For It Is Man's Number: taylour paige

Showing posts with label taylour paige. Show all posts

Thursday, 16 October 2025

The Toxic Avenger (2023)

While it's hard to deny that we live in some truly dire times (I mean . . . *gestures at everything around us*), it's also pleasing to note that we now live in a world that has given us a new Toxic Avenger movie. And not just any Toxic Avenger movie. This is written and directed by Macon Blair, and has a cast that includes Peter Dinklage in the main role, Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood, Julia Davis, and Sarah Niles.

Dinklage plays Winston, a man who will eventually be transformed into the titular (anti/super)hero, although his character is brilliantly portrayed by Luisa Guerreiro. Anyway, Winston is trying to bond with his step-son, Wade (Jacob Tremblay), both still grieving the loss of the main woman they loved, but has his standard routine of drudgery and self-doubt interrupted by a chain of events that lead to his body being dumped into a load of toxic sludge. And that's when The Toxic Avenger is born, just in time to help a plucky investigative reporter (J. J. Doherty, played by Paige) reveal the truth about a corrupt pharmaceutical company headed by Bob Garbinger (Bacon).

The first thing I want to say about The Toxic Avenger is that it's a bit too long, the runtime is just over 100 minutes, and it could have moved things into place in the first act much quicker than it does, but there's a very satisfying pay-off for most of the plot points set up here. While I enjoyed a lot of it, I feel that the pacing really works against it, and others may well feel the same.

Everything else I have to say about the film is pretty positive though, despite me not being as completely won over by it as others were. The cast is uniformly great, with Paige being an essential strong heartbeat for a film so populated with over the top villainy and silly grotesqueries. Dinklage has a lot of fun as the loser who watches his life go from bad to worse to toxic, Tremblay is able to be both a bit sullen and very vulnerable, as required, and Bacon, Wood, and Davis are a dangerous trio that wouldn't look out of place in a big-budget Batman movie. It's Toxie front and centre, but Paige plays her part so well that she helps to ground the ridiculous gore and gags, reminding you that there are people onscreen who are desperate for help . . . even if it comes in the shape of a very unlikely "hero".

It may keep itself slightly distanced from the worst elements of Troma Entertainment, where the main character originated, but fans will be happy to find that it has a spirit, and a commmitment to excessive amounts of gore and bodily harm, that aligns it nicely with body of work we've had throughout the decades from "Uncle Lloyd" and co.

There's room for improvement here, and room for even more detached limbs and geysers of blood, but Blair has done a hell of a job to walk a perilous tightrope. This should please both fans of the original movies and relative newcomers who go into their viewing with some idea of what it's aiming for. I'll be rewatching it, probably more than I would ever rewatch any of the other movies in the series, and I encourage others to at least throw some rental money towards it. How else am I going to get my long-gestating Class Of Nuke 'Em High remake made?

8/10

If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A subscription/follow costs nothing.
It also costs nothing to like/subscribe to the YouTube channel attached to the podcast I am part of - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErkxBO0xds5qd_rhjFgDmA
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews
Or Amazon is nice at this time of year - https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/Y1ZUCB13HLJD?ref_=wl_share

Sunday, 7 July 2024

Netflix And Chill: Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024)

It's easy to see how this film, the fourth feature in the Beverly Hills Cop series, came about, especially when you look at the entertainment landscape and see the money being made from the good old nostalgia train. There may be another new director behind the camera, Mark Molloy (making his feature debut), and the writing team of Will Beall, Tom Gornican, and Kevin Etten also adds plenty of Beverly Hills newcomers, but what matters most is Eddie Murphy being back in the title role, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Paul Reiser, and Bronson Pinchot making themselves available to reprise their characters, and a soundtrack that tries to recreate every sonic beat from the original.

It's all very basic stuff. Axel Foley (Murphy) ends up returning to Beverly Hills when he is informed about his estranged daughter's life being in danger. His daughter, Jane (Taylour Paige), is a lawyer who is about to defend an alleged cop killer, but she suspects that there are some dirty cops trying to frame an innocent man. Billy Rosewood (Reinhold) is now a PI who also believes that there are some cops involved in this crime, John Taggart (Ashton) is now the Chief, and Captain Cade Grant is a main supporting character played by Kevin Bacon in a way that doesn't make his character completely obvious from his very first scene. Okay, it's obvious. This is the Columbo style of mystery story-telling, with the main satisfaction due to be derived from seeing how Foley catches the person he instinctively knows is the main villain. There's also a helpful detective named Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who has just as much interest in keeping Jane safe as they have a shared past as a couple.

Look, it's hard to go into this without knowing what you're letting yourself in for. In that regard, anyone coming away from it feeling short-changed or miserable only really has themselves to blame. That's not to say that this can still leave viewers feeling disappointed, and I was left sadly disappointed, but it basically delivers what it tells you it will deliver. Murphy slips back into his character with relative ease, older, but not necessarily a hell of a lot wiser, and the other series (semi-)regulars turn up to wave and remind you of what you enjoyed about the interactions of everyone the first time around. The structure of the plotting, various lines of dialogue, and the soundtrack choices all work together to ensure that you watch this wrapped up in a cosy glow. It's a shame that there's nothing else accompanying that glow though, and that glow alone just wasn't enough for me.

Murphy has had mixed success in recent years, and it's obvious why he has returned to some past glories (is he currently developing a belated sequel to Trading Places and another 48. Hrs movie? probably not, but I wouldn't be surprised), but he doesn't know how to star in an Eddie Murphy vehicle that also works as well for others around him. Paige is fantastic, and it's good to have someone who actually stands up to the antics of Foley nowadays, even if she has the benefit of being a blood relative, but Gordon-Levitt feels wasted, and sorely out of place, and most of the time watching Reinhold, Ashton, and Reiser is tinged with sadness as viewers are constantly reminded of how age has wearied them. Pinchot is a highlight, as he has been in his previous appearances in this series, and Bacon is very comfortable in a role that he could do in his sleep.

The director and writing team do what they're tasked with doing, but they sadly don't do any more. It doesn't help that everything looks and feels more like a Netflix film than a Beverly Hills Cop movie (a bit tricky to define, but you will know it when you see it . . . something polished that often feels like it has been filmed in front of a whole lot of unnecessary greenscreen). The laughs don't come thick and fast enough, the action is bigger, but not better, and many of the supporting characters feel like popular guest stars on a long-running sit-com. That doesn't make it the worst movie you could choose to watch this weekend, but it does make it the worst of the Beverly Hills Cop movies, despite the fact that it at least has Foley doing some proper detective work again.

4/10