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Expedition: Greenland (NR)
This documentary shows us the expedition to cross Greenland, the world’s largest island, from south to north. It’s never been done. 1,660 miles. Like driving from Annapolis, Maryland to Grand Junction, Colorado. A long way even by speedy highway. But these seven pro extreme explorers are crawling along in custom trucks over a snow-covered glacier while attempting not to fall into truck-eating crevasses. And boy, is it a cold and inhospitable place!
It’s National Geographic-scenic, so it’s best to either watch it in the theater or in a darkened room at home.
It was disappointing to me that they didn’t show how they heated the tents and did their camping on the few nights that they stopped. With a round robin of drivers, they rarely stopped for the entire trip – other than when mechanical issues came up. And mechanical issues came up a lot!
At times, it seemed a little dramatic for the sake of movie-making. At one point, they were at a critical time frame where slowing down would make or break the entire expedition. But then they see a frozen animal beside one of the trucks, so they stop to dig it out and identify it as a musk ox calf. So, not really a critical timeframe, right?
This is no date movie. I suspect guys will find this grueling expedition footage more intriguing than the ladies will. It’s just a team of white men (as usual) risking their lives to push an exploration to its very limits. But if you’re into such real-life adventures, this is a must-see.
– See it on the Big Screen
Red Sonja (R)
What a disappointing, dismal affair. This continuation story, that has been circulating around Hollywood for 17 years, was given to a trans director (MJ Bassett) who has a string of poorly received films and has been kept around solely for DEI reasons.
This turkey sat on the shelf for two years after completion. Now, after only one week in select theaters, it went directly to VOD. The only reason I gave it a shot is because it stars Matilda Lutz, the actress who knocked it out of the park starring in the film Revenge back in 2017.
Although this is a continuation of the Red Sonja character from the 1985 film Red Sonja that starred Bridget Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s a completely different storyline. It’s basically just good guys VS. bad guys, “barbarians battling barbarians.”
The Brass Tacks:
The dialogue is laughably bad throughout. The accents come and go. The music is generic and swells in amateurish ways. The storyline and editing are all over the place.
In one scene, Sonja tells a group of gladiators in a dungeon that she lost the fight with the tough woman who “hears the spirits in her head of everyone she’s killed.” But Sonja clearly won that fight. We saw it happen! The script is so full of holes it’s embarrassing. It’s USA Network level TV series stuff.
In one battle scene, the military leader tells his army to burn down the forest during a heavy rainfall. Heavy rains are what turns the tide on raging wildfires, much less fires starting in the first place. Why would a director go through with that scene as written? Perhaps because it’s a director with a slew of lame films behind them? I could go on and on.
At some point, shouldn’t such a director be told, “Maybe you’re just not cut out for this?”
The only redeeming quality of Red Sonja is Matilda Lutz. She’s a sight for sore eyes in a medieval gladiator movie. She gets a mulligan on this one.
This is the second movie where Lutz gets mortally impaled through the abdomen and comes back with spiritual power. Let’s hope the next time she comes back, it’s in a better movie.
– Avoid!
Nobody 2 (R)
If you saw the original film called Nobody, this is the same basic story, only based on a vacation gone wrong.
For those that didn’t see the original Nobody and need more info, a family man named Hutch had a secret life as a “Cleaner” who made bad people disappear for the government using his John Wick-like skills. He tried to leave his cleaner-past behind, but the past caught up with him.
The first movie did well at the box office. So with Hollywood’s total lack of skills in the originality department, a sequel was demanded.
In this version, Hutch is back in the life as a cleaner, and per his wife’s needs, he takes a break from “work” and takes his family on a much-needed vacation. As one would expect, when his family is mistreated by bad locals, he goes off the rails.
Just like the first one, this one’s funny and violent all at once. It’s not quite as good as the first version, perhaps because you know what to expect in this one. But if you loved the first Nobody, you really owe it to yourself to see Nobody 2 too. It’s also interesting to see Sharon Stone working again. She plays the big villain in the story, and for many, she’s unrecognizable.
– See it on the Big Screen
Weapons (R)
As all too many Hollywood movies begin, this one has a child narrator tell us that this is based on a true story that actually happened in their town. Of course, as always, it’s nonsense. But even more hilarious is that we’re told the reason we haven’t heard about this true story is because the authorities were so embarrassed by the fact that they couldn’t solve the case that they buried the story.
Except that’s not how the world works. As soon as 17 kids disappear, that makes the headlines. It’s not until much later, after it makes worldwide news and you can’t solve it that it becomes embarrassing. By then, we’ve already heard about it. Oops.
Here’s a true story for you. Today’s Hollywood writers have to wear slip-on shoes because they are so mentally retarded, they can’t successfully tie a pair of shoes.
Now that that’s behind us…
Josh Brolin and Julia Garner (both great in their roles here) star in the latest horror film about 17 students that disappear one night at 2:17 a.m. from their homes, all at the same time. We watch as these kids get out of their beds, walk out of the front door of their house, and then spread their arms like an airplane and all run off into the night. And poof, they disappear. The set-up is strong, and the first third of the movie is extremely intriguing. And the long scene with the kids running into the night is accompanied by the song “Beware of Darkness” by George Harrison. What an eerie opening to a film.
The craziest part of the disappearance is that the kids that run off are all in the same classroom each weekday, and only one kid and the teacher don’t disappear. They both show up for class the next morning. So Julia Garner’s character (teacher) is the first to be questioned, and Josh Brolin’s character is one of the missing kids’ fathers who’s outright livid that the police haven’t arrested her to get to the bottom of the disappearance. She must know something.
There are a LOT of puzzle pieces to this story, and each one is told in a separate section of the film. It’s perhaps more intricate than necessary and feels more like three hours instead of just over two hours long, but it is intriguing enough that you won’t want to stop watching it if you start it.
Weapons also has the requisite 2025 Hollywood issues. Scenes with an overtly gay couple? You bet. Two long scenes with the guys, and one of them is Chinese, so there’s an extra DEI checkbox to tick. At least they don’t kiss or have sex on screen.
Due to long and intricate plot, this would be better viewed at home where you can take a mental break at the halfway point.
– Wait for Rental
Dangerous Animals (R)
Jai Courtney stars as a serial killer on a boat in this low-budget but well-crafted horror/thriller. Actress Hassie Harrison plays Zephyr, a surfer girl that becomes his latest captive.
That’s all you need to know. This is a shocking film that’s not for the squeamish. But for those that like horror movies like the Hostel line of films, this one is a winner. It’s available for rental now.
Note: I used the subtitle button due to the thick Australian accents for two of the characters.
