In short: Last Looks (2021)

Former cop with a conscience – therefore the “former” - Charlie Waldo (Charlie “Yawn” Hunnam) is roped back into the crime solving life when his ex-wife Lorena (Morena Baccarin) disappears just after trying to convince him to help her exonerate British ham actor Alastair Pinch (Mel Gibson) for the murder of his wife. All, so that Shakespearean Pinch can continue his work playing a Southern judge on TV. Charlie’s soon up to his neck (and repeatedly knocked out, as is the tradition) in the case. This also involves a sexy kindergarten teacher (Lucy Fry), a producer with a particularly weird looking head (Rupert Friend), a drug dealer who wants his “mem” (Jacob Scipio), and several old enemies from the police force (among them Clancy Brown).

It might have been better if our protagonist had stayed in his trailer in the woods.

It’s pretty obvious that Tim Kirkby’s movie really, really wants to be a throwback to idiosyncratic 70s private eye movies, aka a kind of movie I like rather a lot. Alas, it suffers from various problems that get in the way of these ambitions again and again.

For one, Kirkby’s personality-free direction is as far from Robert Altman – or Peter Hyams, for that matter – as you can get while still making movies in this particular niche of the genre. Then, Charlie Hunnam most certainly is no Elliott Gould (or Walter Matthau, or James Garner, etc), but in fact still one of the most boring and personality-free actors to put on a stupid beard and not emote into a camera you can encounter. Though, to be fair, the only actors on screen here who seem to have come awake and willing to put even a minimum amount of work in are Fry, Gibson (whose acting has improved as much as his private personality has gotten worse over the years, ironically enough) and Brown. Everybody else seems to suffer from a bad case of “what the hell am I doing here”, or, as in our lead’s case, have never been terribly good to begin with.

The script – by sitcom writer/producer Howard Michael Gould, apparently adapting his own novel, badly, unless it’s a bad novel – meanders from one scene to the next, going through jokes bad, tired, and seldom surprisingly funny, while never getting the point of why those 70s crime movies were strangely paced and meandering, or what would be needed to get away with this today.

Some thoughts about Deadpool (2016)

By now, even the geniuses over at Fox have realized the old comics wisdom that, to paraphrase some wise old writers (Archie Goodwin it was, I think), when making a superhero movie, you can make any kind of film around the fights and the superpowers as long as you have the fights and the superpowers. Well, at least some parts of Fox seem to have realized, the rest thought Fantastic Four was a good idea.

So now, we get an oh-so-hip, oh-so-mature cynical comedy around the fights, a film that mostly seems to have come about by its makers misunderstanding the heart in Guardians of the Galaxy or Ant-Man as ironic posturing; which is useful, since posturing is the best Deadpool can do. There’s something unpleasantly puerile about a film whose only idea of subversion is to throw in lots of blood, decidedly less sex (because that’s much worse than the red stuff, obviously), many a joke I would have found funny when I was in puberty, and whose general approach to the specific dreams at the core of the superhero genre is a vague, pointless and joyless cynicism. Basically, the film’s a fifteen year old boy, and teenagers suck.

An extra degree of the tiresome is added by the never-ending fourth-wall-breaking jokes, which add a feeling of undeserved smugness to Deadpool’s other failings by giving the impression of a film that’s more interested in congratulating itself for how funny it is instead of actually being funny.


To add insult to injury, the super-powered action isn’t much cop either with all the ironic, fourth-wall-breaking posturing breaking up any possible flow, an overemphasis on slow-motion and stops that reminds me of one of those 90s US action movies that were so desperate to look like a John Woo movie but never did, and generally unimaginative set-ups for the action that fit how boring Ed Skrein’s Big Bad is.

SyFy vs The Mynd: Sands of Oblivion (2007)

Professor of archaeology Alice Carter (Morena Baccarin) is attempting to dig out and rescue the Egyptian sets for Cecil B. DeMille's (Dan Castellaneta) The Ten Commandments at the Guadalupe Dunes, before they will be washed away in an oil industry related high tide.

Alice finds the sets only thanks to John Tevis (George Kennedy in what amounts to a very fun cameo role) and his ex-soldier son Mark (Victor Webster) who are looking for a time capsule John buried when he was at the set as the child of one of DeMille's more adventurous location scouts, for she and her students have been digging at the wrong place all the time. Alas, John and Mark also awaken a powerful jackal mummy thing (whose identity is for no good reason at all explained in an absolutely useless and ugly pre-credits sequence by a different director) that kills John. That's the sort of thing that happens when you use real Egyptian artefacts in your movie sets.

Mark - who has been exchanging flirty looks with Alice all this time - hires on to the dig as logistics expert. Alice's ex-husband Jesse (Adam Baldwin), also an archaeologist, comes in too - to help, massage his own ego, and to have a preening competition with Mark.

Of course, now that it has been awakened, the Anubis-shaped creature starts terrorizing the dig, killing people in various creative ways. It's up to Alice, Mark and Jesse to get rid of the monster they freed.

Now, if you've made a movie whose basic idea is as wonderful as Sands of Oblivion's - seriously, a jackal mummy thing and biblical-style phenomena haunting the set of DeMille's Ten Commandments!? - that also happens to feature two Firefly alumni in form of the always charming Morena Baccarin and the always charming in a somewhat different way Adam Baldwin, you really have to take incredibly large missteps to get on my bad side; you have after all just produced R'lyeh-nip. The whole haunted movie set idea, and the cleverness to use Guadalupe as Egypt stand-in for a mummy curse movie alone are enough to keep David Flores's movie from being a standard SyFy (well, at that point in time still Sci-Fi, but hey) monster bash, particularly since the film's first acts actually get quite a bit of mileage out of these ideas.

Unless you expect the film to be a deeper study of old Hollywood as a place that made myths of its own just as durable and magical as that of old Egyptian culture; as it stands, Sands of Oblivion is not that kind of film, but rather one that uses haunted Hollywood as a way to develop a more personal and individual feel than is typical of TV monster mashes. I'm perfectly alright with this - not every movie needs to dig deep (sorry), and the way the film treats its core concept as a way to charm its audience for most of its running time is more than enough for me.

Much more problematic is that the film - up until that point not exactly subtle but clearly sane - devolves into a very typical SyFy cheese fest for its final act, with a dune buggy chase, Adam Baldwin doing a pizza-faced Renfield, a comic relief gun nut redneck, and Mark fighting living wall paintings. The change from the bloodier version of classic horror the film's earlier stages indulge in to that sort of thing is a bit grating. I would certainly have preferred if the film had kept to that earlier style. On the other hand, the cheese at hand is very tasty, so it's not as if Sand of Oblivion's final act weren't entertaining.

The other surprise beside the film's curious change in tone is that our chief monster isn't a digital concoction, but - in its jackal mummy form - rather what looks like a mix of suitmation and mechanical puppetry to me. It's a pretty great monster design, even though fans of naturalistic special effects will be just as unhappy with it as if it were a digital creature, for realism - whatever the word means when describing jackal headed mummies - does live elsewhere. The digital effects for their part are really rather good, and are, like the sets of the remnants of the old movie sets, made with an eye for the moody detail, something that's generally much more important to me than the effects looking believable.

So, despite my misgivings about Sands of Oblivion's final act, and that unnecessary pre-credit sequence taking place in Ancient Egypt I can really recommend fast-forwarding through, it turned out to be a particular favourite of mine among SyFy/Sci-Fi Original movies. The power of Cecil B. DeMille compels me.

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