Film Review - Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the new Aquaman film and James Wan returns to direct and Jason Momoa returns as Arthur Curry aka Aquaman as he faces off again against David Kane/Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who now possess his own dark trident of power and to stop him Arthur will need the help of his brother Orm (Patrick Wilson)

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is not a bad film per se but its one that while I was watching it I wish it was a lot better than it is as this film has so many talented people involved (Wan, Momoa, Wilson, Mateen II, Nicole Kidman, Teumeura Morrison, John Rhys-Davies, Amber Heard and Martin Short) that it feels like their all stuck in a pretty run of the mill story that does very little with most of them, Kidman in particular really gets the short end of the trident this time as she an iconic talent is stuck in a pretty thankless mother role that anyone could’ve done, if you’ve got Nicole Kidman give her some fun aquatic action of her own same with Morrison who pretty much does the napping grandpa role.

As for the story it feels like James Wan really wanted to channel Peter Jackson and his work on Lord of the Rings in terms of referencing his horror past but also delivering that big scale spectacle which Jackson did brilliantly in the Lord of the Rings but it feels more like your watching the Jackson of the Hobbit era with this film where the horror references kind of work but the spectacle feels small and very CG heavy and the CG is fine for the most part but it isn’t that large scale that you saw with the first film in 2018.

As for Momoa and Wilson their okay and have some good chemistry but Mateen II feels pretty wasted here with a pretty run of the mill villain role that doesn’t have the bite it should have given his plan here while Heard is in more of this movie than I thought she would be given what’s happened with her in real life but she does okay here.

And okay is not only how I would sum up Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom but also 2023 as a movie year on the whole, it wasn’t bad but not as good as it could have been either but I fear 2024 will be worse given how long and drawn out the writers and actors strikes became (and unnecessarily so too) that led to a big production shutdown for months hopefully it doesn’t get too bad but we’ll have to wait and see, 2 out of 5.

Film Review - Saltburn (2023)

Saltburn is the new film by Emerald Fennell who made a big splash and won an Oscar for her 2020 film Promising Young Woman, this film stars Barry Keoghan as Oliver, a top graduate student at Oxford University who befriends a young man named Felix (Jacob Elordi) but when Oliver finds himself without a home for the Summer Felix invites to his home manor called Saltburn where his strange family (Rosamund Pike, Richard E Grant, Carey Mulligan, Archie Madekwe and Alison Oliver) reside.

I was looking forward to this movie mainly because I loved Promising Young Woman when I got to see it in early 2021, Fennell showed a lot of promise as a new emerging talent and told a tale that felt like it tapped into some very real fears I’m sure her and most women have at some point in their life and so I was keen to see what deliciousness she would cook up next.

Sadly this is another case like Olivia Wilde’s film last year Don’t Worry Darling of the Sophomore Slump striking again as while I was watching this film unfold I kept thinking to myself “How on Earth can a film this pretentious and full of itself also be this dull and uninteresting?” as while the scenes at Oxford are fine they just went on for far too long and I didn’t really find them interesting.

Then again nor did I find the scenes at Saltburn Manor interesting either and this leads me to my first main problem with this movie, none of the characters here I found engaging in the slightest and the rich family in the manor felt more like caricatures than actual characters like you see in Ready or Not or the first Knives Out film, Pike and Grant are great actors but it feels like they are doing cartoon characters with Pike feeling like the ditzy trophy wife and Grant who has a peculiar way of talking already is doing that dialed up to 12 with his line. Readings. Like this.. in that voice he has and it really gets tiresome.

Mulligan who delivered career best work in Promising Young Woman is wasted here and it honestly feels like she came and did this on a day off a year or two back and put on the costume, did her lines and then went again and it feels like a waste to have someone who is doing great work right now be given a thankless and nothing character, Madekwe just sits around and says pithy lines like he’s part of the Social Golf Club from the Simpsons and Oliver is okay but doesn’t really get a lot to do.

