Social Icons

Creed II (2018)


Creed II (2018)



6/10



Starring
Michael B. Jordan
Sylvester Stallone
Tessa Thompson
Dolph Lundgren


Directed by Steven Caple Jr.



Following the success of Creed (2015), it was pretty clear Hollywood wouldn’t let this story end without a sequel. Creed starred Michael B. Jordan as the son of Apollo Creed, the man killed in the boxing ring by Ivan Drago in Rocky IV (1985).
This follow-up sequel doesn’t stray far from what you’d expect from the eighth film in the Rocky franchise. Written by Sylvester Stallone, the movie sticks to the same formula used in the Rocky series after Rocky (1976) and Rocky II (1979). After those first two films, the story follows a predictable pattern: introduce an opponent who’s larger than life and seemingly unbeatable, and then have Rocky (or his protégé) take them down.

The Rocky sequels after Rocky and Rocky II may have been popular, but they were just as predictable as this movie. Don’t expect any surprises here—in fact, you’ll probably guess your way through the entire film. The movie doesn’t even try to spice things up.
In this installment, there’s a new player in town: the son of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Lundgren and several others reprise their roles in this movie.
The new challenger, like his father Ivan, seems unstoppable. And here’s where the movie doesn’t even attempt to change the script—only Rocky’s intervention can take him down.


The movie shows Creed acting like an overgrown child who refuses to let common sense guide his decisions. We see him throw a tantrum when Rocky refuses to help him fight Drago.
Creed claims this fight is about avenging his father, but Rocky tells him he’s not mentally ready for it.

Meanwhile, Ivan Drago is trying to reclaim his glory days through his son. He pushes his son to the brink, almost unbearably so. His goal? Rocky took away his glory, and now he’ll get it back by taking down Rocky’s protégé.
All this happens while Creed’s love interest, Bianca (Tessa Thompson, reprising her role from Creed), becomes his wife.

Their union is further blessed with a child. The story takes us through Creed and Rocky parting ways and then reconnecting to take on Drago.

Like I said, the movie is highly predictable and stays consistent with what it’s trying to prove and do. That proof? If a formula isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it. That said, a Creed III might be pushing it if they decide to make it, but this is Hollywood, so I am sure it will be done.


Polar (2019)


Polar (2019)



7/10



Starring
Mads Mikkelsen
Vanessa Hudgens
Katheryn Winnick
Matt Lucas


Directed by Jonas Åkerlund


Polar isn’t your regular action movie—it’s intense, dramatic, and has a thrilling ending that leaves the door wide open for possible sequels.
I haven’t read the Dark Horse comic this movie is based on, but I can tell you this film feels like a mix of John Wick and Taken, with a bit more blood and nudity thrown in.
I guess Netflix wanted their own antihero star, especially since Disney has been pulling Marvel’s Defenders characters from Netflix.

What makes this movie different from John Wick?
This time, our hero isn’t retired yet. In John Wick, the character was given an impossible task to earn his retirement. Here, our hero has reached retirement age.
The company he works for retires their assassins at 50. The catch? These assassins have a pension program. When it’s time to pay out, the company decides to eliminate them instead. This hasn’t always been the case, as you’ll gather from the film, but new management comes with its own rules.

Our assassin in focus is Duncan Vizla, also known as Black Kaiser, played by Mads Mikkelsen. He’s 50 years old and the best the company has to offer. With a massive pension plan of over eight million dollars, the company decides it’s time to take him out. The problem? Their first attempt didn’t go as planned, and it tipped him off that something was up.

Their first try was ruined by bad assumptions. They sent him to kill a target, but the target was actually paid to kill him. The plan was for Duncan to call in when he saw the target, but instead, he killed the mark first and called in later. By doing so, he stumbled upon his own file and realized something was wrong.

That’s how the cat-and-mouse game begins. We see betrayal, setups gone wrong, and Duncan proving he’s a force to be reckoned with. The company’s head, played by Matt Lucas, had chances to call off the chase, but his greed and the need to cover his expenses kept him going.

Mads Mikkelsen shines in this movie, delivering a performance that’s way ahead of the curve. The rest of the cast also gives it their all, with performances that’ll leave you wanting more.

The movie leaves plenty of loose ends for a potential sequel, and I can’t wait to see how they tie them up.

With amazing kills, jaw-dropping counterattacks, and plenty of thrills, Polar is a wild ride. Get ready to have the time of your life—and maybe start begging for a sequel in 2020.

