Reviews

This film is silly and is a terrible sequel to the first "Mechanic", but it's also incredibly amusing.

I'm on a bit of a Statham-watching streak and I've got to admit, I didn't enjoy "The Mechanic" much. It had some slick action, but I failed to care about any of the subject matter; this film is a lot more enjoyable---largerly due to the aforementioned silliness---but is a terrible sequel. In fact, it's got absolutely nothing to do with the first film, aside from Jason Statham's character sharing the same name and backstory. He's supposed to be the same character, of course, but he strikes me as a completely different person. In fact, from either trailer footage or promotional stills I half-recall, I thought this was a sequel to Statham's "Parker", not to "The Mechanic", which I'd never seen until very recently.

Whilst I didn't enjoy the first "Mechanic" much, and that's purely on me, it was well-executed, coherent, focused, and made sense. Conversely, this plot is flimsy and outright ridiculous at times. In the previous film, Arthur Bishop (Statham's character) was established as a somewhat sociopathic loner who had trouble connecting with those around him, despite having some sort of conscience. He is now furnished with a tragic and romantic backstory, a love interest, and a certain heroism that wasn't there before. This is why I'm saying the film is a bad sequel, and really does feel more like a sequel to Parker rather than to "The Mechanic".

To save the new-found "love of his life", whom he met two days ago and shared three conversations, a drink, and a shag with, and whom I initially suspected was a traitor---before I realised this film truly isn't related to "The Mechanic" at all---Bishop performs some ridiculous feats. Established in the previous film as a specialist in making his assassinations look like accidents, he is now forced to kill three dudes for the bad guy.

Firstly, Bishop infiltrates a maximum-security Malaysian island prison by posing as a serial sex offender and murderer. Not only do the Malaysian cops not beat the living daylights out of him (which, c'mon, they really probably would), they also let him keep his items, which are naturally the key to his escape once his inmate target is dead.

Our man then travels from Malaysia to Australia, cases out a penthouse fortress using a helicopter joyride and a faux flat viewing, and plots and executes an incredible "accidental" assassination... all in less than 36 hours, and all during daylight.

Bishop then proceeds to go to Bulgaria, which is always a source of joy for yours truly, a hot-blooded Bulgarian of the highest calibre. Arriving in the seaside city of Varna, Bishop goes to the roof of a non-existent hospital to scope out the Buzludzha monument, which has been taken over by an American arms dealer, and has an active submarine pen underneath. I was roaring with laughter. Not only because this national monument-cum-museum, which is located in the centre of the country (some 200 kilometres from Varna and the seaside; that's quite the sniper rifle shot you make there, Bishop!), but because it's never exactly clear how this American arms dealer took hold of the facility and how any of this is even remotely possible. Also, one nitpick: the fictional hospital in Varna is called "St. Augustine", but the English labels around the place refer to it as "St. Augustino". Dunno what that's about, it just stands out as something that isn't right.

Finally, in a very strange gambit that really should have resulted in Jessica Alba's death, Bishop saves her, kills the baddie, and saves the day.

In terms of acting, Statham is Statham. Tommy Lee Jones is present for a bit and seems to be having fun, and it's always nice to see Michelle Yeoh show up. Jessica Alba does what she can with the barebones character she's got. Though introduced as a "former special forces" girl, that detail is completely pointless and she hardly acts the part.

I just would have appreciated some more TIME. The plot never relents from its breakneck tempo, giving Bishop no time to fall in love with Jessica Alba, and not even enough time to pull off his assassinations in a plausible manner.

In short, this is a very funny ride that invites a certain degree of ridicule, but does feature some cool action scenes, and in all honesty, I appreciated the simple, by-the-book formula. A few extra editing passes in the writing room could have really made something out of this mess of a plot. Still enjoyable though, you should just know what you're getting yourself into.

In conclusion, I still think Statham is the best replacement for Bruce Willis we've got, and I wish he keeps making more action films. "Parker" was certainly better than this though, and I'd rather see films like that rather than this one.

I lost it when the subtitles consistently tried their best to refer to "the Ukrainians" (a bunch of secondary characters) as."Alexander and his men". What, they're not allowed to be represented in movies now? How awful and misguided. I for one fully support this instance of Ukrainian representation in a Western movie.

This film falls short as a Guy Ritchie title, but is certainly rather enjoyable. Some of the banter is quite witty nonetheless, though the occasional attempts at humour---only a few lines of dialogue, fortunately---miss the mark spectacularly. It does have a certain "slickness" of direction that is consistent with some more recent Ritchie films, if that's a sensible statement to make; but lacks any distinct "over-the-topness" that I'd associate with him.

The plot follows a structure reminiscent of a heist film, with Jason Statham's crew coming together to steal a McGuffin from the baddies. It's serviceable. I've really got nothing much to say except that.

It's good to see Cary Elwes, I don't believe I've seen him in anything more recent than "Twister". Similarly, Hugh Grant appears to be enjoying himself in this role, and his character certainly entertains. Statham himself is playing Jason Statham, there's not much I can say about that, but I do enjoy Statham. As for the rest of the supporting cast, I've got little to say.

Certainly an enjoyable watch, but not as memorable as some of Ritchie's other work. However, I certainly wouldn't mind the possible sequel the ending seemed to shyly hint at.

In short, it's a fun Bourne-like film full of ridiculous action scenes. I was very much surprised by the overall message though: the CIA does bad things and gets away with it. I'd rate it as a 6, enjoyable but forgettable, if not for that strange bit of realism perfused within.

