Fountain Of Youth (2025)

There's no real question about what Fountain Of Youth is, but there is a lack of clarity about who it belongs to. Is it the film of director Guy Ritchie? Perhaps writer James Vanderbilt would want to claim some ownership. And star John Krasinski is certainly given a role that makes the film feel like a star vehicle for him. Maybe we should just ignore these people, however, and spend some time instead acknowledging those who gave us the National Treasure movies and (of course) Indiana Jones. 

Krasinski plays Luke Purdue, a man who we first meet escaping pursuers while trying to keep hold of a painting that doesn't belong to him. It may not belong to those pursuing him either, but it's established that Purdue isn't too bothered by pesky things like security measures and legal recriminations as he aims to get his hands on various paintings. This isn't the best news for his sister, Charlotte (Natalie Portman), who happens to have an important role in a large art gallery. One hijink follows another as we learn that Luke and his crew (Patrck and Deb, played by Laz Alonso and Carmen Ejogo, respectively) have been tasked by a mega-rich individual (Domhnall Gleeson) to find a mythical fountain of youth. Some people don't want it found though, and the main one running interception is the dangerous and lovely Esme (Eiza González), allowing for a number of scenes in which both she and Luke fight one another while engaging in surprisingly ill-timed flirty banter. Oh, Charlotte also ends up letting her young son (Benjamin Chivers) tag along, and there's a determined cop (Arian Moayed) also on their tail.

Hugely derivative, tonally odd, and with a level of smarm and predictability that ensures you will know the ending even as the opening credits play out (especially if you've watched any of those Indiana Jones movies . . . and if you watch any of those instead of this then you have chosen wisely), Fountain Of Youth also relies almost completely on the appeal of Krasinski, who is allowed to dance through the events of the film as if wearing some cloak of invulnerability. His character has no depth, he never really takes anything as seriously as he should, and he is as selfish and careless as his sister accuses him of being. BUT, and I'll admit that this was unexpected, I did end up enjoying a lot of his patter, for want of a better word. There are a number of other actors who could have done better in this role, but it feels a bit more fun because of it being a bit of a step away from the other movie roles that Krasinski has had in the past decade.

It may also be a fact that Krasinski seems better in comparison to the rest of the cast. González is also good fun, no complaints there, and young Chivers has a few good moments, but everyone else is pretty bad. Alonso and Ejogo aren't given enough to do, sadly, Moayed is as misplaced as the tone, Gleeson is forced to play someone usually seen in a 1980s cartoon series, and Portman suffers while being forced to play the wet blanket (although, as mentioned above, she's proven to be quite correct in her disapproval of her brother's actions).

Neither the script nor the direction have anything helping to define their creators. Vanderbilt seems to have done no more than watch a pile of better movies that he then threw into a mental blender and poured into a book titled "Dan Brown Plotting For Dummies". The set-pieces generally work well though, and Ritchie helps out there with his handling of all the moving parts, but even those are shaded with a feeling of something just being a bit off, probably due to the light-heartedness of the "antics" while real blades are being swished around and real bullets are being fired at people. This is a movie with a bodycount that tries to make use of the adventuring and charisma of the main character to distract you from the fact that it has a bodycount. 

In case you didn't notice, I have to end this review by saying that I did still manage to enjoy this.  It was a fast food film. I enjoyed it while it was on, as derivative and predictable as it was. I won't ever watch it again, and there's a part of me that thinks I should jump in the shower and scrub myself down after writing this, but it was a perfectly serviceable way to spend part of your evening. Nobody excels, but everyone works together to try and help viewers escape reality and have something to laugh at (intentionally, but also unintentionally) for a couple of hours. 

6/10

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Scream VI (2023)

For as much as I love most of the Scream movies, including the fun Scream 4, I was absolutely not a fan of Scream (2022) aka 5cream. That immediately became my new least favourite in the franchise (not including the first season of the TV show) and I wasn’t looking forward to this next instalment AKA Ghostface Takes Manhattan.

Thankfully, being a completist is sometimes a good thing. I am glad I watched Scream VI, and it’s already one of my favourites (with my provisional ranking just now being 1, 4, 6, 2, 3, and 5). It’s far from perfect, and I still have issues with the core cast, but the set-pieces and the general vibe of the film, which feels a bit more relaxed and less reflexive and defensive than the last outing, works really well.

The premise is simple. A bunch of people who survived the last film are now in New York. Ghostface is also in New York. People are going to start being stabbed. That’s it. Red herrings abound (or do they?) as our leads try to pinpoint who is doing the murdering, and maybe figure out a way to stop them.

