gwobblewopkins Reviews

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

A Slight Improvement on a Mediocre Movie

[6/10 · 4 April 2024]

I barely even want to talk about this nothing burger of a movie; a hand wave might suffice as a review here. Watch it if you want; I am not going to stop you. Or don't; it's also kind of a waste of time. I should say that the film is an improvement over Afterlife in many ways; it's slightly funnier, a bit more well structured, and uses its ideas a little better. The damnation by faint praise is intentional; slightly more than the bare minimum is still not a good thing.

It's okay. It's okay as okay comes. Afterlife was "almost not okay," and now this one is "okay."

It's very disappointing to see a horror comedy that barely makes you laugh and never makes you scared. And don't give me some crap about how I'm not a kid anymore and pg13 this or you're older now that: go watch The House With the Clock in Its Walls. It's not a perfect or great movie. But it is more than good enough; it's funny, it's scary, and it is for kids. And I still remember it years after watching it, which definitely won't the be the case for Frozen Empire years from now.

What is very disappointing about all of this is that Ghostbusters 2 shouldn't be a hard film to write. The first one is about, to distill the film greatly, entrepreneurs creating a new kind of business. Basically, they're the first exterminators in town. The next Ghostbusters movie obviously should have been about that business becoming bigger somehow, someway- there a billion directions you could take it. But Hollywood always does the dumb thing where the Ghostbusters start back from square one, and fight a new, overhyped villain. Can't we get beyond this and finally see a world where Ghostbusters are commonplace someway somehow? Frozen Empire wants to show you a bunch of stuff you have already seen but with a new snow cone flavored villain. Cool, call me back when you have a story.

Essentially, every Ghostbusters sequel makes the same exact mistake: Going too big with the ghosts and too small with the Ghostbusters. We don't need or want another new big bad who wants to end the world, but better this time. We want to see the natural expansion of the business created in the first film. Or just something funny and scary.

This is as fun as treading water. Scratch that, it's as fun as treading water while you slowly watch the head of the Ghostbusters franchise, once again, disappear below the water line. Call me next time, I'll write you an outline that's better than this entire film in twenty minutes or less.

Jurassic Park (1993)

Hey Tagline! You and I Have Some Issues to Work Out.

[9/10 · 26 January 2024]

Hey Michael Crichton! Steven Spielberg! Do you think we're stupid? This tagline is banal trite, and I was only four years old when I figured that out.

An adventure 65 million years in the making...

What, exactly, was being made for 65 million years? If we're talking about the dinosaurs, they've been extinct for 65 million years, so they're an adventure 65 million years in the hiatus and one Mesozoic era in the making.

All of human history and prehistory doesn't reach that far back, maybe a few million years, and it's not like dinosaurs are a Jesus like figure that every living thing has been waiting for the return of.

Ooh, maybe the tagline refers to that mosquito trapped in the amber! That could work, except the mosquito clearly was from the Jurassic period, and that was more than 65 million years ago.

So basically this tagline is a shallow word association game; you're meant to just look at it and go, "Oh yeah, dinosaurs have been extinct for that long. I am so smart for remembering that," and not think anything about the fact the actual literal words don't make sense.

Meg 2: The Trench (2023)

Flip Side of the Same Coin

[4/10 · 14 January 2024]

I went into the first Meg film expecting a big, bad, stupid movie that I could have fun laughing at and came away pleasantly surprised. Yes, The Meg was big and stupid, but I am pretty sure it was not bad. It was good at being stupid, making sure the audience was having fun the whole way. And it was an awesome celebration of the shark movie as a subgenre to boot!

The Meg 2 is much harder to love. I went into it with the same expectations I had for the first Meg, and came away incredibly disappointed. First and foremost, nearly everything that happens in this film is entirely inexplicable. Secondly, no, this does not mean the movie is freewheeling and fun, as it still pretends to have a plot and wastes a lot of your time doing so, even when literally nothing adds up. At least the laugh out loud bad dialogue will keep you occupied.

Third, and possibly most importantly for your enjoyment of the movie, almost everything that happens in the titular trench is worth fast forwarding. It's dark, hard to see, shaky cam, adr nonsense. Characters die and you will only notice moments later when a shoehorned line of dialogue confirms your suspicion that something just happened. All the creativity that could have been used to create a cool Subnautica inspired setpiece went into... something else instead.

