The ninth and final film of the now rebranded “Skywalker Saga” is the weakest of the the final films, I think, though I haven’t seen the other two in some time. Like the first two, it’s too long. But the real problems centre around how similar it ends up being to previous films in the …
Tag: Adventure
The LEGO Batman Movie (2017, Chris McKay)
This is a very silly kids Batman film that has enough jokes for adults to keep you laughing but is pretty damn cheesy.
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022, Taika Waititi)
The fourth Thor film isn’t as good as the third but is still better than the first two.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013, Peter Jackson)
This second film in the hilariously long adaptation of a 310-page novel is mercifully a little bit shorter than the first. (Though not much.) This one I’d actually mostly scene prior to actually sitting down to watch it, as I think it’s been on a lot over the years on channels available in hotels I’ve …
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012, Peter Jackson)
This nearly 3 hour film is the first part of a preposterous adaptation of a 310-page novel. I have no idea why anyone thought a novel this short needed to be adapted into three films, none of which are less than 2 hours and twenty minutes in length. It’s one thing to make an epic-length …
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022, Sam Raimi)
Can you tell me why some characters in other universes are played by the same actors and others aren’t? In this film Dr. Strange is always the same actor but in other films of the MCU Spider-Man is played by different actors. Jenn suggested it was British cast who stayed the same and American cast …
Viy aka Forbidden Empire aka Forbidden Kingdom (2014, Oleg Stepchenko)
This is a bizarre Russian horror film starring an English actor (and so dubbed into English, at least on streaming services) that was made in 3D, so it looks extra bizarre on your TV. It is bizarrely listed as “Fantasy” on IMDB and, hence, on streaming services, but it’s horror (ish). I actually saw a …
The Lost City (2022, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee)
This is a pretty funny riff on Romancing the Stone style adventure films. Really, it’s a direct parody of Romancing the Stone and its sequel, in many ways.
Ator the Fighting Eagle [Ator l’invincibile] (1982, Joe D’Amato)
This is a classic terrible ’80s fantasy film, made in Italy but starring America’s Tarzan because, why not?
Eternals (2021, Chloe Zao)
Well, we have a winner for the “Worst MCU Movie.” I’m sure you’ve heard that already but apparently I had to see it to believe it.
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021, Jon Watts)
The MCU Spider-Man movies are probably the best overall series within the whole massive thing, though there may be better individual movies. But this is the weakest – and longest (and most self-important) – of the three and, in many ways, reverts back to the usual Marvel crap. There is a difference here, of course, …
From the Sea aka Atlantic Rim (2013, Jared Cohn)
The Asylum takes on Pacific Rim. (Honestly it’s sad they changed the name.)
Mac and Me (1988, Stewart Raffill)
This movie is infamous for being a transparent E.T. rip off that, for some reason, came out six years after its inspiration. But it’s a lot more than that. Because, I’d like to think that, even if this wasn’t so clearly a rip-off of one of the most famous movies of the 1980s, we’d still …
The Incredible Hulk (2008, Louis Leterrier)
So I’ve finally found my way to one of the few MCU movies I’ve missed, the weird one where they replaced the star before things really took off. At this point this feels like a movie from another era, as it has more in common with the first Iron Man, as you’d imagine, than it …
At the Earth’s Core (1976, Kevin Connor)
This is one of those “hollow earth” films. And it stars the one and only Doug McClure, one of inspirations for Troy McClure. If you ever want to watch one of the great man’s performances, I guess you could do worse than this very stupid film about a land in the middle of the earth, …
The Suicide Squad (2021, James Gunn)
Before I get to the film: the branding is super weird, right? With an article different from the title of the notorious disaster it is supposed to replace, it sure feels like we’re supposed to forget about the earlier movie now.
Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020, Cathy Yan)
I remember hearing about the good reviews. And I briefly thought that maybe here was a recent DC movie I wanted to watch. And then I promptly forgot about it until I got on a plane. Now, it’s possible that this film didn’t work for in part because it was the second film I watched …
Black Widow (2021, Cate Shortland)
Much like Captain Marvel, this is a necessary and needed corrective. And much more than Captain Marvel, we can legitimately wonder what took so damn long. Most of the other Avengers got their movies a long time ago. (The Hulk got his own movie, remember.) But being a necessary corrective to a patriarchal movie franchise …
Venom (2018, Ruben Fleischer)
The world is a strange place. Because of rights issues, Venom is not currently part of the MCU even though Spider-Man and the recent Spider-Man movies are. So Venom isn’t part of the MCU and there is no Spider-Man in it. So that’s, um, weird. It might not be the worst thing, given all the …
Free Guy (2021, Shawn Levy)
This is an intermittently amusing and clever film about an NPC that becomes sentient. I have to say, I had no idea what it was about from the title, though the trailer clarified that for me. On the whole, given the cast and the conceit, it’s a film that should work more often than it …
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II (1989, Charles B. Griffith)
If you thought Wizards of the Lost Kingdom was bad, well do I have a movie for you. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, which has nothing at all to do with the original movie, has a far bigger actor attached to it than the original and somehow manages to be so much worse. This movie …
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom (1985, Héctor Olivera, Alan Holleb)
This is a terrible fantasy film with slight more of a budget than you might expect and some credible costuming for a terrible film. It’s basically a fully ’80s fantasy film, with way less of a budget, and where a ton of the cast are dubbed because I guess they were speaking Spanish?
Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019, Jon Watts)
Like Homecoming, this sequel benefits from lower stakes than most MCU movies. And, like the previous Spider-Man, this mostly remains grounded in Parker’s teen life. So it’s among the better MCU films, in that sense. Mild spoilers
Man of Steel (2013, Zack Snyder)
I feel like I remember reading that this movie had too much origin story and they weren’t kidding. This film tries to both tell the origin story of Superman and of General Zod, and then pit them against each other. And there is just an absolute ton of stuff about Krypton. Honestly, if feels like …
The Dark Tower (2017, Nikolaj Arcel)
I know nothing about the source material but this is one of those films which feels like things went wrong from the very beginning. Apparently a huge part of the problem is that it is a fairly normal length movie adapted from a novel series that is over 4,000 pages long. So no wonder.
The Golden Compass (2007, Chris Weitz)
This is a pretty-looking but witless family fantasy film which fails to function as anything more than a pale Chronicles of Narnia imitation and the ending of which truly shows how ill-conceived this whole thing was.
John Dies at the End (2009) by David Wong
Full disclosure: I didn’t read this when it was on the web, before it was published. But I saw the film at Midnight Madness TIFF in 2012. I don’t really remember the movie much any more but my review suggested I enjoyed it except for two things: 1) the CGI (which I remember being awful) …
Ready Player One (2018, Steven Spielberg)
It’s possible that reading bad reviews of this book and this movie prejudiced me ahead of time. But I’m not sure it would have mattered. This is a bad movie. And it’s somewhat shocking that a director as skilled at making popcorn entertainment as Spielberg couldn’t turn it into a passable film.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018, Christopher McQuarie)
This is now the sixth Mission: Impossible film and the third in the 2010s reboot. Things are tired: there are too many damn characters and the plot echoes the plots of previous movies (i.e. some element in the US government doesn’t trust/disavows Hunt and the IMF, again). I’m bored and I’m not laughing as much …
Captain Marvel (2019, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck)
As I have noted with Marvel movies, I only ever read X Men and related comics, so I have no skin in the game of whether or not Captain Marvel should be a man. But a quick Wikipedia search reveals that it’s not so controversial as some made it seem. But make no mistake, this …