am fully into the Transformer franchise stories and understand many of the origin tales. This is the first time I am seeing this particular origin story of the hate between Optimus Prime and Megatron, when I naturally believe that the hate was not personal it was just you are an Autobot and I am a Decepticon. The change from friends to enemies came about from a betrayal that has nothing to do with both, and I felt the movie could have done better with that plot.

I did not enjoy the graphics at all, and I felt the plot was weak and will not help the franchise win more viewers. That said, the voice acting was good in the movie, but that was it.

The plot is about two friends working in the mines of Cybertron. Cybertron is the home of the transformers, who can transform into vehicles. But these two friends ever since they came online (which signifies birth in their world) were without transformation cogs. In fact, it turns out many come online without these cogs and are made to work in the mines of Cybertron, mining Energon for their planet.

These two friends Orion Pax and D-16 are mine workers, and Pax always sees them being more and does everything he can to be more than just a mine worker, especially obsessed with finding the Matrix of Leadership, but without cogs there is little to no way that can happen. The leader of Cybertron is a Prime called Sentinel, Sentinel is the only surviving Prime left in Cybertron after the others were killed by the alien invaders. Sentinel goes to the surface of their planet to fight off the alien invaders and to look for the Matrix of Leadership, something he has been doing for some time but never achieving.

Pax pulled one of his stunts and got he and D-16 noticed by everyone. This caused a moral boast of other mine transformers that they can be more. This did not go well with their mine leader Darkwing, the reason for this will be best if you watch the animation yourself if you are interested.

Darkwing reassigned them to garbage disposal, wanting them to be there forever, it was there they met B-127. But Pax discovers a message from one of the dead Primes, and he convinced D-16 and B-127 to follow him to the surface to find the message’s origin. There is where they find another Prime, who tells them that they were all supposed to have cogs, and no transformer comes online without one. Now they know there is more going on in Cybertron that is being kept from them. We can see from here that Orion Pax will become Optimus Prime, and D-16 will become Megatron.

As I said, I did not feel this animation as much as I should, and that is why I am not surprised that it did not do well in the box office and has some average ratings.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

4/10

Starring          

Michael Keaton

Winona Ryder

Catherine O'Hara

Jenna Ortega

Justin Theroux

Monica Bellucci

Willem Dafoe

 

Directed by Tim Burton

 

Thirty-six years after the masterpiece Beetlejuice (1988), we now have a sequel. This sequel tries to not forget the characters of the previous movie and maintain the special effect style of the first movie, to give this movie the same kind of feel. The problem is the story itself is not focused enough to gather the same kind of love as in the first movie. This movie had too many characters and too many sub-plots and just felt like it was made as a fan service art, rather than a movie meant to be a continuation of a legacy. Michael Keaton reprises his role as Beetlejuice.

The characters like Delores played by Monica Bellucci or Wolf played by Williem Dafeo, if you delete those characters from the movie, I think the movie will still have the same ending. Because both were added to the movie as forms of distractions, but were never integral to the movie itself. At first, it seemed like Delores was the main villain, but the plot just winds past her. Theirs and the other subplots were placed for laughs, problem is they made the movie feel lost.

The movie also introduces us to Astrid (Jenna Ortega) Lydia’s daughter. Now Lydia has embraced her ability to see ghosts, and milks it for money. She is the host of a show called Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, and she is dating the producer. She and Astrid are estranged and so is Lydia and her parents, but the death of her father, causes both Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Delia (Catherine O’Hara) to unite and start planning the burial.

There is a missing link in the movie, which is never fully explored. Astrid and Lydia’s estranged situation is not fully felt on screen. Astrid explains why they are estranged, which for many movies is enough, but add to it that her father is also dead, there seem to be more which can best be explained from Lydia’s view than just Astrid, which was not done.

We are shown that she does not like her family, as you will see from the movie, that they are weird and neglecting, but still it felt in the movie that they could have done more to make that feeling of distance more meaningful.