– Wait for Rental
The Naked Gun (PG-13)
Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson star in another Naked Gun movie, 31 years after the last one starring Leslie Nielsen. They had to do it because today’s inept writers in Hollywood can’t come up with any original stories. So it’s either shut down production until AI software is perfected to the point that they can replace all the writers, or just do remakes until that happens.
So we’re getting a ton of remakes. (You’ll see the trailer for a new DEI version of The Running Man movie as you wait for this awful film to start. The original The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was 38 years ago! So they’re digging deep to bide their time.)
If you think back to the worst SNL show you ever sat through, The Naked Gun is a little worse than that. 99 out of 100 jokes fall flat in this bomb. There is one sexual innuendo scene in the middle with Neeson and Anderson that is pretty funny. Except it totally rips off Mike Myers in his Austin Powers movies, where you think you see naughty things happening, but it turns out to be innocent goings-on.
Pamela Anderson is 58 years old. You’d think she’s too old to play a sexy femme fatale, but for any males old enough to have watched copies of the stolen Pam & Tommy Lee sex tape on VHS in 1998, it’s hard not to retain that VERY up-close (explicit) and personal insight of Pamela Anderson and what she’s really like when you’re alone with her. So for the tens of millions of guys with that insider knowledge, the casting works.
That said, this film is so terrible that I don’t think it’s worth watching even for free when it hits streaming on Tubi.
– Avoid!
Clown in a Cornfield (R)
This movie starts out in 1991 with dozens of teenagers at a late-night Midwestern barn party, drinking beer inside and partying next to a barrel fire outside. So far, so good. Except, of course, in this Hollywood version, there are two pretty teenage girls passionately kissing, and no one seems to take notice of that at all. Yeah, OK. In 1991, every teenage guy at that party would be watching those two girls making out because it would be as unlikely as seeing a seven-leaf clover in wintertime.
Then the movie recreates the opening scene in Jaws, except in this version, the horny young girl peeling off her clothes runs into a cornfield instead of the ocean. The scene is nowhere close to the amazing opening scene in Jaws that still holds up today, but it was a nice touch, and I had hope for his movie.
Once that bloody scene ends, we are brought back to the present day. A Hollywood world where white dads are losers and so afraid of their own shadow that their 16-year-old daughter has to pull a dead, rotting raccoon out of a fireplace while the helpless dad watches. A world where half the population is queer, including teenage boys passionately kissing in public. A world where a podunk town (with spotty cell reception throughout) that few would want to live in oddly has every race on full display living in harmony. Where did these transplanted families come from, and why did they decide to live there?
And once again, we have a movie with a large cast of unlikable characters from start to finish. Why are we seeing this again? It just makes the audience hope they all get killed off as quickly as possible so the credits can roll. The audience is literally rooting for the killer clowns!
There’s one scene where two teenage girls come upon a rotary phone in a home (yeah, the town is that podunk), and they can’t figure out how to use it to dial 911. To add insult to injury, when she hears the incessant dial tone after bringing the receiver up to her ear, she thinks that sound must mean the line is now dead. That might be the most accurate portrayal of the world we live in in the entire film.
But even with all that, the most annoying part of this movie is that the lead actress (Katie Douglas) has a husky voice that sounds exactly like fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. So the whole time, you’re listening to an actress playing an unlikable person that sounds exactly like an even more unlikable person.
Technical issues include the fact that a killer clown’s shoes squeak when he walks away from the kill but not when he walks up on them? The whole clown theme doesn’t hold up once the movie ends. It makes no sense on any level.
– Avoid!
F1 The Movie (PG-13)
Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a washed-up (according to many) race car driver that left F1 racing after a horrific crash nearly ended his life. So he’s been trying his hand at racing in everything from NASCAR to off-road racing. He’s not interested in trophies and he’s not interested in money. He just wants to race wherever and whenever he can.
Suddenly he’s lured back to F1 racing by Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem – you likely know him from No Country for Old Men), who was his teammate back in the good old days.
Sonny’s role is to help out a sorry F1 racing team with no wins halfway through the F1 season, and a young black driver (sigh) will be his teammate. This is an Apple production that is now in theaters before playing for free on Apple TV. Normally, with any Apple or current Disney project, this black F1 driver idea would be a common red flag as both companies are overtly politically correct to a fault. Most of their content is unwatchable and usually bombs spectacularly. But I can report that this is the FIRST tv/film project Apple has EVER developed where political correctness is not the driving force of the story (no pun intended). Brad Pitt is the star of this film and if you’re a Pitt fan, this is one of his best performances ever. He’s as believable as Steve McQueen was back in his day when driving cars onscreen.
The movie seems to be doing well out of the gate and has gotten great reviews, so hopefully this corrects the Apple production direction going forward. Not holding my breath, but let’s hope Apple learns that this is what audiences want.
There’s no use going into the storyline any further, and it doesn’t matter if you like F1 racing or not. Much like Rocky, even women will enjoy this movie. It’s been described as Top Gun on wheels, and I think that’s about as good a description as one can give. Jerry Bruckheimer is the producer, so that should give you a hint of what you’ll experience on the screen. The thumbnail above was chosen because it reflects the true essence of the story, not the shiny F1 cars on the movie posters.
This is great in the theater and will be fine if you want to wait for rental. Either way, it’s worth seeing.
– See it on the Big Screen
28 Years Later (R)
18 years after the movie 28 Weeks Later, we get this new installment. It’s hard to believe that after 18 years, this is the best follow-up script they could come up with.
Once again, uninfected survivors live in a safe zone, and as a boy hits puberty, he has to go out with his father on a hunting trip to kill some infected zombies. If they come back in one piece, uninfected, a strange, crazy party is thrown, and then life continues. There is no proof needed that they actually encountered any zombies, much less killed any, so I don’t know what the point of the ritual really is.
That’s pretty much it. If that sounds boring, it’s because it is. And it’s not really scary either, which is the whole point of a movie that’s promoted as “terrifying.”
This is just another in a growing list of movies where the young boy is worthless and weak in a world where you have to be tough to survive. Not only that, but he has to be saved countless times by adult characters, much like the deaf girl in the ridiculous movie A Quiet Place Part II.
Why we have to keep seeing this trope of inept young teenage boys is anyone’s guess. This kid doesn’t have any disabilities, and yet he’s worthless and weak like few boys in real life his age.
The thick Geordie UK accent will give most Americans fits as they won’t understand a lot of what’s being quietly mumbled throughout. If you’re unfortunate enough to rent this at home, at least you’ll be able to enable the subtitles. Not that that would help this story a lick. If you watched the trailer, you’ve already heard the grating, repetitive Rudyard Kipling poem “Boots” recited over the trailer. I was hoping it was only in the trailer, not in the movie. But it’s used in the movie too. It’s unsettling only because it’s so awful, like nails on a chalkboard, over and over. Thankfully, it’s only used in one early segment for a few minutes.