It's certainly a Bourne-like, inasmuch as a film can be Bourne-like. Super-agent-assassin-man goes on the hunt by his own, and wreaks havoc and destruction in his wake, whilst travelling around some pretty (and cheaper to film in?) locales in central and East-Central Europe. Plenty of action, though hard to take seriously, but it's a fun ride on the whole.

Ryan Gosling does okay with what he's got (which isn't much); I very much fancied seeing Chris Evans play a bad guy, and given that the newest film I'd seen recently-sans the second "Puss in Boots"-was "Blade Runner 2049", I rather enjoyed seeing Ana de Armas again as well.

The banter between Six (Gosling) and Miranda (de Armas) is amusing, but except for establishing a motivation for Miranda to help Six, the film never bothers to slow down and develop their characters, or even to let Miranda have an actual character. Aside from an Indian man with very thick plot armour, Chris Evans's over-the-top villain (I already forgot the character's name) is the only other personage who gets some semblance of importance to the plot, but also virtually nothing in terms of development.

One or two "girlboss" moments in the dialogue could have been excised for the film's benefit; and the "fourth act", the very end of the film that happens after what one assumes would be an expected denouement, surprised me by assuming a strangely realistic mood that clashed rather pointedly with the jovial-yet-violent tone of the entire previous part of the film. Without giving any spoilers, the CIA gets away with effectively conducting terrorist attacks on European soil whilst pinning the blame on someone else, and I'm incredibly surprised to see such a statement present in a big-budget American film in the current year. I wonder if these things happen in the real world too? ;)

In short, the film is quite watchable, but I certainly expected more from the lineup. 6/10, boosted to a 7 by virtue of what the ending invites us to think about.

I first learnt about this film through an advert on the side of the bus, which offered no information at all, and only featured a limited shot of the wheelbarrow scene. Such effective marketing! I was immediately interested.

The overall premise and execution of this film give the viewer strong "Romancing the Stone" vibes: a romance novelist who really isn't very adventurous gets involved in a deadly search for a legendary artefact on a tropical island. The main difference here is that the male lead is as dumb as a post.

On the whole, the film is rather amusing. It is, unfortunately, marred by gratuitous vulgarity that ruins quite a few of its would-be jokes, in tandem with a very strange desire to be rooted in the "current year", with present-day references aplenty (such as several attempts to use "tweeting" as a joke, certain vocabulary choices in the screenplay, or one particular conversation that is pure cringe), which will sadly date this film to obsolescence rather soon... unlike, say, the aforementioned "Romancing the Stone", which I only saw very recently, and is as enjoyable to watch as it must have been back when it came out, nearly 40 years ago. (That film is also funny throughout and features no out-of-place jokes about wedgies and "hoo-hoo"s, but I digress.)

With that said, Tatum and Bullock do have chemistry, and there are plenty of jokes that do hit the mark, including a decent amount of their character-specific gags, and including the leeches scene. A cameo appearance-that I knew nothing about beforehand-also had me in stitches. In short, whilst hit and miss, the humour is of a higher quality than other "funny" American films I've seen recently. That's good.

The story is comfortably familiar, and the ending, though very much predictable (given a throwaway line spoken by the antagonist), is sweet and serviceable. I don't regret seeing this film, but it's far from the best "tropical island adventure" rom-com you can find.

TL;DR: Worth a single viewing if you have no expectations. Amusing, not fantastic, but serviceable.

Well, after the unmitigated disaster that Amazon's "Wheel of Time" fanfic was (it certainly wasn't an adaptation), I was a little hesitant to check out another "book adaptation" of theirs. Fortunately, I ended up being very impressed.

Having never read Lee Child's Reacher series, I enjoyed the Cruise films, though I did learn later how unhappy book fans were with his depiction of the character. This Reacher, Alan Ritchson, is a big man and seems, in my layman's eyes, to be a great fit for the character. I, personally, very much enjoyed Reacher himself, whose expertise and prowess in everything might let him approach the status of a Mary Sue... but I'll let this one slide. The ladies want him, and the men want to be him; he's almost larger-than-life. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I also greatly enjoyed all of the supporting cast, and had a great time seeing Currie Graham as Kliner.

Most surprisingly, there isn't anything unsightly that would make one's eyes roll. Sure, there is the occasional hint that all Southerners are belligerent -ists of various kinds, but that's easy enough to overlook and the show doesn't attempt to force-feed you and political opinions. I'll take it.

The story is sensible enough, though some twists are predictable, and one of two moments are outright silly ("enhancing" a photo of a mortal wound to reveal "micro-lacerations" that conveniently depict the shape of the murder weapon in a very obvious manner, for example), but these are few and far between, whilst the majority of the content involves interesting characters, fun dialogue, and decent action.

Long story short, I greatly enjoyed this show, and hope it was a good adaptation of its source material. I imagine it'll get a second season, and hope that one also faithfully adapts a book (which, again, I hope this one did). In fact, I might just like to peruse the series itself whilst I wait...

Saw the first four "episodes", then couldn't force myself to continue. In short, this is an exceptionally weird, outright bizarre series set in a universe that's effectively as grimdark as it gets, and few things in the so-called plot make much sense.

I feel like you'd need to have some sort of morbid curiosity to watch this, as if it were a gruesome accident on the road (the show certainly is gruesome at times). I've not got that, I'm afraid.

If only the characters were interesting, perhaps the weirdness and seeming aimlessness might cause excitement instead of apathy, but alas, I didn't find any of the main cast interesting at all. Another reviewer mentions something about them "becoming endearing", but I'm afraid I couldn't get to that point; and yet another reviewer compares this (unfavourably) to Farscape. I didn't know we were making such comparisons, but Farscape is my favourite sci-fi series, and I rank it higher than Babylon 5. Perhaps I simply expect something else of my sci-fi, something that Lexx was not interested in giving me.