But the biggest waste here is Keoghan who is a great actor and everything I’ve seen him in up to this point he’s delivered great work but here he is crushingly boring with his misfitting glasses and soft talking, most of the time I kept thinking that someone like Taron Egerton should’ve played this role instead as I never really believed Keoghan’s character came from a salt of the earth background.

But the one person I did like was Jacob Elordi and watching him here I thought to myself “This kid is going to be a star” and with this and Priscilla to end the year it seems that promise is starting to bear fruit and I will be keen to see what he does next as he has charisma and charm and can deliver drama and humour well.

And so that was Saltburn and I wanted this to be more than it was in terms of its risqué, storytelling and characters but the risqué felt dialed back and the storytelling and characters became dull and uninteresting, this is easily my biggest disappointment of 2023, 1 out of 5.

Film Review - Wish (2023)

Wish is the newest Disney Animation film and stars Ariana DeBose as Asha a young girl who lives in the kingdom of Rosas which is ruled by King Magnifico (Chris Pine) but one day a wishing ceremony is held and Asha hopes her 100 year old grandfather will have his wish granted but when that doesn’t happen Asha decides to get rid of the King and free his wish.

Wish is a near complete total disaster of a film and the more I have thought about it the more I come to loathe it.

Firstly, the whole wish thing doesn’t really make a lot of sense and more often than not feels like the wishing stone from Wonder Woman 1984 where it felt like any wish could be granted with no real rules attached to the stone, here any wish can be made to the King and more or less be granted if the moment is right and when you think of the Genie of the Lamp or the Dragon Balls which also grant wishes they have actual rules attached.

The Lamp has 3 main provisos: The Genie can’t kill anyone, can’t make anybody fall in love with anybody else and can’t bring people back from the dead while the Dragon Balls can’t revive someone who has either already died twice or died from a natural cause ie Cancer and Kami had to expunge the evil within him so he could become the guardian of the Earth and then create the Dragon Balls.

Secondly the characters here are deathly dull, I love Ariana DeBose but more often than not she tries to do the same cute and quirky comedic performance that Kristen Bell did as Anna in the Frozen films and it worked there because Bell came from a comedic background for the most part whereas here DeBose who was so swoon worthy and charismatic in West Side Story just feels like a flopping fish with all her spritzing comic lines that fall flat and leave blood on the footpath, as for Chris Pine he does what little he can but the turn from good to bad really doesn’t work and he can’t make it work.

As for the sidekick characters, the talking goat gets very annoying very quickly as it more or less spouts the same ponderous and insufferable piffle that half the cast exposited over and over and over again in A Wrinkle in Time while the little star creature is okay but doesn’t really standout like say Abu did in Aladdin.

Which leads me to my third point and that is the storytelling which is a complete mess to sit through at only 95 smegging minutes, while your sitting there watching it you feel like your watching an AI generation of the rough treatment for the film that would be shown before smart studio executives like Jeffrey Katzenberg from the Renaissance era would look at it and go “this is a mess, redo this” (and Jeffrey did just that on Aladdin by the way) and that treatment jumps from one storyline to another and one character moment to another in such a haphazard way that none of it feels organic or thought through properly.

Okay say you have Magnifico as the villain well why not have him be bad like Maleficent or Jafar or Hades were right from the get-go and establish his goal to become all powerful and rule the kingdom, Asha could be the young heroine like Belle or Ariel who wants more out of life be it the stuff that is neat and makes her collection complete or wants adventure in the great wide somewhere but instead we get what we get and the film suffers as a result.

And lastly the music here feels too taped on and not organically connected to the main body of the film like the songs of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken did in Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin (which Sir Tim Rice was determined to do when he worked with Alan after Howard passed away) and again they feel like an AI generation of early demos before they would be worked on some more and they just come into the film and then go again.

And so that was Wish and it is easily one of my Turkeys of the year and I have felt this for a while now but now feel it in my bones that Disney desperately needs another Jeffrey Katzenberg to take the helm and succeed Bob Iger for while Jeffrey had his faults (insisting When Love is Gone be cut from the Muppets Christmas Carol was a colossal error) he wasn’t afraid to ruffle the feather, make his talent fight for and defend their ideas and crack the whip when needed, perhaps then Disney can get out of this rut their in and get back to giving us great films again but perhaps the old saying of the bigger you are the harder you fall has never felt as true as it does with Disney right now, 1 out of 5.

