Film Review - Ballerina (2025)

Ballerina is the new John Wick spinoff directed by Len Wiseman and stars Ana De Armas as Eve, a young girl who is trained by the Ballerina assassins headed up by the director (Anjelica Huston) but one night she kills a man with an X mark on his wrist and it reminds her of the men who killed her father and she wants payback against those responsible.

Ballerina is a perfectly good Wick spinoff but it isn’t as good as the mainline Wick films though De Armas does a good job as Eve and her action scenes are fun to watch with some creative uses of weapons like flamethrowers, grenades, ice skates and guns and when those scenes are on screen its hard not to get bored while watching them.

The other cast members equip themselves well also, Keanu Reeves has a small supporting role as the Baba Yaga and is as good as always plus he has some memorable action moments of his own, Anjelica Huston and Gabriel Byrne are good as well and I always enjoy seeing Ian McShane and the late Lance Reddick together in the Continental Hotel scenes (RIP Lance Reddick.)

But where this movie does fall down is that it has too much action and not enough storytelling, Chad Stahelski’s John Wick movies (he also serves as a producer on this movie) had a good balance of storytelling, action and world building especially in the sequels whereas here Wiseman pours on the action so much that after a while I wanted more of a story and some more of the world building as you would get into a story point and then BANG! Here comes a big action scene.

And also Len Wiseman just cannot replicate Stahelski’s stylish look for these movies, its not that he does a bad job per se but that look requires specific tools needed to pull it off and Wiseman simply isn’t that kind of director, he’s the “come in and get it done quickly” kind of guy and Stahelski is more meticulous in his crafting of the Wick films and the difference between the two becomes apparent after a while.

And so that was Ballerina and it’s a perfectly enjoyable action romp that relies a little too much on the action to carry it but still I enjoyed myself, 3 out of 5.

Film Review - Karate Kid Legends (2025)

Karate Kid Legends is the newest Karate Kid film and this time concerns Li Fong (Ben Wang) who moves from Beijing to New York with his mother (Ming-Na Wen) as she has taken a job at a New York hospital but one night he comes afowl of Conor (Aramis Knight) and though he has promised not to fight in NYC the cry of the warrior comes calling and he needs masters old and new to help him (Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio.)

Karate Kid Legends is a movie that I enjoyed more than I thought I would and firstly that comes down to the cast, Wang is a good young lead and he handles himself very well in both the martial arts scenes and playing against veterans like Chan, Macchio and Joshua Jackson who plays the head of a local pizza shop and he is a lot of fun in this movie as well and I also liked Sadie Stanley as Mia who befriends Li and Wyatt Oleff as Alan who becomes Li’s tutor in school.

As for Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio both are fun to watch as well and have good chemistry together as well and I swear to god Ralph Macchio has found the location of the Fountain of Youth and is refusing to tell anyone so he can drink from it for all eternity because that man does not look like he has aged a day over 40 (and he was in his early 20s when he first played Daniel-san in the original movie and he looked like a teenager.)

And secondly the film has some good martial arts fight scenes in it as well even if at times they go by a little too quickly be it in their editing or as part of various montages throughout the film though the final climactic fight was cool to watch.

Where this movie does fall down is its villains as Conor and the Demolition Gym not only feel like a poor copy of the Cobra Kai school from the first movie but their being a MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) school is a huge missed opportunity given the popularity of MMA nowadays and it would’ve made for a great contrast between the new MMA style and the old Miyagi-san Karate/Kung Fu style but instead it isn’t touched upon at all and it is a real shame.

And so that was Karate Kid Legends and sadly it is a mixed bag as it has some good fights and a good cast but it doesn’t develop its villains enough to make this a memorable new entry in the series, 2 and a half out of 5.

Film Review - Bring Her Back (2025)

Bring Her Back is the new horror movie by the Philippou brothers who broke out with their debut feature film Talk to Me in 2023 and this one sees Andy (Billy Barratt) and his Sister Piper (Sora Wong) being placed into foster care after the death of their father courtesy of Laura (Sally Hawkins) who is mourning the death of her daughter Cathy after a drowning accident but Laura is now all that she seems.

Bring Her Back is a movie that I have some degree of mixed feelings about, its not in any way shape or form a bad movie but its also a movie that I am struggling to recommend in my movie discussions but firstly the Philippou brothers (good South Australian kids by the way) do a good job directing the film, it is sick and twisted in all the best ways and during those moments I had a big devilish grin on my face.

The film also has some great performances, Barratt and Wong work well together as a brother and sister pair and you understand where Andy is coming from in terms of protecting his younger sister, she has low vision and has lost her parents so he has to step up to help look after her and help her navigate the wider world around her, Wong makes for a good young actress and she is asked to do quite a bit here and she does it well, Jonah Wren Phillips is also great here as Oliver another of Laura’s adopted kids who doesn’t talk but his presence with his eyes makes him a memorable character.