I'd give this a lower rating, but I can't deny the points for effort, and some of the stunning, haunting visuals. The spaceship-sized woman with the tongue, for instance, I don't think I'll ever forget that.

A friend saw this shortly after it came out and said he wouldn't mind rewatching it, leaving me rather surprised. A couple of days later another friend dragged us out to see this, at a 4dx screening, no less. I got burnt out on capeshit after "Ant-Man", but this looked possibly interesting enough to be enjoyable.

Aside from the overwhelming shaking of the 4dx chairs, the film itself is a plothole-ridden nonsensical mess, led by unlikeable characters and a complete waste of its two most famous cast members, Ben Kingsley and Michelle Yeoh. As can be anticipated from modern high-budget films, it's also laden with impressive CGI and good-looking visuals, and the monsters are cool. It's just a shame that it's such a waste. The ratings must be artificially inflated as well, as there's no way anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature would actually think this is a good film. But let's get into some more details.

Starting from the opening, we're introduced to our unremarkable protagonist and the annoying female lead. "Katy" is as useless, annoying, infantile, and uncharismatic as one could imagine. I couldn't have written a more grating character if I tried. On top of her, we're given some very awkward, stilted dialogue that was probably supposed to be cutesy or something, but fails dramatically. After the end of the first act, which terminates with the bus sequence, the film becomes slightly more palatable. Instead of cringing and facepalming and wondering why, exactly, I'd spent £16 on this trash, I could at least watch the thing.

Then we get into the nonsensical. After his mother got killed by the mob, Shang-Chi trained hard for years before getting sent to avenge her death. He killed her murderer, but then decided to feel bad, run away to the US and abandon his ten-year-old sister whom he loved, after telling her he'd be back in three days. His sister, who "taught herself better" just by watching the real fighters train, ran away 6 years later and founded an underground fighting ring in Macau all by herself with no money or support from anyone. Right. Shang-Chi's dad didn't actually want to kill his kids when he sent his mercs to fight them (including the big guy with the blade-hand), he actually wants his children's help to find their mum, who's allegedly still alive. They run away from the dad, stealing some BMW hatchback instead of a Land Rover or a Jeep for a trip into the Chinese outback. Conveniently, the car's turn circle happens to be just the one needed to traverse a perilous "living" forest maze that "eats" stragglers. Our heroes find the late mum's village, train for ONE day, and defeat all evil, including the dangerous merc army bent on burning the village down.

Nothing in the paragraph above, and little in the film in general, makes any sense, including the fact that the bad guys show up to the village---the village they want to slaughter the population of---with stun batons and shock crossbows. I guess assault rifles wouldn't have quite stood up to the good guys' "dragon-forged" staves. Katy, the annoying American-born character who looks significantly out of shape, trains archery for a handful of hours before letting a much cooler character get his soul sucked out (RIP Master Guang Bo, I'll remember you) before landing the single lucky arrow needed to dispatch the eldritch boss-monster from half a kilometre away. She'd never be able to draw a real bow, let alone hit any target at all.

Shang-Chi himself also trains for a few hours before defeating his dad and his rings against all odds, but the flashbacks showing him training with his mum as a kid at least allow me to suspend disbelief sufficiently to go with it. What I can't go with is the fact that Shang-Chi takes a full ring-empowered gut punch beforehand, which propels him some fifty metres, and would have ruptured his spleen or stomach. He's dead, Jim. I don't care about your plot armour.

The final sequence also included so much seat shaking (4dx) that I could barely follow what was going on with the eldritch monster. 4dx was fine in "Alita: Battle Angel", but whoever the poor sod responsible for programming this film's effects was, he must have been out of his mind.

The worst part of this is that the story has potential and could have been handled better if someone actually tried to make it logical. What, am I supposed to "turn my brain off"? I can't "turn my brain off" because I actually have one. As a writer, I'd be laughed out of the room if I were to write a script as nonsensical as this. Guess that doesn't apply to blockbusters for some reason...

Michelle Yeoh is completely wasted in an insignificant role as Shang-Chi's aunt. Ben Kingsley is back as his "Iron Man 3" role, a dumb Englishman theatre actor providing comic relief alongside Katy; a role that I recall people perceived as an insult to the character of the Mandarin when "Iron Man 3" came out. The sole difference between his and Katy's jokes is that I actually chuckled at a couple of his.

A 4.5 is what I'd give, and I'd probably round it up to a 5, as the visual spectacle is decent, albeit dragged way down by the sheer inanity of the script. This unnaturally high rating, however, merits rounding mine down. I can't accept the rating is real. If it is, then people must be too willing to slobber up all the flashy corporate sludge thrown their way, which would be saddening.

This show is insane, I love it to bits. Whilst the pilot loosely follows the plot of the book, the show quickly goes in overdrive and becomes shamelessly ridiculous. Whilst the South American plateau hosting the eponymous Lost World features the ape-men and dinosaurs from the book, it now also features african Zulus, Japanese samurai, ROMAN LIZARDMEN (they've allegedly evolved from dinosaurs), Celtic druids lost in time for 2000 years, maori, Camelot from Arthurian legend, Atlantean remnants, magical seductresses who come out of the forest looking for men, underground ninjas... and even VAMPIRES. Who drink blood and have a gothic vampire mansion. Did I mention that time-travellers from the future also make an appearance? Indeed, right after the episode with the pyramid and the egyptian Pharaoh I thought to myself: "the one thing we haven't seen are Cimmerian barbarians", and lo and behold, the next episode opens with savage leather- and fur-clad barbarian mountain-men. I love it. I love it to bits.