The problem with The Meg 2 is that for every moment of goodbad enjoyment it gives you, it makes you trudge through three moments of pain and drudgery. The Meg 2 is a beer that can only make you hung over, but never drunk. Here's hoping The Meg 3 still happens after this lurking pool turd ruined everybody's day.

Wanted (2008)

Bog Standard

[6/10 · 14 January 2024]

Want a gimmick that is obviously nothing but a gimmick? Want a plot about a secret society of assassins that does nothing to differentiate its self from the mediocre likes of I Am Number Four and The Covenant? Want edgy humor that condescends to its audience, but doesn't even bother to break an R Rating? Wanted might just be your kind of movie.

Wanted's big claim to fame, besides wasting prime Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman on characters you've seen done better elsewhere, is that certain characters in this film can curve their bullets when firing their guns. Apparently, this is a two step process: you can't just flail your gun around like the characters in this film if you want similar results, you must also belong to a secret race of super assassins and sit around letting Morgan Freeman spoon feed you exposition before your bullet curving powers will work.

I have been making fun of how dumb and standard Wanted is, but if the bullet curving gimmick had led to even one fun inventive gunfight, I would probably be talking about how cool that was instead of how lame this movie is. The Bullet curving is wasted. Gunfights play out the way they would in any other pg13 action movie. No one treats cover any differently, main characters walk around with plot armor a mile thick, and the super assassins look as scary firing a gun as an inflatable tube man might. Never before has a gimmick been so blatantly nothing but a gimmick, and no fun to boot.

Unfortunately, beyond the wasted gimmick, there isn't really much to talk about with Wanted. By the time you're half an hour in, you'll have the rest of the movie correctly plotted in your head. The movie isn't boring or badly made. It isn't hard to watch or follow. But it never really manages to reach the low bar of "entertaining." It's an underachiever with a bad attitude and some thin veneer.

The Invisible Man (I) (2020)

Entertaining, Good, but Unignorably Flawed

[7/10 · 7 January 2024]

Forgetting my other nitpicks, 2020's Invisible Man is noticeably a movie at war with its self: It can't decide if it's an over the top horror film that thrills you with set pieces and exists in an enhanced reality where normal people can snap necks and break windshields by punching them, or if it is a subtle horror movie set entirely within the confines of our reality. Imagine if 73's Don't Look Now occasionally turned into Hatchet '06. Both films are entertaining, but they wouldn't create a very elegant mash-up.

Invisible Man does have a secret weapon, that saves it from feeling stupid in all the same ways Hollow Man did before it, in the form of a very well put together ending. It is too bad, then, that this ending hinges on a set up that I feel was incredibly poorly delivered. Spoilers ahead.

If I were to show you a scene of a student trying to hide a teacher's lesson planner and getting caught red handed, what conclusions would you come to? If I showed a scene of a child trying to hide their mom's jacket, and they get caught moments later, what conclusions would you come to? If I showed you a scene of someone breaking into The Invisible Man's house, moving one of his expensive and rare invisibility suits from one room to another, but getting caught by The Invisible Man moments after hiding the suit, what conclusions would you come to? Would you assume that the suit is still where it was hidden, even though everything about a scene where a thief is caught red handed would indicate to an audience failure? Even though The Invisible Man's controlling and smart nature would point to the kind of person who wouldn't sleep until they found that suit and returned it to its home?

My point is that, ironically, The Invisible Man totally gaslights you. It shows you a scene of a character failing totally, then tells you later on that she succeeded. It shows a situation where success is totally implausible, and then tells you, but actually... What would have been so hard about rewriting the scene? It isn't hard to make this more plausible. The writer could have had her use a better hiding place; one the audience would have believed could have been overlooked. The writer could have had the character not get caught, or had the character simply not get caught in the same room where they hid the all important suit. Instead we're supposed to believe that someone whose invisibility suit just got stolen didn't thoroughly check the room he found the intruder in accross the course of weeks. In his own house. Dumb, silly, unnecessary mistake that takes a brilliant ending and turns it into a head scratcher.

You can't gaslight me movie, I was paying attention!