Unlike the first movie, Beetlejuice is shown a lot more, and we see him trying his best to get Lydia’s attention from the land of the dead. Astrid gets herself into some trouble, and she is in the underworld and Lydia needs help to save her, so she calls out Beetlejuice, and he agreed to help her based on his own conditions.

In the end, as I said, the movie is just a fan service making and lacks the fun of the first movie.

Trap (2024)

Trap (2024)

4/10

 

Starring          

Josh Hartnett

Ariel Donoghue

Saleka Night Shyamalan

Hayley Mills

Alison Pill

 

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

 

The first 50 minutes of the movie is amazing, 50% into the movie’s runtime, and you can feel the wonderful writing of M. Night Shyamalan and the directing for the first half of the movie is just superb. If the movie ended there, when he gets to have a one-on-one talk with Lady Raven (the make-believe famous singer in the movie, played by Shyamalan daughter) it would have been great. But even at that point, being able to get that close to someone famous seemed so impossible and out of place, but I was going to let it slide, but the Second Act of this movie was all about being out of place and just not adding up. Yes, the confrontation with the killer is before us and his next actions are important, but it was like Shyamalan ran out of ideas. How he was able to get that close to a famous singer and get that singer to co-operate with him to the point shown in this movie is outrageous and damn lazy writing. The final act of this movie was awful. If I was told this movie was written by someone who was having his first break, I would not have felt bad, but this is M. Night Shyamalan – how can he write such a horrible third act? It was just too obvious he did not want to kill the character off. No way, anyone will attack an officer and not get shot.

The movie is about a man, a serial killer who takes his daughter to a concert of the famous musician Lady Raven, and he notices that there are a lot of police officers about and FBI agents. He is suspicious, and he starts to get familiar with the people working there, asking innocent questions, to gain their trust and finds out that they are there looking for him, even though they do not know what he looks like.

He has no idea how they know he will be there, or how they plan to find him, all he knows is that he needs to get out of this concert and not let his daughter know that something is up.

We get to watch how he cons his way to people’s trust and use all these to get around the police. We see how he tries to keep his family together while trying to escape from the police and keep his identity a secret.

It will be hard for me to say, go and watch this movie when I know that halfway through, it goes from thrilling fun watch, to downright disappointment.

 

Rebel Ridge (2024)

Rebel Ridge (2024)

 

6/10

Starring          

Aaron Pierre

Don Johnson

AnnaSophia Robb

 

Directed by Jeremy Saulnier

 

Rebel Ridge is a fun watch, you are engaged in a cat and mouse kind of situation, where the lead Terry and the police chief Sandy seem to keep running at each other. They never seem to find a way to de-escalate the situation between them, making it almost impossible for the movie to have a happy ending, which is what the movie wanted.

When my friend suggested that I see this movie, he said it had a Rambo, First Blood feel. I think it is more Jack Reacher than it is First Blood.

First Blood was gritty, rough and Rambo you can tell had lost his mind and was never going to stop until he was dead. This had a more reasonable motive, and the Summer character gave Terry the grounding he needed not to go overboard.

Now, that all said, you can easily see in this movie how things were taking to a point where make believe was overdone, and the movie failed to make a lot of sense in many cases, but in the time of useless films like The Union or The Killer, this is a welcome development to watch a film from start to finish and not feel like smashing the screen.

The movie starts with Terry on a bike and getting run over by the cops in the town he just rode in. He was searched, and he had on him $36,000 which he got from selling his truck and his partnership in a business. He needed the money to bail his cousin out. The police seized the money from him, and there is where Terry had a problem.

His brother was a state witness, who helped put a criminal in jail, so he cannot be sent to prison because if he does, he will not last a day. He was busted on drug charges and needed to be bailed out before he gets sent to prison, which is what Terry was trying to do.

