Film Review - Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Solo: A Star Wars Story is the newest Star Wars movie directed by Ron Howard who took over from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller who were fired from the film with 3 weeks remaining on their schedule.

The story here concerns young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) and his upbringing on Correlia, his meeting Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and how he got the Millennium Falcon and going on a big heist for a local Gangster (Paul Bettany.)

Solo is a fun ride and Howard is clearly having a great time getting to direct a Star Wars film (he directed Willow for George Lucas in 1988 and was in American Graffitti for George) and he brings an energetic sense of direction to the scenes and crafts some fun action along the way plus there is some really beautiful cinematography by Bradford Young with its many wide shots and landscapes Young is definitely one of the most underappreciated cinematographers working today.

And the performances for the most part are good Ehrenreich is solid as Han even if at times I just kept thinking of Harrison Ford Glover does a brilliant mimic of Billy Dee Williams’s Lando from Empire and Jedi but gets so little screen time he doesn’t get a chance to shine all that much, Emilia Clarke is okay as Qi’ra but doesn’t really stand out in the role and both Woody Harrelson and Paul Bettany are wasted in their roles Harrelson just comes across as grumpy and out of place while Bettany again gets so little to do it feels like a cameo.

And this is where the movie falls way short: Its screenplay frankly it isn’t much of one and as much fun as it is to see young Han and young Lando and their backstory it doesn’t feel special it just feels like 2 hour fan fiction like Rogue One in 2016 did “Here’s all this stuff in a movie that you’ve imagined in your minds for 40 years” and when you see it on film executed in a way that it feels very bland it takes some of the mystery away and it also doesn’t help that many of the new characters here are so boring and generic that you don’t really care that much about them.

And also what is missing is the character of Jabba the Hutt who was so memorable in Return of the Jedi after being teased so well in Star Wars and Empire having him in this movie could have solved the problem of not having a major villain ala Terry Benedict in Oceans Eleven to help anchor the story plus it would have given far more dramatic weight to the storytelling because we have that investment in Jabba and his gang of Bounty Hunters (“We don’t need that Scum”) and would believe they could have Han and Chewie on the run but we didn’t get that and the film suffers as a result.

And so that was Solo: A Star Wars Story a very disappointing Star Wars movie that hurts because a Star Wars movie like an Avengers movie should be something special and in a year when Infinity War made an Avengers movie special again this kind of warmed up second rate leftovers just isn’t good enough in a franchise where its original 3 movies redefined movie history and say what people will about the Last Jedi and Rian Johnson’s work on it at least he did take some risks even if he didn’t execute them as well as he could have, 1.5 out of 5.

Film Review - Deadpool 2 (2018)

Deadpool 2 continues on from the first Deadpool but this time David Leitch steps into the directors chair replacing Tim Miller Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) finds himself back in trouble once again as a young boy named Russell (Julian Dennison) is targeted by a time traveller named Cable (Josh Brolin) so the chase is on and the quips are not too far behind.

Deadpool 2 is sadly not a very good sequel at all and the comparison I would make is Robocop 2 from 1990 where it had a different and more serious direction but the tone of the film feels very off and at times it becomes very nasty and young Mr Dennison is the biggest reminder of that comparison for me his performance here feels so fowl mouthed and so nasty at times that I hated watching him in the movie and I did think of Hob (Gabriel Damon) in Robocop 2.

This ties into my second biggest problem and that is the storytelling here is a big mess with Deadpool and the X-Force, the storyline with Russell and the storyline with Cable being big storylines in their own right and not one of them comes together in either a satisfying or cohesive way as it feels like 2 separate scripts (one being about X-Force and the other about Cable/Russell) being smashed together in a printer and neither of them is explored well enough to make work and again Robocop 2 had this problem of a messy storyline.

And this last point again like Robocop 2 (I know I know its getting a bit much but I’ll stop here) the more straight laced and serious minded tone makes the action sequences feel more violent than they did in the first Deadpool film and after a while I just got sick of it and at least Robocop 2 had a great end battle sequence with the two robots whereas here the action just became a jumbled mess that without a story hook to make me care just left me bored.

But the biggest problem I had above all else with this movie was Ryan Reynolds now I liked him a fair amount in the first Deadpool film but Tim Miller was smart enough to know when to reel him in and moderate his improvising whereas here he endlessly mugs for the camera the entire film and talks so much that he sounds more like a bad knockoff of Iago from Aladdin and after a while I just said to myself “WILL YOU PLEASE JUST SHUT UP” and it just felt like a trip down the time tunnel to the bad old days of these films where they became little more than glorified star vehicles.

As for Mr Brolin as Cable well I was very disappointed here probably most of all because he gets such little screen time and so few scenes of dialogue now maybe this is due to his Thanos schedule but I wish he was in it more and lastly the comedy just didn’t make me laugh this time the gags were too on the nose and the references got a little tiresome.

And so that was Deadpool 2 a sequel that I hated frankly and it feels worse when a bad sequel comes after we get a great one like Paddington 2 but if you’re a fan of the first film I still feel you should go and see it and make up your own mind, 1 out of 5.

Film Review - Breath (2018)

Breath is based off of the novel by Tim Winton who also helped write this screenplay adaptation and Simon Baker co writes, stars and directs this adaptation as Sando a surfer in 1970’s Australia who ends up befriending 2 young boys with a keen eye for adventure (Brock Fitzgerald and Ben Spence) but Sando’s wife Eva (Elizabeth Debicki) is not so keen for these young boys to be around so much.

Breath is a bit of a mixed bag that overall I found to be a pretty meh movie the more I began to think about it but in terms of the positives I did like of the scenic direction Mr Baker did with those big swelling waves, windy beaches and shots of under water swells those scenes had a slightly lyrical and strangely compelling feel to them.

Mainly because they had very little dialogue and that’s where this movie goes wrong the screenplay is all over the place bouncing from one storyline to the next in a very scrappy way at one point Simon Baker’s character is teaching them to surf then he disappears for a big chunk of the film one of the boys gets into surfing then doesn’t and after a while the film started to bore me a little bit as I didn’t find myself all that interested in any of the characters or the overall storytelling.

The best thing about this movie by far is Elizabeth Debicki who once again exudes sexiness as this late 60s early 70s flower child who also hides a terrible tragic incident and her sense of isolation and loneliness comes through in every scene she has she really does a lot to lift those scenes into something engaging and worthwhile and I was reminded of what an utterly captivating and charismatic actress she can be when given something to work with as she felt wasted in Guardians Volume 2 and the Man from UNCLE.

And so that was Breath which has a great performance by Ms Debicki and some nice scenery but a scattershot screenplay with boring characters, 2 out of 5.