I join CTV Atlantic’s Bruce Frisco to talk about the sci fi action flick “Mercy,” the avian drama of “H is for Hawk,” the thriller “Honey Bunch” and the dystopian drama “The Well.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join the CTV NewsChanel to talk about the sci fi action flick “Mercy,” the avian drama of “H is for Hawk” and the thriller “Honey Bunch.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to make the bed! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the sci fi action flick “Mercy,” the avian drama of “H is for Hawk” and the thriller “Honey Bunch.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: Set three years from today, “Mercy,” a new sci fi action film starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, and now playing in theatres, sees Pratt play a detective accused of murdering his wife in a world where his fate will be determined by an AI judge. “The future of law enforcement is Mercy.”
CAST: Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Annabelle Wallis, Kali Reis, Rafi Gavron, Chris Sullivan, Kenneth Choi, Kylie Rogers. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov.
REVIEW: A movie about AI that feels as though it was written by AI, “Mercy” is a hacky, old school detective story with a technological twist.
Set in the near future, “Mercy” follows LAPD homicide detective Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) one of the main proponents of a new technology-driven justice system. In a city overrun by crime and civil unrest, the Mercy Program is projected to offer fast, unbiased justice, acting as judge, jury, and executioner to prisoners presumed guilty until proven innocent.
As one of the public faces of the Mercy Program, Raven talks up the IA-based system, braying that the Mercy Capital Court will help clean up the streets. “I am proud to have sent the first suspect for trial here,” Raven says at a press conference. “And I will continue to send more until the message is received.”
The concept is simple. The accused have ninety minutes to present evidence and convince the AI judge (Rebecca Ferguson) of their innocence. If they fail to reach the 92% innocence threshold, they will be immediately executed so the good folks of L.A. County can “sleep at night” secure in the knowledge that they are safe.
Reven is all for it until he is accused of murdering his wife and set to face the judgement of the system he once championed. “I shouldn’t be here,” he says. “I loved my wife. I didn’t kill her.”
An attempt to breathe new life into a detective procedural, “Mercy” earns points for shaking up the genre, but any goodwill that comes along with that soon disappears under a fog of ludicrous twists, central casting characterizations and frenetic headache-inducing visuals.
In a movie filled with dubious storytelling choices, perhaps the biggest is the charisma killing decision to to keep Chris Pratt strapped to a chair for most of the running time. The action happens around him, like he’s sitting on a giant green screen, floating amid the body cam and surveillance footage as he uses his detective skills to prove his innocence. Playing the strapped-in, troubled cop with a dead partner and a drinking problem, doesn’t allow Pratt to use the charm that made him a star.
Ditto Rebecca Ferguson, seen here as though she handed in the head-and-shoulders performance as a digital judge via a Zoom call. She’s meant to be a cold, authoritative figure, void of emotion, and while she pulls it off, the icy demeanor dulls the character’s impact. “I was not designed to feel,” she says, and it shows.
Stranger than the casting decisions is the film’s take on AI. What begins as Hollywood sending the message that the clock is ticking, and if we don’t act AI will kill us—a message embraced by much of the creative community—becomes muddled near the end. No spoilers here, but the film’s point-of-view inexplicably changes from the idea that humanity, though imperfect, is superior to artificial intelligence to something akin to having sympathy for the artificial intelligence. It’s a polarizing topic and the film disappointingly fails to take an interesting or consistent stance on AI’s ethics and impact on the world.
“Mercy” is slick and face-paced but no amount of style and high-octane imagery can disguise the film’s fatal flaws.
I joined BNN Bloomberg to talk about the weakest Memorial Day long weekend in nearly three decades.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
LOGLINE: Lasagna-loving, comic-strip cat Garfield returns to the big screen with a new voice, courtesy of Chris Pratt, and a new adventure. After being abandoned by his street cat father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) as a kitten, the orange tabby leads a life of leisure with easy-going Jon (Nicholas Hoult) and canine best friend Odie. When Vic reappears, Garfield and Odie leave the lasagna behind to embark on a risky, high-stakes heist.
CAST: Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Hannah Waddingham, Ving Rhames, Nicholas Hoult, Cecily Strong, Harvey Guillén, Brett Goldstein, Bowen Yang, Snoop Dogg.
REVIEW: “The Garfield Movie” is a big, action-packed (and product placement heavy) movie that doesn’t really feel like a Garfield movie. It’s a big, colorful action-adventure that will entertain kids, make their eyeballs spin and inspire a giggle or three, but the essence of the character, the sardonic, lazy cat with an obsession for sleeping, has been set aside in favor of a lively, fun character who has little to do with what made the comic-strip popular in the first place.
The new Garfield loses the simplicity of the strip, instead, filling the screen with rapid fire gags and frenetic action. The animation, which feels like a cross between computer generated and the comic-strip, offers up expressive character faces and fun voice work, particularly from Waddingham, who takes a generic villain character and gives her some oomph.
Aside from the father-and-son story, which touches on the importance of family, screenwriters Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds keep it simple, sentimental and predictable.
“The Garfield Movie” will likely have little appeal for anyone over the age of 10, but has a silly sense of mischief that the younger members of the family may enjoy.
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” the new sci fi action comedy from director James Gunn, brings the hip needle drops, off-kilter humor and mismatched, misfit superheroes you expect, but adds in unexpectedly heart tugging sentiments about family, second chances and personal growth.
The action begins on a downbeat note. Rocket (Bradley Cooper), the smart mouthed genetically engineered racoon, is feeling down, wallowing in the maudlin sounds of Radiohead’s “Creep.”
