6 stars

Nobody 2

Surely by now he's a Somebody. Surely

dir: Timo Tjahjanto

2025

Nobody 2 is maybe the sequel nobody wanted to a film called Nobody, which someone wanted because it was a minor hit. Premised with “what if you had a middle aged guy bored with his life who decides to go on John Wick- like rampages just for shits and giggles and because his family think he’s pathetic?” it really struck a chord with shlubs and schlemiels everywhere.

Wow, what a premise. So in the first flick the main guy was bored, enervated, listless, a lump to his wife and kids, going through the motions, despite having been at an earlier point in his life a government sanctioned killer of killers. He decides to come out of retirement not because of any crisis or because anyone killed his dog or anything; it’s just because he’s bored.

And he beats up some Russians, which leads to needing to kill more Russians, and by the end he has to kill all the Russians. And then everyone; wife, children, dog, they are satisfied and grateful, and Hutch (Bob Odenkirk) gives up his boring job and goes back to killing people full time. Everybody’s happy!

This sequel is predicated on the premise that even someone really good at killing would get bored of his job eventually. It entirely replicates the whole basis of the first flick, being that Hutch is working in such a dedicated fashion that it’s indistinguishable from the mundane job he was previously doing down at the cracker factory that left him disconnected from his family and dissatisfied with life in general. So, it’s exactly where the first one started from, but it tenders a different solution to his existential malaise this time: maybe a holiday from all the killings will help Hutch reconnect with his family, by actually spending time with them?

Rating:

6 stars

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Weapons

I believe the children are our future, unless we stop them

dir: Zach Cregger

2025

It was, at least for me, always going to be hard for this director to follow up his last, very excellent horror flick Barbarian. It was so good and so unexpected that, yes, okay, I demand, in full Karen mode not to speak to his manager but for him to make another solid, unexpected, unpredictable flick.

I guess he did that. It was successful, more successful than Barbarian financially, and it had ads on tv and on bus shelters in my strange neck of the woods.

So why didn’t I like it that much?

There are parts of the so-called “American Experiment” that, to the people outside of America, make it look utterly insane. I’m not going to lower myself to talk about the political stuff. The gun thing, the collective shoulder shrug after each new gun massacre, the thoughts and prayers and business as usual after classrooms get shot up, and countless children die, that makes them all look collectively fucking insane.

Weapons, perversely, pops us into this national psychosis, but has nothing to do with gun violence. It’s animated by something that almost seems like one of the tragedies alluded to, but instead takes it into an unpredictable yet unfortunately unproductive direction. Because of how insanely comical the ‘solution’ is, how outside of actual human experience, for me the flick itself becomes something of a shoulder shrug, where you wonder what the point was.

The set up is fine, the explanation is meaningless.

One particular night in an unremarkable Pennsylvanian town, a bunch of kids, all from the same 3rd grade primary school classroom go missing, all bar one, being Alex (Cary Christopher). All seventeen of the kids snuck out of their homes at exactly 2.17am, and started running in the same direction, with their arms out behind them.

Everyone thinks the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), must know something or be responsible. Everyone thinks Alex must know something, but he couldn’t be responsible, could he, and he’s not forthcoming with info.

Rating:

6 stars

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729 reads

Jurassic World Rebirth

I would have called it Jurassic It Never Ends
if I'd been asked

dir: Gareth Edwards

2025

Dinosaurs. Now people are sick of them. Now people are bored of them, apparently.

Except kids. Kids between the ages of, I dunno, 5 and 12 are still fascinated by them, but everyone else is suffering from reptilian fatigue. I guess.

These films do seem to be doing a bizarre meta-commentary on themselves. They seem to be saying “well, sure, we keep pumping these out, and your interest waxes and wanes, but maybe this time…?” The last flick, Jurassic World Dominion, described a world with an abundance, an embarrassment of riches of dinosaurs. A modern world overflowing with them. They were on the streets, in people’s breakfast cereals, on their subways; you couldn’t get away from them.

To combat the plethora of thunder lizards they hired / cast way too many people, humans (if you include Chris Pratt amongst them), including the other OGs of the franchises, being Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum (and 17 other main roles, no exaggeration). And yet when was the last time you heard anyone say anything positive about that flick other than “it was nice to see Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum again?”