The Thing (1982)

A Great FX and Monster Movie, Oversold By Its Fans

[8/10 · 31 December 2023]

A feel like there's an effect where when an underrated film faces harsh criticism and condemnation, its fans positive opinions become that much stronger and vocal in order to unbury their hidden gem from its undeserved reputation. Was The Thing oversold to me; No, I think the merits on which my dad recommended it to me (the monsters, the flamethrowers, and a great chess game) were on point. It's more in later years that I have found the average internet opinion of the movie to be way too reverent in ways I feel are kind of misleading. Which is why it was really nice to get the chance to catch it on the big screen to really cement my opinions on whether or not I was missing something the fart sniffers were catching on to.

I joke, of course, this film's reverence is relatively well earned, and I cannot blame or deny an enthusiastic fan their enthusiasm. It is quite possibly still the best special effects movie ever made, and if not, it is the most well realized and unique monster in movie fx history (though I would also need to put the 88 Blob in the running too.) That's quite an achievement considering how much time has passed, and may be a matter of opinion depending on how easily cgi tricks your eyes (in my mind they still haven't fixed the "video game lighting" problem that makes an objects look instantly fake), but it's still an opinion a lot of people would get behind.

The movie is also filled with interesting turns and developments, lots of cool performances, a great score, and wonderful direction and atmosphere. So where does it go wrong? Where do I differ from the fans? In short, the writing and some of the story elements are pretty weak here. Let's start with some basic character logic. Spoilers here soon.

The film reveals to a majority of surviving characters about halfway through that even a single cell of The Thing is capable of entirely assimilating any living being absurdly quickly. Some lip service is made to the idea, but no one really acts like their lives depend on this. They persist in eating together, drinking out of open containers, leaving their faces and sometimes hands uncovered as if they don't care that any contamination is deadly.

The movie is also guilty of using the potentially interesting paranoia element simply to manipulate characters like chess pieces on a board. Most of the conversations regarding trust and distrust don't feature any of the kind of dialogue I would expect from people in a situation like this, and instead railroad quickly towards a forced conclusion. It's too darn bad.

The last element worth mentioning that lets the film down are The Thing's logic its self. Let's not get into too many of the semantics here: The Thing acts pretty dumb until it's time for it to be not dumb. The first two actions The Thing takes are absolutely against its own nature and goals. 1st, it gets alone time in the very beginning with the dog keeper and, for no reason at all, passes up the opportunity to assimilate him. A new base, no allies, all it needs to do is lick his face or hand and... hold on. It does lick his face much earlier when the Norwegians were crashing, and somehow he isn't infected when he dies? So not only does this whole interaction make a rewatch harder with a big plot hole, but it makes The Thing look pretty dumb.

2nd The Thing's big kennel scene is where it blows its cover immediately for no reason. All it needs to do is share a water bowl with all the other dogs, or a meal, or get in a fight where it scratches a few of them, but instead it does something incredibly dumb again.

Luckily, The Thing mostly acts smarter as the movie goes on, becoming bone chillingly intelligent in its final act as the movie realizes a thoroughly brilliant ending. The ending got way better for me on a rewatch; it might be the most thoroughly and realistically depressing horror movie ending our there, beating out The Mist for being less fantastical.

I thoroughly recommend this film, but I have to call it how I see it too: there are a few typical dumb horror movie tropes at work here. The movie mostly serves its self brilliantly, but I feel it occasionally tosses a monkey wrench in to your potential enjoyment with a bit of bad or forced writing here or there. But, make no mistake, it may just be the best monster movie ever made.

Plane (2023)

Actually Riveting

[8/10 · 19 December 2023]

A simple action movie that delivers on all fronts, two things were incredibly remarkable about Plane: Its amazingly tense and real plane crash sequence that was the most gripping thing I have witnessed since Sorcerer's bridge crossing sequence, and its very impactful violence. As a dedicated viewer of every plane movie ever made and a habitual enjoyer of violence, it was a wonderful change of pace to watch a crash that felt so real and violence that hurt me.

Anyone who is passingly curious should check this out, but I should mention that the reason it doesn't get a perfect score is that it feels like, by the end, it could have done a little more with its characters and had a plot that was slightly more involved. It's a really pleasant surprise, and one of the best midbudget action films in recent memory.

