Gareth- Reviews

Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

Called it

[2/10 · 4 April 2021]

Jared Leto needed to stay in the trash with his criminally unfunny 2000s reach-around joke where he belonged along with at least a dozen instances of Ancient Lamentation Music, 15 minutes of slow motion and an hour of b-roll and clunky exposition to retcon a mess of a storyline.

Also this movie deserves at most a 5, nowhere near 8 or above. I give 2 stars for the cast and crew doing their best with what they had and -8 for WB trying to pretend Justice League wasn't a bomb because it deserved it because they didn't bother building a solid film franchise first.

Uncut Gems (2019)

I don't know why this movie got reviewed this high.

[3/10 · 16 July 2020]

I can tell from the cameras that there was a budget to this but everything else about this is amateurish. Adam Sandler smile mumbles every single line of dialogue and tries his hand at an oscar ugly cry that felt as genuine as a toddler throwing a tantrum. Every character in this is an unlikable sleaze, half the characters in this movie should have gotten twice the beatdowns that Adam does and the finale is like watching a game at a bar with a bunch of overenthusiastic, obnoxious clowns. The storyline is just a bunch of random BS to drag out the run time and not a single decision makes any sense whatsoever to anyone with a semblance of sanity. Random characters show up out of nowhere for no other purpose than to show how bad Sandler is and then are immediately dismissed. The audio engineering of this movie is worse than my college classes first attempts at video editing, the balancing is awful. This movie is a jumbled mess and not in an enjoyable way and saying that's the point does not excuse bad filmmaking.

Castlevania (2017–2021)

Low for the series - still possible to redeem.

[7/10 · 10 March 2020]

Blunt right from the top, season 3 was a mess.

I'll start with the lows and end with the highs.

Dialogue was hammed up really hard, they tried way too hard to make Trevor and Sypha a familiarized couple and it lands poorly a lot of the time despite some good lines here and there. The quirky schtick was a bad gimmick that might have been funny if they only dropped it once and did not carry it on so long. I'll add in the sisters here too, every last one but Lenore was unbearably presumptuous and stupid. Carmilla was reduced to a whiner, Striga did literally nothing but state obvious crap as if it was genius and Morana did even less than that. Lenore was at least tolerable in that she appeared to have multiple facets in being a character. She enjoyed being cruel but realizes you capture more with honey. In other words she's at least believable in that you may get some "walkies" if you do what she wants and so you probably shouldn't stab her in the back as soon as you can. The rest of the characters have some seriously ambiguous and vague motivations that I won't spoil here but lets just say if you read someone as rubbing you the wrong way, your instincts are probably very correct. There's some real mustache twirling levels of cartoonish villainy in just being so predictably evil.

Then we have Alucard and literally everything going on around him... Everything about him this season should have been scrapped and I'm not even harping on the bi sex scene at the end. I'm talking about how completely and totally useless everything that happened there was other than to give us a reminder that he still exists and trying badly to give a storyline to justify looking back to him every now and then. Taka and Sumi were terrible. All around they were completely grating. Their dialogue was trash, their motivations were nonsensical, their turnabout could be seen coming from the very first sparring match... Total garbage that did nothing but waste time. God don't let that be a setup for Alucard being the next big bad when Trevor and Sypha come back to question his yard decorations.

Now after that mega pill to swallow, the high points. Despite some clear drops in quality the fight scenes remain clever and brutal. Sypha has got to be one of the most OP characters in the series by now. Ice magic shields used angel vivisection, she is a meatgrinder. Can't stress enough how much damage she can do. Trevor shows he's a capable man with just his hands several times over, he can and will fold people up like a lawn chair. Classy bringing the OG whip back alongside the vampire killer for a bit of fanservice. The music for the finale is absolutely up there with Bloody Tears in season 2. The final showdown definitely shows where the extra effort missing from the prior animation went, it is phenomenal with some dynamic camerawork and gruesome kills.

Isaac is by far my favorite of this series, he chews the scenery, his dialogue is stellar, his story is the best. I would easily watch a season of nothing but Isaac and the Captain. He's the most compelling antagonist the series has set up so far. He pulls this rating all the way up to a 7 for me, I want to see where he goes.

The Mist (2017)

fell out of the trope tree and hit every branch on the way down at least twice

[1/10 · 27 August 2017]

Show is a pathetically thin dumpster fire with the most obvious attempted twists I have ever seen. Characters are all complete trash and this show is a monstrous waste of time. F*** this show at all costs.

Huge fan of the novella and the movie. Movie dared to take a hard left turn and end so that nothing like this could have ever happened and Spike went ahead and did it anyway. Made another version of the story that just ruins every piece of the source material. Every character is flawed in irredeemably stupid ways instead of humanizing them. Each character is practically a cardboard stereotype cutout from the mother with a sexually active teenage life who gets called the town slut clear into her 30s like no one ever grew up and got laid to the father who is portrayed as a spineless wimp who does things behind her back instead of actually speaking like an adult. Hometown hero jock wrongfully accused and demonized with a false rape when the victimized bi-kid is the real monster who obviously did it and drag that pathetically obvious arc out for over half the show. The football players are closet gay and bash this kid without reason because it hurts their masculinity for the little punk to be alive but that all flounders and you realize everyone sucks when you get flat out told the kid is a manipulative, lying, date raping, sociopath. The black characters are made out to be unreasonable crazies, the Christians are actually crazy, the druggie is actually crazy and everyone is just oh so loony and full of the most basic bullshit character tropes that have been beaten to death a thousand times over. Practically nonexistent monsters in the mist and the mist itself takes a back seat to the "true horror that is humanity" but done in such a way that the show becomes an unlikable wreck. Really ashamed that I had been looking forward to this and even more ashamed that I actually watched 5 episodes start to finish and then fast forwarded through 3 more just to be sure it wasn't going to get any better.

tl:dr - if you're going to remake something, at least try to do it better... Screw this show, I hope their sales plummet and they never attempt to do something like this again.