Masters of the Universe (2026)

As a guy who had a somewhat intense He-Man phase in his childhood, I hardly know what to say about this sad attempt at nostalgia baiting by Travis Knight, the director of the only good live action Transformers film – Bumblebee.

Unfortunately, this ain’t no Bumblebee, kids. For a film that has less plot than many a short film, this somehow manages to be nearly two and a half hours (too) long. It’s so slow, we get our first He-Man transformation an hour into the non-proceedings. But then, how else to fit all of the “jokes” in, and that’s why we’re here, right?

And with jokes I mean the sort of winking, no actual jokes included awkward bullshit every movie that didn’t understand why the Guardians of the Galaxy movies worked now uses to undercut every single moment in a nerdcore movie an audience member might actually think is awesome (which really is what this should be all about, even Cannon knew this much about pulp filmmaking), and to destroy every single emotional beat this bloated monstrosity otherwise might have had. Hell, Masters of the Universe doesn’t even manage to utilize a needle drop of Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” properly, because it does of course need to make exactly the “joke” you’ll expect it to make at this point.

For a film that really wants to get my nostalgia money, the tone feels eternally (see what I did there, I’m just as funny as the script) embarrassed by the toy line and cartoons it is based off, always going for the easiest joke (Fisto, anyone?). Consequently, the whole film shows no actual appreciation of what could be fun about all of this.

The actors mostly show themselves equally unenthusiastic (in a way the now much belittled Marvel would never let anyone get away with in one of their films not directed by Waititi), apart from Idris Elba and Alison Brie, who make actual acting choices and have actual screen presence. Jared Leto’s Skeletor is even worse than his Exxxtreme Joker was (at least you could understand all of what he said there), and Nicholas Galitzine and Camila Mendes are less expressive than the action figures they portray.

Man, do I suddenly feel old and grumpy.

Three Films Make A Post: Party Like It’s 2022

Mandrake (2022): Sometimes, I really don’t know. Objectively, Lynne Davison’s clever mix of traditional British social drama and neo folk horror is a fine, perhaps even great film. The acting, particularly by Deirdre Mullins and Derbhie Crotty, is great and absolutely on point, Davison’s visual language is creepy without only ever going for the obvious effect, and the script clearly knows what it wants to be about as well as how to express it. In practice, I didn’t connect with it at all. Despite my love for clever variations on folk horror and good filmmaking this might as well have been Generic Blumhouse Horror Number 9855, for all I felt and thought. Which says very little about the film, obviously.

Beast (2022): To be fair to myself, for most of the time, I had the same reaction to Baltasar Kormákur’s animal attack movie in which Idris Elba needs to protect his family from lions. But here, it’s the proper reaction. As you might expect, the film milks the whole “a man needs to protect his little girls” so incessantly, you can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop and the movie to deconstruct this notion. To nobody’s surprise, the other shoe never does drop, and it’s just a case of very low effort character writing.

On the plus side, Elba is good even if he has very little to do, the young actresses playing his daughters deserved better as well, and Sharlto Copley does – as usual – a great portrayal of Sharlto Copley playing a likeable ranger. Too bad the film has no ambitions beyond being as generic as possible, wasting the talents of everyone involved on the kind of movie that’s simply there.

Barbarian (2022): Because I didn’t want to go into spoiler heavy territory with this one – let’s just say there’s a really clever, effective and actually meaningful structural thing or three that happen – I can end the post on a positive note.

For Zach Cregger’s Barbarian truly is as good as everyone says – apart from one bit I found somewhat too smugly on the righteous side of our times which would involve heavy spoilers to get into – using parts of today’s social conversation in intelligent ways to surprise. It’s the case where a movie has something to say, knows how to say it, and also how to make a pretty fantastic horror movie out of it. Add some really great performances by Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long, and you have something really rather special.

In short: Molly’s Game (2017)

Failed freestyle ski Olympic skier Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) finds her true profession when she first helps a vile Hollywood producer run a high-stakes poker game just this side of being illegal gambling, and then turns it into her own. Apparently, the FBI has some problems with this sort of thing, particular when organized crime sits at the table.

The directorial debut of – much beloved though not necessarily by me – screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is an interesting example of the dangers of basing your film not just on “a true story” but on an actual memoir about said “true story”. So if that memoir/”true story” has an incredibly obnoxious Frank Capra ending, your film is going to get one too, even if it tonally doesn’t fit what came before at all. Though, to be fair, I can’t imagine many films this particular ending would fit with.