I mean, these days… if you quizzed most people, they wouldn’t even be able to tell you what the last one’s title was, they’d probably just say in conversation “the last one.”

Add to that, this one, which people, if they saw it, will just refer to as the last one. As maximalist as the previous one might have sounded, in this one the dinosaurs have made a full retreat by mostly regaining their status as extinct. Only random, narratively convenient dinosaurs still live these days, and that’s mostly around the equator, mostly just doing their thing.

Those areas are marked off limits to humans, and are patrolled etc to keep them out rather than the dinos in, yet of course the characters here will need some reason to break in and be chased by dinosaurs for a couple of hours for our amusement.

It’s very much a return to the traditional model of just having people run around as much as possible as dinosaurs try to eat them. And the classic, most traditional model of this needs kids to arbitrarily be wedged into the story so that kids can be imperiled, which we enjoy more, somehow?

Rating:

6 stars

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661 reads

Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning

Look at this absolute dingleberry, dangling away up there

dir: Christopher McQuarrie

2025

Enough already.

We’ve seen enough of Tom Cruise running. We get it. You’re the boy that won’t grow up, besides being in your 60s. We further get it: you’re really fit for your age, and possibly Scientology is keeping you eternally youthful (I mean, comparatively, for someone your age). And you can run fast and jump off things and onto other things, and that you’re “famous” for doing your own stunts.

We get it. No-one’s saying you can’t do all of that stuff. We’re just saying, okay, we believe you, but that’s enough already.

These films have never been about a team of heroes who save the world from megalomaniacal villains. They have all been about one guy, called Ethan Hunt, who saves the world routinely, and then there are some hangers on. Of course they do “important” stuff, but if they weren’t around, Ethan Hunt would doubtless figure out how to save the day some other way, he just wouldn’t have someone around to explain things to (for the audience’s sake). Sure, they could have gone the Deadpool route and have had him continuously talking to the audience, but even his star power couldn’t make that that interesting for eight fucking movies.

This film completes whatever all that bullshit was that they did in the previous movie, which, if I recall, was called Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1. Terrible name for a movie, almost as bad as calling a film The Last Samurai and having Tom Cruise as the main character. In the previous film there was a really nasty guy called Gabriel (Esai Morales) who strutted around mostly killing women that Ethan Hunt had spoken to or held hands with. He did this for his own personal gratification, not generally because the plot required it. He also happened to be in league with an AI that had reached self-awareness and therefore immediately planned to kill everyone.

What would an AI want with a dead planet? No idea, but I am not as smart as theoretical AIs in films where people jump motorbikes onto trains or fight people for parachutes in biplanes or have to find things in sunken submarines in order to save us all.

Rating:

6 stars

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761 reads

The Salt Path

You salty sea dogs, you

dir: Marianne Elliot

2025

Talk about missing the boat on something…

I don’t even really know if it’s possible to talk about this flick without mentioning or being mindful of the firestorm that arose a month after this flick appeared in cinemas, even Australian cinemas, though admittedly of the arthouse kind. Your Dendys, your Novas, your Lidos, your Palace Cinemas; your places where oldies go to in droves and young people avoid with a shudder.

For almost a month they would have been packing the oldies in, probably overselling seats and stacking them up to the rafters as they watched on in salty joy as grateful tears streaked down their leathery faces, revelling as they were in the heartfelt experiences of Raynor Winn and her husband Moth as life dealt them bad card after bad card and they just kept trucking on, kept walking that salty Cornwall path, not letting the world get them down.

Maybe some of them, the cinema patrons, that is, were clutching one of Raynor Winn’s many books to their chests as they dutifully filed in to the theatre, seeing as they have been bestselling books. To them, the legions of the dusty faithful, they just wanted to hear and see and feel all the things the books had given them thus far in black and white paper form, but now with people and images and music etc.

They would have dried their tears on the pages of her memoirs, content that they’d just watched a wonderful pair of actors, being the great Gillian Anderson and the pretty okay Jason Isaacs, bring to life these heroic characters of Raynor and Moth, two absolute troopers, two modern day saints who walk amongst the rest of us lowly scum.

