aka Skylin3s [ugh]
I thought that Liam O’Donnell’s Beyond Skyline was quite an improvement over the first film in the series, winning my heart through the overwhelming powers of all sorts of sci fi pulp martial arts tokusatsu action nonsense. When presented with so much energy, only a fool would have cared about the thing having the brain of a dinosaur.
Alas, a returning O’Donnell can’t catch this kind of lightning in a bottle twice, and this sequel starring the perfectly decent Lindsey Morgan (replacing the perfectly awesome Frank Grillo), is a real drag, trying to do epic science fiction world building on a budget that can’t pay for it, and with brains that can’t conceive of it, and so falls back on a mess of boring clichés, failing with little grace and no style whatsoever.
Once the plot actually gets going, the film is slowly – for some reason the thing puts half an hour of actual plot into nearly two hours runtime - crawling through all your usual sci-fi action clichés, in the classic tradition of all films that are kinda like Cameron’s Aliens but crap. The final thirty minutes or so do win back some of the energy and general craziness of the second film but at that point it’s simply a case of too little, too late to save the film as a whole.
Not improving my mood is some of the worst dialogue I have had the bad luck to encounter (seriously, the sentence level writing makes Michael Bay look like a writer), and a supposed scenery-chewing villain performance by Alexander Siddig (who can really do better) that reminds of nothing so much as a little boy playing dress-up, badly.
Oh well, there’s always going to be Skyfourth4line, right?
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