Although there’s one notable omission from the cast (no Neve Campbell this time around), everyone returns to their main role behind the camera. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett co-direct, and the script is from both James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick. While that may not seem like a good thing to anyone who disliked the last movie, and I realise I am very much in the minority with my dislike of that film, it’s good to see how much better everyone does while feeling less beholden to everything that came along beforehand. This generally seems more free to properly subvert expectations and play around with the rules viewers think they are so familiar with, as evidenced in an opening sequence that is the best opener since the classic start of the first movie.

It is easier to enjoy the cast a bit more too, having accompanied a number of them through the events of the last movie, but this is the biggest problem that the film has. The supporting players are the most enjoyable (Hayden Pannetiere makes a welcome return, Dermot Mulroney is decent, and Courteney Cox has a confrontation worthy of her character’s status), and both Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown are fine, not to mention one or two others caught up in the midst of the killing spree by virtue of being friends with the targeted group, but Jenna Ortega is left with less to do than she deserves, and Melissa Barrera continues to just not be a very appealing nominal lead. Sorry, there’s no way around the fact that she’s dead weight at the heart of this rebooted phase of the franchise.

The other problem with the film is a sad lack of commitment to actually, well, killing off characters. So many people are savagely attacked here that you will be forgiven for rolling your eyes during the third act when you see how many actually make it to the end credits. There are fantastic sequences, but some of them feel ultimately inconsequential. I still hold out hope for the next film through. Considering how big a step up in quality this one was, I can only hope that everyone involved finds the bravery to start gorily whittling down the core cast next time around. And if that is caused by another “legacy” character, all the better, because these film-makers certainly seem to have taken note of fan theories and internet gossip.

There are at least four great sequences that help to make this a memorable Scream film, and the fact that I didn’t feel the rest of the film pale into comparison after such a strong start is about as good a compliment as I can give it. It’s an unexpected return to form, as playful and violent as you could hope, with the extra fun of watching the parallel strands between this new trilogy and the original three movies come into sharp focus in a way that provides one more layer to a film series known for being so self-aware and self-referential.

I cannot wait to rewatch this. And, AND, I may even finally work up some enthusiasm to rewatch the last film. Maybe I will like it a little bit more. Maybe.

8/10

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Netflix And Chill: Murder Mystery 2 (2023)

As many people will already know, I have been a Sandler apologist for much longer than most people. I understand that a lot of his comedy vehicles over the past few decades have been neither big nor clever, and he leans heavily into choices that guarantee people will love or hate him, but I still tend to find enough in them to have a few chuckles. There have been a couple of absolute stinkers, but I can generally go into a Sandler movie with the knowledge that I'll at least not hate it. Judge all you want. While he may no longer tickle the funny bone as well as he did with the likes of Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, and The Waterboy, Sandler still aims to please his fanbase, usually while he assembles a group of people that he enjoys spending time with and gets them a paid vacation in some beautiful and sunny foreign climes.

Starting off with some narration that briefly recaps the first movie and shows viewers what Nick (Sandler) and Audrey (Jennifer Aniston) have been up to for the past few years, Murder Mystery 2 then allows our characters to head off on another, long overdue, vacation, this time as special wedding guests of their friend, the Maharajah (Adeel Akhtar), who is delighted to introduce them to his bride-to-be, Claudette (Mélanie Laurent). Unfortunately, the wedding is ruined by the Maharajah being kidnapped, and the circumstances of the kidnapping lead Nick and Audrey to suspect a small handful of other guests. There's Claudette herself, a womanising ex-footballer named Francisco (Enrique Arce), the Maharajah's sister (Saira, played by Kuhoo Verma), and Countess Sekou (Jodie Turner-Smith). There may be others involved in the scheme though, and a super-agent named Miller (Mark Strong) comes along to show everyone how an investigation and hostage negotiation should be done.

While it's now Jeremy Garelick in the director's chair, who had what I would consider a moderate success with his previous comedy, The Binge (hey, it did well enough to get a sequel), writer James Vanderbilt returns, the leads are reunited with a familiar face or two from the first film, and there's a feeling of nobody wanting to upset what they obviously consider as having worked well enough the first time around.

Sandler and Aniston once again work well together, the latter continuing to deliver the kind of genuinely great comedic performance that it's all too easy to forget she can do (despite her biggest success being in quite a well-known sitcom) and the former feeling believably, but lovingly, held in check during times when he might otherwise get carried away. It's a shame that the supporting cast isn't as much fun this time around, although everyone works with what they're given. Laurent and Verma aren't given enough to do, and Turner-Smith, her character accompanied by a toadying sidekick (played by Zurin Villanueva), is out of the picture far too soon, but both Arce and John Kani (returning to the role of Colonel Ulenga, now with one less arm than he had last time we saw him) deliver some good lines, and Strong has a lot of fun in the kind of role that is as familiar and obvious as it is entertaining. Akhtar is, of course, onscreen for a lot of the runtime, which isn't a bad thing if his character grates on you slightly, and Dany Boon returns as Inspector Delacroix in time for the third act.