Someone more cynical would perhaps roll his eyes, noting that Veronica-one of the two main female characters original to the show, a young blonde inspired by Tarzan who traipses around the deadly jungle in little more than a bra and miniskirt-seems to find an excuse to get herself submerged in water every other episode, whether it's to save a drowning Indian girl, evade a T-Rex, accidentally get trapped down a well, have a "cat-fight" in a convenient puddle of mud, or simply have a water pipe burst in her face. In the episode with the giant bees, Veronica also slathers herself with copious amounts of honey (and so does everyone else, to a more limited extent) so as to conceal her scent. But I would posit, young sir or madam, that this is nothing to smirk about, it's just the hardships that a life in the primeval jungle can force you to go through.

Veronica's action exploits sometimes become ridiculous when she's occasionally able to beat up several (ape-)men larger and stronger than her-without ever ruining her manicure, let it be noted!-but every once in a while the hunter, Lord Roxton, is able to punch someone in the face and send him flying a metre away, so I guess this is just the 90s adventure TV dramatic choreography in play.

It is of course delightfully refreshing, from a modern perspective, to see a cast of characters unashamed about spreading civilisation and the values of the British Empire amongst dangerous savages, sometimes at gunpoint if need be. The character interactions are engrossing, and whilst the show rarely even tries to take itself seriously (the Camelot episode being a great example of this), some of the more serious and character-driven plots are very, very solid. The entire first season screams of good ideas put into good-if incoherent-use; though alas, quite frequently the plot moves forward after ape-men or dinousaurs randomly jump out of the forest for no particular reason, hardly a creative decision.

Naturally, the CGI is dated and quite lacking by modern standards, but this is something I'm more than willing to overlook when the sum total is so interesting. I also have to say I love the mattes. They're a mixed bag, but I enjoy them greatly; set design is serviceable albeit usually limited. "Is this Camelot?" asks one of our characters when led "to Camelot". "No, it's just the king's hunting camp, Camelot itself is many days away." Also, "Is this your civilisation," they ask the Pharaoh Ramses. "One pyramid and a dozen men?" "No, this is just our place of worship, our civilisation is many days away." All right, show, I see what you did there. Very clever indeed. (But why was the Pharaoh's sister being crowned in the place of worship in front of a dozen dudes instead of in her capital city? We'll never know...)

As for acting, it's solid enough. Michael Sinelnikoff is quite brilliant as the mild-mannered Summerlee, and with a pipe in his mouth and a revolver in hand, with a carefree smile on his face, he truly looks like the most based grandpa ever. Rachel Blakely is fantastic, alluring, and captivating as the duplicitous Marguerite, and though her Australian accent makes itself more than obvious in some cases despite her character being American, Marguerite is a wonderful addition to the cast and makes for a sublimely soapily-operatic "will they, won't they" interaction with Will Snow's John Roxton. Roxton himself is very well embodied by Mr Snow, and his confident manner as the group's expert hunter, tracker, and pugilist is right on the spot. The expedition leader, "the visionary" George Challenger is similarly well-played by Peter McCauley, who certainly looks the part of the unorthodox natural explorer, and usually looks a little too excited for whatever's going on. Ned Malone, the American reporter and protagonist of the original novel is (mostly) played by David Orth, who does a serviceable job of being the everyman. The aforementioned Veronica, lovely in all regards, is played by Jennifer O'Dell. Veronica is somewhat of a native of the plateau (born to American parents currently MIA), is Malone's romantic interest, and does admirably with what she's given as the lonesome but hardened young woman searching for her lost parents, though I'm afraid I was never quite convinced when she'd start snarling, trying to be intimidating.

Season 2 doesn't fail to disappoint, with the very first episode featuring Roxton falling into a river and emerging with a different haircut, Marguerite forgetting about her leg wound, an Age of Discovery shanty town, the party manning a rowboat and having the two women row whilst Challenger captains it up and Malone is the coxswain, and a plesiosaur getting incinerated by a single oil lantern. Aside from much-improved CGI, the rest of the second season gives us amazons (a hilarious and remarkably well-handled implementation of the idea, which would certainly look different-probably worse-if made now, 20 years later), samurai, more time travel (with a blatant continuity error), XVI century ghosts, werewolves, a fire-breathing dragon, Challenger stating that magic doesn't exist when he himself used sorcery in the previous episode, even more magical men and women coming out of the forest to seduce somebody, more holes conveniently opening up under our heroes, golems and nuclear power, and even SPACE ALIENS. The writing in season 2 appears to go downhill, however, what with some retcons of season 1 (ape-men are now partly-civilised "troglodytes" for no reason), as well as an unwillingness to develop the characters further than what even the first episodes of season 1 achieved; and of course, more and more absurd plots that don't seem to serve a specific purpose.

Unfortunately season 2 becomes rather uninspired at times, piling unlikely premise after unlikely premise upon the viewer, and learning that Malone's actor leaves the show midway through season 3, whilst the plot doubles down on bizarre and random shenanigans, I never had the motivation to begin season 3. It's quite the shame, really.

When this show first aired, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must have spun in his grave fast enough to generate enough power for a small household, and undoubtedly his spinning became even more rapid every time the "Based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" credit appears on screen in an episode that has zero relation to the original lost world book. On the other hand, I certainly enjoyed the ride, at least until the end of season 2. The premise is perfect; with a coherent and focused story that kept the new characters but also reduced the ridiculous contrivances to a minimum, you could really make a Lost World adaptation for the ages. The fact we'll probably never see one is truly a loss for all of us... as is the fact that any future adaptation wouldn't feature Rachel Blakely, and that her acting career hasn't been more prominent. I did say she's captivating, didn't I?

