fundaquayman

This is an example of a film starring a decent ensemble cast, with an award-winning director at helm, all of which goes completely south that usually you only see with Netflix productions.

A federal agent is in charge of transporting a witness to a mafia-type case from a small town in Alaska back to the Mainland via Anchorage on a small single-engine 3-seat aircraft. 10 minutes into the film you realize the pilot assigned to fly them to Anchorage isn't legit, and the rest of the dreadful 90-ish minutes deal with their journey that ends up feeling like a first cut to a student film from an online filmmaking course sold on TEMU.

Without revealing too much of that badly written contrived plot, when things start to go wrong, the US Marshall-protagonist (played by Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery) holds back from panicking and decides to radio for help, and it is only after another 15 minutes of banter-fight-nose dives she remembers she had a phone! REALLY?! The witness played by Topher Grace gets a cutaway reaction-shot of surprise when he sees her whip out the phone -- I thought for 15 minutes that the story must have been set in the 1970s or 80s , BUT TURNS OUT THIS STORY IS SET TO TAKE PLACE in the age of the internet-webs and Smart phones - the day of NOW! Our protagonist acts as if she's was transported back to a time when cellphones doesn't exist and the plane's radio was her only means to call for help! The script has enough gall to have the protagonist just shake off that stupidity by asking herself, "what was I thinking!?" when she picked up the phone and makes a call.

Continuity is a mess with this film to the point it seemed to have been intentionally done so the movie could become a tool for a drinking game after it is sold on home video where you spot the mistake and can point to a friend so they have to down 3 shots of cheap vodka while shouting out "APOCALYPTO!!!"

Mark Wahlberg has been in plenty of good popcorn action flicks as well as forgettable ones, but this FLIGHT RISK is so specially bad it fails even as a money-laundering or insurance claimable piece of crap. Wahlberg plays his villain character with so much of a Mississippi kick you'd think it was either a tribute to DELIVERANCE or he was paying homage to De Niro's Max Cady character from Scorsese's version of CAPE FEAR.

The more I type the more I realize my eyes must have been injured just from having watched this piece of garbage of a film - every movie that gets made takes a miracle and a team to make it happen, but this sad little dumpster fire qualifies as an exception. My suggestion is to not watch it even if it is free and they offer you a gift for viewing it.

I'll skip the plotline summary as you can get that just from seeing the trailer. As a fan of this film, it's interesting to see so many film critics comparing this film to PARASITE when the two films' stories and genre have nothing to do with each other except they're both directed by Bong Joon-Ho. I'm thinking maybe these critics have not seen Bong's earlier great films like MEMORIES OF MURDER, or HOST, and they have only watched PARASITE, SNOWPIERCER and OKJA on NETFLIX when they wrote their reviews after screening MICKEY 17 - fact is, Bong Joon-Ho has shown he is well-versed across multiple genres, and PARASITE's success isn't necessarily his endgame (personal opinion perhaps, MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003) remains his finest work in his 3 decades working as screewriter and director). It would be more relevant for PARASITE to be compared to AMERICAN BEAUTY, while MICKEY 17 as a Sci-Fi satire stands on its own as one of the best films released so far in 2025, and it would be a travesty if this film and Robert Pattinson's performance don't become favorites in next year's Golden Globes and Academy Awards. Given the current state of the world we live in, it is sad to see that the ridiculousness of fictional characters and events within the film are not that far off from what we have been seeing on the news in the first 10 weeks of 2025. Bong Joon-Ho again knocks it out of the park with MICKEY 17 and he makes this film easy to understand for even audiences who only watch Marvel-Disney commercial films. As much as this movie is a Sci-Fi action comedy, the only plot element that probably isn't believable in 2025 is that when corrupt politicians are caught red/orange-handed in the movie, they actually get punished by the law...

While MICKEY 17 can be compared more relevantly with earlier Sci-Fi films like MOON, BLADERUNNER, SILENT RUNNING, or maybe even SOLARIS, and TOTAL RECALL, those equally iconic films touch more heavily on what it means to live and question whether the world now and in the future can allow humanity to exist within us. MICKEY 17 makes a note on the existential questions, but focus more on the dangerous state our world is in right now in Q1 2025...

I count my blessings that work afforded me the opportunity to meet Ryuichi Sakamoto twice and watch two of his concerts when he toured across Asia for the release of the albums SWEET REVENGE, and 2 years later 1996.

Even though I sat face-to-face next to him in two different interviews, and watched him perform live, none of those encounters (nearly 3 decades ago) were able to make me feel the same sense of candid immediacy as this solo performance - OPUS has the ability to make the audience feel he played that piano and his music JUST FOR YOU. The film, to me, feels like it was made for both fans of Sakamoto, and people already familiar with his work and more importantly, his demeanor and the nuances to his way of play - the extreme close-ups, the cutaways to his reflection on the piano, hair, back, hands, his gestures and grimace as he plays, pause, and ponder, made to feel all the more alive by leaving in, or enhancing the vibe by integrating ambient sound in the studio into the space between each musical piece and as he performs - all of that help to place us - the audience, as if we were right there with him as he performed for that one last time... compared to all the past concert films and documentaries on Ryuichi Sakamoto, OPUS has neither a concert-hall filled with his diehard fans, nor does it delve into his almost-obsession of "Sound." Instead what the audience get is an experience of Sakamoto playing his music for you only.

Off stage, the Sakamoto I met was a quiet, observant, and slow to warm private man... until you hit a topic that interests him to unlock the guard he so comfortably is shielded by - from disliking the generic Jpop top acts of the time, to comparing 2 different Japanese authors both named Murakami (back in the 90's Sakamoto thought one was a hack, and the other "innovative, daring, and fresh" while admitting the dark topics Ryu Murakami wrote about were not to everyone's liking). Norika Sky Sora, his girlfriend at the time (whom he later married), was always nearby and the two would take cigarette breaks between interviews with their Gitanes... Sakamoto spoke about how the music industry in Japan was stuck with an old boys club arrangement, and if he had his way, music would not have to be distributed by means of just selling physical records or via the internet with the development of digital distribution technologies - there would no longer be boundaries due to geography or language differences... all that became a reality in the decade that followed, and I'm sure it made Sakamoto both happy and feel challenged at the same time. He spoke of his ambition and hope for music to have its own life, and his belief that "sounds" is both a part of, and as a proof of life itself - with OPUS, producer Norika Sora, and their son Neo, helped Ryuichi Sakamoto bid farewell without needing to say or treat this as a "Goodbye" - this sense of being in the Present, and not Past, is not what I expected as a takeaway from a concert film, even as a fan of Sakamoto's music. While some reviews here complain about the performance would have been more engaging if shown in color, in my opinion the choice of black/white allows the music itself to bring us our own unique interpretation to a spectrum of hues - as if this was his intention all along to ensure that not only his music, but also his vibe and presence, remain alive and a personal art form unique to each of us long after he's gone.