It’s really easy to imagine the elevator pitch for Final Score: “It’s just like Die Hard…but in a soccer stadium!”. The man listening to the pitch takes a moment to think and asks “Great idea, but how are we going to sell this?”. He hears that it’s easy, because you just need to have a well known action hero actor in the main role. Unfortunately Dwayne Johnson isn’t available, Schwarzenegger and Stallone are too old to do what is necessary. Then they think of Dave Bautista, “he’s just like Dwayne Johnson, a former wrestler who started acting. Plus he has been really popular since his role in Guardians of the Galaxy”. The idea is finalized and Final Score is the result. But was this really a good idea? Continue reading
Category Archives: Violence
Mandy (2018) – Review
Upgrade (2018) – Review
Every year there are only a few films in which there are shots that amaze me. Moments where I wonder how they are made or that overwhelms me visually (but that might be a subject for a separate article). When you watch a lot of movies it’s much more difficult to get wowed and you hope to see inventive imagery that feel fresh/new. Initially, I had no idea that Upgrade would be a title that had such characteristics. It starts as a fairly average science fiction story, but from the moment above I could not wait to see what else the film had in store. Continue reading
Searching (2018) – Review
How much time do you spend behind a screen every day? If you had an app that would keep track, you might be shocked. We know the interfaces that we use in detail. Nevertheless, in many cases, films and series often choose to present us with an interface that is unfamiliar to us, even if it takes place in the present. A screen that has been specially designed for a film and should look sleek. As a result, as a viewer you have no strong connection with what you see. Searching is an exception. It is a film that takes place completely in operating systems that we know: Windows and Mac OS. Continue reading
The Meg (2018) – Review
If it wasn’t clear before, the moment Jason Statham (playing an expert in saving people from the deepest parts of the ocean) swims towards an enormous prehistoric shark singing Dory’s “Just keep swimming”, you know that this is a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously. And it shouldn’t, because this is a monster movie that has a ridiculous idea behind it. A billionaire has invested a lot of money to find out if the Marianas trench is even deeper than we thought. The first mission doesn’t go as planned and Jonas Taylor (Statham) is called to save the people from the bottom of the ocean. There they find the biggest shark that ever lived, a megalodon, which escapes from the deep and starts terrorizing people. It’s up to Taylor and the group he is working to kill it. Continue reading
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) – Review
Sequels should only be made if you actually have a good idea that could work. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is an example of a movie where this obviously isn’t the case. After the park went out of control in the previous movie, the island has been abandoned and the dinosaurs lived as free animals. As that isn’t an interesting setup for a movie, they are now threathened by a vulcano on the island that will wipe them out once again. Problem solved you could say, but the government is thinking about rescuing them and not letting them go extinct. Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is running the Dinosaur Protection Group in support of this plan. When the government decides against rescue, she is approached by Benjamin Lockwood who has a plan to relocate the dinosaurs to a new location where they can live “in peace”. She must convince Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to join her. Once she does, they head to Isla Nublar and things don’t exactly go as planned. Continue reading
A Quiet Place (2018) – Review
Sound is such a big part of movies, which by many is an overlooked aspect of experiencing them. Ever since the introduction they have added a layer responsible for how you feel, enhancing it or setting the tone. A lot of time is spent on perfecting it. Just think of an animated movie. When you watch it, it is a breathing living and very real world. But just like the frames themselves, every sound needs to be created in order to make swoop audiences away, whether it’s an action scene in Incredibles 2 or an emotional scene in Your Name. In horror movies too it is used effectively, often making or breaking a scene. A jump scare wouldn’t work as well if it wasn’t accompanied by a loud sound after some silence. A Quiet Place is a horror film which uses sound in a different way… Continue reading
Skyscraper (2018) – Review
We all feel a need to categorize the movies we see. It makes it easy to compare them to other in the (sub)genre and at the same time display our knowledge of the movie landscape. In most reviews I read about Dwayne Johnson‘s new movie Skyscraper (which is about a security analyst who has to save his family out of a burning tower taken over by some evil guys) it was compared to Die Hard and The Towering Inferno. But I don’t think you should make the comparison as those movies were quite different. The Towering Inferno was a disaster movie which happened to be about a fire in a high rise building. Die Hard was an action movie like this one, but a lot more realistic and believable. It’s better to not make the comparison and look at this movie for what it is: A summer blockbuster movie which wants to entertain its viewers by giving them a thrill ride. Continue reading
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) – Review
On this year’s blindspot movies list I had added two eighties movies, which both had to do something with aliens. I decided to check out The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension first. There is something about movies from the eighties which I really appreciate which isn’t only because it is the era in which I grew up. The movies from that time have a certain feel and CGI wasn’t a big thing yet, which would mean a lot more creativity to realize some ideas. Because of that some things feel a lot more real and actually have weight as things were physical. This is also the case here. Continue reading
A Taxi Driver (2017) – Review
With all the American movies being released there is a huge risk that movie from other countries don’t get the attention they deserve. Although some of them get released to cinemas, they often don’t reach a big enough audience, making it hard for distributors to take a chance on them. Which of course creates a cycle you can’t get out of. Which sometimes is a shame, as they are a lot of movie worth watching. Recently I saw Bad Genius, which is amazing, but A Taxi Driver, a South Korean movie is also one you should check out. Continue reading