The problem is, the town which his cousin got busted in was running a scheme, to which Terry happened to fall into. They were stealing money off people and running a game to fund the community and buy off the judge. So, Terry needed to get the money back, which was not going to be possible, and time is running out for his cousin.

As you can guess, for this to be a movie, things did not play out the way Terry wanted, and he decided to take the whole police department down with him, if he is unable to get this de-escalated the way he thinks it should go.

You can catch this movie on Netflix.

The Union (2024)

The Union (2024)

 

2/10

Starring          

Mark Wahlberg

Halle Berry

 

Directed by Julian Farino

 

The time has come for Hollywood writers to stop doing some made believe stuff like this. The whole idea that the world (or like this movie the union and its affiliates) is at stake, and they need to go recruit a nobody and train him in everything he needs to know to be an agent in like a week, when it takes some of the best agents’ years to master. Then this nobody will then be good enough paired up with someone else to save the world, it is ridiculous.

The Union is a movie created for fans of Mark Wahlberg or Halle Berry, because the plot and everything in it, does not even make you want to remember that you have seen this movie.

They want me to believe that a man who has no military training at all, who is a complete bum can be trained in like 2 weeks to be an agent, is just lazy writing. The movie plot has two high-school sweethearts reunite. One is the bum Mike (Wahlberg) and the other is an agent for The Union Roxanne (Berry). Roxanne shows up in Mike’s life after like 25 years and kidnaps him with the aim of recruiting him to join The Union. The Union is a secret government agency which functions as the mercenaries for the various government agencies.

You will think, there must be something Mike has to offer to be the one or be the right person for this job, but sadly, no. It is Mike because of the almost 8 billion people on this planet, Mike was the next person on the list which contains everyone Roxanne, the other members of The Union and their other affiliates knew.

The reason there is space for Mike is that, during one of their missions, a lot of their members get killed, so they need to recruit new ones. Now when I say a lot, do not go thinking like hundreds. Of the number of members still shown in the movie, The Union were not lacking members, they just need ground staff, and the ones who were killed were not even up to eight. The reason for recruiting Mike is not clear.

Well, he was recruited, trained and placed in the field to buy a list. The list contains the name of government agents and their agencies functioning around the globe. If this movie plot is feeling very similar to a lot of the movie plots about agents, then you have seen this movie and even a better version if possible.

The Killer (2024)

The Killer (2024)

3/10

 

Starring          

Nathalie Emmanuel

Omar Sy

Sam Worthington

Diana Silvers

 

Directed by John Woo

 

Growing up in the 90s, there is no way you will not have heard about John Woo’s 1989 movie, The Killer. This movie starred Chow Yun-fat in a role that was memorable in our brains then. The movie was not without its pacing problems, but it was good. Now more than thirty years after, Woo releases a remake of this movie and this remake is one of the weirdest movies to see. Here is a John Woo movie, which has shooting, and action, and it is still very boring. There is nothing good to say about this movie, the cinematography was horrible, it has funny camera tilts at odd times, and the no needed zoom ins, I was screaming. Then I noticed some areas where I can tell, some bad editing was obvious. The pacing is all over the place, making it hard to keep you excited.

The actors all felt like children wearing daddy’s shoes. It seemed the roles were too big for them and none of them fitted well into their role, and then there was the plot.

When a hired killer known for being brutal takes pity on someone for a reason which is not shared in a way to make sense, you start to wonder who wrote this script?

It played out like John Woo, typed on ChatGPT, write me a script like my other movie The Killer, it was a lazy plot put together, and to think John Woo directed this.

The pacing was all over the place, and the characters had motives that seem to make sense to them and the child-like thoughts they have in their head.

Our leads are Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Sey (Omar Sy), Zee is the hired killer who works for a man named Finn who in turn works for a Drug lord. Zee is hired by Finn to take out anyone who the Drug lord wants. So, on her recent case to take out everyone in a room, she spared a young lady who, is not innocent, but somehow Zee took pity on her.