Rating:

6 stars

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853 reads

The Accountant 2

Beefy, so beefy

dir: Gavin O’Connor

2025

Who in the name of fuck asked for a sequel to The Accountant? Other than Ben Affleck, or Ben Affleck's accountant, can you imagine anyone writing letters to their local MP or kids in comment sections begging for another movie where Ben Affleck plays an autistic chartered accountant who also happens to have access to limitless funds and no shortage of weaponry?

Wait, that just sounds like another Batman sequel.

When I say that such a sequel is unlikely, when it clearly exists, it’s because the first movie, if you went into it blind, was a hilarious example of escalation into insane realms: it was the equivalent of finding out that the guy making your sandwich at the local deli is not only ex-SAS, but they’re undercover, and they can kill 50 trained killers with only their butter knife, but not only that, but they own all the butter knives in the world, and run all the Subway franchises, plus they have weapons everywhere, and they somehow can kill anyone they want to because they’re neuro-divergent?

The fact that the entirety of the characterisation they give for this character is that he’s autistic, and that it justifies two feature action films where he gets to kill hundreds of people is perhaps an unintended slight against an entire community of people who never asked for such slander, but also it raises the bar to a completely unrealistic level of expectation. It was bad enough back in the day when Rain Man established an unearned and unrealistic expectation that severely autistic people make up for their lack of social graces and ability to communicate by being able to count cards in Las Vegas; these contemporary flicks posit that autistic people make for great killers, hackers and super criminals just because they’re on the spectrum.

Rating:

6 stars

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1094 reads

The Old Woman with the Knife

There was an old woman, who got hold of a knife,
and went on a rampage, because in her life,
she'd never expected to end up in a facility,
that treated her worse than we'd treat a donkey

(파과)

dir: Min Kyu-dong

2025

I’ve never pretended to be an expert on South Korean culture or South Korean movies, but I can definitively say that they sometimes make great films.

This isn’t one of them, but it’s important to remind yourself of that fact.

This flick is okay, though. It is essentially a South Korean take on John Wick, just with a woman of the same age in the role, and instead of killing thousands of people she only kills a hundred or so. It must be a modesty thing.

The strongest element in this flick’s favour is that it delivers exactly what the title promises: There is an older South Korean woman in this flick, and she is often shown holding a variety of knives, with which she usually kills people. Or she at least harms them greatly and gets them to reconsider the life choices that brought them to this moment in time.

On the other hand you could argue that instead of being an example of truth in advertising, that it’s actually false advertising because, like in a lot of South Korean action flicks, sure they start off with knives, but then by the end there’s guns akimbo, hammers and anything else that comes to hand involved.

There isn’t anything particularly unusual or novel about this flick, but it has something of a more melodramatic premise than these kinds of flicks usually require. I mean the aforementioned Keanu Reeves franchise used the murder of the protagonist’s dog as the starting point of a 4 movie killing spree that killed most of the (assassin) population of three continents. This flick, again about a stone cold killer, really leans in to the (fairly generic) premise of that stone cold killer having at least one thing or one person or one group of people that they really care about to justify all the wickedness that is to come.

Rating:

6 stars

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Exterritorial

I think the title would have sounded better in the original German

dir: Christian Zübert

2025

So now there’s another Die Hard variant, only this time it’s “German Die Hard but in the American Consulate so they speak German and English half the time, and WITH A WOMAN!”, plus she doesn’t really need to be in the building the whole time, but she chooses to, because they’ve kidnapped HER SON!

As Die Hard variants, this is ok. I don’t know why it’s made with an English-speaking (only) audience in mind, with people never speaking too much Deutsche before reverting to English at any given time, even if they’re not people known for their crisp pronunciation of the great Germanic language. I mean, Dougray Scott pretending to be an American who’s fluent in German?

His nationality is in his name, somewhat. Now, he’s playing mid-level bureaucrat middle aged villains with bad moustaches. It’s not Movember, Dougray, no excuses for that monstrosity.