Halloween Kills (2021)

One of the Best Plotless Movies Ever Made

[6/10 · 19 December 2023]

There are character moments and threads here, but by the time Halloween Kills ends, nothing that you could call a plot has taken place. But honestly, I don't think this reflects poorly on the film. Slasher films kind of defy a lot of traditional structure, and ultimately rely on our fascination with human survival to work in ways other movies simply can not. While I can't speak for everybody, a large portion of us watch slasher films to see facsimiles of ourselves and the people we know attempt to survive deadly situations. I actually don't watch slasher films to see someone mutilated against a wall of Halloween decorations. Which, unfortunately, is Halloween Kills' MO.

Characters approach survival situations in this film in one of two frustrating ways: acting entirely helpless, or running straight into Michael Myers' arms with a knife to give him. No one acts remotely like they are invested in keeping their heart beating, though, so the essence of a good slasher is lost. I actually ended up liking the movie's dramatic scenes better than its mean spirited yet cheap kill sequences, and I guess I am one of the few that liked Tommy and the mob. But the dramatic scenes don't add up to a plot, everything occurs pretty arbitrarily, and it's all pretty difficult to take seriously.

I'll give it a pass for being a slasher film with lots of Halloween decorations, but it's not my most critically sound opinion.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

It Exists!

[5/10 · 19 December 2023]

If anyone were to need as many examples of lazy screenwriting convenience as possible, this movie is not a bad start. And while, unlike your Rise of Skywalkers and your F9s, this screen convenience actually serves the purpose of getting us to a cool set piece, or cool character moment, or to the next plot point, it still robs the movie of a lot of the impact it could have had.

The movie tells us the main characters are poor, but they never go through many of the discomforts of being poor; somehow a family of three with one job is able to immediately refurbish the old Ecto 1, and just in time for a big set piece too! How convenient! The main characters are portrayed as being dubious of the paranormal, but instantly accept it as soon as it is suggested. Not only that, they act utterly blase towards sharing a house with the ghost of a dead relative who is sending them messages! They nearly act disinterested, only interacting with grandpa ghost as much as they need to get to the next plot point.

Ultimately, though, it's the ending that lets the film down the most. Convenience is acceptable when it brings us to satisfaction, but the ending of Ghostbusters: Afterlife is anything but. (Spoilers after here!)

The opening of the film sets up a device that fails. During the finale of the film, this device fails again during our "all hope is lost" moment. Shortly thereafter, all of the original ghostbusters arrive to help. A good screenwriter might have done a few things here to make this moment work: They might have made the presence of our old heroes a joke as the new heroes prove more competent, they might have given us a solid reason that the presence of the OG busters equates to this device suddenly working, they might have thrown us a trapdoor last act where the new characters have to solve a problem with the old characters. We get none of that: We get meaningless, too-little too-late fan service and a deus ex machina wrapped in a deus ex machina as a battery that has less and less reason to work suddenly springs to life for no good reason.

It's too bad, because our new cast is actually pretty charming, and they are robbed of anything real to do in the conclusion so that a cynical film maker could wrench a few tears out of the most vulnerable film goers. The sad part is they could have earned those tears easily, but instead they tried to steal them.

Yeah, there is a movie here, and it's not bad enough to call bad, and it's not good enough to call good. It exists and you can watch it, and you probably won't have a good or a bad time. You'll just pass time. Make this one a Ghostbusters: Afterthought and don't go out of your way for it.

Gretel & Hansel (2020)

Is it Possible for one Small Thing to Ruin a Movie?

[6/10 · 18 December 2023]

Gretel and Hansel is a perfectly serviceable, if a little slow, horror-adjacent Fairy Tale. For the more motivated movie-goer, it might even border on being great. So why did I nearly walk out of my showing? In one word, CREEEEEEAK!

With movies I really try my best not to sweat the petty stuff. But there are levels to irritation and Gretel and Hansel brought me close to my breaking point. Everything was fine until we got to the witch's house. After that point, every interior (and some exterior) scene features a persistent, frequent, and distracting metal creaking sound that just doesn't go away. Imagine if Get Out had used the Metal Spoon Asmr noise in every single scene of the film. Now also imagine that sound having no reasonable point of origin.

