Film Review - Dumb Money (2023)

Dumb Money is the new film by Craig Gillespie who made I, Tonya and Cruella and stars Paul Dano as Keith Gill, a Youtuber who decides to invest in GameStop in 2020 during the Dark Times of the COVID shutdown as he feels it is a stock that investors want to see fail so they can cash in, sensing a chance to get one back for the little guy many others jump in.

Dumb Money is quite a good little film and first off big kudos has to be given to the cast, Dano has been hit and miss for me in movies but he hits here this time, Shailene Woodley is okay as his wife Caroline but doesn’t get an awful lot to do, Pete Davidson is fun as Keith’s brother while Dane DeHaan is a lot of fun as Brad the owner of a local GameStop who does his whole performance in a facemask.

But the standout here is America Ferrara and between this and Barbie she is having a great year, she plays a local nurse named Jennifer and you really get behind her as someone who is an essential worker and just wants something back for herself given she is putting her life on the line every day during those Dark Times.

Special mention must also be given to the films editing by Kirk Baxter who is one of David Fincher’s editors and he does an excellent job here with the various website grabs, videos from that time and footage shot for the film and make it all look frenetic and seamless and it gave good life to this story.

And lastly I liked how this movie really depicted the dark times of 2020 and early 2021 as this desolate time where people were stuck indoors and life was shut down and how some people lost someone they cared about to those events, its probably the best depiction of those days I’ve seen in a movie so far.

And so that was Dumb Money and at the moment it stands at #6 on my favourite films of the year so far list, its good fun while telling a good story with good performances, 3 and a half out of 5.

Film Review - Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Killers of the Flower Moon is directed and co-written by Martin Scorsese (his co-writer is Eric Roth) and is based off of the novel by David Grann and concerns the Osage nation in Oklahoma who strike it rich when oil is discovered on their lands meanwhile a young man named Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) comes to stay with his uncle King Hill (Robert De Niro) and he starts seeing a local Osage lady named Mollie (Lily Gladstone) but the Osage people are now being murdered for their oil money and Ernest and King might be at the centre of it.

Killers of the Flower Moon the more I have thought about in my mind is a movie that I feel is on the whole good but not a great film and I wish it was now this isn’t to say it’s a bad movie its not but its also one that has some problems.

Firstly the performances in this movie are very good, DiCaprio is I think the weakest of the bunch and I think that he is good in the film but the way he talked really grated with me after a while, De Niro is very good as well as the local mayor like figure of the Osage county near where the oil was found and who has this prospector feel to him but not without his darker side owing to the prejudice against Native American people while Jesse Plemons is very good as well as an FBI agent tasked with investigating the murders.

But the real star here has to be Lily Gladstone, for the first half of this movie she is fantastic and comes across as a real find able to say so much with little more than just her facial expressions and her body language and she develops some real chemistry with DiCaprio in those scenes but sadly at the back end of the film she doesn’t get as much to do and the film suffers for it somewhat as a result.

And there is where I want to mention my issues with this movie and the first of those is the length, at 3 hours and 26 minutes this is a long film to watch in the cinema (and if you can see it in a cinema please do so) and there were numerous times where I checked my watch and because of this long length I feel that the tension and the dread of the Osage murders begins to dissipate after a while and it loses that emotional punch that a more tightly edited version of this story might have been able to bring out.

Now I am not against long movies, James Cameron has proven to be a master of it with the Special Edition of the Abyss as well as Titanic and Avatar: The Way of Water and recently Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer rarely felt its own 3 hour runtime but here it did bother me and I think the movie as a whole suffers from this long length.

And that leads me to my next issue and that is the storytelling, now Marty and Eric Roth were right in their decision to refocus the story to the betrayal of the Osage people instead of the FBI agents tasked with investigating the murders but sadly as a result I feel the film as a whole has this split focus that instead of feeling cohesive in the way that Oppenheimer did it feels like your watching one movie and then another start in its place not unlike how you watch a streaming series and that bothered me especially in the second half.

And so that was Killers of the Flower Moon and it is at the end of the day a good movie but I wish it was a great one with tighter editing helping to bring the 2 main stories into better focus and really heighten the tension and the dread of the story, 3 out of 5.

Film Review - Expendables 4 (2023)

Expendables 4 is the fourth in the series and again stars Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham as Barney Ross and Lee Christmas and they go to Libya to stop a rogue terrorist (Tony Jaa) from stealing Nuclear weapon materials but when the mission goes wrong the CIA head (Andy Garcia) calls off Christmas from the group and they then go to a tanker ship where the Nuclear materials are located and once again the Expendables must do what they do best.

