5 stars

dir: Reinaldo Marcus Green

2024

Hmm. Well. That was a movie.

Bob Marley: One Love is a film about an epileptic hamster living on a musical brick taken from one of the Egyptian pyramids placed on an ice volcano on one of the many moons of Jupiter painted silver and gold, silver and gold…

Nah, I might be fibbing.

It’s about a couple of years in the life of global reggae superstar Bob Marley. And they’re not even the good ones.

I guess, for people of a certain age, not only was Bob Marley a household name for the longest time, depending on your household, but there was also a time when every CD collection had to have, by law, a copy of his greatest hits compilation Legend. I didn’t make the rules, I just abided by them.

Every share house in Melbourne had a copy of it, at least one. These days, of course, there are few CD collections not shoved away somewhere in some dusty corner, and even less share houses in Melbourne. But Legend still gets millions of streams a day on whatever streaming service you can think of. Many of those songs still get played on greatest hits / golden oldie radio every day.

It’s not for me to talk about the man’s music or legacy, because, honestly, who the fuck cares about my opinion about Bob Marley? It’s like, yes I know, no-one should care about my opinions about anything (that isn’t about the sacred and divine medium of cinema!) But, like, I haven’t expressed my opinions about The Beatles, orange juice, the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa or Mount Everest recently, either.

My hot take, by the way, is that they’re all shit / overrated, but that’s by the by, and just between you and me shh don't tell anyone.

Anyone who has listened to popular music over the last forty years has heard all of these songs a million times, so you either like them and are filled with a warm, gooey feeling whenever they come up, or you’re coldly indifferent to them. Which means it’s doubly unlikely that you are reading a review about a film you’ll never watch.

dir: Brad Peyton

2024

Like, did you ever want to watch a whole movie where Jennifer Lopez argues continuously with her GPS / Alexa / Siri for two hours?

Because if you have a subscription to Neflix, all this and more can be bafflingly yours.

This curious lite sci-fi flick has a hero, being JLo, representing humanity, and a villain, Harlan (Simu Liu), representing AI. Don’t worry yourself, the flick goes to absolutely no trouble to define or explain what AI means in this context: all it means is when computers or robots want to kill us.

Like almost every instance of cinematic AI, in this film’s world, an AI that was otherwise docile has a moment and loses its shit, and infects all the other AIs, and they start killing humanity. So it’s Skynet, but instead of the Austrian beefcake of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger representing the AI, it’s the young handsome features of Simu Liu, but with blue eyes, so we know he’s evil.

He has decided that in order to save humanity he has to kill most of them, but leave a tiny fraction alive, to keep as pets, maybe? Anyway, in the middle of some crucial battle he flies off into outer space, eventually to return, we presume.

Twenty eight years later, a woman called Atlas, being JLo, who clearly is carrying the whole world on her shoulders, gets a chance to find out where he is so she can presumably kill him, kill him dead, and save humanity.

She is very distrustful of AI technology, but, wouldn’t you know it, the plot compels her to put aside her misgivings about AIs in order to bond with an AI in order to bring Harlan down. So the vast majority of this movie is watching JLo arguing with someone who isn’t there physically. Because us humans are quite dumb, and nowhere near as smart as AIs, to represent this disembodied AI, we are shown a glowing orb of some description, blue and yellow, sort of, so we know that she isn’t completely crazy and just talking to herself.

What doesn’t help, in terms of not seeming ‘crazy’, is that fucking hairstyle.

dir: William Eubanks

2024

They say we live in divisive times. That people can’t even agree on the basics anymore. The tiny surges in dopamine levels we’ve been trained to crave via the algorithms of social media apps and the online world means we fight with absolute strangers about the most miniscule of things, just to feel something.

I don’t know if that’s anymore true today that it has been in the past, but I feel almost certain about one thing, and one thing only: Land of Bad is a fucking terrible name for anything, let alone a movie. Flat out fucking terrible.

A movie, an honest to god movie. With people in it. Like, multiple Hemsworths (not Chris, but eh). And Australia’s Own (New Zealander) Russell Crowe. They’re in this movie, and whatever their contributions, with a title like that, how can they feel anything but shame, shame, shame?

Like, I can imagine how someone thought it up, maybe on drugs, not good ones:
“What’s another way of saying ‘You’re in for a World of Hurt’?
- How about, “Land of Bad?”
“Put down that crack pipe, you’ve got yourself a deal!”

Stop drilling, because you’ve struck oil. Paydirt. It almost doesn’t matter what you come up with next, what tedium you will put your audience through.

Starting from that absolute low point, the only direction is probably sideways.

The point of US military thrillers is mostly to reassure American audiences that their military is still the best in the world with all the best tech and weapons and that no-one else should even bother. In this age of drone strikes and satellites spying on people, the point is still, even with that technology, the US is the biggest and baddest, and everyone else sucks.

dir: David Ayer

2024

O Lordy, lordy. Spare me from such terrible times.

This fucking flick – it’s pretty fucking stupid. I guess that’s okay, but it’s almost comically, aggressively average, and grimly humorless to boot.

Jason Statham, once again, plays a guy with all the killing skills, who was content living a quiet life tending to bees, but then something happened and he had to kill about a thousand people in order to get revenge, sorry, I meant to say ‘justice’.

This is not Jason Statham’s first rodeo. He has literally played this role dozens of times already. And he’ll probably play it again for another 10 years before he gets tired of it. Although, honestly, he’s in his mid-fifties already, maybe do something different for a while? Might I suggest beekeeping?

There is something uniquely boring about the way the action is done in this flick. Most of the flick is Statham killing or punching or punch killing people who might as well have been mannequins in a mannequin warehouse. The people behind this flick think they’ve learned new lessons from the John Wick flicks in that they want to see someone besting hundreds of foes over the course of a bloated running time, but this flick has none of the flair or the inventiveness that goes into a lot of that stunt work and fight choreography. They felt they should skip that and just have Staham killing countless faceless minions in dull and grim ways. There is one decent knock-down-drag-out towards the end of the flick between Statham and some one-legged Afrikaner goon, but that’s it.

That’s a few competent minutes out of about a hundred minute movie.