There was zero reason to make this film other than as a cash grab, and a second part of this version has already been filmed for us to be subjected to sometime in the near future. I’ll skip that one.
– Avoid!
Sew Torn (NR)
This movie out of Switzerland (in English) is a strange one.
An odd bird of a woman (understatement) plays the “Mobile Seamstress” who travels to people’s homes to sew on a button or whatever. Her fabric shop, that was passed down to her by her mother, is now going out of business.
This Barbara Duggen seamstress character drives the same jalopy her mother drove for decades. It’s the second movie I’ve seen this month with a heat-cracked steering wheel (that only old people will remember on cars).
We watch as Barbara comes upon two crashed motorcycles in the middle of the road. Both riders are badly injured and still struggling to fight with each other. A couple guns and a black case (presumably full of cash) sit on the road, along with damaged bags of drugs strewn about, spilling white powder onto the pavement.
We are reminded throughout the film that Barbara has three choices:
Perfect crime.
Call the police.
Drive away.
Over the 1h 35m runtime, we get to sit through all three chosen scenarios as she reveals herself to be a Seamstress MacGyver of some sort. Literally using needle and thread to cleverly work her way through tough situations. Intriguing? Kind of. But the wacky contraptions she devises on the fly are so out there, there’s no way any of them would really work.
Sew Torn is wackier than a Coen Brothers movie. If that intrigues you (that’s why I gave it a chance), knock yourself out. It likely won’t be the worst movie you’ve rented this month. But it’s beyond strange. Probably best to rent it if you are sitting on the sofa, up for a movie, but can’t find anything else to watch.
– Wait for Rental
Ballerina (R)
Len Wiseman directs this action-packed female version of John Wick starring Ana de Armas. I’m a Len Wiseman fan. He directed Kate Beckinsale’s Underworld films and her Total Recall remake movie (also starring Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel). I consider that Total Recall version a guilty pleasure film.
Len Wiseman was also married to Kate Beckinsale for over a decade. Solid bragging rights. Bravo, buddy! Well done!
Instead of the usual Hollywood female hero nonsense of being able to do everything well just because “they’re a woman and it’s their time to shine,” with no explanation as to how they got their special skills, Eve (Armas) spends the first quarter of this two-hour movie learning how to be tough and hone her hired-killer skills. Like the hero guys we used to love.
Luke Skywalker spent tons of screen time studying under Yoda on how to use the Force. Iron Man struggled mightily at first to master how to use his special suit as he flew into the walls of his workshop. Rocky Balboa trained for 3/4 of the film before taking on the heavyweight boxing champ – and still lost!
That level of working toward a goal is quite different from the hundred movies over the past eight years where the women leads can inexplicably just do everything perfectly and beat up everybody, just because. Ballerina is different. It’s still not believable. But at least our suspension of disbelief is earned as we watch her train and fail, and train some more, over a decade, until she’s ready. And it’s a hell of a ride once she’s let loose.
Lance Reddick, the black guy that works the desk at the Continental Hotel in the John Wick movies, completed his scenes for this film just prior to his death, so we get to see his familiar face one more time.
One pet peeve: Once again, we have a nightclub scene in a massive, crazy, crowded club where people continue dancing while gunfire and mayhem is going on all around them. I don’t understand why we keep seeing that over and over in movies. We all know that everyone would be lying on the floor if not running for the exits. Mostly running for the exits.
But if you enjoy John Wick types of movies, this one delivers in spades. Some of the killing spree scenes would seem to push the NC-17 limits. I loved it, but I can see how some people might be put off by some of the weapons used. It’s incredible footage. For that reason, I think this is a movie you need to see in a theater quickly before people give too much away. There are some pretty dramatic, if not shocking, scenes in this movie, and Anna de Armas worked her ass off to be able to deliver the goods like this.
Note that there is a Reddit user that claimed there was an after-credit scene at their screening. The overseas showing didn’t have any after-credit scenes.
– See it on the Big Screen
Warfare (R)
War isn’t nearly as cool as it seems from most of the war movies we’ve seen throughout our lives. A handful of films have attempted to show us the true grit and horror of it. Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Dunkirk, and The Hurt Locker all stand out.
Warfare would now be on that list. It’s a minimalist movie as we watch one group of soldiers take an Iraqi family’s home by force and then try to hold onto their position when they get attacked by the locals. The fact that the Iraqi war was the biggest military blunder in US history makes this ridiculous battle even worse – for both sides.
The film is based on the accounts from the US soldiers that were in that house, so it’s as realistic as it gets in its re-creation. Since this is not a Hollywood-scripted movie, it’s likely too slow, too gritty, and too raw for most casual movie viewers. The thumbnail above shows how you spend most of your time when waiting for the enemy to come to your position to kill you. It’s not cool to be on that mission. It’s full-time worrisome. A ton of soldiers come home with serious mental issues after a deployment.
But for those that can handle seeing what it’s really like to be shot at and blown up by the locals, this is about as up close and personal as it gets.
– Wait for Rental
Final Destination Bloodlines (R)
Hard to believe it’s been 14 years since the last Final Destination movie was released. This is the 6th installment.
For those unfamiliar, this series of movies always starts with one of the kids seeing a premonition that everyone is going to die as they all sit on a roller coaster, airliner, etc. Each movie has a different situation. The person snaps out of the forced flashback (or foreshadowback, that thankfully we get to see in gory detail) and makes a fuss, warning everyone that they need to get off immediately or they’re all going to die. By doing so, they save the lives of their friends. Once they are clear of whatever they were riding on, they immediately witness that those that didn’t disembark are killed exactly as the one kid visualized in their awful premonition. These scenes usually take eight minutes or so to start the movie. This latest movie stretches that opening scene quite a bit, but it’s the same premise.
The hitch is that no one can cheat death. So one by one, everyone who got away from that starting point unscathed now starts dying one by one in crazy Rube Goldberg machine types of ways as death comes for each of them. Most Final Destination fans just go to watch (enjoy!) the crazy death scenes. That’s certainly why I go! If you’re going to this expecting some watertight plot, great acting, or believability, that’s probably playing in one of the other theaters.
One thing that makes this series of movies different from all the rest is that death doesn’t play favorites. Unlike 90% of these horror flicks where the pretty female is likely to be the sole survivor, in Final Destination films, the entire cast is going to die by the time the credits roll. You can’t ruin the movie by telling someone, “Everybody dies in the end.” That’s literally the whole point of this series.