Now Finn wants her to kill this lady to finish the job. We also discover that Finn has been having dealings of his own, which makes him also someone who wants to clean up loose ends, which Zee happens to be. I guess that predictability in the plot was just something that Woo could not help but include.

If you could see this movie, please save yourself the stress and don’t.

Incoming (2024)

Incoming (2024)

6/10

Starring          

Mason Thames

Ramon Reed

Bardia Seiri

Raphael Alejandro

 

Directed by Dave Chernin and John Chernin

 

The whole movie is like a remake of the coming-of-age 2007 movie, Superbad. I enjoyed this movie enough to give it a good rating, it is not a great movie, but it was good enough.

If you have seen any coming-of-age movie, you have seen this, but it was still fun. I liked the way it did not waste so much time trying to build us up. Things just start going down, everything just gets started and it became a shit-show (a literal one at some point).

I can understand why many will not like this movie, because they will feel like Superbad did it better, and maybe it did, but to have a movie have so much happening from two fronts is fun. The characters all had an angle and something to prove to themselves, and how some achieved some clarity, some grew and became adults is nice to see.

The movie is about four friends, who just got into high school. They are, Benj, who has a crush on his sister’s best friend. Eddie whose mother is dating a douche who takes advantage of him in his own house, because Eddie is laid back and just wants to get on with life. Connor who is the same age as the others but is smaller and is tired of being a nobody. The last one is Danah, the one guy in every group of friends who is actually crazy and thinks he can become somebody legendary.

Danah’s brother Koosh is having a party in his place and tells Danah he can bring his friends. Danah invites his three friends, only for on that day Koosh tells him that only one of the friends can come in. Benj asked to be the one, because he had hopes of getting his sister’s best friend to be his. The other two were upset with Danah for not being man enough to let them in and left, not even giving a fight with Benj to get in. You will need to see the movie yourself to see all the things that Benj and Danah got up to at the party. How Benj was able to get the girl alone and tell her how he felt and how Danah trapped a girl in a room with him, with the hopes of getting laid.

The other two took Eddie’s mother’s boyfriend’s car and had a night they will never forget themselves. Which, in the end, was able to get them to have the respect that Connor wanted and helped Eddie to stand up for himself and tell the man in his house to behave.

Nice movie to catch on Netflix if you have the time, I found it was worth the watch.

The Garfield Movie (2024)

The Garfield Movie (2024)

 3/10

Starring          

Chris Pratt

Samuel L. Jackson

Hannah Waddingham

Ving Rhames

 

Directed by Mark Dindal

 

I have fond memories of the 2004 Garfield: The Movie. That movie starred Bill Murray (as the voice of Garfield), Breckin Meyer as Jon and Jennifer Love Hewitt as Liz, Jon’s love interest. That movie was live action with Garfield being CGI. This movie on the other hand is complete animation. Now, watching this new one, I was hopeful that I would like it. I will be honest, I have not given the 20-year-old Garfield movie a rewatch, so I do not know how I will feel seeing it now, but this one did not give me the same vibe as that one did, when I saw it 20 years ago.

This movie played like it was meant for children, so I will regard it as so. Because for me, other than Odie everyone else in the movie was a bore.

The plot is boring, as it plays to us as a reunion movie between Garfield and his father Vic, by doing this the movie just crosses all the Ts and dots the Is from cliché-r-us. Not playing anything new, just giving us the same old stories of parent and child, separated at birth. You know those Hollywood stories, where both now must overcome a hurdle to survive and to achieve this, they must overcome the past and work together.

The plot starts with us meeting Garfield, he is enjoying his lazy life, when he and Odie gets kidnapped by Jinx and her crew. Jinx used to be part of Vic’s crewmember as they go about committing crime years ago.

