Action

dir: Peyton Reed

2023

The Ant-Man flicks at least previously had the purpose of being lower stakes, a bit silly, a bit goofy, and more comedic than the serious / serious universe ending crap.

Now, no-one trusts that Paul Rudd on his own, with the help of his mates, and occasionally his girlfriend, is enough to carry a flick. Now it has to be him against a multiverse spanning supervillain who, I dunno, wants to control everything. Why can’t he just steal some shit and help people out?

Nup, they have to use his flick to presage the entry of another Thanos-type villain, except this time he’s like the worst person in every single universe, so even if they kill a whole bunch of him / them, there’s plenty more where he came from.

Most of the flick transpires in the Quantum Realm, a realm below the sub-atomic, which is basically considered to be just a freaky looking place where there’s people and strange organisms, and sentient broccoli-headed dudes, but mostly it’s just like yet another planet in Star Wars. Some of the visuals are okay. Mostly it’s just a missed opportunity.

The flick hinges a lot on Janet Van Dyne’s character (Michelle Pfeiffer) not having told anyone about what she got up to for 30 years when she was trapped in the Quantum Realm. It’s been years, but she never thought to tell anyone about how there was a super scary tyrant that she helped rise to power, or that she banged Bill Murray. You would think she would have told someone about that, but then again, maybe she regretted it a tad.

The sex with Bill Murray, I mean, not the tyrant-enabling, but then I’m not completely sure.

dir: Jean-François Richet

2023

PLANE! It’s called PLANE. Not even “THE” Plane. Not even Airplane!

Just PLANE. I would love to know why. I mean, perhaps the motivation or the thinking behind it isn’t that complex. After all, there is definitely a plane in this movie. But someone must have thought “fuck it, we’ll just call it Plane” after arguing for weeks. But why name it after that one object?

There are also other objects, other machines in this movie. At one point a telephone, an old landline, plays a crucial role in the story. I notice they didn’t call the movie PHONE. They could have called it GUN, or Plane Crash. Something simple, something declamatory. I mean Titanic was about a boat called the SS Titanic which sank a while back. They could have called it Boat by that logic.

I mean, this plane has a name too. The Trailblazer 119. No, too complicated, from a marketing perspective, as a title. Too frontloaded. Requires too much thinking. People will wonder what happened to the other 118 Trailblazers before this one.

I mean, what even is a thing? A plane? Is it the object itself, or what it does, or what happens to it? Do we assume that this plane is itself the Platonic ideal of a plane, or the essence of planeness? Or is it a stand-in, a symbol, representing all planes, all possible planes? You know what you are getting when you call a movie Plane. There will be a plane. And you will look at it, and think “that’s a plane, all right. Looks pretty CGI and fake, but it’s definitely a plane.”

Or could they even had been more subversive and called it Generic Movie Title? Now for that I would pay even more good money to see. Snakes on a Plane had snakes on a plane, and classic short film Football in the Groin had a football in the groin, but Plane?

It’s set mainly on a train in Spain while it rains.

dir: Colin Trevorrow

2022

Wow, okay, so some movies have a million things in them and still feel kinda empty.

The first film in this stupid new trilogy had only one good moment in it, which was a strange half second or so where a resort under attack by flying dinosaurs has one guy slowly trying to get away from the monsters even though he’s trying not to spill two very large margaritas that he’s carrying.

That was it. A second or two at most that made me laugh, or possibly chortle, in a film that was probably 13 hours long. The second flick Fallen Kingdom I don’t really remember despite having seen it, but I will guess that about the only good moment was a ruthless capitalist auctioning off dinosaurs getting eaten by said dinosaurs towards the end of the film.

It's that classic moment of “Why, I never thought that I, the smarmy vicious chap releasing face eating monsters into the world would ever ironically get MY face eaten off!!”

This latest flick Dominion doesn’t have a lot going for it despite having 400 main characters and a constant hail of call backs to the earlier films, especially the 1st one. It also brings back Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, again for very little good reason.

But the main chumps of the new trilogy were meant to be Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and either some clone girl or a velociraptor called Blue (Tilda Swinton, probably). They’re here too, but you are asking yourself why these people are here, why any of them are here.

Dinosaurs, now, by the time of this flick, are all over the world, even the cold places. They are not confined to an island paradise or some rich jerk’s palatial estate: They’re everywhere!

But they’re not even the big deal here. The big deal, or the world ending threat is that a very rich fuckhead (Campbell Scott) has genetically engineered monstrous locusts that eat every crop in the world except for the ones engineered by his company Biosyn. His plan is…

What is his plan again? If everyone starves to death then their ghosts will come to his company to buy his grain? Ghost cap in ghost hand? How was that plan going to play out?

Stupid decisions made by billionaires are the bread and butter not only of this entire series of dinosaur films but also of most of the science fiction that comes out these days. The thing is, they’ve completely gone beyond the idea of Olympian arrogance or hubris by the massively wealthy being the cause of their own downfall, to “well, that last billionaire was not rich or smart enough, but I’m sure I’m smart and rich enough to make it work”.

dir: David Leitch

2022

It’s coming to that time of year where I try to catch up on some of the more mainstream and mindless crap that’s out there, just so I can pretend I’m an egalitarian man of the people and not the snooty aesthete and shameless snob that I actually am.

In that spirit I decided to watch a flick that sounds made up, as in, a fictional movie within some other movie, but it turns out it’s actually real, with actual actors and all.

Bullet Train is mostly set on a Japanese train, but there are like 3 Japanese people in the movie. Everyone else is from elsewhere. They’re not even ex-pats or people who live and work in Japan for whatever reason: they’ve all been hired / tricked / manipulated into being on the train for whatever reasons.

They are all, mostly, assassins or the kinds of people who hire assassins and ne’er-do-wells to do their rich people’s dirty work for them. There are way too many people in the movie, but most of them die pretty quickly, so you don’t really have to get to know their motivations or their hopes and dreams, or even their names.

There’s Ladybug (Brad Pitt), a reluctant assassin who doesn’t want to kill anymore, there’s Lemon and Tangerine (Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who do want to kill people, there’s the Prince (Joey King) who wants to kill everyone, there’s some kidnapped guy’s son (Logan Lerman) who has face tattoos so you know he’s going to die immediately, there’s a guy whose son was flung off a building (Andrew Koji), and his dad The Elder (the great Hiroyuki Sanada, an Actual Japanese Person). And then there’s the head of the yakuza, being, of course, The White Death (Michael Shannon).

Did I forget anyone? Oh, yeah, Bad Bunny turns up as a guy called The Wolf who is so dumb he ends up killing himself, and some lady who poisons people (Zazie Beetz) who, get this, poisons herself.

There are probably more people I’ve forgotten. It’s not a memorable film. It’s the kind of film so convoluted and so pointlessly drawn out that you forget who is who and why they’re trying to kill each other within seconds of a scene changing.

It’s been likened to Guy Ritchie’s stuff post-Lock, Stock, and that’s a pretty damning indictment. I loathe when any director overuses the “well, twelve minutes ago…” flashback to explain stuff happening in real time, only to do it again every fifteen minutes or so. It’s lazy bullshit.