Other problems are that Jessica Chastain’s Molly Bloom is just a bit too perfect, too nice for what she’s actually doing and a bit too likeable for the film ever to sell her tale as anything but a cinematic fairy-tale about a woman who is done wrong despite her being super-awesome. Even when she steals the producer’s game she’s in the right, the way the film tells it. I could have gone without the Freudian bullshit between her and her psychoanalyst Dad (Kevin Costner!), and the film’s dubious general ideas about psychology too.

There’s quite a bit to like here, though. More often than not, Sorkin does a pretty decent visual Scorsese – circa Goodfellas – imitation. The film’s certainly not boring to look at, and keeps moving along at a merry pace, despite a two hour plus running time.

The dialogue is fun and clever - if, in typical Sorkin style, bereft of any concept of different people having different patterns of speech - while the cast doesn’t just include the always excellent Chastain (who by the way off-screen-monologues with the best of ‘em) and Costner in a good mood, but also Idris Elba (getting some quality expressive shouting time in), Michael Cera (finding his inner creep), and a horde of other good people doing good work.


All this adds up to a film that’s neither as good in the mildly horrifying “quality cinema” kind of way it is clearly aiming for, nor actually saying terribly much about the state of America as it seems to think it does, but that is certainly worth spending an evening with, even if it is only to enjoy the actors strutting their stuff and looking at the pretty pictures.

Three Films Make A Post: See these incredible scenes before your unbelieving eyes!

November Criminals (2017): Sometimes, one really wonders why certain films don’t come together as well as they should. This one clearly has a decent enough budget, features a good cast with Ansel Elgort, Chloe Grace Moretz as well as Catherine Keener and David Strathairn in the unthankful parent roles, the script is written by well-known professionals, and Sacha Gervasi’s direction does not suggest a lack of talent. Still, what all the talent before and behind the camera adds up to is a film that seemingly can’t decide what kind of movie it is, what it is actually about, if it has a point, or what that point might be. There are a few intriguing, or at least interesting subjects broached, but the film never really hones in on one (or just a couple), instead wandering from one idea to the next with all the focus of a toddler distracted by the next shiny thing. There’s so much less substance in here than you’d expect, it becomes rather annoying right quick.

Hellstone (2016): In comparison, this little German microbudget horror movie about a guy stumbling through a patch of woods fighting off demons directed by Andreas Tom seems laser-focused. It is clearly inspired by spirit and body of the original Evil Dead (as is only right and proper) but does feature a couple or three ideas of its own. The film nicely concentrates on the things it’s got going for itself – a claustrophobic cabin (set), woods, one and a half actors who are decent, a handful of pretty great practical effects, and people behind the camera who do know what they are doing – using them with a complete lack of pretension but a degree of style and what feels like quite a bit of enthusiasm. It’s not the sort of film that’ll have anyone re-writing the history of horror, but it’s fun and suggests a degree of care from its makers; not something I’d say about many German microbudget films.

The Dark Tower (2017): But back to the bad stuff, or really, the completely puzzling stuff. I don’t understand why anyone would buy the rights to Stephen King’s Dark Tower cycle and then turn its first part into a painfully generic bit of YA fantasy in which the supposedly central Gunslinger Roland (a wasted Idris Elba) becomes a side-character in the yawn-inducing story of some kid (Tom Taylor) the film never bothers to give me any reason to care about discovering how very special he is.

Now, if it were a good YA movie, I’d still be puzzled but at least feel entertained, but standing between entertainment and me are a near complete lack of dramatic tension, the usual dependence on the Hero’s Journey trope even if it makes no sense in context, lackluster production design, a mechanically creaky script and Matthew McConaughey playing the villain Walter/The Man in Black as if he were the bad guy in a kid’s TV show.


Honestly, I have no idea what this is supposed to be, for whom it was made, or why anyone should watch it.

Three Films Make A Post: The emotions are real, everything else is questionable.

Wither aka Vittra (2012): Do you like Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead? So do Swedish directors Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund, so they made this near-remake. Alright, there are a few differences: the possessed aren’t as chatty as those in Raimi’s classic and sometimes act more like zombies, nobody is raped by a tree, all colour has been desaturated out of the picture, and there’s no Bruce Campbell to be found. Otherwise the film keeps rather to close to its big inspiration without ever reaching its energy level nor its air of unbridled creativity, which is what happens when one plays in other peoples’ sandbox instead of building one’s own.

The gore is nice to look at though, and the film certainly isn’t boring.

