Multiplex Madness
Daniel and the Fiery Furnace
⭐️1/2
Genre: Drama, Faith
Director: Daniel Kooman, Matthew Kooman
Starring: Mena Massoud, Elijah Alexander
God has space lasers! And an AI generated Jesus pops out of the other side! That was my main takeaway from this attempt at a biblical epic, based on the story of Daniel, who has his faith tested under the rule of King Nebuchadnezzar, where he is tasked to build a golden statue of the king that he and his comrades fail to worship, desiring to onlyworship their one true God.
This movie is pretty shoddy, but there are things in this movie worth discussing enthusiastically. It's a faith drama that went out of its way to utilize a Middle Eastern cast to tell its story instead of whitewashing it. That might seem like a small victory but it's a victory nonetheless. The movie also has ambition, where it feels like it's reaching out to be like one of the biblical epics of years past crossed with Bollywood over-the-topness. All of this is countered by the amaterish production, especially the screenplay, which reads like a church group community stage play. Little of it feels like naturalistic dialogue, as pretty much every scene has the characters relating to the audience how their most remedial of tasks relate to their faith, while our villainous king spends practically every speaking moment mocking the idea of a "one true God." The script is littered with moments designed for stage theatricality, and it's filmed in an indulgence of presenting every moment as being powerful. It mixes into a very unique brand of hammy melodrama that wears the viewer down.
Probably the big talking point when the movie ends is it's use of AI for its CGI. I couldn't find any concrete information about the film's special effects production, but I did find that I wasn't the only one who suspected AI use in the making of this movie, as most reviews I read brought it up. If one dislikes AI being used to create "art" (quotations used because art, by nature, is designed by human mind and hands and not algorythm), then they'll likely want to avoid this movie. It's used pretty extensively as a cost-cutting measure for special effects and establishing shots. My favorite thing to do during this movie was studying all the digital landscapes, intricately detailed at first glance, and then looking at all the people who inhabit it who are just frozen in place or floating forward because the AI couldn't animate it properly. And then there was the ending with a very plastic looking Jesus, which was probably the funniest thing I've seen all year.
Allowing for full disclosure, I fell asleep for about ten minutes of this movie. It's not the movie's fault, I just didn't sleep well the night before and fatigue hit me like a bulldozer while watching it. If that negates anything I have to say about this movie, I understand. I don't think I missed much. Daniel was smelting gold in the furnace when I fell asleep and he was smelting gold when I woke up, and there was very little going on that I didn't understand. I'm not going to go back and watch it again though. My apologies to the haters.
The Musical
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Comedy
Director: Giselle Bonilla
Starring: Will Brill, Gillian Jacobs, Rob Lowe
Will Brill plays a middle school teacher who has a mental breakdown following his break-up with Gillian Jacobs, who begins dating school principal Rob Lowe. Pushed past the edge, he turns the school's presentation of West Side Story into an abrasive and offensive portrayal of 9/11, just to make people angry. Maybe Speilberg's version of West Wide Story would have won more Oscars if it had the same twist.
The Musical is one of those movies that I looked at from a bunch of angles and still had a hard time reading it. The closest I came to was that this was a men's mental health commentary, about how certain men can be so unhappy that they weaponize their misery and try to make everyone around them suffer, but that's entirely a take I'm projecting onto this movie because I'm not sure I understand it. This could just as easily be a movie that's just trying to be subversive in very awkward ways without actually being about anything. Brill's character is played as both the hero and the villain of the movie, as the movie never bothers to make us sympathize with him but it also seems to want us to root for his revenge fantasy. I'm not entirely sure how successful that latter aspect is since there's really nothing to be excited for except anarchy for the sake of anarchy. The movie is as fearless as it is aimless, and that's almost charming by itself. There are things the movie could lean into to make it stronger, like the exploitation and radicalization of children to be raged against the source of one's personal grievances, but the movie doesn't really do as much with the kids' part in this little slice of lunacy as you might hope, and while they are on board with it by the end, it's never clear why. But I also think there are aspects to this movie that are flying over my head, because certain scenes seem staged in such a particular way that I have to wonder if this movie is a parody of something very specific that I'm not familiar with. It's also possible that the movie is referencing many things simultaneously and is doing its own spin on them to enhance satire. The satire isn't particularly strong enough here for that to work, making the film an awkward showcase of awkwardness.