This is an important point because it forces two things. First, no actor cast in these movies is going to be in a sequel. (The only exception is one black man who is never part of the gang who skirted death. He just serves as the person who explains to the survivors that death is still coming for them.)
Secondly, another secret to the success of these movies, along with most movies pre-mid-90s, is that they star a slew of hot young actors. Young Hollywood hopefuls who are just trying to get a foothold in the business. Final Destination films are a perfect vehicle for those newbies to show us what talent they’ve got, and then get killed off.
But unfortunately, this is 2025. So the lead actress was purposely miscast. She’s not attractive at all in any way, shape or form. Overwhelmingly, everyone else onscreen (a lot of people) is properly cast. She’s literally the least good-looking of the bunch. Why Hollywood thinks this is a winning formula is beyond me.
There are some funny lines sprinkled in for those that have seen these movies before. A pretty girl (who should have starred in this film) on a date pricks her finger on a rose thorn, and a little blood comes out. When her boyfriend asks her if she’s okay, she answers, “I think I’ll live.”
That’s clever stuff that brings a chuckle throughout the theater. It’s a Final Destination movie. Everyone knows she’s going to meet a horrible end, along with everyone else. Barrels of fun! And blood! And gore! For anyone who enjoys such things, this one’s a winner. Especially in a theater full of fans who can’t wait for the death scenes.
– See it on the Big Screen
Last Breath (PG-13)
Woody Harrelson stars in this movie about a real event involving a UK ship carrying teams of UK saturation divers. They are shipped to a location and after spending time in a diving bell breathing a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, two divers get into their suits and drop down to the seabed to repair oil and gas lines on the bottom of the ocean. I’m sure most people know there are endless miles of pipelines on the seabed worldwide. Not the telecommunication lines that connect countries at depths that no human could withstand, but oil and gas lines in shallower waters. I never really knew how those things were maintained. These guys can dive down between 600 – 1,000 ft. It’s a crazy profession that most people don’t know anything about.
Although they tried to follow the story as closely as possible, like every movie, they take liberties to make it more tense. The extended “electronics issue” to solve was wildly embellished in the film. And real saturation divers don’t use flares to light up their surroundings while on the seabed (which makes their real-life routine seem even scarier). The flares were used so that WE could see the divers on the seabed. Then there’s the obvious niggle. There was no DEI Chinese hero UK diver in the mix. Hollywood is so ridiculous.
It’s best if you don’t know much about the harrowing story in advance and instead just let it play out in front of you. Working as a saturation diver is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. It’s a crazy journey and well worth a watch.
– Wait for Rental
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (PG-13)
Ethan Hunt is back at it for a third (and final) crack at trying to beat “The Entity” that is close to taking over the world by launching ALL the nukes from every country. Only Hunt and his team can stop it from happening.
The good news is that the stunts that Cruise worked so hard to pull off look great. Especially on a big screen. That’s probably the main reason to see this film in a theater.
The bad news is that the film is mighty bleak with a lot of Debby Downer chat going on and on, and it really drags for at least an hour and a half of the long 2h 50m runtime.
As with many of the Hollywood projects that were in the works years before the last election results came in, it’s obvious that Hollywood was 1,000% sure the US would have a woman president by now. Anyone who has Disney+ has seen numerous series and movies with women US presidents. The sure thing didn’t turn out the way Hollywood expected. The American public has spoken loud and clear. Twice. It makes that gender-swap president casting look even more awkward than it might have seemed a decade or two ago.
Here we have a hero black woman president, and many of the heroes are either black, a woman, or both as the white men all stand around looking dumb. We also get the obligatory overtly butch lesbian hero on a navy submarine. Yeah, OK. The silly Hollywood casting formula is getting mighty old. There’s only so much suspension of belief we can handle.
This was my least favorite of Cruise’s Mission: Impossible projects. Not that it’s a bad movie, it’s just not up to par with the previous ones. It’s still a diamond in the sea of crap Hollywood is dumping like raw sewage into theaters these days.
– See it on the Big Screen
Sharp Corner (NR)
A couple with a six-year-old son moves into a home located on a sharp corner in the road. After a horrific crash on their front lawn, the husband becomes unhinged and has trouble with his home life and with his job. It’s a pretty rapid descent, but we watch for an hour and a half as his life crumbles around him in PTSD ways.
I’ve never seen actor Ben Foster in anything, but here he’s a milquetoast husband that’s out of touch with reality. The part that’s most difficult to swallow is that his attractive wife wouldn’t have seen that years earlier and easily moved on with her life long ago. She has a great job. She doesn’t need him in her life.
Other than the horrific car crash happening while the couple is making love in the front room of the house (a well-done scene for sure), the movie’s a downer and not worth a watch. Especially with the way the husband acts throughout the entire thing.
As a side note, it’s unlikely that any county in the United States would ignore multiple fatalities on a tight curve in a road. They monitor such things. Either speed bumps would be installed or a guardrail. Not the nonsense we see in this story.
– Avoid!
Unit 234 (NR)
You would do things differently.
That’s the biggest takeaway you’ll have while watching Unit 234. People typically put themselves in the role they see onscreen and compare what the actor is doing to what they would do in similar circumstances.
Don Johnson (yeah, that guy from the Miami Vice TV series) stars as the bad guy trying to talk his way into a storage unit without the key to collect something he desperately needs. Isabella Fuhrman (who?) plays the owner of the storage unit facility, and she demands to see his ID since his face doesn’t match the photo of the renter of that storage unit.
Both characters behave in strange ways throughout the film, given the circumstances. The woman is a total bimbo in nearly every scene, wildly squandering multiple opportunities that will frustrate the viewer. She’s also noisier than a sugar-rushed kid at Chuck E. Cheese as she makes racket every time she moves around in the echoey concrete and steel storage facility while hiding from four villains hunting her. Yet the villains all seem deaf to her clambering around and her calling out to others like a lost child.
It’s not until the end of the movie that you will reflect back and realize Don Johnson’s character acted in ways that made little sense. The story is so riddled with plot holes that you’ll think it must have been a simple outline for a future script.
Quibbles:
Hours after having a kidney removed by open nephrectomy (old-school incision vs laparoscopy), you might be up to walking, but you’re not going to be up for fighting other guys your size. And if anyone gets shot right through the middle of their foot, there’s no way they are walking on it minutes later.
Hollywood writers constantly have to figure out ways to keep a cell phone from immediately calling in the cavalry. They take care of it with the bimbo, but what about her boyfriend? Did he time-travel in from the past to the crime scene location and doesn’t own a cell phone yet? Why does he act the way he does when he arrives on the scene? Is he retarded?