Jinx got captured during one of their heists, and wants revenge on Vic, because she believes Vic did not do enough to save her. She kidnapped Garfield and wants both he and Vic to work together to get her a quart of milk for everyday she spent locked up, which was more than four years. They must do this, or else Jinx’s goon will be set on them. So, the two go out to fulfil this new heist, and we see them struggle to work together because Garfield is holding on to the past of being abandoned by his father, and Vic is struggling to explain to Garfield that things did not play out the way he thinks it did. You will need to see the whole movie to see how they get on.

If you can stomach the boredom of this movie, then maybe you can enjoy it, if like me, you cannot stand boring movies with no glimpse of trying to do anything new, then I will advise you to stay away from this movie.

All that said, the movie was a great commercial success in the box office, so I will not be surprised if a part two is already being drafted to be made.

Outrageous Fortune (1987)

Outrageous Fortune (1987)

 

3/10

Starring          

Shelley Long

Bette Midler

 

Directed by Arthur Hiller

 

You do not get that much free time to do a lot of things in life. When you do get that free time, you can decide to take a walk with your dog, go for a picnic, have a nap or do what I did, watch a movie.

It would have been best I donated my free time to my office and work for free. When you decide to watch a movie, the biggest mistake you can make is to watch a movie that does not to be able to entertain, no matter how hard it tries.

Outrageous Fortune is a complete waste of time. How this movie made a lot of money in the box office and earn Midler a Golden Globe nomination goes above my head.

The whole movie context is lame and hard to relate to, because nothing that is happening or being shown to happen is in any way possible even in the context, they claim it can.

The leads are two women from opposite ends of the spectrum, who happen to be in a relationship with the same man, Michael. Michael uses them to be able to pass messages to his partner-in-crime, who happens to be the acting teacher of these two women. Michael is on the run from the CIA because he stole something, and he is using the women as mules to pass messages with his potential buyer.

Now the complexity of achieving getting these two women is not shown, nor do we see how he uses them to pass the messages, we are just told. From this point, the acting in this movie is so dreadful it is amazing and as the plot develops – we are exposed to so many plot holes. These two women must have some superpowers because they were able to track down a man, that the entire CIA could not.

I think what was worse still was seeing the CIA hoping these two women, will be able to assist them to track down the villain.

The two women in question are actresses who happen by some share luck to be in the same acting class and to have the same taste in men, are Lauren (Shelley Long) and Sandy (Bette Midler).

If like me, you happen to just come across this movie playing, and decided to sit through it, then I am sorry. If you have not, then please save yourself the pain, it is not worth the time.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024)

Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024)

 

5/10

Starring          

Will Smith

Martin Lawrence

 

Directed by Adil & Bilall

 

I know Will Smith is on a redemption run, so this movie is a good start on that run. It is not as bad as you will expect it. It is also not as great or cool as I thought it will be. My problem is movies of now lack the grit of the times when the first Bad Boys was done.

Now everything must have some computer genius moving accounts, hacking and cryptic messages and bad guys who seem to have too much connection into things, that just is so unrealistic.

You can send a cryptic message to people, so instead of just sending them the message directly, what you do is this. You send them a message, that points them to someone. The someone then hid a link to another message in a flashing screen, which can only be seen if you record the screen and go through it frame by frame. How did they discover this link? Well, an officer without any prompt from anyone decided to do the frame by frame look at a flashing screen, like… what?

How did she know to do that?

The lazy writing in this movie is so apparent it is annoying. The movie’s plot makes no sense at all and that in itself is even more annoying. I watched it to the end, thinking there will be a reason, why the bad guys, who have gotten away with killing the captain, will decide to bring up the matter again after many years. But I guess the writers are so lazy, they just could not find a better way to get the two actors angry.

All that said, I enjoyed the action, and the references to the old movies, and I did enjoy some of the comedic laughs I got seeing this movie, but the movie is not leaving behind a lasting impression. Like the other two before this, it is easily forgettable. The first Bad Boys movie leaves an everlasting imprint, the others after it do not.