In short, this is popcorn. It's not a roast beef steak with a side of vegetables, brown sauce, and green salad, and you shouldn't approach it looking for what it isn't. It might be popcorn, but very delicious popcorn it is; or it might be cheese, but I really like cheese if I have to be honest. I thoroughly recommend giving this series a shot. It's good fun... at least until it wears out its welcome.

When I started the show, I'd've just called it "trash" with the intention of being incendiary. After sitting through the entire first season, I have to admit: it's not trash, but it's hovering in the area of trash.

The show revolves around a bunch of insufferable "profilers" who go around speculating, drawing up unsubstantiated claims about the killer's behaviour, which inevitably end up being correct. They're always right, they're the best of the best, and they're utterly insufferable.

Case in point: one of our main characters, Reid, is "the nerd", a stereotypical "genius" with "an IQ of 187"; people with 180+ IQs abound, and one episode features a character with an IQ of over 190. I assume the writers thought that IQ sounds more impressive the higher it is, and didn't know that the scale "caps out", for all intents and purposes, around 145, and that everyone in that vicinity is far more likely to be a drooling savant instead of a functional human being. But no, we get a walking encyclopedia nerd stereotype instead of something plausible.

The cringy "tech girl", Garcia, manages to be one of the worst "hacker" characters I've ever seen; my heart shrivelled in despair when I saw her added to the main cast roster at the start of season 2, and I wished for it all to end when she started vigorously spouting a torrent of technobabble tripe in the very same episode. I can't comment on the actress herself, but her character is abysmal. What? She's effectively a main cast member all the way until the end? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I like Thomas Gibson, who takes on the mantle of the most "normal" of the profilers ("the straight man"), and the formal team leader. He does what he can, but it's not much in an ensemble cast. The others are "the guru", "the chick", and "the chad", who similarly don't stand out too much and don't get much in the way of character development.

An illustration of a typical case: in a suspect's home, the team finds out he's insomniac. They take out a CD from his password-protected laptop, it's Metallica's "Some Kind of Monster". From this they deduce (correctly) that he listens to Metallica to try to go to sleep, and thus that the password for his laptop is "Enter Sandman", another Metallica song (on a different album and definitely not on the single with "Some Kind of Monster"). This is how serial murderers are caught, ladies and gentlemen: with the FBI's insufferable crew of hyper-intelligent "profilers" randomly stumbling upon their way to success. Who'd've thunk?

Don't get me wrong: like I said, a handful of episodes are pretty good. "Derailed", "LDSK", "Poison". The remaining 18 episodes aren't of much significance, and aren't saved by some clever cinematography and the gratuitous, gruesome violence the show revels in.

Perhaps the main weakness of Criminal Minds, however, is the cases themselves. Every time they pretty much boil down to "white men and Christians bad", and the killers are inevitably insane psychos. I read this show was supposed to "focus on the murderers instead of the actual case", but most of the time we don't even get a motive! It's just that some white (heterosexual, usually impotent) man has gone insane, and that's the end of it. Only two times in the entire first season was a woman to blame, one of them a Christian (and thus a nutjob zealot, of course), and the other, at least, being a regular lunatic. In a rather unusual way, minorities were never to blame for anything except once (as an unrelated incident), but we did get one episode about evil white racists oppressing Indians (and that was one of the better episodes, though nonsensical), and another shaming Mexicans for apparently being anti-homosexual (we are explicitly told that crossdressing is a "lifestyle" and doesn't cause or correlate with deviations... though the killer in the episode is a crossdressing deviant. Thanks for enlightening me, show!). Colour me surprised; I thought American shows from 2005 were more likely to be about evil muslim terrorists or something, I never would have thought it'd be so "modern" in mindset. (But come to think of it, what else could you expect from a show created by a homosexual man?)

I'm afraid the sum total of the whole thing is very far from equating "good writing", and though there were several episodes that were indeed quite good, and though I like Thomas Gibson, the rest of this drivel isn't worth slogging through. It is unfortunate, but true.

Walter and his girlfriend Anna live in her ex-husband's flat. When the ex-husband, an arrogant and comically self-absorbed orchestra conductor (by his own admission "shallow and self-centred") comes back from his absence, they're thrown out, and convinced by Walter's "legitimate realtor" buddy Jack Schnittman to buy "a million dollar house" for just 200 grand... and the whole thing naturally turns out to be a scam.

As everything in the house falls apart and the various dodgy builders and workmen (the cleverly named "Shirk brothers") prove to be a fantastic parody of well-known stereotypes about builders and workmen, we get to the main conflict, the girlfriend's one-night stand with her maestro ex.

After both our Walter and Anna sink $100000 of their own money into the house, they move in together. Though she claims to love Walter, Anna repeatedly refuses to marry him. After getting drunk one night, she sleeps with her ex-husband and after waking up with no memory of the event, decides that the best course of action is to lie to Walter, claiming that she didn't do anything. After Walter reassures her that he'd understand, she comes clean and he, naturally and understandably, goes berserk. They get into a fight and "break it off", and when the ex-husband shows up and confesses that he made the story up and Anna didn't actually sleep with him, she decides she won't tell this truth to Walter because "he didn't forgive her". The "shallow and self-centred" ex-husband then admonishes Walter for not forgiving his not-even-a-fiancée's infidelity. In the end, Walter and Anna are reconciled when he says he doesn't care that she slept with her ex, and that her sleeping with her ex was the best thing that ever happened to them; she confesses that she didn't actually commit adultery, and they get married.

