A mini meh about…. The Mummy (Dark Universe Edition)

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The Daddy was not pleased.

It’s been a week since the Mummy returned for the 234676th time on the big screen. Why remake this of all things now? Well it seems that Universal Studios have pretty much gambled all by committing themselves to creating what they are calling the “Dark Universe”. Think of all those comic book things from Disney and Warner Bros, but with Monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula and Barney the Purple Dinosaur.

Because they’re making money hand over fist despite questionable quality of film at the time, it seems Universial are pretty much just jumping on the bandwagon while the going is good. Why do I say that? Because damned if I can think of any other reason why this remake exists. On the face of it, it could have been a nice easy route into exploring this tried and tested world with new twists, turns and various other threads. Be standalone, give a taste of what’s to come and then leave us wanting more. The mistake of not really rushing things through was made by DC and Warner Bros with Batman Vs Superman. Sadly not only do they make that mistake here, it’s borderline much worse.

The whole monster movie concept was always a bit of horror / b-movie cheese, and the last series with the wee scamps of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz were actually not too shabby as that went. Some good humour, some neat special effects and ridiculous setups made for some decent entertainment back in the day. Of course it did disappear up it’s own arse with the Scorpion King and that third film that I don’t know what happened in that one for sure, certainly not without looking it up. It did though have some wonderful choices in terms of the time period which made it more interesting, the 1920s.

This version though, chucks that all out the window in favour of being set in the modern day. Apparently some knights in shining armour back in the day took a ruby and buried it in merry ol London, just in time for Crossrail Engineers to uncover it all and bring Russel Crowe into the picture. He’s here to give you all the backstory in the film, so have 5 minutes to explain that the Mummy lady did bad things and got buried. But don’t worry kids, he’ll be back later to tell us more. Continue reading →

A mini meh about….. Gifted

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I’ve been called special…. probably not the same thing….

Ahead of its release tomorrow in the UK, we bring you a fresh mini meh ahead of general release which may get lost in the throng of various summer blockbusters still to come over the next few weeks. Let’s be honest, do we really think Transformers: The Last Knight will be anything other than explosion porn? Even the Fast and Furious attempted something 3% different this time around, and to be honest, it was that which made it a lot more interesting. Ok, we all know we just want to see the Rock and Jason “Steel Nipples” Statham on a road trip next film. Just give us that Universal dammit!

Anyway, moving on. In an effort to have a butchers at something different (and of course courtesy of a free screening), we shine our magic meh light onto the indie film Gifted, which has Captain America exchanging his shield and spandex for a little girl and a crap little house in Florida. Yep, Chris Evans takes on the role of Frank Adler who didn’t fight the Nazis, but instead took on the care of his late sister’s daughter Mary (played very well I might add by Mckenna Grace). They live a very simple life, Frank fixes boats and Mary pretty much seems anti-social.

Mary doesn’t want to go to her new school because school sucks. I agree. But things start to go meh when Mary starts showing the rest of the kids how maths should be done and confounds her new teacher Bonnie (played by Jenny Slate). So much so that it turns out she’s bloody good and a genius it seems. An offer is made to put Mary in a school for gifted kids and Frank basically says no. Why? It seems his family has history which seems to mean that Mary will not have a chance for a normal childhood. Continue reading →

A mini meh about…. Wonder Woman

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Bet you’re wondering how you’ll get this image out of your head….

They finally did it!

You magnificent bastards!

You finally made a DC universe film which wasn’t complete and utter rubbish! Start the parades, kiss your loved ones and celebrate! In 2017, where reality no longer makes any sense whatsoever (See recent news) this is nothing short of amazing.

The worst part is, this is how the DC universe could have actually started. I’m serious, with some actual backstory, some character development, some humour and some excellent action, the scene would be really set for an amazing set of follow-on films. Now granted that sounds an awful lot like what the mega money making machine known as Disney / Marvel Studios has been doing and you would be right. They already have hit on something no-one thought would ever really take off as it has done.

