Tag: movie review

  • Knives Out Review

    Knives Out Review

    Rarely am I as excited for a whodunit murder mystery as I was after watching the trailer for Rian Johnson’s latest film, Knives Out. As revealed in the trailer, the story loosely revolves around the death of a famous murder mystery writer after his 85th birthday. His family was visiting over that night, leaving each of them as a potential suspect. To make things more interesting, the detective who is on the case has been hired by someone anonymously to find the killer.

    With a star-studded cast, including Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Chris Evans, Knives Out takes a slightly lighter heart approach to the genre, leaving you laughing just as much as trying to piece together the puzzle or watching the legendary Detective Blanc at work. The characters are perfectly cast, giving added credibility to each of them as potential killers.

    Although the genre is known for its twists and turns as clues are discovered, Knives Out takes this formula to whole new level and managed to thrill me despite my best efforts to stay ahead of the plot and potential foreshadowing. This is the kind of script that caused me to spend much of Knives Out’s run time wishing I was clever enough to write it.

    Without spoiling too much, Knives Out knows exactly what you think it is and will pull you along for a wild ride that borrows cues from several other types of stories to create something surprisingly unique and memorable. I’d suggest a watch, even if you’re not the biggest fan of whodunit stories to begin with. You will not be disappointed.

    Check out the trailer below:

  • Zombieland: Double Tap – Review

    Zombieland: Double Tap – Review

    (Zombieland: Double Tap – Columbia Pictures)

    Rarely does a sequel so accurately leave me with the same feeling as its predecessor as I’m walking out of the theater. In Zombieland: Double Tap, Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita, and Littlerock are back, albeit a little older, and ready to take on the undead hordes that have laid waste to the contiguous United States of America. In similar fashion to the Terminator franchise that it so often references, this second romp through the apocalypse treads familiar ground while deviating only slightly from the core elements that made the original so popular. Instead of going on a road trip to Hollywood, our survivors decided to turn the White House into a zombie-fortress and visit Graceland to fawn over Elvis memorabilia. The pattern is perfectly apparent as the opening credits roll, once again matching slow-motion zombie battles with Metallica except with slightly crappier CGI and editing.

    What Zombieland: Double Tap does well is deliver on a simple, comedic zombie road trip movie. Butchering the undead is as entertaining as ever and the survivors are just as charming as they were nearly a decade ago, but if you were expecting an evolution on the formula, Double Tap offers more of the same. In that way, the sequel actually improves on the foundation that the original Zombieland set. While the first film abandoned the zombie survival rules gimmick about halfway through its runtime, Double Tap doubles down on the idea by keeping it going throughout the film, even going so far as to introduce a second character that also obsesses about a set of commandments for staying alive.

    The new characters this time around are all welcome additions, especially given how homogenous the original cast was, but like everything else in this series, they aren’t left with much to do or say that’s of much consequence. If The Big Lewbowski was a movie about nothing, Zombieland and its sequel really want to be about something but, either due to budget restraints or severely limited scope, fail to create characters or plot arcs worth caring about. Double Tap makes up for this somewhat by keeping me laughing throughout, regardless of whether I’m laughing with the movie or at it.

    Verdict: Definitely worth seeing if you enjoyed the first, but otherwise forgettable.

  • Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Review

    Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Review

    (ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD – Andrew Cooper/Sony Pictures)

    If there’s anything you can say about Quentin Tarantino, it’s that he has a distinct style to his film making, script writing, and storytelling. Whether you like him or hate him, Tarantino’s films have introduced a generation of movie watchers to classic tropes from serialized television and movies of the past. While films like Kill Bill pay homage to cinema history while telling a compelling and gory story of revenge, Tarantino’s new flick seems to focus more on the former while outright ignoring the latter.

    Tarantino’s signature cast of eccentric characters is on full display in Once Upon a Time, but what’s seemingly lacking is a meaningful plot worthy of the 2 and change hour run time. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performances were stellar, but neither actor could stave off my disappointment as the final tile card appeared and the end credits began to roll. “What had I just watched?” was my first blush reaction, but that was slowly replaced with an inkling that Tarantino had just duped us all into watching the college film he’d always wanted to make, just with an all-star cast of Hollywood royalty.

    Witty dialogue, beautiful set pieces, and a compelling sense of tension run throughout, but it’s hard to say a movie can be entirely positive without a point in the end. Once Upon a Time feels like an improvised bedtime story; there are a lot of threads to keep you interested, but the author may not have expected you to stay awake long enough to see the end.

    Without spoiling things too much, the ending to Once Upon a Time is more of a satire of a Tarantino film than a love letter. It is the epitome of “angry man yells at clouds,” except this time pointed at young hippies, mostly women, and we are meant to celebrate in their gruesome, violent, and over-the-top-to-the-point-of-it-being-slap-stick murder at the hands of Pitt and Decaprio.

    If Tarantino hadn’t done such a good job of setting up the climax, it probably wouldn’t have fallen so flat, but that’s what happens when a famed director gets too caught up in their own auteurship and charges moviegoers to pay $13 to bare witness to his genius.

    I have a hard time imagining Tarantino not wanting this response. There’s something incredibly cocky about hiring Margot Robby for a Tarantino film only to show off her feet and entirely waste her talent on screen. There’s something gloriously obnoxious about being led by a thread through an almost 3-hour endeavor only to be told that none of the best parts mattered in the long run.

    The worst part of Once Upon is that so many of the ignored or abandoned plot threads were more compelling than what we ended up with. The fate of Cliff’s wife alone was much more interesting than the half-assed violence sideshow that capped off Tarantino’s latest film.

    All in all, Once Upon is about as Tarantino as you can get, right up to the “screw you” attitude with which it treats its audience. Yes, we understand that you love old school Hollywood, Mr. Tarantino, but we’d also love a compelling plot to go along with your masturbatory nostalgia trip.