Resident Evil
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Horror, Comedy
Director: Zach Cregger
Starring: Austin Abrams, Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis
Resident Evil's movie series isn't exactly known for adapting the video games it's based on. This is the eighth film in the series (not including four boring Japanese CGI animated movies) and thusfar only two of them have actually sourced their stories from the games (Apocalypse and Welcome to Raccoon City). Most of them have been Paul W.S. Anderson's Mary Sue girl power fantasy about his wife Milla Jovovich, while characters from the games have been sidelined in favor of her. Resident Evil 2026 is actually the first of these movies since 2002 to not feature any character from the game, unless you consider the character of "Matt" a video game character considering he mutates into Nemesis in the sequel. Or if zombies, angry dogs, and the Lickers count. All of this is to say that the Resident Evil fan frustration of getting another movie that sidesteps the source material in favor of an original story is more understandable than some might claim. It's been a long cycle of history repeating itself with the withering hope of "Maybe this time will be different."
I'm not one to knock Resident Evil's film legacy. I find most of the movies they've made so far to be a campy good time (Apocalypse is peak on the "fun bullshit" metric). Maybe I'm the problem because people don't seem to want Resident Evil to be campy, which is weird when you remember this franchise began with a game that delivered the line "You almost became a Jill sandwich." And I have no particular attachment to the games. I've played a couple of them, but never finished them. I do have a fondness for Zach Cregger, who directed this movie, being a big fan of Barbarian and having really enjoyed Weapons. Mostly, I just wanted the new Resident Evil movie to be a good Zach Cregger movie. Sadly, it didn't achieve that one goal.
The latest non-adapting adaptation in this franchise sees Austin Abrams playing a medical courier who is tasked to take a package to Raccoon City. This happens to coincide with the certain event that gamers know happens in Raccoon City, which was chronicled in the video games Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, where a contagion reanimates corpses and mutates living beings into beasts. Cregger said his approach was to make a side-story that felt like video game rather than adapting the game itself. To this, I find the movie a minor failure. Most Resident Evil games put us in the shoes of competent characters who are taken aback by the scenario but adapt to the situation. Abrams' character is not that. He starts off as a bit of a joke and stays a joke throughout the entire movie. It's arguable whether or not he's even competent enough to have his courier position because he's not very good at it, while any success he has out of it is simply because he hasn't died yet. And the movie leans pretty hard into his little brand of silliness. It often feels more like a slapstick comedy showcase for Abrams than it is a horror movie. But the Resident Evil franchise used to be a wire-fu high kick showcase for Milla Jovovich, which is a more lateral trade-off than I think most people will want to admit.
To be fair, the movie is funny. It's also scary. It gets less funny and scary as it goes, and not for a lack of trying. Zach Cregger has a very distinctive tone to his horror movies and Resident Evil struggles at balancing it. Cregger has unique ways of framing a horror shot, and it will successfully create a jolt or a moment of suspense. And he'll let the surprise of such a moment bleed into creating comedy. Unlike Barbarian and Weapons, it feels like the movie's desire for levity is taking priority, and while it's not unpleasant, it feels like it's all Abrams exists for in this movie. I found it hard to genuinely care about what happened to him because he kept fumbling around and had an unreliable sense of alertness. The movie just becomes an episodic string of scenarios for him to just waffle around in, scream, kick his little feets at, and run away from. The movie is at it's strongest in the first half when it's fresh and fun, but the more plot that it starts to introduce into itself, the more the movie becomes less creepy and the more distant Abrams feels from it, just having him running around in big visuals because he carries the McGuffin.
I was already starting to feel a little bored by the end (the movie started to lose me once he leaves the farmhouse), but I was ready to give this movie a minor pass. Then we got to the climax, and the last ten minutes really left me in a sour mood. The finale to this movie is objectively bad, and it genuinely feels like someone was written into a corner, threw their pen at the wall and said "Fuck it, I'm done." I could have lived with this movie being a being about a dummy stumbling around in an apocalypse as long as it had a destination. Since I didn't even get that, a lot of the movie's positive aspects started to dim in my hindsight. The movie then reached the status of apathy. Now it has failed as both an adaptation and as an original story. Congratulations?
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Comedy, Horror
Director: Steve Cox, Matthew Walker
Starring: Justin Fletcher, John Sparkes, Kate Harbour
The little Claymation studio Aardman Animations, best known for Wallace & Gromit, is back with another quirky outing, returning for their third feature film based on its sheep flock characters. This one has Shaun inventing a growth serum to save a destroyed pumpkin patch, only for their farmer to mistake it for hair growth serum. Growing hair all over his body, the sheep flock mistakes him for a monster that is terrorizing their small town. Those who are familiar with this animation studio know what quirkiness to expect, and the latest Shaun the Sheep movie continues to deliver the goods. Like Wallace & Gromit, a little bit of Shaun the Sheep goes a long way, which means I'd have more investment in short films than an eighty minute movie. But Shaun the Sheep's big distinction from Wallace & Gromit is that it's done in pantomime, which keeps my admiration for a feature film up even if I'm starting to feel a little tired. And there are some cute little macabre touches that make it fun as a family Halloween movie. If you or your kids love Shaun the Sheep, this is an easy recommend. If you don't, you probably skipped reading this and it doesn't matter.
