chrisst4 Reviews

Abigail (I) (2019)

Eddie was good but overall disappointing

[2/10 · 4 January 2020]

Ok, let's start with the good points...

1. Eddie Marsen - best actor in this film by a country mile 2. Visuals and cinematography are good.

Now the bad...

1. The dialogue is absolutely awful - no sentence of more than about 5 words and each line is spoken/shouted with really strange intonations. Seems to be dubbed and/or spoken by actors who just don't know what they are saying in English. 2. The script - a lot of the time it just does make any sense e.g. someone saying they don;t understand something when they were told it 5 minutes previously! Did anyone listen to this before it was released!! 3. All the acting (apart from Eddie Marsen of course) was wooden: no character or personality - they just barked each line of the script at each other in pseudo English (usually in a petulant manner for no obvious reason). 4. The story - apart from the start and end it simply lacked a clear direction for the most part.

In short, Eddie Marsen's great, visuals are good but if you speak English then this will be a painful experience.

Extinction (2018)

Would have been 7/10 without those kids!

[5/10 · 8 September 2018]

Plot was reasonable and kept moving along at a fair pace with a great twist. CGI was a bit 1990s but hey; this is a TV movie so really not too bothered. Acting was generally good, however, the one thing that spoiled the movie was the constant whining and crying of those kids! They seem to be acting and wailing like 3 year olds throughout the whole first half of the movie!

London Has Fallen (2016)

Really bad

[1/10 · 17 April 2016]

In a nutshell: Supposed best of the 'land of free' (the sunny place where everyone is happy and waves their spangley flag) come over to the London (where is constantly rains and everyone is incompetent and rather sad). London is blown-up but that's OK because they end- up single-handedly saving the most important person in the world (the US President of course) - so everything is fine! They do this by using a lot of fairly bad CGI and applying a script of continuous, cheesy one liners.

The script is predictable and from the start full of hypocrisy. Where did the big, bad arms dealer get his weapons in the first place? Emmm... tough one that! You are constantly left wondering who is the real baddie in this movie especially when Gerald and co. rattle-off their crass one-liners!

Summary: Avoid at all costs.

The Monuments Men (2014)

Important Message But Poor History

[1/10 · 3 May 2014]

I was expecting so much more from this film given the great cast and the historically important true story. Unfortunately the lighthearted tone and stereotyping of anyone French and British made this feel like a Disney-rewrites-history film.

This leads me on to the historical inaccuracies. Whilst very loosely based on fact the film has, like so many older WWII movies, been tailored to appeal to a more local demographic. For example, the number involved and roles they played; the origin of the group in 1942 in Libya by the British etc. This is deeply sad, because you are left viewing the whole movie as a work of fiction, which undermines those who did such important work to save great works of art, transcending the war itself.

This film had an important point to make regarding the loss of great art through conflict but could have been so much better.

See http://www.historyextra.com/feature/historian-movies- monuments-men-reviewed

Scavengers (2013)

Dreadful

[1/10 · 23 March 2013]

Where do we start...

The CGI was poor (bits looked like they were done on a ZX81), and in some sections of the movie the lighting was all wrong - highlighting the fact that the background was superimposed.

The acting was bad, really bad - no one was believable - but I guess a special mention really needs to be made regarding the "script" which was even worse (did someone get paid for this?). Some of the lines were just ridiculous and seemed at times to be trying to be funny (especially the "baddies" - Captain Jekel and sidekick BreathTaker).

The sound effects were, to say the least, interesting: I would never have thought to have machine gun noises for spacecraft fire.

All in all this is a howler and not worth the 90 minutes you will never recover.

John Carter (2012)

Epic Failure

[3/10 · 19 May 2012]

Oh were do I begin? I was really looking forward to this - especially after reading all these "glowing reviews". How could this have done so badly at the movies? Very strange...

OK let's start with the good points: the CGI was very good and... sorry, that was it: there was one good point.

The story follows a US civil war soldier (John Carter) who is transported to Mars courtesy of a magic amulet, and inadvertently caught-up in a global war between two nations that are at a tipping point in their millennium-long fight.

Some comparisons might be drawn with Cowboys and Aliens and Prince of Persia. However, don't expect the same quality of script or acting (yes, I did say that!). I was certainly not aiming for anything intellectually challenging here - just an afternoon of family entertainment!

The story was slow and meandering (lots of wandering around in the desert), the script poor and short of anything other than stilted dialog and fairly superficial humour. The acting was one (not even two) dimensional. To be fair Willem Dafoe (as Tars Tarkas) and Mark Strong (as Matai Shang) put in the best performances but sadly these were not enough to save the day in a forest of consistently wooden contributions.

Unfortunately Disney again delivers the same formulaic free-world menu, and a rather annoying drawl in the form of Captain Carter, this time on Mars.

Very disappointing 3 out of 10.