I leave this complete and utter insanity presented without any comment, as I could question the soundness of the characters' actions in each and every sentence I just listed (and I gave you the abridged version, too). I ask the reader to consider this premise on his own.

Plot aside, the gags with the house falling apart are absurd and hilarious indeed, especially the one with the carpet (you'll know it when you see it). All in all, it's an amusing film, but I found it hard to suspend my disbelief in places. It's worth a watch, provided you don't take ANY life lessons from this. (Starting with buying unusually cheap mansions from suspicious old ladies that give you a "sales pitch" resembling the one shown here.)

Sally Biggs has the mysterious power of "rewinding" up to nine seconds of her life. She marries a guy who creates a mysterious time machine, and now, ten(?) years later, after her husband's mysterious death, mysterious forces are at work to destroy her life.

Why is it all so mysterious, you may ask? Well, because nothing gets explained properly. Can Sally rewind a "rewound" time segment? Who are the baddies and what are their goals? A lot of other questions? Who knows. There's also something about some motorway in the US, though this film is apparently called "Time Runners", at least on the UK Amazon.

We cut back and forth between Sally's issues, and a pair of guys in the future who are attempting to "lock on" to her timeline, so as to send someone to her before "the bogeys" do it. Alas, we have no real idea of what's going on in the future, as the only development there comes in the third act (when the "sending" of a guy over actually happens for a total of two minutes or so), and features a predictable, yet still slightly entertaining twist. Oh, and also some fighter vehicles shooting at the base of the good guys with CGI that would make the SyFy channel blush in embarrassment. Again, we get no explanations as to the nature of "the enemy", why the world is permanently on fire now, and so on.

We do get some pseudoscientific technobabble that vaguely explains how time travel works, and I was amused enough to consider this of moderate interest; unfortunately, we get no proper explanation of the rules of time travel, and things remain odd throughout.

In the present day, Sally is pregnant and has apparently separated from her husband before his death, due to his slowly-increasing pride and egotism. Her time-rewinding skills come in handy for her job at the FBI, where she helps her colleagues hack into some guy's dedicated Counter-Strike server (the film, unashamed of its sins, gives us gratuitous shots of the monitor during this "hacking" scene). Then her new boss figures her powers out, and begins hampering her on-the-side investigations into the paranormal.

Apparently, if you have a number of positions on a map, and they sort of look like being spaced on concentric circles (that you've actually outlined on said map) according to "a blast pattern", you need a top-secret classified FBI program to tell you where the origin of this "explosion" was. I'm a simple engineer; I'd've thought some simple geometry may've been useful.

Nothing proceeds to happen for the most part of the film, and we are left to revel in the stilted acting, the "A Christmas Carol" play some uninteresting supporting characters are rehearsing for at her house, and the oddly-lit scenes. Every shot of this film screams "shot on a digital camera" -- not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

Credit where credit is due, there are a couple of clever "rewinding 'till you get the desired outcome" scenes in this film, and they were neat. The rest of the editing, however, is full of cuts. Hard cuts not between scenes, but within the same scene. Unfortunately, whilst the resulting effect sometimes ends up interesting, most of the time it feels like someone's been cutting up the footage by accident.

At the end of the film. Sally is taken by her boss to the time machine, so that she may return to the "tipping point", the moment when she decided to marry her scientist husband, and undo it. She does so; but fortunately manages to return to her timeline, read her late husband's diaries, and manage to fix reality and somehow permanently damage "the enemy"'s positions before fading out of existence (that she doesn't end up doing, considering she wins).

The ending features an obvious sequel set-up. Honestly, I'd probably watch the sequel. If I'm really bored and have nothing to do.

Also, the description on Amazon Prime, as well as the poster they had there, made it sound like this'd be a lot more interesting than it actually was.

**TL;DR:** Almost nothing happens for the whole film. Wooden acting. Looks like a soap opera. Some good bits. Not terrible, but far from good. Setting up for a sequel.

... and he probably is, as we'll discuss a bit later.

Now, I've got a very soft spot for "The Day After Tomorrow". It's one of my all-time favourite films, a "guilty pleasure", if you wish. I also enjoy watching bad katastrophenfilms, of the likes made by the Asylum, or those starring Stephen Baldwin (like "Dark Storm" or "Earthstorm", both released in 2006 to make it even worse), or all the other Canadian ones.

In comparison to those, I feel like this one is being bashed way too hard. Then again, I went in knowing exactly what I was expecting, and I've found that my expectations going in are rather important when the time comes for final ratings.

This one wasn't bad, and was very Emmerich-y. Let's go through the list, shall we:

• Well-known actors, some maybe wishing they were somewhere else, tick;
• Badass dad with family issues, tick;
• Badass dad has a super-intelligent child, tick;
• SPACE! Tick;
• Cataclysms on earth, tick;
• Love story, tick, albeit this one is rather subdued;
• Convoluted technological thingamajig McGuffin, tick;
• Bombs Solve All Possible Problems; tick;
• The president of the US; tick;
• Conspiracies, tick;
• Men with guns shooting their guns, tick;
• Previously unseen civilians at the disaster's ground zero who die, tick;
• Other similarly unseen civilians at ground zero who live, tick.

"The Day After Tomorrow" plus "Independence Day" ought to give us an approximation of what we see there. If I were Roland Emmerich, and I was watching this, I'd shed one single tear from my eye. That's how proud I'd be that someone else has made a movie like one of those that I'm well-known for.