But to be honest, there’s worse ways of going about introducing comic book characters to the big screen, and at the moment, DC and Warner Bros are the ones who have done that already. In fact, truth be told that if this was just another waste of time and money, then well, I was not going to bother again with watching any more of the DC films. That was it, done, no more.

But then they brought this onto the screens and it’s about damned time! Continue reading →

A mini meh about….. Rápidos Y Furiosos 8

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Those are some hot wheels…. care for a ride? Sex puns!

You’re probably surprised that Fast and Furious 8 has come up for review now as opposed to when it came out in the cinema some time ago. At this point, you’re more likely to be waiting for the DVD to relive those moments on a tiny screen at home. Well it may have come out decades ago at this point but it’s still worth visiting for a few reasons. One of which, is that this is the first film without Paul Walker, who of course died in a car accident. Which in some ways, only went to show that life is not without a sense of sick irony.

However, to me, Fast and Furious still remains one of the go to brainless film franchises for me. That’s despite the laws of time and space having no meaning in this franchise along with plot holes so big, you’d lose the entire solar system through it.

So for this installment what over the top madness would await us?

Well Dom and Letty are having fun around Cuba to start with, destroying a car to win a race, only to then gain respect from some random hard man who ends up respecting him. After scenes of everyone being happy at the car being destroyed and people not getting killed, Dom gets cornered by a nasty woman in the guise of Charlize Theron.

Next thing we know is that The Rock is being put into prison after throwing Kurt Russel’s new agent into the wall and would you believe it, he ends up in a cell opposite Jason “Hard Nipples” Statham. Remember, he was the bad guy from the previous installment and got put into isolation. Why he was now in a cell block with everyone else now, again, don’t ask as it’s a plot hole. Continue reading →

Quake Champions Closed Beta Impressions

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It’s been a few weeks since the Quake Champions Closed Beta and since then lots of people now know what’s in store for them. But how would the Lord of Leisure fare with such a game where skill is highly valued? You can guess not well and you would be correct. But is it any good in it’s beta state to warrant further investigation when it arrives fully on PC later this year?

Watch on, and find out!

A mini meh about….. Colossal

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If you have a bad day, you may end up destroying South Korea. Fact.

Given all the recent big hitters, this film came out of nowhere on the ol’ movie radar and was actually quite hard to find a screening for. What was the marketing plan here? Put it out there and then sneak off in shame? Was this only meant to be shown on Channel 5 in the afternoon when the old people were having a nap in their chairs?

Well given it’s here and perhaps only for another week or so at the cinema before it disappears again, it’s perhaps best we start now describing what the premise of Colossal right now because it’s a head-f**k to explain for sure! Anne Hathaway plays an out of work writer called Gloria, who ends up being thrown out by her partner Tim for doing nothing with her life and drinking all night and stuff. She’s a wee mess you see and drinks too much.

So having gotten all her stuff nicely packed in bags by Tim, she moves back to her hometown where she meets an old school friend, Oscar, played quite well and at times scary by Jason Sudeikis. He offers her a job in his bar and then night after night the drinking continues along with some really weird behaviour at times.

In the mornings, Gloria wanders home through a kid’s playground doing various actions, and it’s at this time the premise just goes f**king crazy. You see, when Gloria wanders through the playground at a certain time of day, there’s a giant Kaiju which appears in South Korea and causes huge damage and terror.

You’re allowed to ask “what the f**k?” at this point. Continue reading →

A mini meh about….. Baywatch

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All the best pretty people…..

It’s another Bank holiday weekend in the UK, and as such you will find yourself with an extra day to enjoy yourselves or be stuck in endless traffic. Maybe you’ll be hitting the cinema, of course, and given its release today, Baywatch on the face of it, certainly looked like an interesting proposition. A revival of a TV series in film form, where various attractive lifeguards such as David Hasselhoff handle all sorts of situations, though of course exactly how many people were always drowning during those situations varied. They also tended to move slowly quite a bit as we needed to see the pretty ladies’ boobs move slowly up and down as they ran.