Black Rock (2012): Katie Aselton’s film, on the other hand, sets out to play the good old game of role and trope reversal with the survival horror genre. The film isn’t interested in being ironic, though, so it’s still very much a highly focused survivalist thriller, but one with added feminist subtext that doesn’t overwhelm the text, and a deft hand at slightly undercutting expectations in favour of better characterisation. The acting by Aselton herself, Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth is fine too, so there’s little here that doesn’t work rather wonderfully. Which is not a daily occurrence in a sub-genre whose tales about thin veneers of civilization breaking down again and again and again can become a bit tiresome.

Star Trek Beyond (2016): Reboot Star Trek the third, this time directed by Justin Lin (who actually manages to shoe-in a motorcycle sequence into the plot) is a very pleasant loud SF adventure movie, containing many a moment of great and loveable silliness, much loud and rather exciting adventuring, various explosions, generally rather stiff acting – basically all the charms I hope for in a contemporary blockbuster. It’s not up to Marvel standards in sudden bouts of humanity or half-hidden cleverness, but it’s far beyond (sorry) Michael Bay style blockbusting by virtue of having an actual flow, a story that makes some kind of sense, and by being actually fun instead of just being loud and obnoxious.

Bastille Day (2016)

American pickpocket in Paris Michael Mason (Richard Madden) steals the wrong bag when he takes one belonging to Zoe Naville (Charlotte Le Bon), for Zoe’s bag contained a time bomb she was just about to wander off with and throw into the Seine. Initially, she was supposed to deposit it in the office of a racist French nationalist party the film is too polite to name but when she realized said office wouldn’t be empty as promised by the boyfriend who convinced her of the whole thing, she changed her plans.

Michael’s inadvertent intervention ends with four dead bodies, an anonymous message that promises more violence of this sort to come on Bastille Day, and him hunted as the responsible party. Before the French can identify him, the CIA does. And because this is the CIA, they don’t give this rather important information to their allies  – because then they’d have to explain why they have access to surveillance cameras all over Paris – but send out reckless, violent, and nearly disgraced agent Briar (Idris Elba) to illegally detain Michael for a day to torture as much information out of him as possible. Briar might be a bit of a thug, but he’s also not stupid, and he quickly realizes that Michael isn’t responsible for any bombings. In fact, the whole thing will start to look to him like something quite different from terrorism and  only the beginning of a series of provocations set to use the fissures in French society to throw Paris into chaos for rather more petty reasons. Briar, once he’s got a whiff of what’s really going on, will stop at little to get to the truth and the people responsible, even if it means teaming up with a pickpocket and a woman who nearly did something deeply stupid and most certainly highly illegal.

I found James Watkins’s Bastille Day a surprisingly fun film. I’m generally quite sceptical about the slow but steady trickle of international productions seemingly following the lead of Luc Besson’s Europacorp in style and content. However unlike quite a few of these films as well as much of the actual Europacorp output, this one’s actually a neat little addition to the action and thriller genres.

It is even not completely stupid. Sure, the film’s attempt to include the influence of social media and the spread of information as parts of its plot is an interesting idea not very intelligently realized, and the bad guys’ plan has certain shades of the first Die Hard movie with Paris as the skyscraper, and obviously never reads as something that would actually work this way exactly the way they want it, given its dependence of large masses of people acting exactly like they want thanks to the magical power of hashtags, a mysterious Internet thing I’m not terribly sure the scriptwriters have actually encountered in the wild. However, as action movie background guff needed to get the violence and the chases rolling goes, this passes muster quite decently. And hey, while this isn’t a meditation about the worst sides of online culture trickling into the real world, or a film that has something clever to say about mass manipulation, the film’s background is rather more interesting than the usual “Idris Elba shoots the evil terrorists”, and at least tries to use elements of the real world. There’s also the little fact that the film uses its implausible plot with an impeccable sense for the kind of rhythm – which is what the thriller genre, with an emphasis on action like this one has or not, is all about - this sort of thing is supposed to have.

Watkins again turns in a not terribly charismatic but effective direction job, generally following the philosophy that action films are supposed to be edited in a way that enables the audience to follow what’s going on in them and doing a good job with that. The action isn’t exactly realistic in feel but also not terribly over the top, aiming for a middle of the road approach that works quite well for the film.

Idris Elba is an actor you could actually imagine to be physically capable of the stuff he’s doing here. Elba doesn’t, of course and alas, need to strain his considerable acting talents here much, for Briar is a pretty empty vessel; the film doesn’t even make much use of the mistake that brought him to Paris nor does it ever show any interest in explaining who its protagonist actually is apart from slightly insane and exceedingly violent. So all Elba has to go on is his physical presence, which is fortunately also considerable.