The star of the show is a German actor I’m not going to pretend I’ve seen in anything else, being Jeanne Goursaud, playing Sara Wulf, an ex-special forces type person who is our main character.

Unlike a lot of films lately starring bald ex-wrestlers or bald Stathams, Sara can fuck people up royally with some okay choreography, but she often loses fights too, which is somewhat more realistic. I mean, special forces is special forces, but they’re more likely to kill a whole village through poisoning their water supply or torture civilians just for practice rather than actually have to dominate a consulate full of Marines.

Rating:

6 stars

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1599 reads

Death of a Unicorn

Imagine the breath on that thing

dir: Alex Scharfman

2025

Stupid premises can still make for interesting / amusing movies. I’m not going to pretend this is a particularly great film, but it did amuse me. It kept me amused, and it didn’t overstay its welcome, which is important.

It is important not because my time is valuable – it is because stupid premises don’t justify running times over 90 minutes, and passing that they make you want to chew your own leg off in order to escape a cinema you voluntarily walked into.

Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd, and while a lot of people might love him he in and of himself is not really enough of a drawcard to pull an audience into a theatre, if that audience includes me. I don’t know if Jenna Ortega has a massive fanbase based on Wednesday, but she would presumably be the main attraction here, unless it’s the unicorns people desperately want to see.

Or maybe I’m underestimating how many Richard E. Grant fans there are out there, absolute Withnail and I diehards.

The overall premise is less “what if unicorns were real?” and more so “rich people are awful, and do awful things to anything and anyone and have a supportive world that justifies all their worst self-serving actions”. I can even see a world in which they get to spin this flick with them as the “good guys” – “Commie pinkos try to tear down a hard working family that happens to run a pharmaceutical company, when all they want to do is cure cancer and maximise shareholder value”.

The real villain in this is Paul Rudd, as a shitty father and even worse as a handmaiden to rich fucks who seek at all times to remind the lower orders that they are lower and thus expendable, and must be expended. The rich fucks are monsters in the way that we expect them to be, within expected parameters.

But the unicorns, plural? They’re straight out of our worst nightmares.

Rating:

6 stars

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1233 reads

Novocaine

For such a young man, he looks like an old man

dirs.: Dan Berk & Robert Olsen

2025

What a premise! Guy who doesn’t feel pain getting caught up in crime shenanigans, somehow wins the day but is tortured, burned, shot, stabbed, mutilated and humiliated for our entertainment for an hour and fifty long, long minutes.

It’s a comedy, but in some ways it’s body horror, and really it’s not that different from other crime / action related flicks where the guy endures heaps of bodily abuse in order to get revenge / get the bad guys / avenge his dog, except instead of being brutalised but stoically persisting, like a John Wick / any Statham movie, the completely untrained main guy cops the abuse, doesn’t feel anything, but keeps going anyway.

Of course the premise is bullshit. A person with what Nathan Caine – He Feels No Pain! is most likely to succumb to is hyperthermia, or a terrible infection, or any number of undetected injuries. They don’t usually become reluctant action heroes. The condition doesn’t somehow grant immunity from severing muscle tissue, tendons or what should result in catastrophic blood loss.

But let’s not let logic slow us down now – we’re meant to be having fun!

At least, that is if your definition of fun is watching bits of some guy sheer off of his body like you’re watching a Troma film like Toxic Avenger or Street Trash from yesteryear.

I do have to admit that I’m a pretty squeamish person so that this kind of hook for a flick is no hook for me to hang anything from. I hate watching scenes of people gleefully, sadistically tormenting someone even if it is cartoonish. And the difference here is conceptual, rather than anything else. There’s a scene where one of the bad guys is doing what he thinks would cause maximum pain for the lead, by ripping his fingernails out with pliers, and while Nathan only pretends that it’s painful, as opposed to any actor in an equivalent scene pretending that it’s agony for real, doesn’t it amount to the same thing?

Rating:

6 stars

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1000 reads

6 stars

Nobody 2

Weapons

Jurassic World Rebirth

Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning

The Salt Path

The Accountant 2

The Old Woman with the Knife

Exterritorial

Death of a Unicorn

Novocaine

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