Why does the bimbo act retarded when talking with a cop? What planet is this story happening on?
She’s not the main target the bad guys are after. She’s a lame fly in the ointment. A total loose end. By the end of the movie, I actually rooted for the villains to just kill her off and be done with it. It would have made the story 100 times more believable (and dare I say, better). You only get so many mulligans.
There are way too many head-shaking moments for anyone to waste time watching this movie. Which is a shame because it was actually fun to see Don Johnson acting again.
– Avoid!
Rust (NR)
This is the controversial Western starring Alec Baldwin, where Baldwin’s gun fired a live bullet into a crew member, killing her.
Nepo baby nincompoop Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was the armorer on the set, and she was the one who accidentally loaded live rounds into the gun that Alec Baldwin would shoot on set. Hannah had a history of sloppy work, but her stepdaddy is a famous armorer in Hollywood, so she was untouchable. Until her loaded gun killed a crew member. She’s now serving her 18-year prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.
Some would also fault Alec Baldwin, as he was also the Producer of the film and had some clout as to the goings-on. But let’s put things into perspective. Anyone who thinks that a man in power in this day and age would dare tell a woman working in Hollywood that she can’t do her job properly, much less fire her, is kidding themselves. Anyone who would attempt such a thing would never hear the end of it and would be publicly shamed as a misogynist a-hole trying to hold a woman back from doing what is considered a man’s job. Baldwin was in a lose-lose position.
Actress Francis Fisher (more on her later) was also very outspoken from the start of filming about how sloppy the female armorer was on set. Fisher is on record as saying that the shooting incident didn’t surprise her at all.
This is not the first time a movie was released after a death on set. To name a few other big ones:
Brandon Lee (son of Bruce Lee) accidentally shot himself in the head during the filming of The Crow in 1993.
Vic Morrow and two child actors were sliced to pieces in a helicopter crash during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1983.
Second assistant camera operator Sarah Jones was killed when struck by a train while filming Midnight Rider (2014).
As for the storyline for the movie Rust:
Since Westerns have been a thing since The Great Train Robbery was released in 1903, there aren’t many stories based on the Old West that we haven’t seen already. This is just another plot like we’ve seen 100 times before. I’d rather not say which plot this follows in order to give you as many surprises as possible with such a well-trodden formula.
I will say that the situation a young boy finds himself in seems very unlikely and contrived for movie purposes. But it does move the story forward.
Alec Baldwin has been in some terrific movies: The Hunt for Red October, Miami Blues, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Malice, to name just a handful. He knows how to play a role. But Baldwin’s not as believable as Clint Eastwood or Kevin Costner as a grizzled cowboy. Here he’s fine, just not as good as we’ve seen before.
The overly-long film (2h 29m) is helped along by the usual stunning vistas of the West. The Western United States always looks good on film. You can get some magical shots rain or shine. I’ll bet this movie looks great on a monster theater screen. If that scenic stuff floats your boat, you’ll get more mileage out of this film in a theater.
Though she has few scenes, actress Frances Fisher stands out as the kid’s great-aunt. It’s a shame this really long film didn’t feature more of her and fewer scenes of the kid acting like a total idiot.
Actress Jenna Ciralli has a couple of standout scenes as a single mother trying to scrape by in the unforgiving Old West. Very believable.
Some quibbles:
I’m tired of seeing kids like this portrayed as being dumb as rocks just to allow the lazy Hollywood writers to generate more scenes of unnecessary danger. When someone saves your life from certain death, you take to it. You do whatever it takes to stay on the new road to longer life. I truly believe you could make this same movie without making the kid a total dumbass and shave a good 20 minutes off the length at the same time.
The wanted posters say “Dead or Alive,” with a $1,000 reward for Rust and the boy. Rust (played by Baldwin) is an infamous vicious killer. $1,000 ($31,000 in today’s money) is a ton of cash. Why on earth would anyone not just shoot them dead on sight for the reward? Only because it’s a Hollywood movie. Weak.
With both his parents dead, the kid is trying to live in a little house on the prairie on his own in the Old West with his little brother. Yet this kid struggles with the thought of ever shooting a gun. He can’t even pull the trigger to shoot a rabbit for food. Just like the pink-fingered pansy Hollywood writers who grew up in Beverly Hills. We don’t need to see that dumb scene to hammer home the fact that this kid is not a killer. We know he’s not a danger to the public. But in reality, in the 1800s, this kid and his brother would’ve died within a year with such a weak mindset about gun use.
One final tidbit:
Around the 1:44 mark, the cameraman pulls a tree branch back that then flips forward toward the young actor as the camera backs up ahead of him. They should have re-shot that scene as it takes you out of the moment.
– Wait for Rental
The Accountant 2 (R)
I liked the first Accountant movie enough to immediately get a ticket for this follow-up film. I think it’s best if you’ve seen the first one before watching this one so that you already understand the quirks that Ben Affleck’s character has as an autistic savant.
It doesn’t matter if the plot makes sense when it’s all said and done, it’s basically just a series of hits (murders) and a human-trafficking gang that needs to be undone by someone who is better at puzzles than the FBI. The Accountant (Affleck) is the guy for the job. Other than the sections that drag, it’s engaging enough.
But the movie is overly long (2h 5m) and could’ve used a tighter edit. A lot of scenes seem to go on forever. A number of Jon Bernthal’s scenes should have been cut in half if not dropped entirely. Perhaps they served to pad the runtime. There’s also a long ridiculous scene in a country western bar that was so out of place, I have to believe it was just shoehorned into the film just to check an obligatory DEI box.
Because of these shortcomings, I think this movie is best viewed as a rental, just like the first one.
– Wait for Rental
Ed Kemper (R)
There have been a lot of movies made about real serial killers. Audiences tend to enjoy that kind of thing. Films like Zodiac and Monster stand out. Ed Kemper tells the story about a guy who started his love of murder by killing the neighborhood cat, then graduated to killing his grandparents who were raising him.
After spending a lot of years in a maximum-security state hospital, instead of a prison due to his young age at the time, he’s deemed no longer a threat to society and released on parole.
Those familiar with this story that made national headlines at the time (no pun intended) due to their gruesome dismemberment know that he became the Co-Ed Killer, killing a slew of young women in California over eleven months.
It’s filmed in a gritty manner as if really filmed back in the 60s for his first murders and early 70s for the rest of them. It was interesting to see a test pattern on a TV set again. I had forgotten about late-night test patterns. He drove a Ford Galaxy 500, and it was funny to see that distinctive heat crack in the steering wheel that we all put up with in American cars until the Japanese showed everyone how to really make cars in the mid-70s. So they got the era right.
