Month: April 2018

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Shmee Meets An Atomic Blonde!

On paper Atomic Blonde is perfect: it has the color and flair of the punk 80’s and the action of John Wick.  Plus, it features one of the greatest action stars currently working, Charlize Theron.  Mix in a little cold war era spy intrigue, and things get even better.  You look at everything Atomic Blonde has going for it, and you think it is going to be amazing, but sadly it falls a little flat in places, so it ends up being merely pretty good.  Watching a good movie should never make you feel let down, but when it had so much potential, it is hard not to be disappointed.

The hook for Atomic Blonde is fabulous.  You let Charlize Theron loose in Berlin just as the wall is about to come down, and she has to fight her way through every intelligence agency in town while trying to find some list with a bunch of spies’ names on it.  Can she trust the people she is working with?  Absolutely not, but we know she will claw her way to the top of the spy pile.

I was buzzing when I saw the first trailer for Atomic Blonde, and I was even more excited when I found out it was being directed by one of the guys that brought us John Wick, David Leitch.  Here is the thing, while Leitch did a great job bringing the style and filming the stunts, the spy stuff was all pretty by the numbers.  Sure there are the usual spy twists, but nothing that thrilling.  You just have to wait through it to get to the next fight sequence.

However, the fight sequences and the style do almost make up for the lack of an interesting plot.  I mean Atomic Blonde is so cool to look at, and you can feel every punch that gets thrown and every set of keys that get stuck is some dude’s face.  Theron was meant to be in movies like this.  I want to see her punch and kick everything and everyone.  I would faint if she and Keanu Reeves ended up in a movie together.

So where does this leave us?  With a movie that oozes style (and more than a little blood), and has some wonderful stunt choreography, but with spy-craft that is less than intriguing.  Hey, if you are just going in for the action, you will probably like Atomic Blonde, but if you were expecting a little more because of all the potential, it is hard not to be disappointed, so just temper your expectations, and things will be fine.

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Shmee Visits A Quiet Place!

I am sure when Jim from The Office started shopping around the idea of Signs, but everyone has to be quiet, there were not a lot of takers.  However, after a massive opening weekend Paramount must be glad they took a chance.  While the movie is far from original, though honestly what horror movie is at this point, A Quiet Place makes up for it with its spot on execution and amazing performances.

The quick setup for A Quiet Place is that in the near future the world is overrun by blind monsters with amazing hearing, and they kill anything that they can hear.  A family has learned to survive in this silent world, thanks in part to their hearing impaired daughter, giving them the ability use sign language to communicate.

As I said earlier, we have seen a lot of this before.  Obviously Signs used the hook of a family up against aliens, and just last year Don’t Breathe had everyone trying to stay quiet unless they wanted to get viciously murdered, but John Krasinski keeps everything so tight, tense and focused that the familiarity is not an issue.  Not to mention the family’s struggle to survive is so convincing that you can’t help but get swept away with what is happening on screen.

Obviously Krasinski’s directing wasn’t the only reason this family’s tale was so convincing, the actors get a lot of credit for that too.  A lot of times it is hard for real life couples to portray their real life chemistry on screen, but that did not seem to be an issue for Krasinski and Emily Blunt.  They don’t get all the credit though, their kids, played by Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe, also do a fantastic job.  Kids are always great for horror movies because with adults it ticks us off when they do something stupid, but kids, we believe that they will make bad decisions.

As you can tell, I really enjoyed A Quiet Place.  It is refreshing to see horror movies that are made with actual talent, and a will by their creators to make something good.  Instead of the usual dreck that gets made.  Even better, it might be the most family friendly horror movie made in quite some time, so if you have older kids, it is a movie you and the kids can get scared at together.  While not as good as last year’s Get Out, A Quiet Place is a fantastic way to start off the summer movie season.

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I Liked Half Of Pacific Rim: Uprising…

I was blown away by the first Pacific Rim.  It was big and dumb and I couldn’t stop smiling when I watched it.  Pacific Rim: Uprising is also big and dumb, but it misses the heart of the first movie.  Which is a shame, because the movie has a promising start, but then somewhere someone decided that the second half the movie had to be a pointless monster fight, and while Pacific Rim is a movie series about giant robots fighting giant monsters, apparently the writers must have had a contest for the dumbest reason for this fight because it defies all logical explanation.

Pacific Rim 2 takes place ten years after the events of the first movie, and the world has obviously changed.  People are rebuilding after the attacks, and the Jaeger program is struggling to continue to have relevance.  Meanwhile, Jaeger tech is booming on the black market as people try to build their own massive robots.  A post Kaiju world is an interesting one.  Sadly, the movie doesn’t continue to explore this, and instead has a series of increasingly dumb things happen until some robots fight some monsters.

I would have loved Pacific Rim: Uprising if had just extended the first part of the movie to a logical conclusion (or at least a more logical one).  While I may have suggested the writers had some sort of terrible contest to decide the ending, I am guessing there was actually more than a little executive interference that demanded a monster v robot fight like the one we got, and the writers had to figure out how to make it work.  Which is what makes this all so aggravating.  Had the whole thing been bad, I wouldn’t have been as upset, but there were some good ideas here that just got squandered.

I am guessing you can tell that I was disappointed with how Pacific Rim: Uprising turned out, but if you like the first movie, the second one is worth a rental, or if you are MoviePass subscriber like me, there are worse movies.  The robots and the monsters are still cool, even if the reason they are fighting is not.  Let’s hope Pacific Rim 3 learns the right lesson’s from Uprising.