Film Review - Wonka (2023)

Wonka is the new film by Paddington director Paul King and Timothee Chalamet stars as a young Willy Wonka who travels by boat to sell his magical chocolate in France only to find himself stuck in a laundrette run by Olivia Coleman, he also faces stiff competition from rival chocolate sellers (Paterson Joseph, Matt Lucas and Matthew Baynton) who want to keep all the chocolate sales to themselves.

Going into Wonka I was apprehensive mainly because Gene Wilder made Willy Wonka his own in the 1971 film (which Warner Brothers actually inherited from Paramount as it was such a flop for them in 1971 that a few years later they sold the film to WB who then turned it into the cult classic it became) that when Tim Burton and Johnny Depp made their film in 2005 it was a near total disaster but Paddington proved King could do great family films so was this a nice bite of chocolate or too sweet for some teeth.

Well this is happily the former as this film is terrific fun in a cinema, for much of the time I had a big smile on my face and was caught up in the sweet nature of the film, Chalamet (soon to be seen as Paul Muadib Atredies, Duke of Arakkis in Dune Part 2: Long Live the Fighters) much like Tom Blyth recently did in the Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes manages to find a way to make his Wonka his own character while also giving you enough hints of the Gene Wilder version the character would later become.

He also has a great supporting cast to work with as well, Coleman/Joseph/Lucas and Baynton make for a great group of villains and like Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant in the Paddington films they are so much fun to watch and it really makes me wish for the days when Disney Animation gave us great villains in their films, Sally Hawkins is always good to see and Keegan Michael-Key is a lot of fun as the police captain but the show stealer here is Hugh Grant as the Oompa Loompa Wonka comes across.

He's not in the film a huge amount but when he comes on screen I was grinning from ear to ear and at times thinking of the Grunka Lunka parody from the Futurama episode Fry and the Slurm Factory.

And lastly this movie is more of a musical than the previews showed you and the songs are quite good with a good mix of new songs and some old treats one of which made me emotional in my cinema seat while the other put a big smile on my face.

And so that was Wonka and it is some of the most fun I’ve had in a cinema all year, its fun/heartfelt/whimsical and so much more than I thought it would be, 4 out of 5.

Film Review - Napoleon (2023)

Napoleon is the new film by Ridley Scott and stars Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon, Arnold Rimmer’s all time favourite fascist dictator and this movie not only chronicles his rise to power in France but also his relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) and how that relationship was central to his life.

I was very much looking forward to this movie as it was a big historical epic and a new Ridley Scott film and I am a big fan of both plus Phoenix and Kirby are good actors but could it soar to great heights or does it meet its Waterloo.

Well sadly it is a bit of both, this is not in any way a bad movie but its also one that I feel falls short, firstly Scotts direction is very assured especially during the many battle scenes which look and sound amazing on a big cinema screen with a great sound system and during them I thought to myself “Ridley Scott is nearly 86 years old and he’s still giving us this” and the battles themselves are ugly, violent and glorious to watch as it feels like they were done for real on open plains and lots of extras fighting it out and they are fantastic to watch.

Also the films performances are good as well, Phoenix at times sounds like he’s just reciting the lines as Napoleon as he does the role in an American accent but he does a good job for the most part, Kirby is very good as Josephine and she finds a way to balance the sexual nature of her role as well as the isolation of her later years, I also enjoyed seeing Rupert Everett in a small role as well.

But where this film falls over is either in its script or its editing and Scott has since teased a longer version of this movie for its streaming release, watching the version in cinemas right now feels like the pieces of a great film are here except one crucial one and it holds this film back and a lot of the time the film feels like it is doing a lot of time skipping in too short a time frame, I wish Scott had decided to do a 3 hour cut for cinemas much like Christopher Nolans Oppenheimer and James Camerons Avatar the Way of Water were both 3 hour films that made good use of that runtime as I can’t help but think that if he had done so we would’ve gotten a much better film.

