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 antiheroes of “Thunderbolts*,” the crime caper “Another Simple Favor” and the bio pic “Being Maria.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Thunderbolts*,” the new Marvel superhero movie starring Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan now playing in theatres, a team of mostly of reformed supervillains must confront their past deeds when they’re lured into a deadly trap by the manipulative Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.
CAST: Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Directed by Jake Schreier.
REVIEW: A popcorn movie that delivers big boffo action and introspective moments, “Thunderbolts* is a welcome return to form for Marvel after a rough couple of years.
Marvel has often examined ideas of responsibility within their superhuman characters, but rarely have they delved into mental health issues as they do here.
As Yelena Belova, a Black Widow assassin whose hands are stained by blood, Florence Pugh has the physicality to play the rough n’ tumble character, but it is her meditative side that makes her interesting. She can punch, kill and quip with the best of them, but in her work is tinged with an edge of loneliness and lack of purpose that are the result of her deadly, isolating work.
Handled with maturity, the examination of mental health is sensitive, especially so in the case of Bob (Lewis Pullman), who (SLIGHT SPOILER) becomes Yelena’s guide into “The Void,” a dark place where their trauma is endlessly enacted. These vividly rendered scenes of mental anguish are as vivid and suspenseful as any of the film’s battle scenes, but they also provide backstory that deepens the characters and relationships.
“Thunderbolts*” is meditative up a point, but this isn’t a Marvel movie à la Ingmar Bergman.
The character’s self-analysis fuels the gritty action as the entire misfit team—Belova, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (a very funny David Harbour), John Walker/U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen)—learn they are stronger together than apart.
One for all and all for one.
It’s pop psychology, but it provides a welcome entryway into exploring larger themes of psychological trauma left from a lifetime of killing and personal loss.
Is it too soon to say that “Thunderbolts*” harkens back to “classic” Marvel on the big screen? It’s back to basics, doing away with multiverses and the onerous weight of crossovers with the other films, to deliver an entertaining, relatively straight-ahead blockbuster with action, humor and heart.
Gamers will recognize Raccoon City as the name of the once prosperous home base of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corp. That we’re talking about it on this page can only mean one thing, a new “Resident Evil” movie. The seventh film in the series, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City,” now playing in theatres, reboots the videogame-inspired franchise, taking the story back to the beginning.
Raccoon City once thrived. A company town, from the 1960s to the late 90s the Midwestern city grew and prospered as pharmaceutical giant Umbrella set up shop there, and invested heavily in infrastructure and the townsfolk, who made up the bulk of their employees.
Everything changed in 1998 when a genetically-altered organism named Queen Leech attacked the facility, kicking off a series of events that left the city a desolate wasteland with a zombie problem.
It’s into this world director Johannes Roberts drops college student Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) and rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia) on one terrifying night in Raccoon City. Claire has come to the dying city to locate her brother Chris (Robbie Amell). The T-virus, Umbrella’s top-secret biological weapon isn’t much of a secret anymore, and the infected residents of Raccoon City are now terrifying zombies. Over the course of one night Claire, Chris, and others from the video game series like Leon (Avan Jogia), Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen) and Albert Wesker (Umbrella Academy’s Tom Hopper), fight to survive.
Adapted from the first and second “Resident Evil” games by Capcom, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” returns the series to its video game roots. The previous films emphasized action over horror. This time around Roberts reverts to scary vibe of the videogames, paying homage to both the games and vintage John Carpenter for the atmosphere of dread that builds throughout. Stylistically, as a videogame tribute, that approach works quite well.
As a movie, however, it comes up lacking. Despite some good gooey and gory zombie action and some fun action scenes, it takes too long to get where it is going. While we wait for the going to get good, we’re subjected to dialogue straight out of the Handbook of Horror Clichés and too much exposition.
The opening feels long winded and the ending rushed, but, especially for gamers looking for Easter Eggs, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” has enough moments in between to satisfy fans of the series.
Richard interviews Hannah John-Kamen of the weekend’s number one movie “Ant-Man and the Wasp” on playing the villain Ghost and working with the all-star cast.
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“Do you guys put the word quantum in front of everything?”
That’s the question Paul Rudd, playing Scott Lang / Ant-Man, asks in the new Marvel movie “Ant-Man and The Wasp.” Having seen the film I wonder why he didn’t speak up earlier, like when the screenwriters were scribbling about quantum physics, quantum realm, quantum void, quantum this and quantum that. These movies are supposed to be about a smart alecy guy who can shrink himself down to the size of an ant to solve crimes, not the Heisenberg principle.
The movie begins as Lang has just three days left on his house arrest following the events of “Captain America: Civil War.” Trapped in his apartment he has a strange dream. He sees Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), wife of scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), mother of Lilly van Dyne a.k.a. Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), trapped in the quantum wormhole she disappeared into three decades before. Meanwhile Hank and Lilly are perfecting a method to rescue their loved one from the quantum hike she now calls home. Trouble is, they can’t do it alone. They need any information that may be trapped in Rudd’s head and money from a grubby bad guy. Time is of the essence as Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a spectral presence who can walk through walls, also seeks out Janet’s quantum power to heal her cellular disorder.
From the kitschy sounding title to the size-shifting characters to the scientific mumbo jumbo that takes up much of the screen time, “Ant-Man and The Wasp” is a throwback to drive-in movies of the 1950s. It’s been updated with better special effects and more authentic sounding science jargon, but make no mistake, for better and for worse, this has just as much in common with flickers like “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” and “Them!” as it does with the Avengers. Like the 50s b-movies that were undoubtedly an influence, this is a loud-n-proud genre film but like many of the Avengers films that are part of the Ant-Man family, it is marred by excess. Too many characters, too many story shards—a rescue mission, two sets of baddies chasing down the quantum technology, a romantic subplot, a family film angle—too much exposition to much quantum theory.
There is a funny scene about an hour into the movie where Michael Peña, playing Lang’s former cellmate and current business partner, recaps the story so far. It takes two minutes, is laugh-out-loud funny and completely negates the need for much of the exposition—people in this movie love to ask things like, “What have you done?”—that comes before it. Move that to the beginning of the film and they could have saved pages of dialogue and juiced up the film’s fun factor by at least fifty percent.
“Ant-Man and The Wasp” does plough some new ground—it is the first time a female superhero’s name is in the title of an MCU film—but feels scattershot in its execution.
Richard interviews “Ant-Man and the Wasp” star Hannah John-Kamen on The Nightside on NewsTalk 1010. John-Kamen plays Ghost, a mysterious figure who can “phase through objects.” Find out more HERE! From wikipedia: Hannah John-Kamen is a British actress known for her roles as Dutch in the Syfy television series Killjoys, Ornela in the HBO series Game of Thrones and F’Nale Zandor in Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One.
Listen to the whole interview HERE!