This movie is about Captain Howard, who as we know is dead. The whole Bad Boys franchise (other than the first movie) is so forgettable, I was trying hard to remember this. Now, in present time, the two buddy cops Mike (Will Smith) and Marcus (Martin Lawrence) are at a wedding when Marcus had a heart attack and almost died.

His survival meant he looked at life differently and then, Captain Howard is implicated in a crime. His reputation is at stake because some millions have been found in his account, dating back to years, showing he is in bed with the cartel.

Now, I am not trying to ruin this, but even this setup was useless. You see, you can back date payments and forge documents to make it look like you have been paying money for some period, but this is traceable. Everything leaves a time stamp, so if anyone does just a tiny bit of forensic check, they will see this is fake. Hollywood writers must think everyone is dumb and knows nothing about how computers work.

Mike and Marcus are upset and want to clear their captain’s name, but they were not upset enough, says the writers. So, the captain sent them a cryptic message that points them to someone, who gets killed when he was trying to point them to the flashing screen, then they get shot at and almost get killed trying to catch the bad guys.

The movie, in a succinct way, is about these two trying to clear their captain's name and identify the corrupt cops in their station.

As far as lazy writing goes, this movie is full of it, and it is so forgettable a movie.

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

 

7/10

Starring          

Ryan Reynolds

Hugh Jackman

Emma Corrin

Matthew Macfadyen

 

Directed by Shawn Levy

 

The best way I saw this movie and will advise anyone else to see it is to keep away from previews and spoilers (if that is possible). This is a fun movie to see and although it is not the best superhero movie there is other there, it is good enough for anyone to go see.

This movie may be a bit difficult to follow if you are not someone who has been watching all the superhero movies from the late 90s until now. In fact, this movie was made for people in their 30s and above, and I do not think the writers, producers and makers are apologetic about it. Because there are a lot of cameos and many jokes that only people who have been watching superhero movies from the late 90s will understand.

You can tell that the movie was a fun project, and you can tell that everyone had fun on set making the movie. Some of the critic’s points about this movie are obvious to see when you watch the movie, but it did not mar the experience of seeing it. I, too, felt the plot could have taken another path which would have been more fun. I also felt there were way too many CGI moments, which could have been reduced (but maybe it was not possible).

It is the 34th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and it is a sequel to Fox's Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool 2 (2018), before Disney bought Fox and now own the X-Men characters. So, this is the first cinematic release from that purchase that has to do with the Marvel Universe, and it kept to its R rating.

The movie plot is very simple. Deadpool/Wade (Ryan Reynolds) wants to mean something, wants to matter (because his girlfriend just dumped him). So, he decided to see if he could join the Avengers by jumping from his timeline, Earth-10005 to the MCU timeline, Earth-616 using Cable's time-travelling device (from Deadpool 2 (2018)). He did not get the part and decided to go back to his timeline and hang up his Deadpool life and be an ordinary Joe.

During his birthday, he got a visit from the TVA (Time Variance Authority). They capture him and bring him to Mr. Paradox. Paradox tells him that he has been offered a place on Earth-616 (the MCU avengers timeline) so he can get his opportunity to join the Avengers. There is a catch though, he cannot go back to his timeline because the Logan of his timeline (from the Fox Movie Logan) is dead, and since he (Logan) is the anchor of Earth-10005 timeline, his death will bring an end to Earth-10005.

Knowing Wade, and since all the people he cared about are in the timeline he is coming from, he uses Cable’s device to jump through different Earth timelines looking for a Logan (Wolverine) that he can take to his. But you can guess that things do not work like that and soon, he and the Logan he got were sent to the void by Paradox as Wade does not want to play along. With his world at stake, Wade needs to find a way to get out of the void and stop Paradox and save his world.

There is one catch, though, this Logan he has with him, is the worst Logan he could have found in all the entire multiverse.

You should see this movie – it is worth it.