Star-Lord, a.k.a. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is using booze to grapple with the change in his girlfriend Gamora (Zoe Saldaña). She was killed by Thanos, but, courtesy of an alternate timeline, a version of her returned, but different, with no memory of her adventures with the Guardians or her love affair with Quill. “I’ll tell you something,” he says. “I’m Star-Lord. I formed the Guardians. Met a girl, fell in love, and that girl died. But then she came back. Came back a total d**k.”
Their world is given a shake and bake by caped supervillain Adam Warlock (Will Poulter). He is a powerful cosmic entity, with a third eye jewel embedded in his forehead, working with the man responsible for creating Rocket’s unique genetic makeup, a Dr. Moreau type known as the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). The ultimate plan is to kidnap and study Rocket to use the chatty racoon as the basis to sidestep the evolutionary process and create more hybrid species. “My sacred mission is to create the perfect society,” he says.
During the invasion, Rocket is severely injured, revealing to his co-Guardians—Star-Lord, Nebula (Karen Gillen), Mantis (Pom Klementieff) Drax (Dave Bautista), Groot (the voice of Vin Diesel) and Gamora—the extent of his genetic modifications.
As the racoon wavers between life and death, the film cleaves into two parts, Rocket’s origin story and the rescue mission to save his life. “Are you ready for one last ride?” asks Peter.
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” succumbs to the usual superhero movie pitfalls. By the time the end credits roll, it has become a loud, slightly over-long orgy of CGI, but James Gunn brings something most other superhero movies don’t have.
Within the wham-bam action overload is a genuine sweetness that overrides the bombastic action. Under his watch the movies provide the expected wild ride while grounding the otherworldly action with poignant relationship drama. These movies are about logical, not necessarily biological, families, and that connection, above all else, is what makes these movies so effective.
If Gunn (and Bautista) can make a character named Drax the Destroyer loveable, then anything is possible.
The most famous plumbers since Thomas Crapper, the man who popularized the flush toilet, are back in “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” The new animated film starring the voices of Chris Pratt, Charlie Day and Anya Taylor-Joy, and now playing in theatres, sends Mario and Luigi on an adventure that begins with a mysterious water pipe.
While working on a broken water main, Brooklyn, New York plumbers Mario (Pratt) and his fraternal twin brother Luigi (Day), leave the real world, sucked through the pipe into the Mushroom Kingdom.
“What is this place?” asks Mario.
Buried deep beneath the Earth’s surface, it’s the psychedelic principality of the strong-willed Princess Peach (Taylor-Joy), a ruler who shares her castle with Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), a humanoid mushroom aching to find adventure in his life.
But there is bad news.
“Your brother has landed in the Darklands,” Toad informs Mario. “They’re under Bowser’s (Jack Black) control.” Bowser, a giant, fire breathing turtle with world conquering ambitions, has Luigi, and it’s up to Mario to rescue his brother and save the Mushroom Kingdom.
“My little brother is lost,” says Mario. “He looks exactly like me, but tall and skinny. And green.”
With the help of the Princess and Toad, Mario’s quest begins.
“Excuse me, everybody,” shouts Toad. “Coming through! This guy’s brother is going to die imminently! Out of the way, please!”
There are questions you have to ask when reviewing a movie inspired by a video game. Is it good because it remains faithful to the game? Or is it successful because it transcends the game and embraces the big screen?
If you answered yes to the former and no to the latter, you may enjoy “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” The theatrical experience of the film is essentially like playing the game, without the inconvenience of actually having to play the game.
The beautifully animated movie mostly delivers what Nintendo has been successfully doling out for forty years; Mario, Luigi and the gang dodging Bowser in the Mushroom Kingdom. That formula earned the game accolades as one of the greatest video games of all time, so why tinker with success?
I’ll tell you why. Because by not tinkering with success, by playing it safe, by bowing down to fan service, directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic have created a movie with all the charm of a broken Game Boy. Loud and frenetic, it’s propped up by nostalgia for the game and little else.
“Bigger,” says Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in the trailer for “Jurassic World Dominion.” “Why do they always have to be bigger?”
It’s a legit question. The good doctor is, of course, referring to the dinosaurs that, once again, are causing problems in our modern world.
But the question might also apply to the movie itself.
The follow-up to “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” and the sixth and final film in the franchise, is bigger and louder than the movies that came before it, but as a viewer you may ask yourself, “Why?”
Set four years after Jurassic Park was destroyed by an erupting volcano, “Jurassic World Dominion” begins with dinosaurs let loose worldwide, living among humans.
Dino whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and girlfriend, founder of the Dinosaur Protection Group Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), are in hiding, protecting Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon). As a teenage clone of Jurassic Park co-founder Benjamin Lockwood’s daughter, her DNA is of great interest to Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), the villainous CEO of Biosyn. When she is kidnapped, Owen and Claire give chase.
At the same time, locusts with prehistoric DNA devastate the globe’s grain supply, prompting paleobotanists Ellie Sadler (Laura Dern) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to launch an investigation. Their search for answers leads them to Biosyn and a familiar face, chaos theory mathematician Ian Malcolm (Goldblum).
The dinosaurs and the story may be bigger than the last time round, but remember, bigger is not always better. The original “Jurassic” franchise worked because if a streamlined simplicity to the storytelling mixed with masterful execution. Oh, and lots of dinosaurs.
“Jurassic World Dominion” has lots of dinosaurs and some fan service but misses the mark otherwise. It is a talky dino-bore with none of the suspense that made “Jurassic Park” edge of your seat stuff. The action scenes are murky and few-and-far-between, there’s lots of dodgy CGI and unlike the reconstituted dinosaurs, it feels lifeless. Luckily Goldblum reappears after a quick cameo off the top to shake things up with his trademarked droll wit in the third act.
Near the beginning of the film Dern’s character Ellie sees a small dinosaur and coos, “this never gets old.” She clearly hasn’t seen “Jurassic World Dominion.”
