Film Review - Fuze (2026)

Fuze stars Sam Worthington, Theo James and Aaron Taylor-Johnson and takes place in London where an unexploded bomb from WWII is found in a busy street and the Met Police and Army are called in to evacuate the area but while that is going on a group of thieves decide to take an advantage of the situation and rob a nearby bank but not all robberies go as smoothly as planned.

Fuze is a perfectly fine action heist thriller that will do the job competently enough for those who watch it, Worthington is okay but at times his accent ranges from Cockney to Aussie to Jake Sully (his character in the Avatar films) and his role isn’t as big as I thought it would be, James is okay despite his South African accent not being the best at times while Taylor-Johnson is good as the Army Major overseeing the bomb situation and the film has a good propulsion to it in terms of the tension and ticking clock of the bomb situation.

Where it does fall over a little bit is regarding the heist which goes through a few more twists and turns that I thought it would and some of those worked and some of those didn’t but overall that part of the film wasn’t as interesting to me as the bomb plotline was as that section felt tightly paced, had a good amount of tension and interested in how that type of technology works.

And so that was Fuze and its fine but only worth a watch once, 2 out of 5.

Film Review - The Drama (2026)

The Drama stars Robert Pattinson as Charlie and Zendaya as Emma a young couple who are engaged to be married and are planning their wedding when one night they are invited out with their friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and are asked what’s the worst thing they’ve ever done during a round of drinks and the answers some give will lead to shocking consequences.

The Drama is an awkward watch but in the best possible way as I really enjoyed this movie, firstly the performances by Zendaya and Haim are terrific and both play their parts very well, Zendaya is turning into a great young talent outside of the Spider-man movies which have regrettably not given her a huge amount to work with (hopefully Brand New Day later this year changes that) and she brings a lot to Emma that makes her a compelling character to watch while Haim is a relative newcomer to movies but plays that bitchy jealous girlfriend very well and she has a few memorable moments of her own as well.

The film also has a good performance by Hailey Gates as Mischa one of Charlie’s museum co-workers and she makes the most of her small part while Athie is fine as Mike but doesn’t really stick out amongst the broader ensemble cast.

As for Pattinson’s Charlie he is okay but at times he becomes very insular and withdrawn and that is not really something Pattinson can do all that well as I prefer him in roles like Tenet where he can be charismatic and less insular and I get that his character goes through a lot throughout this movie in regards to what he thought about Emma and how much he felt he really knew about her but some of those scenes didn’t work as well for me and that is primarily because of the soft spoken way Pattinson talks.

As for those feelings well I won’t delve too much into what caused those to come to the surface but it is something bad enough that I felt that things between Emma and Charlie probably would’ve been okay if they had had a chance to properly sit down and talk it all out between each other before they were married or if Emma had told Charlie much much earlier in their relationship say when it was becoming clear to her that Charlie was going to be her husband she should’ve sat him down then and said “Sweetie can you come in here please” and he goes and sits down and asks why and she says “There’s something I have to tell you about me and you might not like it” and then told him what is revealed in the film because the manner in which Emma reveals that about herself so close to her wedding creates a tension that didn’t need to be there if she had come clean sooner as she should have.

That said however The Drama works quite well despite some of those shortcomings and I liked it quite a bit, 3 and a half out of 5.

Film Review - Super Mario Galaxy (2026)

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the follow up to 2023’s Super Mario Brothers movie and concerns Bowser Jr (Benny Safdie) kidnapping the cosmic princess Rosalina (Brie Larson) as he wants to use her to conquer the universe and free his father Bowser (Jack Black) from imprisonment in the Mushroom Kingdom but when Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Toad (Keegan Michael-Key) go missing in the cosmic universe Mario (Chris Pratt), Luigi (Charlie Day) and Yoshi (Donald Glover) go looking for them.

Super Mario Galaxy isn’t a terrible movie but its also not a movie that is going to appeal outside of kids and Nintendo superfans either but firstly it does have some positives and the first of those is the animation it is very bright and colourful and cosmic looking blending 3 dimensional worlds with 2 dimensional looking scenes which nod back to the classic NES games and the various planets the characters go to all have a unique visual style that is very appealing to look at on a big cinema screen.

The voice cast for the most part is also pretty good too, Pratt/Day and Glover play off each other very well and Glover in particular is a highlight as Yoshi even if I suspected that his vocal performance might have been edited that way in post-production much like Frank Welker’s vocals for Soundwave were in the original Transformers Cartoon, Taylor-Joy and Michael-Key are good as well in their roles while Safdie and Black are great as the Bowsers.

But for all of that the movies storytelling is all over the place, going from one planet to the next in one story arc to the next that at times it feels like your watching a speed run of a video game instead of a movie and there are so many fast moving set piece moments in the film that some kids could end up being over stimulated while watching it and because of that it feels like none of our heroes get any kind of proper attention applied to them to make us feel invested in the journey.

And the second problem is the use of Rosalina, Brie Larson is an Academy Award Winner and self-confessed Nintendo nerd playing a fan favourite character but after the opening scene she disappears for a huge part of the film and plays only a minor role in the climax of it that it ultimately felt like a waste of her great talents as an actress and that really annoyed me.

And lastly the more I’ve thought about this movie the more I want to compare it to the Sonic the Hedgehog series which has always been the great rival of the Super Mario Brothers over the years and those films are much better than these and really should have been the template for these Mario animated films as those movies:

-    Have a proper storyline with an emotional core at the centre
-    Know when to use the fan service and when not to
-    Took their time to develop their core heroes over the course of the franchise
-    And make proper use of fan favourite characters from the games and make them feel like the centre of the story

It’s not a hard formula to copy but here it feels ignored and that might please some and give Universal and Illumination and Nintendo that short term sugar hit but it only works for that one time but it doesn’t make me want to go back to them the way I have the Sonic movies.

And so that was Super Mario Galaxy and it has its moments but its really only for kids and Nintendo super fans who will get every reference as for the rest I think it will bore them dizzingly fairly quick, 2 out of 5.

Film Review - Hoppers (2026)

Hoppers is the latest Pixar film and concerns a young college student named Mabel (Piper Curda) who is determined to save her favourite forest water glen from her hometown mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) and his determination to build a new highway bypass through that area but one night she comes across a secret experiment program called “Hopping” which transfers the consciousness of a human body into a robotic body of an animal which in Mabel’s case is a Beaver and she wants to use it to help save her Glen.

Hoppers is the most I have enjoyed a Pixar film since Elemental in 2023 and it is one of the highlights of this movie year so far, it is a more comedic film than most Pixar films but it works very well in the films favor as I laughed quite a bit throughout the film at particular in jokes, comedic gags and well delivered humorous lines.

The film also has a more pleasing animation style, a lot of the recent Pixar films have suffered from a very bland and lifeless animation style that just makes the movie feel dull to watch but here the animals are very well animated and the forest area much of the film takes place in looks good as well.

The film also balances a more serious story about environmental conservation with that comedic element well also and lastly the voice cast are good here as well, Curda and Hamm are good in their roles while Meryl Streep was a nice surprise in a small role as were Dave Franco, Sam Richardson and Bobby Monyihan.

And so that was Hoppers and it is a very enjoyable time at the movies and Pixar’s best in some years, 4 out of 5.