All in all, this is bread and butter action thriller stuff done right, even though it’s certainly not a classic of the genre.

In short: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011)

Wait just a minute, Internet! Wasn't the second Ghost Rider movie as directed by the terrible couple of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (shouldn't they have a better shared director name like "The Explosion Twins", by the way? Neveldine/Taylor doesn't really cut it.) supposed to be utterly dreadful?

To my surprise, I found myself highly entertained by the film's silly shenanigans and its clever dumbness when I finally dared watch it. Of course, my enjoyment of Ghost Rider: SoV might have something to do with lowered expectations, seeing as I did not expect anything from the directors of the overrated and annoying Crank movies and the improbably horrible Gamer, and surely not a movie that gets the dubious allure of Marvel's Ghost Rider character. That allure, as if I need to tell anyone, is that of a bad metal album cover; we are, after all, talking about a biker with a flaming skull on his shoulders riding a burning motorcycle, hitting people with chains and eating souls.

SoV gets that, and so mostly consists of CGI Rider doing appropriately burning and chainy things while clichéd guitar noises play on the soundtrack. Because that sort of thing might get boring once in a while, the directors also delight us with some nonsensical mythology (OMG! The Ghost Rider was the angel of justice before he was dragged into hell and corrupted by a diet of flashing TV violence!), dumb-clever quips, and Idris Elba as a French alcoholic religious bad-ass fighter.

And then there's Nicolas Cage. Clearly, the only directorial advice Neveltaylor (that's better, isn't it?) had for Cage was to tell him "go insane", so that's what he did, gibbering, grunting, chewing and spitting his absurd lines with the greatest enthusiasm while pulling his face into various monkey-like positions. It's quite a performance, even in a career that is as full of all-out scenery slaughter as that of Cage.

So, Dinotayl, I salute you (for once).

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In short: The Losers (2010)

Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Roque (Idris Elba), Pooch (Columbus Short), Cougar (Oscar Jaenada) and Jensen (Chris Evans) are an effective little black ops unit for the US military, yet they also have some of those hearts of gold prostitutes in Westerns are so often outfitted with. So when doing as they are told by their CIA contact Max (Jason Patric) on a mission in Bolivia would lead to the death of a group of children, they decide to save the babies and risk their on lives instead.

They needn't have bothered, because Max betrays them for their efforts and blows an extraction helicopter the team should have been on sky high. The team didn't enter the helicopter, though, leaving to make space for the children, who are now what children in Hollywood films usually aren't - dead. Max doesn't know about the group's survival (and couldn't care less about the children, obviously), but that leaves the soldiers still stranded without papers in Bolivia.

Thoughts of revenge aren't far, yet there just doesn't seem to be a way to get back into the US, even less one to get back at the evil traitorous CIA guy. Until the mysterious Aisha (Zoe Saldana) makes contact with our heroes and offers to smuggle them back into the country, if they are willing to help her kill Max.

It will probably be better if they do, too, because Max is using his copious spare time to buy insane weapons of mass destruction with which to incite a war or two to keep himself in business.

The comic book series by Andy Diggle and Jock The Losers is based on is known to be a Big Dumb Action series made by and for people who aren't as dumb as one would expect them to be, and the film keeps itself - surprisingly enough - very much in the comic's spirit.

The Losers seems to thrive on its own self-consciousness, an only slightly detached knowledge of, and, more importantly, love for classic action movie clichés that allows it to take each and every silly idea it thinks it might just get away with (and some it shouldn't expect to) and run with it, without having to care too much about deep characterisation or too sensible a plot. Often, movies this self-conscious tend to be rather dreary affairs, seeming more interested in congratulating themselves for their own cleverness than in actually being clever or fun. Director Sylvain White manages to avoid this problem nearly completely and makes his movie only ever exactly as self-conscious and clever as needed to provide that mythical feeling of being fun most US action movies of the last few years have tried to avoid like a venereal disease. And how's that from the director of I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer?

Although there are a lot of people dying here, White imbues his film with a lightness of touch that fits its silly set-up and not exactly deep characters perfectly. Somehow, action hero poses and action movie structures make sense again when presented in this way.

Besides White's light touch, The Loser works as well as it does thanks to some very enthusiastic acting by just about everyone on screen (although Jason Patric's bad guy might be too comically broad for some). The actors seem to be at once in on the joke and serious enough to throw themselves into the moment, no matter if it is a shoot-out or a silly comedy bit.

In fact being at once in on the joke and serious about it seems to me what makes The Losers work.

 

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