Maybe I still sound like I am just bugging out, latching onto some stupid thing no one else did. Maybe that's actually what I am doing, and you go ahead and call me wrong about this if you want to but first I would like you to imagine trying to watch a movie alone in a theater where someone is squeaking a rusty door hinge once every ten seconds. That was my experience with this movie. One rogue sound killed my whole experience. Still, I recognize there's something here for other people, and no one else's review seems to mention this, so I guess I may be alone or perhaps my viewing suffered from a quirk of my theater's sound system. All I know is that it felt like torture.

Slender Man (I) (2018)

Bored

[2/10 · 16 December 2023]

I haven't been bored in a really long time; not since I saw Slenderman in theaters. I'm an adult who is in charge of what I do now, so I feel like I have few excuses for being bored. But even as a kid I got used to navigating some pretty boring spaces without getting too bored. Slenderman brought me back to a headspace of bored I haven't been for a while; that kinda of bored that sits in your stomach and starts to sicken you. A physically uncomfortable boredom.

Sure, I firmly stand by my opinion that the worst commercially released film is Dark Harvest 2: The Maize because it is the most boring and has no setting changes, plot twists, new characters, just one change in the form of day to night, to break up the monotony beyond the first ten minutes. And it has repeated scenes of children who had no direction besides "scream as loudly as humanly possible; daddy wants to redline the mic." But Slenderman has the distinction of being the big budget, theatrically released equivalent of this. So boring you will be physically repulsed by it.

There's nothing here; the film is Rings but way worse, which is saying quite a bit. Things happened in Rings, though, and nothing really happens in Slenderman. If I am to say anything in praise of the film, there were production values and a couple promising moments. I'll spare you all the but at the end of that sentence. This one is just bad with so few distinguishing features that even a bad movie nerd like me can't imagine recommending a single scene of this film to anyone for any reason.

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker (2019)

Totally Apathetic to Your Viewership

[4/10 · 16 December 2023]

Have you ever wanted to experience the filmic equivalent of being along with someone you barely know while they run errands? And they don't like you particularly much, or think you are particularly intelligent, so when they do talk to you, they refuse to give you any details about anything they're doing, and only give vague, short replies that intentionally left you in the dark? Have you ever wanted to bottle the feeling of being gaslit? Have you ever wanted to feel entirely bored by a lightsaber duel? Nostalgic for the relatively frenetic and thoughtful blocking of Kenobi and Vader's awkward, but interesting '77 duel?

This movie truly doesn't care whether you pay attention to it. It's because because: The Movie. Why? Because the movie said so. Over and over again. The movie never, ever reaches a raison d'etre, any scene or sequence that seems like it does more than simply exist to get to the next scene or sequence. It's a dark ride with all the lights turned on and none of the decor; it's a film that never feels like it begins as nothing ever really is indicated as being important to the audience, but nonetheless it continues forward. Yes, they really somehow made a whole film feel like introductory fluff, like the plot before the plot in a Simpsons episode, but infinitely less relatable or amusing.

If everything can be swept under the rug, what am I to care about? If no one scene or sequence stands out, where is the heart or identity of your film? Your family could improvise a Star Wars film together this holiday and it would arrive a point more quickly and organically than Rise of Skywalker ever does. And it will be more entertaining, because even the most amateurish improvisers understand the universal constant that an audience doesn't watch a scene to get it over with, but because cool things, dramatic things, or funny things can happen during a scene.

Mile 22 (2018)

I Didn't Hate This Until the Final Ten Minutes

[4/10 · 16 December 2023]

Yes, the dialogue was kind of laughably bad, and everyone else in the theater, all five of them, were already openly mocking it. Yes ,the plot was really simple, the characters were all archetypes we've seen before, and most of the action was shaky and not greatly exciting. But, there was one really good fist fight already. Some of the cynical writing choices were interesting me. Not all of the gunfighting was bad, some of it was cool! There was a nice immediacy to the situation that was making the simplicity work. And the Russian interference was promising to be an interesting midpoint twist.