Tiny Fugitives
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Comedy, Adventure
Director: Michael Lewen
Starring: Johnny Knoxville, Benjamin Pajak, Aaron Harris, Isa Bernal Steiner, Jay Saunder, Arrian Kenneth Wu, Alyssa Gervasi
Get ready for one of those movies that gets all of its mileage out of foul-mouthed kids, as Tiny Fugitives tells the story of a group of camp friends who don't want the summer to end, so they run out into the woods and are chased down by camp counselor Johnny Knoxville. It's a little Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but it primarily reminded me of that episode of The Simpsons where Bart plays hooky and Principal Skinner is chasing him down.
The movie makes sure the audience knows that its favorite joke is children who curse and talk trash. It's as if all of the Losers from It were just Richie. The movie can be overbearing on this, but what's interesting about this aspect is how it contrasts this with their realistic childlike innocence. These characters talk a big game and seem to know a lot about what adults do behind closed doors, but when they're actually in the "intimate" situations of childhood, it's very childlike. They can play it up in dirty ways, but a first kiss between two characters will be portrayed as a nervous peck instead of any of the extravagant descriptions they'll play it off as. The movie's tender moments are much cuter than they have any right to be.
But I also feel like I've seen various spins on this type of movie. The film plays out like one of those rambunctious kid movies we all watched when we were children, but this one is rated R, so it can't have that audience. It tries to make up ground as a "coming-of-age" story for the adult audience, but it's also not detailed enough to be one. It exists in this awkward middle ground where it struggles to appeal to either side of the fence, and while it's a decent afternoon killer, it's hard to picture it gaining traction as something that resonates with people.
The Weight
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Director: Padraic McKinley
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, Julia Jones
There's gold in them thar hills and Russell Crowe needs a few good men to haul it. Ethan Hawke is a convict on Crowe's labor crew who has been hired to smuggle gold bars through the woods and keep it safe, though challenges and danger prove to be an inevitability. Sometimes the movie is a bit too base for its own good, as Hawke's motivation is a slight prologue about being separated from his daughter, which almost feels as if it was written after the rest of the movie to give emotional stakes. It's an effectively made movie, though. It's well-directed and tense. Some of the hurdles in the plot are underdeveloped, but it feels like it just wants to keep our focus within the group, not fully knowing what's going on, just wanting to survive it. I liked this, and it makes me hope to see the talent behind it go on to do bigger things.
Netflix & Chill
The Last Kiss
⭐️⭐️
Streaming On: VOD
Genre: Mystery, Horror, Comedy, Romance
Director: Yoko Okumura
Starring: Mckenna Grace, Akira Chantaratananond, Jaden Michael, Riley Davis
Mckeena Grace can see the future deaths of whoever she kisses in this odd little mystery that is conceptually just The Dead Zone but with more tongue. Upon kissing her new boyfriend, she finds that he dies in a massacre with several classmates at the school dance, and she tries to figure out who the killer is. By kissing people. A lot.
I mostly checked this movie out because I was curious as to how well this movie maintained its gimmick, because while it sounds like an interesting idea, it also seems hard to wrap a story around. I think my skeptism was somewhat justified because the film can struggle to adequately push its story forward based on this chosen plot device. Kissing is an inherently intimate act, and for Grace to do what needs to be done, the plot requires her character to put on the mask of being a loose woman who is forcing herself onto other people. Some of her actions brush upon crossing the line into sexual misconduct because she is kissing people for her own needs that she is keeping that private. The movie does try and avoid the problematic line, but it comes closer that it probably wanted.
Despite this, the movie has a fun, playful vibe to its dark story. If they had pulled half of this off, this might have been a decent macabre option for a Valentine's Day release. Its a decent combination of mopey self-absorbed teen dramatics and off-beat anxiety-fueled dark humor tearing through it. Unfortunately, there is also a small understanding of why this went straight to VOD while watching it because while it has mostly assured directing and a solid cast, there is something about it that just isn't snapping into place. You can tell there that there was probably a vision for this movie and it's not paying off. Sometimes you just have to take the swing even if it doesn't connect, though.
Hope ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Insidious: Out of the Further ⭐️⭐️1/2
The Odyssey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Practical Magic 2 ⭐️⭐️
Runner ⭐️1/2
Spider-Man: Brand New Day ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Transformers: The Movie ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
The Uprising ⭐️⭐️1/2
New To Digital
The End of Oak Street ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Finding Emily ⭐️⭐️⭐️
It Ends ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Tony ⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Physical
Stop! That! Train! ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Coming Soon!
