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LoftheB
Reviews
Lucifer: Partners 'Til the End (2021)
So much wasted potential
It's kind of hard to put into words how much the last season and a half of Lucifer undermined everything that attracted viewers to the series in the first place - to a degree that it couldn't have even been accidental. There's so much malice and incompetence in the writing for the end of this series that at some point it begins to feel like an outright insult towards the fans.
And then the finale itself. Wow. Absolutely stellar job of underlining that we were fools for ever caring about these characters, when the writers very clearly didn't.
Setting aside the raw stupidity in so many of the decisions the characters made, we're left with the devastation of Lucifer resuming his endless servitude in Hell, missing the entire lives of all of the mortals he'd come to care about, and abandoning his daughter in the process. I've seen far too many people describe this as "bittersweet," and I don't think they understand what that word means. Where was the sweet? This finale reeks of so much insecurity on losing the "will they or won't they" suspense of Deckerstar happening, that it was deferred into nonexistence. We were, simply, scammed.
We were scammed not just from a relationship standpoint, but in a view of any of the characters - especially the main characters, who should have been the thrust of the show - achieving a character arc that was satisfactory. I didn't need happiness from them - it'd've been nice, but not necessary. But what I DID need was character development or a conclusion for the main characters that in any way made sense, and that categorically didn't happen. "They have eternity together" I'm sorry, but I didn't sign up for Evangelical preaching in my happy devil show. Mortal lives matter. The entirety of what Lucifer missed in Chloe's life and his daughter growing up and Trixie and Linda and Eve - everything he missed, it *mattered*. Saying it didn't matter because Chloe and Lucifer, who have lived lifetimes apart after a few moments together, are trapped in Hell together now... What a joy.
The heavy handedness in using a time-travelling baby to force Lucifer into Hell at the ending was also obnoxiously blatant and jarring. It was such bad writing, and Tom had clearly checked out by then so it wasn't even sold with good acting. It was just painful to watch.
While the earliest seasons will probably always have a soft spot in my heart for all the cleverness and charisma packed into the characters and story, the ending still makes me feel like I wasted my time. The themes and messaging that made me fall in love with the series were abandoned at best and fully reversed at worse over the course of the ending.
There was so much potential to turn "Lucifer" into a series that could be watched again and again, and instead... this. Dialogue and plot points so amateurish it's embarrassing. Characters repeatedly reduced down to their dumbest components until they were unrecognizable from the characters we'd fallen in love with. And then the ghoulish spectacle of having those caricatures frog-marched to the end by the very visible hand of the writers.
It's such a shame. What a waste.
The Time Capsule (2022)
Who thought this was a good idea?
I'll admit that my initial interest was with the weird typecasting of Brianna Hildebrand in yet another role where she's time-travelling. The curse of having a baby-face, I suppose.
But once that curiosity had been satisfied, I was left with the entire rest of the movie, which... yikes. Best way I can sum it up is "yikes." There are movies where you can tell the writers are male, and this is absolutely one of them. Our two main female characters are, respectively, the "wife that the main character resents being tied to, and thus as the movie progresses becomes more and more of an outright harpy to justify his waning interest," and "literally teenager who obviously reciprocates the attraction this middle-aged man is feeling for her, as a ham-handed way to try and make it less horrifying when he pursues her."
The premise seemed like a whole lot of justification to make it seem acceptable for a "just turned 18" 18 year old to be in a relationship with a middle-aged man. While the ending, at the very last moment, veered away from being as gross as it certainly had the potential to be, I was left with only one pressing question -
Who on earth was this movie made for?
Hard to make an argument that the target audience is anything other than aging men who want a fantasy of leaving their aging wives to pursue younger women and recapture their lost youth, and wow, do we not need any more movies catering to them. The whole thing left me feeling disgruntled and disgusted. The messaging was appalling, the worldbuilding shabby, the pacing was BAD, and the only likeable character was the token black friend - who was clearly so bored with his small-town life that stirring up drama with the main characters seemed to be not just a recurring coincidence, but his outright passion.
1/10. Do not recommend.