But there's our problem. This film keeps cutting back to the Russians. The Russians keep saying "We're going to do something really bad soon," before disappearing back into complete plot irrelevancy. Essentially, the film continuously announces that these guys are going to do something bad to derail the plot, but it only comes in the zero hour. The film's only "plot twist" comes too late to make the movie more interesting and, frankly, one of the few times I few like my intelligence has literally been insulted by a movie. What kind of jerk continuously tells an audience, "this character is going to do something really bad soon," only to turn around and go, "Ha, I bet you never saw THAT coming!?" A small, incorporated element of this twist is legitimately good, the reveal of a traitor, but it doesn't serve the movie at all, where it could have been the basis for the good scenes and sequences this movie so desperately lacked.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then watching it drop, is not the same as a well foreshadowed plot twist. Watch Iko Uwais' fight scene. Nothing else about this is really worthwhile.

Bones and All (2022)

Wasted Potential in the Tradition of Twilight

[6/10 · 15 December 2023]

Wouldn't Star Wars have been better if they had forgotten all about that Death Star and started a romantic tryst? Wouldn't Jurassic Park have been improved if Sadler and Malcolm had found a cozy spot away from all those raptors to cuddle? Wouldn't Rocky have been better if Rocky had never accepted the fight with Creed? A story needs to follow through on what it sets up, but Bones and All trips on a romantic sub plot and gets stuck in bed staring at Timothy Chalomet with goo-goo eyes. It's not a particularly interesting romantic sub plot, either; it kinda just goes through the motions as a contrived argument breaks our characters up and a contrived, ho-hum series of scenes gets them back together.

What is particularly vexing in this case, is that Bones and All is basically perfect during its first half. At around the point in the movie where the title dropped, I thought for sure I was watching something very special. But, alas, stories are about something, and Bones and All is not about anything. It's just a pointless series of events, a story over before it ended.

I'd like to give everyone as much credit as I can, because the film looks good, is well acted, moves well (for a time,) and behaves 90% like a real movie. But a basic lack of understanding of setup and payoff really ruins this. No one intentionally reads a book where the last thirty pages are missing, and unfortunately, no one should intentionally watch this either. It hurts for me to say, but no one needs something that is essentially incomplete.

65 (2023)

B-Plot: The Movie

[6/10 · 16 March 2023]

After a series of anticlimaxes and false starts, 65 finally gave me something enjoyable in the form of a decently engineered jump scare. From this point on, the film took it in turns doing something unbearably dumb, and doing something competent. This is is the status quo for most Hollywood films, but it's too little too late after the slow start, and the successes are tiny in the face of the failures. What does it matter that a scare here or there is good when the plot is simple to the point of trite? Little conflict arises, the fight for survival is uninteresting, and often too easy, and the things that aren't predictable about the plot are too poorly presented to qualify as plot twists. The film's scifi technology is sometimes cool in theory, but serves mostly as an easy button.

A couple points of contention, in regards to the tech, really stick in my craw. The whole plot, which could be summed up as After Earth 2.0, revolves around the fact that the crashed space ship was full of engineering flaws. It has pathetic, Starship Troopers-esque cryopods that get everyone killed right away, a lifeboat equivalent that, weirdly does not contain all the crummy cryopods, is attached to the bottom of the ship, and isn't located conveniently enough in the case of an emergency. It's the scifi equivalent of a busy kitchen keeping their only fire extinguisher on the roof of their restaurant.

And yet, Adam Driver's various hand tools are basically perfectly engineered pieces of scifi tech that get him through every problem easily. There's literally a point in the film, where in the same sixty seconds, one of his tools serves the disparate purposes of being A: a proximity detector that you can stick into solid rock, B: A light source, C: A surgical tool capable of safely and cleanly removing an alien parasite, D: An ipecac.

In short, the tech just serves to make the screenwriting easier in dumb ways, creating problems when the screenwriting needed problems, and resolving problems with ease when the screenwriting needed the characters to overcome. It cheats the already simple story of any real feeling of struggle.

At the end of the day, if you want dinosaurs, this movie has them, but it will be very difficult to watch the whole thing without feeling at least a little, and probably a lot, let down. The material feels like a B-plot that got stretched into an entire film. The movie could have been a modern day upgrade of something like The Land That Time Forgot, but instead it's just another movie that time will forget.