Mortal Engines (2018)


Mortal Engines (2018)



3/10



Starring
Hera Hilmar
Robert Sheehan
Hugo Weaving


Directed by Christian Rivers



I’ll take my time to explain why this movie feels so out of touch with itself—it’s surprising it has any good reviews at all.
Mortal Engines seems more focused on what it’s trying to achieve and impressing the filmmakers than entertaining us, the viewers.

Does the movie have an aim?
Well, to the makers, it does. But for me, someone who knows nothing about the source material and was just curious to see a Peter Jackson film, I was left unimpressed. I had no idea what the movie was trying to do. The genre-crossing was so blandly executed that if you’re not careful, you might doze off. Even though the actors were fully committed to their roles, the movie failed at the one thing every film should do: entertain.

My biggest turn-off was how much happened in the first twenty-five minutes. It felt like a premature explosion of ideas. Then, for the next twenty-five minutes, almost nothing happens. The movie meanders through pointless scenes, introduces random characters, and has a flow that’s just not worth the time invested to keep up.


Now, the plot: the movie follows a girl named Hester (not Elizabeth) with a scar across her face, which she got when she was eight years old.
It’s also about a man named Valentine, who has a diabolical vision for the future—a future where he has the power to destroy any city that opposes him.
What connects Hester to Valentine is her mother. Valentine murdered Hester’s mother and scarred Hester in the process.
All of this takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where cities move on wheels. Why the future is like this? The movie doesn’t bother to explain.
In this world, bigger cities consume smaller ones for fuel and manpower.


Fair warning: don’t get confused about Valentine’s daughter in this movie—she has no real purpose. She’s mainly used to introduce a historian named Tom, who collects dangerous artifacts tied to the destruction of Earth.
She’s also the one who saves Valentine when Hester tries to kill him. After failing to apprehend Hester, Tom is thrown off the moving city and ends up in the hands of the very person he tried to capture: Hester.

Hester is still determined to get her revenge, Tom just wants to return to city life, and Valentine remains obsessed with collecting old weapons to create a device powerful enough to wipe out entire cities.

In the end, the movie misses the mark on almost everything. I don’t have fond memories of watching it, and the only thing I’m 100% sure of is that it’s hard to believe anyone actually liked this movie.





Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)


Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)



4/10



Starring
Eddie Redmayne
Katherine Waterston
Dan Fogler


Directed by David Yates


Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is full of noise, plot twists, and suspense, but despite all that, the film is boring and less interesting than even the weakest movie in the Harry Potter or Fantastic Beasts franchise.

At one point, I couldn’t understand why so much was happening in the movie, yet so little of it led to any excitement. It felt like every turn revealed something important, only for that thing to connect to another reveal much later. This approach can be very annoying and, frankly, boring. I don’t get how this movie was praised by critics because, for me, it was a struggle to sit through its over-two-hour runtime.

The odd thing is, J.K. Rowling wrote the screenplay, and it’s clear she’s plotting something big. This might work well in a two-part book where the first part is in your hands and the second is waiting on the shelf. But in this movie, the way things unfolded left me bored with the franchise. It’s taking too long to get anywhere, and it’s taking even longer for things to start adding up.


The plot picks up three months after the first movie ends, with Newt trying to get his international travel rights reinstated. His rights were revoked because of what happened in New York during the first film.

Newt is given a condition to get his travel pass back: he must help the Ministry of Magic find Credence Barebone, the man believed to be the only living pure-blood wizard. Grindelwald wants Credence as a pawn to kill Albus Dumbledore.

After refusing to take sides or help the Ministry, Newt is dismissed. Later, Dumbledore contacts him and convinces him to search for Credence. Newt, along with his friend and human companion Jacob, sets out on the mission.

This search takes us through some dark backstories for many characters. We learn about Dumbledore and Grindelwald’s past relationship, why Newt is so different from others, and more about Credence’s origins.
Along the way, we lose some characters, see Grindelwald recruiting wizards to his cause, and get a glimpse of the larger conflict brewing.

For me, the movie was too deep for its own good. It introduced so many characters who appeared briefly and then vanished, leaving too many loose ends. You’re left wishing they’d start tying things together sooner rather than later. A third movie is set to release in 2020, so we’ll see if it can salvage the mess.


Replicas (2018)


Replicas (2018)



3/10



Starring
Keanu Reeves
Alice Eve


Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff


Have you seen the science fiction movie Replicas? If you haven’t, please save yourself the pain.