It's been a while since I watched Murder Mystery (hey, I may not hate Sandler movies, but there aren't many that I rush to rewatch lately), but this sequel feels as if it is trying to deliver a bit more action and spectacle. From a lovely wedding dance sequence to an impressive high-speed drive through Paris, not to mention a surprisingly satisfying and memorable final set-piece, there's a better sense of balance between the gags and the actual central mystery being solved.

Very few people will agree with me here, and many won't even bother wasting their time with another Sandler vehicle, but I liked this a little bit more than the first film. Considering I liked the first film more than most, you may just want to discard my whole opinion on this one. It's entirely up to you, but you'll miss some wonderful scene-stealing from Aniston.

6/10

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Scream (2022)

Is anyone else getting as tired as I am of the formulaic way so many franchises have been "reinvigorated" over the past few years? Find some way to ensure the film connects to the original. Have at least one character from the first movie to help push those nostalgia/familiarity buttons. Make up for any weak plotting and poor scripting with some extra FX work. Oh, and have one big surprise, or death, that doesn't really feel all that surprising. Horror movies get a bonus for allowing a central character from the original to face their fear while showing how the trauma of being stalked by a crazed killer has affected their life. From the Star Wars movies to the Halloween movies, and now Scream, this is the way it works. I WAS looking forward to the next instalment in the wildly uneven The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, but now I am not so optimistic. 

Scream starts, funnily enough, with a phone ringing. A young girl, Tara (Jenna Ortega), is attacked in her home. That attack brings her sister, Sam (Melissa Barrera), back home to Woodsboro. Sam is with her boyfriend, Richie (Jack Quaid), and she introduces him to a group of sort-of-friends that includes Amber (Mikey Madison), Wes (Dylan Minnette), twins Mindy Meeks-Martin (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding), and Liv (Sonia Ammar). Everyone wants to survive the latest potential ghostface killings, but everyone is also a suspect. That's why Sam gets in touch with Dewey Riley (David Arquette), who subsequently warns Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) to stay far away. 

The first film in the Scream movie series to be directed by anyone other than Wes Craven, and the second script not written by Kevin Williamson, this is a film that very much highlights the lack of both of these talents behind the camera. Not that directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are bad. I've enjoyed most of their work before this, to varying degrees, and they stay firmly in control of the mechanics of the film, as it were, with the actual visuals and editing here being the least of the problems with the film. The overall feel of the film still lacks something though, that confidence and playfulness that Craven could wind through all of his better works. That is never more apparent than in a sequence that should be playful and fun, with the frame being blocked in ways that leads viewers to expect a jump scare at any moment, but instead ends up irritating and tiresome as it plays the same trick in a couple of different ways.

Never mind the directors though, especially when the writers, James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, have to shoulder almost all of the blame for how bad this is. It's probably easier for me to list my criticisms of the script here in a series of bullet points.

* A distinct lack of tension. In attempting to feel fun and unpredictable, the writers made this arguably the most predictable, and therefore boring, entry in the series. So far.

* A killer so obvious that I really hoped my gut feeling was wrong. It wasn't. I saw the end of this thing coming a mile away. That's down to sloppy writing, whether it's to do with just dismissing characters until they start to become more prominent when you know the final reveal is due or interactions between characters that feel like they're pointing a neon-lit arrow at someone.

* The meta commentary here is awful, and I mean AWFUL. This is, in certain ways, very similar to The Matrix Resurrections, but that film showed how you could do super-smart commentary on events that also discuss the very film you are watching without feeling like a lecture delivered by idiots misunderstanding the appeal of their own source material.

* As subjective as it is, a lot of the humour doesn't work. I would also argue that a lot of the new characters don't work, but I'd say it's about a 50/50 with who I liked and who I didn't (although not liking the new lead is a big stumbling block).

* There's one character depicted in "visions" here, and it's a very bad move. It's usually best to leave that trope to Stephen King, who has used it so often that it's part of his comforting appeal when I read his stories.

* Putting even more emphasis on the Stab films, but without the wit or fun cameos that have been there in previous excerpts from the film-within-the-film series.

* As difficult as it is to confirm the feeling in my gut, the characters generally feel dumber in this film. Being so easily separated, being fooled by tech that should surely be avoided, and turning up somewhere after being specifically warned to stay away. These things have always happened in the Scream movies, and many other horror movies, but characters used to end up reluctantly "breaking the rules" as dangerous situations forced them to make difficult decisions in the heat of the moment.