But like all of these docudramas, they play it loose with the facts. They do, however, lean heavily into the graphic body dismemberment of the victims and subsequent sex with dismembered corpses. A little too heavily in my opinion. A little of that goes a long way.
For those that are into serial killer films as a genre, this one covers the story but is a bit too on the nose in my opinion.
– Avoid!
The Amateur (PG-13)
Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is an introverted data analyst and code breaker for the CIA. The movie takes its time showing us how intelligent he is and how much he loves his wife.
Then his wife is executed in public while on a business trip overseas by a terrorist attack gone wrong. The CIA shows him footage of his wife’s execution. It’s plenty shocking and drives him to scour all the public camera recordings and voice recordings of the area to glean the identities of the terrorist members involved in her murder. He quickly presents his concrete findings to the top CIA guys so they can send a team to take care of them.
When Charlie discovers that the CIA is purposely dragging its feet on bringing her killers to justice for the greater good, he becomes enraged and cunningly leverages his superiors to train him as a field operative so he can hunt them down himself.
The Accountant (Ben Affleck) is another formula of the autistic savant gone rogue idea, and it’s a weird coincidence that Jon Bernthal costars in both stories. The Account 2 comes out at the end of this month.
Since Charlie is a quirky weakling, much like Malek’s real-life persona, he uses his skills of mathematics and understanding of explosive devices to dole out his justice. Most of his strikes are mighty far-fetched, but Hollywood movie believable enough. But the notion that you can have a YouTube video playing loudly on your cell phone explaining how to pick a door lock open while attempting it for the first time in a mid-rise apartment hallway is beyond stupid.
The ending is a letdown because it hinges on too many assumptions on Charlie’s part. Only Bond villains spend time capturing and toying with their enemies. To expect that face-to-face quality time with a Russian bogeyman in real life is a fool’s errand.
We used to have action heroes like Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Clint Eastwood. Those guys knew how to finish the job and send a message. As far as I’m concerned, The Amateur ends with a disappointing pulled punch. Keep in mind, this Russian bogeyman publicly executed his wife in cold blood. I walked out of the theater shaking my head.
– Wait for Rental
Drop (PG-13)
Meghann Fahy stars as Violet, a widowed mother of one who is going on her first date in quite some time. She’s been chatting with a guy named Henry for months, and this will be their first face-to-face meeting. Violet’s sister comes over to babysit the six-year-old boy as Violet hems and haws over what to wear on the date. Eventually, she gets it all sorted out and heads to the ultra-exclusive restaurant at the top of a skyscraper.
She arrives before her date and is obviously nervous, as are other people at the bar awaiting their first dates. The banter is fine in an LA kind of Hollywood writer way.
Violet then starts getting texts called “Drops” sent to her phone as she sits at the bar waiting for Henry. This is based on Apple’s “AirDrop” feature that was introduced back in 2011. The messages she receives are disturbing and about to get far worse.
Then Henry arrives and they both head to their special table by the window. Of course Henry and Violet are both beautiful specimens of human beings like most of the people sitting at their tables at this fancy restaurant. This matters, as I’ll cover later.
The Drop messages start to get increasingly menacing and she mentions it to Henry. He tells her that whoever is sending those messages needs to be within 50 feet, so they have to be in the restaurant somewhere. As you can imagine, a lot of people are on their phones all the time, so it’s not as easy as it would seem to figure out who is sending these messages.
For some inexplicable reason we get numerous scenes with an insufferable, if not fruity, waiter that is as off-putting as Jar Jar Binks in the 1999 Star Wars – Phantom of the Menace film. Another comparison would be abomination actor Chris Tucker in the otherwise fine film The Fifth Element. What were they thinking? Scenes that you’ll fast forward through upon any repeated viewings.
Eventually, the anonymous texter tells Violet to check her home surveillance cameras on her phone, which then reveals that there is a masked man in her house who is threatening her sister and her son at gunpoint. The texter then tells Violet that she’s not to tell her date or anyone about what’s happening and starts making her do crazy things like a puppet on a string. Since the villain is also watching all the video feeds from cameras placed around the restaurant, she can’t even try to write notes or other tactics to alert people about her dire issue.
From the outside looking in, as a casual diner (or her date), Violet starts acting in crazy ways that everyone around her soon notices. It’s almost like that philosophical question: Would you do this or that crazy thing in public without revealing that you’re doing it for money so that in the end, after 10 minutes of looking like an idiot, you can make $1,000? Some might do it. Most probably wouldn’t. And how far would you be willing to go?
Violet has to do crazy things for an hour. It’s not only mighty uncomfortable (understatement) to watch Violet as she’s forced to do crazy, dangerous things (no spoilers), but a lot of it wouldn’t go as smoothly as the antagonist would picture in their head when planning all this in advance.
The reason I mentioned the good-looking actors is because Violet acts so unhinged throughout the meal, like an escaped mental patient, that most guys sitting across from her would immediately consider it a total bust of a date right out of the gate. I can imagine most of the viewers wondering why this guy isn’t just excusing himself from the table and cutting his losses. Except for the fact that she’s just so damn attractive. The truth is, guys will put up with A LOT if they’re sitting across from a beautiful woman like Violet with even the slightest chance of having sex with her. Casting matters. In this case it basically saved the film.
But issues abound. Given the detailed circumstances, the masked gunman seems to be a total amateur. It doesn’t make sense. Then there’s the question of who fired a gun. Crime novel writing 101 – Police worldwide have used a paraffin test since the early 1930s to find out who shot a gun at a crime scene. Basically coating the hands of every suspect with wax, including the victim, and then looking for traces of nitrates and other substances revealing a gun going off. Not knowing who pulled a trigger is a gaping plot hole in this movie.
Then there’s the finale of this movie where they opened up the gigantic Book of Hollywood Movie Tropes and obviously said, “Let’s cram ALL of them into this ending.”
C’mon man!
– Wait for Rental
Locked (R)
Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins star in this story about a petty criminal loser who enters a high-end parked vehicle only to find that he’s then locked into this bulletproof car and can’t get out. Anthony Hopkins then gets to toy with this loser for 90 minutes as we watch.
If it sounds like an awfully long time to sit through a movie about a guy trapped in a car, you’re spot on.
There is one really cool extended shot in the car where the camera continually moves 360° around the criminal as he moves around the inside of the car trying to figure out how to escape. In a behind-the-scenes reveal on YouTube, the prop car the perp is sitting in was designed to come apart in 6 pieces in real time as the camera revolved around the interior of the car. In a well-choreographed manner, the thug moved around inside the car as the camera continually moved around him on a track. Stagehands dressed in green skin suits would carefully pull the car apart as the camera passed and make sure it was put back together wherever the camera was focused. Then with a green screen behind them, the surrounding parking lot could be added later so it looks normal through the car’s windows.