The movie stars Keanu Reeves, but it’s not enticing, and the story is very sad—not dramatic sad, but boring sad. You can literally hear the time ticking away as you waste over an hour of your life watching this film. You can’t fall asleep because you’re too angry, and you can’t throw anything at the screen because you can’t afford the damage. Instead, you just sit there wondering, “How bad can it get from here?” Then it reaches the climax, and you realize there’s still more horrid writing ahead.

This movie is about mind transfer, and the acting feels like it was done by people who were just there for the paycheck. It’s clear they didn’t care whether anyone would mind that they, too, thought the movie wouldn’t amount to anything in the end.
Even Keanu Reeves wasn’t in his “A” game here—or maybe the problem was just the wrong casting.


The movie’s plot follows a scientist genius, played by Keanu Reeves. He’s married with three kids, and his job is to figure out how to transfer the consciousness of a recently deceased person into a machine.

The first successful trial, which resulted in some form of speech, was mostly a disaster—and that’s what we see, as they’ve been at this for a long time.

The moral implications of these trials start to weigh on his wife, and she asks him to be careful. One unfortunate night, he and his family are involved in an accident, and he’s the only survivor.
He calls his colleague from work to bring over the synthetic bodies they’ve been developing for their experiments. Miraculously, he transfers the consciousness of his wife and two of his kids into these new bodies.

The miracle works this time, driven by his desperate need to have his family back. The only issue? They only had three bodies, so he had to make a drastic decision.

He edited his family’s memories to exclude the crash and the existence of his youngest child. He even removed all traces of her from their home. He put his family to bed, and in the morning, they woke up and carried on as if nothing had happened.

Unbeknownst to him, his success was monitored by the company he works for. Now, they want in on his breakthrough, but he doesn’t want to share.

That’s what this total crap of a movie is about. Don’t bother enduring it or looking for a reason to watch it.


A Life Less Ordinary (1997)


A Life Less Ordinary (1997)



6/10



Starring
Ewan McGregor
Cameron Diaz
Holly hunter
Delroy Lindo


Directed by Danny Boyle


Do you want to see a movie go to crap in the final moments?
Are you dying to watch a movie grow on you, only for everything to fall apart in the last minute?
Then look no further than this movie. I enjoy watching it, but I always try to skip the ending. Everything would’ve been perfect if the writers had just thought things through for a second. How could a hole in the heart be the one thing missing from this movie?

The movie wasn’t well-received when it was released, and you can understand why. The plot is flimsy, the actors seem overly invested, and the ending is downright rotten. Yet, for me, I still watch it often because sometimes a simple love story can be heart-warming.

The movie’s plot follows two people: Robert (Ewan McGregor) and Celine (Cameron Diaz). In heaven, there’s a department whose job is to ensure that two people destined for each other end up together. The problem? With the growing trend of divorce and breakups, the department’s success rate is dwindling—and God, apparently, is coming down hard on them.
Two angels, O’Reilly (Holly Hunter) and Jackson (Delroy Lindo), are assigned to our two leads. Robert is a janitor at a company who gets fired and replaced by a machine. Celine is the daughter of the millionaire who owns the company. She’s bored, cycling through boyfriends like clothes because she can’t find the “perfect fit.”

Fed up with being treated like crap and overlooked, Robert decides to break back into the office during working hours to demand his job back from Celine’s dad. On that fateful day, Celine is also in the office, having a conversation with her father about settling down and starting a family.
Robert crashes their conversation, shouting and demanding his job back. Before he can get a full sentence out, security tackles him.

During the scuffle, Robert manages to grab one of the guards’ guns. Celine, seeing the gun on the floor near her, kicks it toward Robert. He grabs it, takes her hostage, and suddenly finds himself in a situation he didn’t plan for. Celine, who just wants to escape her father’s control, goes along with it, essentially helping Robert kidnap her.

Now, the two must figure out how to get money from her father while being chased by two angels posing as hired guns sent by her dad to kill Robert and retrieve Celine. The angels, however, are secretly hoping to use the chaos to bring Robert and Celine together.

Like I said, the movie’s story has me hooked on how things unfold between these two. But in the end, when all the writers had to do was find a way for the couple to escape with their lives, they went for a “love miracle.” The miracle is delivered in such a messy, meaningless way that it can make you hate everything that led up to it.


Disclaimer

All images featured on this site are the property of their respective copyright owners. They are used solely for illustrative and commentary purposes under fair use principles. This site is a personal blog, unaffiliated with or endorsed by any copyright holders. If you are the copyright owner of an image featured here and wish to have it removed, please contact me directly, and I will address your request promptly.