BEES-keeper

Jason Statham does good action, so let's enjoy!

A scamming group defrauds an elderly lady, and because of that her tenant decides to go on a killing spree, and her daughter chases him. As it happens, the tenant is a Beekeeper, a member of a secret organisation everyone knows about, and the daughter is a member of the FBI. The Beekeeper goes after the scamming group, and the daughter gets there after. Then the Beekeeper goes after the higher level group, and the daughter chases after him. Then the Beekeeper goes after the higher group, and the daughter chases after him...

Yeah, so, this movie is stunningly nothing. As you might be able to tell from the summary, it's basically the same scene repeated three times. Okay, yes, some good action beats in there, and lots of references to bees, but... still a lot not of nothing of any import happens.

One odd thing that occurred to me was that the Beekeeper is a highly trained person who can take out everyone else... it's odd in that, is that special training? For some reason the government has decided, or doesn't know about, that everyone in the military shouldn't have that training? That seems amazingly inefficient.

But hey, Jason Statham kicks a lot of ass, so there is that. Emmy Raver-Lampman is fine as the FBI agent, and her mother is a cameo by Phylicia Rashad. And not much more than a cameo is one Jemma Redgrave. Josh Hutcherson is playing a scumbag, which he seems fit for. And Jeremy Irons is in this, easily dominating all scenes he is in.

Fine if you want something simple, no thinking needed.

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TTTT'Omen

Damian dead? Not a problem, let's do the first movie again... but this time with a girl!

A couple, where the husband has political aspirations, adopt a child. The child grows up, with weird things around her, and eventually the mother comes to view her with suspicion (and jumps to the Book of Revelations rather quickly). After some random deaths that... actually are the child's fault, the mother finds herself pregnant, and wants the child to stay away from potentially harming the new baby. Eventually she finds the truth that (deep breath) the child, Delia, is the child of Damian, and is carrying the fetus of her twin brother inside her, which the doctor transplants to the mother, to give birth to the new antichrist, which isn't Delia but Alexander, and the mother tries to stop them, but hey this is the Omen movies... (it's a very busy 10 minutes at the end).

Delia is so more active over dealing with people than Damian ever was. With Damian, it felt like there was another force keeping an eye on him and killing others, whereas here Delia is very much the one killing people. And more power to her! This movie is basically a retake on the first (and a little of the second) movie, and this is so much better! I don't know if they learnt from the previous movies, or just had a better script writer, but this movie works on Delia as a devil child more than Damian ever had.

Faye Grant does good work as the mother, and Michael Learner owns the scenes he is in. Hey, that's Don S. Davis in around two minutes of screen time. Even Asia Vieira as Delia isn't a terrible child actor and plays her part well too!

This clearly set up the next part of the ongoing series, and there is no need to do anything silly like reboot the series (yes I know what the next movie is).

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Gojira Smooching Kongy

Another premier, so got in. This was a bit fuller than the previous one, but still not bursting.

I haven't seen the trailer, so no idea what is revealed. What we have here is that Kong find another layer to the Hollow Earth (...the planet has severe gravity problems...) and lo encounters a whole new villain to fight. In related plot, humans follow Kong and encounter something that I feel would have been set up differently in the previous movie had they known they were doing this. And Godzilla is hanging out.

Yeah, this is a Kong movie that guest stars other titans. The humans feel like "we have these actors who agreed to return for this movie, so we need a plot for them, as well as throwing in some other characters". We don't get the return of Millie Bobby Brown, but do get her sidekick the Conspiracy Wacko (who is less of a wacko in this). And Godzilla was also there...

The actors were fine, and not annoying unlike so often in the previous movies. (G-1 so much showed up how to do humans in a Godzilla movie.) There is a lot of time with Kong and Ko, and while the CGI worked, they simplified so much to make the basic story/emotions come across. [And, amusingly, a trailer for Kingdom of Planet of the Apes played before this!]

There's a few other comments I want to make, but for the sake of spoilers, I will resist.

It's fine, and better than previous entries, but I hope future movies aren't just "here's another generic villain" (although that does describe most movies).

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Arjille

I was looking forward to seeing this. Due to reasons, I missed it in the theatres, so had to wait for the VOD.

Elly is a writer... or is she? Is she a psychic that can predict the actions of spys? Or can she? Certainly one spy seems to think she has more capability than she thinks she does, so the Evil Spy Agency(tm) is now after her... or are they?

There are twists in this... and also a lot of unreliable narrator. Some of them I picked because... they were really obvious if you thought about things for a moment. Admittedly, in the cinema, I couldn't pause like I could here, to go "hang on, that doesn't make sense" or "that means that... that person is the thing." That's always the worst thing for stories with a "twist" in the plot, if you get time to think away from the story, you can jump to the obvious conclusions that are the right conclusions.