Really clever stuff. It made for a great shot. It was my favorite part of the movie as I tried to figure out how they did that. I thought perhaps there were two other people in the car carefully hiding behind the seats and passing the camera between them around the thug.
One problem throughout the film is that Anthony Hopkins is often difficult to understand (his accent doesn’t help) as he speaks over the car speakers during the numerous phone call conversations between the two of them.
The Anthony Hopkins character punishes the thug by turning things on remotely. Electric shocks installed in the seats, freezing the thug with the A/C system, or roasting him with the car’s heater. One method that will make you fidget in your seat is when Hopkins plays annoying music loudly on the stereo system. The problem is that whatever annoys the thug annoys the audience too. Incessantly played, loud polka music is as torturous for us to sit through as it is for the bad guy. And unfortunately, we paid to be tortured by it!
All in all, Locked might make for a good rental on a rainy Wednesday night. So keep that in mind.
– Wait for Rental
A Working Man (R)
Jason Statham is back playing his usual typecast role as an ex-soldier who just wants to be left alone to live out a boring life instead of killing bad guys.
But there always seems to be some vulnerable person in his life that gets taken advantage of by bad guys. Charles Bronson’s characters knew a thing or two about that. Clint Eastwood’s many characters too.
Statham is working for a Spanish company that owns and operates a big commercial construction company in Chicago. They gave him a chance when others wouldn’t with his iffy background. Their 18ish daughter (fake ID’s needed to get into clubs) hits the Chicago town with her girlfriends one night and gets taken by Russians who “fill orders” to supply rich men with young girls they see captured on cell phones in the clubs. Not only for sex but also for torture purposes. This theme isn’t really a US issue, but in the mind of a Hollywood writer, I’m sure this kind of thing happens every night in the US clubs. (Sigh)
Statham has a young daughter and a custody battle on his mind so he really doesn’t want to go on a rampage that could endanger his future plans in court. But of course he can’t help himself when the Spanish family he works for pleads for him to do something because the police aren’t helpful, and some are on the take because the Russians are so rich and powerful. Yeah, OK.
This screenplay was written by Sylvester Stallone and has all the beats you’d expect from one of his films. Ham-fisted would be one description. Some of the Russians are cartoonish, nobody can shoot straight, even with an automatic weapon, and some of the “touching” scenes come off sappy like an 80s TV show. The long slog until Statham’s usually short fuse is finally lit is another issue. The film is nearly 2 hours long.
But if you’re in the mood for a Jason Statham movie, none of that matters. You know what you’re in for, and for the most part Jason Statham delivers. Just like Arnold did back in his heyday.
– Wait for Rental
Cold Wallet (R)
Three unlikable idiots break into a mansion to steal money from the owner. Similar story to the three idiot robbers in the 2016 film, Don’t Breathe, where the buffoons were trying to steal a fortune from a blind, tough-as-nails military veteran.
In this version, the rich man in the house is a crypto kingpin who has fleeced his crypto-investing suckers out of millions of their invested dollars. He’s a total slimeball, which means there’s literally no likable character in this entire clown show. Normally, in a movie full of unlikable protagonists, I root for the monsters, serial killer or the aliens who are killing them off one by one. But in this case, there’s no such villain. So I found myself rooting for the credits to start rolling. I waited a long time.
Of course, the smartest and toughest of the village idiots is a young Puerto Rican woman who’s a master computer hacker that not only traces down the elusive slimeball the Feds can’t find but leads the two wimpy men on the heist to get all that swindled money back. Once in the house, she jumps onto a mega computer in the mansion and gets to work breaking that super-duper encryption the crypto kingpin has used to protect his fortune.
It’s totally believable because every time we see master hackers worldwide getting arrested for their heinous hacking skills year after year, it’s always an evil chick being paraded off in cuffs.
I’ll give credit where it’s due. The ending to this debacle goes in an interesting direction. But it can’t even begin to save the long and tedious awful shenanigans that leads up to it. What a mess.
– Avoid!
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (R)
Gerard Butler is back as a cop trying to take down a group that performs amazing heists in this second Den of Thieves film.
This movie concentrates more on the planning of the heist, so the runtime may seem every bit of the 2h 24m length to casual viewers. That said, the camera work and direction are fantastic, as is the location of the shoots. The seaside communities in Europe are nothing short of breathtaking, and the cast is well-rounded.
Overall, I found the script kept the audience tense throughout, even though there’s not a lot of action other than at the beginning and end. Everyone onscreen certainly prospers or makes hay from unlikely coincidences, but that’s typical of these kinds of Hollywood movies. I did appreciate that they showed the physical shortcomings of a couple of the overweight/aging men involved in the mid-rise building heist. That added realism to a movie like this. Not every second-story thief has the physique of James Bond or Catherine Zeta-Jones in a clingy jumpsuit.
But keeping it real. Every law abiding guy has spent time fantasizing about bank robberies, armored car heists, etc. (from their preteens!) because it’s exciting to go through the mental process of what it would take to actually pull off such crazy things. That’s what makes these kinds of stories thrilling to watch. It’s what makes the Grand Theft Auto game such a top seller worldwide. You can imagine yourself in these stories playing out in front of you without being worried about actually going to prison for doing it. And this one plays out in a serious, straightforward manner without the constant comedy relief of an Oceans film. (Oceans Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen.)
If the planning aspect of pulling off what seems to be an impossible heist by serious-minded pros is the least bit interesting to you, this is your kind of film.
– See it on the Big Screen
The Gorge (PG-13)
This streaming-only movie (Apple TV) is a hard one to review because the less you know going in, the better.
The nuts and bolts description is that the United States selects a skilled sniper (Miles Teller) and puts him on a very important mission in a concrete tower overlooking a deep, mist-covered gorge. The Russians have selected their own skilled sniper (Anya Taylor-Joy) and installed her in a tower on the opposite side of that large gorge.
The American sniper relieves his predecessor and will now monitor the gorge solo for a year. There are plenty of military devices and electronic installations installed on the ridge of that gorge to make sure whatever is down there doesn’t come out. Of course, he’ll also have to shoot his own guns if anything reveals itself. Thus, the sniper side of it.
That’s about all the information he’s given as his predecessor leaves. He doesn’t know where on Earth he’s been dropped (he parachuted in from the back of a military transport plane and was instructed to walk 23 miles north on foot to the gorge). But he suspects he’s still in the Northern Hemisphere because the weather is similar to the fall weather he left in the US. As a trained soldier, just as he knew which way north was during the day, he could’ve easily figured out his latitude at night from the North Star (Polaris) if he was indeed in the Northern Hemisphere. But Hollywood writers don’t know about such things.