And so that was Napoleon and it is probably my biggest disappointment of 2023 movie wise, the pieces are here for a great film but it feels like something is missing and time will tell whether it was an editing decision or a scripting decision but for now its worth watching on a big screen but I wish this was so much better than it is, 2 and a half out of 5.

Film Review - The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023)

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is based off of the 2020 prequel novel and stars Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow who we know as President Snow in the earlier stories, this story takes place 64 years before the first Hunger Games story and Coriolanus is a young man wanting a prized university scholarship and to rebuild his once proud family name but Dean Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) wants his students to make something of the Hunger Games and Snow is assigned a District 12 girl Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) and Snow wants to land on top.

I was very keen for this movie as I am a big Hunger Games fan and I really liked the book when I read it during the Dark Times in 2020 but this film version was going to have a tough task ahead of it because when I read the young Snows lines in the book I was hearing them in Donald Sutherlands voice which fundamentally would not work in any film version without it sounding ridiculous to have this old man’s voice coming out of this young mans mouth but could the film version pull it off or be yet another franchise revival that should’ve stayed dead with its picture in the sky and the sound of cannon.

Well happily this movie version pulls it off as I really really liked this movie a whole lot and first I will start with Tom Blyth who embodies the young Snow very well and more often than not when looking into his eyes you can see the lack of a soul behind them and the evil that Sutherland brought to his Snow is there waiting to bubble up to the surface with the right push, Zegler is the perfect Lucy Gray and like Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen I cannot imagine anyone else in this role, she nails the southern accent and when she sings she is captivating and her and Blyth have this dark twisted chemistry that really worked for me.

What also worked for me was the feel of this movie, it really does feel like Francis Lawrence the director of the film, James Newton Howard the score composer and the production design by Uli Hanisch pick up right where they left off from 2015’s Mockingjay Part 2, you see a lot more of the Capitol in this movie than you did in the earlier films and while its not quite that Post World War 1 Berlin vibe I got from reading the book it feels like the earlier films and the score also fits right in with the earlier films with a couple of neat callbacks that worked well for me.

And lastly the performances outside of the 2 leads are very good as well, Hunter Schafer was very good as the young Tigris even though that character is not a big one in this story, Jason Schwartzman channels Stanley Tucci well as Lucky Flickerman the first real host of the Games while Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage are a lot of fun as the sadistic leaders of the school Snow goes to.

And so that was the Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and I liked this movie a whole lot, it brought me back to Panem in a way I found very satisfying and adapted its source very well, I haven’t enjoyed a movie this much in quite a while and after the middling year we’ve had it feels like a big relief, 4 out of 5.

Film Review - The Killer (2023)

The Killer is the new movie by David Fincher and his second for Netflix after 2020’s Mank and stars Michael Fassbender as an assassin who has a hit go wrong in Paris and someone he cares about is targeted in another attack so he decides to go after those responsible.

The Killer is not one of David Finchers best movies but it is also a very good one at the same time and a lot of that comes down to the films craftsmanship, Fincher’s direction first of all is much better here than it was in Mank it feels tighter, more concise and yet knows when to ramp up the action and the tension as well as let things slow down to either let character moments breathe or the inner monologue of the assassin play out, the films editing by Kirk Baxter is very good as well and adds to the tight concise feel of the film well.

The film is also well photographed by Erik Messerschmidt though some scenes will be too dark to watch on your TV during the daytime and the music score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is a memorable one.

As for the cast it was nice to see Tilda Swinton and Charles Parnell (Warlock from Top Gun Maverick) in brief scenes but this is Fassbenders movie through and through and he is very good in it whether it be his voiceover work or the way he creates a memorable physical presence with his focused walking, his eyes and his facial expressions, I doubt this will happen but I hope he will be in the running for Oscar consideration for his work here.

And so that was the Killer and Fincher being very good can sometimes be other filmmakers hitting it out of the park and while I don’t love it there is a lot to like here, 3 and a half out of 5.