Aside from the list of tropes, we get two UK lads pretending to be American, some nice CGI, ridiculously large interiors on the ISS, and collapsible touchscreen phones and tablets (lifted right out of "The Expanse"). Oh, and some other shenanigans, too.

In the end though, this film is about family, and it subverts expectations... oh, wait, wrong website to post this on. My bad.

I give this a solid 6/10. I was entertained, and it's better than mediocre. Then again, when it comes to disaster movies, I consider "Earthstorm" with Stephen Baldwin to be mediocre. It's worth one single watch, not any more, but it's not the piece of stinking rubbish that other commenters seem to believe it is. Give it a shot, I say, if you're fond of Emmerich's stuff, or disaster films in general.

Just finished the first season. I also happen to be a networking engineer, with a certificate and whatnot. I don't work in a cyber-security company, but I get as close to hacking as you can without being a hacker, so here's the opinion of someone who knows what they're talking about.

I'm compelled to say the show was shite after seeing the final episode, but it really wasn't. It was mediocre, and just that. Stilted "techy" dialogue, ridiculous events that make no sense, blatant rip-offs of better films... and don't forget the pretentious dialogue.

But hey, we've got Christian Slater! That's great!

So, what've we got? Rami Malek plays Elliot, a hacker who works at a cyber-sec company and suffers from some undetermined mental illness pretending to be social anxiety disorder. (Really like Rami Malek - he does a great job of playing the character.)

In the beginning, Elliot pretends to be a vigilante whilst imagining people in suits which are following him. He then gets laid a bunch of times, does drugs a lot, fights crime, commits crime, "hacks" things in a usually impossible fashion, and suffers from his mental disease. He also stares at people a lot with wide eye-pupils. Insert a load of subplots: Elliot's "best friend" and crush Angela and her goofy moronic boyfriend (my favourite character, can't stop laughing when he's on screen); a Swedish "villain" who is too idiotic to have gotten to his high post in the first place, and his kinky psycho wife; people serving the Chinese hacker group "Dark Army" (2spooky4me), and amongst them a guy named Cisco (As a Cisco Certified engineer I take great offence at that); the other hackers of Mr Robot's gang (which Elliot joins); other evil corporate people.

Evil people? Yep, loads of 'em. And all of them like to ruin people's lives, like to get rich, like to laugh at people's misery. They love beating others up, killing them, destroying them. And they're as evil and as corporate as they can get. No character development anywhere there.

The viewers are - usually a few times per episode - spoon-fed the blatantly obvious "ermahgerd corporations are evil and rich people are evil" message, along with some other bullshit that I was too bored to pay attention to.

The plot has a very predictable twist, one "inspired" by (i.e. ripped off of) an iconic film (but I won't tell you what it is, for only the name will be enough for you to realise what this show's twist is), and the final episode of season 1 attempted to mimic the ending of "V for Vendetta" to an extent, failing dramatically in the process.

In conclusion, I'm going to miss the pretentious dialogue, Angela's confused face, her goofy (ex-)boyfriend, and Rami Malek's perfect drug-addict impersonation. And the soundtrack is pretty good too. I like some of the "tenser" recurring themes associated with particular characters.

6/10: Ain't that awful, but there's better media to be consumed.

It's hard for me to say when the last time I saw a non-violent film was, and given that I enjoy video games myself, I thought "Gamer" would be something I would really like, especially given that I was feeling like watching Gerard Butler kick arse, with explosions on the side. I couldn't've been more wrong, and I should've seen it coming since the ultimate beginning, as the film starts with Marilyn Manson's (dreadful) cover of Eurythmics's classic song "Sweet Dreams".

I'll make it short. First and foremost, the action in this film is filmed in the shakiest, most jarring manner, which actually gave me a headache; and this has never happened before. Neither when watching at home, nor at a cinema; not on 3D films, and not even on "The Hobbit"'s custom 48-fps 3D or whatever, which was quite jarring as well. The instability of most shots, combined with the fact that a lot of the shots (and most dialogues) consisted of terrible close-ups of people's faces, combined with flashing lights and an arguable cinematographic taste in contrast made the whole experience pain-inducing, as weird as that is.

The characters aren't developed at all, and we are quite often left "in the dark" about their motives. Gerard Butler gives us one of his regular "tough guy" performances, and is good at it as usual, but most of the acting is unremarkable. Exceptions include Michael C. Hall's great performance as the "villain", I don't believe I've seen him in anything before, and he did look like a maniac; and Amber Valetta (who I've seen in a couple of films before) was excellent as the troubled wife of Butler, looking properly indifferent and robotic whilst under control. Keith David appears in a small cameo (and as a voice in an advert), but it was nice nonetheless.

The plot? The plot is mostly nonsensical, and anything worth looking for appears to come together only after the 75-minute mark, which is, in fact, the beginning of the film's conclusion. However, the film's ending, whilst outrageous, awkward, and frankly, complete tosh, was surprisingly enjoyable.

The violence is... gratuitous, and that took me by surprise. I mean, come on, I watch films with violence in them and I play violent video games. But this was still too much. I should also say that I am in fact quite disgusted with the way the future is portrayed in this film. More solace could be found even in films like "Nirvana" (1997), with its atmospheric dystopia. I do realise that this was probably the filmmakers' intention, but that does not mean that I liked it, nor that I enjoyed it.

Four out of ten, because my eyes hurt, and the depiction of society was dreadful. Not three our of ten, because the ending was actually neat... despite not really logical.

