Category: Home Video

In the opening few minutes of Furious 7 Brian O’Conner(Paul Walker)’s son throws a toy car out a minivan door and says that it flew.  O’Conner responds that cars can’t fly, but Furious 7 goes about doing its best to prove O’Conner wrong.  Much like O’Conner’s son and the toy car, Furious 7 is just a boy playing with his toys.  In this case the boy is director James Wan, but the effect is the same: cars doing impossible things in a seemingly random series of events.

I generally like to give some sort of movie plot synopsis or plot teaser, but in this case there really isn’t one.  The Furious crew does random stuff while Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) tries to kill/stop them.  Also Djimon Hounsou plays a bad guy too.  Not sure what his goal was other than to be not good.

Any time any of this movie’s actors were tasked with acting or setting up the movie’s ‘plot’ Furious 7 ground to a halt.  It was stilted and cliché.  I mean it was almost unbearable.  However, once the cars started literally flying the movie started figuratively flying.  It was so much fun to watch these characters do impossible things all with wide grins on their faces.  For Furious 8 I hope they skip the ‘talking’ scenes all together and just come up with crazy set pieces because that is what the Fast & Furious franchise is now.  Mind-bending-ly awesome car stunts.

I am not sure if Furious 7 is a good movie or not, but once the chit chat stopped I enjoyed myself quite a bit, and that has to count for something.  I don’t know what sort wild things James Wan has planned for Furious 8, but it will be hard to top what he put on screen with Furious 7.  If you want to believe that cars can fly, Furious 7 might just be what you are looking for.

I recently watched the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  I was going to review it, but then I remembered that The Paladin already reviewed it a year ago.  Instead of doing all the work of writing my own review I am just going to link to his since we pretty much agree.  Plus it can’t hurt my ‘click’ rate (sadly it probably can’t help it either).

The Paladin dug The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Disney Animation Studios is on quite the roll.  They haven’t released a bad movie in quite some time, and Zootopia continues this streak.  Somehow the folks over at Disney managed to make a poignant movie about racism, but still have it be cute and charming.  Zootopia is a great movie, and one that can be seen by the whole family.

The film follows a bunny named Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) who becomes Zootopia’s first rabbit cop, but she soon finds out that the world isn’t the wonderful place she hoped it would be, and tensions are running high in the city between Prey and Predators.  Her first big case could make things even worse.  Hopefully her new friend a sly fox named Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) can help her navigate the big city.

A bad movie would have fumbled this story and made it too preachy, or even worse, insulting, but Zootopia’s writers managed to get just the right tone while still getting their point across.  I like how they made sure that the main characters were not immune to the problems the city had, but instead they had to overcome them.  Too many kids movies make the main characters perfect, so nothing is learned.

Disney Animation and Pixar continue to be the gold standard on finding great voice talent for their films.  While other studios chase big stars, so they can advertise their star power, Disney just gets the right people for the job.  Bateman and Goodwin are very good, but the rest of the cast is wonderful too.  Though I am a sucker for anything with John DiMaggio in it.

The animation in Zootopia is amazing.  Disney Animation Studios really brought this animal city to life.  I loved all the different districts, and how all these different animals interacted with one another.  It made Zootopia feel like a real place.  It was just great work all around.

Zootopia is a good family film that was made by a studio that has really hit its stride.  The only reason that I could find for not recommending this film is that it has a couple of quick scary parts, but my two year old made it through with flying colors.  Zootopia is so good you should watch it even if you don’t have a family.

The Maze Runner was a surprise mid-level hit for Fox in 2014, so it was not surprise that a sequel based on the second Maze Runner book, The Scorch Trials, was green-lit.  What was surprising is how different Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials was from the previous film.  It is pretty much a straight up zombie movie.  It is mildly entertaining, and there is some fun to be had, but it doesn’t go deeper than that.

Now that the Gladers have escaped the maze and WCKD’s clutches they find themselves ‘rescued’ by a new group.  Can this ‘rebel band’ be trusted?  Of course not, so they soon escape only to be chased by zombies in the desert while looking for a real group of rebels to take them in.

I just wrote three short sentences about the plot of The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, and I think I may have given away too much.  There really isn’t that much to this movie.  They just run a lot getting chased by either WCKD or zombies (known as Cranks).  They do offer a little more info about what WCKD is up to, but nothing that interesting, and I still have no idea what the title of the film is referring to.  There are no ‘trials’ as far as I could tell.  Tribulations perhaps.  Also after looking at the plot synopsis of the book, don’t expect this movie to be anything like the source material.

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials is a completely passible way to send a couple of hours.  There is nothing wrong with a family friendly zombie movie, but after the intriguing first movie it is a bit of a let down.  Still it was good enough that I will probably watch the third movie whenever it comes out.  At least they are not splitting Maze Runner: The Death Cure up in two movies like every other YA series’ last book adaptation.