Do the writers get anything right, in between silly moments like showcasing the "Randy Meeks Memorial Home Theater"? Yes. It's a shame that they can only deal with the characters of Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers by merging them into some kind of symbiotic Laurie Strode-alike, but they do a lot better by Dewey Riley, giving Arquette some of the best scenes that he's had in the series. I also liked Quaid's character, the easy interplay between Brown and Gooding, and the fact that we had a bit more time with Sheriff Judy Hicks (played by Marley Shelton, reprising her character that I enjoyed in Scream 4).

Arquette is the heart of the film, which leads to the presence of Campbell and Cox feeling much more forced (despite it being obvious that they need to come into the picture at some point). Barrera and Ortega are disappointing, considering that viewers spend so much time with them. The former has to handle some of the more ludicrous moments, not really her fault, and the latter just doesn't feel like an important part of the cast once that opening sequence has finished. Quaid has enough charm and likability to make the most of his role, and I've just mentioned the enjoyability of Brown and Gooding in the last paragraph. Madison, Ammar and Minnette are there to make up the numbers, and there are a couple of enjoyable cameos to watch out for, as well as one awful one.

I won't deny that I enjoyed sitting in a cinema and hearing "Red Right Hand" accompanying some Woodsboro scenery, and there are a few bits of fairly graphic brutality that at least make Ghostface seem even more driven and vicious this time around, but I was very unhappy by the time the end credits rolled. Some have already been celebrating the fact that a sequel to this has already been greenlit. I would prefer if the series provided one last big twist, and just left an iconic killer to stay dead and buried now that the film-makers seem to have nowhere else to take the story.

4/10

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Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher hasn't made a bad movie, I'll say that right now so that people know how biased I am when it comes to his work. I'd even go so far as to say that he's made at least three modern masterpieces. One of those modern masterpieces is Seven, a movie which really reinvigorated the thriller genre after too many years of safe, but enjoyable, movies that all had a movie sheen to them. Zodiac certainly isn't Seven, but it's most definitely made by the same man who shows such attention to detail and seems to always find some new way to treat material from any genre.

Zodiac is about the Zodiac killer, and the lives that he changed. The strange thing, and the thing that many people will know before the movie begins, is that the Zodiac killer was never caught. A Jack The Ripper for the modern age, he committed his crimes, taunted the police and deliberately kept changing his M. O. to stay one step ahead of those trying to catch him. The fact that he was never caught explains why Zodiac is half a film about a serial killer and his crime spree and half a film about the obsession that he sparks in those who become involved in the investigation. The murders start to consume Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and even a cartoonist who starts to weigh up the evidence and begin his own amateur investigation (Robert Graysmith, who wrote the book that the screenplay was based on, played by Jake Gyllenhaal).

Closer in feel to All The President's Men than Seven, and all the better for it, this is a tour de force mix of great acting, superb attention to detail and sheer bravura (as Fincher paces the film perfectly while also jumping through the years to various pivotal points in the investigation and the life of Graysmith).

The actors already mentioned give performances that show just why they're often heaped with praise, but the supporting cast features other people effortlessly doing what they do best. People like Elias Koteas, Anthony Edwards (so good here that it makes me wish he had more good roles through the years), Brian Cox, Chloe Sevigny, Donal Logue, Philip Baker Hall, John Carroll Lynch, Candy Clark, Dermot Mulroney, Zach Grenier, Charles Fleischer, Clea Duvall and Jimmi Simpson. You may not know recognise all of the names, but you will know most of their faces.

The script by James Vanderbilt may be hampered by having to stick to Graysmith's interpretation of events, but it's pretty flawless in all other respects. Dialogue informs the viewer about both procedural events and each character is nicely rounded out, both in the usual way and also in the way that the ongoing murders begin to affect them.

Everyone deserves praise for working together and achieving such a great end result - director of photography Harris Savides, David Shire who created the score, the hundreds of people that it took to get the look and feel of everything just dead on - but it's all overseen by David Fincher, who shows, once again, just why he's a director I always support. I know that there are people who will pick at least one of his movies to highlight as a bit of a mis-step, to say the least, but I really don't feel that. He's a master of the medium, able to elevate even average material into something well worth seeing. With the story that he's handed here, it's almost another masterpiece. Almost.

To hear my gushing praise, you'd be forgiven for thinking that I view this as a perfect film, but there are a couple of minor flaws that see it falling short of perfection. First, the fantastic script also has a few too many lines that make for great soundbites as opposed to real exchanges/replies. That worked better in The Social Network, but seems a bit incongruous at times here. Second, the first half is understandably a bit rougher than the second half, with so many characters needing introduced and the whole situation being set up. The second half becomes rather more streamlined as people fall out of the big picture, leaving only those most caught up in the events to see it all through to the very end, whatever that end may be.

Despite those small flaws, I was still tempted to rate this film as perfect, but I ended up going with near-perfect instead. See the film for yourself and find out whether or not you agree with me.

9/10

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