Expendables 4 is a terrible film and in a year that gave us John Wick Chapter 4 and Equalizer 3 this really isn’t good enough, firstly it feels like Stallone and Statham are just going through the motions here and I like Statham but I am really wanting him to make better quality movies because this and Operation Fortune from earlier this year are not doing him any favours and as for Stallone this is just another example of him ruining his legacy with lazy sequels between this and 2019’s Rambo Last Blood which was also terrible but at least Michael B Jordan is safely looking after the Creed series so there’s that at least.

As for the action and storytelling well as Bob from Reboot would say it is bad, it is very bad and firstly the storytelling is not that interesting just another “find a bomb and disarm it” and I was waiting for it to go one step further like the great action films do and it doesn’t we spend half a film on a damn boat and it isn’t interesting to watch as a location nor do we get any fun action moments and the action here is terrible where it be from the bad effects, the bad editing or the 2 moves and their dead fight scenes and again John Wick 4 and Equalizer 3 had great action and great stories and characters you were invested in and this movie has none of that.

And I’m going to leave it there as I aren’t wasting anymore time on this turkey except to eat it and give it a 1 out of 5.

Film Review - Retribution (2023)

Retribution stars Liam Neeson as Matt Turner a man who is taking his young children (Jack Champion and Emily Kusche) to School when a mysterious man rings him and tells him there’s a bomb underneath his car seat and if he doesn’t do exactly as he’s told it will explode so what will he do, what will he do?

Retribution honestly does what it says on the box, its an okay if at times silly thriller but is one of Neeson’s better films he’s made in the last few years, he himself seems more engaged in this material for a start and I also liked seeing Jack Champion again after seeing him as Spider in Avatar: The Way of Water and in Scream 6 earlier this year and the film has some good thrills for the most part and it clocks along nicely at 90 minutes.

But where this falls way down is its ending as it feels like the movie is building to a climax that makes a lot of sense within the story and character framework and there’s a very tense moment near the end of the film but then it goes completely elsewhere and I just sat there going “What the Fuck” and it really undoes a lot of the film for me as I felt it just made no sense to do this when you could’ve done that and that would’ve worked a whole lot better.

And so that was Retribution and its fine save for a dumb ending, 2 out of 5.

Film Review - The Creator (2023)

The Creator is directed and co-written by Gareth Edwards and stars John David Washington as Sgt Taylor who is mourning the loss of his wife Maya (Gemma Chan) when he is asked by a US Army commander (Alison Janney) to find a mysterious weapon in the Republic of New Asia which unlike the West has embraced AI in everyday life but when he finds the weapon he begins to question his loyalties to both the mission and his country.

The Creator is a very enjoyable Sci-Fi film and firstly the look of the film is fantastic and worth seeing the film on a big cinema screen, Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser along with Oren Soffer have helped to create a real world here in terms of how man and machine live alongside each other in New Asia but also how the US forces use the powerful Nomad sky station to help win the war in their favour and that station is an dominant presence in the film.

Also the look of New Asia is really good as well with the numerous wetlands, the coastal towns, the ancient temples there’s this great mix of the old and the new here that I found very interesting and the artificial humans look almost indistinguishable from the real ones, if this film does not win Best Visual Effects and Best Cinematography at the Academy Awards next year it will be a tragic mistake.

Also the performances are very good as well, John David Washington is very much his fathers son but sadly it seems he will not get quite the same opportunities that Denzel got when he started out to prove his movie star quality as it is here, he’s soft hearted, charming, good at action and very charismatic as he was in Tenet and BlackKlansmen, Janney is very good as the US Army Commander as is Sam Watanabe in his role while little Madeliene Voyles almost steals the entire film as Alphie the young child who may be the key to the wars end.

But where the film isn’t as strong sadly is its storytelling and it isn’t awful here not in the least but I found its messaging regarding AI to not sit as well with me and that is mainly due to the rise of AI and the need for very strict guardrails to be put on it in the real world and here the film has almost a very pro AI message and that didn’t really sit well with me like I mentioned above especially given the strikes going on in the movie industry which AI is a big reason for them happening and for those strict guardrails to be put in place.

And so that was the Creator and despite some messy messaging I really enjoyed this movie and feel it is definitely worth a watch, 3 and a half out of 5.