While we have big names in this, can I just start by saying I was disappointed in Dua Lipa's role. She has a lot of time in the trailer, but then only like five minutes of screen time. What was in the trailer was basically her entire role! And Henry Cavill wasn't much more. So we do rely on Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell to carry us through... and yes there is Sam Rockwell dancing, so Matthew Vaughn didn't waste his appearance there.

And speaking of Vaughn, there are some classic Vaughn'ian bits, from colourful shot composition to, yes, colourful smoke. Does he get smoke by the volume or something? The most unconvincing parts are the CGI cat, as you can see in the trailer, which DO NOT WORK.

I was told I didn't need to see this on the big screen to get the experience and... sure, they were right. This is a fine movie, but not one to blow me away.

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Ain't Afreeze of No Ghost

Big new Ghostbusters movie and... only about a dozen or so people at the premier? Apparently no-one cares.

So there's this MacGuffan ball that contains an old and powerful ghost... but never mind! Phoebe is have teenager's problems (due to being a minor). And Paul Rudd wants to be a parental role. And... the other kid is facing off against a ghost and... the previous Ghostbusters are here. All over the movie. More than cameo, but I can't really say relevant to the movie. Indeed... I'd be hard pressed to say a lot is relevant to the movie. There is a lot of setup in this movie. In fact, this movie is mostly set up. The final act feels very low key...

It's like they wanted to do an emotional movie, but had too many characters to flick around, and also had to staple a ghost movie onto it. This movie is very slow, and the ghost side is more backdrop than anything of import we needed a movie for.

Mckenna Grace and Paul Rudd are front and center in this movie, not being daughter and dad. The old Ghostbusters are around, and clearly the movie cares about them, but they really are cluttering up the place. Oh, and James Acaster is in this. I was not expecting him... speaking of characters cluttering up the place...

There is a potentially good movie in this, but you'll need to edit away the rest of it.

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TTT'Omen

It's the last one! There is no more!! We have reached the Final Conflict!!!

Damian is in charge of a corporation that seems to be evil (so, a corporation yet), but it's time to return to his roots of being the American Ambassador to Great Britain, because it is the time of the second coming! And as anyone who knows, who knows their bible, this is the time where Damian kills the christ and takes command of the world... Oh wait.

First we have the return of the daggers, and seven priests who each take one to kill him... and their completely inane plans fail to work on all kinds of levels. But the stars have combined to say the new christ has come, so clearly the right step is to kill all new born males (sexist!). This seems to work well, with a potential problem of one of Damian's main adherents having a kid? But what is a little slaughter of the innocents if not a call back to the bible's passages.

Eventually we get the final confrontation of evil vs ... random people. Good here is about as actively taking a role as evil does. Again Damian barely does anything evil himself, just takes advantage of a lot of other people doing work for him, so why not christ doing the same?

The big thing here is Damian is... our own Sam Neill! Yes, of course, the American Devil raised in England has a New Zealand accent! It's only natural! Sam clearly devours several scenes, and his trademark smirk is the right note for several "yes, I am evil!" scenes. I'm sure the other main actors are also well known, but I don't know them.

There are few on screen deaths, and lots of implied ones around the babies. Again, no photographs are taken. Although I'm not sure if they could claim that no animals were harmed? Certainly the reverse is portrayed to happen.

While this movie claims to be a big conflict, it's more about Damian dealing with the coming of christ and not really a conflict there at all. As such, there is a whole lot of nothing happening. Watchable nothing, but really this isn't much of a final battle as the title would suggest.

So... no more movies then?

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tips hatM'dame Web

Okay, time to see the not MCU movie that people (by which I mean the actors involved) thought was MCU.

In the casual part of Peru everyone can get to, there are secret spiders that the obviously clearly bad guy grabs. Cut to Cassie hating children (so there's her arc!), who falls into the water and activates her powers, although badly. PEPSI She accidentally gets into the same train as three young woman who are clearly not in their twenties and the bad guy who some people can see if they are related to the plot. They run away and avoid fight scenes because they were only visions from Cassie, which is a cop out we were already tired of when Twilight did it. Cassie pops over the easy to access Peru to get thirty years of therapy in ten seconds of exposition, and then win using Nic Cages powers from Next. PEPSI COLA.

This movie was... boring. Like not even "bad in an enjoyable way". Just huge slabs of "I don't care, I have other things to do." I'm sure some people cared when they were making this movie, but then some thought they were in MCU and expected more. In many ways this movie is fine, but nothing amazing takes place, either in the script or in production.

But at least they made fun of Peter's parents dying...

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