The Russian sniper has just relieved her predecessor on the same day and has the same lack of information about what exactly they are facing.
That’s about all you should know going in for maximum enjoyment. I could go on and on about the pros and cons of the film, but it would reveal too much.
I will say that it’s because of the pro actors that you’ll remain engaged in the story from start to finish. By the midpoint, the story becomes so ridiculous that I suspect many viewers would tune out if not for the fact that the two actors can carry such a silly movie.
It’s worth a watch for anyone who subscribes to Apple TV because there’s no additional cost for this Apple movie. Overall, it’s just OK. You might even watch it again at some point. We’ve all seen a lot worse on these streaming platforms.
– Wait for Rental
When I’m Ready (PG-13)
The idea of a doomsday object on track to hit the Earth has been thoroughly mined for years. Armageddon and Deep Impact, both released in 1998, are probably the biggest moneymakers of the genre. The most recent highly recommended end-of-the-world disaster film would be Greenland starring Gerard Butler.
When I’m Ready is a low-budget version of the theme with a first-time director and actors you’ve never heard of. In this one, we follow a young couple who are driving endlessly and squat in basically any home they stop at because there are few people around. The asteroid impact is days away, and it would seem everyone for hundreds of miles has simply vanished in advance. Where did they go? Who knows.
Their first road trip is to see the girlfriend’s grandmother, who basically raised her. Then they decide they should also visit the boyfriend’s estranged father while they’re at it. One last goodbye before the end. This estranged reattachment idea was done much better in Deep Impact (the ending beach scene).
So we basically watch this couple take a LONG road trip, day by day. It’s a total snoozefest with fleeting moments of action. They do allude to a (suspenseful?) dark secret as to how this couple got together, but it’s revealed midway in a boring scene in a diner. If you’ve seen only 50 movies in your life, or even watched two episodes of The Walking Dead series, you know there are exciting ways to do a quiet diner scene in an end-of-the-world movie. This writer flunked that class.
The acting is not stellar, and the writing is worse. Nothing is explained. For one thing, there are no other cars on the road (for days), and this couple only finds a handful of people during the entire movie. Since they never say where the asteroid is going to hit (NASA would certainly know well in advance), I guess we’re supposed to assume this couple is at ground zero. Why? And why would they simply assume her grandmother and his estranged father would remain at ground zero too?
The boyfriend carries a loaded gun around in his waistband like he’s John McClane in Die Hard, even when playing laser tag in an abandoned game center. Not easy to pull off unless you’re a rapper.
Then later, why would you voluntarily give up your handgun when everyone you meet is on edge and that gun has saved you multiple times? Ridiculous.
The girlfriend looks to be in her mid-20s and her grandmother’s favorite candy is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, so this girl is very familiar with them. Yet somehow she’s dumbfounded to learn that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups melt in the heat. Really? I can only hope that’s not an accurate representation of US Gen Z/Millennials.
If you found yourself driving for days, stopping for gas when needed (the power is always on everywhere they go because power plants work by magic) with the end of the world coming and a destination to get to just hours before the asteroid hits, is it even remotely possible you would lose track of your only mission with literally nothing else to do and run out of gas before you got there? Only a Hollywood writer would accidentally run out of gas when he absolutely had someplace to be as the world was ending.
At least we get to see the cluster of asteroids streak into full impact. I was afraid they’d leave that out in such a low-budget film. So if you manage to stay awake, the last 30 seconds of the movie are well done. Shame about the other 107 minutes.
If you’re looking to watch this type of movie, you should probably rent Greenland instead.
– Avoid!
Companion (R)
This film opens in the US on Jan. 31st.
Those who have read my reviews over the years know I’m a sucker for smart-home/human robots-gone-wrong movies and TV shows. There have been quite a few of them over the decades, starting with the 1973 Westworld film starring Yul Brenner. The cream of the crop of the female robot genre is still the Russian TV series called Better Than Us. Netflix is the only place Americans can watch that series. The most recent example worth seeing is the 2022 film M3GAN.
In Companion, we see very realistic human robots that are sophisticated enough that they seem like real human girlfriends/boyfriends and can be brought to dinner parties or to the beach. Very believable for everyone around them. But of course, your friends would know that you own a companion robot, so the companions aren’t necessarily respected or treated all that well in company. Because, why bother really. They’re robots with no real feelings. So what seems off-putting at the start of the movie kind of makes sense once you realize what they really are.
The idea of controlling their software with your smartphone and how the whole system operates is well done. I’ll give credit to first-time director Drew Hancock (also the screenwriter here) for making that part believable. The problem is, Drew Hancock has trouble sustaining the story and can’t really decide whether he wants it to be a comedy or a horror movie.
The kills are solid, so the horror aspect somewhat delivers. It’s the rest of the movie that fell flat for me. The characters don’t act like normal people would act given the situations they find themselves in. They act like movie screen people, which only fools moviegoers under 25 (or Hollywood writers).
The main robot is played by actress Sophie Thatcher. She has a closed-mouth smile in 99% of her online photos because she has twisted and discolored front teeth. That’s fine if that’s her choice. (As an actress, no less. Sigh. At least Jewel concentrated on creating hit music with her guitar.) But it’s just not believable at all that any man would spend a ton of money on a female companion robot that is not only very average in looks but has a terrible grill to boot. Hell, people even want their new kitchen appliances to look nice! Did he get a deal on her at the Scratch and Dent robot store? She’s so expensive that he admits he’s leasing her. C’mon, man. Be for real. That’s NOT the robot he’d lease for big money. It torpedoes the believability of the movie right out of the gate.
Then there’s the queer content. Yes, Hollywood continues to cram gay scenes down everyone’s throat. There’s a LOT of gay content here. Many scenes of lovey-dovey. Men kissing on the lips. Like, a lot of it. You’ve been warned.
But the overall message of this film is female empowerment. Whether robots or real women, men are all Controlling Bad Guys! And this film is going to hit you over the head with it! Even a mid-credit scene shows us yet another example of female empowerment.
Hollywood. Good grief. Where’s the Russian film industry when we really need them?
– AVOID!
Below is a screenshot of the female Russian robot in Better Than Us. Compare her to the Companion screenshot photo above. The little girl she’s carrying is the robot’s Primary User. She’s very protective of her Primary User and her father. She’s a badass robot, and that Russian villain had better watch himself. Which robot would a man spend big money on for his home? Not a scratch and dent model!
End of 2025 Movies.