But Sally Hawkins is the real MVP here and I really really hope she is given an Academy Award nomination next year but given the Academy’s reluctance to nominate horror movie performances I will sadly not be surprised if she misses out but that doesn’t change the fact that she is fantastic here, finding when to be warm, when to show the unease under the surface and when to embrace the darkness growing inside her that her grief over her daughter’s death has helped to create and the lengths she will go to make her a great villain.

But sadly this movie as well made and performed as it is is at times too bleak to sit through, there is so much discussion and setup about grief and trauma and loss that after a while I just got tired of it because it was so grimdark as they say nowadays that I began to find it off putting, okay we get it your all hurting but you all are just wallowing in it so much throughout this movie and the more this movie has sat in my head since seeing it the more that feeling has come to my mind the most.

And I am not someone who dislikes dark movies or shows, I generally enjoy them for the most part but having a dark and bleak tone is a fine line to walk for me and if filmmakers aren’t careful it can either feel like it is dark to the point of parody (Matt Reeves’s The Batman was a good example of this) or it feels so bleak that you feel uncomfortable sitting in your cinema seat watching it unfold.

And also this movie has a really interesting use of a VHS player in a key sideplot that sadly doesn’t get the payoff I wish it got as those parts of the film had me really interested in them and I sat there after a while thinking “I hope this has a good payoff” and it kind of does but this sideplot in particular is only revisited every now and then and I wish we got more to it but these things happen.

And so that was Bring Her Back and sadly it is a mixed bag the more I have thought about it, it is well made and has some great performances but its overt bleakness and lack of a proper sideplot payoff weigh it down for me, 2 and a half out of 5.

Film Review - Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning (2025)

Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning is the newest and supposedly final film in the MI series and once more Christopher McQuarrie is on writing and directing duties, the story here picks up from where 2023’s Dead Reckoning left off and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell) still hunting down the Entity AI program as it threatens nuclear Armageddon on the world.

Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning is a good way for this series to exit if this is supposedly the final film in the franchise because while it has a big storytelling issue I still had a good time watching this movie and Cruise and Co still commit to their roles and Atwell has been a memorable addition to the series in the previous 2 films.

The film also has 2 great action setpieces, the first of those is on a downed submarine which is starting to flood while Cruise has to retrieve something from it and the whole time watching that scene play out I was reminded a lot of the Abyss (a very underrated film by James Cameron) in terms of being down in the depths of the ocean with the clock racing against you and hoping you don’t run out of breath and die all alone down there and the tension was very apparent in that sequence.

The other involved the films climax with a race against the clock on the ground and in the air and the editing by Eddie Hamilton is excellent generating maximum amounts of tension and counting down plus vintage Tom Cruise daredevil stunt work though you could see this time around that it was starting to take a toll on him.

But this movie also has a big storytelling issue and that is the convoluted ways it tries to tie together all of the previous movies so that it all feels like one big story and more than once did I not only think to myself “what the fuck” but I was also reminded in all the worst ways of Spectre which I consider the be the worst James Bond film ever made and one of the reasons why is its pointless attempts to tie together all of the Craig era films up to that point and it was totally unnecessary there and here.

And lastly this movie is also very long, it runs just shy of 3 hours but it sure felt like 3 hours and at one point my bottom did start falling asleep in my cinema seat and the opening segment could’ve easily dispensed with the pointless tie ins for a more straightforward “Hello Mr Hunt” exposition dump and we all would’ve been much better off.

And so that was Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning and I enjoyed it for the most part and it delivers a good enough finale but its also too long and too needy to tie everything together when it didn’t need to, 3 out of 5.

Film Review - Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

Final Destination: Bloodlines is the newest film in the series and concerns Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) who has horrible nightmares of an incident concerning the Skytower restaurant and wants to talk to her grandmother Iris (Gabrielle Jones) about the incident but her family is weary as Iris was there the night of that fateful accident and it has haunted her ever since.

Final Destination: Bloodlines is a lot of fun and more than once I had a big smile on my face watching the film and those moments come mainly in the grizzly death scenes that have always been pretty creative in this series (though I’ve only seen the first 2 films I will admit) but here there’s a lawnmower, a high rise tower and a very memorable one with a fan in a tattoo shop and though the film at times throws you off in terms of how and when people will die but that’s part of the fun.

As for the storytelling itself, its okay but sometimes you just sit there thinking “okay stop talking just hurry up and die already” and the cast are pretty good though Juana did remind me a little of Melissa Barrera from the recent Scream films (before that series foolishly got rid of her) while Richard Harmon, Teo Briones, Owen Joyner, Anna Lore, Gabrielle Jones and Rya Kihlstedt are good in their roles as well.

This movie was also sadly the final film of Tony Todd and seeing him here so thin and frail was sad to see as I always enjoyed seeing him pop up in movies like this series or the Rock or Candyman and also as Worf’s brother Kurn on Star Trek the Next Generation (his exit from the franchise on Deep Space Nine however deserved far better)

And so that was Final Destination Bloodlines and it is a good time on a dark night at the cinema, 3 and a half out of 5.