*sigh* Where do I begin? Well, maybe from me being from Bulgaria, and, as this film explicitly told us, it was filmed in Bulgaria.

First of all, I want to say that I am ashamed of the Bulgarian actors and their horrific English accents. It's obvious that nobody actually cared to practice their lines for more than ten minutes before filming. And even I, the Bulgarian (though with a certified proficiency in English), couldn't stop cringing when they'd speak. And when the little girls, present on screen maybe for 2 minutes, speak English better than your main cast, you know you're in trouble. The evil king (whose name I couldn't understand at all, Marian Valev) also contributed to this horror of mine, especially with his dreadfully placed "BETRAYAL?!" line. And Uncle Tybalt (Nikolai Sotirov) had the worst accent of them all, yet he was given the epic speech near the end... I wonder how poor Dominic Purcell didn't feel the need to rip his ears off... At least some of the actors' mistakes were funny to hear, like Ralitsa Paskaleva's: "Go on the horse". "Go." Not "get".

Maybe it wasn't the actors' fault. Perhaps the screenwriter wasn't at all proficient in English?... *sigh* Forget it.

Now, accents aside, this film is still terrible. The opening is boring and drags on forever. Dominic Purcell, ever the watchful assassin, leaves his fingerprints all over a crime scene and nobody even notices the pile of corpses he's left in the hallway of a big hotel. He then goes to some random people's flat -- it's got a little inscription on the door saying something like "The Andrews family" or whatever it was -- and smokes a cigarette in the kitchen. Nothing about that is explained. It's not his flat, because it's a family home, as the tag tells us.

Dominic isn't "the chosen one", and the film relies on his accidental getting of a tattoo to justify him being selected to bring order to the fallen kingdom... of Bulgaria. Then, the portal to the medieval world opens up for no apparent reason, at which point Dominic starts shooting at a dragon with a gun. I must admit, that's pretty hilarious and also a perfectly natural response to seeing a damn *dragon* in front of you.

Did you catch the big reveal? Bulgaria. The film takes place in Bulgaria. The *story* takes place in Bulgaria. It's not Dungeon Siege any more, it's not "Ehb". Ralitsa Paskaleva's character straight-up tells Dominic Purcell that he's in Bulgaria.

Last I checked, there weren't any dragons in Bulgaria, neither in the medieval one, nor in the modern one.

Anyhow, Dominic is now in the dragon-infested medieval Bulgaria, apparently. It is by sheer luck that he's been teleported into the right place for the rightful heirs of the throne to find him and to bring him along on their quest for glory and peace. And so on...

And once again, our main character was not given any armour whatsoever. Like in all the previous "In the Name of the King"s, which continues to make no sense at all.

The villain is as 2D as he could get, he's flat, one-sided and not even interesting or rational. He does have a court though -- or should I say a courtYARD, as the courtyard of the Baba Vida castle, probably, is about as much as we see of his fortress.

The plot doesn't make too much of a sense, and the battles don't either. People have conversations in the middle of battles, and apparently yelling "STOOOP FIGHTIIING" at the top of your voice actually causes soldiers to stop fighting.

So, the accents are a disgrace, and villain is a disgrace, the plot is a disgrace, and the combat scenes are as well. Dominic Purcell actually throws a sword and it kills someone. Unbelievable.

Did I mention the Shaman? Yes, there's a "shaman" in medieval Bulgaria. He cooks things on a fire using a large soviet-era metal cooking pot. A "shaman" in an Eastern Orthodox country. Yes...

You know what else is a disgrace, to top everything off? The costumes. The bad guys wear a blend of XIV c. plate armours, Saracen turbans and yatagans, and katanas and what looked like Japanese Samurai armour. Truly something to be called an "eyesore", and it's NOT something you'd ever see in medieval Bugaria.

Talking about disgraces, I should mention the ending. It's truly and utterly, and completely and terribly, and I ran out of adverbs, dreadful, with the dragon passing through the portal and chasing Dominic's hijacked soviet-era Zhiguli through the streets of Sovia. Oh, dear... (Dominic also steals the driver's shirt later, which was actually funny.)

This is the first film in my life that caused me to take a pen and write down all the faults in it. By the end, I had four full pages written in my notebook. "Oh God, why?", says the popular Internet meme. I'd ask the same.

If only they didn't say that this was taking place in medieval BULGARIA, I'd be more lenient. As it stands, it's like having a very bad film set during Charlemagne's reign in France, but having people running around fighting Norse-style elves in Zulu armour or whatever, with Buddhism being the predominant religion. It's just nonsensical. And disgraceful.

Reading the (only) plot summary at the time of posting of this review, it seems that Uwe Boll himself has written it. "Inspired by Dungeon Siege"? The film takes place in medieval Bulgaria. Ish. "Mind-blowing special effects"? Not a chance in hell. You know what the CGI dragon lacks? MASS. It looked and felt like a CGI thing superimposed on the picture. Not like a dragon, unlike other films. Hell, "Dungeons and Dragons 2: Wrath of the Dragon God" is a quadrillion times better than this, and it's not the best fantasy film with dragons either. "Nonstop action"? Yeah, right. "A massive army"? Probably, if you call thirty men "a massive army". (Still better than the previous film, where armies were six men on each side.) In fact, I'm gonna go round there and try to submit a different summary that doesn't glorify this piece of rubbi... "art". With heavy air-quotes.

Seriously, don't waste your life with this. Go and watch something else. There's plenty of good films to choose from, and many better bad ones too. Watch the first "In the Name of the King". It's actually good fun, if you can believe it.

Such a disgrace to my motherland. *sigh* Damn you, Uwe Boll...