It’s not the first one this year as apparently there was a revival of the TV cop show Chips, which went down as well as the titanic did, taking quite a lot of people with it. But will Baywatch with new pretty people be very Baywatchable or will we be left wanting to be drowned so we were out of our slow motion misery? Having watched it at a preview screening in London, I certainly can indeed answer that for you. Continue reading →

A mini meh about… Pirates of the Cashing-in 5

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A pirate’s life…. but for whom?

OK, hands up everyone who thought that after the WTF moment that was the fourth Film in the long running Pirates of the Caribbean franchise would ever come back? Seriously, even Blackbum the Pirate, played by Ian McShane must have thought it was the end after such a lacklustre sequel that had Penelope Cruz being all woman fightery and no real reason to exist.

But then again, Pirates of the Caribbean would be hard to ignore a revisit. This after all was the series which gave Johnny Depp license to pretend to be drunk all the time while apparently performing feats of wonder and skill. It gave us some outrageous plots, some wonderful effects and fight scenes and introduced a lot of people to Orlando Bloom and Gorgeous Boy-Girl Keira Knightley. Whether or not that was ever intended during the first film or not, who cares?

Because of the success of the first film, we got two more films with the main cast, over which it seemed to just disappear up its own arse during the third film where Will Turner became the captain of the Flying Dutchman and boy-girl Kera become the Pirate King. So imagine the surprise when Disney decided that it was worth continuing on the epic story of Captain Jack Sparrow even after it all went off the rails of the ride it was all based on. Now as cynical as I’m going to sound here, here’s a question to you gentle reader;

What’s the betting though that even without seeing the trailer or the film that you wouldn’t be able to guess what the general plot is? Continue reading →

A mini meh about….. Ghost in the Shell

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Think that hair suits me….

Before anything else, I have to start this meh with a horrifying declaration; I’m not an Anime fan. I know, fat guy, glasses and a geek, yet doesn’t like Anime. I may as well just go off into the wilderness right now. Maybe passers-by will find themselves able to throw scraps of food at me from time to time….

So when it came to watching Ghost in the Shell, unlike Beauty and the Beast, I had no frame of reference. I never watched the original and therefore it was a lot easier to judge this solely as a film by itself without the baggage that came from the previous mini meh.

It seems that we’re in the future that looks a sh*t ton like Blade Runner at times for this story to unfold and our heroine who’s called Major (played by probably the only reason a lot of people will watch the film; Scarlett Johansson) is a new type of super hero type person who starts off being saved but then turns into a huge badass working for a special police type force. Why and how, well that basically gets revealed during the course of the film so we’ll leave that be for the time being. She also wears a sort of….err…. skin tight suit with which she can go invisible and it’s sort of flesh coloured which means that it can look like at times that she’s naked. OK, starting to see why this was popular now as Anime…. Continue reading →

A mini meh about…. Beauty and the Beast (2017)

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When Tinder goes wrong….

A real tale as old as time is on the docket for discussion next; A remake of Beauty and the Beast from the lovable, profit making mega-giant Disney again. Aside from just printing money from Marvel movies, It seems that they are really on the ball with redoing their old classics in real life. We’ve had Cinderella and the Jungle Book as two recent examples where things were slightly changed and updated to tell the stories we already know. Cinderella passed me by, while I did see and enjoy the new Jungle book, even if given the tone they were going for that the songs were just way out of place.

Seriously, Christopher Walken singing “I wanna be like you”, was just weird.

So when this remake came along about a girl who eventually falls in love with a monster who learns to be kind and loving again, you would wonder how it would do in comparison to the 1991 Animated version which won a couple of Shiny Shiny things. But back then there wasn’t as much Oscar bait when they released films then now.

I’m going to be honest here, this was bad in comparison to the 1991 film and I would state now, go and watch that instead. Take the money you would have paid at the cinema and just buy the 1991 classic if you’ve not got it already and just enjoy that instead. Continue reading →