Film Review - Thunderbolts* (2025)

Thunderbolts* is the newest Marvel Studios movie and sees Florence Pugh and David Harbour return from 2021’s Black Widow and this time their joined by Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), John Walker (Wyatt Russell) and Bucky (Sebastian Stan) and this group is brought together by Valentina Allegra Di Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and a mysterious man named Bob (Lewis Pullman)

Thunderbolts* is not a bad movie and certainly a better movie than the previous Marvel movie Captain America Brave New World but the more I’ve thought about it the more I find myself putting it in the same basket as Black Panther 2 and the Marvels in that while I don’t hate it I also don’t think its all that much either especially as my overall fatigue with this franchise has grown more and more over the last few years.

Now that isn’t to say that this movie isn’t without any merit, certainly not as this movie definitely has some good ideas at its core especially around mental health and wanting to be recognised as the hero they were meant to be and the toll of pain and fighting over many years that it takes on some of the characters especially Yelena and Pugh is great in this role but for all of the talk of pain I just kept thinking of “I don’t want my pain taken away I NEED MY PAIN!!!” from Star Trek 5 the Final Frontier and that film was willing for all of its many faults to explore that in a more sincere way.

And the cast is good as well, Pugh as I mentioned above sells her Pain very well as does Harbour who was trumpted so much as the Soviet equivalent of Captain America but was never given the chance to properly prove it (and unfortunately this movie doesn’t really give him that chance either which is a shame), Sebastian Stan is good as well but he can do Bucky well at this point and I enjoyed seeing Hannah John-Kamen again as Ghost and Wyatt Russell was good as well.

As for Julia Louis-Dreyfus I thought she was okay as Valentina but this franchise really needed to make her the new big bad after Thanos in order to make the arc this movie had in mind for her all the more impact to work properly and also at times it feels like she is playing Evil Elaine from Seinfeld and as for Lewis Pullman he was fine but doesn’t do an awful lot save for the third act.

And given the positives here I also had a feeling while watching this movie that I’ve now become so fatigued by this universe and the lack of direction and glut of movie and streaming shows without any real purpose or drive or forward momentum to them that I’ve just become tired of it all now and that feeling has intensified for me as the next movie coming up is Fantastic Four: The First Steps and I can’t help but feel that that movie exists at the expense of losing 20th Century Fox as an independent movie studio as so many die hard Marvel fans essentially didn’t care if Fox was bought by Disney if it meant F4 and the X-Men went into the MCU.

And it is very clear to see that the loss of Fox has left a large hole in the industry post Covid which has struggled to get back to the kind of numbers both box office and attendance wise that it enjoyed before the pandemic and as much as Amazon reviving MGM and streamers like Netflix and Co have tried they just cannot fill that hole left behind by Fox’s absence.

And this isn’t to let Fox off the hook in their treatment of Fantastic Four either as they utterly failed in the mid 2000’s to learn the lessons from the success of X-Men and X-Men 2 those being hiring a strong creative mind to oversee those characters and deliver great films with them in the same way that Bryan Singer (considerable baggage aside) did with his era of X-Men save for Apocalypse in 2016 but these things happen I suppose.

And so that was Thunderbolts* and its an okay film that many Marvel fans will be happy with as it isn’t a dumpster fire but it also can’t escape the fatigue I feel with this series post Infinity War and Endgame, 2 out of 5.

Film Review - Drop (2025)

Drop is the new horror film by Christopher Landon who also made Happy Death Day and Freaky and stars Meghann Fahy as Violet, a widow with a young son who goes on a first date with photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar from 1923) but during their evening she gets mysterious air drops on her phone telling her to kill her date or her young son will be murdered.

Drop shows once again why Chris Landon for the most part does great horror movies, he doesn’t just couch them in the usual “evil person with a metal blade” running around and carving up young teens like their animals in the wild their couched in a fun concept at their core be it repeating the same day in HDD, body swapping Captain Ginyu style in Freaky or “Kill your Date or I Kill Your Son” in this movie and Landon does a great job generating tension and suspense throughout the film and its single location of a Chicago high rise restaurant and the way he moves the camera around also won me over as well.

The cast also deliver the goods as well mainly Fahy and Sklenar who have great chemistry together even though at times I was thinking of Julia Schalepfer from 1923 and the chemistry she and Sklenar had in that show and how once again he is romancing a young blonde woman and as someone who was a big fan of 1923 it was hard for me not to want to make that comparison.

Where this movie does sadly fall over somewhat is its use of domestic violence in a key sideplot, this issue is far too serious to be in what should be a fun high concept horror movie and it could’ve easily been removed with only some minor tweaks to the script and I think the movie would’ve worked just as well if not better without it.

And so that was Drop and once more another movie comes along that shows 2025 as an overall movie year off to a strong start with a fun concept well executed with a great duo of leads, 3 and a half out of 5.